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no play for Jeff's followers. Last year he banned most toys and recreational equipment. Church leaders blockaded basketball courts with huge bales of cardboard. At another court, they blocked it with fences and took down the basketball hoops.
"They did that because Warren doesn't want people playing ball any more, of any kind," said former FLDS member Isaac Wyler, who left Jeffs' church years ago.
Whyler still lives in Jeffs' home base, the border twin towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona. Wyler said Jeffs is removing all fun and joy from the town. He's also heard rumors that sex is allowed only for a certain chosen group.
They said there had been fifteen men delegated or designated by the God to sire the new special children, I guess. –Isaac Wyler
"They said there had been 15 men delegated or designated by the God to sire the new special children, I guess," Wyler said.
Investigator Sam Brower, who wrote a best-selling book called "Prophet's Prey," said relatives of faithful members also told him about the fifteen men edict.
"These men are now breeding stock, essentially. And it's their assignment to breed with the women in town," Brower said.
According to these 2nd- and 3rd-hand reports, the other men in the group will be just caretakers, earning a living for their wives, and for children fathered by others.
"The sex act itself is going to be a priesthood ordinance which is witnessed and carried out by these 15 men," Brower said.
"Just the way Warren works, it wouldn't surprise me if he was going to call the husband to be a witness, just because he's always testing people with these loyalty tests," Wyler said.
According to Brower's sources, FLDS members were told that if they had any reservations about the new edict, they should leave the meeting and await further discussion. At least 200 got up and left.
"I've still got brothers and sisters that are caught up in this thing. And they're buying this stuff. I can't imagine how, but they are," Wyler said.
As is usually the case, KSL has been unable to reach anyone who's willing to speak for the FLDS church or to confirm that these new rules exist.
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Related StoriesMembers of the Seattle Education Association (SEA) approved a contract between the union and its school district Sunday, officially ending a weeklong strike that extended summer vacation for 53,000 students.
The contract gives teachers a 9.5 percent base salary raise over three years, as well as a state cost-of-living adjustment of 4.8 percent. As for the students, the contract guarantees a 30-minute recesses for elementary-aged students and new policies to reduce over-testing.
“We got many new things in our contract that will benefit students,” Shelly Hurley, a special education teacher in Seattle, said in a statement.
The Seattle agreement marks a shift in strategy that could offer a template for other teacher's unions: This strike wasn't just over a pay hike, but garnered broad community support by including issues that parents and community leaders wanted addressed.
“This is a hard-fought victory for the kids of Seattle, and I am proud of SEA members and our incredible bargaining team,” said Jonathan Knapp, SEA president. “This agreement signals a new era in bargaining in public education. We’ve negotiated a pro-student, pro-parent, pro-educator agreement.”
Take Action: Seeking progress and innovation in education
The teachers insisted the strike wasn’t only about their salaries. To finally reach an agreement, the teachers came down from the 21-percent pay raise they were initially requesting.
Mr. Knapp said Seattle teachers were interested in other issues besides pay, a focused strategy he called “bargaining for the public good.”
The Seattle union used the Chicago strike of 2012 as their model, says Knapp, in which teachers and parents formed “a forceful and unbeatable alliance” to fight school closures. To unite with local parents, Seattle teachers focused on a common frustration with increased standardized testing.
And Seattle wasn’t alone in welcoming in this ‘new era.’ Washington had three major teacher strikes this summer outside of Seattle, in the Pasco, Kelso, and South Whidbey school districts. Leaders of all three strikes worked to include parents, students, and the larger community in the issues.
Take Action: Seeking progress and innovation in education
“It was humbling to see all of the different ways people showed us support,” Rachel Kizer, a fourth-grade teacher who participated in the South Whidbey strike, told the South Whidbey Record.
Inspired by a bottom-up movement of students, parents, and teachers, Knapp says SEA was confident that “we could count on Seattle being in our corner.” And SEA was right. There was not any official condemnation of teachers in Seattle, with all parents and community members either supporting teachers or staying out of the strike altogether.
“There’s a mood shifting out there among teachers and parents about what’s going on in the schools, and who has a say over it,” Knapp told the Seattle Times. “It has become what I call the ‘contested era of public education.’ As teachers we felt we could take a stronger stand on some of those issues, and that this was a time to do it.”
The two sides reached a tentative agreement early Tuesday, which suspended the strike until Sunday’s vote.
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The tentative agreement needed a simple majority for approval from each of the three groups that the union represents: teachers, paraprofessionals, and office staff. The Seattle Times reports that more than 3,000 of the union’s 5,000 members attended the meeting – the largest turnout in the union’s history.
The meeting lasted over four hours, with members from all three groups asking questions about the contract before voting on paper ballots.The price of a PC game used to be carved in biro by enthusiastic teenagers employed at brick-and-mortar games retailers. But early access has thrown pricing conventions into greater disarray than ever before.
Developers can’t seem to decide whether to pitch low, to compensate players for the bugs they’ll have to put up with, or high, to sell players on the idea of being VIPs.
Frontier fell into the latter camp with Elite: Dangerous, asking premium beta players to ‘join the elite’ for £100. David Braben acknowledges the approach might seem “cruel and merciless” – but says he doesn’t know of a better way to keep beta numbers manageable.
Elite: Dangerous’ Kickstarter campaign laid out a gradually decreasing price plan for the game as it progressed through beta. Players could pay £100 for premium access from the end of May, £50 for the following standard beta, or a £35 pre-order to enter the game at its gamma phase just before release.
Frontier have stuck to that initial plan – but we wondered whether Braben still thought it was a good idea. He does.
“We knew how many people we wanted on the alpha, and it may seem like a cruel and merciless way of doing it,” Braben told PCGamesN. “But that’s the way of getting people who are most likely to be dedicated and genuinely want it.”
Asked whether the premium beta was made up simply of the richest Elite players rather than the most dedicated, Braben replied: “Well, a bit of both actually”.
“Looking at it another way – what else is a good way of doing it?,” he asked. “Looking at ways of doing that, that works the best. It may seem mercenary but it seemed like the very best way to do it.”
A high price of entry is certainly the easiest and most effective way of creating an artificial bottleneck – but its flaws are self-evident. What would you suggest in its stead? A competition of joystick skill to determine the most enamoured Elite fans?The mind-bending novel, celebrated for its gargantuan length and mentally demanding, non-linear narrative, is particularly famous for Wallace's exhaustive endnotes, which routinely interrupt the author's prose. Some of the notes have footnotes themselves, and one of them is a lengthy filmography.
Scroll Down For Audio Excerpts From "Infinite Jest."
But, in a move that might give some fans a case of the "howling fantods," Hachette decided not to record audio of the book's 388 endnotes. Given the importance of the notes to the novel's structure and plot, it was not a decision that the publishers took lightly.
"[It was an]... incredibly difficult decision for all involved, and we debated different options for a long time before beginning production," Hachette spokeswoman Megan Fitzpatrick wrote in an e-mail to The Huffington Post. "Because some of the endnotes are pages-long digressions, if we had them read in line with the main narrative, we would have run the risk of making the already complex story unfollowable for listeners."
A previous release of "Infinite Jest" for e-readers solved the footnote challenge by embedding them as hyperlinks, but that option is not available on an audio recording.
"Ideally, we may have preferred each endnote indexed as a separate file to be jumped back and forth to on an MP3 player, but there’s no current audiobook technology (perhaps barring prohibitively expensive apps) that would have made this feasible or at all friendly to the end-user," Fitzpatrick wrote.
Instead, the complexity of the endnote issue spawned a creative solution, and one that is not totally divorced from the intent of the disruptive devices in Wallace's storytelling. Included in the download of the audiobook, which is currently only available in digital format, is a PDF containing the text of every note.
According to Sean Pratt, the actor that narrated the recording of the 1,076-page book, endnotes are indicated at appropriate times by a different actor's voice. This innovation allows the casual listener to enjoy the novel's narrative sweep, while preserving the interruptive quality of Wallace's original text.
Still, Pratt, who spoke with The Huffington Post in a phone interview, concedes that the exclusion of audio endnotes might offend some "hardcore acolytes."
"I had no idea what I was getting into when I agreed to it... Not just the length, but the depths of people's devotion [to the book]," Pratt, whose past narration credits include volumes-long histories of Abraham Lincoln and Nazi Germany, said of his work on "Infinite Jest."
While the literary acrobatics of "Infinite Jest" may frustrate or even repel some readers, those same qualities have captivated others. A fan site that offers tips on how to read "Infinite Jest" recommends carrying around a notebook and multiple bookmarks along with the 3 lb. tome.
It would seem that, for some, the exercise, devotion and abandon required to complete "Infinite Jest" are inseparable from its central themes -- addiction, obsession, the very nature of how we entertain ourselves. This perspective is not lost on Pratt.
"It was the hardest book I ever had to narrate... it was maddening, engaging, enlightening, frustrating and entertaining," Pratt said.
LISTEN: "Infinite Jest" Read By Sean Pratt
See below for more extreme audiobooks:SEOUL (Reuters) - SK Hynix Inc 000600.KS expects to resume production of memory chips at its Wuxi, China, plant shortly, the South Korean chipmaker said on Wednesday, adding that a fire at the facility caused one minor injury but did not cripple critical equipment.
Hynix said the fire raged for more than an hour. After an initial assessment, the world’s No. 2 maker of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips said it found no “material” damage to fabrication gear in its clean room at the plant, which produces around 12 to 15 percent of global computer memory chips.
With global supplies of DRAM chips already tight, shares in rivals Micron Technology Inc (MU.O) and SanDisk Corp SNDK.O rallied after early reports of the fire. But the rivals’ shares pared gains after Hynix’s update.
Micron shares were up 4 percent at $14.615 at midday, after surging almost 9 percent at one point. Sandisk was up 2.3 percent at $56.60, after climbing 6 percent at its peak.
“Currently, there is no material damage to the fab equipment in the clean room, thus we expect to resume operations in a short time period so that overall production and supply volume would not be materially affected,” company representative Seongae Park said in a statement.
“In addition, we expect that the majority of damage will be covered through insurance.”
The fire started at around 0750 GMT during chip equipment installation and was extinguished in less than two hours, the company said. The incident caused one minor injury, it said, adding that it is still assessing exact damages.
Park said photographs showing towering clouds of black, billowing smoke that circulated among blogs and news websites made the fire appear worse than it actually was.
“While there are some pictures of the fab surrounded by large dark smoke being circulated, please be informed that the damage is not as severe as it seems,” Park said.
“The smoke was created because the fire was concentrated in the air purification facilities that are linked to the rooftop of the fab.”
Hynix, which commanded 30 percent of the memory chip market in the second quarter, said the plant it has suspended produces around 40 percent to 50 percent of its total DRAM output.
Any prolonged suspension could tighten the global supply of DRAM chips, widely used in computers and mobile devices. DRAM chip prices nearly doubled in the first six months of this year due to tight supply.
Hynix competes with bigger rival Samsung Electronics Co (005930.KS) and the third-ranked Micron. Samsung had 32.7 percent of the global DRAM market in the second quarter and Micron owned 12.9 percent, according to data tracker DrameXchange.October 12, 2015
A group calling itself New York City Students for Justice in Palestine recently circulated a critique of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, arguing that BDS had become an impediment to the further advance of the struggle for Palestinian rights. Within days, a collection of Gaza-based students groups issued the following statement in defense of the BDS strategy, explaining how it had laid the groundwork for joint action and opening up space to take up many political questions the movement must grapple with.
THE PALESTINIAN Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI) and all the undersigned student groups, representing the entire political spectrum in Gaza, are deeply troubled by a recent article titled "The BDS Ceiling," written by the newly formed group New York City Students for Justice in Palestine (NYC SJP). The most disconcerting aspect of this article is that, despite its veneer of leftist rhetoric, it does a great disservice to those it purports to represent and be in solidarity with. Not only does the article misrepresent the BDS movement with false premises and ill-informed arguments, it also undermines our BDS efforts.
Clearly, NYC SJP group does not speak on behalf of SJP National, which adopted the 2005 BDS call as their first unifying principle in 2010. Moreover, this group's views and misunderstanding of BDS seem to be at odds with the great majority of the over 160 SJP chapters in the United States. Students in Palestine see the efforts of students leading BDS campaigns across U.S. campuses not only as a clear gesture of solidarity and commitment to our cause, but also as an exceptionally effective form of support for our struggle. SJP chapters have frequently been in communication and coordination with Palestinian student campaigns in Palestine, like PSCABI, that are part of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC)--the largest coalition in Palestinian society that is the reference for the global BDS movement.
Students in New York take part in a global day of action for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli apartheid
Unlike the NYC SJP group, most SJPs that work to enhance and advance BDS efforts seem to take their cues from the largest coalitions representing all Palestinians, in Palestine and in exile, especially those of us living, working and struggling on the ground in Palestine, under the daily assaults against our lives, land and dignity. Indeed, one of the main reasons why SJP is widely respected as a partner among many Palestinian groups is because most SJP organizers take the time to engage in meaningful conversations with those of us in Palestine who see BDS as one of our most effective strategies for garnering political leverage by isolating Israel's regime of oppression.
It is disturbing and ironic that activists claiming to be supportive of the Palestinian struggle would attack BDS, a distinguished form of popular resistance that enjoys a near consensus among Palestinians and that has become one of the most effective solidarity strategies--if not the most effective--in support of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.
Regardless of the underlying intentions, this NYC SJP attack on BDS after 10 years of its impressive growth, and at a time when the Israeli government, Israel lobby groups and Zionist organizations all over the world are fighting it as a "strategic threat" to Israel's regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid can only serve Israel's well-oiled crusade against the BDS movement.
NYC SJP set out to critique Palestine solidarity activism, and as a general critique, this could have been a useful exercise. However, they digress into an attack on BDS and its broad Palestinian leadership, the BNC. That sadly regurgitates many of the arguments the movement has had to counter over the years by those opposed to Palestinian rights.
THERE ARE three major issues with this article that make it entirely inaccurate, uninformed, poorly researched and damaging.
First, by suggesting that the BDS movement uncritically accepts the idea of an idealized, monolithic "Palestinian civil society," NYC SJP seems to be inattentive to the actual politics of the movement. The entities involved in the BDS call include the largest Palestinian political parties, refugee coalitions, trade unions, women's unions, writers and professional associations, academic unions, student groups, and the largest networks of 1948 Palestinians, among others. Framing these bodies as "imperialist tools" raises serious questions about the intellectual integrity of NYC SJP and the legitimacy of their argument.
It is clear that the NYC SJP article is also oblivious to the delicate negotiations and difficult political calibrations that were needed to construct points of unity that correspond to our most fundamental rights and that can be endorsed and enforced across such a broad spectrum of Palestinians in order to generate concrete and strategic action.
Criticizing a crucial component of our resistance by indirectly claiming to know the real interests of the Palestinian people more than we do and trying to speak on behalf of an entire people without taking the necessary steps needed to be accountable to it precisely indicate the kind of patronizing colonial mentality that BDS is attempting to work against.
NYC SJP argues that the BDS movement is successful at the expense of other strategies and campaigns, rather than recognizing it as a crucial tool that enhances and augments the Palestinian struggle. From the ground in Palestine, we consider our diverse, strategic forms of resistance not as mutually exclusive but rather as mutually beneficial. We view internal competition for political authenticity, amongst self-proclaimed progressives or revolutionaries, as antithetical to the Palestinian struggle and toxic to all movements seeking to engender political change.
, THE statement sets up straw-man arguments to undermine BDS work and BDS organizers. One straw-man argument suggests that an ominous Palestinian BDS leadership forbids advocacy for a One-State agenda. This argument is misleading and politically obtuse. Some in this BDS leadership, in theircapacity, have been among the most consistent in advocating for a single democratic state solution for decades, but outside the BDS framework. Some of us in the student movement have also been advocates of the One-State solution and actively working on this issue. Moreover, all members of the Gaza-based One Democratic State Group are BDS activists. However, requiring the BDS movement to put forward a solution before creating the conditions under which the Palestinian people can decide on the ultimate solution is not only undemocratic but also shortsighted.
The BDS movement is consistently and completely neutral on the question of the political solution to this colonial conflict for several reasons:
1. There is absolutely no consensus among Palestinians in support of a one-state or two-state solution. Opinion polls show ebbs and flows in this regard connected to political developments. This is a fact that must be taken seriously by any popular consensus-oriented movement like BDS.
2. The BNC is not, and never claimed to be, the political leadership of the Palestinian people and therefore cannot decide on behalf of the people what the acceptable political outcome of our struggle should look like. Self-determination means that the Palestinian people (including Palestinians in the 1948 territory and the refugees) must democratically determine a solution that is deemed acceptable and just. An anonymous group of student activists in New York, with all due respect, are not part of the decision-making process in determining the future for the Palestinian people.
3. BDS is based on the three main Palestinian rights (most importantly, the right of return for refugees) that, taken together, would contribute significantly to creating conditions that are favorable to Palestinian emancipation and self-determination.
4. The three rights in the 2005 BDS Call correspond to the three main constituencies of the Palestinian people. No matter what solution the Palestinian people ultimately decide is just, it must address the rights of all Palestinians, in historic Palestine and in exile, we all agree. These rights, which constitute the highest common denominator among almost all Palestinian parties, unions and networks, cannot and should not be reduced to ending the 1967 occupation alone, as doing so would not just undermine the rights of 62 percent of the Palestinian people who do not live in the 1967-occupied territory, but also undermine the right of return of the refugees (internally displaced persons) who reside in the 1967 territory.
5. BDS as a crucial part of the Palestinian popular and civic resistance and as arguably the most impactful form of international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality is not an intellectual exercise. It seeks to concretely isolate Israel's regime of oppression in the academic, cultural, economic and eventually military spheres, as was done to apartheid South Africa, in order to achieve the inalienable rights of our people. To be effective and in harmony with its principles as a human-rights movement, BDS is anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international law, despite the obvious flaws of the latter.
Even if this announced closure goes ahead, SodaStream will remain implicated in the displacement of Palestinians. Its new Lehavim factory is close to Rahat, a planned township in the Naqab (Negev) desert, where Palestinian Bedouins are being forcefully transferred against their will. Sodastream, as a beneficiary of this plan, is complicit with this violation of human rights.
, the article mentions SodaStream as an example of the "liberal limits" of BDS. It suggests that BDS focuses almost exclusively on the settlements and occupation, and thus when SodaStream announced that it was leaving the West Bank, this exposed the movement's logic. This is simply false. Even a cursory look at the BDS movement website would have shown exactly the opposite: the BNC called for continuing the boycott against SodaStream, as explained by BNC spokesperson Dr. Rafeef Ziadah, who wrote that SodaStream will remain actively complicit in the displacement of Palestinians in the Naqab and will remain a focus of boycott campaigning. She said:
Moreover, many of the top priority campaigns waged by the BDS movement since 2005 have targeted Israel's regime of oppression and violations of international law as a whole. These include the military embargo drive, the mobilization against the Prawer Plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinian Bedouins in the Naqab (Negev), the G4S boycott which straddles the company's complicity in international law violations in the 1967 territory as well as in the 1948 territory, the Elbit boycott and divestment drive, the Mekorot boycott campaign, HP, etc.
NYC SJP draws a number of conclusions based on their flawed argument. One conclusion is that BDS "as the ceiling of our work has proved to be little more than a revolving door, churning out similar petitions and events each semester with little to no focus on escalation or movement building in general." We would agree that strategic escalation and adopting diverse effective tactics are always welcome, but we fail to see how the fact that we could all do more in this area shows that BDS has reached some kind of "ceiling."
If BDS is not growing exponentially and dramatically intensifying the isolation of Israel's system of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid, why is Israel fighting it as a "strategic threat," one may justifiably ask?
Israeli industrialists have established a "BDS hotline" to help companies counter international boycotts.
A former Israeli Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit is convinced that BDS has become a "critical" challenge to Israel's system of injustice, while the former prime minister Ehud Barak admits it is reaching a "tipping point." Indeed, BDS has become a hot topic even in the U.S. presidential elections and Congress.
Recent reports and studies about the current and potential impact of BDS, whether direct or indirect, may help to explain why Israel takes the movement so seriously.
According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), foreign direct investment in Israel has dropped by 46 percent in 2014 as compared to 2013, partially due to the growing boycott of Israel, as a co-author of the report admits.
A recent Rand study predicted that if BDS continues to grow at its current rate, it will cost Israel in the coming 10 years 1 to 2 percent of its GDP (U.S. $44-88 billion).
According to a World Bank study issued at the end of September 2015, Palestinian imports from Israel dropped by 24 percent during the first quarter of 2015. The study explains that the drop "is the result of reduced economic activity, but also a growing trend among Palestinian consumers to substitute products imported from Israel by those from other countries, as a result of which non-Israeli imports were up 22 percent." These local boycott initiatives are coordinated by the BNC.
With some institutional memory of Palestine solidarity activism, many would realize that solidarity has come a long way because of BDS, which played an indisputable role in mainstreaming Palestinian rights. Attacking it with contrived, misleading and frequently debunked arguments is not a constructive way to push the movement forward, assuming that to be the intention.
Another conclusion this group draws relates to the need to connect struggles. Again, this is a straw man because the BDS movement in Palestine and internationally has been connecting struggles not just through workshops and statements, but also through cross-movement campaigning and joint organizing. Intersectionality is a key strategy and principle adopted by BDS partners worldwide, connecting the struggle for Palestinian justice with racial, social, economic, environmental and other justice movements worldwide.
A concluding point the article makes is that BDS alone cannot lead to political transformation. Precisely. The BNC has never suggested that BDS alone can possibly defeat the massive, U.S.-sponsored system of Israeli oppression that we are facing. Indeed, other forms of effective organizing are necessary and welcome. But BDS is without a doubt widely recognized today, whether among Palestinians and international supporters of Palestinian rights or, ironically, by Israel and its lobby groups as among the most potent strategies ever developed by Palestinians to isolate Israel's system of injustice internally and globally.
As student groups in Gaza, we are saddened to see attacks on this indispensable part of our struggle from those who claim to be fighting for our liberation. We reiterate that we stand with the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people calling on people of conscience and progressive forces around the world to endorse BDS and to be involved in effective BDS campaigning. Achieving our comprehensive and inalienable rights as a people is our only "ceiling."
The Secretariat of Students' Unions and Blocs--Gaza Strip:
Fatah Youth Movement
Islamic Bloc
Progressive Student Work Front
Islamic League of Palestinian Students
Mubadara Student Bloc
Union of Students' Struggle Committees
Student Unity Bloc
Progressive Student Union Bloc
Student Bloc of Independence
Student Struggle Bloc
Palestinian Liberation Youth
Palestinian Union of Students' Struggle Committees
Land and Man Bloc
Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (PSCABI)
Herak Youth Center
UPDATE: The Progressive Student Labor Front, incorrectly called the Progressive Student Work Front previously, has withdrawn its signature from this statement.Thai authorities have fined two American tourists for revealing their buttocks in a photo taken last week at Bangkok’s Wat Arun, but authorities say the pair could could face further charges.
The two travelers, Joseph Dasilva, 38, and Travis Dasilva, 36, were arrested Tuesday night local time at Bangkok’s Don Mueang airport, and fined 5,000 baht ($154) each for public indecency. Deputy spokesman of the Thai immigration police, Col Choengron Rimpadee, told the BBC the Dasilvas had been on a watch list after authorities flagged their controversial social media post.
“Once they are through with the charges, the Thai immigration police will revoke their visas and push for deportation,” he said. “They will also be blacklisted from coming back to Thailand.”
However, the Bangkok Post reported punishment for such violations (such a religious insult) could have been more serious, and the Americans might be still be up for charges that could result in possible imprisonment in addition to their existing fines. The Bangkok Post claims they could be additionally charged with violating Thailand’s Computer Crime Act by “posting pornographic pictures online” as well as “breaching Section 206 of the criminal law concerning behavior at a religious place that insults the religion”, quoting police chief Jaruphat.
The Bangkok Post claims the offense under the computer crime act is punishable by jail time of up to five years and/or a fine of up to 100,000 baht ($3,070).
Police chief Jaruphat said the two would also be fined for a similar picture taken at another temple in Bangkok, which was uploaded as the pair were detained for the Wat Arun photo, while police considered the possible violation of Thailand’s Computer Crime Act.
The Daslivas ran a since-deleted joint Instagram account called traveling_butts; a profile that showcased similar ‘butt selfies’ captured at tourists sites around the world. The account had more than 14,000 followers.
San Diego Gay & Lesbian News (SDGLN) identified the men as a married couple from San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood, and reported that they were seeking assistance from San Diego City Commissioner Nicole Murray-Ramirez. Murray-Ramirez says that the men reached out to him and he is talking to American authorities on what to do next, according to SDGLN.
“Though I am very disappointed in their actions, I am talking to U.S. government officials to see what assistance we can give them,” Murray-Ramirez told SDGLN.
While Thailand has a reputation for racy partying and bikini-clad beach-goers, the mostly-Buddhist country is deeply conservative. Revealing clothing is looked down upon and public nudity is considered outright offensive, reports Reuters.Canadian superstar Sidney Crosby again should be among a legion of NHL players with the chance to become the next Olympic hero.
Group A Group B Group C Russia Austria Czech Republic Slovenia Canada Latvia Slovakia Finland Switzerland United States Norway Sweden
The NHL announced Friday the League will pause the 2013-14 regular-season schedule from Feb. 9-25 so its players can participate in the 2014 Winter Olympics, to be held in Sochi, Russia. The decision to again send NHL players to the Olympics was a joint agreement between the League and the National Hockey League Players' Association.
The dozen nations competing for gold in Sochi are Russia, Slovakia, the United States, Slovenia, Finland, Canada, Norway, Austria, Czech Republic, Sweden, Switzerland and Latvia. NHL players should have a presence on each of the 12 teams.
Slovenia is participating in its first Olympic men's hockey tournament after failing to qualify for the past six. Austria is back in the tournament for the first time since 2002, and Belarus and Germany, which took part in the 2010 tournament, did not qualify for the 2014 event.
For Crosby (of the Pittsburgh Penguins) and Canada, it will be an opportunity to become the first country since the Soviet Union in 1988 to repeat as Olympic champion. The Unified Team, which comprised Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Uzbekistan and Armenia, also won gold in 1992.
Crosby's golden goal came Feb. 28, 2010, when he sent a low shot from the bottom of the left circle through the legs of USA goalie Ryan Miller of the Buffalo Sabres for the overtime winner in the gold-medal game in Vancouver. The goal gave Canada its second gold medal since the NHL started sending players to the Olympics in 1998.
In that game, American left wing Zach Parise, who now plays for the Minnesota Wild, scored his memorable game-tying goal with 24.4 seconds left in regulation, but Crosby topped the dramatics and capped Canada's Olympics with his goal.
The United States has been on the wrong end of each of Canada's gold-medal wins during the NHL era, also losing the championship game in 2002 in Salt Lake City. The Americans haven't won Olympic gold since 1980, the iconic "Miracle on Ice" win in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Russia is hoping to recapture its gold-medal glory in Sochi, the first Russian city to host the Winter Olympics. Russia won the silver medal in 1998 and the bronze in 2002.
Finland leads all nations with three medals since NHL players started attending the Games in 1998, winning bronze that year and in 2010, as well as silver in 2006.
Dominik Hasek led the Czech Republic to the first Olympic gold that featured NHL players, in 1998 in Nagano, Japan. Hasek was perfect in a 1-0 win against Russia in the gold-medal game.
Four years later, in Salt Lake City, the Canadians celebrated their first Olympic gold medal in men's ice hockey in 50 years. With a Canadian loonie frozen into center ice, Canada beat the United States 5-2. Joe Sakic, now a front-office executive for the Colorado Avalanche, and Jarome Iginla, who recently signed with the Boston Bruins, scored two goals apiece in the victory.
Sweden won gold in 2006, beating Finland 3-2 in Turin, Italy, behind 25 saves from New York Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist.
Men's Preliminary Round Schedule WED, FEB 12 1 12:00 PM ET Czech Republic vs. Sweden 2 12:00 PM ET Latvia vs. Switzerland THU, FEB 13 3 3:00 AM ET Finland vs. Austria 4 7:30 AM ET Russia vs. Slovenia 5 7:30 AM ET Slovakia vs. United States 6 12:00 PM ET Canada vs. Norway FRI, FEB 14 7 3:00 AM ET Czech Republic vs. Latvia 8 7:30 AM ET Sweden vs. Switzerland 9 12:00 PM ET Canada vs. Austria 10 12:00 PM ET Norway vs. Finland SAT, FEB 15 11 3:00 AM ET Slovakia vs. Slovenia 12 7:30 AM ET United States vs. Russia 13 12:00 PM ET Switzerland vs. Czech Republic 14 12:00 PM ET Sweden vs. Latvia SUN, FEB 16 15 3:00 AM ET Austria vs. Norway 16 7:30 AM ET Russia vs. Slovakia 17 7:30 AM ET Slovenia vs. United States 18 12:00 PM ET Finland vs. Canada Qualification play-off - TUE, FEB 18 19 3:00 AM ET TBD 20 7:30 AM ET TBD 21 12:00 PM ET TBD 22 12:00 PM ET TBD Quarterfinals - WED, FEB 19 23 3:00 AM ET TBD 24 7:30 AM ET TBD 25 12:00 PM ET TBD 26 12:00 PM ET TBD Semifinals - FRI, FEB 21 27 7:00 AM ET TBD 28 12:00 PM ET TBD Bronze Medal Game - SAT, FEB 22 29 10:00 AM ET TBD Gold Medal Game - SUN, FEB 23 30 7:00 AM ET TBD
---LDS Wedding Planning Checklist-3 Months
So, you have three months to accomplish all your LDS wedding planning! There is so much to do and it can be overwhelming, but WeddingLDS.com is here to help. Simply follow the three month checklist below and you’ll stay on track for your LDS wedding day! Click on the links if you need more information about a particular wedding planning subject, and you’ll be taking directly to a page full of wedding information. Or you can download a free customizable three month LDS wedding planner checklist by Clicking on the 3 month Checklist symbol. Or download a printable 3-month LDS wedding planner PDF page by Clicking the Download Button.
If you have less than three months, just start at the beginning of the list and catch up as quickly as you can!
Three Months (or Earlier) before the Wedding
Set your wedding date.
Interview and hire a professional wedding consultant, if desired, as soon as possible.
Decide what kind of wedding you want to have (i.e. how formal or informal, number of guests, if children will be included, what time of day).
Determine your budget and decide how expenses will be split between the families.
Determine how you’ll keep record of any payments made, or simply download one here.
Speak with your bishop about receiving a temple recommend, if you do not currently have one, and consider receiving your endowment before the big day, if possible. Schedule your endowment with the temple and arrange to purchase the needed temple clothing.
If you’re not getting married in the temple, select and reserve the ceremony site. Talk to your bishop about officiating at your civil ceremony.
Select and reserve the reception location. If your reception is at a home, arrange for any improvements needed.
Work on the guest lists for both the temple ceremony and the reception. Make sure the bride, the groom, the bride’s family, and the groom’s family have input. Gather full names and addresses.
Choose and order your wedding gown and veil or headpiece. Ensure that it is temple ready or plan for the needed adjustments.
Select and reserve a photographer, videographer, florist, DJ or musicians, and a caterer as soon as possible.
Schedule engagement photo session |
Affordable Care Act. Judge Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion in the 10th Circuit’s decision that went even further, urging that courts should defer to a person’s subjective claim that a law burdens his religious beliefs, regardless of how tangential that burden appears objectively.
Little is known about Gorsuch’s personal faith other than that he is religiously observant.
Little Sisters of the Poor is another example of a case that involved the question of a religious exemption from complying with the ACA. In that case, the Catholic order that operates nursing homes claimed that even applying for an exemption under the ACA from the government violated their religious beliefs. Gorsuch dissented when the 10th Circuit declined to reconsider its decision rejecting the Little Sisters’ religious liberty claims. That dissent argued that the court had given insufficient deference to the Little Sisters’ own articulation of the burden on their religious beliefs.
He has also written or joined on opinions siding with the ability of governments to display religious symbols on public property, such as a Ten Commandments monument on courthouse lawns. According to one bipartisan analysis of Gorsuch’s record:
“The common thread in these cases is one that matters very deeply to conservatives: a sense that the government can permit public displays of religion—and can accommodate deeply held religious views—without either violating the religion clauses of the Constitution or destroying the effectiveness of government (nondiscrimination) programs.”
Religious affiliations in the Supreme Court
The question many people are asking is, will Gorsuch’s religious affiliation matter? First, let’s look at the religious makeup of the Supreme Court.
Currently, the Supreme Court comprises five Catholics and three Jews (Justice Scalia was also Catholic). This has led some commentators to speculate on what this means for issues such as abortion regulations and church-state matters.
The vast majority of justices have been Protestants, which is not surprising considering the Protestant dominance of the culture until recently. President Andrew Jackson appointed the first Catholic to the Supreme Court (Chief Justice Roger Taney) in 1836, a fact that did not go unnoticed. The next Catholic justice, Edward D. White, was appointed in 1894, some 58 years later. (White was more controversial for being a former Confederate officer than for being Catholic.)
The first Jewish justice was appointed in 1916 (Louis Brandeis), to be followed by Benjamin Cardozo in 1932, which established the unofficial “Jewish seat” on the court. From 1940 forward, there has always been at least one Catholic and one Jewish justice on the high court (absent a hiatus from 1969 to 1993 of a Jewish justice).
Those demographics have changed significantly over the past two decades. With the resignation of Justice John Paul Stevens in 2010, the court was left without a Protestant member for the first time in its history.
Here’s what history tells us
In most instances, research shows, a justice’s religious faith has been a poor predictor of his or her judicial philosophy (and that would assume that one can draw accurate conclusions about what any religion requires of its adherents).
For example, is it safe to assume that a Catholic justice will vote against abortion and gay marriage because of the teachings of the Catholic Church?
Catholic Justice Frank Murphy (1940-1949) was a staunch New Deal liberal, whereas Catholic Justice William Brennan (1956-1990) was likely the Supreme Court’s fiercest supporter of church-state separation and reproductive choice during his long tenure.
Currently, Catholic Justice Sonia Sotomayor is considered to be part of the court’s liberal wing. Another notable liberal was Justice Hugo Black (1937-1971), who was a Southern Baptist, while two conservative justices were William Howard Taft (1921-1930) (Unitarian) and William Rehnquist (1972-2005) (Lutheran).
And though Catholic Justice Anthony Kennedy usually sides with the conservatives, he has voted to uphold abortion rights and gay marriage. Likely the closest religious indicator of judicial philosophy has been among the court’s Jewish justices, who have overwhelmingly been liberal.
To be sure, there have been some exceptions. Justice William Strong (1870-1880) was an evangelical Presbyterian who served briefly as president of a religious organization that sought to amend the Constitution to declare the United States a “Christian nation.”
Similarly, Justice David J. Brewer (1889-1910) was an evangelical Congregationalist who declared in a court opinion that America was a Christian nation, a matter he wrote about at length off the bench. And Justice Felix Frankfurter (1938-1962), a secular Jew, frequently referenced his religious/ethnic heritage in his strong support for church-state separation.
But those instances have generally represented the exceptions.
The safest conclusion to draw from history is that religious affiliation is probably a poor indicator of judicial philosophy. It generally does not preordain any judicial holdings. However, a conservative religious outlook may reinforce an existing conservative judicial ideology, and vice versa, particularly on social issues.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.MacNeille was born in Chicago, Illinois. She loved cartoons as a child and wanted to be a voice actress from the age of eight, but instead chose a "practical" career, feeling she would never be able to realize her ambition. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and attended broadcasting school, becoming a disc jockey. [2]
MacNeille worked in a variety of jobs and had numerous minor voiceover roles before becoming a regular on an animated TV show. In her words, "I'd been doing radio spots, some TV, demos, sound-alikes, industrial narrations -- anything that came my way for about two years."[2] She was also a member of the improvisational comedy group The Groundlings for ten years.[3] MacNeille took acting workshops and worked as a casting assistant for voice acting talent agent Bob Lloyd in what she calls "The University of Voice-over." Lloyd and fellow agent Rita Vennari got MacNeille her first role on an animated show: a part in an episode of the 1979 Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo.[2]
She sang and appeared in the music video (as Lucille Ball) for "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "Ricky" (1983), which was based on the I Love Lucy television show and parodied the song "Mickey" by Toni Basil.[3] MacNeille also appeared on Yankovic's 1999 album Running with Scissors, on the tracks "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi" and "Jerry Springer."
MacNeille was cast as Babs Bunny in Tiny Toon Adventures (1990–1995). Writer Paul Dini said that MacNeille was good for the role because she could do both Babs' voice and the voices of her impressions.[4] MacNeille commented: "The best part of doing Babs is that she's a mimic, like me...In the show I do Babs doing Billie Burke, Hepburn, Bette Davis, Madonna and Cher. I even have her doing Jessica Rabbit."[3] The success of Tiny Toon Adventures led to the series Animaniacs. MacNeille was brought in to voice Dot Warner, one of the show's three main characters, because Dot's character was very similar to Babs Bunny.[5] Andrea Romano, the voice director and caster for Animaniacs, said that the casters had "no trouble" choosing the role of Dot: "Tress MacNeille was just hilarious (...) And yet [she had] that edge."[6] MacNeille was nominated for an Annie Award for her performance on the show in 1995.[7]
She has provided voices for numerous films, television shows, video games and commercials, garnering over 200 credits. MacNeille says: "The characters that I do all come from people in my own life--as well as the material I've stolen from my friends!" Her TV roles include characters on The Simpsons, where she voices Agnes Skinner, Brandine Spuckler and Lindsey Naegle, and Futurama, in which her main role is the character Mom. MacNeille has provided voices on many other television shows and cartoons such as Rugrats (as Charlotte Pickles), Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers (as Chip and Gadget),[2] Histeria, Hey Arnold, as well as dubbing work on English language anime translations.
She is the current voice of Daisy Duck and Wilma Flintstone.[2] MacNeille also appeared as an angry anchorwoman in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and served as the voice of Elvira's Great-Aunt Morganna Talbot. She provided voice acting for the 2003 Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner short feature The Whizzard of Ow.There’s something poetic about President Donald Trump defending the treasonous generals who fought for the Confederate States of America. Considering how Trump allegedly conspired with a hostile foreign regime to hijack the 2016 election, we’re essentially observing a traitor defending traitors. If any president knows what it means to conspire to subvert American democracy, it’s Donald Trump.
Early Thursday, Trump dropped a series of tweets directly defending statues dedicated to Confederate commanders Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
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...the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017
It’s informative to know that our current president believes the only features that successfully beautify our parks and public spaces are the apparently incomparable statues of Confederate generals. Also, I’d wager Trump knows next to nothing about either Jackson or Lee, not to mention other A-list Confederates such as P.G.T. Beauregard, James Longstreet, A.P. Hill or any of the other secessionists he’s defending.
Trump has illustrated with shocking clarity how important it is for Americans to learn the whole story -- the true story -- of the American Civil War, a story that absolutely includes a lengthy discussion of rebel soldiers from the ranks on up. While many Confederate infantrymen had their pet reasons for fighting, make no mistake: the defining goal of secession and firing upon Fort Sumter was to defend the perceived rights of the Southern states to retain slave labor as the driver of its economy. But it’s a toxic storm of racism and the absence of education about factors and motives of this harrowing chapter of American history that’s led us to this tragically frustrating time and place in which the sitting president is actively flacking for Nazis, white supremacists, KKK members and, yes, Confederates.
Trump doesn’t understand that his concept of the Civil War is mostly based on Lost Cause myths that arose during the post-Reconstruction era as a means of socially reunifying the North and the South. Trump doesn’t understand that politicians, writers and even turn of the century silent films engaged in a pernicious whitewashing of the old Confederacy, while nefariously targeting recently-freed African-Americans as a common enemy -- an easy-to-spot population of falsely stereotyped villains, rapists and thieves who Northern and Southern whites could mutually demonize. Blacks and racial equality, the Lost Cause suggested, were the true culprits behind the bloodiest war in American history. Given the existence of blinding racism in both the North and the South, it wasn’t a very difficult fiction to propagandize. Consequently, the Lost Cause triggered nationwide support for Jim Crow laws, the KKK, lynch mobs, neo-slavery, the GOP’s Southern Strategy and, eventually, targeted voter ID laws and voter suppression efforts of the modern era.
Trump doesn’t understand that Confederate traitors responsible for defending slavery to the tune of hundreds of thousands of Union dead were rebranded to become what Shelby Foote called “marble men.” According to the Lost Cause, these bronzed underdogs barely fell short of achieving their allegedly noble and ultimately unquenchable thirst for independence, freedom and states’ rights. Sadly, as you’ve probably seen in your Twitter feed, this “states’ rights” nonsense endures today, as does the deification of traitors, re-written as flawed but redeemable American heroes. In fact, Confederate commanders weren’t any more patriotic than criminals like Timothy McVeigh or Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, each of whom notoriously took up arms against the federal government.
Trump doesn’t understand that these statues he suddenly claims to love so much are actually memorials to a myth -- definitely not actual Southern heritage.
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Trump doesn’t understand that KKK members, white supremacists and American Nazis actively market in the Lost Cause myths that Trump also seems to accept as true history. By refusing to single out and condemn these groups, he’s knowingly building a political movement on racial oppression and white hegemony. Come to think of it, it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong about Trump’s level of education about the Civil War and its 150 year aftermath. It could be that Trump knows what his rally-going cult followers like to hear and so he’s deliberately and knowingly misrepresenting history in order to pander to his base.
While Trump’s base isn’t entirely populated with Nazis or Klan members, there are certainly more than a few Trump voters who, while they’re not wearing the silly uniforms or marching with tiki torches, subconsciously or overtly agree that white power is intrinsic to resurrecting their long sought 1950s utopia. Frankly, I’m more inclined to believe Trump doesn’t know anything about the racial history of America or the Civil War. He simply knows which Southern Strategy buttons to push and, unlike his GOP predecessors, he’s dispensing with the dog-whistles while barely stopping short of blurting the n-word, or worse.
One thing we know for certain, there will never be a marble or bronze statue of Donald Trump. At least, not one that’ll remain standing for very long. For all of Robert E. Lee’s flaws and for all of Stonewall Jackson’s eccentricities, at least they looked their enemies in the eye, unlike Trump who runs away from tough questions while hiding behind his pathological duplicity and the warm glow of his Twitter feed. At least Lee and Jackson were educated men who understood history and the high stakes of their secessionist enterprise. But they were still criminals against the Constitution and oppressors of an entire race on this continent. This last point is sadly lost on Trump.
The president has stupidly chosen to defend -- both tacitly and explicitly -- America’s enemies in three major wars: the South in the Civil War, Nazis in World War II and the Russians in the Cold War. The party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan is being consumed by Trump’s despotism and his amoral leadership on multiple fronts. And he simply doesn’t care. As long as his white loyalists are sated, he believes he’s on the right track. He’s believing wrongly.The lawsuit of an Indiana police officer injured in a gunfight with a suspect was allowed to proceed over claims the shooter obtained his gun through alleged negligence by the store.
In 2011, Indianapolis police officer Dwayne Runnels conducted a stop of a vehicle tied to an armed robbery and soon became involved in a shootout with Demetrious Martin, a felon, that left Martin dead and Runnels injured with a round to his pelvis. Martin’s gun, a Smith and Wesson.40, was recovered and traced to local gun store, KS&E Sports.
A subsequent investigation found that Martin, along with his friend Tarus E. Blackburn, visited KS&E two months before the shooting and allegedly Martin selected the handgun in front of store employees for which Blackburn returned alone later that day and purchased. As part of a straw buy, Blackburn handed the gun over to Martin, who due to his criminal record was prohibited from firearm possession, in the store parking lot for $50.
Blackburn was charged and later pled guilty to one count of making a false statement in connection with the acquisition of a firearm, in violation of federal law, picking up twelve months in prison.
This brought a 2013 suit by Runnels against the gunshop, backed by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, alleging negligence by store employees. Attorneys for Runnels, citing negligent entrustment, argued that KS&E’s employees failed in their “duty to exercise reasonable care on selling firearms and to refrain from engaging in any activity that would create reasonably foreseeable risks of injury to others.”
For their part, KS&E contends the act of a third party, Martin, was beyond the scope of their sale to Blackburn while state and federal law insulates them from damages.
After weaving through local trial courts since then, a three-judge panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals on Thursday, in a 2-1 ruling, found that Runnels has enough of a case to proceed, sending it into pre-trail discovery.
“We reach a similar conclusion with respect to Runnels’ contention of negligent supervision of employees and negligent entrustment,” wrote Judge Patricia A. Riley, with Judge Elaine B. Brown in concurrence.
Judge Robert Altice dissented in part in the panel’s ruling, contending state law which allows for protections against gun dealers for later misuse of their firearms, are solid, saying, “Regardless, while the legislature could have – and arguably should have – carved out an exception for straw purchases in subsection, it did not.”
The Brady Campaign backed a similar lawsuit for two Milwaukee police officers against a gun store for negligently selling a pistol to a straw buyer, which yielded a $6 million judgement last year. The group celebrated the decision by the Indiana appeals court.
“This is a huge win that will no doubt send shock waves through the legal community,” said Brady President Dan Gross in a statement. “With this victory, Brady’s Legal Action Project team made it perfectly clear that anyone made the victim of the gun industry’s negligence is owed their day in court and has a right to seek justice. Officer Runnels has put his life on the line defending that justice and he deserves nothing less.”
Citing Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives statistics, the Bradys contend KS&E is one of the “top sellers of guns later used in crime” noting the store sold 529 guns between 1996 and 2000 that were later traced to crimes.Rolf Karling drives his van laden with bread into the car park every evening. Within minutes it is empty – the loaves seized by hundreds of grappling hands, stuffed into hungry mouths.
But this is not a war zone, it is a high-rise housing estate in northern Germany. And the people he feeds are Romanian migrants who have flocked to the north western city of Duisburg in their thousands, but are without work, unable to feed their families, and crammed into tiny, crumbling apartments.
"They have created a Romanian refugee camp right here in the centre of the city," said Mr Karling, whose charity hands out food to the needy. "They call this place a 'Problemhaus'. But it's not a Problemhaus – it's a ticking time bomb."
German cities have seen a six-fold increase in migration from Bulgaria and Romania since the two countries joined the EU in 2007. Last week Germany once again successfully pressured the EU to delay a decision on allowing both countries into the Schengen passport-free zone, responding to fears over the effects of flinging open borders to countries known for high levels of corruption and organised crime.
"Does freedom of movement mean we have to assume that people from all over Europe who believe that they can live better on welfare in Germany than they can in their own countries will come to Germany?" said Hans-Peter Friedrich, German interior minister. "This danger cannot be allowed to come true."
Germany is currently home to around 249,000 migrants from both countries - double the number officially in the UK. And the situation confronting Chancellor Angela Merkel gives something of a foretaste of what could possibly happen in Britain.
At the end of this year, a temporary ban on Romanian and Bulgarian citizens coming to the EU to seek work will expire. When the EU's two poorest nations joined in 2007, they could visit the UK and be contracted for highly-skilled jobs, work self-employed, or labour where there was a shortage of British manpower, but not – unlike other EU citizens – come merely to look for work.
At the moment Britain is officially home to 93,000 Romanians and 42,000 Bulgarians, who are entitled to housing benefits, child support and council tax credits. They cannot claim unemployment allowances unless they have been in employment in the UK for 12 months.
Yet from next January they will be entitled to come without a job - abandoning Bucharest or Sofia, where the average net monthly pay is £340 and £283 respectively, in favour of the UK – where the average worker takes home £1442 a month. The same will apply in Germany.
"I can't wait until New Year," said Katia Borisova, 33, serving up glasses of tea at the Café Sofia in Duisburg. "My 10-year-old daughter is with my parents at home in Plovdiv. I want her to be with me. And when she is here, I will be able to claim €180 a month in childcare support – in Bulgaria it is €7."
It is a chain of events that is sparking a war of words between Brussels – which insists that the EU's rules must be respected – and the UK and Germany, which are deeply concerned about the impact of unrestricted migration from the duo of deprived nations.
Many countries are also scrabbling to find ways to rethink their welfare system to stop an influx of "benefits tourists". And it is worrying Whitehall. On Wednesday Nick Clegg chaired a meeting to examine a wide-ranging plan to deter EU migrants from coming to Britain, and to discuss how British benefits could be tightened without breaching EU law.
Other British politicians are calling for the government to be upfront about how many Romanians and Bulgarians they think will arrive. The think tank Migration Watch claims that 50,000 a year will come from Bulgaria and Romania, though the government is reluctant to be drawn on figures – aware of the previous mistaken prediction that only a few thousand Poles would come to the UK when all restrictions were lifted in 2004. In fact, more than half a million Poles have since made Britain their home.
There has even been talk of a negative publicity campaign in Bulgaria and Romania to dissuade people from travelling to the UK, while ambassadors from the two countries in both Britain and Germany have appealed for calm, telling worried Britons that most of their countrymen who wanted to are already resident.
Mihai Botorog, the Romanian consul in Bonn - the nearest consulate to Duisburg - said "practically no one" was planning to come after the restrictions were eased.
"I look with concern at these claims that now a wave of migration is preparing to come from the land of Dracula," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "Of the Romanians currently in Germany, 80 per cent have a job. And of all Germany's welfare claimants, only 0.23 per cent are Romanian. There are the same mix of gifted and not gifted people as any other nation - and being poor does not mean you are any less respectable."
Yet in Germany, the impact is already being felt. The country was a natural choice for Romanians and Bulgarians seeking a better life. It has had the same restrictions on working as the UK, but is geographically closer, economically stronger, and has the added bonus of a vast Turkish community – meaning that Bulgarians, with their very similar language, can feel at home.
For Turgut Ezcan, however, the influx has not been welcome. "I'm moving back to Turkey," he said, as he showed The Sunday Telegraph around the Duisburg district of Hochfeld – an area previously dominated by Turks, but now home to the city's 4,000 Bulgarians.
It is a socially deprived neighbourhood of grim Soviet-style housing blocks, its alleys littered with rubbish thrown out of the windows by their residents. Gangs of men in leather jackets loiter on the streets, as Mr Ezcan, 41 – who speaks seven languages – translated snippets of their conversations.
"Out of 1,000 Bulgarian people, maybe 20 will be working," he said. "The Turkish cafés are empty during the daytime as we have jobs; the Bulgarian ones are full. Turks have been here for fifty years and are integrated, speaking German. But this is different."
He points out a shiny BMW X6, and whispers that the owner is the local pimp, bringing girls from Bulgaria for prostitution. A large silver Mercedes cuts across our path. The cocaine dealer, he nods.
"I've lived here for 15 years, but it is really going downhill. The streets are untidy, there is lots of noise at night, and you can't leave your bike outside as it'll get stolen.
"I earn €2,300 a month as a lorry driver. But the Bulgarians tell my boss they will do my job for €1,000 a month – and they don't need visas, unlike me. Turkey is booming now, so it is time to go home."
Miram Usolu, 23, left her home in Shumen, eastern Bulgaria, three years ago. "It's really not easy to live in Bulgaria," she said, sitting with her husband and two young sons in a park. "But here the children can go to school and have a future. I earned €200 a month with McDonalds in Bulgaria; here I earn €1,200 for doing exactly the same job."
The sudden arrival has left the Hochfeld International Centre struggling to cope. For over 25 years Karoline Robins has helped new arrivals to the area – translating for the first wave of Turks and then Arabs, then the refugees from the former USSR, and now the Eastern Europeans.
"But it's very difficult at the moment, and we are run off our feet," she said. "They are only looking for a better life for their families – but the existing cultural programmes weren't really suitable for them."
Dr Michael Willhardt, who runs a PR agency, is one of the few native Germans to remain in the district. "I've lived here all my life, and have always tried to keep the area in good shape, attract young professionals, and make it a pleasant place to be," he said. "We feel totally abandoned by the government, who do nothing to support these people and leave us in this state," he said. "If you invite in guests, you have to have someone at the welcome desk."
Inside Duisburg's ornate 1870s town hall – one of the few buildings to survive the Second World War bombing that wiped out 80 per cent of this industrial town – the local politicians agree that more must be done.
The town of 490,000 has a traditionally large immigrant population – Turks were invited to come in the 1960s to work in the steel and coal factories – but has since suffered from a steep decline. Unemployment is 12.8 per cent (compared to 6.8 per cent nationally), one of the highest levels in the country.
"They come here because it's a cheap place to live, and there are lots of empty houses," said Leyla Ozmal, the council's representative for Bulgarian and Romanian integration. "But they are exploited by landlords and forced into ghettos. We want laws to prevent this overcrowding.
"And we also need money from Berlin and Brussels to help fund their health care, education and basic needs. Some other cities in Germany look at us and think we are scandalising the issue – but we are not. We simply recognise the problem and say that something urgently needs to be done."
Mrs Ozmal – herself the daughter of Turkish immigrants – describes Duisburg as being "at the end of a long rope from Brussels via Berlin, ending up here". The problem is heightened, she said, by the fact that Duisburg is heavily in debt: the city owes €2.1 billion to the federal government, and yet next year estimates it will have to start paying €15 million annually in housing benefits to the Romanians and Bulgarians.
The city has set up a series of remedial classes for Bulgarian and Romanian children, teaching them German, basic literacy and maths so that they can eventually enter mainstream education. But since 2007, these classes have cost the city €12 million.
"Brussels and Berlin have their heads in the sand," she said. "We are one of the few cities to face up to the scale of the problem. They are quite entitled to be here, but we must be able to pay for it."
For all the clouds on the horizon, central Duisburg is a remarkably peaceful place. On Tuesday the extreme-Right regional party, Pro NRW, will stage a demonstration in the city – but the mayor is confident his rival anti-fascist rally on the same day will draw far greater crowds.
"Europe is all about integration and tolerance," said Luisa Marongiu, 53, a cleaner. "My parents emigrated here from Italy. If people don't like it – what is the alternative? Go back to the USSR and close all borders?"
Retired teacher Christian Eichblatt, 70, said: "If they come just to get benefits then obviously that's not good. But I can understand them wanting to escape poverty. The real problem is that Germany and the EU have not done enough to make their own countries positive places to live."
Across the Rhine, however, is another story. In the district of Rheinhausen – where the "Problemhaus" is located – the German residents are worried.
Berbel Kohla, 47, who lives opposite the teeming building, no longer leaves her Mercedes outside her home for fear it will be torched. The balconies of the seven-storey block – where 400 people are crammed into 46 flats – are packed with carpets, mattresses, childrens' toys and a collection of car hubcaps. Smashed windows are patched up with splintering chipboard. Gaggles of street-wise children run rings around rubbish and overturned shopping trolleys.
"The problem is that there is no work for them," said Hans-Ludwig Ziegun, 65, a pharmacist who lives opposite. "They come from real poverty and just don't understand how things work here. The noise is incredible."
As The Sunday Telegraph watched, the landlord pulled up in a huge Dodge pick-up truck – its silver Ram's head logo glinting against the gleaming black bodywork. The children were immediately dispatched to clean up the rubbish and carry out rows of mattresses lining the corridors, while the parents were lined up and angrily berated by the Balkan owner – who also owns Duisburg's largest brothel.
Sandu Vassili, 20, a resident of the block who is originally from the Romanian town of Urziceni, said: "We don't want any trouble." Speaking in French – he lived near Strasbourg until then-President Sarkozy offered immigrants €300 to leave – he added: "We just want to work and make a better life for our families."
Andree Dura, 24, agreed. He arrived a month ago from Spain, where he had lived with his wife and three children. "I spent six years in Spain and never had any trouble, but now there is no work so people suggested I come here. I like it here, I want to stay."
Their attitude does not surprise Rolf Karling, the social worker.
"Those idiots in Brussels had absolutely no idea what they were doing," he said. "They wanted Romania and Bulgaria to be part of the EU because they were scared Russia might get its claws into them – but they never thought it through.
"Now we are faced with this. And it's going to get worse – two, three, four million will come. You open the floodgates from a very poor country to very rich ones. Wouldn't you move?"
Additional reporting by Harry AlsopBy Andrew Burnes
Game photography is undeniably a new art form - screenshots can be posed and framed, and those with a great eye will select the best scenes and most beautiful vistas, just as a real world photographer would. The very best screenshots from famous game photographers like Duncan Harris, James Pollock, Leonardo Sang and Joshua Taylor are shown in exhibitions, printed and framed, and admired by millions of gamers online.
Many of us would love to take similar screenshots, and try as we might we simply can't work around the limitations of traditional game capture - views and camera angles can't be changed, enemies continue to attack, and you can only capture a generic shot with the HUD visible.
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An example of the tools and processes Dead End Thrills uses to create his stunning screenshots, which have in the past been printed and displayed at art exhibitions.
That changes now however with the introduction of NVIDIA Ansel, a revolutionary, accessible game capture tool built in cooperation with leading game developers.
Simply put, Ansel enables you to make and capture your own unique and personally-framed screenshots via an easy-to-use user interface, on NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics cards.
Within Ansel there are numerous functions, features and modes, detailed below, that help you take amazing screenshots.
Free Camera - Compose Your Shot, Anywhere, From Any Angle
Start your game photography career by activating Ansel, at which time the game will be paused, and a freecam enabled, allowing you to compose your scene and take unlimited high-quality shots until you achieve that perfect image. In other words, you can escape the confines of a game’s first or third person camera and take a screenshot from any angle, until you have the perfect shot.
Roll, zoom, and reposition - do whatever you like to achieve the perfect game photo that real-life photographers may only get once in a lifetime. With this functionality Ansel instantly overcomes the limitations of traditional game capture, enabling you to capture any type of screenshot you can imagine.
Game developers, of course, will have the ability to restrict camera movement in multi-player games so Ansel users don’t gain an unfair advantage through use of the feature.
Super Resolution - Capture Every Detail With Gigapixel Images
Once you’ve positioned and framed your shot, simply select “High Resolution” in the Ansel in-game overlay and you can capture screenshots tens of thousands of pixels in size.
These super resolution screenshots can be viewed in Irfanview and other applications, and shared online via file sharing sites, forums, or any other service that supports the uploading of large files.
But why would you want to capture screenshots at super resolutions tens of thousands of pixels in size? Well, the resulting screenshot is almost entirely free of aliasing, detail is significantly sharper and clear, crops of any part of the screenshot are at maximum fidelity levels, and screenshots can be downsampled to lower resolutions for wall prints, posters, or super high-quality desktop wallpapers.
By saving at such a high resolution you can view incredible amounts of detail in games - take The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt screenshot below, for instance. In that image, Geralt of Rivia’s eye is less than a pixel in size, yet we can zoom in and see his eye and entire face in full detail. Below Geralt is another room that players pass through at the start of the game - by zooming in there we can read the words in the books in full detail.
Download the original 46080x25920, 1.7GB screenshot here.
Post-Process Filters - Adjust The Look & Mood Of Your Favorite Games
If you want to tweak the look, feel and mood of your screenshot before saving, Ansel includes brightness, vignette, sketch, color enhancer, and special FX options for tweaking the image. Moreover, Ansel allows users to create and share their own special FX filters, as they currently do for ReShade and other post-process applications.
OpenEXR Capture - Capture In The Widest Color Spectrum For HDR Images & Color Tweaking
Export Ansel screenshots in Industrial Light & Magic’s OpenEXR format; enabling you to choose your camera exposure as a post-process, and adjust colors and levels without common banding artifacts. Use any popular image editing tools such as Adobe’s Photoshop.
360 Capture - Snap 360-Degree Panorama Photos In Mono and Stereo For Desktop & Virtual Reality Applications
360 degree video, Google Cardboard, and Virtual Reality are all in the news right now - 360 degree film and photo capture solutions are being sold by leading firms, and the results enjoyed by millions of people on YouTube, Google Photos, and other services. Additionally, there are tens of millions of high resolution phones are compatible with Google's entry-level Google Cardboard VR solution, and Virtual Reality headsets from HTC, Oculus VR and Samsung are all on sale.
With Ansel you can create screenshots for these services and devices, with full 360 degree stereo views - simply select the 360゜ you wish to use in Ansel, and follow the instructions on our NVIDIA Ansel technology page to share and view the images on the web, in Google Cardboard, and in Virtual Reality headsets. It's that easy.
For additional 360゜ and Virtual Reality 360゜screenshots, visit our tech page.
For Cardboard users, we've released the NVIDIA VR Viewer bundled with Ansel 360 Capture screenshots that you can view today. Download the app and check it out!
NVIDIA's Ansel, A Revolutionary Game Photography Tool, Coming Soon
Our revolutionary Ansel technology is coming soon to a number of top games, including The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Epic Games' Fortnite, Paragon and Unreal Tournament, Cyan Worlds' Obduction, Thekla’s The Witness, Boss Key Productions’ Lawbreakers, Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, and the highly-anticipated No Man’s Sky from Hello Games.
Whether you want to capture standard screenshots, freecam screenshots, super high resolution screenshots, Instagram-style edited screenshots, or even 360゜web and VR screenshots, NVIDIA's Ansel can do it all.
Show your creativity, your humor, your sense of style, and maybe even become the next professional game photographer, wowing the world with stunningly composed screenshots worthy of display in an art gallery and on enthusiasts' walls.
Anything’s possible with Ansel, and it will all be available for GeForce GTX gamers.
For further Ansel news, stay tuned to GeForce.com.2008, States carried by the Republicans in all four elections States carried by the Republicans in three of the four elections States carried by each party twice in the four elections States carried by the Democrats in three of the four elections States carried by the Democrats in all four elections Summary of results of the 2004 2012 and 2016 presidential elections
116th Congress Senate party membership by state showing Vermont and Maine one independent senator each, Bernie Sanders and Angus King, respectively
Since the 2000 United States presidential election, red states and blue states have referred to states of the United States whose voters predominantly choose either the Republican Party (red) or Democratic Party (blue) presidential candidates.[1] Since then, the use of the term has been expanded to differentiate between states being perceived as liberal and those perceived as conservative.[not verified in body] Examining patterns within states |
’ve just got to get it fixed,” he said. “That’s something that I’ve got to be mindful of.”Two brothers were fishing off Wolfe Island near Kingston, Ontario, earlier this month when they spotted a shark.
Or did they?
In a video posted last week, the brothers appear to be reeling in a fish when a dorsal-finned shark surfaces — according to the video uploader, it snatched the catch off the hook — then disappears under the water.
The shark in the video is believed to be a bull shark, "an aggressive carnivore not adverse to freshwater and known to travel inland," the National Post reported.
The video went viral, with some locals now concerned for their safety in the water.
"I think a lot of people aren’t sure if it's a true story or not," Erin Whalen, a waitress at a restaurant on Wolfe Island, said. "But it's got a lot of parents being wary."
Others, however, aren't convinced.
"You're pulling my leg, of course," Wolfe Island Mayor Denis Doyle told the National Post when contacted by phone on Tuesday.
"That's a good one," he said, joking that it would be more likely to find "sharks on Bay Street" in Toronto. "It sounds like a Loch Ness monster."
Doyle watched the video and admitted that it could have been shot in his area, but he couldn’t be certain.
Wynfield Woodman, who ran fishing tours in the area for 40 years, believes the sighting was likely a sturgeon.
Other viewers are adamant that the "shark" is a catfish.
"There's no way it's a shark. It's a catfish," wrote Kristen Lamarche. "The dorsal fin is too close to the head to be a shark, and the shark's backs don't have a pointy ridge like this one."
And a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources said there isn't enough "good solid physical evidence" to confirm what it is.
"Not like anyone has ever posted a 'Fake Video' on the internet before… right?" wrote Variety 104.5's Nathan Carr.
What do you think, real shark, real something-else, or just another Internet hoax?
Here's another shark image that's getting some serious attention. Brazailian underwater photographer Adriana Basques captured a 26-foot-long whale shark, with its 4-foot-wide mouth open, seemingly ready to chow down on a boat full of fisherman. (In reality, the whale shark was touching the dome of the photographer's camera.)
"It might look scary when you see one with a huge open mouth coming in your direction," Basques told Caters News Agency. "But they usually have a very good sense of space and will turn before they get too close, although this is not what happened with the particular one in this image."
The optical-illusion photo is up for the People's Choice Award in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition held by the Natural History Museum in London.The Trump administration on Tuesday will propose the deepest cuts to government programs in a generation, delivering the opening salvo in a new round of budget battles in Washington.
The proposal, titled “A New Foundation for American Greatness” and set for release at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, sets out a 10-year plan to balance the budget.
It relies on a mix of cuts to anti-poverty programs, optimistic economic forecasting and deep cuts to nondefense discretionary funding to meet its targets. It would not touch Social Security and Medicare, which President Trump promised to leave alone during his campaign.
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The budget would dramatically shift spending to the Pentagon from domestic programs.
In 2018, it would shift $54 billion from nondefense discretionary spending to defense by enacting major cuts to the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and other agencies.
It would eliminate or phase out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and theNational Endowment for the Arts.
In subsequent years, that shift between defense and nondefense discretionary spending would grow to the point where defense spending would make up two-thirds of discretionary domestic spending, a huge shift from the 50-50 split of today.
By 2027, the Pentagon would continue to benefit from increased annual spending, while nondefense discretionary spending would be $260 billion less than what would be spent without Trump’s budget.
A sizable portion of the cuts to domestic spending would be made to Medicaid.
The budget assumes full passage of the House-passed version of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) to repeal and replace ObamaCare, which cuts $839 billion from Medicaid and pulls funding from Planned Parenthood.
In addition, the budget would make another $610 billion in cuts to Medicaid over 10 years by transitioning the program from a traditional entitlement to either a block grant program or a per-capita program that puts a ceiling on federal Medicaid funding to states. It would also allow states to impose work requirements for certain Medicaid beneficiaries to reduce costs.
A budget document explaining the cuts to Medicaid and other healthcare programs was briefly posted on the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) website.
“This proposal will free States to advance solutions that best serve their unique populations—for example, encouraging work, promoting personal responsibility, and meeting the spectrum of diverse needs of their Medicaid populations,” the budget document said.
Overall, the Trump budget would reduce the deficit from 3.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2017 to 2.2 percent in 2018.
Besides the cuts to Medicaid, the budget finds $274 billion in savings over 10 years from spending cuts to anti-poverty programs. These would include $193 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), $21 billion from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and $40 billion from cuts to the earned income tax credit and child tax credit.
The budget documents revealed at a briefing on Monday night didn’t specify how these savings would be found, but Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney said they would chiefly come from tightening eligibility for the programs, adding work requirements and shifting more of the financial burden to states.
“We are no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or number of people on those programs,” Mulvaney told reporters.
“If you’re on food stamps and you’re able-bodied, we need you to go back to work.”
The same is true, he added, for people who get disability benefits but should not receive them.
An OMB spokesperson said the budget would lead to a larger economy and increased jobs.
The budget office assumes that the economy will hit 3 percent growth in five years and sustain that growth through 2028.
The Congressional Budget Office, in comparison, estimates the nation will see 1.9 percent growth on average for the next 10 years.
Anti-poverty advocates reacted to the cuts with horror, arguing they would increase inequality while doing nothing to reduce the deficit.
“The Trump budget would make inequality and poverty significantly worse, while allowing deficits, when honestly measured, to soar,” said Bob Greenstein, president of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
But Mulvaney argued the budget would reform programs while putting people to work.
“We believe in the social safety net. We absolutely do,” Mulvaney said.
A well-administered safety net, he continued, could boost economic activity by mitigating risk for would-be entrepreneurs.
The budget allocates $2.6 billion for improved border security, including $1.6 billion for Trump’s physical wall on the Mexican border, though the OMB did not say what percentage of a full wall would be covered by that expense.
Estimates of the cost for a wall on the border have generally run between $10 billion and $20 billion.
The budget plan proposes a $19 billion expenditure for paid family leave, an issue first daughter Ivanka Trump has championed.
Mulvaney said the benefit would ultimately give people more security to stay in the workforce, which would further help the economy.
Nathaniel Weixel contributed.Episode Trivia Goofs Quotes Transcript Gallery Credits
Phoebe's Little Problem is an episode in the Hey Arnold! TV Series.
Synopsis
Plot
Phoebe is given a Perfect Attendance award at P.S. 118. After eating the whole tin box of Arnold's Grandma’s homemade prune cookies on the bus to school, she accidentally "cuts the cheese" into a microphone while accepting her award. Ironically, she vows never to return to school after facing such humiliation.
Mr. Simmons, Stinky, Rhonda, Arnold and Helga, among other offscreen classmates all try to cheer Phoebe up, but she feels even more embarrassed ever since Stinky said his poem's last line which was; "On account'a y'farted." Eventually, Arnold tells Phoebe that she had to face her problem head-on.
Taking Arnold's advice, Phoebe gives a speech in the auditorium, acknowledging that she farted, but stating that she is not just "that girl who farted", and that she is "much more than that." After Phoebe finishes her speech, Harold stands up and begins teasing her, and ends up laughing so hard that he wets his pants. This incident takes the attention away from Phoebe and transfers it to Harold. The episode ends with Phoebe smiling and leaning back in her seat, with the entire student body laughing at Harold when he runs out of the auditorium and him crying for his “Mommy”.Michael Barrett and Jenna Mulligan, emergency paramedics in Berkeley County, West Virginia, recently got a call that sent them to the youth softball field in a tiny town called Hedgesville. It was the first practice of the season for the girls’ Little League team, and dusk was descending. Barrett and Mulligan drove past a clubhouse with a blue-and-yellow sign that read “Home of the Lady Eagles,” and stopped near a scrubby set of bleachers, where parents had gathered to watch their daughters bat and field. Two of the parents were lying on the ground, unconscious, several yards apart. As Barrett later recalled, the couple’s thirteen-year-old daughter was sitting behind a chain-link backstop with her teammates, who were hugging her and comforting her. The couple’s younger children, aged ten and seven, were running back and forth between their parents, screaming, “Wake up! Wake up!” When Barrett and Mulligan knelt down to administer Narcan, a drug that reverses heroin overdoses, some of the other parents got angry. “You know, saying, ‘This is bullcrap,’ ” Barrett told me. “ ‘Why’s my kid gotta see this? Just let ’em lay there.’ ” After a few minutes, the couple began to groan as they revived. Adults ushered the younger kids away. From the other side of the backstop, the older kids asked Barrett if the parents had overdosed. “I was, like, ‘I’m not gonna say.’ The kids aren’t stupid. They know people don’t just pass out for no reason.” During the chaos, someone made a call to Child Protective Services. At this stage of the American opioid epidemic, many addicts are collapsing in public—in gas stations, in restaurant bathrooms, in the aisles of big-box stores. Brian Costello, a former Army medic who is the director of the Berkeley County Emergency Medical Services, believes that more overdoses are occurring in this way because users figure that somebody will find them before they die. “To people who don’t have that addiction, that sounds crazy,” he said. “But, from a health-care provider’s standpoint, you say to yourself, ‘No, this is survival to them.’ They’re struggling with using but not wanting to die.” A month after the incident, the couple from the softball field, Angel Dawn Holt, who is thirty-five, and her boyfriend, Christopher Schildt, who is thirty-three, were arraigned on felony charges of child neglect. (Schildt is not the biological father of Holt’s kids.) A local newspaper, the Martinsburg Journal, ran an article about the charges, noting that the couple’s children, who had been “crying when law enforcement arrived,” had been “turned over to their grandfather.” West Virginia has the highest overdose death rate in the country, and heroin has devastated the state’s Eastern Panhandle, which includes Hedgesville and the larger town of Martinsburg. Like the vast majority of residents there, nearly all the addicts are white, were born in the area, and have modest incomes. Because they can’t be dismissed as outsiders, some locals view them with empathy. Other residents regard addicts as community embarrassments. Many people in the Panhandle have embraced the idea of addiction as a disease, but a vocal cohort dismisses this as a fantasy disseminated by urban liberals. These tensions were aired in online comments that amassed beneath the Journal article. A waitress named Sandy wrote, “Omgsh, How sad!! Shouldnt be able to have there kids back! Seems the heroin was more important to them, than watchn there kids have fun play ball, and have there parents proud of them!!” A poster named Valerie wrote, “Stop giving them Narcan! At the tax payers expense.” Such views were countered by a reader named Diana: “I’m sure the parents didn’t get up that morning and say hey let’s scar the kids for life. I’m sure they wished they could sit through the kids practice without having to get high. The only way to understand it is to have lived it. The children need to be in a safe home and the adults need help. They are sick, i know from the outside it looks like a choice but its not. Shaming and judging will not help anyone.” One day, Angel Holt started posting comments. “I don’t neglect,” she wrote. “Had a bad judgment I love my kids and my kids love me there honor roll students my oldest son is about to graduate they play sports and have a ruff over there head that I own and food, and things they just want I messed up give me a chance to prove my self I don’t have to prove shit to none of u just my children n they know who I am and who I’m not.” A few weeks later, I spoke to Holt on the phone. “Where it happened was really horrible,” she said. “I can’t sit here and say different.” But, she said, it had been almost impossible to find help for her addiction. On the day of the softball practice, she ingested a small portion of a package of heroin that she and Schildt had just bought, figuring that she’d be able to keep it together at the field; she had promised her daughter that she’d be there. But the heroin had a strange purple tint—it must have been cut with something nasty. She started feeling weird, and passed out. She knew that she shouldn’t have touched heroin that was so obviously adulterated. But, she added, “if you’re an addict, and if you have the stuff, you do it.” “Just imagine the hole is world peace and the sand traps are nuclear Armageddon and the club is your ability to deal calmly and rationally with complex situations.”
In Berkeley County, which has a population of a hundred and fourteen thousand, when someone under sixty dies, and the cause of death isn’t mentioned in the paper, locals assume that it was an overdose. It’s becoming the default explanation when an ambulance stops outside a neighbor’s house, and the best guess for why someone is sitting in his car on the side of the road in the middle of the afternoon. On January 18th, county officials started using a new app to record overdoses. According to this data, during the next two and a half months emergency medical personnel responded to a hundred and forty-five overdoses, eighteen of which were fatal. This underestimates the scale of the epidemic, because many overdoses do not prompt 911 calls. Last year, the county’s annual budget for emergency medication was twenty-seven thousand dollars. Narcan, which costs fifty dollars a dose, consumed two-thirds of that allotment. The medication was administered two hundred and twenty-three times in 2014, and four hundred and three times in 2016. One Thursday in March, a few weeks before Michael Barrett responded to Angel Holt’s overdose, I rode with him in his paramedic vehicle, a specially equipped S.U.V. He started his day as he often does, with bacon and eggs at the Olde Country Diner, in Martinsburg. Barrett, who is thirty-three, with a russet-colored beard and mustache, works two twenty-four-hour shifts a week, starting at 7 a.m. The diner shares a strip mall with the E.M.T. station, and, if he has to leave on a call before he can finish eating, the servers will box up his food in a hurry. Barrett’s father and his uncles were volunteer firemen in the area, and, growing up, he often accompanied them in the fire truck. As they’d pull people from crumpled cars or burning buildings, he’d say to himself, “Man, they doing stuff—they’re awesome.” When Barrett became a paramedic, in his twenties, he knew that he could make a lot more money “going down the road,” as people around here say, referring to Baltimore or Washington, D.C. But he liked it when older colleagues told him, “I used to hold you at the fire department when you were a baby.” Barrett’s first overdose call of the day came at 8 a.m., for a twenty-year-old woman. Several family members were present at the home, and while Barrett and his colleagues worked on her they cried and blamed one another, and themselves, for not watching her more closely. The woman was given Narcan, but she was too far gone; she died after arriving at the hospital. We stopped by a local fire station, where the men and women on duty talked about all the O.D. calls they took each week. Sometimes they knew the person from high school, or were related to the person. Barrett said that in such cases you tended “to get more angry at them—you’re, like, ‘Man, you got a kid, what the hell’s wrong with you?’ ” Barrett sometimes had to return several times in one day to the same house—once, a father, a mother, and a teen-age daughter overdosed on heroin in succession. Such stories seemed like twisted variations on the small-town generational solidarity he admired; as Barrett put it, even if one family member wanted to get clean, it would be next to impossible unless the others did, too. He was used to O.D. calls by now, except for the ones in which kids were around. He once arrived at a home to find a seven-year-old and a five-year-old following the instructions of a 911 operator and performing C.P.R. on their parents. (They survived.) Around three o’clock, the dispatcher reported that a man in Hedgesville was slumped over the steering wheel of a jeep. By the time we got there, the man, who appeared to be in his early thirties, had been helped out of his vehicle and into an ambulance. A skinny young sheriff’s deputy on the scene showed us a half-filled syringe: the contents resembled clean sand, which suggested pure heroin. That was a good thing—these days, the narcotic is often cut with synthetic painkillers such as fentanyl, which is fifty times as powerful as heroin. The man had floppy brown hair and a handsome face; he was wearing jeans, work boots, and a black windbreaker. He’d been revived with oxygen—he hadn’t needed Narcan—but as he sat in the ambulance his eyes were only partly opened, and his pupils, when I could catch a glimpse of them, were constricted to pinpoints. Barrett asked him, “Did you take a half syringe? ’Cause there’s half a syringe left.” The man looked up briefly and said, “Yeah? I was trying to take it all.” He said that he was sorry—he’d been clean for a month. Then he mumbled something about having a headache. “Well, sure you do,” another paramedic said. “You weren’t breathing there for a while. Your brain didn’t have any oxygen.” The man’s jeep sat, dead still, in the middle of a street that sloped sharply downhill. A woman introduced herself to me as Ethel. She had been driving behind the man when he lost consciousness. “I just rolled up, saw he was slumped over the wheel,” she said. “I knew what it was right away.” She beeped her horn, but he didn’t move. She called 911 and stayed until the first responders showed up, “in case he started to roll forward, and maybe I could stop traffic—and to make sure he was O.K.” I asked if the man’s jeep had been running during this time. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “He just happened to stop with his foot on the brake.” Barrett shared some protocol: whenever he came across people passed out in a car, he put the transmission in park and took their keys, in case they abruptly revived. He’d heard of people driving off with E.M.T. personnel halfway inside. The sky was a dazzling blue, with fluffy white clouds scudding overhead. The man took a sobriety test, wobbling across the neat lawn of a Methodist church. “That guy’s still high as a kite,” somebody said. Tara Mayson, Tina Stride, and Lisa Melcher run the Hope Dealer Project, which helps addicts find a spot in rehab. Photograph by Eugene Richards for The New Yorker Photograph by Eugene Richards for The New Yorker We were driving away from Hedgesville when the third overdose call of the day came, for a twenty-nine-year-old male. Inside a nicely kept house in a modern subdivision, the man was lying unconscious on the bathroom floor, taking intermittent gasps. He was pale, though not yet the blue-tinged gray that people turn when they’ve been breathing poorly for a while. Opioid overdoses usually kill people by inhibiting respiration: breathing slows and starts to sound labored, then stops altogether. Barrett began preparing a Narcan dose. Generally, the goal was to get people breathing well again, not necessarily to wake them completely. A full dose of Narcan is two milligrams, and in Berkeley County the medics administer 0.4 milligrams at a time, so as not to snatch patients’ high away too abruptly: you didn’t want them to go into instant withdrawal, feel terribly sick, and become belligerent. Barrett crouched next to the man and started an I.V. A minute later, the man sat up, looking bewildered and resentful. He threw up. Barrett said, “Couple more minutes and you would have died, buddy.” “Thank you,” the man said. “You’re welcome—but now you need to go to the hospital.” The man’s girlfriend was standing nearby, her hair in a loose bun. She responded calmly to questions: “Yeah, he does heroin”; “Yeah, he just ate.” The family dog was snuffling at the front door, and one of the sheriff’s deputies asked if he could let it outside. The girlfriend said, “Sure.” Brian Costello had told me that family members had grown oddly comfortable with E.M.T. visits: “That’s the scary part—that it’s becoming the norm.” The man stood up, and then, swaying in the doorway, vomited a second time. “We’re gonna take him to the hospital,” Barrett told the girlfriend. “He could stop breathing again.” As we drove away, Barrett predicted that the man would check himself out of the hospital as soon as he could; most O.D. patients refused further treatment. Even a brush with death was rarely a turning point for an addict. “It’s kind of hard to feel good about it,” Barrett said of the intervention. “Though he did say, ‘Thanks for waking me up.’ Well, that’s our job. But do you feel like you’re really making a difference? Ninety-nine per cent of the time, no.” The next week, Barrett’s crew was called back to the same house repeatedly. The man overdosed three times; his girlfriend, once. It was getting dark, and Barrett stopped at a convenience store for a snack—chocolate milk and a beef stick. That evening, he dealt with one more O.D. A young woman had passed out in her car in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, with her little girl squirming in a car seat. An older woman who happened on the scene had taken the girl, a four-year-old, into the store and bought her some hot chocolate and Skittles. After the young woman received Narcan, Barrett told her that she could have killed her daughter, and she started sobbing hysterically. Meanwhile, several guys in the parking lot were becoming agitated. They had given the woman C.P.R., but someone had called 911 and suggested that they had supplied her with the heroin. The men were black and everybody else—the overdosing woman, the older woman, the cops, the ambulance crew—was white. The men were told to remain at the scene while the cops did background checks. Barrett attempted to defuse the tension by saying, “Hey, you guys gave her C.P.R.? Thanks. We really appreciate that.” The criminal checks turned up nothing; there was no reason to suspect that the men were anything but Good Samaritans. The cops let the men go, the young woman went to the E.R., and the little girl was retrieved by her father.
Heroin is an alluringly cheap alternative to prescription pain medication. In 1996, Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, marketing it as a safer form of opiate—the class of painkillers derived from the poppy plant. (The term “opioids” encompasses synthetic versions of opiates as well.) Opiates such as morphine block pain but also produce a dreamy euphoria, and over time they cause physical cravings. OxyContin was sold in time-release capsules that levelled out the high and, supposedly, diminished the risk of addiction, but people soon discovered that the capsules could be crushed into powder and then injected or snorted. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of overdose deaths in the United States jumped by a hundred and thirty-seven per cent. Some states became inundated with opiates. According to the Charleston Gazette-Mail, between 2007 and 2012 drug wholesalers shipped to West Virginia seven hundred and eighty million pills of hydrocodone (the generic name for Vicodin) and oxycodone (the generic name for OxyContin). That was enough to give each resident four hundred and thirty-three pills. The state has a disproportionate number of people who have jobs that cause physical pain, such as coal mining. It also has high levels of poverty and joblessness, which cause psychic pain. Mental-health services, meanwhile, are scant. Chess Yellott, a retired family practitioner in Martinsburg, told me that many West Virginians self-medicate to mute depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress from sexual assault or childhood abuse. “Those things are treatable, and upper-middle-class parents generally get their kids treated,” he said. “But, in families with a lot of chaos and money problems, kids don’t get help.” In 2010, Purdue introduced a reformulated capsule that is harder to crush or dissolve. The Centers for Disease Control subsequently issued new guidelines stipulating that doctors should not routinely treat chronic pain with opioids, and instead should try approaches such as exercise and behavioral therapy. The number of prescriptions for opioids began to drop. But when prescription opioids became scarcer their street price went up. Drug cartels sensed an opportunity, and began flooding rural America with heroin. Daniel Ciccarone, a professor at the U.C.-San Francisco School of Medicine, studies the heroin market. He said of the cartels, “They’re multinational, savvy, borderless entities. They worked very hard to move high-quality heroin into places like rural Vermont.” They also kept the price low. In West Virginia, many addicts told me, an oxycodone pill now sells for about eighty dollars; a dose of heroin can be bought for about ten. A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes, “Following the OxyContin reformulation in 2010, abuse of prescription opioid medications and overdose deaths decreased for the first time since 1990. However, this drop coincided with an unprecedented rise in heroin overdoses.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, three out of four new heroin users report having first abused opioids. “The Changing Face of Heroin Use in the United States,” a 2014 study led by Theodore Cicero, of Washington University in St. Louis, looked at some three thousand heroin addicts in substance-abuse programs. Half of those who began using heroin before 1980 were white; nearly ninety per cent of those who began using in the past decade were white. This demographic shift may be connected to prescribing patterns. A 2012 study by a University of Pennsylvania researcher found that black patients were thirty-four per cent less likely than white patients to be prescribed opioids for such chronic conditions as back pain and migraines, and fourteen per cent less likely to receive such prescriptions after surgery or traumatic injury. But a larger factor, it seems, was the despair of white people in struggling small towns. Judith Feinberg, a professor at West Virginia University who studies drug addiction, described opioids as “the ultimate escape drugs.” She told me, “Boredom and a sense of uselessness and inadequacy—these are human failings that lead you to just want to withdraw. On heroin, you curl up in a corner and blank out the world. It’s an extremely seductive drug for dead-end towns, because it makes the world’s problems go away. Much more so than coke or meth, where you want to run around and do things—you get aggressive, razzed and jazzed.” Peter Callahan, a psychotherapist in Martinsburg, said that heroin “is a very tough drug to get off of, because, while it was meant to numb physical pain, it numbs emotional pain as well—quickly and intensely.” In tight-knit Appalachian towns, heroin has become a social contagion. Nearly everyone I met in Martinsburg has ties to someone—a child, a sibling, a girlfriend, an in-law, an old high-school coach—who has struggled with opioids. As Callahan put it, “If the lady next door is using, and so are other neighbors, and people in your family are, too, the odds are good that you’re going to join in.” In 2015, Berkeley County created a new position, recovery-services coördinator, to connect residents with rehab. Yet there is a chronic shortage of beds in the state for addicts who want help. Kevin Knowles, who was appointed to the job, told me, “If they have private insurance, I can hook them right up. If they’re on Medicaid—and ninety-five per cent of the people I work with are—it’s going to be a long wait for them. Weeks, months.” He said, “The number of beds would have to increase by a factor of three or four to make any impact.” West Virginia has an overdose death rate of 41.5 per hundred thousand people. (New Hampshire has the second-highest rate: 34.3 per hundred thousand.) This year, for the sixth straight year, West Virginia’s indigent burial fund, which helps families who can’t afford a funeral pay for one, ran out of money. Fred Kitchen, the president of the West Virginia Funeral Directors Association, told me that, in the funeral business, “we know the reason for that was the increase in overdose deaths.” He added, “Families take out second mortgages, cash in 401(k)s, and go broke to try and save a son or daughter, who then overdoses and dies.” Without the help of the burial fund, funeral directors must either give away caskets, plots, and cremation services—and risk going out of business—or, Kitchen said, look “mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, and children in the eye while they’re saying, ‘You have nothing to help us?’ ”
Martinsburg, which has a population of seventeen thousand, is a hilly town filled with brick and clapboard row houses. It was founded in 1778, by Adam Stephen, a Revolutionary War general. The town became a depot for the B. & O. Railroad and grew into an industrial center dominated by woollen mills. Interwoven, established in the eighteen-nineties, was the first electric-powered textile plant in the U.S. The company became the largest men’s-sock manufacturer in the world, and at its height, in the nineteen-fifties, it employed three thousand people in Martinsburg. The Interwoven factory whistle could be heard all over town, summoning workers every morning at a quarter to seven. In 1971, when the mill closed, an editorial in the Martinsburg Journal mourned the passing of “what was once this community’s greatest pride.” In 2004, the last woollen mill in town, Royce Hosiery, ceased operations. It’s simplistic to trace the town’s opioid epidemic directly to the loss of industrial jobs. Nevertheless, many residents I met brought up this history, as part of a larger story of lost purpose that has made the town vulnerable to the opioid onslaught. In 2012, Macy’s opened a distribution center in the Martinsburg area, but, Knowles said, the company has found it difficult to hire longtime residents, because so many fail the required drug test. (The void has been filled, only partially, by people from neighboring states.) Knowles wonders if Procter & Gamble, which is opening a manufacturing plant in the area this fall, will have a similar problem. The Eastern Panhandle is one of the wealthier parts of a poor state. (The most destitute counties depend on coal mining.) Berkeley County is close enough to D.C. and Baltimore that many residents commute for work. Nevertheless, Martinsburg feels isolated. Several people I met there expressed surprise, or sympathy, when I told them that I live in D.C., or politely said that they’d like to visit the capital one of these days. Like every other county in West Virginia, Berkeley County voted for Donald Trump. The Interwoven mill, derelict and grand, dominates the center of Martinsburg. A local police officer has proposed turning most of the mill into a rehab facility. Photograph by Eugene Richards for The New Yorker Photograph by Eugene Richards for The New Yorker Michael Chalmers is the publisher of an Eastern Panhandle newspaper, the Observer. It is based in Shepherdstown, a picturesque college town near the Maryland border which has not succumbed to heroin. Chalmers, who is forty-two, grew up in Martinsburg, and in 2014 he lost his younger brother, Jason, to an overdose. I asked him why he thought that Martinsburg was struggling so much with drugs. “In my opinion, the desperation in the Panhandle, and places like it, is a social vacancy,” he said. “People don’t feel they have a purpose.” There was a “shame element in small-town culture.” Many drug addicts, he explained, are “trying to escape the reality that this place doesn’t give them anything.” He added, “That’s really hard to live with—when you look around and you see that seven out of ten of your friends from high school are still here, and nobody makes more than thirty-six thousand a year, and everybody’s just bitching about bills and watching these crazy shows on reality TV and not doing anything.” The Interwoven mill, derelict and grand, still dominates the center of Martinsburg. One corner of it has been turned into a restaurant, but the rest sits empty. Lately, there’s been talk of an ambitious renovation. A police officer named Andrew Garcia has a plan, called Martinsburg Renew, which would turn most of the mill into a rehab facility. Todd Funkhouser, who runs the Berkeley County Historical Society, showed me around one day. “Martinsburg is an industrial town,” he said. “That’s its identity. But what’s the industry now? Maybe it will be drug rehab.”
In the past several months, I have returned to Martinsburg many times, and spoken with many addicts there. I learned the most about the crisis, however, from residents who weren’t drug users, but whose lives had been irrevocably altered by others’ addiction. Lori Swadley is a portrait and wedding photographer in Martinsburg. When I looked at her Web site, she seemed to be in demand all over the area, and her photographs were lovely: her brides glowed in afternoon light, her high-school seniors looked polished and confident. But what drew me to her was a side project she had been pursuing, called 52 Addicts—a series of portraits that called attention to the drug epidemic in and around Martinsburg. It was clear that Swadley had a full life: her husband, Jon, worked with her in the photography business, and they had three small children, Juniper, Bastian, and Bodhi. Her Web site noted that she loved fashion and gardening, and included this declaration: “I’m happy that you’ve stumbled upon our little slice of heaven!” The 52 Addicts series seemed like a surprising project for someone so busy and cheerful. We met one day at Mugs & Muffins, a cozy coffee shop on Queen Street. Swadley is thirty-nine, tall and slender, and she looked elegant in jeans, a charcoal-colored turtleneck, and high boots. She and her husband had moved to Martinsburg in 2010, she told me, looking for an affordable place to raise children close to where she had grown up, in the Shenandoah Valley. Soon after they arrived, they settled into a subdivision outside town, and Swadley started reading the Martinsburg Journal online. She told me, “I’d see these stories about addiction—whether it was somebody who’d passed away, and the family wanted to tell their story, or it was the overdose statistics, or whatever.” Many of the stories were written by the same reporter, Jenni Vincent. “She was very persistent, and—I don’t know what the word for it is—very in your face,” Swadley said. “You could tell she wanted the problem to be known. Because at that time it seemed like everybody else wanted to hide it. And, to me, that seemed like the worst thing you could do.” It turned out that thirteen of Swadley’s friends had died of opioid overdoses. I said that it seemed like an extraordinarily high number, especially for someone who was not an addict. She agreed, but there it was. All thirteen were young men—Swadley had met most of them when she was in her early twenties, and she had been a tomboy back then. The first time she heard that a friend had died, she had been photographing a wedding for some mutual friends. They were sitting around a bonfire at the end of the day. When Swadley spoke of a crazy horror film that she and a guy named Jeremy had made in high school, somebody mentioned that he had recently died, from a |
<summary> /// /// </summary> public function Get(i:int):* { Assert(i<m_counter, "Pool.Get(): index out of range!"); return m_pool[i]; } /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public function Clear():void { m_counter=0; } } }
This one allows you to construct a pool with runtime type checking and also allows you to call an Initialise() function on the object being allocated. I couldn't find a way of calling the object's constructor in AS3, which would have been the ideal case - something like placement new in c++ would be nice. Equally, I couldn't find a way of passing all the parameters directly to the function without manually indexing them or calling apply() which I've read is very slow. However, it works well in practice.
For the temporary calculations involving Vector2's I used a large pool of Vector2s which only exists for one frame. The only caveat is that you need to be very careful not to persist a reference to one of these across frames because it will be overwritten. I really wish AS3 had struct like c# does to avoid having to do this.
I used the following profiler (which I highly recommend) to identify the slow parts of the engine: http://manuel.bit-fire.com/2007/10/17/an-as3-profiler/
Once I had identified all the slow parts and made pools for all the temporary objects I was still a little discouraged because it wasn't running quite as fast as I'd have liked on my old desktop that I have here. I worked hard at it but eventually reached the point of diminishing returns and I was in danger of making the source code too hard to follow.
In desperation I fired up the real angry birds in my chrome browser to see how quickly that would run on my machine. I was shocked and relieved to discover that it actually ran a lot slower than my implementation did! Happy days.
Particles and blinking
Some little items of polish that I added to the game were a simple particle system which used Sprites defined in the Flash IDE as the particles and a simple blink controller that used named instances inside each character for the open eyes and the closed eyes and then animated them in code depending on a random waiting period to judge when to toggle the visibility of each.
Figure 8 shows an example character with blinked and open eyes and the corresponding eye shapes for each.
Conclusion
Of course the game contains many more little things which I don't possibly have time to write about now, but if there is enough interest I can write another article of course! In this article I have covered some of the things which are necessary to turn theory into practice when it comes to talking about physics engines in games.
If you would like to do so, please purchase the source code and assets which go with this article; its very close to being a completed game which can be easily used as a template for your own 2d physics game, complete with editor (in the form of flash) which is delightfully easy to use.
This one is a little more expensive than my regular example code, but take into consideration that it took me two solid weeks of work which if I were contracted would be significantly more than this for one days work and also that what you are getting represents 10 years of industry experience and knowledge - if you think of it like that it really is a bargain... Remeber, Roivo spent $120k developing the original angry birds!
The only thing I ask is that no one just releases this as a game as it stands - please use it as a template for your own games! 🙂 As ever, the licence allows you to use all the code and assets for commercial purposes or otherwise as long as you don't just release it as it stands and that you don't simply give the entire thing to anyone else.
Note: requires Flash CS4+ and builds with Amethyst or FlashDevelop.
49.99USD
I hope you make some exciting games with this and I look forward to playing them!
Until next time, have fun!
Cheers, Paul.
p.s. in the game if you get bored of playing by the rules, you can simply pick up any object with the mouse and smash it around for fun!Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the seventh chapter in the mega-franchise, is but a few days from opening on Friday in theatres worldwide. Some of us at the Citizen are very excited. Others are indifferent. Still others couldn’t tell you the difference between a Jedi Master and a Sith Lord.
This week, the Citizen’s mobile app got together with the Ottawa Humane Society’s photographer Rohit Saxena to bring you a special Star Wars-themed adoption gallery.
Every Sunday, the app produces Petfinder, a round-up of cuddly cats, dogs, Guinea pigs and hamsters looking for loving homes. You can download the app here, and go here to learn more about the animals.
Below, a photo gallery.
A big thanks to the Capital City Garrison, 501st Legion and the Rebel Legion — Canadian Base for generously donating their time by coming down to the shelter for the photo shoot. Thanks in particular to Mark (Weequay, Skiff Guard), John (Greedo), John (Tusken Raider), Don (Commander Praji), Cindy (Jedi master, Ewok), Chloe (Jawa), Luc (Chewbacca), Amber (Visas Marr), Mark (Stormtrooper), Jeff (Tusken Raider), Derek (Darth Vader) and Kim (Stormtrooper).
(Note: the Garrison is part of the 501st Legion and not paid by Lucasfilm.)When local authorities decline to honor ICE detainers, they can have any number of good reasons for doing so. A likely one is the Fourth Amendment, which forbids imprisoning anyone without justification. If a police department is about to release someone who posts bail, it can’t prolong the detention — in essence, arrest that person again — just because ICE asks it to. Federal courts have repeatedly ruled that the local police cannot be forced to honor a detainer in violation of the Constitution. That is, without an arrest warrant from a judge. Which an ICE detainer is not.
Beyond the constitutional problems lies an argument about public safety, which also finds the Trump administration on the wrong side of the facts, in service of a campaign of fear. Mr. Trump has been trying to make Americans fear unauthorized immigrants. He has succeeded in making these immigrants terrified of him, having declared open season on the undocumented, in effect making every one of 11 million people a priority for deportation. Nobody — not parents of citizen children, not students, not those with clean records and deep American roots — is above suspicion or safe from arrest.
That fear has had palpable effects. Chief Charlie Beck of the Los Angeles Police Department announced on Tuesday that Latino immigrants had suddenly and sharply become less willing to report crimes. He said reports made by immigrant Latinos of sexual assault had dropped 25 percent in 2017 through March 18, compared with the same period last year. Reports of domestic violence fell by 10 percent early this year.
Chief Beck said Mr. Trump’s deportation crackdown had made immigrants afraid of going to the police or cooperating with courts. “Imagine a young woman, imagine your daughter, your sister, your mother,” he said, “not reporting a sexual assault, because they are afraid that their family will be torn apart.”
And now, with his ICE detainer bulletins, Mr. Trump wants local law enforcers to be afraid of him, too. He wants them to fear being publicly blamed for crime by immigrants, to have second thoughts about releasing anyone who might give the administration an excuse to brand them as complicit.
By attacking them in this way, the administration puts local law enforcement agencies in a terrible position. Honoring a detainer puts them at risk of a federal lawsuit. Not honoring one puts them in the cross hairs of the xenophobic Mr. Trump. His indiscriminate search for immigrants to deport keeps ICE from focusing on real public safety threats. It antagonizes local agencies that want to do policing the right way. It emboldens corrupt local jurisdictions that engage in racial profiling and other abuses. And it makes immigrants fear and shun the protection of law enforcement.What happens when newly-monied Russians design a super car? You get the successor to the first Russian super car, the B1. It's the Marussia B2 and it's got looks to shame a Ferrari Enzo and, supposedly, a 420HP Cosworth mill.
We weren't holding out much hope for the Marussia B2, but it's turned out to be one of the pleasant surprises of the Frankfurt Motor Show with Enzo-like looks and supposedly a 420HP Cosworth mill.
We're still a little foggy on the details, but it seems the Marussia B2 is built on the same frame as it's B1 predecessor but gets a specially built 3.5 liter Cosworth V6, ranging from 245 HP to 420 HP. Whatever the powerplant, it's hard to argue on the looks — the thing is bad ass. It's got more cut lines than a knife fighter and while the forward visibility is probably pretty terrible, awesomely ridiculous is the only way we can describe it.Av: Bjørnar Moxnes, leder i Rødt/Rødts gruppeleder i Oslo
Når Nettavisens redaktør Gunnar Stavrum sprer sine skrivebordsteorier om velferdsprofitørenes fortreffelighet, lar han sjelden fakta forstyrre framstillinga. Heller ikke denne gangen. Jeg tar det punktvis:
1. Rødt lys for nye barnehager i Oslo. Dette er feil.
Rødt og byrådet har gitt grønt lys for mange nye barnehager. Det borgerlige flertallet innførte et forbud mot nye kommunale barnehager. Strengt forbudt for landets største kommune å bygge en eneste ny barnehage! Vi har opphevet forbudet. Det betyr at det blir bygd flere barnehager nå enn da Gunnar Stavrums politiske venner i Høyre og Frp styrte Oslo. Innen 2019 får Oslo 3000 nye barnehageplasser.
Da de borgerlige innførte forbud mot kommunale barnehager, kom ingen refs fra Stavrum. Intet engasjement på vegne av foreldre som venta på barnehageplass pga de borgerliges prinsipprytteri. Kanskje Stavrum ikke bryr seg så veldig om småbarnsforeldre? Kanskje han først og fremst vil at kommersielle selskaper skal få enda mer skattepenger?
2. Byrådet stopper nye barnehager fordi de ikke liker private tilbud. Dette er også feil. Rødt og byrådet er ikke mot private. Vi ønsker flere ideelle, som Kanvas-barnehagene. De er private, ikke kommunale.
Det vi ikke ønsker mer av, er kommersielle. Det kaller Stavrum for «ekstrem venstresidepolitikk». Men i befolkninga som helhet ønsker 88 % å begrense selskapers mulighet til å ta ut profitt fra velferdstjenester eller forby dette helt.
Det er kanskje ikke så rart, når folk ser hvordan barnehagebaroner beriker seg på skattepenger bevilget til barnas beste. Som Benn Eidissen og Rolf Tore Andersen.
Når vi sier nei til nye kommersielle barnehager, er det fordi vi vil sikre at hver krone bevilget til drift av barnehager går til det - og ikke til privat profitt.
Så enten har 88 % nordmenn blitt venstreekstremister. Eller så er folk flest enig i standpunktet vårt mot velferdsprofitører.
Interessant nok er alle enige om dette prinsippet når det gjelder skole, til og med Høyre. Derfor er det utbytteforbud i skolen. Kanskje Stavrum syns at Høyre også har blitt venstreekstremister?
3. «Den politiske skepsisen til private drivere kommer til tross for at alle undersøkelser viser at foreldre i private barnehager er vesentlig mer fornøyde enn foreldre i offentlige barnehager» Dette er misvisende.
Avtalen i Oslo trekker skillet mellom idelle og kommersielle barnehager, mens undersøkelsen Stavrum viser til bare skiller mellom offentlige og private. Og som kjent ønsker vi flere private, ideelle barnehager i Oslo. I tillegg har det vært valgfritt for ulike private barnehager å delta i undersøkelsene, men obligatorisk for de kommunale.
Derfor er det misvisende å konkludere med at foreldre i private barnehager er vesentlig mer fornøyde, slik Stavrum gjør. Men etterettelighet er kanskje ikke så viktig når man prøver å score et politisk poeng?
4. «Byrådet sier nei til 225 nye barnehageplasser det er stort behov for i bydelene» Også dette er feil. Planene for flere tusen nye barnehageplasser i nye boligprosjekter fins på tegnebrettet i Oslo kommune. Det blir ikke én eneste ekstra barnehageplass hvis disse barnehagene driftes av Espira i stedet for av kommunen eller den ideelle barnehagekjeden Kanvas. Den barnehagelæreren som Espira vil ansette, kan like godt Oslo kommune eller Kanvas ansette.
Espira er eid av EQT, via svenske Academedia. EQT er registrert i skatteparadiset Guernsey. Vi snakker om et oppkjøpsfond som ikke tilfører norske barnehager noen verdens ting.
Tvert imot. Målet er å ta profitt fra skattepenger bevilget til barnehagedrift. I stedet for at pengene går til barnas beste, skal de havne på Guernsey. Dette er ren parasittvirksomhet på offentlige midler.
Jeg syns det virker som det er viktigere for Stavrum å ivareta næringsinteressene til selskaper med kommersielle motiver for sin virksomhet, enn barnehagebarnas behov. Han sa jo ingenting da småbarnsforeldre ble skadelidende på grunn av de borgerliges forbud mot nye kommunale barnehager.
Skulle vi gjort som Stavrum ønsker, vil bare enda mer penger som skulle gått til barnas beste, forsvinne i noens lommer.
Saken har imidlertid en enkel løsning for Espiras del. Hvis de slutter å drive barnehager med kommersielle motiver, vil de få tilskudd fra Oslo kommune på linje med andre private, ideelle aktører. Da vil de samtidig vise at deres viktigste hensyn er barnas beste, ikke egen profitt.But as Mr. Leane, who was raised in a big Irish family in North London, knew, Mr. McQueen’s soul was as a deep and powerful as an ocean but his reserves of happiness were always drying up. He said: “You can’t just move on and think that the problems will go away. I think that’s what caught him up.”
Still, in that moment, in the eternal minutes before the taxi reached Green Street, Mr. Leane believed that Mr. McQueen had beaten back the demons and once again like Houdini escaped. He told Ms. Verkade and Ms. Burton that the Spanish-speaking housekeeper must have been misheard. “It’s just a scare. He’s going to be all right.”
A few days after that Saturday night out with Mr. Leane, on Feb. 2, Mr. McQueen’s mother, Joyce, had died after a long illness. People may not know, or have forgotten in the clamor of years, that in the mid ’90s, when fashion writers were expressing disgust at his extreme fashion — the low-riding “bumsters” that became one of the most influential garments of the decade, the dirtied models and slashed clothes that suggested rape and other violent acts — Mrs. McQueen, the hub of an East End family, was in the backstage making sandwiches and tea.
Her approval, so plainly and freely given (his father, Ronald, was a different matter), was essential to Mr. McQueen, a gay man and the youngest of six, but it alone did not explain the enormous self-belief, the mental speed, the bursting ideas — which were present at the start. “You almost became addicted to him somehow,” Ms. Burton said later, recalling drafty mornings in Hoxton Square (she, in a coat, sitting on a too-low stool at the secondhand cutting table, Ms. Verkade on the phone hustling money, a dog afoot) and the pride as Mr. McQueen, chubby then, showed them five things he had made overnight. “It was almost like the old machine makers.”
Photo
SUCH feeling for beauty, for greatness, for never being quite happy, undoubtedly had its roots in his relationship with his mother and with another woman, Isabella Blow, the alarming-looking stylist-aristocrat whose effect was like an umbrella opening in a phone booth — but the perfect umbrella in finest silk.
Ms. Blow, with her red carnation mouth, liked to talk dirty to Mr. McQueen, and he to her. She also gave him friendship, books, approval. “Isabella could make it all O.K. in an instant,” the milliner Philip Treacy said. “She’d never say to Alexander, ‘Nice dress.’ She would say, ‘Oh my God, I love it.’ ” When she died, in 2007, taking her own life — the tragedy of Ms. Blow was that in spite of her gift of hope in others she was convinced she had no future — people said that Mr. McQueen had let her down. He didn’t bother to correct the record until last summer, for as Mr. Leane said, “She was on his mind a lot.” Later, when he met with someone making a film about her life, he broke down sobbing.
Ms. Verkade said: “He was somebody who talked about the future all the time. He was in the office talking about the show, the music, booking a holiday.” Indeed, in the last three years, since the show that he and Mr. Treacy dedicated to Ms. Blow, Mr. McQueen seemed to reach a real point of clarity. He and Mr. Leane traveled to India, from which came the jewel-like “Girl Who Lived in The Tree” collection. (Ms. Burton remembered getting text messages from him in the middle of the night describing colors to be dyed. “That’s how he worked.”) And he moved out of a big house he owned in East London, ending yet another relationship, and into a rental flat in Mayfair, which had the advantage of being central.
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At the New Year, Mr. McQueen was skiing in Val-d’Isère, France, with Annabelle Neilson and two other friends. A wild thing, with a small body and dark eyes, Ms. Neilson and Mr. McQueen were in a sense well matched. He liked familiarity amongst those he loved, he liked home, and indeed he often took vacations with his sisters and their children. Ms. Neilson recognized that need for intimacy and encouraged it, perhaps beyond proportion. She said, “I was sort of married to a gay man.”
Mr. McQueen, though — and this was so like him — chose to commemorate their bond by having two pieces of jewelry made, in the shape of an L and an A, in diamonds with a single black stone indicating a black heart.
“The bubble we lived in really didn’t allow a lot inside it,” Ms. Neilson said somewhat ruefully. “Sometimes I think maybe that was a mistake.”
Considering everything — his focus on work, the pleasure trips conducted while his mother was ill and the fact that Mr. McQueen had a history of being emotionally low and beyond reach — staying at home in his flat the week after her death didn’t seem to warrant unusual concern. Mr. McQueen was grieving — he told Mr. Leane that he couldn’t bear to see his mother buried. Her funeral was on Friday, Feb. 12, in East London. He had also recently learned that one of his dogs, the oldest, Minter, which he had from Hoxton, was sick with cancer. His friends were in daily contact. Mr. Leane told him, “We’ll get through this together.” And he seemed to.
On Tuesday, Feb. 9, Mr. McQueen went into the office, spending much of the time working on the new collection with Ms. Burton. He had been looking at 15th-century paintings, drawn to a lightness in the Dark Ages, and to see how the complex, digitalized prints of saints and angels would look before they were woven into costly silk jacquards, he had doll-size dresses produced in paper. As Ms. Burton said, he had mastered the technical process of prints just as he had tailoring and pattern cutting.
Mr. McQueen also spoke briefly with Ms. Verkade about plans for his mother’s funeral. She had booked a table for that evening at J Sheekey, a restaurant in Covent Garden. “Make it late,” he said.
They planned to go together — Mr. Leane, Ms. Burton, Ms. Verkade and Ms. Neilson, who spent the evening of Feb. 9 with Mr. McQueen in his flat, leaving at 3 a.m. She was probably the last to see him alive.
Now, though, as the taxi carrying Mr. Leane and the two women came to a stop at Green Street and they got out, he knew in a sick wave of fear that what had been unthinkable only an hour before had arrived. “As we walked toward the house there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to walk any further,” he said. “The ambulance and the police were there. It just shocked us. Then the family came. It was one of the saddest days of my life.”
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LAST summer, I saw Alexander McQueen in London for a profile I was writing. We met at his office, his apartment, over haddock and dressed crab at Scott’s in Mayfair. The city was tranquilized under a vicious heat wave. Over the years I had seen him often and — thinner, fatter, funnier — he was always the same, always passionate and ready to be the one to move the fashion marker.
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And it was as Sam Gainsbury told me later — she produced Mr. McQueen’s shows, all those shows that involved imaginative sets and the skills of choreographers and lighting designers, for he always preferred to work with people outside fashion — when she said: “You have to remember, lots of times Lee was really happy. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much with a human being.”
Daphne Guinness, whose understanding of fashion history collides with Ms. Blow’s like a bloodline, recalled the scene in his Paris hotel room in October, when friends gathered after his remarkable show: “I had never seen him happier or so full of ideas. It was a really kind of sedate, wonderful evening.”
Like everyone, she is puzzled by his suicide. “I really thought he had turned a lot of corners,” she said, adding, “Maybe it was suddenly like he had turned so many corners that the blackness came back tenfold.”
That may be the answer. Mr. McQueen was someone who only did what he wanted to do. And though he told me in July that Ms. Blow’s death served as a caution to him — “to know how quickly you could lose yourself” — he obviously wasn’t equipped to heed his own warning. Friends said he refused or shrugged off several attempts to get him to seek psychiatric help. (“God, I don’t think a therapist could handle me,” he said when I raised the topic.)
Mr. Leane said, “Lee always believed he could do anything on his own.” He recalled being thrilled when Mr. McQueen decided to quit smoking and go to a clinic. “He called me literally once he got outside and I said, ‘How did it go?’ And he went, ‘Well, I’m having a cigarette.’ I said, ‘Lee, but you’ve got to give it a chance.’ And he said: ‘Oh, it’s a load of rubbish. Come on, are we going to have a drink?’ And off we’d be, back to square one again.”
In one sense, Mr. McQueen’s suicide wasn’t a surprise. Statistically, according to mental health studies, he fitted the characteristics of those most likely to kill themselves — single, middle-aged men who are under severe stress, which bereavement would certainly cause. Suicide is also a means of escape.
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Mr. Leane believes that Mr. McQueen couldn’t deal with the pain of losing his mother. “She understood him,” he said. And that wasn’t an easy matter for his father. “With East End families, there’s always an issue with tradition,” Mr. Leane explained. “Lee’s dad was a cabbie, his brothers were a builder and a cabbie, and Lee wanted to make dresses. It wasn’t on their radar. I think there was a clash with his father in the beginning, because he didn’t understand. He said, ‘Now, what you want to do if you want to sell clothes is get a stall in the market.’ Lee told me that. And when Lee got the Givenchy job, he said to his dad, ‘Now, that’s the way to sell clothes.’ Lee loved his dad and his brothers. They just didn’t understand what he was getting into.”
Mr. Leane also thinks that Ms. Blow’s death and the prospect of losing a beloved dog were also contributing factors. “When he lost Issie, it was one of the elements, really,” he said. Based on interviews with his closest friends, this seems the most plausible explanation for his suicide. “It’s not great having all those important women disappear,” Mr. Treacy said. “And his mum was very important. He was the youngest.”
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Friends said he didn’t regard his recent dating partners (mostly online dates) as serious. In contrast to past boyfriends, Ms. Verkade said, “These guys never came into the office, we were never introduced to them.” And it seems very unlikely that he thought his restless, creative spirit had come to a dead-end.
Remembering the last three years of shows, which coincided with Ms. Blow’s death as well as the move to Mayfair, Ms. Burton said: “It was a moment, I feel, when Lee was released. Since the Issie show he cut every single pattern himself and I think in a way it made him modern. He believed in authenticity. And I think he felt if he didn’t cut those patterns himself then he wouldn’t know how these new fabrics he had would drape and fall.”
Their suicides do feel linked, if only because they were both amazing catalysts always getting at the beauty that other people didn’t see. Mr. Leane, who made metal corsets and sculptural pieces for Mr. McQueen’s shows, though he was a fine jeweler, remembers the first time McQueen asked him to do a large piece. It was a corset in the form of a human skeleton. Mr. Leane told him he didn’t know how to make something on that scale.
“And he said: ‘Well, Shaun, if you can make it small, you can make it big. It’s just as simple as that.’ ”
“He challenged me, you see,” Mr. Leane said. “Working with Lee was like getting on a fast train. You just enjoyed the buzz and excitement. And you knew you were doing something different.”
Today there are fewer people who want something different.
Many people inferred from Mr. McQueen’s silence after Ms. Blow’s death a rift, and shortly they accused him of betrayal. But maybe they just didn’t have enough information. On the day before Ms. Blow’s funeral in Gloucester in May 2007, Mr. McQueen phoned Mr. Treacy, who was with her sisters, to ask if he would cut a bit of her hair for him. Of course, Mr. Treacy told him, but then he thought Mr. McQueen should be there as well. So he went.
The lock of hair was put in an envelope, which Mr. McQueen later asked Mr. Leane to keep in his safe. A ring was made with a plait of hair wound and sealed under a piece of glass, which Mr. Leane gave to Mr. McQueen.
On Feb. 25, at a small funeral service at St. Paul’s Church in London, Mr. Leane put the rest of the hair, along with a letter, into his friend’s coffin.
“See, everyone wants to blame other things,” he said of Mr. McQueen’s death. “They want it to be so rock ’n’ roll and to say it was because of this or that. But he was such a sensitive boy.”Millions of Americans will celebrate Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday, but the vast majority of journalists probably won’t be among them — and it’s not their scrupulous “objectivity,” or a unique aversion to Trump’s personal style, that keeps them from joining the party.
Reviewing the media’s inauguration coverage since 1989 finds that incoming Republican presidents receive little of the worshipful coverage that’s accompanied the ascension of Democratic presidents. Instead, journalists measure new presidents using their standard liberal yardstick. A review:
■ 1989. TV reporters chose to salute the incoming President George Bush by slamming the more conservative Ronald Reagan. ABC’s Richard Threlkeld went to Overtown, a riot-scarred area of Miami, for Inauguration Day: “After eight years of what many saw as the Reagan administration’s benign neglect of the poor and studied indifference to civil rights, a lot of those who lived through this week in Overtown seemed to think the best thing about George Bush is that he is not Ronald Reagan,” Threlkeld claimed on the January 20, 1989 World News Tonight. “There is an Overtown in every big city in America — pockets of misery made even meaner and more desperate the past eight years.”
Over on NBC, anchor Bryant Gumbel praised Bush’s speech as signaling “a new activism, a new engagement in the lives of others, a yearning for greater tolerance....Basically a rejection of everything that the Reagan years had been about.”
■ 1993. Bill Clinton’s arrival was touted with the same fervor later bestowed on Obama. The New York Times asked in a January 3, 1993 headline: “Clinton as National Idol: Can the Honeymoon Last?” Newsweek magazine ran TV ads touting a commemorative edition “that’s sure to be a collector’s item because it covers the most important inauguration of our lifetime.” Wall Street Journal reporter Jill Abramson — who rose to become executive editor of the New York Times — confessed: “It’s an exciting time to be in Washington.... People are excited. They’re happy about change....I think you’re going to see crowds for these inaugural events the likes of which we haven’t seen in Washington ever.”
■ 1997. Clinton’s second inaugural inspired just as much hero-worship. Howard Rosenberg reviewed Clinton’s speech for the Los Angeles Times: “His sturdy jaw precedes him. He smiles from sea to shining sea. Is this President a candidate for Mt. Rushmore or what?...In fact, when it comes to influencing the public, a single medley of expressions from Clinton may be worth much more, to much of America, than every ugly accusation Paula Jones can muster.”
■ 2001. After the long recount, reporters applied an asterisk to Bush’s first inaugural. NBC’s Maria Shriver emphasized “millions of people who felt disenfranchised by this election, who don’t feel that he’s their President yet.” On ABC, George Stephanopoulos warned Bush to avoid conservative policies: “With a 50-50 Senate and a tiny margin in the House, and a majority in the country who actually voted against President Bush, he’ll be able to fulfill that central promise of unifying the country only if he’s willing to compromise.”
■ 2005. Bush’s second inaugural was met with more hostility, with reporters attacking the $40 million price tag as obscene. “In a time of war and natural disaster, is it time for a lavish celebration?” ABC’s Terry Moran doubted. The AP’s Will Lester calculated that the money spent on Bush’s inaugural could vaccinate “22 million children in regions devastated by the tsunami....Do we need to spend this money on what seems so extravagant?”
(Obama’s first inaugural cost an estimated $45 million, but the AP found that completely acceptable. The headline over correspondent Laurie Kellman’s article: “For inaugural balls, go for glitz, forget economy.”)
The day before Bush’s swearing-in, ABC’s Web site pleaded for tips of “any military funerals for Iraq war casualties scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 20.” Sure enough, then-ABC anchor Peter Jennings got his wish to report how “just about the time the President was speaking, there was a funeral for a young Marine reservist: 21-year-old Matthew Holloway was killed in Iraq last week by a roadside bomb.”
■ 2009. Thrills rippled through the press corps when Barack Obama took the oath of office eight years ago. On January 19, co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez gushed on CBS’s Early Show: “Does it get any better, or more beautiful, or more spectacular, than this?” The next night, ABC correspondent Bill Weir openly celebrated. “Can national pride make a freezing day feel warmer?” he wondered. “Never have so many people shivered so long with such joy.”
As for the outgoing Bushes, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews likened them to the executed family of the last czar of Russia: “It’s going to be like the Romanovs... the whole family will now go into retreat,” while retired NBC anchor Tom Brokaw summoned memories of deposed communist dictators: “It reminds me of the Velvet Revolution [in Czechoslovakia]....We’re not overthrowing a communist regime here, obviously, but an unpopular President is leaving and people have been waiting for this moment.”
■ 2013. Four years ago, Newsweek’s cover cast Obama as Jesus Christ, touting his inaugual as “The Second Coming,” while a giddy Diane Sawyer on ABC saw “excitement” all over Washington, D.C., claiming “the whole city has a smile on its face.”
Her colleague Terry Moran, on the January 21 Nightline, celebrated Obama’s audacious left-wing agenda: “He is a president renewed in office by the votes of 65 million Americans. He is a president with a purpose....Change — this time around that word means something else to Barack Obama. He used his second inauguration to make an audacious claim that the coalition that re-elected him — younger, more diverse, more non-native, more socially liberal — is the next America, the rising generation, and he spoke directly to and for them....A man, a president with a purpose and an agenda, a progressive agenda, no question about it.”
Don’t expect journalists to liken President Obama’s retirement to that of a fleeing communist dictator, and don’t expect the media to cheer Trump’s ascension as a needed check on an out-of-control political class. After all, the establishment media are a core element of the political class that was so repudiated by voters in the last election, and Friday’s ceremony marks an end to a left-wing administration they have celebrated as progress.
<<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>>When Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop booked the Grand Tarabya hotel in Istanbul for the group’s annual leadership meeting at the end of January, he planned a spectacular finale. As the meeting of 200 senior executives drew to a close, musicians introduced themselves into the room, playing Ravel’s Bolero, until the whole orchestra was present for the climactic bars.
“My message was that the way we would succeed in the end was if each of us played our role, and each instrument came together to build this beautiful symphony,” Mr Elop says.
The Nokia boss likes a metaphor. It is two years since he stunned the Finnish mobile telecoms company and the sector with a memo – quickly leaked – that warned Nokia was standing on a “burning platform”. The company would perish unless it was prepared to jump into the icy water. Days later, on February 11, he announced the leap: a controversial alliance with Microsoft in smartphones to build a “third ecosystem” to rival Apple and Google’s Android, and an accelerated pursuit of the “next billion” consumers in emerging markets.
At the time, there were still a few inside Nokia who doubted the situation was that dire. The company was, after all, the biggest handset manufacturer in the world. It was still infected with what one senior executive has called “the arrogance of Nokia”. But if some could not yet smell smoke, they quickly felt the flames as Nokia implemented a deep restructuring.
Since then, Mr Elop has sought to tackle a trio of internal challenges identified in a two-part FT analysis in April 2011: to become more open, more accountable and more agile. But the company, which launched four new devices on Monday at the Mobile World Congress in |
with a blank tearful face. Suddenly the Boy launches himself at Sam with terrible ferocity. Sam is knocked against the wall. A mirror falls off the wall and smashes on the floor. The Boy is all over Sam kicking and pulling his hair. Mrs. Buttle's reaction, however, is to try and pull the Boy away from Sam. By the time she succeeds, Sam is on his hands and knees, in pain. The Boy is crying and shouting, and Mrs. Buttle is loudly trying to quieten the Boy. From SAM'S POV, a piece of broken mirror lying on the floor reflects the hole in the ceiling... with Jill's head and shoulders framed in the hole. The moment is unreal for Sam in his dazed condition. The vision seems unreal too. Jill is staring at Sam out of the piece of mirror and. she's very much the Girl from his dream now. JILL Are you alright? SAM (mumbles) It's you... it's you... JILL Mrs. Buttle, are you alright? Sam grabs at the image, i.e. at the mirror, shifting the angle so that the vision disappears. He looks for the vision on the floor but can't find it. Then he begins to realise the reality of what he has seen. He stands up, dazed and battered. Mrs. Buttle has been looking up at the ceiling. Sam looks up at the ceiling but there is now only the empty space of the hole. SAM Wait! Stop! Come back!! Mrs. Buttle is shouting. Sam rushes out of the flat. INT. BUTTLE'S CORRIDOR - DAY Sam looks both ways and heads for the stairs. INT. BUTTLE'S STAIRCASE - DAY Sam runs up the stairs to the floor above and finds himself in EXT. SIMILAR CORRIDOR - DAY He runs along the corridor but has omitted to count the doors downstairs and now doesn't know which door to knock at. He hesitates. He rings the bell on what he hopes is the right door. The bell doesn't work. He bangs on the door. The door opens a crack. A malevolent eye looks at him. SAM Girl... fair hair... The door shuts firmly. Sam rushes to the next door. INT. JILL'S FLAT - DAY Sam bursts into Jill's flat. He sees the hole in the floor. The place looks derelict. He hears an explosion and looks out of a window to see his car in flames. Jill is apparently retreating from it across the forecourt. She is carrying a suitcase and bundles. INT. STAIRCASE - DAY Sam rushes down the stairs. EXT. BLOCK OF FLATS - DAY Sam charges out into the open air. Jill has disappeared. The Messerchmidt, however, is in flames. Sam doesn't know which way to turn. Spotting an old mattress lying by the building he grabs it and throws it over the car in an attempt to smother the flames. The group of CHILDREN watch him silently. Suddenly with a great roar, Jill's lorry comes round the corner at speed. Sam sees that Jill is at the wheel. Sam runs after the lorry. SAM (shouting) Wait! It was nothing to do with me! The lorry roars away. Sam dashes back to his smoldering three-wheeler. He flings himself into it and starts it up. He also roars away, except that he doesn't move... all three wheels have been removed. He turns round in despair and sees the group of children regarding him expressionlessly. They include the little Girl Buttle. Defeated, he slumps down against his charred vehicle. A shadow passes across his face. Looking up he sees Girl Buttle standing over him. SAM Go away. GIRL BUTTLE Her name is Jill. SAM What?... Jill? Jill who? Jill who? GIRL BUTTLE Layton. SAM Jill Layton... (getting up) You're a very good little girl. What are you doing here? GIRL BUTTLE I'm waiting for my daddy. SAM (uncomprehending) He will be pleased when he comes home. Girl Buttle doesn't answer and Sam starts to walk away. After a few yards, the thought strikes him: he turns back to look at the little Girl Buttle who stands alone patiently in the vandalised wilderness. INT. RECORD CLERKS POOL - DAY It is the end of the work day. The Clerks are busily getting their coats and leaving the office. As the last one goes Mr. Kurtzman comes out of his private office with his hat and coat on. He turns out the office light. He sees Sam isolated in the empty room, still working at his computer console. Totally absorbed in what he is doing. KURTZMAN Oh... Sam. I've had the transport pool onto me... You don't know anything about a personnel transporter gone missing do you? Sam doesn't seem to hear him. On the computer screen is a front and side view picture of Jill. Her name and code number is at the top of the screen. Sam is punching up personal dossier information like "age", "height", "weight", "colour of hair", "colour of eyes", "distinguishing marks" etc. SAM (preoccupied) A "personnel" transporter? They've got it wrong. I had a personal transporter. I'll do the paperwork tomorrow Sam punches up a few more categories for Jill's dossier. KURTZMAN Is it all right about Mrs. Buttle's cheque? SAM I delivered it. KURTZMAN Can I forget it? SAM Yes. Sam punches a few more buttons on the computer. KURTZMAN What a relief! (on reflection) I shall probably have nightmares. At this point the word "Classified" superimposes itself over most of the screen and "IRQ/3" starts agitating at the bottom SAM Damn! Blast! KURTZMAN What's the matter? SAM You don't happen to know how I can get around an IRQ/3 do you? KURTZMAN All information on 3rd Level Suspects is classified. SAM I know that. KURTZMAN All enquiries to Information Retrieval. Which is hopeless, of course. They never tell you anything. But come the time they want something from us... Throughout this verbal wallpaper Sam has been punching keys cancelling the CLASSIFIED overprint. He then punches in the code for a hard-copy print-out. Jill's two-view computer portrait rolls out as Sam ponders his options. SAM (cutting off Kurtzman) I've go to accept that promotion to get behind this, haven't I? KURTZMAN Yes. (realising what he's suggesting) NO! You can't! You've only just turned it down! (thinking Sam is joking) SAM I never signed the form. KURTZMAN I did it for you. SAM What! Shit! KURTZMAN It's what you wanted isn't it? SAM Yes... No... I don't, know. Kurtzman picks up Jill's print-out and glances at it. He grimaces and drops it back on the desk with a shudder. KURTZMAN Come on, before they turn the lights out. Sam nods. He turns off the machine. He stands up and follows Kurtzman towards the door. The door is some distance away, and before they get there all the lights go out. Kurtzman bumps into a desk and curses. INT. TRANSPORT CAGE - EVENING Packed tightly between other passengers Sam is busy drawing long flowing hair with a pencil on the computer print-out of Jill turning her into the Dream Girl. The transport cage rattles through its elevated tube towards a tower block. INT. SAM'S CORRIDOR - EVENING The transport cage arrives at the platform forming the end of Sam's corridor. Passengers disembark and head for various doors along the corridor. Sam almost fails to get off in time so concentrated on Jill's picture is he. Looking as if he's trying to make up his mind about something he heads for his own front door. INT. SAM'S FLAT - EVENING Sam enters. The place is in a state of turmoil. Servicing panels are off the walls. Conduit, ducting, pipes, unknown mechanical horrors spew from the wall as if the place was disemboweled. Spoor stands in the middle of it all trying to direct two other WORKMEN who are poring over wiring plans which seem to make little sense to them. Dowser is not visible but there is a great deal of clunking and banging going on somewhere behind the wall. SAM What the? How did you? SPOOR Emergency procedures. DOWSER (O.S.) (muffled)... ergency procedures. SAM (angrily) I haven't got an emergency. Get out of here. For reply Spoor whips a small tape-recorder out of his bag and plays back Sam's original phone call to Central Services, claiming "an emergency". Spoor shuts off his machine, puts back into his bag and comes out with what looks like a quite thin phone hook with carbon paper between each page. Spoor indicates the bottom of page 1. SPOOR Sign here please. SAM What is it? SPOOR (surprised) It's a 27B/6, what did you think it was? Sam takes out Kurtzman's old-fashioned fountain pen from his pocket, signs where indicated. Spoor registers that Sam's signature has hardly penetrated through he first carbon let alone the other 43. SPOOR (sourly) Haven't you got a ballpoint? Sam resignedly starts signing all the other pages one by one. Spoor realises that Dowser's echo has gone missing. SPOOR Now where's he got to? (shouts) Dowser! Dowser bursts through a panel in the wall. This is the panel which Tuttle had removed and replaced. A few of the flat's intestines have come out with Dowser. Dowser has made a find Tuttle's spare part. SPOOR What have you got there? DOWSER (highly excited) Got there! Dowser points to Tuttle's spare part which is hanging out of the wall attached to rubber tube. Spoor examines this closely. Sam watches alarmed. The two men go into a mumbling huddle. SPOOR Mumble... mumble... mumble... Tuttle DOWSER Mumble... Tuttle... SPOOR Tuttle!... mumble! (to Sam) You've had that scab Tuttle here, haven't you? DOWSER... aren't you? SAM What? SPOOR Who fixed your ducts? DOWSER... your ducts? SAM I fixed it myself. SPOOR Oh yeh? Where'd you get this from eh... (he holds up Tuttle's spare part)... out yer nostril? DOWSER... Yer nostril? SPOOR Central Services don't take kindly to sabotage! DOWSER... sabotage! Spoor and Dowser and the other workmen gather up their tools put them in the bag, grab everything else that belongs to them and are leaving. Spoor grabs the form-book out of Sam's hands, rips out the last page, thrusts that page at Sam, shoves the book into his bag. The workmen begin leaving the flat. SAM Hang on! Wait a minute! You can't just go and leave it like this! SPOOR (mock innocent) Why not? All you've got to do is blow yer nose and fix it, haven't you? DOWSER... ven't you? SPOOR (leaving) You're putting your talents to very odd use Mr. Lowry yes, odd use to pit wits against Central Services DOWSER... sod you, stupid twit. They go, slamming the door behind hem, leaving Sam in the ruins of his flat. Sam stands in the maimed sitting-room. Wall panels are off. Tubes, ducting wires etc. spill out into the room like greasy intestines. Sam more or less collapses onto a couch. He stares at the ceiling. The room is gently hiccoughing and belching around him. He stares at the print- out of Jill's face. Slowly it dissolves into the Dream Girl. EXT. CONDUIT FOREST - NIGHT Dream Girl's face fills screen. The camera pulls back to reveal that she is separated from us by a tangled forest of conduit/ducting-like vines. Sam is struggling through the vines, which grab at him, entwine and entangle him. Finally bursting free he reaches out for the Girl hovering before him, But as he embraces her she dissolves in smoke and he plummet into a void beneath his feet. EXT. CLOUDS - NIGHT CUT TO Sam plummeting down through dense clouds, his cape twisting around him. Somehow he manages to wrestle it clear of his body. Gripping the corners he whips the cape up and over his head. The wind catches it and fills it out until it acts as a parachute slowing Sam's descent. Suddenly the clouds thin out and Sam can see below him. EXT. STRANGE LANDSCAPE ANTI - DAY Sam is heading down towards a barren landscape. Strange mounds dot the barrenness they ooze smoke and the occasional flame. Near one of the mounds are two long lines of shrouded FIGURES being forced into two giant cages, suspended beneath two great misshapen balloons. The black- robed Forces of Darkness (FOD) surround the PRISONERS, relentlessly herding them towards the cages. The entire scene is strangely coloured by unearthly light. The sky is blood red and where the sun should be is a black disc. Sam descends on his cape-parachute. CUT TO PRISONERS in their grey shrouds, shuffling towards the jaws of the brutal cages. They are defeated, destroyed, without hope. The FOD prod and whip them forward. One of the FOD raises his spear to force a stumbling PRISONER to his feet but stops with the spear raised above his head. He has seen something. Other FODS turn to see what it is. CUT TO Sam landing on the beach a short distance away. The prisoners stop and look up. We see their faces clearly for the first time. One of them is Mrs. Buttle. Others are people Sam saw in the flats, and the kids. Sam recognises them. He is slightly taken aback. A look of determination crosses his face. He draws the sword. Everyone is frozen in place. Sam starts forward. But he is stopped by a violent tremor as the earth begins to tremble and shake. Everyone looks terrified. With a mighty roar a crack opens up in the ground between Sam and the others. Brilliant rays of light shaft upwards from the opening. And then, with a maniacal shriek, the large black flapping thing shoots out of the crevasse and streaks high into the sky. Sam hesitates and turns to look down into the light. There, under several meters of the earth's crust are fluffy white clouds darting about in a beautiful blue sky. Sam is delighted but as he looks up he is frozen in his tracks by an enormous FIGURE that straddles the crevasse. This terrifying Creature stands over 12 feet high. He is encased in a frightening concoction of ancient Japanese armour which seems on closer examination to he made of computer parts. His face is hidden behind a horrific steel mask. It is the Giant Samurai Warrior that was pushing the drawer closed in the Storeroom of Knowledge. In his hand is an evil-looking spear. Sam is unsure which way to turn. The grey Prisoners are being loaded into the cages with more speed. He turns to face the Giant Warrior. As Sam steps forward the Giant stands ominously still. Then very slowly he raises his spear in an almost religious gesture. POOF! He vanishes. As he does the light from the day is cut off. Looking down, Sam sees that he crevasse has vanished as well. Maniacal laughter from the flapping black thing makes Sam look up to see the ballooned cage packed with grey Prisoners rise up from the ground and begin to float away escorted by the Black flapping Thing. Sam rushes after it grabbing one of the trailing ropes. But as he is hoisted into the air it is severed by the FODS. He tumbles to the ground. Looking around he sees that, for some reason, the second ballooned cage is still tethered nearby. Sam rushes over to it and begins chopping the tethers away. The cage bobbles ungainlily as Sam cuts the last restraining rope. Grabbing hold he is pulled upwards, but before he can reach the cage something clutches his leg halting his progress. As he struggles his other leg is caught. He is being pulled back by two giant hands. Looking down he can see that from the top of one of the smoking mounds a head an d two giant arms protrude. The face looks like Mr. Kurtzman. Sam desperately clings on to the rope as he struggles with the restraining hands. MR. KURTZMAN OF THE MOUND Don't go! It's a trap! She's not what she seems. Sam kicks and strains but the hands hold firm. INT. SAM'S FLAT - NIGHT Sam wakes up. His feet are entangled in some wiring and ducting. He is still in his devastated sitting room. As he untangles himself the door bell rings. It takes a moment for Sam to recognise it as the door bell. Annoyed and still disturbed by the dream he gets up and goes to the door. He opens it. In bursts a GIRL dressed in a silly bell-boy costume with lots of glitter, net stockings and big-bowed tap dancing shoes. She launches into a terrible song and dance routine. GIRL (singing) Mrs. Ida Lowry requests the pleasure of your companyyyy at her apartment tonight, from eight thirtyyyy midnight to celebrate the completion of her recent cosmetic surgeryyyy The guest of honour will be Mr. Conrad Helpmann, Dep. Under Minister of State for Public Information, R.S.V.P. by singing telegram. Sam and the Girl stand looking at each other uneasily for a moment. SAM Er... Thanks... GIRL It's reply paid. SAM Oh... (he sings uncertainly) Thank you very much, mother, but actually GIRL You don't have to sing it. SAM Oh, right... The Girl begins to dance again but this time in a rather strange strangled fashion. SAM (he looks at his watch) Aren't you a bit late? the party started half an hour ago. GIRL Yes, I know. It's the backlog, everybody complains. Was it all right otherwise? SAM Yes, it was... very nice... thank you. GIRL Do you mind if I use your bathroom? INT. MOTHER' S CORRIDOR - NIGHT Sam rings the doorbell to his mother's flat. He is wearing. an unstylish tuxedo and bow tie obviously his only dress outfit. The door is opened by a LIVERIED FLUNKY who's about to speak when an attractive 40-year old woman's face appears over his shoulder and addresses Sam over the threshold. WOMAN Sam, I'm so glad you came. Do come in. INT. MOTHER'S FLAT - NIGHT Sam steps inside, where the flunky proceeds to search him. The place is full of sleek people smartly but less formally dresses than Sam. It is an elegant baroque room lavishly appointed but still violated by the ubiquitous Central Service ducts that thrust through antique tapestries and gilt mirrors with little regard for aesthetics or the interior decorator's feelings. SAM (bewildered) Mother? Is that you? MOTHER (taking his arm looking slightly askance at his clothes) Of course. Isn't it wonderful? The bandages came of this afternoon. Come and join the fun. Everybody's here. SAM Is Mr. Helpmann here? MOTHER Yes he is he wants to talk to you. SAM I want to talk to him. Sam pushes away the Flunky who is by now passing a metal detector over him. MOTHER It seems you're the first person ever to turn down a promotion. He thinks you should see a doctor. SAM Actually, I've decided... DR. JAFFE hoves into view. MOTHER Oh, Louis! You know Sam. Dr. Jaffe is no longer suave. He has been transformed by drink and success. Mostly by drink. DR. JAFFE (as high as a kite) Can you believe it?! Just me and my little knife! Snip snip slice slice Can you believe it? SAM (repelled) Congratulations... DR. JAFFE And this is just the beginning!! SAM Really? DR. JAFFE Chirst yes, you've seen her with her clothes off. Faces are a doddle compared to tits and arse. (explains) No hairline. MOTHER (primly) Really, Louis. A handsome young piece of BEEFCAKE delivers a drink to Mother. BEEFCAKE I've been looking everywhere for you, Ida. The beefcake takes Mother away. DR. JAFFE Ah, dear boy... And what do you think of your mother now? VOICE (off camera) It will never last. Sam and Dr. Jaffe turn to see who is speaking. It is DR. CHAPMAN a tall, pipe-smoking, professional-looking gent. DR. JAFFE (a trifle haughtily) Excuse me, Dr Chapman, did you say something? DR. CHAPMAN That technique... I've tried it. A nice effect. But highly unstable. In six months she'll look like Grandma Moses. Sam wishing to escape from this bitchery turns away but suddenly freezes the reflection in the large wall mirror next to him is not that of the party guests but of the grey Prisoners in his dream they are massed in the room looking pleadingly towards him. DR. JAFFE (unsuave again) Now see here, Chapman. At least mine don't look like they've been mugged. Through the grey Prisoners pushes Mrs. Terrain. MRS. TERRAIN (calls) Sam! Sam turns around to see her pushing through the party guests. Mrs. Terrain is limping and is even more heavily swathed in bandages than the last time. Dr. Chapman hastily moves away as Mrs. Terrain comes up. She claims Sam, taking his arm. SAM (looking at her worriedly) Whatever happened to you? MRS. TERRAIN There was a slight complication. Dr. Chapman says it often happens with a delicate skin like mine. Nothing to worry about. He's promised me I'll have these bandages off in a... SAM (trying to disengage) Actually, there's someone I want to meet... MRS. TERRAIN (roguishly) I know, I know...! She drags Sam through the party and we arrive at her daughter, SHIRLEY, who is, of course, a wallflower. MRS. TERRAIN Here we are! I'm going to leave you two lovebirds in peace. SAM I... uh... But he is alone with Shirley, standing at the entrance to his Mother's embarrassingly rampant boudoir style bedroom. In amongst the diaphanous curtains enclosing the bed Mother is playing hide and seek with a YOUNG STUD. SAM Can I get you a drink, Shirley? Shirley looks at him terrified. SAM Look... Shirley... your mother... and my mother... they seem to have got the idea... I mean, I'm terribly flattered, of course, but, um, the thing is, I don't want you to be under any false... SHIRLEY (struggling into speech shyly) It's... it's... all right... I don't like you either... This isn't what Sam expected. He smiles weakly at her. VOICE (off camera) Sam! Sam turns round, to see Jack Lint a few paces away. SAM Hello, Jack! JACK You remember Alison? He indicates his cute blonde perfect junior executive's WIFE SAM Hello, Alison. You look different. ALISON Well, I'm two years older. JACK And she's been to Dr. Jaffe! Alison locks displeased. JACK (winking at Sam) She doesn't like me telling anyone but she's pleased as anything really. SAM Er, I knew you looked different. JACK Remember how they used to stick out? SAM What? Oh, yes vividly. I used to wonder if they were real. ALISON What, my ears? SAM Your ears? JACK Dr. Jaffe has pinned her ears back. SAM (covering up hopelessly) Quite, absolutely I always thought they were false. JACK (looking past Sam) Mr. Helpmann! Sam spins round and sees a very pleasant-looking distinguished OLD MAN moving in their direction. He is in a wheelchair. HELPMANN Hello, Jack. JACK You remember my wife... Alis HELPMANN Of course. Barbara isn't it? How are you? ALISON Um... JACK (instantly. Conveying to Alison that she mustn't object) Barbara's very well, thank you, sir. How are you? HELPMANN Fine, thank you. Hello, Sam. Ida said you might be here. Have you got a minute? (to Jack) Would you excuse us? Jack is taken aback, envious and eager to please. JACK Of course... of course... Come on Alison Barbara Jack propels his wife away. HELPMANN I need your help, Sam. INT. BATHROOM - NIGHT It's the sort of bathroom you would expect of Mother, an adjunct to her boudoir. The pink or purple lavatory is in the process of flushing, while Sam holds Mr. Helpmann vertical, grasping him under the armpits, while Mr. Helpmann is zipping his fly. HELPMANN Thanks very much Sam. SAM That's all right Mr. Helpmann. Glad to help. He is lowering Helpmann into the wheelchair. HELPMANN If I can help you... SAM (broaching the subject) Well, I... In maneuvering Helpmann Sam clumsily knocks over one of the pretty pots which fussily decorate Mother's bathroom shelf. A thin layer of powder is spread over the wash-stand. SAM Sorry... HELPMANN Your father and I were very close. Of course Jeremiah was senior to me but we were close friends... especially after the bombing... (he indicates his legs)... and I... (chuckles)... keep his name alive at the office every day. With his finger Helpmann is tracing letters in the powdered surface. HELPMANN It's as though he's there speaking to me "'ere I am, J.H.!" The ghost in the machine. We see that Helpmann has traced the letters "EREIAMJH" in the powder. HELPMANN I know he would have wanted me to help you... And I promised your mother I'd take you onto the team at information Retrieval. But I gather that... SAM Mr. Helpmann. I've changed my mind. I'd like to accept the transfer am I too late? HELPMANN Too late? That's for me to say. SAM Well... well, I... Helpmann puts out his hand. Sam takes it. HELPMANN Welcome to Information Retrieval! Helpmann blows away the spilled powder and "EREIAMJH" with it. INT. INFORMATION RETRIEVAL LOBBY - DAY CUT TO WIDE SHOT of massive imposing lobby much like the Records lobby but this one is very austere. No crowds. No statues. No decoration. Not even the ever-present security checks. Impressive. And a bit unnerving. Framed in the doorway is a lone TINY FIGURE. CUT TO CLOSEUP. It's Sam. He hesitates and then enters. CUT TO: VIDEO SCREEN The video camera follows Sam across the lobby til he stops in tight profile at Reception Desk. We tilt up revealing Sam standing facing us just beyond the monitor which is on the desk. SAM (diffidently to the porter) My name is Sam Lowry. I have to report to Mr. Warren. PORTER (looking down his nose at Sam's unsleek clerk's suit and then handing him an I.D. badge) Thirtieth floor, sir. You're expected. SAM Er, don't you want to search me? PORTER No, sir. SAM (taken aback. Reaching into his pocket) My I.D. cards. PORTER No need, sir SAM (nonplussed) But I could be anybody. PORTER No you couldn't, sir. This is Information Retrieval. (indicating to the right) the lift's arrived, sir. INT. 30TH FLOOR CORRIDOR - DAY Sam steps out of the lift.The lift doors close. Sam looks up and down the corridor hearing nothing. Silence. Then he, and we, begin to hear a sound. It is a curious whirring murmuring tummeling sound, and it seems to be growing closer. Suddenly a scrum of PEOPLE swings into view around a corner at the far end of the rather long corridor. At the centre of the scrum is a TALL MAN with a magisterial expression and an air of eternal bustle. This is MR. WARREN. He is surrounded by the EXPEDITERS who are competing for his attention with bits of paper and bits of sentences. Mr. Warren is snapping out decisions. Satisfied Expediters drop out of the scrum at intervals, disappearing one at a time through one of the many doors which line both sides of the corridor.The scrum doesn't get any smaller because new Expediters dart out of other doors and join the milling MOB. The whole circus is coming by Sam at the rate of knots. The sound it makes breaks down into something like this. EXPEDITER #1 (waving pager) Mr. Warren, this order... EXPEDITER #2 (waving same) Mr. Warren... EXPEDITER #3 (ditto) About this invoice... Victim's list... WARREN (dealing on all sides) Yes... No... send that back... wrong department... of course... of course not... yes... no... maybe. CUT TO Sam watching this caravanserai with awe as it starts pass him. EXPEDITER #4... about these requisitions... EXPEDITER #5 Mr. Warren... EX/27 has 15 suspects still outstanding. EXPEDITER #6... a decision, Mr. Warren... WARREN... cancel that... okay... put half as terrorists, the rest as victims... yes... yes... no... definitely no... Sam doesn't have the nerve to jump into this. The scrum sweeps by and fades away along the corridor, and finally disappearing around the corner at the other end. Sam follows. Silence has descended again. INT. CORRIDOR - DAY Sam gets to the corner of the corridor and finds a similar corridor at right angles. He hesitates and continues. Then he starts to hear the sound again. It is coming up from behind. Mr. Warren has circumnavigated the building. The same sort of business is being enacted at the same pace. As the scrum reaches Sam he gathers his nerve and jumps right in beside Warren, and keeps going. SAM (in a hurry) I'm Lowry, Mr. Warren... Sam Lowry. WARREN (putting arm around Sam) Ah. Lowry... yes. (still dealing with Expediters)... no, cancel that... glad to have you aboard... yes... no... don't be ridiculous Jenkins... Yes, yes, yes... you'll like it up here... send that back... we've got a crack team of... are they kidding?... decision makers... No, in triplicate... I'm expecting big things... two copies to Finance... of you... send that to Security... uh, uh, uh. (poring over forms) Uh, don't let Progress see this... between you and me, Lowry, this... no, no... department... tell Records to get stuffed... is about to be upgraded and... Warren suddenly pivots around, swinging Sam 240 degrees in the direction they came from plus a bit. WARREN Ah, here we are! (they are standing facing a door one of the hundreds of identical doors lining these corridors) What do you think? The door says: "OFFICER DZ/015" Sam has no idea what he ought to say. WARREN (solemnly) Your very own number... on your very own door... and behind that door (he turns the knob and opens the door)... your very own office. Congratulations, DZ/015, welcome to the team. Warren whirls off in a flurry of paperwork and Expediters leaving Sam standing dumfounded at the entrance to his office. CUT TO: SAM'S POV OF THE OFFICE It is about four feet wide. A small blacked-out window high on the far wall is bisected by what looks like a recently constructed side wall. The room is bare except for a chair and a desk which is also bisected by the new wall. Pneumatic tubes hang from the ceiling. Sam slowly enters the room. INT. SAM'S OFFICE - DAY Sam looks lost... disoriented. He doesn't know where to begin because there's nothing to begin with. He squeezes in behind his desk and for want of anything else to do starts arranging his "in" and "out" baskets. There in his "in" basket is one of the ubiquitous executive toys gaily wrapped with a card from Helpmann Merry Xmas & Welcome. Sam can't quite believe. He returns to lining up his pencils, placing a couple of bocks (phone books) against the wall on the left extreme of his desk. Sam turns his attention away from the books when suddenly they both fall over with a "plop". Puzzled, he stands the books up again, turns his eyes away and "plop". Same result. Intrigued, a bit exasperated, Sam carefully, and before his very eyes, the desk begins to disappear into the wall, and "plop", the books topple over. Puzzled, Sam grabs hold of the desk and begins to try to pull it back through the wall. The desk moves back an inch or so, but then stops, somehow held stubbornly. Sam grits his teeth, reallllly pulls, grimacing a bit, but the desk won't budge. Intrigued, Sam gets up, goes around his desk and heads for the door. INT. CORRIDOR - DAY CUT TO Sam coming out of his office, turning right and walking to the next door, the nameplate of which reads: "OFFICER DV/048." As is his custom, Sam opens the door without knocking. INT. LIME'S OFFICE - DAY CUT TO SAM'S POV. Here is an office much like his. It's the other half of his room bisected by the partition wall. The other half of his desk is occupied by a slimy looking, round-headed little JUNIOR EXECUTIVE wholly occupied with trying to drag a bit more of the desk into his office. He is unaware of Sam. SAM Hello. Lime startled, lets go of his desk and vents his irritation on Sam whom he mistakes for someone else. LIME No, you can't have any more chairs! There's only one left in here now, and I need that to sit on! (realizing his mistake) Oh... er, sorry. Who are you? SAM Sam Lowry. LIME (becoming unctuous) Ah, yes, you're the new boy from next door, ha ha! (he advances toward Sam with hand out to shake; shaking hands) My name's Lime. Harvey Lime. Welcome to Expediting. SAM Ah. (he pauses looking around) Would you mind if I borrowed your computer console? LIME What? SAM I'll bring it back in ten minutes. LIME You want to take my console into your office? SAM Yes. LIME (after a moment's consideration) I'll tell you what... You tell me what and I'll do it for. I'm a bit of a whizz on this thing. (indicates computer console) Sam hesitates, but sees that there's no other way. SAM (taking print-out on Jill from his pocket) Alright. There's someone I want to check out. A woman called Gillian Layton. LIME (leering) A woman eh? I see. SAM (trying to ignore this) I know her age and distinguishing marks. But I need an address or a place of work or something LIME (continuing to leer) This is your dream girl, is it? SAM (taken aback) What? (recovering) Look, let me use the console for a few minutes. LIME (trying to be jocular) You must be joking (entirely unconvincing) When there's a woman involved there's no stopping me. Now, let me have that sheet. He takes Jill's print-out sheet from Sam and begins to punch the keys laboriously with one finger. Nothing happens. LIME Sod it, it's broken! SAM You haven't switched it on. LIME Oh yes. Look you're putting me off, standing there! Go back to your office and I'll give you a knock when I've finished. Sam hesitates, but goes. LIME Go on. I'm not going to elope with her. Sam exits. INT. SAM'S OFFICE - DAY Sam is sitting in his office listening to the protracted one finger exercise which is going on next door. He stares dumbly at the shining, absolutely useless, executive toy. EXT. ICY SEA ANTI - DAY The CAMERA skims along over an icy sea. This is SAM'S POV as he wings his way over the water with his new gleaming wings. In the distance rises a strange massive ship. As he gets closer we can see that the snip is listing heavily to one side. In fact it is barely afloat. Closer still, it becomes apparent that the ship is made of stone. Dark, evil, grey blocks of granite form not only the hull, but the super-structures and smokestacks. It looks like a massive medieval fortress gone to sea. The screen is engulfed in stone. The CAMERA heads up the side of the ship. Higher and higher we climb past course after course of mammoth stones. Reaching the first deck, we continue upwards. There appears to be no entrance. Sam is looking frustrated and angry. But then he spots an opening. A few stones have come loose one of them juts out forming a ledge. As the cage passes, Sam jumps and managed to gain a foothold on the outcropping. Squeezing thru the gap in the rocks, he makes his way thru a dark passage. Emerging from the opening he finds himself teetering over an enormous abyss formed by the outer hull and the inner stone core of the |
says. “If we went back then I would want to at least give a valiant attempt to search for my family.” He worried if he got there and started looking, he wouldn’t be able to stop.
Instead of traveling to India to pick up Saroo, Sue and her husband John waited for him to arrive at the airport, accompanied by a representative from The Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption, or ISSA. This was by design, she says, because rather than “taking away a screaming child from a foreign country,” the organization preferred the “much more gentle and kind approach” of bringing children to their new homes.
When Saroo arrived in Australia, Sue says he was “starving,” and though he couldn’t speak English, he constantly indicated “this horrible pain in his belly, because they couldn’t get enough to eat” at the orphanage. She’s “very proud” of the fact that he got into such good shape so quickly. “I put a lot of effort into that. I waited 16 years for my kids, so I wasn’t going to do it in a half-hearted way,” she says. “And look at him now.”
Just as Saroo’s birth mother was moved by the experience of seeing what happened to her son after he left home, Sue found the early scenes in the film “quite traumatic” to watch herself. “Obviously Saroo had spoken to me quite a lot about that time,” she says of his life in India. “We had a lot of those bathtub discussions. And as you learned more English, I knew more about what was going on,” she tells her son. “But to see it in front of my own eyes and know what Saroo went through really rocked me.”
One of many heartbreaking scenes in the film comes when Sue, played by fellow Aussie Nicole Kidman, gives Saroo his first bath. He can’t understand what she’s saying, but she tells him that someday he’s going to share everything about his life in India with her. “We did that. I had discussions with Saroo bathtub-side night after night,” Sue says. “Saroo couldn’t speak to me so it was just these incredible eyes looking up at me and splashing in the water. I’m so gifted in life to have had that experience.”
Sue says she was “over the moon” when she found out Kidman would be playing her in the film. “I wanted her to be me all along,” she says, going on to chastise the Australian media for being “very harsh” on the actress. “I’m the first to speak up for her, because she truly is a very intelligent, spiritual, soulful woman, who’s been through a lot in her own life. And she went to such lengths to learn about me and I really admire that.”
Kidman could also relate to Sue personally, calling her role in Lion a "love letter" to the two children she adopted with Tom Cruise in the mid-1990s. “I’m very similar to Sue,” Kidman told the Guardian in a recent interview, “in the sense of having a vision, and feeling that it was just part of my path. Something, for whatever reason, I was going to do.”
“I’m a great believer in the idea that, if you’re a maternal woman, you can love,” Sue says. “And I was not confined to biology and blood. Most of the world doesn’t agree with that. To be with somebody who knows that feeling, knows the intensity is just the same. As an adoptive mother, you’re often almost downgraded as a mother. Because it’s not from your body. But for me, I think we’re a higher level of mothers. We can mother a child that isn’t from us. She understood that.”
“She’s had a difficult life as well, it hasn’t always been cruisy,” Sue adds, using an Australian slang expression to describe Kidman’s experience that she only subsequently realizes is a pun for the actress’ famous ex-husband. “I felt for her with all of that.”
Both Patel and Kidman landed Oscar nominations for supporting performances, a phenomenon that is still confounding the people they play. “We’re just trying to figure out who the actual star of our film is,” Sue says.
“I think it’s Sunny, really, I just love him,” Saroo says of the eight-year-old Indian actor who had to learn his English lines phonetically. “He really takes you in. And he’s so innocent.”
In what may very well be the most politicized Academy Awards in history, Lion is not necessarily among the most political of this year’s films. But the Weinstein Company has attempted to make a connection between the movie and President Donald Trump’s ban on immigrants from majority-Muslim countries in one of its recent For Your Consideration ads. Another nominee, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, plans to boycott the awards due to the ban.
And Sue, who describes herself as “an old hippy from way back,” sees a political message in Lion as well. “I don’t want people to get locked into bizarre attitudes about refugees and mass movement of people,” she says. Perhaps, she hopes, people will see the film and think about adopting the millions of refugee children who currently reside “in camps because of war and bombs.”
To President Trump and other politicians like Chris Christie, who once said he wouldn’t even allow “three-year-old orphans” into his state, Sue says “those orphans, those unaccompanied children living in tents now, should be at the top of the list.”
“If I can raise another woman’s son, so can a lot more women,” she adds, calling on parents around the world to “step up” and welcome refugee children into their homes. “I never dreamt I’d have such a scope and have so many people respecting what I’ve got to say,” Sue says, still a bit baffled that anyone in the press cares what she thinks about these issues.
More than anything else, Sue is still a proud mother at heart. Before they set out on their L.A. shopping trip, she excitedly shares the news that the Taronga Zoo in Sydney has decided to name one of its new lion cubs after Saroo. Her son can’t help but blush.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
THE timing has been simultaneously perfect and awful.
The same week that the Government launches their Welfare Bill – a vicious, concerted attack on the poor that eclipses anything even Thatcher would have dreamed of – a psychotic egomaniac is sentenced for killing his children, handing the right-wing the perfect benefits bogeyman.
If one were inclined towards conspiracy theories, well…
By any standards, Mick Philpott is a terrible human being. An abuser of women. A moral vacuum capable of using his own children’s lives as bargaining chips.
The stark facts of Philpott’s life are undoubtedly depressing – 17 children by five different women, thousands of pounds a month in benefits payments, his council house a Tory wet dream of Sky TV, snooker tables and PlayStations all funded by the taxpayer.
And so it goes, overnight Philpott becomes a demon. A cipher used to represent every single person claiming benefits in the UK.
No matter that the case is so extreme as to render it useless as an example, here’s what we get across the front page of the Daily Mail – Vile Product Of Welfare UK.
Below this headline it carried a picture of the six children who died in the blaze caused by Philpott in a half-witted attempt to frame his ex-partner and foil her attempts to get custody of the children and, yes, the child benefit that came with them.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more callous, cold-hearted attempt to make political capital out of the deaths of the innocent.
Those children, aged five to 13, died in their beds, choking to death on toxic fumes.
The eldest boy survived for two more days in intensive care, fighting but failing to hold on to life.
Further inside the Daily Mail, AN Wilson writes: “Those six children, burnt to a cinder for nothing, were, in a way, the children of those benevolent human beings who, all those years ago, created our state benefits system.”
The strange sensation on top of your foot is your jaw hitting it on its way to the floor. Yes, he’s saying exactly what you think he’s saying – the benefit system killed those children because it created and enabled their father.
And hopefully AN Wilson will, in a way, burn in hell for using the deaths of these children to further his own political agenda.
(Image: ITV)
Others joined the chorus. Alison Pearson wrote an article for The Telegraph with the headline Mick Philpott: A Good Reason To Cut Benefits. The Sun said: “Let’s hope this is the last time the State unwittingly subsidises the manslaughter of children.”
This is hate talk. It is using a terrible crime – an aberration – to generate rage at a specific group of people.
And why is the debate even on the table? Benefit “scrounging”, “fraud”, whatever you want to call it, costs us a fraction of what tax evasion costs us. But it’s not such a good story, is it?
A couple of men sitting in a boardroom reeking of Boss in designer suits as they structure a complex offshore tax shelter just doesn’t play as well as the real-life Shameless, an unruly extended family spilling out of their council house.
Greedy, devious, amoral bankers caused the crash and wrecked our economy. Not the people claiming disability benefit, working tax credits and unemployment benefit. But, again, it just doesn’t make such easy copy.
Here’s how it will play out over the coming weeks. We’ll see David Cameron, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith on TV and in the House of Commons all saying it was a “deplorable tragedy”. That Mick Philpott was an evil man. They’ll perhaps say things about how “the extreme case of Mick Philpott”, a man claiming thousands of pounds a month in benefits, has only “highlighted” the urgent need for the kind of welfare reform the Government are bringing about.
None of them will go quite as far in a public statement as saying: “The welfare system murdered those children.” But they won’t have to – because their journalistic fellow-travellers have already got the lie across for them.
So tax evasion by the likes of Google, Amazon, Starbucks, Facebook and countless other corporations – all happily sanctioned by Osborne, all costing the UK economy more than a million Mick Philpotts ever could – will continue.
Meanwhile, very soon, many people are going to have to live on just over £7 a day to cover gas, electricity, transport, food, clothing and entertainment.
We’re all losers in this. Double losers. You weep with sorrow and rage for the needless deaths of those children. Then you weep all over again at the terrible lies and falsehoods perpetrated in their names.
The lie that we are not a wealthy nation (on Thursday, the day the Philpotts were sentenced, Cameron paid a visit to the nuclear submarine HMS Victorious, reaffirming our £100billion investment in renewing Trident).
The lie that we cannot afford to help our poor and disadvantaged.
The lie that an unseen army of Mick Philpotts is bleeding us dry. On Thursday, Osborne just happened to be in Derby, where the murders took place. He said Philpott’s lifestyle would “raise questions for society”.
In life, the Philpott children – with their names like Duwayne and Jayden – would have been seen by the hand-wringing columnists as, at best, unfortunates, born in the gutter and unlikely to rise.
In death, they became a saintly battering ram used to beat their own kind. As the week wore on, as I read the headlines, columns and opinion pieces, I increasingly thought – and there’s no other way to put this: whither kindness? Whither compassion? Whither decency? When did we begin to hate our poor? When did we become such a vicious country? Have none of these people read Dickens?
I began to feel almost sorry for these hatemongers. I began to wonder how well they sleep at night.
Because, really, God help these people. You know? God help them.22nd Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, April 22, 2017
Call for Session Proposals:
Hey everyone! Session proposals for the Book Fair are due December 1, 2016. You can submit your proposal here. And please help us circulate the call below. Thanks!
The Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair is an annual event that brings together people interested and engaged in radical work to connect, learn, and discuss through books and information tables, workshops, panel discussions, skillshares, films, and more! We seek to create an inclusive space to introduce new folks to anarchism, foster a productive dialogue between various political traditions as well as anarchists from different milieus, and create an opportunity to dissect our movements’ strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and tactics.
We are currently seeking workshop proposals for the 22nd Annual Book Fair to be held Saturday, April 22, 2017 at The Metro in Downtown Oakland.
Here’s how you can help us make this year’s Book Fair dynamic and engaging:
Forward this call to a group that’s doing work that inspires you, especially if they’ve never come to the Book Fair.
Submit a proposal for a workshop topic that has never before appeared at the Book Fair.
Create a strategy to get a crowded room full of people talking about how to create the structures needed to dismantle capitalism.
Organize an event (ex. a talk, a panel, a skillshare, a music show) throughout the week preceding the Book Fair, and let us know about it! We will use the Book Fair’s website to promote what’s happening across the Bay Area.
What Are the Workshops?
The Book Fair provides an open forum for discussion among anarchists and individuals or groups who work with anarchists. Workshops will be generally facilitated by one person or a panel of people, and scheduled in blocks of 60-90 minutes. We encourage active hands-on participation, creativity, and enough time and space for questions, answers, and discussion.
We are looking for workshop proposals that:
Are aimed at people who are curious about, or new to anarchist ideas and radical practices.
Delve into a topic in depth intended for people who are already involved in the anarchist tradition or radical activism.
Address broad, philosophical questions about our work and allow a constructive critique of our actions.
Encourage dialogue between anarchists and other political tendencies, groups, or movements
Explore the inner-workings of our work by highlighting stories or lessons learned.
Share specific skills for better organizing and better living.
Encourage and enable participants to make connections with each other.
Tackle and propose strategies to struggles occurring in our local communities like gentrification and police violence.
Connect anarchism and radical activism to current movements like environmental destruction, workers’ struggles, and immigration.
These parameters provide a starting point for developing a session, but please feel free to get creative and propose something outside of these categories.
How Do I Submit My Proposal?
To propose a session for the Book Fair, please submit the form on website here by December 1, 2016. We will get back to you by early January 2017 and will finalize the program and confirm sessions in mid-March. As always the number of workshop slots is limited, so please get your proposal to us on time and understand if we cannot make room for you this year.
Go directly to the proposal form here.
What Else is Happening Besides the Book Fair?
In addition to the Book Fair, a variety of diverse anarchist themed events will occur at different venues throughout the Bay Area the week preceding and the weekend during the Book Fair. You can propose any type of event or activity; the only limitation is your imagination! These events will be organized autonomously from the Book Fair (think of the BASTARD conference, normally held on Sunday), and as such, venues are the responsibility of the event organizer—though the Book Fair organizers are happy to help with suggestions.
The Book Fair organizers are committed to helping promote autonomous events to the best of our ability through the event website and Facebook page. In general, contacting the Book Fair organizers in advance of scheduling the event is a useful way to ensure the least number of event conflicts.She'd expected something similar to last time. But it wasn't like that.
Olaf ordered her something fruity and exciting she couldn't ever pronounce, and Anna insisted on a full retelling of how and why Elsa wanted this job. It was nice.
The music was just subtle enough to be appropriate and groups of friends sat around tables laughing and joking. Those dancing were making a show without being ridiculous. Maybe not a family setting, but definitely comfortable.
"You know, I always wanted to be a model," Anna was saying, stealing the tiny umbrella from Elsa's glass. She twisted it between her fingers. "I was told I didn't have the figure."
Olaf scoffed, slapping the table with an empty palm. He'd already downed his first beer and was about to get another. "No way! You're fucking gorgeous."
She laughed at him, Elsa glared. He shrugged as if it concluded his point and walked away.
"What do you think?"
Elsa raised her glass, sipping the pink substance. "What do you mean?"
Anna's smile grew. She twirled the umbrella again. "Am I as gorgeous as your boyfriend thinks?"
The blonde nearly choked. She dropped the glass, not caring when some of the liquid sloshed out, coughed awkwardly into the crook of her elbow.
"Boyfriend?" she basically wheezed, looking up to find Anna trying her hardest not to laugh.
"I'm guessing that's the wrong label?"
Elsa shook her head, glancing toward the bar. "He's not my boyfriend. He's more like a brother."
Anna nodded in understanding. "Mm. My bad. Just thought since you two were so close..."
"No."
It was harshly finalizing. Like the very idea disgusted her. Which, in a way, it did.
The redhead held her hands up defensively, smirking. "All right, alright. Don't bite my head off over this."
"Yo, Elsa, hottie at twelve o'clock," Olaf hissed, sliding in beside the blonde and jerking his head to the left. He was smirking much like Anna, but Elsa didn't take his look as offensively.
She couldn't help looking. No wonder Olaf still thought she was straight. She saw Anna looking, too, out the corner of her eye.
She knew she knew him from somewhere. His demeanor seemed so familiar. But the backwards ball cap he wore and his high color hid the majority of his face.
Anna must have been able to tell who it was, though. "Hans," she murmured, a smile twitching her lips up.
Oh. That's where she knew him from.
"Huh?" Olaf asked, looking over at Hans then Anna.
The redhead rolled her eyes, crossing her arms over her chest. "That's Hans. He said he had a date or something tonight."
That only seemed to confuse Olaf more. "Woah, woah, wait. So you know that hunk?"
She laughed at his description of her brother. "You could say that."
Elsa shook her head, sitting back in her seat and fingered the rim of her glass. "He's her brother, dumbass."
He nudged her half-heartedly, feigning hurt. "Hey, I didn't know, alright? You gonna go talk to him?"
It was directed at Anna, who only snorted. "No. He'll be back at the apartment tonight so I'll see him then. Doesn't mean he has to become part of my social life."
The two fell into a low conversation, but Elsa couldn't include herself. She was watching Hans, subtly, annoyed by something that hid at the back of her conscious.
So she didn't hear when the music shifted course. From respectively romantic slow songs to something a bit more upbeat and offering. Several more friends and couples found their way to the dancefloor.
Anna gapped when one song started, catching Elsa's attention. "Oh, I love this song!" Her eyes drifted over to the blonde. "Please, please, please dance with me, Elsa?"
The blonde stared, then snorted. "I told you, I don't dance."
The redhead's jaw set. "You also said you would last time we hung out."
Elsa mouth opened, but she found she couldn't argue. She had said that after all. Damn it.
"Fine," she groaned, but it wasn't agitation twisting her gut up. It was pure nerves.
Against better judgement, but egged on by Olaf, she followed Anna out onto the floor. Into the midst of people who'd already found a rhythm to stick to.
Into the belly of the beast.
Anna's hand found her own, and everything in Elsa startled and stalled for a moment.
Someone bumped into her, she jerked forward instinctively. Just to find herself so close to Anna she could've counted all those freckles.
She stumbled back as Anna laughed, and thankfully they found a decent amount of space to work with.
It took a moment for Elsa to feel less heated. She watched Anna start to move, swaying her hips, body in perfect harmony to the music. She tried her best to mirror those actions.
But it wasn't fun. And if she was doing this, she was going to enjoy it.
Biting back that annoying worry, she grasped Anna's wrist and, surprising the redhead, pulled their bodies closer.
It only took a moment for Anna to see what was happening, maybe she knew the dance. If she didn't, she was one hell of an improvisor.
They swayed and brushed past each other effectively, like waves in the water, sometimes intermingling, sometimes separate.
Elsa couldn't help that she actually felt relaxed and happy.
And then the song was over, and Anna bumped into her and stayed, laughing and clutching Elsa's upper arms.
And Elsa didn't think. She just did.
Her head ducked down, their lips met breathlessly.
And all Elsa remembered was watching Anna's back, watching her push people out the way as she ran from Elsa.
A/N: Sorry, please don't hate me! Happy Thanksgiving (early)!When Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person in history to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, she was no doubt inundated with notes on congratulations from around the world.
But the 17-year-old would be forgiven for not immediately recognising the support of supermodel Naomi Campbell, who took to Twitter just hours after the ceremony to add to her thoughts on the occasion.
The 44-year-old fashion icon appeared to fall foul of autocorrect, spelling the Pakistani teenager's name "malaria" and drawing an instant chorus of dismay from eagle-eyed Twitter users.
<noframe>Twitter: Donna White - <a href="http://www.twitter.com/sophie_gadd" target="_blank">@sophie_gadd</a> There's some things you just have to spellcheck before you click submit! <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=hash&q=%23socialmedia" target="_blank">#socialmedia</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?src=hash&q=%23PR" target="_blank">#PR</a></noframe>
<noframe>Twitter: Marc Tessier-Ashpool - <a href="http://www.twitter.com/NaomiCampbell" target="_blank">@NaomiCampbell</a> that's a helluva autocorrect mistake, Naomi</noframe>
<noframe>Twitter: Straight Bat - <a href="http://www.twitter.com/NaomiCampbell" target="_blank">@NaomiCampbell</a> yay for malaria</noframe>
Ms Campbell's offending tweet, which was still on the site more than seven hours after being posted, also included a link to an instagram picture of the women's education campaigner.
On the picture Ms Yousafzai is quoted: "I speak not for myself but for those without a voice - those who have fought for their right to live in peace."
But once again the supermodel misspelt her name, tagging @malaria, an unknown instagram user, in the post instead of the new Nobel laureate.
She later tweeted a correction, claiming her phone "spat out" the wrong spelling of Malala's name.
The peace prize was awarded jointly to Malala and Kailash Satyarthi from India, "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education".
"The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim - an Indian and a Pakistani - to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism," the judges said in a statement.
As a teenager Malala living in Pakistan's Swat Valley when she was shot in the head by militants in October 2012 as punishment for her high profile campaign to encourage girls to go to school.
A year later she was living in Britain, having staged a remarkable recovery thanks to surgeons in Birmingham, and has become an international role model for young people.
Read more:
Nobel Peace Prize winners: 1901 to 2014
Who is Kailash Satyarthi?
How the Nobel Prize has favoured white western men for more than 100 yearsEconomist Arthur Grimes yesterday suggested building 150,000 new homes to reduce Auckland house prices by 40%. This idea was described as ‘just crazy’ by the Prime Minister. Is it?
Affordability
We know that in Auckland the median house price is more than 9 times the median household income. The standard international definition of ‘affordable’ is 3 times, so it is pretty safe to say that Auckland’s house prices are a long way from being affordable.
The maths of restoring affordability are fairly simple; we need to reduce house prices relative to incomes. To achieve that we either need to reduce house prices, increase incomes, or both; slow the growth in house prices so that it is less than the growth in incomes.
In contrast, the Government’s target is to return house price growth to ‘single digits’. That is no guarantee of house prices becoming more affordable. Instead, if the Government achieves their target it could just as likely mean that already unaffordable housing gets slowly more unaffordable. As an aside, returning house price growth to single digits seems inevitable – the current rate of growth cannot be sustained indefinitely – at some price level people would stop buying.
From an affordability perspective Grimes’ plan seems comparatively sane.
Financial Risk
The concern the Prime Minister raised was that people would lose their equity and banks would be put in trouble.
As Grimes pointed out, housing is an investment like any other so why can’t prices come down? Most investments are by their nature a risky business. Values may rise or fall; just ask any Kiwi who piled into the sharemarket back in 1987. The law of investments is the more return you get, the greater the risk is that you could lose it all. Why shouldn’t that apply to housing? Indeed, we have seen price falls in some parts of the country in recent years.
As for the risk to banks, in Grimes’ view (and he is a former Reserve Bank chair) our banks could handle that kind of shock; in fact they could handle up to a 55% drop in Auckland house prices.
The Prime Minister shouldn’t fret about this one, it is the job of the Reserve Bank to ensure that banks are prepared to deal with a fall in house prices. The Morgan Foundation has for many years pointed out that the lending rules around mortgages have helped fuel the speculation in the housing market. The Reserve Bank has argued that housing is a lower area of investment, which justifies higher leverage without increased risk to the economy. However this has become a self fulfilling prophecy – allowing for higher leverage simply means that investors pile in until housing does eventually become a risk. The Reserve Bank seems to be realising this increased risk, they have already implemented loan to value ratios (which look set to be tightened further) and perhaps the use of debt to income ratios in the future. So the risk to banks is low and assuming the Reserve Bank continues to act, looks set to remain that way.
Developers
Finally the Prime Minister argued that developers could be hit by any drop in house prices, which would work against Grimes’ plan for 150,000 new homes.
However, Grimes’ suggestion wasn’t for business as usual. His was a bold plan to build up and out. Allowing increased density in the inner suburbs would provide a strong incentive to stop land banking and start building, otherwise developers could see their land values start to fall. Similarly on the fringes Grimes was suggesting using the Public Works Act to acquire land, and using the profits from that to fund the development of infrastructure.
While a fall in house prices could hurt certain developers who own a lot of land and were slow off the mark to develop it, it is hard to see how it would hurt development.
Are there enough builders to build the houses in Grimes’ plan? We found the builders to build in Christchurch – we got them in from overseas where necessary. The Christchurch rebuild will be winding down soon, so there will be plenty of spare capacity if the jobs are there.
Radical?
Is Grimes’ plan really that radical? The most extreme part of his proposal is compulsory land acquisition; effectively forcing owners to sell their land. However, the Government is already looking at this idea as a way to reduce land banking, so it is hardly radical. As we have pointed out, closing the loopholes around the taxation of assets would be a far less invasive incentive against land banking.
The only really radical part of the plan is the sheer scale, particularly for intensive development in the city. This is the part of the plan that scares politicians because it means standing up to residents that oppose development in their back yard. The problem is that these NIMBYs vote, and have a much louder voice than the future tenants of those inner city apartments.
However, intensification is essential for restoring affordability. As we have discussed previously, sprawl may deliver cheaper housing, but once the private and public costs of transport are taken into account it often ends up more expensive overall. Intensification is the thorn that must be grasped for sake of the future of Auckland.
Would it be Crazy to Reduce House Prices by 40%? was last modified: by
Would it be Crazy to Reduce House Prices by 40%? was last modified: byHave love, will travel
How did my story begin? I had been asked to provide makeup services for a fashion photo shoot and jumped at the opportunity. Then I realized that I had no convenient way to transport my large collection of makeup brushes to the set....
This was in 2008. At that time, options for makeup brush rolls weren't great. So, I ended up making my own. That was the first aSoftBlackStar brush roll! Other beauticians (and my friends) fell in love with it, each insisting that I make one for them. I quickly realized there was a huge demand for these adorable items and set up this Etsy store!
Since then, I've expanded my product line by developing other items, specifically designed for the fashionable, feminine traveler. All these years later, my store has maintained a five-star rating and my products are highly regarded by professionals in film, photography, theater, fashion, etc.
I hope you love my items! Thank you!
♥ LotusFrom Dogfish Head:
Did you know Dogfish Head is celebrating 20 off-centered years this year? You heard us... 20 years! It was 1995 when we first launched Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats in Rehoboth Beach, DE … in fact, our actual birthday is June 23, 1995.
20 years later and it's been quite the journey. From those early days of learning brewpubs were illegal in the state of Delware to our latest venture into the craft spirits world, it's been a wonderful ride. We're looking to celebrate that journey with a week full of events, and we're hoping you'll join us June 22-26! After all, where would we be without our awesome fans?
At the Rehoboth Beach brewpub …
Monday
Mini Growler Monday
- We’re brewing up a special small-batch for this mini-growler release.
- Only 50 limited-edition, signed growlers will be available for purchase and DFH founder & president, Sam Calagione, will be the one to hand it over.
- Release kicks off at 2 p.m. - when they're gone, they're gone!
- Beer is TBD, so stay tuned!
Tuesday
The Official Birthday of Dogfish Head
- Special guest bartender! Dogfish Head founder & president, Sam Calagione, will be behind the bar slinging your favorite DFH brews from 5-7 p.m.
- Share a birthday with DFH? We've got a present for you. Show us your ID and that your birthday is also on June 23 and we'll hook you up with a little DFH love.
- Got a craft beer tatto? Show us - we've got a little DFH love for you! #craftbeertats
Wednesday
Randalls and Candles & Wayback Wednesday
- Randall the Enamel Animal will be in the house with some tasty ingredients.
- Beer-inspired cupcakes at the ready – make a wish!
- We're digging deep for this Wayback Wednesday and pulling out a vintage keg of '10 Palo Santo Marron, '13 Olde School Barleywine, Festina Lente! On tap all day... until it's not.
Thursday
Throwback Thursday
- Show us your vintage DFH gear and bring the stories!
- We'll have some vintage brews on tap - '13 Immort Ale, '14 Red & White, '11 Fort.
- #TBT & #20offcenteredyears
Friday
Live Music & Party Like It's 1995
- Live, original music has been a huge part of Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats, so we're bringing you Dale and the ZDubs.
- Show starts at 10 p.m., no cover.
- With this being our 20th Anniversary, we're going to party like it's 1995! Dress the part with your favorite '90s attire... we're already working on our outfits.
At the Milton brewery …
Monday
Mini Monday with Randall Jr.
- We're setting up a Randall Jr. bar so you can fix your beer just the way you like it.
- Add cherries, coffee, mint and other fresh ingredients to one of our off-centered ales - boom, now you're the Brewmaster.
Tuesday
Randalls and Candles & The Official Birthday of Dogfish Head
- Randall the Enamel Animal will be in the house with some tasty ingredients.
- Beer-inspired cupcakes at the ready – make a wish!
- Share a birthday with DFH? We've got a present for you. Show us your ID and that your birthday is also June 23 and we'll hook you up with a little DFH love.
Wednesday
Special Guest Bartender
- Dogfish Head founder & president, Sam Calagione, will be behind the bar slinging your favorite DFH brews from 4-6 p.m.
- Got a craft beer tattoo? Show us - we've got a little DFH love for you!
Thursday
Throwback Thursday
- Show us your vintage DFH gear and bring the stories!
- We'll have some vintage brews on tap - lineup TBD
- #TBT & #20offcenteredyears
Friday
Beer:30 & Party Like It's 1995
- It’s our favorite day of the week – we stop work every Friday at 4:30 p.m. to celebrate the week with co-workers.
- With this being our 20th Anniversary, we're going to party like it's 1995! Dress the part with your favorite '90s attire... we're already working on our outfits.
- Join us for Beer:30, some bocce, good times, and a pint!
We hope you’ll join us for our birthday celebration. It’s been 20 off-centered years … Cheers & Thank You!
Dogfish Head Brewings & Eats
320 Rehoboth Ave.
Rehoboth Beach, DE 19971
Dogfish Head Craft Brewery
6 Cannery Village Center
Milton, DE 19968
About Bil Cord Founder, owner, author, graphic designer, CEO, CFO, webmaster, president, mechanic and janitor for mybeerbuzz.com. Producer and Co-host of the WILK Friday BeerBuzz live weekly craft beer radio show. Small craft-brewer of the craft beer news sites and one-man-band with way too many instruments to play.Charlotte Hornets swingman Lance Stephenson becomes eligible to be traded Monday and his new team is indeed exploring its options to move him, according to league sources.
Lance Stephenson's stay in Charlotte might be a short one as the Hornets have been exploring a possible trade of the swingman. Bill Streicher/USA TODAY Sports
Sources told ESPN.com that the Hornets, just 23 games into the Stephenson era, have already begun the process of searching for potential trade partners that would be willing to take the talented but enigmatic former Indiana Pacer off their hands.
Although sources say no deal involving Stephenson is imminent, Monday is the first day that players signed to new contracts in July are eligible to be dealt, which typically triggers what teams leaguewide regard as "trade season" over the next two months leading into the annual February trade deadline.
One factor that could ultimately lead to a deal, despite Stephenson's ragged and discouraging start, is the fact that the three-year, $27 million deal he received over the summer from Charlotte owner Michael Jordan is only guaranteed through next season. The third year of the deal is not guaranteed, which theoretically enhances Charlotte's chances of finding another team willing to gamble on the mercurial swingman.
Sources say that the Hornets are not in a move-him-at-all-costs mode with Stephenson but made it clear that Charlotte is ready now to abandon the experiment if a palatable deal presents itself.
Stephenson has quickly proved to be a poor fit alongside the Hornets' established core twosome of Al Jefferson and Kemba Walker, shooting 38.9 percent from the floor overall and 8-for-48 percent on 3-pointers during Charlotte's 6-17 start.
Projected by many NBA prognosticators to move up the Eastern Conference ladder this season after going 44-38 in 2013-14 to claim the East's No. 7 seed under first-year coach Steve Clifford, Charlotte ranks as one of the league's most disappointing teams through the first quarter of the schedule |
haven't got proper emotions.'
Colin Leacock was cleared of two counts of rape and two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
He was said to have punched the complainant in the face and swung her round by her hair until chunks fell out.
The brother said he did not join in as Mandy beat the woman, and was 'disgusted and shocked' by police pictures of her injuries.
Mandy Leacock (pictured) treated the woman like a slave, ordering her to cook and clean as an 'unpaid skivvy', punishing her by covering her with bleach as she sat in a bath
A psychologist concluded that Colin's IQ may be as low as 55 but he has a 'rudimentary' understanding of consent.
In September 2015 Mandy Leacock posted Facebook pictures from a champagne-session at the five-star Langdon Hotel in Marylebone, central London.
She also revealed her 'addiction' to Rihanna, sharing an iTunes link for the R&B superstar's ANTI (deluxe) album in January.
Prosecutor David Povall told jurors of the horror the victim suffered at Mandy's hands after she moved in with Colin in early 2015.
He said: 'She was lonely and she went looking for love, romance, on the internet on Match.com.
'In March 2015 online she met Colin Leacock.
'It was clear to her even on those visits that Colin's sister Mandy was quite a powerful personality and didn't approve of the relationship.
'But in the event, having visited twice she came to London and she moved in with Colin Leacock in his flat.
Colin Leacock was cleared today
'Mandy Leacock did not consider her to be good enough for Colin and she needed to prove that she was capable of cooking and cleaning and doing necessary household work.
'She came to be living in Mandy Leacock's flat where she quickly became an unpaid skivvy, sleeping on the floor, required to clean and after a time soon the victim of repeated assaults.
'She was living in that flat in a state of fear, of depression, being bullied and controlled.
'Sometimes she was made to sit in the bath and she would have bleach poured on her skin.
'There were occasions when she was grabbed by the hair and swung round so that chunks of her hair were pulled out.'
He added: 'Her ordeal continued until the beginning of May 2016 when she walked into a local shop and as a result of talking to one of the people who was working there she was sent on for medical help and the police became involved.'
A Match.com spokesperson said: 'We are appalled by these crimes and welcome the conviction of Mandy Leacock.
'Sadly, there is a tiny minority of people who set out to harm others.
'While this is not confined to dating sites or even the internet, those who do so should be convicted.
'Our member's safety is our highest priority.
'We continually review our policies and fully support the initiatives that the Online Dating Association and Suzy Lamplugh Trust are taking on the issue.'
Colin Leacock was cleared of two counts of rape and two counts of assault occasioning ABH.
Mandy Leacock will be sentenced for three counts of ABH tomorrow at Southwark Crown Court.By Daniel Stolte
The meteorite impact that spelled doom for the dinosaurs 66 million years ago decimated the evergreens among the flowering plants to a much greater extent than their deciduous peers, according to a study led by UA researchers. The results are published in the journal PLoS Biology.
Applying biomechanical formulas to a treasure trove of thousands of fossilized leaves of angiosperms — flowering plants excluding conifers — the team was able to reconstruct the ecology of a diverse plant community thriving during a 2.2 million-year period spanning the cataclysmic impact event, believed to have wiped out more than half of plant species living at the time.
The researchers found evidence that after the event, fast-growing, deciduous angiosperms had replaced their slow-growing, evergreen peers to a large extent. Living examples of evergreen angiosperms, such as holly and ivy, tend to prefer shade, don’t grow very fast and sport dark-colored leaves.
“When you look at forests around the world today, you don’t see many forests dominated by evergreen flowering plants,” said the study’s lead author, Benjamin Blonder, who graduated last year from the lab of UA Professor Brian Enquist with a Ph.D. from the UA’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and is now the science coordinator at the UA SkySchool. “Instead, they are dominated by deciduous species, plants that lose their leaves at some point during the year.”
Read more here.Computer Usability and Realism
Matt Bernhard Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 13, 2016
Using a computer is hard. Showing how people actually use computers seems to be even harder. Television and movies generally seem to want to cash in on all the sexiness of technology without putting in any effort into understanding how it all works, and that can lead to some pretty unfortunate, if hilarious results. You may recall movies like WarGames, or the infamous Unix scene in Jurassic Park.
It’s a UNIX system. Wait, no it isn’t…
Don’t even get me started on the fact that there was briefly a CSI show with the word cyber in the name. And, of course I can always poke fun of NCIS:
This is not how keyboards work
But not every show is disingenuous about how technology works. Shows like AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire or HBO’s Silicon Valley have finally discovered that there are interesting stories to be told in and around technology. Embracing technical details, and more importantly getting them correct, offers a chance to have more nuanced and interesting conversations about the role technology plays in society. Involving the tech community in this conversation is vital, and doing so can not only help improve technological literacy in the general population, but can actually help technology improve as well. This brings me to the 6th episode of Mr. Robot’s second season, eps2.4_m4ster-s1ave.aes. (In case you’re wondering, the episode titles often follow various Unix-like file naming conventions and file extensions,with a bit of bothersome 1337speak thrown in for good measure). What follows contains spoilers, and if you haven’t watched Mr. Robot yet, now is your chance. Just go watch the first episode. I’ll wait.
Alright, now that you’re caught up (or more probably decided to not bother), let’s talk about how authentically portraying technology allows us to have a more productive conversation than doing otherwise. Episode 6 of season 2 sees Angela (one of the least technically-inclined characters in Mr. Robot) attempting to learn to hack so that Darlene and company can infiltrate the FBI and delete all traces of Mr. Robot and Angela’s involvement with the 5/9 attacks. Angela must be the one to carry out the hack, as she is the only one with physical access to vulnerable FBI network infrastructure. The catch: she has never even seen a terminal, let alone executed a complex series of shell commands to install a backdoor.
At this point, dear reader, you have been sorted into one of two groups: people who understood that last sentence, and people who didn’t. I shall refer to the former group henceforth as geeks, techie people who know how computers work and cringe when they see things like the aforementioned television follies. I will refer to the latter as non-geeks, people who might feel like their intelligence is being insulted by said follies (and possibly my next statement), but who don’t know enough about computers to say otherwise. Angela trying to learn to hack is an incredibly important scene for both of these groups. To better understand why, let’s break it down.
For non-geeks, Angela is an every-woman trying to navigate her way through the complex world of computer hacking and corporate politics. She may not know much about computers, but she clearly has a refined set of skills that help her land her first job as an Accounts Executive for the AllSafe computer security company. Later she puts these skills to use by finagling her way into a PR job at Evil Corp, where she constantly repositions herself to maintain as much leverage as possible over management. Angela is smart, motivated, personable, and yet she is completely hopeless when it comes to dealing with the multitudinous intricacies of computer science. In short, she is relatable. Her ultimate success at gaining access to the FBI network is a real triumph for non-geeks; in fact, from a technical perspective the show’s portrayal of hacking can be used as an accurate illustration on how hacking actually works.
For geeks, however, Angela is a different story. I found myself immensely frustrated watching someone who should have some working knowledge of computers struggle to execute a simple ifconfig command. In fact, if we examine why she was struggling to “learn to hack” in the first place, we see that it’s simply due to a typo:
There should be a space between WLAN1 and WLAN2, and there’s an extra 2 at the end.
Watching this, I found myself struggling to reconcile how someone so capable could struggle so mightily with such a simple task. It was infuriating!
But then it occurred to me: this is exactly why computer science is broken. Us geeks spend so much time buried in technical obscurity we often forget what it was like to first learn how to install Linux or run a Bash script. The opaqueness of technology works both ways: on the outside it seems impossible to tell what’s going on; once you enter into the fray, it can become difficult to see the what the outside world looks like.
This is a well-documented problem. Studies like Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt or Alice in Warningland show that computer scientists, and especially those who focus on computer security, fundamentally lose touch with how real people interact with computer systems. There have even been security technologies that address usable security issues, for example Apple now encrypts all iMessages by default, and apps like Signal make obscuring text messages and phone calls essentially pain free. But despite how well identified the problem is, despite the fact that I am currently running a study on how people use computers and how they interact with computer security, I briefly forgot how far removed from the average user I am. A TV show was capable of bringing me back to reality, and this is a point that cannot be emphasized enough.
I could go on about the importance of computer usability, but I’ll leave that for my day job. The point here is that television shows which actually engage with their source material, shows which don’t insult their audience’s intelligence, can actually make the world a better place. Don’t take it from me, take it from the Peabody Mr. Robot has already won. By taking seriously the lives of the people engaged in the source material, and by taking the source material itself seriously, TV allows us to engage in a more meaningful dialog. Geeks (generally, communities on the fringes) feel validated, like they have more of a stake in society at large when a show earnestly tries to portray them, instead of reducing them to caricatures for a quick laugh. Non-geek viewers of the show actually learn things — as I already mentioned, Mr. Robot does such a good job with its portrayal of “hacking” that you can actually do it real life. Together, this helps us bridge the gap between obtuse technicality and the real world, even if just by a little. This is an incredible achievement for a television show, especially one that is so much fun to watch in the first place.The Dodgers have suspended minor league shortstop Erisbel Arruebarrena for the remainder of the season without pay, according to Barry Lewis of the Tulsa World (via Twitter).
Team director of player development Gabe Kapler says that the suspension occurred due to “repeated failure to comply with the terms of his contract,” as Eric Stephen of SB Nation reports on Twitter. The particular underlying issue that spurred the action remains unknown.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that the high-cost international signee has run afoul of the organization; the Dodgers stated the same grounds for action back in May of 2015. He was suspended then, too, with a “rest of the season” ban ultimately being reduced to thirty days after a grievance proceeding.
Arruebarrena is still owed a good bit of cash under the $25MM free agent contract he signed out of Cuba. He’s due $4MM this season — which is now in jeopardy — and $9MM total over the next two campaigns.
The 26-year-old, who’s known as a glove-first player, ended up having a reasonably productive season at the plate last year at Double-A level, slashing.299/.337/.418 over 205 plate appearances. Arruebarrena was off to a slower start back at Tulsa in 2016; his strikeout rate is up quite a bit, though so too is his isolated slugging.Earlier we have posted installing WP 7 on HTC HD2.
With the same procedure you can dual boot WP 7 and Android. You can choose the OS as soon as your phone startup.
Due to some limitations you can not run WP 7 and Android from Nand at the same time. WP 7 wiill run from NAND and Android from the same or another SD card.
NOTE :
Make sure you backup your SD cards as WP 7 will erase all that is on them.
This method works for me but I take no responsibility for whatever may happen to your phone.
You should be able to reactivate your phone with windows market but I cannot guarantee this.
Read the how to carefully, I have also attached thread link where you can post your problems as well as find out alternate method of this how to.
How to :
Fist we need to format the SD card as per our requirement. You need 2 SD cards. I took one 8GB and 16GB SD card. 16GB card will be our permanent SD card and 8GB card enable us to get small partition to run WP 7.
To partition SD card we need to download SD card partition software. You can download a free copy of it from here.
Insert 8GB SD card in phone and Flash the WP 7 ROM using Magldr 1.1.2.
Restart phone and start WP 7 and format 8GB card with its partition.
After completition switch of your phone and remove SD card which you have inserted earlier.
We assume you already install SD card partition tool on your PC. Start SD card partition utility.
Now attach your SD card reader to PC and insert both 8GB and 16GB SD card in it.
Now in SD card format utility you will be seeing two partitions on 8GB SD card, one is fat 16 partition of 200MB and another one is unformatted partition. This “unformatted partition” is actually your WP 7 partition.
We need to delete the partitions on 16GB SD card to do so, select the 16GB card partition, right click choose delete and click on apply.
Copy and resize the fat16 partition of your 8GB SD card to your 16GB SD card. To do this, select the partition on your 8GB SD card, right click (or use the menu) and select copy and follow the onscreen wizard to copy. You can change it to fat32 as well. When resizing, you need to do some math. Take the size of your 16GB SD card and subtract the size of the “unformatted” partition of on your 8GB SD card and set this value as the resize value for the fat16 partition that you are copying. In other words, if the unformatted partition is 8GB and you are setting things up on a 16GB SD card then set the resize value to approx. 8GB. Click “apply”
Using the above procedure, copy the “unformatted” partition from your 8GB SD card to the 16GB SD card. Click “apply”.
IMPORTANT: Before copying your android build and while still in windows format the fat 32 partition using 32 or 64 kb sectors USE WINDOWS EXPLORER OR MY COMPUTER TO FORMAT. This should help with speed. I used 64 kb sectors. I am using the desire_Z build in this post and set up everything in the desire_z folder
Copy your android SD build onto the fat32 partition.
IMPORTANT – Do not use usb mass storage as there is some data corruption problems. Remove your SD card to copy. You need to have a modified rootfs.img file where nand_init was added to init.rc and you need to copy and replace the existing rootfs.img file of the SD build else it won’t work.
Remove the 16GB card and insert it into your phone.
Reboot the phone and hold the “red end key” to enter the magldr boot menu.
In Magldr 1.1.2 use volume down to go to “9. Services” and click “green phone button” to select.
Use volume buttons to select “1. Bootsettings” and click “green phone button” to select.
Use volume buttons to select “2. Always Menu” and click “green phone button” to select. This will give you the Madldr menu on phone startup to allow you to choose WP 7 or SD android as your boot choice.
Click the “green phone button” to confirm.
After completing above steps you will be brought back to the initial magldr 1.1.2 menu.
Again, use volume down to go to “9. Services” and click “green phone button” to select.
Use volume buttons to select “1. Bootsettings” and click “green phone button” to select.
Use volume buttons to select “3. AD SD Dir” and click “green phone button” to select.
Select the folder where your SD android build is located.
Reset your phone and enter Magldr 1.1.2.
To boot into wp7 select boot “1. Boot WPH” or to boot sd android select “2. Boot SD AD”
Booting into android SD is long.
Thread to followOn Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 04:38:08AM +0000, Jakob Ovrum via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: > On Wednesday, 20 January 2016 at 15:28:05 UTC, jmh530 wrote: > > I like the description of @trusted and template inference. Template inference, in particular, was not something that was obvious to me when first reading about D. I'm not sure how clear you make it that you can still mark templates @safe and what have you (you seem to just say don't make templates @trusted). > > Templated functions can still be explicitly annotated with attributes, which disables inference for those attributes. This is often a good idea even for templated functions when template arguments do not inject code, so that every instantiation has the same, known set of attributes. Attribute inference can handle it, but explicit annotations provide documentation value. I might incorporate this into the article, but I'm wary of it losing focus. A common idiom used in Phobos related to this is to use an attributed (pure, nothrow, @nogc, etc.) unittest that instantiates the template in question, to ensure that it does not accidentally become non-pure, throwing, etc. (the unittest will stop compiling if so). This way, we ensure that the template itself doesn't contain any impure / throwing / @system code, even though you can instantiate it with template parameters that may be impure, throwing, @system, etc.. > > I wasn't aware of the point that "@trusted nested functions in templated functions do not have to have a memory safe interface as long as all calls to the function are memory safe". Interesting. > > It is a necessary evil to propagate attributes correctly. Don't use it when you don't have to. Wouldn't it be better to refactor the code to separate out the part that needs to be @trusted into a separate place, with a safe API? Or are there cases for which this is impossible? T -- The early bird gets the worm. Moral: ewww...The big game has arrived, you’ve been waiting all week for this moment – this game could decide your team’s entire season! Suddenly standing in the goal whilst 10 of your mates smash 8 different footballs at you from 9 yards out just won’t do, but what is the best way to make the most of your warm-up time?
I think the best thing to start with is that everyone’s ‘perfect’ warm-up will be slightly different dependent on each goalkeeper’s strengths and weaknesses, the opponents strengths and weaknesses and the level you are playing at. Each warm-up should consist of some core fundamentals though which we have put together below, you can choose which ones need the most focus for you as an individual!
Warm-up your body!
Before we can even begin to think about focusing on handling a ball, the first thing we need to do is get your body warmed up! Depending on the warm-up your team do it is often useful to piggy back on to their warm-up to begin with, they will usually cover off the basics such as gentle jogging and stretching etc.
If your team mates aren’t doing a proper warm-up then separate yourself off and do at least 3 lengths across the width of the 18 yard box, mixing it up with side steps and short backwards jogs to replicate the kind of movements you are likely to be doing in a game, this should include getting your knees up high as you would when coming for a cross etc and be sure to stretch off your whole body!
Basic Handling
There are a whole host of ways you can begin to bring some basic handling into your warm-up, the simplest way to begin with is by having a server simply begin to volley the ball towards you from around 12 yards out, explain to them that you want simple balls at waist to head height that you can catch. You don’t want to be parrying anything at this stage or having to dive, just focusing on catching the ball and building confidence in your handling. As well as warming you up this will begin to raise your confidence in handling the ball as well, a lot of goalkeeping is mental!
Once you feel a bit more confident you can ask the server to increase the tempo and begin to play the ball further away from your body, but the key is to continue to focus on handling rather than making TV saves.
One way to warm your body up for diving and focus on handling is to sit down with your legs bent in front of you and have a server toss the ball left and right so you can stretch out as you would diving but still focus on your handling.
Warm-up your reactions
I must admit that when it comes to warming up reactions I have my personal favourite technique which is used across the world by many keepers. Standing with my back to the server and having them shout turn before delivering a shot on target, this is a great way to begin to work on fast feet, simulates seeing the ball late and allows you to genuinely react to a shot rather than reading an attackers body shape.
It may take a few ‘shots’ to get the timing and difficulty of the shot right to begin with – remind the server they are supposed to be stretching the goalkeeper but every shot is supposed to be something you can save. The key here is to ensure you vary which way you turn when initially turning around and making sure you don’t tire yourself out by only doing a maximum of about 10 of these.
Crosses
This one is often overlooked during a goalkeepers warm-up but is so important! There is no magic formula to this one, simply have a server fire around 5 crosses in from each side that you can come and gather in the air, ensure there is a variety of crosses, in and out swingers, drilled crosses, looping crosses to the back post etc.
If you can get a spare player / substitute to play the role of an attacker and lightly challenge for the ball whilst in the air all the better, if not then you must make sure you put the effort in to simulate a real game – make sure you are claiming the ball at the highest possible point and get your knee up to protect yourself.
Distribution
In today’s game it is no secret that a goalkeeper has to be able to play football, it’s not enough nowadays to simply be a great shot stopper and be unable to kick a ball. Take a few minutes to practice a few goalkicks from both sides of the 6 yard box, focusing on accuracy and technique rather than pure power. Then repeat with kicks from your hand and some long overarm throws to a team mate.
Test the pitch
A lot of people reading this will unfortunately not be playing on carpet like professional pitches, so as part of your warm up it is always extremely useful to ensure that you understand how the area and the goalmouth play before you kick off. Make sure between you and the server you really understand how the ball rolls when hit across the ground, how does it bounce? This can often vary drastically between in and outside of the 6 yard box so really do test it out and adjust your play style accordingly if needed.
How much time should you spend on each drill?
That bit is up to you I’m afraid! I would suggest you cover off all of these items as a minimum, but each warm-up will likely be different, some days you will turn up and your reactions will be fantastic, your handling will be awesome but your distribution will be sloppy, another week it will be completely the opposite. Focus on what ever you don’t feel confident on going into the game, but please ensure you don’t get negative and don’t tire your self out.Housing company Svenska Bostäder (SB) have redesigned the centre of Husby in the north-west of Stockholm with a "feminist, equality-based" perspective in mind. SB's social sustainability coordinator in the district, Nurcan Gültekin, explained to The Local exactly what that means:
"With that we mean that we need to get more women into the public spaces. It's above all about having an equal public space where everyone, both men and women, feel welcome."
Husby is one of 15 places the Swedish police described as "particularly vulnerable" in a 2015 report, and was one of the areas where riots broke out in the Swedish capital in 2013.
The forthcoming changes are the product of discussions SB has had with local residents since 2009. During the conversations it emerged that the centre around the tunnelbana (metro) station was the part of the area where residents, and in particular female residents, felt least safe.
"We started workshops where female residents were free to speak up and point out the places where they felt unsafe. We then started to get a clear image of how the centre is perceived and the factors playing into that. It emerged that women to a large degree were opting to take a detour around the centre. They didn't feel comfortable," Gültekin noted.
Changes that will be rolled out as a result include improved street lighting to create a safer-feeling passage from the tunnelbana station through the area. The relocation of a cafe currently situated on the main square that tends to attract mostly male customers will also be used as an opportunity to create a more female-friendly meeting place in the centre.
"The cafe has become a natural meeting place for some Husby residents, mostly men. Today however women don't have a natural meeting place in the centre. There is an imbalance. Our ambition is to create harmony, where both men and women dwell in and move around the centre," Gültekin explained.
There are plans for further changes in the future, including alterations to the tunnelbana station entrance. SB wants Husby to be the starting point for further feminist urban planning ventures in the future.Sitting in 2nd place in the West with 2 games at hand on the conference leading Minnesota Wild, things are looking pretty good right now for the Detroit Red Wings. Currently on their longest winning portion of what has been an incredibly streaky season, a lot of things have been going right for the ‘Wings, and those things will need to continue to go right for Detroit if they are to continue their winning ways.
1. Pavel Datsyuk’s Scoring Touch Returned
Noticeably absent through the first part of the season, Pavel Datsyuk’s point production returned. and directly coincided with the success Detroit began to have. Datsyuk, who had 11 points through the first 17 games this season, has 10 in the last 6, split evenly between goals and assists. While the rest of the league worships at the Crosby altar, Pavel Datsyuk is quietly putting up just as impressive of point totals, and easily more impressive play.
2. The Red Wings Powerplay Began To Click
After a dismal start to the season with powerplay success at just 16.4%, things turned around rapidly and the Red Wings now find themselves ranked 7th in the league in powerplay effectiveness after going 7/25 (28.%) through the last 6 games. The Leading powerplay point producer through those 6 games? Tomas Holmstrom, with 5, closely followed by the aforementioned Pavel Datsyuk and the distinguishable captain Nicklas Lidstrom, both with 4.
3. Better Shorthanded Play
This 6 game upward trend has seen the Red Wings average nearly 1 less penalty per game than the 17 prior, and while this may not sound like much, when your season’s penalty killing success rate is ranked 24th in the league, it can mean a lot. Spending less time a man down means more rested penalty killers, which helped the Red Wings allow only 3 powerplay goals against in the last 25 times shorthanded. That 88% kill rate is significantly higher than their 80.2% on the season, and by itself would be enough to place them 5th.
4. Valtteri Filppula‘s Surprise Play
Valtteri Filppula is 3rd on the team in scoring. If you predicted that one, you’re beyond psychic. While the Finnish forward has been an incredibly asset to the Red Wings over the years, we’ve been waiting for his promised point production to kick in since he joined the team in 2006. That time has come. Filppula has 4 goals and 2 assists during the last 6 games, and has seemingly been everywhere on the ice. He’s played well for the entire season, and hopefully it continues. Career best numbers are in Fil’s future.
5. Improved Road Play
Home ice has been a thing of utmost importance to the Red Wings this season, and luckily they find themselves with the best home winning percentage in the league. What they’d struggled with up to this point is winning on the road, winning just 2 of their first 7 games away from home. They righted this ship to begin the streak with back-to-back wins in Southern California against the Kings and Ducks, and continued their improvement with an impressive win in Boston, becoming only team to win against the Bruins in the month of November.
6. All-Star Performance From Jimmy Howard
While the rest of the NHL may not feel Jimmy is an elite goaltender (as evidenced by his being left off of the ASG ballot), Red Wings fans have witnessed his brilliance at work all season. Howard, who has started in 16 consecutive contests, was stellar in net during all 6 of Detroits wins, with only one small hiccup in the game against Boston (which poor communication from defensemen was equally to blame for). Posting a.933 save percentage and a 1.83 goals against average, Jimmy Howard has been an unstoppable force of consistency in the crease for the Red Wings.
There you have it, those are the top 6 reasons Detroit has excelled during their last 6 starts, and I didn’t even mention the stellar play from team point leader Johan Franzen, or the fact that Nicklas Lidstrom and the rest of Detroit’s defensive group have been the most productive of any in the league so far. So many things are going right for the Red Wings right now, and while they still have a few things to work on, the season is shaping up to be another good one for Hockeytown’s finest.“It was a beautiful time,” says guitarist Alex Lifeson, recalling the summer of 1980, when he and his Rush mates (singer-bassist Geddy Lee and drummer-lyricist Neil Peart) rented a house in Stony Lake, Ontario and wrote their eighth album, Moving Pictures, together. “We’d spend the weeks working, and on weekends we’d drive back to Toronto. Rehearsing, figuring out arrangements – everything just flowed. Electricity was in the air.”
The past six years had been a tough slog, but by that golden summer, Rush were sailing. No longer an opening act, the group that had worn out cars and vans on a tangled path across North America, winning fans the hard way – knocking ‘em out with their stage show and a string of bold, radio-unfriendly albums that nonetheless found their way onto turntables - was now an arena headliner.
Not only that, they had an honest-to-God hit on their hands: Permanent Waves. DJs were all over the long-player, particularly its ironically titled single The Spirit Of Radio, a masterstroke that managed to cram Rush’s complex musicality into four minutes and 56 seconds while shoehorning in undeniable pop hooks with even a hint of reggae. That Rush succeeded in crashing the mainstream without losing one hardcore fan would play out big-time on Moving Pictures.
“After we felt confident of what we’d written, we started recording at Le Studio [the now-shuttered facility was located in Morin Heights, Quebec] with our co-producer, Terry Brown,” says Lifeson. “We ate well, drank well and we played really well. The whole vibe was fun. We’d gone from playing clubs and theaters and were now selling out big places. We were at that cusp of coming into our own.”
Released on 12 February 1981, Moving Pictures not only saw Permanent Waves’ radio win but raised it one better, packing the classic singles Tom Sawyer and Limelight. “We knew they were good songs,” says Lifeson. “Did we think that they’d ever be considered ‘standards’? Not at all. All we tried to do was please ourselves.”
In 2011, the whole of Moving Pictures is being celebrated by Rush on stage – they’ve been playing the album in its entirety since last year - and on a just-issued special edition Blu-ray CD+DVD package, which renders its seven wondrous cuts with a level of sound clarity that Lifeson calls “mind-blowing. Richard Chycki, who remixed the album, knew he was working with a part of history, and he did an amazing job. He didn’t change the record, just expanded on it. When I heard what he did for first time, I couldn’t believe it. It was impeccable. It was Moving Pictures in a 3-D box!”
On the following pages, Alex Lifeson walks us through Moving Pictures track-by-track. “It’s a very optimistic album,” he says. “There’s a brightness about it, which I think is why people respond to it so much. Playing it live every night is interesting – The Camera Eye, which we hadn’t performed in a long time because it’s pretty difficult, has now become one of our favorite songs. The bottom line is, we’re very proud of Moving Pictures. Thirty years later, it still feels magical.”Supervisor Eric Mar has an idea that stands in stark contrast to the national discussion about deporting immigrants who don’t have legal status — he wants to let noncitizens vote in local school board elections.
On Tuesday, Mar proposed a charter amendment at the Board of Supervisors’ weekly meeting for the November ballot that would allow the noncitizen parents, legal guardians or caregivers of students 18 and younger who are enrolled in San Francisco public schools to vote in local school board elections, whether they have a green card or a visa or are living in the country without documentation.
The proposal resurrects two previous ballot measures. In 2004, voters narrowly rejected the same proposal by then-Supervisor Matt Gonzalez with 49 percent in favor and 51 percent opposed. An even larger margin of voters rejected it in 2010, with 46 percent in favor and 54 percent opposed. Assemblyman David Chiu proposed that measure when he was a supervisor.
The political context now is different, Mar said, pointing to a backlash to Republican presidential nominee’s Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Trump has called for a ban on Muslims entering the country and, more recently, claimed that a federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University couldn’t be impartial because of his Mexican heritage. He has also vowed to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and deport about 11 million immigrants without legal status.
“In the previous campaigns, it was a different climate,” Mar said. “With Donald Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant sentiments, there is a reaction from many of us who are disgusted by those politics. I think that’s going to ensure there is strong Latino turnout as well as other immigrant turnout.”
Legally defensible
Legal scholars said it is unclear whether such a measure would pass legal muster. That it has been on the ballot in previous years means the city attorney’s office believes the proposal is legally defensible because that office vets ballot measures proposed by supervisors.
There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that prevents undocumented immigrants from voting, said Erwin Chemerinsky, law school dean at UC Irvine. The 14th Amendment says no person should be denied equal protection of the laws. The 15th Amendment prevents the government from denying a citizen the right to vote based on his race.
While voting rights have traditionally only been extended to citizens, Chemersinky said, “if the government wants to give voting to a larger group of people like noncitizens it can do so if it wants to” — at least under the U.S. Constitution.
But David Carrillo, director of the California Constitution Center at UC Berkeley School of Law, said the measure probably violates the state Constitution.
“The California Constitution limits the franchise to citizens,” Carrillo said in an email. “And the Legislature (which controls voter qualifications for statewide elections) has by statute limited voting to citizens. So even if it passes, this measure’s prospects in the courts are dubious.”
Done in other cities
While San Francisco would be the first California city to extend voting rights to noncitizens, it has been tried elsewhere in the United States. Seven jurisdictions have extended voting rights to noncitizens, said Ron Hayduk, a political science professor at Queens College of the City University of New York.
Six of them are in Maryland — all allow noncitizens the right to vote in local elections. The seventh municipality is Chicago, which allows noncitizens to vote for local school councils, a quasi-management body at each public school.
In 2013, a majority of New York City Council members voted to extend |
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A general view of the central business district during autumn in Beijing September 14, 2013. REUTERS/Petar Kujundzic
It is mainly retail investors who have packed their bags and moved on to date. If and when big institutional firms join in, there is a risk of wholesale capital flight.
Signs of China slowing down and the global impact of a wind-down in U.S. monetary stimulus - effectively draining money from the system - have been particularly punishing in emerging economies dependent on external financing.
Currencies in Turkey, Argentina and Russia have hit record lows, for example, lifting safe-haven yen, Swiss francs and U.S. Treasuries in a sign of global contagion.
Such moves are crucial factors for foreign investors because exchange rate losses can easily wipe out any gains in stocks bonds in the high-yielding emerging world.
However, data on capital flows shows many long-term investors have either stuck with, or even added to, their emerging holdings. The outflows of over $50 billion seen since 2013 have largely been driven by retail investors.
But fears are that at some point the big investors will be forced to cut losses and run as the effect of falling currencies becomes too painful to bear.
“Every emerging market crisis is first-and-foremost a currency crisis,” said Mike Howell, managing director of London-based CrossBorder Capital.
“Emerging economies have very weak private sector cash flow growth. This is both a cyclical but also a structural problem. There is a lot more pain to take out in the emerging markets.”
Emerging debt performance of the past year illustrates how currency moves matter. For example, South African government debt was slightly positive in rand terms in 2013. But in dollars terms, it lost more than 18 percent, according to Citi’s bond index.
And in the past three months or so, the dollar has risen 2 percent against key developing currencies.
Fund tracker EPFR estimates emerging equity and bond funds have seen outflows of almost $5 billion so far this year, on top of $58 billion of losses seen in 2013. EM equity funds have had 13 consecutive weeks of outflows, the longest run in 11 years.
JP Morgan estimates emerging equity exchange-traded funds have already seen a net redemption of $4.2 billion this year.
And emerging stocks.MSCIEF are the worst performer in global markets this year, having lost 4 percent.
But investor positioning so far seems far from extreme. CrossBorder’s emerging market risk appetite index, measured by normalized weightings of investors in equities less bonds, stands at a moderate -3, the lowest only since August and ca far cry from the -40 seen in 2012.
“What we haven’t seen in emerging markets is major currency devaluation, a run on government debt or ratings downgrades. Any combination of those would suggest humiliation trade (a complete giving up of the asset class) is taking place,” said John Bilton, European investment strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
SUDDEN STOP
Now investors may need to be braced for further outflows.
The Institute of International Finance expects capital inflows into emerging markets, which include buoyant direct investments, to fall more than 3 percent to $1.029 trillion in 2014 - the lowest since at least 2009. Portfolio equity flows are forecast to be down $17 billion.
World Bank warned earlier this month of the risk of a sudden stop in capital flows for emerging markets, a point which was discussed by the International Monetary Fund as well.
The bank said long-term interest rates are subject to a sudden rise of as much as 200 basis points under a scenario of disorderly adjustment when super-easy Western monetary policy begin normalizing.
This could cut financial inflows to developing countries by as much as 80 percent for several months.
In such a case, nearly a quarter of developing countries could experience sudden stops in their access to global capital, throwing some economies into a balance of payments or financial crisis, the Bank said.
Stephen Jen, managing partner of SLJ Macro Partners, says emerging markets will have seen the worst - which involves currencies falling a further 10-15 percent - when the rising U.S. 10-year yield reached 4 percent.
The yield was 2.7 percent on Friday.
“The worst is ahead of us, not behind us,” Jen |
ger awards (1991, ’93, ’94, ’96, ’97-’99). He also led the American League in home runs four times, including three consecutive seasons (1994, 1997-1999).
In six of his eleven seasons in Seattle, he had 40+ home runs (’93, ’94, ’96, ’97, ‘8, ’99). But the piece de resistance was his 1997 season, arguably one of the greatest seasons ever by an individual player. Griffey’s take home at the end was his one and only MVP award. He batted.304 and slugged.646, hit a career-high fifty-six home runs (he tied that amount the following season), and set another career-high with 147 RBI, all while leading his team to a division title.
Much to the chagrin of an entire city, February of 2000 saw his departure from Seattle. Wanting to be closer to his family, in particularly his children, Junior was traded to the Cincinnati Reds. He spent nine seasons with the Reds, but was never able to bring the same magic he once had in Seattle. He touched forty home runs in just one season with the Reds (2000), and the decline of his offense was seen as being directly related to his inability to stay healthy.
In a time when baseball saw players who never seemed to age or injure due to the increased usage of PEDs, Junior was seen as “The Natural”, as he was sometimes called. Not once was he tied to any sort of PED use. Despite the back end of his career being plagued with injury, Junior was elected to three more All-Star games (’00, ’04, ’07), and won NL Comeback Player of the Year for the 2005 season.
After nine seasons, Junior left Cincinnati for one season with the Chicago White Sox, where he only played in forty-one games. The White Sox declined his option in 2008, and for the first time in his career, Junior was a free agent. On February 18, 2009, it was announced that the prodigal son would be returning to Seattle. Junior finished out his career in the city where it all started. On May 20, 2010, in his final plate appearance, facing Toronto Blue Jays closer Kevin Gregg, Junior hit a walk-off single to help the Mariners win one last time.
In a career that spanned twenty-two seasons, Junior emerged as one of MLB’s most exciting players, as well as one of the game’s most prolific hitters. He finished his career with 630 home runs (6th all-time) and 1,836 RBI (15th all-time). In retirement, Junior was inducted into both the Mariners and the Reds Hall of Fame. While still playing in 1999, he was voted by the fans as one of nine outfielders on the MLB All-Century Team.
The Mariners, in conjunction with his Baseball Hall of Fame induction, will retire his #24 on August 6, 2016. Junior transcended the game; he got people excited about baseball again. His million-dollar swing, and his million-dollar smile, helped bring baseball back from the dead after the 1994 strike. He kept an entire generation of fans enthralled. It’s only fitting that the game give everything it can back to a player who gave everything he had to the game. First-ballot entry into the Hall is a good place to start.
Main PhotoYears ago, gay columnist Dan Savage created an alternate definition for the word “santorum,” after then-Senator Rick Santorum compared the issue of gay marriage to pedophilia and bestiality. Savage launched the website SpreadingSantorum.com in 2003 to retaliate against the arch conservative. The site defines “santorum” as “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex” and encourages the usage of the term. Since the coinage, the site has risen through the Google ranks and now sits higher than the senator’s own campaign page (likewise, if you Google “santorum,” the Wikipedia page that appears first is the one for the “sexual neologism”). Now that Santorum has dutifully been making appearances in key primary states, lining up his ducks in order to launch a presidential run, Mother Jones thinks he has a serious Google problem.
“This is an unusual problem,” Michael Fertik, CEO of ReputationDefender, told the magazine. “It’s devastating. This is one of the more creative and salient Google issues I’ve ever seen.”
It’s certainly creative, but it’s hardly deadly. Santorum’s been flying under the radar for years now and his campaign site only has 5,000 inbound links, compared to the 13,000 that SpreadingSantorum has. But if and when he becomes a mainstream candidate, of course that will change, and hugely. In addition, with a savvy web strategy and the purchase of paid search results, he could make the Google issue go away relatively easily (if not cheaply).
Still, Dan Savage hasn’t been working on his SpreadingSantorum campaign for years now, and it has nowhere to go but up. “I’ve sort of been in denial about the fact that Rick Santorum is going to run for president,” he told Mother Jones. “But now I’m going to have to sic my flying monkeys on him.” Not that this is necessarily a net negative for Santorum; It’s not like he was going to have much luck getting the gays to include him in their pillow talk otherwise.
Rick Santorum’s Anal Sex Problem [Mother Jones]I am surprised to find, in looking back, that I apparently never made a post about becoming an owner of the credit card-sized, ARM-based Raspberry Pi computer. As such, belated newsflash: in the summer of 2012, I acquired an early-revision, $35 Raspberry Pi Model B. Now, the Raspberry Pi, made in the spirit of the Acorn BBC Micro, is a story in and of itself, but both of this blog’s readers have certainly heard of the machine, so I won’t go into heavy details here. For anyone unfamiliar, I point you to Wikipedia.
When I got the Pi, I attached it to a 20-inch 1080p display and a Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2 at my main workstation desk (which are shared by my PowerPC-based Sam440ep-Flex AmigaOS 4.x machine). I’ve enjoyed using the Pi for the last year and a half: chatting over IRC, exploring the Pi Store, scripting Minecraft with Python, trying out RiscOS, etc. However, being down in the basement, it wasn’t easily accessible for fiddling around with while sitting in the den with the family at night. I find the Pi a very interesting platform and I wanted to make it more accessible in order to spend more time with it.
So, I decided to turn it into a laptop.
I recalled seeing a few tweets and blogs posts about users taking a a laptop-looking mobile phone dock and rigging it up to work with the Pi, so I began investigating. It turns out the device in question is the Motorola Laptop Dock for the Atrix 4G mobile, which is no longer produced. It’s basically a laptop without the brains; it has a rechargeable battery, a decent LED screen with (micro) HDMI-in as well as (micro) USB-in to connect to a keyboard, trackpad, and the integrated 2-port USB hub. The Atrix phone is meant to dock into a cradle at the back of the unit, but with some creative cabling (very creative, in my case), the Raspberry Pi can connect quite nicely.
(Here’s a video guide from Adafruit that gets the job done with a bit of soldering. (I’m happy to solder when it’s necessary, but as I expected, I was able to get this done with the right parts and no soldering.))
I found a Motorola Laptop Dock on eBay for a fairly decent price and then set out ordering the closest-match cables I could find, and then adapter after adapter to tie them all together. (Two, I had to source from overseas.) It took some time, but with all parts finally in hand, it was as snap to get the Pi talking to the Lapdock. I used a few strips of velcro to temporarily attach the enclosed Pi to the back of the screen, wired it all together, added a WiFi dongle, and I was in business. The whole arrangement is a little “cabley,” but it works great.
I do get strange looks in the Starbucks, however…At the CES gadget show, the news wizards of the BBC managed somehow to obtain "an exclusive look"* at a miraculous new technology which promises to allow an ordinary Samsung smartphone to be fully charged up** in "less time than it takes to boil a kettle".
"I've just been witness to what feels like a modern-day technological miracle," ejaculates the Beeb's Leo Kelion, witnessing the wondrousness.
Well hold onto your post-ironic porkpie hats, BBC, because we here at El Reg #VultureTRENDING have gone one better. In an even more journalistically valid scoop, we've managed to discover a technological miracle which allows a Samsung smartphone to be recharged even faster, in just sixteen seconds, and – get this – WIRELESSLY and with only cheap, basic equipment.
It may or may not be true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it's definitely true that a video is worth a thousand words***, so here's the stunning vid:
Youtube Video
There: that's a technological miracle that you can buy right now. You can carry it around in your pocket and use it without needing so much as a wall socket.
Unless, of course, you have an iPhone. Which might offer a clue as to which consumer demographic it is that finds fast-charging of phones to be a modern-day technological miracle. ®
Bootnotes
*Except that it had already been exhibited to the entire world eight months previously. Check out the searing BBC coverage here and here.
**Well, not really. A special, crap battery that doesn't last very long can be fully charged up fairly quickly.
***In terms of ad revenue anyway. A fact the BBC are well aware of as they put ads on their overseas web traffic, the statistics on which they refuse to divulge (claiming the "journalism" exemption from the Freedom of Information Act). #statefundedandstealingbreadfromourmouthsThe central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications.
When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.
While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue struggling because they over-predict failure and rejection. Studies have shown depressed people are distinguished from the norm by their tendency to imagine fewer positive scenarios while overestimating future risks.
They withdraw socially and become paralyzed by exaggerated self-doubt. A bright and accomplished student imagines: If I flunk the next test, then I’ll let everyone down and show what a failure I really am. Researchers have begun successfully testing therapies designed to break this pattern by training sufferers to envision positive outcomes (imagine passing the test) and to see future risks more realistically (think of the possibilities remaining even if you flunk the test).
Most prospection occurs at the unconscious level as the brain sifts information to generate predictions. Our systems of vision and hearing, like those of animals, would be overwhelmed if we had to process every pixel in a scene or every sound around us. Perception is manageable because the brain generates its own scene, so that the world remains stable even though your eyes move three times a second. This frees the perceptual system to heed features it didn’t predict, which is why you’re not aware of a ticking clock unless it stops. It’s also why you don’t laugh when you tickle yourself: You already know what’s coming next.
Behaviorists used to explain learning as the ingraining of habits by repetition and reinforcement, but their theory couldn’t explain why animals were more interested in unfamiliar experiences than familiar ones. It turned out that even the behaviorists’ rats, far from being creatures of habit, paid special attention to unexpected novelties because that was how they learned to avoid punishment and win rewards.
The brain’s long-term memory has often been compared to an archive, but that’s not its primary purpose. Instead of faithfully recording the past, it keeps rewriting history. Recalling an event in a new context can lead to new information being inserted in the memory. Coaching of eyewitnesses can cause people to reconstruct their memory so that no trace of the original is left.Square Enix Highlights What’s New In Dissidia Final Fantasy For Arcade
By Sato. April 13, 2015. 7:56am
With the location test starting later this week, Square Enix held a livestream presentation for their upcoming arcade title of Dissidia Final Fantasy. Below are some of the highlights from the presentation.
While most of the controls are similar to the PSP versions of the game, one of the new features in Dissidia Final Fantasy for arcade is that Team Ninja have added new attacks you can perform while dashing.
The new 3-on-3 battle system brings a new cooperative aspect to the Dissidia series. This concept came from the idea of how Final Fantasy games are about fighting in groups or parties.
“EX Skills” are abilities that will allow you to help out buddies with with different effects or for debuffing enemies. Characters will have their own unique EX Skills, for example, Cloud will have access to his “Limit Break”.
The new Summoning system is considered to be a “super special” that comes from the bond between allies, and it calls out a Summoned Beast as a fourth ally to the party.
Summoning can be done when the white glowing meter shown on the upper-left part of the screen fills up. Players can summon in their own, but it will take a while longer. Performing it it with another ally or two will speed up the summon cast.
Additionally, Summoned Beasts provide buffs to the entire party. For example, having Ifrit might increase attack for the party while Ramuh increases the speed. (Those might not be the exact effects those two Summoned Beasts may have, but were used as simple examples.)
Rather than the Chaos versus Cosmos as seen in the PSP Dissidia games, the story will revolve more around you, the player.
As far as updates go, there are plans to release updates for the game with new characters, stages, Summoned Beasts, Battle music, various custom parts, balance adjustments, and system additions. Their goal is to have the game go on for at least 10 years with regular updates to keep players coming back for more.
It was also reiterated that while Square Enix previously mentioned that there will be about 50 characters, that’s simply a goal they’re aiming for, and will start out with 14 characters. Square Enix hope to reach 50 characters or higher in the long run, but they say to not expect that right away.
Similar to the announcement of Ramza, they will announce new characters over time, and will feature various characters from Final Fantasy I to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.
As a way for players to save data on arcades, players will be able to do so through the “Nesica” cards. Those who take part of the upcoming Location Tests will also get a special little something for when the game officially launches.
The above is a look at the character select screen, which shows some details on the characters. Once you select a character, their HP Attacks and EX Skills can be customized to your liking. You can also have more than one of the same character per team.
Dissidia Final Fantasy is in development for arcade.Maybe saying that C.C. Sabathia was “skinny” last season is simplifying things just a little bit. But Sabathia did get into better shape, dropping 30 pounds and turning up to Spring Training looking downright in shape. Here’s a pic of Sabathia from last spring.
But that weight loss was short-lived. According to the New York Daily News, Sabathia has turned up to Yankees camp this year at 305 pounds…30 pounds heavier than he was last spring.
“I lost a bunch of weight drastically, pretty quick, two years ago, and was kind of off-balance,” Sabathia, who was 275 at the start of camp last season, said Saturday. “I didn’t know really how my body was working.” After consulting with Yankees team doctor Chris Ahmad and the club’s athletic trainers, Sabathia decided his ideal playing weight should be between 295-305. He put on about 20 pounds last season while rehabbing his surgically repaired right knee, then added another 10 during the winter. “I feel like this is a good weight,” Sabathia said. “I feel a little stronger. I feel my legs under me, being a lot stronger, and being able to push off the mound.”
The logic here is staggering. Trying to tie Sabathia’s struggles over the last two years to his weight loss is ridiculous. Sabathia is 34, and has a degenerative condition in his right knee. His fastball velocity peaked in his first year as a Yankee back in 2009, and has fallen off every season since (with a brief exception in 2011 when it slightly perked up). He’s getting smashed by bad luck in regards to his home run rate, BABIP, and strand rate.
But hey, if Sabathia and the Yankees are comfortable with him getting chunky again, so be it. New York is on the hook for at least $53 million to Sabathia over the next two seasons…and his option for 2017 will vest as long as Sabathia’s left shoulder is OK. Yikes.
[New York Daily News]Today is the seventy-first anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an act that brought us into World War II, pushed a reluctant America onto the world stage, and ushered in the age of empire. The official history of that event is that it was a "sneak attack" precipitated by war-crazed Japanese militarists, and that the totally unprepared Americans – kept from arming themselves by evil "isolationists" in Congress and the Republican party – were caught completely by surprise.
There is, however, one big problem with this official history: it’s a lie.
The truth is that, by the winter of 1941, the Americans had decrypted the various Japanese military and diplomatic codes: President Roosevelt, key members of his cabinet, and top military leaders, including Gen. George C. Marshall, US Army chief of staff, had access to this intelligence, which was intercepted, decoded, and transmitted directly to them. We know this because Robert Stinnett, in researching his seminal book, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, obtained heretofore unknown documents under the Freedom of Information Act, which trace the intelligence stream from interception stations throughout the Pacific to the 36 Americans cleared to look through what was, in effect, a window into Japanese plans and preparations for the Pearl Harbor attack. The President and 35 other Americans in top political and military circles knew where the attack was to take place, they knew when it was to take place, and they watched it unfold, step by step, with full knowledge of its import.
It is widely remarked that even on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the vast majority of the American people stubbornly resisted efforts to drag us into the European war. The Court Historians responsible for constructing the FDR cult would have had great difficulty denying the pattern of presidential prevarication that had us effectively fighting the Axis powers long before war was officially declared. So instead of taking on this impossible task, which would have been laughed out of court, they openly valorized him for his expertise at the art of deception. Thomas Bailey, who taught history at Stanford University for 40 years and authored The American Pageant, long a standard US history textbook, extolled the liar and his lie in his 1948 book, The Man in the Street: The Impact of American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy:
"Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor. He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good…. Because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests."
In a rave review of the Bailey volume on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, a young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., hailed Bailey’s "candor and good sense" in dealing with "the Roosevelt problem." "If he was going to get the people to move at all," wrote the future Official Historian of American liberalism, "he had to trick them."
Trick them he did. He also tricked the Japanese, who had no idea their codes had been broken, thus allowing the Americans access to their internal diplomatic deliberations as well as their military preparations after the peace proposals of then Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye had been decisively rejected by Washington. Konoye had proposed traveling to the United States on a secret mission to reach an accommodation with Washington over China and Southeast Asia: Washington responded with a disdainful silence – and by leaking the Japanese proposal to the pro-war Herald-Tribune.
A few weeks later, due in no small part to this revelation, the Konoye government fell. Japan’s War Party was in charge, and war preparations had begun on the Japanese side – followed step by step by our extensive intelligence-gathering operation, which intercepted and translated coded Japanese messages almost as soon as they were transmitted, drawing a comprehensive picture of Japan’s war plans weeks before the Pearl Harbor assault.
As Stinnett shows, a Japanese spy at Pearl Harbor, attached to the Japanese consulate, was closely watched, his messages to his superiors decoded and dispatched to Washington, where they were eagerly read. The Japanese had mapped Pearl Harbor down to the last warship, and Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa’s last message to his commander read:
"There are no barrage balloons at these places – and considerable opportunity is left for a surprise attack."
Could it get any clearer than that? Yet when US Admiral James O. Richardson objected to FDR’s insistence on keeping the US fleet bottled up at Pearl Harbor, he was summarily fired.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s diary for November 25, 1941 notes a meeting of FDR’s top advisors: "The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into … firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves."
Stinnett’s book provides a wealth of detail, and cites hundreds of supporting documents, including those unearthed thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, which prove conclusively that the movements of the Japanese military as they made their way across the Pacific to Pearl Harbor were well-known to the Americans. The communications of Japan’s chief of the naval general staff, Admiral Osami Nagano, from November 5 to December 2, "violated every security rule," writes Stinnett:
"[Admiral] Yamamoto would direct Vice Admiral Nagumo and the First Air Fleet to set sail from Hitokappu Bay on November 26, 1941 (Tokyo Time), proceed through the North Pacific, and refuel north of Hawaii (transmitted November 25, 1941); and finally, Nagano set the date for commencement of hostile action against the United States, the British Empire, and the Netherlands as December 8, 1941 (Tokyo Time; transmitted December 2, 1941). Based on these transmissions, President Roosevelt and General George Marshall predicted war with Japan would begin the first week of December. We would know even more about what FDR and his chief advisors thought, but the Japanese radio messages remain incomplete, still cloaked in American censorship. Though the author has filed Freedom of Information requests for all communication data concerning Nagano’s messages, the information has not been released."
Of course it hasn’t, and for a very good reason: the myth of the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor is a pillar of the "Greatest Generation" narrative that is the foundation of our interventionist foreign policy. That storyline goes something like this: we "saved" the world from the Axis powers, overcoming our "isolationist" inclinations, and went on to create a "world order" in which we established, forevermore, our duty and destiny to police the four corners of the earth and stand up for Goodness, Justice, and Fair Play. Now that we know how FDR lied us into that war, however, the picture becomes a bit more complicated – and certainly less favorable to an American president described by Gen. Douglas MacArthur as a man who "never told the truth where a lie would suffice."
It is a testament to the persistence of mythology in place of actual history that Michael Beschloss, an alleged historian, could tweet the following as the Pearl Harbor anniversary approached: "Friday is Pearl Harbor Day, and no, FDR didn’t knowingly allow the attack to take place."
The Court Historians never rest, for their job is never done: since the truth is eventually going to come out, no matter how strenuously the cover-up is engineered and maintained, they are constantly seeking to marginalize truth-tellers like Stinnett and others, who labor to disinter the facts from the collection of self-serving fables we call "history."
That FDR’s deception holds some lessons for our own day seems too obvious to even comment on, and I’ll let my readers draw their own conclusions as to its meaning and applicability in the present context. I’ll just note that after 70-plus years of government lies, the "news" that the President of the United States could lie us into a war – while sacrificing the American fleet at Pearl Harbor – isn’t half as shocking as it was back when writers like John T. Flynn first made the accusation.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
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Read more by Justin RaimondoFREILASSING, Germany — Traffic along one of Europe’s busiest highways, which used to flow unimpeded, now often backs up for miles at a newly installed checkpoint, where a phalanx of German police officers screens trucks and cars for hidden migrants.
At this border crossing, as a result, Austrians who work in Germany have trouble getting to their jobs. Many companies in Germany must wait days longer for deliveries of food, machine parts and other goods. Shoppers who made quick weekend jaunts to Freilassing’s stores now mostly stay away.
“It’s really bad,” said Karl Pichler, the owner of a large gardening center here in Freilassing, whose sales of tulips, rose bushes and other plants has slumped as longtime customers from Austria have stopped coming.
More than two decades after much of Europe began abolishing border controls under the so-called Schengen Agreement, the free movement of people and products between countries has helped transform the European Union into the world’s largest economy.I biked home last night, took a quick swim, then turned on Democracy Now. As I sorted laundry, I listened to Amy Goodman interview the presumptive Green Party presidential nominee, Dr Jill Stein, and her veep nominee, Cheri Honkola. In the first interview Goodman asked Dr Stein what she would do after elected, and she spoke about a Green New Deal and Medicare for All. "But how's she going to get Congress to approve anything? That's what I'd ask her." I thought. She also felt that the ACA, "basically pits the very poor against the near poor."
At the end of the second interview, Goodman said, "We’ve been speaking with Jill Stein, who’s the Green Party’s 2012 presumptive presidential nominee. The vote will take place tomorrow here in Baltimore, where the Green Party convention is underway." "What?" I thought. While local news told me that a detective had resigned after being caught stealing groceries, and that more speed cameras were being placed near school zones, they hadn't mentioned that the Green Party's National Nominating Convention was being held at the Holiday Inn near the Convention Center. Sheesh.
I tried registering for media credentials online, but got no response, so this morning I took the light rail in to attend the Saturday session, which was only $25. Just after 8:30, I was directed to Press Contact Starlene Rankin at the media credential desk. A fellow named Klaus found his yellow badge. After passing Allison Keyes of NPR right through, Starlene asked, "How do you spell that?," pulled up dagblog on her smartphone, and said, "OK, that looks real enough."
The crowd first struck me as looking like the peak oil crowd at ASPO. Lots of longish grey hair and ponytails. There was a small crowd wearing Minnesota green t-shirts. A lot of people smiled as they walked by, coming back from Dottie's snack bar with coffee. Someone announced that the press conference would be on the twelfth floor at 9 AM. I rode up the elevator with Press Contact Scott McLarty, who then announced to the few of us already there that the press conference was actually starting at 9:30. I walked across the low-ceilinged lobby towards a room with a lot more people. A man told me I probably wanted the other side, because this was a meeting of the International Chemical Workers. I asked if it was a trade group, and he told me a little about what they did and then said, "Good luck, brother," so I knew it was a union. Their meeting had baked goods, and ours didn't.
Back downstairs in the hallway a lightly bearded young man in a grey jacket was chatting up Connie, a young woman in grey suit. He was in advocacy somewhere. She was a lawyer, and had helped represent Occupy Columbus. After he wandered off, I asked her a few questions. She was a delegate and was already committed to Dr Stein. She liked Roseanne Barr, and thought she connected well with working people, but thought she hadn't showed up enough to establish herself as a real candidate. She said Occupy Columbus was almost silent now. I told her a bit about Occupy Baltimore, then headed back upstairs, thinking, "aren't most of us working people?"
I ran into Steve and Cathy, nominating delegates from Florida. They asked about dagblog. I told them we had a range of folk from moderate Dems sticking with Obama, to disgruntled Dems voting Romney in protest to anti-government types refusing to vote at all. "Romney as a protest vote?," said Cathy, "That's stupid." They liked Baltimore.
In the twelfth floor lobby with Klaus were Christian and Matthias, from SudDeutche Zeitung (literally South German Newspaper), who were interviewing Ben Manski, formerly of the Wisconsin Green Party and now Stein's campaign coordinator. Christian seemed to be asking most of the questions. As I came in, Manski was claiming that the US Green Party had its roots in the German Green Party, starting with some immigrants in Wisconsin. Answering another question, Manski said there was a great deal of racial diversity in the movement, particularly Native Americans. Christian asked if they actually thought they could win or were just sending a message. Manski said they were here to win, and Christian just smiled. Manski admitted they were up against long odds, but said that they had to start accumulating political force, rather than just setting a competing agenda.
Christian admitted that it was an old story, but asked about the idea that voting Green would cause a replay of Nader undercutting Gore. Manski felt that was a fraudulent argument perpetrated by the Democratic Party, that Pat Buchanan had also drawn away votes and that the Supreme Court had made the wrong decision. He thought it was a canard, and that Democrats act like they own their voters. Christian said they were from Munich, and asked where dagblog was from. A lot of people assumed dagblog was connected to a place.
As the press conference started, there were about 20 journos sitting and about ten or twelve camera persons standing behind us. McLarty announced that Roseanne Barr was a no-show. Ben Manski boasted that the Green Party was not dominated by corporate money, that he started as the sole campaign worker with $4,000 to spend, and that they were here to win. He introduced Dr Jill Stein, saying that she had twice bested Mitt Romney during the Mass Governor debates. Stein repeated much of what she had told Amy Goodman about the current government imposing austerity, about her Green New Deal, about halting climate change and making oil wars obsolete. She wants to enact a moratorium on foreclosures, to provide free higher education as was done with the GI bill, and to downsize the military. Cheri Honkola spoke about her advocacy for the poor, again echoing what she covered on Democracy Now, and mentioning her incredibly racially diverse extended family.
After Stein and Honkola sat down, McLarty asked for questions. No one raised hands, but he pointed at NPR's Keyes, who asked about the Green Party getting on the ballots in more states. Then McLarty pointed at Christian who asked his Nader Gore question again, and got the same answer. A black man in the front row asked how they were going to motivate the poor into voting, and Honkola stepped up to the mike. She said that they expected votes from the newly poor. She recounted getting a call to take in a family of five. Their water had been shut off, and welfare officials were prepared to take the children if no one with water took in the family.
Each time, as Stein or Honkola was answering a question, Manski was floating behind, waiting to add a few comments. I stopped trying to figure out the signals and simply raised my hand. Based on Manski's comment about corporate money, I asked whether the Green Party had accepted or would consider accepting contributions from an environmentally-responsible corporation, if say, Patagonia wanted to support them. Stein hurriedly said that they accepted no corporate contributions or PAC money, and that even if money was found to be from a high ranking company official it would be returned. Manski chimed in that corporations had offered money in the past, but that Patagonia had not.
Keyes asked about getting into the televised debates. Stein noted that, unlike the league of women Voters, the debates are run by the Commission on Presidential Debates which answers to the two major parties, not to the voters, and that they had to get to 15%. Someone asked about diversity, and Manski noted that the Green Party in some places has merged with remnants of Jesse Jackson's rainbow coalition. For example in DC they had worked together to stop redistricting.
After the press conference, I went to the main room and looked at people's t-shirts. Many were shades of green. Think Green, Live Green, Vote Green. One had a large green and yellow star dripping oil, with FUBP above. Whirlpool Commits Genocide. StopClimateChange.net. Occupy the Vote. A fellow told me he got his McLenin's tee (Vlad below golden arches) in Russia, then explained that the convention was arguing whether to discard a motion to change the platform's recommendation that apportionment of electoral college votes be based on the popular vote. It was hard to hear, and some people were calling out Mic Check! Arkansas was for it, so they voted three votes and two proxies Yes, then realized they meant, No. The Black Caucus, which seemed equal to a state delegation, was against it so they voted two votes and one proxy Yes. California was next, but someone claimed that the Black caucus only had two votes. Much of the morning session is on CSpan.
I decided to go to lunch. I walked to Light Street Cycles, told Penny about the convention and asked if she had any chain lube. She did, and it was even soy-based.
I returned about 3:30, and they were close to an official vote that would select Dr Stein. Cheri Honkola was waiting outside the hall with her son, his sitter and a campaign worker. She said she had spoken to larger crowds, but this seemed more important to her. After Stein's lead was deemed insuperable, Ben Manski gave a rousing speech about how far he had seen the Green Party come in thirty years. Then a party official asked for a vote of acclamation that Honkola be the VP candidate, which carried easily, though a few people were pointedly not applauding.
Even though she was reading from lined paper, Honkola gave a very moving acceptance speech. She spoke about having to move with her two kids out of their Minnesota apartment into her car, the car being totaled while parked, and being faced with the choice of occupying a vacant house or freezing. That led to her helping many others occupy otherwise vacant housing as well.
Stein spoke at length about the ideals of the Green Party, but first recounted her early dismay at having to practice largely through prescribing drugs. She likes to say that she is now practicing political medicine.
Manski's, Honkola's and Stein's speeches are on CSpan, starting at about 2:18.
It will be interesting to see how they run their campaign.Stephen Paddock’s girlfriend may be hiding something from investigators who are trying to piece together the motive behind the Las Vegas massacre, the city’s sheriff suggested in a wide-ranging interview with a local television station.
Marilou Danley, who is still a person of interest in the case, has told authorities that she never knew the attack was coming. Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, in his first TV appearance in nearly three weeks, told KLAS that investigators he’s spoken to believe this assessment is accurate. But he added that something appears to be off about the manner in which Paddock amassed his arsenal of weapons.
“There is a lot of people that have hundreds and hundreds of guns, but for this individual to do it at a certain point in time and to do it all with such robust action, you would think that Ms. Danley would have some information associated with that,” he said. “But currently we haven’t been able to pull that out of her, if it’s in her.”
Lombardo added |
headedness makes you effective." This time he placed a hand on her shoulder to reassure her, looking directly into her eyes as he said it. His confidence relaxed her as she let go of her anger, rewarding Ron with a soft look from her usual lilac eyes.
Azule stamped toward the mission boards in Beacon's main hall with his partner, Ray Stewart, in tow. "Sharkbait I don't think this is gonna work," Ray tried to slow his partner down. Azule's march didn't let up as they approached the terminals.
"Mason said if we can find a mission back home we can return for a bit before the tournament," Azule hadn't slowed as he approached it, "I need to swim."
"There are docks in town!" Ray pointed out. His hand had gestured in the direction he thought town to be as they stood in Beacon's main hall.
"The water isn't the same," Azule countered as Ray placed his head on his temples. Azule had been feeling homesick for days but the rest of the team had just tried to talk him down from it every time it was brought up, which was at least three times a day. Mason had finally buckled and offered this idea to Azule but Ray knew the headmasters wouldn't allow it. As Azule stopped at the mission board he scrolled through the options, setting Vacuo missions as search parameters he quickly scrolled through.
"This is ridiculous," "Ray tried to reason with the aquatic faunus. "Missions are off limits to students right now anyways! Even if you found one they wouldn't let us take it."
"I wouldn't be too sure about that," the voice was accompanied by the steady tapping of a cane. It belonged to Beacon's headmaster, Ozpin. The older huntsman stood behind them as Azule slowly moved his hands away from the mission board turning, along with his partner, to face the headmaster.
"Huh?" Ray seemed confused.
"I know of a mission that would take you back to the shores of Vacuo but it wouldn't be easy," the headmaster spoke kindly to them with a tone that told Ray he was confident in the student's abilities. Azule's eyes lit up with excitement as he heard the professor.
"Sir you aren't seriously thinking..." He shot a glance back to his shadow, Professor Goodwitch who had been following him from wherever it was they had come. She ceased whatever protest she was about to make as he continued.
"And I would not allow you to make this journey alone," Ozpin explained to them, "Glynda if you would be so kind as to send a message to Mr. Feldgaunt of team FWCS that his team is being requested to assist team Maroon of Shade in a mission to Vacuo."
"Sir I...," he glanced at her once more and she sighed. "Yes sir." Goodwitch opened her scroll and walked off in the direction of her own office in order to compose the message.
"Team FWCS?" Ray breathed questioningly.
"Isn't that the team who lost...?" Azule's eyes had gone from excitement to anxious fear as he began to question Ozpin's choice.
"They are a capable team who will speed along the mission in order to get all eight of you home in time for the tournament," Ozpin smiled as he retrieved his own scroll to assign the mission to both teams. "Enjoy your trip," Ozpin paused as he smiled once again at Azule, "and good luck." With this he turned, using his cane to walk once again as strode back toward his office.
"Lost what?" Ray looked down at his partner, wondering what the fish knew that he didn't.
Elodie had gone back to Team FWCS' dorm room in order to rest on her bed. She had been lying awake for most of the time, unable to sleep as she thought back to her fight with the Beowulf masked swordsman. He knew her name but up until that warehouse she'd never shown her face to the White Fang. Unless they had tracked her based on her weapon. It was a likely explanation but in order to know the specifics they would either need a spy inside Beacon or access to Beacon's records. Either way her musings, and spinning thoughts, were interrupted by Ron bursting into the room with Chris following close behind. He had an unusually serious look on his face. "What happened now?" She asked.
"Oh you know the usual we get in trouble with the White Fang so Ozpin puts us on a punishment assignment," Ron was searching for something underneath his bed, "now where did I leave my D203 attachment for Lanius!"
"What's the assignment?" Elodie asked as she pointed to the rarely used closet. As Ron opened it he found a case haphazardly tossed into the small space. It was sparsely populated with extra shirts that belonged to Elodie as well as the dress she hadn't gotten to use at the Festival Ball because FWCS had been sent to cover CFVY during their mission when they hadn't come back in time to plan the dance. She shook the off topic thought as her eyes moved from the bag that contained the dress. The concern had begun to set in as she waited for Ron's answer.
"Read it big guy," Ron tossed his open scroll to Chris who was caught off guard by the device flying toward him. He had managed to catch it before it fell and straightened it into his hands, his eyes squinting down into the screen.
"Dear Mr. Feldgaunt," Chris began as Ron opened the case. He pulled out a triggered tube. Elodie recognized it as a gift Joey had given him shortly before their first mission. A D203 Dust Grenade launcher made to replace the bayonet on Ron's assault rifle. "Professor Ozpin and I are glad that no one was fatally injured during your team's most recent run in with the White Fang. While the headmaster always appreciates the intel your extracurricular activities bring along with them, we have told you numerous times to allow graduated hunters to deal with the White Fang and to focus on your studies." Chris' tone took on an exasperated mood as he droned through the rest. "As an aid to get team FWCS focused back on slaying Grimm we are dispatching you along with team MARN from Shade to exterminate a nest of Grimm on the shores of Vacuo. You will be airlifted to Oar's Rest, a port town in Vacuo. There you are to assist team MARN in eradicating any and all Grimm that plague the area. Azule Beryl is the top of his class in dealing with aquatic Grimm however the town's inland side has also seen an influx of Deathstalker attacks. Team MARN has requested to take on this mission and Professor Ozpin is requesting that your team accompany them in order to return in time to participate in the Vytal Festival Tournament. Good Luck, Glynda Goodwitch."
"But why?" Elodie rolled onto her back in irritation, "what if those assassins come back for team RWBY?"
"I know," Ron sighed, "on the bright side Yang will probably destroy that guy next time she sees him. You guys should have seen how close she came to breaking one of my projections."
"Wait where is Joey?" Chris asked as he looked to Elodie, "He's going to want to prep a lot of gear once he hears that we're going after a nest. Remember when they sent us after Coco?"
"Anyone seen where Sunflower's explosive rounds have gotten off too?" Elodie mocked Joey's accent.
"And where'd y'all but my pocket knife?" Ron joined her, "I swear Ron if you lost another one I'll shove my next one where the sun..." Ron was interrupted by the sound of his scroll ringing. It was a heavy metal song that accompanied Joey's face on the screen of his scroll. Chris answered the call while simultaneously pressing the speaker button.
"Where are you man?" Ron asked "we're in the dorm waiting."
"We need to talk," Joey's voice held a familiar harshness that was usually accompanied by bad news.
"You can tell me on the way back home," Ron told him, "their shipping us off to Vacuo in the morning."
"O' course they are," Joey sighed into the receiver, creating a static filled mess as the breathe ended, "meet you in the dorm in thirty."
"Thirty?" Elodie shot up, "Even from the other side of campus you'd get here in at least fifteen, Joey where are you?"
"Ironwood's ship," the team all glanced around at each other, "see y'all soon." Joey ended the call, leaving his team to ponder what exactly Joey was doing up there.
As Joey and General Ironwood approached the main office of the airship Joey was stopped by two of the Atlesian Knight-200s. The tall machines' visors fell down to his waist. "Surrender your weapons before entering General Ironwood's office," one of the machines told him as it extended a single hand to Joey. The faunus frowned as he looked down toward his pistols.
"General Ironwood," Joey bit down on the nervousness that was mounting within his throat as he fought for the strength to say the next statement, "my mother carried these pistols into every meeting she ever attended and I intend to do the same." The wolf knew that he'd either be reprimanded by Atlas' headmaster, stripped of his weapons or laughed off the airship. To his surprise none of these things happened.
"He can keep the pistols," Ironwood's hand waved off the knights as they resumed an upright stance outside of the office. The doors slid open automatically, allowing Ironwood passage through the portal.
Joey watched the general as the towering figure sauntered around his desk toward the window at the end of the room. General Ironwood's office aboard his airship was a contrast to Ozpin's darker office. The walls were a pale white that led to the large window that framed the entire room in light from the outside sky. From that segmented window Joey could see down toward Beacon as well as the floating Amity Colosseum. Before he could get lost in the awe inspiring view his brain shot back to his upbringing as he focused on the General who was now motioning for Joey to join him by the window. "General Ironwood, sir," Joey swallowed nervously. He felt out of place as he removed his hat from his head as a sign of respect. Even though the general had taken his side on the pistols Joey felt as though he was still subject to any number of judgments from Ironwood. He was off balance, nervousness was not something he liked to let dominate his approach but with his company's reputation slowly becoming worse he had a feeling that Ironwood didn't call him up to the airship to discuss the attack on Weiss. "What am I doing up here?" This last question was caught in limbo between Joey's usual confidence and the losing battle he was fighting with his own nerves.
"Stand with me," Ironwood's attitude was inviting as Joey placed his hat on the genrera's desk and stepped to join him, looking down along the surface of the airship below the window. "," Ironwood's voice took on a formal tone that Joey had heard often during a time when his parents were still alive. That tone was almost enough to force Joey to stand at attention before the general. Instead he took a relaxed stance by window as he continued to look around the sky, his hands finding a resting place in his gunbelt. "Your headmaster tells me that you're one of the most effective weaponsmiths in your class and I would agree after seeing some of the things you've designed for." Ironwood's reference to some of the attachments and equipment Joey had designed for Viridi Lanius, his leader's assault rifle, strengthed his confidence with a smirk that tugged at his lips.
"Thank you sir," Joey kept his response short with his mouth closing quickly over his fangs as he spoke. His family had spent a lot of time in business meetings hiding their faunus heritage in order to be taken seriously and had passed this technique onto him at an early age. It was an alien feeling to him now and he knew his actions must have been obvious to Atlas' commander and headmaster.
"But you haven't stopped there have you?" Ironwood asked and Joey froze as their eyes met. "Argent Silverback, the CEO of your company, has informed me that you have also contributed to your company's most recent program. I believe he called it the Wilhelm Initiative." Joey's stark silence was both a response of shock but also an invitation for the general to continue. "A program originally proposed to me by your mother almost seven ago, but I rejected it and she began to seek alternative resources for her project." The general paused, inviting Joey to confirm what he was telling him but Joey responded in silence. He wanted the general to continue making his point. Joey didn't need to hear Ironwood regurgitate past events for him to understand why he had rejected her. "Unfortunately, the plans never reached the development stage because of an attack made by two humans who were convinced that your company was aiding the White Fang.. and now eight years later your company has found the funds, materials, and testing grounds for such an operation. Would you mind explaining to me how this came to be?" Joey tilted his head in curiosity. The general obviously had all of this information at his finger tips.
"You already know how," Joey responded as politely as he could while still asserting that Ironwood knew the information.
"I've read news articles and field reports," Ironwood's stance was unchanging as his head swiveled to look at the wolf faunus standing next to him. "But none of them contain a single statement from you. I want to hear the reasons why you continued to pursue this course of action." Joey took in a deep breath. Between his time at Beacon and the things his mother had taught him he was feeling conflicted. With Professor Ozpin he was able to speak freely but he was no longer in front of Ozpin. Before he was born Atlas and the military of Mantle had been business partners with Wulfechester Arms but those contracts ceased when his mother had taken over the company. His mother's meeting with Ironwood had been the last attempt at a military contract Wulfechester Arms had tried. Everything was in the private sector and now Joey could sense an opening at a new contract that could open new doors for his company, financially and in the public eye. Before he could speak another thought crossed his mind. His mother didn't want a military contract, she wanted their help so that she could help the citizens of Remnant.
"I.." The sound came as a surprise to Joey before he began to speak again. "My mother had a vision for the citizens of Remnant. She had seen huntsmen and huntresses at work but there was something important that she had noticed. It wasn't that the hunters were ineffective, they did a damn good job according to her. The problem was response times. A hunter needs to be hired, prepped and dispatched before they can begin saving the day." There it was again, the falter between formality and the way he was used to speaking in front of Ozpin. He shook it off and continued, Ironwood wanted a statement and Joey was becoming determined to give him one. "She decided that the people waiting to be saved needed a way defend themselves. The problem was finding an R&D team to design a cheap weapon that would get the job done. Atlas' Spider droids would never go on loan to small towns and the patent meant we couldn't just make our own so it seemed like we were stuck at the drawing board. Someone once suggested to her that she mass produce these," Joey pointed a finger to his Snapdragons, "but that didn't take off..45 Long is good for soft skinned Grimm, even some older Beowulves have been dropped by these pistols, but they needed weapons that didn't recoil as heavily. What the company needed was a reliable rifle that would compensate for the recoil, was overall easy to learn, and could be made on the cheap." These three points were accented by Joey counting them off on his right hand one by one. He hadn't taken notice of the General's impressed smile as he began to fall into his own passion for weapon design. "This is where I came in. After my ma and pa passed I threw myself into my studies and weapon designs." This was a lie. Joey had also thrown himself into several White Fang encampments, blaming them for what had happened to his parents. "I eventually began looking at low cost materials and designed the Wulfechester Arms Wilhelm Repeater Model 16, or WR-16 for short. The WR-16 is a semi-automatic rifle designed to fire.308 armor piercing rounds designed to kill juvenile Grimm and ward off older Grimm. It won't kill a Deathstalker or a Nevermore but it'll take down some younger Ursa and just about any other average sized Grimm. The weapon is not designed to turn townsfolk into huntsmen, just to give them a chance while they wait for the good guys to arrive." Joey's breathing was slightly elevated. Regardless of the circumstances that had led to the weapon's design he was extremely proud of the WR-16. It was the first weapon he had designed on his own and the first one he built still sat in his adoptive father's office above an ornate mantle.
"And what made this project so important to you?" Ironwood's question seemed to have an obvious answer.
"It was the last project my mother worked on," Joey told him. The general's face told the wolf that this answer was unsatisfying.
"But what made it so important to her?" Ironwood rephrased his original question with a little more enthusiasm. Joey felt that the general was leading the conversation to a specific point.
"She wanted to give the people of Remnant a chance to fight back," Joey spoke, realizing where exactly the general was steering him, "she believed that every citizen from every kingdom was capable of protecting themselves and deserved the chance to know it."
"Now what if I told you that I could give you the opportunity to help the people of Remnant fight back," Joey knew that the general's approach wouldn't involve arming citizens. He believed in taking humans off of the battlefield. "Without putting them in harm's way." That was it. The words Joey had expected to hear from Atlas' leader. "From what Ozpin has told me you and your team have encountered the White Fang on numerous occasions and I am sure that you are well aware of the technology that they have stolen from us."
"A shipment of Paladins," Joey answered, allowing the General's words to pass without offense. Their difference in opinion did not currently matter, all that mattered was that Ironwood was about to present him with an opportunity to help the people of Remnant and his company.
"Were you aware that they had also stolen Paladin blueprints as well?" Ironwood's revelation of Atlas' true loss was startling to Joey. The general was sharing privileged information with him that was suddenly making him wary of the entire conversation.
"Yes," Joey swallowed as he thought to those blueprints.
"There are rumors that White Fang recruiting forums are broadcasting them to criminal organizations across the kingdoms," Ironwood grimaced, "which is why I need you. I want you to take the Paladin design and expand it. We need a weapon that will be prepared to compete against and even destroy Paladins by the number." Joey's weariness had become shock as he turned to face the general with a nervous thought ticking in the back of his mind. "So the question is: Can you do it?"
"It..." Joey had begun to speak when that nervous thought began to flourish. Before it could blossom he forced it back into the depths of his mind, focusing on the general's stern yet hopeful expression. "I would need to look at the plans first before I make my decision. I don't want to make you a promise that I can't keep." Joey had found his confidence again with this course of action. He would be uncommitted but still have a chance to discuss the idea with Argent, his adoptive father. His mind had already begun turning on how he would accomplish this task without letting the general know that his designs had begun the day the White Fang went public with the Paladin designs a month ago.
"Sir are you certain sending team FWCS out is a good idea?" Glynda Goodwitch had finally found her way to Professor Ozpin's office to protest his decision.
"Glynda," Ozpin started with his hands clasped together and his elbows resting on the table in front of him. "We must have faith in our students. Sending a team to aide team MARN is a show of good faith between kingdoms. Mr. Beryl was quite homesick and having team FWCS accompany them back to Vacuo ensures that both teams will be able to dispatch the Grimm plaguing Oar's Rest with ample time to return for the tournament."
"But, sir, team FWCS was just attacked by the White Fang," Glynda continued her protest with genuine concern for the students, "is it truly the wisest decision to send them away from Vale?" Ozpin regarded her with soft brown eyes.
"It is," Ozpin reached for the mug of coffee that was sitting to the left of his desk. Picking it up and looking down before taking a sip of the liquid inside. "From the recordings we got of their fight in town Teams FWCS and MARN would have no problem dealing with the two assassins. More interestingly I want to send FWCS to confirm a suspicion of my own." He placed his scroll onto his desk as a screen appeared with a video paused on the exact moment that Weiss was pulled into the alley by chains. "I believe the assassins may have been after Ms. Schnee and not the members of FWCS." Glynda watched as the recording played, seeing that Weiss was wrapped into the chains and viciously dragged backward and away from the FWCS members. Uncertain of Ozpin's plan she swallowed, deciding to trust the headmaster as she had in the past.The Swiss artist who designed the 'xenomorph' creature in Alien as well as imaginative sleeve designs for Debbie Harry and others has died aged 74
HR Giger, whose "biomechanical" artwork lent Ridley Scott's film Alien much of its terror, has died aged 74.
A spokesperson from his gallery in Switzerland confirmed the news. According to the Swiss press, he died from injuries sustained in a fall on stairs.
Born in 1940 in Chur, Switzerland, Giger studied architecture and industrial design in Zurich, before beginning a successful career in art and interior design from the mid-1960s onwards. Beginning with ink and oil paintings, he graduated to using an airbrush, which helped articulate his vivid, often disturbing style, characterised by dark sexuality and cyberpunk energy.
His painting Necronom IV, depicting a creature with a human torso and grotesquely phallic skull, was seen by Ridley Scott who used it as the inspiration for his sci-fi horror film Alien. Giger received an Academy Award as part of the visual effects team for the film; as well as the chest-bursting "xenomorph" that is the film's central focus, Giger's designs also inspired the derelict spacecraft, the unfurling alien eggs, and the masked 'Space Jockey' gunner discovered on it. The film's producer Gordon Carroll described the artist's work as "sick", but Scott was bowled over, later saying: "I'd never been so certain about anything in all my life."
On hearing the news of his death, Scott said: "I am very saddened to hear of Giger's passing. I think back on how committed and passionate he was, and then consequently, all the security we built up around his 'lock up' studios at Shepperton. I was the only one allowed the honour of going in, and I absolutely enjoyed every hour I spent with him there. He was a real artist and great eccentric, a true original, but above all, he was a really nice man. He will be missed."
The designs continued to be used in the subsequent Alien sequels, and in 2012 Giger contributed murals for Scott's most recent film in the saga, Prometheus; but he was left off the credits for Alien: Resurrection, prompting an angry letter to the studio that ended: "As for those responsible for this conspiracy: All I can wish them is an Alien breeding inside their chests."
Alien artwork by Giger. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
In 1975 he was hired by fellow cult visionary Alexander Jodorowsky to design the world for his film adaptation of the science fiction novel Dune, which at one point was slated to star Salvador Dali. In the end, the film was directed by David Lynch with just a fraction of Giger's designs. "My planet was ruled by evil," Giger said of his Dune design, "a place where black magic was practiced, aggressions were let loose, and intemperance and perversion were the order of the day. Just the place for me, in fact." In a 2009 interview with Vice he credited Samuel Beckett, HP Lovecraft, crime writer Edgar Wallace, and his childhood fears amid World War II as key inspirations.
In the wake of Alien's success he became a go-to designer for repellent yet sensual imagery, with his work also used in horror sequel Poltergeist II and erotic sci-fi thriller Species, though he later said that "I was only pleased with Alien, and with the other [films] I was not very happy with." He designed a radically reimagined Batmobile for Batman Forever, shaped like a crooked X, but it was passed over for a more conservative design.
Giger also designed iconic and controversial record sleeves: on Debbie Harry's Koo Koo the singer appears with spears cutting through her face, while the poster insert for the Dead Kennedys' Frankenchrist prompted an obscenity trial. He also designed the cover for Emerson Lake & Palmer's 1973 album Brain Salad Surgery.
He later created "Giger Bars" in Switzerland which used his designs for their interiors – he disowned another bar in Japan after they failed to properly realise his designs. In 1998 he opened the HR Giger Museum in Chateau St. Germain, Switzerland, which hosts the largest collection of his work alongside his own private art collection, featuring Dali, Ernst Fuchs and Bruno Weber amongst others.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.
Hamas has known better days.
It is now ready to consider what it rejected for so long: setting up a joint administration of the Rafah crossing with the Palestinian Authority, the same authority it kicked out in 2007 when it took over the Gaza Strip.
The writer, a fellow of The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, is a former ambassador to Romania, Egypt and Sweden.
Hamas has since repeatedly turned down calls to let the PA return as stipulated in the agreements concluded with Israel and the European Union.However, beggars can’t be choosers, and Hamas hopes that such a move would placate the Egyptian Army and induce it to open the crossing more often. It would bring sorely needed relief to the population of Gaza, now openly grumbling against the organization. But there is no question of letting the European inspectors come back, since Hamas considers the agreements null and void.Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood set up in 1987, had placed great hopes in the then newly elected Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, the candidate of the Muslim Brothers. It confidently expected the Rafah crossing would henceforth let people and goods flow in both directions; it also counted on the support of the new regime against Israel and against its rival, the Palestinian Authority.It did not happen. Morsi, busy tightening his control on all public institutions while trying to tackle the disastrous economic and social situation of the country, let the army deal with the growing threat of terror in the Sinai Peninsula.The Egyptian Army, now engaged in an all-out war against jihadist terrorism in Sinai, knows Hamas only too well and has scores to settle.During the Mubarak years Hamas grew close to Iran, which funded its activities and supplied it with arms through Sudan. Coached by the Revolutionary Guards, Hamas set up a vast network to run arms, missiles and explosives through the Egyptian mainland to the peninsula and then to Gaza via underground tunnels.Needing local help, Hamas recruited Sinai Beduin disenchanted with a central regime that neglected and oppressed them. Hamas terrorists were caught in Sinai and sentenced to jail.A number of jihadist organizations inspired by al-Qaida took advantage of the unsettled conditions to infiltrate the peninsula and set up their own cells, with the tacit consent of Hamas, which saw in them potential allies against Israel.“Tawhid and Jihad,” the group responsible for the attacks in Sharm el-Sheikh and Taba, was the first Salafist organization established in the area. It was followed by a host of smaller movements.Each of these would recruit its own Beduin and set up its own military and ideological infrastructure.With the fall of Mubarak and the disintegration of the security apparatus in Sinai, seasoned terrorists from Iraq and other Arab countries joined the fray. The civil war in Syria and the closure of Hamas headquarters in Damascus dealt a near death blow to the Iranian-Sudanese route, badly hit by operations attributed to Israel.The fall of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi opened another way to Sinai. Hamas and jihadist organizations found a common ground to move weapons from the dictator’s arsenals through Sinai to Gaza via the tunnels. In fact, Hamas believed that jihadist groups bent on attacking Israel would provide camouflage for their own activities, and that Israel would refrain from retaliating in order not to violate Egyptian sovereignty.Interestingly, this ultimately led to the opposite, with the Egyptian and the Israeli armies having a common interest in stopping terror.During the interim military regime which followed the fall of Mubarak, the army demonstrated its incapacity to do something in Sinai. The pipeline supplying gas to Israel and Jordan was sabotaged 14 times; jihadist groups, moving with impunity, attacked road blocks set up by security forces as well as police stations.Following Morsi’s election, the army did try to do something, but never got the green light for a large-scale operation. There are indications that the president intended to reach an agreement with Hamas and possibly with jihadist organizations and turn them against Israel.Egyptians, however, were getting increasingly angry with Hamas, especially after it was revealed a year ago that members of Izzadin Kassam (the military wing of Hamas) had crossed into Sinai through the tunnels in January 2011 at the height of the demonstrations against Mubarak and, together with their Beduin allies, had driven to Cairo to lead concerted attacks on a number of jails.Among the some 20,000 prisoners freed were Salafists from Sinai, Hamas terrorists such as Ayman Nofel and the head of the Hezbollah cell arrested in 2009.In less than three hours the newly freed Hamas terrorists had reached Gaza; Hezbollah gunmen took the longer route home and reached Beirut four days later via Sudan.It turned out that a number of Muslim Brothers had escaped at the same time. Prominent among them was one Mohamed Morsi, who is still considered an escaped felon.Needless to say, Hamas and its media have been vocal in their condemnation of Morsi’s ouster. In fact, Mahmud Ezzat, a deputy of the (imprisoned) supreme guide of the Brotherhood, fled to Gaza and is said to be coordinating opposition from there.The Egyptian Army, which has launched an unprecedented campaign against terror in Sinai, enjoys wide popular support. There is great anger against Hamas, accused of supporting both terrorists and the Muslim Brothers. The organization is suspected of having aided and abetted the terrorists who murdered in cold blood 16 soldiers near Rafah last year.Hamas does its best to reject these accusations, and Musa Abu Marzuk, the movement’s No. 2, claims that “it would be illogical for Hamas, which depends on Egypt, to act against it.”On the other hand, the Palestinian Authority is only too happy to pour fuel on the flames. While demanding that the Palestinian Presidential Guard be allowed to resume its rightful place at Rafah, it points out that Hamas media are rooting for the Brotherhood.Israel, for its part, shows understanding for the needs of the Egyptian Army and does not protest its operations alongside the Gaza Strip, though they go beyond the terms of the military appendix of the peace treaty. So far both armies are united in their fight to eliminate terrorism from Sinai.Hamas has been hit hard. The Brotherhood is down in Egypt and the country has turned against Hamas. The steady destruction of the tunnels combined with the 500-meters-wide security zone set up along the border are asphyxiating Gaza, where a new political movement calls for the toppling of Hamas.It is not likely to happen anytime soon.Some say the Egyptians will invade Gaza. This is not likely either.As to the third option – a desperate Hamas will turn against Israel – that is even less likely. It should be noted that Israel has quietly increased the amount of goods it lets into the Gaza Strip, and is even allowing the import of cement and building materials.
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Share. Nintendo unveiled the launch timing for two of its biggest 2014 games. Nintendo unveiled the launch timing for two of its biggest 2014 games.
Exit Theatre Mode
Nintendo announced that 110814" >Smash Bros. for 3DS will release this summer, followed by the Wii U version in winter 2014.
Series creator Masahiro Sakurai unveiled the release window during a special Nintendo Direct presentation. Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS is developed in collaboration with Bandai Namco Games. Nintendo also confirmed that fighters in the 3DS version would move at 60 fps, and that the game will support stereoscopic 3D.
Exit Theatre Mode
Check out IGN’s Smash Bros. wiki for a comprehensive list of announced characters, stages, items, and more.
Jose Otero is an Associate Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat. You can follow him on twitter.The 1985–86 season is the team's 60th season, their 54th season as the Red Wings.[1] This is the first of two seasons in which Red Wings games would air in the Detroit area on then-independent WXON-TV (now MyNetworkTV affiliate WMYD) channel 20[2][3] before returning to WKBD channel 50 (then a Fox station, now with The CW) for the 1987–88 season after the two-year break. It is also the first of 11 seasons with current NBC sportscaster Dave Strader as the Red Wings' television play-by-play announcer, joining him as color commentator and analyst is former Red Wings right wing man Mickey Redmond. It is unknown at this time if this is Redmond's first season as analyst, but when the games moved to WKBD in 1987, they went along with them. Also, the Red Wings played their first game with Hall of Famer Brad Park as their head coach on December 31, 1985. This was Park's only season as a head coach in the NHL, replacing current Buffalo Sabres radio and television color analyst Harry Neale, who was fired after 35 games. Park had retired as a player during the previous season. The Red Wings finished dead last in the Norris Division, the Clarence Campbell Conference, and in the entire National Hockey League with a record of 17 wins, 57 losses and 6 ties, failing to make the playoffs with only 40 points. It is the worst record in franchise history;[4][5][6] the Red Wings finished the season with the fewest goals scored of all NHL teams, the most goals against, and the most penalty minutes. Since this time, the Red Wings would miss the playoffs only one more time, that was the 1989–90 season.
Offseason [ edit ]
Regular season [ edit ]
Final standings [ edit ]
[7] Note: GP = Games played, W = Wins, L = Losses, T = Ties, Pts = Points, GF = Goals for, GA = Goals against
Note: Teams that qualified for the playoffs are highlighted in bold.
Schedule and results [ edit ]
Playoffs [ edit ]
Player statistics [ edit ]
Regular season [ edit ]
Scoring
Player Pos GP G A Pts PIM +/− PPG SHG GWG LW 76 38 32 70 18 −30 15 1 2 C 76 21 48 69 85 −21 7 3 0 D 67 19 41 60 109 −36 11 0 0 W 74 32 24 56 16 −39 8 0 4 C/RW 67 19 29 48 26 −30 8 0 2 C 79 22 24 46 161 −34 9 0 1 C 51 14 28 42 16 −24 3 0 3 LW 52 20 19 39 106 −10 3 1 2 D 62 5 19 24 84 −14 0 0 0 C 48 7 15 22 142 −27 2 0 1 RW 59 10 11 21 21 −8 1 1 0 LW 44 8 13 21 186 −14 3 0 0 C 38 9 11 20 10 −24 1 0 1 RW 55 6 12 18 48 −13 1 1 0 D 78 5 13 18 196 −54 0 0 1 RW 57 7 9 16 102 −19 1 0 0 RW 59 9 6 15 377 −24 2 0 0 D 65 2 12 14 125 −29 0 0 0 D 37 2 11 13 26 −23 1 0 0 D 29 0 10 10 16 −8 0 0 0 D 13 1 7 8 16 −6 0 1 0 C 21 2 4 6 11 −8 0 0 0 D 35 0 6 6 75 −7 0 0 0 RW 34 2 3 |
end Today” and “Dateline” anchor.
In February 2015, Holt stepped behind the “NBC Nightly News” anchor desk as the network was embroiled in scandal over Brian Williams’ false claim about coming under fire in Iraq and other alleged exploits. NBC officially handed Holt the reins, a promotion which made him the first African-American journalist to solo anchor a broadcast network evening newscast.
“We are not unaware that there are a lot of eyeballs on us right now, and there will be,” Holt said at the time. “We are going to try to deliver every day.”
Holt will not only face a lot more eyeballs during the debate than he does on the “Nightly News,” which averages nearly 9 million viewers a night. He’ll also face Trump, a candidate who has waged an unprecedented attack on the press and has repeatedly suggested he won’t be treated fairly.
Trump’s pre-emptive complaints have been seen as a classic attempt to “work the refs” ― to influence the moderators, consciously or subconsciously, to go easier on him for fear of being perceived as biased.
While Trump described Holt as “a good guy” weeks before he was selected as moderator, the Republican presidential nominee has since been sowing doubts about the journalist’s ability to be fair ahead of Monday’s debate. “Look, it’s a phony system. Lester is a Democrat,” Trump said on Fox News, his preferred network. “I mean, they are all Democrats. Okay? It’s a very unfair system.”
Holt is actually a registered Republican.
Trump’s willingness to routinely make such false claims presents a challenge for Holt, who will surely be criticized if he allows outright lies to go unchallenged.
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, moderator for the third Clinton-Trump contest, sparked controversy earlier this month by saying he doesn’t view his role as a “truth squad” and expects the candidates to fact-check one another.
Days later, during a widely panned performance moderating a presidential forum, NBC “Today” show host Matt Lauer failed to challenge Trump’s lie about immediately opposing the Iraq invasion.
Jemal Countess/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Lester Holt's musical skills drew cheers from colleagues on Tuesday, but he faces a tougher audience when he moderates the first presidential debate.
Holt hasn’t said where he stands on the fact-checking issue ― or anything about his debate plans. An NBC spokesman who accompanied Holt during Tuesday night’s event said the moderator wasn’t commenting in advance.
NBC sources told CNN’s Brian Stelter that Holt won’t be a “potted plant” during the 90-minute debate, and can be expected to set the record straight if necessary. The network declined to make anyone available to comment on Holt’s preparations.
But the topic has come up on air.
Todd, who serves as NBC political director and host of “Meet the Press,” stressed last week on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the focus should remain on the candidates, not the moderator, during a discussion about fact-checking.
“Good grief, leave the man alone,” Todd said.
“It’s about Trump and Clinton at the end of the day, not about any of the moderators,” he continued. “If the moderators are the story after the debate, that’s a disservice. That’s either the candidates or the campaigns wanting to deflect on bad performances or whatever. We can’t take our eyes off the two candidates.”
“Of course, of course,” co-host Joe Scarborough responded. “I’m just saying, though, nobody’s really moderated a wrestling match.”Is This the New Condom?
Taken once daily, the pill Truvada can prevent HIV. It’s safe, effective, FDA -approved, and usually covered by health plans. So why are so few gay men taking it?
Photography by Greg Broom
The gay 40-something well-known New York City doctor with many gay patients — let’s call him Dr. John — can barely talk freely about what he’s doing. “It’s telling, how reluctant I am to talk about this, even anonymously,” he says. “This isn’t being talked about in our community at all.”
The subject causing such anxiety for Dr. John is an oval blue pill called Truvada. He takes it once a day — not to treat HIV, but to keep him from getting it. It’s even covered by his insurance, thanks to a decision by the FDA last year to approve it as a prophylactic against HIV. That approval followed a groundbreaking study in 2010, called iPrEx, that found that HIV-negative gay men who faithfully adhered to a one-a-day regimen of Truvada reduced their risk of getting HIV by more than 99%.
Those findings, which HIV specialists had been keenly awaiting for several years, were enough to make Dr. John talk to his own doctor and start the regimen himself. “I don’t want to become HIV-positive,” he says. “But I don’t love using condoms.” Sexually active with multiple partners, Dr. John admits he avoided condoms about 20% of the time. He was tired of stressing constantly over whether he’d gotten HIV. “Even if my sex was relatively safe, I would have long periods where I’d be freaked out that something had happened.”
Since he started taking daily Truvada, or PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), as the regimen is called, Dr. John has remained HIV-negative and has experienced no side effects from the drug. “My sex life has been much less anxiety-provoking,” he says. “Now if I don’t use a condom, I feel like there’s a safety net.”
So why isn’t he shouting about PrEP from the rooftops? Partly, he says, because he doesn’t want people to think that because he’s a doctor, he’s endorsing PrEP for everyone: “There’s a difference between giving medical advice and making individual choices.”
But his reluctance is deeper than that. He also doesn’t want to be judged for eschewing condoms from time to time. “Gay men talking about not using condoms is really stigmatized,” he says. “Most of us have never known sex without condoms or without threat of a ‘deadly disease.’ ” But he adds passionately, “I think it’s a lot to ask an entire generation of gay men to use condoms forever.”
Slow to Catch On
Dr. John is not alone in his reluctance to say that he doesn’t always use condoms, or that he’s on PrEP. I talked to dozens of LGBT health workers in the United States, as well as HIV-negative men on PrEP, and a clear picture emerged: Even though PrEP is the first proven new HIV prevention tool since the condom, and even though it’s FDA-approved and is widely covered by health plans, few gay men appear to be on it.
“The uptake has been extraordinarily slow,” says Dr. Bill Valenti, who works at an HIV-positive and LGBT-serving health care center in Rochester, N.Y. He says that of their 75 HIV-negative patients, three had started PrEP. At D.C.’s LGBT-serving Whitman-Walker Health, staff said that about 90 of their 3,000 HIV-negative patients had started PrEP. The clinic’s patient population is made up primarily of African-American gay or bisexual men, the group at highest risk for HIV in the United States, along with transgender women.
It is difficult to know exactly how many guys in the U.S. are taking PrEP. Cara Miller, a rep for Gilead, the company that makes Truvada, said she couldn’t pinpoint such numbers because the company doesn’t know who is being prescribed Truvada in combination with other HIV drugs — which is necessary for treating HIV — and who is getting Truvada alone for PrEP purposes.
But Jim Pickett, who heads prevention advocacy at AIDS Foundation of Chicago, says that he has heard through inside sources that one of the country’s largest insurers has, to date, covered only 300 prescriptions for Truvada alone, presumably for PrEP. That is a tiny number considering that Truvada, approved for use against HIV infection in 2004, has become a multibillion-dollar seller for Gilead. (The two drugs that comprise Truvada are sold separately or as part of the No. 1–selling HIV med, Atripla.)
Despite its slow uptake, PrEP comes along at a moment when it could potentially help reverse a 22% rise in HIV rates in young gay men in recent years, with young gay and bi men of color most affected. The CDC recently calculated that, if HIV infections continue to rise at current rates, half of young gay men will have HIV by age 50.
At the same time, the longstanding admonition to “use a condom every time,” an approach pioneered in the ’80s and ’90s with posters and ads making condoms look sexy and fun, does not seem to be working. True, condoms are highly effective at protecting against HIV, as well as other STDs, including syphilis, herpes, and gonorrhea. They also sometimes break.
Moreover, studies since the 1980s have consistently shown that gay men forego condoms up to half the time, depending on the situation, for reasons ranging from “the heat of the moment” to alcohol and drug use to a plain old dislike of how condoms feel.
According to Pickett, this means that condom-only prevention campaigns will never succeed in bringing HIV rates close to zero. “If condoms were so wonderful and a part of human nature, we wouldn’t have a problem with rising infections,” he says.
And yet, PrEP doesn’t seem to be catching on yet. Part of that is simply PR — not enough people even know what it is. Miller says that Gilead prefers to support LGBT health centers in getting the word out over doing direct advertising. Why would they not go full throttle to boost sales of PrEP? “They know it would be a potential PR disaster,” says Pickett.
And indeed, public reaction to PrEP has been mixed, with many concerned that widespread PrEP use will lead to an explosion of unprotected sex in gay men. Says Kevin Cates, who works in HIV prevention at Chicago’s LGBT-serving Howard Brown clinic, “I hear a lot, ‘Oh my God, this PrEP thing is so awful because people are going to bareback like crazy.’ ”
One group in particular, the large Los Angeles–based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, has taken a vocal stance against the FDA approval of PrEP, creating posters and other media warnings against it. Michael Weinstein, the group’s president, says it’s wrong for the FDA to have approved Truvada for PrEP when the iPrEx study showed that a large percentage of participants failed to take it once daily as prescribed. “It’s giving people a false sense of security,” he says.
Risks Involved
The truth is that PrEP comes with risks. Truvada can cause stomach upset in the first weeks of taking it. The drug, though low on side effects as HIV meds go, has been linked to mild kidney and bone problems in a small percentage of HIV-positive takers. However, Dr. Robert Grant, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and head of the iPrEx study, says he saw only mild side effects in his HIV-negative participants. Among the dozen or so men on PrEP with whom I spoke for this story, some of whom had taken PrEP for more than a year, none reported serious side effects.
It’s true that if someone takes PrEP spottily, they lower the amount of the drug in their body, exposing themselves to HIV. There is also the possibility of developing resistance to Truvada, thus losing it as an HIV treatment option. Granted, Truvada is just one among many HIV treatment options. Moreover, Grant says that the only people in the iPrEx study who developed Truvada resistance were a few whose HIV infections were not picked up during the initial screening process.
The more you adhere to the recommended daily dosage of PrEP, the closer to 100% protection you get. According to Grant, those in the study whose blood levels indicated they used PrEP four times a week still had a 96% risk reduction. Those with blood levels showing they used PrEP twice a week had 76% risk reduction. Grant says that experts still aren’t certain exactly how little, and at what intervals, one can use PrEP to have it still be effective, which is why one pill daily is currently recommended.
There is also validity to fears about “barebacking.” Even if PrEP protects against HIV, condomless sex still invites other STDs. Some, like syphilis, gonorrhea, and herpes, are fairly easily treatable. But in recent years, there have been outbreaks among HIV-positive men of sexually transmitted hepatitis C, for which treatment is improving but still difficult, expensive, and imperfect. In certain parts of the world, such as Japan and India, a new antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea has rung alarm bells of a new STD epidemic. Simply put, nobody knows what new infections lie in wait down the road.
But despite those risks, several PrEP users I spoke with said they were unfazed. “I’m not going to let fear rule my life,” says Damon Jacobs, 42, a Brooklyn family counselor who has not only taken PrEP for two years now, he’s also started a Facebook page, “PrEP Facts: Rethinking HIV Prevention and Sex,” to promote an open conversation and breaking news about it. Dr. John admitted he worried about getting hep C or drug-resistant gonorrhea, but “so far, I haven’t gotten any STDs, so it’s an abstract concern.”
“I have to admit that since being on PrEP, I’ve become much riskier,” says “James,” 51, a New York City computer programmer.
Importantly, recent research has made it clear that HIV-positive people reduce their chance of passing on the virus by 96% if they take meds that make their blood levels of HIV consistently undetectable on tests.
James says he began PrEP because he has multiple sex partners and hates condoms — “Every instinct in my body says I don’t want to wear them” — but he didn’t want to potentially pass HIV to his HIV-negative boyfriend. “I can’t tell him I’m on PrEP, but I’m trying to protect him,” he says. He’s contracted chlamydia a few times, he says, but in the near year he’s been on PrEP, he’s stayed HIV-negative.
PrEP As a Health Booster
Then again, there is the argument that being on PrEP actually makes people safer because it raises their consciousness about their health. The iPrEX study found that participants reported decreased anal sex and increased condom use, though that might partly be because participants were regularly meeting counselors as a requirement of the study. In addition, participants initially did not know whether they were on Truvada or a placebo.
Being on PrEP requires seeing a doctor four times a year for an HIV test and kidney and bone tests. Being that connected to one’s health, say PrEP advocates, may actually bolster safer choices.
That seems to be the case for Gustavo Varela, 25, a program coordinator for an LGBT youth group in Chicago. Varela was on PrEP in the iPrEx study, but isn’t on it currently. “I used condoms when I was on PrEP, and if I went back on PrEP, I would still use condoms,” he says. So why be on PrEP at all? “I’ve had slip-ups where I didn’t use a condom in the heat of the moment, or if I was drinking,” he admits. “It’s an extra precaution.”
That extra protection is also sought by Darius Mooring, 34, an African-American college bookstore manager in Bethlehem, Penn. He says he is researching if his health plan will cover PrEP. “There are times I use condoms and times I don’t,” he says. “I will have sex with guys who I know are HIV-positive.”
“If I go on PrEP, will I be condomless in all my sexual encounters?” Mooring asks. “I don’t think so. But I’m not going to live in fairy tale where I tell myself I use condoms all the time. PrEP will be adding another strategy to my HIV prevention.”
That is how PrEP advocates want to frame it — as another tool in the kit of HIV prevention, in the mix with condoms, monogamy, negotiated safety, and keeping HIV-positive people treated and undetectable. For example, you might be on PrEP and forego condoms with your HIV-negative boyfriend, but use them when you play outside the relationship. Or you may go on PrEP for periods of time when you’re having multiple partners, then off PrEP once you’re in a relationship.
Daring to Talk About It
Certainly, PrEP may be a good option for guys who put themselves at risk again and again. At D.C.’s Whitman-Walker Health, Dr. Raymond Martins speaks of a patient who came to him three times for post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP, otherwise known as the HIV “morning-after” regimen: After possible exposure to HIV, a patient takes HIV meds for a month to block the infection.
According to Martins, that patient is a perfect candidate for PrEP. “He never uses condoms. Better that he’s on PrEP as a permanent backup for his lifestyle than come in every month for PEP.”
In some ways, it’s easy to accept PrEP if you think of it as an extreme solution for turbo-sluts who fail again and again to use a condom — if, in other words, you pathologize it. Several friends I spoke with about this story said they couldn’t understand a person having such a hard time using condoms that they would have to actually go on an HIV med to prevent getting HIV. To that, PrEP advocates say it’s far safer to be on Truvada for a period of time than to live with HIV for a lifetime. Even well-treated HIV has been shown to have myriad effects on health, such as accelerated aging, in the long-term.
But it also can be easy for us to forget that only 30 years ago, nobody thought of a condom as a routine part of sex. “If HIV infections truly were a hetero issue, there’d be an alternative to condoms by now,” says Dr. John. “I don’t think the world of straight men would settle for using a condom their whole lives.”
Several men I talked to for this story told me of their dislike of condoms defiantly, without shame. In Boston, hairstylist Scott Owen, 48, said he’d never used condoms and had somehow stayed HIV-negative all these years. “I don’t like condoms,” he says. “I can’t enjoy sex with them. They desensitive it for me. I always just figured that if I became HIV-positive, I’d deal with it.”
When he heard about the Boston branch of the iPrEx study four years ago, he immediately signed up. He’s off PrEP now that he’s finished the study, but he wants to go back on it. He also wants to do another upcoming study, to test the effectiveness of a rectal microbicide gel.
That gel may be among the many new tools in the HIV prevention arsenal years down the line. Others in development include looking at another HIV drug, Selzentry, for use as PrEP, as well as “mini-vaccines” that would require injections three or four times a year. Meanwhile, studies of Truvada as PrEP continue as a way to assess effectiveness, adherence, and safety over time.
Advocates often talk of PrEP in birth-control terms: If a condom is like a diaphragm, then PrEP is the Pill, with perhaps more options in the works. “Women change methods of contraception over time,” says Pickett. Likewise, he says, “No one thinks of PrEP as a lifetime strategy. It’s for when you need the support.”
In the meantime, Dr. John has no apologies for being on PrEP, even if he’s not ready to go public about it. “We need to be able to talk about our desire to have sex without a barrier,” he says. “Sex is about getting as close to someone as you possibly can. I think we’re entitled to that. And as long as the answer is, ‘Well, you should just wear a condom all the time,’ you’re obviously not reaching everybody.”Dear all, Several attempts have been made to lift control operations (functions that use monadic actions as input instead of just output) through monad transformers:
MonadCatchIO-transformers[1] provided a type class that allowed to overload some often used control operations (catch, block and unblock). Unfortunately that library was limited to those operations. It was not possible to use, say, alloca in a monad transformer. More importantly however, the library was broken as was explained[2] by Michael Snoyman. In response Michael created the MonadInvertIO type class which solved the problems. Then Anders Kaseorg created the monad-peel library which provided an even nicer implementation. monad-control is a rewrite of monad-peel that uses CPS style operations and exploits the RankNTypes language extension to simplify and speedup most functions. A very preliminary and not yet fully representative, benchmark shows that monad-control is on average about 2.6 times faster than monad-peel: bracket: 2.4 x faster bracket_: 3.1 x faster catch: 1.8 x faster try: 4.0 x faster mask: 2.0 x faster Note that, although the package comes with a test suite that passes, I still consider it highly experimental. API DOCS: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/monad-control INSTALLING: $ cabal update $ cabal install monad-control TESTING: The package contains a copy of the monad-peel test suite written by Anders. You can perform the tests using: $ cabal unpack monad-control $ cd monad-control $ cabal configure -ftest $ cabal test BENCHMARKING: $ darcs get http://bifunctor.homelinux.net/~bas/bench-monad-peel-control/ $ cd bench-monad-peel-control $ cabal configure $ cabal build $ dist/build/bench-monad-peel-control/bench-monad-peel-control DEVELOPING: The darcs repository will be hosted on code.haskell.org ones that server is back online. For the time being you can get the repository from: $ darcs get http://bifunctor.homelinux.net/~bas/monad-control/ TUTORIAL: This short unpolished tutorial will explain how to lift control operations through monad transformers. Our goal is to lift a control operation like: foo ∷ M a → M a where M is some monad, into a transformed monad like 'StateT M': foo' ∷ StateT M a → StateT M a The first thing we need to do is write an instance for the MonadTransControl type class: class MonadTrans t ⇒ MonadTransControl t where liftControl ∷ (Monad m, Monad n, Monad o) ⇒ (Run t n o → m a) → t m a If you ignore the Run argument for now, you'll see that liftControl is identical to the 'lift' method of the MonadTrans type class: class MonadTrans t where lift ∷ Monad m ⇒ m a → t m a So the instance for MonadTransControl will probably look very much like the instance for MonadTrans. Let's see: instance MonadTransControl (StateT s) where liftControl f = StateT $ \s → liftM (\x → (x, s)) (f run) So what is this run function? Let's look at its type: type Run t n o = ∀ b. t n b → n (t o b) The run function executes a transformed monadic action 't n b' in the non-transformed monad 'n'. In our case the 't' will be a StateT computation. The only way to run a StateT computation is to give it some state and the only state we have lying around is the one from the outer computation:'s'. So let's run it on's': instance MonadTransControl (StateT s) where liftControl f = StateT $ \s → let run t =... runStateT t s... in liftM (\x → (x, s)) (f run) Now that we are able to run a transformed monadic action, we're almost done. Look at the type of Run again. The function should leave the result 't o b' in the monad 'n'. This 't o b' computation should contain the final state after running the supplied 't n b' computation. In case of our StateT it should contain the final state s': instance MonadTransControl (StateT s) where liftControl f = StateT $ \s → let run t = liftM (\(x, s') → StateT $ \_ → return (x, s')) (runStateT t s) in liftM (\x → (x, s)) (f run) This final computation, "StateT $ \_ → return (x, s')", can later be used to restore the final state. Now that we have our MonadTransControl instance we can start using it. Recall that our goal was to lift "foo ∷ M a → M a" into our StateT transformer yielding the function "foo' ∷ StateT M a → StateT M a". To define foo', the first thing we need to do is call liftControl: foo' t = liftControl $ \run →... This captures the current state of the StateT computation and provides us with the run function that allows us to run a StateT computation on this captured state. Now recall the type of liftControl ∷ (Run t n o → m a) → t m a. You can see that in place of the... we must fill in a value of type'm a'. In our case this will be a value of type 'M a'. We can construct such a value by calling foo. However, foo expects an argument of type 'M a'. Fortunately we can provide one if we convert the supplied 't' computation of type 'StateT M a' to 'M a' using our run function of type ∀ b. StateT M b → M (StateT o b): foo' t =... liftControl $ \run → foo $ run t However, note that the run function returns the final StateT computation inside M. So the type of the right hand side is now 'StateT M (StateT o b)'. We would like to restore this final state. We can do that using join: foo' t = join $ liftControl $ \run → foo $ run t That's it! Note that because it's so common to join after a liftControl I provide an abstraction for it: control = join ∘ liftControl Allowing you to simplify foo' to: foo' t = control $ \run → foo $ run t Probably the most common control operations that you want to lift through your transformers are IO operations. Think about: bracket, alloca, mask, etc.. For this reason I provide the MonadControlIO type class: class MonadIO m ⇒ MonadControlIO m where liftControlIO ∷ (RunInBase m IO → IO a) → m a Again, if you ignore the RunInBase argument, you will see that liftControlIO is identical to the liftIO method of the MonadIO type class: class Monad m ⇒ MonadIO m where liftIO ∷ IO a → m a Just like Run, RunInBase allows you to run your monadic computation inside your base monad, which in case of liftControlIO is IO: type RunInBase m base = ∀ b. m b → base (m b) The instance for the base monad is trivial: instance MonadControlIO IO where liftControlIO = idLiftControl idLiftControl directly executes f and passes it a run function which executes the given action and lifts the result r into the trivial'return r' action: idLiftControl ∷ Monad m ⇒ ((∀ b. m b → m (m b)) → m a) → m a idLiftControl f = f $ liftM $ \r -> return r The instances for the transformers are all identical. Let's look at StateT and ReaderT: instance MonadControlIO m ⇒ MonadControlIO (StateT s m) where liftControlIO = liftLiftControlBase liftControlIO instance MonadControlIO m ⇒ MonadControlIO (ReaderT r m) where liftControlIO = liftLiftControlBase liftControlIO The magic function is liftLiftControlBase. This function is used to compose two liftControl operations, the outer provided by a MonadTransControl instance and the inner provided as the argument: liftLiftControlBase ∷ (MonadTransControl t, Monad base, Monad m, Monad (t m)) ⇒ ((RunInBase m base → base a) → m a) → ((RunInBase (t m) base → base a) → t m a) liftLiftControlBase lftCtrlBase = \f → liftControl $ \run → lftCtrlBase $ \runInBase → f $ liftM (join ∘ lift) ∘ runInBase ∘ run Basically it captures the state of the outer monad transformer using liftControl. Then it captures the state of the inner monad using the supplied lftCtrlBase function. If you recall the identical definitions of the liftControlIO methods: 'liftLiftControlBase liftControlIO' you will see that this lftCtrlBase function is the recursive step of liftLiftControlBase. If you use 'liftLiftControlBase liftControlIO' in a stack of monad transformers a chain of liftControl operations is created: liftControl $ \run1 -> liftControl $ \run2 -> liftControl $ \run3 ->... This will recurse until we hit the base monad. Then liftLiftControlBase will finally run f in the base monad supplying it with a run function that is able to run a 't m a' computation in the base monad. It does this by composing the run and runInBase functions. Note that runInBase is basically the composition: '... ∘ run3 ∘ run2'. However, just composing the run and runInBase functions is not enough. Namely: runInBase ∘ run ∷ ∀ b. t m b → base (m (t m b)) while we need to have ∀ b. t m b → base (t m b). So we need to lift the'm (t m b)' computation inside t yielding: 't m (t m b)' and then join that to get 't m b'. Now that we have our MonadControlIO instances we can start using them. Let's look at how to lift 'bracket' into a monad supporting MonadControlIO. Before we do that I define a little convenience function similar to 'control': controlIO = join ∘ liftControlIO Bracket just calls controlIO which captures the state of m and provides us with a runInIO function which allows us to run an m computation in IO: bracket ∷ MonadControlIO m ⇒ m a → (a → m b) → (a → m c) → m c bracket before after thing = controlIO $ \runInIO → E.bracket (runInIO before) (\m → runInIO $ m >>= after) (\m → runInIO $ m >>= thing) I welcome any comments, questions or patches. Regards, Bas [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/MonadCatchIO-transformers [2] http://docs.yesodweb.com/blog/invertible-monads-exceptions-allocations/ [3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/monad-peel _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskellThe Docket – February 13, at 1:00 p.m. est, : Just a quick note — Rabia Chaudry and I will be appearing on MSNBC Shift’s the Docket tomorrow, for a one-hour Serial special. You can watch online, it should be a good show! Unfortunately, former prosecutor Kevin Urick had to cancel and will not be joining us – but hey, that just means there will be more time for us to actually discuss the evidence in this case.
On February 16, 1999, less than a week after Hae’s body had been found in Leakin Park, a grand jury had already been convened to investigate whether Adnan should be indicted for her murder. At that point, the only evidence to suggest Adnan had been involved in her murder (or, at least, the only evidence that the prosecution has ever chosen to disclose) consisted of an anonymous phone call that was placed on February 12th, by an “Asian male 18-21 years old,” who “advised investigators [they] should concentrate on the victim’s boyfriend[,] Adna Ansyed.” With this flimsy evidence as a starting point, a grand jury began investigating Adnan, and issued a subpoena for his cellphone records.
When investigators received the location data associated with those phone records, they thought they saw something very important: the 7:09 and 7:16 p.m. calls had originated on tower L689, in Leakin Park. On the strength of these two little numbers, from the print out of a cellphone billing record, the state’s entire case was born. Adnan was in Leakin Park at 7 p.m., burying Hae’s body — or so the story goes — because the cellphone records showed he was in Leakin Park then, and Jay said he was in Leakin Park then. Case closed. From that point onward, the detectives believed that it was settled fact that Hae had been buried in the 7:00 p.m. hour, and all further evidence that they obtained was filtered, shifted, or disregarded, in whatever way was necessary to fit that theory.
And that meant filtering, shifting, and disregarding a lot of evidence. As a result of their fixation upon the 7:09 and 7:16 p.m. phone calls, the investigators and the prosecution overlooked the fact that all the rest of the evidence in the case showed that Hae had not been buried in Leakin Park shortly after 7:00 p.m., but rather had been buried at a much later time — long after the “Leakin Park phone calls,” and long after Adnan and Jay had gone their separate ways that day.
a. The Medical Examiner’s Findings
In claiming that Hae had been buried at 7 p.m., the prosecution either overlooked or ignored the fact that this timeline was contrary to the medical examiner’s findings with respect to livor mortis. As Hae’s body was found to be positioned on its right ride at the burial site in Leakin Park, and as the pattern of lividity found by the medical examiner showed that Hae had been left on her front for an extended period of time after her death, her body was not buried until at least eight hours after her death, and most likely even longer than that.
Hae’s body was positioned on its right side:
When Mr. S led investigators to the burial site in Leakin Park, they found Hae’s body was laid out on its right side, in a shallow depression behind a log, and covered over with dirt and large rocks. The positioning of the body was confirmed by the report of the medical examiner:
The body was found in the woods, buried in a shallow grave with the hair, right foot, left knee, and left hip partially exposed. The body was on her right side. (Autopsy Report.)
In accordance with the prosecution’s MO in this case (and, presumably, many other cases during this time period) there are no written records aside from the autopsy report which documents the position of Hae’s body at the burial site. Although a forensic anthropologist, Dr. William Rodriguez Ill, Ph.D., was present at the crime scene to oversee the disinterment of Hae’s body, he never produced any written reports of his findings or observations. This was part of the state’s litigation strategy, pursuant to which those involved in the investigation refrained from committing their findings to paper whenever possible — because if an investigator’s findings were not preserved in writing, then the prosecution could not be required to produce that writing to the defense.
As a result, everything we know about Dr. Rodriguez’s analysis of the crime scene comes from oral statements that he made in the months after Hae’s body was found. His first statement was made to Prosecutor Kathleen Murphy, on July 31, 1999, and following his statement, Murphy took notes concerning the portions of it that she deemed to be worth writing down. The result was a brief, five-line memorandum, which had the following to say about how Hae had been buried:
Rocks piled on her. Area had been dug out. Dirt over it. Large rocks on body, one on hand. Keep animals from dragging body off. Way body is exposed – animal activity. Soil samples: typical of wooded area, highly organic. Collected plants, green plant material underneath. Couldn’t tell if tool used.
Notably, the fact the body was positioned on its right side was absent from the prosecutor’s brief memo. However, although Dr. Rodriguez also avoided ever testifying at trial as to how the body had been positioned at the burial site, his testimony did indirectly confirm that Hae had been buried on her side:
Dr. Rodriguez: Well, here we see in this photograph a number of the leaf debris has been brushed away. We can see we’re beginning some excavation to trowel out around the body producing its outline. You can see the leg here bent at the knee (1/28/00 Tr. 164).
If the body had been laid out frontally, in a way that could have been consistent with the livor mortis findings, then photographs would not have been able to depict the leg “bent at the knee” unless the leg had been sticking straight up in the air — a fact which I assume would have been noted, had that been the case.
Additionally, evidence that Hae’s body had been buried on its right side also comes from Jay’s initial statements to the police, and his descriptions of how Hae had been buried. Although Jay’s statements are useless when its comes to figuring out the truth of what happened on January 13, 1999, they are very useful when it comes to figuring out what the investigators knew about the crime, and when they knew it. Based on Jay’s first interview, the investigators knew that Hae had been buried on her right side, because they made sure that Jay specified those facts in his statement:
Detective: She’s face down, what side is she laying on?
Jay: |
the country.“Over the course of the next month we are going to be deploying British service personnel to provide advice and a range of training, from tactical intelligence to logistics to medical care, which is something else they have asked for,” UK Prime Minister David Cameron said on Feb. 24.
“We will also be developing an infantry training programme with Ukraine to improve the durability of their forces. This will involve a number of British service personnel; they will be away from the area of conflict but I think this is the sort of thing we should be helping with.”
EU officials in Brussels first learned of the decision when contacted by the Kyiv Post for comment, and were unable to provide one. The EU already has two military attachés in Ukraine but they are not involved in operational or training activities.
The French Embassy in Kyiv were similarly taken aback, saying they were focused on today’s peace talks in Paris as the foreign ministries of France and Germany tried to resuscitate a still-born cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine.
But speaking to the House of Commons’ liaison committee, Cameron said it would be “miraculous” if the second Minsk peace deal, brokered by French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, held. He expressed concern that the Black Sea port city of Mariupol would be Russia’s next target, arguing for tough new sanctions in the face of such an eventuality.
“What we are seeing is Russian-backed aggression, often these are Russian troops, they are Russian tanks, they are Russian Grad missiles. As I said the other day, you can’t buy these things on eBay, they are coming from Russia, people shouldn’t be in any doubt about that,” he said.
“People will be looking at Mariupol as the next potential flashpoint, and if that were to happen, I think the argument for further action would be overwhelming. I think that would be the view of countries like Poland, the Baltic states and many others.”
“I think what we should be putting into place is a sense that if there is another Debaltseve then that will trigger a round of sanctions that will be materially different to what we have seen so far.”
The UK decision followed hot on the heels of the Paris meeting’s conclusion, implying impatience and frustration with yet another fruitless round of talks with an intransigent Russia.
A vague statement given at the meeting’s close by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that “France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine remain determined to continue taking action in this [the Normandy meeting] format and to do their utmost to ensure that the commitments are upheld and the crisis is resolved,” but offered nothing on concrete steps the respective parties would take to resolve the conflict.
Earlier today Ukraine accused separatist and Russian troops of continuing an assault on the Ukrainian-held village of Shyrokyne, just 10km from Mariupol, and failing to withdraw its heavy weaponry from the front line as required by the Minsk plan. Ukraine said that enemy tanks and artillery were moving southwards to the Mariupol area, and refused to withdraw its own artillery as long its forces were under attack.
The UK move will likely exacerbate divisions within the European Union over the Ukraine crisis, with countries like Greece and Hungary opposing fresh sanctions against Russia for fear of short-term damage to their economies.
However, economic instability in Europe continued to reflect political instability in the region, with the euro dropping against the dollar throughout the conflict, from 1.39 euros to the dollar in May 2014 to 1.13 today.
When asked how the UK’s position related to that of other EU member states, Cameron said:
“Britain’s role is to be at the tougher end of the spectrum, to try to keep the European Union and the United States together, and I think we should be clear about this pattern of behaviour we’ve seen from Putin now over many years.”
For its part, the US has already pledged a full battalion of advisers to help train three Ukrainian battalions in spring this year, at the Yavariv training center in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
The US Army Europe commander, Lt. General Ben Hodges, said American soldiers will teach the Ukrainians how to better defend themselves against “Russian and rebel artillery and rockets.” Training will also include securing roads, bridges and other infrastructure, treating and evacuating casualties, and operating in an environment where Russians are jamming communications.
Kyiv Post news editor Maxim Tucker can be reached at tucker@kyivpost.com or via Twitter @MaxRTuckerThe clock we bought from IKEA several years ago started to lose its face. This caused the hands to get stuck and we needed a new clock. I am currently busy making a wooden clock (including the mechanism), from plans that my wife bought me (click here for the most awesome wooden clock site anywhere), but I thought I will make something a bit less ambitious in the meantime. I thus designed and made this warped clock-face and added a normal quartz mechanism:
The video below is a speed up version of the whole DIY process described below (high speed cutting start at 0.25):
I wanted to make something that is a bit unique and have recently seen several wooden objects with a “digital flaw” designed into the object. The process thus starts with the design and I drew a reasonably normal face and digitally warped it and printed the image.
Since the face is quite thin I decided to make several at once (the additional clocks can be bought here). I cut stack two 4 mm and two 6 mm pieces and tape it together (total thickness is thus 2 cm which is no problem). The time per cut is slightly slower but the overall time to make four clocks is much, much faster.
I use masking tape (painters tape) on the wood itself and use a glue stick to stick the pattern to the tape. I find that the masking tape is very easy to remove from the wood. It also reduce the amount of splintering (especially when crosscutting pine plywood). The stacks are also held in place with the masking tape. I cover the pattern with packing tape. Once this is set up I drill the entry holes.
At this stage I had all these pieces and got side tracked. I posted this on Facebook and asked people to guess what I am making. I promised a small prize and this was the beginning of the competitions that I now sometimes have (here is the current competition):
I continued with the outside cuts. I did however need to re-wrap the stacked pieces together as the masking tape originally keeping the stacks together (on the outer edge) was cut away.
Once done I started to remove the template and tape.
Which led to four identical clock faces. As usual with all woodworking projects, a lot of sanding takes place. Each piece was sanded from 240 to 800 grit.
I coated the faces with clear lacquer and the differences in color became quite apparent. Next, the fitting of the quartz mechanisms. I simply stuck them to the wood with some hot-glue and added the hands.
I am happy with how these clocks turned out. A few people had comments on what a shame it was that the wood warped in such an ugly fashion, which gave me a nice feeling of accomplishment 🙂
One clock is now in our kitchen and the others I will sell (here). I will, in the future, probably design more digital error patterns and have several plans to make pixelated wooden items.
Robroy.
p.s. feel free to sign up for our newsletter to keep up to date with new items and exciting competitions:As an independent college counselor, I get questions every day about the college admissions process and what it takes to get in. Questions range from "Will donating a large sum of money help get my child admitted?" to "Does study abroad look good on an application? What about volunteering overseas?" Once a family even asked if we personally make calls to admissions offices in order to advocate for students. (No, we don't.)
The admissions process is seen as a system shrouded in mystery, with colleges colluding to make it harder for students to get into the country's top schools. The stress for some students is palpable, leading some families to believe they need to take extreme measures in order to help their students stand out.
It's a misconception to assume the higher education system is working against those it values the most. The truth is, applying to college doesn't have to be as anxiety-provoking as most assume it will be, and there are many things families can do to take control of and enjoy the process. Here's what I wish people understood about the complicated admissions landscape.
1) Princeton isn't the "best" college
Princeton and other top-tier colleges may seem like the holy grail of higher education institutions — and they are fantastic schools — but they're not for everyone. In the frenzy to get into the "best colleges," what many forget is that the best college for one student isn't necessarily going to be the best college for someone else, or even the top college on a list. That's what's so great about higher education in the US: there are a variety of institutions to match just about any student's needs, whether academically, financially, or socially. From large public universities with sprawling campuses to small liberal arts colleges with fewer than 1,000 students, there is a best-fit school for every applicant.
The idea that an Ivy League college (or a similar institution like Stanford) is the only path to success for students is very misguided and is evidence that families haven't really done their homework on all the options out there. To that same point, colleges are looking at fit, too, and if it's very apparent a student isn't going to thrive at a college, he or she isn't going to get in. This is why doing research and creating a balanced list of colleges is so crucial to success in the college admissions process.
2) Not every deserving applicant is going to get into an Ivy League university
Yes, it sounds harsh, but it's the truth. Not because your high school valedictorian isn't a qualified candidate (which he or she very may well be), but because the schools just don't have enough room. Last year, Ivy League schools admitted 22,593 students out of 253,472 applicants. Each top-tier college could fill a second and even third class of equally qualified applicants from their rejection piles.
More on college 10 things not enough kids know before going to college
Is it fair that a highly qualified candidate (outstanding test scores, grades, classes, activities, etc.) is rejected one year but could have could have been admitted just a year before? Of course not, but it's the nature of the process. Colleges have institutional needs, so they're not just looking at whether a student is a good candidate for admission.
They're also looking at gaps in the student body they need to fill and which qualified applicants can meet those needs. If there's an influx of engineering majors that year and the department is already saturated, then it's going to be really difficult for engineering applicants to get in that year. On the flip side, if the sociology department has had low enrollment the past few years, it's going to be a little easier for those applicants to gain admission. There are many factors at play — not just the qualifications of a particular applicant.
3) Perfect grades and test scores aren't your ticket into the college of your dreams
Straight-A students with perfect SAT scores get rejected from highly selective colleges all the time. It's the biggest grievance in admissions — if this student with perfect grades and test scores can't get into an Ivy League college, then who can? The answer: plenty of other qualified students. Yes, applicants need to have grades and test scores within the range the college considers admissible, but that's not sufficient in and of itself to merit admission.
Most colleges use a holistic review process, meaning they look at the whole applicant, not just the numbers. A student with glowing recommendations, specialized activities, and an outstanding essay can edge out an applicant who may have a higher GPA but dull recommendations and a lackluster personal statement.
A poorly constructed application can come across as an indicator that the student isn't really that interested in attending the institution, which can work against him or her. Colleges want to admit students who really want to attend their institution. Yes, colleges do this somewhat selfishly so that they can manage their yield rates, but also because they want to build a class filled with students who are going to excel and thrive at that particular institution. By looking at applicants holistically and considering students' qualifications, interests, motivations, potential, and more, in conjunction with the university's needs, schools can build classes of students who are going to be successful and graduate in four years.
4) Everything is about quality — not quantity
The college admissions process is often seen as a numbers game: how do these GPAs, test scores, and grades compare? So it's no surprise that many assume the same evaluative process applies to everything else colleges consider. Things like extracurricular actives, community service, and advanced courses aren't just counted up and used to compare one student with another. Admissions officer are going to look at the quality of those elements, not the number.
For example, if a college sees an applicant that took 20 AP classes and was involved in 15 different student organizations, the first thought is going to be: "With so much going on, did he or she really make a meaningful impact in those areas?" Students should pick just a few activities or interests that really appeal to them and devote a significant amount of time to them over the course of high school. Colleges aren't looking to admit "serial joiners" or "well-rounded" students — they're looking for specialists so they can build a well-rounded class.
The same even applies to grades and courses. An aspiring STEM student with a 3.9 GPA carrying AP courses like chemistry, physics, and calculus is going to be much more compelling than one with a 4.0 who took standard science and math classes with some "easy" electives thrown in.
5) Admissions officers are people, too
Around the time decisions are released, I think there's a collective mental picture of admissions officers huddled around a desk laughing maniacally as they stamp "REJECTED" on thousands of applications. The truth is, they're just as human as you and I are. I've experienced it firsthand and heard former admissions officers recount similar experiences. They wrestle over difficult admissions decisions. They advocate for students they think can really contribute to the college. It's a very human process. It's a mistake to think admissions officials don't care about applicants or that they are trying to work against them.
A single admissions officer can read thousands of applications each year — not an easy task. Because of this, decisions early in the process are often swift and can seem merciless to those on the outside. With just a small amount of time to read through an application and decide if it should move forward in the process, things like grades, test scores, and similar elements can greatly impact the outcome. Some decisions follow hard-and-fast criteria, and others, once the pool starts to narrow, are more nuanced. Decisions at the advanced stages of review are never easy. The reality is there just isn't enough room for everyone the admissions committee wants to admit.
6) Rankings are (mostly) useless
There are so many lists of college rankings out there it's hard to keep track of them all. Each list has different criteria for evaluation, and the number-one school on one list can be toward the middle or bottom of another. Even within the same list, a college can jump or fall an unbelievable number of spots in the span of just a few years. For example Duke University was ranked No. 104 in Forbes' 2009 rankings list. By 2013 it had jumped 89 spots to No. 15. A college that didn't even crack the top 100 four years earlier was now in the top 15. Did it really change that much in just a few years? Doubtful.
The rankings themselves actually do very little to tell families about the quality of a college or whether a student will be successful there. What families should look at, instead, is the data used to calculate the rankings and how that factors into a student's goals. For example, some lists incorporate graduation rates, percentage of graduates employed six months after graduation, average amount of student loan debt, and other data points that can help students decide if a college is a good match for their needs. Look at the different pieces of the puzzle, not the final number on a list.
7) Massive student loan debt is avoidable
The most prevalent criticism of higher education today is the cost. Colleges are constantly raising tuition, and with the national student loan debt topping $1 trillion, it's hard to ignore the crippling effects of student loan debt on millennials. But significant loan debt is avoidable if students are smart about where they apply. I mentioned before that a college should be a good fit for a student's needs and goals — and that applies to finances, too. Determining whether a college is a financial fit requires research. The listed tuition price isn't necessarily what you're going to pay, so don't immediately write off a college without digging deeper.
All colleges have net price calculators on their websites that help families estimate what they might be expected to contribute. Use these and resources like College Navigator to get a good idea of what you might pay, and inquire about merit scholarships and aid when researching colleges. You might be surprised — a private college that at first seems financially out of reach might turn out to be more feasible than a local public university. If a school seems out of reach financially after doing your homework, it's probably not a good fit. As with any other product or service, there are a variety of colleges out there with various price points. If you do diligent research, you can find great schools that won't require you take out large loans.
8) Pulling strings won't do much to help you get you in
Everyone has a friend of a friend who knows someone on a university board that can "pull some strings" to get their kid into the college of his or dreams. It's a tall tale that gets played out mostly in fiction (i.e., in House of Cards when Frank gets Linda's son accepted to Stanford), and that's what it is: fiction. Connections, no matter who they are, really do little to sway admission decisions. The admissions office decides who gets in and who doesn't.
The same applies to legacy applicants or development cases — those who donate large amounts of money to a college. While applying as a legacy can give applicants a small boost, it really depends on the school. Every college treats legacy applicants differently, and just because you're a third-generation student applying to your family's alma mater doesn't mean you'll automatically be accepted. Legacy status and development potential really only help students who are already within the school's range of admission standards but who may be on the cusp for their demographic group. If your grades or test scores are well below that range, applying as a legacy or donating a large sum of money won't make up for it.
9) It's not where you go to college but what you do with your experience
Frank Bruni recently did a great piece on this for the New York Times. Whether a student goes to an Ivy League or other "top-ranked" college does not determine his or her success in life. You can lead students to Harvard, but if they're not motivated or serious about their futures then they won't be successful. The name of a school or the type of institution a student attends can only carry him or her so far.
This is why it's so important for parents and students to focus on academic, social, and financial fit when choosing where to apply and enroll. If a college is a good fit, whether it's a small liberal arts college or a large public university, students will be more likely to thrive, gain valuable experience, and graduate on time.The value of the treasure found in the four vaults of Sri Padmanabha temple in Kerala has so far crossed an estimated value of Rs 60,000 crore. Tonnes of gold, thousands of precious stones and other valuables found in the secret vaults of the temple have literally blinded the eyes of the Supreme Court appointed team to estimate the value of the treasure.
Two other unopened vaults are believed to contain the yellow metal and gems worth an equal amount.
In short, the twelve centuries old temple owned by the royal family which ruled the erstwhile princely state of Travancore, is sitting on a treasure worth Rs 1.2 lakh crore. If their antique value is taken into account, their worth will be 10 times higher than the current market price.
The sudden discovery of the hitherto hidden treasure in the heart of the capital city is a headache rather than a pleasant surprise for the government.
Onus is on the government to provide tight security to the treasure which carries a religious sentiment too.
"There will be no lapse on part of the government in protecting the treasure trove at the Sri Padmanabha Swami temple. The government has already given directions to the director general of police ( DGP)," chief minister Oommen Chandy said.
But DGP Jacob Punnose was not too confident of the task assigned to him.
He sounded apologetic while giving out hints that the state police was still searching for a way to keep the invaluable treasure well protected, especially after the amount of exposure it has gained owing to worldwide media coverage.
"It is too big a challenge for the police. We have no trained personnel to manage such a huge treasure. We have sought the help of several agencies who can really help us," Punnose said.
By Saturday evening, the security was entrusted to the ADGP P. Venugopal. Nearly 200 officers and men will be deployed under him in and around the temple.
Sophisticated webcams and other modern equipment will be installed within the temple premises to further strengthen the security.
Earlier the Supreme Court had directed to make inventories of the articles found in the vaults and then place them back in the cellars, granting the plea of former IPS officer Sundara Rajan.
But it has kicked up heated discussions across the state regarding the future of the treasure trove.
While a section argues that since it is the wealth of the presiding deity, it should be kept as such at the temple; the other section contends that it belongs to the government and should be used for social welfare.
During the last two days search in two vaults which are believed to have not been opened for centuries, brought out several sacks full of precious stones.
Reportedly, one of the stones itself is worth Rs 50 crore.
The vaults also had several tonnes of ancient gold coins of various countries and thousands of ornaments The SC appointed panel is headed by former high court judge M. N. Krishnan and is assisted by experts from state archives and public works department.
The stock taking operation is expected to be completed in a few days.
TEMPLE AGLITTER
Estimated value of treasure trove found in the four vaults is Rs 60, 000 crore
It is believed valuables worth an equal amount is contained within the two other vaults
Taken together the centuries old temple is sitting on treasure worth Rs 1.2 lakh crore
A search conducted on the two vaults revealed that it contains ancient gold coins from various countries and thousands of ornamentsPresident Trump sent a letter to Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Thursday announcing 2018 pay rates for civilian government workers.
In the letter, Trump cited his authority in times of “national emergency or serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare” to make adjustments to the 2018 pay schedule for federal employees.
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If Trump had not acted, workers were scheduled for an across-the-board base pay raise of 1.9 percent. They also would have received an additional 26 percent on average in locality pay, but that figure is based on an outdated formula that presidents have routinely circumvented. Trump proposed an average 0.5 percent increase in locality pay instead, within the range of recent locality increases.
Trump will use his authority to lower across-the-board pay raises to 1.4 percent, with an average additional raise of 0.5 percent, depending on what city the worker lives in.
“We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a sustainable fiscal course,” Trump wrote.
“A pay increase of this magnitude is not warranted, and Federal agency budgets could not accommodate such an increase while still maintaining support for key Federal priorities such as those that advance the safety and security of the American people.”
Presidents have historically intervened to submit alternative pay plans for government workers to prevent larger pay increases that would kick in by default. Former President Obama froze government salaries in place from 2011 to 2013.
Obama implemented a 2.1 percent rate hike last year for 2017.
The overall 1.9 percent pay hike is consistent with Trump’s proposed budget. The White House has changed the formula it is using to get to that number by reducing the across-the-board pay hike to 1.4 and using the balance for adjustments to outside localities, so not everyone will see the 1.9 percent increase.
The raise is lower than some government workers unions and lawmakers had advocated for.
“[The National Treasury Employees Union] believes this figure is too low especially in light of the fact that federal law calls for a 1.9 percent across-the-board raise and private sector wages are growing at an even faster rate,” Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement. “Add to that, current proposals attacking the federal retirement system would result in a pay cut for federal workers.”
Trump will maintain the 2.1 percent pay increase for members of the military.
“I strongly support our men and women in uniform, who are the greatest fighting force in the world and the guardians of American freedom,” Trump wrote. “As our country continues to recover from serious economic conditions affecting the general welfare, we must work to rebuild our military's readiness and capabilities.”
This story was updated at 1:21 p.m.The number of people successfully masquerading as pastors astounds me. How do these imposters manage to carve out lengthy and prosperous careers, often in spite of obvious character flaws and an utter lack of biblical fidelity? The short answer is that too many congregations prize personal preferences over biblical standards for shepherds.
Through the pen of the apostle Paul, the Lord has given us a comprehensive list of qualifications for pastors and elders. These biblical standards help God’s people know what to look for in a true shepherd. And just as important, they help us know what to avoid.
An overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money. (1 Timothy 3:2-3)
So far in this series, we’ve examined what it means to be above reproach, as well as some of the specific qualifications Paul mentions above. Today we’ll consider two more.
Respectable
Paul instructs that an overseer must be respectable. John MacArthur explains:
Kosmios (respectable) carries the idea of “orderly.” A man prudent in mind will have a respectable or orderly life. His well-disciplined mind leads to a well-disciplined life. In his commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, Homer Kent said, “The ministry is no place for the man whose life is a continual confusion of unaccomplished plans and unorganized activities.”... the word kosmos, from which kosmios derives, is the opposite of “chaos.” A spiritual leader must not have a chaotic, but an orderly lifestyle.
The orderliness, or lack of, in a pastor’s life has a direct influence on his ministry. If he cannot order his own life, how can he bring order to the church (1 Timothy 3:5)? Sadly, there are many leaders today who ignore Paul’s admonition for church services to be conducted “properly and in an orderly manner” (1 Corinthians 14:40). There are even charismatics at the far end of that spectrum who fervently believe that chaos is the conduit through which the Holy Spirit operates:
Random and chaotic ecclesiology brings no honor to God. Instead it sows confusion and distraction into the church, and weakens believers’ confidence in the veracity and authority of God’s Word. Chaos has no place in the church or in the orderly lifestyle the Lord requires of the shepherds of His sheep.
Hospitable
God also requires approachability and accessibility from those who would shepherd His flock. Paul tells Timothy that church leaders must also be hospitable. According to John MacArthur, “The word literally means ‘to love strangers.’ It is a frequently commanded Christian virtue (Romans 12:13; Hebrews 13:2; 1 Peter 4:9).” So the hospitality Paul is highlighting is not primarily about entertaining friends, but rather showing hospitality to strangers. Jesus said:
When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, otherwise they may also invite you in return and that will be your repayment. But when you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, since they do not have the means to repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. (Luke 14:12)
There was a time not too long ago when pastors primarily communicated with their people face-to-face, or at least personally over the phone. But with the advent of email, text messages, and social media, church leaders today can keep a layer of separation from their congregations. Some take an even more aggressive approach to their privacy:
If left unchecked, that kind of toxic attitude will permeate the entire church, sowing division where there ought to be unity. It’s a selfish arrogance that is the exact opposite of how believers are commanded to behave (Romans 12:10-13; 15:1; Galatians 6:2; Philippians 2:3-4). Division comes easily enough to most churches without encouragement from the pulpit—it must never be the fruit of the pastor’s example.
A true pastor is someone who personally cares for his sheep and strangers in need of his care. John MacArthur shares the following insights:
Persecution, poverty, orphans, widows, and traveling Christians made hospitality essential in New Testament times. They had no hotels or motels, and the inns were notoriously evil. Often they were brothels, or places where travelers were robbed or beaten.... The door of the Christian home, as well as the heart of the Christian family, ought to be open to all who come in need. That is especially true of the overseer. Elders are not elevated to a place where they are unapproachable. They are to be available. A pastor’s life and home are to be open so that his true character is manifest to all who come there, friend or stranger.
Pastoral leadership is a high calling that must not be taken lightly. Unqualified shepherds are dangerous to your spiritual growth, and a destructive cancer to the Body of Christ. Even in areas as seemingly mundane as orderliness and hospitality, God has high standards for His shepherds.
People looking for a new church, or churches looking for a new pastor are often too narrowly focused on the skills the pastor has to offer. Scripture calls us to focus on personal character and conduct.
But there is one—and only one—skill pastors must have (1 Timothy 3:1–7). That one skill is an indispensable ability required by all who would shepherd God’s flock. We’ll look at it next time.
(All quotations from The MacArthur New Testament Commentary: 1 Timothy unless otherwise noted.)Over millions of years, nature developed a variety of starch based elastomers. Eco-Chemistry is slowly catching up. BioInspiration's "Beta Test" is WillowFlex for 3D Printing. After all - there is no better chemist then Mother Nature.
Why is this a game changer?
WillowFlex Filament is a step into the Organic Material Evolution – access to materials and process that follow nature’s lead - compostable, upcyclable, harmless, innovative, resilient.
Material Transparency
WillowFlex’s base component is non-GMO corn starch. This unique elastomeric bioplastic is made from compostable raw materials that have passed the U.S. (ASTM D6400) and E.U. (EN 13432) standards for compostability. <Read More about the compostability tests here>
Safety
Anyone who has tried 3D printing knows the familiar scent of melted plastic in the air. WillowFlex gives hardly any smell - but if you lean in close, you might catch a natural scent like baking bread or brewing beer.
We envision WillowFlex (and our standard Willow Filament line in the following months) will set a new baseline for filaments used in sensitive environments such as schools, homes and kitchen, and medical applications.
MakerBot going to Schools: http://bit.ly/1Dkcc5H
Stratasys online courses for Schools: http://bit.ly/1IG7dfX
Used with Permission from Otelo (http://www.otelo.or.at/)
BioInspiration defines our safety requirement not only for humans but also for the environment. When your custom printed Willowflex headlamp adapter gets lost in the woods on your next camping trip – it will return to the earth without any harmful effects (in the future the electronic portion will too!). Did your daughter bury her new 3D printed sand form at the bottom of the sandbox? In a couple years it will blend right into the sand.
Quality
Bio-Inspired products have comparable qualities and often include unique advantages provided direct from Mother Nature. BioInspiration searches out products that aren't there only to relieve the waste stream but to improve the products themselves.
Sample "Squeeze"
Heat Resistance
WillowFlex is able to maintain integrity at temperatures in excess of 100 C. Now you can print your teacup and use it to drink tea without affecting the structure. You can leave your 3D printed sandals in the sun and they won’t deform when you step into them. We are also excited for what this heat resistance will mean for electronic applications such as flexible PV Panels.
Cold Resistance
Giving materials to children is a great way to test all the possible uses! Our first sample 3D Printed WillowFlex boxes have been being put in the freezer to make ice-cubes for 3 months. They continue to withstand the freezing and defrosting process and the flexible surface makes it easy to remove shaped ice cubes. The Material has been confirmed to retain its flexibility at - 15 C. (But it might go even lower...)
10 Colors to Choose From
We have selected an initial 5 Colors that will be the initial Willow Flex batch. The other 5 will be voted on by the project bakers and be made "to Pantone color specification" by our filament producers.
Tell me more about what this compostability testing means…
The more stringent of the two criteria is from the EU (EN 13432). It states that the material can be recycled through the composting of organic solid waste (http://greenplastics.com/wiki/EN_13432) and includes:
A biodegradation level of at least 90% in less than 6 months.
Disintegrability with test material greater >2 mm less than 10% of the original mass
Absence of negative effects on the composting process
Low levels of heavy metals and absence of negative effects through a plant growth test.
The raw material from WillowFlex has additionally met the less stringent U.S. (ASTM D6400).
It is important to note that these certifications are based on Industrial Level Composting – so you should not expect the same speed from your backyard compost pile. But you should expect the same end result, the material returning to the soil.
Composting Status (10 Months)
Composting Status (18 Months)
But if it is compostable – won’t it just start decomposing?
The Composition Process only occurs when 4 criteria appear concurrently – Moisture, Microbes, Oxygen and Heat. When any one of these criteria are not met, then the material will remain stable. We are working with a base material that has been use (and remained stable) for 4 years and counting.
Steps for Decomposition
As this is a Beta - we are currently running a series of tests to see how the material responds in the following conditions and we will keep our backers updated:
Inside Location (Sun)
Inside Location (Shade)
Outside Location (Sun)
Outside Location (Shade)
Wet Location
Children’s sand-box
Slow Composter
Fermentation Composter (Bokashi)
Buried
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I’m ready! – but why should I choose a flexible filament?
Flexibility in 3D printing is a new road that we are all traveling together. What is most exciting about WillowFlex is that you aren’t just adding flexibility to your 3D Print, you are also adding heat and cold resistance. A good way to get inspiration is to simply look around you and see what are the items you are using already that are made from flexible plastics - And how do you want to customize them on your 3D Printer?
We expect (and will ourselves be playing in) the following product developments
Shoes
Clothes
Fashion Accessories, Watchbands
Toys
“Adult Toys”
Cups / Plates / Bowls
Glasses Frames, especially for children and sports
Custom Ice Cubes!
Outdoor Equipment
Models and Body Applications
Masks
- - - -
Flexible Electronics
This is a field that we think is a perfect synergy with our material and we are searching out partners to develop our material and test its response in various electrical applications.
Flexible PV
Flexible Batteries
Flexible Displays
Flexible Sensor Systems
These are all directions that are at the tipping point of feasibility.
Images used with Permission from IDTechEx (http://www.idtechex.com/)
- - - -
Who is bringing us this new material?
http://bioinspiration.eu
The project was brought together by BioInspiration, a Berlin-Area company dedicated to expanding the Organic Material Evolution.
BioInspiration expands access to materials and process that follow nature’s lead - compostable, upcyclable, harmless, innovative, resilient. The Organic Material Evolution is about providing access to natural products that are equal to or exceeding the capabilities of currently produced materials. BioInspiration’s focus is bringing the nascent technologies of innovators to wider use and public awareness. BioInspiration offers material, technical and production innovations. BioInspiration emphasize direct partnerships to bring seamless integration of these innovations into products and existing production streams.
BioInspiration worked with two experienced production partners to offer WillowFlex to the world!
GREEN DOT, Kansas USA
http://www.greendotpure.com/
Green Dot aspires to improve the environment in which we live by building a more sustainable world through renewable biobased resins and promoting their use through invention, creation and research. Green Dot is a bioscience social enterprise headquartered in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas. We're a full service bioplastics company dedicated |
October where a woman used Twitter's livestreaming Periscope app to film herself driving while drunk. Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU, also mentioned a case where a person posted a picture of his illegal marijuana growing operation, only to be reported to the police by a social media friend.
Those moves may be, well, just plain stupid. But you could also look at them as extreme versions of the kinds of oversharing mishaps that we've all faced.
Stanley said he doesn't have sympathy for someone who flees a crime scene, but that cases like this can illustrate how little people think about how their tech use can affect them. And that can give us all pause.
"Technology is moving so fast that people can forget what information is being collected and who it's going to," Stanley said.The Warden is a new class in ESO Morrowind
The Warden is a new class introduced in The Elder Scrolls Online Morrowind.
Summary [ edit ]
Wardens can use frost spells and can summon animals to help them in combat.
Skill Trees [ edit ]
Animal Companions: The Warden can summon various animal companions to aid him in combat. Some animal companions can inflict damage to the enemy (For example Cliff Racer, Shalk, and Fetcherflies) while others can restore magicka or boost the Warden's stats (Betty Netch, Falcon).
The Warden can summon various animal companions to aid him in combat. Some animal companions can inflict damage to the enemy (For example Cliff Racer, Shalk, and Fetcherflies) while others can restore magicka or boost the Warden's stats (Betty Netch, Falcon). Green Balance: This skill tree let the Warden use nature forces to heal him and his allies.
This skill tree let the Warden use nature forces to heal him and his allies. Winter Embrace: This skill tree has frost-based abilities that let the warden cause frost damage to his enemies. This tree also has some defensive abilities such as an ice shield that absorbs damage, and some other utility abilities.
Best Race for Warden [ edit ]
The best Warden race will depend on what role you want to play:
Magicka DPS [ edit ]
Choose Altmer (High Elf) or Breton Altmer: Altmer's racials lets you have more max magicka, magicka recovery, and increase cold damage Breton: Breton lets you have more max magicka and decreases the cost of your spells
(High Elf) or
Stamina DPS [ edit ]
Choose Redguard or Khajiit Redguard: For max stamina and stamina recovery Khajit: For critical damage and stealth
or
Healer [ edit ]
Choose Altmer (High Elf) or Breton Altmer: Increased magicka, magicka recovery lets you cast more healing spells when they are needed the most. Breton: Increased magicka and decreased spell costs let you cast more healing spells when they are needed the most.
(High Elf) or
Tank [ edit ]
Use Imperial or Nord Imperial: Has better max health and stamina, so great as a tank Nord: Increased max health and stamina, as well as damage reductions, also makes Nords great as tanks.
or
PvP [ edit ]
Choose Orsimer (Orc) Orsimer: The increased max health, health recovery, and stamina, as well as the sprint-based racials makes the Orcs perfect for PvP.
(Orc)We recently caught up with Zombie studios director Jared Gerritzen to talk about their upcoming free to play game for the PlayStation 4, Blacklight Retribution. We got a chance to ask about their experience while developing the game for Sony’s next generation console, the DualShock 4 controller, the in-game monetization model, the possibility of new content and post launch support.
Rashid Sayed: The game was originally released back in April, 2012 for the PC. What prompted Zombie Studios to re-introduce it again on the PlayStation 4, instead of making, say a sequel or a new IP?
Jared Gerritzen: Our players love the game, and we love our players! We wanted to make sure it was available to as many people as possible, for our current fans and our new. Zombie Studios also gained the rights to publish and produce Blacklight: Retribution, and we were excited to bring it to a new player base and console.
Rashid Sayed: Content wise, how different will the PS4 version be when compared to the onePC? Extra maps, maybe?
Jared Gerritzen: We have a lot of love for our PC players, and we want to make sure they get the same content as our PlayStation 4 players. Part of what we did during development was optimize our maps, and we plan to bring these to the PC for even better performance. We want to make sure our content is equal to our PC and console players.
Rashid Sayed: One of the core features of Blacklight Retribution is the indepth customization option. Have you made any changes or added anything that makes its different from the PC version?
Jared Gerritzen: We remade the menu system to allow controller players to easily customize and easily interact with the game, and we utilized the touchscreen to bring some of our systems to the controller because the keyboard just has more keys. We also redid the pricing and monetization for the game.
"It’s exciting to bring Blacklight to the PlayStation 4, where a new audience will get the see it and our existing fans can enjoy the game they already know they love."
Rashid Sayed: Are the pricingfor in game items similar to the PC version?
Jared Gerritzen: Since we are our own publisher for Blacklight on the PlayStation 4, we are in control of our own pricing, so we can offer our players benefits and deals unique to the PlayStation 4. We also changed the pricing drastically to allow true micro-transactions.
Rashid Sayed: Can you please let us know what resolution and fps does Blacklight Retribution run on the PlayStation 4?
Jared Gerritzen: We are currently at 1080p, and as the game evolves we are targeting the highest frame rates possible.
Rashid Sayed: As someone who has core experience with PC games development, what is it about the PlayStation 4 that excites you the most?
Jared Gerritzen: Any gamer knows that PC gamers and console gamers are different, but what brings them together is the mutual love for awesome games. It’s exciting to bring Blacklight to the PlayStation 4, where a new audience will get the see it and our existing fans can enjoy the game they already know they love.
Rashid Sayed: Furthermore, from a tech perspective what are your thoughts on Sony’s decision to include 8GB of fast memory in the PS4 and how is that helped you guys in the development process?
Jared Gerritzen: Zombie Studios has been wanting to bring Blacklight to the console for a long time, and it wasn’t until we had the opportunity to work on the PlayStation 4 that console hardware was up to the task of running the game without making serious cuts.
"As Blacklight evolves out of Beta, we plan to use as many of the PlayStation 4 peripherals as possible, but we are very happy to hear that the PlayStation will not only be using on-board streaming functions but capture cards will be able to get game footage via the HDMI cables themselves."
Rashid Sayed: Warframe developer, Digital Extremes, recently stated that it took them only a mere 3 months to port their game from the PC to the PS4. How long did you guys took to do the same with Blacklight Retribution?
Jared Gerritzen: Zombie Studios not only ported our game, but we ported the Unreal 3 Engine as well. We can’t really speak to timelines other developers have had, but every game is different.
Rashid Sayed: The PS4 version looks absolutely gorgeous. But does it hold up against a high end PC running Blacklight Retribution?
Jared Gerritzen: We have all the PC settings cranked up to their highest setting on the PlayStation 4, so it holds up great! We are really happy how the transition between high end PC and PlayStation 4 works for us.
Rashid Sayed: As you must be aware that several well known developers have claimed that the PS4’s GPU is 40-50% more powerful than the Xbox One. What are your thoughts on this and did this played any role in your decision of not bringing the game over to the Xbox One?
Jared Gerritzen: We spoke with both Xbox and PlayStation, and our decision is something we cannot talk about, but we are very happy to join with the PlayStation group with Blacklight. As for the Xbox one technology, we cannot speak about that, because we currently have no Xbox One projects underway.
Rashid Sayed: You guys must be excited by some of the community and streaming features that the PS4 provides. How will Blacklight Retribution take advanatge of those?
Jared Gerritzen: We really love watching the Blacklight streams that our fans are always making, and we look forward to seeing more once the PlayStation 4 launches! As Blacklight evolves out of Beta, we plan to use as many of the PlayStation 4 peripherals as possible, but we are very happy to hear that the PlayStation will not only be using on-board streaming functions but capture cards will be able to get game footage via the HDMI cables themselves.
"The DualShock 4 controller really helps us rise to the challenge of mapping keyboard commands to the controller. We can get really creative with the touchpad and come up with great ways for the players to give input."
Rashid Sayed: I know for a fact that you guys absolutely love the DualShock 4 controller. Besides being comfortable to play with, how do you think it will enhance the gameplay in Blacklight Retribution?
Jared Gerritzen: One of the challenges of porting a PC game to a console is that you lose out on having a keyboard that gives you a lot of options for input. The DualShock 4 controller really helps us rise to the challenge of mapping keyboard commands to the controller. We can get really creative with the touchpad and come up with great ways for the players to give input.
Rashid Sayed: What are you plans post launch?
Jared Gerritzen: A real drive to get everything we need to fix in our Beta to go full launch, as well as more content. And we are really excited to be playing all the great games that are coming out on new systems as well, Xbox and PlayStation 4.
Rashid Sayed: Okay, time for a tricky question. From a gamer’s perspective, what version of the game will you suggest and why?
Jared Gerritzen: Gaming and specifically ‘how you game’ is a personal preference for everyone, so we suggest playing where you have the most fun! We’ll be playing on the PS4 on day one though, so we hope to see you there!Valve has just released the second major preview version of SteamOS, though it mainly brings undisclosed, under-the-hood changes.
The new version is codenamed “Brewmaster,” and is based on Debian Linux 8.1. This follows the original launch of the Debian 7.1-based “Alchemist” in December 2013. “Although there are a lot of changes under the covers, the overall functionality and experience of brewmaster is the same as alchemist and most of the SteamOS FAQ applies to both releases,” Valve’s announcement says.
Keep in mind that Valve had been steadily improving Alchemist over the last 18 months, and the new preview release is considered to be rough by comparison. Valve has only done limited hardware compatibility testing and is particularly interested in cases where hardware or game support has regressed. There are also some known issues, such as desktop mode failing to work on AMD systems.
For now, it’s not even clear whether Brewmaster will make its way onto the first Steam Machine consoles when they arrive in November. Valve says it’s still figuring out whether to use Brewmaster or stick with Alchemy instead.
In the meantime, tech-savvy users who want to help test the latest version can grab it from Valve’s download site and check the FAQ page for setup instructions. Installing SteamOS will erase everything on the machine, and Valve notes that Alchemy users cannot upgrade to Brewmaster without a full system wipe and reinstall.
Why this matters: Just like last year, a slew of Steam Machines are waiting in the wings on the official debut of SteamOS, presumably hoping not to get caught with yet another delay. The fact that Valve is still debating which version to use is somewhat disconcerting, but hopefully the company can get it together in time for the planned November launch.: Ready to cover your Vikings in sand and pass those scorpion-bite antidotes around? Well you better be, because the first promised DLC foris here and it sees your brave warriors take a detour through the desert in their way to Valhalla. Owners of the Two Horned Helmet Edition get the DLC for free and anyone that was still holding back can now go for the Upgrade. All editions are on a 25% discount until February 19, 1:59 PM GMT. Go and grab these deals by the horns, warrior! Valhalla Hills a viking city builder, is available now, DRM-free on GOG.com for Windows, Mac and Linux.The mightiest of warriors will be fallen in battle, slain by the swords and hands of their foes. The chosen revel in perennial glory, where wine flows eternal and time is naught.is a viking-themed city builder and survival game that invokes memories of games like The Settlers, Cultures and Banished. In this world, entrance to Valhalla is only granted to those who are deemed worthy. The rest will wander the hills for eternity. But not you, you're going to prance right in there. That's going to take some preparation, but you're a true viking after all.Even vikings need teamwork to overcome the randomly-generated challenges awaiting at the beautiful-but-harsh. Gather resources, build sturdy settlements, and guide your people through hardships and pitfalls to the promised halls of Valhalla.You can also get the Two Horned Helmet Edition which features Sand of the Damned plus an upcoming DLC pack, an artbook, wallpaper, soundtrack, developer Video and 5 special in-game items!Earn your place among warriors of legend by traversing Valhalla Hills, now DRM-free on GOG.com.The Indiewire 2015 Fall Preview: The 28 Films We're Most Excited to See (That We Haven't Seen Yet)
READ MORE: The Indiewire 2015 Fall Preview: The 15 Films We’ve Already Seen (And You Won’t Want to Miss)
“About Ray” (September 18)
Elle Fanning has long been on the cusp of a major breakout role, thanks to her steadily evolving oeuvre (that Fanning is the second sister to seamlessly translate from child star to adult actress shouldn’t surprise, it seems to be their M.O.) and a filmography marked by director-driven offerings. In Gaby Dellal’s TIFF premiere, the younger Fanning plays Ray, a teenager in the midst of transitioning to better suit his gender identity. Although his close-knit family — including Naomi Watts and Susan Sarandon — approach the situation with love and respect, things get complicated when Ray’s estranged father (Tate Donovan) becomes involved (and recent comments from the film’s director have reflected an uncomfortable disconnect between the material and her take on it). The film’s first trailer struck an odd tone between honest drama and raucous family-centric comedy, though the talent involved is more than heartening and Fanning’s dedication to the role seems singular. This one has real potential, and we’re anxious to see how it delivers this season.
“Black Mass” ( September 18 )
Johnny Depp has spent the better part of the last decade taming his adult sensibilities for family-friendly Disney audiences, and the few times he’s catered to serious-minded moviegoers — “The Tourist” (2010), “Transcendence” (2014) — the results have been truly disastrous. Fortunately, Scott Cooper’s “Black Mass” looks to be the Depp comeback vehicle we’ve been desperately waiting for. With a receding hairline, a gravely Boston accent and a pair of ghostly eyes, Depp seems downright sinister in the role of James “Whitey” Bulger, the notorious Boston gangster who became an FBI informant from the ’70s to the early ’90s in order to eliminate criminal competition. Adding further anticipation for the film is its acclaimed source material — the book of the same name by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth — its Venice Film Festival world premiere date, and an ensemble cast that includes Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dakota Johnson, Kevin Bacon, Peter Sarsgaard and more. Writer-director Cooper has nailed a violent, brooding atmosphere before in “Out of the Furnace,” and this drama should play to those strengths while offering Depp another chance to blow us away.
“Everest” (September 25)
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur continues to make his move into American cinema — he recently directed “2 Guns” and a remake of his own “Contraband” — and “Everest” poses a major undertaking for the filmmaker, his very own mountain to climb. Packed with a top-tier cast, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Keira Knightley and Josh Brolin, and a heart-stopping premise, the Venice opener has the potential to thrill and chill audiences, but it remains to be seen how much genuine emotion and true human drama Kormákur can include in the mix. With a festival pedigree behind it, cinephiles ready to deride it as another 3D spectacle may want to give it another look. Of course, it can be that too, but if there’s something deeper there, it’s worth exploring.
“Stonewall” (September 25)
Roland Emmerich’s latest has already stirred up quite a bit of controversy in the wake of its first trailer release, a small slice of marketing that made it clear that the historically rooted film may not be as grounded in fact as its viewership are hungry for. Still, the team behind the film promises that their fact-based feature comes from a place of love and respect for the participants in the Stonewall Riots. It’s hard to judge that sentiment from a trailer alone, but the film will soon show on the fall festival circuit, including TIFF, before getting an official release this season. If nothing else, it shows Emmerich’s continued dedication to breaking away from the world-busting action features that have so dominated his career, even if the final result could stand a hefty dose of veracity.
“The Walk” (September 30, limited; October 9, wide)
Philippe Petit’s daring high-wire walk across the Twin Towers in 1974 was masterfully chronicled in James Marsh’s Oscar-winning doc “Man on Wire,” but that’s not stopping Robert Zemeckis from giving the same story another cinematic treatment. Selected as the Opening Night film at the 53rd New York Film Festival, the drama stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the French daredevil, but all eyes are on Zemeckis and his thrilling eye for 3D adventure. The Oscar winner’s career as of late has been all over the place — from motion capture projects like “A Christmas Carol” to adult dramas like “Flight” — but his ability to craft intense, sustained action sequences remains unmatched. For this reason, Petit’s Twin Towers walk has all the potential to be another classic moment in Zemeckis’ history, especially since it’s been tailormade for IMAX 3D.
“Freeheld” ( October 2 )
Based on the true story of New Jersey police detective Laurel Hester, “Freeheld” examines what happens to a loving partnership when it isn’t viewed as equal in the eyes of the law. Hester falls in love with car mechanic Stacie Andree before being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, and fearing for her partner’s future, she appeals the county’s board of chosen freeholders with the hopes of ensuring her pension benefits will be passed on to Stacie. The emotional storyline could not be more relevant, and while director Peter Sollett hasn’t made a feature since 2008’s “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” he’s assembled a cast of dramatic heavyweights, including recent Best Actress winner Julianne Moore and Oscar nominees Ellen Page, Steve Carell and Michael Shannon. If any cast can make a predetermined tearjerker feel fresh and surprising, we’re putting our money on this acclaimed quartet.
“Legend” ( October 2 ) Tom Hardy is always a reason to get excited, but Tom Hardy starring opposite Tom Hardy as a pair of infamous London gangsters is causing some mind-blowing levels of anticipation. Returning to the crime drama for the first time since “LA Confidential,” Brian Helgeland brings the story of Reggie and Ronnie Kray to the big screen, chronicling their rise as mob kings in London during the ’50s and ’60s. The film is based on the book “The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins” by John Pearson and promises its fair share of period glamour and extreme mob brutality. Emily Browning, Colin Morgan and Chazz Palminteri co-star, though it’s really Hardy opposite Hardy that has “Legend” at the very top of our fall movie wish list. “The Martian” ( October 2 )
You’ve seen Matt Damon stranded on a planet before. You’ve seen Jessica Chastain stranded on Earth before. You’ve seen Ridley Scott grapple with near-future worlds featuring robots and aliens. But “The Martian” is promising to be something altogether different. Based on the best-selling self-published novel by Andy Weir, the sci-fi feature stars Damon as an astronaut left behind during a dangerous mission on Mars. The film is said to match the novel’s unique tone: It embraces a bleak situation with levity and infuses rigorous science with a casual first-person feel. Over the past couple years, Ridley quietly assembled an all-star crew — Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Kate Mara, Donald Glover and Chiwetel Ejiofor — to play Damon’s devoted fellow earthlings determined to rescue him from solitary confinement on Mars.
“Steve Jobs” (October 9)
Danny Boyle’s portrait of America’s tortured genius is arguably the most highly-anticipated film of 2015. The sharp-witted Aaron Sorkin penned the script, which follows Jobs, played by Michael Fassbender, through Apple’s initial product launches and behind the scenes of the digital revolution. Broken up into three 30-minute scenes, the film concludes with the 1998 launch of the iMac. The trailer showcases stark and stunning cinematography as it sets up the epic events that would change technology forevermore. Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen and Katherine Waterston also star.
“Bridge of Spies” ( October 16 )
Few Hollywood pairings are as enticing as Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Whether collaborating behind the scenes as producers (“Band of Brothers”) or at the forefront of projects as director and actor (“Saving Private Ryan,” “Catch Me If You Can”), the duo have been a consistent high mark of cinema and television for over two decades now. Cold War thriller “Bridge of Spies” finds the two reuniting for the first time since “The Terminal” to tell the true story of James Donovan, a Brooklyn lawyer who gets entangled with the CIA in order to negotiate the release of a captured American U-2 pilot. With Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan and Alan Alda in supporting roles, Spielberg’s longtime DP Janusz Kaminski back behind the camera and the Coen Brothers helping out on the screenplay, “Bridge of Spies” has almost too much amazing talent to be true. Color us very, very excited.
“Crimson Peak” ( October 16 )
After the effects-heavy bombast of “Pacific Rim,” visionary director Guillermo del Toro returns to his Gothic roots in “Crimson Peak.” The haunted house pic stars indie darling Mia Wasikowska as an aspiring author torn between the love for her childhood friend (Charlie Hunnam) and the temptation for a mysterious outsider (Tom Hiddleston). Trying to escape the ghosts of her tragic past, she gets swept up in the stranger’s house where things aren’t all as they seem, including his sister (Jessica Chastain). Early trailers for the film have touted the movie as “Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece,” and while that certainly remains to be seen, all of the lavish period costumes, eye-popping architecture and supernatural undertones suggest a tour-de-force from the Mexican filmmaker. Throw in Chastain in her first villainous role, and it looks like we have the makings of a new horror classic, something along the lines of Daphne du Maurier by way of del Toro’s fantasy imagination.
“Room” ( October 16 )
Brie Larson took the indie world by storm in 2013 with her acclaimed, Gotham Award-winning performance in “Short Term 12,” and she looks to do it again this fall thanks to her lead role in the highly anticipated “Room.” Adapted by Emma Donoghue from her bestselling novel of the same name, the drama centers around a mother and her five-year-old son (newcomer Jacob Tremblay) who have been living in captivity in a small room for a number of years. Fans have long thought the book was impossible to translate to the big screen, but director Lenny Abrahamson, who last showed an assured vision behind the camera in “Frank,” reached out to Donoghue directly to convince her of the novel’s cinematic possibilities. As fans of the book already know, the finished result should be a powerhouse drama about the bonds between mother and son.
“Truth” ( October 16 )
“Truth” has got to be one of the biggest question marks of the fall season. The cast is undeniably strong, with Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford in the leads and Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, Topher Grace and Bruce Greenwood in support, but the drama is the directing debut of action-oriented screenwriter James Vanderbilt (“White House Down,” “The Amazing Spider-Man” franchise) and not a single trailer has been released, even though the film is less than a month away from screening at the Toronto International Film Festival. Still, Vanderbilt wrote the script for David Fincher’s dense “Zodiac,” which brought a frightening intensity to a journalistic investigation, something that should bode well for this story about CBS news anchor Dan Rather and the controversial Killian documents scandal. Considering both Redford and Blanchett have been at the height of their powers lately (see “All is Lost” and “Carol”), the chance to see them opposite one another can’t be missed.
“Suffragette” (October 23)
Featuring a stacked cast of female talent in front of and behind the camera, Sarah Gavron’s “Suffragette” promises to provide a lightly fictionalized look at the beginning of the feminist movement in the UK. Starring Meryl Streep, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Romola Garai, the girl power vibe in this one is strong, just as it should be. Penned by “Shame” and “The Iron Lady” scribe Abi Morgan, the film will likely thread together the personal and the political to provide a fuller look at the battles waged in the early part of the suffragette movement by unstoppable women who fought to be heard.
“The Wonders” (October 30)
Alice Rohrwacher’s latest walked away from Cannes with a Grand Jury Prize, a Palme d’Or nomination and plenty of lavished (and very well-deserved) praise. Loosely based on the filmmaker’s own life, “The Wonders” stars Rohrwacher’s own sister Alba (who recently stunned audiences with her turn in the jarring “Hungry Hearts”) as a version of the pair’s own mother. The family-centric drama is mostly concerned with telling an intimate family story, but Rohrwacher’s eye for details and lush lensing should also make it a feast for the eyes, as well as the heart.
“Our Brand is Crisis” (October 30)
Indie darling David Gordon Green has dipped his toe in star-packed fare before, but the results have been widely mixed, with “Pineapple Express” sparking to audiences while both “The Sitter” and “Your Highness” fell mostly flat. Despite Green’s own interest in broader comedies, he looks to be finally marrying his earlier dramatic sensibilities with pointed humor in “Our Brand is Crisis.” Based on the documentary of the same name, Green’s latest centers on political campaign maneuvering in South America, as headed up by Sandra Bullock as fixer “Calamity” Jane Bodine. A strong supporting cast, including Billy Bob Thornton, Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan, further up the film’s cred, giving Green a fresh chance to shine in the studio space.
“Trumbo” ( November 6 )
Jay Roach made a name for himself as the director of the “Austin Powers” franchise and comedy blockbusters like “Meet the Parents,” though in the past couple of years he’s reinvented himself as the Emmy-winning director of HBO political dramas “Recount” and “Game Change.” His television work should serve him well in the upcoming biographical drama, “Trumbo,” which stars Bryan Cranston in an awards-ready role as the eponymous screenwriter who was blacklisted by Hollywood at the height of McCarthyism. Trumbo ended up fighting the U.S. government and studio bosses in a war over words and freedom, and if Roach can successfully bring his political edge to the big screen, the results should be enthralling. Louis C.K., Elle Fanning, John Goodman, Diane Lane, Alan Tudyk, Michael Stuhlbarg and Helen Mirren co-star.
“Spotlight” ( November 6 )
Looking to rebound after the critically maligned comedy “The Cobbler” earlier this year, writer-director Thomas McCarthy is in good hands with a star-studded ensemble and a plot ripped from one of the biggest headlines of all time. Starring Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery and Stanley Tucci, the drama tells the riveting true story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe team that investigated allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church. Their year-long search for the truth uncovered a cover-up at the highest level of Boston’s religious, legal and government establishments and ignited a wave of controversy and revelations around the world. McCarthy, best known for small human dramas and strong character work, paints his biggest canvas yet on this ambitious drama, and his incredible cast is too promising to miss in action.
“By the Sea” ( November 13 )
“Secret in Their Eyes” ( November 20 ) Hollywood has had an uneven track record mounting domestic remakes of foreign language hits. For every success (“Let Me In”) there has been a handful of tragic imitators (“The Vanishing”), but things look optimistic for “Secret in Their Eyes” based on the acclaimed talent involved. The remake of Juan Jose Campanella 2009 Argentinian crime drama, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, stars a triumvirate of Hollywood heavyweights — Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman and Chiwetel Ejiofor — and marks Billy Ray’s first film since 2007’s “Breach” (though he recently received a writing Oscar nom for “Captain Phillips”). The shocking story of an FBI investigation into the death of one of its members’ children is full of twists that really hit hard emotionally. It’ll be hard to compete with the astute execution of the original, but here’s hoping Ray and company have what it takes. Angelina Jolie’s transition from actress to director has been largely effective so far. Although her first two films — war dramas “In the Land of Blood and Honey” and “Unbroken” — may have been a bit too ambitious for their own good, they showed a directorial promise that was hard to deny. Based on the gorgeous first trailer for “By the Sea,” it appears scaling back for a morality drama between a husband and wife was the right direction for Jolie to go in to really hone her craft. The drama finds the director in front of the camera as well, starring opposite husband Brad Pitt as a women trying to fix her martial crisis while on vacation at a French seaside resort. The 1970’s setting and alluring vistas should make for an emotional drama, one that Jolie has already gone on record as calling an art film. Forget Brad Pitt for a second, because “By the Sea” could be Jolie’s true directorial breakout if all goes well.
“Creed” ( November 25 )
Nearly everyone in the indie community was waiting with anticipation to hear what project Ryan Coogler would take on after the staggering success of “Fruitvale Station.” When it was announced he’d be directing “Creed,” a spin-off of the “Rocky” franchise centered around Apollo Creed’s son, it turned quite a few heads. However, the project slowly started coming together, with “Fruitvale” breakout Michael B. Jordan stepping into the lead role opposite Sylvester Stallone and a dramatically talented supporting cast, including Tessa Thompson and Phylicia Rashad. When the stunning first trailer dropped, it was clear this was a sports movie to get very, very excited about. In what looks to be a continuation of the “Rocky” universe but a revitalization of the aesthetic approach to the series (Coogler is going more grounded than ever for a look at sports and urban life), “Creed” should have no problem becoming the heavyweight of 2015 boxing dramas.
“The Danish Girl” ( November 27 )
Poised to be a perfect combination of rising star power — from current it girl Alicia Vikander to newly minted Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne — and fascinating historical drama, Tom Hooper’s “The Danish Girl” seems guaranteed to set the awards circuit alight this season. At its heart, the film promises to be a classic love story, but its timely nature should also set it apart as a tale still relevant to today’s world. Complete with a Alexandre Desplat score, the art-infused feature will likely look and sound stellar, but we’re banking on this one to give us sterling performances that should carry over well into 2016.
“I Saw the Light” ( November 27 )
Tom Hiddleston may have rocketed into the Hollywood stratosphere thanks to his indelible turns in the Marvel universe, but the actor has true chops and appears to finally be able to show them off to a wider audience thanks to his upped recognizablity and a meaty role in Marc Abraham’s Hank Williams biopic. With Elizabeth Olsen by his side as Williams’ wife Audrey Mae, the film will probably find plenty of time to pile on the romance and classic jams. If nothing else, Hiddleston in a cowboy hat is certainly something new. Bring on the country twang.
“In the Heart of the Sea” ( December 11 )
Going head to head with “Star Wars” would be a David and Goliath-type box office battle for any title, yet that somehow is only fitting for Ron Howard’s epic “In the Heart of the Sea.” Starring Chris Hemsworth (his second collaboration with Howard after “Rush”), Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Whishaw and Brendan Gleeson, the historical disaster film recounts the story that inspired Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” During an 1820 voyage, the whaleship Essex is sunk by a large bull sperm whale, forcing the crew to survive on the open ocean for 90 days and fight the untamed beast. The last time Howard brought stranded adventurers to the big screen, it was the miraculous “Apollo 13,” and we’re certainly hoping he’s able to scale those dramatic heights for this harrowing drama about the resiliency of the human spirit.
“The Hateful Eight” ( December 25 )
Any time Quentin Tarantino sits in the director’s chair, it’s a cause for celebration, and this Christmas’ “The Hateful Eight” will be no exception. In many ways, the director’s eighth feature looks to be a greatest hits collection. Not only is he returning to the Western genre after the Oscar-winning success of “Django Unchained,” but he’s back in business with some of his greatest collaborators, including cinematographer Bob Richardson and cast members Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth and Bruce Dern. Throw stars like Kurt Russell and a roughed-up Jennifer Jason Leigh into the mix, and it seems like we have ourselves a new Tarantino classic in the making. Best of all, the director and Richardson shot the movie on 70mm film and will premiere it on a limited release road tour at select 70mm theaters. In the days of digital overload, it really doesn’t get more classic Hollywood than that. “Joy” ( December 25 )
In keeping with David O. Russell’s interest in left-of-center characters, “Joy” is the untold story of the inventor of the Miracle Mop. Jennifer Lawrence plays Joy Mangano, a single mother of three who hustles to achieve the American Dream. Though she starts out with the intention of providing for her children, Joy eventually succeeds in building an empire. She encounters betrayal and ill will along the way; in the end, she has only her sheer will and fierce imagination to thank for her rollicking accomplishments. It’s a classic rags-to-riches story, and, of course, it also stars Bradley Cooper.
“Snowden” ( December 25 ) “The Revenant” ( December 25 )
Spending Christmas with Oliver Stone may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but count us incredibly excited that Stone is heading back to theaters, especially because he’s got the controversial topic of the NSA and whistleblowers providing the backbone for his latest expose of American politics. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as the titular Snowden, and the film chronicles his rise to becoming one of the world’s most controversial figures after he leaks classified government documents to The Guardian in June 2013. Stone has always been an impassioned filmmaker, and this timely subject matter should be just the fuel to reignite his fires, something fans have been waiting for since the disappointing returns of “W.” and “Savages.” We’ve all heard the reports by now that the conditions on “The Revenant” set were “a living hell.” From long shoot days in the brutal cold to disagreements that led to defections to a budget that doubled to accommodate so many schedule changes, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s unrelenting methods tested the sanity of his crew. But, in true Inarritu fashion, the director promises |
beliefs into law. Society today is far more heterogeneous than it was in the days of our inception. Government belongs to everyone; prayer is personal. Maybe it all just comes down to good manners. If we know something we are about to do would offend someone or make them unnecessarily uncomfortable, we shouldn’t do it. Pretty sure that’s in the Bible as the Golden Rule.
We would do well to thus keep public, aloud prayer to places where others share our beliefs – in church, at home around the table or with like-minded friends. Posturing as holy or religious is offensive. Christ condemned the Sadducees and Pharisees for their public show/pretense of religiosity. What of Jesus’ biblical command, “When you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret”?
Brian Lee, D.C., a guest chaplain for the U.S. House of Representatives, said, “None of the reasons in favor of praying for the state suggest you should do so publicly in the halls of government, outside the home or the context of a worship service. None of them fundamentally overcome Christ’s warning against hypocrisy and vanity. When I pray publicly in church, I pray in common and on behalf of every member of that community. It is not only unchristian, but rude, to offer prayer publicly on behalf of people who don’t claim Christ.”
Amen.
Marianne Stanley is an attorney, college professor and former journalist who believes many of our nation’s ills could be cured if our children were taught critical thinking skills beginning at the elementary level and continuing through middle and high school. She can be reached at MarianneStanley@DaytonCityPaper.com.
Debate Right: Oyez! Oyez! Pray for the high courtCharles Zhang, the founder and CEO of Chinese internet giant Sohu, has shot down rumors swirling around the Chinese internet that he is dating Taylor Swift, offending all foreign women in the process.
On a livestream session on Friday morning, the 52-year-old tycoon claimed that he was definitely not the American pop princess's latest squeeze. "It's a rumor! No taste for foreign women!" he said, adding that he didn't even know who Taylor Swift was.
So take that, TSwift!
To explain how all this came about, you should know that currently there is a completely unsubstantiated rumor circulating around Weibo that "America's number one singer" is dating a middle-aged Chinese tech tycoon. While Chinese netizens have decided that Swft must be that singer, they have not yet figured out who the lucky tycoon could be.
After the livestream, Zhang's comments went viral on Chinese social media with Weibo users playfully accusing him of playing hard to get. Though most have come to the reasonable conclusion that Zhang probably isn't Taytay's type either.
Swift is known for her string of high-profile romances with stars like Jake Gyllenhaal, Taylor Lautner, Joe Jonas, John Mayer, Harry Styles, and, most recently, Tom Hiddleston. None of which would appear to have a lot in common with Zhang.
So it looks like ZhangSwift is not going to be a thing, which is too bad, because they could have made some beautiful music together.Oracle lost a patent and copyright case against Google last year when a Northern California District judge ruled that APIs, or “declaring code,” cannot be copyrighted. But Oracle is now appealing that decision, hoping that the "structure, sequence, and organization" of its Java APIs will be protected under copyright law.
On Friday, the Application Developers Alliance along with Rackspace, TMSOFT, and Stack Exchange filed an amicus brief in the appeals case, which is being heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. (The Federal Circuit normally only hears patent cases, but it's taking on this copyright case because it was joined with patent infringement allegations by Oracle in the original case.) In the brief, the interested parties explain that for the past several decades, declaring code has been understood to be outside of copyright while implementing code is protected by copyright. “Were this Court to accept Oracle’s position, almost every player in the industry would be susceptible to suits for copyright infringement when using declaring code,” the brief states.
The group of developers also says that the court can't solve software developers' liability problems by allowing APIs to be copyrighted and then applying a fair use doctrine to determine whether they infringed. “If liability for the entire market were determined based on a case-by-case determination of fair use (an already unpredictable doctrine), developers would be unable to adequately predict their exposure.”
Since Oracle brought its appeal to the Federal Circuit in February of this year, Microsoft, EMC, and Netapp have together filed an amicus brief in favor of Oracle's position. The document states that without copyrighted APIs, the software industry would become destabilized.
Naturally, the signatories on this week's amicus brief disagree. “It's like using the + sign to mean addition,” wrote Joel Spolsky, chairman of the Application Developers Alliance Board of Directors and CEO and co-founder of Stack Exchange, in a press release on Friday. “Letting one company copyright APIs would be like letting one company have a monopoly on the use of the + sign. It's nothing more than a ridiculous, shameful attempt to abuse the legal system for the purpose of extortion.”Shipping Container House Hardwood Timber Floor
We installed the hardwood timber floor and the shower base over the weekend. The flooring went down using a secret nailer and a straight air bradder/nailer. The timber we used is called Mountain Gum and the features look very nice, the boards are 25mm thick and 130mm wide, supplied in random lengths.
To start off we laid the first board down with some flooring glue and used the air bradder/nailer because the secret nailer is much too big to get close to the walls. The bradder fires 50mm galvanised nails into the boards which we can putty and fill later on. At first we were using a 15L bucket of flooring glue and spreading it on with a spatula and gloves. This method was making a huge mess and the glue went everywhere. The sausages are a little more expensive but much quicker and cleaner.
The secret nailer fires the nail into the tongue on the board and is then hidden when the next board slides over the top. The glue is important to stop the creaking and movement in the boards over time. Overall the floor was exceptionally quick to install and the hidden fixings are a good look.
The shower base is a solid 25mm marmox base made from a lightweight concrete composite mixture. The size is 900x1200mm and sets the fall in the shower floor so we can tile directly over it. The base was easy to install and went down quickly with one cartridge of polyurethane glue. However we were very disappointed with the inconsistent base thickness, overall it was out by around 6mm (which makes a big difference when laying the tiles.) We put buckets of water onto the shower base overnight to push the base into the glue.Hockey Blogger ReviewThey say I'm the most positive guy on my block - like Jenny, but with more hair and more denim. But today's edition of PLUS/MINUS, well, it should come with a box of tissue - as there seems to be a preponderance of MINUSes. I'm going for righteous indignation here, not whining, but - full disclosure - studies show that at least 8% of people can't tell the difference.The Rio Olympics. Why bother? Nationalism, track and field, corruption, horror stories about venues and displaced people. The Olympics continue to be the worst. At least there's no hockey at this one.If the Predators go into next season with Pekka Rinne as their starter, they will be a middle-of-the-pack team when they could be the Cup Favorite - along with Pittsburgh and (depending) Tampa. They are a good to great goalie away from being a dominant force in the NHL.Prediction: Before October, Ben Bishop takes an unusual new interest in country music.The fact that the Leafs even talked about talking about signing Kris Russel. We're talking replacement level player here and one less roster spot for the type of fast, puck moving defenseman who actually helps you win games.Now, almost nothing leaks from the Leafs camp, so it might be a total fabrication to say they were interested. I hope so. Because if not then I say:Lou Lamoriello. His ridiculous rules about performance bonuses, facial hair, not talking to the media and whatever other eccentric stupidity he enforces is only cute if he's the adviser. If he moves the team away from the way they were going, and if he forces Kyle Dubas to take a job elsewhere, then getting him may have been a terrible decision.If the Leafs are sticking with the plan, if Dubas does in fact succeed him and they maintain their position as a forward thinking, analytics using team, then Lou can keep his PLUS.The OHL and the other leagues that make up Canadian Junior Hockey should not be able to get away with making profits off players they don't pay. It's unconscionable. It's unfair and it should be illegal.It's shameful.Jake Gardiner is an elite, #1, top-line defenseman, with an amazing contract.He is the Leafs #1. Not Morgan Rielly. It is highly unlikely Morgan Rielly ever reaches Gardiner's level. Also, his biggest impacts are defensive and he skates like the wind and is one of the best defensive defenseman in the NHL. After Auston Matthews, he is the Leafs' most important player.Can we please recognize him as this?"Top Six Forwards" or ":Top Six/ Bottom Six" or "Can he play in the top six?"NO. "Top Six" is Dead. Teams need balance, they should try to have 3 x #1 Centres. They should have balance up and down their lineup and work towards more even ice-times for players who aren't elite. They should take advantage of how bad most teams 3rd and 4th lines are by having scoring and youth on those lines.You shouldn't have a just checkers on your bottom six because you shouldn't have any checkers in your lineup - if you can't skate, can't score, you can't play.For the last time, "impactful" is not a word and the definition of insanity has nothing to do with what you expect out of results.The filmography of Nicholas Cage is magnificent.I love when people say 'Just Saying."The Coyotes have Strome, Dvorak, Keller and MacInnis as their C prospects. That's pretty amazing.The Leafs have Nylander, Matthews and Kadri. The Oilers have RNH, Draisaitl and McDavid.My losery trifecta is going to be a lot more fun to watch, starting now.Taylor Hall for Adam Larsson was a bad trade - because Taylor Hall is a 5v5 scoring machine, was stupidly blamed for losing and the idea of 'culture' in the NHL is beyond stupid, (It could only be described accurately in an R rated environment where I was free to use profanity, mock people and make unflattering, offensive comparisons).However, I let me make an unpopular opinion: Adam Larsson is so good defensively, and the NHL (including it's best crowd-sourcing stats guys) have such an under-appreciation for defense (actual defense, not "Kris Russel" Defense) that Larsson's lack of offensive success is making him under-appreciated.Let me try a thought exercise here and defend the Taylor Hall Trade:The Oilers are not hurting for offense and, in fact, probably have the best group of forwards the salary cap era has ever seen.Taylor Hall has a pretty big injury history and is a higher than average risk to get hurt.. Allows them to address needs while keeping their 3 x # 1 C model in place (McDavid, RNH, Draisaitl).Gives them better lineup balance.Gives them an elite defender, who is right handed and cheaper. And, the Oilers have someone on their staff who truley understands how to value defense.They were immediately able to somewhat address Hall's absence with Lucic.Now, I still think it's a horrible trade because Taylor Hall is as elite as they come and the opportunity cost is massive. However, if (and I mean IF) Larsson can provide defense on an elite level, perhaps it's not the worst thing ever, as I have been wont to say.Blueberry Yop. It's so good I'm not even getting paid to say this.Unpopular Opinion #235: I think Jamie Benn might have just got massively overpaid. He's a point-per-game scorer, but his defensive impacts are not that great.For the next 4 years, Jamie Benn will make $4.5 million more than Taylor Hall.Benn is 27. Kucherov is 23. I know who I'd rather have. Can't wait to see what Nikita gets paid.Watching how the Lightning go forward with their roster is going to be exciting. I bet the reason no one has traded for Ben Bishop is because they want to see if Kucherov, Palat, Johnson, Namestnikov or Killorn become available first.ownthepuck.blogspot.ca is where you get Hero Charts. They are amazing. Great thanks to Dominic Galamini for putting on a great show.Thanks also to Eklund for making this possible, and to my man EO behind the scenes.Thanks to WaronIce, and whoever was bringing that to us. Thanks also to Corica.hockey and whoever is now bringing us that.And thanks to my Mom for keeping the A.C blasting in the basement and for agreeing to lay off the Chris deBurgh so I can get some writing done.I saw at least two different people (both of whom make more money than me and, one assume's, have credentials) refer to Antoinne Vermette as a "top-six centre" this week.That is so lazy that, when reached for comment, Marc Bergevin expressed concern over how they keep their job in the face of incompetence.Thanks for readingIn an exit poll of voters at Australia House in London on Saturday, conducted by Australian Times, Labor holds a commanding lead over the Coalition on a two party preferred basis. However, the primary vote of the two major parties and the Greens was split by just 2%.
Following the casting of their ballots, 116 people agreed to share with Australian Times how they had voted in the election for the House of Representatives.
First preference
Liberal/National: 34%
Labor: 33%
Greens 32%
Other 1%
Two party preferred
Labor: 63%
Liberal/National: 37%
Both Liberal and Labor parties historically consider votes cast at Australia House in London to strongly favour Labor, reflecting the progressive mindsets of travellers and expatriates.
As such, the results of the Australian Times exit poll indicate migration of Labor’s core left primary vote over to The Greens, evidence of a dissatisfaction with Julia Gillard and her government that translates to a swing of the middle-ground vote towards Tony Abbott and the Coalition. This trend may be borne out in the wider election next Saturday.
The results of the exit poll were described as “very encouraging” by Liberal spokesman in the UK, Jason Groves.
“This is a Labor booth,” said Mr Groves.
“We normally poll about 30% here (two party preferred). This is good news to report to HQ.”
With approximately 20,000 people expected to cast their vote at the Australian High Commission in London by the time the polls close there next Friday, Australia House is the largest polling station in the election.
It is also unique from polling stations in Australia in that it is truly a national polling booth, hosting voters representing all parts of Australia as opposed to just a locality.
While conventionally considered a ‘backpackers’ booth’, representing the youth vote, this is a too simplistic notion. The voters encountered by Australian Times during the exit poll represented a broader cross-section of Australian society than the dated London Aussie backpacker stereotype would suggest.
Those polled included stroller pushing mums, working professional couples in their 30s and 40s and travelling empty nesters in their 50s and 60s as well as the young working holiday makers who occasionally even had a visiting parent in tow.
Polling officials at Australia House reported that 700 to 800 Australians cast ballots in person there each on Thursday and Friday with a similar turn-out on Saturday. Many more thousands are expected by Friday this week when polls in London close ahead of election day in Australia on Saturday August 21.
With many London based Australians away in Europe for the summer holidays it is also expected that the proportion of postal votes cast via the High Commission in London for this election to be higher than usual.
More Election 2010 on Australian Times:
How and when to vote at Australia House
Message from Julia Gillard to Australian Times readers
Tony Abbott’s message to overseas voters
Interview with Greens’ Bob Brown
Will the real Julia Gillard please step up?
More can vote after GetUp! wins High Court election caseReports have emerged that the controversial Church of Scientology is attempting to'recruit' Australian wildlife conservation family the Irwins.
According to Woman's Day, the church has been courting Terri, 52, Bindi, 18 and Robert, 13, into the fold.
The publication quoted an unnamed source, who said that Bindi in particular was a very attractive prospect as a new member.
Courted?Reports have emerged that the controversial Church of Scientology is attempting to'recruit' Australian wildlife conservation family the Irwins
'They want to make Bindi the poster child for Scientology,' the source allegedly said.
The'source' also claimed that Bindi's'spirituality' and popularity around the world also made her a good candidate.
'Bindi is very spiritual, especially after losing her dad at a very young age. But she is also very bright and intelligent and beloved around the world,' they allegedly said.
High-profile: According to Woman's Day, the church has been courting Terri, 52, Bindi, 18 and Robert, 13, into the fold
Poster child? The publication quoted an unnamed source, who said that Bindi in particular was a very attractive prospect as a new member
'She is an inspiration to people young and old – and there is no doubt Scientology would love to bring her on board.'
The magazine claims that both Bindi and Terri had been 'friendly' with high-profile Scientology devotee John Travolta after the trio met at a G'Day Australia event in New York after Steve Irwin's death in 2008.
Daily Mail Australia has reached out to the Church of Scientology for comment.
Famous friends: The magazine claims that both Bindi and Terri had been 'friendly' with high-profile Scientology devotee John Travolta after the trio met at a G'Day Australia event in New York after Steve Irwin's death in 2008
The Church of Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard when the first church opened in Los Angeles.
Long known for courting high-profile people, the church also runs Celebrity Centre International, based in Los Angeles, as well as a number of smaller celebrity Centres around the world.
The Church also counts such high-profile stars as Tom Cruise, Orange is the new Black's Laura Prepon, The Simpsons' Nancy Cartwright, Australian singer Kate Ceberano and actress Juliette Lewis.Wal-Mart vice president of communications David Tovar said Monday on Fox News that the retail giant didn’t expected any disruptions on Black Friday, despite planned worker protests.
The Wal-Mart worker are protesting against poor wages, unfair hours and lack of benefits. They also claim the retail giant has retaliated against workers who tried to organize a union.
“We don’t think any of that is going to have any impact on our ability to serve our customers on Black Friday,” Tovar said. “We are excited about a great Black Friday event that we are going to have this year and we are really going to delight our customers, we’ve got some great items, unbelievable prices, and we think Black Friday at Wal-Mart this year is going to be awesome.”
Wal-Mart has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) has violated federal labor laws. Wal-Mart is seeking a ruling to block the planned walkouts and protests on the busiest day of the year.
“We think what they’re doing is illegal,” Tovar explained. “They’ve been doing these kinds of demonstrations for more than 30 days, but this week, like I said, we are focused like a laser on Black Friday and we think it is going to be an awesome day at Wal-Mart.”
He added that the planned actions against Wal-Mart might not even materialize. Tovar refused to say whether any workers who walked out on Black Friday would be fired. He said such incidents would be handled on a case by case basis.
At the next commercial break, viewers were informed that, “This segment was brought to you by Wal-Mart.”
Watch video, via Media Matters, below:I'm getting jealous of all of the pictures Jason posts of his adorable dog, Bailey, so I thought I'd squeeze in a gratuitous picture of my own.
The little one on the left is Patton (he has one blue eye and one brown eye), the black one is Winston and the red one is Jackson. Yes, they are named after General George Patton, Winston Churchill and Andrew Jackson. Don't ask.
Jackson was our first. Winston came a couple of years later because we thought Jackson was lonely. We meant to stop at two, but then we found Patton with his wonky eyes and his Gene Simmons tongue and couldn't help ourselves. We're in good company, though "“ dachshunds have been the faithful companions of authors, artists, politicians and actors for centuries. I thought I'd share a few "celebrity" dachshund tales with you. If anything, this will make myself feel better about owning three of them.
Picasso and Lump
A dachshund who has gotten a fair amount of press in the last couple of years is Lump (pronounced "Loomp," it's German for rascal).
Our own Andréa, the author of the "Feel Art Again" posts, could tell you more about Picasso's works than I can, but I do know that Lump was featured in many of his pieces. He acquired Lump from photographer David Douglas Duncan in 1957 when Duncan brought Lump along on a trip to photograph Picasso. It was love at first sight. Lump didn't get along with Duncan's other dog and made it pretty clear that he preferred to become an artist's muse. Lump had his portrait painted for the first time that very day. Their relationship is chronicled in Duncan's book Picasso and Lump: A Dachshund's Odyssey. The friendship is pretty clear from the pictures in the book, which include Picasso holding Lump like an infant and letting the dog eat from his dinner plate.
Andy Warhol, Amos and Archie
Andy Warhol only got a dachshund puppy because his boyfriend wanted one, so they got Archie. Warhol ended up being the one infatuated with the breed, though. Warhol would bring the dog to interviews with him to "answer" questions he didn't care for. He also took Archie to galleries, on business trips, on photo shoots and to his studio.
Things were going so swimmingly for the two of them that Andy decided a second dachsie was in order, which was when Amos came along. Archie stopped accompanying Andy everywhere so he could stay home and play with Amos. Even though they weren't seen out and about together as often, the breed's influence on Andy's work was still evident: he painted one of his famous colorful portraits of Maurice, an art collector's dachshund.
David Hockney, Stanley and Boodgie
One of Warhol's pop art contemporaries, David Hockney, also found inspiration from his dogs. Stanley and Boodgie were the featured attraction in about 45 oil paintings in his 1995 gallery show. Hockney is known for his dry humor, but when it comes to his dachshunds he is downright adoring "“ he actually refused to sell any of the paintings of them because he felt they were "too intimate." Stanley and Boodgie are also the subjects of David Hockney's Dog Days, a book of illustrations and photos released last year.
I particularly enjoyed these sketches because I see our dogs wedge themselves in weird positions and crevices like this all of the time. I thought it was just their individual quirks, but apparently it's a breed thing.
Waldi
I didn't mean to turn this into "Wiener Dogs in Art," but what can I say? They must be popular muses: a dachshund named Waldi just happened to be the first-ever mascot of the Olympics when they were held in Munich in 1972. The dachshund was chosen to represent the summer games because the breed originated in Germany and they has certain personality characteristics similar to those of athletes "“ namely, agility and tenacity. And, if they are anything like my dachshunds, stubbornness.
The stripes in Waldi's midsection were the colors of the games that summer. Unfortunately, the cute dachshund mascot isn't the most memorable thing about the 1972 Olympics "“ that was the year of the "Munich Massacre," when 11 Irsaeli competitors were killed by Palestinian terrorists.
William Randolph Hearst and Helen
William Randolph Hearst had many dachshunds, but none that he loved as much as his Helen. He even had a little ramp installed on a fountain at Hearst Castle so she could use it as her own personal swimming pool.
Hearst was so devastated when Helen died in 1942, he wrote an elegy for her that was published in Time magazine:
"A boy and his dog are no more inseparable companions than an old fellow and his dog. An old bozo is a nuisance to almost everybody — except his dog....She always slept on a big chair in my room and her solicitous gaze followed me to bed at night and was the first thing to greet me when I woke in the morning. Then when I arose she begged for the special distinction of being put in my bed.... "Aldous Huxley says: 'Every dog thinks its master Napoleon, hence the popularity of dogs.' That is not the strict truth. Every dog adores its master notwithstanding the master's imperfections of which it is probably acutely aware.... "So as your dog loves you, you come to love your dog. Not because it thinks you are Napoleon, not because YOU think you are Napoleon. Not because you WANT to be Napoleon. But because love creates love, devotion inspires devotion, unselfishness begets unselfishness and self-sacrifice.... "Helen died in my bed and in my arms.... I will not need a monument to remember her. But I am placing over her little grave a stone with the inscription: "Here lies dearest Helen —my devoted friend."
Kaiser Wilhelm II and Wadl, Hexl and Senta
The last emperor of Germany loved dachshunds so much he buried five of them in the park at Huis Doorn, his residence-in-exile after WWI. The most famous of them, though, are Wadl, Hexl and Senta. Senta accompanied the Kaiser during WWI, which earned him the honor of having a stone dedicated to him at the Huis Doorn park. Wadl and Hexl are famous for a more mischievous reason, though. When the Kaiser was paying a visit to Austria to visit Archduke Franz Ferdinand, they gobbled up one of his golden pheasants.
John Wayne and his dog
While I can't find any entertaining stories about John Wayne and his dog, I thought this picture was worth sharing:
Other celebrities and their dachshunds include:
"¢ Dorothy Parker and Robinson
"¢ Dita Von Teese and Greta and Eva
"¢ Napoleon Bonaparte and Grenouille and Faussete
"¢ Carole Lombard, Clark Gable and Commissioner
"¢ Mary Tyler Moore and Dash
"¢ Wayne Gretzky and Clyde
Do you have an ornery dachsie? If you're like me, you love to trade stories about them"¦ so let's hear it! Good stories about other breeds are welcome too (I suppose"¦).The NFL held its second annual Personal Finance Camp for players from April 4 to 7 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The first session, “Funding an Uncertain Lifespan,” was led by Patrick Kerney, who played in the NFL for 11 years and is now director of business development at National Fire & Casualty Investments. After retiring from the league, he got his MBA at Columbia University and was the vice president of player benefits at the NFL.
Here’s the slideshow he used in the class, which focused on staying ahead of inflation and the importance of controlling what you can: Where you live, what you spend, what level of goods and services you purchase, and realizing the difference between what you want to buy and what you need to buy.THIRUVANANDHAPURAM: Worsening heat, fodder shortages and the threat of drought are forcing many hard-hit dairy farmers in the Anantapur area of India’s southern Kerala state to reduce their herds, experts say.
“This is nothing less than a catastrophe,” said Ananthakrishnan Kannappan, a livestock agent for 30 years in Anantapur. “This is the first time that due to lack of water and fodder, farmers are eagerly competing to sell off their livestock for throwaway prices.” But the solution to the problem is simple and small, livestock experts argue: heat-tolerant dwarf cows.
A team of researchers from Kerala Veterinary and Animal Sciences University and the state government’s Animal Husbandry Department are now promoting a switch to Vechur and Kasargod cattle, two local varieties known for being easy to raise, resistant to diseases and — most important — better at tolerating high temperatures than the more popular crossbred cattle.
“High-yielding crossbreed varieties of cattle can faint or even die during hot and humid summer days,” said E.M. Muhammed, an expert on animal breeding and genetics at the university. “Our natural breeds can better withstand the effects of climate change.” Dwarf cows, on the other hand, appear to carry a “thermometer gene” that allows them to better tolerate high temperatures, researchers said.
Dwarf cows were already gaining popularity among some farmers because they consume less food and water than conventional cattle varieties, the experts said. Small-scale farmers need only one or two dwarf cows to meet the milk needs of their households, they said.
The breeds are also less susceptible to mastitis, a common udder infection. Kerala farmers lose at least 250 crore rupees (around $40 million) each year due to mastitis in crossbreed varieties, according to researchers at the animal husbandry department.
According to the 2012 Kerala livestock census, not a single case of severe mastitis has been reported among dwarf cows.
Quality, not quantity
Still, many commercial cattle farmers are sceptical about the benefits of downsizing to dwarves. Of the 2.3 million cattle in Kerala, only 6.5 per cent are dwarf varieties, agricultural experts say.
One issue is cost. A dwarf cow costs almost the same as a larger crossbred — about 20,000 rupees ($300). But a crossbreed cow, when it is healthy, produces much more milk than its dwarf counterpart, making crossbreeds a popular choice among farmers.
“I am concerned about the commercial aspects,” said K. Ravindran, a farmer from Palakkad. “In order to produce 10 litres of milk, a farmer has to rear at least four Vechur cows instead of one crossbreed.” But Basha Balakrishnan, a farmer living in Calicut, argues that customers are willing to pay more for milk from dwarf cows. Her dairy herd includes 35 crossbreeds and 15 dwarf varieties, and she says she can sell a litre of milk from the smaller animals for three times as much as the larger cows.
“Though dwarf milk is costlier, many people — especially the rich who live in flats in Calicut — are eager to purchase it because it is thought to be more nutritious than crossbred milk,” she said.
Balakrishnan’s dwarf cows are even famous. One of her Vechur cows was recently featured in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s shortest cow at a height of 61cm (24 inches).
With India facing growing heat and drought threats, other state governments have reached out to learn more about Kerala’s dwarf cows as a way to help protect their own cattle and dairy industries.
Government officials from the state of Gujarat recently bought three Vechur cows from Kerala, while Punjab Chief Minister Prakesh Singh Badal took six dwarf cows from Kerala to his farm in Chandigarh, livestock experts say.
“It is a fact that the characteristics of the seasons have been altered by the disastrous impacts of climate change, so our lifestyle needs to adapt to using our indigenous flora and fauna,” said K. Ramankutty, a dairy farmer in Palakkad.
“The dwarf cow is a great weapon against climate change,” he said.
Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2015
On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google PlayBrendan Rodgers has taken issue with Sir Alex Ferguson over the comments in his autobiography on current Liverpool players, claiming he was bitterly disappointed by what he said about Jordan Henderson and saddened that such a towering managerial figure will now be remembered for making "inappropriate" remarks about players with whom he has never worked.
The former Manchester United manager was being critical of Kenny Dalglish's most recent spell at Anfield when he said that he would never have spent £20m on Stewart Downing; that Steven Gerrard was not "a top, top player", and that Henderson, bought for £16m from Sunderland two years ago, has an odd gait, running with a straight back, that will cause him fitness problems later in his career.
Downing has now left Liverpool, and as captain of England with more than a hundred caps, Gerrard can probably look after himself. While Rodgers thinks Ferguson is one of the very few people in football who does not rate his captain highly, he reserved most of his scorn for the apparently gratuitous attack on Henderson, 23, "an honest young player trying to make his way in the game". The comment was especially wounding and unnecessary, he felt, because Ferguson has a reputation for working with young players and must know how sensitive they can be to criticism.
"I think if Sir Alex ever bumps into Jordan he might want to apologise for that," the Liverpool manager said. "The comment surprised me, I have to be honest,coming from someone with such status in the game. Maybe it was meant as flippant but to a young player making his way in the game it could be damaging. Every player is different, and every player at this club has had his strengths and weaknesses medically assessed. The statement in terms of Jordan was inappropriate.
Jordan Henderson's running style was criticised by Sir Alex Ferguson in his latest autobiography. Photograph: Michael Mayhew/Sportsphoto/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
"Sir Alex is in a position to say what he likes, and you don't have to agree with it, but I think there is a sadness to this as it is something that will probably stay with people for a long while. I think every football person would have enjoyed his achievements in the game and the legacy he has left, but now people are only going to talk about the comments in the book. In a way I can understand some of the comments, when you have been chasing a club as successful as Liverpool you have to find ways to bring them down. But this is a club that has class and history and in the modern era is fighting to get back to that level again."
Ferguson also remarked rather caustically that Liverpool were around eight players short of what it would take to win the league. "That's probably two short of what they need then," Rodgers countered. "I don't really want to give the book any more publicity than it has already had, there's been enough reaction in the past few days. Sir Alex has obviously bided his time and now feels that his retirement is the time to put a few things straight. It is his right to do that, but I won't be rushing out to buy a copy."Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany has been injured for nearly two and a half years in total since joining the club.
City boss Pep Guardiola revealed Kompany had suffered knee ligament damage before Wednesday's clash with Borussia Monchengladbach, and on Friday he confirmed the Belgium defender is facing six weeks out.
It's the latest in a long line of fitness problems. In total, the 30-year-old has now been sidelined for 260 days this year since suffering a calf strain during the festive period, followed by further injuries to his thigh and groin.
Since joining City from German side Hamburg in 2008, Kompany has been sidelined for a total of 878 days from 37 injuries, according to Physioroom.
The Belgium defender has suffered most from calf and shin damage, missing nearly 351 days from 14 setbacks, followed by two thigh injuries totalling 196 days.
In May this year, Kompany underwent thigh muscle surgery which kept him out of action until September, having previously suffered a two-month lay off from a thigh strain in October 2013.
As Kompany prepares for another spell on the sidelines, here's a breakdown of his injury record since joining City...Section grower Jeremy Strother, left, and production assistant Dan Brennan prepare to move marijuana plant clones into a growing room at Tweed Marijuana in Smiths Falls, Ontario, on Feb. 20, 2014. (Blair Gable/Reuters)
In a strongly worded new report out Tuesday, researchers at the Brookings Institution call on the federal government to eliminate roadblocks to medical marijuana research in the United States.
"The federal government is stifling medical research in a rapidly transforming area of public policy that has consequences for public health and public safety," the report, written by John Hudak and Grace Wallack, says. "Statutory, regulatory, bureaucratic, and cultural barriers have paralyzed science and threatened the integrity of research freedom in this area."
Noting that medical marijuana is already legal in dozens of states, the report argues that conflicting and contradictory federal policy is "interfering with the relationship between doctor and patient."
Even in states where medical marijuana is legal, doctors, patients and researchers often find themselves caught in a murky gray area between state and federal policy. Since 1972, the Drug Enforcement Administration has classified marijuana as a Schedule 1 controlled substance, meaning it |
post office grow from 75 offices in 1789 to nearly 77,000 in 1900. The number of offices would peak in 1901, at 76,945, then start to decline after that with the advent of rural free delivery, which eliminated the need for many offices.
So while the USPS closes post offices today due to shrinking revenues and postal service usage, the decline in post offices has been going on for a century. As of 2013, the total number of post offices stood at 26,670. Since 2012, the postal service has closed 141 facilities as part of a cost-cutting strategy it calls a "network rationalization plan." While the USPS had planned on cutting more than 3,600 offices as of 2011, it eventually decided to instead slash hours at rural offices.
2) The fast death of your friendly neighborhood mailman
Of course, as the USPS grew, so did its ranks of employees. The number of workers skyrocketed as the population (and therefore number of customers) likewise grew, but in the last decade the postal service has aggressively cut back on workers. Today, there are just under 500,000 workers, down by around 300,000 from the nearly 800,000 there were in 1999.
The postal service has been cutting its workforce through attrition — simply not hiring people to replace its retiring workers, as Government Executive reports — and is also offering buyouts to some postmasters, hoping they'll retire early. But the agency could cut some of those workers through layoffs, if they do not accept buyouts or get other postal jobs. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has said he wants ultimately to shrink the workforce down to 400,000 workers by 2017.
3) The check is not in the mail
Starting in 1886, the first year for which continuous data starts to be available (though data doesn't exist for most of 1914-1925), the amount of mail the USPS handled took off, growing exponentially until around 2000. But then email and online bill pay helped drag mail volume down sharply starting in the mid-2000s.
4) Lots of work for far fewer workers
The number of postal workers may be shrinking, but the efficiency of the USPS has grown relatively steadily since 1926. Today, the USPS is handling nearly 325,000 pieces of mail per worker, compared to around 104,000 in 1926. And the trend is still upward, so even as the postal service has shrunk in the last few years, it has grown more efficient by this measure.
5) The ever-rising (but really quite stable) cost of postage
The USPS (through Congress) keeps ramping up the cost of postage, and with each hike, there is some degree of backlash. But when you adjust it for inflation, the cost of postage has been relatively stable since the 1980s and is in fact cheap today compared to the mid-1970s. The above chart from 2013 shows how much today's 49-cent stamp (then the "proposed" rate) would cost in comparison to the past. While it continued the upswing in the cost to send a first-class letter, it really didn't raise prices out of the ordinary.
6) Revenues vs. expenses
Starting in 1971, the USPS stopped receiving taxpayer dollars and became an independent agency of the US government. And in the last decade or so, the USPS's finances have gone from the black to the red. In 2012, the postal service lost a record $16 billion.
The internet certainly helped kill postal revenues, but the question of whether the USPS should have to undertake the costly step of prefunding retirement benefits is very controversial (see chart 8 for more). Congress in 2006 passed a law mandating that the USPS prefund pensions and health benefits for its retirees. The postal service and many of its supporters argue that it's silly to require the USPS to do this — no other government agency is required to do so, nor is any business. But proponents say it's necessary to keep taxpayers from eventually having to bail out the postal service.
What all of this really highlights is the odd no-man's-land that the USPS occupies, somewhere between being a business and a government entity. Congress has made it "independent" but still maintains heavy control over it. For example, Congress has nixed USPS plans to cut costs by cutting Saturday delivery. But then as the USPS cuts costs other ways and shrinks, it reduces service to many Americans, like those in rural areas. That raises the question of what sort of a postal service Americans have a right to.
7) Packages are helping the USPS stay afloat
The postal service isn't hurting on all fronts; in fact, its package business has been one bright spot for the agency. According to data from the USPS's 2013 annual report, package revenue grew by around 8 percent from 2012 to 2013. Partnerships with Amazon, FedEx, and UPS all are helping the USPS keep its parcel business thriving.
But it will take a lot of Amazon and eBay purchases to solve the postal service's fiscal problems. As the Wall Street Journal's Laura Stevens reported earlier this year, the postal service was designed for letters, not packages. First-class mail is simply more profitable than packages; currently, it takes around $3 in package revenue to make up for $1 in lost first-class letter revenue.
8) Prefunding retirements
The US Postal Service has long railed against the requirement that it prefund employees' pensions and health benefits. This chart shows exactly how big those liabilities are (i.e., huge). As of 2013, the postal service owed nearly 1.5 times its annual revenues in retiree benefit funding.
9) Postal banking
One plan the USPS has to boost its income is postal banking. In a proposal released earlier this year, the USPS inspector general pointed out that around one-quarter of all Americans are unbanked or underbanked — that is, they either have little or no access to financial tools like bank accounts or loans. That's a huge potential customer base, and the plan could benefit both the post office and poor Americans who rely on expensive payday loans. The above chart is an example from the proposal of what loans from a post office would look like — i.e., much less predatory than those from a payday lender.What happened: Emergency Medical Responder and EMT student Daniel Wesley, 17, is recovering from two gunshot wounds, a broken arm and a broken leg after he was attacked Sunday evening caring for a woman who had been shot and tossed in a road.
Wesley came to the aid of April Peck, 30. While donning gloves and preparing to apply pressure to Peck's wounds, the shooter returned to the scene. Terrell Walker, 48, drove Peck's car directly at Wesley, other bystanders and an ambulance crew. Wesley was struck and thrown against the ambulance, the impact breaking his arm. Walker got out of the vehicle, shot Wesley twice and ran him over a second time as he fled the scene. Walker, the gunman, was killed later Sunday night in a shootout with East Baton Rouge sheriff's deputies.
Kathy Wesley, Daniel's mother, reported that Wesley had surgery Sunday night and Tuesday. "He's a tough kid. He's silly and has a sense of humor you wouldn't believe," she said. "He's cracking jokes and trying his best to keep the pain in. He's been surrounded by friends and family all afternoon."
Daniel Wesley in his hospital bed. (Courtesy Photo)
Why it's significant: Daniel Wesley is a caregiver. As a teenager, the son of an EMT is already a certified Emergency Medical Responder, capable of recognizing a person in need and providing care. Wesley is one of us. He is our brother who like the Good Samaritan saw a person injured in the road and gave care, but Wesley was attacked for taking action and doing the right thing.
Top takeaways: Since Wesley is one of us, a young man called to care, we all can learn from his experience.
1. Combined risks are exponentially more dangerous.
A routine roadway incident, if there is such a thing, is a hazardous hot zone for EMS providers and public safety personnel. Fire apparatus blocking scenes are regularly struck accidentally or intentionally, police officers are injured or killed and medical helicopters waiting for a patient to be loaded have been hit by drunk drivers twice in 2016.
Domestic violence incidents can be just as dangerous for EMS providers and law enforcement. If the assailant has fled the scene before EMS arrival, there is a constant worry that the assailant still enraged, armed and hopeless will return at any moment.
Wesley and other emergency responders were confronted by the combined danger of initiating care in the roadway as the assailant returned to the scene to attack Wesley and other caregivers. The combined risks were not twice as dangerous. This incident was 20 or 200 times more dangerous for everyone.
2. Anything is a weapon.
It's OK to know this and be reminded it is true. Anything is a weapon when it is wielded with malice and intent to main, injure or kill.
Sunday night, Wesley was attacked with a vehicle before being shot. Monday morning, an Ohio State University student drove onto a crowded sidewalk before attacking people with a knife. Body armor is partial defense for one type of weapon. Other shielding, along with distance, cover and concealment are partial defense for any type of weapon.
3. Targeted for caring.
Caregivers have been and will continue to be a target of violence for the simple act of caring. This year started with the fatal shooting of an Arkansas volunteer firefighter who responded to a medical call. In April, a Maryland firefighter-paramedic was fatally wounded and a volunteer firefighter was seriously wounded after being shot by a man they had been called to perform a welfare check. Throughout the year, paramedics, EMTs and other caregivers are violently attacked, assaulted and verbally abused by patients and bystanders. The risk of violence is unrelenting and unpredictable.
Your prayers, thoughts and even financial support for Wesley are important and appreciated. Reflecting on this incident, discussing it with your partner and squad and learning from it are also critical.
What are your top takeaways from this incident as an EMS provider, educator and advocate?In Taylor Swift’s seminal music video, “You Belong With Me,” she sings from the perspective of a high schooler bemoaning the fact that her neighbor-slash-crush doesn’t see her for who she is, a hidden treasure that he has been overlooking for various reasons.
Though the Toronto Raptors probably share little in common with Swift, perhaps we’re the ones overlooking them now as they’ve blossomed into something worth celebrating.
For example, the Raptors have finished with 48-plus wins in four straight seasons now and have yet to be selected for a Christmas Day game, something that their two biggest stars lobbied for last week. It’s not that anyone wants to lose a holiday, but for DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry, this was about respect. Haven’t they done enough? Haven’t they proven themselves?
But the answer, before this season, was no. The Raptors have won many regular season games, but they’ve never been seen as a threat to the Cavaliers, and they’ve failed to give them trouble the past two seasons, even as Toronto advanced to the conference finals. That’s why teams like Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston have been given more attention — all three playing on Christmas — due to bigger stars and brighter futures.
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That was Toronto’s deserved reputation, plagued with problems like their non-modern offense and uninteresting play.
But these 2017 Raptors are doing their best to shake it off with style, filling a blank space in the Eastern Conference and taking off their glasses to reveal a team that’s, well, quite attractive.
How else would you describe a squad that had the best winning percentage in the Eastern Conference until Tuesday’s surprising loss to the Mavericks and sits only three games behind the Golden State Warriors for the best record in the league?
More importantly, perhaps, is how the Raptors are doing it. This season, Toronto is outscoring opponents by 8.3 points per 100 possessions, third-best in the league, and by far their best ever as a franchise. Why?
The Raptors have earnestly embraced modern basketball
The NBA doesn’t require homogeneity, but things like shooting and spacing are becoming increasingly necessary. CBS Sports’ James Herbert unearthed this nugget about the team’s offseason scrimmages earlier in the season:
Corner 3-pointers -- where the distance shortens and the shot becomes ultra-efficient -- counted for four points. Other 3s were treated normally, as were layups. Anything outside of the paint and inside the 3-point line was either worth zero or minus-one. This new "shot spectrum," as they call it, was designed to change their habits.
The Raptors are attempting the sixth-most three-pointers in the league, an average of 31.5 per game, while hitting 35.2 percent of them. They’ve picked up their pace, averaging more than 100 possessions per game after years in the mid-90s.
Their leading scorer, DeRozan, historically known for his love of inefficient two-point jumpers, is pushing his comfort zone. He’s still not a great three-point marksman, but his 34 percent and 2.8 attempts per game are both career highs.
This is one of the league’s best benches
The Raptors’ third-most used lineup — Delon Wright, Fred VanVleet, OG Anunoby, C.J. Miles, and Jakob Poeltl — is a mostly bench concoction that ramrods opponents, outscoring them by 12.6 points over 100 possessions in the 59 minutes they’ve played together. Then there’s Norman Powell and Pascal Siakam, and sometimes Lucas Nogueira, all players that allow Dwane Casey to play 10 or 11 players deep.
Siakam is a little more creative off the bounce. Wright is better finishing at the rim (and has attempted literally zero long two-pointers, somehow!). Miles has always brought valued shooting to any team he plays for, and that has continued.
Toronto’s secret weapon is a rookie
OG Anunoby is a 6’8 do-everything wing who has the same wingspan as Rudy Gobert — 8’0. The 20-year-old has spent most of the season in the starting lineup, and it has given Toronto a terrifying new weapon on the defensive end. If that wasn’t enough, Anunoby is shooting 44 percent behind the arc this season, too.
Toronto’s at its best when Anunoby’s on the court — outscoring opponents by 17.5 points per 100 possessions when he’s out there. That’s partly because the Raptors don’t overextend their young rookie: He is never asked to “anchor” bench lineups, and he has mostly played in the starting five, which has smoked opponents.
But look, when you have a 6’8 wing who can smother a perimeter player with arms that reach out longer than most starting centers, it’s going to make an impact. When that same player can record a 62.6 percent True Shooting Percentage, you’ve discovered someone that’s pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a 3-and-D player, even if all Anunoby does is stay in that role.
Related All the Raptors want for Christmas is a real shot at the big time
So they’re good. But what are the Raptors this season, anyway?
There are reasons to think the Raptors might be a great regular season team whose strengths will be mitigated in the playoffs. Deep benches are usually replaced by shorter rotations, and old, ingrained habits are hard to kill, even when replacing them with a new style. DeRozan and Lowry both still need to overcome historic playoff slumps that have plagued them the past few seasons.
Still, this team increasingly seems like the leading challenger to the Cleveland Cavaliers, especially as Boston begins to fade after a fast start. In my head, and probably yours as well, it’s ridiculous to imagine the Raptors beating LeBron James in a playoff series. It seems more ridiculous than, say, the 76ers, due to their sheer talent, or even the Celtics.
That might be the old Taylor Swift effect, the one with nerdy glasses and oversized T-shirts, really being something different underneath. These Raptors are radically different, for sure.
Related The Toronto Raptors keep evolving instead of breaking
We’ll have a better idea once the Raptors and Cavaliers actually play each other — they haven’t yet, with their first meeting taking place on Jan. 11, before two more matchups happen in late March and early April. Maybe James will laugh off Anunoby’s 8’0 wingspan, and the Cavaliers will turn DeRozan back into an ugly duckling.
If they don’t, though, and if the Raptors look more competitive than those two painful Eastern Conference postseason clashes, then it’s time to start taking this transformation that they’ve undergone seriously, if we haven’t already.By Ashley Wood
Whether it’s wearing that lucky shirt when gambling or taking a few steps to avoid walking under a ladder, some people convince themselves certain actions will influence some aspect of their lives. Yet in the age of science, people with academic backgrounds based on logic and reason still have superstitious tendencies.
“When I was getting my master’s degree, I used to drive to campus (from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara), so my superstition was that if all the lights were green, it was a good omen,” said Dr. Ronald Heck, a professor and the department chair of Educational Administration at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He has published extensive articles and books in organizational theory, leadership, policy and quantitative methods. Despite his education credentials, the fact that Heck saw good and bad omens when he was a grad student and followed local Hawai‘i superstitions when he moved here is a telling sign of how a little superstition plays a role in peoples’ lives.
“I like to whistle, but everyone around is like, ‘don’t whistle at night’,” Heck said. “So I try not to, and I’m conscious of it.”
There are many stories in Hawaiian folklore that tells of how doing so will lead to bad luck; one being that it mimics the sound of Night marchers, the ghosts of ancient Hawaiian warriors. Many of Hawai‘i’s folklore and mythology have been made popular by Glen Grant, the author of the Obake Files and Chicken Skin series, who ironically was a professor of history, American studies and political science at UH Mānoa.
In Hawai‘i, it is customary to bless new locations, whether they are new homes or businesses. It is supposed to bring peace and harmony to the places. Bonnie Tam-Hoy, a real estate agent at Coldwell Banker Pacific Properties, has shown homes where Hawaiian blessings were performed.
“I don’t think it’s (a blessing) superstitious, but it brings people a peace of mind because they have respect for the culture, and it wouldn’t hurt to do it anyway,” Tam-Hoy said. “Also as a realtor, I have to disclose what happened in homes before to the new home buyers, like crimes and hauntings, which sometimes affects their decision to buy or not.”
Although Tam-Hoy deals with people who hold certain beliefs, she herself doesn’t consider herself superstitious. However, Tam-Hoy always wears a gold anklet, which she refers to as her lucky charm. “It makes me feel safe and protected. I got it as a gift from my grandma before she passed, so it’s like I have a piece of her with me.” Tam-Hoy said.
Superstitions at work
Other work-related superstitions are common in other professions like sports and acting. Sports entertainment is widely known for having players who engage in routines that will safeguard their team’s success. From Michael Jordan wearing his blue North Carolina shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform to Tiger Woods donning a red shirt during final rounds, these are just some examples of athletes who attribute their actions with good luck. Furthermore, many people are familiar with referencing Shakespeare’s Macbeth by “the Scottish play” because it is believed to bring bad luck by mentioning it by the name itself. Even wishing good luck to an actor by saying “break a leg” is said to have the opposite effect. However, in the medical field where experience is based on knowledge and reason, some health professionals do things that are superstitious in nature.
“When a person dies, we usually open a window,” Registered Nurse Sandra Yamamoto said. “It’s supposed to let out the person’s spirit, but then again others see it as airing out the room.” Yamamoto works in the critical care unit at Kaiser Permanente Moanalua Medical Center. Contrary to the specialized fields that Yamamoto and her colleagues work in, there are other beliefs that they hold true when it comes to performing duties in the hospital.
“For some reason, when there’s a full moon, it’s always busy on the unit,” Yamamoto said. “There’s an increase in admissions, and (emergency) codes are going off.”
Yamamoto also shared that the floor gets busy if there are two people wearing black scrubs. “We (my co-workers and I) joke and blame the two wearing black, but I guess that’s our way of injecting humor into the stressful part of our jobs,” Yamamoto said.
In a recent poll about superstitious beliefs, Npolls found that 59 percent of the people surveyed did not believe in superstitions, 24 percent believed in some, and 17 percent of people truly believe in superstitions. Of the 41 percent who said they did believe in superstitions; 51 percent reported that their beliefs were based on habits or customs of their society, while the other half reported reasons of control, worry, veracity of superstitions, and other reasons that attributed to their beliefs.
Regardless of those who rely on logical methods to prove the cause and effect of events, some of them still hold beliefs that make sense to them which may be viewed as odd by others.
In the 21st century, there are professionals who hold superstitious beliefs, but it may be because it links them to their older family generations, their heritage, it’s their ability to cope with the state of their lives, or they recognize patterns when doing certain things.
“Despite the knowledge you accumulate throughout your life, I think everyone has some form of superstition; it just depends on your perspective.” Yamamoto said. “It’s human nature to question why certain things happen (or don’t happen) and when you can’t explain; you make things up and come up with your own answer.”
Only in Hawai‘i
Hawai‘i’s multiculturalism provides links to old beliefs in modern times, where local practices live on due to people’s cultural roots.
Here are some local beliefs that are inherent in Hawai‘i’s culture.
Night marchers
Night marchers (huaka‘i po) are ghosts of ancient Hawaiian warriors. While the characteristics of night marchers in ancient Hawaiian belief vary depending on the sources describing these spirit processions which march on specific nights of the month, all sources agree on one major point: don’t get in their path and don’t look at them.
According to legend, if someone comes across a procession of the night marchers, it is important that that person crouch low to the ground, resting on their stomachs and to avoid making eye contact. Doing so is said to prevent harm to that person. While some night marchers may prod and poke a person lying on the ground to instigate them to look up, night marchers are known to stick to their destination and not deviate in their aim to haunt humans.
Lava rocks
People who have taken lava rocks from Hawai‘i have returned them because they fear it is the source of their bad luck.
Legend has it that Pele, the goddess of fire and volcanoes, afflicts those who take lava rocks or sand because she sees them as her children. The only way to counteract one’s bad luck is to return pieces from whence they came. Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park continue to receive returned items and notes from tourists asking for forgiveness.
Ti leaves
Ti leaves were used by kahuna (priests) in their ancient religious ceremonial rituals as protection to ward off evil spirits, to heal and to bring good luck.
Till this day there are people who plant ti leaves around their homes for good luck. Ti leaves have also been made popular at football games with people waving them like pom-poms to keep bad spirits away from their favorite team.
Pali Highway
Local folklore states that if pork is carried over the Pali Highway, one’s vehicle will stop at a certain point and will only re-start when the pork is removed.
According to legend, Pele had a relationship with the demi-god Kamapua‘a (a half-man, half-pig). Once it ended, the two agreed not to visit each other, so taking pork over the Pali means taking a form of Kamapua‘a from his domain (the wet side of the island) into Pele’s domain (the dry side of the island).
Burial tradition
Some cultures place a deceased person’s favorite food and drink on the gravesite as an anniversary gift. This is done to keep ancestors happy in the spirit world. It is also thought to bring the blessings of elders who have passed away, ensuring property for the gift giver.
Bananas
Do not bring bananas on a boat, especially when fishing: even some Hawai‘i commercial fishing charters enforce this rule. There are various stories as to why, but there’s one that has substantial evidence.
According to fishing charter Ku‘uloa Kai, “back in the days of the sailing ships, sailors ate fruit to prevent an onset of scurvy. Bananas would ripen and spoil faster than most fruit. The bug larvae in the skin would hatch and infest not just the other fruit but the entire ship itself. It was deemed unfit for sailing ships. Any mention of bananas was seen as a bad omen and would spell misfortune for the voyage.”
Bed placement
It’s considered bad luck to have one’s bed in line with a door, with one’s feet pointing towards it. This can be traced to rules of feng shui, where it says that doing so, will deplete a person’s energy. Doors are considered energy connectors between different areas; in order for areas to connect, there’s a force that pulls them together.
, where it says that doing so, will deplete a person’s energy. Doors are considered energy connectors between different areas; in order for areas to connect, there’s a force that pulls them together. It’s also known as the death position, because the deceased are carried out feet first. There are other stories where sleeping in that position would cause one to be dragged out the door by spirits.
House cleaning
In the Chinese tradition, sweeping during New Year’s Day should be avoided because it is believed that all the good luck will be swept away.
In Hawai‘i many locals have adopted this tradition and have applied it to the Western calendar. Some even apply it to New Year’s Eve because it’s a day when parties take place to celebrate the upcoming year. What’s more, Hawai‘i’s way of ringing in the New Year by popping fireworks has roots in Chinese traditions. In Hawai‘i lighting fireworks on New Year’s Eve was a bigger deal than doing so on Independence Day. There has since been a ban on fireworks, so ringing in the new year will be much quieter.
Gift giving
When giving a purse or wallet, it’s supposed to be good luck to put in some money; if not it will stay empty. It is believed to mean that the recipient will never have money. The amount of money doesn’t matter, a penny will suffice.
Photos by Ashley WoodFor his final set of All-Star Weekend tricks, John Scott is going to broker a new labor agreement, renegotiate the NHL's American TV deal and win the Iowa caucus.
Scott, shortly after scoring his first goal of two in the new 3-on-3 tourney format, dunked on Jeremy Roenick pretty hard. Roenick had led part of the charge against Scott, a borderline NHL player who won the fan vote as a joke, from participating. It was terrific.
MORE: John Scott's All-Star experience | All-Star Game action
This whole conversation is legendary. pic.twitter.com/Tr4T548qgk — Doc Emrick (@DocInRealLife) January 31, 2016
In the run-up to the game, Roenick said Scott playing was "terrible," and that he lost respect for him, and that he should've declined and blah blah blah blah blah. Scott noticed, and good on Roenick for not trying to pretend none of it happened. It takes some amount of courage for one to admit so publicly that one has blown it.
It was quite a sequence for Scott, too; scoring was crazy enough without mixing in very a public, good-natured form of revenge. We've gone into how stupid the situation is already, so there's no sense in rehashing all of it. It is worth re-stating, though — this is not correct.
And we're not trying to pick on Sports On Earth's Twitter account or anything — it's just necessary to remember, especially in the afterglow of the John Scott Show: The NHL has gotten exactly no part of the situation correct, unless you credit the league for opting not to frame him for some sort of crime once he arrived in Nashville. They did not "Steve Avery" John Scott. That is good.
Still, at every juncture, by all available reports, they tried to prevent it from happening, failed, and then, with all legal recourse apparently exhausted, decided to drop it. There were reported pleas from Scott's GM, pleas from the league, an attempted deal to only participate in the skills competition, an orchestrated trade and, most balls-ily, a shame-based approach involving Scott's kids.
They stayed petty until the bitter end, too, leaving Scott off the MVP ballot despite, uh, everything. He won anyway, via Twitter write-in.
So, yeah, the NHL pulled out nearly all the stops without stopping to realize a few different things:
That once you pick a voting system for an All-Star Game, you're kinda stuck with it.
That there was no way whatsoever for them to squeeze out Scott and not look small and petty.
That the All-Star Game is, in almost all instances, boring and irrelevant, with no integrity to protect.
That the only real point to the All-Star Game is having fun and making memories for the fans.
That Scott's participation made the game more fun and more interesting by an order of magnitude.
They're reaping the benefits now, and that's good on some level, but they still fell ass-backwards into a rose bush. They did not want this to happen.
It did, though, and the results are great. All's well that ends well. Just don't forget how we got here. Jeremy Roenick didn't have much to do with it.All of which raises the question: have we reached peak fantasy? Aside from Martin's books, much of the best-selling fantasy out there has been distinctly non-genre work like Twilight, which no self-respecting fantasy purist would ever be caught dead reading, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, by Rick Riordan, or Harry Potter (though whether the Harry Potter books qualify as true fantasy is more controversial, with many fans and many detractors in the fantasy traditionalist camp). There have been other successes, such as the popular Hunger Games trilogy, which is in production for a film version due in theatres in 2012, but Hunger Games is less fantasy and more speculative or science-fiction. With few fantasies capable of transcending the genre/mainstream divide, can publishers and studios continue to rely on fantasy to provide blockbusters?
Fantasy lends itself well to trilogies and to longer series. Harry Potter was seven books long, but Warner Brothers squeezed it into eight films. A Game of Thrones is the first book in Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series, which may be as long as eight books by the time it's finished. If HBO can afford the tab, it could make as many as eighty or more hour-long episodes. And if loyal fans keep coming back for more, these long shows and multi-film franchises represent a huge cash cow for both publishers and studios. The trick is finding more and more fantasy books with loyal—and large—fan bases.
Therein lies the rub. There's a reason fantasy wasn't mainstream before. It's a genre that appeals to people who play D&D and get their kicks reading about elves with names like Tanis Half-Elven and Galadriel. Unless publishers can keep finding the next big crossover, fantasy may once again return to its less mainstream, and considerably less profitable, roots. People can only take in so many teenage vampire romances and wizarding schools. It's possible that the next Harry Potter is just around the corner, of course, but it seems like no matter how many "Is Such-and-Such the Next Harry Potter?" articles I read, the books never quite gain enough momentum to go mainstream. Books like Lev Grossman's The Magicians gain wide critical acclaim, but then run into the immovable object that is the hardcore fantasy fan base.
As much as I'm enjoying the bubble, I won't care too much if it bursts. Fantasy has simply gotten better over the past decade, and most of the best titles will never be adapted into an HBO series or a movie anyways. The really good stuff these days also tends to be really edgy. R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series is so dark I'm not sure it would make an R-rating if it were translated to the silver screen. Many other contemporary fantasies are similarly adult, with lots of sex and lots of violence. Steven Erikson's Malazan books are also dark, but more problematic from a filmmaking standpoint, as the popular series spans several distinct time periods, countless perspectives, and a sprawling epic storyline. The various storylines are not obviously connected with one another even after several books. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series suffers from the same kind of shortcomings. What works in epic fantasy doesn't necessarily translate onto the big screen.Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.
This is both the best and worst Apple iPad case we've ever seen. On the one hand, it's got novelty working for it, like the manila folder cases for the Macbook Air, but on the other hand we'd never want to be seen in public toting it.
The iMaxi iPad case seems more at home on the set of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman than tucked neatly away inside your messenger bag, but the item?priced between $30 and $40 and even available with a red lining?is doing swift sales since the iPad became available over the weekend.
You can rest assured that Apple stores won't be carrying it anytime soon, but still, we're curious: would you stash your iPad in an iMaxi?
· iMaxi by Hip Handmaids [Etsy]
· iMaxi Case will keep your iPad clean and dry [iPhone Savior]If you just look at this picture, it appears Cristiano Ronaldo is doing a Nigel De Jong impression. No big deal. But, alas, it was kind of a big deal. Ronaldo has scored off heels. He has scored off wicked dipping free kicks. He’s even come super close to scoring off bicycle kicks several times.
But just how exactly do you label his goal vs. Valencia?
It’s not a Scorpion Kick. It’s not a heel. It’s not a bicycle kick. Dirty Tackle referred to it as a “donkey kick.” Take a look at the actual video:
Once we separate the physical act from the drama (game-tying goal, close champions race, end of the game, etc), it’s obvious that Ronaldo struck the ball with the bottom of his foot after making a conventional kicking motion. The movement is fluid and natural, like a slow-motion Mortal Kombat and CRon has just been commanded to “finish him.” Perhaps a martial arts name could be used – the Kung Fu kick? The Jet Li special? The Jackie Chang Half-roundhouse?
I actually like the simple “Kick Kick” term. Redundant but easy to remember. Even though Nigel De Jong gave overt, studs-up kicking a bad name in the 2010 World Cup final, surely it’s less heinous when performed against a ball and not Xabi Alonso? Regardless, we may never see another goal like this again. Long live the Kick Kick!
Check out a free preview of Elliott’s book, Real Madrid & Barcelona: the Making of a Rivalry, by clicking here.Flickr/Eric Petor
The ride-hailing giant has built a development facility there, luring away some talented Carnegie Mellon researchers.
Ride-hailing giant Uber has brought the company’s driverless-car efforts to Pittsburgh, snapping up Carnegie Mellon researchers to come along for the ride. If the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, this is something of a disaster for the acclaimed university, where I taught for nearly two decades. “Carnegie Mellon University is scrambling to recover after Uber Technologies Inc. poached 40 of its researchers and scientists earlier this year,” the Journal reported this past Sunday, “a raid that left one of the world’s top robotics research institutions in a crisis.” According to the report, Uber essentially stabbed the university in the back, luring “six principal investigators and 34 engineers” from CMU’s word-class National Robotic Engineering Center (NREC), including the center’s director, Tony Stentz, and most of its program directors—even after establishing a partnership with the university earlier this year. The pilfered researchers will work in Uber’s new driverless-car research facility, located just down the street from NREC’s laboratories.
Tensions abound when universities and industries try to work together, and even more so when a major funder like the U.S. Department of Defense is involved. (The Pentagon has supported major NREC research for decades.) “If you want to do autonomous vehicles—we have a lot of people here doing that,” Jeff Legault, head of business development for NREC, told WSJ. “I would have preferred [Uber] just come to us” to work with the school to develop the technology, he said. But the biggest tensions tend to arise when the lines between the two—academia and industry—blur, and when companies influence university research, or worse, keep key findings from publication. The loss of key people may be temporary hardship for CMU, |
or treating there’d be a thirty-something lady who opens the door and laughs and tells them how cute they are and Weiss will be bright red and when they go back to the dorm Weiss’ll try to pull a move on Ruby but her costume is in the way and she clumsily trips into Ruby and then things happenUsing the Decentralized Web
Interact with decentralized applications without understanding Ethereum
Joe Urgo Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 8, 2017
Outside of a small community of cypherpunks, futurologists, and speculators that tend to congregate in dark corners of the web known as subreddits, the amount of people in the world who understand Ethereum is small in scope relative to the vast number of lives the technology will impact in coming years. The fact of the matter is that blockchains, the grand innovations introduced to the world by Bitcoin, are neither interesting nor easy to comprehend for most people without a computer science background.
On the other hand, the utility of decentralized applications is easily understood, especially in highly regulated or censored environments. Imagine a company or service that isn’t controlled by a single individual or other central entity, is outside of the jurisdiction of any government, and is impossible to be shut down. These characteristics are obviously appealing for social networks, gambling platforms, identity management, banking, online marketplaces, media distribution outlets, and many other fields.
Understanding Ethereum is by no means a requisite for using applications built on top of it, much like knowledge of SMTP is not necessary to send an email. Thanks to a tool named MetaMask, you can connect to and start interacting with decentralized applications such as Ethlance, Etherplay, Maker Market, vDice, Weifund and more within a matter of minutes.
Setup MetaMask
If you are not already doing so, open Google Chrome Click here Press ‘Add to Chrome’ and confirm Click the Fox icon from your Chrome extension menu Agree to the terms Set a strong password Copy your seed words
Buy Some Ether
Ether is the fuel required to interact with applications built on the Ethereum network. Think of it as the charge in a Tesla’s battery pack. You can power up your Chrome browser by purchasing some ether directly from your MetaMask extension.
Open MetaMask and click ‘Ropsten Test Net’ near the top left Click ‘Ethereum Main Net’ Reopen MetaMask and input your password Click ‘Buy’ then ‘Continue to Coinbase’ Select the amount you would like to buy ($1 is plenty to get started), submit the requested info, and complete your purchase.
Note: This functionality is currently only available in the US. For readers located outside of the US, please refer to this guide.
What Now?
You are ready to start interacting with applications built on Ethereum, just keep MetaMask enabled and stay connected to the Ethereum Main Net.
To put things to the test, head over to Ethlance to set up an employee or employer profile. Fill in the required info, hit send, wait for MetaMask to pop up, and click Accept.
That’s it. You just used the Ethereum network. Your profile will exist on the blockchain in perpetuity, free from censorship or removal, ready to accept proposals and work for or hire others.
Join Our Slack
Having trouble getting setup? Did you decide that this Ethereum stuff does seem interesting after all and you’re looking to take a trip down the rabbit hole? Do you have feedback about Ethlance you’d like to share? We want to hear from you. Join our Slack team today!A Canadian rapper recently represented himself in court and won a judgement against West Coast powerhouse label Top Dawg Entertainment, after the imprint and their parent labels Interscope Records and Universal Music Group had his song unlawfully removed from streaming services.
Jonathan Emile, a 30-year-old MC from Montreal, acquired a feature from Kendrick Lamar for the song “Heaven Help Dem” (above) from his The Lover/Fighter Document project in 2015. But, shortly after the song hit the Internet and started to gain steam, it was removed for alleged copyright infringement.
“We paid Kendrick Lamar for a feature, and once we paid them, they basically stopped communicating with us altogether," Emile tells Billboard. "It was understood that we’d take care of the paperwork with the lawyers, so we paid them and they basically disappeared... we couldn’t get in contact, so I just continued producing my album and with the verbal agreement we had, and we put out the song in 2015."
He continues, “After the song was put out, they placed a false copyright claim on the song itself and got it pulled from YouTube and SoundCloud and all that stuff. So, after going back and forth with these companies, they realized that they were in error and that there was no copyright claim on the song, but the damage had already been done and the momentum to promote the song had already been [lost]."
Seeking to clear his name, Emile sued and won a judgement of $8,600 CAD (roughly $6,400 USD) plus five percent interest.
The judgement was paid out about a month ago, but the case has been kept low key because Emil has not tried to capitalized off the moment by doing any press. “It was just picked up because it was looked at by different lawyers as an atypical case,” he said.
Emile is currently working on a new album titled Phantom Pain.Edit: I changed the contrast, since it's probably too dark on some screens? My cintiq is quite low-contrasty so all the blacks look different on my laptop. I don't want the details disappear into the blackness in this piece..!
Bwah! I always feel like there's a long time since I've painted something detailed and "big" but I just had painted two commissions. It's weird (and kinda annoying, feeling like I don't paint often enough or something). Maybe it's about personal paintings, idk..!
I also wonder why I finish mostly paintings I start as "just something" rather than paintings I have bigger and more detailed ideas for. I guess it's because painting "just something" is easier and you don't have to think much. When if you have a specific idea, you have to pay attention to important details. Also when painting "just something", you don't have to think how the end result "should" look like. Though of course, you can paint something with a specific and detailed idea, and kind of let it go.... ehh I dunno
Also, about the importance of titles; I feel this piece would give a different message, if it was just "Frightened" or just "Demon". Do you know what I mean..? :U
BUT anyway, pondering aside, I'm happy how this turned out! And I enjoyed painting it, it was really nice.The hormone insulin is released in distinct pulses from the β-cells of the pancreatic islets in response to elevated blood glucose levels, and disturbed pulsatile insulin secretion is a hallmark of the metabolic disease diabetes. Electrical coupling between β-cells leads to excitation waves, which have been proposed to provide the synchronizing signal that propagates the glucose-evoked response across the islet. Surprisingly, recent studies showed that the β-cells within an islet constitute a functional small-world network, i.e., a network that shows a high degree of local coupling with a few long-range short-cuts. There are no obvious anatomical candidates for these short-cuts, and further, small-world networks typically do not promote wave propagation. Using computer simulations of a heterogeneously nearest-neighbor coupled lattice network of β-cells, we propose that the functional long-range coupling is due to wave propagation. Further, we show that heterogeneity and gap junction coupling can explain wave and synchronization properties found experimentally without resorting to percolation theory, thus providing a more natural framework for understanding these previous results.
We investigate this hypothesis with a mathematical model of heterogeneously gap-junction-coupled-cells in a regular latticeWe show that nearest-neighbor coupling can result in small-world characteristics of thewhen investigated with “functional coupling.” Moreover, our simulations show that synchronization and wave properties of islet Cadynamicscan be explained by heterogeneity and ohmiccoupling. Our results prove that functional small-worldness is not necessarily a result of anatomical or mechanistic small-worldness.
Axonal extensions can readily explain the anatomical foundation for the short-cut connections in neuronal small-worldIn contrast,-cells are known to be locally coupled byformed by connexin-36 (Cx36) proteins, which are crucial for intra-islet synchronyand CaPresumably, these excitation waves provide the intra-islet synchrony that, in addition to inter-islet synchrony by unknown signals, is a prerequisite for pulsatile insulin secretion,which is disturbed in diabetes.There are no clear candidates for the long-range coupling suggested by functional small-worldness in pancreatic islets,though intra-islet neurons and paracrine communication remain possible mediators of long-range coupling.Further, it has been shown that spatiotemporal wave patterns in excitable media may be disrupted by even a low degree of long-range coupling characteristic of small-world connectivity.Since inter-cellular Cawaves are robustly observed in pancreatic islets,these results speak against direct long-range coupling between-cells. Thus, we speculated that functional coupling between distant-cells is the result of excitation waves spreading via localcoupling,rather than that of physical long-range links.
Functional coupling is derived through pair-wise statistical analysis of the signals from nodes within theand represents, for example, whether twoshow similar functional behavior. When the correlation of the two signals is above a certain threshold, the nodes are defined to be functionally coupled.Mechanistic or physical coupling can be expected to induce functional coupling, but it is not obvious that direct coupling can be inferred from functional coupling; it may be envisaged that two distant nodes appear functionally coupled due to the propagation of a coupling signal via intermediate, directly coupled nodes. In order for the functional signals to be approximately synchronous, so that the nodes are defined as functionally coupled, the coupling signal should propagate fast enough to avoid significant delays compared to the time-scale of the functional signal, e.g., the period of Caoscillations.
Small-worldhave received substantial interest in the last two decades. Suchare characterized by a high degree of local coupling with a few long-range “short-cut” connections that reduce the average path-length greatly. Global air transportation,co-starring film actors,and the World Wide Webare examples of social and man-made small-worldSeveral biologicalhave also been shown to exhibit small-world properties, such as the human brain as revealed by different imaging techniques,the neuralof the nematode wormand the metabolicofRecently, Caimaging demonstrated that neural progenitorsand insulin-secreting pancreatic-cellsare functionally coupled in small-world
To investigate this idea further, wethe graphs defined by functional coupling as thecoupling strength was varied, which, as discussed above, change the wave properties.We found that thecoefficientwas greater than the corresponding random, for> 0.4 (Fig.). In contrast, theof-cells had similar, or slightly lower, efficiencies than the corresponding randomfor> 0.4,(Fig.). Thus,> 1 for> 0.4 indicating small-worldness in the simulated-cellNote that this range ofcoupling strength corresponds to the values whereand synchrony are obtained (Fig.), suggesting that the concepts offunctional coupling, and small-worldness are intimately related.
TABLE I. Functional network parameters. The values are medians of values obtained from 10 simulated β -cell networks and 10 corresponding random graphs.
Table I confronts the results of our simulations with the results from StožerWe find that our simulations exhibit indices similar to the experimentally obtained ones with the best correspondence for= 0.8. In particular, our nearest-neighbor coupledshows small-worldness with respect to functional coupling, although thevalue tends to be slightly below the experimental value. For= 0.8, this is entirely due to a too high averagecoefficient for the random). All together, our results highlight that functional small-worldness does not necessarily imply direct long-range coupling, but that such long-rangecoupling can result, for example, from excitationbetween nearest neighbors.
We proceeded bythe correlation between Caoscillations in thefollowing the recipe of StožerPair-wise cross-correlation coefficients were calculated for the simulated cellular Catraces after discarding initial transients (see Sec. IV for details). If the Caoscillations of twoshowed correlation above a threshold level, then thesewere defined to be functionally coupled. Thus, from this analysis, we obtained a graph with nodes representingand all-or-none edges indicating whether two nodeswere functionally coupled (Fig.). The graph was thenwith techniques fromIn particular, we calculated the averagecoefficient, which measures the degree of local coupling in theand the efficiency, an indicator of how well information is transferred across theWe then confronted these indices with indices obtained from a graph with the same number of nodes and edges (degree), but where the nodes were linked randomly (Erdös-Renyi graph). Small-worldare defined by having efficiency similar to random) due to long-range connections, whereas the averagecoefficient is much higher, reflecting that small-worldlocally (in topological sense) are similar to latticeThese conditions are often condensed into the index, and small-worldness is definedas> 1.
The model simulations also reproduced the islet synchrony properties aswas varied (Fig.).In this approach, the cross-correlation between each of the simulated single-cell Catraces and the average islet Casignal was calculated, and the degree of synchrony was defined as the fraction ofhaving peak cross-correlation coefficient >0.85 (see Sec. IV and Ref.). Confronting panels (a) and (b) in Fig.suggests that the propagating waves are responsible for synchronizing the-cell population in our simulations. Thus, heterogeneouscoupling can explain wave and synchrony properties at changingcoupling strengths.
Weour simulations following the approach of Benningerin order to facilitate comparison with their experimental results (see Sec. IV for details). We found that Cawaves propagated across the islet (Fig.), and that the wave speed was reduced whenwas diminished (Fig.). Below a certain averagestrength (≈ 0.4),no longer occurred, in agreement with previous simulations.Heterogeneity is crucial for understanding this observation,since in the case of homogeneousproperties andcoupling the wave speed is proportional to the square root of the coupling strengthand allowsalso for very small(Fig. S1 in the supplementary material). In contrast, with heterogeneity, the wave speed is approximately proportional to the square root of the harmonic mean of the coupling strengths,which can be very small even when the average coupling strength is well above zero. Indeed, the wave speeds in our simulations were approximately proportional to the square-root of the harmonic mean of the positiveweighted by the fraction of positive(Fig., see also Sec. IV ).
25. See supplementary material at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4949020 E-CHAOEH-26-004605 for five supplementary figures and a complete description of the model equations and parameters.
For this latter purpose, pharmacological or genetic reduction of thewas assumed to be heterogeneous, reducing the coupling strength between individual pairs ofunevenly. This assumption reflects that the degree of pharmacological inhibition ofchannels most likely various from onepair to another. Similarly, Cx36were assumed to have some cell-to-cell variation around the 50% reduction in the number ofchannels expected from the heterozygous genotype, which could be due to the differences in post-processing, protein transportation, and formation of functionalSuch heterogeneity was modeled by multiplying individualwith randomly distributed constants drawn from a distribution with meanbetween 0 and 1, and standard deviation 0.2 (see Sec. IV ). The drawn constants were truncated to guarantee that they fell within the interval [0, 1].
Our aim was to investigate if such an arrangement can explain, simultaneously,commonly seen in pancreatic isletsand small-world properties of thedefined by functional coupling.Further, we were interested in studying the origin of synchronization and wave properties whencoupling strength was modified.
We performed simulations of electrically coupled beta-cells, each modeled by a general and commonly used mathematical description of bursting electrical activity and Caoscillations.Thewere organized in a hexagonal latticewhere a centerhas 12 neighbors.parameters and coupling strengths were distributed randomly, in particular, the findings that only ∼67% of adjacent(possiblepairs) are gap-junction coupledwere taken into consideration. As a result, a centerwas on average coupled to ∼8in good agreement with estimations from whole-islet patch clamp recordings.
Investigating the role of islet cytoarchitecture in its oscillation using a new beta-cell cluster model
III. DISCUSSION
gap junction coupling between simulated β-cells with attention to wave propagation, synchronization, and small-world properties. We were able to reproduce apparently unrelated experimental results regarding, respectively, synchrony and wave propagation 11 Gap junction coupling and calcium waves in the pancreatic islet,” Biophys. J. 95, 5048– 5061 (2008). 11. R. K. P. Benninger, M. Zhang, W. S. Head, L. S. Satin, and D. W. Piston, “,” Biophys. J., 5048–(2008). https://doi.org/10.1529/biophysj.108.140863 network properties 7,8 Functional connectivity in islets of Langerhans from mouse pancreas tissue slices,” PLoS Comput. Biol. 9, e1002923 (2013). 7. A. Stožer, M. Gosak, J. Dolenšek, M. Perc, M. Marhl, M. S. Rupnik, and D. Korošak, “,” PLoS Comput. Biol., e1002923 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002923 Progressive glucose stimulation of islet beta cells reveals a transition from segregated to integrated modular functional connectivity patterns,” Sci. Rep. 5, 7845 (2015). 8. R. Markovič, A. Stožer, M. Gosak, J. Dolenšek, M. Marhl, and M. S. Rupnik, “,” Sci. Rep., 7845 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep07845 β-cells. In this work, we have investigated the influence of heterogeneity andcoupling between simulated-cells with attention tosynchronization, and small-world properties. We were able to reproduce apparently unrelated experimental results regarding, respectively, synchrony andor small-worldpropertiesin a unifying framework consisting of a lattice of coupled-cells.
wave propagation is the key to explain the findings. First, synchronization is related to whether wave propagation is present or not, both in experiments 11 Gap junction coupling and calcium waves in the pancreatic islet,” Biophys. J. 95, 5048– 5061 (2008). 11. R. K. P. Benninger, M. Zhang, W. S. Head, L. S. Satin, and D. W. Piston, “,” Biophys. J., 5048–(2008). https://doi.org/10.1529/biophysj.108.140863 2 cell was functionally coupled in spite of the imposed nearest-neighbor coupling (compare edges in Figs. 1(a) 3(a) cells, yielding the near-synchrony that results in functional coupling when the simulated Ca2+ traces are analyzed. These long-range short-cuts in the functional network (Fig. 3(a) networks (Fig. 3(c) network transports information. In the case of pancreatic islets, it has been suggested that wave propagation is a means to communicate a glucose stimulus between β-cells. 18 Excitation wave propagation as a possible mechanism for signal transmission in pancreatic islets of Langerhans,” Biophys. J. 80, 1195– 1209 (2001). 18. O. V. Aslanidi, O. Mornev, O. Skyggebjerg, P. Arkhammar, O. Thastrup, M. Sørensen, P. Christiansen, K. Conradsen, and A. Scott, “,” Biophys. J., 1195–(2001). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3495(01)76096-1 networks of nearest-neighbor coupled β-cells have efficiencies approaching the efficiencies of the corresponding random graphs (Fig. 3(c) cells almost as efficiently as random networks. We suggest thatis the key to explain the findings. First, synchronization is related to whetheris present or not, both in experimentsand in our simulations (Fig.). Second, we found that distantwas functionally coupled in spite of the imposed nearest-neighbor coupling (compare edges in Figs.and). Likely, the observed excitation waves provide the communication between these distantyielding the near-synchrony that results in functional coupling when the simulated Catraces areThese long-range short-cuts in the functional(Fig.) assure that the efficiency is similar to the corresponding random(Fig.and Table I ). The efficiency is a measure of how efficiently thetransports information. In the case of pancreatic islets, it has been suggested thatis a means to communicate a glucose stimulus between-cells.Our results show that theof nearest-neighbor coupled-cells have efficiencies approaching the efficiencies of the corresponding random graphs (Fig.), which suggest that the excitation waves transport information, such as the presence of glucose stimuli, betweenalmost as efficiently as random
clustering coefficient was higher in our simulations than in the corresponding random networks for the entire range of coupling strengths permitting wave propagation (μ > 0.4, Fig. 3(b) 7 Functional connectivity in islets of Langerhans from mouse pancreas tissue slices,” PLoS Comput. Biol. 9, e1002923 (2013). 7. A. Stožer, M. Gosak, J. Dolenšek, M. Perc, M. Marhl, M. S. Rupnik, and D. Korošak, “,” PLoS Comput. Biol., e1002923 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002923 clustering coefficient is what is to be expected in a lattice network as simulated here. In biophysical terms, the small-world property means that neighboring cells, because of direct gap-junction coupling, are easily synchronized (high clustering coefficient) but some distant cells are also synchronized because of wave propagation (long-range short-cuts and high efficiency). In contrast, thecoefficient was higher in our simulations than in the corresponding randomfor the entire range of coupling strengths permitting> 0.4, Fig.), which together with the efficiency results lead to the small-world property in our simulations (Table I ) in agreement with experimental findings.The highcoefficient is what is to be expected in a latticeas simulated here. In biophysical terms, the small-world property means that neighboringbecause of direct gap-junction coupling, are easily synchronized (highcoefficient) but some distantare also synchronized because of(long-range short-cuts and high efficiency).
gap junction coupling that determine the wave speed and the degree of synchrony in the network (Fig. 2 wave propagation between heterogeneous, gap junction coupled β-cells agree with the results presented here, 11 Gap junction coupling and calcium waves in the pancreatic islet,” Biophys. J. 95, 5048– 5061 (2008). 11. R. K. P. Benninger, M. Zhang, W. S. Head, L. S. Satin, and D. W. Piston, “,” Biophys. J., 5048–(2008). https://doi.org/10.1529/biophysj.108.140863 percolation theory, which considers and modifies the fraction of all-or-none coupling to model changes in average gap junction conductance. In our opinion, this interpretation is biologically less realistic than our view focusing on heterogeneity, and moreover, does not correspond to the simulations. Indeed, the number of missing connections is constant in our simulation for μ ≥ 0.4 (Fig. 4 cells, and the clustering coefficient and efficiency vary (Figs. 2 3 percolation threshold for hexagonal three-dimensional lattices (p c = 0.12, i.e., 88% missing connections 27 Percolation thresholds and universal formulas,” Phys. Rev. E 55, 1514 (1997). 27. S. C. van der Marck, “,” Phys. Rev. E, 1514 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.55.1514 4 We propose that it is heterogeneity andcoupling that determine the wave speed and the degree of synchrony in the(Fig.) when the coupling strength varies. Previous simulations ofbetween heterogeneous,coupled-cells agree with the results presented here,but were interpreted usingwhich considers and modifies the fraction of all-or-none coupling to model changes in averageIn our opinion, this interpretation is biologically less realistic than our view focusing on heterogeneity, and moreover, does not correspond to the simulations. Indeed, the number of missing connections is constant in our simulation for≥ 0.4 (Fig.), i.e., the range where wave speed, the fraction of synchronizedand thecoefficient and efficiency vary (Figs.and). Note also that we are far from thethreshold for hexagonal three-dimensional lattices (= 0.12, i.e., 88% missing connections) in all our simulations (Fig.).
cell parameters and coupling are homogeneous, the wave speed follows the square-root of the gap junction conductance, 11,18 Gap junction coupling and calcium waves in the pancreatic islet,” Biophys. J. 95, 5048– 5061 (2008). 11. R. K. P. Benninger, M. Zhang, W. S. Head, L. S. Satin, and D. W. Piston, “,” Biophys. J., 5048–(2008). https://doi.org/10.1529/biophysj.108.140863 Excitation wave propagation as a possible mechanism for signal transmission in pancreatic islets of Langerhans,” Biophys. J. 80, 1195– 1209 (2001). 18. O. V. Aslanidi, O. Mornev, O. Skyggebjerg, P. Arkhammar, O. Thastrup, M. Sørensen, P. Christiansen, K. Conradsen, and A. Scott, “,” Biophys. J., 1195–(2001). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3495(01)76096-1 wave propagation is seen even for low coupling strengths (Fig. S1), in contrast to experiments. 11 Gap junction coupling and calcium waves in the pancreatic islet,” Biophys. J. 95, 5048– 5061 (2008). 11. R. K. P. Benninger, M. Zhang, W. S. Head, L. S. Satin, and D. W. Piston, “,” Biophys. J., 5048–(2008). https://doi.org/10.1529/biophysj.108.140863 cell parameters can give results similar to experimental findings even in the presence of (biologically unrealistic) homogeneous electrical coupling (Fig. S2). Of note, the threshold for wave propagation and synchrony is not due to percolation failure, since the number of missing connections was kept constant at 33%, well below the percolation threshold. 27 Percolation thresholds and universal formulas,” Phys. Rev. E 55, 1514 (1997). 27. S. C. van der Marck, “,” Phys. Rev. E, 1514 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.55.1514 β-cells similarly found that the cell population did not synchronize at low coupling strengths, and moreover that this finding did not depend on whether gap junction coupling was assumed heterogeneous or homogeneous. 28 Why pancreatic islets burst but single β cells do not. The heterogeneity hypothesis,” Biophys. J. 64, 1668– 1680 (1993). 28. P. Smolen, J. Rinzel, and A. Sherman, “,” Biophys. J., 1668–(1993). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3495(93)81539-X cells with homogeneous coupling also showed that a certain coupling strength is needed to permit wave propagation and synchrony. 29 Synchronization phenomena in mixed media of passive, excitable, and oscillatory cells,” Chaos 18, 037129 (2008). 29. A. K. Kryukov, V. S. Petrov, L. S. Averyanova, G. V. Osipov, W. Chen, O. Drugova, and C. K. Chan, “,” Chaos, 037129 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2956985 wave propagation is absent, is not strictly dependent on the presence of heterogeneous coupling, if the cell population is heterogeneous. To understand how the wave speed changes with coupling strength, heterogeneity is crucial. If bothparameters and coupling are homogeneous, the wave speed follows the square-root of theandis seen even for low coupling strengths (Fig. S1), in contrast to experiments.Cell-to-cell variation in intrinsicparameters can give results similar to experimental findings even in the presence of (biologically unrealistic) homogeneous electrical coupling (Fig. S2). Of note, the threshold forand synchrony is not due tofailure, since the number of missing connections was kept constant at 33%, well below thethreshold.Previous studies of coupled heterogeneous-cells similarly found that thepopulation did not synchronize at low coupling strengths, and moreover that this finding did not depend on whethercoupling was assumed heterogeneous or homogeneous.Simulations of heterogeneous cardiac or Fitzhugh-Nagumowith homogeneous coupling also showed that a certain coupling strength is needed to permitand synchrony.Thus, the presence of a coupling threshold below, whichis absent, is not strictly dependent on the presence of heterogeneous coupling, if thepopulation is heterogeneous.
gap junction strength, modeled as k ij = μ with no variation, yielded results (Fig. S3) similar to the ones presented in the figures above, since the cells and electrical coupling were already heterogeneous. However, in our opinion, non-homogeneous pharmacological inhibition of gap junctions is the more realistic assumption. In the presence of heterogeneous coupling, the wave speed has been predicted to be proportional to the square-root of the harmonic mean of the gap junction conductances, 24 Homogenization of heterogeneously coupled bistable ODE's—Applied to excitation waves in pancreatic islets of Langerhans,” J. Biol. Phys. 30, 285– 303 (2004). 24. M. G. Pedersen, “,” J. Biol. Phys., 285–(2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOBP.0000046727.28337.f4 conductance but also by the degree of heterogeneity (the variation of the gap junction conductance distribution of the islet). Indeed, the square-root of the calculated harmonic mean predicts the simulated wave speeds decently (Fig. 2(a) wave propagation below a certain coupling strength in spite of positive harmonic mean is likely due to the discrete and heterogeneous structure of the cellular network, since it was also observed with homogeneous coupling (Fig. S2) and in the case of even reduction of the gap junction conductance (Fig. S3), is in agreement with previous results. 11,28,29 Gap junction coupling and calcium waves in the pancreatic islet,” Biophys. J. 95, 5048– 5061 (2008). 11. R. K. P. Benninger, M. Zhang, W. S. Head, L. S. Satin, and D. W. Piston, “,” Biophys. J., 5048–(2008). https://doi.org/10.1529/biophysj.108.140863 Why pancreatic islets burst but single β cells do not. The heterogeneity hypothesis,” Biophys. J. 64, 1668– 1680 (1993). 28. P. Smolen, J. Rinzel, and A. Sherman, “,” Biophys. J., 1668–(1993). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3495(93)81539-X Synchronization phenomena in mixed media of passive, excitable, and oscillatory cells,” Chaos 18, 037129 (2008). 29. A. K. Kryukov, V. S. Petrov, L. S. Averyanova, G. V. Osipov, W. Chen, O. Drugova, and C. K. Chan, “,” Chaos, 037129 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2956985 Finally, assuming homogeneous reduction in thestrength, modeled aswith no variation, yielded results (Fig. S3) similar to the ones presented in the figures above, since theand electrical coupling were already heterogeneous. However, in our opinion, non-homogeneous pharmacological inhibition ofis the more realistic assumption. In the presence of heterogeneous coupling, the wave speed has been predicted to be proportional to the square-root of the harmonic mean of thewhich is influenced not only by the averagebut also by the degree of heterogeneity (the variation of thedistribution of the islet). Indeed, the square-root of the calculated harmonic mean predicts the simulated wave speeds decently (Fig.). The complete absence ofbelow a certain coupling strength in spite of positive harmonic mean is likely due to the discrete and heterogeneous structure of the cellularsince it was also observed with homogeneous coupling (Fig. S2) and in the case of even reduction of the(Fig. S3), is in agreement with previous results.Story by Rita Goldman
In Genesis, God spends the better part of a week shaping Heaven and Earth from the formless void, then stands back and declares that it’s good. He pays an occasional visit, but long before the Old Testament ends, God drops out of sight, a distant figure detached from His own creation.
Hawaiians first encountering this western cosmology must have found it bewildering. In the worldview inherited from their ancestors, the divine is everywhere, and everything is the divine.
One term for this concept, kino lau, translates literally as “many bodies,” the myriad forms of the 400,000 gods that make up the Hawaiian pantheon. Every plant and animal is an embodiment of a god. So are clouds, rain, the movement of lava, the currents of ocean and air.
“There is some connection between the characteristics of the god and the kino lau,” says Hokulani Holt, a Hawaiian cultural expert and revered kumu hula (teacher of hula). She offers the example of Kāne, who, along with Kū, Kanaloa and Lono, is one of the four main Hawaiian gods. Because Kāne’s realm includes flowing and upwelling water, says Holt, “many of his kino lau are either water bearers or plants that need lots of water: taro, bamboo, awa....”
I ask whether the shark is a kino lau of Kū because both are aggressors.
“When Kū is the god of war, the shark is one of his forms, yes,” Holt replies. “But kino lau are complex, because the god, too, has many forms.”
To illustrate, she recalls a question I had asked upon learning that each of the four principal gods is paired with a goddess. I had wondered why Lono, god of peace and agriculture, would be linked with Pele, goddess of volcanoes.
“Lono is not the god of peace and agriculture when he is with Pele,” Holt explains. “He is Lono-makua, the fire god. When he is the god of peace and agriculture, he is linked to Laka, goddess of hula. That’s why at Makahiki, the time of Lono, there is always hula.”
This divine mutability begins to explain how the Hawaiians have 4 gods, but also 40, and 400, and 400,000. Kino lau, it turns out, is a deceptively simple term for the rich and complex relationship between Hawaiians and the rest of the natural world.
Asked for an example of how one might interact with the gods through kino lau, Holt chooses what she knows best: hula.
“Among the kino lau of Laka, the plants ʻōhiʻa lehua, ʻieʻie, hala pepe, maile, palapalai and other native ferns usually have the highest status. In addition, many hālau [hula schools] have particular native plants special to them. My hālau is Pāʻū O Hi‘iaka. Hi‘iaka, this particular one, is Pele’s youngest sister, Hi‘iakakapoliopele. Pāʻū-o-hi‘iaka is also the name of a beach vine. The plant holds higher status in our hālau than it might in others.”
When non-Hawaiians came to power in the Islands, hula was relegated to mere entertainment —when it wasn’t prohibited outright. But hula is more appropriately comprehended as a spiritual practice. Before the dancers perform, they gather kino lau, plant forms of Laka, to adorn themselves and the hula altar.
“Many hula people conceive of three hula altars,” says Holt. “The first and most important is the mountain. The second is the altar that exists within a hālau hula, a hula school. The third altar is the dancers themselves.”
Because the dancers will become Laka, the essence of hula, there’s another step that precedes the gathering of kino lau.
“Beyond making sure that the dancers are well prepared in their dance,” says Holt, “I expect an understanding of the story being told, the poetry.” If plants are physical forms that connect one |
exactly how they should respond if the new data on foreign ownership shows overseas money is significantly distorting Canadian markets.
A construction worker builds a new home in Oakville, Ont. Despite repeated warnings of a property crash, prices keep rising. (Canadian Press) According to GDP figures, the two hottest cities in the fastest-growing provinces are both being powered by the property market.
"British Columbia led the country with 3.0% growth, the best pace since 2006. Residential construction offset a downdraft in mining investment," BMO economist Robert Kavcic wrote last week. "Ontario was also strong, rising 2.5% for a second year, led by the biggest gain in construction output (residential with an assist from transportation) in 14 years."
Foreign vs. domestic demand
Even if the Canadian housing market is principally driven by domestic demand, markets that have been rising so relentlessly could be reaching a point of instability.
What governments quite rightly must be considering is what would happen if legislation to discourage foreign buyers was just enough to crack confidence and pop what so many people worry may be a property bubble.
With houses selling over asking price year after year, buyers are convinced it's safe to overpay for a home because they'll make their money back as prices continue to rise. (Mike Cassese/Reuters) Vancouver prices have hit such staggering levels that even talk of a special tax or restrictions on what properties foreign investors can buy could feasibly send the market into a tailspin. In both Toronto and Vancouver, a slide in prices would have echoes far beyond house prices.
Without a continuing influx of foreign investors, new construction would likely slow and deprive the economy of jobs. The sellers of existing homes would no longer count on a premium for their fixer-uppers.
Worst of all, those who entered the market recently would be under water. Younger people who are already spending almost everything they earn on mortgage bills would feel even poorer as falling prices swallowed up years of payments.
Not only that, a general decline in employment could lead to a vicious cycle of economic weakness.
In the bidding war for government attention, legislators must weigh the outrage of those priced out of the market against the fears of those whose livelihoods depend on a continued boom.
The best solution would be to meet in the middle, with rules that would help new buyers without mortgaging their economic future. But like your dream home, engineering a soft landing may be out of reach.
Follow Don on Twitter @don_pittis
More analysis by Don PittisFAQ - F requently Asked Questions Answers to FAQ concerning Albert Einstein.
1 Portrait diagram (chalk lithography)
"Albert Einstein", around 1920/21
by Max Liebermann When and where was Albert Einstein born?
He was born on Friday, March 14, 1879 at 11.30 a.m. in Ulm, Württemberg, in Bahnhofstraße B 135, later renamed Bahnhofstraße 20. When and where did Albert Einstein die?
Aged 76 he died in hospital in Princeton, New Jersey, USA on Monday, April 18, 1955 early in the morning at 1.15 a.m.
What did Einstein die from?
The aneurysm, an enlargement of the abdominal artery filled with blood, which had been diagnosed earlier, had burst. He bled to death internally. Was Einstein’s brain removed during the autopsy?
Yes! The pathologist, who did this without permission, was Dr. Thomas S. Harvey. The autopsy was carried out few hours after Einstein’s death. As the bereaved learned about it they gave their belated approval to take out and scientifically examine Einstein’s brain.
Where was Albert Einstein buried?
There is no grave. According to Einstein’s wish his body was burned on the same day and the ashes were scattered after a simple ceremony at an unknown place.
Did Einstein write a last will?
Yes! It was signed by him on March 18, 1950. His secretary Helen Dukas and Dr. Otto Nathan were inserted as administrators of his will. The heirs were among others his step daughter Margot and his two sons Hans Albert and Eduard. His whole written property was given to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where it is still to be seen today, in the Albert Einstein Archives. Who were Albert Einstein’s parents?
His father was Hermann Einstein (1847-1902) and his mother was Pauline Einstein, nee Koch (1858-1920). Did Einstein have siblings?
He had a sister - Maria, called Maja (1881-1951). Brother and sister always liked each other. Where did Einstein spend his childhood?
He spent his childhood in Ulm from his birth in March 1879 until June 1880 and in Munich from June 1880 until December 1894. As a 15-year-old he followed his family to Milan (Italy), where his family had settled in the meantime. What did Albert Einstein like to play with as a child?
Maja, Albert Einstein’s sister, reports in „Albert Einstein - Beitrag für sein Lebensbild“ (Albert Einstein – Contribution for his biography), that her brother very much liked to play with "puzzles, jigsaw works, building complex constructions with a construction kit". He liked best building houses of cards, which he was able to build up to 14 stories high as a ten-year-old. He was less interested in wild and sportive games with other children. With increasing age he began to read very much and very concentrated. Is it true that Albert Einstein had a quick temper as a child?
Young Albert had a quick temper, however, it vanished during his first school years. Albert’s sister Maja reports in Albert Einstein - Beitrag für sein Lebensbild (Albert Einstein – Contribution for his biography) the following: "In such moments his face became all yellow, however, the tip of his nose became snow-white, and he was no longer under control. At such an opportunity he once grabbed a chair and threw it after his teacher, who was so terrified, that she ran away and never came back again. His little sister was once thrown a big skittles ball on the head and a third time a children’s pick served as a device for, hitting somebody on the head." Which schools did Einstein attend?
Einstein received private lessons at home starting in 1884 and attended „Petersschule” (Peter’s School), a catholic public school in Munich, from October 1885 until 1888. „Luitpold-Gymnasium“ (Luitpold Grammar School), also in Munich, followed from October 1888 until 1894. However, he left this grammar school before time in December 1894 without taking his exams. To make up his graduation exam (Matur) he attended the business department of the Cantonal School in Aarau, Switzerland from October 1895 until October 1896. He studied at the Polytechnic (the later Swiss Technical Academy, ETH) in Zurich starting in October 1896. Was Albert Einstein a good or a bad pupil?
Albert Einstein, whose school performance seemed already very promising in elementary school, became a good student. He was always amongst the better students in his class. He received especially good marks in maths and the natural sciences, some worse marks in the languages, in drawing and in sports. Is it true, that Albert Einstein had a 5 in maths?
Einstein’s performance in maths was always well up to excellent and in his school reports he received the marks good and very good. The rumour about the 5 in maths has proposedly developed from the fact that in Einstein’s school reports, for example from the Cantonal School Aarau, the mark 5 and even 6 can be found in maths. However, we have to consider that the criteria for school performance in Germany and Switzerland are different. That means, mark 1 (very good) in Germany corresponds to mark 6 in Switzerland; mark 2 (good) equals mark 5; etc. Did Einstein „have to repeat a year“ in school?
Albert Einstein never had to “repeat a year” during his whole school time. Which school leaving certificate did Einstein have?
He passed the school leaving examination (Matur) at the Cantonal School in Aarau, Switzerland, in October 1896. What did Albert Einstein do after passing his school leaving exam?
Einstein studied at the Polytechnic (the later Swiss Technical Academy, ETH) in Zurich from 1896 until 1900. The aim of his studies was the subject teacher diploma for maths and physics. He ended his studies successfully in July 1900. Did Einstein have to do his military service?
No! Einstein escaped the German military service by giving up the German citizenship as 17-year-old with the approval of his father. It was different with Swiss army. Einstein became a Swiss citizen in February 1901 and was summoned by the military officials for the medical examination one month later. At the medical examination on March 13, 1901 Einstein was attested varicosities, flat and sweaty feet.
Thus he was declared "Unqualified A" (" Untauglich A" ) by the examination committee. The “A” means, that he could only be used for "helpers’ services" ( "Hülfsdienste und Platzdienst" ). However, the Swiss Army has never summoned Einstein to perform these services. Was Albert Einstein married?
Yes! Albert Einstein was married two times. He married Mileva Maric (1875-1948) in January 1903, a former fellow student from his time as a student at the Polytechnic in Zurich. They were divorced in February 1919. 4 months later, in June 1919, he married his cousin Elsa Löwenthal (1876-1936), nee Einstein. Did Albert Einstein have children?
With Mileva Maric, his first wife, he had three children.
Lieserl (1902-?), who was born illegitimate, Hans Albert (1904-1973) and Eduard (1910-1965). His second wife, Elsa Löwenthal, nee Einstein, brought two daughters from her first marriage, Ilse Löwenthal (1897-1934) and Margot Löwenthal (1899-1986). Which nicknames did Mileva and Albert Einstein have for their sons Hans Albert and Eduard?
As a child Hans Albert was called Buio, Swiss for “boy”. However, in Einstein’s letters he was also only called Bu. Later Hans Albert was called Adn or just Albert. Eduard was only called Tede or Tedel by Mileva, Serbian word for "child". In Einstein’s letters he is also called Tete, Tetel and Teddy. How tall was Einstein?
In his Swiss "little log book" ( Dienstbüchlein) of 1901 a body height of 171,5 cm is stated. In his passport dated 1923 175 cm are stated. What colour did Albert Einstein’s eyes have?
Einstein had brown eyes (Source: Einstein’s passport dated 1923). Was Albert Einstein left- or right-handed? Einstein was right-handed. Which hobbies did Albert Einstein have?
Einstein very much liked to play the violin and the piano. Sailing was also special to him. Did Einstein play an instrument? He played the violin and the piano. Did Albert Einstein have one or more violins?
He had several violins in his life. The "last" violin was handed down to his grandson, Bernhard Caesar. Legend has it that Einstein called all its violins Lina – supposedly deduced from "violin". Was Einstein a good violin-player?
Here different opinions do exist. Ze'ev Rosenkranz writes in his book, Albert Einstein - Privat und ganz persönlich (Albert Einstein – Private and very personal) about Einstein playing the violin: "... He himself liked to scoff at his 'incompetence', which he rarely found “impressing”, however, this did not reduce his joy in playing the 'violin'. Supposedly he was a good amateur musician with an own intuitive understanding of the music. In his later years he didn’t like the notes produced by himself any more; in the end he stopped playing the violin and only fantasized on the piano." Who were Einstein’s favourite composers?
Next to Mozart, whose music he liked best, there were for example Vivaldi, Bach, Schubert and Corelli. Did Einstein have a sailing boat of his own?
Einstein had a boat in Caputh, near Potsdam, named Tümmler, which was confiscated during the national socialist seizure of power in 1933 and sold one year later. In the US he had a sailing boat of his own called Tinnef. Could Albert Einstein swim?
Though Einstein liked sailing very much he could not swim. He even denied to use swim vests. This led to his family always worrying very much when he was out sailing. Did Albert Einstein have a car?
Albert Einstein had no car of his own and he also never learned how to drive. If he had to, he was driven by friends and relatives or their chauffeurs. Did Einstein smoke?
He smoked cigar and pipe despite his wife Elsa and his doctors forbid him to smoke. Did Einstein drink alcohol?
Albert Einstein drank only few alcohol. If at all, a glass of wine or a little glass of cognac. Mostly he only sipped on the alcoholics served to him. Did Einstein have a favourite book and a favourite author?
Einstein liked reading very much and he read a lot. Therefore it is difficult to name single books or authors. Despite that fact a small selection in the following: He very much liked to read Don Quijote by Cervantes Saavedra and The Karamasow Brothers by Dostojewski. David Humes Traktat about human nature had according to Einstein’s own words quite an influence on his development.
Here the authors have to be mentioned Poincaré, Mach, Tolstoi, Heine, Shaw as well as Schopenhauer and Spinoza. As a student he read with increasing enthusiasm the Naturwissenschaftlichen Volksbücher (Natural-Scientific Popular Books) by Aaron Bernstein and dealt among other things with Ludwig Büchners Kraft und Stoff (Energy and Matter) and Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason). Did Albert Einstein write books of his own?
Next to very many scientific and non-scientific publications Albert Einstein has also written, i.e. published several books.
About the special and the general theory of relativity (intelligible to everybody),
Basics of the theory of relativity,
The evolution of physics, with Leopold Infeld.
The books mentioned here have been translated into many languages. Did Albert Einstein write some kind of diary? During his journeys he wrote a diary. Today the following travel diaries exist:
(Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem) 1: Japan, Palestine, Spain - October 1922 to March 1923
2: South America - 1925
3: USA - November 1930 to January 1931
4: USA - December 3, 1931 to February 4, 1932;
December 10, 1932 to December 18, 1932
5: Berlin, London - April 1931 to June 1931
6: USA - January 28, 1933 to February 16, 1933 Einstein had worked at the Patent Office (Swiss Office for Intellectual Property) for some years in Bern. Did he also have own patents?
Yes, he owned more then twenty patents. However, always together with a partner. Thus for example with the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard among other things a patent for a refrigerator. With the industrial Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe a patent for a gyroscopic compass, with Rudolf Goldschmidt, a professor for mechanical engineering and electrical engineering, a patent for a hearing device and with the doctor Gustav Bucky a patent for an automatic camera. When was Einstein working at the Swiss Office for Intellectual Property in Bern?
He was employed as technical expert third-class with an annual salary of 3500 Swiss Francs in June 1902 and he was promoted to be technical expert second-class, with an annual salary of 4500 Swiss Francs in April 1906. He handed in his notice to start a new job as extraordinary professor for theoretical physics at the university Zurich in July 1909. What became of Einstein’s working place (office) in the Patent Office in Bern? Is it open to the public today?
Einstein’s former working place, i.e. his office in the back then Bern Patent Office in Speichergasse has been rebuilt during the course of time. The building, which is not open to the public, is used no longer as patent office today and except for a commemorative plaque in the foyer nothing anymore points out that Albert Einstein has worked there. What became of Einstein’s office in Princeton, in which he worked until shortly before his death?
From Einstein’s office in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton there is only the known photograph still left, which shows the room how Einstein left it in 1955. Nothing more is left of "his office". After Einstein’s death is was again used as office by an employees of the institute.
On the official website of the Institutes for Advanced Study the following hint can be found: "Is it possible to visit Albert Einstein's office at the Institute?
Professor Einstein's Institute office has been occupied, since his death in 1955, by other members of the Institute's Faculty. The offices of all Faculty and Members are private." What is the theory of relativity?
Whole books might be filled with answering this question. Very briefly the following: Concerning Einstein’s theory of relativity it can be differentiated between the special theory of relativity dated 1905, and the general theory of relativity (gravity theory) of 1915.
The special theory of relativity deals with questions of systems of reference moving with constant speed against each other. It lead to a revision of the terms space and time and is based on the principle of the constancy of the speed of light and on the principle of relativity, which postulates the impossibility of the determination of an absolute movement. However, the general theory of relativity deals with systems of reference relatively accelerated against each other, as well as the impact of gravity on space and time. Was it possible to confirm the effects predicted by the general theory of relativity with experiments?
To the classical confirmed tests of the general theory of relativity belong among others the predicaments of the perihelion motion of Mercury, the gravitation red shift as well as of the deviation of light in the gravitational field of the sun.
The gravity waves predicted by Einstein and his theory however, could only be indirectly proven until today. How many people understand the theory of relativity?
Was the special theory of relativity still "intelligible", the general theory of relativity could not be understood by most of Einstein’s contemporaries. Legend has it that the English astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington is said to have answered on the question, whether three people could understand the theory of relativity: "And who is going to be the third?"
Today things have changed. The theories of relativity are already dealt with in the upper classes of grammar school and are basic components of every physics study. Thus it can be assumed that very many people are able to understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, at least the basics of it. What does the formula: E = m · c2 mean?
Einstein’s famous formula of the Equivalence of Mass and Energy: E = m · c2 (energy equals mass times speed of light squared) is a direct consequence of his special theory of relativity from the year 1905.
It says that any energy, which is supplied to a body, also increases its mass and each energy, which is deduced from the body, reduces its mass.
The conversion from mass into energy was sadly confirmed at the latest in August 1945 by the throwing two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How big is the part of Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Maric, in the theory of relativity?
Again and again there are people claiming that Mileva Maric had a big part in Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Of course the two of them have jointly discussed Einstein’s work, in which Mileva has introduced some thoughts. However, it is pure speculation to say that Mileva played a bigger part in Einstein’s theories. There are no known documents, from which it becomes clear that Mileva has scientifically contributed to Einstein’s theories. Her personal and intellectual relationship with the young Einstein however, has played an important role in his development. But she could not help him with the creative part of the theory of relativity. In the 20ies there is said to have been a film by Einstein concerning the theory of relativity. What do you know about this film?
The German version of the film about Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which was first shown on April 2, 1922, is no longer be traceable. Hanns-Walter Kornblum had the idea to this film, which almost entirely consisted of animated pictures. Today only the English version of the film from the year 1923 is preserved. However, this is a version which is very shortened of the German original version. Was Albert Einstein awarded the Nobel Price?
Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Price for physics in 1921. The price was given to him "for his merits concerning theoretical physics, especially for his discovery of the law of photoelectric effect". It has to be mentioned that Einstein was not awarded the Nobel Price for the theory of relativity. What had Einstein to do with the construction of the atomic bomb?
Frightened that Germany worked on the development of the atomic bomb, Albert Einstein signed a letter to the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2, 1939 to point out the possibility of an atomic danger to him. In the letter indicated to the president that there was a military threat with atomic energy and gave him the tip, that also the US should increase its nuclear research. This was the only part Einstein played in connection with the atomic bomb!
In a letter to his long-time friend Max von Laue Einstein wrote in March 1955: "...The thing with the atomic bomb and Roosevelt was restricted to the fact that I have signed a letter by Szilards facing the danger that Hitler could be in possession of the atomic bomb first. If I had known that this danger was not real, I would not have participated in opening Pandora’s box, by the way as little as Szilard. [...] ". Which contemporary technical modern comforts can be traced back to Albert Einstein?
Today Einstein’s findings are also applied in technical systems. Such for example in laser technology, the CD player, the digital camera, the solar cell and in the „Global Positioning System“, abbreviated GPS, which we are no longer to imagine being without, which is used in our cars as navigation system. Are there still descendants of Albert Einstein today (2013)? If yes, where do they live? Yes, there are still descendants. However, due to reasons of personality protection their addresses are not published. Again and again it can be read, e.g. on the internet, that there is a "Einstein-riddle" with the following or similar conceptual formulation:
1. There are 5 houses, each with a different colour.
2. In each house lives a person of another nationality.
3. Each tenant prefers a certain beverage, smokes a certain cigarette brand and has a certain pet.
4. None of the 5 persons is drinking the same, smoking the same or has the same pet.
The question is: To whom does the fish belong?..." Is this riddle really from Albert Einstein? The riddle is not from Albert Einstein!
There is no prove for the fact that it is from him
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Illustrations credits: Courtesy of the Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Porträtgrafiksammlung, Nr. 192 Ü, Berlin: 1 Copyright © 2000-2014 Hans-Josef Küpper. All rights reserved. | ImprintMy several year old Logitech MX Revolution was finally starting to feel its age, so I decided to upgrade to a proper gaming mouse this time, but also wanted to keep the wireless functionality that I enjoyed with the MX, so I set my sights on the G700s, the latest and greatest from Logitech. While I do realize there is not much change from the G700 as some have previously noted, I can only speak to what I notice now about this mouse and its relationship to my prior mouse, the MX Revolution.
The packaging was well put together and easy enough to open and remove the mouse and receiver from. All together, you have the Mouse, the wireless receiver, the USB charging cable, a USB extension cable for the receiver, and a simple user guide - drivers are not included, and you will need to download the Logitech Gaming Software from the Logitech website - more on that later.
The feel of the mouse is certainly one of a 'premium' feeling - whereas the MX revolution feels like a solid mouse, I would go so far as to say that the G700s feels even nicer, if that's possible. The area where your thumb rests as well as where your ring and pinky finger rest is coated in a bumpy-like texture, which feels odd at first, but as you continue to use the mouse, you can tell that it does help keep the mouse gripped to your hand, and its a good feeling. The graphics on the mouse top are neither here nor there, and are purely decorative and serve no other purpose. From a size standpoint, the mouse is slightly smaller than the MX and feels weird at first, but after a few hours usage it feels completely normal and easy to hold. And from a weight standpoint, the mouse feels solid - not too light where it feels like it will fly away, but not too heavy that it becomes a burden to move.
The mouse clicks from the left and right mouse button are nice and firm - a solid click, but not difficult in any manner to depress - probably the best clicking mouse I've ever used. The click on the 'G' or macro keys is less 'clicky' than the normal left and right mouse buttons, but they feel solid and will be able to stand up to the test of time. The 'G' keys are all simple enough to feel and find with your fingers, and I have not encountered an issue with clicking an unintended key. The scroll wheel is easy to use - it offers a 'bump' setting like a regular mouse, but you can also hit a mechanical switch right below that will remove the mechanical lock and will allow the wheel to spin freely (I might add it appears that there is a ball bearing in the wheel, as it will spin for quite some time if spun hard). The bottom of the mouse you will find the cutout for the laser, an on/off switch, and the battery door, which houses a 1900 mAh AA Eneloop battery - fairly common AA battery that can be purchased if you need a backup or it dies over time. The front nose of the mouse houses a micro-USB port for where you can charge the mouse. There are also 4 glossy 'feet' on the bottom of the mouse that allow it to glide over any mousepad you might use without any issues - I've encountered no snagging issues with my Steelseries cloth mouse pad.
The USB receiver is the same size as the Logitech nano-receiver commonly used on many Logitech products, but is not compatible with the 'nano' technology, as the mouse has a very high polling rate compared to other products. Plugs in easily, no issues here - fits easily into the USB slot on the back of my G710+ keyboard. The included USB charging cable fits tightly into the mouse and was designed to fit perfectly into the micro-usb slot on the front of the mouse. Cable is about 6 feet long and is thick and sturdy. One nice thing about this set up is that you are able to charge the mouse and use it at the same time, simply leaving the USB receiver plugged in and then plugging in the charging cable to another USB port - however, you can remove the receiver and use the mouse as a wired mouse if you need to. The USB receiver extension cord (I say receiver usb extension cord simply because there is a little picture on it showing that it should only be used for the USB receiver, not the charging cable) is thinner than the charging cable and is also about 6 feet long - most likely used for someone who's computer is farther away from their desk than a couple feet, ensuring that the mouse is as close to the receiver as possible.
The Logitech gaming software is simple to install, and houses a ton of options for the mouse. While it can be intimidating at first looking at all the options you have to change the settings, spending a couple minutes with the software will easily show you the many many things you can do with the programming. I think one of the greatest highlights of this mouse is the use of the on-board memory, meaning that all the information you program in the gaming software gets stored onto the mouse itself, meaning you don't have to worry about multi-key macros that you've created to get jumbled in the software when you are running another program. I know from personal experience with the MX revolution, which you could store functions to the back and forward buttons that sometimes while in a game, the SetPoint software would not respond properly and the keys would not perform as intended. This is not the case with the G700s, as the commands are stored right on the mouse and work flawlessly every time.
You are able to save up to 5 different profiles for the mouse, all of which can be changed from the mouse itself (so long as you have one of the 'G' keys set to "Switch Profile") or from the software. There are 3 LED's on the left side of the mouse that will indicate which profile is active based on how you program it in the software. The actual programming is very simple as well - just click on a button in the software, define what you want it to do, and click OK - it's as easy as that. You can do anything from making a 'G' key perform a keystroke to checking the battery level (also displayed with the 3 LED's on the mouse) to switching profiles and more. You are also able to set multiple laser DPI levels per profile, and are able to change them on the fly using the 'G' program keys as well. DPI's range from 200 all the way up to 8200. There is also a selectable polling rate (meaning how many times the mouse and the receiver talk per second), and you have the option of 125, 200, 250, 333, 500, or 1000 polls per second. You can also select a power mode for each profile - power saving, normal gaming, and max gaming. Again, it may seem daunting at first to make all of the programming, but after a couple minutes with fooling around, its simple enough to figure out and program to your pleasing.
Using the mouse is a great joy, whether using it for gaming or using it around your operating system and programs. I've noticed my precision in FPS games like Planetside 2 and Battlefield 3 go up a noticeable amount, and I've also noticed that I'm more precise just using the mouse over my old MX revolution around Windows as well.
My only gripe with the product (which I think I accepted before purchasing anyway) is the battery life. The MX was able to go for days on end without requiring a recharge. The G700s? Not so much. Using the normal gaming setting with 1000 polls per second, I can see probably 5-6 hours of gaming before I need to plug the mouse in to recharge it. Using the mouse on a normal basis with the power saving feature and a much lower polling rate I can get a few days out of the mouse, but not much more. So while I knew the battery life wasn't going to be as good as the MX, its slightly below my original expectation of how long it would last. Personally, I would have loved to see 2 AA batteries in the mouse for extended battery life.
Outside of the battery issues, this is an excellent mouse for gaming and for every day use that I would certainly buy again if given a choice.Channel 5 are still intending to pay ex-housemate Ray J a six figure sum of money for his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, according to reports.
TMZ has 'been told' that the show 'will pay Ray the balance due' and that it will be 'in the high six figures'.
The scenario around Ray J's departure is still extremely unclear with some reports stating he was removed, some insisting he quit and others suggesting he wants to now go back inside; circling it all is the fact that he has had to seek dental attention due to a problem with his teeth.
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Put your money where your mouth is! Channel 5 'will still pay Ray J a high six-figure fee' despite leaving Celebrity Big Brother in light of dental issues
To add further mystery to the situation, TMZ also says that Ray J was axed from the show before his dental problems came to light.
On Wednesday night's CBB episode, the American rapper was seen entering the Diary Room and never returning.
Big Brother then announced the news to his remaining housemates, who appeared disappointed.
Yet it's still uncertain precisely what the facts are, as Big Brother contestants have been known to exit the house in the past to attend hospital, but are then let back inside to continue their stint.
The fact that Ray J won't be returning has suggested he is too ill to continue on the show; yet he has publicly slammed Channel 5 for 'axing' him, insinuating that he is well enough to continue and producers don't want him to.
Cha-ching! He was reportedly set to receive close to $1million for his appearance on the series, making him one of the highest paid celebrities to take part in the show's history
He was reportedly set to receive close to $1million for his appearance on the series, making him one of the highest paid celebrities to take part in the show's history.
It's understood that celebrities don't earn their full fee if they are removed or walk out - yet the situation regarding medical needs is unclear.
The reports that he will still earn a six figure fee suggests he was not asked to leave and did not walk out.
On Tuesday the news hit that the 35-year-old had been forced to leave Celebrity Big Brother after one week in the house due to 'unbearable pain' caused by a tooth abscess.
Farewell: Ray J has quit Celebrity Big Brother after one week in the house due to 'unbearable pain' caused by a tooth abscess
The singer was rushed to hospital with a serious toothache but was said to be 'enraged' with producers for letting him suffer for three and a half days without medical care, according, again, to TMZ.
In a FaceTime video, the brother of pop star Brandy said he blacked out on the way to the hospital but now feels ready to return to the house - and has threatened to sue the show amid claims he isn't being allowed back.
On Wednesday he was photographed looking downast as he left a London dental clinic.
Suggesting that he could return, he tweeted: 'I was having so much fun! - still waiting to go back in - fingers crossed! #cbb2017'.
His departure was confirmed after being announced at the end of Tuesday night's episode. MailOnline has contacted Channel 5 for comment.
Ray - who had been up for eviction this week - is said to have been suffering with the pain for three days and had complained to his housemates so much that they refused to continue filming until he was given medical help.
He said on a FaceTime call with TMZ: 'I have a bad tooth problem and I've been doing this show Big Brother in London and I've been complaining about my tooth for about three and a half days now.'
Tragic: His departure was confirmed after being announced on the show at the end of Tuesday night's episode
Up in the air: Suggesting that he could return however, he Tweeted: 'I was having so much fun! - still waiting to go back in - fingers crossed! #cbb2017'
'It got to the point where some of the housemates felt like I was being ignored, we took petitions to say "We're not doing any more tasks until Ray J's tooth gets fixed".
Ray J was in fact nominated by several housemates, including Coleen Nolan and Nicola McLean.
Explaining her reasoning, Coleen said: 'He’s said a few times about "not being interested in speaking to everyone and hearing about their lives” but that’s all we’ve got in the house!'
Nicola added: 'He’s slept too much and it says in the Big Brother rules you shouldn’t sleep in the day. he doesn’t play by the rules'.
Up for eviction: Ray J was nominated by several housemates, including Coleen Nolan and Nicola McLean - who complained that he'slept too much'
Dramatic: It has been claimed that Ray blacked out on his way to the hospital, where he is currently receiving treatment for an abscessed tooth, a cracked filling and a severe gum problem (pictured with his wife Princess Love)
Detailing his tooth complaints on Facetime, the singer said: 'I've got a cracked tooth where I need a filling fixed, I got a gum coming over my over tooth and I'm in a lot of pain - so three and a half days in the house with all of this pain, they decided to take me out.'
'The wind hit my tooth and I blacked out, I ended up in the hospital. 45 minutes later they gave me some nutrition and I eat some McDonald's and I'm cool, like I'm literally fine and I'm ready to go back in the house.'
Ray J continued: 'They won't let me back in and I'm really hurt by it because I felt like I was doing well, I felt like I was connecting with the British fanbase, and it just sucks because I was having such a good time.'
Controversy: He had reportedly been complaining to his housemates so much that they refused to continue filming until he was given medical helpMine Diving in Sweden
By Guest Blogger Chris Haslam
Photos by Patrik Pdyk Juhlin and Chris Haslam
Nearly one year ago I set off for another diving adventure around the globe leaving behind my home turf of Cairns, Australia. It is a slow journey taking me to the many spectacular diving locations this planet has to offer. I had a vision to promote international diving, quality courses and conservation (its still an ongoing project). Via Amed, Bali I have traveled to Egypt where I spent 4 months in this technical diving mecca diving with team mates Team Blue Immersion Dahab, to a depth |
in their late teens. The story deals in some part with Max learning that becoming an adult means dealing with the consequences — good and bad — of her choices.
Compartment Shot: Seen when Max finds Frank's gun in the overhead locker of his van.
Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: The game will try to nudge you into getting on with the story if you take too long looking at objects or otherwise not progressing. For example, both Warren and Chloe will send an additional text to Max if she takes too long getting to them.
Controllable Helplessness: After Mr. Jefferson captures Max and takes her to the Dark Room, you can move the camera and look around, but there are very few objects you can meaningfully interact with.
Corner of Woe: In the Sacrifice Chloe ending, Max sits behind the bathroom stalls weeping while Nathan shoots Chloe.
Covers Always Lie: A minor case. The game's official art shows Max using her power while holding out her left hand. In the game, she does this with her right hand. Max actually reproduces said image in her journal.
Creator Cameo: Christian Divine, one of the game's writers, voices Truss Limpbow in Episode 5.
Credits Gag: "To All of You", the first licensed song in the series, plays backwards in Max's nightmare. Naturally, when the credits arrive at the music section, it's spelled backwards.
Cruelty Is the Only Option: The only way to get Victoria to stop blocking the door to the girls dorm is to ruin her outfit with water and paint. This is then followed by a choice of being kind or cruel about her predicament.
In Episode 5, Max has to turn on a sprinkler that will put out the fire that is blocking her way. In the process, a nearby fisherman will get electrocuted and die. While Max can rewind from the other side of the fire to save him and turn on the sprinkler from there, there is no way she can save him without killing him first.
Darker and Edgier: The game slowly moves into this territory, starting out as a somewhat lighthearted coming-of-age story with high school drama and a mystery to solve. As the truth behind Rachel's disappearance comes to light, things become less and less light, with Max making harder decisions and the weather events getting steadily worse. By the time we've gotten to Episode 5, the town is on the brink of destruction, and at the end of it all, Max has to make the hardest decision of her life.
Darkest Hour: At the end of Episode 4. Chloe is dead, Max has been kidnapped by the Big Bad, and the day the tornado is supposed to strike Arcadia Bay is approaching with Max unable to do anything to stop it.
Death Is Cheap: Played straight most of the time, but subverted in three occasions: Chloe dies on multiple occasions: shot by Nathan, shot herself while doing trick shots, ran over by a train, either euthanized or die of respiratory system failure in the alternate timeline and finally shot by Mr. Jefferson. Max uses her powers to reverse all but the last one. Her powers fail when Kate tries to kill herself and she has to save her without them. Finally, she manages to save William, but the consequences are so bad she decides to undo it. This is also subverted with the revelation that Chloe's not dying creates the massive weather disturbances and tornado that eventually destroys Arcadia Bay. In this case, death prevents a disaster.
Decided by One Vote: The success of Ms. Grant's petition to stop David from installing security cameras hinges on Max's participation.
Deconstruction: Of being a superhero. Max's storyline is similar to a Superhero Origin, what with the sudden gaining of superpowers and using them to help people and prevent an impending disaster, but saving people is not as easy or simple as "punch out the villain".
Developers' Foresight: A twofer that spans Episodes 1 and 2: In the middle of Episode 1, you have to visit Max's friend Dana to get back a flash drive that Dana borrowed. While doing this, you can look around the room. Look in the trash can and you'll find a pregnancy test. Of course, since you did this right in front of Dana, she'll notice and call you out for snooping into her private business. At this point, you're meant to use Max's time powers to undo this action, but you can choose not to, in which case talking to Dana in Episode 2 will trigger a special sequence where Max apologizes and patches things up with Dana.
. Of course, since you did this right in front of Dana, she'll notice and call you out for snooping into her private business. At this point, you're meant to use Max's time powers to undo this action, but you can choose not to, in which case talking to Dana in Episode 2 will trigger a special sequence where Max apologizes and patches things up with Dana. In Episode 2, one of the five bottles in the junkyard is located on a boat which is too tall for Max to climb. To get there, you have to go up the nearby hill and move a large plank to make a bridge. After collecting the bottle, you can rewind this action and trap Max on the boat. Max will comment on how she's just trapped herself, then jump down so the player can keep going.
Also in the junkyard, you can find a doe that will move a few meters away from its spot once it sees you. Attempting to rewind it back to that spot will not work and Max will even comment about it. It turns out that this doe is not normal.
In Episode 3, when you visit the Blackwell pool with Chloe, she'll let Max choose which locker room to go through. If you pick one, enter it, then rewind and unlock it from the other side, Chloe will call you on using the same trick you used to get into the principal's office.
In Episode 4, Max's journal has unique cellphone texts and diary entries in the alternate timeline. There are also alternate texts in Episode 5, when you're trying to reach the lighthouse.
. There are also alternate texts in Episode 5, when you're In Episode 4, the player is given four long lists of GPS coordinates associated with different license plates, the intent being to find the one associated with Nathan in order to track where he's been. However, one of the other pages is associated with Mr. Jefferson's car, and if you compare those coordinates with the places the game says they belong to when you figure out Nathan's whereabouts, they make total sense. In fact, if for some reason you decided to work this out before the ending, you'd probably figure out that he was actually the ringleader.
car, and if you compare those coordinates with the places the game says they belong to when you figure out Nathan's whereabouts, they make total sense.. In Episode 5, looking at Max's journal in the timeline where Mr. Jefferson burnt her journal shows only burnt paper. Looking at it later when you're trying to reach the lighthouse shows a page full of crazy scribblings.
Diabolus ex Machina: In Episode 2, Max's powers go awry right when they would be most useful. In the first instance, Max has a vision, during which Chloe gets her leg caught in the railroad tracks. This resets Max's rewind potential and she can only go back to the moment she left the vision, preventing her from just warning Chloe beforehand. Later, her Psychic Nosebleed kicks in when Kate commits suicide, and though Max is able to rewind enough to get to the roof, her powers are burnt out for the duration of the following conversation, meaning she has to get it right on the first try.
, and though Max is able to rewind enough to get to the roof, her powers are burnt out for the duration of the following conversation, meaning she has to get it right on the first try. In Episode 4, Mr. Jefferson drugs Max before shooting Chloe, which prevents Max from focusing and rewinding it. It wasn't like he knew about Max's power, but he took exactly the action he would have if he did.
. It wasn't like he knew about Max's power, but he took exactly the action he would have if he did. In the beginning of Episode 5, Max uses her photos to create an alternate timeline where Mr. Jefferson is arrested early and she goes to San Francisco as the winner of the Everyday Heroes Photo Contest. However, she forgets about the tornado and goes back to when she took her winning photo, destroying it so she stays to help Chloe. As a consequence, Mr. Jefferson finds the torn photo in her diary and burns her entire diary with all of her photos in it out of anger for her not turning it in.
The whole concept of Max's time travel is this. She got her power, or discovered it, by first using it to save Chloe. This turns out to be the root cause of the strange weather that will ultimately will destroy the town, unless Chloe dies — in which case, if that's what's needed to set things right, why give Max the power in the first place? Why make the impetus for it her saving Chloe? Why allow her to realize what life is with Chloe, what life can be, and then force her to undo it or watch as her hometown is destroyed? The game's explanation seems to be that, in Chloe's words, "shit just happens."
Disproportionate Retribution: On a cosmic level, the universe is really pissed that Max saved Chloe and decides to exact payment for her life (so to speak) by blowing the entire town of Arcadia Bay off the map. All because she saved one person.
Distress Call: At the art gallery, Max receives a garbled call from Chloe who is stuck by the beach.
Do Not Do This Cool Thing: In-universe. Max quips that an abstinence poster must drive people to have sex, which isn't that far from the truth.
Does This Remind You of Anything?: Nathan and Mr. Jefferson drug girls at parties, take them to an unknown location and does something to them. It's explicitly stated in Episode 5 that the "something" doesn't strictly speaking involve sexual assault, but the objectification and loss of bodily autonomy still has a very similar emotional impact on victims like Kate and Max.
Doomed Fellow Prisoner: In the beginning of the Episode 5, Max wakes up tied up in a chair by the Big Bad. Depending on the player's choices, Victoria might be there, drugged on the floor. Later on, after returning to the same situation via time travel, it's revealed Mr. Jefferson has killed her, and he's about to do the same to Max.
Down in the Dumps: American Rust, a junkyard on the outskirts of Arcadia Bay. It used to be one of Chloe and Rachel's secret hiding spots, and Chloe takes Max there to further test out Max's powers after the first test in the diner. It's also where Rachel is buried, and Mr. Jefferson uses this fact to lure Max and Chloe into a trap at the end of Episode 4.
Downer Ending: Episode 2. For anyone unable to save Kate, who will jump to her death after being bullied and victim blamed through the two prior episodes.
Episode 4. Rachel is revealed to be long dead, Chloe is killed by Mr. Jefferson, and Max is drugged by him beforehand so she can't rewind it, leaving her at his mercy.
Dramatic Ammo Depletion: In Episode 2, there's a scene where Chloe practices with a gun she stole from her stepfather in the junkyard. She hands the gun to Max to try, when Frank, a drug dealer who Chloe owes a lot of money to, shows up and begins threatening the girls with a knife, causing Max to point the gun at him, giving the player a choice of whether or not to shoot at him. If you decide to shoot, it will turn out that Chloe had already used up all the bullets, but the fact Max was willing to pull the trigger is enough to scare Frank off and impress Chloe.
Dramatic Irony: With Max's time travel powers, this is a given. One of the primary uses for rewind is gathering information through dialog and then going back to appear as if Max already had that information, making her appear more attentive or clever than she may actually be. For instance, when Max questions Juliet in the hallway, Juliet will accuse her of not really caring and ask if Max even knows her last name. Unless you read the dorm map and know the right answer, Max will take a guess. If it's wrong, Juliet will call Max out and correct her, at which point the player can rewind and get it right. Juliet will express surprise at her remembering her name, but odds are Max only knew because she used her powers to learn it.
The player knows that there are ominous red binders with Rachel and Kate's names on them, but there's no way for Max to know that until Episode 4.
names on them, but there's no way for Max to know that. Near the end of Episode 3, Max calls out Chloe on her It's All About Me outlook and stop blaming others for her problems. Trying to go to the source of her outlook ends with Chloe paralyzed.
. "Nobody would even miss your punk ass, would they?!" Said as Max (and potentially the player) weep just out of Nathan and Chloe's sight.
Dream Intro: The game starts with a scene of Max at night by the lighthouse during the storm which turns out to be a Daydream Surprise she was having in class.
Dreaming of Things to Come: Max's Daydream Surprise in the opening scene of Episode 1 is a premonition of what's gonna happen to Arcadia Bay four days into the future.
Dysfunction Junction: Nearly everyone in Arcadia Bay has some kind of issue: The Price family. When Max meets them again after five years after William Price's death, Joyce Price is married to a new husband traumatized by combat who physically and verbally abuses the borderline delinquent Chloe. After Max changes the timeline, William and Joyce are struggling to make ends meet and face the threat of eviction from the expenses of caring for Chloe, who is severely disabled and close to death.
. The Prescotts. Their corruption spreads back over a century - in their secret barn, you can find photos and letters showing they were ruining people's lives right from the beginning. They're running (or at least funding) an illegal photography operation and might have been doing so for a long time. Sean Prescott is a greedy Corrupt Corporate Executive who seems to be trying to take over the whole town, and who willingly withholds help and treatment for his son Nathan's severe mental health issues. Meanwhile, Nathan is an aggressive, high-strung Jerk Jock who legally and violently threatens anyone who treads on his toes, appears to carry a gun with him at all times, and, willingly or not, drugs and abducts girls for Mr. Jefferson to use in said illegal photography operation. The only exception out of all of them is Nathan's sister, Kris Prescott, who works in the Peace Corps and seems to be oblivious to everything that's going on in Arcadia Bay.
The End Is Nigh: Everyone in Arcadia Bay seems to think so, given the Signs of the End Times (flash snowstorm, the unscheduled eclipse and all those dead birds). Max can even comment that they might be right for once. There's also one particular person you can forewarn about this, and though it's not a major choice it does save her life when the storm finally hits. There are actually quite a few references to this, even casting aside Max's powers and the environmental weirdness that plagues Arcadia Bay over the course of the game. The Vortex Club is putting on an 'End of the World' party (which they named before everything started going to hell) David is a prepper, and the Prescotts were funding what was essentially a doomsday bunker, even if that's not what it ended up being used for.
Enter Stage Window: Chloe and Max leave Chloe's room via her window in order to avoid David.
Establishing Character Moment: The bathroom scene in Episode 1 serves as a nice one for Max and Chloe, as well as Nathan (who serves as The Heavy): Max gets stressed from class, makes her way to the bathroom while wearing her headphones to avoid interacting with anyone to try to collect herself alone in the bathroom, then sees something cool and photographs it. After developing her powers, and despite not having a clue what's going on, she endeavors to rescue the (apparent) stranger who just got shot. Nathan aggressively barges in with barely any awareness. He also gives himself a pep talk while looking in the mirror, which quickly turns into a rant about how he could blow up the school. After Chloe pushes his buttons, by bringing the possibility of angering his father, he draws a gun to threaten her and accidentally kills her. Chloe enters confidentially, sneaks in a complaint about David, methodically (but quickly) makes sure there's nobody in the stalls and then immediately starts trying to blackmail Nathan. When her browbeating accidentally sets Nathan off, she lets her mask slip enough to look scared while trying to threaten him into backing down, and when Max sets off the fire alarm as a distraction, she knees him in the crotch.
The scene right after the bathroom scene is one for David and Principal Wells. As soon as Max leaves the bathroom, David is being rude to her for not having left the building already. Wells then appears and tries to be nice to Max. However, he still won't believe her if she tells him that Nathan was brandishing a gun.
Evil Gloating: Mr. Jefferson does this to Max in the Dark Room for the sake of exposure.
Evolving Title Screen: Depending on the progress of the active save file, the title screen will reflect the time of day and other conditions. At the end of Episode 4, it depicts the tornado.
Experimented in College: Max will mention this in her journal if the player chooses the route where she kisses Chloe.
Extreme Mêlée Revenge: In Episode 4, Warren beats Nathan to a pulp if you let him. It's meant as a revenge for when Nathan beat Warren up in the parking lot and also for his mistreatment of Max and Kate.
Extremely Short Timespan: The entire game takes place over the course of five days. It seems longer because of Max's rewind abilities and the alternate timeline.
Failed a Spot Check: In the scenes where Max is hiding in the bathroom while Nathan and Chloe are having their argument, not only does Nathan not check at all to see if anyone else is in the restroom, but Chloe only does a cursory glance of each stall without looking behind them (where Max is). This is doubly stupid because, realistically, if either of them had looked at the mirrors, Max would have been easily visible.
Failure Is the Only Option: In the confrontation with Frank in Episode 2, rewinding causes Max to try and avoid the confrontation altogether by getting Chloe to leave immediately. However, Frank's already close enough, and Max was out long enough, that there simply isn't enough time to do that.
Ultimately, Max can't save everyone. Either she sacrifices Chloe for the town, undoing most of the week and letting her best friend and/or lover die in the bathroom, or she sacrifices Arcadia Bay to keep Chloe alive, killing who-knows-how-many people.
Fanservice Faux Fight: While they're in the school pool after hours in Episode 3, Max and Chloe play-fight by splashing one another with water.
Fantastic Aesop: Max suddenly manifests time travel powers after seeing Chloe shot. She discovers a lot of clever ways to use it, but no matter what she does, it never seems to make anything better in the end, and it's ultimately revealed that her use of the time travel is what's causing the coming apocalyptic storm, and the only way to stop it is to go back to the first time she used her powers and let the girl get shot. In other words, you shouldn't use time travel powers that are miraculously given to you after a terrible event, because the universe might have arbitrary rules that make time travel a bad idea to use. note This also overlaps with Space Whale Aesop, because the implied mundane message of "accept what happened in the past and move on" is only delivered through arbitrary and fantastic consequences. That, in turn, creates a Broken Aesop, because the only reason Max didn't learn to accept what happened early on is because the universe decided to grant her time travel powers to begin with, thanks again to the arbitrary rules of the fantastic element.
Feminist Fantasy: You play as a female character who can rewind time and she uses this superpower to help others and catch sexual predators. Also, half of the game's main cast are females who have as much prominence as the males.
Five-Second Foreshadowing: When Max first vists Chloe's house in the alternate timeline, sharp-eyed players will notice a wheelchair accessible ramp, hinting at Chloe's ultimate fate.
For Want of a Nail: Episode 3 plays it straight. Near the end of the episode, Max goes far enough back in time to save William Price's life, then returns to the present, where she finds a few things changed — David Madsen is now the school bus driver, Max is part of the Vortex Club, and Chloe has become paralyzed and wheelchair-bound.
. Episode 5 has several instances due to Max's repeated hopping around through photographs, and it turns out the entire game is one - Max saving Chloe's life in the bathroom is what's causing the storm and other environmental catastrophes. This is also discussed by Warren and Max at Two Whales.
Foreshadowing: If you look closely at Kate's notes in Mr. Jefferson's class at the start of the game, you can see that she's drawn a noose hanging from a tree with a pool of blood below it. An early sign that Kate is suicidal.
"Santa Monica Dream" by Angus and Julia Stone plays late in Episode 1. The song's chorus, which begins with "goodbye to my Santa Monica dream" foreshadows that Chloe will never make it to California to live out her dream with Rachel, much less find her alive.
While sitting in the diner in Episode 2, Max mentions that she wishes the moment would last forever and that though she could technically keep rewinding, it wouldn't really be a "moment". In the climax of the episode, she manages to completely freeze time by essentially doing a slow, constant rewind.
. In Episode 2, there is an optional photo at the Two Whales Diner. The hint in the journal shows the Diner Sign next to the sun. However, when taking the picture, the sun is blocked by the sign. The sign foreshadows three of the upcoming anomalies: The sun is blocked: the solar eclipse of Episode 2. "Two Whales Diner" Sign: the whales stranding of Episode 3. " Two Whales Diner" Sign: the twin moon of Episode 4.
In Episode 1, Max first sees Chloe's truck double parked in a handicapped spot, and in Episode 3, they can choose to steal money from the handicapped fund in the principal's office. By the end of the episode, after Max has altered the timeline so Chloe's father lives, the alternate Chloe is paralyzed from the neck down and in a wheelchair.
. In Episode 2, the spirit doe appears in the junkyard despite nothing supernatural going on in that area. In Episode 4, Max and Chloe learn that Rachel was buried in the junkyard. The spot where the doe appears is exactly where she was buried.
. In that same junkyard, there are some syringes that look like they were just used recently. This place is likely where Rachel was overdosed and killed.
There are some hints to who has been the Big Bad all along: In Episode 1, Mr. Jefferson dismisses a particular philosophy of photography by saying he could easily frame any of the students in a dark room and capture their moment of desperation. Another hint comes from his artwork, which almost exclusively focuses on younger women in vulnerable positions. In Episode 3, you find the duct tape needed to make the pipe bomb in Mr. Jefferson's classroom. In Episode 4, you find a note addressed to Nathan telling him to "stop calling (the writer's) name in public". Max guesses that this must be from Nathan's father, but why would Nathan call his father by name? The mere fact that you could blame Mr. Jefferson for Kate's suicide attempt in Episode 2 indicates that that character plays a larger role than the player might think. While the Dark Room functions as a sinister sounding name for what amounts to a torture dungeon, it is also a photography reference, where a darkroom is a workshop for processing light sensitive photographic film.
Max first discovers her power in Episode 1, when Nathan shoots Chloe in the stomach. Chloe is wearing a shirt with a skull on it at the time. In Episode 4, Chloe receives a bullet to the skull.
When Max is talking to Mr. Jefferson in Episode 2, she tells him that she doesn't want Kate to become "the next Rachel Amber". In Episode 4, it's revealed that Kate and Rachel were both drugged and nonconsensually photographed in humiliating and sexually suggestive positions.
. If you look closely at Max's character model during the opening cutscene of Episode 1, when she wakes up during the storm, you can see a tiny little mark on her neck, right where Mr. Jefferson sticks her with a needle in Episode 4, set the night before the vision takes place.
. In Episode 4, Max mentions Star Trek in her journal. She refers to a moment where having saved a doomed person messed up time in the series - the thing she has to painfully understand in Episode 5.
The graffiti littering the environments in the game foreshadow that saving Chloe's life in Episode 1 causes the storm. This includes phrases like "JUST GOTTA LET GO" (which is positioned right behind Chloe when she dances on her bed in Episode 1), "THIS IS BIGGER THAN YOU" and "PLEASE JUST KILL ME" written all over the place.
. During an early scene in Episode 5, Max tears her Everyday Heroes photograph in two with the words "Sorry San Francisco, but Chloe comes first". Choosing the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending has Max repeat this action on the butterfly photograph, making the same statement non-verbally.
. A relatively minor one: At one point, Mr. Jefferson begins to deliver a lecture on Chiaroscuro. When the Big Bad is finally revealed to be Jefferson himself, it's by way of a Face Framed in Shadow thanks to Max dropping her cellphone.
, it's by way of a Face Framed in Shadow thanks to. One of the few failure screens that shows the immediate consequences of not being fast enough to solve a puzzle is when you prevent Chloe from getting murdered by Nathan in Episode 1, where Nathan tries to get Chloe to get up. As it turns out, this was how that encounter was supposed to go from the beginning.
Short-term example: Kate being Driven to Suicide Giving up preferred activities is a warning sign of suicidal ideation.
When you put together the clues to find the Dark Room, David's coordinates will reveal that he was following four cars: The first, TWNPKS, is Chloe's truck. The second, SXFTNDR, is Nathan's. The third, TWLGHTZN, belongs to an unknown individual who has a car that strongly resembles Nathan's, and the fourth, TPFTHLK, is Mr. Jefferson's, seen at the end of Episode 2. If you pay attention to the coordinates that each car was recorded at, it turns out that Nathan and Jefferson's cars were at the exact same location the night Kate was drugged, the Prescott Farmhouse. This turns out to be the location of the Dark Room, and foreshadows Jefferson's involvement in the whole thing prior to the twist at the end of the episode.
Episode 2 sees Max having to manipulate a lever in order to switch a train onto another track in order to prevent Chloe from being run over. This could be taken as a visual reference to the trolley problem, which asks whether it's more ethical to allow five people to die or to kill one person to save them. The game presents you with this same choice on a much larger scale at the end of Episode 5.
, which asks whether it's more ethical to allow five people to die or to kill one person to save them. Nathan's license plate is "SXFTNDR" (Six Feet Under) which is a clue as to what he did to Rachel, and what Mr. Jefferson will do to him.
. The first thing that the player will actively rewind when Max discovers her powers is accidentally smashing her camera. A short time later, it gets destroyed anyway in a scuffle with Nathan, which Max realizes too late to rewind. In the ensuing scene, she tries to fix it using tools borrowed from David, only to find that it's futile and accepts William's old camera from Chloe. The very next thing you do is save Chloe from being killed in a scuffle with Nathan. You then spend the game saving her from strange accidents, until the beginning of Episode 5, where she's killed in circumstances that make it impossible to rewind. You spend the chapter trying to save her, after being rescued by David, only to realize that the only way to save the town is to let her die or let the town be destroyed.
Forgot About His Powers: In Episode 4, one major choice involves trying to get Frank's customer list. While there are several ways to get it, including killing him, it never occurs to Max to take the list herself, at which point she could rewind and avoid the whole confrontation. Instead, Chloe always takes it.
Freeze-Frame Bonus: A small one in Episode 2. If you take long enough searching for bottles in the junkyard scene, a freight train will rattle by. Quick eyes (or a well-timed rewind) will allow the player to note the engine's number: 1337.
Near the end of Episode 4, Chloe receives a text message from Nathan who is looking for her and Max. However, if you look closely, the way the message is texted is very different compared to the ones Max received from him. Turns out it is from Mr. Jefferson who may already have killed Nathan at that point and used his phone to lure them.
Frivolous Lawsuit: Nathan and his father are constantly threatening to sue everybody for defamation any time someone says anything they don't like, which indicates that they have a rather large misunderstanding of exactly what defamation is.
From New York to Nowhere: Max has come back from a five-year stay Seattle, a bustling metropolis that couldn't be more different than the small town of Arcadia Bay.
Full-Circle Revolution: A small-scale example. The Vortex Club was originally founded in The '80s as a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits group meant to counter Blackwell's dominant yuppie culture and offer support to the school's social outcasts. At the time the game is set, about three decades later, they have effectively become the school's new elitist hegemony of cool kids.
Full-Name Ultimatum: When you get Julia's name wrong, then rewind, there is a dialog option to say this even before she asks for it: Juliet Watson, you be nice!
"Funny Aneurysm" Moment: In-Universe: If Max ignores Kate's call in Episode 2, Chloe says that she'll survive. Taking it automatically clears one of the prompts at the climax. However, if the player ignores it, she very well may not.
Funny Background Event: When Max wakes up at the start of Episode 2, you can see Warren peeking out from behind the corner of the building if you look out the window.
In Episode 5, when Max is in San Francisco for the Everyday Heroes exhibit, you can run across a man and woman talking about Mr. Jefferson being arrested. The man is voiced by Derek Phillips, Jefferson's voice actor, who is using the exact same voice he uses for Jefferson.
Gallows Humor: Mr. Jefferson is a sadistic psychopath with an artist complex, but the guy can turn a clever death-related phrase with the best of them.
Game-Breaking Bug: In Episodes 3 and 4, the photo focusing minigame glitches out with certain graphics cards, causing the photo to remain in focus constantly. Though it can still be solved, it has to be done by sound alone, which is much more difficult. The developers eventually just added an auto-focus option so players could bypass it.
During the Nightmare segment in Episode 5, Max will be pursued by warped versions of people she subconsciously fears and you have to rewind to get around them without being seen. If you happen to rewind too quickly, you'll get caught in a loop where Max will always be seen and you won't be able to rewind far back enough, forcing a restart. This largely occurs if you try to speed up or use the quick rewind.
Gameplay and Story Integration: The contents of Max's diary and texts change at certain points in the story. In Episode 4, thanks to Max creating an Alternate Timeline at the end of Episode 3, the alternate version of her has an entirely different set of texts and barely any journal entries Mr. Jefferson burns her journal and thus the only page is charred, which is restored after Max changed history to prevent herself from being kidnapped, and save Chloe. Later on, during the Nightmare Sequence, her journal is changed to a bunch of hostile ramblings and her texts are likewise threatening
In Episode 2, Max starts getting nosebleeds as she overuses her powers. Although this doesn't do anything for most of the chapter, at the end of the episode her powers burn out, and you have to talk Kate down without access to the rewind power, meaning if you make too many wrong choices, you won't be able to save her.
Max's lack of self confidence means she will always second guess the important choices the player makes. This serves as a handy reminder that you can go back and try a different one as well as giving some hints on what the potential consequences might be.
Gameplay and Story Segregation: Any items you pick up and optional photos you take remain in your possession if you rewind past the point where you obtained them, the former being important to certain puzzles. In Episode 1, however, two of the game's major choices give you the opportunity to either take a photograph or involve yourself in a situation. In both these cases, these options are mutually exclusive despite the fact that Max's rewind power should allow her to keep the photos in the same manner. In the subsequent conversations involving the photos, Max will claim not to have taken them if the player chose to intervene. While withholding the first of these is justified, as it would be rather mean-spirited to reveal the photo of Victoria after she took down the one of Max, there's really no reason why Max would choose not to use the photo of David harassing Kate as leverage, especially since she'll use it against him later if you didn't intervene, and the fact that you don't have proof is important in several later choices.
Max's rewind power does not affect her, meaning that any time she uses it, she effectively teleports if she's not in the same place. This is vital to numerous rewind puzzles, such as saving the dead bird in Episode 1. You even use it to teleport into a locked room in Episode 3, which impresses Chloe. As far as other people go, though, no one ever notices that Max more or less just vanishes into thin air or appears out of nowhere.
Max suffers a Psychic Nosebleed in Episode 2 after using her rewind too many times in the diner and junkyard scenes, indicating severe exhaustion of her powers. You can abuse Max's rewind powers to your heart's content otherwise until the scripted moment mentioned above. In the aftermath of Kate's suicide/attempted suicide, Max's monologue notes she can only just about manage rewinding, but you can still rewind your choice of who to blame as you please.
Girl-on-Girl Is Hot: Invoked by Chloe if the player has Max kiss her. She'll claim Warren is out of luck unless he's into girl-on-girl. In a meta sense, it's worth noting that roughly 75% of players chose to do so.
. In a meta sense, it's worth noting that roughly 75% of players chose to do so. Frank seems to have a spot for this as he has a poster of it in his RV, which becomes ironic when he admits to Max in Episode 5 that he was jealous of Chloe and Rachel's relationship.
At one point, Max can come across a man admiring a photograph of two women kissing. He claims to be appreciating fine art, but it's pretty obvious that this is the true reason why he likes the photo.
God Test: The first few chapters of Episode 2 have Chloe testing Max's rewind power to make sure it's legit. This includes guessing the contents of her pockets and predicting the immediate future.
Godzilla Threshold: The first time Max uses her focus power, she winds up rendering Chloe paralyzed and terminally ill and has to let William die once more to reverse that. Max resolves to never use that power again, but when she's captured by Mr. Jefferson, she realizes that the focus power is the only way she's getting out alive.
Gray Rain of Depression: Occurs when Kate attempts suicide.
Greasy Spoon: Some pivotal scenes take place at "The Two Whales", a local diner in Arcadia Bay where Chloe's mother works. The place is known for its "homestyle cooking"and "old-fashioned service". Shares features of a Malt Shop with the checkerboard floor tiles and the plot-relevant jukebox.
Groin Attack: Chloe will knee Nathan in the groin after you prevent her from being shot. She also mentions trying to do the same during his (possible) Attempted Rape, but she missed and hit a lamp.
"Groundhog Day" Loop: Played with. When Max wakes up in the classroom near the end of Episode 5, she suspects that she is stuck in a time loop. It quickly becomes obvious that she is in a Nightmare Sequence instead.
Guide Dang It!: As the game encourages exploration and playing with the rewind mechanic, it's easy to miss minor things on the first playthrough: The optional photos can vary on being obvious to somewhat obscure, and several need to be taken from specific angles. The game does offer hints via the placeholder photographs, but these can be hit or miss. For example, the first photo in Episode 3 requires taking a picture of a figurine in Victoria's room. What the game doesn't tell you is that the figurine is glow-in-the-dark, which you learn by rifling through the trash and finding the box it came in. Then you have to trigger that effect by shining your light on it for a few seconds. The figurine isn't even selectable until you've made |
someone needs to be killed before they get a bigger sentence. “These days with the amount of terrorist attacks it would be a great concern.” Hassan admitted the racially aggravated public order offence, which took place in Barnard Castle, County Durham, on Sunday July 9, when he appeared before magistrates in Newton Aycliffe. Ansab Shan, prosecuting, told the court how a young family outside the church saw the defendant sat on a bench become increasingly aggressive.
GETTY Ukip MEP Mike Hookem demanded Hassan be deported
He said: “The witness heard him talking about Iraq and his hatred of the English and he was swearing. “The defendant then walked into the church and even though the service had started he walked straight to the front and began shouting and swearing. Members of the congregation, which included children, were clearly upset by the defendant’s actions. “The witness, along with other worshippers, tried to escort him outside the church. After a short while police arrived and arrested the defendant.
GETTY - SOTCK IMAGE Hassan admitted the racially aggravated public order offence
“The defendant then became more aggressive and abusive and began shouting, ‘I will ******* kill you and kill all the English ********. He made references to the war in Iraq.” Mitigating, Ben Pagman revealed Hassan had been in the UK since 2008 but was “effectively here illegally without permission to remain”. He said because he had no National Insurance number he could not work or claim benefits and so had got drunk.
GETTY Hassan had been in the UK since 2008 but was ‘effectively here illegally’ARM immediate value encoding
The ARM instruction set encodes immediate values in an unusual way. It's typical of the design of the processor architecture: elegant, pragmatic, and quirky. Despite only using 12 bits of instruction space, the immediate value can represent a useful set of 32-bit constants.
What?
Perhaps I should start with some background. Machine code is what computer processors run on: binary representations of simple instructions. All ARM processors (like the one in your iPhone, or the other dozen in various devices around your home) have 16 basic data processing instructions.
Each data processing instruction can work with several combinations of operands. For example, here are three different ADD instructions:
ADD r0, r2, r3 ADD r0, r2, r3, LSL #4 ADD r0, r2, #& 4 F0000
The first is easy to understand: add two registers, and store in a third. The second example shows the use of the barrel shifter, which can shift or rotate the second operand before performing the operation. This allows for some fairly complex single-instruction operations, and more importantly lots of fun optimising your assembler code.
But the instruction I want to describe in more detail here is the third and simplest one: adding a register to a constant value. This value is encoded in the instruction, so that it's immediately available.
Immediate value encoding
ARM, like other RISC architectures MIPS and PowerPC, has a fixed instruction size of 32 bits. This is a good design decision, and it makes instruction decode and pipeline management much easier than with the variable instruction size of x86 or 680x0. However, it means that any instruction with an immediate value operand cannot represent a full 32-bit number.
Here's the bit layout of an ARM data processing instruction:
Any instruction with bits 27 and 26 as 00 is data processing. The four-bit opcode field in bits 24–21 defines exactly which instruction this is: add, subtract, move, compare, and so on. 0100 is ADD.
Bit 25 is the "immediate" bit. If it's 0, then operand 2 is a register. If it's set to 1, then operand 2 is an immediate value.
Note that operand 2 is only 12 bits. That doesn't give a huge range of numbers: 0–4095, or a byte and a half. Not great when you're mostly working with 32-bit numbers and addresses.
Compare it also to the equivalent instruction in MIPS, addi :
Or the similar PowerPC, also called addi :
Both have 16-bit immediate values: 0–65535, or two bytes. This is much more reasonable. Unfortunately, because of the 4-bit condition field in every ARM instruction, the immediate field has to be smaller. And therefore less useful.
The clever part
But ARM doesn't use the 12-bit immediate value as a 12-bit number. Instead, it's an 8-bit number with a 4-bit rotation, like this:
The 4-bit rotation value has 16 possible settings, so it's not possible to rotate the 8-bit value to any position in the 32-bit word. The most useful way to use this rotation value is to multiply it by two. It can then represent all even numbers from zero to 30.
To form the constant for the data processing instruction, the 8-bit immediate value is extended with zeroes to 32 bits, then rotated the specified number of places to the right. For some values of rotation, this can allow splitting the 8-bit value between bytes. See the table below for all possible rotations.
Examples
The rotated byte encoding allows the 12-bit value to represent a much more useful set of numbers than just 0–4095. It's occasionally even more useful than the MIPS or PowerPC 16-bit immediate value.
ARM immediate values can represent any power of 2 from 0 to 31. So you can set, clear, or toggle any bit with one instruction:
ORR r5, r5, #& 8000 BIC r0, r0, #& 20 EOR r9, r9, #& 80000000
More generally, you can specify a byte value at any of the four locations in the word:
AND r0, r0, #&ff000000
In practice, this encoding gives a lot of values that would not be available otherwise. Large loop termination values, bit selections and masks, and lots of other weird constants are all available.
But what I find really compelling is the inventiveness of the design. Faced with the constraint of only having 12 bits to use, the ARM designers had the insight to reuse the idle barrel shifter to allow a wide range of useful numbers. To my knowledge, no other architecture has this feature. It's unique.
Play with it
Here's an interactive version of an ARM assembler's immediate value encoder. Requires JavaScript and a modern browser.
Choose an immediate value and see its encoding. See which values can't be encoded. Rotate the constant to see what happens.
Try these examples: 0x3FC00, 0x102, 0xFF0000FF, 0xC0000034
<< >> − +
31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1
11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0xB 0xD7
Encoding requires JavaScript.The Warehouse Project is to take a year-long break in 2014, organisers have confirmed.
The Manchester-based event - which has taken place annually for the last eight years - will return in 2015 to celebrate its tenth anniversary.
Organisers commented: "Whilst we look forward to the start of the new year, we would like to announce that the WHP season will not take place as normal in 2014.
"There will be a handful of special events but no full series as there has been for the last 8 years.
"2015 marks 10 Years of The Warehouse Project and we will be ready to do that justice."
Chic featuring Nile Rodgers, Thom Yorke, The Knife, Phoenix and Disclosure are among the headline acts at this year's shows.
The 12-week event kicked off last month and will end with a New Year's Day party on Wednesday, January 1, 2014.
The Warehouse Project 2013 takes place at Victoria Warehouse on Trafford Wharf Road.Tim Leiweke, head of the Oak View Group, is focused on bringing the NHL first to a renovated Seattle Center arena. “Let’s be honest here,” Leiweke says. “There is no NBA team to be had today.”
The head of a company planning a $564 million renovation of KeyArena says he’s “passionate’’ about bringing an NBA team to town, but there just aren’t any imminently available.
And that’s why Tim Leiweke, head of the Los Angeles-based Oak View Group, insists he’s hyper-focused on bringing the NHL here. Leiweke, who met Thursday with The Seattle Times editorial board ahead of speaking at the GeekWire Sports Tech Summit at CenturyLink Field, said he’s heard local commentary about how he’s not as committed to the NBA as Sodo District arena proponent Chris Hansen.
“Some people want to yell that I’m not passionate about basketball,’’ said Leiweke, who oversaw operations for the Los Angeles Lakers, Denver Nuggets and Toronto Raptors. “That’s incorrect. I’m more passionate about basketball than about hockey, if you look at my tenure in my last 30 years of where I’ve spent my time.’’
Leiweke noted that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver suggested three weeks ago during the NBA Finals that expansion was likely several years from happening. That means, Leiweke added, that OVG can best spend its efforts landing an NHL franchise he suggests would be imminent once he completes a deal with the city.
“I seem to be the only one willing to step up and say ‘Folks, here’s the reality of the situation we face. Let’s be honest here,’ ’’ Leiweke said. “There is no NBA team to be had today.’ And if there is one to be had, we will be the first ones on it and we have an ownership group and partners that have the ability of going and chasing that team.’’
Brian Surratt, who headed up the KeyArena renovation process for the City of Seattle and accompanied Leiweke and OVG members to the editorial board meeting, added a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) could be finalized between the two sides by year’s end. After that, the Seattle City Council — which will have two representatives involved in MOU talks — must finalize a formal contract with OVG sometime next year.
Leiweke was asked whether his group would pull out of talks if the council in the interim approved a provisional street vacation of Occidental Avenue South that Hansen’s group says it needs to be “shovel ready’’ and attract more financing and teams.
Leiweke replied that his group would never have pursued the KeyArena renovation if it felt Hansen still had any shot at landing an NBA team. An MOU between Hansen, the city and King County expires Dec. 3 and provides up to $200 million in public bond funding if he acquires an NBA franchise.
Hansen has also separately petitioned the council to revisit selling him part of Occidental in a new vote this fall. The council rejected his first request in May 2016 but Hansen now says he’ll embark on an all-private arena project if his latest Occidental request is approved.
“We wouldn’t have jumped into this if we thought either the NHL or the NBA has or was about to make a deal with Chris for a team,’’ Leiweke said of Hansen. “We did our homework and we talked to everyone.’’
Leiweke said OVG studied the potential “calendar of events’’ for a Sodo arena and found there would be roughly 50 annual conflict days between a new venue and the two existing stadiums. The Seahawks, Mariners, Sounders and other event stakeholders in Sodo have complained about the lack of a “binding’’ event scheduling deal with Hansen.
Surratt said the lack of a scheduling deal is one of the things being studied by the city as part of Hansen’s new all-private project and request for another Occidental vote.
Leiweke added: “There are a lot of reasons why that (Sodo) arena is not done. Foremost is, he hasn’t got a team. And so, if Chris can land a team tomorrow and he comes walking in with an NBA team tomorrow, then we’d get out of his way. We’re not going to go build another arena if Chris ultimately buys a team and moves a team to Seattle between now and December when we get this done.
“Again, we spend an enormous amount of time with commissioners,’’ Leiweke said. “I have commissioners telling me how to run my life on a daily basis right now. I can assure you, we are extremely focused on the window of opportunity.’’
Leiweke reiterated the NBA just isn’t realistic for now.
“What we do believe is out there, based on what we continue to hear from (NHL) commissioner (Gary) Bettman is there is an opportunity that we could get the NHL,’’ Leiweke said. “We have to go get an agreement done with the city. If we don’t get an agreement done with the city, there’s no team coming here.
“But we are all over it,’’ he added. “I’m too all over the NHL … there’s a window of opportunity here and we are prepared to walk right through that window and close the deal.’’Megyn Kelly revealed in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres that it was President Trump's constant attacks that led to her decision to depart Fox News after a 12-year career with the cable news network.
The NBC host also said that she left the legal profession to get into journalism because she enjoyed reporting the news, but did not enjoy the amount of political coverage she eventually had to do as the host of her primetime show, 'The Kelly File.'
'It wasn't until I got my job in primetime that the coverage became all political, and I was never a political person,' explained Kelly while appearing on 'Ellen' Wednesday.
'I wasn't raised in a political household, and it became clear to me that it just wasn't what I wanted to do.'
Then came the attacks from the Republican frontrunner during the presidential primary, which continued for over a year.
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Opening up: Megyn Kelly spoke about why she left Fox News in January of last year to take a new post at NBC during an interview with Ellen DeGeneres (above)
Over-and-out: Kelly said that President Trump's attacks on her played a big role in her decision to leave the network
'Donald Trump has a way of clarifying one's life choices,' said Kelly during the interview, drawing laughter from the studio audience.
'And that was true in my case too.'
Kelly went on to state: 'Just as I was wondering if this is where I wanted to be and how I wanted to live, the universe sort of came and shone a light and it was clear to me what I wanted to do.'
She later explained that her job at Fox News had become like a'snake pit' and she kept 'getting pulled back in' due to Trump's tweets and attacks, stating: 'This wasn't the life I wanted.'
Kelly did make a popint however of noting that despite President Trump's calls for a boycott of her show, her ratings only went up during her 'year of Trump.'
Trump's attacks on Kelly began after she grilled him about his controversial comments about women during the first Republican debate in August 2015.
'You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,''slobs' and 'disgusting animals,'' Kelly said.
'Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?'
Trump replied: 'Honestly, Megyn, if you don't like it, I'm sorry... I've been very nice to you, although I could probably not be, based on the way you have treated me.'
He then said of Kelly the following day: 'You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her... wherever.'
The attacks by Trump against Kelly continued for months, and he took to Twitter countless times to lash out at the host or retweet criticisms of her and her show, The Kelly File.
He even backed out of a Fox News-sponsored debate in Iowa that she was moderating earlier this year.
The two eventually made amends and in May, and Trump appeared on Kelly's primetime special which aired across Fox platforms that same month.
Shut it down: Later in the show, DeGeneres went into the reasons she refreshed to have President Trump on the program (above)
Wrestlemania: Kelly later put on a sumo suit to engage with the audience (above)
Quick change artist: There was another outfit change as Megyn donned a pink dress to speak with Mari Lopez later in the day on Tuesday (above), when the Ellen interview taped
When asked if she would ever have President Trump on her NBC show, Kelly told DeGeneres she would, adding: 'I would not say no to the sitting president of the United States, I mean, would you?'
DeGeneres immediately responded by telling Kelly that she would in fact say no to President Trump.
'He is who he is and he has enough attention and he has his Twitter account and he has ways to get his message across, there's nothing I am going to say to him that's going to change him and I don't want to give him a platform because it validates him,' said DeGeneres.
'And for me to have someone on the show I hate to at least admire them in some way and I can't have someone who I feel is not only dangerous for the country and for me personally as a gay woman but to the world. He's diving all of us.'
She went on to say:'And I think I don't him to represent...'
DeGeneres at that point just threw her hands up in the air and said: 'I don't want him on the show.'The ugly pasts of famous men whose names grace SF landmarks Should these places be renamed?
Click through to see some of the controversial pasts of men who have their names on San Francisco landmarks, streets, and more. Click through to see some of the controversial pasts of men who have their names on San Francisco landmarks, streets, and more. Image 1 of / 48 Caption Close The ugly pasts of famous men whose names grace SF landmarks 1 / 48 Back to Gallery
While an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose white supremacists, they are less certain about how they feel about the Confederate statues those supremacists supposedly were defending, according to a recent report by the data-analysis site FiveThirtyEight.
Should they be toppled? Allowed to remain where they are? Relegated to battlefields and museums only?
An NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist University poll taken after the violence in Charlottesville, Va., found 62 percent of respondents favored leaving statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy stand as testaments to history.
In San Francisco, there are statues and street names that honor those who enslaved or helped eradicate indigenous peoples, or both. A recreational area is named after a "hero" of the Philippine-American War who bragged about hanging 35 Filipinos without trial. A prominent street plaza bears the name of a man behind the forced displacement of African-Americans and Japanese-Americans from the city's Western Addition in the 1960s.
The above slideshow examines some of the men deemed worthy of public approbation in the Bay Area, but whose resumes are tainted with shameful episodes. Should their names be preserved on signposts, schools and parks?
Perhaps it comes down to whether the good deeds outweigh the bad.
For example, Franciscan friar Junipero Serra, "the evangelizer of the West," is so highly regarded by the Vatican for his missionary work in colonial California that Pope Francis made him a saint. But Native Americans view him as anything but saintly.
"Everywhere they put a mission the majority of Indians are gone," Ron Andrade, executive director of the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission, told the Guardian in 2015. "And Serra knew what they were doing: they were taking the land, taking the crops, he knew the soldiers were raping women, and he turned his head."BATON ROUGE, La. -- For those wondering how Les Miles managed to keep it together on Saturday, only hours after learning that his mother Martha had passed away, LSU's coach could lean on previous life experience.
This was the second time that Miles had coached in the immediate aftermath of one of life's most traumatic experiences: the death of a parent. In both instances, his team presented the charismatic coach with an honorary game ball after a victory against one of its biggest division rivals.
"We played for him tonight. We absolutely played for him," said tight end Logan Stokes, who caught the game-winning touchdown pass in LSU's 10-7 win over previously unbeaten Ole Miss on Saturday night. "For a guy that cares about us like that -- I mean, your mother just passed away. I know if my mother passed away, I know how I would be feeling, so I can only imagine how he feels.
"But for us to go out there and get that win for him tonight, there's no greater feeling. Yeah, I scored the game-winning touchdown. That's a great feeling. But the fact that we won for Coach Les Miles is unreal."
Les Miles coached LSU to a win over No. 3 Ole Miss just hours after learning about the death of his mother. Chris Graythen/Getty Images
Miles' postgame press conference is typically an event, featuring a mixture of his trademark zaniness and non-answers about pressing matters regarding his team. Miles' tone Saturday was much different, with the emotional coach still holding the game ball and speaking with a scratchy, quiet voice as he thanked those who had expressed their condolences after his 91-year-old mother's death.
"I had a rough night last night," Miles admitted, later adding, "Martha Miles, this is a great night, considering. I miss you, mom."
Miles was the tight ends coach with the Dallas Cowboys in 2000 when he first went through this kind of personal tragedy. His father, Hope Cecil (or "Bubba" as he preferred), died only a few days before the Cowboys were to meet the hated Washington Redskins on "Monday Night Football" -- a game Dallas eventually won 27-21.
Miles will always have a soft spot for Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who allowed Miles to use his personal plane to fly home on the Friday before the game, attend his father's funeral and return to the team on Sunday before the game.
"I buried my father that weekend," Miles recalled. "And Jerry Jones was just tremendously graceful in traveling me back home to see my father and mother, my father who passed."
Fourteen years later, the circumstances were even more trying when Miles learned of his mother's death.
When the phone rang with the news on Friday, Miles was actually at the hospital with his son, Ben, who had broken his ankle during a football game at Baton Rouge's Catholic High School. Miles' team was on the eve of its biggest game of the season, facing the nation's No. 3 team, with the spotlight of ESPN's "College GameDay" preparing to fall on Tiger Stadium the following morning.
And Miles is no longer an assistant coach like he was in Dallas. He's the No. 1 guy at LSU, in charge of more than 100 players in their late teens and early 20s -- not NFL adults -- who would be looking to him for guidance when they took the field against the Rebels.
Many of his most valuable players, after all, are only a few months removed from living at home with their own parents.
"It made everybody think about their mothers and what would we do if it was our mother," said true freshman running back Leonard Fournette, who rushed for 113 yards against Ole Miss. "I can't explain the feeling because I was hurting for him."
Miles said he struggled to come up with a way to break the news to his players and still convey the stiff-upper-lip mentality that he felt was necessary to win the game.
"I spent time today thinking about the way that I need to tell them that when they see me on the sideline, it has not to do with who's passed and what's going on," Miles said. "It has only to do that I'm looking for every opportunity and advantage for us to win, and they need to see me as an aggressive man."
Then he went out and coached his team to a quintessential LSU win. There was unbelievably physical play along the line of scrimmage. Vicious defense on both sides. Power running. And like many LSU wins from its decade under Miles, a touch of late craziness before the Tigers escaped with yet another Saturday night victory at Tiger Stadium.
If you ever wondered where the relentless spirit that has marked Miles' LSU tenure comes from, it clearly starts at the top.
"He's a true man, the definition of a responsible man," Fournette said.
Stokes agreed, adding, "I've never had more respect for an individual in my entire life."
One of the most difficult challenges of a head coach's job is that he can't choose to be a leader only when it is convenient. He's the leader all day, every day -- even when his mind is distracted and his heart heavy.
Miles has now coached pivotal games twice while dealing with the heartache of losing a parent, and walked away a winner both times. Surely there are more pleasant ways to gauge leadership, but Miles has coaching under stressful situations down pat.
"His son was in the hospital … and then he finds out his mother passed and the man showed up to the team meeting last night, didn't skip a beat," Stokes said. "He was the first one up this morning, he was the first guy that I saw when I walked into the hotel this morning to eat breakfast. He didn't skip a beat.
"For us to have a leader like that, it's unreal. To handle a situation like that in a game of this magnitude, it's unreal."Update: We're over 60,000 70,000 signers - can you help us get to 80,000? Click here to sign.
The New York Times just reported that Comcast will block Netflix unless a new fee is paid to Comcast -- so Netflix's price goes up and people use Comcast's video service instead.
This outrageous abuse of power by Comcast comes on the very week that President Obama's FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce whether he'll fulfill Obama's promise to protect the open Internet and Net Neutrality -- which would prevent this type of corporate abuse.
The FCC needs to hear from us now, before the chairman's big announcement this week.
Sign our message to the FCC: "Don't let Comcast block Netflix or other online innovators for their own profit! Support the strongest Net Neutrality protections possible -- and keep Obama's promise." Click here to sign.Justice Department political appointees overruled career lawyers and ended a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of wielding a nightstick and intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place last Election Day, according to documents and interviews.
The incident - which gained national attention when it was captured on videotape and distributed on YouTube - had prompted the government to sue the men, saying they violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring would-be voters with the weapon, racial slurs and military-style uniforms.
Career lawyers pursued the case for months, including obtaining an affidavit from a prominent 1960s civil rights activist who witnessed the confrontation and described it as “the most blatant form of voter intimidation” that he had seen, even during the voting rights crisis in Mississippi a half-century ago.
The lawyers also had ascertained that one of the three men had gained access to the polling place by securing a credential as a Democratic poll watcher, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Washington Times.
The career Justice lawyers were on the verge of securing sanctions against the men earlier this month when their superiors ordered them to reverse course, according to interviews and documents. The court had already entered a default judgment against the men on April 20.
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A Justice Department spokesman on Thursday confirmed that the agency had dropped the case, dismissing two of the men from the lawsuit with no penalty and winning an order against the third man that simply prohibits him from bringing a weapon to a polling place in future elections.
The department was “successful in obtaining an injunction that prohibits the defendant who brandished a weapon outside a Philadelphia polling place from doing so again,” spokesman Alejandro Miyar said. “Claims were dismissed against the other defendants based on a careful assessment of the facts and the law.”
Mr. Miyar declined to elaborate about any internal dispute between career and political officials, saying only that the department is “committed to the vigorous prosecution of those who intimidate, threaten or coerce anyone exercising his or her sacred right to vote.”
Court records reviewed by The Times show that career Justice lawyers were seeking a default judgment and penalties against the three men as recently as May 5, before abruptly ending their pursuit 10 days later.
People directly familiar with the case, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution, said career lawyers in two separate Justice offices had recommended proceeding to default judgment before political superiors overruled them.
Tensions between career lawyers and political appointees inside the Justice Department have been a sensitive matter since allegations surfaced during the Bush administration that higher-ups had ignored or reversed staff lawyers and that some U.S. attorneys had been removed or selected for political reasons.
During his January confirmation hearings, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that during his lengthy Justice Department tenure, the career lawyers were “my teachers, my colleagues and my friends” and described them as the “backbone” of the department.
“If I am confirmed as attorney general, I will listen to them, respect them and make them proud of the vital goals we will pursue together,” he said.
Justice officials declined to say whether Mr. Holder or other senior Justice officials became involved in the case, saying they don’t discuss internal deliberations.
The civil suit filed Jan. 7 identified the three men as members of the Panthers and said they wore military-style uniforms, black berets, combat boots, battle-dress pants, black jackets with military-style insignias and were armed with “a dangerous weapon”and used racial slurs and insults to scare would-be voters and those there to assist them at the Philadelphia polling location on Nov. 4.
The complaint said the three men engaged in “coercion, threats and intimidation, … racial threats and insults, … menacing and intimidating gestures, … and movements directed at individuals who were present to vote.” It said that unless prohibited by court sanctions, they would “continued to violate … the Voting Rights Act by continuing to direct intimidation, threats and coercion at voters and potential voters, by again deploying uniformed and armed members at the entrance to polling locations in future elections, both in Philadelphia and throughout the country.”
To support its evidence, the government had secured an affidavit from Bartle Bull, a longtime civil rights activist and former aide to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Mr. Bull said in a sworn statement dated April 7 that he was serving in November as a credentialed poll watcher in Philadelphia when he saw the three uniformed Panthers confront and intimidate voters with a nightstick.
Inexplicably, the government did not enter the affidavit in the court case, according to the files.
“In my opinion, the men created an intimidating presence at the entrance to a poll,” he declared. “In all my experience in politics, in civil rights litigation and in my efforts in the 1960s to secure the right to vote in Mississippi … I have never encountered or heard of another instance in the United States where armed and uniformed men blocked the entrance to a polling location.”
Mr. Bull said the “clear purpose” of what the Panthers were doing was to “intimidate voters with whom they did not agree.” He also said he overheard one of the men tell a white poll watcher: “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker.”
He called their conduct an “outrageous affront to American democracy and the rights of voters to participate in an election without fear.” He said it was a “racially motivated effort to limit both poll watchers aiding voters, as well as voters with whom the men did not agree.”
The three men named in the complaint - New Black Panther Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz, Minister King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson - refused to appear in court to answer the accusations over a near-five month period, court records said.
Justice Department Voting Rights Section Attorney J. Christian Adams complained in one court filing about the defendants’ failure to appear or to file any pleadings in the case, arguing that Mr. Jackson was “not an infant, nor is he an incompetent person as he appears capable of managing his own affairs, nor is he in the military service of the United States.”
Court records show that as late as May 5, the Justice Department was still considering an order by U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell in Philadelphia to seek judgments, or sanctions, against the three Panthers because of their failure to appear.
But 10 days later, the department reversed itself and filed a notice of voluntary dismissal from the complaint for Malik Zulu Shabazz and Mr. Jackson.
That same day, the department asked for the default judgment against King Samir Shabazz, but limited the penalty to an order that he not display a “weapon within 100 feet of any open polling location on any election day in the city of Philadelphia” until Nov. 15, 2012.
Malik Zulu Shabazz is a Washington, D.C., resident.
Mr. Jackson was an elected member of Philadelphia’s 14th Ward Democratic Committee, and was credentialed to be at the polling place last Nov. 4 as an official Democratic Party polling observer, according to the Philadelphia City Commissioner’s Office.
Efforts to reach the Panthers were unsuccessful. A telephone number listed on the New Black Panthers Web site had been disconnected.
The complaint said that the three men were deployed at the entrance to a Philadelphia polling location wearing the uniform of the New Black Panther Party and that King Samir Shabazz repeatedly brandished a police-style nightstick with a contoured grip and wrist lanyard.
According to the complaint, Malik Zulu Shabazz, a Howard University Law School graduate, said the placement of King Samir Shabazz and Mr. Jackson in Philadelphia was part of a nationwide effort to deploy New Black Panther Party members at polling locations on Election Day.
The New Black Panther Party reportedly has 27 chapters operating across the United States, Britain, the Caribbean and Africa. Its Web page said it has become “a great witness to the validity of the works of the original Black Panther Party,” which was founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Auckland mayoral candidate Phil Goff is pushing for the Ports of Auckland to be shifted, telling The Nation programme that by the time the port reaches capacity, it'll be too late to make a change.
While Manukau, Muriwai and the Firth of Thames have all been floated as possible future sites for the port.
Valuable land in the CBD is being wasted on used cars and containers coming into the country, Mr Goff argues, and in only three to 12 years room is going to run out.
"What you can do as an interim is that you can move the used cars off the wharves in Auckland and you could put them in Northport."
And it'll cost less than the estimated $5 billion to shift the port.
"The chief executive of Northport has told me that he can deliver the cars to the consumer in Auckland for the same price as they get it from those cars sitting on really expensive real estate," Mr Goff tells The Nation.
A report by Ernst & Young examining the future of Auckland Port is due in the next few weeks but Mr Goff isn't confident it will have a definitive answer as to the port's final location.
But whatever else, further expansion into the Waitemata Harbour is out of the question.
"My position's very clear," Mr Goff says. "We have to preserve our harbour. We've got to restore access to the harbour by the public.
"I don't think we should be reclaiming any more of our harbour. The thing we should be reclaiming is public access to our harbour, which we've lost over the past 100 years."
Newshub.A Northern Virginia mom who said her church stopped her from breastfeeding her baby may seek legal action. Virginia’s law, which went into effect in 2015, protects a mother’s right to breastfeed her child.
On Sunday, April 23, Annie Peguero said she was shocked when employees of Summit Church in Springfield interrupted her as she nursed her baby and asked her to cover up or move to a mom’s room.
“Just taken aback this had happened,” said Peguero, who had just returned with her children from a six-week trip overseas to visit her husband who serves in the U.S. Marine Corps and is on deployment.
“I really felt at home there,” said Peguero about Summit Church, which she began attending in January.
She felt a special bond after the pastor and members prayed for her to find her birth family. But that bond was destroyed on Sunday after she dropped her two little girls, ages 4 and 18 months, off at the church nursery.
Autumn, the youngest, was fussy.
“I sat down on the floor and began breastfeeding her. Right away, the church employees were frantically grabbing for a blanket. And one of the employees came over to me and covered up Autumn,” she said. “And I said, ‘Oh, no. That’s okay. We’re good,’” said Peguero.
Autumn didn’t like the blanket and stopped eating.
Peguero said the employee tried to get her to use a special moms’ room to nurse Autumn, but Annie said no, she didn’t need to. Annie went up the sanctuary to hear the sermon…when the nursery texted her that Autumn was still fussy. She brought her daughter up to a back pew with her and began nursing her.
WORKING MOTHERS: How do you transition from the job to breastfeeding?
“Immediately, one of the church employees came over my left shoulder and |
questions – like how to handle educational records of transgender students and how to address harassment of transgender students," the U.S. Department of Education wrote in a statement. "They also highlight sensible ways that schools around the country have been able to address concerns from other students and parents without infringing upon transgender students’ civil rights."
Asaf Orr, a lawyer who directs the Transgender Youth Project Staff at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said the guidance could help temper the transgender rights backlash that the restroom issue has engendered in states such as North Carolina by showing that minority rights and privacy rights can co-exist if schools respect all students' need to be comfortable.
Today we released guidance to ensure that every student is in a school environment free of discrimination. https://t.co/d0OzeSRZ0K — US Dept of Education (@usedgov) May 13, 2016
At least 13 states and the District of Columbia prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity in schools. Hundreds of school districts, from Anchorage, Alaska, and Tucson, Arizona, to Fairfax County, Virginia and Chicago, have adopted similar protections.
Nearly two dozen state high school sports federations have adopted rules governing the participation of transgender athletes on competitive teams, including the ones in South Dakota, Maryland and Nevada.
In Portland, Oregon, Lincoln High Principal Peyton Chapman recalls the "challenging times" about seven years ago when a transgender student who identified as female transferred there after being bullied at her previous school. The student made the cheerleading squad and "bathroom and locker rooms became an immediate issue with the cheerleading parents," she said.
An anti-bullying campaign that focused on the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity diffused the situation, Chapman said.
Thanks to.@CivilRights &.@EDCivilRIghts school districts & admin have all the info they need to affirm #trans kids in schools — Asaf Orr (@AOrrEsq) May 13, 2016
"Some students may be uncomfortable with it, but we can't let some people's discomfort violate other people's civil rights," she said.
But there was a high level of discomfort as soon as the directive came out, with officials in several states saying they would defy the administration. The rallying cry was against what Mississippi's Republican governor said was the federal government's "forcing a liberal agenda on states that roundly reject it."
While the guidance is not legally binding and the Supreme Court may ultimately decide whether federal civil rights law protects transgender people, schools refusing to comply could face lawsuits from the government and a cutoff of federal aid to education.
schools refusing to comply could face lawsuits from the government and a cutoff of federal aid to education
Even in areas of the country where such policies enjoy broad support, putting them into practice can be complicated.
The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference allows transgender students to play on teams that match their gender identities. Since the policy took effect in 2013, a few transgender boys have played on boys' high school teams, said Karissa Niehoff, the group's executive director.
Niehoff said that since the state has a policy prohibiting boys from playing on girls' teams, a transgender girl would be allowed to play on a girls' team, but not a boys' team. She said students are allowed to establish eligibility to compete under a different gender once during their school careers to prevent players from bouncing between teams.
So far, there have been no complaints, she said.
"But had somebody said to us, 'Hey, you have a transgender playing on the team and we think there is a physical disadvantage, well we support that student," she said.
Boston's public schools require staff members to use the names and pronouns requested by students, change school records to reflect them and acknowledge they've read the district's policy regarding transgender students, according to Steven Chen, the senior equity manager.
But sometimes there are mistakes.
"If you've known a student for the first three years as one name and one pronoun, and then in year four the student has a different name and a different pronoun, I think just naturally you might make a mistake," he said. "Honest mistakes are much different than affirmatively saying, 'I'm not going to support my students on this.'"
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.If it was simply an exhale of relief, I would know what to do. But it’s not. I find myself at this time of winter holiday feeling more fractured than ever. I don’t see my children anymore. One has indicated he wants no further contact, and the other continues as he has for almost twenty years. I don’t understand how any of this happened, but it has. I suspect it’s the tendency to hold others in a place of our own choosing that’s in play here. But then it can be hard to let go of past hurts, real or imagined through a child’s eyes.
It’s not been an easy road, being a mother. An empath, I could see the larger picture so I always wanted to be fair, occasionally to the point of indecision. I didn’t want either child to feel that I didn’t believe them, or that their voice mattered not. However, I never suffered from the debilitating syndrome of trying to be my child’s friend. I saw moms who did that and shuddered as I saw the damage they were doing. No, I was always their mother. But now the one who still occasionally speaks to me has reduced me to someone on the fringe. Although a matter of perspective, I suppose there’s some truth to that.
I suppose I’ve expected too much from them. We’ve had somewhat of an alternative lifestyle, given that we homeschooled after a point, and were martial artists with our own dojo. And although I basically lived as a witch, I never found the right words to tell anyone until a few years ago. It had always been a private reality for me, growing up as a witch and an empath as well. It was my safety. It was my truth, but I never felt safe enough to tell anyone other than a few who suspected in high school and college. After that, I worried about staying employed, married, etc. Witches weren’t as mainstream as they are now. And I feel horrible that I wasn’t on the front lines of that struggle, aligned with my sisters and brothers in that effort. But it is what it is and I can’t go back and change any of it.
So the exhale I believe is about looking at my life and accepting what is. Maybe someday my boys will forgive me for being a mother who encouraged them to consider the “possibility of”, to convey that they could accomplish anything they chose, and to live with integrity and purpose. Or maybe they’ll just forgive me because they realize that there was no roadmap for a mother with gifted children. Because I’m not the only one. Maybe they’ll realize I did the best I could do, that I never abandoned them, no matter what the situation, no matter the circumstance.
Maybe they’ll exhale as well and realize that they’ll always have a home in their mother’s heart.
~Blessed Be
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Like this: Like Loading...A convoy of military jeeps snakes up a hill in one of Rio deJaneiro's rougher neighbourhoods, passing by a sculpture of a giant soccer ball and a broken down abandoned soccer pitch.
Thirty Brazilian soldiers are on alert, their automatic rifles pointed outward, ready for an attack.
"Our main mission here is to stabilize the area, take out the drug dealers, get people back to normal life," says Col. Alex Correa, in near perfect English; he did some of his training at Canadian Forces College in Toronto.
Susan Ormiston on patrol with the Brazilian army in Rio's Mare deComplexo neighbourhood
The military has occupied the favela known as Mare de Complexo in the north part of Rio for the last two months. Tanks and troops patrol the narrow web-like streets, and sometimes residents throw stones at them, angry at the militarization of their community.
Watch Susan Ormiston's documentary report from inside Brazil's favelas tonight on The National
Over a million people live in poor, unregulated settlements like these — known as favelas — some of which have been hot zones for drug wars and violence.
Militias and gangs control many still, but with the World Cup bearing down on Rio, and the Olympics just two years away, the Brazilian government felt compelled to do something about its favelas, especially as some were close to tourist areas.
A man shelters his baby from gunshots as police and gang members fire on each other in Alemao, a favela in Rio, in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup. (AF Rodrigues / CBC)
Col. Correa points to a neighbourhood map speckled with coloured dots — red for drug zones, pink for stolen cars and black for shootouts.
But when asked about his mission's relationship to the World Cup, he says "nothing to do with the World Cup, no," though conceding the timing is suspect. His operation officially concludes in July, just as soccer's grand tournament wraps up.
'False sense of security'
Mare, with its 130,000 people, is strategically squeezed between three main highways funnelling international visitors into the city centre. Local police had either lost control or been corrupted into ceding control to criminal leaders, officials say.
However, Adriano Rodrigues, a 35-year-old local photographer who has lived in Mare his entire life, scoffs at the army's rationale.
"This is the eve of the World Cup," he says. "For our leaders, the most important thing is to create a false sense of security. For all those who pass by, they need to have the sensation they're safe and won't be hit by a stray bullet."
Still, as he sees it, "everything that happened before in the favela is still happening since the occupation, only in a disguised way."
Brazil's army is now patrolling certain neighbourhoods, like Mare in Rio, saying it needs to stabilize them. (Susan Ormiston / CBC)
Rodrigues has documented the often violent demonstrations against the World Cup over the past two years. One photo shows a man cradling a child against his body as police and criminals shoot at each other.
The majority of favela residents are not running drugs or involved in other crimes, but they are vulnerable to the ongoing violence. And they also have other priorities — like better schools, sanitation and health care.
That helps explain, perhaps, why support for hosting the World Cup here in Brazil has plummeted to less than 50 per cent of those surveyed, according to a poll taken near the end of May.
Brazilians appear bitterly disappointed with the cost of playing host — $11 billion for a country where 16 million people live on less than $360 a year.
Every one of the 12 stadiums that have been newly built or refurbished for the tournament has soared above budget, some with a paper trail of inflated construction invoices.
Construction firms biggest scorers
The World Cup was sold to Brazilians as a golden opportunity for much needed investment in roads, airports and other transportation links, and even for improvements in the favelas, like sewers and clean water.
But the money has been mostly devoured meeting the demands of soccer's governing body, FIFA, for first-class stadiums and facilities. Construction firms could be the biggest World Cup winners.
"I think the population is very divided," says Patricia Vianna, executive director of REDES, a non-profit community group in Mare. "A lot of people love soccer of course, but because of a lot of disappointments they're not that excited about" the World Cup itself.
In April, the Brazilian government topped up its $860-million security budget by $100 million for Rio alone. Last week, it suddenly decided to add army reinforcements to protect hotels hosting soccer teams.
Infantry troops were sent to the Brazilian team's training camp after the team bus was set upon by protestors who plastered it with stickers saying "Whose World Cup."
Some of the visiting teams are staying in hotels just a few hundred metres from favelas like Vidigal, which is perched on a mountainside overlooking a sweep of Rio's stunning beaches.
But in Vidigal, security was tackled two years ago as part of an initiative called police pacification, which is a combination of SWAT teams and community police.
Over time it has pushed the drug dealers out, community leaders say, and gentrification is slowly creeping in. Rumour has it that soccer great David Beckham has just bought a cinderblock house here, presumably to turn into something more impressive.
For those without Beckham's wealth, but still seeking a taste of Brazil's wilder side, there are cheap rooms to book in what some would still call a slum.
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The 'Favela Experience'
On a potholed winding street with a canopy of hot-wired electrical cables you will find a welcoming hostel called the Favela Experience.
Eliot Rosenberg, an American living in Rio, leads us up three sets of steep stairs to what can only be described as a million dollar view, a sweeping vista of the Atlantic ocean lapping against Leblon and Ipanema beaches.
The view from Rio's storied Ipanema beach towards the Vidigal neighbourhood where soccer star David Beckham is rumoured to have bought property. (Susan Ormiston / CBC)
It's the common room for guests.
Rooms here can cost as little as $15 for a single, except during the World Cup where you will pay $50 a night. The house is owned by a local community group and two thirds of the rental profits will go back to the charity for work inside the favela.
"A lot of the guests we have had said they feel safer inside the community instead of outside," says Rosenberg.
Brazil can't escape its violent reputation — 56,000 murders in 2012, considered an epidemic by UN standards. "If it's any consolation," says Rosenberg, "most of those are criminal against criminal or police."
A different pitch
From the terrace at Favela Experience we get a glimpse of a small cement soccer field ringed by walls covered in graffiti.
A vigorous game is in play, the boys booting around a dirty soccer ball with a few of its seams unravelling.
These 12-17 year olds are one of the better teams inside the favela. Their parents can't afford putting them in one of Rio's established soccer clubs, which develop young talent.
Enzo de Deus, a young soccer player in the Rio neighbourhood Vidigal, says the World Cup attention isn't trickling down to his soccer pitch. (Susan Ormiston / CBC)
They sure can't afford tickets to the World Cup. But the young players are still excited.
"It's marvellous," says Caio Rodrigues, a lanky teenager, sweating from the exertion. "It's our pride because we never have anything."
Still, asked whether the money spent to bring the world's best soccer here was worth it, they shake their heads emphatically no.
"It wasn't worth it because there are a lot of people suffering in hospitals," says Rodrigues.
The soccer boys from the favelas will watch the games on television or on big screens set up on the beach.
They won't get close to Rio's legendary Maracana Stadium even if Brazil makes the final.
As one of them quietly chimed in before we left, "They won't leave anything for us. If they were going to leave anything better for us, well, look at our field."(Emma Sulkowicz: Andrew Burton/Getty)
Yes, there are victims of America’s alleged college “rape crisis.” There are the women who are actually raped — who experience among the worst of crimes and live with the psychological and sometimes physical consequences for the rest of their lives. But there are also other victims, people whose lives are ruined by false accusations, with reputations destroyed in the quest to prove a larger narrative — that America’s college campuses are uniquely dangerous places for American women.
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Three recently filed lawsuits show the other side of the “rape crisis,” how the media glosses over ambiguity to advance an agenda, creating heroes out of potential liars and villains out of the possibly innocent. I say “potential” and “possible” because in the real world, ambiguity is common and clarity is rare. But its difficult to create a crisis out of confusion, so agenda-driven “journalists” manufacture clarity, no matter the cost.
The three most prominent campus rape stories of the past year — Columbia University’s “mattress” protest, the Rolling Stone hoax, and former Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston’s alleged assault — are now the subject of three unusual lawsuits. Each lawsuit directly challenges rape narratives that the plaintiffs claim were deeply harmful to their reputations, finances, and emotional well-being.
RELATED: Campus Rape and the ‘Emergency’: It’s Always an Excuse for Totalitarianism
The first, brought by Columbia University student Paul Nungesser, accuses Columbia University of essentially collaborating in a campaign of retaliation and harassment against him when Emma Sulkowicz launched her now-famous “mattress” campaign to draw attention the university’s alleged failure to convict Nungesser of sexual assault. The lawsuit makes for shocking and sobering reading — shocking because the mainstream media’s account of Sulkowicz’s alleged ordeal glossed over an ocean of ambiguity and doubt about her own account of the alleged assault. Nungesser may or may not have assaulted Sulkowicz (a campus court cleared him of any wrongdoing and police declined to pursue charges), but to describe her as a “victim” or “survivor” was to presume Nungesser’s guilt, a presumption that flies in the face of substantial evidence. Nungesser’s suit alleges that Columbia violated its own policies to collaborate in his public shaming — essentially disregarding its own adjudication to destroy Nungesser and preserve the “rape crisis” narrative.
To describe her as a “victim” or “survivor” was to presume Nungesser’s guilt, a presumption that flies in the face of substantial evidence.
The suit is sobering as well, laying bare — through copious social-media messages — the personal lives of students unmoored to any coherent code of sexual morality, where alcohol plays an outsized role and sexual connections are casually created but have meaningful and long-lasting consequences. Such an environment offers the perfect formula for hurt, confusion, and rage.
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Jameis Winston’s highly unusual counterclaim — filed after former Florida State student Erica Kinsman sued Winston — also introduces complexity to a media storyline dominated by critiques of police and university processes. But the dominant media narrative — star athlete gets away with rape after a flawed investigation — is far too simplistic. Winston outlines shifting stories, notes the multiple, independent investigators who found in his favor, and provides a financial motive for Kinsman’s accusations — a demand for $7 million in compensation.
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RELATED: Fighting Against ‘Rape Culture’ Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
The final lawsuit, recently filed by University of Virginia dean Nicole Eramo against Rolling Stone after the magazine cast her as a principal villain in Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s now-discredited blockbuster tale of rape and cover-up at UVA, is in some ways the most poignant. Dean Eramos isn’t an accused rapist, she’s a person who has dedicated her professional life to working within a highly imperfect university system to help victims. Yet Rolling Stone and Erdely accused her of discouraging police reports, discouraging “Jackie” (the alleged victim) from sharing her story, and withholding statistics because she didn’t want UVA to be seen as a “rape school.” These claims, if true, would mean that Eramo didn’t just abuse her office, she turned its very purpose on its head — using it to harm victims and protect the university at all costs.
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RELATED: Fear of Facts: Rolling Stone’s Negligence Is Just Part of a Larger Problem of Media Bias in Sexual-Assault Cases
Eramo’s lawsuit clearly and methodically lays out the case against Rolling Stone, exposing how Erdely had a reputation for fabrication even before writing the story of “Jackie,” how she hunted for just the “right” victim and then refused to check the facts when the facts were just too good to check. The suit exposes how Rolling Stone went so far as to doctor photographs to make Eramo look like a callous villain willing to give the “thumbs up” sign even to weeping victims of sexual assault. The suit also lays out how Rolling Stone doubled down on its flawed reporting by continuing to promote the story even in the face of known, substantial doubts.
The “crisis” is the same crisis faced by prosecutors since time immemorial: Rape cases are among the most difficult to prove.
These cases have barely begun, but their claims bolster an alternative, competing narrative about sexual assault on campus — that it’s simply not true that universities or the police turn a blind eye to alleged rape. When the facts and evidence are clear, rapists are prosecuted. The “crisis” is the same crisis faced by prosecutors since time immemorial: Rape cases are among the most difficult to prove, and no amount of ideology-fueled wishful thinking can clear memories fogged by alcohol or reconcile the different perceptions of people navigating all the complexities of the most intimate of human interactions.
Nowhere has the sexual revolution triumphed more completely than on America’s college campuses. Yet instead of creating a sexual utopia, colleges are awash in hurt, anger, and confusion. No amount of ideological crusading can change the facts of human nature or change the facts of actual cases involving real human beings. (Indeed, college-age women are safer on campus than off.) But ideological crusades do create collateral damage — and now the targets of the crusade are fighting back. Can the crusade survive the court system? Only time will tell.
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— David French is an attorney and a staff writer at National Review.Byron burgers gets dozens of its own employees deported.
On the 4th of July, workers across 15 Byron restaurants were called in for a training at 9.30. 5 minutes after start, 2 immigration enforcement officers for the Home Office arrived, carrying lists of names and photos. They started calling people into a room one by one.
A manager in Byron unashamedly explained ‘We know what’s going on here. We prepared this.’ Dozens of workers were arrested, and deported that same name. Most of them were Latin American. Here’s what Byron said when contacted by El Iberico: “Byron confirms that several of our London restaurants were visited by representatives of the Interior Ministry earlier this week. The Interior Ministry recognizes that Byron, as an employer, meets the requirements of immigration law in their procedure for hiring workers. In Byron we are proud of the diversity in the staff of our restaurants built around people of all backgrounds. We have a long and close collaboration with the Ministry of Interior, to cooperate fully with them throughout the course of the investigations currently carried out and that will be in the future. “ A quick search on the internet tells me that no other media outlet is talking about that. Let’s change that.
The above is one of the few write ups I could find of a recent immigration bust on Byron Burgers. There’s a Spanish language report over at El Iberico too. I know this is a bit out of the usual and I’m not planning to make too much of a habit of posting random news items but this seems to have been ignored in most places so I figured I’d throw it out there.
Why does it matter? Because in working with a business that illegally employed undocumented workers the Immigration authorities have thrown the weight of guilt directly onto workers. It tells business that they can get away with breaking immigration law as long as they’re willing to throw up a few scapegoats if they get caught out. And it tells workers that their bosses are willing and now able to barter them away to avoid any repercussions they should be facing. It does nothing to stop dodgy practices, but it does make those workers even more easily exploitable. At the same time it gives politicians and the authorities an easy way to look ‘tough’ on illegal immigration without undermining the cheap labour market that their peers in business increasingly rely on.
It’s an example which extends beyond employment too – landlords for example have been known to use the threat of deportation to coerce or force poor conditions on tenants. Again, shifting all responsibility to the individuals who’re just living their lives while removing all responsibility from those profiting from it.
Sadly there’s no doubt going to be more stuff like this coming out as Theresa May looks for stories to re-enforce her ‘tough’ position on immigration.
Update: Full translation of the El Iberico piece below, not done by me but credit to whoever did it. Drop me a line with your name and I’ll add it.Share 0 SHARES
A CONGLOMERATE of national drug gangs have officially thanked the Irish public for their continued support over the past 30 years at their annual AGM in a Dublin City hotel this afternoon.
Boasting billion euro profits year-on-year, cartel bosses and henchmen donning balaclavas and flanked by armed personnel, also thanked the sitting press and the Irish government for their part in their ongoing reign of violence and terror, stating that they couldn’t have done it without them.
“We would really like to thank The Sunday World for their continued glamourising of our key players by giving them nicknames and reporting their wealth. Recruiting disadvantaged young men has never been easier,” said one boss, before turning to attending Justice Minister Charles Flanagan and winking at him, “and of course, we couldn’t have done any of this without the government’s incompetence and continued cuts on the Garda Síochána, whose corruption, may I add, is quite an inspiration to everyone working in our criminal network.
“Due your right-wing stance on cannabis, we wouldn’t be making a third of the money we are now. So well done on keeping that plant illegal, despite its vast array of medical benefits – making criminals out of normal people is usually our job, but I won’t complain,” he added, before pulling out a semi-automatic pistol and firing it three times in the air.
“And finally, three cheers for the Irish public; without your love of cocaine and your indifference to the fact you fund our bloodshed, we wouldn’t be here today… Hip, hip! hooray!” he shouted, between gunfire, “Hip, hip! hooray!”In 2014, Tumblr was on the front lines of the battle for net neutrality. The company stood alongside Amazon, Kickstarter, Etsy, Vimeo, Reddit, and Netflix during Battle for the Net’s day of action. Tumblr CEO David Karp was also part of a group of New York tech CEOs that met with then-FCC chairman Tom Wheeler in Brooklyn that summer, while the FCC was fielding public comment on new Title II rules. President Obama invited Karp to the White House to discuss various issues around public education, and in February 2015 The Wall Street Journal reported that it was the influence of Karp and a small group of liberal tech CEOs that swayed Obama toward a philosophy of internet as public utility.
But three years later, as the battle for net neutrality heats up once again, Tumblr has been uncharacteristically silent. The last mention of net neutrality on Tumblr’s staff blog — which frequently posts about political issues from civil rights to climate change to gun control to student loan debt — was in June 2016. And Tumblr is not listed as a participating tech company for Battle for the Net’s next day of action, coming up in three weeks.
Tumblr has been uncharacteristically silent
A representative for Battle for the Net told The Verge in an email, “Outreach for the day of action is very much an active and ongoing process... I wouldn't read too much into who is and isn't on the list so far.” Still, a rep for Tumblr declined to comment on whether the company would be participating, and AOL’s senior VP of brand communications Caroline Campbell responded to an inquiry about whether Tumblr would maintain its stance on net neutrality, writing “[It's] just too early to answer your question.”
When a company and a CEO have a reputation for being loud, silence says something.
Karp is still outspoken on other issues that matter to him, however. He is on the board of Planned Parenthood, and Tumblr hosted a “Never Going Back” rally at SXSW this year, protesting renewed threats on reproductive rights. He published a joint statement with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards on The Verge, and has been extremely outspoken about his belief that tech industry leaders are obligated to step in to defend federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Karp’s only public comment about net neutrality since the 2016 election was a quote he gave to Variety as an aside at SXSW in March: “I’m heartbroken to see the sea change on net neutrality.”
One reason for Karp and Tumblr’s silence? Last week Verizon completed its acquisition of Tumblr parent company Yahoo, kicking off the subsequent merger of Yahoo and AOL to create a new company called Oath. As one of the world’s largest ISPs, Verizon is notorious for challenging the principles of net neutrality — it sued the FCC in an effort to overturn net neutrality rules in 2011, and its general counsel Kathy Grillo published a note this April complimenting new FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to weaken telecommunication regulations.
Now, multiple sources tell The Verge that employees are concerned that Karp has been discouraged from speaking publicly on the issue, and one engineer conveyed that Karp told a group of engineers and engineering directors as much in a weekly meeting that took place shortly after SXSW. “Karp has talked about the net neutrality stuff internally, but won’t commit to supporting it externally anymore,” the engineer said. “[He] assures [us] that he is gonna keep trying to fight for the ability to fight for it publicly.” Karp did not respond to four emails asking for comment, and neither Yahoo nor Tumblr would speak about the matter on the record.
On the day Verizon’s Yahoo acquisition was completed, Tumblr was hit by a wave of layoffs. A number of current and former employees shared a post by social media industry commentator Andréa López entitled “Layoffs and Tumblr the Centipede.” In it, López theorizes, “In addition to the real life talented human beings impacted by these layoffs, the move is a warning and reminder — Tumblr is no longer in the protective purgatory of pre-Verizon Yahoo.” If Mayer’s Yahoo didn’t really know what it was doing with Tumblr, that meant Tumblr was free to do what it wanted. That extended to politics: Yahoo didn’t give Tumblr any official blessing or encouragement when it decided to become the tech industry’s fiercest net neutrality defender three years ago. Now things are a little bit stickier.
Bryan Irace, an engineering manager who worked at Tumblr from March 2012 to November 2015, explained Tumblr’s culture to The Verge in an email, writing, “We all [participated]. As with many other causes (e.g. SOPA/PIPA), [net neutrality] was a huge part of the company culture. A free and open Internet was a prerequisite for Tumblr to grow from an idea in David’s head into the platform that it is today... During my tenure there, Tumblr never shied away from speaking out about causes that the team collectively believed in.”
aggression on net neutrality “stops at leadership”
But a former employee who recently left Tumblr told The Verge that some employees who wanted to work there because of its culture of community and activism have been feeling uneasy for at least the last several weeks because of what they feel is a shift in Tumblr’s priorities.
“Some of our previous stances on issues that are really important to Tumblr employees and its community are being silenced,” said the former employee. “We've been really noisy about things like net neutrality in the past. We asked the new Head, Simon Khalaf, about it in an all-hands a few weeks ago and he said it was ‘not his problem’ and ‘above his pay grade.’” A current employee and another former employee corroborated this account.
Simon Khalaf is the former CEO of Flurry, an analytics app that was acquired by Yahoo in 2014. Under Yahoo, Khalaf was given a myriad of responsibilities related mostly to mobile app development and publishing partners — including Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, and Tumblr. He was promoted to senior VP in April 2015, then tapped by Oath CEO Tim Armstrong to head Media Brands and Products. Karp now reports directly to Khalaf.
The Verge spoke to two former employees and one current employee about net neutrality advocacy at the company. One former employee said that the “whole org” is still aggressive on net neutrality and other progressive causes — but that aggression “stops at leadership.”
In addition, at the all-hands meeting at Tumblr last month, all three sources say Khalaf gave a speech that shocked much of the staff. One source described the talk as “a whole bunch of terrible, shitty corporate speak,” in which Khalaf used military metaphors to explain how Tumblr could use content as “a weapon” to beat out its competition.
Two former Tumblr employees said they were alarmed when Khalaf chose Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. One told The Verge, “Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to [make] a ton of money.” The same person also recalled: “Tumblr employees totally freaked, but couldn't really be vocal about it because we were in [New York City] watching over video cast.” The other said that the meeting was “extremely uncomfortable” and “a lot of people were really upset,” leading to a heated conversation in Tumblr’s Slack, which is separate from Yahoo’s.
One Tumblr engineer did not recall the statement about Black Lives Matter, but remembered staffers discussing the generally “eyebrow-raising” all-hands in Slack, as well as the conversation turning into “a huge mess.” That conversation got back to Khalaf, and it fell to Karp to discipline the Tumblr staff in a weekly meeting. Khalaf did not respond to a request for comment, but a source close to him wanted it noted that Black Lives Matter was only one “community” that Khalaf referenced: he also discussed Game of Thrones and Manchester United fans.
Asked whether progressive politics were still a powerful force at Tumblr, Ari Levine, who worked as Tumblr’s brand strategist from July 2012 to November 2014, told The Verge in a phone call, “I imagine that remains innate on some level. But without question the people that saw their role at Tumblr as being able to empower change and be a voice and motivate the community to be a voice in a meaningful way, those people are gone.”
There has been a notable exodus of many of the individuals who spearheaded Tumblr’s net neutrality activism. That includes employees like former public policy lead Liba Rubenstein (now at 21st Century Fox) and general counsel Ari Shahdadi (now at BuzzFeed), who collaborated on Tumblr’s first major actions in support of net neutrality. Katherine Barna, head of communications at Tumblr since March 2011, left the company this month, writing that her biggest accomplishments during that time included “saving net neutrality for a minute there.” It’s not an overstatement: Tumblr even went to court to defend net neutrality in 2015, alongside the other NYC startups it had built an alliance with the year before, and tech policy lawyer Marvin Ammori told Motherboard at the time, “No companies deserve more credit than the New York tech community for the victory at the FCC.”
It’s important to note that the 2017 and 2014 battles for net neutrality are very different — even when completely divorced from Verizon’s involvement at Tumblr. Defenders of the open internet are facing a far more antagonistic FCC and Congress, as well as a president who does not seem to know what net neutrality is, and is far more likely to ignore the issue completely than invite David Karp back to the White House.
Whether or not Karp comes out in support of net neutrality, all of the employees we spoke with were still adamant about fighting for the cause. “We all love Tumblr and actually really care about its future and community,” said one former employee. “Many of the people who are still there are good people trying to do the right thing.”Sweden's central bank cut its main interest rate even further below zero on Thursday as it sought to hold down the national currency to support a recovery in the inflation rate toward a 2% target.
The bank, known as Sweden's Riksbank, lowered its main repurchase rate to minus 0.5% from minus 0.35% and said it still had scope to drop it further if needed.
Markets judged the move as more aggressive than expected and the Swedish krona weakened against the euro, which rose to 9.59 kronor from 9.47 kronor.
A rate cut was expected by six of 11 analysts in a Wall Street Journal survey with five forecasting an unchanged rate. Only two of the 11 expected a cut of this size with four expecting a smaller cut.
The Riksbank has been in focus over the past year as one of a small but growing number of central banks willing to test the boundaries of how low interest rates can go. Zero or just above was long seen as the lower bound for rates, but the Riksbank, along with the Swiss, Danish, European and most recently Japanese central banks have now all gone lower.
The policy imposes a charge on commercial banks when they place some types of deposit with the central bank. The aim is to encourage banks to lend, which stimulates the economy and pushes inflation higher.
The adoption of the policy also shows how central banks are looking to their currencies as a way of boosting prices. Negative interest rates in a country discourage foreign investors from holding that country's currency and that pushes the value of the currency down. That in turn pushes import prices up, giving the inflation rate a further boost.
The Riksbank's decision to cut interest rates was a consequence of its new lower forecast for inflation, also published Thursday. The Riksbank cut its forecast for consumer price inflation this year to 0.7% from 1.3%. The bank hasn't hit its 2% target for four years and would have had difficulty explaining why it wasn't acting now in the face of lower expectations for prices. Among other things, lower energy and commodity prices have kept prices in Sweden low. Inflation in December was 0.1% in annual terms.
"The upturn in inflation is still not on a firm footing, as is illustrated by the unexpectedly weak outcomes in recent months," the Riksbank said.
One question being asked is how low the Riksbank can go before banks start moving into cash rather than suffer the cost of depositing with the central bank. The Riksbank made clear it doesn't see minus 0.5% as the floor.
"There is still scope to cut the repo rate further," the Riksbank said in its statement.
A further problem for Sweden is that, unlike Japan and |
.
Here are Audrey and Min with the $50,000 prize awarded by Innotribe.
Well deserved Min and Audrey, wish you luck.
--- end update
--- update on 1 October 2012 ---
Min came back to me today with some great news, showing PlayMoolah's progress since I wrote the original article back in June.
PlayMoolah has its first bank partnership, with OCBC. The bank will sponsor PlayMoolah for their customers, and will provide digital and retail space in all 55 branches across Singapore.
Excellent news for Min and Audrey. I wish them a continued success and, most importantly, hitting their target to educate thousands of children in Singapore. And elsewhere!
Here is an extract of their press release:
Technology start-up, PlayMoolah, is today announcing that it is working financial institution, OCBC Bank. This tie-up will see young customers from OCBC Bank's Mighty Savers programme gaining access to PlayMoolah's fun online platform that educates 6-12 year olds on financial literacy matters. In order to provide financial empowerment to more young people, PlayMoolah is partnering with financial institutions around the world and OCBC Bank is the first financial institution to sign up. Through this partnership alone, PlayMoolah target to educate over 50,000 children in Singapore.
--- end update ---
Forbes is running a "startup month" and this week is about turning an idea into a real business.
Immediately I thought about the PlayMoolah startup and its co-founders Min Xuan Lee and Audrey Tan. Playmoolah was a winner in the Innotribe Startup Challenge in Singapore earlier this year. I was inspired with what they do - a tool to help parents educate their children about the value of money - and the energy and passion of Min, so I asked her to tell her story.
Giving the floor to Min -
It was an eye-opening experience to learn how different cultures use money. Coming from Singapore to California during the height of the financial crisis, we uncovered more and more horror stories over casual conversations about debt and over-leverage, fueled by relentless, uninformed optimism. It was evident how this generation was fast becoming the most indebted generation in modern history. This sparked one simple question - what is the root cause of financial illiteracy in our world today?
Our curiosity led us onto a path of inquiry, into the homes of American families, volunteering to teach in public schools, and speaking to anyone who had done work even remotely related to the field of financial literacy. Over one year, we spoke to hundreds of researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, teachers, and parents. The problem was clear - children lack financial education, school intervention had not proven effective, and only 32% of American parents talk to their children regularly about money.
The solutions were staring in our face. First, the problem is not simply about literacy, but in following through with real action and cultivating good habits. It’s also about starting young and involving not just the child but their parents to encourage good role-modeling and healthy conversations about money. At the root of the problem, parents just don’t know where to begin. And if the problems start at home, they need to be solved at home. But why isn’t there a home-based solution to help children and parents work through money matters together?
On the other hand, children are exposed to an avalanche of mass media and games that encourage consumerism and peer comparisons of what they have, even in the virtual world. What are our kids exposed to?
While at Stanford University, we were influenced by the work of B.J. Fogg and his methods for designing persuasive technology –technology that influences behavioral change. We saw an opportunity to nip the problem in the bud and take what kids have come to love, to turn the incentives completely on their head and design good technology that inspires real-world behavioral action.
There is something powerful about an idea whose time has come. So many people rallied around the idea offering us so much encouragement and help, putting us in a position where taking no risk became the greatest risk of all. With gut indignation towards the problem, an agonizing discomfort of the status quo, and the collective wisdom of all that we met along the way, PlayMoolah (http://playmoolah.com) was born.
In the PlayMoolah headquarters, there is a little desk with little chairs for the kids, filled with sketch paper, color pencils and markers, lego bricks and all sort of toys for kids to join us in the design process. All our concepts go through prototyping and feedback from the kids before put into production.
We design and develop playtools that put kids in the driver seat of their own learning, empowering them with the curiosity, knowledge, skills and tools needed for financial capability. Separately, parents are provided with a dashboard where they can monitor and track their kids progress, get involved with their kids saving goals, or get ideas on family projects they can do at home. No other solution on the market today is tying important age-appropriate lessons about managing money to real life, real dollar and real impact.
There is a famous saying in the valley – ask for money and you get advice, ask for advice and you get money. Through many of these unexpected conversations, we raised our seed round from a diverse group of angel investors across US and Singapore with an alignment in intention and a great humility towards something larger than ourselves. Our first investor wrote a tongue-in-cheek description on our cheque – “Pay to the Order of Play Moolah” for “Saving the world”, definitely one for the archives.
We are approaching exciting times as we partner with more schools and financial institutions to offer PlayMoolah to a greater number of kids and parents around the world. As part of the International ChildFinance Movement headquartered in Amsterdam, we also hope to catalyze quality financial education and access to reach the goal of touching the lives of 10 Million children around the world.
At the end of the day, we hope to inspire a next generation of young people to develop a healthy perspective of money, and to really rethink what money is. To see money as a wealth creation tool rather than an end in itself, money should serve our own dreams, personal growth and happiness. It’s about the enhancing the quality of our experiences, the strength of our relationships, our well-being and our health, and ultimately using money as fuel to create greater value in society. That is the true essence of startups that have served as a vehicle for wealth creation - because every single time we see our Playmoolah kids saving up for their goals, or giving their allowance to charity, we couldn’t imagine trading what we’re doing for anything else in the world.America deserves credit for its decision to publish a report into the CIA’s use of torture following the 9/11 disaster. Despite redaction, the Senate’s intelligence committee confirms what has long been known, that 20 “enhanced” interrogation methods were authorised by the Bush White House. Less well known is that 54 other countries, including British territories, were induced to collaborate. Despite former members of the Bush administration declaring that torturers are “patriots”, and the usual nonsense that “lives could be put at danger” from the truth, the Senate has bravely spoken.
Less creditable is what the report apparently says. The US in the aftermath of 9/11 displayed a collective psychosis of fear and paranoia. What had been overwhelming world sympathy – Yasser Arafat gave blood for New Yorkers – turned to aversion and then hatred as revenge wars were waged on Afghanistan and Iraq. Defence turned to belligerence – and torture. The Senate report is sceptical whether any useful intelligence was gained thereby.
Theorists of torture have long debated whether a higher good – “national security” – can justify the lesser evil. Torture is in the same category as the bombing of populated places from the air. The agony is certain, the gain speculative. That is why civilised states no longer execute, torture or mutilate their citizens, whatever the possible justification. They acknowledge that civilisation is a matter of means as well as ends. The UN outlawed torture in 1975.
Yet no area of government is so enveloped in secrecy and hypocrisy. The British government lectures the world on civil and human rights, but has yet to account for the use of torture – water-boarding and other methods – in Northern Ireland. Its blanket secrecy for “national security” extends to surveillance, rendition, hacking and drone targeting. Its use of “trusties” in parliament as a fig-leaf for accountability and its meek collaboration with Washington in all things must leave it vulnerable to suspicion of complicity with the CIA.
Nations everywhere react badly to trouble. They do so the more recklessly the longer the trouble is perceived as lasting. That is the poison of the “war on terror”, that it keeps people perpetually in thrall to the security state.
Democracy’s only defence is to demand that account be subsequently rendered.
Citizens must know what is done in their name, even if it takes time. It has taken the US more than a decade. Britain is still waiting for its Chilcot report on Iraq.The FBI issued a report on the attack on Republican congressmen practicing for their annual baseball game against the Democrats. The FBI's findings, according to Charles C.W. Cooke, are devastating to the anti-Second Amendment crowd:
Over the past two decades, Democrats have focused on three major proposals for reform. They are: 1) That all private transfers should be contingent upon a federal background check; 2) That firearms that look a certain way should be classed as “assault weapons” and prohibited from sale; and 3) That civilians should be forbidden from buying magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. None of these proposals intersect with what happened in Alexandria.
Cooke, quoting the FBI report, notes:
First, the FBI confirms that Hodgkinson moved to Virginia in March of 2017:
In March 2017, Hodgkinson, of Belleville, Illinois, told a family member that he was traveling to Washington D.C., but he did not provide any additional information on his travel. FBI analysis of Hodgkinson’s computers showed a Google search of truck stops, maps, and toll-free routes to the Northern Virginia area. Prior to his travel, local law enforcement in Belleville had been called to Hodgkinson’s residence due to complaints of target practice he was conducting on his property. Local law enforcement requested he keep the noise down but determined Hodgkinson was not in violation of any local laws. Hodgkinson’s prior criminal record includes a charge of domestic battery in 2006. Evidence collected thus far indicates Hodgkinson had been in the Alexandria area since March 2017.
It then confirms where — and how — he obtained his weapons:
The investigation thus far determined that Hodgkinson purchased his SKS 7.62mm caliber rifle in March 2003 and 9mm handgun in November 2016 legally through federal firearms licensees. The investigation has determined that there were cartridges found to be chambered in the SKS rifle and the FBI’s Evidence Response Team found 9mm and 7.62mm shell casings on scene. The SKS rifle was modified to accept a detachable magazine and the original stock was replaced with a folding stock. This means that Hodgkinson bought the guns in Illinois, where he was resident.
Cooke says these items matter because:
...before they knew anything about the case, many in the press had reflexively tried to use the incident as an argument for stricter gun control. The Atlantic’s David Frum, for example, immediately went on an error-laden tear about Virginia’s laws, which he considers to be too lax, and then took to proposing the sort of “common sense” reforms that the Democratic party has been so impotently trying to sell. But, as the FBI confirms, this reaction was an ignorant one. For a start, the guns weren’t bought in Virginia; they were bought in Illinois, which has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. And they weren’t purchased privately, illegally, or without attendant background checks, but “legally through federal firearms licensees” that are obliged under federal law to run checks. Moreover, Hodgkinson only got the weapons after he obtained an additional possession-and-purchase license (FOID) of the sort that more extreme gun-control advocates want to see made mandatory in all states.
Or, put another way: Illinois has stricter rules than even Barack Obama endorsed — it quite literally licenses all gun-owners in the state — and those rules made no difference to this case. This is not rare. It is typical.
There is much more to the piece, and we urge you to read the whole thing. The conclusion:
Repeatedly, conservatives such as myself are told that “confiscation” and “outright banning” are red herrings and straw men and “NRA lies,” and that what is being proposed is merely ”common sense” gun control. Specifically, we are pitched on the ideas I mentioned above — and they are sold as the means by which incidents such as this one will be prevented. Well, those ideas didn’t have anything to do with this incident, and those who are honestly limiting their ambitions to them need to stop for a moment and acknowledge that. And if they’re really talking about something else... well, they should acknowledge that, too.
We won't hold our breath waiting for such honesty.Monaco Visa Raises $3M in 3 Days, Announces Instant Cashback Program
This is a paid press release, which contains forward looking statements, and should be treated as advertising or promotional material. Bitcoin.com does not endorse nor support this product/service. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the press release.
May 24th, 2017 Zug, Switzerland. Monaco Technology GMBH, the company behind the revolutionary Monaco VISA® Card and App, announced the world’s first Cryptocurrency Cashback program today. Holders of Monaco VISA® cards will be entitled to up to 10% instant cashback rewards at participating merchants.
Kris Marszalek, Founder of Monaco Technology, commented: “The Monaco VISA® Card & App gives users the ability to spend, send and exchange money at perfect interbank exchange rates, saving them EUR30-40 on every EUR500 equivalent spent. We’re doubling down on this strategy to increase the level of savings they can achieve even further by announcing the world’s first Cryptocurrency Cashback rewards program.”
After a transaction at a participating merchant, Monaco VISA® Card holders will be instantly credited up to 10% of the transaction value to their Monaco App wallets. The credit is in MCO, the native currency of Monaco Technology, which will be tradable on various exchanges starting 19 JUN 2017. Users will be able to easily convert MCOs to Bitcoin, Ether, as well as USD, EUR and other fiat currencies.
“Combining perfect interbank exchange rates and instant cashback could potentially bring the savings on a single transaction to 15-18% for our customers. It’s simply unheard of.”, continued Mr. Marszalek. “The credit for the idea belongs entirely to the Monaco user community. We’re listening to what our users want in the product and executing at a rapid pace. If there’s a merchant you would like to see participating in the program, please join our Slack channel at slack.Mona.co, where users are currently contributing and voting on a list of merchants to bring to the Monaco platform.”
MONACO ICO HITS TARGET IN 90MIN, RAISES $3M IN FIRST 3 DAYS:
• ICO launched on 18 MAY and exceeded minimum goal in 90 minutes
• 1,500+ contributors to date
• Bidding war for Limited Edition Monaco Black Card #001 continues – price already exceeding $250,000
Commenting on the ICO, Mr. Marszalek said: “We’ve launched the ICO without any pre-marketing believing that the product is so strong that it will sell itself. The community quickly understood what we’re building and immediately saw tremendous value in it. Our team are working incredibly hard to perfect the product and we’re beyond happy that it resonates with our users. We’re also humbled with the warm reception we have received from the community and the trust that over 1,500 community members have placed in us by contributing to the ICO.”
LIMITED EDITION MONACO VISA BLACK CARD
Mr. Marszalek continued: “To acknowledge and reward the early supporters, we’ve created a Limited Edition Monaco VISA® Black Card.”
Cards numbered 001 to 999 will be issued to participants of the ICO. Black Cards numbered from 001 to 499 will be assigned to Top ETH Token Contributors. Black Cards numbered from 500 to 999 will be assigned to the fastest contributors, based on the time stamp of their ETH contribution. The Black Card Leaderboard will be available at Mona.co and will update automatically in real-time during the ICO.
‘We were astounded to see that the Black Card #001 fetched over $250,000 in what appears to be a bidding war. It’s unbelievable!”, added Mr. Marszalek. “We’re looking forward to working together with this amazing community to deliver the best possible product to the market.”
To find our more about Monaco please visit: www.Mona.co
To participate in the ICO, please visit: www.Mona.co
White paper download: www.Mona.co/whitepaper
To join our Slack channel: slack.Mona.co
LEAD ADVISOR:
TokenMarket: www.TokenMarket.net
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Virginia Lam
Virginia@Mona.co
Freya Stevens
Freya@TokenMarket.net
This is a paid press release. Readers should do their own due diligence before taking any actions related to the promoted company or any of its affiliates or services. Bitcoin.com is not responsible, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any content, goods or services mentioned in the press release.A Bengals fan known around Paul Brown Stadium for his festive beard has been charged with trafficking marijuana. Garey Faulkner, 33, of Amelia, is also charged with possession of marijuana. He's scheduled to appear in Warren County Common Pleas Court Nov. 23. According to court records, Faulkner and another man, Steve Battle, of Hamilton, possessed marijuana packaged for sale in July. Faulkner was arrested at a Loveland gas station Sunday and is being held without bond in the Warren County Jail.
A Bengals fan known around Paul Brown Stadium for his festive beard has been charged with trafficking marijuana.
Garey Faulkner, 33, of Amelia, is also charged with possession of marijuana. He's scheduled to appear in Warren County Common Pleas Court Nov. 23.
Advertisement Related Content Bengals bearded guy cheers on team behind famous follicles
According to court records, Faulkner and another man, Steve Battle, of Hamilton, possessed marijuana packaged for sale in July.
Faulkner was arrested at a Loveland gas station Sunday and is being held without bond in the Warren County Jail.
AlertMeToday FanGraphs came out with their early projections for the 2016 season. As is almost always the case with anyone’s statistical projections, there is a lot stuff that doesn’t seem to hew close to human expectations and/or observable reality. Stuff like the World Champion Royals slated to win 79 games or the 78-win Red Sox to be the second best team in the game. Could those things happen? Sure! Anything can happen in baseball. But they’re not necessarily the safest bets. And they’re gonna anger a lot of people, especially Royals fans.
They seem to anger baseball writers a lot too. Each year as soon as the projections come out from FanGraphs or whoever, there is a goodly bit of snark from the ink-stained wretches. “Ha! They have the Royals stinking and the Nationals winning! Silly computers!” says the baseball writer. Never a word, however, for the scores of living breathing “baseball experts” who predicted exactly the same thing last year. Projections are mocked. Predictions — which almost every writer either does on his or her own accord or is elbowed into doing by their editor — are forgotten.
Which isn’t to say I have a lot of use for projections or that I am somehow defending them as superior. I don’t pay too much attention to them and couldn’t begin to do any of my own. I do know enough about them, however, to know that they are not meant to be guesses as to what will actually happen. Rather, they are attempts to approximate what is most likely to happen given variables one can reasonably ascertain and figure. They’re a baseline, really, of what might happen before the totally unexpected and unprojectionable crap that happens every year comes into play. All things being equal, Shlabotnik is going to decline this year because he’s older, Oppenheimer is going to improve a bit because he’s no longer a rookie and if we do this to all 25 guys on the roster, we might be able to make some assumptions.
I think maybe the folks who do projections could be clearer about that when they release them. That all things aren’t equal, ever, and that they are just assumptions built on assumptions, subject to the unfolding of actual events. I know they build that into the numbers too, in the form of error rates and whatnot, but maybe the people who produce the articles presenting the projections could do a better job of clearly stating it in human terms as well. Doing so may seem unnecessary for the projectors — I get an image of a research scientist being told to talk to the popular press about his research, which is always kind of awkward — but it might help with popular adoption of projections by those who currently prefer to mock them. Or, at the very least, would make them think twice about mocking given that it’d be more clear then than it is now that they are, in fact, attacking a straw man.
It’s a humility thing, really. A humility which, to their credit, the writerly class has tended toward in recent years when it comes to their predictions. In their heart of hearts I still think that baseball writers consider themselves experts and think that their predictions are better-informed than that of most people, but they no longer act that way publicly when it comes time for predictions. They preface all predictions with self-effacing humor and verbiage in which they 100% acknowledge that they’re going to look foolish in seven months (and if they’re right, they brag anyway), and I think that makes talking about baseball easier. In my own practice I’ve done that for several years now, and I no longer get nearly as much angry “YOU HATE MY TEAM!” responses as I get “man, that’s a reach, but I guess we’ll see!” responses. The former stops conversation. The latter encourages it.
Anyway, the projectors won’t stop projecting. The predictors won’t stop predicting. Neither of them will stop being wrong a lot of the time because sports are random and unexpected things happen. I would just hope that, at some point, we’d stop mocking folks who do projections and stop claiming that anyone has the market cornered on this stuff.
Follow @craigcalcaterraPut free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.
“We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now,” he said. “What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.”
Not many law professors have Mr. Moglen’s credentials as lawyer and geek, or, for that matter, his record as an early advocate for what looked like very long shots.
Photo
Growing up on the West Side of Manhattan, he began fooling around with computers as a boy. In 1973, at age 14, he was employed writing programs for the Scientific Time Sharing Corporation. At 26, he was a young lawyer, clerking for Justice Thurgood Marshall. Later, he got a Ph.D. in history from Yale. He was also the lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, headed by Richard M. Stallman, which aggressively — and successfully — protected the ability of computer scientists, hackers and hobbyists to build software that was not tied up by copyright, licensing and patents.
In the first days of the personal computer era, many scoffed at the idea that free software could have an important place in the modern world. Today, it is the digital genome for millions of phones, printers, cameras, MP3 players, televisions, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange and the computers that underpin Google’s empire.
This month, Mr. Moglen, who now runs the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke to a convention of 2,000 free-software programmers in Brussels, urging them to get to work on the Freedom Box.
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Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”
In January, investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.
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“It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Mr. Moglen said.
By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material.
In response to Mr. Moglen’s call for help, a group of developers working in a free operating system called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software. Four students from New York University who heard a talk by Mr. Moglen last year have been building a decentralized social network called Diaspora.
Mr. Moglen said that if he could raise “slightly north of $500,000,” Freedom Box 1.0 would be ready in one year.
“We should make this far better for the people trying to make change than for the people trying to make oppression,” Mr. Moglen said. “Being connected works.”Make some new friends at the 2017 MaxFun Meetup Day! On Tuesday, March 28 at 7:00 PM local time, MaxFun listeners will be gathering across the nation to celebrate all things Maximum Fun!
If you don't see your city represented in the list below but want to join in on the fun, don't fret! Simply pick a location (we suggest a group-friendly restaurant or bar), and email elisabeth@maximumfun.org with your city, venue name, and any additional information you want to include, and we'll add you to the line-up! If you make a Facebook event to go along with your town's meetup, please make the event public (rather than a private group event), so new MaxFunsters can join, too! Click here to find a list of MaxFun fan groups all over the world, and check out this list below for locations to see where MaxFunsters will be gathering on March 28:
UNITED STATES
ARIZONA
Phoenix:
First Draft Bar (Inside Changing Hands Bookstore)
300 W Camelback Road
Phoenix, AZ 85013
Look for Carlos Clark!
CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles:
The Lost Knight (upstairs room)
1538 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
Facebook invite
Look for Dana Scarborough!
Oakland/Alameda:
Forbidden Island
1304 Lincoln Avenue
Alameda, CA 94501
Facebook invite
Look for Joe and Sue!
San Diego:
Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery La Jolla
8980 Villa La Jolla Drive
La Jolla, CA 92037
Facebook invite
Look for Masha Evpak!
San Luis Obispo:
Kreuzberg Coffee Company
685 Higuera Street
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
Facebook invite
Look for Anne Stevens!
COLORADO
Denver:
Grandma's House (back room)
1710 S Broadway
Denver, CO 80210
Facebook invite
Look for Abbey Byrne!
FLORIDA
Orlando:
Lazy Moon Pizza
1011 E. Colonial Drive
Orlando, FL 32803
Facebook invite
Look for Manny Amor!
GEORGIA
Atlanta:
Ormsby's
1170 Howell Mill Road, suite 20
Atlanta, GA 30318
Facebook invite
Look for Ron and Kelsey!
GUAM
Tamuning:
Shamrock's Gastropub
1206 Pale San Vitores Road
Tamuning, 96913, Guam
Look for Nora Sweeney!
IDAHO
Boise:
10th Street Station
104 N 10th Street
Boise, ID 83702
Facebook invite
Look for Will and Emily!
ILLINOIS
Chicago:
Hopewell Brewing Company
2760 N Milwaukee Avenue
Chicago, IL 60647
Facebook invite
Look for Dawn and Benjamin!
INDIANA
Indianapolis:
Sushi Boss
803 W 10th Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
Facebook invite
Look for Mararet Gallina!
IOWA
Iowa City:
Big Grove Brewery
1225 S Gilbert Street
Iowa City, IA 52240
Facebook invite
Look for Sam Pelelo-Ray!
KENTUCKY
Lexington:
The Casual Pint
233 E Main Street
Lexington, KY 40507
Facebook invite
Look for Michael Lee!
MASSACHUSETTS
Boston:
Night Shift Brewing
87 Santilli Hwy
Everett, MA 02149
Facebook invite
Look for Tom Morang!
MICHIGAN
Ann Arbor:
The Pretzel Bell
226 S Main Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Facebook invite
Look for Heather Eady!
Royal Oak:
D'Amato's
222 S Sherman Drive
Royal Oak, MI 48067
Facebook invite
Head into Goodnite Gracie (bar area of the restaurant) and look for Allison Pellerito!
MINNESOTA
Minneapolis:
Byte
319 1st Avenue N
Minneapolis, MN 55401
Facebook invite
Look for Rebecca!
MISSOURI
St. Louis:
Urban Chestnut - The Grove
4465 Manchester Avenue
St. Louis, MO 63110
Facebook invite
NEBRASKA
Omaha:
Spielbound
3229 Harney Street
Omaha, NE 68131
Facebook invite
Look for Morgan Thompson and Greg Harries!
NEW YORK
Brooklyn:
Hinterlands Bar
739 Church Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11218
Facebook invite
Look for Jeremy Frank!
Buffalo:
Thin Man Brewery
492 Elmwood Avenue
Buffalo, NY 14222
Facebook invite
Look for Alexandra Bowser!
Ithaca:
The Haunt
702 Willow Avenue
Ithaca, NY 14850
Facebook invite
Look for Andrea Streeter & her MaxFun rocket coloring page! Trivia starts at 7:30!
NORTH CAROLINA
Greensboro:
Boxcar Bar + Arcade
120 W Lewis Street
Greensboro, NC 27406
Facebook invite
Look for Karissa Gravel!
Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill:
Boxcar Bar + Arcade (Raleigh)
330 W Davie Street
Raleigh, NC 27601
Facebook invite
Look for Chloe Rockow!
OHIO
Akron:
Frank's Place On Market
549 W Market Street
Akron, OH 44303
Facebook invite
Say hi to Rob Core with the sound equipment at the door. Stay for free trivia at 8 pm!
Columbus:
The Blue Danube
2439 N High Street
Columbus, OH 43202
Facebook invite
Look For Erin Deel (wearing her MaxFun rocket T!)
OREGON
Eugene:
Sizzle Pie
910 Willamette Street
Eugene, OR 97401
Facebook invite
Look for Rachel Rosing!
Portland:
Tom's Restaurant & Bar (in the bar)
3871 SE Division St.
Portland, OR 79202
Facebook invite
Lots of parking, cheap drinks, skiball and free pool! And look for 'tori Christensen!
PENNSYLVANIA
Pittsburgh:
Bites and Brews
5750 Ellsworth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15232
Facebook invite
Look for Padraic Malinowski!
TENNESSEE
Chattanooga:
3rd Deck Burger Bar
201 Riverfront Parkway
Chattanooga, TN 37402
Facebook invite
Look for Kristin Diesel!
Memphis:
Celtic Crossing Irish Pub
903 Cooper Street
Memphis, TN 38104
Facebook invite
Look for Nicole Kolenic!
Nashville:
East Nashville Beer Works
320 E Trinity Lane
Nashville, TN 37207
Facebook invite
Look for John Paul! Here's his twitter: @johnpaulwhatnow
TEXAS
Austin:
Yard Bar
6700 Burnet Rd,
Austin, TX 78757
Facebook invite
Look for Andrea Caprotti!
Dallas:
The Cidercade
2777 Irving Blvd, Unit 200
Dallas, TX 75207
Facebook invite
Look for Hayley, wearing green MaxFunCon t-shirt and Bullseye bandana!
Houston:
McElroy's Pub
3607 S Sandman St.
Houston, TX 77098
Facebook invite
Look for Ben Hebert!
WASHINGTON
Seattle:
Assembly Hall at Via6
2121 6th Ave
Seattle, WA 98121
Facebook invite
Mezzanine level - come upstairs, and look for Kristy Overton!
WASHINGTON D.C.
Penn Social
801 E Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20004
Facebook invite
Look for Chris Burton!
WISCONSIN
Madison:
Next Door Brewing
2439 Atwood Avenue
Madison, WI 53704
Facebook invite
Look for Jonathan Levine and Jackson Ritter!
Milwaukee:
Lee's Luxury Lounge
2988 S Kinnic Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53207
AUSTRALIA
QUEENSLAND
Brisbane:
The Pancake Manor
18 Charlotte Street
Brisbane, QLD 4000
Facebook invite
Look for Melanie Packer!
VICTORIA
Sydney:
Moreland Hotel
Sydney Rd
Brunswick, VIC 3056
Facebook invite
Main meet up starts at 7pm, but those with kids can show up at 5pm for a family affair!
Look for Leigh and Eliot! They'll be wearing their OBM and TSOYA t-shirts!
CANADA
ALBERTA
Calgary:
Midtown Kitchen and Bar
302 10 Street NW
Calgary, Alberta T2N 1V8
Facebook invite
Look for Emily Iris Baird!
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Vancouver:
Storm Crow Alehouse
1619 W Broadway
Vancouver, BC V6J 1W9
Facebook invite
Event starts at 6pm so Graham Clark can make it!
Look for Josh Coles!
NOVA SCOTIA
Halifax:
Good Robot Brewing Company
2736 Robie Street
Halifax, NS B3K 4P2
Facebook invite
Look for Helen Langville!
ONTARIO
Ottowa:
Ward 14
139 Preston Street #1
Ottawa, ON K1R 7P4
Facebook invite
Look for Alex Wright!
Toronto:
Prenup Pub
191 College Street
Toronto, Ontario M5T 1P9
Facebook invite
Look for Elissa Janca (wearing her Summer Boi T)!
QUEBEC
Montreal:
Fiddler's Green Irish Pub
1224 Bishop Street
Montreal, Quebec H3G 2E3
Facebook invite
Look for Sarah Luger!
FRANCE
Paris:
Deli Drop
16 Esplanade Nathalie Sarraute
75018 Paris
Metro Marx Dormoy or Gare du Nord. The esplanade is on rue Pajol.
Look for Todd!
NEW ZEALAND
Auckland:
Nomad
5 Point Chevalier Road,
Point Chevalier, Auckland New Zealand 1022
Facebook invite
Look for Thomas in the yellow GARABA t-shirt!
UNITED KINGDOM
ENGLAND
London:
Rotunda Bar and Restaurant, Kings Cross
Kings Place, 90 York Way
Kings Cross
London N1 9AG
Facebook inviteTAPPS draws renewed criticism for rejection of an Islamic academy
From left, Mahnoor Javed, Zaynab Abidogun and Maheen Gardezi listen to AP English teacher Gabriela Pruneda, center, at Iman Academy. The Texas Association of Private and Parochial schools rejected the school in 2010. less From left, Mahnoor Javed, Zaynab Abidogun and Maheen Gardezi listen to AP English teacher Gabriela Pruneda, center, at Iman Academy. The Texas Association of Private and Parochial schools rejected the school in... more Photo: Johnny Hanson Photo: Johnny Hanson Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close TAPPS draws renewed criticism for rejection of an Islamic academy 1 / 10 Back to Gallery
A Texas private school system that drew national attention for almost keeping a Jewish team on the bench during a state semifinal basketball game last week is facing renewed questions for not allowing an Islamic school in Houston to join the organization.
Houston's Iman Academy was denied membership in 2010 to the association after being grilled about the Quran and the proposed mosque at Ground Zero in New York. That decision by the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools garnered scant scrutiny until the recent dispute with the Jewish school put a spotlight on TAPPS' policies.
A national Islamic group has threatened to revisit possible legal action against TAPPS, and a state senator from Houston is considering legislation that would address concerns |
.
I’m going to take a case study I know quite well : myself.
I wanted to get off on the right foot, so after taking advice from the aforementionned fora, I began with a Merkur Progress safety Razor (52€, though I got it from my uncle), a bol of Monsavon soap (1.01€. No typo here!) a 10 blade kit (6.85€) and a Wilkinson shaving brush (11.29€).
Total : 71,15 euros.
That was a while ago.
Here’s a picture of my shaving equipment as of this day. You’re welcome to click on the image to see the full extent of my folly.
You have been warned.
To conclude, here are two commentated photos of my shaving kit and travel kit.
My Shaving Kit of the Day
The centerpiece being my beautiful Chevalier razor, made by hand by Master Heribert Wacker, a fourth generation razor maker from Solingen – an revered place for German straight-razor making.
The soap bowl on display is a Martin de Candre, made in France, and unanimously acclaimed for the quality and abundance of its foam. This razor simply slides, cutting the hair and not the skin ~
The brush is an Infinity, handmade by Kent, the official supplier of the British crown.
My aftershave is Taylor of Old Bond Street Jermyn Street of Old Bond Street, Jermyn Street. I used to live without. I don’t know how I coped.
My Travel Kit
The head is a Mühle R41, the safety razor that offers the maximum blade exposure possible. The blade is from Feather, a Japanese brand. For a cleaner cut, I suggest an industrial water jet cutter.
The handle is an OSS from the American brand Ikon – for an optimal grip in humid conditions.
For its small size, the British shaving oil Somersets offers a high degree of protection, and lets the blade slide beautifully.
A bar of Osma Alum to terminate any potential cuts and bleedings. Up to a certain degree anyway.
Emmanuel Laurent for Parisian Gentleman.The San Francisco 49ers traded away perhaps the best backup quarterback in football this year in Alex Smith.
The move was necessary, but it has left the team without a comfortable arrangement behind Colin Kaepernick. CSN Bay Area reported Wednesday that the 49ers have shown interest in Seneca Wallace and are expected to visit with the veteran free agent, according to a source.
Colt McCoy entered training camp as the favorite for the backup job, but injury and middling production appears to have opened up the competition. Niners coach Jim Harbaugh said Wednesday that McCoy, Scott Tolzien and rookie B.J. Daniels have received an equal number of snaps during practice this week.
Wallace, 33, is a free agent after being released by the New Orleans Saints this week. Wallace served as McCoy's backup in 2010 and 2011 with the Cleveland Browns. Niners offensive consultant Eric Mangini was the head coach in Cleveland when the Browns drafted McCoy and signed Wallace.
The 49ers probably aren't confident Daniels would sneak through waivers, so his spot should be safe if Wallace comes aboard. The same cannot be said for McCoy and Tolzien, who both appear extremely vulnerable at the moment.
The " Around The League Podcast" is now available on iTunes! Click here to listen and subscribe.A devastating wildfire ripped through their state and destroyed their home, leaving only the chimney and a porcelain Nativity scene in the rubble. Instead of asking why God allowed the natural disaster to destroy the house, they said God saved the statue “as a reminder to let go and move on with your life.”
Ray and Tammy Hand lost their family’s home a year ago in the Gatlinburg fire in Tennessee, which killed at least three people, but they say God was actually in control the whole time. In fact, said Tammy, “You can see his hand in everything that has happened.”
For years the Hands spent summers and holidays at the home, which belonged to her parents who both passed away suddenly. “As I was going through the rubble I was very angry at all the memories we lost and all the time that was wasted and the sorrow of my family,” Tammy said. Tammy would soon to find a nativity scene — one of just a few things that survived the fire. She said she doesn’t understand how a fire that was 1400 degrees destroyed her whole home, but didn’t destroy the porcelain set. “(God) gave me this as a reminder to let go and move on with your life,” Tammy said.
“Porcelain enamels have the ability to withstand intermittent or prolonged heat without changing physical, chemical or appearance properties.”
It’s perfectly acceptable for someone to use symbols to inspire them, but let’s talk science for a second. Porcelain is forged by heating materials in a kiln to temperatures between 2,200 and 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Even porcelain enamels, coating non-porcelain items, are not affected by “abrupt and severe temperature changes.”
Porcelain tiles are actually preferred over linoleum because they can withstand higher temperatures, according to Hunker.com.
Porcelain can withstand high temperatures due to the formation of mullite during the heating process. Mullite, also known as porcelainite, refers to a silicate material that takes the form of needles within the porcelain. Mullite is considered refractory, or a material that maintains its strength at very high temperatures. The melting point of the mullite, which helps porcelain maintain its shape and integrity, is 2,400 Celsius [4,352 degrees Fahrenheit].
Considering the average house fire burns at only 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s not all that surprising the statue survived.
So it turns out the porcelain Nativity scene was spared from destruction not because it was a Nativity scene, but because it’s made of porcelain. It’s the same reason older bathtubs and toilets are often left standing after a fire, and the same reason their chimney was also saved: they’re built to withstand high temperatures.
Tammy may not “understand” how a fire burning at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit could burn everything but the Jesus statue and the chimney, but this is definitely not supernatural.Horizontal Reference Datum
When you need to accurately enter latitude and longitude coordinates in a GIS, the first step is to give it a datum. A geodetic datum uniquely defines all locations on Earth with coordinates.
Because where would you be on Earth without having reference to it?
Because the Earth is curved and in GIS we deal with flat map projections, we need to accommodate both the curved and flat views of the world. In surveying and geodesy, we accurately define these properties with geodetic datums.
We begin modelling the Earth with a sphere or ellipsoid. Over time, surveyors have gathered a massive collection of surface measurements to more reliably estimate the ellipsoid.
When you combine these measurements, we arrive at a geodetic datum. Datums precisely specify each location on Earth’s surface in latitude and longitude. For example, NAD27, NAD83 and WGS84 are geodetic datums.
A Mammoth Collection of Survey Benchmarks
In order to create a geodetic datum, surveyors undertook a mammoth collection of monument locations in the late 1800s. Surveyors installed brass or aluminum disks at each reference location.
Each monument location was connected using mathematical techniques like triangulation.
From the unified network of survey monument, the result of triangulation was the North American Datum of 1927 (NAD 27). After, geodesists developed the more accurate NAD 83, which we still use today. NAD 27 and NAD 83 provide a frame of reference for latitude and longitude locations on Earth.
Surveyors now rely almost exclusively on the Global Positioning System (GPS) to identify locations on the Earth and incorporate them into existing geodetic datums.
For example NAD27, NAD83 and WGS84 are the most common geodetic datums in North America.
What is North American Datum 1927 (NAD27)?
NAD27 stands for North American Datum of 1927. NAD27 is the adjustment of long-baseline surveys. Overall, it established a network of standardized horizontal positions on North America. Most historical USGS topographic maps and projects by the US Army Corps of Engineers used NAD27 as a reference system.
A horizontal datum provides a frame of reference as a basis for placing specific locations at specific points on the spheroid. Geodesists use a horizontal datum as the model to translate a spheroid / ellipsoid into locations on Earth with latitude and longitude lines. Geodetic datums form the basis of coordinates of all horizontal positions on Earth. All coordinates on Earth are referenced to a horizontal datum. The North American Datum of 1927 (NAD27) is one of the main three geodetic datums used in North America.
NAD27 uses all horizontal geodetic surveys collected at this time using a least-square adjustment. This datum uses the Clarke Ellipsoid of 1866 with a fixed latitude and longitude at Meade’s Ranch, Kansas. (39°13’26.686″ north latitude, 98°32’30.506″ west longitude)
Kansas was selected as a common reference point because it was near the center of the contiguous United States. The latitudes and longitudes of every other point in North America were based off its direction, angle and distance away from Meade’s Ranch. Any point with a latitude and longitude away from this reference point could be measured on the Clarke Ellipsoid of 1866.
Surveyors gathered approximately 26,000 stations in the United States and Canada. At each station, surveyors collected latitudes and longitude coordinates. NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey used these survey stations and triangulation to form the NAD27 datum.
As time went on, the number of stations also grew. For example, surveyors benchmarked approximately 250,000 stations. This set of horizontal positions formed the basis for the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83). In 1983, the NAD27 datum was eventually replaced with NAD83.
What is North American Datum 1983 (NAD83)?
The North American Datum of 1983 (NAD 83) is the most current datum being used in North America. It provides latitude and longitude and some height information using the reference ellipsoid GRS80. Geodetic datums like the North American Datum 1983 (NAD83) form the basis of coordinates of all horizontal positions for Canada and the United States.
The North American Datum of 1983 (NAD 83) is a unified horizontal or geometric datum and successor to NAD27 providing a spatial reference for Canada and the United States.
NAD83 corrects some of the distortions from NAD27 over distance by using a more sense set of positions from terrestrial and Doppler satellite data. NAD83 is a geocentric datum (referenced to the center of Earth’s mass) offset by about 2 meters. Even today, geodesists are continually improving horizontal geodetic datums.
WGS84: Unifying a Global Ellipsoid Model with GPS
It wasn’t until the mainstream use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) until a unified global ellipsoid model was developed. The radio waves transmitted by GPS satellites enable extremely precise Earth measurements across continents and oceans. Global ellipsoid models have been created because of the enhancement of computing capabilities and GPS technology.
This has led to the development of global ellipsoid models such as WGS72, GRS80 and WGS84 (current). The World Geodetic System (WGS84) is the reference coordinate system used by the Global Positioning System.
Never before have we’ve been able to estimate the ellipsoid with such precision because of the global set of measurements provided by GPS. It comprises of a reference ellipsoid, a standard coordinate system, altitude data and a geoid. Similar to NAD 83, it uses the Earth’s center mass as the coordinate origin. The error is believed to be less than 2 centimeters to the center mass.
Question: What is EPSG4326? Answer: EPSG4326 is just the way to identify WGS84 using EPSG. Here is the spatial reference list
Geodetic Datums: NAD83 versus NAD27
NAD83 corrects some of the distortions from NAD27 over distance by using a more dense set of positions from terrestrial and Doppler satellite data. Approximately 250,000 stations were used to develop the NAD83 datum. This compares to only 26,000 used in the NAD27 datum.
One of the primary difference is that NAD83 uses an Earth-centered reference, rather than a fixed station in NAD27. All coordinates were referenced to Kansas Meade’s Ranch (39°13’26.686″ north latitude, 98°32’30.506″ west longitude) for NAD27 datum. The National Geodetic Survey relied heavily on the use of Doppler satellite to locate the Earth’s center of mass. However, NAD83 is not geocentric with an offset of about two meters.
North American Datum of 1983 is based on the reference ellipsoid GRS80 which is physically larger than NAD27’s Clarke ellipsoid. The GRS80 reference ellipsoid has a semi-major axis of 6,378,137.0 meters and a semi-minor axis of 6,356,752.3 meters. This compares to the Clarke ellipsoid with a semi-major axis of 6,378,206.4 m and semi-minor axis of 6,356,583.8 meters.
The Varying Historical Accuracy of the Ellipsoid
Is the Earth Round? Earth bulges out more at the equator than at the poles by about 70,000 feet.
And since the beginning of the 19th century, the dimensions of the ellipsoid have been calculated at least 20 different times with considerably different accuracy.
The early attempts at measuring the ellipsoid used small amounts of data and did not represent the true shape of the Earth. In 1880, the Clarke ellipsoid was adopted as a basis for its triangulation computations. The first geodetic datum adopted for the United States was based on the Clarke ellipsoid with its starting point in Kansas known as Meades Ranch.
One Datum with Many Versions and Abbreviations
Since 1986, geodesists have made several updates to NAD83. Actually, because of these changes, there are more than one version of NAD83. For example, the National Geodetic Survey has adjusted the NAD83 datum four times since the original geodetic datum estimation in 1986.
NAD83 (1986) : This version was intended to be geocentric and used the GRS80 ellipsoid.
: This version was intended to be geocentric and used the GRS80 ellipsoid. NAD83 (1991, HARN, HPGN) : High Accuracy Reference Network (HARN) and High Precision Geodetic Network reworked geodetic datums from 1986-1997
: High Accuracy Reference Network (HARN) and High Precision Geodetic Network reworked geodetic datums from 1986-1997 NAD83 (CORS96) : Continually Operating Reference Stations (CORS) are composed of permanently operating Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers
: Continually Operating Reference Stations (CORS) are composed of permanently operating Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers NAD83 (CSRS, CACS) : Canadian Spatial Reference System and Canadian Active Control System with GPS processing.
: Canadian Spatial Reference System and Canadian Active Control System with GPS processing. NAD83 (NSRS 2007, 2011): National Spatial Reference System and current survey standard using multi-year adjusted locations based on GNSS from the CORS.
The Importance of Datum Transformations
The coordinates for benchmark datum points are typically different between geodetic datums. For example, the latitude and longitude location in a NAD27 datum differs from that same benchmark in NAD83 or WGS84. This difference is known as a datum shift.
Depending on where you are in North America, NAD27 and NAD83 may differ in tens of meters for horizontal accuracy. The average correction between NAD27 and NAD83 is an average of 0.349″ northward and 1.822″ eastward.
It’s important to note that the physical location has not changed. To be clear, most monuments have not moved. Datum shifts happen because survey measurements improve. Also, it happens when there are more of them and methods of geodesy change. This results in more accurate geodetic datums over time. The horizontal datums that form the basis of coordinates of all horizontal positions in North America improve.
Because maps were created in different geodetic datums throughout history, datum transformations are often necessary. Especially, this is true when using historical data. For example, USGS topographic maps generally were published using a NAD27 datum. You would need to apply a datum transformation when working with NAD83 data.
When Do We Need Datum Transformations?
A coordinate transformation is the conversion from a non-projected coordinate system to a coordinate system. A coordinate transformation is done through a series of mathematical equations.
The geodetic datum is an integral part of projections. All coordinates are referenced to a datum. A datum describes the shape of the Earth in mathematical terms. A datum defines the radius, inverse flattening, semi-major axis and semi-minor axis for an ellipsoid. The North American datum of 1983 (NAD 83) is the United States horizontal or geometric datum. It provides latitude and longitude and some height information.
Unfortunately, NAD 83 is not the only datum you’ll encounter. Before the current datum was defined, many maps were created using different starting points. And even today, people continue to change geodetic datums in an effort to make them more accurate. A common problem is when different coordinate locations are stored in different reference systems. When combining data from different users or eras, it is important to transform all information to common geodetic datums.
Projected coordinate systems are based on geographic coordinates, which are in turn referenced to a datum. For example, State Plane coordinate systems can be referenced to either NAD83 and NAD27 geodetic datums.
NAD27 Datum vs NAD83 Datum
The NAD27 datum was based on the Clarke Ellipsoid of 1866:
Semi-major axis: 6,378,206.4 m
Semi-minor axis: 6,356,583.8 m
Inverse flattening: 294.98 The NAD83 datum was based on the Geodetic Reference System (GRS80) Ellipsoid:
Semi-major axis: 6,378,137.0 m
Semi-minor axis: 6,356,752.3 m
Inverse flattening: 298.26
When you transform NAD83 and NAD27 geographic coordinates to projected State Plane coordinates, it is the same projection method. However, because the geodetic datums were different, the resulting projected coordinates will also be different. In this case, a datum transformation is necessary.
For any type of work where it’s important for coordinates to be consistent with each other, it is critical that you use the same geodetic datum. If you are marking property or land boundaries or building roads or planning for coastal inundation scenarios, you must know about and use the correct geodetic datums.
READ MORE: Datum Transformations – Converting Coordinates from NAD27 to NAD83Does India deserve big cats like the leopard?
ONGOING PETITION TILL THE KILLING OF LEOPARDS IN INDIA HAVE STOPED!
2011 - 356 leopards were killed in 365 days in India.
2012 - the number of dead leopards is even increasing.
Most leopards are killed due to poaching, speeding cars and slaughtered by angry villagers.
The cheetah was the first big cat to get extinct in India, the tiger still is very much endangered, but in the way it is going now leopard will be the next big cat to get extinct in the wild in India. Unless.....
We can convince the government of India that it is the time for them to start acting now. Let them show us they are capable of saving the remaining leopards in their country. Together with all the signatures we will also hand them our "do & don't" list - how to live peacefully close to leopards, if behaving the right way.
Please everybody sign this petition and support our projects to save the incredible leopard in their natural habitat in India.
Babette de Jonge
Wild Cats World
http://www.wildcatsworld.nl/36839021The past, the Present and the Future of Net Neutrality
BizzVenue Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 12, 2015
Net neutrality…what is it all about? The term was first coined by Columbia University media law professor Tim Wu back in 2003. The topic of Net Neutrality has been bombarding the headlines for the past few months. Everyone is talking about it but no one seems to understand what it’s all about. We are going to give you the low down on Net Neutrality so that you can stop pretending to know what’s going on.
So put simply, net neutrality is….
Essentially, net neutrality protects you from big bad companies that want to control the content you can access online. Net neutrality is the idea that all internet providers will need to treat all traffic sources equally. This means that AT&T, for instance, can’t cut support for FaceTime and your internet providers can’t slow down your connection for Netflix. Companies that have an interest in promoting a certain service can’t speed up one service and slow down the other. This is all enforced by the Federal Communications Commission also known as the FCC.
So net neutrality keeps things fair and even amongst all service providers no matter how big (or small) they are, leaving us internet users as the big winners: we get to enjoy unrestricted access to anything we want online. We, the users control the content we consume, not the service providers.
Where are we at today?
On February 26th of 2015, the United States FCC ruled in favor of net neutrality by reclassifying broadband access as a telecommunications service and thus applying Title 2 of the Communications Act of 1934 to Internet service providers.
FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler, commented,
This is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech. They both stand for the same concept.
Net neutrality is a go! To give you an idea of the proceedings that took place over the years, we made an awesome infographic that will give you the major stepping stones on the path to net neutrality.
A Timeline of Net Neutrality
Where are we heading in the future?
Despite the good news that came from the FCC last month, we have a strong feeling that this isn’t the end of the road. The big providers aren’t going to give up so easily. They aren’t going to take this ruling with open hands and a big smile. What does the future hold? At least we know AT&T is going to put up a fight.
AT&T has commented on the FCC decision stating that:
For our part, we will continue to seek a consensus solution, and hopefully bipartisan legislation, even if we are the last voice seeking agreement rather than division. And we will hope that other voices of reason will emerge, voices who recognize that animosity, exaggeration, demonization and fear-mongering are not a basis on which to make wise national policies.
Where do you think the road will take us next?
Be sure to check out Bizzvenue.com for more exciting entrepreneurial and tech content! You can also Follow Bizzvnue on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.By now, most of you know that Eclipse Phase won RPG of the year at Origins 2010. What you might not know is that I had a chance to sit down with one of the designers, Rob Boyle, and talk about where Eclipse Phase came from, about the move from Catalyst to Sandstorm, and about where Eclipse Phase is going from here.
This post is going to be short, as the meat of what I have to report is in the audio.
So, here’s the audio!
Much thanks to Rob for sitting down with me to talk about this awesome game. The core book of it is now sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to have some free time to crack it open and devour its contents. When that happens, expect a post regarding my impressions of this award-winning product.
[tags]rpg, rpgs, role playing games, Origins, Eclipse Phase, interviews[/tags]Mad Max is a movie about a post-disaster world, and its success has inspired oodles of disastrously bad films. Witness Grade-Z movies so epically execrable that you’ll be yearning for a couple minutes in Thunderdome.
1) Battletruck
Also known as Warlords of the 21st Century (the film takes place in 1994), 1982’s Battletruck was New Zealand’s answer to Mad Max. How does Battletruck stack up with the Mad Max franchise? Imagine if Flight of the Conchords opened for AC/DC circa 1977. I think that’s a brilliant bill, but a lot of people would throw bottles. That being said, Battletruck has its merits.
Finally, I’m just going to say “fuck spoilers” and show you the death of Battletruck because everyone needs to see a real 16-ton truck plummet down an 800-foot precipice. Why save your props when you can toss them off cliffs in a blaze of glory? I sort of wish the demise of Battletruck occurred on the first day of filming to boost crew morale, and then they had to halt production for a month to build a new one.
2) 1990: Bronx Warriors
Also made in ‘82, the Italian 1990 cribbed its esthetic not only from Mad Max, but also Escape from New York and The Warriors. Is it a greater than the sum of its parts? Yes and no. On one hand, there’s this narration, which is aural chorizo...
...but then again, there’s this acting, which makes The Warriors sound like it was literally penned by Xenophon. So is 1990 deserving of a Bronx cheer? You be the judge.
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3) 2019 - After The Fall Of New York
Another Italian Mad Max/Escape from New York hybrid, 2019 at least has the good graces to give us a couple of decades for their world to go to pot. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure the opening narrator just freestyled the plot on the 1983 flick, and the director was too lazy/cowed to correct him.
Come to think of it, the acting seemed pretty improvised too. This fellow probably wanted to get out of his contract, so he threw himself on a car battery. On the plus side, the movie also had some Death Race-like car gladiators thrown in for good measure. See for yourself.
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4) Warriors of the Apocalypse
This 1985 Filipino film was The Road Warrior in the Amazon with “The Mountain of Life” with laser eyes. Witness!
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5) Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
People describe Metalstorm as Mad Max + Star Wars, but I think it’s more along the lines of Mad Max + Krull. I’m a big fan of the title, as Jared-Syn is never destroyed. That’s like naming Star Wars “Episode IV: A New Hope (Because Darth Vader Dies Of Rubella).” It was also released in 3-D in 1983, so know you can experience what it feels like to be engulfed by a crap rainbow.
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6) Steel Dawn
Q: How do you make Road House 100% more macho?
A: Remove all the infrastructure. (On second thought, Steel Dawn was more like Point Break if every other character was Anthony Kiedis.)
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7) A Man Called Rag
This 1984 Italian clone replaced “gasoline” with “Uranium,” which is sort of unremarkable in the world of Mad Max rip-offs. So why’s it on here? It was part of Sybil Danning’s Adventure Video. Danning is a fucking legend; she was like the Elvira of the action movie circuit. Watch her openly admit that A Man Called Rage is a rip-off. In that dress, no one will oppose you.
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8) Equalizer 2000
Another 1986 Filipino production — this one featured a pre-T-1000 Robert Patrick. In Equalizer 2000, Alaska is a desert, and real guns are made by sweating all over them. Need more übermanly wasteland theatrics? Look no further.
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9) Rats: Night of Terror
And finally, the bastard child of The Road Warrior and The Killer Shrews. And, of course, it’s Italian! Check it out here.
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10) Everything Else
Honestly, we had trouble stopping this list at 10, as there are so many other Milquetoast Maxes out there. For your perusal, here’s the best of the worst.
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• Exterminators of the Year 3000, which has the most brutal trailer in celluloid history.
• Ultra Warrior (1990), which recycles a stock footage sex scene (NSFW).
• From the Philippines, we have Wheels of Fire, which is so shameless it doesn’t even add an idiotic twist (1985, link slightly NSFW).
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• 1988’s Hell Comes to Frogtown (and its sequel Return to Frogtown, which is less than Rowdy but has Lou Ferrigno).
Mutant Thrash Band Rocks Frogtown! When James Cameron says that a movie sequel must be more awesome than the original, he's… Read more Read
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• The parched Stryker, which was like Waterworld in the desert.).
•Max Wasteland’s YouTube Channel, which is a treasure trove of wasteland cinema. (Rollerblade Warriors, anyone?) Click that link and you’ll waste an hour just listening to the opening narrations from shitty after-the-fall movies. Recommended.
This article originally appeared on November 28, 2010.Behavioral patterns, including sexual behavioral patterns, are usually understood as biological adaptations increasing the fitness of their carriers. Many parasites, so-called manipulators, are known to induce changes in the behavior of their hosts to increase their own fitness. Such changes are also induced by a parasite of cats, Toxoplasma gondii. The most remarkable change is the fatal attraction phenomenon, the switch of infected mice’s and rat’s native fear of the smell of cats toward an attraction to this smell. The stimuli that activate fear-related circuits in healthy rodents start to also activate sex-related circuits in the infected animals. An analogy of the fatal attraction phenomenon has also been observed in infected humans. Therefore, we tried to test a hypothesis that sexual arousal by fear-, violence-, and danger-related stimuli occurs more frequently in Toxoplasma -infected subjects. A cross-sectional cohort study performed on 36,564 subjects (5,087 Toxoplasma free and 741 Toxoplasma infected) showed that infected and noninfected subjects differ in their sexual behavior, fantasies, and preferences when age, health, and the size of the place where they spent childhood were controlled ( F (24, 3719) = 2.800, p <.0001). In agreement with our a priori hypothesis, infected subjects are more often aroused by their own fear, danger, and sexual submission although they practice more conventional sexual activities than Toxoplasma -free subjects. We suggest that the later changes can be related to a decrease in the personality trait of novelty seeking in infected subjects, which is potentially a side effect of increased concentration of dopamine in their brain.
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that the Republican Party should offer "market-based" methods to address climate change is in sharp contrast to the GOP's absence on the issue. The party's platform developed last year, for example, doesn't mention climate change, except as an attack on Obama.
Alex Bozmoski, director of strategy and operations for the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, begins his discussions with student groups by asking each person how he or she feels about climate change. Usually, he says, they believe that humans are contributing to it, but they don't know how to address it without hurting the economy or acquiescing to Democratic policies.
He has to restrain himself until everyone has finished before providing his pitch: an optimistic scenario in which Republicans fight Democrats and climate change at the same time using what he describes as conservative principles to lower harmful taxes on income and business.
"An elected official may not fully understand the amount of young conservative support that would accrue to them after leading on climate change," he said. "It's not readily apparent when you go to tea party rallies that there's this large group of young conservatives that are singing a slightly different tune -- same principles but a different outcome that acknowledges and wants to tackle this issue.
"These kids want to show that they're out there," he said.
Cold call on climate: 'awkward'
Appealing to young voters is a message with resonance. Republicans and their pollsters acknowledge their disadvantage among age groups under 30. Obama won that category by 24 points over Romney last year, continuing a trend that Democrats have enjoyed to varying degrees for decades. The advantage may have helped Obama win Florida last year, a crucial state that teetered into his column by 1 point, according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. He can thank young voters, who gave Obama twice as many votes as Romney.
But their draw toward Democrats might be less about political loyalty and more about their messages on key points, said David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
"These are people who do not have solidified partisan attachments. It's much harder to change someone's lifetime voting practices when they're in their 40s and 50s," he said. "I think they're more open to politicians who will listen to them. And something like climate change I think is definitely one of those issues where Republicans would be very wise to listen to these young Republicans."
Still, the optimistic message about conservative action on climate change didn't harmonize with everyone.
Wendelberger and McNeil were in charge of finding about a dozen field fellows for Inglis' group. They called friends and tapped the ranks of College Republicans at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside, which McNeil attends, and at other schools. The recruiting efforts sometimes ended uncomfortably.
"I let [McNeil] give me a good spiel on it, a good 10 or 15 minutes. Then I said it doesn't work for me," recalled Noah Cascio, a Parkside student who describes himself as "non-interventionist" libertarian.
A carbon tax, he added, is a government infringement on personal liberty that is "basically just a gun to the head."
For her part, Wendelberger would approach acquaintances -- usually the kind who devote free time to conservative politics -- with cautious probes about climate change. Many seemed open and were awarded with an intimate five-hour meeting with a former congressman.
Others, not so much.
"We had some guys who were really active in conservative efforts just say, 'Oh, it's not real. It's a hoax,'" she recalled. "And we were like, 'Ohhh-K, awkward.'"As if all of the current accusations of sexual harassment and assault against him weren’t enough, Harvey Weinstein is also linked to a prominent sex scandal from decades ago. It turns out that back in the 90s, when President Bill Clinton was dealing with accusations that he lied about sexual activity with Monica Lewinsky, Weinstein and his checkbook were there for him.
Back in 1998, The Washington Post reported that a number of Hollywood figures donated to Clinton’s legal defense fund at the time, with Harvey Weinstein listed among them as donating $10,000 the legal maximum. The fund was started by Clinton friend and former Arkansas Senator David Pryor.
Weinstein wasn’t the only known figure to give the max (Tom Hanks, Barbra Streisand, Michael Douglas, Ron Howard, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, are among others), but recent allegations against him could indicate why he was sympathetic to another man accused of using a position of authority to have a sexual encounter with a younger woman.
Hillary Clinton has said that donations she has received from Weinstein would be donated to charity, and that she is “shocked and appalled by the revelations” of his alleged behavior. In the meantime, Clinton Foundation officials have said that they will not return donations from Weinstein. They said in a statement, “We are a charity. Donations, these included, have been spent fighting childhood obesity and HIV/AIDS, combatting climate change, and empowering girls and women, and we have no plans to return them.”
[h/t Fox News]
[Image via cnn screengrab]Project Lambda
JSR 335 (Lambda Expressions for the JavaTM Programming Language) supports programming in a multicore environment by adding closures and related features to the Java language. The JSR has reached its Final Release; these changes to the platform are part of the umbrella JSR 337 and have been integrated into Java SE 8 (modifying the language, JVM, and library specifications).
Project Lambda produced the OpenJDK implementation of these features, now integrated into the jdk8 repository. Binary distributions are available from Oracle; see the JDK 8 Project for more information.
General/tutorial information about the Lambda feature set can be found in the following documents:
Now that the Project is complete, feedback and discussion should take place using the normal Java SE and JDK channels:
The prototype implementation and lambda-dev mailing list are no longer active.
This Project is sponsored by the Compiler Group.
Older linksAbout a year ago, I finished reading the final instalment of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium trilogy”. I found these Swedish crime novels absolutely gripping—and not just because the heroine Lisbeth Salander rides a motorcycle. In two weeks, the US movie adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo will be released—so here’s a timely look at how the motorcycles used in the film were prepared. The job was given to Justin Kell of Glory Motor Works in LA, and it’s an insight into a rarely-seen aspect of the film-making process.
“I got the call to meet with [director] David Fincher and discuss motorcycles for a new film he was doing,” says Kell. “I bought all three Larsson books and read them in three days: the character of Lisbeth Salander is killer. As I read the books, I kept thinking that Lisbeth’s bike would be the kind of bike most 20-somethings with limited financial recourses would ride. She wouldn’t have an expensive modern bike: she would have an inexpensive older bike that would be customized to fit her personality.”
Originally, the producers considered using modern bikes. “I had to convince Fincher that we could build vintage bikes to be as reliable as modern bikes. David leaves no detail untouched: he knows that a broken motorcycle can delay production and cost the film company thousands of dollars.” Kell also had to keep the art director happy, make the bike fit the conceptual drawings, and build bikes that would start and perform whenever called upon.
He had 30 days to find, buy and rebuild three late-60s Honda CB350s. “I went after low mileage, original machines in stock condition. We looked at updating charging systems and upgrading performance.” The script called for a lot of high speed riding, plus off-road action on ice and snow. Bikes in movies are usually started and shut down hundreds of times during a day of filming: this means that starter motors have to be rebuilt, and three-wire high-output charging systems installed.
Kell also increased the battery box size, so he could fit a higher amperage sealed battery. “The lighting is always super important in a Fincher film, so the bikes were fitted with HID lamps. All the metal parts were stripped and cleaned, and sent out for paint, powdercoating, polishing or cadmium plating. “We ended up powdercoating the wheels and using bigger gauge SS spokes. We replaced everything: new clutches, new brakes, new wiring harnesses and every fastener on the bike. The motors were torn down to the cranks, we trued the flywheels, did valve jobs and replaced pistons and rings.” The carbs were rebuilt and the fuel tanks were stripped and re-lined. Flat track style seats were installed, covered in vintage glove leather.
“We had to build one bike first to get the final approval from David,” says Kell. “We finished that one in about two weeks.” Fincher gave the okay to build two more bikes, and cast Rooney Mara to play Lisbeth Salander. “She was sent over to me to start teaching her to ride,” says Kell. “She had never been on a bike before, so we had to start easy. I’ve trained many actors to ride over the years, and I must say that Rooney was one of the best. She was fearless, but smart. In three days, we had her doing everything that she needed to do on camera at 35 mph.”
The final two weeks were “mayhem. Getting three full rebuilds together at the same time requires a lot of diplomacy and hundred dollar bills. We had 30 days straight of 16-hour days, but we finished the bikes on schedule. The day after we turned the last screw, the bikes were in crates on the way to Stockholm for the shoot.”
The bikes are now back in LA though, and Kell is tearing them down yet again—this time to prepare for the second film.
[First four images courtesy of Coop. Final two images courtesy of Jacqui Van Ham.]The romance of the FFA Cup, it appears, only comes under certain conditions. On Wednesday it emerged that clubs will no longer be able to stream their matches online, while concerns over the quality of lighting has meant that at least one lower league club will have to forfeit home ground advantage in the round of 16.
While the opening round of the FFA Cup was a roaring success, behind the scenes there have been rumblings among clubs about the strict criteria set by Football Federation Australia. In the opening round Bayswater City, Stirling Lions and Adelaide City all played their ‘home’ games at unfamiliar grounds due to insufficient lighting. And after hosting their opening game against Melbourne Knights at their home ground Goodwin Park, Olympic FC have been forced to move their match against Central Coast Mariners to the Queensland Sports and Athletic Centre. “Apparently our ground is not good enough for A-League standards,” Peter Ioannidis, the president of Olympic FC, told Guardian Australia.
What emerges is a pattern. A-League sides require a certain standard of lighting to play against State League opponents, meaning that there are different standards for different teams in the FFA Cup. It’s not a good look. In this case, what was good for the Melbourne Knights is not good enough for the Central Coast Mariners. “We were lucky enough to draw a home game, but unlucky enough to get an A-League side,” Ioannidis explained.
Olympic FC is faced with a choice: spend up to $150,000 to upgrade the lights at Goodwin Park, or spend $5,000 to rent QSAC for one game. No financial assistance has been offered from FFA. “If they want to move us to a different venue, help us with the costs,” said Ioannidis. Meanwhile, he has had to field complaints from fans and sponsors who expected to see the game against Central Coast Mariners at Goodwin Park.
Ioannidis says he understands that appropriate lighting is a concern for the broadcast on Fox Sports. However, the only live televised matches in the round of 16 will be Tuggeranong United against Melbourne Victory on 16 September, and Sydney United ’58 versus Sydney FC on 23 September. Olympic FC’s match will only briefly be covered by the roving reporters showing live crosses and highlights packages from around the grounds. Put simply, Olympic FC will be forced to foot the bill to play at a foreign ground, and with no option to live stream their match.
In a memo sent on Monday, participants were advised by FFA that “there will be no further opportunities for clubs and/or Member Federations to organise an online stream of any Westfield FFA Cup matches.” Furthermore member federations cannot house highlights or footage on their websites as it is “in breach of the broadcast and online contractual agreement.”
FFA is well within their rights to prevent live streaming and move games where they judge it to be necessary. Article 22.2 of the FFA Cup Competition Regulations states that “FFA has the power to require any FFA Cup Match to be played at an alternative venue or date if FFA considers it appropriate and necessary (in FFA’s sole and absolute discretion). No money or other compensation shall be payable relating to any change of venue.”
Yet many believe this is contrary to the spirit of inclusiveness that the FFA Cup is supposed to promote. “The spirit is to give the underdog an opportunity,” said Ioannidis.
Victoria Morton, president of South Hobart FC, said that live streaming their match against Tuggeranong United in the opening round reached “anywhere between 18,000-20,000 people”. Paid for and organised by volunteers, Morton said the decision to stream the match helped generate unprecedented interest in the club and allowed Tuggeranong United fans to watch their team live from Canberra. The videographer Ash Wilkes worked tirelessly to ensure that the stream was smooth, while the local commentary team of Callan Paske, Damian Gill and Trent ‘Corndog’ Cornish were an instant hit with viewers. The “slice of cheese” reference will surely become part of FFA Cup folklore.
“It certainly had a flow on effect, that’s for sure,” Morton told Guardian Australia. “We were actually asked to make some t-shirts. We ordered some white shirts and got the designs done by a graphic artist. Hopefully they’ll be printed by the end of the week.
“It almost became not about the game but about the coverage and how we put the game on,” said Morton, who hopes to replicate the coverage should South Hobart get the opportunity in 2015. “We were disappointed that we lost, but it was an absolutely outstanding connection with the rest of Australia. Don’t forget we’re an island and we hardly ever got top flight football until these competitions started.
“I think, exposure wise, it was unbelievable. We’ve had advice that it [the live stream] will help us generate sponsors because of the exposure we’ve had. People have expressed interest in coming on board with the same thing happening next year.” FFA could not confirm whether the live streams will continue in 2015.
The restrictions have made many State League clubs feel like second-class citizens, and the goodwill that was created in the opening round may well be lost. For Olympic FC, their round of 16 match has been made all the more difficult with the move away from Goodwin Park, and they are unlikely to turn a profit from hosting the game. “We know we might lose,” said Ioannidis, “but we want to lose in front of our guys at our place.”
“I love the FFA Cup,” said Morton. “But unless you allow that sense of ownership, then what’s the point: you’re just playing another game.”Pundits and ‘experts’ alike love to drone on about managers needing ‘time’ to succeed at football clubs. This noble notion was almost always supported with evidence of ‘look at Ferguson at United’ and ‘Wenger at Arsenal’. The telling difference there though is that those particular examples happen to be two of the finest managers of the modern footballing era.
Those men demanded time because they epitomised forward thinking and footballing progress. Bobby Robson didn’t need time, neither did Keegan. Newcastle gave Pardew loads of time, look what that did…game after game of uninspiring, unimaginative unsuccessful football. Something Palace fans are just getting used to.
There is a ridiculous assumption that Newcastle fans demand a team that plays exciting football and is challenging for the top honours every season.
No, Newcastle fans only ask for a team to be proud of. A team whose players sweat and bleed for the black and white. A club that shows ambitions of being better than what they have become. A club that is forward thinking and strives to progress. A club that is at least heading in the right direction.
Following the abysmal capitulation at Stamford Bridge, McClaren had 18 days to prepare for Stoke and Bournemouth.
He took them for warm weather training and plotted his game plan. And what masterful design did Steve come up with? Play for a nil-nil draw. They failed. They failed in every which way a team could fail. Failed to Score, failed to keep a clean sheet, failed to secure a single point. Under McClaren, Newcastle are headed in one direction, and we all know which way that is.
McClaren cannot be afforded any more time. We simply don’t have it. Ashley should be aware of this. The last time we were relegated Ashley hired Shearer with just eight games remaining to rescue our side…he was powerless to do so. Newcastle need new direction, new impetus, new belief…but they need it now. With plenty of good managers in need of a fresh challenge available, Ashley would be foolish to stick with Steve.USDC, N.D. California, January 28, 2016
District court dismisses copyright infringement action brought on behalf of macaque monkey who took “selfies” using defendant photographer’s camera, holding that animals lack standing under the Copyright Act.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Antje Engelhardt filed a “Next Friends” complaint in California district court on behalf of a Naruto, a six-year-old crested macaque monkey, against photographer David John Slater, publisher Blurb Inc. and Wildlife Personalities Ltd. The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants violated sections 106 and 501 of the Copyright Act by displaying, advertising and selling copies of Naruto’s “selfie” photographs. They alleged the defendants infringed on Naruto’s copyright on the selfies by “falsely claiming to be the photographs’ authors and by selling copies of the images” for profit, and claimed that Naruto is entitled to those profits.
In 2011, Naruto had taken photos of himself by examining and manipulating Slater’s unattended camera by “independent, autonomous motion” and by “purposely pushing” the shutter release, “understanding the cause-and-effect relationship between pressing the shutter release, the noise of the shutter, and the change to his reflection in the camera lens,” according to the plaintiffs’ complaint.
Defendants moved to dismiss on the grounds that Naruto lacked standing under Article III and the Copyright Act. The district court granted the defendants’ motion. Without ruling on Naruto’s standing under Article III, the court held that the Copyright Act does not confer standing upon animals. The Copyright Act did not “plainly” extend the concept of authorship or statutory standing to animals, as it should if Congress intended to take the “extraordinary step” of authorizing animals to sue. The court explained that the U.S. Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit have repeatedly referred to “persons” or “human beings” when analyzing copyright authorship, and found no cases expanding the definition of authors to include animals. The district court also noted that the Copyright Office has stated it will not register works produced by “nature, animals, or plants” including, by specific example, a “photograph taken by a monkey.”
(Click here to view the full decision)comicsansvanjams:
farorescourage: “Stop bullying people for their gender identity!” Tumblr screeches as it proceeds to bully cis people for being cis because apparently that’s not bullying someone for their gender identity.
lmao we say “stop killing people for their gender identity, old cis people! and stop oppressing them! yes, bullying is bad, but let’s get the big things first.” and that “bullying” of cis people? We call them out on transphobia and then you side with them because it doesn’t matter how horrid they are, people will side with the more privileged. oh, but fine, assume we bully cis people for only being cis, because if your straw men arguments make you feel better for belittling and silencing trans people’s feelings, then there’s nothing stopping you except the “bullies”.
1. I’m a transman before you go making your radical bs SJW assumptions that I’m cis and defending myself because myself and many nb and trans friends of mine agree with the fact that this website is hypocritical and attacks people for their gender identity often. I see it often. I have had cis friends chased off this site for being cis and no other reason. But clearly as a trans person who works as an equality and educational advocate on a large university I have no idea on how to handle others and advanced situations. (and diffuse and destroy the shit I see HERE on my campus as much as possible because it does us no good. Aggressing our aggressor in circumstances which does not require it [ie die cis scum showing up for no reason] will only threaten us further and make us look worse than popular media already makes us look)
2.Supporters of the Anonymous hacktivist collective are holding rallies all around the world on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day. They are protesting against what they see as the rule of greedy corporations and corrupt governments around the world.
Read more about the protest
01:26 GMT:
01:08 GMT:
00:19 GMT: Separate protests coincided with the Million Mask March in London Tuesday, with demonstrators rallying against growing austerity measures in the United Kingdom. Britain’s Green Party has called on anyone who is opposed to the “heartless” cuts instituted by Prime Minister David Cameron’s government to join in a rally on Westminster bridge. In a statement to reporters, Green Party spokesman Romayne Phoenix echoed many of the same complaints lobbed by Million Mask Marchers.
“This heartless government’s austerity measures have hurt the poor thirteen times harder than the rich,” he said. “They’re slashed funding for vital public services, cut away the social safety net of benefits and seem determined to hammer the final nails in the coffin of the National Health service, an institution this country is proud of. At the same time they’ve let the banks ratchet up huge profits, allowed train operators to continue to rip-off customers and defended the energy companies whose soaring prices are forcing many people to choose between food and heating.”
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00:10 GMT:
23:42 GMT: Some major media outlets have been criticized throughout the day on social media for their lack of coverage on the Million Masks March.
So the media is going to completely ignore these people outside Parliament and everywhere else? #MillionMaskMarchpic.twitter.com/qVRkZEjyTj — Oliver James (@OliverJamesUK) November 5, 2013
23:33 GMT: Sara Firth estimated that a thousand demonstrators took part in rallies early in the day, but that number fizzled to a few hundred when the march made its way to Buckingham Palace.
23:09 GMT: Hundreds of people turned out in Los Angeles, California, where crowds gathered at City Hall before marching and chanting through the streets.
Still going strong in LA pic.twitter.com/9RRL3w24WQ — Anonymous Operations (@YourAnonCentral) November 5, 2013
Marching. Broadway and 3rd Los Angeles, growing every minute. Join us. #MillionMaskMarchpic.twitter.com/YWTKjenlVx — Anonymous Operations (@YourAnonCentral) November 5, 2013
22:59 GMT:
Protesters marching in Sao Paulo tonight. Photo: Estadao Conteudo. #MillionMaskMarchpic.twitter.com/dzNMJBd27Y — Kety Shapazian (@KetyDC) November 5, 2013
22:51 GMT: The video below was captured at a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, where calls for nonviolence and peaceful protest have clearly done nothing to dampen the enthusiasm.
22:37 GMT: RT’s Sara Firth has been reporting live on the March throughout the day and, after speaking to London’s Metropolitan Police, found out there have been no arrests through 8:00 PM. Any arrests after that time have so far gone unreported.
22:14 GMT:
The DC #millionmaskmarch has landed at Federal Reserve headquarters. Chants of "End the Fed" abound. pic.twitter.com/KtKjjUAjD8 — Andrew Blake (@apblake) November 5, 2013
22:00 GMT:
Not my first flag burning, but definitely my first in front of the White House. #millionmaskmarchpic.twitter.com/xiVwWBjy0R — Andrew Blake (@apblake) November 5, 2013
21:49 GMT: Actor and comedian Russell Brand, a noted supporter of anonymous and the Occupy movement, gave a now famous interview last week when he condemned what he sees as a corrupt political system. Brand was also spotted participating in London’s Million Mask March Tuesday, the same day he clarified the statements made in that interview with a column published in The Guardian.
“The only reason to vote is if the vote represents power or change. I don’t think it does,” Brand wrote. “I fervently believe that we deserve more from our democratic system than the few derisory tit-bits tossed from the carousel of the mighty, when they hop a few inches left or right. The lazily duplicitous servants of The City expect us to gratefully participate in what amounts to little more than a political hokey cokey where every four years we get to decide what colour the liar who leads us wears.”
21: 38 GMT:
#MillionMaskMarch#Buckingham Palace. Not a huge number of protestors at this spot - few hundred Estimate. pic.twitter.com/WY96OXX1M7 — Sara Firth (@SaraFirth_RT) November 5, 2013
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21:05 GMT:
21:03 GMT: Hours after Washington police made arrests protesters could still be found throughout the US capitol. Some of those participating in the Million Mask March made their way past the White House, where demonstrators spoke to Agence Presse-France about the ongoing National Security Agency surveillance.
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20:50 GMT:
#MillionMaskMarch heading down the Mall and towards Buckingham Palace. Wasn't expecting that! pic.twitter.com/L7NuxtMRBr — Sara Firth (@SaraFirth_RT) November 5, 2013
20:40 GMT:
20:25 GMT:
Sara Firth @SaraFirth_RT 1m [VIDEO] Fireworks at #MillionMaskMarch#London. Lots of dancing going on here now too! http://t.co/qYdcIcREP2 — Lyme Regis Reiki (@DorsetReiki) November 5, 2013
19:55 GMT: The Fox News website was briefly scattered with some bizarre 'headlines' which they later dismissed on Twitter as an 'internal production problem'.
19:40 GMT: A Max Keiser poster has been spotted amid the banners wielded by London demonstrators.
@arbolioto So awesome. And that image of @maxkeiser is FAR scarier than the Guy Fawkes mask! — Stacy Herbert (@stacyherbert) November 5, 2013
19:08 GMT: Protesters have blocked off a red London bus.
#MillionMaskMarch in #Westminster have blocked a red bus. Quite a rowdy atmostohere at the moment. pic.twitter.com/2sTw1xn5Ki — Sara Firth (@SaraFirth_RT) November 5, 2013
18:50 GMT: Chants of "here we come, Tory scum" are coming from protesters on Downing Street. RT's Sara Firth estimates that around a thousand are present in total. Russel Brand has been spotted among them.
18:30 GMT: London protesters have started to march towards Parliament.
18:25 GMT: Turkish police are out in force, ready to confront people marching in Istanbul.
18:00 GMT: Yva Alexandrova, of the People's Assembly spoke to RT about the ideological basis for the collective's participation in the protests in London.
“The People’s Assembly is broad coalition of movements, unions, organizations, activists and campaigns groups, and its brought together to basically reach out to all members of society and send a very loud and clear message that austerity is not a policy that is working for the majority of people in this country and we are going to oppose it,” she explained.
“Four out of five jobs created are in the low wage sector, so one has to look at where this recovery is going, and who it is working for,” she said.
London's Trafalgar Square is currently swarming with protesters.
17:25 GMT:“We want president Obama to hear that five years after the financial crisis - the banks being bailed out – we’re still suffering, people are still struggling, we’re drowning in debt," said a march participant speaking from Washington DC.
"We live in a country that’s fundamentally unfair; we no longer have the rule of law. From the NSA, to Edward Snowden, to Chelsea Manning, all over the world, people are speaking out, whistleblowers are speaking out, regular people are speaking out and saying enough is enough. We want justice and we want it now," he added.
Watch footage from the march in Washington DC:
17:00 GMT: Crowds have gathered in Amsterdam, joining the hoards of European protesters.
16:50 GMT: Police and participants of an 'Anonymous' march in Yerevan have clashed, according to Interfax. The detentions apparently began after the organizer announced his intent to "blow up the residence of the President of Armenia."
16:45 GMT: As hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Milan, Italy, hacktivists also took down an Italian website.
16:34 GMT: One person has been arrested in Washington DC during a confrontation between protesters and police. People were heard chanting: "Whose streets? Our streets!" as the arrest was made.
One arrest at the #MillionMaskMarch outside the White House just happened now #anon#owspic.twitter.com/VG0MxAqOc2 — Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallSt) November 5, 2013
16:10 GMT:“They protest against what they see as a police state, they protest against the persecution of whistleblowers, they protest against Monsanto – the biggest producer of genetically modified seeds…generally speaking they see themselves as a movement against the government and corporations taking advantage of the people,” said RT’s Gayane Chichakyan from Washington DC.
One masked participant explained his motivations fro joining to RT. “First off it would be nice if he [Obama] would stop lying about knowing about the NSA and do something about the NSA,” he said. “Spying on foreign leaders, allies, our own people, our own communications needs to stop, and it needs to stop now,” he added.
15:55 GMT:
Police in DC attempting to divide & conquer: Threatening to pull permits for the rest of day if the crowd doesn't disperse. — Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) November 5, 2013
15:35 GMT:
15:25 GMT: Protesters are begin to gather in London's Trafalgar Square. RT's London bureau will be reporting live from the scene.
15:25 GMT:
RT @Versability: #MillionMaskMarch protestors in DC told to keep moving...so they started dancing... — Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) November 5, 2013
15:19 GMT: Arguments over where the protesters can stand rage on, but the protesters have announced their arrival. One demonstrator on a megaphone was imploring other demonstrators to engage in acts of civil disobedience, but was seemingly met with a tepid response. Demonstrators are allowed three opportunities to obey a police order before they risk being detained.
15:10 GMT: Protesters outside the White House in Washington DC have successfully negotiated with police to allow them to stay on the sidewalk. Chants of "No justice, No Peace" and "Obama come out, we got somethings to talk about " are intermittently ringing out.
15:06 GMT:
The Million Mask March I'm Washington, D.C. right now. pic.twitter.com/03Jn8Jjqau — Jenna Çapulcu Pope (@BatmanWI) November 5, 2013
15:05 GMT: RadicalMedia, which is dedicated to covering Activist movements, is live streaming the Million Mask March from Washington DC.
15:00 GMT:
14:50 GMT:
13:55 GMT: The Million Mask March is just kicking off in Washington DC. Event organizers planned to meet up at the Washington Monument at the National Mall and march on to Lafayette Park. Over 17,000 people plan on attending, according to the group’s Facebook page. The stated goal of the march is: "To remind this world what it has forgotten, that fairness, justice and freedom are more than just words."
13:30 GMT: The Philippines are among one of several Southeast Asian states to hold marches as part of the global event.
13:00 GMT:
12:53 GMT:
12:50 GMT: Hundreds of protesters in a “spontaneous protest” marching through the streets of Milan, Italy. Rallies are also |
drives me. The accomplishments or accolades are just a result of busting your butt."
Ackerman says while he may have the label of disabled, it doesn't define who he is or his personality. He says others who face physical and mental challenges can learn to appreciate that fact by competing in sports like wrestling.
Maynard agrees. “Wrestling is a sport of no excuses,” he says, looking back on his career. “Hopefully, teammates, fans, and coaches saw mehaving fun doing what I loved. Not having legs was a very small part of that picture."GREG Chappell is an Australian cricketing icon. And lobbing grenades at him is akin to lobbing water balloons at the Queen.
You’ll likely be court-martialed, strung up by all fours and have car battery wires applied to your nipples.
But to get to the core reason as to why Australian cricket is now on its knees, we need to, at the very least, hit Greg with a rubber band or an onslaught of Nerf-related bullets.
Greg Chappell - just named an interim selector - is responsible for taking the lead on a decision that sent cricket in Australia spiralling backwards and to this day, still impacts the development of the game and those aspiring to be contributors to both their state and their country as playing representatives.
2009 was a time when reality TV was with us, but nowhere near as prominent to our social fabric. In many regards, Greg was a cricketing pioneer for attempting to bring a reality TV model to Australian domestic cricket. The Next Top Order Batter.
He so desperately wanted to find the next 15-year top order batter, or handsome fast bowler oozing marketability and the frame of a centre half forward, that he disturbed and shifted the foundation of what had made Australian cricket strong.
Soon after, Pat Howard was appointed high performance supremo and went on to push for experiments in the Shield like pink balls, Dukes balls and new points systems.
But back to 2009. The Australian domestic cricket scene was the one asset not broken, or to be messed with. It didn’t need tinkering. Australian cricket would not prosper if the strongest production line of talent in the world was disrespected. Greg picked it up, without an ear to the screams of the players, and dropped it. Dropped it right on its head. Hard.
Greg Chappell next to ‘Greg Chappell Street’ in Brisbane. Picture: Steve Pohlner. Source: News Corp Australia
Remarkably, he turned the domestic second XI competition into a glorified junior competition; implementing restrictions on how many players over the age of 24 could be selected in each team. Because 25 year-old’s were deemed past it and simply clogging the transition of kids who had nice techniques and success in national junior tournaments, but no runs on the board in the breeding ground of a once hot-spot for talented, battle-hardened men: club cricket.
The change was drastic, with seven out of the 11 players needing to be under 24.
This sent a message to states, and its contracted players, that if you were over 24 and not being selected in the first XI, your days were numbered.
I would love to know how many contracted players lost their spot on a state list, with the impact being detrimental to their motivation and ultimately their want to contribute in grade cricket.
How many grade players that missed out on the talent identification of state junior representation - over the age of 24 - aspiring to play first-class cricket for their state, saw this decision as a smack in the face to their pursuit of their childhood dream?
How many departed the game for the lure of the country synthetic cricket and its offering of cash? How many departed for the lure of family time and a game of golf? How many picked up an extra day’s work?
Having lived in the grade scene for the past five years and consistently being the second oldest in the competition, at age 29 onwards, I can tell you now that it has impacted club cricket enormously. So much so that Australia’s contracted players – international and domestic - contributed close to $20 million dollars from their player payment pool to feed the development of grade cricket, youth pathways, player welfare and a host of other areas.
Former Test batsman Alex Doolan (C) during a Futures League game. Picture: Luke Bowden. Source: News Corp Australia
Be aware that this act is unprecedented in world sport. Players, giving up their own slice of the pie to ensure the game remains in a healthy place.
Concerning is the fact that the players saw this coming. That they felt they had to take ownership, with their own money, to fix the issues created by a management team so focused on believing that the answer sat with the identification of a superstar kid to save the day that they lost sight of what was actually working.
Two years after implementing this drastic change to that national second XI competition, CA eased up on its stance of the restriction of players over the age of 24 and states can now select six ‘over-age’ players. And it is still not enough.
The damage is done and it will only continue while the domestic competition – both first XI and second – are diluted with underachieving kids who aren’t entering the highest levels of the game equipped with the experiences of complete domination through the once-challenging stepping stone to the earnt representation of state and country.
How many times have we heard about the generational talent of Ponting, McGrath, Warne, Hayden, Langer, Lee, Hussey and Gillespie?
The international dominance of the group that took us on their journey of two 16-Test winning streaks - 1999 to 2001 and 2005 to 2008 - was no fluke. All of the players that are put into that once-in-a-generation category were developed in the hardest of schools.
Club games were not gifted to them as teenagers because of their technically correct stroke play. They banged hundreds and took wickets.
Greg Chappell with the pink Kookaburra ball. Picture: Darren England. Source: News Corp Australia
They were not gifted state second XI games purely because of their age and dominance against their junior peers. They banged more hundreds and took more wickets.
Their emergence as state players and development into international greats? Hundreds. Wickets. Lots of them. All of which came in a domestic competition seen as the strongest in the world.
Adding to the disrespect of the domestic competition is the current scheduling of the Matador Cup and the introduction of the Cricket Australia XI; a collection of technically nice-looking kids who have shown promising junior careers, but have not earned the right to represent their state; like Phillip Hughes did as a 19 year old. And Cameron White did as skipper of Victoria at 20. And George Bailey at 19. And Ricky Ponting at 18. The best kids will get their chance, and the great ones will make it work.
So not only has Chappell’s individual pursuit to whittle down the contestants to find The Next Top Order Batter impacted on the depth of grade cricket and the development opportunities of those in the system, contestants now get a free shot at the big time of first-class cricket. And this isn’t even made up.
For as long as the domestic cricket scene is being treated as a play thing for Pat Howard, the schedule of one-day cricket and Shield cricket is condensed and compromised to ensure that the Big Bash gets maximum exposure and the search for Greg’s Next Top Order Batter continues with age restrictions on the second XI and the ongoing free ride to first-class cricket for kids with nice techniques, Australian cricket will continue to spiral into the ugly murkiness of the 1980s.Could actress Jeri Ryan be one of the reasons Barack Obama is weeks away from possibly becoming America’s next president?
Yes, actually!
It was Jeri Ryan’s husband, Jack, who was running for Senate in 2004 against Barack Obama in Illinois.
Jack Ryan was a formidable candidate, but a sex scandal involving his wife Jeri would derail his Senatorial dreams and illuminate those of Obama.
It was late in the campaign and the Republicans had no one set to run against Obama after his history-making speech at the Democratic National Convention. The Republicans would eventually run Alan Keys, who lost to Obama in a landslide.
Jeri Ryan divorced her husband in 1999 because of numerous reasons, but the foremost was the way he alledgedly treated her. It was said that the Senator-wanna-be took his wife to sex clubs across the world and forced her to perform acts while he watched. Ryan has denied ever taking part in these activities.
Eventually, Jeri would grow tired of this lifestyle and break free. But it was when a reporter sued to have the files of their custody hearing in Illinois that the news broke about their supposed sex club adventures and Jack’s candidacy was buried – even five years later.
Could he have beaten Barack Obama? It is hard to say. He never got the chance.
But what is clear is that Senator Obama could not have even attempted to run for president if he had a more measured foe in his 2004 Senate run. Thanks to actress Jeri Ryan and her custody battle, Obama was a shoe-in. Well, thanks to that reporter.
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Nelly Furtado had a secret summer wedding!NEW Feature: COLORS! (Mod Tools Magic)
Nelly Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 6, 2015
Yes Colors
For a while now we’ve consistently heard from the community you need more moderation features in Discord. A little history lesson here: we launched our Alpha in Mid-May and we had no idea large game communities would support Discord the way they have. It made us happy. It made us cry. It made us a little scared. Thanks to Stan, our expert server magician, the scared part went away quickly.
So what to build? Colors. All the colors of the rainbow (almost) so you can easily identify who has what role in your server. If you don’t know much about roles and permissions read more here.
Once you’ve set everything up, you can start picking colors.
“That’s it!?”
This is serious shizz people. Is an admin pink or red? Perhaps green? Or my favorite: Discord Blurple.
Ok, ok, let’s get serious…there’s actually a lot more going on here…100 Civilians Killed in Afghanistan, Where is the Outrage?
Afghanistan officials are claiming that United States air strikes have killed between 100 and 200 civilians including scores of women and children. General David McKiernan is asking for American citizens and officials not to jump to conclusions because the Taliban may actually be responsible for the deaths.
The strange thing is that nobody is jumping to conclusions. The reason I find this strange is because many of our legislators have made a career of jumping to conclusions about the United States military over the last six years. But that is not the case now that Afghanistan and the troop surge there belongs to the current president and not President Bush.
John Murtha did not have a problem jumping to a conclusion when the Haditha marines were accused of murder; he called them cold blooded killers before any one of them ever had a chance in court. The marines have been cleared of any wrongdoing while John Murtha has never apologized.
During the 2004 presidential campaign John Kerry accused US troops of TERRORIZING Iraqi families in the dead of night.
When rumors of abuses at GITMO first came to light Dick Durbin jumped to conclusions and compared United States soldiers and their treatment of detainees to Pol Pot, Nazis, and gulags.
Those are just three of the most despicable examples of people who jumped to conclusions for political reasons. These people were perfectly willing to throw American troops under the bus, they were perfectly willing to slander American troops to discredit the Bush administration and undermine the war effort.
But now these same people are strangely silent. There is nobody jumping to conclusions, and there shouldn’t be, but there can only be one explanation why these people, who were so adamant and vocal about the abuses and horrors that they claimed American troops were perpetrating just a few years ago, are so silent now when there is a claim that American air strikes killed women and children. It all has to do with who is in the White House. These same people wouldn’t dare to slander our troops now that a Democrat is calling the shots.
These people have shown us their true character, and it isn’t pretty. To put politics above our troops was disgraceful, now that they are saying nothing they have been exposed for the hypocrites and political whores that they are.
Their silence is deafening.
AdvertisementsLindsey Graham. Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Lindsey Graham is a formidable figure in Congress: A third-term Republican senator who also served eight years in the House, Graham is a national security hawk and a foreign policy expert beloved in his home state of South Carolina, despite his occasionally moderate leanings.
Yet ever since Graham formally announced his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, his candidacy has been treated as something of a joke. Thus far, Graham’s bachelor status has attracted the most attention. His promise to have “a rotating first lady” drew giggles and jokes—including a quip by Sen. Mark Kirk that Graham was a “bro with no ho.” Graham then gave a somewhat melancholy interview insisting that being single did not make him a “defective person.”
Lurking behind the media’s fascination with Graham’s singlehood is an assumption about his sexuality. Gay rumors have long plagued the senator, and other South Carolina politicians have even implied that Graham is closeted. (Graham has declared that he “ain’t gay.”) These whispers become shouts on the late-night circuit, where comedians like Jon Stewart and John Oliver earn laughs by ridiculing Graham’s ostensibly effeminate mannerisms. Recently, Larry Wilmore felt compelled to push back against one of his guests, who laughingly stated she thinks Graham is gay. “Here’s the thing,” Wilmore said:
Sometimes people … mak[e] that insinuation, like there’s something wrong with you if you are single at a certain age. They always put you down as damaged or gay, like those are related.
Wilmore is on to something here. The mainstream media’s coverage of Graham’s bachelor status may not blatantly hint that the senator is gay—but it doesn’t need to. Even in 2015, many Americans still assume that anybody who isn’t partnered at a certain age must be homosexual. The fact that Graham talks in a somewhat stereotypically gay voice only makes the assumption more irresistible.
But when Stewart performs his effeminate Graham impression, he isn’t just suggesting the senator is gay—he’s mocking him for it. That’s a problem. Were Graham openly gay, no progressive comedian would dare ridicule him for his manner of speech. Graham is only fair game because he’s perceived to be closeted. The implication that he’s gay and lying about it is what makes the joke amusing. (That is, if you think it’s funny at all.)
It’s difficult to draw a direct line between these jeering late-night jibes, the mainstream media’s winking coverage of Graham, and the senator’s striking unpopularity among GOP voters. (He is currently polling around 1 percent, lagging behind train wrecks like Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum.) But it’s hard to believe the media’s refusal to take Graham seriously isn’t having some effect on his terrible numbers. Rather than pressing Graham to explain his apparent support for drone strikes without due process, anchors are forcing him to justify his lack of a wife. Nobody looks presidential when they’re anxiously explaining why they’re single in their 50s.
If Graham were more traditionally masculine, I seriously doubt he’d be dogged by so many questions about his bachelorhood. The fun of poking Graham about his personal life lies in the ambiguous presentation of his sexuality. Most Republican voters may not currently think Graham is gay. But they’ll be all but required to consider that question if Graham’s media coverage continues to dwell on his romantic and sexual choices. Graham may well be an awful presidential candidate for the Republican Party. But an analysis of his qualifications shouldn’t rest on the giggling assumption that he’s stuck in the closet.Michael Lawrence Tyler (born September 22, 1970), known professionally as Mystikal, is an American rapper and actor from New Orleans, Louisiana.
Early life [ edit ]
Mystikal's family moved to New Orleans when he was young. His father, who ran a small neighborhood store, died when he was seven. As a teenager he got caught up in the fads of the breakdancing and toyed around with rudimentary rhyming and rapping calling himself "Mystikal Mike". He attended Cohen High School, and was an average student fond of science, especially astronomy. LL Cool J became one of his idols as he grew more into rapping. After graduation, Mystikal joined the United States Armed Forces enlisted as a Combat engineer where he served in the Gulf War during combat. While in the Army, he took psychology and business classes, but spent more time performing raps in NCO clubs. After being discharged, he came home to New Orleans and was hired as an undercover security guard at the Woolworth's in the Carrollton Shopping Center. Before going into the service, he had laid down some vocal tracks with his friends in 3-9 Posse, which turned up on one of the group's albums on a small local label. Because of his 3-9 Posse association, he was invited to be one of the local acts who opened for Run-D.M.C. and Doug E. Fresh at an outdoor concert at the Treme Center. Leroy "Precise" Edwards, the house producer for Big Boy Records, was in the audience, and was blown away by Mystikal's one-song performance of "Not That Nigga." After the performance Mystikal was granted a contract.[1]
Career [ edit ]
1990–94: Early career [ edit ]
Mystikal's debut album, Mystikal, was released on New Orleans-based independent record label Big Boy Records in 1994. The album was one of Big Boy's most successful and gained major success for Mystikal.[2] In 1995, he found himself involved in conflict with fellow New Orleans rappers signed to rival Cash Money Records, including U.N.L.V., Lil Wayne & B.G.. They dissed him on tracks like "Drag 'Em in Tha River" by U.N.L.V. and "Fuck Big Boy" by The B.G.'z. He struck back with the diss "Beware" which was on his second album, Mind of Mystikal. Mystikal's sister, Michelle Tyler (with whom he had close ties), sang the chorus on "Not That Nigga" and her fate became a major influence on Mystikal's music after her untimely death. The songs "Dedicated To Michelle Tyler", "Murder" (both on Mind of Mystikal), "Murder 2", "Shine" (both on Unpredictable) and "Murder III" (on Let's Get Ready) refer to her murder. It wasn't long after their beef that Mystikal and Lil Wayne decided to squash it and become collaborators.[3]
1995–2000: Mind of Mystikal and stint with No Limit Records [ edit ]
Mystikal signed to Jive Records and released Mind of Mystikal in 1995. He signed to No Limit Records in 1996 and released Unpredictable in November 1997. He appeared on many of the No Limit albums released from 1997 through a chunk of 2000. He also collaborated with Mariah Carey on her Rainbow album on the track 'Did I Do That'. In late 1998, he released Ghetto Fabulous. That was his last album with the label, and he left later in 2000 to go on his own.
2000–2004: Let's Get Ready, Tarantula and prison [ edit ]
In 1999 he had begun recording his fourth album before leaving No Limit. Let's Get Ready was released in 2000 and contained "Danger (Been So Long)", which featured rising pop star Nivea, and was the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs number-one single in June 2001. Let's Get Ready debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, making it Mystikal's only chart-topping album to date. The album also featured the popular, Neptunes-produced hit "Shake Ya Ass". The song attained cult-like popularity and can be heard in the background of numerous movies.
Mystikal's most recent solo release was the 2001 album Tarantula, which contained the hit single, "Bouncin' Back (Bumpin' Me Against The Wall)". Though it presented Mystikal's typical and funky flow style, which had the distinction of drawing comparison to legendary R&B soul screamers Little Richard and James Brown,[4] the song also saw a blending of jazz and swing elements with hip-hop. The well received album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album in 2003, and Mystikal was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Male Rap Solo Performance that same year.[5] Mystikal was also featured prominently in the single, "Move Bitch" by Ludacris as well as "I Don't Give a Fuck" by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz along with Krayzie Bone, both in 2002. In 2003 he starred in the film 13 Dead Men. In 2003, Mystikal was indicted on charges of sexual battery and extortion. On January 15, 2004, he was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to forcing his hairstylist to perform sex acts. He served the full six years and was released on January 14, 2010.
Mystikal performing in March 2012.
Mystikal headlined a concert at the Mahalia Jackson Theater of the Performing Arts on Mardi Gras, February 16, 2010.[6] Mystikal's first song after being released from prison was an underground track with former No Limit labelmate Fiend entitled "I Don't Like You".[7] A few weeks later, Atlanta-based, New Orleans-born R&B artist Lloyd released "Set Me Free" featuring Mystikal. The music video for "Set Me Free" was released on May 18, 2010 and was shot in New Orleans, primarily from the Calliope Projects.[8]
In an interview in May 2010, he stated that he was still obligated to Jive Records for one more album and would be taking the necessary time to ensure the album would be his best to date.[7] He made a promo song called "Papercuts" featuring Fiend and Lil Wayne. In 2011, he performed at the Gathering of the Juggalos.[9] Mystikal and Busta Rhymes were signed to Cash Money Records by Birdman on November 16 the same year. His first single for the label, "Original", was released shortly thereafter and featured new label-mates Birdman and Lil Wayne.
In 2014, Mystikal recorded "Feel Right" for Mark Ronson's Uptown Special. The song and video were released in 2015.
Also in 2015, Mystikal appeared on Stevie Stone's Single Rain Dance with Tech N9ne from the 2015 release Malta Bend.
As of February 2016, Mystikal was touring the United States. In January 2016, he performed in shows in Bahrain and Bulgaria with Danny![citation needed]
In April 2016, Mystikal was featured on Just a Lil' Thick (She Juicy) by Trinidad James along with Lil Dicky.
Sexual battery conviction and other legal issues [ edit ]
On June 26, 2003, Mystikal pleaded guilty to sexual battery and extortion. On January 15, 2004, Mystikal was sentenced to six years in state prison after pleading guilty to forcing his hairstylist to perform sex acts. The rapper and two bodyguards forced the woman to perform oral sex, and accused her of stealing $80,000 in checks. As part of a plea bargain, all three pleaded guilty. Mystikal initially claimed that the incident was consensual, but a videotape of the incident was later found at his home shortly after the charges were made. Negotiations during the trial held the videotape from being entered as evidence and Mystikal agreed to the plea bargain offered by the prosecution, avoiding the mandatory life sentence for sexual battery in Louisiana and expecting to receive probation. However, the case took a twist when the judge viewed the videotape at the sentencing, took into account Mystikal's two prior arrests (for drug and gun possession), and had him remanded into custody to begin serving a six-year sentence immediately. Mystikal's bodyguards, Leland Ellis and Vercy Carter, also pleaded guilty to sexual battery.[5]
In August 2005, while incarcerated on the state sexual battery and extortion charges, Mystikal was charged federally with two misdemeanor counts of failing to file tax returns for 1998 and 1999. On January 12, 2006, he was convicted in federal court of the tax offenses, but was allowed to serve the one-year federal sentence concurrent with his six-year state sentence.[10] Mystikal was incarcerated at Louisiana's Elayn Hunt Correctional Center. On January 19, 2006, Mystikal was denied parole at a parole board hearing.[11] On January 11, 2007, Mystikal was released from custody on the federal misdemeanor tax convictions (as his one-year sentence had expired), but he remained in custody on the six-year sentence for the Louisiana state felony convictions. The news of his release caused confusion among fans who heard the news and mistakenly thought he had been released on parole.[12] He was released January 14, 2010.[13] After his release, Mystikal was registered as a sex offender.
After his release Mystikal stated:
I was gone so long, all the things I achieved, all the accolades I attained, it felt like it was a dream. It felt like I'd never done that stuff. But watch how I shake this world up now — I want reparations.[13]
On February 22, 2012, Mystikal was arrested again following a dispute with his domestic partner and was later given a misdemeanor charge of domestic abuse battery. He was detained for nine days and then released on bail. On April 16, he was given a three-month jail sentence for violating the terms of his probation he was given following his release from prison in January 2010. He was given credit for the nine days already served, reducing his confinement to 81 days. He began serving his sentence on May 14 at the East Baton Rouge Parish Jail.[14] During his incarceration, he appeared in court to be heard on the domestic battery charges as well as for a hearing to determine child support payments for his two youngest children. Mystikal was released from jail in August 2012.
On August 21, 2017, Mystikal turned himself into the Caddo Parish Sheriff's Department after a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was subsequently charged with rape.[15] He has been held at the Caddo Correctional Center on a $3 million bond ever since he turned himself in.[16]
Discography [ edit ]
Studio albumsIt is a fundamental principle in any democracy that the military fulfils the wishes of the elected politicians. However, the Armed Forces are entitled to be given a clear idea of what those wishes are and how success is to be recognised. Confused messages, political histrionics and indecision are inimical to the proper conduct of any conflict, and especially one as difficult as that currently taking place in Afghanistan. Yet there is a dangerous chasm developing between the political leaders both here and in America and the military, that is caused largely by a failure of the former to explain clearly what is wanted. The disclosure that Barack Obama and Gen Stanley McChrystal, the Nato chief in Afghanistan, are seriously at odds over tactics and resources, including manpower, is deeply worrying. Here, Gordon Brown believes he has been "let down" over the running of the war by Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of the defence staff. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Gen Sir David Richards, the Army chief, issued a warning that failure would have an "intoxicating effect" on militant Islam. Sir David is right; and he articulates the strategy better than the politicians. It is not merely about stopping al-Qaeda regaining their base in Afghanistan; it is about ensuring that defeat of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan stops the spread of Islamism in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state vulnerable to the allure of religious militancy. It is in the West's interests to prevent this happening, but it will not be achieved by a piecemeal approach. The soldiers daily risking death and mutilation deserve better than to see their top brass and governments squabbling over a strategy that is supposed to be clear, but can only be achieved if the resources are made available. This palpable sense of disarray needs to be sorted out quickly.MUMBAI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A flagship government program to modernize India’s sanitation has failed to tackle the practice of low caste women clearing faeces by hand, and has even exacerbated the problem by building toilets not connected to water supplies, campaigners say.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Mission, with much fanfare after he took office in 2014, sweeping a Delhi street with a broom. Since then, thousands of toilets have been built across the country.
But Dalit communities, especially women, are still forced to be manual scavengers, a euphemism for clearing faeces from dry toilets and open drains by hand, despite laws to end the practice. The workers have it harder now, activists said.
“Swachh Bharat has diverted attention from ending manual scavenging, and makes it seem like the whole country is cleaning. But if that’s the case, then why are people still dying in septic tanks,” said activist Bezwada Wilson.
“There is also no discussion of caste, when nearly all sanitation workers are Dalits, and no recognition of the abuse they suffer,” said Wilson, who won a Ramon Magsaysay Award last year for his efforts to end manual scavenging.
Manual scavenging has long been an occupation thrust upon the Dalit community, the lowest ranked in India’s caste system.
At least 90 percent of the estimated one million manual scavengers are women, who have to clean public and private dry latrines with barely any safety equipment.
India, which banned caste-based discrimination in 1955, has passed several laws to end the practice, yet Dalit communities continue to face threats of violence if they try to give it up for other jobs.
More than 4 million individual toilets and about 223,000 community toilets have been built since the launch of Clean India mission to make the country open-defecation free.
Many toilets lack water connections or a continuous supply of water, and are not linked to the sewage network, said Wilson, whose own family members were manual scavengers for generations.
Rights groups will make a representation to the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to water and sanitation, who is visiting India from Oct. 27, said Ramesh Nathan, general secretary of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights.
With pressure from the Clean India Mission, safety norms are flouted, and dozens of workers have died in septic tanks from toxic fumes, said Nathan.
Most deaths are unreported or claimed as accidental, so the employer is not liable to pay the compensation of 1 million rupees ($15,000), he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
A senior government official acknowledges manual scavenging is prevalent, but said Clean India ensures workers’ safety.
“We have already asked all states to convert dry toilets, and we recommend mechanical equipment for cleaning of toilets,” said J. B. Ravinder, a joint adviser for Swachh Bharat Urban.
“If manual cleaning is to be done, it has to be done with proper supervision and with the necessary safety equipment.”
($1 = 65.0454 Indian rupees)Forget the "impossible trinity" - Turkey is facing a just as impossible dilemma where it is trying to juggle two things at the same time: attempts to lower interest rates while supporting its currency, and predictably it is failing.
On Friday, the Turkish Lira crashed to record lows, plunging as much as 3.60 against the dollar when Turkish president Erdogan urged banks to lower interest rates because in order to stimulate investment in the economy "there is no other remedy".
He referred to the United States, Japan and Europe as examples of where rates are low and questioned why Turkey still had such high rates. The Lira, which has soundly ignored the recent rate hike by the Turkish Central bank, plunged on the news, which in turn prompted Erdogan to tell his countrymen to convert their dollars into Lira and gold.
"For those who have foreign currencies under the pillow, come change this to gold, come change this to Turkish lira. Let the lira win greater value. Let gold win greater value," he said during a televised speech in Ankara.
Then overnight, Turkey continued its crusade against high rates, so critical to keep the currency from foundering, when it announced it would prevent companies from borrowing at high rates. The measure will be part of a broader package of economic steps due to be announced Thursday, according to state-run Anadolu Agency which cited Deputy PM Veysi Kaynak as saying in an interview on CNNTurk.
“The rise in the dollar is certainly important, but the rise in interest is affecting our companies very quickly.” He added that the “prime minister will explain a package of measures that will touch the daily lives of our people,” and “relieve our companies financially,” including our banks."
It was not exactly clear how government pressure to lower rates would help the plunging currency, however, in a surprising twist, one which likely seeks to isolate the Turkish Lira from its dependency on the US dollar, Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey is taking steps to allow commerce with China, Russia and Iran to be conducted in local currencies, in what Reuters dubbed "the government's latest effort to shore up the tumbling lira."
Speaking at the opening ceremony of a shopping mall in Istanbul, Erdo?an said that he had proposed Russian President Vladimir Putin to conduct trade between the two countries with local currencies.
“I proposed Putin the following: Let’s do our trade in local currencies. Whatever I buy [from you] I shall pay you in Russian ruble, and whatever you buy from me make the payment in Turkish Liras,” said Erdogan on December 3, quoted by Hurriyet.
He added that he had made the same offer to China and Iran and his offer was found reasonable. “We have given the necessary instructions to our central banks and we will try to conduct such [trade] relationships between us through this way,” Erdogan said.
Erdogan again reiterated his call to Turkish citizens to convert their foreign exchange into gold or the Turkish Lira. “Those who keep foreign currency under their mattress should come and turn them into lira or gold,” he said.
Stating that one should convert their foreign currencies to liras or gold against the ones who want to “destroy us,” Erdogan also answered the question of ‘what if we lose money,’ with this currency conversion.
“Look, this is national, there is fruitfulness in this, you will not make a loss from this, do not worry,” said Erdogan, adding that it was actually the “other,” a reference to foreign currencies, that would make the Turkish people lose because “the other is a representative of the imperial logic.” “You look after your money that is local and national; the money will stay here,” he said.
We expect another sharp move lower in the TRY following these overtures by what increasingly sounds like a desperate regime, one in which Erdogan is likely set to soon take over the central bank next,in his quest to both lower rates and boost the currency.Protester at "Stand With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate" conference in Garland, Texas (NBC-DFW)
Protesters, upset that a Muslim group was holding a conference at a Texas conference center owned by the local school district, showed up last night waving flags and signs telling attendees, “Go home and take Obama with you.”
The conference, titled “Stand With the Prophet Against Terror and Hate,” was being being put on as a fundraiser for a Chicago-based Islamic group, Sound Vision, and approximately about 500 attendees were expected, reports NBC-DFW.
Holding signs saying “You are not Americans. Don’t fly our flag,” protesters complained about the Garland Independent School District allowing the group to use the facility.
“We pay our taxes to that school, and I don’t want them here,” one woman, Lavona Martindale said.
Another protester, identified as Greg McKinley, said, “We’re here to stand up for the American way of life from a faction of people who are trying to destroy us.”
McKinley added, “If they want to live their life like the middle east, they can go back to the middle east.”
“I want for people to see that we are kind peaceful people,” explained conference attendee Page Spence. “We’re not here to fight, we’re not here to argue. We’re just here to show that we’re Americans too.”
A young woman, part of a group of counter-protesters, explained, “People are here to stand up with the Prophet against hate and intolerance.”
Police authorities beefed up their presence at the event following earlier protests at a Garland School Board meeting, where board members were told by one man,”I certainly don’t think you need people there who want to destroy this country.”
A spokesman for the school district said they do not discriminate against facility renters based upon religion.Video won't always be the only way of sharing your favorite Xbox One moments: Although we don't yet know when it will be coming, the ability to take screenshots of your games on Xbox One is on Microsoft's list of features to add in a future update.
This is according to Head of Xbox Phil Spencer, who was asked whether Microsoft has plans to allow players to take screenshots and share them on social networks like Twitter. "Yea, this is the list for the monthly updates, team is making great progress on the updates," Spencer replied on Twitter. "More features to come."
Indeed, Microsoft has been routinely rolling out system updates for the Xbox One. Among other things, the Xbox One added a new Party Chat mode and Twitch streaming in March, friend notifications in April, and a sound mixer this month. June's update will add support for external storage devices and allow players to use their real names on Xbox Live.
The ability to take screenshots would be a natural addition to the system--players can already record gameplay video on the fly that can then be shared with other Xbox One owners or uploaded to OneDrive. The PlayStation 4, meanwhile, already allows screenshots to be taken using the DualShock 4's Share button.
What features |
base and our brand becomes more widely known and recognized, we may become more of a target for these malicious third parties. If we experience any actual or perceived data breach as a result of third-party actions, employee negligence or error, or malfeasance, whether or not resulting in the unauthorized acquisition of or access to cardholder data, we could incur significant liability, our business may suffer and our brand and reputation may be damaged. We could be required to pay extensive fines and costs related to any such data breach, including costs incurred to replace credit cards and cardholder information and provide security monitoring services, and we could lose future sales and subscribers, any of which could harm our business and operating results. Such fines and costs could become due in one or two business days following such breach and exceed the amount of cash available to us, thereby impacting our ability to operate our business. In addition, a
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data breach or failure to comply with rules or regulations of payment systems could also result in the termination of our status as a registered Independent Sales Organization / Merchant Service Provider, thereby dramatically impairing our ability to continue doing business in the payments industry.
We are subject to risks related to our reliance on third-party processing partners to perform our payment processing services.
We depend on our third-party processing partners to perform payment processing services, which generate almost all of our payments revenue. Our processing partners may go out of business or otherwise be unable or unwilling to continue providing such services, which could significantly and materially reduce our payments revenue and disrupt our business. A number of our processing contracts require us to assume liability for any losses our processing partners may suffer as a result of losses caused by our subscribers, including losses caused by chargebacks and subscriber fraud. Thus, in the event of a significant loss by our processing partners, we may be required to pay-out a large amount of cash in one or two business days following such event and, if we do not have sufficient cash on hand, may be deemed in breach of such contracts. A contractual dispute with our processing partners could adversely impact our revenue. Certain contracts may expire or be terminated, and we may not be able to replicate the associated revenue through a new processing partner relationship for a considerable period of time. In addition, the failure of any third-party processing partner to provide accurate and timely reporting could adversely impact our ability to report accurate and timely revenue in accordance with GAAP.
We expect to initiate new third-party payment relationships or migrate to other third-party payment partners in the future. The initiation of these relationships and the transition from one relationship to another would require significant time and resources. New third-party payment processing relationships may not be as effective, efficient or well received by subscribers and their consumers, nor is there any assurance that we will be able to reach an agreement with such processing partners. Our contracts with such processing partners may be less lucrative. For instance, we may be required to pay more for payment processing or receive a less favorable revenue arrangement from our payment processing partners. We may also experience the termination of revenue streams due to such migrations.
We may undertake to directly perform certain payment processing services and expand the scope of payment processing services we provide, which may require a significant investment of time and resources, and expand our exposure to potential liabilities.
In the future, we may undertake to directly perform certain payment processing services that we currently depend upon our processing partners to perform, expand the scope of payment processing services we provide, offer additional payment processing services or otherwise undertake additional responsibilities and liabilities related to such payment processing services. For example, in the future, we may undertake to act as a registered payment facilitator or payment service provider of the payment systems, providing merchants with a suite of services, including payment processing and funding and accepting payments as the merchant of record on behalf of other merchants. Any of these endeavors would require a significant investment of time and effective management of resources before presenting any potential upside for us, and may dramatically expand the scope of our potential contractual liability or exposure in the event of a lawsuit. Further, we may fail to effectively execute in performing such an expansion of services.
If our network or computer systems are breached or unauthorized access to subscriber or consumer data is otherwise obtained, our platform may be perceived as insecure, we may lose existing subscribers or fail to attract new subscribers, and we may incur significant liabilities.
Use of our platform involves the storage, transmission and processing of our subscribers proprietary data, including personal or identifying information regarding their consumers or employees. Unauthorized access to or security breaches of our platform could result in the loss of data, loss of intellectual property or trade secrets, loss
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of business, reputational damage, regulatory investigations and orders, litigation, indemnity obligations, damages for contract breach, penalties for violation of applicable laws, regulations, or contractual obligations, and significant costs, fees and other monetary payments for remediation. For example, if our platform is breached in a way that constitutes a violation of HIPAA, we could face costs for remediation, criminal penalties, and/or monetary penalties up to $1.5 million per year for violations of an identical provision of the law.
If any unauthorized access to our systems or data or any other security breach occurs, or is believed to have occurred, our reputation and brand could be damaged, we could be required to expend significant capital and other resources to alleviate problems caused by such actual or perceived breaches and remediate our systems, we could be exposed to a risk of loss, litigation or regulatory action and possible liability, and our ability to operate our business may be impaired. If subscribers believe that our platform does not provide adequate security for the storage of personal or other sensitive information or its transmission over the Internet, our business will be harmed. Subscribers concerns about security or privacy may deter them from using our platform for activities that involve personal or other sensitive information. Additionally, actual, potential or anticipated attacks may cause us to incur increasing costs, including costs to deploy additional personnel and protection technologies, train employees and engage third-party experts and consultants. Our errors and omissions insurance policies covering certain security and privacy damages and claim expenses may not be sufficient to compensate for all potential liability. Although we maintain cyber liability insurance, we cannot be certain that our coverage will be adequate for liabilities actually incurred or that insurance will continue to be available to us on economically reasonable terms, or at all.
Because the techniques used to obtain unauthorized access or to sabotage systems change frequently and generally are not identified until they are launched against a target, we may be unable to anticipate these techniques or to implement adequate preventative measures. We may also experience security breaches that may remain undetected for extended periods of time.
Because data security is a critical competitive factor in our industry, we make statements in our privacy policies and terms of service, through our certifications to privacy standards, and in our marketing materials, describing the security of our platform, including descriptions of certain security measures we employ. Should any of these statements be untrue, become untrue, or be perceived to be untrue, even if through circumstances beyond our reasonable control, we may face claims, including claims of unfair or deceptive trade practices, brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, state, local or foreign regulators and private litigants.
Because our platform can be used to collect and store personal information, domestic and international privacy and data security concerns could result in additional costs and liabilities to us or inhibit sales of our platform.
Personal privacy and data security are significant issues in the United States, Europe and many other jurisdictions where we offer our platform. The regulatory framework for privacy and security issues worldwide is rapidly evolving and is likely to remain uncertain for the foreseeable future. The U.S. federal and various state and foreign governments have adopted or proposed limitations on, or requirements regarding, the collection, distribution, use, security and storage of personally identifiable information and other data relating to individuals, and the Federal Trade Commission and numerous state attorneys general are applying federal and state consumer protection laws to enforce regulations related to the online collection, use and dissemination of personally identifiable information and other data. Some of these requirements include obligations on companies to notify individuals of security breaches involving particular personal information, which could result from breaches experienced by us or our service providers. Even though we may have contractual protections with our service providers, notifications related to a security breach could impact our reputation, harm customer confidence, hurt our sales and expansion into new markets or cause us to lose existing customers.
Further, many foreign countries and governmental bodies, including the European Union and Canada, have laws and regulations concerning the collection and use of personally identifiable information obtained from their residents or by businesses operating within their jurisdiction. These laws and regulations often are more
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restrictive than those in the United States. Laws and regulations in these jurisdictions apply broadly to the collection, use, storage, disclosure and security of data that identifies or may be used to identify or locate an individual, such as names, email addresses and, in some jurisdictions, Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses. We certify adherence to the U.S. Department of Commerces Safe Harbor Privacy Principles and comply with the U.S.-EU and U.S.-Swiss Safe Harbor Frameworks. However, it is not clear whether or for how long applicable data protection authorities in the European Union will continue to recognize such certification as a valid method of compliance with restrictions set forth in EU data protection legislation restricting the transfer of data outside of the European Economic Area. Such uncertainty has increased as a result of a vote by the EU Parliament to suspend the Safe Harbor.
We also expect that there will continue to be new proposed laws, regulations and industry standards concerning privacy, data protection and information security in the United States, the European Union and other jurisdictions, and we cannot yet determine the impact such future laws, regulations and standards may have on our business. Future laws, regulations, standards and other obligations, and changes in the interpretation of existing laws, regulations, standards and other obligations could impair our or our subscribers ability to collect, use or disclose information relating to consumers, which could decrease demand for our platform, increase our costs and impair our ability to maintain and grow our subscriber base and increase our revenue. New laws, amendments to or re-interpretations of existing laws and regulations, industry standards, contractual obligations and other obligations may require us to incur additional costs and restrict our business operations. In view of new or modified federal, state or foreign laws and regulations, industry standards, contractual obligations and other legal obligations, or any changes in their interpretation, we may find it necessary or desirable to fundamentally change our business activities and practices or to expend significant resources to modify our software or platform and otherwise adapt to these changes. Any failure or perceived failure by us to comply with federal, state or foreign laws or regulations, industry standards or other legal obligations, or any actual or suspected security incident, whether or not resulting in unauthorized access to, or acquisition, release or transfer of personally identifiable information or other data, may result in governmental enforcement actions and prosecutions, private litigation, fines and penalties or adverse publicity and could cause our subscribers to lose trust in us, which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business. We may be unable to make such changes and modifications in a commercially reasonable manner or at all, and our ability to develop new products and features could be limited. Any of these developments could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations. Furthermore, the costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by, the laws, regulations, and policies that are applicable to the businesses of our subscribers may limit the use and adoption of, and reduce the overall demand for, our platform. Privacy and data security concerns, whether valid or not valid, may inhibit market adoption of our platform, particularly in certain industries and foreign countries.
We are subject to a number of legal requirements, industry standards and contractual obligations regarding security, data protection, and privacy and any failure to comply with these requirements, obligations or standards could have an adverse effect on our reputation, business, financial condition and operating results.
As a service provider to our subscribers, we must comply with a number of data protection, security, privacy and other government- and industry-specific requirements, including those that require companies to notify individuals of data security incidents involving certain types of personal data. For example, our solutions must conform, in certain circumstances, to requirements set forth in HIPAA, as amended by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, and the regulations promulgated thereunder, which collectively govern the privacy and security of protected health information. Through the provision of online scheduling services to certain of our clients, we may collect, access, use, maintain and transmit protected health information in ways that may be subject to certain of these laws and regulations. Any inability to adequately address privacy and security concerns, even if unfounded, or comply with applicable laws, regulations, policies, industry standards, contractual obligations or other legal obligations could result in additional cost and liability to us, damage our reputation, inhibit sales and adversely affect our business.
HIPAA applies to covered entities (e.g., health plans, health care clearinghouses and most health care providers) and to business associates of covered entities, which include individuals and entities that provide
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services for or on behalf of covered entities pursuant to which the service providers may access protected health information, as well as subcontractors of business associates who may access such information. We are a subcontractor to certain business associates of covered entities. Under the current HIPAA regulations promulgated by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, if we experience a breach of patient information, the liability rules for business associates and business associates subcontractors could result in substantial financial and reputational harm to our business.
The Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information, or Privacy Rule, and the Security Standards for the Protection of Electronic Protected Health Information, or Security Rule, which jointly govern the privacy and security of protected health information, could significantly affect our business. The Privacy Rule and the Security Rule require the development and implementation of policies, procedures and contracts to assure compliance. We have implemented certain compliance measures, but we may be required to make additional modifications or to document and implement additional policies and procedures to comply with evolving HIPAA rules and our subscribers business associate agreements with us. We may also be required to perform periodic audits and refinements as required by HIPAA and our subscribers business associate agreements with us.
Additionally, because we process a significant portion of our payments through debit or credit cards and enable our subscribers to engage in payments through our service, we are contractually required to maintain Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS, compliance as part of our information security program. We also may find it necessary or desirable to join industry or other self-regulatory bodies or other privacy or data protection-related organizations that require compliance with their rules pertaining to privacy and data protection. We also may be bound by additional, more stringent contractual obligations relating to our collection, use and disclosure of personal, financial and other data. If we cannot comply with or if we incur a violation of any of these regulations or requirements, we could incur significant liability through fines and penalties imposed by credit card associations or other organizations, breach of contracts with our payment processors, or our growth could be adversely impacted, either of which could have an adverse effect on our reputation, business, financial condition and operating results.
The market for business management software is intensely competitive, and if we do not compete effectively, our operating results could be harmed.
The market for business management software for the wellness services industry is fragmented and rapidly evolving, with relatively low barriers to entry. We face competition from in-house software systems, smaller companies offering alternative SaaS applications and traditional paper-based methods. Our competitors vary in size and in the breadth and scope of the products and services they offer. In addition, there are a number of companies that are not currently direct competitors but that could in the future shift their focus to the wellness services industry and offer competing products and services. Some of these companies, such as Intuit and Square, have or may in the future acquire greater financial and other resources than we do and could bundle competing products and services with their other offerings or offer such products and services at lower prices as part of a larger sale. There is also a risk that certain of our current business partners could terminate their relationships with us and use the insights they have gained from partnering with us to introduce their own competing products. Many of our current and potential competitors have greater name recognition, established marketing relationships, access to larger customer bases and pre-existing relationships with customers, consultants, system integrators and resellers. Additionally, some potential subscribers in the wellness services industry, particularly large organizations, have elected, and may in the future elect, to develop their own business management software. Certain of our competitors have partnered with, or have acquired, and may in the future partner with or acquire, other competitors to offer services, leveraging their collective competitive positions, which makes, or would make, it more difficult to compete with them.
Our competitors may be able to respond more quickly and effectively than we can to new or changing opportunities, technologies, standards or customer requirements. With the introduction of new technologies, the evolution of our platform and new market entrants, we expect competition to intensify in the future. Pricing
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pressures and increased competition generally could result in reduced sales, reduced margins, increased churn, reduced subscriber retention, further losses or the failure of our platform to achieve or maintain more widespread market acceptance, any of which could harm our business. For all of these reasons, we may fail to compete successfully against our current and future competitors, and if such failure occurs, our business will be harmed.
Interruptions or performance problems associated with our technology and infrastructure may adversely affect our business and operating results.
Our continued growth depends in part on the ability of our existing and potential subscribers to access our platform at any time and within an acceptable amount of time. Our platform is proprietary, and we rely on the expertise of members of our engineering, operations and software development teams for its continued performance. We have experienced, and may in the future experience, disruptions, outages and other performance problems due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, introductions of new functionality, human or software errors, capacity constraints due to an overwhelming number of users accessing our platform simultaneously, denial of service attacks, or other security related incidents. For example, in 2011, we were subject to a denial-of-service attack that rendered our core software inaccessible for several hours. In addition, from time to time we experience limited periods of server downtime due to server failure or other technical difficulties. In some instances, we may not be able to identify the cause or causes of these performance problems within an acceptable period of time. It may become increasingly difficult to maintain and improve our performance, especially during peak usage times and as our platform becomes more complex and our user traffic increases. If our platform is unavailable or if our users are unable to access our platform within a reasonable amount of time, or at all, our business would be adversely affected and our brand could be harmed. In the event of any of the factors described above, or certain other failures of our infrastructure, subscriber or consumer data may be permanently lost. Moreover, our online subscription agreement includes a limited warranty that enables subscribers to be eligible for credits if cumulative service levels over a certain period of time drop below 99.9%. If we experience significant periods of service downtime in the future, we may be subject to claims by our subscribers against these warranties. To the extent that we do not effectively address capacity constraints, upgrade our systems as needed, and continually develop our technology and network architecture to accommodate actual and anticipated changes in technology, our business and operating results may be adversely affected.
Real or perceived errors, failures, or bugs in our platform could adversely affect our operating results and growth prospects.
Because our platform is complex, undetected errors, failures, vulnerabilities or bugs may occur, especially when updates are deployed. Our platform is often used in connection with computing environments with different operating systems, system management software, equipment and networking configurations, which may cause errors in or failures of our platform or other aspects of the computing environments. In addition, deployment of our platform into complicated, large-scale computing environments may expose undetected errors, failures, vulnerabilities or bugs in our platform. Despite testing by us, errors, failures, vulnerabilities or bugs may not be found in our platform until after it is deployed to our subscribers or their consumers. We have discovered, and expect to discover in the future, software errors, failures, vulnerabilities and bugs in our platform, and we anticipate that certain of these errors, failures, vulnerabilities and bugs will only be discovered and remediated after deployment to subscribers. Real or perceived errors, failures or bugs in our platform could result in negative publicity, loss of or delay in market acceptance of our platform, loss of competitive position or claims by subscribers for losses sustained by them. In such an event, we may be required, or may choose for subscriber relations or other reasons, to expend additional resources in order to help correct the problem.
We have limited experience with our expanded platform and revised pricing model, which makes it difficult to evaluate our prospects and future operating results.
Although we commenced our business in 2001 and began offering our integrated cloud-based business management software on a subscription basis in 2005, many of the products offered as part of our platform have
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been recently introduced. For example, in 2013, we released Connect, and in 2015, we introduced Connect Workplace and began offering automated marketing functionality with our higher-priced subscriptions. In addition, in January 2015, after careful deliberation, we introduced a new tiered pricing structure for new subscribers. Given the recent introduction of Connect Workplace and our new tiered pricing structure for new subscribers, their contribution to our total revenue has not been meaningful to our financial results to date. As we have a limited operating history with our expanded platform and updated pricing structure, our ability to forecast our future operating results and effectively assess our future prospects is subject to a number of uncertainties, including our ability to plan for and model future growth. Our historical revenue growth should not be considered indicative of our future performance. Further, in future periods, our revenue could decline for a number of reasons, including any further changes in our pricing structure, any reduction in demand for our platform, including our payments platform, decrease in payments processing volume, increase in competition, contraction of our overall market, or our failure, for any reason, to capitalize on growth opportunities. We have encountered and will continue to encounter risks and uncertainties frequently experienced by growing companies in rapidly changing industries, such as the risks and uncertainties described herein. If our assumptions regarding these risks and uncertainties, which we use to plan our business, are incorrect or change, or if we do not address these risks successfully, our operating and financial results could differ materially from our expectations, and our business could suffer.
Failure to effectively expand our sales capabilities could harm our ability to increase our subscriber base and achieve broader market acceptance of our platform.
Increasing our subscriber base and achieving broader market acceptance of our platform will depend, to a significant extent, on our ability to effectively expand our sales and marketing operations and activities, including internationally. We are substantI'm happy to announce the official release of the Light Table Playground! You can find instructions for getting it here: http://app.kodowa.com/playground
What is the playground?
The playground is a chance for you to follow along as we test out new things for Light Table. In return, it helps us collect metrics on how people are using our experiments as well as gives us an opportunity to see how certain concepts fare in the real world. All in all, it keeps us connected to you guys and you guys connected to us.
Currently, the playground includes what we call the "instarepl" for Clojure. This is the real-time evaluation and code-flow stuff we showed in the first video. It serves as a fun scratch pad for either learning Clojure or when you're working and trying out random things. A number of folks have been using it to do 4Clojure or Project Euler problems, which can be a great starting point if you're new to the language and itching to try something.
Wait, what's Kodowa?
Kodowa is the official entity behind Light Table. It's still early days for us, so we're not quite ready to introduce it fully, but don't be surprised if you see the name associated with Light Table more as time goes on.
The plan moving forward
The playground is a very stripped down version of Light Table, but it helps us prove out the platform necessary to support the vision we've laid out. With the update mechanism built into it, we'll be releasing new things often with the goal of turning it into a full-fledged Clojure environment over the next few months. At the end of which, we'll have a solid foundation to continue forward on. Our hope is that you'll follow along with us, so that we can learn more about you and maybe introduce some new minds to Clojure.
There are very exciting things to come and now that we've hit this milestone, we can do a lot more than just tell you about what we're thinking - we can begin to show you.Thanksgiving Pet Safety Tips at Ark Animals
Learn pet safety tips for the Thanksgiving holiday. Animal behaviorist, Diana L. Guerrero offers a few humane holiday hints along with seasonal safety suggestions for pet households.
Animal Behaviorist Offers Pet Safety Tips For the Thanksgiving Holiday
Do you give in to cute pesky pets at the dinner table? This Thanksgiving holiday pet lovers are urged to resist the intense gazes and vocal demands of pleading pets. According to animal expert, Diana L. Guerrero. "There can be deadly consequences for animals during the holidays. Holiday threats to animals can include seasonal decorations, ornamental lighting, ingestion of inappropriate or toxic items, excessive consumption of rich foods or harmful food, candle flames, and many other hazards."
Guerrero is an animal behaviorist who writes columns on wild animal behavior, training, and animal etiquette. She is contributing editor to Resources for Crisis Management in Zoos and Other Animal Care Facilities and is the author of the holiday favorite, What Animals Can Teach Us about Spirituality: Inspiring Lessons of Wild and Tame Creatures.
Before you sit down to feast, Guerrero suggests you take away temptation-from both guests and pets. " If you feed pets before the guests arrive you reduce the temptation for begging and stealing. You can also use a pet gate or play pen to house the pet nearby, but provide a safety barrier."
One of the easiest ways to avoid trouble is to make sure your guests know the pet rules and discourage them from feeding critters scraps from the table. Guerrero said, "The best approach is to make sure any animal is occupied with a chewy or playmates in another room. Once the table is cleared, make sure pets cannot get to scraps or bones."
Guerrero said the biggest hazards to pets on Thanksgiving include:
Rich, fatty foods (turkey skins, gravy, etc,) can contribute to pancreatitis. This inflammation of the digestive gland is painful and can be serious--requiring emergency veterinary assistance.
Cooked bones can splinter and cause tears or obstruction in a pet's digestive tract.
Baking strings, if ingested, can create trouble if ingested by your pet.
Onions in holiday stuffing can lead to canine anemia if consumed by your dog.
Grapes and raisin toxins can cause kidney failure in pets.
Ingesting chocolate can kill your pet.
Caffeine and alcohol are also toxic for pets.
Keep all goodies out of reach!
"Preventative safety measures are the best strategies," states Guerrero, " Keep leftover food out of reach and in tightly closed containers. Make sure garbage cans are secure to keep critters so they are safe from e-coli and unable to chew on leftover tinfoil."
The animal behaviorist suggests that pet households plan on providing appropriate chew toys or food occupation devices for pets during holiday activities. "The Kong Company produces a goodie dispenser that keeps dogs occupied. They also have some great bird and cat toys that provide similar activity. Most pet stores carry these products. The investment and preparation can insure that you have a happy and healthy holiday."
Even so, it never hurts to keep your emergency vet clinic or veterinary hospital number handy. You never know when you will encounter a disaster due to a delinquent guest or persistent pet.[/caption]
In many ways Venus is Earth’s twin planet. It’s only a little smaller, and made up of the same composition as Earth. But when it comes to climate, Venus couldn’t really be more different. Venus is a hellish world – the hottest planet in the Solar System, with an average temperature of more than 400°C, and a surface pressure almost 100 times what we experience here on Earth. On top of that, there are clouds of sulfuric acid and other corrosive chemicals. Visiting Venus would be the worst vacation ever.
Before the 1960s, scientists thought that the climate of Venus might be similar to Earth. It has clouds, and here Earth, clouds mean rain, water, oceans and even life. But microwave observations of Venus showed that its surface must be incredibly hot, too hot for liquid water to exist. And spacecraft visiting the planet in the 1960s and 70s confirmed that the clouds of Venus are made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide; a potent greenhouse gas keeping the planet so hot.
But you could say that Venus has a climate. It has severe winds that blow at speeds greater than 100 m/s; although, the winds don’t reach down to the surface of the planet. It has sulfuric acid clouds which send down torrents of sulfuric acid rain.
The climate of Venus wasn’t always this harsh. In fact, Venus used to have an atmosphere similar to our own. But at some point in Venus’ past, its global magnetosphere shut down. Without this global force field, the Sun’s solar wind was able to reach the planet and tear away at its atmosphere, stripping away the lighter atoms. The lightest atom is hydrogen, of course, one of the constituents of water. Recent observations by ESA’s Venus Express showed that this process is still going on today. 2 x 1024 atoms of hydrogen are being blasted off Venus into space every second.
We have written many articles about Venus for Universe Today. Here’s an article about Venus’ wet, volcanic past, and here’s an article about how Venus might have had continents and oceans in the ancient past.
Want more information on Venus? Here’s a link to Hubblesite’s News Releases about Venus, and here’s NASA’s Solar System Exploration Guide to Venus.
We have recorded a whole episode of Astronomy Cast that’s only about planet Venus. Listen to it here, Episode 50: Venus.
Reference:
NASA: The Solar System
NASA: Pioneer Mission to VenusLas Vegas (CNN) -- In the brutal heat, Mike Forizs ventures out of his North Las Vegas home to take out the trash.
"If I go over and look at the house on the corner, there are broken windows," he says. It appears to be a party hangout, with empty booze and soda bottles that can be seen through a broken pane.
"People don't care when they're getting ready to leave."
Welcome to one of the top foreclosure areas in the nation, the sunny Las Vegas area.
There are plenty of "For Sale" signs, up and down the street. Front doors are littered with tacked-on notices: "You are in danger of losing your home. Your home loan is being foreclosed.
"This property has been determined to be vacant and abandoned."
Some houses get stripped of whatever valuables are inside, from pipes to door hardware. It's impossible to know if the occupants took things with them, or if the empty houses fell to vandals.
The neighborhood of single homes and garages was built in the early 2000s when Las Vegas was the fastest-growing metro area in the nation. Nevada was the fastest-growing state from 2000 to 2010.
The area still looks new. There are no cracks in the streets, sidewalks or driveways, and the slow-growing desert landscape doesn't hurt the curb appeal.
Post-boom, Vegas tries to kick its water habit
But the recession hit Vegas hard. Nevada's foreclosure rate has led the nation for more than four-and-a-half years; about 1-in-4 homes in the Vegas area is in some foreclosure process.
Prices have dipped by 40% or more. It means turnover and uncertainty for residents such as Forizs.
"A couple of the neighbors have already moved out because of foreclosure. There's like three or four (other houses) just on this little block that are empty already. And there's a couple neighbors" trying to refinance, Forizs says.
It does mean an upside for buyers, of course, including Forizs, who moved here a few months ago. His split-level home originally sold in the mid-$300,000s. Forizs bought it for $95,000.
"Guy let it go," he says of the last owner. "The banks weren't working with him."
Las Vegas' foreclosure rate -- one of every 118 housing units received a foreclosure filing August -- is a symptom of all the excesses of the American housing boom, but with shows, gambling and bright lights in easy reach.
Foreclosures rise in August
The downside of that tourism-driven economy: Vacationers and convention-goers spend less or don't come at all. Residents who relied on tips to make the house payments found themselves unable to keep up. Unemployment is stuck in double digits.
Of all the homes sold, about a quarter are short sales. The borrower owes more on the mortgage than the house is worth.
George McCabe, a public relations executive who works with the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, shakes his head. A lifelong resident, McCabe is contemplating his own neighborhood.
"I bought a home in 2003, in Summerlin, for $300,000," McCabe starts, speaking of a "master-planned," high-dollar suburban community.
"I lived in it through the boom, when my neighbors would gather around the mailbox and say, 'We all paid about three (hundred thousand dollars) and we can sell for 550 (thousand dollars). Isn't that amazing? Wow! We're all sitting on a gold mine.'"
To boot, many of those neighbors, like many around the country, borrowed heavily on their equity.
"Now," McCabe says, "they stand around the mailbox talking about who may or may not be in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure or who's talking about walking away from their loan."
Juggling the stats is Paul Bell, president of the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors.
"Some areas have declined as much as 75%" in home value, he says.
Now, a new trend emerges: More than half the homes sold here are cash transactions. That's a sign that speculators and investors are waiting for the next boom. In the meantime, they turn the houses into rentals.
The association lost more than 6,000 members since the start of the recession in 2007.
But Bell likes to point to a recent slow rise in home sales and prices.
He said he's hoping that the worst in foreclosures is over.Where do the clocks change?
The following world map shows where the clocks change. In the US, Daylight Saving Time is observed everywhere except Arizona and Hawaii. The clocks change mostly throughout Europe. Asia, the most populous continent, does not observe Daylight Saving Time. So in addition to asking "when does the time change?" you may ask "does the time change at all where I am?":
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It is difficult to have a good understanding of the world if you don't know anything about antennas, Maxwell's Equations or Fourier Transforms.
History of Daylight Saving Time
The earliest mention of a formal "changing of the clocks" goes all the way back to the 1800s. Back then, an entomologist ("bug doctor") named George Hudson wanted more time after work to gather bugs. Hence, in 1895 he wrote a paper proposing the clocks move forward by two hours in the summer. Surprisingly, people thought this was a good idea (me must have been quite the persuader).
The Englishman William Willett also proposed a summer clock change in 1905. His proposal gained traction, and was taken up by a member of parliament and the bill was introduced in 1908. The bill was ultimately defeated, but Willett never gave up trying. He died without ever hearing the common refrain "when do the clocks change??".
So initially the idea was not well received. But war has a way of forcing unpopular ideas on the masses. And so it was that during World War I, Germany and the Axis Powers began to use daylight savings time (Sommerzeit! = summer time in German) to conserve resources, around 1916. That is, if the people are awake during the day and asleep at night, they will need less heat and lights, etc.
Apparently, the economics worked out and England and the European allies took on the system. The United States decided it was worth doing in 1918. And the rest is history.
Location Specific Time Change Information
When Does the Time Change in Arizona?
When Does the Time Change in California?
When Does the Time Change in Hawaii?
When Does the Time Change in 2012?
When Does the Time Change in 2013?
When Does the Time Change in 2014?
When Does the Time Change in 2015?
When Does the Time Change in 2016?
When Does the Time Change in 2017?
When Does the Time Change in 2018?
When Does the Time Change in 2019?
When Does the Time Change in 2020?
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This page on "when does the time change?" is copyrighted. No portion can be reproduced except by permission from the author (who won't give it). Copyright www.whendoesthetimechange.com, 2011-2018.CAIRO (Reuters) - Seven Saudi troops and dozens of Houthi fighters were killed in heavy fighting on the border with Yemen, Saudi state news agency SPA reported on Sunday, as the main combatants in Yemen’s war prepared for a further week of peace talks in Kuwait.
Pro-government fighters ride on the back of a patrol truck in a village taken by pro-government forces from the Iran-allied Houthi militia, in the al-Sarari area of Taiz province, Yemen July 28, 2016. REUTERS/Anees Mahyoub
The U.N.-sponsored negotiations had been on the verge of collapse after a new row erupted last week between the Saudi-backed government and its Iranian-allied Houthi foes and renewed fighting broke out.
But U.N. Yemen envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed said the talks between the Houthis and their General People’s Congress party allies and the internationally-recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi had been extended by a week.
“We hope that the delegations can utilize this remaining week to achieve progress on the path towards peace,” he said in a statement.
The slow-moving negotiations are aimed at ending a 16-month-old conflict that has killed more than 6,400 people, nearly half of them civilians, and displaced more than 2.5 million.
A truce that began in April has slowed the momentum of fighting, in which a Saudi-led coalition has been trying to restore Hadi to power and roll back Houthi gains, but violence continues almost daily.
UN MAKES NEW PROPOSAL
The coalition said Houthi fighters, backed by troops loyal to former president and GPC chief Ali Abdullah Saleh, tried to breach the Saudi border at the Rabou’a area on Saturday, igniting heavy fighting.
It said in a statement that dozens of Houthi fighters were killed |
about our September roster, that wasn't meant to be a criticism of any players or anything in the organization," Valentine said. "It's a statement of fact because of the injuries and our Triple-A team in the playoffs. This is different. We have less people than most September rosters. We have less positions filled than any September roster I've ever seen before.
"Anybody who thought that to be anything other than a statement of what it was, stand corrected on that."
Boston's top farm team, the Triple-A Pawtucket Red Sox, wrapped up a three-game sweep of Charlotte last Thursday to claim its first International League crown since 1984.
The PawSox moved on to Tuesday's one-game, winner-take-all showdown with the Reno Aces, who won their first Pacific Coast League title Saturday, beating Omaha in four games. Reno is the top farm team of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Before Friday's game, Valentine was asked whether there was a particular area of his team that could most use some extra help.
"Are you kidding?" he responded. "This is the weakest roster we've ever had in September in the history of baseball. It could use help everywhere."
On Sunday, Valentine said it was an absence of depth, not quality, that led to that outburst.
"Usually a September roster has some starting pitchers who are waiting in the wings," Valentine said Sunday. "Ours doesn't. Usually a September roster has some left-handed pinch-hitter type guys, or pinch runners, five or six outfielders. We have four outfielders. It's not like a September roster."
What Valentine failed to explain is why reinforcements have not been drafted in from Pawtucket, their playoff run notwithstanding.Heda Margolius Kovaly is a writer best-known for her memoir, Under a Cruel Star, about her ordeal in Nazi concentration camps and living under communist rule in Czechoslovakia. After her first husband, a government official, was executed in a show trial in 1952, Kovaly became a pariah, barely supporting herself and her small son by working as a translator.
Of all the writers whose work she translated before her death in 2010 — including Heinrich Boll, Arthur Miller and Philip Roth — Kovaly most revered the work of Raymond Chandler. In 1985, Kovaly wrote a suspense novel of her own called Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street. Soho Press has just brought out an English edition of the novel, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker. It's set in the Prague of the 1950s, a time when the city was the living embodiment of a "paranoid landscape."
The center of the intrigue in this tale filled with spies, informers, murderers, snitches and victims is the Horizon Cinema, a movie theater where people go for escape. Kovaly describes how the moviegoers always left the theater at night silently, because they were "just focused on not getting bruised during the steep descent back into reality." Our heroine is a young usher named Helena — modeled partly on Kovaly herself — who is desperate to rescue her husband, who has been thrown into prison for espionage. Everyone else from the concession stand operator to the cleaning lady has some scam going on.
The great draw of Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street is the menacing view it gives us of communist Prague. Helena, for instance, describes being hustled into a small interrogation room and having "pairs [of men's eyes] stick to [her] face like frog's legs." Kovaly channels Chandler but takes him into a landscape far, far away from wide-open LA.Liberal Heartache: Democrat of the Year stripped of title for stealing from disabled elderly woman
% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.
If she had been stealing votes, democrats would have given her another award.
The Jefferson County Democratic Party announced in late 2011 that it planned to honor Carson at a gala in January 2012 for her Democratic activism and efforts. Three days before the Jan. 8 dinner, critics warned the Democratic Party officials of an ongoing criminal investigation into Carson’s activities.
Carson was found guilty of felony identity theft and felony theft from an at-risk person for stealing checks from the woman to pay for cable, cellphone and Internet bills. The elderly victim, who is confined to a wheelchair, has a fixed income of $596 per month.
Jefferson County, Colo. Democrats have revoked 66-year-old Estelle Carson’s 2012 “Democrat of the Year” award, following her conviction on Thursday for stealing from a 71-year-old woman who suffers from both partial blindness and cerebral palsy.
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Yet another slightly different Mini variant – or, if you’re of a more cynical disposition, the bottom of a well-scraped barrel. The Mini Roadster is a soft-top version of the two-seat Coupe, sharing its sister’s lower windscreen line but with what we’re promised is a greater emphasis on driving dynamics than the existing, four-seat Mini Cabriolet.
The Roadster will be sold with the same selection of petrol and diesel engines as the Coupe. But, despite losing two seats and a fair percentage of its windscreen, the Roadster is £500 more expensive than the equivalent cabrio.
Technical highlights?
We’re struggling on this one. The Roadster gets a reworked version of the Cabriolet’s bodyshell, with reinforcement to compensate for the lost roof. Chassis settings are very close to those of the Coupe. The Cooper S that we drove is powered by a 181bhp 1.6-litre turbocharged engine, with drive supplied to the front wheels by a six-speed manual gearbox.
The folding roof mechanism is a basic system that reflects the Roadster’s pared-back ethos. Instead of the Cabriolet’s sliding and folding mechanism the Mini Roadster has a simple ‘throw back’ fabric roof that requires users to unlatch the roof and then physically heave it backwards (we’re told that power operation will be standard in the UK.)
What’s it like to drive?
A disappointment, if we’re honest. Dynamically the Roadster sticks closely to the established Mini script with keen reactions and plenty of entertainment to be had from ringing out the torquey turbocharged engine.
But, like the Cabriolet, it suffers from noticeable shuttle shake, which really takes the edge off the driving experience. On our Portuguese test route, and with a car wearing the ‘standard’ 16-inch alloys, it wasn’t too bad. But on Britain’s rougher roads and riding on the larger optional alloys that many buyers are likely to pick, we fear it’s going to become a big issue.
It’s hard not to conclude that form came before function in the Roadster. The roof does without a proper interior lining meaning that you have to look at its internal frame when it’s in place. And roof-up refinement is poor, with lots of wind and road noise getting into the cabin at everyday speeds.
Fashionistas will love the Roadster’s quirky speedster looks, but we’re struggling to see what it adds to what’s already offered by the cheaper and more refined Mini Cabriolet. And if you’re looking for a two seat Mini to actually drive, then the Coupe is definitely the better bet.
How does it compare?
That depends on what you regard the Roadster as being a rival to. It will certainly win you more attention than something like an Audi TT Roadster, and at a substantial saving. But if you want to get some driving pleasure with your fresh air then the Mazda MX-5 is cheaper and far more dynamically accomplished.
Anything else I should know?
This is almost the last iteration of the current generation ‘R56’ Mini – we’ll see the new, third-generation hatchback in 2013.
SpecificationsA Russian-American lobbyist accompanied a Russian lawyer to a summer 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr., The Associated Press reports.
Rinat Akhmetshin confirmed to the AP that he was in attendance at the meeting with Trump Jr. and the lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
A separate report from NBC News stated that an unnamed former Soviet counterintelligence officer was in the Trump Jr. meeting.
Akhmetshin is a former member of the Russian military intelligence services, known in the U.S. as GRU, but is now an American citizen. He told the AP suggestions that he has ties to Russian intelligence are part of a "smear campaign" against him, adding that he wasn't trained as a spy.
The new detail about Akhmetshin's involvement in the meeting is the latest wrinkle in the Russia story that has rocked Washington this week.
The meeting was prompted by emails to Trump Jr. that promised damaging information on then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE.
Trump Jr. has said no such information was provided by Veselnitskaya, who instead wanted to talk about the separate issue of a U.S. law targeting Russians for human rights abuses known as the Magnitsky Act and countermeasures from Russia prohibiting U.S. adoptions of Russian children.
President Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE's son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort were also present for the meeting.
What remains unclear is who, other than Akhmetshin, attended the meeting with Veselnitskaya.
An attorney for Trump Jr., Alan Futerfas, told The Hill that three people in addition to Veselnitskaya came to the meeting as part of her envoy.
Futerfas would not reveal the names of the others in the envoy, but said the lobbyist identified in the NBC report was introduced as a friend of Veselnitskaya and Emin Agalarov, the Russian pop star whose agent, Rob Goldstone, arranged the meeting.
“He’s a U.S. citizen and not working for the Russian government and my client was introduced to him literally at the meeting,” Futerfas said.
"[Trump Jr.] didn’t know the name before and had no recollection after that. He was introduced either as a friend of Emin’s or of Natalia’s. Basically he helped translate because Natalia’s English is not that good. He’s a U.S. citizen.
"All I can say is Trump Jr. met him for the first time and learned his name minutes before the meeting and he was introduced as a friend."
Trump Jr.'s meeting with Veselnitskaya was first reported over the weekend by The New York Times. On Tuesday, Trump Jr. tweeted out emails with Goldstone that detailed how the meeting was arranged.
In one of the emails, Goldstone writes that the information being offered “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump,” Goldstone continued.
“If it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” Trump Jr. replied.
Democrats are pointing to the meeting as proof that Trump's campaign sought to collude with Moscow amid its efforts to meddle in last year's presidential election.
The White House says nothing substantial came out of the meeting, and Trump has said "most people" would have taken the opportunity to get opposition research on a campaign opponent.
Updated at 10:51 a.m. Jonathan Easley contributed.Disney's live-action remake of the classic animated film has become Fandango's No. 1 family film of all time in terms of presales.
Beauty and the Beast is already waltzing to new records.
Advance ticket sales for the Disney movie, which hits theaters Friday, are the biggest for any family film in Fandango's 17-year history, topping the likes of Finding Dory, the online service announced Tuesday.
Director Bill Condon's live-action adaptation of Disney's classic animated movie is expected to open to well north of $120 million this weekend in North America, with some suggesting it could cross $140 million.
Currently, Pixar and Disney's Finding Dory boasts the top domestic debut of all time for a PG title with $135.1 million.
Fandango also reports that Beauty and the Beast is surpassing non-family titles including Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, although family movies often are bigger presellers than superhero fare.
According to Fandango, plenty of adults and teens plan on seeing Beauty and the Beast with a date, significant other or friend (43 percent) in addition to the traditional family audience (44 percent).* Super tanker skimmed mainly water, not oil
* Vessel billed as possible savior for Gulf coast
* Company says dispersants make skimming difficult (Updates with comment from TMT)
HOUSTON, July 16 (Reuters) - A Taiwanese-owned “super skimmer” ship sent to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has collected virtually no oil in two weeks of tests, a U.S. Coast Guard official said on Friday.
“All we found in the tanks was water, so it was very ineffective,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral Paul Zunkunft, federal on-scene coordinator, told a news briefing.
The 1,100-foot (335-metre) “A Whale,” an ore and oil carrier refitted for skimming, was sent by TMT Shipping Offshore to help clean up oil spewing since April 20 from BP Plc’s (BP.L) (BP.N) blown-out Macondo well.
The vessel arrived the first week of July in search of a contract with BP and began undergoing tests, which were hampered at first by bad weather. Conditions have since improved, and the tests have continued.
“The results are the amount of oil recovered by the A Whale is nil,” Zunkunft said.
TMT billed the ship, which skims oil through horizontal slits on its sides, as a vessel that could collect up to 500,000 barrels (21 million gallons) of contaminated water per day.
The company defended the performance of its vessel and said the large quantity of dispersants poured into the water near the source of the spill made skimming difficult.
“The particular conditions present in the Macondo spill did not afford the vessel the opportunity to recover a significant amount of oil,” said a statement by Bob Grantham, spokesman for TMT Offshore.
“This is due to the highly dispersed nature of the oil in the Gulf. When dispersants are used in high volume, virtually from the point that oil leaves the well, it presents real challenges for high-volume skimming,” Grantham said.
The company would continue to work with the Coast Guard to improve its technology, he said.
Zunkunft said part of the challenge for the A Whale was maneuvering a large vessel to pick up scattered patches of oil, many no larger than a kitchen table. It also was not equipped with suction but let oily water in the slits as it sailed.
“The A Whale will probably need further modifications, and it may need a different type of oil spill, where you have thick, heavy oil that is concentrated in order to be effective,” Zunkunft said. (Reporting by Bruce Nichols, Kristen Hays and Matthew Bigg; editing by Stacey Joyce)North Dakota's Brad Eidsness was named Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA) Most Outstanding Student-Athlete and Ben Blood and Brock Nelson were selected to the All-WCHA Third Team, highlighting the league's awards announced earlier today.
Additionally, 11 Fighting Sioux were named to the All-WCHA Academic Team.
Eidsness, a senior goalie, is the second straight Sioux and the fifth in the history of the program to receive the WCHA Most Outstanding Student-Athlete Award, joining Chay Genoway (2010-11), Karl Goehring (2000-01), Mitch Vig (1997-98) and Steve Johnson (1987-88).
A native of Chestermere, Alberta, Eidsness completed his bachelor's degree in business administration following his junior season and will receive his master's degree in business administration in May. Last year, Eidsness received the 2011 NCAA Elite 88 Award for men's hockey at the NCAA Frozen Four for owning the highest grade point average among all participants at the championship. He graduated Magna Cum Laude with a 3.779 cumulative grade point average as an undergraduate and boasts a 3.625 cumulative GPA in graduate school.
On the ice this season, Eidsness finished second in the WCHA during league games in goals against average (2.19) and save percentage (.919), while going 6-3-1. Overall this season, Eidsness is 7-3-1 with a 2.09 GAA and a.923 save percentage while moving into third place on UND's career wins list (57).
Blood, a senior defenseman, has appeared in all 35 games this season and has amassed a career-high 17 points, with both of his goals counting as game-winners. A native of Plymouth, Minn., Blood averages approximately nearly 30 minutes of ice time per game and has appeared in 135 consecutive games, having not missed a game since his freshman season.
Nelson, a sophomore forward, led all WCHA players with 20 goals during league play and is tied for the league's overall goal-scoring lead with 23. The Warroad, Minn., native, UND's youngest 20-goal scorer since Jonathan Toews in 2005-06, leads the Sioux in game-winning goals (4), is tied for the team lead in power-play goals (9) and ranks second with a career-high 39 points.
Eidsness, Blood and Nelson were also among UND's 11 All-WCHA Academic Team selections, with Eidsness and Blood joining Mario Lamoureux (Sr., Grand Forks, N.D.) and Tate Maris (Jr., Denver, Colo.) as three-time selections.
UND's other All-WCHA honorees included two-time selections Andrew MacWilliam (Jr., Calgary, Alberta) and Carter Rowney (Jr., Sexsmith, Alberta), as well as first-time recipients Nelson, Taylor Dickin (So., Winnipeg, Manitoba), Derek Forbort (So., Duluth, Minn.), Derek Rodwell (So., Taber, Alberta) and Dillon Simpson (So., Edmonton, Alberta).
The 12th-ranked Sioux host Bemidji State in the opening round of the WCHA playoffs on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (if necessary). The winner of the best-of-three series advances to the Red Baron WCHA Final Five March 15-17 in St. Paul.
Click on the PDF link to view the complete list of 2011-12 WCHA award winners.
Notes: Blood and Nelson were both first-time All-WCHA selections... UND has placed 86 student-athletes on the All-WCHA Academic Team during head coach Dave Hakstol's eight-year tenure, an average of more than 10 per season. Last year UND placed a team-record 16 on the All-WCHA Academic Team.
~ Go Sioux ~Whenever you open a New tab page in Chrome if you’ve been redirected to https://chrome-updates.win/s.html page, without further thinking uninstall or remove the VPN extensions you’ve using. These extensions have been compromised and used by the phishing site to spread malware.
Millions of users are using VPN extensions in Chrome browsers, these are directing users to fake Chrome update page, and also showing ads on sites you visit. Do note, Chrome will never ask you to download update as it will be automatically updated or you will be notified via an icon in the Chrome menu when an update is available. You should be always be downloading and installing updates manually by visiting ‘About Google Chrome’ page in Help menu.
You should be removing these extensions right now, if using
Touch VPN
Hotspot shield
Betternet unlimited Free VPN Proxy
Here is how you can remove them
Click on Chrome Menu > More tools > Extensions,
Select the extension and select ‘Report abuse‘ before clicking ‘Remove’ button.
After that, do the following
Download and run Chrome Cleanup tool, and remove any malicious programs if found and reset Chrome
Download Malwarebytes and perform a scan.
Also Run Adwcleaner.
Are you affected?Think You Know Iowa? Five Things You've Got Wrong
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Call it what you will — an August Occasion, Summery Judgment, Iowa... wa... whatever — the hype is hyperbolic this week as Republican presidential aspirants converge on Ames, Iowa, like storm clouds on an open prairie. The candidates will debate Thursday night at Iowa State University and then be subjected to a straw poll on Saturday.
Watchers are wondering: Will Iowa be the Republicans' Field of Dreams? Will it be a place where hopefuls can build new Bridges of Madison County? Or is Iowa nothing more now than a mythic — but meaningless — kickoff to the 2012 election?
To many Americans, Iowa is a symbol of something. Sometimes wrongly so.
For instance, ESPN sportswriter Rick Reilly notes in a recent post that Iowa is so flat "you can watch a train pull out for three days." And last year then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California said that Iowa is so bland nobody wants to visit there.
Is it true what they say about Iowa? Not always.
So as the nation turns its jaundiced eye toward Iowa, let's take a look at some of the myths and misconceptions about the state:
1. Iowa is flat. Each year, bicyclists ride across Iowa in an annual event called RAGBRAI — the Des Moines Register's Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. "Any participant who has done RAGBRAI can tell you that Iowa isn't flat," says Mark Wyatt, executive director of the Iowa Bicycle Coalition. "First-time participants are wowed by the often hilly terrain of the Loess Hills region or much of the driftless areas of southern Iowa. Sure, there are some flat regions, but Iowa's terrain is surprising — sometimes inducing panic — to the flatlander who thinks a hill is an Interstate overpass."
2. Iowa is boring. Not according to a just-released list of Top Party Schools in America compiled by the Princeton Review. In the past three years the University of Iowa has moved from 12th place on the Review's list to fourth place, just behind the universities of Ohio, Georgia and Mississippi.
3. Iowa is monocultural. "A state that is not open to new ideas would never have given Barack Obama his victory, which propelled him to the presidency," says Des Moines attorney Douglas E. Gross, a former candidate for governor in Iowa and a campaign official for presidential candidates George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. As further evidence, Gross cites the 2009 Varnum decision, in which the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, making Iowa the third state to sanction gay marriages. A Drake University survey of more than 1,700 people, released midsummer, shows that an overwhelming majority of Iowans (61 percent) support same-sex marriage. The same survey reveals an intrastate misconception: Most respondents also imagined that fellow Iowans would look unfavorably on same-sex marriage. They were wrong.
4. Iowans love ethanol. "When people say that in order to win in Iowa you need to pander by paying homage to King Corn — not so much," says J. Ann Selzer, a public opinion pollster in West Des Moines. To buttress her point, she refers to the mid-June release of her survey of people who say they will definitely or probably attend the Republican caucus in February 2012. Only 14 percent said that a candidate's opposition to continued subsidies for ethanol would be a "deal-killer."
5. Iowa is politically irrelevant. Iowa is still an essential component of the kingmaking machinery, says Douglas E. Gross. The state's political scrutiny — through debate, straw poll and caucus — separates wheat from chaff and winners from losers. The unsuccessful candidates, Gross points out, "will drop out after the straw poll and caucus results."
Even the RAGBRAI bicyclists think Iowa is still important. The people of Iowa "pay close attention to the presidential race and take the first-in-the-nation role very seriously," says Mark Wyatt, who lives in Iowa City. And they get to know the candidates up close and personally. "There is a little joke about two ladies talking about who they would caucus for. One of the ladies asked how the other liked a particular candidate. "Well, I thought he was much better the third time I met him."
So you see. Rick Reilly is wrong, and so is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Iowa has its ups and downs, and plenty of people want to visit. In fact, a bunch of well-dressed visitors will be on the dais Thursday to talk about the symbolism of Iowa.My wife was supposed to make chicken fajitas last night, and I spent the last 3 hours and 25 minutes of my work day planning on how exactly I was going to eat the chicken and what type of drink to have with my meal. So I get home, and she did make chicken. But it was chicken kiev. This is bullcrap! I make a...
My wife was supposed to make chicken fajitas last night, and I spent the last 3 hours and 25 minutes of my work day planning on how exactly I was going to eat the chicken and what type of drink to have with my meal.
So I get home, and she did make chicken. But it was chicken kiev. This is bullcrap! I make a simple request, and she usurps my authority like that, right in front of my daughter!
I had trouble even finishing the kiev, with the tears still reddening my eyes. My appetite was totally shot.
All she does all day is take my daughter too and from school in the morning, as well as volunteer at the church. She also drags my five year old neophyte son along too.
The lady is lucky there isn't a quick divorce law in our state. If that was the case, I would be at the church tonight, making future family plans.
Do I approach her for her apology, or should I just wait for her to take the next step?#50
M Ross Perkins
M Ross Perkins
SofaBurn Records [2016]
It was a good year for Dayton, Ohio native M. Ross Perkins. He had a track premiered by the High Times website, an album feature/stream on AllMusic, and recorded both his own solo album and a record with fellow Daytonians Me Time. His self-titled record pulls from a well of influences that include the obvious (The Beatles, CSNY, The Beach Boys) and not-so-obvious (Harry Nilsson, Todd Rundgren, “Lola”-era Kinks). M. Ross Perkins’ debut LP shows that sometimes all you need to make a great record is yourself.
M Ross Perkins: M Ross Perkins [Fire Note Review 11/21/16]
#49
Cymbals Eat Guitars
Pretty Years
Sinderlyn [2016]
It would have been easy to write off Cymbals Eat Guitars with the rotating band members but Pretty Years has the main drive of original member singer D’Agostino which is still full of fresh steps. With more synthesizers roaming in the background the band’s foundation of guitars, drums and bass are still well intact. Cymbals Eat Guitars separates themselves from the so-called dying indie genre and reinvented their music for 2016. Pretty Years was another solid album in their catalog.
Cymbals Eat Guitars: Pretty Years [Fire Note Review 11/17/16]
#48
Alejandro Escovedo
Burn Something Beautiful
Fantasy [2016]
Supported by Decemberist drummer John Moen, guitarist Kurt Bloch (The Fastbacks), Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin on baritone sax and strong vocal performances by Corin Tucker (Sleater-Kinney) and Kelly Hogan (Neko Case and Minus 5), Escovedo’s long fascination with Mott the Hoople style glam rock shines through crunchy rock tracks on his 12th overall album and first in four years. This no holds bar fire keeps Burn Something Beautiful moving as Escovedo celebrates the noisy possibilities of our existential crisis.
Alejandro Escovedo: Burn Something Beautiful [Fire Note Review 11/7/16]
#47
Martha
Blisters In The Pit On My Heart
Dirtnap Records [2016]
Martha is the first UK band that Dirtnap Records has worked with and you can hear how their sophomore record fits in the with the label’s pop punk vibe. The band has a nice balance of pop and punk as their songs can rip and bounce at the same moment. Martha is an English band with a political agenda which gives them substance and drive. Once you wrap it up in songs you can sing along with really loud it completely worked and is volume knob heaven.
Martha: Blisters In The Pit On My Heart [Fire Note Review 11/30/16]
#46
Steve Gunn
Eyes On The Lines
Matador Records [2016]
Gunn’s Matador debut is full of masterful psychedelic guitar groovers. Eyes On The Lines feels like summer, it feels like hanging out with your friends and having your favorite album on while you’re drinking some beers. It has a comfortable, confident vibe, and then suddenly you realize that it’s been twenty minutes and you haven’t said a word to anybody because you got lost in the guitar grooves that Steve Gunn has been laying down. That is what landed this record in the Top 50.
Steve Gunn: Eyes On The Lines [Fire Note Review 6/22/16]
#45
Charles Bradley
Changes
Dunham/Daptone Records [2016]
They don’t call Charles Bradley the screaming eagle of soul with a heart of gold for nothing. Changes housed some of his truest confessions of love and soul this year. Bradley’s delivery is heartfelt, consistent and a straight shot that plays to his honest strengths. If you are looking for just a complete honest performance, Bradley is your man because he has nothing to hide and lays all of his card on the table.
Charles Bradley: Changes [Fire Note Review 5/3/16]
#44
OMNI
Deluxe
Trouble In Mind Records [2016]
Atlanta’s OMNI plays a low-fi indie rock that has the similar post-punk vein of Parquet Courts but with a bit more laid back mood like Spoon. OMNI keep a consistent vocal, guitar, drum and bass but shake it up with an undertone of hooks and running riffs. There is no fire here, there is no last breath, and there are no exploding moments but OMNI make up for it with little treasures that sneak up on you again and again. Deluxe was a true indie sleeper.
OMNI: Deluxe [Fire Note Review 8/11/16]
#43
The Julie Ruin
Hit Reset
Hardly Art Records [2016]
Kathleen Hanna is all you need to say here as her resume includes Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. The Julie Ruin’s new album, Hit Reset, was smart, snappy and sassy. It is full of tight songs that let Hanna just run wild and also allows her to state her world views, teach younger artists a lesson and it highlighted how well written punk songs can go a long way!
Julie Ruin: Hit Reset [Fire Note Review 7/21/16]
#42
Tim Easton
American Fork
Last Chance Records [2016]
Tim Easton is the singer/songwriter that you just can’t stop from delivering a pure heartfelt record. His eleventh, yes eleventh, record American Fork feels and sounds like an artist at the top of his game which has no care in the world except providing the absolute best sonic effort for your ears. Tim Easton is one of the best under the radar songwriters out there and American Fork once again backs it up with quality writing, singing and production. When you add drummer Jon Radford (Justin Townes Earle, Steelism), bassist Michael Rinne (Rodney Crowell), the pedal steel playing of Russ Pahl (Ray Lamontagne, John Hiatt), and multi-instrumentalist Robbie Crowell (Deertick, Turbo Fruits) to the equation, American Fork absolutely could not fail.
Tim Easton: American Fork [Fire Note Review 9/9/16]
#41
Weezer
Weezer (White Album)
Crush/Atlantic Records [2016]
On this tenth studio album (and the fourth with eponymous title), Weezer returned to it’s LA/Southern California roots with a host of songs that played around in territory covered by the Beach Boys. Guess what? It was catchy good! Cuomo & Co. are not just having fun with the music (although clearly they are), lyrically they turned the Beach Boy summer fantasy clichés on their ears, and make obscure references to Darwin’s trip to the Galapagos islands on the ship. It was a summer sing along record that still holds some of that classic Weezer magic today.
Weezer: Weezer (White Album) [Fire Note Review 4/25/16]
#40
Guided By Voices
Please Be Honest
Guided By Voices Inc. [2016]
Guided by Voices returned as a one-man band this go around as Robert Pollard was responsible for playing every instrument. Please Be Honest is a little rough around the edges and is one of those records that takes a few listens to fully appreciate: its hooks aren’t as immediately apparent, and its melodies aren’t as instantly catchy. But, Please Be Honest contains the sprawling “My Zodiac Companion,” which featured one of Pollard’s most effortless melodies in recent memory, so even though this was not the most consistent GBV effort, it did capture that indefinable GBV spirit. That spirit is why it is still Top 50 material.
Guided By Voices: Please Be Honest [Fire Note Review 4/26/16]
#39
Votaries
Psychometry
Wharf Cat Records [2016]
There is a good chance this record would be higher up on the list if we heard it earlier in the year. Votaries is Jackson Scott’s new project, which has now released their first LP, Psychometry, and it is a rather stunning collection of psychedelic drone-rock. Psychometry exceeded expectations with its blend of My Bloody Valentine drone, slithering vocals and psychedelic flourishes that will remind you of artists like Wand and Mac DeMarco. This is truly a grower of an album but once you get bit by the Votaries bug – it is really hard to turn down or turn away!
Votaries: Psychometry [Fire Note Review 11/29/16]
#38
Nada Surf
You Know Who You Are
Barsuk Records [2016]
Nada Surf returned with their first batch of new tunes since 2012 as You Know Who You Are was the group’s eighth LP and marked its first as an official quartet with the addition of the super talented guitarist Doug Gillard (Guided By Voices, Death of Samantha, Cobra Verde). Sometimes it takes time to absorb an album and our intial score on this record was a bit too harsh. With more time and perspective, the album’s bursting moments sound bigger, its angular driving sections are more intense and it really does represent the Nada Surf formula that is hard to replicate. Nada Surf haven’t changed much over the last four years and You Know Who You Are is not only ultra-catchy but just kept getting better and better everytime we put it on.
Nada Surf: You Know Who You Are [Fire Note Review 3/8/16]
#37
White Lung
Paradise
Domino Records [2016]
White Lung have to be one of the more under the radar great female fronted rock bands currently on the scene today. Deep Fantasy (2014) was great and with Paradise they showed that it was no fluke. White Lung is full of piss and vinegar with a touch of melody and memborable hooks. The result was a 29-minute record that blows you away with frontwoman Mish Barber-Way’s commanding vocals and a tight guitar-drum-bass combo roll that never allows breaks. It is harder and harder to find this sound as Paradise is full of essential rock elements. This record is full speed and made cranking up the volume a given!
White Lung: Paradise [Fire Note Review 5/24/16]
#36
Kyle Craft
Dolls Of Highland
Sub Pop Records [2016]
The debut from singer/songwriter Kyle Craft will be one of the more interesting and entertaining records you will hear this year. I really thought Craft would break out more but that was not Dolls Of Highland’s fault. His floating tenor and talented musicianship is uniquely addicting with great storytelling, a 70’s folk/glam sound and surprising song shifts. Kyle Craft is a new artist that is completely worth the hype and Dolls of Highland is a record that deserves your ear! Be on the watch because you probably have not heard the last of him.
Kyle Craft: Dolls Of Highland [Fire Note Review 5/5/16]
#35
Sleepies
Natural Selection
Mirror Universe Tapes [2016]
Wake up people! Sleepies third album needs your attention. This band has a knack for crafting quirky, off-kilter and unpredictable rock. Just when you think you know where a song is going, these guys pull the rug out from underneath you and hit you with something unexpected. Natural Selection finds Sleepies evolving their sound into a hybrid of power-pop-punk mash-up with occasional flourishes of psych-rock. They have a nervous edge to them that has bits of Pixies, Parquet Courts, and McLusky which is just one more reason the Sleepies ended up in the Top 50.
Sleepies: Natural Selection [Fire Note Review 9/7/16]
#34
Fascinating
Dice Game
Quality Time Records [2016]
Fascinating is a trio out of Cleveland, Ohio that is one of many projects from Quality Time Records’ Ricky Hamilton. Fascinating comes at you 100mph with their lower fi post punk that sounds like you are in the best sounding basement in the world. This debut has it all with a raw |
serious concurrent progress on energy infrastructure, to ensure we have the economic means to fund these policies,” Notley said.
“It is time for the Government of Canada to act on this issue. Albertans have contributed very generously for many years to national initiatives designed to help other regions address economic challenges. What we are asking for now is that our landlock be broken, in one direction or another, so that we can get back on our feet.”
READ MORE: Alberta brings in carbon levy legislation, estimates higher cost to families
Watch below: Alberta Premier Rachel Notley says the province will not support Ottawa’s climate change plan unless the federal government makes progress on new oil pipelines to Canada’s coasts. Notley spoke about the topic Monday morning at the Alberta legislature.
Mike Hudema with Greenpeace Canada slammed Notley’s comments, saying the Alberta government “needs to realize that new pipelines aren’t compatible with a climate safe future and there’s no climate leadership to be found in building one.
“It’s incredible that the Alberta government would withhold its support for an action to combat climate change until it gets a new pipeline that further accelerates the problem,” Hudema said in a statement.
“Rather then (sic) pushing to deepen the problem, the government should be focusing on clean energy solutions that get us out of them and create thousands of jobs in the process.”
READ MORE: Pipelines vs. the environment: weighing greenhouse gas emissions against the economy
Alberta’s carbon levy comes into place on Jan. 1, 2017 and will be applied to fuels – such as diesel, gasoline, natural gas and propane – at the rate of $20 per tonne. One year later, the tax will go up to $30 per tonne.
Alberta’s carbon levy will tax home and business heat bills, along with gas at the pumps.
READ MORE: Brad Wall calls Liberal carbon price disrespectful
The province says low and middle-income earners, representing 60 per cent of Alberta households, will get a rebate next year while another six per cent will get a partial rebate. The rates and rebates will rise again in 2018.
Anyone earning more than $51,250 a year or a couple with two children making over $101,500 a year are not entitled to any rebate.
With files from The Canadian Press.The House is expected to vote on the package that merges two bills on Russia. One bill would repeal a Cold War-era provision known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, that linked favorable U.S. tariffs on Russian goods to the right of Jews in the Soviet Union to emigrate. Congress needs to approve "permanent normal trade relations" status with Russia for American companies to receive all of the market benefits from Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization.
Some lawmakers, including Republican Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, says changes in Russia should be recognized.
"Today's Russia is not yesterday's Soviet Union; that is the most important message. Over 20 years of reform have created an imperfect country, yes, but also a new Russia with a relative free press," he said.
The vote comes on the third anniversary of the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in jail after exposing a massive tax fraud. The second part of the legislative package would direct the U.S. government to deny visas and freeze the U.S. bank assets of Russian officials involved in the detention, abuse or death of Magnitsky.
Democratic Representative James McGovern of Massachusetts says the vote on the so-called Magnitsky Act sends an important message.
"It says that here in the United States that we care about human rights, and that it does matter. And that people who commit human rights violations, not just in the case of Sergei Magnitsky, but in a whole range of other cases, there is a consequence. You will be named, people are watching," he said.
McGovern says that the package of merged bills has broad bipartisan support. "This concern about the deteriorating human rights situation in Russia is not a concern just by Democrats or just by Republicans. There was a rare display of unity today," he said.
If the bill passes in the House as expected, it would then go to the Senate, where supporters are optimistic that it will be approved. It then would go to President Barack Obama, who is expected to sign it.
Russia has warned the United States to expect a tough response if Congress passes what it calls "unfriendly and provocative'' legislation. Russian officials have not specified what actions Moscow would take, but say U.S.-Russia ties would suffer.
The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on Friday on a combined bill that would upgrade U.S. trade relations with Russia, while punishing Russian officials for human rights violations.Toronto’s much-vaunted status as one of the world’s “most livable” cities masks the reality that a sizable underclass of people is missing out on the benefits of life in the Big Smoke, according to a new report on the social and economic standing of the city. Published Tuesday by the Toronto Foundation, the “Vital Signs 2015” report surveyed recent data from Statistics Canada, academic research and other sources to analyze the quality of life in the city, based on factors such as access to transit, affordable housing, well-paying and stable jobs, sense of belonging and health.
The Vital Signs 2015 report suggests that the presence of middle-income residents has eroded across much of the city, contributing to an ever-wider gap between the rich and the poor. ( David Cooper / Toronto Star )
“We’re becoming a divided city,” said Rahul Bhardwaj, Toronto Foundation president. “If we need to move forward and maintain our livability, we’ve got to become one place; we need to think in an integrated fashion about how we move this city forward around issues like transit, affordable housing, youth unemployment, child poverty. “It’s only been 17 years since amalgamation,” he said. “We need to come together as one place.” The report suggests that the presence of middle-income residents has eroded across much of the city, contributing to an ever-wider gap between the rich and the poor. Over the past 25 years, incomes for the poorest 10 per cent of city neighbourhoods have gone up by 2 per cent, while the richest 10 per cent have seen their wealth balloon by 80 per cent, the report says. Moreover, in 1990, 68 per cent of census areas in Toronto were defined as middle income; in 2012, that number had shrunk to 32 per cent.
Article Continued Below
This means that, after Calgary, Toronto has the second-widest income gap in Canada. And it’s growing at twice the national average — 96 per cent since 1990. The report also states that, while 20,000 new jobs were created last year, the proportion of people with “precarious work” has jumped. Temporary employment went up by 17 per cent from 2011 to 2014, and less than half of workers in the GTA and Hamilton have permanent, full-time jobs with benefits. At the same time, youth unemployment (defined as workers between 15 and 24 years old) rose from 18.1 per cent to 21.65 per cent in 2014, and average housing prices in the city have tripled since the 1970s. “We see some of the unintended consequences of this,” Bhardwaj said. “Eighty thousand families on the waiting list for affordable housing, a million visits to the food bank” in 2014. Bhardwaj noted the report isn’t entirely bleak. Violent crime has dropped for the ninth year in a row for instance, making Toronto one of the safest cities in the country, with a homicide rate and crime rate lower than the national average, the report says. The city is also considered to be “greening,” Bhardwaj said, with 186 buildings that are LEED certified for their small environmental footprints (up from 59 three years ago). Business and personal bankruptcies were also down 10.2 per cent and 21 per cent respectively from 2013 to 2014.
But even so, Bhardwaj emphasized that the report highlights some glaring challenges that face Toronto and its environs, arguing that better planning across the region and with different levels of government would help address them and include more people in the success of the city.
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Bhardwaj said there are many factors that relate to rising income inequality and that there isn’t one clear solution. “These are very complex issues, and they’re very interconnected,” he said. “There’s never one silver bullet.”A new batch of seasonal events are now available in Gran Turismo 6, featuring front-wheel drive non-race cars, non-race cars, race cars, and the Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe. This week’s challenges are as follows, and remember to stop by our GT6 Seasonal Events forum for in-depth analysis and discussion, and tips and tricks.
All events will be available through June 24th, 2015 at 23:00 GMT/UTC.
Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe Super Lap
Willow Springs Int’l Raceway – Big Willow
550PP Max, Racing/Hard compounds or less
Gold: 198,000cr; Silver: 119,000cr, Bronze: 59,400cr
Gift: GT OLD GENERATION 005-W
Front-Wheel Drive Non-Race Car Super Lap
Ascari Full Track
Normal cars, 450PP Max, Sports/Hard compounds or less
Gold: 88,000cr; Silver: 48,000cr, Bronze: 30,800cr
Gift: GT METALLIC 006-W
Non-Race Car Drift Trial
Willow Springs Int’l Raceway – Big Willow
Normal cars
Gold: 95,000cr; Silver: 57,000cr, Bronze: 28,500cr
Gift: Gold Chrome
Race Car Drift Trial
Apricot Hill Raceway
Racing cars
Gold: 200,000cr; Silver: 100,000cr, Bronze: 60,000cr
Gift: GT PASTELTONE 003-W
GT6 Photomode image by StrayShadow.
More Posts On...Barcelona (CNA).- 72 million euros were contributed to the Catalan GDP by the 2015 Sonar music festival. In 2015, Sonar, along with Sonar+D (the collection of conferences based around the relationship of creativity and technology) brought in 111,000 visitors from 104 different countries. This information was released at the pre-festival press conference on Thursday. Since the creation of a study group in 2004, according to figures presented by Sonar itself, the festival’s economic impact has been steadily growing. Sonar 2016, to be held on the on the 16th, 17th, and 18th of June, is set to include 130 concerts by artists from 28 different countries, based on a “more social” rhetoric. Meanwhile, Sonar+D will include activities in about 180 different formats, with 400 registered participants, and more than 4,000 professionals from 57 countries. Some novelties regarding this year’s edition of the festival are the new peripheral sound stage SonarCar and the one-hour delay of the daytime event Sonar by Day. Additionally, Sonar has published, for the first time, a map showing where creative training programmes are offered throughout the city of Barcelona (including 51 training centres, and more than 700 certificates). As for the confirmed Metro strike, co-director and founder of the festival Ricard Robles noted that there has never been a Metro for the night-time Sonar festival, so they will continue as they “always have”.
The 2015 edition of the internationally-known, Barcelona-based Sonar music festival contributed 72 million euros to the Catalan GDP. Sonar, along with its sister event Sónar+D (created to bring together a combination of activities based on the relationship between creativity and technology), attracted 111,000 visitors from 104 different countries. These figures were released by the organisers of the festival during their press conference last Thursday. The upcoming edition of the Sonar event, to be held on the 16th, 17th and 18th of June, will feature 130 concerts by artists from 28 different countries, and be based on a “more social” rhetoric. Meanwhile, the Sonar+D activities will include about 180 different formats, with 400 registered participants, and more than 4,000 professionals from 57 countries. Among the highlighted novelties for Sonar 2016 are the new SonarCar octagonal stage at the festival, equipped with peripheral sound technology, and the one-hour-delay for the daytime event Sonar by Day, which will take place from 1 pm to 11 pm.
In 2004, Sonar pioneered the development of a study regarding the economic impact of festivals and cultural events in Catalonia and Spain. If, 12 years ago, the contribution of the festival and the activities it generated related to the electronic music industry exceeded 47 million, a decade later, this number has risen to 125 million.
Besides its economic impact assessment, Sonar decided that in 2015 it would extend this analysis to include an appraisal of the festival’s contribution to Barcelona and Catalonia, in order to capture the concert’s overall impact as a global event. To do so, it analyses the economic, social, cultural, media, and innovation contributions of the festival.
The results of this multidisciplinary approach have shown, according to co-director and founder of the festival Ricard Robles, an active projection of the city, which contributes to the structure of the creative industries in Barcelona and promotes social change.
“A global understanding gives us a vision that Sonar is an element of revitalisation of the cultural world, and encourages creative industries”, he noted.
An additional novelty this year is that Sonar has published the first map of the training offering from the creative industries in the city. This map identifies 51 training centres with more than 700 certificates and degrees.
A budget of 7.5 million euros
With an overall budget of 7.5 million euros, a figure similar to last year’s edition, the 23rd edition of Sonar will feature the world premiere of Jean Michel Jarre’s new show, Anohni (i.e. Anthony & the Johnsons)’s first European concert with ‘Hopelessness’ (of a high political content), along with performances by James Blake, New Order, the Black Madonna, John Talabot, Santigold, Flume, Skepta, El Guincho and el Niño de Elche.
This edition also includes special sessions of seven hours of circular sound, with Four Tet and DJ Laurent Garnier playing on the renovated SonarCar stage.
Climate change, mass surveillance, immigration policies and transgender rights are some of the Sonar 2016 artists’ subjects.
The impact of algorithms on the relationship between culture and activism
In parallel with Sonar, Sonar+D will also arrive, bringing a catalyst to the world of creativity, technology and knowledge. The programme of activities for this year encourages interaction between the various protagonists of innovation, through collaboration with the creative community, universities, scientific research centres and the business world.
Thus, the event will offer debates regarding the impact of algorithms in cultural prescription, the challenges artists face to approach technology as a transformative tool, and the relationship between culture and activism and ways to decentralise networks.
Mobility “guaranteed”
In the press conference for the Sonar 2016 presentation, speakers also touched on the possible impact on mobility caused by the planned Metro strike, which was confirmed this afternoon. “We aren’t working on a Plan B, we only have a Plan A, because there has never been Metro mobility at Sonar by night, so we will continue as we always have, for the last 22 editions”, stated Robles.
Meanwhile, the deputy mayor of Enterprise, Culture and Innovation, Jaume Collboni, who participated on Thursday in his first culture press conference, has stated that taxi schedules have been freed up for Saturday morning (although he avoided speaking about Friday morning); Collboni is convinced that mobility “is guaranteed”.epa01176258 (FILE) A file photograph showing the Yushin Maru catcher ship of the Japanese whaling fleet injuring a whale with its first harpoon attempt, and taking a further three harpoon shots before finally killing the badly injured fleeing whale in the Southern Ocean. 07 January 2006. Ignoring international protests, a Japanese whaling fleet 18 November 2007 headed for Antarctica to hunt for some 950 minke, humpback and fin whales. The expedition of six vessels is to last until mid-April, with theJapanese - in keeping with previous practice - declaring that the catch is for "research purposes." EPA/JEREMY SUTTON-HIBBERT/HO EDITORIAL USE ONLY Picture: Aap
AUSTRALIA will seek urgent talks at the "highest levels" of the South Korean government over its plan to begin "scientific" whaling.
Julia Gillard said there was “no excuse” for whaling in any country and expressed regret over South Korea's announcement it planned to follow Japan by hunting the mammals in what it says is the name of scientific research.
“I am very disappointed by this announcement,” Ms Gillard said.
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“There is no excuse for scientific whaling and I have instructed our ambassador in South Korea to raise this matter today at the highest levels of the South Korean government.
“We are making our voices heard today, our ambassador will speak to his counterparts in South Korea at the highest levels of the South Korean government and indicate Australia's opposition to this position.”
South Korea told an International Whaling Commission meeting in Panama overnight that it would seek to resume whaling after banning hunts in 1986 in line with an IWC dictate.
South Korean delegate, Park Jeong-Seok, said that his country would submit its research plans to the next meeting of the IWC in 2013 “in the spirit of trust, good faith and transparency” but stressed “we are under no obligation to inform you in advance”.
“As a responsible member of the commission, we do not accept any such categorical, absolute proposition that whales should not be killed or caught,” he said.
“This is not a forum for moral debate, this is a forum for legal debate.”
Kang Joon-Suk, the head South Korean commissioner, did not provide numbers, areas or a timeline for scientific whaling. But other delegates said they expected South Korea would target minke whales in the Sea of Japan, which Koreans call the East Sea.
Australia has long been opposed to whaling, launching proceedings against Japan in the International Court of Justice over its scientific program. The case is expected to be heard later this year.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott earlier today urged the government to pressure South Korea to abandon its plans for whaling.
“We oppose whaling, we've opposed whaling for a long time,” Mr Abbott said. “We would respectfully say to the South Koreans `don't do it'.”
The Greens also called for a quick response.
“Though they (South Korea) are proposing to call it scientific whaling, in the statement of reasons it's because the whales are eating all the fish,” Greens Senator Scott Ludlam told ABC News 24.
“I hope the Australian government pushes back on it very hard and I think they'll find as well as having cross-party support they'll have very strong popular support.”
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said he was surprised at South Korea's announcement, declaring it a step in the wrong direction.
New Zealand would also raise the issue in talks with South Korean officials.
“I think most people around the world would be very disappointed with the Koreans,” he said.
“I think most people find the concept of killing whales abhorrent and I just can't see why anyone would want to condone or sanction that activity.
“We don't think it's necessary, we don't think it's appropriate, we don't think the stocks could support that and we don't think it will be good for the Korean reputation.”
International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) Australia campaigner Matthew Collis said it would lead to the slaughter of whales when they already face more threats than ever before.
“There is simply no humane way to kill a whale,” Mr Collis said in a statement.
The anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd is vowing to harass South Korean whalers if scientific whaling goes ahead.
The IWC has imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling since 1986 amid fears for the survival of the ocean giants.
Japan has carried out whaling through a loophole in the commission's rules that allow nations to conduct lethal research on whales, with the meat then going to consumption.
Norway and Iceland are the only nations that defy the moratorium entirely. Iceland used to describe its whaling as scientific but shifted its position in 2006 and said it was commercial in nature.
South Korea carried out scientific whaling for one season after the 1986 moratorium went into effect. Whale meat remains popular in the coastal town of Ulsan, which serves remains of whales “accidentally” caught in nets.
The IWC allows the processing of whales that are killed by accident, but activists have long charged that South Korea was turning a blind eye or even deliberately killing whales through nets.
Additional reporting: AFP, Nadia DalyIn Robert A. Caro’s “The Passage of Power,” the most recent volume of his majestic biography of President Lyndon Johnson, he recalls the mental machinations LBJ went through before accepting the vice president slot on the 1960 Democratic ticket led by John F. Kennedy.
LBJ didn’t like the Kennedys, but weighed the merits of the number-two job in relation to his own stalled but ferocious presidential aspirations. He even instructed his staff to look up how many presidents had died during their term since 1860 — five out of 18. Later, when asked why he took the offer, LBJ said, “I looked it up: one out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.”
I imagine Mike Pence making similar calculations before becoming Donald Trump’s running mate last summer. This is not to imply that Trump isn’t “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” as his longtime physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, declared with suspiciously Trumpian hyperbole last year. Instead, Pence was likely banking on the chaotic Trump campaign birthing a calamitous Trump presidency. With the administration buckling under daily accusations and investigations, Pence is acting like a man ready to move on up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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The New York Times recently reported that Pence is chatting with deep-pocketed money men like Charles Koch, and hosting dinners with his wife, Karen, for wealthy donors at the vice president’s mansion. In May, Pence launched his own PAC, the “Great America Committee.” While its name echoes Trump’s campaign slogan, no previous sitting vice president has ever formed such a separate political organization. An unnamed Pence surrogate told NBC News that any chatter that the PAC is meant to bolster the veep’s 2020 plans is misguided.
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That’s probably true. Pence likely envisions his White House scheme coming into focus long before 2020. Behind that frozen smile, he has to despise Trump’s say-and-tweet-anything belligerence, multiple marriages, and situational Christianity. By comparison, Pence comes off as controlled, steely, and sane. He looks like a 1990s basic cable TV version of an American president.
Pence behaves as if he’s immune to all the drama swirling around his boss, or at least sufficiently out of the loop to seem reasonably clean. Yet like others in the Trump administration, he has also lawyered up, hiring his own attorney to represent him in the special counsel investigation and congressional inquiries into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Whether Pence will be ensnared in this administration’s bottomless troubles remains, for now, smoke from a distant fire. This much is already certain: Pence would be an awful president. The man who describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” is a hard-line theocrat with more respect for the Bible than the Constitution. As a US congressman, then Indiana’s governor, he proposed policies that threatened the lives and rights of women and the LGBT community. Even in a reliably red state, Pence’s medieval beliefs, especially a so-called “religious freedom” law to legalize discrimination, were so denounced that the Indianapolis Star ran a front-page editorial under the massive headline “FIX THIS NOW.” The state legislature eventually watered down the anti-LGBT language enough to curtail the economic backlash.
If Trump is ultimately removed from office, it can’t happen soon enough for Pence, who always looks like he’s humming “Hail to the Chief” to himself whenever he walks into a room. Should that happen, Trump’s detractors would need to gird themselves for a new fight with a man whose best qualification for the job is that he’s not Trump. While that’s certainly true, saying Pence would be a better president than Trump is like claiming it’s better to be mauled by a black bear than a brown bear — the disastrous impact on this already reeling nation would be exactly the same.
Renée Graham can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @reneeygrahamEver since I got engaged, planning my wedding has been a financial challenge—especially since I’m both a sentimental and thrifty person. On the one hand, I think: It’s a special day—the one moment in my life when I’ll be surrounded by all of my dearest family members and friends. So why not splurge? But I also think: I don’t have a huge income.
My fiancé and I are saving for a house, so extravagance isn’t necessary. I guess that I don’t really need to tie the knot in wine country and pay $10,000 to $15,000 just for the “location fee,” which doesn’t even include the cost of tables, chairs and linens. Over the last year, I’ve learned the art of striking a balance between splurging on my priorities (a live band, a pretty dress) and resisting the urge to blow the bank on things that are less important to me, like fancy programs and escort cards.
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But no matter what I spent money on, I always found a way to get it for less than full price—whether that meant negotiating with a vendor, waiting for a sale or using “rewards” points—and I managed to save $21,485 in the process! For all those brides- and grooms-to-be who want in on my secrets, check out these 10 tricks that allowed me to cut corners… and still have a dream wedding.
Don’t Be Overly Accommodating
My wedding was originally supposed to be on a Friday evening. I signed a contract with my venue coordinator, and started to spread the exciting news. The next day, when she called to tell me that she had accidentally double-booked my date, I didn’t say, “Oh, that’s OK. Mistakes happen. I totally understand.” Instead, I told her politely (but firmly) that I was disappointed—and that I might take my business elsewhere.
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Sensing that I was serious, and recognizing that she was in the wrong, she offered me a Saturday evening wedding… at a Friday evening price! And that meant a savings of $50 for each of the 229 guests I was inviting. In other words, she was offering me the most desirable day and time of the week for $11,450 less than it usually costs. Although I was nervous about making the deal, since the coordinator had already broken my trust, I decided that it was too good of an offer to pass up.
Wedding vendors juggle as many as four brides per weekend—especially between April and October—and errors aren’t all that uncommon. So if your vendor makes a mistake, remember that you have leverage. There’s no need to throw a tantrum, but don’t be a pushover either. Hesitate before moving forward with the vendor, and gently express the fact that you’re dissatisfied. Then see if that person makes you a better offer. After all, you have nothing to lose.
Borrow Instead of Buy
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Before you purchase something, think about weddings that you’ve been to recently. Is there an item that a past bride wore or used that you might be able to borrow? For example, I always admired my sister-in-law’s veil—it was simple, elegant and just the right length. And since a veil is one-size-fits-all, it can be easily reworn. That saved me about $50.
And when I started ring shopping, I wanted a basic band. My mom said, “If that’s what you’re after, I should show you my original ring. I have a newer one, so I don’t use it anymore.” As it turned out, her band was perfect. I spent $40 getting it resized and polished, still saving roughly $60.
Negotiate, Negotiate, Negotiate
After I booked the venue, my next biggest priority was hiring musicians. My fiancé and I love live music, so we were willing to pay for a band instead of a less expensive DJ. I already had a band in mind that I was obsessed with—I’d seen them perform four times—but the bandleader charged a ton for a Saturday night.
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I said to the bandleader, “We love you guys, but the price is steep. Is there any way you could cut it down a little?” She immediately slashed her price by $2,500. I told her that I’d think about it because it was still above our maximum. A few days later, I called back and asked, “Is that the very best price that you can give us?” She said that she could drop her price another $2,500, if we paid in cash—and she offered to throw in a cocktail hour duo for free, saving us another $800. My reply: “Deal!”
Negotiating was scary because I didn’t want to annoy the vendor and make her not want to work with me. But it was worth it, since I saved a total of $5,800. Bottom line: Never accept a vendor’s first price without trying to negotiate. More often than not, there is wiggle room.
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Work With Your Venue
The wedding business is filled with partnerships. Venues refer brides to certain clients, and clients refer brides to certain venues in return. So you should always ask if a venue has a list of “preferred vendors,” and if you like them, use them, because there’s a good chance you’ll get a deal. By using my venue’s preferred hair and makeup team, the total cost of the package for my bridesmaids and myself was $200 cheaper than normal.
Call on Talented Friends
My fiancé and I were hoping for a personal ceremony, and it occurred to us that one of our closest and wittiest friends is an ordained minister who had already officiated a few weddings. He agreed to marry us at no charge. We are giving him a gift worth $250, but we likely saved $250, since officiants charge around $500.
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We have two other friends who are talented singer-songwriters, and they agreed to play music for free during the ceremony, which will make it much more meaningful. We’re also giving them gifts, but we likely saved about $750 by not hiring pros.
Shop Around
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When you’re choosing a vendor, it helps to have context. The more websites that you visit, calls you make and meetings that you set up, the better sense you’ll have of what prices are “low,” “average,” and “high.”
I visited two florists before making a decision. I liked Florist A a lot more than Florist B. The only problem: Florist A gave me an estimate that was $1,100 higher! I decided to email Florist A and say, “I’d really love to work with your company, but I got an estimate from another florist that’s $1,100 less.” Guess what? Florist A matched that exact price, so I got the quality that I wanted at a much more reasonable cost. A win-win!
Wait for Sales
The earlier you start to plan, the more deals you’re likely to snag—because you’ll have more time to wait for sales. My fiancé and I knew which gifts we wanted to buy for our bridal party members on TheKnot.com within a month of getting engaged. We knew that we had about a year to buy the items, so we held off on purchasing them—and signed up for The Knot’s online newsletter. When December rolled around, we got an email that read: “Year-end clearance sale!” That savings: $120.
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I was also patient when searching for a pair of bridal shoes. I eventually found a gorgeous, sparkly Badgley Mischka pair on sale at Bloomingdale’s—marked down to $150 from $215. If you can, hold out for big holiday sales around Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day. And ask wedding gown salons for a list of their upcoming trunk shows or sample sales.
Pay Attention to the Fine Print
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When you’re planning a wedding, you have to read and keep track of dozens of contracts—many of which are long and detailed. So it’s all too easy to skim them quickly without fully focusing on what you’re signing. Resist that urge and carefully analyze what you’re agreeing to—and make sure to bring home a photocopy of the agreement, in case you need to refer to it later.
While tweaking invitation proofs, my vendor told me that it would cost an additional $180 to use two colors. I thought that sounded different from what the vendor had told me originally, and sure enough, the contract clearly stated that since my invitations were digital, I could use as many colors as I wanted at no additional charge. I pointed that out to the salesperson, who corrected the error. But if I hadn’t spoken up, odds are that I would have been charged extra.
Use Rewards Points
My fiancé is a Hilton HHonors member, thanks to business travel. So we were able to use 160,000 of his rewards points to get a free hotel room for two nights during our Hawaiian honeymoon. That saved us a total of $800. You should also think about using frequent flyer miles and credit card rewards points—you can also rack up a lot of the latter if you pay for all of your wedding-related stuff with your credit card.
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D.I.Y. It
Instead of asking a professional company to print out my ceremony programs and reception place cards, I saved money by printing them myself. The place cards would have cost about $175, and the programs would have been about $400. You can use other D.I.Y. skills to save money, like making your own bouquet out of antique jewelry or artificial flowers. Or design your own party favors by baking your famous chocolate chip cookies or growing your own mini potted plants.
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Learn How to Fake Calligraphy If you want to have beautiful invitations you can use a calligraphy font or learn actual… Read more Read
It’s easy to get sucked into a wedding spending vortex, especially when vendors prey on your emotions by saying things like, “We want to help you create memories that you’ll carry with you for a lifetime.” I had to keep reminding myself that how much I spent wasn’t a reflection of how in love I was nor how strong my marriage would be. These were business transactions, and at the end of the day, all the vendors really wanted was my cash.
When I reflect on every wedding purchase I made over the past year, I can’t believe that all of the small cuts add up to over $21,000. Crazy! And I’m thrilled that I can put that chunk of change toward something a lot less romantic but a lot more practical—a future mortgage.
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10 Ways I Trimmed $21,00 Off My Wedding Budget | LearnVest
Jane Bianchi is a freelance writer in New York. Follow her on Twitter @janebianchi. Want more from LearnVest? Check out:
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12 Fun Ways to Save on Your Wedding
7 Destination Weddings in the U.S
With This Ring, I Thee Save: How Men Buy Wedding Bands
Illustration by Tina Mailhot-Roberge.
Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Tessa.Dwyer has released 21 albums with Thee Oh Sees – and 20 other records that range from German industrial electronics to heavy metal. He gives the backstories about key tracks in his vast back catalogue
‘My motto is: try everything, life is short,” says John Dwyer, the leader of San Francisco garage rockers Thee Oh Sees. “We are growing at every turn. Every day you get a little older, a little closer to the grave – you should taste it all.”
A master of contemporary garage rock, he came into prominence as part of the fruitful San Francisco scene of the early 2000s. Since then Thee Oh Sees have rattled out 21 LPs of bewilderingly consistent quality, under various iterations of their name, and Dwyer has written, recorded and released another 20 albums with other collaborators, encompassing everything from industrial electronics to improvised jazz and death metal.
In a recent interview with Marc Maron, Dwyer talked of his love of Scott Walker and, in particular, a scene in the Walker documentary 30th Century Man when a percussionist is recorded punching a side of beef; Dwyer has similarly tried to master new sounds, be it a flute on Thee Oh Sees’ Dog Poison or electronic bagpipes on his most recent Damaged Bug LP. His career is full of examples of how to explore genres on a shoestring, too – there are projects that are just drums and vocals (the Drums) or a hefty death metal record squeezed out of three people (Dig That Body Up, It’s Alive). We asked him where to begin in his vast back catalogue.
Coachwhips – Bangers vs Fuckers (Narnack, 2003)
Coachwhips rewrote the punk aesthetic for the 21st century. Raw, stripped back to the bones of guitar, drums and keys, their shows were chaotic and rambunctious. Bangers vs Fuckers epitomises that, squeezing 11 tracks into 18 minutes, and was notable for Dwyer’s use of a telephone transducer rather than a microphone. “It was very simplistic and was meant to be bombastic and primitive,” Dwyer says. “Doing it the most direct path was key. The music was so abrasive and forward that no one would have noticed any of our innovation. It was a sort of as-much-as-you-can-squeeze-from-nothing aesthetic.”
OCS – 34 Reasons Why Life |
information, and the threat to the larger university system “was not very serious.” And although the video did not appear to be threatening terrorist action, the administration had to “consider all the possibilities,” he said.
Students—including many fans of the V for Vendetta film—saw the video more as an amusing prank than a threat. Michael Bjork, a Washington State senior, saw the video during his Friday-morning statistics class. His professor and peers were initially confused by the video, he said, but quickly picked up on the hacker’s message. Mr. Bjork said the video and the hacker’s Web site—WSU1812.com—have sparked discussion about university governance, course cuts, and tuition hikes. While Mr. Bjork said he hopes the videos will get students more involved in campus politics, he is afraid that they “will think this is just a cool little prank.”
IT staff members and the campus police are still searching for the person or group responsible for Friday’s breach. According to Mr. Watkins, officials believe the hack may have been an inside job, but they are still following up on leads. Mr. Bjork said students suspect the hacker may be an engineering student because of department-specific criticisms he made in the video against the IT department’s handling of computer upgrades.
Though the investigation is still ongoing, Mr. Watkins said the responsible parties could face “serious charges” for their prank. “Childish pranks just don’t have a place anymore,” he said. “What may have been seen as cute and clever years ago really doesn’t get that kind of reaction today.”Many men struggle with "impostorism," but they're afraid to talk about it. shutterstock Back in the 1970s, researchers coined the term "impostor phenomenon," which describes what happens when you feel like a fraud and fear that you'll one day be exposed.
Common symptoms include worrying that your success in life has been the result of some kind of error and thinking that everyone around you is more intelligent than you.
For years, the scientific community believed that the phenomenon was largely confined to high-achieving women. But many of those same researchers are beginning to realize that feeling like an impostor is a more universal experience and that it could be even more problematic for men.
In her new book "Presence," Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy describes this shift in perception of the impostor phenomenon — also known as the "impostor syndrome" or "impostorism."
After she gave her TED Talk on power posing in 2012, Cuddy said she received thousands of emails from people who reported feeling like a fraud — and about half were men.
Meanwhile, other researchers were discovering that men struggled with impostorism just as often as women. Men, however, were generally more afraid to talk about feeling like a fraud.
Cuddy quotes Pauline Rose Clance, one of the researchers who came up with the term "impostor phenomenon," who said: "In private practice, it wasn't as common for men to talk about it. But when [the survey that diagnoses the impostor phenomenon] was anonymous, men were expressing it to the same degree as women."
Cuddy explains that "men who deviate from the strong-assertive stereotype — in other words, men who are able to express self-doubt — risk experiencing what psychologists call'stereotype backlash': punishment, which often takes the form of harassment or even ostracism, for failing to conform to societal expectations."
As a result, men end up hiding their fears, unable to unburden themselves and seek help.
Even the most successful men can struggle with self-doubt.
Cuddy interviewed the author Neil Gaiman, who said that even after his first few books were published — and some landed on the bestseller list — he still harbored nightmares about someone showing up at his door and telling him he didn't deserve to write every day instead of having a "proper job."
The problem with impostorism isn't simply psychological discomfort: It can lead directly to failure.
Cuddy writes that impostorism causes us to self-criticize constantly, to "choke at the worst possible moments, [and to] disengage — thereby virtually ensuring that we will underperform at the very things we do best and love most."
It helps to realize that many other people feel the same way. Flickr / David Goehring
Unfortunately, as Gaiman's experience suggests, achievements don't necessarily alleviate impostorism. In fact, Cuddy says, they may just make the experience worse, because you have new opportunities to feel like you don't deserve your success.
While there's no magic cure for impostor syndrome, Cuddy suggests that the best way to get rid of it is to be aware of your feelings and communicate them.
This advice could be especially useful for men who are concerned about sharing their insecurities. In opening up, they'll likely realize that many other people feel the same way. Despite what they might think, they're hardly alone.
Moreover, Cuddy says it helps to accept that you'll probably never completely get over your fears of being "found out." Her idea of "presence" ultimately comes down to conquering your fears as they come, in the moment — as opposed to finding an inner source of strength that will last you the rest of your life.
In other words, the next time you start feeling like a fraud at work, you can tap into the knowledge that even your boss probably feels similarly. Hopefully, that idea will help you dismiss those fears and act confidently in the face of whatever challenges come your way.Smokey and the Bandit
It seems like a hundred years ago when redneck bad boys were all the rage, Burt Reynolds was a top star, CB radios were the hot technology with phrases like "10-4" and "good buddy" as familiar parlance, and movie action sequences were achieved by daring stunt men in souped-up cars without benefit of digital enhancement. But it was actually only 25 years ago whenwas a runaway favorite at the drive-in and the second highest grossing film of the year after(1977). The success of the film catapulted Reynolds to the number one box office spot and inspired a string of similar movies and TV shows (not to mention igniting a short-lived CB trend among non-truckers).The plot ofis simple enough and really just an excuse for fast-paced comic action and a crowd-pleasing flouting of the law. Two truckers, Bandit (Reynolds) and Cledus (Jerry Reed), accept a dare to retrieve a truckload of beer from Texas and return it within a specified amount of time. The pair gets the beer, but on the way back, they pick up a hitchhiker, Carrie, who just left her groom, Junior, at the altar. It turns out Junior is the son of Portague County Sheriff Buford T. Justice, so father and son set out on a high-speed pursuit across the Southeast to catch Bandit and company. The success of the film spawned two hit sequels in 1980 and 1983 and a number of similar movies, including(1978),(1981),(1983), and(1984), all starring Reynolds and directed bydirector Hal Needham. Sam Peckinpah did a more dramatic, violent variation on the CB scene in his trucker movie(1978), and Jonathan Demme gentle, appealing comedy about the CB craze,(1977, aka), followed this picture by about four months. The movie also gave rise to the popular TV action-comedy series(1979-1985). Needham also made a series of TV movies in 1994 with Brian Bloom as Bandit.was the directorial debut for former stuntman Needham. It was also the first of nine collaborations with his good friend Burt Reynolds, with diminishing degrees of success. A native of Waycross, Ga., and a former Florida State University football star until an injury ended his athletic career, Reynolds had been kicking around Hollywood almost 20 years before this picture, first as a TV actor. He got his first major break in John Boorman's(1972) when proposed stars Marlon Brando, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart each backed out of the project because of the hazards of filming on the Chatooga River. He then found his niche as a tough guy with a sense of humor, and began honing the "good-ol-boy" image that would serve him so well inwith roles in such movies as(1973),(1975, on which Needham served as stunt coordinator), and(1976, directed by Reynolds).The picture also stars Sally Field - before her Oscars for(1979) and(1984) - as the runaway bride, an updated down-home take on characters in similar predicaments in 1930s screwball comedies. She and Reynolds had a much-publicized love affair around this time (It was enough of a threat to cause Reynolds' future wife, Loni Anderson, to talk him out of co-starring with Field in the comedyin 1991). The part of Carrie earned her a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy.Comic legend Jackie Gleason took on the role of Buford T. Justice, the name of a real Florida Highway Patrolman known to Burt Reynolds' father, who was once Chief of Police of Jupiter, Fla. Gleason and country singer Jerry Reed, who contributed to the soundtrack, returned for both the sequels, but Field came back only for the first one. Thanks largely to the success of the Bandit movies, Reed won a People's Choice Award in 1979 as Favorite Motion Picture Supporting Actor. The jilted groom was played by former movie Tarzan Mike Henry, who must have been delighted to be out of the jungle and in the backwoods. During his short tenure as the Ape Man in the late 60s, Henry was bitten in the face by a chimp (requiring 20 stitches) and suffered from dysentery, an ear infection, and a liver ailment. After three Tarzan films, he sued the producer for maltreatment, abuse, and working conditions detrimental to his health and welfare, and turned down the TV series that eventually starred Ron Ely.Atlanta-area residents may be able to spot some familiar locales in the movie. It was shot in and around the towns of Riverdale and Jonesboro, Ga., as well as in West Palm Beach, Fla., near Reynolds' old stomping grounds. Though one may not think of it today as an Oscar contender,earned a nomination for Best Film Editing due to the complicated action sequences.Director: Hal NeedhamProducers: Mort Engelberg, Robert L. LevyScreenplay: Hal Needham, Robert L. Levy, James Lee Barrett, Charles Shyer, and Alan MandelCinematography: Bobby ByrneEditing: Walter Hannemann, Angelo RossArt Direction: Mark W. MansbridgeOriginal Music: Bill Justis, Jerry ReedCast: Burt Reynolds (Bandit), Sally Field (Carrie), Jerry Reed (Cledus), Jackie Gleason (Sheriff Justice), Mike Henry (Junior), Paul Williams (Little Enos), Pat McCormick (Big Enos).C-96m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.by Rob Nixon
VIEW TCMDb ENTRYHank Grebe via Getty Images Inflammation in the brain may play an important role in the development of Alzheimer's.
Curbing brain inflammation may help people treat and prevent Alzheimer's disease, according to a landmark new study.
Researchers at the University of Southampton in England conducted a series of experiments showing a chemical that reduces neuroinflammation may have the potential to protect against the memory and behavioral changes associated with the disease that affects roughly 5.3 million Americans.
"We have shown a way into tackling the disease, and now it is time to progress this to the clinical setup as soon as possible," said Dr. Diego Gomez-Nicola, the lead author of the study that was published in the journal Brain on Friday.
An overactive immune system can result in chronic inflammation, which previous research has linked to Alzheimer's. These new findings makes it increasingly apparent that inflammation is not a result of Alzheimer's as much as a key driver of the disease.
With an aging population and no new dementia drugs in over a decade, the need to find treatments that can slow or stop disease progression is greater than ever." Dr. Doug Brown, director of research at Alzheimer's Society
In one experiment, the researchers looked at the tissue of both healthy brains and the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease. The brains of people with Alzheimer's had higher levels of microglia, or immune cells, which suggested brain inflammation.
The molecules that regulate the number of microglia became more active as the severity of the Alzheimer's increased, resulting in even higher levels of inflammation.
In another experiment, researchers showed that the chemical known as GW2580 reduced memory loss and behavioral problems in mice with an Alzheimer's-like condition.
They gave these mice an inhibitor to keep microglia from multiplying, and found that the progression of the disease stalled once microglia numbers stabilized. People with Alzheimer's typically experience a break down in communication between nerve cells in the brain, which the inhibitor helped prevent.
The mice treated with a drug containing the GW2580 chemical showed fewer memory and behavioral problems than the untreated mice.
"These findings are as close to evidence as we can get to show that this particular pathway is active in the development of Alzheimer's disease," Gomez-Nicola said in a statement. "The next step is to work closely with our partners in industry to find a safe and suitable drug that can be tested to see if it works in humans."
The findings also suggest that a diet and lifestyle focused on fighting inflammation could be important in preventing Alzheimer's. The researchers noted, however, that it's too early to make recommendations.
Other members of the scientific community are buzzing about the research, calling it "an exciting discovery" and "encouraging."
"With an aging population and no new dementia drugs in over a decade, the need to find treatments that can slow or stop disease progression is greater than ever," Dr. Doug Brown, director of research at Alzheimer's Society, told BBC News.
Also on HuffPost:BERLIN — Lufthansa was once a proud symbol of Germany Inc., standing for the quality and smooth functionality of Europe’s No. 1 economy. But that was before the last week, when a strike by the airline’s pilots stranded more than half a million passengers.
As of Wednesday, 4,461 flights had been scratched over six days, with no end in sight to a dispute over wages for pilots.
The Lufthansa pilots’ union, known as Cockpit, counts just a few thousand members, but they have the power to paralyze the airline as it grapples with myriad challenges, in particular the growing pains of its low-cost Eurowings affiliate.
Lufthansa’s troubles have become Exhibit A in demonstrating how the changes of the 21st century are eating away at decades of cooperation between labor and management that allowed Germany to rebuild and grow after World War II.Beach Slang frontman James Alex has now appeared on two zero-bullshit rock ’n’ roll albums with the word Teenage in the title, released by two different bands 22 years apart. The second one’s out tomorrow. It’s called A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings. Alex is 42 years old. These are the facts.
Beach Slang sing boozy, ecstatic, radically vulnerable, gutter-transcendent hymns to beer-lit punks of all ages; every line of every song would make a perfect yearbook quote for those seething, yearning outcasts so loathed and invisible their pictures aren’t in the yearbook at all. “Play me something that might save my life.” “Your arms are a car crash I want to die in.” “When I die, bury me in the clothes of my youth.” “Don’t be afraid to want to be alive.” It’s absurd, and overwhelming, and suspicious in its invigorating eagerness to rouse and soothe and reverse-age you. It’s all pretty fantastic. These are the feelings.
The visual aesthetic here boils down to “cigarette smoke billowing from the plump lips of young, alluring dirtbags.” It is not ineffective. The best line in this song is “YEAHHHHHHH!”
Based in Philadelphia, Beach Slang became a big whoop last year thanks to their debut album, The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us, which crams 10 celestial dive-bar anthems into 26 minutes. Three chords, one amp-volume setting (guess), and a discomfiting amount of truth. Notable song title: “Too Late to Die Young.” Notable chorus: “We are young and alive.” Swooning climax: a dumpster-prom theme called “Porno Love.” (The Things We Do is a tighter, more desperate, and slightly better album than A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings. That’s the opinion.)
It’s also a booze-fueled fount of shameless, exhilarating pandering to college-radio DJs of a particular age. (Mid-30 to early 40s, charitably.) “I feel like they made this record at me,” went the common sentiment among those who fell in love but felt a little guilty about being such easy marks for something so … Springsteenian. Rockist, even. Same deal for the Canadian duo Japandroids, whose exuberant and unabashed and fairly self-explanatory 2012 record Celebration Rock is still the 21st century’s gold standard for this uneasy and irresistible sort of thing.
This particular genre’s North Star — or the fiery, interstellar, planet-size-beer-kegs collision inevitably mistaken for a star by drunk, lonesome Midwesterners — is the Replacements, who were a going concern during Alex’s actual teenage years. He first hooked up with ’90s cult Pennsylvania pop-punks Weston, playing guitar on their ramshackle 1994 debut A Real-Life Story of Teenage Rebellion (that’s the first album) and a few more records of great consequence to certain native Pennsylvanians and little consequence to anyone else. (You had to be there. That’s a fact.) After the band broke up, Alex trudged through a protracted dark period he recently described to Stereogum thusly:
The three most important words there are “realness,” “permanence,” and “smooching.” Alex finally went straight (wife, kid, graphic-design gig) and revved up Beach Slang more or less simultaneously, and the band consequently has that strange and lovely indie-rock-as-classic-rock feel of being instantly nostalgic for itself, of feeling wistful about having done the things your lyrics suggest you’re currently doing. Such as being young, going nowhere, idolizing the rock bands your own band now devotedly emulates, etc. (Fans of the Hold Steady know this paradox well: Alex basically collapses the distinction between the cult-classic lyrics “Lord, to be 17 forever” and “Lord, to be 33 forever.”) And so now, when he sings, “The gutter’s alive / With young hearts tonight,” you get to decide if he’s in the gutter, too, or if he’s one of the young hearts, or both, or neither. You get to decide if you believe him.
As choruses go, “I’m an atom bomb / Tick-tick-tickin’” is immediately believable, no problem. (Side note: Get a load of that video dude’s eyebrows.) Here’s the thing about worshiping the Replacements. As you can learn in Bob Mehr’s exhaustive and excellent new band bio, Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, the reason Paul Westerberg and Co. were so credible as shambling coulda-been-rock-star fuckups is that they were actual fuckups, prone to self-destruction, self-sabotage, self-loathing, self-annihilation. Pickled and broke and miserable and doomed. It’s one of those books where every record-store rat and studio engineer and label goon seems to get a three-page backstory, but that context is so rife with broken homes and mental illness and alcoholism that the accumulated weight is as crushing as it is poignant. The Replacements’ story doesn’t begin well and mostly ends worse; the only triumph in a song like “Bastards of Young” radiates from the song itself. Which only magnifies both the misery and the triumph.
So it’s bracing in interviews when Alex alludes to his own dark, isolated childhood or admits that even the song called “Punks at the Disco Bar” is “about my dad. It’s always about my fucking dad.” At first blush Beach Slang might sound very simple, very derivative, very naive, very “How do you do, fellow kids?” But a lot of that turns out to be a defense mechanism. And an offense mechanism. Prose as purple as its bruises.
Alex says A Loud Bash of Teenage Feelings is mostly written from the perspective of fans he met while touring behind The Things We Do to Find People Who Feel Like Us, which means that his second album is about living vicariously through the people who lived vicariously through his first album about living vicariously through his younger self. The best song is called “Hot Tramps.” “I’m with you,” Alex intones, on a song called “Future Mixtape for the Art Kids.” “Are you with me?” For zero-bullshit rock ’n’ rollers, Beach Slang sure do bring up a lot of weird, neurotic questions. But that’s the only one that matters. For however long you can dial in, you’re only as young as he feels.An anti-immigration group on Facebook has been widely mocked - after its members confused empty bus seats for women wearing burkas.
Users of the Norway-based Fedrelandet Viktigst group on the social networking site reacted to the photo posted by one member who asked: “What do people think about this?”
The image, showing around six empty seats on a bus, attracted comments such as ‘frightening’, ‘tragic’, and ‘scary’, according to The Local.
Others claimed it was evidence of the ‘Islamification’ of Norway.
One member of the group added: “It looks really scary, it should be banned. You never know who is under there - could be terrorists with weapons.”
Another demanded: “Get them out of our country, they look like collapsed umbrellas. Frightening times we are living in.”
Screenshots of the photo and accompanying comments from the group were posted by Sindre Beyer, with the caption: “What happens when a photo of some empty bus seats is posted to a disgusting Facebook group and nearly everyone thinks they see a bunch of burkas?”
Beyer told Nettavisen: “I’m shocked by how much hate and fake news is spread [in the group],” adding that he had been following the page for quite some time.
“The hatred that was displayed towards some empty bus seats really shows how much prejudices trump wisdom. I shared the post so that more people can see what is happening in the dark corners of the internet.”
Rune Berglund Steen, head of the Norwegian Centre Against Racism (Antirasistisk senter) told Nettavisen that the responses illustrated how quickly people can jump to conclusions.
Steen said: “People see what they want to see and what they want to see are dangerous Muslims. In a way it’s an interesting test of how quickly people can find confirmations of their own delusions.”On the subject of Iran's nuclear programme, he said that Iran would "resist" Western bullies attempting to prevent the country acquiring civilian nuclear technology, which western nations are fearful could be used to develop nuclear weapons.
'Defending Iran's rights'
Refering to the US and its allies he said: "They oppose other nations' progress and tend to monopolise technologies and to use those monopolies in order to impose their will on other nations."
He said that Iran "will continue to defend its rights".
"The Iranian nation is for dialogue. But it has not accepted and will not accept illegal demands."
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst in New York, said: "This speech was quite high on generalities and low on specifics.
"It was almost deflated of any particulars. And certainly not approaching any one of those controversial issues that we live today - whether it's the economy, or the question of the Gulf or Iraq."
Bishara said Ahmadinejad was "trying his best to present an Islamic discourse... to say that if [the West] is not going to respect, legally speaking, different questions that concerns the international community, he is going to lean back on such things as religious discourse."
Economic worries
But the global financial turmoil dominated the assembly with Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, urging world leaders to put aside their national interests and show "global leadership" to alleviate world poverty.
Ban Ki-moon focused on global
economic problems [AFP]
He said the economic problems could have a "very serious negative impact" on the capacity of rich nations to help others achieve their targets - primarily to reduce extreme poverty by 50 per cent.
"We face a global financial crisis. A global energy crisis. A global food crisis. Trade talks have collapsed, yet again," Ban said as he opened the assembly.
"We must think about how the world economic system should evolve to more fully reflect the changing realities of our time."
The secretary-general said that the world also faced a "development emergency".
"We must galvanise global awareness and global action, with a special focus on Africa."
He criticised the intenational community in assiting with Africa's development, saying it had "not matched words with deeds".
Ban also urged stronger action to combat the crisis in Somalia and highlighted the problems for the UN to meet deployment deadlines in Darfur, Sudan.
"If ever there were a call to collective action - a call for global leadership - it is now."
'Urgent timeframe'
President Bush also spoke to the assembly on Tuesday, saying that he realised that other nations were watching the US to see how they deal with the economic crisis.
He said that he was confident that the US would act "in the urgent timeframe required" to prevent broader problems.
Talking about the $700bn bail-out package proposed by his administration to fortify the US economy, Bush said: "I can assure you that my administration and our congress are working together to quickly pass legislation approving this strategy."
Al Jazeera's Sarah Brown in New York, said meetings at the assembly would also address the Middle East conflict and the Iranian nuclear crisis, among other topics.
Brown said that with the recent conflict in Georgia and the situation in Iran would mean that the atmosphere at the assembly would be tense.
Other speakers on Monday's session included Nikolas Sarkozy, the French president, and who urged greater regulation of financial markets.
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, urged for reform of the UN to give it greater power to deal with global economic and security crises.Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a lost city atop a hill on the great Thessalian plains of Greece, some 300 kilometers (190 miles) north of Athens. Dating back to around 2,500 years ago, the settlement is largely buried underground, which is why researchers in the area had failed to spot it until now.
While exploring the ruins of a village called Vlochós on the Strongilovoúni hill, researchers came across the remains of towers, walls, and city gates belonging to an ancient town that had previously been considered little more than a backwater, largely due to the fact that no other relics could be seen on the ground.
Fortress walls, towers and city gates are clearly visible from the air. SIA/EFAK/YPPOA
Yet after taking a closer look, the team quickly realized that they were standing on the site of a former metropolis.
“'We found a town square and a street grid that indicate that we are dealing with quite a large city. The area inside the city wall measures over 40 hectares [99 acres],” explained team leader Robin Rönnlund in a statement.
“We also found ancient pottery and coins that can help to date the city. Our oldest finds are from around 500 BC, but the city seems to have flourished mainly from the fourth to the third century BC before it was abandoned for some reason, maybe in connection with the Roman conquest of the area.”
Fragment of red-figure pottery from the late 6th century BCE, probably by Attic painter Paseas. SIA/EFAK/YPPOA
Rather than dig up the surrounding turf in order to excavate the remains of the city, the researchers plan to use radar to view the subterranean relics without causing any damage.
“What used to be considered remains of some irrelevant settlement on a hill can now be upgraded to remains of a city of higher significance than previously thought,” said Rönnlund, adding that “the fact that nobody has never explored the hill before is a mystery.”WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry is threatening to cut off all contacts with Moscow over Syria, unless Russian and Syrian government attacks on Aleppo end.
The State Department says Kerry issued the ultimatum in a Wednesday telephone call to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Kerry’s spokesman, John Kirby, says Kerry expressed grave concern over Russian and Syrian government attacks on hospitals, water supplies and other civilian infrastructure in Aleppo.
He says Kerry told Lavrov the U.S. holds Russia responsible for the use of incendiary and bunker-buster bombs in an urban area.
Kerry told Lavrov the U.S. was preparing to “suspend U.S.-Russia bilateral engagement on Syria,” including on a proposed counterterrorism partnership, “unless Russia takes immediate steps to end the assault on Aleppo” and restore a cease-fire.Judging by the imperial magnificence of the Elysee Palace, France has never ceased to be a world power. Rooms with five-meter (16-foot) ceilings, gilded chandeliers, candelabras and elaborate stucco work are guarded by members of the Republican Guard, who parade in front of the palace gates with their plumes of feathers and bayonets.
The man in charge, on the other hand, seems lonely and small in his palace. He is surrounded by court ushers who make sure that glasses and writing sets are perfectly arranged, and when he enters a conference room, they call out grandly "Monsieur le Président de la République!", to give his attendants time to stand up for him.
François Hollande never intended to become a king, but rather a "normal president," as he put it, and now he has to play one nonetheless. He occasionally seems like an actor who has somehow ended up in the wrong play.
Outside, throughout the country, unemployment reaches new highs each month, factories are shut down daily, hundreds of thousands take to the streets to protest gay marriage, and the French are increasingly outraged over a barrage of new political scandals as the country hovers on the cusp of waning global relevance. Yet this roar of dissatisfaction doesn't permeate the walls of Hollande's world. Here, it is quiet, very quiet.
Shortly after moving into his new official residence, Hollande warned his staff that in a palace it is easy to feel protected, and he insisted that he did not want to be "locked in." But that is precisely what is happening, as evidenced by the documentary film "Le Pouvoir" (The Power), which recently debuted in French theaters and whose creators accompanied Hollande during the brutal first eight months of his presidency.
Elite in a Bubble
They paint an image of a likeable man who seems to spend a lot of time rewriting speeches prepared by his staff. As you watch him in the movie, you start to wonder: Does he do all the important things when no one's watching or does he really spends most of his time on the unimportant? However, the main subject of the film is not the president, but rather the reality bubble in the country's top echelons. Not just Hollande, but also most of his cabinet ministers, still reside in Parisian city palaces that predate the French Revolution, and perhaps that's a problem.
A justice minister who spends her days in the Hôtel de Bourvallais on Place Vendôme, next door to the Hotel Ritz, a culture minister who goes to work at the magnificent Palais Royal, a prime minister whose offices are in the grand Hôtel Matignon and a president who resides at the Elysee Palace, they all need a great deal of inner strength to avoid losing their connection to reality. It's a difficult proposition, because Paris's settings of power convey the message that France is big, rich and beautiful.
But the mood hanging over the country is depressed. France is in the midst of the biggest crisis of the Fifth Republic. It feels as if the French model had reached an end stage, not just in terms of the economy, but also in politics and society. A country that long dismissed its problems is going through a painful process of adjustment to reality and, as was the case last week, can now expect to be issued warnings by the European Commission and prompted to implement reforms.
France's plight was initially apparent in the economy, which has been stagnating for five years, because French state capitalism no longer works. But the crisis reaches deeper than that. At issue is a political class that more than three quarters of the population considers corrupt, and a president who, this early in his term, is already more unpopular than any of his predecessors. At issue is a society that is more irreconcilably divided into left and right than in almost any other part of Europe. And, finally, at issue is the identity crisis of a historically dominant nation that struggles with the fact that its neighbor, Germany, now sets the tone on the continent.
The French economy has been in gradual decline for years, without any president or administration having done anything decisive about it. But now, ignoring the problems is no longer an option. The economy hasn't grown in five years and will even contract slightly this year. A record 3.26 million Frenchmen are unemployed, youth unemployment is at 26.5 percent, consumer purchasing power has declined, and consumption, which drives the French economy, is beginning to slow down, as well.
There is a more positive side of the story, which sometimes pales in the face of all the bad news. France is the world's fifth-largest economy, and interest rates for government bonds have been at historic lows for months. The country is far from being on the verge of bankruptcy and cannot be compared with Italy or Spain, and certainly not with Greece. Nevertheless, France is ailing. And looking weak is something the French themselves hate more than anything else.
Consequences of French Decline
This mixture of factors could jeopardize the entire European structure. For one thing, if France continues to decline, more and more responsibility will be shifted to Germany. "Germany cannot carry the euro on its shoulders alone indefinitely," writes Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff. "France needs to become a second anchor of growth and stability."
Another problem is that the European Union is losing its standing in France at a more dramatic pace than in any other EU member state. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the public approval of the EU in France has declined from 60 to 41 percent in only a year. This might be owed to the uncomfortable fact that Brussels is increasingly treating France as a problem and not as one of Europe's supporting columns, and many French citizens have started to see the terms 'Brussels' and (German Chancellor) 'Angela Merkel' as synonymous.
But is the EU to blame for the France's crisis? Can Europe truly be held responsible for the fact that the government is behind 57 percent of total economic output in France? That government debt has risen to more than 90 percent of the gross domestic product? Is it Germany's fault that, for decades, French administrations have failed to make the country's business environment more competitive? And has anyone in Brussels demanded that a fifth of all workers in France be employed by the government?
France may be ailing, but it still has a lot going for it. It is home to successful major corporations, such as the luxury brand group LVMH, tire manufacturer Michelin and many pharmaceutical companies. The country has an efficient healthcare system, the highest birthrate in Europe and healthier demographics than Germany, fostered by tax breaks for families, the acceptance of working mothers as a fact of life and a corresponding system of full-day childcare.
But the French welfare state costs money, a lot of money. The country has neglected to make decisions on how much its individual achievements are worth, and how certain luxurious aspects of life it has come to appreciate could be modified to conform to not-so-luxurious realities, including the 35-hour workweek, a retirement age of 60 for some workers and unemployment benefits of up to 6,200 ($8,122) a month. As a result, there is a sense of gridlock, and a sour public mood is following on the heels of bad economic news.
Stuck in Past Grandeur?
France has an illustrious past, of which it is justifiably proud, but its historic success also prevents it from clearly recognizing the need for reforms. The omnipotent, bloated central government, which also controls the economy, should have been reformed long ago. The privileges of the Paris political elite are so outdated that they have become intolerable, and many bribery and corruption scandals are undermining an already fragile political legitimacy.
It cannot be accidental that France's leading politicians increasingly refer to their country as the "grande nation." Since the election campaign, President Hollande has hardly missed an opportunity to invoke the nation's greatness. With some dialectical malice, one could see this as evidence that France's greatness is now becoming a relic, but it certainly reflects the self-hypnosis of a nation whose stature is in the process of shrinking.
"Our soldiers demonstrated our role," Hollande said recently in a major press conference at the Elysée Palace, as he praised one of his rare successes, the military operation in Mali. "Namely that of a great nation that can influence the balance of power in the world."
There is an increasingly stark contrast between the feigned grandiosity of the president's appearances and the faintheartedness of his daily actions. The obstructionism and inflexibility that prevail throughout the entire country can only be eliminated through deep-seated renewal. But so far Hollande, who promised "change" in his campaign, has been more conspicuous for his hesitation than his courage.
Since this spring, Hollande has been viewed by most commentators as the nice "Grandpa" in the Elysee Palace, who lacks the gumption to address the country's serious structural problems. The French constitution grants the office of the president more power than is allotted any other leader of the Western world. Besides, his Socialist Party holds significant majorities in the National Assembly, the Senate and even in regional governments.
In other words, Hollande could get down to business on any day he chooses. He could reform the country as he wished, if only that were his objective. But no one -- not citizens, not journalists and possibly not even his cabinet |
that informed without compelling.
It has been a long time since I have read a Bill Bryson book so when I happened upon an opportunity to win an ARC of, I jumped at the chance. Bryson is nothing if not prolific. He cranks them out. C-SPAN’s Book TV has an eight minute interview with him about his most recent effort: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEx_GC... Since I received the ARC ofjust a month before publication, I was not able to read the entire 448 page book prior to its publication. But I do want to say a few words about it even after publication since Bill Bryson is, for me, a Blast from the Past with this summer of eighty-six years ago. Two central events of the book are the Lindbergh flight from NYC to Paris and Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs. The Prologue covers many of the unsuccessful efforts to fly between Paris and NYC. But many more events are covered in this three-ring circus of a book. The action never stops. It would be hard to say that many of these tabloid news events warrant so much attention so many decades later. However, the entertainment value is high. If you are a Bryson aficionado, you don’t want to miss this one.Bryson, you will not be surprised to hear, was not totally fixated on the year 1927. He covers some of the family history of Charles Lindbergh. He writes of the lives and presidencies of a snoozing Calvin Coolidge and a self-aggrandizing Herbert Hoover. Coolidge was actually President in 1927. As the Commerce Secretary Hoover was appointed the head of relief efforts in response to the unprecedented Mississippi River flood of 1927 during which the great river was in flood stage for over 150 days.U.S. population in 1927: 120 millionU.S. v. Sullivan: 1927 Supreme Court case that established the legality of the IRS pursuing tax evasion charges against criminals for ill-gotten gains.The Spirit of St. Louis took off from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, NY at 7:52 am on May 20, 1927 and landed in Paris 33½ hours and 3600 miles later.Bryson detours from Lindbergh for a while to begin to tell us the story of the life of Babe Ruth who was born in 1895 leaving some distance to be covered before we arrive in the signature year of 1927. But even diversions have their own diversions in this homegrown history of many years rolled somehow into one. The segues from the Spirit of St. Louis to Shipwreck Kelly to The House that Ruth Built to radio coming of age are not always smooth.And as Babe Ruth is sold by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees, we slip nimbly into pages about New York City.Prohibition in the U.S. lasted thirteen years. One of those years was 1927 so Prohibition gets a chapter in the book. There is no lack of stories about Prohibition and Bryson tells many of them – poisons being added to some forms of alcohol and padlocked establishments having customers enter through the back door are a couple of examples. The phrase “giving a hand’ (applause) to an entertainer was allegedly coined during Prohibition and was probably uttered several times in the summer of 1927!You may think that with four seasons in a year, each would have three months. You will not be surprised, I am sure, to learn that for the purposes of his book Bill Bryson extended the summer of 1927 to five months – May through September. I can only wonder if, when asked about this, Bryson said, “So sue me!” The connections of the book to the summer of the title are not always self evident. You just have to go along for the ride.The flight of Commander Richard Byrd from New York to Paris weeks after Lindbergh is given some considerable attention although Byrd arrived in Paris by train since the plane was forced to land in the ocean along the coast of France. Evidence is given of serious misinformation given by Byrd and his chief pilot Bert Acosta about the trip; foremost is the fact that the co-pilot Bernt Balchen actually did almost all of the actual piloting as a result of the lack of skill of the pilot Acosta who knew nothing about flying on instruments, an integral part of the journey.Cramming events of other years into 1927 continued with abandon:If you like tabloid journalism and “Ripley’s Believe It or Not,” I can almost promise that you will like. Although it is somewhat long, it’s an easy read that seems determined to amaze and amuse. Frippery may be too strong a word but no one should expect too much of consequence from this book. The ARC I read was missing the bibliography and notes from the end, additions that may be of value to those who are interested in pursuing the historical aspects of the book. But I think you will likely findmore entertaining than stimulating.More weak tangents to 1927: boxing and Fordlandia. Fordlandia was a failed Henry Ford development in Brazil in 1928. There were some well known boxing matches in that era, but, again, a summer 1927 connection is a stretch. But, hey, it’s just the title of the book so I probably shouldn’t be so demanding about the content as long as it is interesting. Much of it is interesting without dwelling overlong on many of the topics. We are talking blurbs here of a page or two for those with a short attention span. History in the form of birdshot.The August segment of the book leads off with a twenty page story of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian anarchists convicted of a payroll robbery and murder that occurred in Massachusetts in 1920 and culminated in their execution in August of 1927. After dipping briefly into the announcement of President Coolidge that he will not to run for re-election in 1928, we find ourselves in the story of the carving of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Zip, zip, zip. We move quickly.Silent films turned to talkies in the 1920s and Clara Bow morphed from the It Girl to the has-been because her voice just would not do on screen – “the vocal equivalent of nails on a blackboard.”Few difficult questions are asked in. However, one question directly related to the book was asked: “Were Sacco and Vanzetti innocent?” Bryson equivocates and vacillates. He names some who thought they were guilty and boldly states:For himself, Bryson says,He did not specifically note the positions of the tabloids that were often evidently a trusted source. This is one place I wish I had the final edition complete with notes. I am sure Bryson must have been more forthcoming there. But, here again, I am probably taking this book too seriously. It is not investigative journalism by any means. To call it “fluff” is too cruel for me but I am sure that some would use that appellation!In fairness I should note that serious consideration and topics are not totally absent from. In the section titled “Summer’s End,” the Ku Klux Klan and eugenics are examined in some detail. The information about the eugenics movement in the 1920s and 1930s is chilling. In 1927 a U.S. Supreme Court case (Buck v. Bell) was decided 8 to 1 in favor of eugenic sterilization.The flood of copyright notices in Canada continues to attract attention and generate concern among many Canadians. I’ve posted several pieces on the issue, including a recent post on what recipients should consider if they receive a notice. I still receive daily emails from notice recipients, with some admitting that they quickly paid the settlement in a panic and now fear that they may have opened the door to even more settlement demands. In response to this copyright abuse, I was pleased to participate in an open letter signed by many groups calling on the government to fix the loopholes in the notice-and-notice system by prohibiting the inclusion of settlement demands within the copyright notices.
A recent Metro article suggests that the government is well aware that the system is being misused. Industry Minister James Moore’s press secretary Jake Enwright emphasizes that “there is no obligation for Canadians to pay these settlements” and that the current system is “not a notice-and-settlement regime.” Those are encouraging words that come as close as the government can to tell consumers that it does not believe that settlements should be included in the notices and to hint that it does not expect Canadians to pay.
With CEG TEK, the primary notice sender, leaving little doubt that it intends to continue, it falls to the government to address the problem. Enwright says that the government is waiting for the industry to identify an appropriate solution, but the real problem lies with the absence of regulations that prohibit the inclusion of settlement demands within notices that were designed to educate, not bully Canadians into paying pricey settlements. The government often talks about a copyright balance, yet it has decided to move ahead with copyright term extension without any consultation following backroom lobbying from the recording industry and is somehow is content to leave thousands of Canadians without protection against misuse of the very system it created."The Freak" may not possess the same caliber of stuff he used to earn two Cy Young awards early in his career, but right-hander Tim Lincecum is still drawing interest from teams, including his former Bay Area club.
Lincecum, who will likely throw this weekend and showcase himself to 20 clubs next week, is drawing interest from the San Francisco Giants, reports Jon Heyman of MLB Network.
Heyman cites an observer who said Lincecum was spotted pitching at the Giants spring training complex in Arizona and recently hit 90-91 mph during a dust storm.
Lincecum has already drawn interest from the Baltimore Orioles and San Diego Padres at points throughout the offseason, but the hurler remains jobless.
The 31-year-old is close to a full recovery from September hip surgery and could slot into the Giants' bullpen, a role he's had brief experience in during his career, making seven relief appearances in 2014.
Lincecum made 15 starts for the Giants last season, notching a 4.13 ERA and 1.48 WHIP in 76 1/3 innings of work.
Over the course of his nine years in the bigs, the four-time All-Star owns a record of 108-83 with a 3.61 ERA, while striking out 9.3 hitters per nine innings.We’re kicking off Game of Thrones season 4 with one doozy of an awesomesaucey interview: the one and only Kristian Nairn.
Don’t let the warm eyes fool you, this is one wickedly funny dude. If I had to describe him in two words it would be “Irish wry,” because he never seems to miss a chance to offer any humorous offhanded remark about anything he finds funny–some of which are pretty ribald–and half of which you’re not sure if he’s quite serious. I tend to think he likes to keep us guessing that way. But he has a good heart and is, indeed, a lovely person.
Kristian was raised in Belfast, and still calls that lovely city home. Before he was more worldly renowned as that lovable Hodoring Hodor, he was a professional DJ–and is still a professional DJ to this day. (He just finished a whirlwind tour that had him spinning in the U.S. one night and then was doing it again back in Belfast the very next. I have no idea when he sleeps, because anyone taller than 5′ 10″ shouldnt be able to sleep on airplanes ever. I know I can’t. No idea if Kristian can.)
Fire And Blood: Let’s start with music first, since that was your first big thing. What musical acts did you like as a teen?
Kristian Nairn: I was a total metalhead as a teen. I still love it too. Back then I was into everything from proper glam stuff like Poison, etc, right through to thrash and death metal like Sepultura and Obituary! The ones that have really stayed with me are ones like The Cult and Danzig… although I still love a bit of obituary grind!
FaB: Never liked Poison, though C.C. DeVille was a passable guitarist. If I swayed toward glam metal, it was maybe Cinderella, but they were really just a rock/blues band masquerading as hair metal. The Cult was wicked good. Rise still gets me going. Anyway, you were an extremely popular DJ in Belfast long before you were Hodoring around, and were (and still are) a staple at Kremlin. What are some of your performance influences?
Kristian: For being a DJ, it’s really anything than can provoke an emotional response for me. And thats a very personal thing. At a gig recently in Pensacola Florida, as I was standing looking over the crowd, it dawned on me that it feels like I’m shooting emotional laser beams out into the crowd. When they respond, it’s the most amazing feeling, and conversely, when a crowd doesn’t get it, it can be like “WHY DONT YOU GET WHAT I’M GETTING?!” We all have gigs like that though, but thankfully more of the former.
I guess it’s kind of funny that maybe growing up you have this dream of being a DJ, where you learn to express yourself and your emotions through music and not words, and then you become an actor in which you are best known for playing a character that has to express all of his emotions using only one word.
Kristian: My first musical dream was to be a guitar player, and believe me, it’s still in there. I haven’t really put it out there yet, but I’m a pretty damn good guitarist, if I say so myself. I studied players like Yngwie Malmsteen, Ty Tabor, Steve Vai, Zakk Wylde, Jake E. Lee, so much, that I could pretty much play on a level with them at one stage, but sadly, at that point, no one really was interested in hearing that from a guitarist anymore.
Tell us about your first paid DJ gig.
Kristian: I was already working in Kremlin at the time (not as a DJ), and one of the DJ’s called in sick, so they were kinda stuck. I remember rocking up with my CD’s all in a toolbox, haha. Was a good night obviously, as since then, I basically haven’t stopped!
If you could describe your DJ-ing style in one sentence, what would it be?
Kristian: Chunky, Deep, Dark, Always with Attitude.
On to what’s most important – no, not Game of Thrones, but rather World of Warcraft! Was WoW your first roleplaying game?
Kristian: Haha. Yeah, it was. I remember being completely lost at first – being killed by a wolf in Elwynn Forest, and thinking “screw this.” Then not playing for a month, but slowly I returned, and from then it’s had a grip on me HARD.
Hey, I enjoy WoW on occasion (currently more into FFXIV, but hey). I only do the roleplaying servers, however.
Kristian: I love the game. The characters, the lore, the places in the game. I DREAM about the places in the game as if they are real places. On the day the game is switched off eventually ( *shudder* )… it feels so weird and kinda terrible that I might never see those places again.
I’ve seen some things at the Lion’s Pride Inn in Elwynn Forest that I never want to see again.
(Conversely, scenes like that are the BAD part about playing on RP servers.)
Can we say what server you’re on, or is that a secret?
Kristian: I’m currently on Thrall U.S., on the Horde side!
I know you like to keep your screen name secret, but can you give your stalkers any other clues so they can go on Hodor hunts?
Kristian: Hahahaha. Fine, usually I’m a small green goblin hunter with a spectral pet called Jupiter or Hannibal. :P
Let the stalking commence! You recently got a VIP tour of the Blizzard facilities in Irvine, CA, (along with another actor and good friend of mine, Jake Stormoen). What was the best part of that?
Kristian: Really it was meeting all the people behind the scenes, and realising what safe hands the game is in. They all LOVE warcraft as much, if not more, as any of us do!! Was a huge privilege.
You’ve branched out a little since GoT. What was it like working on Ripper Street?
Kristian: Ripper Street was a delight to work on!! SO different to Game of Thrones… not that GoT isn’t wonderful. It was a different kettle of fish, as it was very relaxed and definitely on a much smaller scale. Very glad to see it’s been picked up again for another series!
Can you give us an idea of what the documentary Treasure Trapped is about?
Kristian: Treasure Trapped is a Documentary/Film following a number of events around the european LARPing circuit. It takes a very LARPer-sided look at the whole thing, and its done in a great way that doesn’t make fun of the art at all! In fact i reckon a lot of new people will want to try it after seeing the documentary.
On to Game of Thrones! Has your life been everything you thought it would since the first day you were cast as Hodor?
Kristian: I never dreamed things would have turned out how they have. Things seem to keep happening that I constantly have to check myself and think “Really? Is this real?” I knew Hodor would be a popular character… D&D [David Benioff and Dan Weiss] told me he would, but I didn’t think to the level he has so far! I love the guy, I can see why people like him. It’s a testament to GRRM and the Show that they can make every character so wonderful.
I have some friends in the gay community, “bears” as they’re wont to call themselves, who hold you on a pretty high pedestal. One good friend of mine (I’ve known since we were in the 5th grade together) says your bear following is “extensive.” Is this something you’re aware of?
Kristian: Well, in all honesty, when you talk about “the gay community,” you are talking about MY community, haha. I AM aware of it yeah, and I think it’s really lovely. There’s not a day that I don’t get a few messages, but 99% or more are super sweet and nothing smutty at all! Again, it’s a privilege, and I really mean that. I’ve never hidden my sexuality from anyone, my whole life in fact, and I’ve been waiting for someone to ask about it in an interview, cos it’s not something you just blurt out. I’ve tried to lead the questions a few times, to no avail!
Seeing as how some people might react negatively to it, did most of the cast and crew have an understanding of it? Or was it just never really brought up?
Kristian: I had an upbringing to respect other people’s privacy, and their right to be and choose what they want, and I expect, no, demand no less for myself. It’s a very small part of who I am on the whole, but nonetheless, in this day and age, it’s important to stand up and be counted. I have and always will stand my ground. So, yeah, people have been great, on the show, but I don’t see why it would be an issue.
I ask because I know there is a certain percentage of parents who might say, “Oh, well, I don’t want my child acting with a gay man.”
Kristian:I would love to see the children in question on the show react to [someone telling them] that. That’s so not even been an issue. The families and kids on the show are so switched on to reality, to “old ways” aren’t an issue.
On to more questions! Other than people asking for piggyback rides, what’s the weirdest or funniest request you’ve ever gotten from a fan?
Kristian: Well, regarding those piggyback ride. Although i DON’T do them, (I’m not ACTUALLY a pony), at a convention recently, for a joke, I put a sign up “ Piggyback rides $5000” obviously to discourage people from asking. But after one or two people stood staring for a minute and were clearly thinking about it… I decided to amend the sign to $150000… just in case!
But for $150,000 you would be willing to give piggybacks? ;D
Kristian: There are LOT of things I would do for $150,000.
“…but I won’t do THAT, FaBio!”
Noted! We’ve seen you be given the opportunity to stretch yourself as an actor more and more, as each season passes. Season three saw Bran actually warg into Hodor, which was pretty cool… but playing out the terror Hodor felt just prior to that must have been tricky. How many takes did they make you do, playing him so freaked out?
Kristian: It’s interesting that i get asked regularly, “So, you have the easiest job on TV…” and also “So, you have the hardest job on TV…” Man, they did an afternoon of takes for that scene. It can be difficult to keep the energy up on a consistent level for that length of time, but David Nutter is an amazing director.
For that scene I thought back to the Asterix Comics I read when I was a child. I remembered that one of their only fears was that the sky was going to fall on their heads, and I tried to picture that in Hodor’s eyes… not knowing why this sound and light was coming from the sky.
Asterix comics! I’m not sure if most Americans get that reference. But can I put you on my fancast shortlist to play Obelix someday?
Kristian: Sure!! I even have the little white Dogmatix lookalike already.
So… GRRM (George R. R. Martin) being GRRM, he has left us some tantalizing hints that Hodor may not be as simple as he seems. Do you have a favorite theory as to Hodor’s origin?
Kristian: There is NO way Hodor is simple beneath it all. I truly believe that, and can’t wait to find out. I do have a couple of favourite theories, but I’ve decided not to voice them anymore, as I don’t want George to see them and think “Hell, no!”
Without spoiling anything (we have a number of “Unsullied” show-only fans here at WiC, so we don’t want to give away any book secrets), did you get the chance to do anything even more crazy for season 4? We’ve seen interviews taken from shoots in which you appear to be beaten up all to hell. Is it safe to say Hodor has his most action-packed season yet?
Kristian: There is literally nothing I can say here without spoilers or being beheaded by HBO. Let’s just say that he didn’t walk into a door!
That would have to be a pretty mean door. I put Hodor’s chances of ending up on the Iron Throne at 0.04%. Accurate?
Kristian: I want to see your calculation workings.
Thanks so much, Kristian.This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.
When Jon Bernthal returns to Netflix later this month in The Punisher, he'll be walking down a well-worn path. The superhero-movie industry likes to paint itself as risk-averse, but somehow the Marvel antihero has been given room to fail on the big screen three times before his well-received supporting role in Daredevil. Now that he's the headliner again, it's worth looking back on one of those failed attempts, one of Marvel Studios' best and most under-appreciated films: 2008's Punisher: War Zone.
Coming out the same year as the inaugural Avengers titles Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, War Zone was part of the first batch of Marvel films made in-house (unlike those two, however, the Punisher character rights belonged to Lionsgate, which financed the movie in partnership with Marvel).
Who owns what in Marvel's stable of characters is an ongoing source of convoluted relationships between films; rather than being part of Marvel's "Phase One," War Zone was produced as part of an aborted side project called Marvel Knights. Like the whole Marvel Knights imprint, War Zone was quietly written out of canon after terrible reviews and subpar box-office earnings. Its fate was all but cemented when Marvel recast titular actor Ray Stevenson in the Thor films before the Punisher's official reboot in Daredevil.
Looking back, War Zone has all the hallmarks of the kind of movie superhero fans are always asking for. It's still the only Marvel film helmed by a woman, Lexi Alexander, making its casual dismissal all the more annoying.
What's more, War Zone has the hard R-rating of Deadpool and Logan, with the pitch-black humor of the former. These are important points of comparison. Marvel's in-house productions are overseen by Disney, and their kid-friendly lightheartedness doesn't hide their provenance.
FOX got a lot of attention with its edgier, adult-oriented X-Men spinoffs. The two films are already fan favorites in the superhero genre, and that little capital R on the posters is at least partially to than—Deadpool was especially successfully, briefly holding the record for the biggest single-day opening of an R-rated film. Marvel has been cagey about the prospect of R-rated Avengers titles, but this success can't have gone unnoticed. Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, has recently become publicly more open to the idea, marking a change from earlier Disney statements.
War Zone's nostalgia and playful sense of (dark) humor similarly taps into some of what makes more recent Marvel titles feel fresh and exciting, in that peculiarly contemporary recycled way. It's a throwback to 80s action movies—maybe more violent than Guardians of the Galaxy, but playing in the same ballpark of nostalgic references. That's a strategy that seems to be working, with the most recent film Thor: Ragnarok getting praise for its Flash Gordon-y sense of classic sci-fi adventure (and 80s comic-book color palette).
But War Zone's tongue-in-cheek outdatedness and gallows humor seem to have been missed by critics who called it a "monstrosity" and an "inane bloodfest." It's a film that shouldn't be read straight, but instead with an openness to lines like "Fuck you, Castle, you fucking fuck!"
Admittedly, Frank punching through a guy's face or driving a chair leg into someone's eye aren't the most whimsical of images, but you have to admire the absurdity of it all. It's the kind of ultra-violence that goes so far as to be funny. Even the coke-sniffing Italian mobsters standing in Frank's way are a trope so outdated as to feel like some kind of anarchic statement. Again, the parallels to Deadpool are important. Had War Zone been marketed with an emphasis on its comedy, like Deadpool, it may have paved the way for a more receptive audience.
In all fairness, there are plenty of valid reasons why people wouldn't love Marvel's bastard child, not least of which is that the character is always hard to root for. In short, Frank Castle is a simple character. His family was murdered, leaving him broken but with a mission to use his military training to take out criminals as the Punisher whenever he sees the justice system fail. Unlike other heroes, though, Frank is fine with just killing his marks (and those around them), removing a lot of the nuances and moral complexities of the superhero job.
That simplicity makes it hard to get Frank right, too, as was illustrated by the painfully awful Punisher films that preceded War Zone. The Punisher (1989), starring Dolph Lundgren in the title role, feels like an action B-movie cashing in on the successes of the bigger stars of its time, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. Thomas Jane (and his kitchen-sink dye job) is OK in 2004's The Punisher, but none of the supporting actors seem like they're acting in the same movie, making the whole thing feel tonally incoherent.
Dolph Lundgren and Thomas Jane, missing the mark in their own ways
Of course fleshing out Frank's personality and motivations is a big risk. Frank's a monster who is sort of sometimes barely a good guy. The murder of his family is all the character development he ever needed, so thought bubbles and drawn-out monologues feel forced and function as hugely problematic justifications of his brutal vigilantism—they tend to spoil otherwise interesting comic-book iterations of the character and don't work any better when adapted to the screen.
Punisher: War Zone, more than any other superhero movie, seems to get that this is the problem with the Punisher, if not every other superhero too. It doesn't waste any time giving us a glimpse into his mind, because what's the point? Frank is like the shark from Jaws. We need him to keep the tension up and the story moving forward, but it's how the characters around him react to him that really determines if a Punisher movie works or not.
That's what War Zone understands. It's not the most memorable film, and it's ridiculous on so many levels, but it doesn't stray from its purpose, namely having a one-man army take on New York's criminal underworld. Between shootouts, we see bumbling cops and cartoonishly evil mobsters try to figure out how to deal with Frank.
The moralizing that we usually find on the surface of other superhero movies is only implied here, and it's so much more compelling than elsewhere. There's little doubt that Frank is going about this the wrong way, so we're forced to question why he doesn't seem like more of a villain. And how different is he from the cops who more or less accept his MO? How broken is our system that when Frank scoffs at the idea of rehabilitation, he sounds just like a politician or police chief, albeit more direct about his scorn for the slow process of justice?
There's something almost refreshing about Frank's honesty, in a fucked-up way. He's a hopeless shell of a man who has given in to despair and is now defined by his compulsive need to lash out. He should be easy to dismiss as a villain, but the fact that both cops and the general public are on the fence about him is oddly believable. No other Punisher film, comic, or series that I've come across has managed to distill Frank as perfectly as War Zone has in this regard, and it does so while still being a fun shoot 'em up film.
The closest we come to Frank growing as a person is when he accidentally kills an undercover cop. This could have led to a hokey redemption arc, but it doesn't. Seeing the effect on the man's family leaves Frank questioning his mission, not because what he does is wrong but because he has become what he hates. It's a revealing bit of self-reflection that calls into question everything about the Punisher. His motive is absurd and selfish, and his reason for almost quitting is just as stupid. The simplicity of this broken man is suddenly laid bare.
Bernthal's take on Frank, to its credit, did work similarly well in Daredevil. Unlike Matt Murdock's horned hero, Frank isn't tormented by guilt or questions of right and wrong. Pitting the two of them against each other and pairing them as unlikely allies cranks up the drama without forcing the Punisher to get introspective or grow as a person.
Now that he's going solo, things might get muddy again. Trailers give the impression that the Punisher series will focus on surveillance state overreaches and a conspiracy to silence Frank, who saw and participated in war crimes. These are interesting issues, but is the Punisher the right character for unpacking them? If he's morally torn when breaking the rules of war, how will he justify killing strangers without due process? And can any of us trust Marvel to know how to approach this?
The release of The Punisher was wisely pushed back after a heavily armed gunman opened fire on a crowd in Las Vegas last month. But the underlying philosophical problem with Frank Castle doesn't get any less complex after a few weeks' delay.
The Punisher should be a difficult character. In a broken system, he solves problems efficiently, but certainly, not justly, nor without innocent casualties. He's a good guy only insofar as his heart is in the right-ish place. It doesn't excuse him. As soon as we get too close, things start to get ugly. Let's hope he's kept at a safe distance now that he's the star again.
Follow Frederick Blichert on Twitter.Many believe housing is “affordable” when the cost makes up no more than 30 percent of a person’s income. Unfortunately, a recent report discovered that the cost of rent for a one-bedroom apartment is, on average, 104 percent higher than government benefits offered to people with disabilities; indicating that affordable housing is out of reach for many. This report comes from an analysis released by the Technical Assistance Collaborative and the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities.
The organizations assessed the value of Social Security Income with federal government data from 2012 on fair market rents for studio and one-bedroom apartments in cities across the United States. They discovered that even studio apartments were often too high for individuals with disabilities as the cost was around 90 percent of their monthly income. While the costs varied by city, the report found that rents for even the smallest apartments accounted for at least 60 percent of the benefits received from the government in every state.
According to Kevin Martone, executive director of the Technical Assistance Collaborative, “Nowhere in the United States can people with disabilities receiving SSI afford a safe, decent place to live. Yet taxpayer resources are spent exponentially on the costs associated with the institutionalization and homelessness when more cost-effective, proven solutions exist”.
Housing continues to become more and more unaffordable for people with disabilities. According to Priced Out, a bi-annual report produced each year since 1998, average rental prices have grown from 69 percent of SSI benefits in 1998 to 104 percent. As a result, the report estimates that as many as two million people with disabilities are living dependently with their parents, in homeless shelters, crowded boarding houses or institutions, and nursing homes.
Scioto understands the many issues people with disabilities face in finding affordable housing. We are committed to helping people with disabilities find affordable disability housing in the community they choose to live.Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones speaks during a Canelo Alvarez vs. Liam "Beefy" Smith press conference at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, Monday, July 18, 2016. Alvarez and Smith will fight for the WBO Junior Middleweight World Championship on Sept. 17 at AT&T Stadium. Golden Boy Promotions and Dallas Cowboys will donate a percentage of proceeds to a charity selected by Dallas Police Department and Dallas Area Rapid Transit in memory of five police officers killed by the July 7 ambush attack. (Jae S. Lee/The Dallas Morning News)
ARLINGTON - With training camp approaching at the end of the month in Oxnard, Calif., Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and executive vice president Stephen Jones met with reporters Monday following an official announcement welcoming the Canelo Alvarez-Liam Smith boxing fight in September to AT&T Stadium.
They spilled some tidbits about the Cowboys:
*Running back Lance Dunbar's rehab is going well, according to Stephen Jones.
Dunbar's recovery from a torn anterior cruciate ligament and medial collateral ligament in his left knee in October is progressing faster than anyone expected, though the Cowboys will be cautious in how they bring him back. If his return crowds the running backs room even more (Ezekiel Elliott, Darren McFadden, Alfred Morris), Jerry Jones is just fine with it.
"We've got the quality there to where if it works itself out to where we keep them all," Jones said, "we'll keep them all. And we'll go short on other positions. They're too good. It's too important.... We want that kind of depth."
*Defensive end Benson Mayowa (knee), running back Darren McFadden (elbow), defensive tackle Maliek Collins (foot) all underwent surgery during May and June and their recovery will be watched closely as training camp begins.
"We could certainly see a few of those guys start off on [Physically unable to perform list]," Stephen Jones said. "We want to be careful with them. This is a long season, and we all remember last year when Darren McFadden missed a majority of the camp in Oxnard and then went on to have a tremendous year.....It's certainly not the end of the world for some of these guys not to get right out there Day One."
*Jerry Jones on the suspensions of LB Rolando McClain, DE Randy Gregory and DE DeMarcus Lawrence and the impact of them all coming on the defensive side:
"You want to make the best of it and look for the silver lining. The silver lining is that there's going to be some younger guys step up. I think that we can look at that, surely we'll get some consideration from the main decision-maker, the guy up above. And say, 'Look, we don't want to take away any more. We've got enough right there.' If he'll leave those guys out there that weren't out there last year for us, [Tony] Romo and Dez Bryant and get us a good, continued success in our offensive line, then maybe something's compensating for it. There's nobody that's got any empathy or sympathy for us, for me, for my nightly screaming in my pillow."
*Jerry Jones said he made mistakes as last season's 4-12 misery unfolded. He kept holding on, waiting for key players to return from injury or suspension to turn the season around.
"We all probably would not have depended as much on people coming back," Jones said. "That promise of 'Well, we're going to be better. Let's hold it together or get one or two wins.' Just that attitude. I think we all have gotten current on how good that worked."
Jones said that approach affected the Cowboys' decision-making at quarterback -- Tony Romo battled to return from a broken clavicle only to suffer a second break - and possibly other positions.
Receiver Dez Bryant was limited even after he returned from breaking the fifth metatarsal in his right foot in the season opener.
Linebacker Rolando McClain and defensive end Greg Hardy returned from suspensions but the defense didn't transform.
"We learned some things last year," Jones said. |
done. But they could have. And that would also have been their right.”
Beck told Florida Bulldog she was taken aback by Spiva’s legal argument since Wasserman Schultz had always denied the DNC was playing favorites. “It’s a pretty outrageous position to take,” she said. “It was very different from what the congresswoman had been saying on national TV during the primaries.”
A little over a month later, things got even more strange. On June 1, Beck sent an email to DNC attorneys to inform them that her secretary had received a phone call from an unknown individual seeking information about the case. “The caller refused to identify himself/herself,” Beck wrote. “My secretary stated that it sounded like the caller was using a voice changer because the voice sounded robotic and genderless.”
Beck also noted that the phone number that showed up on the caller ID was the same one for Wasserman Schultz’s Aventura district office. According to a June 1 reply filed in court by the congresswoman’s lawyers, Wasserman Schultz had no knowledge of the call being made and did not authorize it.
“Further, it is highly unlikely that the call did in fact originate with that office, as no one is currently working in the office associated with the subject number — or has anyone been working there for several months — due to ongoing repairs,” the reply states. “Given that the matter involves congressional phone lines, the incident has been reported to Capitol Police.”
The following day, Fort Lauderdale attorney O’Brien received three phone calls from an unknown number from a person who identified himself only as “Chris” inquiring about the lawsuit, according to the motion requesting protection. During the second phone call, “Chris” allegedly said, “This is bigger than you and your family and your law partners” and made a reference to news about the mysterious death of Assistant U.S. Attorney Beranton Whisenant in Fort Lauderdale. O’Brien also submitted under seal 11 emails allegedly sent by “Chris.”
Whisenant’s body was spotted floating just off Hollywood beach shortly before dawn on May 24. The cause of death has not been released, but the Miami Herald has reported that Hollywood police have said Whisenant suffered some trauma to his head.
On June 3, plaintiff Angela Monson from Dassel, Minn., said she woke up around 5:45 a.m. to use her laptop computer only to find it in a different spot from where she had last left it, which she thought was odd, according to an affidavit she filed as part of the motion for protection. “When I plugged in my laptop, it made a snapping noise and did not turn on,” Monson said. “When I turned it over, the bottom cover of the laptop fell off. I then noticed that the bottom cover, which is attached to the laptop with 10 screws, had all the screws missing.”
After noticing that two patio doors she had locked the night before were unlocked, Monson called local police to file a report about a possible break-in, her affidavit states. The same day, O’Brien claims he received a call from the far-right militia group Oath Keepers offering him and his clients protection.The first half of Friday’s New England Patriots-Philadelphia Eagles preseason game was played amid a monsoon of yellow flags.
The teams were penalized a combined 10 times (not counting those what were declined) during the game’s first 30 minutes, with several fouls stemming from the NFL’s new effort to limit defenders’ leeway to hassle receivers downfield. Patriots safety Patrick Chung, however, found a way to deliver a big hit without drawing laundry.
With the Eagles driving after a blocked Patriots punt, Chung lit up Philadelphia tight end Brent Celek with a shoulder to the chest, sending Celek’s helmet flying.
Celek held on to the ball for a 22-yard gain, though, bringing the Eagles down to the Patriots’ 9-yard line. His fellow tight end, Zach Ertz, beat Chung one-on-one three plays later for the Eagles’ second score of the night.
Helmet sticker to SB NationThe Attorney General’s exact words:
What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes. You know, when I was growing up, people smoked all the time. Both my parents did. But over time, we changed the way that people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it.
Cower — interesting choice of words that. Cower is a word more associated with fear than shame in my mind. One cowers in fear. One blushes or hides out of shame.1
It’s a natural inclination in those with a love of power to want to see those beneath them cower. Our proper posture when faced with the disapproval of our betters is on bended knee, shoulders trembling, head bowed in anxious deference.
It’s also interesting that Holder suggests smokers “cower” outside of buildings, doing their nasty deed in private, on their own initiative. Silly me, I thought it was because government regulations and corporate policies require them to smoke only in designated areas outside. I doubt most such smokers feel any shame in the act, though they may huddle in winter.
I wonder, Does Holder cower in shame over his responsibility for hundreds of gun deaths as a result of Operation Fast and Furious and his zealous prosecution of the Drug War?2This is a trick that I use for getting out of bed in the morning - quite literally: I count down from 10 and get out of bed after the "1".
It works because instead of deciding to get out of bed, I just have to decide to implement the plan to count down from 10 and then get out of bed. Once the plan is in motion, the final action no longer requires an effortful decision - that's the theory, anyway. And to start the plan doesn't require as much effort because I just have to think "10, 9..."
As usual with such things, there's no way to tell whether it works because it's based on any sort of realistic insight or if it works because I believe it works; and in fact this is one of those cases that blurs the boundary between the two.
The technique was originally inspired by reading some neurologist suggesting that what we have is not "free will" so much as "free won't": that is, frontal reflection is mainly good for suppressing the default mode of action, more than originating new actions.
Pondering that for a bit inspired the idea that - if the brain carries out certain plans by default - it might conserve willpower to first visualize a sequence of actions and try to'mark' it as the default plan, and then lift the attention-of-decision that agonizes whether or not to do it, thus allowing that default to happen.
For the record, I can remember a time some years ago when I would have been all enthusiastic about this sort of thing, believing that I had discovered this incredible new technique that might revolutionize my whole daily life. Today, while I know that there are discoverables with that kind of power, I also know that it usually requires beginning from firmer foundations - reports of controlled experiments, a standard theory in the field, and maybe even math. On the scale of depth I now use, this sort of trick ranks as pretty shallow - and in fact I really do use it just for getting out of bed.
I offer this trick as an example of practical advice not backed by deep theories, of the sort that you can find on a hundred other productivity blogs. At best it may work for some of you some of the time. Consider yourself warned about the enthusiasm thing.Diane Abbott is just one woman who has suffered misogynistic abuse. Photo: PaulNUK A few years ago, if you’d informed me that the misogyny on the left would soon become a mainstream political concern, I’d have been delighted. After decades in the wilderness, the left being taken seriously at all feels like a breakthrough. The thought that journalists and commentators would also, finally, listen to leftist women’s specific concerns about harassment, violence and marginalisation by men ostensibly on ‘our side’ would have sounded too good to be true. Perhaps that’s because it is. If there’s one thing that can be said about the current debate around leftwing politics, misogyny and online abuse it’s that women like me aren’t being listened to. In the narrative that has gained most mainstream currency, we don’t even exist. Women in politics are situated somewhere on a spectrum that stretches from Andrea Leadsom to Stella Creasy. Anything to the left of that is the domain of “brocialists”: aggressive, bitter woman-haters wallowing in a swamp of Marxist dogma and undiluted testosterone. A cynical agenda It’s grimly ironic that men who’ve developed a sudden and keen interest in opposing misogyny (sometimes, in a direct contradiction of their previous stance) so frequently erase a whole category of women as part of this crusade. The longer it continues, the harder it is to interpret their concern as anything other than entirely cynical. This is a straightforward smear campaign: the point is to discredit an entire political tendency by associating it, inextricably, with the worst behaviour of a minority of its adherents. Ignoring the existence of leftwing women isn’t some unfortunate oversight—it’s the point. Point out that men (and indeed, on occasion, women) from across the political spectrum are perfectly capable of being creepy, aggressive and intimidating online and at best you’ll be dismissed. At worst, you’ll be informed that talking about your own experience amounts to apologism. As someone who has managed to piss off left, right and centre commentators at varying points over the past few years, I feel fairly well placed to comment on the issue. But when I have tried to comment, I’ve been criticised by men—and accused of distracting from an exclusive focus on the misogyny of leftwing men. Quite frankly, it’s enraging. Anger musn’t be a proscribed emotion Rage is, I feel, a legitimate reaction to such insincere manipulation. It’s an acceptable emotion to feel in a wide range of different contexts: it’s okay to feel anger towards politicians, whose decisions have far-reaching consequences for all of our lives. It’s fine to be cross at journalists, public figures and random strangers who espouse views you consider harmful. However, it should go without saying that anger doesn’t justify threats and harassment. That it doesn’t make sexist, racist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted speech any more justified, and that it’s not good praxis to focus disproportionately on women as targets for your enmity. Petty, personal nastiness doesn’t help the left achieve its goals—particularly when it takes the place of structural critique. To avoid a political culture where only the most vicious and impervious feel able to participate, it’s crucial to distinguish between acceptable expression and abusive speech. Stepping over the line shouldn’t necessarily preclude someone from any further involvement—humans are imperfect, and I’ve been struck by how many of the people insisting on a “zero tolerance” approach have less-than-spotless records themselves—but it does need calling out. Equally important is resisting efforts to define “abuse” so broadly that anger becomes a proscribed emotion. Take, for instance, the media outrage at John McDonnell’s use of a term “social murder” to describe the Grenfell Tower fire. It’s reasonable to argue his language is inaccurate or hyperbolic (though I personally agree with Aditya Chakrabortty that the phrase, taken from Engels’ seminal work The Condition of the Working Class in England, is entirely appropriate) but some opponents went a step further. Because the notion that possibly upwards of 80 people died as a result of political decisions with knowable risks is likely to inspire fury, they suggested it’s an idea that shouldn’t be expressed. Feminism has always been driven by anger If we follow this line of thought to its natural conclusion, the responsibility for abusive speech is no longer assumed to lie with those directly engaging in it. Even non-abusive criticism is unacceptable if it expresses or risks provoking anger, as some enraged individuals might engage in toxic behaviours as a result. Political discourse therefore becomes the preserve of those able to engage in a cool and detached manner. Pointing to a graph and suggesting your opponent has made a factual error is fine. Arguing that their stance is the product of inadequate morals and twisted priorities is off limits. The suggestion that our social, political and economic system is intrinsically immoral, and that anyone invested in its perpetuation is culpable for harm caused, is perhaps the most inflammatory claim of all. Through this rhetorical slight of hand, the entire political left can be dismissed as toxic and abusive. Socialists’ fury at the status quo is understood as antithetical to feminist priorities—which are assumed to be greater civility, and increased representation of women in positions of power. This claim is, of course, not grounded in any sort of accurate history. From its inception feminism has called for the radical reconfiguration of social structures. It’s a movement driven by justified, righteous fury. Socialist women in Los Angeles jail, 1908: feminism has long been driven by anger. My priorities as a feminist and as a socialist are not contradictory, but inextricable. Welfare cuts have disproportionately affected women, who’re statistically far more likely to be single parents and thus dependent on state support. Removing the social safety net forces women to stay in abusive relationships just to keep a stable roof over their heads. It pushes people into sex work against their will. People on zero hours contracts and in other insecure forms of employment are far less able to challenge sexual and other harassment in the workplace, and women are disproportionately affected. Domestic violence and rape crisis services have been shut down as a result of government spending cuts. Women are forced to self-censor It’s perverse to be censured for expressing anger about these things, on the grounds it encourages abusive behaviour towards politicians. This is abuse. Politicians are morally culpable for the consequences of the decisions they take. Feminists are right to oppose hateful, misogynistic speech towards female politicians; but it’s also abhorrent to focus exclusively on protecting powerful women while others suffer as a result of the cruellest government policies. (For what it’s worth, I don’t believe many of the people attempting this actually are feminists according to any normal definition. Mainly, they seem to be individuals with centrist or rightwing political views who’ve spotted an opportunity to punch left.) “Two warring, predominately male factions are left defending equally ridiculous positions: either the left is uniquely and irredeemably misogynistic, or it has no problems at all” Frustratingly, this cynical weaponisation actually makes it harder for leftwing women to fight misogyny in our own circles. Attempts to raise sincere concerns are met with heightened suspicion, and we risk being accused of “siding with the enemy.” We know that anything we do say might be jumped on, overgeneralised and used as ammunition against the left—and so self-censor. Two warring, predominately male factions are left defending equally ridiculous positions: either the left is uniquely and irredeemably misogynistic, or it has no problems at all. It’s hard to know how to respond, except by repeatedly asserting the simple truth: that sexism permeates every part of our society, and leftwing organisations and institutions are no exception. The existence of socialist feminists might be inconvenient for anti-left narratives—but rest assured that we exist. And we see what’s going on.
4329011145c7615a3420d27.91010320I spoke with Andrew Jones by phone last week, just as he was finishing tweaking a prototype of his latest speaker design, the bookshelf Debut at ELAC's brand-new design lab in Southern California. He started out working as a research engineer for KEF, then moved on to Infinity and later rose to prominence at TAD, where he designed the $80,000 Reference One speakers. Audiophiles the world over (including me) hailed the Reference One as one of the greatest speakers of all time. More recently he crafted the super-affordable Andrew Jones Pioneer speakers and sound bars.
Randall Cordero
He is no longer working for Pioneer USA or TAD; he is now vice president of engineering for ELAC America. Jones sounded genuinely excited by the prospects, and he promised to develop new types of speakers for ELAC. The little Debut speaker will be demonstrated for the first time in public at the T.H.E. Newport Audio Show, starting on May 29 in California.
The Debut Series will reflect Jones' latest ideas in speaker design, picking up from where he left off with the highly regarded Pioneer SP-BS22-LR and SP-FS52 speakers, but with speakers priced slightly higher than the Pioneers. Just as with Pioneer, Jones will be designing complete speakers: the tweeters, woofers, crossover networks and cabinets. The first bookshelf Debut will feature a 1-inch tweeter and a 5-inch woofer. Unlike the curve-sided Pioneer speakers, the Debuts will be more conventional, flat-sided boxes; Jones is focusing his resources on building better drivers rather than curved cabinets. There will be eight Debut models, including bookshelfs, towers, center-channels, Dolby Atmos-enabled speakers, and subwoofers.
The Debuts share no common design traits with the Pioneer models; Jones started fresh. He sees them as the next step in his design process. The Andrew Jones Pioneer speakers were sold through Best Buy stores (and many other vendors), but ELAC's Debut distribution is still taking shape for the US and Europe; they will go on sale probably in September of this year.
Not only that, Jones will also design a new-from-the-ground-up, ultra-high-end speaker line for ELAC, but right now he's focusing on the Debut Series speakers and subwoofers. The future looks very bright.
The Andrew Jones ELAC speakers website will go online near the end of this month. ELAC was founded 89 years ago in Kiel, Germany.As if dealing with your average thug isn’t enough, an NYPD sergeant was beaten up by a Golden Gloves winner during a traffic stop over the weekend, police said.
The cop and two other officers from PSA 4 were on patrol in Chinatown around 3 a.m. Sunday when they saw 34-year-old professional boxer Gabriel Bracero make an illegal U-turn near the corner of Oliver Street and St. James Place and stopped him, sources told The Post.
When the sergeant approached the car, he noticed Bracero — who fought at Barclays Center in April — allegedly trying to hide something. Officers searched the pugilist and found a pill bottle containing marijuana, police said.
When the cops attempted to take Bracero into custody, he allegedly fought back, yelling, “I’m a pro boxer! I’m going to f–k you guys up!’’ sources said.
He decked the sergeant, separating his shoulder and chipping his elbow, according to court records.
After the other officers subdued Bracero, they found two gravity knives in his vehicle and brass knuckles in his trunk, the sources said.
Bracero was charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon, obstructing government administration and resisting arrest.
He has 12 prior arrests dating from 1995, including for his role in an armed robbery.
He turned pro shortly after being released from state prison in 2008 and has been trained by Tommy Gallagher at Gleason’s gym in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
Gallagher wasn’t aware of Bracero’s latest arrest but told The Post, “A fight with a cop? I’m not surprised.”
Bracero’s mom defended her son to The Post.
She disputed the NYPD’s version of events and said the cop was injured when he fell to the ground.
“It’s not what they’re saying,” said Bracero’s mom, Elsa Centeno.Not so fast – Fukushima’s limited impact on the global nuclear industry
Except for a political panic attack in Germany, most other nations have the “full steam ahead” sign out for their new reactor projects
There’s been a lot of overblown rhetoric about the so-called “death” of the global nuclear renaissance. Anti-nuclear groups have trumpeted that the crisis at Fukushima in Japan is the silver stake that has finally been driven into the heart of the nuclear monster. Frankly, that’s a lot of wishful thinking.
The stark reality of energy security in the 21st century is the nuclear reactors are needed to put the world on a path toward lower carbon emissions and to supply more electricity to raise standards of living that improve the human condition.
What about Germany?
Shortly after the extent of the damage to reactors at Fukushima became apparent, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced she was reversing her policy of keeping the nation’s oldest reactors open beyond 2020. A deal put in place by her predecessor called for the eventually closure of all 17 reactors.
Looking at the issue of energy security, and especially the unhappy prospect of being more dependent on Russian natural gas, in September 2009 Merkel swung for the fences and bet her election chances on keeping the reactors open. Her conservative coalition won by a slim margin. The German Social Democrats and German Green Party vowed a political comeback and they have started to make their influence felt in regional elections.
Even so Merkel’s panicky retreat from her decision to keep the reactors open is tempered by the fact that the closure of the seven oldest units is positioned as a “safety review,” and not a permanent action. Anti-nuclear forces in Germany want all 17 reactors closed immediately and permanently, but business groups that represent the export driven manufacturing sector of Germany’s economy have called such actions “irresponsible” and a form of “energy suicide.”
Last November Russian premier Vladmir Putin asked German business groups whether they planned to invest in Siberian firewood for energy since they don’t like nuclear reactors or the prospect of being reliant on Russian natural gas.
Merkel may find that keeping the lights and the factory assembly lines humming, a key jobs issue, may be persuasive when the next national election comes around. The delusional vision of solar energy and wind power being positioned as a substitute for the reactors can only lead to one outcome. It is a situation worse that the situation that South Africa finds itself in with brownouts, an inability to raise electricity rates for new generating capacity due to social welfare spending, and overall politically intractable gridlock.
Italy’s pause to refresh
Until recently Italy’s reversal of its 1988 ban on new nuclear reactors held out the long-term promise of relief from some of Europe’s highest fossil fueled electrical power. Plans to build up to five reactors were being vigorously pursued by the incumbent government.
However, the economic minister driving the process ran afoul of his own greed and he was removed from office for involvement in a completely unrelated real estate scandal. Worse, the current prime minister is embroiled in a sex scandal.
Efforts to establish a strategy to select sites, and to create the necessary nuclear regulatory organization, have been suspended as the government. A new government and a new economic development minister may re-start the long process. Italy’s economic cannot sustain the current high prices it pays for power.
An early effort to buy 12% of the output of a new French reactor is still going forward. Once the benefits of that deal are seen, it may be an incentive to pursue full scale development of domestic projects.
India rejects protests at Jaitapur
The Indian government will continue with its commitment to build 20 Gwe of new nuclear powered electricity generation capacity over the next decade. A key project is at the Jaitapur site where two and possibly as many as six Areva 1,600 MW reactors will be built. Local protests over land compensation have created an impression the project might be stopped, but the government is not backing down.
The government’s response is to create an independent oversight body for the project and also to strengthen the national nuclear regulatory agency. Construction of the 10 GWe facility will begin later this year.
The government held a meeting attended by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and decided to go ahead with the nuclear power plant. “The government is satisfied with the safety aspects of the Jaitapur nuclear plant,” V Narayanswamy, a minister in the prime minister’s office, told the BBC.
The government also decided to increase the compensation already paid to villagers whose land has been acquired for the plant, and step up talks with them to assure them of the safety of the plant.
India is developing is own 700 MW indigenous reactor design which is expects to eventually make a major contribution to the nation’s electrical grid. In the meantime, India is rely on Russian and French reactor technology. The Russians have two reactors nearing completion and four more that are underway. As many as 18 Russian 1,000 MW and 1,200 MW VVER reactors may be built over the next 20 years.
U.S. firms are locked out of India’s nuclear market because of a strict supplier liability law that is based on the historical political legacy of the Bohpal disaster. Strenuous efforts by U.S. diplomats to change the law have not had any success, and that failure was an embarrassment for President Obama when he visited India in November 2010.
China’s demand for uranium will make the market
The biggest commitment to nuclear energy globally is in China. The country will build at least 40 GWe of new reactors by 2020. Of that amount, 4 Gwe will be built by Westinghouse, 3 GWe by Areva, and 2 GWe by Russia. The vast bulk of new construction, over 30 GWe, will be a new indigenous design for a 1,000 MW reactor that China may also position for export. It will be based on aggressive technology transfer agreements the country imposed on its vendors.
To fuel these reactors, China will have to import 60% of its demand for uranium. Also, the long-term view on energy security has prompted China to begin investing in construction of a $15 billion spent fuel reprocessing plant based on Areva’s technology.
Other nations also in the mix
Turkey has one 4.8 Gwe multi-reactor site under construction on its Mediterranean coast, is negotiating for a vendor for a similar project on the Black Sea, and has announced plans for a third site near the Bulgarian border.
The United Arab Emirates is proceeding with construction of four 1,400 MW reactors supplied by South Korea.
Sweden has stuck by its reversal of its prior moratorium on new reactors and will now replace the units supplying 9 GWe of power to the country as needed.
Beads or Blackberries
These commitments to building new nuclear reactors are a signal that anti-nuclear sentiments are just so much wishful thinking. Worse, the strongest voices from the anti-nuclear sector also contain a desire to “go off the grid” and return to some kind of pre-industrial and pastoral village lifestyle. Irrational fear of nuclear energy is linked in part to the larger than life nature of industrial infrastructure. They want to go back to trading beads rather than Blackberry messenger IDs.
It is clear that developing nations such as China, India, and Turkey have no use for these visions. Yet, to be successful, they and the G20 group of nations must educate their citizens to think coherently about science and engineering issues. Otherwise, they will cede the ground to media celebrities who seek attention for its own sake and not for the benefit of current or future generations.
Photo by gc85.A Free and Open Source Verilog-to-Bitstream Flow for iCE40 FPGAs
Clifford
59 min
59 min 2015-12-27
2015-12-27 21119
21119 events.ccc.de
Playlists: '32c3' videos starting here
Yosys (Yosys Open Synthesis Suite) is an Open Source Verilog synthesis and verification tool.
Project IceStorm aims at reverse engineering and documenting the bit-stream format of Lattice iCE40 FPGAs and providing simple tools for analyzing and creating bit-stream files, including a tool that converts iCE40 bit-stream files into behavioral Verilog. Currently the bitstream format for iCE40 HX1K and HX8K is fully documented and supported by the tools.
Arachne-PNR is an Open Source place&route tool for iCE40 FPGAs based on the databases provided by Project IceStorm. It converts BLIF files into an ASCII file format that can be turned into a bit-stream by IceStorm tools.
This three projects together implement a complete open source tool-chain for iCE40 FPGAs. It is available now and it is feature complete (with the exception of timing analysis, which is work in progress).
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TagsThe mother of the man who killed nine people and himself at Umpqua Community College in Oregon last week wrote extensively on social media about her love of guns and her difficulty raising an autistic child, the New York Times reports.
Laurel Margaret Harper, mother of gunman Chris Harper-Mercer, wrote that she kept AR-15 and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles and a Glock handgun in their home, and cited her son as her source on facts about gun laws. Writing on Yahoo Answers under the name TweetyBird, she mocked “lame states” with tough gun-control laws, and said that because of the multiple loaded guns she kept at home, “no one will be ‘dropping’ by my house uninvited without acknowledgement.”
She and her son would frequently go to shooting ranges, and she expressed disdain for inexperienced gun owners, writing that she would “cringe every time the ‘wannabes’ show up.”
Harper also acknowledged her son’s troubled history, and wrote that she and her son both had Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. She wrote that Chris—whom she never identifies by name—was “among other things, a head-banger,” and seemed proud and what she and her son had accomplished despite their challenges. “I have Asperger’s and I didn’t do so bad,” she wrote. Elsewhere, she comforted another parent of a child on the autism spectrum, writing, “I was in your shoes and now my son’s in college.”
When advising other parents of kids on the autism spectrum, Harper recommended reading early and often to their children, and said that a particular favorite of hers was Donald Trump’s bestseller ‘The Art of the Deal. “Fact: Before my son was even born, I was reading out loud to him from Donald Trump’s ‘The Art of the Deal,’” she wrote.
Police found 14 guns belonging to both Harper-Mercer and his mother at their home after the shooting.
Harper got divorced from her son’s father, Ian Mercer, in 2006, Mercer told CNN he had no idea his son had access to so many guns, and that the massacre “would not have happened” had his son not been able to purchase so many firearms. “How is it so easy to get all these guns?” he asked.
[NYT]
Go Inside the Lives of Families Affected by Gun Violence Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz Carlos Javier Ortiz 1 of 16 Advertisement
Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.The main detractors of the proposed South Atlantic whale sanctuary were Japan, Norway and Iceland, with backing from a number of African, Asian and island states (AFP Photo/Luis Robayo)
Portorož (Slovenia) (AFP) - Whaling nations defeated a renewed bid Tuesday by southern hemisphere states to create an Atlantic sanctuary for the marine mammals hunted to near extinction in the 20th century.
A proposal by Argentina, Brazil, Gabon, South Africa and Uruguay, which needed a 75 percent majority, mustered only 38 votes in favour with 24 against at an International Whaling Commission meeting, an outcome lamented by conservationists.
Its main detractors were whalers Japan, Norway and Iceland, with backing from a number of African, Asian and island states.
"With all the problems currently facing whale populations that have previously been devastated by commercial whaling, it is clear they need a protected zone where they will be able not just to survive, but to rebuild and thrive," said Greenpeace whale expert John Frizell.
"What is the most disappointing is that all these efforts are ultimately being undermined by IWC member countries (which) are thousands of miles away, not even in the southern hemisphere and some even on the other side of the world."
The proposal, backed by countries which depend on whale-watching tourist dollars, has been shot down at every IWC meeting since it was first introduced in 2001.
"It's a disappointment that the proposal for a South Atlantic whale sanctuary has again been defeated by those nations with a vested interest in killing whales for profit," Humane Society International vice president Kitty Block said.
"The whales have lost out and so too have local communities who stand to gain so much from booming ecotourism such as responsible whale watching."
The scheme is to create a whale sanctuary of 20 million square kilometres (eight million square miles) in the South Atlantic ocean.
Backers say about 71 percent of an estimated three million whales killed around the world between 1900 and 1999 were taken in southern hemisphere waters.
- 'Some kind of security' -
The most targeted species were fin, sperm, blue, humpback, sei and minke whales, they say -- and many populations are still recovering under a 30-year old moratorium on all but aboriginal whale hunting.
According to the proposal, a sanctuary would "promote the biodiversity, conservation and non-lethal utilisation of whale resources in the South Atlantic Ocean".
But Japan, under fire for its annual whale hunts in the name of science, which critics say is a cover for commercial whaling, expressed vehement opposition.
Tokyo argues that stocks of some species have recovered sufficiently to make them fair game for hunters, and that simply declaring all whales off-limits did not address environmental imperatives.
"Sustainable use of marine living resources, including whales... is perfectly consistent with environmental protection," Japan's IWC commissioner told delegates on Monday.
"This proposal is against the principle of sustainable utilisation of marine living resources," he said of the sanctuary.
Two other sanctuaries exist today, in the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean -- where Japan conducts some of its hunts.
An outstanding issue on the agenda of the five-day IWC meeting, running in the Adriatic resort town of Portoroz until Friday, is a proposal by New Zealand and Australia for scientific whaling, such as Japan says it conducts, to be much more closely scrutinised.
Country representatives are trying to fine-tune the wording of a consensus document to this effect -- failing which the proposal will be put to a vote, possibly on Wednesday.
While there are no reports of hunting in the South Atlantic today, Brazil's IWC commissioner Hermano Ribeiro told AFP a sanctuary would provide "some kind of security".
"There is a whale killing and catching in the (Southern Ocean), who may tell us that if a particular species begins to be depleted the whale-catchers for science will not come to the South Atlantic?
"We want to avoid that," he said.
Whale-watching is an estimated $2 billion (1.8-billion-euro) a year industry employing some 13,000 people around the world.
There are an estimated 51 species of cetaceans -- whales, dolphins and porpoises -- in the South Atlantic.The sale of more than half of the country's gold reserves between 1999 and 2002 has proved to be deeply controversial.
Critics say that signalling such a large sale of bullion to gold traders helped to drive the precious metal to a 20-year low.
In 17 auctions, Mr Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer sanctioned the sale of 395 tonnes of gold.
Figures released by the Treasury show that the total proceeds from the sales was around $3.5billion. According to a Parliamentary answer, if the gold was sold last month, on December 15, it would have raised $10.5billion.
The difference - $7billion - would be worth £4.7billion if the proceeds were converted into pounds yesterday.
The figure, which moves with the value of gold, is far higher than previously thought. Grant Thornton calculated two years ago that the figure lost to the Exchequer was £2billion.
The news comes as the Government considers whether to sell major public assets, including a stake in the Royal Mail and the bookmaker the Tote, to raise funds for public finances.
Treasury minister Ian Pearson attempted to defend the gold sale. He said: "The gold sales between July 1999 and March 2002 reflected a prudent decision to reduce over-exposure to a single asset in the net reserves portfolio."
However official confirmation of the scale of the loss was severely criticised by the Conservatives, who claim that by signalling the gold sale in advance, the Government drove down the price of gold to a 20 year low.
Philip Hammond, shadow secretary to the Treasury, said: "Gold traders confirm that it was because the Government announced in advance that it was planning to sell such a large quantity of gold that the markets became depressed.
"The low price Gordon Brown got for selling our gold wasn't caused by bad luck. It was a staggering display of economic incompetence that has landed taxpayers with a £7 billion black hole."
Mr Brown has fiercely resisted attempts to release private advice to the Treasury about the sale and has claimed that it was backed by then-Bank of England Governor, Sir Edward George.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "The disastrous sale of the gold reserves was a huge blunder that cost taxpayers vast amounts of money.
"For the Government to pretend it was a strategic move is absurd - it was a foolish decision that the Prime Minister should be held accountable for.
"The Government is right to be considering selling unnecessary public assets, but they must first prove they have learned the lessons of the gold fiasco."
Cash raised from the sales was reinvested in foreign currencies. A Whitehall source insisted that the Government could not have been expected to behave like a precious metal trader when it sold the gold.
The source said: "The Government could not predict the future rise in the price of gold, however, we knew that gold historically pays less interest and has more volatile returns than bonds. This is still the case."
A Treasury spokesman added: "This was a long-term investment decision designed to reduce the risk to the Government in our foreign currency reserves, not a short-term attempt to play the market.
"It would be inappropriate to measure gains or losses resulting from fluctuations in market values on a particular day over the short-term."Trivia
Many fans have been expressing thoughts regarding Indiana Jones and friends' choice to go back into the mines instead of leaving through Pankot Palace with the rest of the escaped captives. |
rotation. Hell, even Matthew Dellavedova, who was a mainstay in the rotation for the Cavaliers in the regular season, found his role shrinking in the postseason until he was axed from the rotation altogether in the Finals.
In the regular season, however, the end-of-rotation players are valuable.
Kevin Love's injury is a bit of a bummer because it'll lead to increased LeBron James and Channing Frye. Need them saving energy for May. — David Zavac (@DavidZavac) December 20, 2016
The only player averaging more minutes per game than LeBron James in December is one (LaVine) who's played in 2 OTs: https://t.co/ctTH49t7Di — John Schuhmann (@johnschuhmann) December 18, 2016
Our fearless leader and NBA.com’s John Schumann combine to make an important point here. The Cavaliers survive and thrive without a 10-man rotation, but LeBron James and co. have to play more than they should in games they should get a degree of rest.
Now, LeBron James has noted that it’s the entire process of getting up for a game that causes him the majority of his fatigue, not the total number of minutes he plays. Still, the Cavaliers would be wise to rest him as much as they can, and with their roster as currently constructed, the amount of rest they can afford to give him is “not much.”
So, what are the solutions?
One thing the Cavaliers could do is play guys they don’t really want to play and just take a short-term loss, especially in the guard and wing rotation. DeAndre Liggins has been a pleasant surprise, but maybe the Cavaliers should stick players like Kay Felder or Jordan McRae onto the court for more than mop-up duty.
On the wing, it might be wise to let Mike Dunleavy play through whatever funk he’s in. The back clearly is an issue for Dunleavy, and maybe this is what he is now and that’s why Lue has relegated him to this bench. Regardless, if the long-term goal is to preserve LeBron James, giving Dunleavy some forward minutes might be the smartest choice.
Among the bigs, the Cavaliers are backed into a corner among in-house options. With Birdman hurt, the Cavaliers are down to three big men on the roster in Tristan Thompson, Kevin Love and Channing Frye. A three-man big rotation is probably fine for this team on a day-to-day basis (with Richard Jefferson and LeBron James playing spot minutes at the PF spot), but if anybody has to miss time due to injury or foul trouble, their absence is really felt and with Andersen’s injury, the team doesn’t even have a body to throw in for spot duty.
Until the team finds a place to move Williams’ and Andersen’s contracts, their filled roster spots are albatrosses hanging around David Griffin’s neck. There are replacement level bigs on the free agent market, but while the team has 15 players, their hands are tied.
There’s some scuttlebutt about the team potentially waiting to sign Mario Chalmers bumping around the rumor mill, and that might go a long way towards solving the team’s depth issues. Even so, the team probably needs to find a way to add another big via trade or free agency. They don’t really need to be world beaters at this point in the year - they just need to sop up some minutes.
Even then, the use of the word “need” feels a little silly. This team doesn’t “need” to do anything. They’re the defending champions and comfortably the best team in the East. They’ll almost certainly be fine either way, and almost any criticism of the team’s construction or play on-court is going to feel hilariously nitpicky.
David Griffin has proven to be a wizard with his team’s finances and trading and signing players in ways that allow his team maximum flexibility. He’s got some work cut out for him, and it’s fair to expect that he’ll find a workable solution in the near future to keep LeBron and the other Cavs’ stars odometers from racking up numbers too quickly.A Brazilian woman who has been likened to a ‘human Barbie’ claims her appearance is natural and she hasn’t had plastic surgery or starved herself to be thin. Andressa Damiani, from Blumenau, who has a 20-inch waist and wears a 32F bra size, boasts the same facial features as a doll – including huge eyes and long legs. The 23-year-old has found fame in her native country with passers-by on the street calling her ‘Elsa’ because of her resemblance to the character in Disney’s Frozen.
Image credits: News Dog Media
“I’ve also had strangers tell me they are disgusted to look at my face and they fear me when they see me walking past. People run away when they see me. People think I’m insane and I only care for beauty but they shouldn’t be afraid. I want to show the world that everyone can be a doll. You don’t have to be skinny or blonde – just create your own look and be happy.”, told Andressa to Daily Mail.
Image credits: News Dog Media
Andressa, who wears blue contact lenses to cover her blue eyes, revealed how she gets her doll-like look without surgery – with hair extensions matched to her bleached hair to get her long locks.
Image credits: News Dog Media
She said: “For as long as I remember I have always looked like a doll. I hardly wear any heavy make-up on a daily basis, I don’t diet and I walk my dogs for exercise. I like resembling a doll and I receive many lovely messages from fans.”
Image credits: News Dog Media
Image credits: News Dog Media
To make her eyes look wider, Andressa, who wears blue contact lenses, uses a white eyeliner pencil on the waterline, she then uses three different shades of eyeshadow followed by a dark purple shade to give her eyes depth. She then applies winged eyeliner and false eyelashes on the top line.
Image credits: News Dog Media
On her YouTube channel, which has more than 600,000 subscribers, she shows viewers how to achieve her style – with one video, a how to do ‘Elsa’-style makeup, getting more than one million views:We want to see that big money taken out of politics: Gregor Robertson
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It’s a move aimed at eventually banning unions and corporations from contributing to municipal elections.
Vancouver’s mayor is backing a plan which would let you vote on letting municipalities reform donation rules.
For years, Mayor Gregor Robertson has been asking the province to change the rules about who can donate to parties during local elections.
“We want to see that big money taken out of politics,” says Robertson. “It’ll make a big difference for transparency and accountability, and giving the public comfort that there’s no big money involved in the campaigns.”
He’s backing a motion from fellow Vision party member and City Councillor Andrea Reimer, calling on the province to let you vote in a referendum which would transfer the rule-making power to cities and towns.
That referendum would take place as part of next year’s provincial election.
“The only feasible period to do a referendum — it costs a lot to do a standalone referendum, so this is an opportunity for the province to do it at the same time people are already headed to the ballot box,” says Reimer.
As for his party’s acceptance of corporate and union donations in the past, Robertson says his party is just using the rules as they exist.[email protected]
Además de ser un negocio redituable, en la Ciudad de México el narcomenudeo no se castiga al ser considerado un delito de bajo impacto. A quien se le sorprende con pequeñas dosis, máximo 500 miligramos de cocaína y 5 gramos de marihuana, pueden argumentar que son adictos y no proceden en su contra, los que llevan “papelitos” de más, pueden pasar hasta seis meses en prisión.
Estas lagunas legales, las conocen a la perfección los narcomenudistas quienes ahora, para repartir estas drogas llevan solamente las cantidades que no representan cárcel, así burlan a la justicia. Ésta metodología se ve reflejada en los ingresos de los detenidos al Sistema Penitenciario Capitalino quienes sólo pernoctan ahí, pues en lo que empieza el proceso legal, ya están fuera.
La Secretaría de Seguridad Pública es la que más detenciones hace, en el pasado informe de actividades del actual titular de la dependencia Hiram Almeida Estrada detalló que por ejemplo, en el primer semestre del año pasado se realizaron 674 remisiones con 928 personas presentadas ante el Ministerio Público, con lo que se desarticularon un total de 110 células y 47 bandas delincuenciales dedicadas al narcomenudeo.
De este rubro, se especificó que 76.1% de las remisiones son por posesión de marihuana, 18.1% por cocaína, 1.3% por pastillas sicotrópicas y 4.5% por otras drogas.
Alertó a las autoridades que de 31.4% de las personas remitidas se encuentra en el rango de 18 a 22 años de edad, 16.7% tienen entre 23 y 27 años y 17.5% son menores de edad, cifra que va en aumento porque el crimen organizado los usa más, al saber que no son castigados.
Sin embargo, este trabajo no se ve reflejado en la Procuraduría Capitalina, de 10 detenciones al día, en promedio, que hace la policía local, apenas cuatro son remitidos a las autoridades correspondientes y no por posesión sino por las agravantes, es decir; cuando los detienen con un arma de fuego o por cometer otro delito, a estos es difícil comprobarles que la droga era para la venta.
Cifras de la Procuraduría Capitalina detallan también que siete de cada 10 carpetas de investigación por delitos contra la salud están vinculadas al delito de posesión, sin embargo al momento de llegar a un juzgado, se analiza cada caso y al darse cuenta del rango de edad no los envía a prisión como sanción, busca una medida alternativa.
Como terapias, trabajo social o su defecto talleres para que el imputado, sobre todo los menores de edad y los que están en el rango de 18 a 22 años, se reintegren a la sociedad.
“Los jóvenes que se quieran enfocar a este delito saben el camino... Si andan con dos paquetitos de droga no van a prisión”, explica una fuente de la Fiscalía contra el Narcomenudeo de la Procuraduría Local.Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.) announced Tuesday that the Senate will delay the August recess as senators scramble to catch up with a GOP agenda that is months behind schedule.
“In order to provide more time to complete action on important legislative items and process nominees that have been stalled by a lack of cooperation from our friends across the aisle, the Senate will delay the start of the August recess until the third week of August," McConnell said.
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Senators had been scheduled to leave town at the end of July and not return to Washington until early September.
With the change, the Senate will now work the first two weeks in August, with the break starting on Aug. 14.
The decision by McConnell could give the Senate more time to work on its legislation repealing and replacing ObamaCare. McConnell hopes to have a vote next week, but it does not appear he has the votes necessary to win approval.
McConnell indicated that lawmakers will use the extra time to pass an annual defense policy bill and "the backlog of critical nominations that have been mindlessly stalled by Democrats."
Trump has repeatedly knocked Democrats for holding up his nominees. They can't block the picks on their own but are able to use the Senate's rulebook to drag out debate.
Deadlines for Congress to raise the debt ceiling and fund the government are also quickly approaching.
The government will shut down Oct. 1 without a new funding bill, and the nation's borrowing limit needs to be raised by the end of September or early October to prevent a possible default by the U.S. government.
A number of Republican senators have been pushing for McConnell to either truncate or cancel the recess.
A half-dozen GOP senators held a news conference Tuesday to highlight the need to cut into the recess.
“We are glad leadership took our concerns into consideration. It is time to get results for the American people," a broader list of 10 GOP senators said in a statement about the delayed recess.
But the decision appears to be a quick reversal from GOP leadership, who had signaled no interest in curbing the break.
"I'm for getting our work done now. I don't think stringing it out any longer than next week helps us with the product," Sen. John Cornyn John CornynHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl MORE (R-Texas), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, told reporters Monday about the healthcare bill.
Republicans in Congress also face political pressure.
They have yet to score a major legislative victory since taking over the White House, though the House did approve its version of an ObamaCare repeal.
GOP leaders said the real timetable for evaluating their action would not be President Trump's first 100 days in office, but by day 200, which will come in early August.
Updated: 2:42 p.m.On former Missouri state legislator Cynthia Davis’ show last Tuesday, David Whitney of the Institute on the Constitution claimed that President Obama and the Supreme Court justices who struck down anti-gay state marriage amendments are going to hell and that those who hold public office should be “Christians who have a biblical understanding of law and government.”
Whitney urged Christians to “be in prayer for those in civil government. Be in prayer for those running for office, even those who you know have the wrong point of view, pray for their repentance. Pray that somebody like Barack Obama, who began violating his oath of office from the day he took his oath of office, that he would repent, because as I read his life, he’s headed on the road to hell and he’s gonna be eternally damned if he does not repent of his sins.”
Whitney stressed that the Founding Fathers were, in his opinion, Christians who built the country on their religious beliefs.
“We know that until people understand the worldview of our founders, a biblical worldview of law and government, they are really not qualified to hold office in any position, even down to the dogcatcher at the county level,” Whitney said. “We need Christians who have a biblical understanding of law and government, an understanding of our founders, they are the ones that need to take every position of leadership in our country at every level, county level, state level, and indeed, the federal level as well.”
In 2014, Whitney and his Institute on the Constitution colleague Michael Peroutka both ran for seats on their local county council in Maryland on explicitly theocratic platforms; Peroutka was successful.
Whitney claimed the Founding Fathers “said there is one god, the God of the Bible,” and today’s government must also follow God’s “standard of justice.”
“I think of the Supreme Court justices, who, I probably shouldn’t call them justices, even, but anyway, who redefined God’s holy institution of marriage, I can’t imagine what deep pit in hell awaits those justices unless they repent,” Whitney said. “They think they’re higher than God. They put themselves above the Almighty, and believe me, there’s a comeuppance coming for every one of them where they’re gonna be dragged down off their high and mighty position on that bench with their black robes, and they’re gonna be cast into the pit of hell unless they repent.”It’s a mystery worthy of the Twilight Zone. Government inspectors in the British city of Birmingham have discovered “unregistered schools” where children are being taught “misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic material” in “unhygienic and filthy” conditions by unscreened and unqualified teachers. The Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, says that far more children may be at risk and that the promotion of British values is being “undermined by the growth of these unregistered schools.”
Clearly those schools are like something from the Third World. How could they exist in a First World nation like Britain? Why are British children being force-fed these ideological poisons? Well, the liberal media are very coy about giving full details, but they do speak of a “narrow Islam-focused curriculum” at these dismayingly un-British schools. They also say that the schools have been found most often in “Muslim communities.”
The Boys from the Burger Bar
It seems then — brace yourself — that these schools are run by Muslims. And remember that Birmingham was also the scene of the so-called Trojan horse scandal, in which Muslim-dominated official schools were caught exposing vulnerable children to similar misogyny, homophobia and anti-Semitism. In other words, Muslim immigrants from the Third World have set up schools in Britain just like those back home. Who could have foreseen it? The mystery gets bigger when we reflect that Muslim immigrants rape children here just as they do back home. And Muslim immigrants mutilate their daughters here just as they do back home.
But it’s not just Muslims. At the same time as the White folk of Birmingham learnt about the anti-Semitic schools, they were reading about the jailing of a notorious gang called the Burger Bar Boys, who dealt drugs, sold guns and kept the city humming with murder, rape and robbery. If you examine this photo of the B.B. Boys, you’ll see that although they are all male, they are far from stale or pale:
So Black immigrants from the Third World tend toward violent criminal behavior in Britain just as they do back home. These demographic patterns involving Muslims and Blacks are deeply puzzling to liberals, who greet each new scandal with bafflement and dismay. Why do Third-World people create Third-World problems? It’s an enigma that won’t be cracked without much more research and much more funding for think-tanks and community groups. And while liberals are working on it, they ensure that the Third-World population of the West continues to grow. This lunacy isn’t found just in Britain, but in America, France, Sweden, Australia and every other First World nation that has been enriched by the Third World. Liberals are horrified by pathologies that their own policies have created.
Good for Goyim, Bad for Jews
How have Jews been so successful in promoting their pro-immigration agenda on the West despite the opposition of the White majority in every enriched nation? In scientific and mathematical terms, this is a problem in game theory, or the study of strategies for maximizing gain and minimizing loss in competition. These strategies don’t have to be consciously designed: game theory is just as applicable to bacteria or plants as it is to chess, poker and politics.
And bacteria prove a very important point: physical strength and size are not essential for strategic success. Medical fields like embryology and parasitology offer many examples of small and weak organisms manipulating much larger and stronger organisms for their own advantage. In politics, the majority does not automatically win and impose its preferences on official policy, even in self-professed democracies. As Guillaume Durocher has pointed out on the Occidental Observer, the statistician and game-theorist Naseem Taleb “has written insightfully on the apparent paradox of ‘stubborn minorities’ having more agency, influence, and power among political elites than apathetic majorities.”
So we should put aside questions of morality and examine the “double standards” of Jews as strategies in competition between Jews and the White gentile majority. Prima facie, it might seem disadvantageous for Jews to encourage mass immigration by Muslims, who are much more anti-Semitic on average than White Europeans. But Muslim anti-Semitism can strengthen Jewish power. When Muslims murder Jews in France, Jews like Moshe Kantor don’t demand an end to Muslim immigration, but more state surveillance and less free speech.
Fooled by Gould
Furthermore, the criminality and social failure of Muslims and Blacks can be useful tools of psychological warfare against the White majority. If all human groups possess the same intellectual potential, as we are so loudly told by pseudo-scientists like Stephen Jay Gould, then non-White failure can only be explained by White discrimination and malice. In other words, Whites are eternal villains, non-Whites are eternal victims.
After all, they’re minorities and oligolatry, or the worship of minorities, is now the official religion of the West. If the White heterosexual majority suffered from AIDS at higher rates than Blacks and homosexuals, that would clearly be an indictment of the White heterosexual majority. As it is, the reverse is true, which is just as clearly an indictment of the White heterosexual majority. Like water, wickedness runs only downhill: from the White majority onto the minorities whom that majority oppresses.
This explains the apparent paradox of the staunchly feminist Labour party not merely concealing but collaborating with the gang-rape of under-aged girls in Rotherham and other British towns and cities. And feminists don’t benefit from pointing out that Muslims and other non-Whites commit sex-crimes at much higher rates than Whites. With rare exceptions, feminists are interested in power and personal prestige, not in helping ordinary women. Muslims are not susceptible to emotional blackmail and wouldn’t be remunerative targets if they were. Indeed, more sex crime and sexual harassment mean more opportunity for feminist propaganda and moralizing — so long as the perpetrators are identified only as men, not as non-White men.
Majority Malice
But minorities have another highly important function in Jewish and liberal strategy. They serve as a buffer-zone against self-assertion by the majority, rather as the occupied Eastern European states did for the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War. The Western powers could not launch an invasion of the Soviet Union without first invading Eastern Europe, and Stalin’s paranoia was undoubtedly assuaged by this simple fact of geography.
Similarly, minorities like Muslims and homosexuals are cultural buffer-zones for Jews. In Jewish understanding, European history has been blackened again and again by outbreaks of irrational gentile malice against blameless Jews. When Jews are the only or most highly visible minority in a gentile society, this irrational malice can erupt without warning at any moment. After all, how could Jews know it is coming when they are doing nothing to provoke it?
But when other and more visible minorities are present, hostility towards those minorities by the White majority is a clear warning that trouble may also be on the way for Jews. Conversely, majority tolerance of the minorities is a reassurance that Jewish power will not be challenged. Indeed, the more the majority tolerates bad behaviour by minorities, the greater that reassurance is. Whites are undoubtedly suffering serious harm from the presence of non-Whites in Western nations. When Donald Trump suggests limiting this harm by ending Muslim immigration, Jews are horrified by the threat to Muslims. In reality, they are horrified by the idea that the White majority might assert itself and act in its own defence. The harm done by non-Whites is a feature, not a bug, of mass immigration and minority worship. This is the state inquisitor O’Brien in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948):
He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said. “Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part III, chapter 3)
City of Sanctuary
The passivity of Whites in the face of non-White pathologies is proof that Western societies are obeying the will of Jews, not of Whites. This is why organizations like the English Defence League and PEGIDA cannot appease Jews by insisting that they are philo-Semitic and fully support Israel. By expressing hostility to Muslims, the EDL and PEGIDA are moving into the buffer-zone between Jews and the gentile majority and exposing themselves as a potential threat. As we’ve seen above, Birmingham’s enrichment by non-Whites has been extremely bad for Birmingham’s Whites (see also the murders of Lucy Lowe and Christina Edkins). But when PEGIDA plan to hold a rally in the city in opposition to that enrichment, the traitorous Labour party and its allies respond with all the clichés of cultural Marxism:
Birmingham’s political leaders have united to condemn plans for a far-right rally in the city involving ex-EDL leader Tommy Robinson. Pegida UK has announced plans to gather in the city on February 6 as part of a series of protests across Europe. Robinson said in an interview that the aim was to “preserve our culture, save our country and save our future”. But Birmingham’s Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders issued a joint statement saying the group would not be welcome. Labour council leader [Councillor] John Clancy and Tory and Liberal Democrat group heads, Robert Alden and Paul Tilsley, said the city was no place for “prejudice, intolerance and hate”. They said: “On the day that Birmingham was formally awarded City of Sanctuary status, it was disappointing to hear of the plans for the launch of a new anti-Islamic far-right group. Birmingham is a city that has a proud history of tolerance, cohesion and integration — with people from around the world of all faiths and heritage welcome to make their home here. “Brummies [people from Birmingham] do not subscribe to ideas based on prejudice, intolerance and hate. That is why the planned launch of a new group in Birmingham is rejected by the council. The best way to demonstrate this is for everyone to go about their normal business on February 6 as a very public exhibition of what makes Birmingham great.” (Birmingham unites to tell Pegida UK: ‘You’re not welcome here’, The Birmingham Mail, 8th December 2015)
In reality, Birmingham is neither united, cohesive nor integrated. Large numbers of Whites there are horrified by what mass immigration has done to their city. Like similarly industrial Detroit, Whites made the city great and non-Whites are destroying it. The Labour council in Birmingham, like the Labour council in Rotherham, responds to Muslim pathologies by pretending that they aren’t happening. The “Trojan horse” scandal was first exposed twenty years ago and in 2014 the Birmingham Mail reported that “Child sex gangs [have been] a problem in Birmingham for 40 years.” The council knew and did nothing (see also here and here).
Punishing the Goyim
But some people respond to Muslim pathologies in a quite different way: by gloating over them, including rabbis expressing Schadenfreude at what Muslims are doing to Europe: “Jews should rejoice at the fact that Christian Europe is losing its identity as a punishment for what it did to us for the hundreds of years [we] were in exile there.”
I also wonder at the attitude of feminists like Jenni Murray of the BBC to the mass rape carried out by Muslims in Rotherham, Oxford and elsewhere. Murray, whose autobiography has the “poignant tale of an early 1960s visit to Auschwitz with her half-Jewish father,” is not a slim or attractive woman. Does she genuinely care that shiksas are being raped in such large numbers? One thing is certain: the BBC’s daily Woman’s Hour, which Murray has graced for many years, did not break any of the Muslim rape-gang scandals. Nor did the Guardian, despite the numerous readers it has among the social workers and child-welfare officers who were paid large sums of money to “supervise and safeguard” the victims.
Did those Guardian-readers not have access to email, telephones or postage stamps? Did they not think the Guardian would be interested in what brutal misogynist males were doing to helpless under-aged girls on such a vast scale? Apparently not. The extensive news-gathering apparatus of Guardian, with reporters and sources in every corner of the United Kingdom, failed to notice what the Guardian itself called “grotesque abuse” and a “colossal institutional failure in child protection.”
All the necessary information was available, but it wasn’t being transmitted or processed as it should have been. If British society is likened to a human body, then the media are part of its nervous system. That nervous system is clearly diseased, because it doesn’t work as it should. Oligolatry is a selective neuro-toxin: it interferes with the transmission and processing of information on certain topics. If minorities can’t be criticized for pathological behaviour, that behaviour will worsen, not improve.
Contingent Cuckoos
Game theory is applicable again, because the control and manipulation of information is an essential part of competition. For example, cuckoos lay camouflaged eggs to trick their hosts into raising non-related chicks. If birds used full language, cuckoos would undoubtedly be passionate supporters of universalism. Here’s an imaginary rendition of one of the notorious Stephen Jay Gould’s famous quotes:
Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow; more important, understand it as the center of a network of implication: “Avian equality is a contingent fact of history.” Equality is not given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for avian history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn’t happen. “Species” does not exist. We are all the same under the feathers. (Adapted from a famous homily by Stephen Jay Gould)
Cuckoos would also support laws against “hate-speech,” denouncing pigeons who claimed that hawks had a tendency to eat pigeons and shouldn’t be allowed to immigrate into pigeon societies. But cuckoos would of course ban immigration by hawks into any cuckoo society.
As it is, birds don’t have language and cuckoos manipulate their hosts in non-verbal ways. But whether it’s camouflage or confabulation, the scientific principles of game theory can be applied to identify the strategies used by competing groups. Cuckoos are an avian minority that has flourished for millions of years by exploiting more numerous species of bird. Minorities are not automatically helpless and minorities are not automatically virtuous. That is just as true in the political and cultural zone as it is in the biological zone. In politics, competing groups attempt to extend their zones of control and restrict the zones of their opponents.
Life is always a game of zones. By understanding this, Whites will get better at competing with groups who use mass immigration and minority worship as weapons of psychological and demographic war.Ever since WCW and ECW closed their doors in 2001, fans of North American pro wrestling have been clamoring for an alternative to WWE. Sure, WWE's product can be great sometimes, but it's often not, and either way, that's what we've got. Yes, there's TNA, but for most of its existence, the company's been offering a WWE-lite style product (either in terms of booking or in terms of the talent it hires) and let's face it if you've given TNA a chance, you were probably even more desperate for an alternative afterwards. The good news is, there's a great alternative to WWE, and in recent years it's become ultra-accessible. New Japan Pro Wrestling, the Land of the Rising Sun's biggest grappling company for decades, has risen from the ashes of the early 2000s puroresu bust to become the best wrestling promotion in the world. With iPPVs available online (NJPW's contract with provider Ustream is coming to an end, but a new deal is expected to be made), anyone with internet access can watch the shows and follow the action. You don't need to take my word so easily, though here are 10 reasons why New Japan is worth checking out.Choking back tears, parents whose children were slain by illegal immigrants said Tuesday the federal government and so-called sanctuary cities both share blame for their children’s deaths, and pleaded with Congress for an all-out effort to secure the border and deport those who already snuck in.
“I don’t want your sympathy, I want you to do something,” demanded Laura Wilkerson, whose 18-year-old son was strangled, had his throat smashed and his body lit on fire by an illegal immigrant trained in mixed martial arts. “Quit sitting silent because it’s going to help you get a vote.”
The lawmakers, who said they were moved by the testimony of Ms. Wilkerson and a handful of others who recounted their relatives’ murders, vowed to take action and trained much of their criticism on San Francisco, whose sanctuary policy protected an illegal immigrant whom police have accused of killing 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle earlier this month as she walked on Pier 14 with her father.
The city’s former mayor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, announced she’s working on a bill to punish cities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities trying to deport serious criminals, and one of the country’s top police chiefs testified to Congress that policies like San Francisco’s aren’t considered good practice among the police community.
But President Obama’s top lieutenants on immigration, who sat through the moving testimony from the victims’ families, still rejected their calls to get tough on sanctuary cities, insisting that asking for cooperation has already won over some jurisdictions and could still work on San Francisco too.
“I’m hopeful I don’t have to hit somebody over the head with the federal hammer,” Sarah Saldana, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said.
SEE ALSO: House aims to punish sanctuary cities, force cooperation by withholding federal funds
Tuesday’s hearing grew heated at one point as the victims’ families were leaving the witness table and Ms. Saldana and her counterpart, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Leon Rodriguez, took their seats.
Don Rosenberg, whose son was killed by an illegal immigrant in a drunken driving incident, but who was not on the witness panel, stepped forward and scolded sanctuary city defenders.
“How dare you!” he said in remarks that appeared to be addressed to the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, pastor of Lamb’s Church of the Nazarene in New York City, who defended sanctuary policies.
Mr. Rosenberg continued to admonish the sanctuary city defenders as Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley banged his gavel and demanded order. Mr. Rosenberg was escorted out of the room by U.S. Capitol Police, trailed by a horde of reporters and photographers.
The rest of the hearing was calmer, but no less intense, with Ms. Wilkerson recounting the graphic details from the autopsy report on her son, Joshua, and Jim Steinle recounting his daughter’s final words to him moments after she was shot and fell to the ground: “Help me, Dad.”
The man accused in that shooting, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, had been deported five times before and was still being sought by Ms. Saldana’s ICE agents — but the federal Bureau of Prisons had shipped him to San Francisco instead on a decades-old drug warrant.
San Francisco authorities decided not to pursue the drug case, but rather than turn Sanchez over to ICE, which had put a detainer request on him, the county sheriff’s department released Sanchez as per its sanctuary policy. Under that policy, the sheriff won’t even inform ICE when an illegal immigrant is about to be released, shielding them from being picked up by agents.
Now, in the wake of the killing and the growing political pressure to do something, the sheriff and the city’s mayor are exchanging letters over whether the sanctuary policy can be changed under city law.
Ms. Feinstein, a senior Democratic senator who was the city’s mayor in the 1970s and 1980s, has sided with the mayor and called for the sheriff to change his policy. She also said she’s writing legislation to force cities and counties to cooperate when ICE is trying to deport felons.
“The man who killed Kate is a classic case of multiple felonies and prior deportations, and a simple phone call would have been enough,” Mrs. Feinstein said.
Tom Manger, chief of police in Montgomery County, Maryland, and head of the Major City Chiefs Association, said refusing to even notify federal authorities of an illegal immigrant’s release is not considered good practice on the part of police agencies.
He said his association’s model policy calls for notification of arrests and releases, and said that’s the policy his own county follows as well. But he also said local police shouldn’t be asked to go further and enforce immigration laws themselves.
“Surely no member of the committee would want to hear from their own community that we did not respond to a call for help because we were off enforcing immigration laws,” he chided the Judiciary Committee in his written testimony.
The hearing highlighted a shift in the immigration debate. Over the last few years, immigrant rights advocates have essentially won the public debate, focusing on sympathetic illegal immigrants, and so-called Dreamers in particular, who have made good on their chances of a better life in the U.S.
But enforcement supporters had argued that gave a one-sided portrayal of the issue and insisted illegal immigration wasn’t a victimless crime. Tuesday’s hearing put an exclamation point on those claims.
“I want you to be angry that America’s borders are wide open. America does not know who is in this country. It is time to put Americans first,” Ms. Wilkerson said. “Close the borders, figure out who is really here. Keep statistics. Realize that we are at war right here in this country.”
Republicans, joined by some Democrats, are vowing to take up the fight.
The House will vote later this week on a bill by Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, to withhold funding from several federal grant programs from any cities that refuse to cooperate on immigration.
Mr. Grassley said he’s working on his |
attice of localized electron pair, which makes the compound an insulator. Na2He has negatively charged oxygen in the form of O2 instead of the electron pairs, as reported in Nature Chemistry.
“The compound that we discovered is very peculiar: helium atoms do not actually form any chemical bonds, yet their presence fundamentally changes chemical interactions between sodium atoms, forces electrons to localize inside cubic voids of the structure and makes this material insulating,” says Xiao Dong, the first author of this work, who was a long-term visiting student in Oganov’s laboratory at the time when this work was done.
This is clearly exotic work. The findings illustrate how the ‘impossible’ is possible sometimes if you set your mind to it.
It was a good day for science!
Enjoyed this article? Join 40,000+ subscribers to the ZME Science newsletter. Subscribe now!THE CLIFFS OF Moher attracted a record 1.4 million visitors last year – but facilities struggled to cope with large volumes arriving at popular visiting times.
The Clare County Council-owned Cliffs of Moher Visitor Experience attracted just over 175,500 additional tourists last year, representing a 14% increase on the total visitors for 2015.
In 2014 – the year the attraction first broke the million-visitor mark – an off-peak, pre-booked service was introduced to encourage large groups to arrive outside the peak visiting hours between 11am and 4pm.
However, tour operators responsible for designing group itineraries were slow to avail of the offer. Only last year did off-peak tours truly come into effect.
Cliffs of Moher director Katherine Webster attributed the record numbers last year to the uptake in off-peak visits and extended opening hours during the summer.
She said dealing with rising numbers is “not without its challenges” and acknowledged that the facility has “faced capacity issues during peak times throughout the season”.
“The majority of people look to visit between 11.00am and 4.00pm, and consequently, our facilities have at times struggled to cope with the numbers during the peak season,” she said.
The Cliffs of Moher Visitor Experience Source: Eamonn Farrell/Photocall Ireland
Sun sets
Referring to the slow uptake in off-peak group visits, Webster said: “It takes time for tour operators to be able to change their itineraries.”
The attraction also enticed solo travellers to come at quieter times by encouraging them to watch the sun set at the cliffs.
Webster said this “favours those visitors who stay locally. We will continue with these initiatives and others into 2017.”
As a result of the off-peak initiative, visitors for December were up more than 50% on 2015′s figure. However this number may be skewed by low, and therefore highly volatile, visitor numbers during the winter.
The US market represented a quarter of all visits to the attraction. Interestingly, the German market overtook domestic Irish visitors as the second-biggest market.
“We have also seen higher than average growth from Spain, Australia, China, Poland and India,” Webster said.
Three other Irish attractions saw more than one million visitors last year: The Guinness Storehouse, the busiest attraction in the country, Dublin Zoo and the National Aquatic Centre.
Written by Conor McMahon and posted on Fora.ieRussia has denied 'completely fake' allegations that it has a blackmail file on Donald Trump containing footage of him watching prostitutes in a Moscow hotel bed.
U.S. officials allegedly included a two-page synopsis of 'kompromat' – Russian for compromising material – as part of their security briefing of Trump on Friday.
The material, described by Trump as 'fake' and a 'political witch hunt', was based on memos compiled by a British intelligence operative who was considered 'credible' by the U.S. intelligence community, CNN reported.
The document claims Russian sources told the operative that they had extensive material on the now president-elect - including a secret film of him in the suite where President Obama stayed in Moscow, watching prostitutes committing degrading sex acts on the bed where the president slept.
But Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, dismissed the reports as a 'complete fabrication and utter nonsense'.
What is believed to be the 35-page document itself was published by Buzzfeed, which pointed out that it contained errors. Little of its contents can be independently verified, while there has been no official confirmation of the details of the briefing.
Denying even the existence of a 'kompromat' on Trump, Peskov said this morning: 'This information does not correspond to reality and is no more than fiction.'
Briefing: President-elect Trump was briefed face-to-face by James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence on the Russian threat
Kremlin overlord: Trump was told that Vladimir Putin was in possession of apparently incendiary material
Degrading acts in bed used by president: The extraordinary - and entirely unverified - allegations that Donald Trump ordered prostitutes to commit degrading sex acts in the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow are contained in a dossier drawn up by a former British spy
He insisted that the Kremlin 'does not engage in collecting compromising material'.
And he added: 'There are those who pump up such a tantrum and do their best to maintain a 'witch hunt', and by the way this is how president-elect Trump characterised this fake.
'And why is the continuation of this hysterical state needed? To force our relationship to stay degraded.
'It is a complete fake - not worth the paper it was written on.'
The memo also states that Peskov 'controlled' another dossier containing compromising material on Hillary Clinton compiled over'many years'.
But Peskov denied there was any such material.
Elsewhere, the memo states that Peskov was 'the main protagonist in Kremlin campaign to aid Trump and damage Clinton', but that he is now'scared and fears being made scapegoat by leadership for backlash in US'.
Trump himself has already dismissed the claims, tweeting: 'FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!'
In later tweets, Trump slammed 'Very unfair' reports, insisting Russia had 'never tried to use leverage over me' and that he had 'nothing to do with Russia - no deals, no loans, no nothing'.
Part of the document is seen above. Click here to see the full document first published by Buzzfeed
Donald Trump denied the allegations shortly after they were published on Tuesday night
In a later tweet, Trump repeated Russian claims that the report was 'a complete and total fabrication', adding: 'Very unfair!'
Donald Trump insisted Russia had 'never tried to use leverage over me' and that he had 'nothing to do with Russia - no deals, no loans, no nothing'
In one message, he wrote: 'I win an election easily, a great "movement" is verified, and crooked opponents try to belittle our victory with FAKE NEWS. A sorry state!'
The apparent leak by security services comes just nine days before Trump's inauguration.
Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, told Mic that the claims were absolutely false and'so ridiculous on so many levels.'
'Clearly, the person who created this did so from their imagination or did so hoping that the liberal media would run with this fake story for whatever rationale they might have.'
His counselor Kellyanne Conway also hit back against the allegations, and attempted to cast doubt on them by saying they came from 'unnamed sources', during an interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
She then said: 'I have to say as an American citizen… we should be concerned that intelligence officials leaked to the press but won’t go and tell the president-elect or the President of the United States himself, Mr Obama, what the information is. They would rather go tell the press.'
When Meyers corrected her by pointing out the reports came from briefings last week, Conway said Trump 'was never briefed'.
DOSSIER TIMELINE Summer 2016: A series of memos containing explosive details about Donald Trump are drawn up with datelines ranging from June to December. November 2016: Trump wins the United States presidential election. December 2016: Document reaches the top of the FBI. Reports claim senator John McCain presents material to agency director James Comey on December 9. January 6: Donald Trump is allegedly briefed about the claims. January 10: Document is leaked and details of its contents published.
The Trump administration's transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Buzzfeed News, it has been reported.
Obama had little to add publicly to the bombshell revelations.
'You know I hadn't seen the reports, we were on the plane together, and I hadn't read the news since then and as a matter of principle and national security I don't comment on classified information,' the president said in an interview with NBC News late Tuesday.
He added however that he hopes Congress and the Trump administration will continue to work toward finding answers about who is responsible for hacking scandals that have roiled American politics in recent months.
According to CNN, the briefings, which included the documents of incendiary material, were presented by the country's most senior intelligence chiefs - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers. But they are all yet to comment on the matter.
The meeting last week was at a time when Trump has been feuding with the intelligence community.
The intel chiefs reportedly included the information in order to make Trump aware that the information was circulating within the U.S. intelligence community, lawmakers and senior intelligence officials told the network.
It was included to bolster the agencies' conclusion, also made publicly, that Russia had dirt on both Republicans and Democrats, but released only the bad info on Democrats, via leaks to the WikiLeaks site, as part of the narrative of election interference to bolster Trump.
The document also charged there was an information exchange between Trump surrogates and representatives of the Russian government.
The document also referenced Trump's alleged '(perverted) conduct' at the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow. Pictures show the hotel's interior
Luxury: The Ritz-Carlton (pictured) in Moscow overlooks the Kremlin and Red Square
The charge has echoes of what then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who got top-level security briefings, charged this fall.
Reid wrote FBI director James Comey in October: 'It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government - a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States.'
Buzzfeed on Tuesday published memos, which the site noted could not be verified, charging that Russia had been 'cultivating, supporting and assisting' Trump for 'at least five years.'
The site wrote that the documents were 'understood to be by a former British intelligence agent' and was prepared for political opponents of Trump.
Degrading: The dossier claimed Russians purport to have footage showing Donald Trump ordered prostitutes to commit sex acts at a hotel used by the president and first lady 'whom he hated'
Dealings: The dossier apparently includes claims about Trump's financial dealings with Moscow. In 2013 he held his Miss Universe contest in the Russian capital
The document states that Trump had declined'sweetener' real estate deals in Russia that the Kremlin lined up in order to cultivate him. The business proposals were said to be 'in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament'.
Russian authorities tried to 'exploit Trump's personal obsessions and sexual perversion' in order to compromise him.
The document also referenced Trump's '(perverted) conduct' at the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow, where the President and First Lady Michelle Obama 'whom he hated' had stayed.
It cited 'Source D' as saying Trump's conduct included hiring prostitutes 'to perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show in front of him.' It says the hotel was known to be under the control of Russia's FSB, with hidden cameras and microphones.
KREMLIN DENIES MEMO CLAIMS Russia has denied allegations that the Kremlin collected compromising information about U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, dismissed news reports as a 'complete fabrication and utter nonsense.' He insisted that the Kremlin 'does not engage in collecting compromising material'. He added: 'There are those who pump up such a tantrum and do their best to maintain a 'witch hunt', and by the way this is how president-elect Trump characterised this fake. Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir Putin (pictured), dismissed news reports as a 'complete fabrication and utter nonsense' 'And why is the continuation of this hysterical state needed? To force our relationship to stay degraded. 'It is a complete fake - not worth the paper it was written on.' The memo also states that Peskov 'controlled' another dossier containing compromising material on Hillary Clinton compiled over'many years'. But Peskov denied there was any such material. 'This was absolutely fabricated, this is total nonsense. This is what is called "pulp fiction".' This morning, the Russian state-run media has blasted 'troubling' suggestions the FBI should be investigating Donald Trump over some of the claims in the document. News outlet Sputnik warned its readers: 'The fact that multiple media outlets practically simultaneously decided to publish these reports despite admitting their erroneous character is telling by itself. 'However, allegedly the FBI has been in the possession of these memos for some time too.' Sputnik also highlighted a report on the Wikileaks whistleblowing website which claimed as unreliable media reports of Russian agents having kompromat on Trump. Nikolay Kovalyov (right) a former head of Vladimir Putin's (left) security service has denied that the FSB snooped on Donald Trump and collected compromising material on him when he was in Moscow '35 page PDF published by Buzzfeed on Trump is not an intelligence report. Style, facts & dates show no credibility,' WikiLeaks said on Twitter. Meanwhile a former head of Vladimir Putin's security service has denied that the FSB snooped on Donald Trump and collected compromising material on him when he was in Moscow. Nikolay Kovalyov claimed: 'Of course, there is no kompromat.' Commenting on the press reports that 'kompromat' on Trump was gathered since the times when Trump came to Moscow as organiser the Miss Universe pageant in 2013, he said: 'To gather compromising materials about a man who came to hold a beauty contest - who would be interested in it? 'You can rely on my experience. This is not our routine here in Russia.' Kovalyov is now a Russian MP for Putin's United Russia party. He was head of the FSB from 1996-98 and was replaced in the position by Putin, who used the position as the launch pad to his political career. 'The feeling is that (Barack) Obama's administration has put all its efforts on compromising the winner of the presidential race, and they believe that in this fight all means are worth it,' said Kovayov. 'They have got enough compromising materials in their motherland, let them sort it themselves there. 'It is not correct to drag Russia into their political fight.'
A spokesman from the hotel told MailOnline this morning: 'In line with our company standard to protect the privacy of our guests, we do not speak about any individual or group with whom we may have done business.'
The site noted that the document contained some errors, such as misspelling the name of a company, the 'Alfa Group.'
The documents quote an unnamed Russian intelligence official as saying there was enough information to blackmail Trump.
The New York Times reported that intelligence officials considered the material'so potentially explosive' that they decided they needed to tell Trump, Obama, and top congressional leaders about it.
The paper described the memos as being 'generated by political operatives seeking to derail Mr. Trump's candidacy.'
CNN's story was reported by four reporters, including former Watergate scribe Carl Bernstein.
Bernstein said on air that the raw intelligence memos were drafted by a retired MI6 British intelligence operative. MI6, formally the Secret Intelligence Service, conducts foreign intelligence gathering for the UK government.
Chain of information: The dossier was drawn up by an unnamed British ex-spy, obtained by a British diplomat and passed personally to John McCain - who then gave it to James Comey, the FBI Director
Offered? NBC News reporter Tom Winter suggested that he and other reporters had been offered the information but had not acted on the offer
The operative had been hired by a political opposition research firm who did work first for Republican and then Democratic political opponents of Trump.
'He then took it to an FBI colleague that he had known in his undercover work for years,' Bernstein said on CNN.
He said a British diplomat in Russia became aware of the findings independently.
The ambassador then took the information to Arizona senator and staunch Russia critic Senator John McCain, who then 'personally' provided the information to FBI Director Comey.
Pervert: Revelations around Anthony Weiner were made public by the FBI but the Trump 'dossier' was not
On Twitter, NBC reporter Tom Winter suggested the information had already been'shopped' to reporters last summer but never acted on.
It is unclear if outlets other than NBC were offered it. DailyMail.com was not.
The apparent confirmation of Reid's claim that FBI Director Comey was in possession before the elections of explosive information about Trump – including the claim that Russia tried to cultivate the future U.S. president as an asset – is certain to inflame Democrats.
Democrats were already fuming that Comey decided to reveal just 11 days before the election that the bureau was conducting a search of material contained on the laptop of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin.
The device contained emails between Abedin and Clinton which Comey said could be relevant to the closed investigation into the former Secretary of State's handling of classified material on her secret email server.
It was found while the FBI investigated the sexting relationship Abedin's pervert husband Anthony Weiner had with an underage girl. The relationship was first disclosed by DailyMail.com.
After the disclosure of fresh moves on the email probe rocked the campaign, Comey announced two days before the election that the investigation had not changed the original decision not to charge Clinton in connection with her email scandal.
Comey wrote Congress that he felt obliged to reveal the new search for Clinton emails to avoid'misleading' the public.
'We don't ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed,' Comey wrote.The husband’s phone recorded the beating, but an appeals court ruled the voice-mail is inadmissible as evidence.
John Garrett Smith was found guilty by a Washington court of assault and attempted murder for beating his wife so severely he believed her to be dead. According to the Daily Beast, Sheryl Williams was left with a swollen face, broken nose, concussion, injured back, and brain damage.
A key piece of evidence used to convict Smith was a voice-mail left on his cell phone. The couple had reportedly started to argue when Williams called the phone to help Smith locate it. Smith didn’t pick up, and the call went to voice-mail, recording the beating.
“Where is my phone?” Smith asked on tape, according to the appeals decision. Williams then said, “Look what you have done to me!,” to which Smith replied, “I will kill you.”
Smith’s recorded threat to kill Williams was enough to convict him of attempted murder and send him to prison for 12 years. But his lawyers appealed the decision based on the fact that Williams never consented to be recorded in the first place (Washington is a two-party consent state), and the appeals court agreed.
“Standing alone, Sheryl’s screams would not constitute a conversation,” Judge C.J. Bjorgen wrote in his decision. “However, these screams were responsive to statements that John was making. Within this context, Sheryl’s screams serve as an expression of sentiments responsive to John’s yelling and thus constitute part of a conversation.”
For his part, Smith and his lawyers claim his death threat wasn’t literal. “I never intended to hurt Sheryl, let alone kill her,” he wrote in a letter to the court. “Any inference otherwise is simply false.”Photo: HBO
“Music is always a part of my characters’ make-up,” explains Michael K. Williams as he scrolls through his iPhone. “All my characters have playlists.” While talking to Williams for a New York Magazine feature, we learned that in order to maintain a given character’s temperament, he crafts playlists. “Sometimes it could be twenty songs, sometimes it’s just two or three.” Each playlist takes quite a bit of time to assemble. He rarely recalls song titles, so he spends hours going through the entirety of his music library, listening for qualities (usually lyrics) that might strike the right mood for a given character or scene. There are some consistencies, though: “There’s a 90 percent chance Nas will be on all my characters’ playlists.”
“Music for me is a portal,” he reflects. “Once I’ve gone to that dimension and I’m there, whatever got me there, I just loop those songs.” For Williams, his playlists allow him to “stay there” for as long as possible. While filming, he will listen to his headphones until he “hears sticks” (the clapperboard). “The moment they call ‘cut,’ theyre right back on.” Williams’s current playlist for Boardwalk Empire’s Albert “Chalky” White consists of three songs — fittingly, two of them are by Nas. He was gracious enough to share with Vulture the longer playlist that he compiled for Omar Little, his character from The Wire. Collectively, these songs “tell the story of Omar.” It’s a sequence he knew intimately for years, but no longer. “I tend to stay away from the Omar playlist … I know where it’s gonna take me.” (Listen to the entire hour-long playlist over at Spotify.)
2pac, “Unconditional Love”
Nas, “Let There be Light”
Young Jeezy, “Dreamin’”
Mary J. Blige, “My Life”
Lauryn Hill, “Oh Jerusalem”
Jay-Z, “You Must Love Me”
2pac, “So Many Tears”
Biggie Smalls “Suicidal Thoughts”
Young Jeezy “Bury me a G”
Jay-Z, “Oh My God”
Biggie Smalls, “Who Shot Ya”
2pac, “Against All Odds”
Biggie Smalls, “Everyday Struggle”
Nas, “One Mic”
Lauryn Hill, “War in the Mind”
Common, “It’s Your World”
Lauryn Hill, “Mystery of Iniquity”
Meshell Ndegeocello, “Akel Dama (Field of Blood)”
Lauryn Hill, “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind”
2pac, “Dear Mama”Much has been said of Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, be it in reviews, in advertisements, in the media, or even in fiscal reporting. The latest news has arrived via Kantar WorldPanel, which found that the two siblings earned a respectable 5.8% of Q1 2016 smartphone sales, an impressive accomplishment given that the pair of products released on March 11th, with less than 3 weeks remaining in said fiscal period.
The report, written by Mobile Analyst Lauren Guenveur, indicates that the Galaxy S7 was “the fifth best-selling phone in Q116” and perhaps even more significantly, that “the same cannot be said of its predecessor, the Galaxy S6, which was the 10th best-selling smartphone (3.2%), after its launch in the three months ending in April 2015.”
Purchasing patterns
While it’s easy to assume what may have contributed to the success of these handsets – battery life for example – Kantar has statistics to offer. The findings may be surprising to some:
Among Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge buyers who purchased the devices in March, the leading purchase driver was battery life, with 53.5% citing it as the main driver of handset choice. The battery on the S7 is larger than on previous iterations (though according to some- battery life is not significantly improved), and ships with fast and wireless charging (50% of the battery life in 30 minutes). This is the first Samsung device to do so, though this feature was available as an accessory for earlier models. Quality of the camera was also an important driver for S7 buyers—specifically, for 50.9% of them versus 33.5% of overall smartphone buyers for the period. S7 buyers also prioritized storage capacity on the phone, at 36.5% versus 17.8% among all buyers, and processor speed at 39.8% versus 23.9% of all buyers.
Perhaps the most interesting data, however, relates to that of price-related issues:
38.8% of Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge buyers were influenced by an exclusive phone promotion or offer, 12.2% by a free or discounted product, 11% by a trade-in scheme, and 10.3% by free or discounted accessories.
Based on this report, it would thus seem that a majority of customers were swayed by (1) a larger battery, (2) a better camera, and (3) the ability to get the device as part of some kind of perk/offer.
MicroSD
Curiously, one of the most widely criticized aspects of the Galaxy S6 –a lack of microSD support – is not specifically mentioned in factoring into the decision to buy the S7 variants – which do include it. It’s possible the data is part of the storage-related figures, but even then, 36.5% is not a majority. It’s also possible that microSD support – as a standalone feature – wasn’t examined. Whatever the case may be however, despite all the Samsung-bashing from last year, the now-restored support seemingly was not as important among early adopters as one might seemingly expect.
Wrap Up
Given the limited amount of time the S7 and S7 Edge were available in Q1 2016, it can be expected that Q2 will see even more impressive performance result. Presumably the phone(s) will skyrocket to the top of the charts, but that could change given the release of the LG G5 and HTC 10, which will also be factored into the period.
What do you think about the results and data contained in this study? Do you fit into the same breakdown or were there other factors that influenced your decision? Drop a line in the comments section down below!US President Donald Trump suffers from an acute strain of trade deficit disorder. He blames America’s ills on trade deficits and the bad deals that underpin them. Not only is this poor economics, drawing heavily on the fearmongering of White House senior trade adviser Peter Navarro, it threatens the stability of a still-fragile global economy.
The US has trade deficits with 101 nations. This is not a bilateral problem, as the Trump administration insists. It is a multilateral one. This profusion of deficits reflects a far deeper problem: the US’s saving deficit. In the third quarter of 2016, its net domestic saving rate stood at just 3 per cent of national income, less than half the 6.3 per cent average that prevailed over the final three decades of the 20th century.
Lacking in saving and wanting to grow, the US must import saving from countries like China, Germany, and Japan, which have big surpluses. But it must run a massive balance of payments deficit in order to attract the foreign capital. Since 2000, the cumulative $8.3tn balance of payments deficit has been almost identical to the $8.6tn multilateral trade gap over the same period.
This underscores why tough talk aimed at one nation or another is nothing more than political bluster. Without dealing with the root cause of the problem, eliminating a trade deficit with a few nations will simply be reflected in expanded deficits with others.
The temptation to punish China is an example of this misguided approach. Assume that the Trump administration delivers on its threat and imposes punitive tariffs on China. With China accounting for close to 50 per cent of America’s total merchandise trade deficit, such a move may seem appealing. But it would backfire.
The Chinese chunk of the US’s multilateral trade imbalances would have to be absorbed by other nations, most of which have cost structures and product prices that are well in excess of those currently available in China. The labour compensation rate in Chinese manufacturing runs at about 10 per cent of that of America’s top 10 non-Chinese foreign suppliers. Asking them to fill the void would be tantamount to a large tax on Walmart prices and US consumers.
Related article OECD warns of need to escape global ‘low-growth trap’ Static forecasts signal disconnect between business upswing and real economy outlook Wednesday, 8 March, 2017
All this points to the only meaningful solution to US trade deficits : boosting national saving. That would wean the US off excess reliance on foreign capital and the multilateral trade deficits required to secure the inflows from abroad. But it would require a long-profligate America actually to live within its means. Without a restoration of saving via federal budget reductions or expanded private saving incentives, trade deficits are here to stay.
Mr Trump is an unabashed protectionist. In his inaugural address, he exclaimed: “Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.” That hearkens to the late 1920s and early 1930s when a similar mindset led to the passage of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, a global trade war and the Great Depression.
Protectionism is a blame game that avoids giving an honest message to the American public: that trade deficits have become central to the grand bargain between the US and the rest of the world. They have allowed Americans to tap the surplus saving of others in order to keep consuming beyond their means. If the US does not like trade deficits, then it either has to start saving again or give up on the false promise of economic renewal. Trade deficits are not the problem, but symptoms of a deep denial.
Trade deficit disorder is a manifestation of that denial, which can lead to major policy blunders and destabilising dislocations at home and abroad. It offers the fantasy of a bilateral solution for a multilateral problem. This delusion must be treated before it is too late.
The writer teaches at Yale University and is author of ‘Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China’Snøhetta has won a competition to design the new Banque Libano Francaise (BLF) headquarters. Located in Beirut, the project marks Snøhetta’s first ever commission in Lebanon
The stunning concept for the new general headquarters points towards a new future both for the bank and the city. The design of the high-rise block will feature chequerboard-patterned facades, while the building will feature picturesque plant covered terraces carved into the roof and walls.
The design creates a new public space which will articulate a public and private domain. The terraces in the building will provide staff at the headquarters of the Lebanese bank with access to outdoor areas which the architects hope will become social hubs.
A public area forms the foundation of the new headquarters building containing the essential public functions and facilities. Connected to the street and surrounding urban context, a high degree of permeability will be maintained at street level, ensuring connectivity across the site and with the local people.
“We are delighted to enter into this creative partnership with the BLF. In a time of profound change and transformations, the BLF is an ideal partner for Snøhetta with our shared ideals of sustainability, community, and dialogue”, says Snøhetta founding partner Kjetil T. Thorsen
Images provided by SnøhettaFROM earthquake warnings to chocolate milk, here are eight brilliant Irish inventions...
1. Quick Tattoos
The first ever patent for a tattoo machine, was filed by Irish immigrant Sean O’Reilly, in New York in 1891. O’Reilly was already an established tattoo artist in the city at the time. He was responsible for the living artwork adorning some of the most well known tattooed ladies including Emma De Burgh and Annie Howard. Tattooed ladies were at the time big business, providing a popular freakshow attraction.
It’s not known if O’Reilly ever struck it rich from his patent — only one of the machines is said to still exist and there is no record of him ever opening a factory or production line creating them.
He did however continue tattooing, gaining recognition for faster and cleaner work thanks to his electronic machine. He worked out of the back of a barbershop at No. 11 Chatham Square, and occasionally the famed Stillwell Ave on Coney Island. O’Reilly died in 1908 after a fall when painting his Brooklyn home. His apprentice Charlie Wagner continued to work out of the same backroom studio until his death in 1953.
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2. Chocolate Milk
Killyleagh’s most illustrious son, the Royal physician Sir Hans Sloane was a big name in the 18th century. So much so, they named Chelsea’s famous Sloane Square after him.
Sloane was born in a thatched house on Frederick Street in Killyleagh, Co, Down, not far from Killyleagh Castle. At the age of 19 he moved to London to study medicine.
A successful physician, he counted the Royal Family among his patients and grew himself a pretty substantial fortune. He become president of the Royal College of Physicians, succeeding Isaac Newton and still found the time to treat poor patients for free.
On top of all this he was by all accounts, a bit of a hoarder, it was his vast collection of books and manuscripts that became the basis of The British Library where you will find a bust of him in the entrance lobby.
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It was during a collector’s trip to Jamaica when the locals introduced him to a local delicacy known as cocoa. Sloane wasn’t too keen on the drink, but found that by mixing it with milk, it became considerably more enjoyable. He brought the recipe home to London with him where it was sold in apothecaries as a medicine. Eventually a certain Mr Cadbury picked up on the recipe, and the rest is history — delicious, delicious history.
3. Humane Hanging
You should, so I’ve been told, be thankful for small mercies. If there was ever a small mercy to be very thankful for, it’s the mathematical accuracy of Samuel Haughton.
A trained doctor and an ordained priest, Haughton was Born in Carlow and worked as a professor of geology at Trinity College.
In 1896, he devised the precise mathematical equation that enabled hanging to be used as a humane method of execution. He found that, ultimately, by using the correct length of rope you could almost ensure that the human neck would snap, causing paralysis, and probably unconsciousness. This would avoid the grim spectacle of watching the convict strangling to death, which so often occurred. It’s a system that became known as the standard drop, probably most famous for being used to execute condemned Nazis after the Nuremberg Trials.
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Away from the gallows he was a distinguished figure in Irish scientific circles, he submitted papers on everything from the laws of equilibrium to the motion of solid and fluid bodies. He was President of the Royal Irish Academy as well as Secretary of the Royal Scientific Society of Ireland. He was also the first of many to critique Darwin’s theory of evolution.
4. Ejection Seats
The ejection seat is the brainchild of James Martin born in Crossgar, Co. Down. They may seem like science fiction, but aircraft ejection seats do actually exist outside of the opening scenes of Indiana Jones movies. They play a vital role in the safety of many modern-day military aircraft. It’s a crucial mechanism designed to save the pilot’s life in the event of catastrophe, carrying them clear of the doomed aircraft and deploying a parachute.
In 1934, Martin together with Valentine Baker formed an aircraft-engineering firm. Tragically during the testing stages of their third aircraft design, Baker was killed. The plane engine seized and he was forced to make a crash landing, striking a tree stump.
Witnessing the event affected Martin so much that he became fixated on safety, in particular with the idea of providing aircraft with a means of assisted escape for pilots. After testing a number of different ideas, it became apparent that this could be best achieved via a forced ejection of the aircraft seat with its occupant still seated. This could be made to work by an explosive charge located under the seat. The idea of the ejection seat was born.
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5. Boycotts
Boycotts, the withdrawal of commercial support as a form of protest, is the result of one man’s misguided feud with the Irish Land League in Irish land wars of 1800s.
The Irish Land League was a political organisation that hoped to abolish the status quo of land ownership in Ireland, whereby rich British lords extorted money from the Irish tenant farmer’s who worked the land.
Captain Charles Boycott was in charge of collecting rent from these tenant farmers on a patch of land near the Lough Mask area of Mayo. The farmers, unhappy with the cost, demanded a reduction in rent. Many refused to pay, this led to Boycott evicting a number of them.
However he couldn’t evict them all, and when Irish Land League got involved, they encouraged the farmers to band together and refuse to co-operate with him. The tactic even spread so far as local Irish-owned shops and businesses who began to refuse his custom. Soon Boycott was left with acres of land without the workforce required to harvest crops, and he couldn’t even hire a girl to do his washing.
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The perceived humiliation of British establishment by Irish farmers was causing quite a stir in the British press. Eventually a relief workforce was sent to harvest the crops, and save face. They worked under the protection of soldiers from the Royal Irish Constabulary. In the end it was said to have cost the British Government around £10,000 to complete that year’s harvest.
The Irish Land League had succeeded in turning Boycott’s very name into shorthand for their new form of protest.
6. Chemistry
It’s widely accepted in scientific circles that Robert Boyle, a leading figure in 17th century academia, was the creator of chemistry as we know it. So if you hated making blue powder explode with Bunsen burners at school it’s his fault.
Born in 1627 in Waterford, Boyle was the seventh son of the Earl of Cork. He was educated at Eton, before embarking on the 17th century version of a gap year. He eventually settled in Dorset where he built himself a laboratory and started making things go bang.
He was the first to really float the idea of science as defined by a series of experiments. In fact he was the first to perform controlled experiments before documenting and publishing his procedures and findings.
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His most famous discovery — that if the volume of a gas is decreased the pressure will increase — is widely known as Boyle’s law. As well as this, he introduced the litmus test to tell acids from bases and many other |
to do other fun activities. At some point, I may decide it is better to buy larger multifamily buildings than single-family homes, but for now, I see more opportunity in the single-family market in my area than multifamily. If you want help with your investing, you may want to consider the Complete Blueprint to Successful Real Estate Investing.
Update on my plan 2016
The market has gotten even crazier in Colorado. Houses I was buying for $100,000 are now at least $160,000 or more. The rents have not increased nearly as much as house values have increased. It is very hard to find rentals and I have stopped buying them in Colorado. I have started to look at other states including Florida for a new market.
I also stopped paying off my mortgages early. I decided my money was better used to buy as many homes as I could. It has paid off buying 16 rentals in the last five years since our market has gone up so much. I have invested about $300,000 in buying my houses and my equity is close to $1.5 million. I have even decided to sell some of my rentals and re-invest that capital into more properties in another market. You can read all about that here.
I wrote this goal out in 2013 and updated it in 2014, and it is now 2016. I think goals are vitally important to achieve what you want in life. Will I reach this goal? I do not know. If I don’t reach it, will I be a failure? No! I am already way ahead of where I would have been without this goal. That is the point of goals, to motivate you to go farther than you think you can.
Update on my plan 2018
Right now it is the middle of 2018 and I have not come close to where I should be with my goal. Am I disappointed? No. Many things have happened that are out of my control; good and bad. The biggest challenge I have faced is the housing market in Colorado. Prices have almost tripled since I made this goal. Some of the rentals I bought for less than $100,000 7 years ago are worth close to or more than $300,000 today. I can no longer cash flow on residential rental properties in my market. I have thought about buying rentals in Florida, but in the end, decided to buy commercial properties here. I even bought a 68,000 square foot strip mall this year. I am buying rentals worth a lot of money, but not as many as my plan called for. Sometimes we have to change our plans based on changes in our lives or markets. You can see all of my rentals here.
I have also focussed more on flips because I can make money with those in my market. I flipped 26 houses last year!
For more information on how to buy the best rentals which will make the most money, check out my book: Build a Rental Property Empire: The no-nonsense book on finding deals, financing the right way, and managing wisely. The book is 374 pages long, comes in paperback or as an eBook and is an Amazon bestseller.John Lloyd and Jo Brand are joined by writer and comedian Deborah Frances-White, bumble-bee expert Professor Dave Goulson and the man with 'no cunning plan', Sir Tony Robinson.
This week, the Professor of Ignorance John Lloyd and his curator Jo Brand welcome comedian, screenwriter and Guilty Feminist podcaster Deborah Frances-White; the entomologist and bumblebee expert, Professor Dave Goulson; and "that bloke off Time Team who was Baldrick in Blackadder", Sir Tony Robinson.
This week, the Museum's Guest Committee enshrine the first Englishwoman to make a living as a professional poet, Emilia Lanier; speculate on the unusual polyphiloprogenitive strategies of virgin death watch beetles; and pay homage to the moment when Blackadder finally went "over the top".
The show was researched by Anne Miller of QI and Mike Turner.
The production coordinator was Sophie Richardson.
The producers were Richard Turner and James Harkin.
It was a BBC Studios Production.Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 25, 2005; Page A13
TORONTO, March 24 -- A board hearing Canada's refugee cases rejected a bid Thursday for asylum by a U.S. Army deserter who refused to go to Iraq, raising legal roadblocks to the growing trickle of American servicemen fleeing north of the border.
The board ruled that Jeremy Hinzman, 26, could not argue that he would be unfairly persecuted in the United States for refusing to serve in what he said was an illegal war.
Hinzman, a parachute-trained specialist from Rapid City, S.D., served in Afghanistan but fled from Fort Bragg, N.C., and entered Canada in January 2004 after his unit, the 82nd Airborne Division, was given orders to deploy to Iraq.
"Our hands were tied by not being able to argue the legality of the war," Hinzman told several dozen demonstrators, including two other American deserters, who gathered outside the U.S. Consulate after the decision. Now working as a bicycle courier, Hinzman cycled up after work, to chants of "War resisters welcome here."
His attorney, Jeffry House, said nine other servicemen had started the asylum application process and he estimated there were "about 100" in hiding in Canada.
"Obviously we are disappointed," House said. "We certainly are not giving up. We believe the decision is wrong, and we will appeal it."
House said the ruling was a setback for those fleeing the war, but that it didn't "make those cases unwinnable."
The decision came two weeks after the arrival of another serviceman, who served eight months in Iraq before fleeing to Canada with his wife and four young children. Army Pfc. Joshua Key, 26, served as a combat engineer in Fallujah and Ramadi, located in the violent Sunni Triangle area, before deserting while home on leave.
In Canada, he told reporters he refused to return to Iraq because of "the atrocities that were happening to the innocent people of Iraq."
Hinzman, whose case is the first to be decided by the refugee board, tried to raise similar arguments, but the board refused to hear those claims, along with those that he would be persecuted for following his conscience. But the board noted that the United States, as a democracy, would give Hinzman "full protection of a fair and independent... judicial process" if he returned to face trial.
Hinzman initially applied for non-combat, conscientious-objector status in the Army, but was denied. The refugee board said "Mr. Hinzman was no doubt guided by his moral code" in refusing to serve, but that he failed the test of a refugee fleeing persecution. The board found that his likely punishment in the United States would not be "not excessive or disproportionately severe."To honor slain Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, and to stop the cycle of violence that led to her death, Oxfam and its supporters are calling on all investors and companies involved in the Agua Zarca dam project—which Cáceres fiercely opposed—to withdraw their funding and involvement now.
"Berta's death must be the last," said Ed Pomfret, the head of Oxfam's land-rights campaign, in a statement on Sunday. "The only good that can come of it is for her people to emerge successful in their struggle for rights to their lands and resources."
Cáceres, an Indigenous Lenca activist and winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize, was assassinated in her home on March 3. She had long opposed the Agua Zarca dam, and had recently led a successful effort to pressure the World Bank and the largest dam company in the world, Chinese state-owned Sinohydro, to pull out of the project. "Tragically, because other financial interests are always waiting in the wings to plunder for profit," Other Worlds co-founder Beverly Bell wrote last week, "the dam is still under construction."
The day after Cáceres' death, the group she co-founded—the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, or COPINH—issued a statement that read in part:
We know very well who murdered her. We know it was [United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, or DESA] and the Hydroelectric project Agua Zarca, financed by the Dutch Development Bank (FMO), the Finnish Fund for Industrial Cooperation Ltd. (FINNFUND), the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), the German corporations Siemens and VoithHydro, the company CASTOR (Castillo Torres) Constructora Cerros de Comayagua, the Honduran bank FICOHSA, the corporate group of the Atala family, the government of the United States through the USAID program and the project “Mercado,” as well as SERNA, in complicity with the National Government of Honduras. These are the authorities behind the physical disappearance of Berta. Their hands are stained with indigenous blood and with the blood of the Lenca people.
Some of those very same entities are targeted by the Oxfam campaign.
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"This project is tainted and beyond repair," Pomfret said. "We demand that CABEI, FMO, Finnfund and Voith-Hydro do the right thing and withdraw. We need a proper investigation into Berta's death and the immediate establishment of peace in the area for the Lenca communities, and this can only occur if the project is stopped and the companies pull out. People have been killed and injured and no one has been held responsible. It's unthinkable that these companies would let this project continue under these circumstances."
Of course, Agua Zarca is just one of 17 dams being imposed within Lenca territories alone, as Democracy Center researchers Philippa de Boissière and Sian Cowman point out in a piece published Monday. And "[t]his picture is being replicated across the region," they note, as South America faces what they call an "unprecedented expansion of mega hydroelectric power."
Echoing Pomfret's assertion that Agua Zarca "is emblematic of hundreds of similar projects happening today, all around the world," de Boissière and Cowman continue:
The need for international action against megadams has been underscored by Berta Cáceres’ murder. Following her example, there’s an urgent need for global activists to continuously and vociferously denounce the mega hydroelectric dam complex — calling it out as a false solution to the climate crisis that it’s helping to drive. Berta not only put her body on the line to protect the rivers, lands, and communities she felt a part of. She also went beyond her own community struggle, relentlessly shining a light on the global dynamics of power that lay behind local injustices. Like transnational corporations, resistance movements are strongest when they connect beyond fenceline struggles. Berta’s strength of resistance and international perspective posed a threat to a development paradigm based on the enrichment of global elites — so much so that the forces pushing that agenda felt it necessary to take her life.
Oxfam is also urging Honduran authorities to launch an independent investigation into Cácares' murder, under the supervision of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. A similar call was issued earlier this month by a coalition of more than 50 international organizations.Note : Many well-known freedom movement spokesmen/women have not been willing to fully discuss and/or expose this subject for reasons known only to them. Why? Because they think it's either too trivial, they don't fully understand it or perhaps in their mind, it's been debunked by an attorney they give credence too, without doing their own thorough due diligence. It is also important to note that there are some well intentioned lawyers who strive to assist in making our world a safer and better place for all to live. The intention of this article is to shine a bright light and empower you to help break the matrix grip.
First and foremost, it is vitally important to comprehend that everything in the business / commercial world is done by contract, both public and private. Secondly, relationships are also contractual - marital, parental and social (friendships). You both consciously and unconsciously verbally contract all day long, and when merited, in written form as well.
Words are understood to be very powerful and it is through spelling, that spells are cast. However, it is a very misunderstood fact, that words used in everyday language, most often do not have the same meaning in a legal sense (contractual or in a court setting).
What are these 5 words that are used to control / enslave you? = person, resident, citizen, driver and passenger (all commercial terms). In my humble opinion, it is these 5 words that are the keys to casting the spell in the attorneys’ legal jargon trickery. All commercial transactions / contracts have been designed to remove the men and women from the equation and replace with a legal fictional entity in the matrix system.
PERSON is a legal entity - a trust, corporation, partnership, association. Don't be fooled by the attorney's statutory word trickery if you see - "natural person". An adjective cannot change the root meaning of a word. Plain and simple, it is impossible to be a "person". You are either a man or woman - a living being. A 'person' is a dead entity and attorneys may only represent persons – commercial legal entities.
RESIDENT is the word term used to establish jurisdiction in a State (a legal entity). To "reside" is a commercial term only used to establish domicile for tax revenue purposes.
CITIZEN is the word term used to establish jurisdiction in a Federal district. It is also a commercial term only used to establish domicile for tax revenue purposes. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) may only tax those people who have voluntarily deemed themselves internal to the district. Thus only legal entities have tax liability.
DRIVER is a For Hire / paid operator of a motor vehicle. The term'motor vehicle' is defined as every description of carriage or other contrivance propelled or drawn by mechanical power used for commercial purposes on the highways in the transportation of passengers, passengers and property, or property or cargo.
PASSENGER is someone who pays a fare for passage on a commercial carrier - airplane, bus, taxi, limousine, cruise ship, train or trolley, rather than a 'guest' who travels without charge or fee.
It is necessary to go to the very root when looking at a complex problem. It is obvious that most politicians and their key staff are attorneys/lawyers, who are minions in servitude to the bankers. The simplest solution is to start removing the attorneys from office.
Take note of these quotes:
"In a recent conversation with an official at the Internal Revenue Service, I was amazed when he told me that 'If the taxpayers of this country ever discover that the IRS operates on 90% bluff, the entire system will collapse'." -- Henry Bellmon, U.S. Senator (1969).
"Our tax system is based on individual self-assessment and voluntary compliance." - Mortimer Caplin, former Commissioner of Internal Revenue, Internal Revenue Audit Manual (1975).
"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are U.S. government institutions. They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the U.S. for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will." -- Congressman Charles McFadden, Chairman, House Banking and Currency Committee, June 10, 1932.
"The real truth of the matter is, and you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. History depicts Andrew Jackson as the last truly honorable and incorruptible American president." -- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, November 23, 1933 in a letter to Colonel Edward Mandell House.
"... our system of credit is concentrated... in the hands of a few men.. a power so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that [we had] better not speak above [our] breath when [we] speak in condemnation of it... We have come to be... completely controlled... by... small groups of dominant men." -- President Woodrow Wilson.
"The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes" -- Felix Frankfurter, United States Supreme Court Justice.
"Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws." -- Baron M.A. Rothschild (1744 - 1812)
The Solution for unraveling control in the matrix grip:
The NAME = all Capital letter designation - JOHN DOE or JANE DOE is the corporate legal entity = person (also known as - strawman).
This is not a trivial matter. The key to your freedom is to know that you are not this NAME / PERSON. The voluntary act of identifying yourself in a legal contractual setting without proper status declaration will continue your enslavement to the system. You are a living being.
There are 4 ways to respond when offered a contract - acceptance, conditional acceptance, rejection or going silent (acquiescence). The first two choices are honorable and the last two choices are dishonorable.
Why is a judge referred to as "Your Honor"? – It’s because he/she is weighing who is before him/her and remaining in honor... like a mirror and also weighing who will get into argument and therefore acting in dishonor.
Lessons in HONOR AND DISHONOR
You will always lose unless you abide by the rules of the matrix game. You will probably lose even if you use the rules, because you will argue and that is what the "controllers" want you to do, argue. When you argue, you are in dishonor. This is unfortunately how we’ve been conditioned.
Forget about the law. The law is only for those that have violated some tenet of commerce.
Remember, everything in this world is a contract. When you go to the store to purchase a quart of milk, you are about to enter into a contract. When you pick up the milk and pay for it, the clerk will give you a receipt. This receipt is the title to the quart of milk. If you discard the receipt before you leave the store and you leave the store, you could be charged with stealing since you do not have the title to the milk.
You will probably begin to argue. Once you begin to argue, you are in dishonor and when you are in dishonor nothing matters except getting back in honor.
Here is a 'biblical story' allegory example: Jesus came upon the land to teach people how to operate in commerce. His main purpose was to save us from our dishonor. Yet we persist in this dishonor by acquiring things, which we are treating as little demigods.
One of the best lessons Jesus taught was by his example. On his trip to Galilee, he encountered three beggars, who called out and said "Jesus, heal us"! They were offering Jesus a contract.
There are four possible ways in which to answer when one is offered a contract.
a. Agree to the contract and you are in honor.
b. Remain silent (considered insolent) and therefore you are in dishonor.
c. To argue about the contract is a dishonor. That is why the courts want you to have an attorney. Attorneys argue and get you in dishonor. They are there to turn you in!
d. Doing a novation is like bargaining and it is a conditional acceptance. For example, if a merchant is selling apples for one dollar each and you want an apple, but you don't want to pay a dollar, you may offer fifty cents. This is bartering, not dishonor and you are remaining in honor. You have just placed the merchant in the position of having to make one of the same four choices on how to answer. You will probably walk away and he will lose the sale if he declines by arguing or remaining silent. He lost because he dishonored you. He remains in honor if he chooses 'd'.
Getting back to the lesson. The beggars offered Jesus a contract. Jesus replied, “What would you have me do?” He is now doing a novation to the contract. Before he can comply, he has to know what the contract requires. The beggars then re-offered the contract to Jesus by saying, "make us see". He then agreed by saying, "you are healed". The beggars and Jesus were always in honor and the contract was completed and everyone was satisfied.
In a court setting, you should re-offer the Judge, by stating: Your Honor, I conditionally accept your offer to give you a NAME upon Proof of Claim that if I do so, it will not bind me to any contract with the State of XYZ (whatever jurisdiction you are supposedly in). The judge will keep trying to get you into contract. You must continue to conditionally accepting the judge’s offer by continually repeating, upon Proof of whatever Claim they are making.
The case is The State of XXY v. JOHN DOE. The judge asks you…How do you plead, Guilty or Not Guilty? or he may say Responsible or Not Responsible? Your answer: Your honor, I conditionally accept your offer to plead upon Proof of Claim that the State of XYX is an injured or the State of XYZ and I have a contract and upon Proof of Claim that the XYZ on the complaint, in all upper case letters is not a legal fiction and upon Proof of Claim that, I, a living being, am a corporation.
PRESUMPTION
The people of the courts and all levels of government presume that you are a corporation because all courts and governments are legal fictions and following the law of like kind can only deal with other legal fictions or incompetent persons. All government codes/statutes (laws) deal only with persons, corporations, trusts, partnerships or other like entities. They are not real. They only exist on paper (in form). They do not exist in the physical sense (substance).
A city, a county and a state have lines drawn on a map that show (what they claim to be) their jurisdiction. There are buildings that are referred to as schools, courts, offices and other titles. They are real because they are made with gravel, cement, wood and other physical materials. The government is a fiction created from a man's imagination. It is of course not real, and only an image in people's minds. It cannot do anything without the physical man. The physical man has a ‘go between’ and that ‘go between’ is a legal fiction. It is a transmitting utility. Just like the electric power company manufactures electrical power for business or home use, the transmission lines are the transmitting utility that connects them together. The person - legal entity - strawman - all capital letter name fictional corporation is the transmitting utility between the flesh and blood man and the government and its agencies.
Presumption comes into play when you receive a contract from the government, a police officer, court, etc., and if you do not correct them, they will presume that you are the all capital letter NAME - legal entity. It is when you don't correct them that the presumption becomes a stipulation of fact.
STIPULATION
A stipulation is an agreement that the facts of the case are not in dispute and therefore will not and cannot be addressed from the point of stipulation. The way that you get into a contract is by doing something that you may be unaware of... like a drivers license. You are offering the State to allow you to operate a vehicle in a commercial venture on the roadways within the State, when you apply for a driver’s license.
Whomever offers the contract has the energy or the power because they are the Creditor. The one who is being offered the contract is the Debtor. You always want to be the Creditor. Now, while you are operating the vehicle in commerce, you violate a rule (law) that you agreed to abide by accepting the license.
You were the Creditor when you applied for a license, and were in honor. They were the Debtor. Then they re-offered you the license, making them the Creditor and you the Debtor. Everyone is still in honor when you accepted the license (contract). When you violate some rule (law), you are in dishonor and have to go to a hearing (court). Once again, you are going through the same rules. Honor and dishonor.
CONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE
Condition yourself to remember that everything is a contract. When somebody offers you a contract and you do not like the terms, simply re-offer or counter-offer. When a debt collector sends a letter / a collection notice that is a contract. You now have the choices of a, b, c, and d. What are you going to do? The thing not to do is argue or remain silent. You must re-offer in a timely manner.
"Mr. Debt Collector, I conditionally accept your offer pay the debt indicated, upon Proof of Claim that you are the owner of the debt and upon Proof of Claim that you and I have a signed contract.
When a police officer pulls you over and offers you a ticket for speeding, the ticket is a contract. When he asks you to sign the ticket, stating that you promise to appear at a certain date, that is a contract. You may properly do two things.
1. You may demand that the police officer takes you to a Judge/Magistrate immediately or;
2. You may sign the ticket: All rights reserved, UCC 1-308, and then sign the Name below what you just wrote on the ticket. This action allows you 72 hours to rescind the contract. A widely recognized and universal law of commerce is that contracts can be canceled within 72 hours. Many contracts include a document titled "notice of rescission." The buyer, in most cases, must execute / sign and date the document and get it into the possession of the seller in order to properly rescind the sale.
If you are arrested and taken before a Magistrate, he/she will ask you to state your Name. The Magistrate is making you an offer to enter their jurisdiction. Next you will be invited to sign the paper the clerk offers you. You will be in a contract if you sign it.
If you are about to go into court, it is vitally important to declare that you are not a corporation prior to a hearing or trial. Otherwise, the judge will find your silence on that point a fact and then proceed under the presumption that you are a corporation.Table of Contents
=Part One=
=Essential background Knowledge=
[0.0.0] Preface
[0.0.1] The Rhino9 Team
[0.0.2] Disclaimer
[0.0.3] Thanks and Greets
[1.0.0] Preface To NetBIOS
[1.0.1] What is NetBIOS?
[1.0.2] NetBIOS Names
[1.0.3] NetBIOS Sessions
[1.0.4] NetBIOS Datagrams
[1.0.5] NetBEUI Explained
[1.0.6] NetBIOS Scopes
[1.2.0] Preface to SMB's
[1.2.1] What are SMB's?
[1.2.2] The Redirector
[2.0.0] What is TCP/IP?
[2.0.1] FTP Explained
[2.0.2] Remote Login
[2.0.3] Computer Mail
[2.0.4] Network File Systems
[2.0.5] Remote Printing
[2.0.6] Remote Execution
[2.0.7] Name Servers
[2.0.8] Terminal Servers
[2.0.9] Network-Oriented Window Systems
[2.1.0] General description of the TCP/IP protocols
[2.1.1] The TCP Level
[2.1.2] The IP level
[2.1.3] The Ethernet level
[2.1.4] Well-Known Sockets And The Applications Layer
[2.1.5] Other IP Protocols
[2.1.6] Domain Name System
[2.1.7] Routing
[2.1.8] Subnets and Broadcasting
[2.1.9] Datagram Fragmentation and Reassembly
[2.2.0] Ethernet encapsulation: ARP
[3.0.0] Preface to the WindowsNT Registry
[3.0.1] What is the Registry?
[3.0.2] In Depth Key Discussion
[3.0.3] Understanding Hives
[3.0.4] Default Registry Settings
[4.0.0] Introduction to PPTP
[4.0.1] PPTP and Virtual Private Networking
[4.0.2] Standard PPTP Deployment
[4.0.3] PPTP Clients
[4.0.4] PPTP Architecture
[4.0.5] Understanding PPTP Security
[4.0.6] PPTP and the Registry
[4.0.7] Special Security Update
[5.0.0] TCP/IP Commands as Tools
[5.0.1] The Arp Command
[5.0.2] The Traceroute Command
[5.0.3] The Netstat Command
[5.0.4] The Finger Command
[5.0.5] The Ping Command
[5.0.6] The Nbtstat Command
[5.0.7] The IpConfig Command
[5.0.8] The Telnet Command
[6.0.0] NT Security
[6.0.1] The Logon Process
[6.0.2] Security Architecture Components
[6.0.3] Introduction to Securing an NT Box
[6.0.4] Physical Security Considerations
[6.0.5] Backups
[6.0.6] Networks and Security
[6.0.7] Restricting the Boot Process
[6.0.8] Security Steps for an NT Operating System
[6.0.9] Install Latest Service Pack and applicable hot-fixes
[6.1.0] Display a Legal Notice Before Log On
[6.1.1] Rename Administrative Accounts
[6.1.2] Disable Guest Account
[6.1.3] Logging Off or Locking the Workstation
[6.1.4] Allowing Only Logged-On Users to Shut Down the Computer
[6.1.5] Hiding the Last User Name
[6.1.6] Restricting Anonymous network access to Registry
[6.1.7] Restricting Anonymous network access to lookup account names and network shares
[6.1.8] Enforcing strong user passwords
[6.1.9] Disabling LanManager Password Hash Support
[6.2.0] Wiping the System Page File during clean system shutdown
[6.2.1] Protecting the Registry
[6.2.2] Secure EventLog Viewing
[6.2.3] Secure Print Driver Installation
[6.2.4] The Schedule Service (AT Command)
[6.2.5] Secure File Sharing
[6.2.6] Auditing
[6.2.7] Threat Action
[6.2.8] Enabling System Auditing
[6.2.9] Auditing Base Objects
[6.3.0] Auditing of Privileges
[6.3.1] Protecting Files and Directories
[6.3.2] Services and NetBios Access From Internet
[6.3.3] Alerter and Messenger Services
[6.3.4] Unbind Unnecessary Services from Your Internet Adapter Cards
[6.3.5] Enhanced Protection for Security Accounts Manager Database
[6.3.6] Disable Caching of Logon Credentials during interactive logon.
[6.3.7] How to secure the %systemroot%\repair\sam._ file
[6.3.8] TCP/IP Security in NT
[6.3.9] Well known TCP/UDP Port numbers
[7.0.0] Preface to Microsoft Proxy Server
[7.0.1] What is Microsoft Proxy Server?
[7.0.2] Proxy Servers Security Features
[7.0.3] Beneficial Features of Proxy
[7.0.4] Hardware and Software Requirements
[7.0.5] What is the LAT?
[7.0.6] What is the LAT used for?
[7.0.7] What changes are made when Proxy Server is installed?
[7.0.8] Proxy Server Architecture
[7.0.9] Proxy Server Services: An Introduction
[7.1.0] Understanding components
[7.1.1] ISAPI Filter
[7.1.2] ISAPI Application
[7.1.3] Proxy Servers Caching Mechanism
[7.1.4] Windows Sockets
[7.1.5] Access Control Using Proxy Server
[7.1.6] Controlling Access by Internet Service
[7.1.7] Controlling Access by IP, Subnet, or Domain
[7.1.8] Controlling Access by Port
[7.1.9] Controlling Access by Packet Type
[7.2.0] Logging and Event Alerts
[7.2.1] Encryption Issues
[7.2.2] Other Benefits of Proxy Server
[7.2.3] RAS
[7.2.4] IPX/SPX
[7.2.5] Firewall Strategies
[7.2.6] Logical Construction
[7.2.7] Exploring Firewall Types
[7.2.3] NT Security Twigs and Ends
=Part Two=
=The Techniques of Survival=
[8.0.0] NetBIOS Attack Methods
[8.0.1] Comparing NAT.EXE to Microsoft's own executables
[8.0.2] First, a look at NBTSTAT
[8.0.3] Intro to the NET commands
[8.0.4] Net Accounts
[8.0.5] Net Computer
[8.0.6] Net Config Server or Net Config Workstation
[8.0.7] Net Continue
[8.0.8] Net File
[8.0.9] Net Group
[8.1.0] Net Help
[8.1.1] Net Helpmsg message#
[8.1.2] Net Localgroup
[8.1.3] Net Name
[8.1.4] Net Pause
[8.1.5] Net Print
[8.1.6] Net Send
[8.1.7] Net Session
[8.1.8] Net Share
[8.1.9] Net Statistics Server or Workstation
[8.2.0] Net Stop
[8.2.1] Net Time
[8.2.2] Net Use
[8.2.3] Net User
[8.2.4] Net View
[8.2.5] Special note on DOS and older Windows Machines
[8.2.6] Actual NET VIEW and NET USE Screen Captures during a hack
[9.0.0] Frontpage Extension Attacks
[9.0.1] For the tech geeks, we give you an actual PWDUMP
[9.0.2] The haccess.ctl file
[9.0.3] Side note on using John the Ripper
[10.0.0] WinGate
[10.0.1] What Is WinGate?
[10.0.2] Defaults After a WinGate Install
[10.0.3] Port 23 Telnet Proxy
[10.0.4] Port 1080 SOCKS Proxy
[10.0.5] Port 6667 IRC Proxy
[10.0.6] How Do I Find and Use a WinGate?
[10.0.7] I have found a WinGate telnet proxy now what?
[10.0.8] Securing the Proxys
[10.0.9] mIRC 5.x WinGate Detection Script
[10.1.0] Conclusion
[11.0.0] What a security person should know about WinNT
[11.0.1] NT Network structures (Standalone/WorkGroups/Domains)
[11.0.2] How does the authentication of a user actually work
[11.0.3] A word on NT Challenge and Response
[11.0.4] Default NT user groups
[11.0.5] Default directory permissions
[11.0.6] Common NT accounts and passwords
[11.0.7] How do I get the admin account name?
[11.0.8] Accessing the password file in NT
[11.0.9] Cracking the NT passwords
[11.1.0] What is 'last login time'?
[11.1.1] Ive got Guest access, can I try for Admin?
[11.1.2] I heard that the %systemroot%\system32 was writeable?
[11.1.3] What about spoofin DNS against NT?
[11.1.4] What about default shared folders?
[11.1.5] How do I get around a packet filter-based firewall?
[11.1.6] What is NTFS?
[11.1.7] Are there are vulnerabilities to NTFS and access controls?
[11.1.8] How is file and directory security enforced?
[11.1.9] Once in, how can I do all that GUI stuff?
[11.2.0] How do I bypass the screen saver?
[11.2.1] How can tell if its an NT box?
[11.2.2] What exactly does the NetBios Auditing Tool do?
[12.0 |
’t vote, you forfeit your right to any form of dissent for four years.
These write-ups didn’t acknowledge the fact that had every protester in Portland voted for Hillary Clinton, it wouldn’t have affected the outcome of the election one bit, given Oregon’s status as a safely blue state. (You’d have to drive 350 miles from Portland to find the nearest electoral vote that wasn’t virtually guaranteed to go for Clinton.) No matter, dirty anarchists were in our streets causing problems and had to be publicly shamed—up to and including mugshots being plastered all over the news.
Liberal gatekeeper Samantha Bee took to her show (Full Frontal, 11/14/16) to do a little left-punching, drawing the distinction between the proverbial “peaceful” and non-peaceful protestors. For over a year, pro-Democratic pundits have justifiably warned us Trump was a Hitler or Mussolini-like figure. In the face of this looming threat, protests will predictably result in some property damage and arrests. Those wanting to remain in good standing with the establishment will show their reasonable status by jumping in to “condemn” the excesses of protests:
Can we make a pledge right now that we’re gonna leave “moral high ground” liberalism in 2016? h/t @adamjohnsonNYC pic.twitter.com/yNf8h1iR5U — #J20 (@Delo_Taylor) November 15, 2016
First thing to note is that Bee distinguishes between protesters and “Middle America.” With mass demonstrations in Nashville, Iowa City and Denver, one is compelled to ask, where is this “Middle America,” exactly?
In this moral universe, peaceful or good protesters shake hands with police officers and protest in a subservient, state-sanctioned fashion. Anyone with a passing knowledge of how protest works knows this is about as useful as a strongly worded letter to a congressperson in terms of putting pressure on the state, but the alt-center has above all one goal: the maintenance of social order. Protest, by all means, but not in a way that disrupts the normal course of society.
Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg (11/15/16) added some more concern trolling, saying he supports protests in theory, but they weren’t making any specific demands:
I believe the liberal cause would be better served if the demonstrators stayed home…. The protesters also are telling Trump that, whatever he does, they don’t consider him their president. They reject him in advance. That’s hardly a message designed to extract a constructive response. Trump has already said he’s going to try to be a president for everyone—but he knows many don’t believe him.
Bershidsky, for some odd reason, thinks these protests are about convincing Trump in some interpersonal manner. They’re actually about demonstrating mass disapproval of the pending regime and its stated goals, not appealing to Trump’s better angels.
The Bloomberg columnist went on:
Wouldn’t it make more sense, however, to begin protesting when—or, rather, if—Trump actually proposes some action that smacks of bigotry? For example, if he actually attempts to make good on his promises to build a new border wall or to ban Muslims from entering the US.
What Bershidsky theory of power is is anybody’s guess, but he’s wrong on the facts. Trump already is mapping out several of his most dangerous campaign promises, from deporting millions of immigrants, to “the wall,” to the creation of a Muslim registry. Bershidsky expects those most threatened by Trump’s clearly stated goals to display outrage… once they’re underway?
Worst of the alt-center attacks on the protests was Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak who, in “Stop Protesting Democracy. Saying #NotMyPresident Is the Same as Saying #NotMyConstitution” (11/14/16), took false equivalency to heretofore unseen levels of vulgarity. She began:
What was lost in the election last week? Decency. Humanity. Morality. All the way around. From protesters destroying property in Portland, Ore., to racists destroying a sense of safety in Silver Spring, Md., too many people are undermining the foundation of our country in the aftermath of a polarizing election. And our first order of business is to fix it. Because this is about democracy, really.
Setting aside the adolescent writing (Gratuitous. Periods. Make. Platitudes. Seem. Important.), Dvorak is, quite shockingly, equating dumpster fires in Portland with spraypainting “Trump Nation. Whites Only” on a Spanish-language church in Maryland. From the outset, we have two “extremes”: those protesting–and occasionally causing property damage–in the face of emboldened fascists, and the fascists themselves. To the alt-center, these two poles are moral equals, two sides of the same ideological coin, and must be condemned in equal terms:
Sore losers protesting the democratic process are just as useless as hate-filled winners sneaking around towns painting swastikas and racist graffiti.
OK. Go on….
I want to say that the only difference between the two is that one is ridiculous while the other is dangerous. But that’s not totally true, either…. Protesting the simple fact of our democratic process is dangerous, too.
Dvorak is unsure of her own facile point. She hedges a 1:1 equation, but then steps back from that. What Dvorak fails to understand is that the protestors aren’t protesting “democracy” as such, they’re protesting the pending presidency of a man who is stocking his White House with white nationalists, Islamophobes and gay-baiters—not to mention people with a notorious hostility toward democracy itself. They’re protesting someone who has pledged—and to a large extent already begun planning—the deportation of millions. In the face of this crisis, many have chosen to take to the street to send a message his agenda will not be acquiesced to without resistance, both legal and extralegal.
The protests against the pending Trump administration and the forces he emboldens are likely to go on until his inauguration in January and beyond. During this time, these protests, like all before, will have instances of property damage and clashes with police, and each time, the alt-center will be there to highlight and hand-wring over those excesses in pursuit of civility and order.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.Promotional artwork for Backdraft (Universal Studios, 1992)
Universal Studios Hollywood
Marvel Mania
(Feb 18 1998 - Sept 10 1999)
Marvel Mania was a stunningly themed restaurant environment where you felt like a Marvel Comics superhero. Bold designs throughout, interactive video screens and a total themed experience meant many diners were converted to being comic fans and many existing Marvel fans were in heaven.
The restaurant was planned to be the start of a chain similar to Planet Hollywood, however, due to unfortunate timing (it launched just as the Planet Hollywood bubble burst) in September 1999, Marvel were forced to close the restaurant arm of their business for financial reasons.
The main Marvel Mania building only had it's paintjob replaced in 2007 when it was rethemed as Stage 13. The entrance to the restaurant is now the entrance to the Universal House of Horrors walkthrough, and the walkthrough element of that attraction uses the former restaurant building fully. Part of the structure was formerly the Victoria Station restaurant.
From Studio Guide leaflet, 1999:
"MARVEL MANIA: Enter Marvel's Universe! A full service restaurant with outrageously great American food, high energy cocktails, out of this world souvenirs and a fabulous "Holiday Feast" menu to choose from. Truly the most unique experience on this planet"
From Press Release, 1998
A "Marvel-ous" Place to Eat: Southern California restaurant goers can now tell their waiter to "Make mine Marvel" when they go out and eat at Marvel Mania at Universal Studios in Universal City. Owned by Marvel Comics, the theme restaurant is patterned after other successful eateries like The Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood, and offers fans a wide variety of comic-related activities and delicious food.
Highlights include a mini-museum, gift shop, game room and bar. Fans can purchase everything from videos and T-shirts to comic book art and mouse pads, all featuring classic Marvel comic heroes.
Favorites on the Marvel Mania menu include various "Stanwiches" (named after Marvel Founder and comic book legend Stan Lee), Captain America burgers and Fantastic Four Cheese Pizza. The servings are generous and will satisfy even the heartiest of super-hero appetites. Kids of all ages also will enjoy watching television series and films based on Marvel characters on big-screen TVs while they eat.
The younger set will enjoy seeing their favorite Marvel super heroes in person as costumed characters make the rounds posing for pictures. Thankfully, no super villains have yet been sighted!
Photo Gallery
Interior mural design
Exterior signage (photo by Sheryl Roberts, 1998)
Exterior signage (photo by Phillip Donnelly, 1998)
You can see part of the exterior decoration of Marvel Mania on the far right of this photo from 1999 (photo by John Redmood)
Cartoon sound effects graphic above the Blues Brothers Stage (copyright 1999 Brainworks Inc: www.brainworksart.com)
Exterior (photo by Phillip Donnelly, 1998)
Phillip outside Marvel Mania (photo by Phillip Donnelly, 1998)
Video
Tourist video at Marvel Mania
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Content and photos (c) theStudioTour.com except where noted.Portrait photos of 16 Indonesian former “comfort women” are currently on display at a Tokyo gallery in an exhibition focused on conveying their painful wartime experiences.
The women were taken against their will to brothels for the Japanese military as comfort women, but kept their silence for a long time until journalist Hilde Janssen and photographer Jan Banning, both from the Netherlands visited them to record their harrowing memories.
Each portrait by Banning is accompanied by an account of the woman captured in the photo — sometimes reluctantly shared — about her experience during World War II.
Janssen and Banning launched a research project in 2007, and in the following three years they interviewed and photographed around 50 women.
The women “suffered” while telling their hidden stories and “suffered again” when they were in front of the camera, Banning says.
Banning brought the women to his temporary studio immediately after Janssen interviewed them so he could “keep up the tension” stoked during their interviews, he says.
According to a description attached to her portrait, a woman named Mastia was taken from her community together with 15 other girls, and forced into service as a concubine. After the war, she underwent a religious ceremony to wash away her “sin.”
“People nevertheless continued to call me a ‘Japanese hand-me-down,’ ” she was quoted as saying.
Another woman, Niyem, was kidnapped while playing when she was around 10 years old, according to a description for her photo. She was brought to a military camp in West Java, where she was raped by soldiers in the presence of others. “I was still so young, within two months my body was completely destroyed,” she told her interviewer.
While some in Japan continue to deny the forced recruitment of women, Banning says he expects visitors to the exhibition to “look those women in the eye” to see and share their suffering.
It is clear that the Japanese government is “responsible for setting up the system” during the war, he adds.
Janssen and Banning were in Japan to attend a symposium at the start of the exhibition, which kicked off at Kid Ailack Art Hall in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward last Saturday. The exhibition, held under the auspices of the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, runs through Oct. 25.
The “Comfort Women” exhibition has already been held in the Netherlands and Indonesia as well as in the United States, Germany and France.
Banning says his family is strongly connected with the wartime history of Indonesia.
His parents were from the Dutch East Indies, which was occupied by Japan in 1942. Recruited by the Japanese military, his father and grandfather were put into forced labor, while his mother, together with her family, was confined in an internment camp there.
They may have been killed and he would not have been born had the war continued longer, Banning says.
Janssen, meanwhile, lived in India and Indonesia for nearly 20 years since 1991 to work as a correspondent for Dutch media and as an anthropologist.
“The visitors to the exhibition must feel as if they are watched by the 16 women, rather than watching them,” says Mina Watanabe, secretary general of the museum. “We hope the visitors will be aware of the hardships the women have gone through.”
“Comfort Women” runs through Oct. 25 at Kid Ailack Art Hall in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo (open 12-7 p.m., ¥700, 03-3202-4633). For more information, visit blog.livedoor.jp/kidailack/archives/1880678.htmlAs people asking Google this question have accurately observed, smiles are grimly absent from early photographs. Portraiture was at the heart of photography’s appeal from its very invention. In 1852, for instance, a girl posed for her Daguerreotype, her head slightly turned, giving the lens a steady, confident, unsmiling look. She is preserved forever as a very serious girl indeed.
RIP the selfie: when Prince Harry calls time on a craze, you know it's well and truly dead Read more
That severity is everywhere in Victorian photographs. Charles Darwin, by all accounts a warm character and a loving, playful parent, looks frozen in glumness in photographs. In Julia Margaret Cameron’s great 1867 portrait of the astronomer John Frederick William Herschel, his deep melancholy introspection and wild hair kissed by the light give him the air of a tragic King Lear. Why did our ancestors, from unknown sitters for family portraits to the great and famous, become so mirthless in front of the lens?
You don’t have to look very long at these unsmiling old photos to see how incomplete the apparently obvious answer is – that they are freezing their faces in order to keep still for the long exposure times. In Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Tennyson the poet broods and dreams, his face a shadowed mask of genius. This is not simply a technical quirk. It’s an aesthetic and emotional choice.
People in the past were not necessarily more gloomy than we are. They did not go around in a perpetual state of sorrow – though they might be forgiven for doing so, in a world with much higher mortality rates than in the west today, and medicine that was puny indeed by our standards. In fact, the Victorians had a sense of humour even about the darkest aspects of their society. Jerome K Jerome’s book Three Men in a Boat is a revelatory insight into the Victorian sense of humour – it’s rollicking and irreverent. When the narrator drinks some water from the river Thames, his friends chaff him that he will probably catch cholera. It’s a startling joke to make in 1889 just a few decades after cholera had ravaged London. But then Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, which can still raise laughs, in the century of the Black Death. And Jane Austen found plenty to giggle about in the era of the Napoleonic wars.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Summer Days by Julia Margaret Cameron. Photograph: Stapleton Collection/Corbis
Laughter and gaiety (to use an old word) were not just common in the past but institutionalised far more than they are today, from medieval carnivals in which entire communities indulged in riotous comic antics to Georgian printshops where people gathered to look at the latest funnies. Far from suppressing festivals and fun, the Victorians, who invented photography, also created Christmas as the secular feast it is today.
Today, we take so many smiling snaps the idea of anyone finding true depth and poetry in most of them is absurd.
So the severity of people in 19th-century photographs cannot be evidence of generalised gloom and depression. This was not a society in permanent despair. Instead, the true answer has to do with attitudes to portraiture itself.
People who posed for early photographs, from earnest middle-class families recording their status to celebrities captured by the lens, understood it as a significant moment. Photography was still rare. Having your picture taken was not something that happened every day. For many people it might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Rembrandt’s portraits would look very different if everyone was smiling in them.’ Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride. Photograph: Alamy
Posing for the camera, in other words, did not seem that different from having your portrait painted. It was cheaper, quicker (even with those slow exposure times) and meant that people who never had a chance to be painted could now be portrayed; but people seem to have taken it seriously in the same way they would a painted portrait. This was not a “snap”. Like a portrait painting, it was intended as a timeless record of a person.
Oil portraits are not that packed with smiles, either. Rembrandt’s portraits would look very different if everyone was smiling in them. In fact they are full of the consciousness of mortality and the mystery of existence - nothing to smile about there. From the ruddy glare of Velazquez’s Pope Innocent X to Titian’s intimately serious Violante, few of the painted portraits in museums are smiley faces.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Jerome K Jerome’s book Three Men in a Boat is a revelatory insight into the Victorian sense of humour - it’s rollicking and irreverent.’ Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images
The most famous exception is of course the Mona Lisa – and Leonardo da Vinci laboured for years to make that smile “work”. His contemporaries were amazed to see a smiling portrait. In the 18th century, artists painted smiling people – the sculptor Houdon even gave Voltaire a smile in marble – to capture the new, sociable, smiling attitude of the Enlightenment. But on the whole, melancholy and introspection haunt the oil portrait and this sense of the seriousness of life passes on from painting into early photography.
In fact this question might be reframed: Why are old photographs so much more moving than modern ones?
How selfies became a global phenomenon Read more
For the existential grandeur of traditional portraiture, the gravitas of Rembrandt, still survives in Victorian photography. Today, we take so many smiling snaps the idea of anyone finding true depth and poetry in most of them is absurd. Photos are about being social. We want to communicate ourselves as happy social people. So we smile, laugh and cavort in endless and endlessly shared selfies.
A grinning selfie is the opposite of a serious portrait. It’s just a momentary performance of happiness. It has zero profundity and therefore zero artistic value. As a human document it is disturbingly throwaway. (In fact, not even solid enough to throw away – just press delete).
How beautiful and haunting old photographs are in comparison with our silly selfies. Those unsmiling people probably had as much fun as we do, if not more. But they felt no hysterical need to prove it with pictures. Instead, when they posed for a photograph, they thought about time, death and memory. The presence of those grave realities in old photographs makes them worth far more than our inanely happy Instagram snaps. Perhaps we should stop smiling sometimes, too.“As the Second Amendment says, a well-regulated militia is essential to our national identity,” former Secretary of State Gen. Colin Powell told the Morning Joe crew on Monday, adding that gun control advocates need only follow the Amendment in order to accomplish their goals.
“The American people want to see something done, and it is not a threat to the Second Amendment,” Powell said, live at The Dubliner.
“A message I’d like to see get out is: ’we’re not taking away your Second Amendment rights,’” Powell said. ”I believe in the Second Amendment, I have guns in my home, I am prepared to protect my family, but I’m prepared to do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone buying guns is checked—what is objectionable about that?”
Extremists who think they need to protect themselves from the government need to be countered by diplomatic calls for gun control, the panel agreed.
“The Second Amendment was written to protect the people from the government, but the reality is the government isn’t coming after you and the Second Amendment is intact. You can own guns legally,” Powell said. “But the American people have been devastated by what’s happened at Newtown and elsewhere.”9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS IX) Abstract Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for High-concurrency Servers) Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit, and Eric Brewer, University of California, Berkeley Abstract Event-based programming has been highly touted in recent years as the best way to write highly concurrent applications. Having worked on several of these systems, we now believe this approach to be a mistake. Specifically, we believe that threads can achieve all of the strengths of events, including support for high concurrency, low overhead, and a simple concurrency model. Moreover, we argue that threads allow a simpler and more natural programming style. We examine the claimed strengths of events over threads and show that the weaknesses of threads are artifacts of specific threading implementations and not inherent to the threading paradigm. As evidence, we present a user-level thread package that scales to 100,000 threads and achieves excellent performance in a web server. We also refine the duality argument of Lauer-Needham, which implies that good implementations of thread systems and event systems will have similar performance. Finally, we argue that compiler support for thread systems is a fruitful area for future research. It is a mistake to attempt high concurrency without help from the compiler, and we discuss several enhancements that are enabled by relatively simple compiler changes. View the full text of this paper in HTML and PDF, or the talk slides in PDF.
The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2003 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.
The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2003 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper. If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site. To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.Designed by Martin Azua, Basic House is a foldable, inflatable, and reversible quasi-tent that provides instant shelter. The material is a metallicized polyester that, once unfolded, self inflates with body heat or from the heat of the sun. On the inside, the material reflects body heat to protect from cold. When reversed, the material reflects solar heat to provide a cool interior.
The Basic House can be used in any situations where temporary shelter is needed. The concept is especially relevant in light of the increased need for immediate shelter after emergencies.
Martin Azua is a Barcelona based designer whose designs explore using a minimal amount of material and rely on natural processes or forms of energy to complete the work. The Basic House prototype has been part of collections at MoMA and Vitra Design Museum.
Casa Básica / Basic House from martinazua on Vimeo.
Images: Martin Azua
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.comEVIDENCE has emerged that Muammar Gaddafi's retreating forces executed scores or even hundreds of political prisoners, even as victorious rebel fighters seem to have carried out their own abuses.
Survivors of an attack by pro-Gaddafi troops said they had watched as fellow prisoners were mowed down by machinegun fire, minutes after being told they were free.
Rebels arrest one of Gaddafi's fighters.
But Gaddafi loyalists were also targets of apparent extrajudicial killings. Those deaths have cast a dark shadow over Libya's new-found freedom and call into question whether the rebels will break with Colonel Gaddafi's blood-soaked style of governance or merely mimic it.
Diana Eltahawy, Libya researcher for Amnesty International, said a trail of abuse, torture and the extrajudicial killing of captured pro-Gaddafi fighters had followed the rebels from east to west as they took over the country.U.S. and Israeli officials reached a closed-door cooperation agreement on how to deal with Iran, according to Israel's Channel 10 News.
The agreement, which was reportedly signed on Dec. 12 at the White House, aims to counter Iran's missile and nuclear programs.
According to Channel 10, the agreement would translate President Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE's Oct. 13 speech decertifying the Iran deal into steps on the ground.
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The two countries have reportedly decided to set up joint teams to combat Iran in the region.
One joint team would grapple with Iran's ties to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, as well as Iranian activity in Syria.
The second team would aim to deal with Iran's nuclear goals, while another team would specialize in dealing with the country's missile program.
The fourth team is designed to control preparations for any escalation from Hezbollah or Tehran.
The news organization reported a senior Israeli official as saying the two nations “see eye to eye on the trends and processes in the region."
U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster and his Israeli counterpart Meir Ben-Shabbat led the negotiations, according to Channel 10.
The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.
The report comes as U.S.-Iranian relations have declined in recent months.
Trump announced in October that he would decertify the Iranian nuclear deal, which was reached during the Obama administration.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley Nimrata (Nikki) HaleyNikki Haley tapped to join Boeing board of directors Nikki Haley launches new policy group to tackle'socialism,' other issues Trump selects Kelly Craft for United Nations ambassador MORE ripped into Tehran earlier this month when she presented what she said was "undeniable” evidence that Iran was supplying weapons to Yemeni rebels in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
U.S.-Israeli relations have been on the uptick since Trump announced earlier this month the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Iran's legislative body voted on Wednesday to declare Jerusalem the capital of Palestine.ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
Stomach cramps, mood swings and hot flushes. Yes, it's that time of the month again.
But these are symptoms reported by men, not women. New research suggests men suffer from pre-menstrual-style symptoms, in some cases as badly as women.
The news is bound to be greeted with snorts of cynicism by most females.
But the study published today shows that the majority of men claim to suffer from a range of symptoms most usually associated with pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS).
Dr Aimee Aubeeluck of the University of Derby, who carried out the study, said: "We asked 50 men and 50 women lots of questions about symptoms normally associated with PMS and we found men actually scored higher than women in everything apart from water retention."
The men admitted to feeling antisocial and suffering poor concentration; depression; lack of arousal; hot flushes and pain - including stomach cramps, back pain and headaches. The team believes that the reason that men complained more than women may be because of their alleged lack of forbearance when it comes to illness.
Dr Aubeeluck, who is presenting her findings to the British Psychological Society conference today, said: "There is some evidence to suggest that pain thresholds differ between men and women so it could just be perception of pain.
"It could be women experience more pain but don't give it as much attention.
"When you are asking people to rate their experiences it is a little bit subjective." What causes the men's symptoms is, at present, a mystery. They may be triggered by stress but Dr Aubeeluck said the findings were significant enough to warrant further research.
She and colleague Joanne Worsey will now study couples over several months to discover if symptoms are cyclical for both men and women.
She said: "If men are experiencing big changes in mood, surely that should be addressed.
"While some may be coping, others may be wondering why they feel so down.
"It's really important for men that if they are suffering they feel they can talk about it and seek treatment."
The suggestion that men suffer from a form of PMS is bound to divide opinion - as has the theory of the male menopause.
Many doctors, including some British specialists, believe middle-aged men experience a sudden fall in testosterone - a hormone responsible for sex drive, sperm production and muscle tone.
However, a American study said that those who complain of hot flushes, excessive sweating, depression and a lack of sex drive are probably suffering the side effects of being overweight, lazy, smoking and drinking too much.
More than 50 per cent of men in their fifties are thought to suffer lethargy, lack of interest in sex, mood swings and even hot flushes, all of which could be caused by a lack of testosterone.
Yet in the study, of 1,700 men from Massachusetts, testosterone was found to decline very gradually with age, at about one per cent a year. The team concluded it was their unhealthy lifestyle that caused the unpleasant symptoms.FILE - In this 1998 file photo made available on March 19, 2004, Osama bin Laden is seen at a news conference in Khost, Afghanistan. The CIA's release of documents seized during the 2011 raid that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has again raised questions about Iran's support of the extremist network leading up to the Sept. 11 terror attacks. U.S. intelligence officials and prosecutors have long said Iran formed loose ties to the terror organization from 1991 on, something noted in a 19-page report in Arabic included in the release of some 47,000 other documents by the CIA. Iran always has denied any links. (AP Photo/Mazhar Ali Khan, File)
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The CIA’s release of documents seized during the 2011 raid that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden appears to bolster U.S. claims that Iran supported the extremist network leading up to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
U.S. intelligence officials and prosecutors have long said Iran formed loose ties to the terror organization starting in 1991, something noted in a 19-page al-Qaida report in Arabic that was included in the release of some 47,000 other documents by the CIA.
For its part, Iran has long denied any involvement with al-Qaida, and its foreign minister disparaged the documents in a tweet late Thursday: “A record low for the reach of petrodollars: CIA & FDD fake news w/ selective AlQaeda docs re: Iran can’t whitewash role of US allies in 9/11.”
The report included in the CIA document dump shows how bin Laden, a Sunni extremist from Iran’s archrival Saudi Arabia, could look across the Muslim world’s religious divide to partner with the Mideast’s Shiite power to target his ultimate enemy, the United States.
“Anyone who wants to strike America, Iran is ready to support him and help him with their frank and clear rhetoric,” the report reads.
The Associated Press examined a copy of the report released by the Long War Journal, a publication backed by the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank fiercely critical of Iran and skeptical of its nuclear deal with world powers. The CIA gave the Long War Journal early access to the material.
The material also included never-before-seen video of bin Laden’s son Hamza, who may be groomed to take over al-Qaida, getting married. It offers the first public look at Hamza bin Laden as an adult. Until now, the public has only seen childhood pictures of him.
The release comes as President Donald Trump has refused to recertify Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers and faces domestic pressure at home over investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The 19-page report included in the CIA release was available online Wednesday. The CIA later issued a warning about the files on its website, saying that since the material “was seized from a terrorist organization... there is no absolute guarantee that all malware has been removed.” The CIA then took down the files entirely early Thursday, saying they were “temporarily unavailable pending resolution of a technical issue.”
“We are working to make the material available again as soon as possible,” the CIA said.
The unsigned 19-page report is dated in the Islamic calendar year 1428 — 2007 — and offers what appears to be a history of al-Qaida’s relationship with Iran. It says Iran offered al-Qaida fighters “money and arms and everything they need, and offered them training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon, in return for striking American interests in Saudi Arabia.”
This coincides with an account offered by the U.S. government’s 9/11 Commission, which said Iranian officials met with al-Qaida leaders in Sudan in either 1991 or early 1992. The commission said al-Qaida militants later received training in Lebanon from the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which Iran backs to this day.
U.S. prosecutors also said al-Qaida had the backing of Iran and Hezbollah in their 1998 indictment of bin Laden following the al-Qaida truck bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.
Al-Qaida’s apparent siding with Iran may seem surprising today, given the enmity Sunni extremists like those of the Islamic State group have for Shiites.
But bin Laden had run out of options by 1991 — the one-time fighter against the Soviets in Afghanistan had fallen out with Saudi Arabia over his opposition to the ultraconservative kingdom hosting U.S. troops during the Gulf War. Meanwhile, Iran had become increasingly nervous about America’s growing military expansion in the Mideast.
“The relationship between al-Qaida and Iran demonstrated that the Sunni-Shiite divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations,” the 9/11 Commission report would later say.
Before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, Iran would allow al-Qaida militants to pass through its borders without receiving stamps in their passports or with visas gotten ahead of time at its consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, according to the 19-page report. That helped the organization’s Saudi members avoid suspicion. They also had contact with Iranian intelligence agents, according to the report.
This also matches with U.S. knowledge. Eight of the 10 so-called “muscle” hijackers on Sept. 11 — those who kept passengers under control on the hijacked flights — passed through Iran before arriving in the United States, according to the 9/11 Commission.
However, the commission “found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack.”
For its part, Iran has denied having any relationship with al-Qaida since the 1998 attacks on the embassies. Iran quietly offered the U.S. assistance after the Sept. 11 attacks, though relations would sour following President George W. Bush naming it to his “axis of evil” in 2002.
On Thursday, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency, which is close to the hard-line paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, dismissed the CIA documents as “a project against Tehran.”
The 19-page report describes Iranians later putting al-Qaida leaders and members under house arrest sometime after the Sept. 11 attacks. It mentions the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, saying it put increasing pressure on Iran, especially with the rise of al-Qaida in Iraq.
“They decided to keep our brothers as a card,” the report said.
That would come true in in 2015 as Iran reportedly exchanged some al-Qaida leaders for one of its diplomats held in Yemen by the terror group’s local branch. While Yemen described it as a captive exchange, Tehran instead called it a “difficult and complicated” special operation to secure the Iranian diplomat’s freedom from the “hands of terrorists.”
“The repercussions... of the Sept. 11 attacks were undoubtedly very large and perhaps above (our) imagination,” the al-Qaida report said.
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Associated Press writer Amir Vahdat in Tehran contributred to this report.
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Jon Gambrell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jongambrellap. His work can be found at http://apne.ws/2galNpz.After more than a year of deadlock, Japan and North Korea on Thursday agreed to resume official government talks over kidnapped Japanese citizens and Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.
“Both nations agreed to coordinate (efforts) in a direction to resume intergovernmental talks,” a spokeswoman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry told NK News on Thursday.
“A schedule has yet to be decided for the next talks.”
The agreement was reached as foreign ministry officials from the two nations held their unofficial meeting on March 19-20 in Shenyang, China on the sidelines of Red Cross talks on returning the remains of Japanese who died toward the end of World War II in what is now North Korea.
The move came as Pyongyang is attempting to pursue a policy of multi-directional diplomacy towards its neighbors such as Japan and South Korea—apparently to ease economic sanctions imposed by the international community after a series of missile and nuclear tests.
“North Korea’s policies are shifting to place more and more emphasis on the central party, the economy and its dialogue diplomacy” rather than the traditional military-first, confrontational approach, Masao Okonogi, emeritus professor at Keio University in Tokyo said at a seminar in Tokyo on Wednesday.
Hwang Jihwan, an assistant professor of International Relations at University of Seoul, echoed Okonogi’s views.
“Pyongyang’s dialogue approach is likely to continue at least two or three years” as Kim Jong Un is pursuing the policy of parallel nuclear and economic advancement, Hwang said at the same seminar at Keio University.
Japan-North Korea negotiations have essentially been frozen since November 2012 following Pyongyang’s pre-announcement on the launch of the second version of the Kwangmy |
As peanut allergies became increasingly common in the United States, some well-meaning doctors began to advise parents not to expose allergy-susceptible kids to peanuts until age three. Turns out that was precisely the worst advice docs could have given, as research now indicates exposure by age four to six months — the earliest most babies start eating solid foods — dramatically reduces a child’s likelihood of contracting such an allergy.
A “landmark” clinical trial recently found that parents could reduce by 80 percent a susceptible child’s risk of later developing a peanut allergy if they introduced foods with peanut butter to their babies as early as four months of age. Babies are considered at risk for developing a peanut allergy if they have severe eczema or an egg allergy.
In response, this January the National Institutes for Health advised parents to introduce peanut butter — not peanuts, a choking hazard — to babies essentially as soon as they start eating solid food. If the child is at risk for allergies, NIH says parents should introduce peanut butter in conjunction with advice from their doctors about a possible allergen test first or even introduce the food in the doctor’s office. Last week the Food and Drug Administration issued a similar recommendation.
“Even if our own children don’t have a peanut allergy, most of us have friends or relatives whose children do. That’s not surprising, given that the prevalence of peanut allergy has more than doubled in children from 1997 to 2008 alone. Today, about two percent of American children are allergic to peanuts,” said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb in a press release.
While the FDA says this recommendation is based on one, albeit large and quality, study, studies have been finding similar results for some time. Six years ago our pediatrician advised us to give our first baby a wide variety of foods as soon as he started eating solids (which was early — he was a voracious pudgebucket), including nuts and dairy, because of studies showing Israeli kids have almost no nut allergies.
Why? Turns out peanut butter is an ingredient in a very popular Israeli snack often used as a teething biscuit. Studies in the New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, among others, have found that early exposure to potential allergens actually reduces the development of allergies. Other studies have found that when a pregnant mother eats dairy, wheat, and peanuts, her baby is less likely to develop childhood allergies to these foods or asthma. Same for if the baby himself eats these foods early.
There’s good news also for kids who already suffer from a peanut allergy: A new Australian clinical trial may have found a cure. Chase Purdy reports at Quartz:
Rather than avoid the allergen altogether, the researchers designed a treatment that combined a probiotic with peanut oral immunotherapy to trigger an immune system response. The hope was that the immune system would reprogram its response to peanuts and—over time—develop a tolerance to the allergen. The approach worked for 82% of the 48 children who were given the treatment daily for 18 months in 2013. Now, four years later, the majority of those children are still able to consume peanuts in their diets without adverse reactions, according to the research, which was published this week in The Lancet Journal of Child and Adolescent Health.
All these findings have lots of implications for the mommy and health wars, especially if subsequent studies strengthen them for other foods besides peanuts. Allergy levels have been growing in the United States, and are twice as prevalent among children now as they are among adults, causing plenty of practical headaches in child-heavy places such as schools and daycare. Just about every mom is now familar with being prohibited from giving her kids trail mix or a good ol’ PB&J in a packed lunch because one kid among 30 in her child’s class or sports team is allergic to nuts. Besides the human misery and anxiety an allergy cure could bring, which is of course the most important effect, it could bring relief for the social costs these allergies inflict.
Not only that, the rising prevalence of allergies has fueled the anti-vaccination movement, which frequently notes — despite the important difference between correlation and causation and the lack of corroborating evidence — that allergies have grown in tandem with childhood vaccination levels. Major health institutions like the FDA and NIH have damaged their credibility by pushing ideas about health that later turn out not to be true, such as the infamous food pyramid, decades of warnings against cholesterol and fat, and recommendations that parents withhold peanuts until kids are three.
All of these, and many other government health recommendations over the years, have ultimately turned out to worsen the very problems they were supposed to be alleviating. So it’s no wonder that many parents have started to tune out such recommendations and look skeptically on “new and improved” scientific findings that contradict their instincts and preferences. So we moms crowdsource our decisions about when and what to introduce our babies. That only works as well as the quality of your crowd’s information. Luckily, our pediatrician gave us reliable advice at a time when her peers were doing otherwise, and our kids have no allergies. Ideally, however, such happy outcomes could rely on a little more than luck.The first of four Chicago suspects accused of beating and torturing a disabled teenager and broadcasting the attack on Facebook has pleaded guilty, but a judge let her off without prison time, a report says.
Brittany Covington, 19, pleaded guilty to a hate crime in court on Friday, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The suspect also “pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and intimidation charges. As part of a plea deal, prosecutors dropped additional charges, including kidnapping,” the Tribune said.
Despite the guilty plea, Cook County Circuit Judge William Hooks released Covington without jail time. Telling Covington, “Do not mess this up,” Judge Hooks imposed 200 hours of community service and banned Covington from using social media and having contact with her co-defendants for four years.
The judge did not assign jail time because, he said, “I’m not sure if I did that you’d be coming out any better.”
Hooks insisted that his sentence would give Covington the chance to put her life on a productive path.
Covington is the first of the four defendants who were arrested early this year for the attack posted to Facebook.
In January, four Chicago teens were arrested after police were alerted to a Facebook live video showing the assailants beating and at one point slashing a victim tied up in a Chicago apartment. During the video of the attack, the suspects are heard saying, “F*** white people,” and “f*** Trump.”
The victim turned out to be a disabled white teen from nearby Rockford, Illinois. A GoFundMe campaign was set up for his benefit days after the reports broke.
Four black residents of Chicago – Jordan Hill, Tesfaye Cooper, and Brittany Covington, all 18 years old; and 24-year-old Tanishia Covington – were charged with battery, kidnapping, and hate crimes in connection with the attack.
Chicago police called the incident “sickening.”
“It’s sickening. It makes you wonder what would make individuals treat somebody like that. I’ve been a cop for 28 years, and I’ve seen things you shouldn’t see in a lifetime,” police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said. “It still amazes me how you still see things you just shouldn’t. So I’m not going to say it shocked me, but it was sickening.”
Cases for the other three defendants are pending.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.While sexy new sustainable buildings and automobiles often make the eco-headlines, the self-storage facility industry has seen a steady uptick towards embracing green energy practices too (they just haven’t been as flashy about it). Many storage facilities have long used energy-saving methods like motion-sensor lights within storage units and hallways and along driveways to save money. After all, it doesn’t make sense to have lights burning constantly in areas that are only being accessed once a month or less. Beyond simple measures like motion-activated lights, the common grid layout of storage facilities makes them ideal for solar panels.
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StorageMart, a large storage chain, has been experimenting with solar panels at its storage facilities in Toronto. Another storage facility in Delaware also went green in 2010. Secure Self Storage installed solar panels which provide so much energy that the facility is able to sell excess energy back to its local energy company. They’re also considering installing green roofs with vegetation which would provide insulation in winter, prolong the life of the roof, and prevents run-off water. The same facility was looking into wind power given its proximity to the coast.
Allegan U-Stor in Allegan, Michigan is another example of a green storage facility. It recently installed 104 solar panels on the sloping roofs of its storage units, giving them the distinction of having the most solar panels in Allegan County. Another mini storage facility in Hawaii chose to make an agreement to retain the natural beauty surrounding its facility. A-American Storage Management signed a voluntary conservation agreement pledging to protect 1,276 acres of land adjacent to its facility, comprising part of the Waianae Mountains in Oahu. The agreement even rules out the building of power lines.
In addition to saving money and adding to a business’ green cred, many storage facilities would benefit from the installation of solar panels, given that they already use minimal amounts of energy by running facilities that generally stand without lighting or climate control. There are even ways to green climate-controlled storage units, which are usually housed within a larger building. Seasonal climate control – where units are climate-controlled when temperatures are extreme and left uncooled or unheated during months with steady temperatures — is also gaining popularity.
Lead image: The roof of one storage facility, Cedar Storage, has been decked out with solar panels.It’s known that Apple’s design teams “obsess over corners”—but that level of caring about detail need not be confined to electronics, or even excluded from disposable goods to earn a lasting bond with customers. I noticed this stickiness more than a year ago, but didn’t research its origins until this morning.
Say what you will about Starbucks vs. Peet’s coffee flavor (and do try Clover-brewed if you think the latter always wins out, but that’s another post); however there is more to the coffee experience than just that. Only a bit over 5% of Starbucks customers bring in their own cups or tumblers, which means >90% of customers use a paper or plastic cup. And those getting a hot beverage usually get one of those brown sleeves.
And how many times have you had a non-Starbucks coffee sleeve slip off the cup? How many of you noticed that Starbucks’ sleeves rarely slip off, and then peeled one off to discover why? Probably more than a few, but in googling for coverage of this, I only found one person who wrote about the glue’s impact on the customer experience.
Copywriter Jennifer Rotman blogged about her experience drinking from a coffee cup where the sleeve kept falling off. When she (like I) realized this didn’t happen with Starbucks coffee, she tore off the sleeve and found the little magical Unique Selling Point. In following the trail of the glue, I first found Starbucks’ 2005 patent for the generation of sleeve Jennifer noticed. This patent details some of the complex issues involved in manufacturing the sleeve—most notably the need to use a glue that would melt when placed against a hot cup of coffee, but which could be made to not melt during manufacturing when the sleeve is folded and the hot-melt glue that affixes the ends to form a ring is sealed in close proximity to the flaps. (Search for item “22” in the figures and description.)
That led to finding the press release and other references.
The person behind the Starbucks sleeve is Matthew Cook, of LBP Manufacturing, who is an inventor of many other food industry things, but the magic of the glue came from Henkel Corporation. You most likely do not know the Henkel name, but you know some of their brands: Dial soap, Locktite glue, and a few others.
The net win for Starbucks? This helped win me as a regular customer, but Jennifer said it best:
“If I can avoid hurtling along in traffic at the edge of disaster because of an errant coffee sleeve, I know where I’ll be buying coffee for the commute.”
And that’s the story small, usually unnoticed feature on a 3-cent sleeve won Starbucks a couple of loyal customers who shared their happy tales, gave Starbucks a bit of free PR, and probably won many more customers who noticed the benefit but didn’t bother figuring out why. All with about 1/10th of a cent worth of glue (from the maker of Dial) per cup of coffee.
Further Reading:A 23-year-old Heathrow airport worker who dubbed herself the "lyrical terrorist" today became the first woman to be convicted under the government's anti-terror legislation.
Samina Malik, who burst into tears on hearing the verdict, wrote poems entitled How To Behead and The Living Martyrs and stocked a "library" of documents useful to terrorists.
On the social networking site Hi5 she listed her interests as: "Helping the mujaheddin in any way which I can... I am well known as lyrical terrorist."
The jury at the Old Bailey found Malik guilty by a majority of 10 to one of possessing records likely to be used for terrorism.
Judge Peter Beaumont, the Recorder of London, bailed Malik on "house arrest" and ordered reports into her family background ahead of the sentencing on December 6, warning her that jail remained a possibility.
"You have been, in many respects, a complete enigma to me," he told her.
Malik, who worked at WH Smith at the airport, was arrested in October last year. When her bedroom was searched police found a ringbinder full of documents as well as a bracelet bearing the word "jihad".
There was also a sticker on a mirror inside the door, bearing the words "lyrical terrorist".
In one handwritten document found by police, she wrote: "I want to have the death of a shaheed [martyr]... I want the opportunity to take part in the blessed sacred duty of jihad."
Also found were publications from an Islamist extremist group called Followers of Ahl us-Sunnah Wal-Jammaa'ah, linked to another group, The Saved Sect, and to the extremist cleric Sheikh Omar Bakri.
In a box file in the family lounge was a printed version of the "declaration of war" by Osama bin Laden.
One of Malik's poems, entitled The Living Martyrs, said: "Let us make Jihad/ Move to the front line/ To chop chop head of kuffar swine".
A second poem was called How to Behead. "It's not as messy or as hard as some may think/ It's all about the flow of the wrist," it read.
The Mujaheddin Poisoner's Handbook, Encyclopaedia Jihad, How To Win In Hand To Hand Combat, and How To Make Bombs and Sniper Manual were found on her computer.
The court heard Malik joined an extremist organisation called Jihad Way, set up explicitly to disseminate terrorist propaganda and support for al Qaida.
Jonathan Sharp, prosecuting, said she was an "unlikely" but "committed" Islamic extremist: "She had a library of material that she had collected for terrorist purposes. That collection would be extremely useful for someone planning terrorist activity."
But Malik, of Townsend Road, Southall, west London, told the jury: "I am not a terrorist." She claimed to have used the nickname "lyrical terrorist" because she thought it was "cool".
Malik was convicted of possessing records likely to be useful in terrorism under the Terrorism Act 2000. She was earlier cleared by a jury of a separate count of possessing an article for terrorism.October 01, 2014
After stocks of the newly-released Android Wear smartwatch were quickly depleted by eager customers, it took Motorola some weeks to build more units of the Moto 360 but everything seems OK now as the wearable is now back in stock.
At the moment, you can have your Moto 360 smartwatch is in two flavors — light metal case with stone leather band, and dark metal case with black leather band. The watch still goes for $250 per unit — not too costly and not too cheap considering the average price of smartwatches nowadays.
The Motorola Moto 360 features a 1.56″ round Corning Gorilla Glass display. There’s 0.5GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, dust and water resistance and of course, a 320mAh (or is it 300mAh?) sealed batter unit.As a large 155er, there's long been talk about whether former UFC and WEC lightweight champion Benson Henderson would be better served fighting at welterweight.
It appears we'll soon find out.
Henderson's coach, The MMA Lab's John Crouch, told MMAFighting.com's Ariel Helwani on Wednesday's edition of UFC Tonight that his fighter is planning on having one more bout at 155, then making the move up.
Why not an immediate move? Well, Henderson's last fight was an upset knockout loss to Rafael dos Anjos, and he doesn't want to exit the division on a loss.
Beyond that, Henderson realizes that he's far removed from a title shot as long as Anthony Pettis, who holds two wins over him, keeps his grip on the belt. Henderson says he's going to retire at age 33, which is just two years down the road, and doesn't want to waste much time.
And there's another reason.
"He would like to see what it feels like to not cut weight," Crouch said. "The weight cut is irritating for him."The cinema that's always deserted: Egypt's eerie End of the World movie theatre that has never shown a film
The outdoor cinema was built in the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt
A wealthy Frenchman decided it would be the perfect location for a bizarre cinema
But at its premiere, the power cut out and no films have been show there since
Now the 150 wooden seats are weathered and worn by the apocalyptic surroundings
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Sitting in the middle of a vast desert, an eerie abandoned cinema lies waiting for its first movie to be screened.
It has been over a decade since the outdoor cinema was built in the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, at the bottom of a desert mountain range.
The site is accessible by just one road - called Dusti Road - and few people ever go there.
Now the 150 wooden seats are weathered and worn by the apocalyptic surroundings, and remain empty. The screen's foundations stand broken and the building housing the generator and projector has been left crumbling.
What a picture: The abandoned cinema is still waiting for its first movie to be screened
View from space: The 'End of the World' cinema, located in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt According to Kaupo Kikkas, the Estonian photographer who took these shots, t he End of the World Cinema was built by a wealthy Frenchman who decided it would be the perfect location for a bizarre cinema.
He went to Cairo to buy everything he needed from an old theatre. However things didn't exactly go according to plan. On the night of the premiere the generator powering its grand debut cut out.
Apparently, the local authorities weren't very excited about the idea of having a theatre in the middle of the desert, and it is suspected that they might have had something to do with the premiere's incidents. RELATED ARTICLES Previous
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Next Military rockets being delivered to Palestinian militants... British tourists remain in Sharm El Sheikh but German... Share this article Share Mr Kikkas said: 'Egypt is and was kind of a police state. In Sinai it's actually forbidden to go to the desert if you don't take a tour or organized trip. These tours and trips take you to all the same places and actually one route is just two miles away from the cinema. 'I think most of the locals know about this place but because of the ‘confusion’ between this Frenchman, local government and Bedouins, it's a topic that's not really talked about,' he added. 'At the premier evening everything went "accidentally" wrong, their electricity generator was sabotaged and no movies were ever screened at the End of the World Cinema.' It has been over a decade since the outdoor cinema was built in the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, at the bottom of a desert mountain range Abandoned: The 150 wooden seats are weathered and worn by the apocalyptic surroundings, and remain empty The screen's foundations stand broken and the building housing the generator and projector has been left crumbling The cinema was built by a French visitor who decided the Sinai would be the perfect location The 150 wooden seats are weathered and worn by the apocalyptic surroundings, and remain empty
As if the auditorium had risen from the sands of the Sinai itself, an abandoned cinema lies in waiting for an audience that never cameAwesome product! Light and Sturdy as well!
I had to decide whether I should choose Cloud Core, Cloud or Cloud 2. After I googled for quite awhile, I came to decide purchase Cloud Core with several reasons. Differences between Cloud Core and Cloud. 1) Less accessories(carrying pouch, airplane audio jack converter, extra ear cup) = Less $$$. *In my case, I really didn't need those accessories since I was planing to use this headphone while I'm playing game with my desktop 2) Headphone itself is identical to Cloud = No performance difference. *I checked specs for both Cloud Core and Cloud from official Kingston website and they were identical. Differences between Cloud Core and Cloud 2 1) Volume controller on Cloud 2 *This volume controller was irrelevant to me. I don't need change my mic volume during the game and I can change audio volume by media keys from my keyboard. 2) 7.1 Surround Sound. *I read many reviews that USB sound card that is in the volume controller is not that good that most motherboard's sound chip provides better sound quality Hope this review helps others to make rightful decision!Read full review
Verified purchase: Noby Brett Stevens on October 5, 2016
Back in the second wave of dot-com boom and bust, there was a site called MySpace. It was a revolution, the media told us. No longer was big media in control. This was a new age where the old rules did not apply. Everything was different.
Except it was not, as you might have guessed. MySpace followed the cycle that every other consumer product does: it started out promising, but as margins declined and its userbase was “democratized,” its quality plummeted and anyone with any brains escaped it if possible. That left a ruined shell.
This gave us “the MySpace Cycle” which seems to apply to all online services:
Service starts out with promise and attracts power users. These users contribute content, making the service desirable. That in turn brings in the masses, who cause chaos with their behavior. The service fights back by making more rules and removing “troublemakers.” This drives away the power users, so the service doubles down on attracting grandmas, geeks, neckbeards, SJWs, welfare users and other mass culture zombies. The company, which has now grown big and fat with all is new hires, must save itself, so it finds a buyer — usually from big media — who is purchasing it for its existing userbase. This fails eighteen months later when the buyer realizes that the number of these users who are active is declining. The service is re-sold for a lot less. At this point, no one uses it but homeless people in public libraries.
Twitter has reached stage three: over the past two years, it has increasingly cracked down on non-conformists as a way to stop the “troublemakers,” a term it could never define so it fell back on easy definitions like trolls, non-Leftists, etc. This has caused not an exodus of users, but an exodus of content as people are unwilling to trust Twitter as the primary place to post new material; instead, they post it elsewhere and link to it on Twitter.
The crackdown having failed, and with its new userbase of SJWs and homeless not generating it much income, Twitter is looking for a sugar daddy. This is all but an admission that its business has failed. Luckily, it has found some captive idiots who think they can monetize the dying regime:
Twitter Inc. is expected to field bids this week, and Marc Benioff has been building a case to Salesforce.com Inc. investors and others that his company should be the buyer, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Benioff is looking to make a splashy acquisition that would secure for Salesforce a treasure trove of data as well as a prized consumer brand, according to the people. Mr. Benioff, whose recent approach to Twitter set off the bidding process, sees the social-media pioneer as an “unpolished jewel†with untapped potential in advertising, e-commerce and other data-rich applications he regards as important to the cloud-software juggernaut’s next phase of growth, the people said.
We now see that those who make it in business are often lucky more than intelligent. He is hoping to, as the people who bought MySpace were, put more ads on the site and then sell the users to other services as potential customers. In other words, he is buying Twitter for its userbase, who are already disengaging and will further do so as more ads and intrusive policies appear.
Even more, he has missed the demographic change on Twitter. Back in the day, it was cutting edge and attracted power users: people who do interesting things and generate content. By endorsing safe spaces and censorship, Twitter has driven those away and replaced them with people who buy little and know little, and therefore are not worth advertising to or using to attract other users. This is a death spiral for the Twitter audience.
The illusion among dot-com boffins is that people flee from one service to another. The reality is that, like most things human or monkey, the audience simply flakes out. They stop logging in so frequently, or use the service less, or use it less deeply by giving it a cursory check-in and then going to something else.
The real competition among online services is not other services, but the wide world of other ways to spend leisure time at work. People can get away with watching videos on their phones, chatting to friends, shopping at ecommerce sites, or even playing video games. There is no reason they should stay within the realm of social media.
After the recent explosion of Twitter censorship against ideological non-conformists, it is gratifying to see the service failing exactly as was predicted. Censorship drives away quality users and replaces them with low-value users. And now Twitter has no option but to sell itself by the pound.
Tags: censorship, entropy, myspace, social media, twitter
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.A 3D printed Apple logo is seen in front of a displayed Irish flag. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
DUBLIN (Reuters) - A planned $1 billion Apple data center is in doubt after Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said the U.S. company’s Chief Executive Tim Cook would no longer commit to it, adding that Dublin would do whatever necessary to get it built.
Apple announced plans in February 2015 to build the facility in a rural location in the west of Ireland to take advantage of green energy sources nearby, but the project has faced a two-year delay due to planning objections.
In a meeting on Thursday, Cook did not commit to going ahead with it, Varadkar told state broadcaster RTE.
“We didn’t get a start date, or a definite commitment or anything like that,” said Varadkar, who is on a tour of the United States to meet investors, adding he had told Cook that the government would do “anything within our power” to facilitate the resumption of the project.
Ireland relies on foreign multinational companies like Apple for the creation of one in every 10 jobs across the economy and sees major investments such as data centers as a means of securing their presence in the country.
Apple did not respond to an e-mail query asking about whether it was committed to the project.
A similar Apple center announced at the same time in Denmark is due to begin operations later this year and Apple in July announced it would build its second EU data center there.
The government has said it is considering amending its planning laws to include data centers as strategic infrastructure, thus allowing them to get through the planning process much more quickly.Another juror, dressed in casual clothes like the others instead of in their usual businesslike attire, wore a pink T-shirt, with the word "Scruples" on the front. Whether that was a plug for the Judith Krantz novel of the same name, or an expression about the foundation of this verdict, was never explained.
After the verdict, one of two men on the panel, a black marketing executive who Robert L. Shapiro, one of Mr. Simpson's lawyers, said had once been a member of the 1960's-era Black Panther Party, gave what looked like a black power salute, a fist raised in the air.
And then they were all out the door, cryptic as ever, out into the 100-degree heat and midday smog, leaving a hole in the sea of self-believing knowledge about what really went on inside the jury room. The jurors -- 10 women and 2 men, among them 9 blacks, 2 whites and 1 Hispanic man -- did not wish to talk to the press or the lawyers for either side, Judge Lance A. Ito said.
Speaking about the reporters who would soon be showing up at the jurors' houses, Judge Ito said, "Expect the worst."
At least one member of the panel, Brenda Moran, a 44-year-old black computer technician, talked briefly outside her home.
"I think we did the right thing -- in fact, I know we did," said Ms. Moran. When she was asked why the verdict was reached so quickly, in less than four hours on Monday, she said, "We were there for nine months. We didn't need another nine months to decide."
But the Los Angeles County District Attorney, Gil Garcetti, said, "Apparently, this decision was based on emotion that overlapped reason."
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The jurors sat through 126 witnesses, were presented with 1,105 pieces of evidence, 45,000 pages of transcripts, and heard closing arguments that evoked Adolf Hitler, conscience and history. They were told by the defense that if gloves found at the murder scene and at Mr. Simpson's home "do not fit -- you must acquit." They were urged by the prosecution to follow a trail of blood from the murder scene to Mr. Simpson's house.
Each day, the jurors had been told by Judge Ito not to form an opinion about the case and not to discuss the case among themselves. But in the end, their deliberations were so brief that many lawyers thought their minds had been made up long ago.
The "mountain of evidence," cited by the prosecution, may never have been climbed once the jury was given the case.
"Jurors vote with their heart and use their minds to support it," said Sonya Hamlin, a New York-based jury consultant and author of "What Makes Juries Listen." She said research showed that juries tended to make up their minds early in the trial, "and then use the rest of the trial to support how they feel."
Another lawyer, Karen Ackerson-Brazille, a Los Angeles lawyer active in several high-profile cases, said, "It's not a secret that most jurors make up their minds before opening statements."
Lawyers on both sides said emotion had played a big part.
"One of the jurors was crying," at some point in the trial, Mr. Cochran said, referring to Ms. Moran. "We thought that was important." In fact, her sister, Debbie Bennett, said in an interview that Ms. Moran left the jury room in tears several months ago because she was "just so tired -- exhausted."
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The Deputy District Attorney, Christopher A. Darden, fought back tears today. "That's the jury's position," he said. "That's their voice."
To some, this jury was viewed as a dream for the defense, and not just because of its racial makeup in a racially charged trial. Court records from questionnaires showed many jurors doubting the police, and some complaining of personal run-ins with authority.
The lone Hispanic juror, a 32-year-old man, had said of Mr. Simpson, "How could a man who had it all be a suspect?"
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Another juror, a 50-year-old black woman who became the forewoman, had said she viewed domestic battles as "personal problems." She also offered a telling anecdote about a urine sample she submitted to a doctor that incorrectly showed her to be pregnant.
For a jury, they were not all that unusual. Two had college degrees. They ranged in age from 23 to 72, with the average age 43. Five worked in Government jobs, including two postal workers.
It may well be that the toughest decision now for this jury is whether to write a book or screenplay, selling the inevitable "inside story" of the 266 days spent in sequestration. Two dismissed jurors have written best sellers. One book, "The Private Diary of an O.J. Juror," by Mike Walker and Michael Knox, published by Dove Books, sold 500,000 copies.
They have been more scrutinized -- and more pampered -- than perhaps any other jury. They got a tour in a Goodyear blimp, a private audience with the comedian Jay Leno, a trip to Universal studios. None of it seemed to alter their sense of being prisoners of the judicial system.
"I feel free," Ms. Moran said yesterday.
A CLOSER LOOK A Profile of the Jury
Here is a look at the composition of the jury as drawn from questionnaires filled out by the jurors and released by the court. The court did not release the jurors' names to protect their safety and privacy.
FOREWOMAN -- Black Woman, 50 She is divorced and describes herself as a vendor. Michael Knox, a dismissed juror, described her in his book as one of the smarter members of the panel.
Black Woman, 24 She is single and works in a city hospital. She is one of the jurors who complained about reporters, getting two of them banned from the trial. she reported to Ito that former jurors had passed a note, getting both of them dismissed from the panel
White Woman, 60 She is divorced, a retired clerk for the Southern California Gas Company. Midway through the trial, she suffered a hip injury while entering the jury box.
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Hispanic Man, 32 He is single and has a 4-year-old son. He works as a truck driver for Pepsi Cola.
Black Woman, 37 She is married and self-employed. Mr. Knox described her as the funniest member of the panel.
Black Man, 43 He is a married marketing representative. He was rushed to the hospital in late July with an unspecified ailment, but returned to the panel after getting clearance from a doctor.
Black Woman, 44 She is single, a Los Angeles Superior Court computer technician. She has lost weight during the trial, and has told Ito that she works out often.
Black Woman, 38 She is single and an environmental health specialist.
Black Woman, 52 She is divorced and a postal worker.
Black Woman, 28 She is married and a postal worker. She replaced a juror who was removed after complaints that he had intimidated other jurors.
White Woman, 22 She is single and an insurance claims adjuster
Black Woman. 72 She's married and a retired cleaner (Source: Reuters)This article is from the archive of our partner.
Update 2:52 p.m.: Silvio Berlusconi has confirmed that he will resign after a new austerity budget law is passed, Reuters is reporting.
Original post: Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano told Italian news media that famously scandal-ridden prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has offered to resign after securing passage of an austerity bill in Parliament, The Guardian writes. The news comes after a vote in Parliament today revealed that he'd lost his majority support there and a main coalition partner in Parliament called for his resignation. There have been rumors that Berlusconi would resign floating around as Europe's debt crisis continues, but he's previously denied them, (through media as diverse as Facebook, no less!) The Guardian says he could step down as soon as mid-November, after which the president would work with Parliament to determine whether a new government could be immediately formed or whether the country would have to hold early elections. Berlusconi indicated he would be his party's leading candidate in those elections, reports The New York Times, but others in his party disagree, finally deciding he might be a liability for Italy as it faces ever-growing budget deficits.
Over at TheAtlantic.com, former Atlantic Wire features editor Heather Horn notes that despite having successfully overcome a wealth of embarrassing sex scandals through the years, it is the economy that has finally brought the leader down. Horn calls it good news for "those thinking the economy determines all political fortunes," quipping, "How do you say 'it's the economy, stupid,' in Italian?
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.JASMINE Waltz and Austin Armacost may have been evicted from the Celebrity Big Brother, but they're still causing controversy.
The pair took to their social media accounts and both started Instagram Live feeds to connect with their fans. However, the chat soon turned X-rated when Jasmine began gyrating and pushing her nether regions into Austin's face. After Austin correctly told fans where Jasmine was from, the American babe appeared to get over excited and started the sexual move. Austin – who was laughing at the time – then exclaimed: "Put your vagina on me.
INSTAGRAM X-RATED INSTAGRAM: Jasmine Waltz & Austin Armacost put on quite the show
Celebrity nip slips, sideboobs & underboobs They may be rich and famous, but these celebrities aren't immune from flashing the flesh in our ultimate celebrity nip slips, sideboobs, underboobs and now gapboobs gallery. 1 / 299 Getty Images Chantel Jeffries exposes side |
casting agent took a photo and asked her to audition. She eventually obtained a supporting role in the drama Waterland (1992), in which she had the opportunity to work with actors who had been in the business several years before her. She also had a small role in the critically acclaimed film The Remains of the Day, which received eight Academy Awards nominations. Her career would continue to grow in England throughout the decade, and see larger parts in bigger motion pictures.
Headey played Kitty Brydon, the childhood friend and romantic interest of Mowgli, in Disney's The Jungle Book (1994). James Berardinelli praised the cast's "solid performances".[8] as part of a positive critical reception, and the film found moderate commercial success in theaters.[9] She appeared opposite Vanessa Redgrave in the 1997 romantic drama Mrs Dalloway, portraying the closest friend of a housewife, who is now wife of a self-made millionnaire and mother of five. She was then cast in the drama Onegin (1999), a film based on the 19th century Russian novel of the same name by Alexander Pushkin, in which she portrayed the fiancé of an aspiring poet and appeared with Ralph Fiennes and Liv Tyler.[10] The film was critically and financially unsuccessful.[11]
In 2000, Headey played a newly promoted lawyer with not apparent emotional attachments in the romantic comedy Aberdeen, receiving a received the Silver Iris Award for Best Actress at the 2001 Brussels European Film Festival, and also starred as a troubled college student in the psychological drama Gossip, with Kate Hudson. In 2001's comedy The Parole Officer, Headey took on the role of a police officer, alongside Steve Coogan in his first film role. While the film was warmly received, ViewLondon remarked: "The only disappointment is Lena Headey, who, despite being fantastically sexy (she’s given both a nude scene and a ‘dressed as a prostitute’ scene), smirks her way through the entire film, even at the most inappropriate moments".[12]
In 2002, she appeared as a mousey Victorian lesbian artist with Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart in the mystery drama Possession, based on the 1990 novel of the same name by British author A. S. Byatt, and as the wife of a law-abiding art framer dying of leukemia in the thriller Ripley's Game, adapted from the 1974 novel of the same name. In its review for the latter, Eye for Film noted: "Whilst this is very much a male-centered film, Lena Headey turns in a powerful performance as Jonathan's wife, creating a sense of balance and normality against which other events are contrasted".[13] Headey appeared in the comedy The Actors (2003), opposite Dylan Moran and Michael Caine, portraying the love interest of a struggling actor.[14]
Rise to prominence (2005–2010) [ edit ]
Headey found a much wider recognition when she starred with Matt Damon and Heath Ledger in Terry Gilliam's adventure fantasy film The Brothers Grimm (2005), as Angelika, whose woodsman father was transformed into a werewolf by the Evil Queen. She was drawn to the "tomboy" nature of her character, on which she stated: "She lives and grows up and survives in the forest. Terry and I talked about how her instincts are almost animalistic and she can see 360 degrees around her. She is aware of what is going on. That is how she is grounded. She is of the earth".[15] The Brothers Grimm received mixed reviews and made US$105.3 million worldwide.[16][17]
In 2005, Headey also starred with actress Piper Perabo in the films The Cave and Imagine Me & You. The horror film The Cave saw the actress play a member of a group of divers who become trapped in an underwater cave network. While critical response was negative,[18] the film managed to turn a profit at the box office.[19] In the romantic dramedy Imagine Me & You, she took on the role of a woman who becomes infatuated with a newlywed bride, causing a stir among the bride's family and friends. The film found a limited release in theaters, but Mick LaSalle from the San Francisco Chronicle stated that the actress "has a forthright, irresistible appeal and a face and especially a smile that suggest intelligence, integrity and lots of fun".[20]
Her most known film role came perhaps in 2007, when Headey played Queen Gorgo in Zack Snyder's epic war film 300, based on the 1998 comic series of the same name by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, a fictionalized retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae within the Persian Wars. Her character has a much larger role in the film than she does in the comic book, where she only appears in the beginning,[21] and required her to film naked for one scene. "It's always weird the thought of taking your clothes off in front of 20 people and then to have it projected in front of many more", she said during an interview. "I think it was necessary because we only get that scene to establish their relationship. It is a very obvious moment but I think it does it in quite a beautiful way."[22] The film received mixed reviews, but was a box office success, grossing over US$450 million.[23] In 2007, she also appeared as the stuffy Miss Dickinson in the sixth release of the St. Trinian's film series.
Headey starred as Sarah Connor in Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a television spin-off of James Cameron's popular Terminator franchise. The show ran for 31 episodes in two seasons, from January 2008 to April 2009. Variety praised "Headey's gritty performance as Sarah —managing to be smart, resourceful and tough, yet melancholy and vulnerable as well".[24] For her performance, she was nominated twice for the Saturn Award for Best Actress on Television. In 2008, she starred alongside Matthias Schweighöfer and Joseph Fiennes in The Red Baron, a biographical film of the legendary World War I fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen,[25][26] appeared in Ridley Scott-produced sci-fi drama Tell-Tale, a film based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe,[27] and played a radiologist in the horror film The Broken, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.[28] While the three aforementioned films went largely unnoticed by audiences, some critics praised Headey's performance in The Broken, including Kim Koynar, of Cinematical, who wrote that Headey "largely carries the film, and does so quite ably".[29]
In 2009, Headey played an ill-fated character in the slasher film Laid to Rest, which received a DVD release,[30][31] had a part in a short film titled The Devil's Wedding, and also provided her voice for an episode of the Cartoon Network series The Super Hero Squad Show, playing Black Widow and Mystique. She briefly appeared in the independent comedy Pete Smalls Is Dead (2010).
Mainstream success (2011–present) [ edit ]
Beginning in April 2011, Headey has portrayed queen regent Cersei Lannister on the HBO series Game of Thrones, based on George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels.[32] She was cast in the role after her friend and eventual co-star, Peter Dinklage, suggested her casting to producers.[33] Her performance as the ruthless queen has received critical acclaim,[34][35][36] earning a Scream Award nomination in the category of Best Fantasy Actress for the role in 2011,[37] and Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2014,[38][39] 2015,[40] 2016 and 2018.
After guest-starring in the White Collar episode "Taking Account" in 2011, Headey took on the role of the leader of a drug dealing gang and the primary villain in the 3D sci-fi action film Dredd (2012), alongside Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby.[41][42][43] Her performance was inspired by punk-rock singer Patti Smith, and on the character, Headey asserted: "I think of [Ma-Ma] like an old great white shark who is just waiting for someone bigger and stronger to show up and kill her [...] she's ready for it. In fact, she can't wait for it to happen [...] She's an addict, so she's dead in that way, but that last knock just hasn't come". Despite a positive critical response, the film flopped at the box office, seeing greater success following its home release; it has since been recognised as a cult film.[44]
Headey joined again with Ethan Hawke to star in The Purge (2013), a "micro-budget" horror film, in which she took on the role of the matriarch of a family who find themselves endangered by a gang of murderers during the annual Purge, a night during which all crime, even murder, is temporarily legal. The film at number one position in the United States, grossing over US$36 million over the weekend;[45] it eventually made US$89.3 million worldwide.[46] She next played shadowhunter Jocelyn Fray/Jocelyn Fairchild inThe Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (also 2013), based on the first book of The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare, and opposite Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower. The film flopped at the box office, and as a result, plans for sequels were eventually canceled.[47]
Following the success of 300 (2007), Headey reprised her role as Queen Gorgo in 300: Rise of an Empire, which was released in 2014. Like the first film, Rise of an Empire received mixed reviews, but was a major commercial success, grossing over US$337 million worldwide.[48] In 2014, she also starred in the fantasy adventure film The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box[49] and the biographical film Low Down, which detailed the life of jazz pianist Joe Albany. In 2015, she played the wife of a federal prosecutor running for office who cannot stop himself from sleeping with high-class escorts in the political thriller Zipper, opposite Patrick Wilson.
In the historical action comedy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Headey appeared as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, with her former Game of Thrones, Century and The Contractor co-star Charles Dance. Andrew Barker, of Variety, found her to be "excessively diverting" in what he considered a "tolerable, but not handsome enough" film.[50] In 2017, Headey appeared as a "predictably hard-boiled boss" in the crime thriller Thumper, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival,[51] and provided the voiceover for Mercedes A-Class television advertisement and Morgana in Trollhunters.
Public image [ edit ]
She has appeared on the covers of TV Guide, G3, Sunday Mirror and Germany's Filmstar. She ranked No. 64 on the Maxim magazine Hot 100 of 2007 list. She was listed at No. 4, No. 10 and No. 3 in AfterEllen's list of the Hot 100 in 2007, 2008 and 2009, respectively.[52]
Personal life [ edit ]
Headey in 2007
Headey was a vegetarian; however, in a 2011 interview she stated she now eats meat again, albeit rarely.[53]
Headey has a number of tattoos. Her tattoos include a large floral design on her back[54] as well as a Pema Chödrön quote on her ribs.[55] She told Esquire that "I love tattoos. I find it calming."[56] Her tattoos often require covering when Headey works, although she has stated, "you can usually get away with it by keeping your clothes on."[56]
Relationships and family [ edit ]
Headey married musician Peter Loughran in May 2007;[57] their son, Wylie Loughran, was born on 31 March 2010.[58] She has spoken about suffering from postnatal depression following Wylie's birth.[59] Headey and Loughran separated in 2011, and she filed for divorce in the Los Angeles County Superior Court on 20 July 2012.[57] The divorce was finalised on 26 December 2013.[60] She was linked to Game of Thrones co-star Jerome Flynn; however, the relationship reportedly ended badly some time before March 2014, resulting in the two being kept apart on set.[61]
On 10 July 2015, Headey gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Teddy, with director Dan Cadan (her childhood friend, who also worked with Headey on his short film The Devil's Wedding).[62] The pair got engaged in July 2017[63] and married in 2018.[64]
Headey has been close friends with actress Piper Perabo since they starred together in the 2005 films The Cave and Imagine Me & You.[65] She is also good friends with her Game of Thrones co-stars Pedro Pascal and Peter Dinklage, the latter of whom first suggested to producers on Game of Thrones that she be cast as Cersei Lannister.[33]
Activism [ edit ]
Headey has campaigned on behalf of animal rights.[66] In 2008, she spoke out against animal abuse in an advertisement for animal welfare group PETA.[67]
Headey supports the LGBT rights organisation NOH8,[68] and in April 2015 appeared on a T-shirt designed by them and sold through Represent.com to raise funds for the cause.[69] She has been involved with humanitarian organization the International Rescue Committee (IRC), advocating for migrants languishing in Greece, saying that in the face of rising populism, and the "lost humanity in leadership", people should continue to "fight for the good".[70] In 2018, Headey did a voice over for an advert by the charity Alzheimer's Research UK, which launched ahead of World Alzheimer’s Day (21 September).[71]
Filmography [ edit ]
Headey's most critically acclaimed and commercially successful films, as of 2018, include:[72][73]
Awards and nominations [ edit ]I love being creative - and that state of flow when you are consumed with the project. So, I made a necklace to commemorate it.The charms dangling on this sterling silver necklace represent the 3 major neurotransmitters (those brain chemicals responsible for mood and emotion) critical to creativity:(from left to right)serotonin - happiness, satisfactiondopamine - love, passion, pleasureacetylcholine - learning, memory, dreamingThe necklace is adjustable between 16-18 inches long and closes with a lobster clasp. The charms vary in length from about.75 to 1 inch long. The necklace is made of high quality solid sterling silver.It comes with a little tag identifying the molecules used in the design and a recycled gift box. It is quite elegant and certainly a conversation piece.(customer selfie in last photo)......Customer comments about this necklace:“The necklace is just perfect and so beautiful - and the way it was packaged made me smile.”“Incredibly fast shipping. Beautiful quality and obviously made and sent with love. I bought this as a gift for a chemist and she adores it. :)”“Three years ago, my AP Chemistry students gave me your creativity necklace as a birthday present. It's one of the most wonderful gifts I've ever received, and I wear it all the time. Your art brings joy.”“I absolutely adore this necklace - it's even better than the photos led me to believe! I wear it all the time, and always get compliments. Thank you so much! It shipped very quickly, too, and the seller is so sweet and professional!”“Absolutely gorgeous and perfect. I love it!”“I get so many compliments when I wear this necklace! Thank you! ““The pictures cannot quite depict the full beauty of the necklace. This seller rocks. Thank you very much!”......I'm scientist-turned-artist Raven Hanna, Ph.D. of Made With Molecules. I hand-make original, high quality jewelry and use Earth-friendly and people-friendly business practices. I live and work in a solar-powered sugarcane shack on the flank of an active volcano in Hawaii, and I donate a percentage of profits to environmental and science education nonprofit organizations. Please take a look at other molecular jewelry offerings in my shop. http://molecularmuse.etsy.comOn Portlandia, Carrie Brownstein demonstrates that with a little persistence, anyone can pickle anything. In real life, the indie-rock star turned music critic turned sketch comedian proves that the same general principle applies to mastering an art form—or a racquet sport.
There's a 12-piece polka band setting up in Carrie Brownstein’s neighborhood dive bar when we pop in on a Saturday afternoon in November. We’re looking for a quiet place to chat after our photo shoot, and this is not that place. “It’s like an episode of Portlandia!” says the 39-year-old cocreator and costar of IFC’s hit television sketch show, which lovingly satirizes modern life at urban hipness ground zero.
That Brownstein has enough energy to summon a joke is amazing. She was out the night before at a wrap party. Portlandia’s fourth season just finished three months of filming, and she spent that time in “a state of mania,” on set 12 hours a day, jumping between two or three locations, playing four or five characters (requiring at least that many wig changes). At times like this, she says, “I don’t need to sleep as much. I don’t need to eat as much. I exist on a level that’s fervent and restless.”
If you’ve paid attention to Brownstein’s career, that explains a lot: She seems to have the superhuman ability to master whatever she pursues. Portlandia is just one line on her résumé. She’s also a guitarist and singer who spent a dozen years co-fronting the celebrated indie-rock band Sleater-Kinney. Not long ago, she released another critically acclaimed album with a different band, Wild Flag.
And as if that weren’t enough multitasking mastery, she’s about three quarters of the way through writing a new album—one she won’t say much about except that she’s working with people she’s worked with before, which is enough to make a Sleater-Kinney fan’s heart skip a beat. In her free time, she’s working on rewrites of a memoir.
“I would describe her style as ‘Keep going, then go more, then let’s do this, then let’s think about that, and then here’s another idea,’” says Fred Armisen, her Portlandia partner. The verb Brownstein uses to describe her work life is vacillate. But switching from acting to music to writing doesn’t feel like shifting existences. “It’s coming from the same place of energy and intention and drive,” she says. “It’s easy to take lessons from one discipline and apply them to another.”
Although she comes across as a perfectionist—she speaks in thoughtful complete paragraphs—Brownstein’s training has been ad hoc. As a self-proclaimed drama nerd growing up outside Seattle, she went to theater camp and acted in school plays but was “diffident and awkward” on stage. Something about it appealed to her anyway. “There were moments that I could transcend that and sense that the stage was a place you could step outside yourself,” she says. “It was music that got me further outside, to that place of fearlessness or trying not to care what people thought.”
At 14, she saved up babysitting money to buy a guitar, enlisting a neighbor to teach her chords. She played in a riot grrrl band called Excuse 17 at Evergreen State College in the early ’90s and then, from 1994 to 2006, in Sleater-Kinney, a tight trio that, over the course of seven albums, transcended punk rock to become a staple of critic’s-pick lists. Greil Marcus, in Time, called them the best rock band of 2001, and Rolling Stone declared Brownstein one of “the 25 most underrated guitarists.”
But even at Sleater-Kinney’s pinnacle, Brownstein’s interest in acting didn’t recede. In Portland for a summer in the early 2000s, she and her friend Miranda July, the writer and performance artist, embarked on a course of study that could double as a segment from Portlandia. They collected a group of seven or eight acquaintances into what Brownstein describes as a “folksy, casual, almost self-undermining” theater group. Each week, a member was tasked with coming up with a lesson plan. He or she would go out and buy a book on acting technique—Meisner or Stanislavsky—and teach it to the group through improv activities.
July was fond of using psychoanalytic ’70s board games she found at thrift stores. “We’d just pull the cards out and sit around someone’s living room or backyard and play out these scenarios,” Brownstein laughs. But the endeavor wasn’t a joke. “It was a way of dealing with tedium but also acknowledging a kind of ambition we had. It was a way of taking risks couched as silliness.”
It was her first experience publicly embracing awkwardness—of harnessing the power of those little moments of clumsy uncertainty. In Sleater-Kinney, she says, “We were OK with being disarming, but you didn’t want to be awkward.”
Portlandia’s impulse is the opposite. Its humor is predicated on a layer of clumsiness, on dipping a toe into real life’s often uncomfortable current. To Brownstein, it’s why the comedy works. “Clunkiness can be charming if it’s married with intention and bravado,” she says. “It’s OK to embrace the parts that seem mismatched. That’s when you surprise people. It’s very hard to surprise people.”
People who knew Brownstein as a serious rock star were surprised when she started popping up in goofy online improv videos with Saturday Night Live’s Armisen in 2005. With Sleater-Kinney winding down, Brownstein was looking for other things to do. In the ensuing years, she contributed to NPR’s All Songs Considered, volunteered at Portland’s humane society (she’s good at training dogs), and, even briefly, worked a day job at the hip Portland ad agency Wieden+Kennedy. (“I was dreaming of corporate lunches,” she told NPR’s Peter Sagal in 2012. “But it turns out I’m not very good at working with a traditional boss.”) She and Armisen met at an SNL after-party (he was a Sleater-Kinney fan, wearing a button with her face on it) and became fast friends. Their comedy duo, ThunderAnt, made satirical sketches about snooty foodies, uptight feminist bookstore employees, and bloviating performance artists—a rough draft of Portlandia, which debuted in 2011.
If Brownstein’s new role as comedic actress was incongruous—this cool rock star wearing a fake mustache in a crude rendering of a muscle-head boyfriend—it was also totally hilarious. She eased into the role with such charm and shared such obvious chemistry with Armisen that the juxtaposition was hardly jarring. Together, they’re the Lucy and Desi of the YouTube era.
Brownstein also found familiarity in the process. To her, writing a song and writing a sketch are similar exercises. “There’s a moment of vulnerability when you present your ideas to someone else,” she says. “I like the sense that the idea is not fully formed until it’s been added to or rethought or restructured with collaborators. If you’re working with people you trust and admire, there’s an implicit awareness that the idea will actually be better once everybody chimes in.”
This makes writing her book both the least collaborative of her pursuits and the most challenging. After she finished filming Portlandia’s third season, Brownstein turned her focus to writing the first draft of her memoir. Being alone with a laptop can be intimidating. “All the onus and drive is whatever is inside me every morning, and sometimes it’s not there,” she says of writing. “I’ve never known procrastination greater.”
After rejecting the loud dive bar, we end up across the street at a bicycle shop that serves espresso and flights of beer on skateboards. “That is such an unnecessary presentation,” she laughs. “People always ask if Portland is like Portlandia, and I say it’s weirder.”
The show may be a skewering send-up of hipster culture, the earthy, overearnest, faux-inclusive Portland variety in particular, but it’s also a loving homage to the city and its people. It’s the kind of good-natured teasing that can only come from a place of genuine investment. Brownstein cares deeply about the city she’s called home since 2000. It’s not just the small-town outsider spirit that lets things like backyard theater groups arise. There’s also an enduring faith in the future and in community—something the show gently lambasts as “the dream of the ’90s”—but which for Brownstein is still an important motivating force.
“I want others to feel a sense of ownership. I like to feel invited into a space, whether that is a creative space or a dialogue with art or culture,” she says when asked whether it’s important that her work have underlying politics. “It doesn’t have to be overtly political. It doesn’t have to be aggressive or contrarian. But I like something that posits a question, something that foments engagement and loyalty. We’re in an age of dabblers. There are so many dabblers. To have something that somebody wants to engage and reengage with is exciting.”
For Brownstein even dabbling is a chance to gain a new proficiency. She won a ping-pong tournament a couple of years ago. She’s “entranced” by sociolinguistics, which she studied in college. She recently accidentally mastered slam poetry. (“I started extemporizing slam poems in jest and then started to get pretty good at them.”) When I ask Armisen whether there’s anything Brownstein can’t do, he says, “She cannot bring liquids, aerosols, or gels onto a commercial aircraft if they are not consolidated into one bag and X-rayed separately.”
“I’m not very good with stillness,” Brownstein says. But curiously, this hasn’t turned her into a classic multitasker. She’s more like a serial tasker—a master of prioritization with an ability to focus intensely on one thing at a time. And it’s clear she’s careful to concentrate on what’s truly important to her while letting the rest—namely cooking and yoga—fall by the wayside. “I want to be present in everything I do,” she says. “That’s the only limitation I set for myself.”
This story originally appeared in mental_floss magazine. Subscribe to our print edition here, and our iPad edition here. All photos by Chris Hornbecker.Two men who say they were barred from riding a roller coaster at Universal Studios Hollywood because they are missing limbs have sued the theme park.
Angel Castelan, whose forearms were amputated after an electrical accident as a child, and Marvin Huezo, whose legs were amputated after a car accident, say they were kept off Revenge of the Mummy: The Ride, an indoor roller coaster.
The suit, filed last month in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, contends the men were kept off the ride in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A spokeswoman for Universal Studios Hollywood said the park does not comment on pending litigation.
In the suit, Castelan said he is a longtime fan of the theme park and had ridden the roller coaster several times. But in October 2010, Castelan said, ride operators told him he could not ride the roller coaster because he does not have hands to grip the safety bars.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
June 17, 2013, 2:45 PM GMT By A. Pawlowski
Alex is part of a Sesame Workshop online took kit aimed to help children with a parent behind bars understand and cope with the situation. Today
Those friendly, fuzzy Muppets from “Sesame Street” have helped kids open up about all sorts of serious subjects, from hunger and divorce to military deployment.
But they’re now tackling a much more unexpected issue: incarceration.
Meet Alex, the first Muppet to have a dad in jail. According to a Pew Charitable Trusts report, one in 28 children in the United States now has a parent behind bars -- more than the number of kids with a parent who is deployed -- so it’s a real issue, but it’s talked about far less because of the stigma.
That’s why the Sesame Workshop says it created the “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration” initiative, an online tool kit intended to help kids with a parent in prison find support and comfort, and provide families with strategies and tips to talk to their children about incarceration.
Alex is blue-haired and green-nosed and he wears a hoodie – you might think he’s just another carefree inhabitant of Sesame Street. But there’s sorrow in Alex’s voice when he talks about his father.
“I just miss him so much,” he tells a friend. “I usually don’t want people to know about my Dad.”
It’s easier for kids to hear such things from a Muppet than an adult, creators of the initiative noted.
“Coming from a Muppet, it’s almost another child telling their story to the children,” said Jeanette Betancourt, vice president of outreach and educational practices at the Sesame Workshop.
Alex will not be part of the regular cast on “Sesame Street,” but he’s playing a central role in the online tool kit.
Children of parents behind bars often feel sadness, shame and guilt about the situation, so they need to know they are loved and that the incarceration is not their fault, said Carol Burton, executive director of Centerforce, a non-profit dedicated to supporting families impacted by incarceration.
“There are several million children impacted by incarceration in this country,” Burton said. “No one is paying attention to them.”
The project and its unusual subject matter have garnered a lot of attention, with some observers calling it a sign of the times.
"Congratulations, America, on making it almost normal to have a parent in prison or jail," wrote a columnist on Reason.com.Bread is ‘overlooked and not seen as cool’, warns baker
Ben making bread at the E5 Bakery. Photo Mónica R. Goya Archant
The nation’s bread industry is in toil and set to decline if consumers do not change their perspective was the message at a conference designed to get people thinking about its importance.
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E5 Bakehouse in London Fields held the Farm to Loaf conference to allow speakers from across the bread industry to share their ideas on the problems they face and to promote what makes a good loaf of bread.
“We need to establish organic methods of food production so that our children do not starve” warned John Clohsey, crop production lecturer at BMC for 30 years.
“As it stands, bread is lacking in nutritional content and farming methods are destroying the soils organic content.
“When the soil organic matter depletes, civilisation will die”.
Ben Mackinnon, owner of E5 Bakehouse organised the conference to get people thinking about the importance of bread.
He thinks bread is often overlooked and given a ‘bad press’ because the industry is not seen as ‘cool’.
“Bakers need to do their part and find the solution to good bread, and market it to consumers,” he said.
“We need to combat supermarkets encouraging consumers to buy cheaply, and fancy bakeries luring consumers into buying ‘sexy loafs, that are aesthetically pleasing with their big holes and have thick crusts.
“The industry of bread is ageing. I am trying to engage young people, and different members of the community who need help to learn the trades of baking, whilst making bread fun. Baking is an engaging science that can change the world.”
E5 is trying to latch into the global ‘new food’ movement, where consumers react to the big organisations that exploit food production systems.
“The idea of a food chain embodies bondage. We need to lose this notion and promote the idea of a sustainable food web,” said Andrew Whitley, founder of the Bread Matters Campaign.
“Each person within the production of food is important.”
The Bakehouse was decorated in the style of a farm for the day, with haystacks used as seats, and the warm comforting smell of bread from the bakery next door.
“Bread has been an important part of British culture for the past 200 years, providing us with ample jobs and food” added Jojo Tulloh, former food editor of The Week.A museum employee walks past the skeletal replica of a dinosaur at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum in Shanghai, June 22, 2007. REUTERS/Aly Song
BEIJING (Reuters) - Scientists in China say they have discovered the world’s largest dinosaur fossil site in the eastern province of Shandong, state media reported on Tuesday.
Scientists had recovered some 7,600 fossils from a 300 meter (980 ft) long pit near Zhucheng city over the past seven months, Xinhua news agency said.
The finds included remains of a 20-meter hadrosaurus, which could be a record size for the duck-billed dinosaur, Xinhua said.
Scientists had put down tools for the winter, but said further excavations could yield more fossils.
Zhucheng, known locally as China’s “Dinosaur City,” has produced dinosaur fossils in some 30 sites, according to local media.
China, a relative late-comer to archaeology, has ramped up exploration in recent years and makes regular finds of rare fossils, which are sometimes smuggled out of the country to be sold for large sums.
In January, Australia handed back hundreds of kilograms of Chinese dinosaur fossils to Beijing, including eggs dating back hundreds of millions of years, recovered from warehouses and cargo containers in sting operations, Australian media reported.Golly gee, is it getting to be election season already? Yes, it is, because in America “election season” is the entire 15 months, give or take 5 months, before a presidential election. Since there’s little one can do at this early juncture to really influence the outcome, it almost seems better to stick your head in the sand until at least the point where there’s a single candidate nominated and televised debates for you to scream and throw things at. That’s actually a totally okay strategy.
But if you are the kind of person who just needs to know, and who has had a vague background noise of anxiety going on for weeks because you keep hearing snippets of NPR stories about candidates you don’t really know anything about and how awful is Michele Bachmann REALLY and you sort of feel like maybe one of them might be a Scientologist? If you are that person, here is a helpful cheat sheet of the basic facts about the frontrunners, with special attention to How They Feel About Gay People.
Now, note that “frontrunners” up there – there are as of right now 15 GOP presidential candidates, and we’re only going to talk about five. They are the five that I felt were most worthwhile to discuss, mostly because they seem most likely to win a nomination. For example, they do not run a pizza chain, nor are they Jimmy McMillan (as much as I sort of think he’s hilarious and great, as does Riese sometimes) or Ron Paul (who I never want to hear another word about ever.) That said, there are other candidates who are interesting and worth reading about, even if they almost definitely won’t become President – like Gary Johnson of New Mexico, who recently lashed out at other candidates for their anti-gay views, saying:
“This type of rhetoric is what gives Republicans a bad name… While the Family Leader pledge [ed. note – which was recently signed by Santorum and Bachmann] covers just about every other so-called virtue they can think of, the one that is conspicuously missing is tolerance. In one concise document, they manage to condemn gays, single parents, single individuals, divorcees, Muslims, gays in the military, unmarried couples, women who choose to have abortions, and everyone else who doesn’t fit in a Norman Rockwell painting.”
If you would like to know more about the rest of those candidates, I recommend Wikipedia and also, duh, their campaign websites. Actually I recommend that for the candidates below also, because you shouldn’t let me be your only source on this, I mean really.
That said, get out your red-white-and-blue flags to wave while scrolling, and let’s get to it. (Thanks to Julia for research help and Rose for dead-on Harry Potter insights.)
+
MITT ROMNEY:
Platform:
Believing in America and believing also that Obama is a bad president. Also though, job creation, fiscal responsibility, health care and foreign policy.
What he’s got going for him: As of last month, Romney was well ahead of the other candidates in polls – “A quarter of Republicans or GOP-leaning independent voters said they would back Romney over the rest of field for the Republican nod.” It seems safe as of right now to call him “the favorite.” As one of the more moderate candidates (i.e. not Michele Bachmann), he has more political clout within the Republican Party than Santorum, which gives him a pretty strong advantage.
What might not work out so well: Despite his popularity, Romney has more than a few strikes against him. Maybe the most important is his religion – he’s Mormon, and the LA Times reports that “between a quarter and a third of voters say they would have a problem voting for a Mormon.” Furthermore, Romney has a history of flip-flopping that’s pretty objectively impressive, on issues from abortion and gay rights to job creation. This will be brought up again and again by his opponents, and so far in his career Romney doesn’t seem to have formulated a good defense. Lastly, as former governor of Massachusetts, Romney participated in a state healthcare program that shared many of the same tenets as Obama’s Affordable Care model – some have used the derisive nickname “Romneycare” alongside “Obamacare.” Healthcare is a huge issue in this election, and Romney will have to work hard to distance himself from Obama on it to win over Republican opponents of |
and the MOU marks the first step in a series of commitments China Energy plans to make in the Mountain State.
Planning for the projects is underway and will proceed in phases over the course of 20 years. The projects will focus on power generation, chemical manufacturing, and underground storage of natural gas liquids and derivatives. The plans clearly demonstrate a total value chain approach, integrated from raw materials through the production of useful chemical intermediates locally.
"This is a great day for the state of West Virginia," said West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice. "I've been saying for the last couple months that the tides are turning in West Virginia and this is proof. Today is another sign as we joined with my good friend President Trump to announce the largest investment in our state's history."
"West Virginia has actively sought direct foreign investment to strengthen and diversify our economy," said WV Commerce Secretary Thrasher. "Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Hino Motors, Gestamp, Sogefi and other solid corporate citizens with international parent companies create jobs, generate incomes and support communities in West Virginia. In that same spirit, we welcome China Energy and the mutual benefits our energy collaboration will bring."
China Energy selected West Virginia for this project because of the State's position as a key energy-producing state and home to one of the world's largest shale gas reserves, underpinned by a longstanding relationship between the two entities.
West Virginia enjoys a strong relationship with China Energy, including ongoing research initiatives with West Virginia University. WVU and then-Shenhua Group began their relationship in 2002 with joint research on direct coal liquefaction technology.
"The massive size of this energy undertaking and level of collaboration between our two countries is unprecedented," said Secretary Thrasher. "It required cooperation between state and federal level officials. Senator Shelley Moore Capito has worked hand in hand with the West Virginia Development Office for months to ensure this unparalleled economic development opportunity was realized for the state of West Virginia."
"Expanding Appalachia's energy infrastructure, including developing a regional storage hub and market for natural gas liquids, will have a transformative effect on our economy, our security, and our future. From driving growth and creating jobs to maximizing America's energy potential, the benefits for West Virginia and the country from this new investment will be significant and long-lasting," said Senator Shelley Moore Capito. "That's why I worked diligently to expand West Virginia's energy infrastructure and bring this investment to our state, advocating for it with President Trump, Vice President Pence and Secretaries Perry and Ross. I'm excited to continue working with the administration, and state, local and private-sector leaders to keep this effort moving forward."
"I am thrilled Secretary Thrasher and China Energy have signed the Memorandum of Understanding today in Beijing. I have always said that West Virginians are the hardest working people in the world. I'm glad China Energy recognizes this and is working with us to create jobs and economic growth in our state," said Senator Joe Manchin.
"This investment in shale gas resources located here in West Virginia will spur tremendous economic growth in our communities," said Congressman David McKinley. "Secretary Thrasher has been in constant contact with my office as his team has worked out the details for this project. We commend him for his dedication to bringing new jobs to the Mountain State, and we look forward to the opportunities created by this new partnership."
China Energy is the recent creation of a merger between China's state-owned coal mining company Shenhua Group and energy producer Guodian Group. The merger positions China Energy as the world's largest power company with more than 200,000 employees.
SOURCE West Virginia Department of Commerce
Related Links
http://www.wvcommerce.orgA tagua nut sure has a lot of names. Like The Rain Forest Ivory or Vegetable Ivory. Other titles are Corozo (also spelled Corrozzo), Binroji Nut (Japanese), Steinnuss (German), and Coquilla Nut. A tagua nut is the fruit of a palm tree, primarily Phytelephas macrocarpa, which flourishes in tropical rain forests from Paraguay to Panama.
Natives replant palm trees for their seeds instead of logging them, which saves a bit of the rain forests. They polish the shell of the seeds and typically carve them into the shape of a button, living creature, or beautiful jewelry. Just think: an object much like a gem with all the qualities of ivory, but without harming wildlife.
Where tagua nuts grow high up in South American palms, there are about 40 shelled seeds to a cluster, called a cabeza. Harvesting them appears totally harmless to trees and forests.
Some businesses customize tagua nuts by company contracts. Being a fraction of the cost of ivory, it’s not a hard sell. Tagua vendors can toot their horn for indirectly saving elephants, whales, walrus and other species. Humans are so fortunate to have a natural, organic, resourceful product in plentiful supply.
There are other interesting facts about tagua nuts. Twenty percent of all buttons were made of tagua nuts in the 1920’s. Ecuador continues to offer tagua buttons and enjoys a thriving tagua jewelry market too.
Stephanie Schiff is the owner of Ecobutterfly in Los Angeles. She offers buttons and beads made from tagua nuts. Check out her bamboo, sustainable wood and recycled glass items as well.
“Like all creations made from a corozo or tagua nut, each button is a little different from the next,” says Stephanie. “When it comes to color shading, the nut has swirl patterning that makes colors more varied and interesting. That especially makes these buttons so beautiful and unique.”
Be sure to stay tuned for more interesting facts about tagua. How they are naturally processed and colored is fascinating. Bring on your comments and queries.
No matter what you call this lovely ivory-something, designers have good reason to go nuts and save a little rainforest with tagua!
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Yearn Worthy Yarn Store: Knit For BrainsThe NC Courage clinched the first spot in the NWSL Playoffs last night in a hard-fought match with the Washington Spirit. After not playing for over ten days, the ladies earned three points Wednesday night to put them five points ahead of second place Portland and 13 points clear of fifth place Sky Blue FC. The top four teams make the playoffs, to be held in Orlando.
In the first five minutes of play on Wednesday night, the ladies were dominant. The Courage had three shots and a nice cross, early: you could tell that the game plan was to attack and go up early. Then off a fast break that slipped through the midfield, the Spirit got a shot off and after goalkeeper Katelyn Rowland deflected the first shot, Estefania Banini was there to finish it and send the Spirit up 1–0 in the 8th minute, completely against the run of play.
The Courage answered back before the halftime whistle on a free kick from Abby Dahlkemper who sent in a great pass that went right off the head of Mewis into the back of the net. If the Courage didn't score there, I was sure that Paul Riley would've been pretty upset with them being down 1–0 at halftime after their performance.
Paul Riley halftime anger avoided.
The Courage came out to start the second half fast, hoping to build on the goal that tied the game. The lightning-fast Lynn Williams sent an early cross in to McCall Zerboni, but she was not able to finish that one. Then, in the 61st minute, Jaelene Hinkle took a free kick, and this time it was Jessica McDonald who was able to send it in off her head to the back of the net.
Just five minutes later, McDonald was able to connect with the ball again when Sam Mewis stole a pass and sent it down field to Lynn Williams who passed it to McDonald who sent it into the goal. Very quickly, the score was 3–1.
Washington was able to bounce back in the 74th minute to narrow the lead to one goal.
But the Spirit, who have struggled this season with injuries and did so again on Wednesday, ran out of subs for the match and had to finish the game with ten players. The game ended 3–2, and the Courage booked their spot in the NWSL Playoffs a month before the end of the regular season.
Match Stats and Facts
Jessica McDonald passed Christen Press to move into second place all-time in the NWSL with 35 career goals.
This was the first game all season that the Courage won after going down a goal first. They were previously 0–5 when conceding first.
Courage out shot the Spirit 21–6 and corners 11–2.
Thanks for reading our recap. We will have more on the Courage playoff push here at Soccer ‘n’ Sweet Tea in the coming weeks, it should be a fun September and October in Cary.BY: Follow @LizWFB
The cost of federal regulation neared $2 trillion in 2014, according to a new report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).
Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, a report by Clyde Wayne Crews, CEI’s vice president for policy, also reveals that the U.S. debt now exceeds the size of China’s economy.
"Federal regulation and intervention cost American consumers and businesses an estimated $1.88 trillion in 2014 in lost economic productivity and higher prices," amounting to roughly $15,000 per household, the report said.
The report found that the federal bureaucracy—made up of 60 agencies, departments, and commissions—has 3,415 regulations in the process of being finalized, meaning that the number of regulations far surpasses the number of laws passed by Congress.
"In 2014, agencies issued 16 new regulations for every law—that’s 3,554 new regulations compared to 224 new laws," the report said.
CEI, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, found that the Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, Interior, Health and Human Services (HHS), Transportation (DOT), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) account for 48 percent of all federal regulations.
The EPA issued 539 final rules in the Federal Register last year, up 12.5 percent in five years.
Enforcing regulations alone cost the government $59.5 billion in 2014.
Government regulation has led to a hidden "tax" for Americans, the report said, as businesses pass along compliance costs to consumers.
"Economy-wide regulatory costs amount to an average of $14,976 per household—around 29 percent of an average family budget of $51,100," the report said. "Although not paid directly by individuals, this ‘cost’ of regulation exceeds the amount an average family spends on health care, food and transportation."
Aside from passing costs onto consumers, the report said, regulation is a way for the federal government to further agendas without relying on the legislative system.
"Rather than pay directly and book expenses for new initiatives, federal regulations can compel the private sector, as well as state and local governments, to bear the costs of federal initiatives," the report said.
Regulations hit small businesses the hardest, averaging $11,724 per employee for firms that employ fewer than 50 people in 2012. The overall cost per employee for all companies comes to $9,991.
The cost of regulation has grown so large, according to the report, that if it was a country "it would be the world’s 10th largest economy, ranking behind Russia and ahead of India."
The regulatory state has been growing for decades. The report notes that 90,836 rules have been issued since 1993.
The Federal Register, the government’s official record for all federal regulations, was 77,687 pages long at the end of 2014, the sixth-highest page count in history.
"Among the six all-time-high Federal Register page counts, five have occurred under President Obama," CEI said.
The report also noted that the national debt, which currently stands at $18.152 trillion, is now larger than China’s economy. China surpassed the U.S. to become the largest economy in the world last December.
"The national debt topped $18 trillion in December 2014, the same month the International Monetary Fund calculated China’s economy to be worth $17.6 trillion in terms of purchasing power parity, making it the world’s largest economy (albeit still significantly lagging the United States on a per capita basis)," CEI said.(It is his fault.)
Nearly one year after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, and by any objective measure, his tenure has been an embarrassing failure characterized by humiliating legislative defeats, unprecedented scandal, and a remarkable amount of vociferous support of literal white supremacists. In a surprising development, though, one of the myriad voices offering a frankly critical review of Donald Trump's performance is none other than... Donald Trump.
During a Cabinet meeting this morning, after asserting that he maintains "great relationships" with "most" Republican senators, the president made a startling admission.
We’re not getting the job done.
Yes, in this tradition of Harry S Truman and pretty much every commander-in-chief worth a damn who has served since then, President Trump acknowledges that a political party's failings must necessarily be blamed on its leadership, and that the GOP's hilarious inability to pass any legislation of note despite controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress rests squarely at Trump's feet. Perhaps this signals a new era of the administration in which his patented brand of pathological narcissism finally gives way to the type of leadership that he has long promis—
And I’m not going to blame myself, I’ll be honest. They are not getting the job done.
Oh.
We’ve had health care approved, and then you had a surprise vote by John McCain
Among others, of course.
I can understand where Steve Bannon’s coming from
...a place that legitimately imperils your legislative majorities, the sum total of whatever you call a coherent policy agenda, and perhaps even your presidency itself? Cool.
I can understand where a lot of people are coming from, cause I’m not happy about it, and lot of people aren’t happy about it.
To be clear, "it" in this scenario refers to his presidency, which, again, is a thing that has been an abject failure.
The president went on to utter of some his standard-fare lies about his recent decision to end payments that make health insurance affordable to low-income Americans ("I cut off the gravy train"), and about the continued viability of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare is finished, it’s dead, it’s gone. You shouldn’t even mention it... There is no such thing as Obamacare anymore."). But it's the single undeniable truth he uttered—however quickly he may have attempted to retract it—that stands out. Donald Trump is an inept, talentless president, and those who believe otherwise need only listen to the wise words of the man himself.
Watch Now:FACTS about the North Korean economy are not so much alternative as non-existent. The country has never published a statistical yearbook. If it did, no one would believe it. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, calls analysis of its economy “essentially pre-quantitative”.
The most-cited estimate of the size of the economy comes from South Korea’s central bank. Its methodology is opaque but is based, at least in part, on the South Korean intelligence agency’s estimates of the North’s physical output, which is then translated to South Korean prices. But it is hard to estimate market valuations for goods that are not traded on the market, and physical goods make up only a fraction of overall economic output. Another technique is to “mirror” statistics from the country’s trading partners. But most North Korean trade is with China, where statistics are unreliable.
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The advent of satellite imaging has helped, providing researchers with better estimates of manufacturing output, coal production and urbanisation. Yet another strategy is to work out national income from non-economic data. The Hyundai Research Institute, a consultancy, publishes another widely cited estimate of the North Korean economy based on a model that incorporates both infant-mortality rates and crop yields, two variables for which the numbers are at least plausible.
A recent paper by Suk Lee of the Korea Development Institute, a South Korean government think-tank, puts a new spin on this approach. It estimates North Korea’s national income by comparing the share of its households that use solid fuels for cooking with that in other lower-income countries. The data, as reported by the North Korean census of 2008, show that nearly 93% of households lack access to gas or electricity and rely on firewood or coal. Assuming the numbers bear some relation to reality, they put North Korea in line with countries such Uganda and Haiti, and suggest that North Korea’s purchasing-power-adjusted income per person was somewhere between $948 and $1,361 in 2008.
North Korea’s economy has made great strides since the country’s famine in the 1990s. The government has tacitly allowed the market economy to grow. Although the rest of the country is still indisputably poor, visitors to Pyongyang, at least, cannot help but note the rise of shops and taxis. The paradox is that as the North Korean economy modernises, the data may actually be deteriorating. The size of the country’s apparently burgeoning service sector is a complete mystery. Many scholars believe that the South Korean numbers are too low. Welcome though it is for poor North Koreans, growth may be bad for statisticians.You know Keurig’s machines. The company's squat black coffee brewers have become fixtures in offices, hotels, and homes around the country, as have garbage cans heaped with the spent plastic pods they use. Purely on the strength of those machines — or more accurately, the relatively expensive pods they use — Keurig transformed its parent company, Green Mountain Coffee, from a small regional brewer to a major corporation doing over $4 billion in sales each year.
Late last year, Keurig announced a new machine, the 2.0, calling it the "future of brewing" and touting its ability to make both small cups and large carafes. But another, less-publicized feature has been getting most of the attention: the brewer’s advanced scanning system that locks out any coffee pods not bearing a special mark. It’s essentially a digital rights management system, but for coffee, and it’s proving to be the brewer’s downfall.
"Talk about GREEDY corporate ridiculousness."
On an earnings call Wednesday the company announced that brewer sales fell 12 percent last quarter, the first full quarter for which the 2.0 was on sale. "Quite simply our 2.0 launch got off to a slower start than we planned," said CEO Brian Kelley. He said the company had been too slow to get 2.0-compatible cups onto retail shelves and "confusion among consumers as to whether the 2.0 would still brew all of their favorite brands."
Indeed, the 2.0’s Amazon reviews overflow with caffeine-deprived fury, the idiosyncratically capitalized wrath of people who bought 2.0 machines only to find that their old cups don’t work. "Talk about GREEDY corporate ridiculousness," said one guy who tried to use his refillable pods. "On principle alone, I hate that they are dictating which coffee I'm using in my machine," said another. "It is a HUGE SHAME that the company decided to remove the ability to use your own coffee grounds in the home brew k-cup....They should have just said we made these changes so our products would sell more so we could make a bigger profit," reads a typical review. "They took a potentially killer machine and added horrible DRM - a rights management system, in the greedy attempt to get all other coffee pod manufacturers to pay them so their pods work," reads another of the hundreds of one-star reviews. Many lamented the ability to give no stars. If you Google "Keurig 2.0," the first thing that autocompletes is "hack."
"I hate that they are dictating which coffee I'm using in my machine."
The funniest thing about the backlash is that it was entirely predictable. Consumers hate DRM — in music, in movies, in anything — but applying it to coffee feels especially galling. It’s the most open caffeinated beverage there is; all you need is beans and hot water and, I guess, a vessel to brew it in. Locking it up in plastic cups was already a little silly, though something lots of people were happy to buy for the sake of convenience. Building a complicated infrared scanning system so that you can only use Keurig-approved cups was a step too far.
At a Keurig 2.0 launch event last June, company representatives demonstrated the DRM system using old Keurig pods, without the scannable ink markers. If you tried to use one, the machine displayed a message saying "oops" and did nothing. It was designed to lock out cups made by third parties, but obviously it also locked out old Keurig ones, as the demonstration made clear. I asked whether that would be a problem, and no one seemed to think it would be. The old cups would be phased out, and retailers would carry only the new ones, Keurig said. That turned out to be wrong, possibly because so many Keurig users buy their cups in bulk, and probably because unlicensed pods were cheaper. Maybe the problems will subside somewhat now that retailers are stocking the new cups, but as Kelly acknowledged in the call, the initial angry response did a lot of damage.
It’s the most open caffeinated beverage there is
Keurig says the scanning system allows the machine to optimize brew temperature for different types of cups, and to tell the difference between carafe-size cups and regular ones. But at the event, a Keurig engineer said the technology is based on anti-counterfeiting technology used by the US Mint, which surely is not the simplest way of distinguishing between one pod and another.
At a corporate level, Keurig’s attempt to make a DRM system for its coffee is understandable. The company’s business model depends on selling its brewers cheap and making money selling pods, a model reminiscent of printer manufacturers and their marked-up ink cartridges. It’s a tremendously lucrative business. Of Keurig’s $1.4 billion in sales last quarter, $1 billion came from selling cups. But in 2012, key patents on its cups expired, and competitors rushed in, selling compatible cups for cheaper and quickly eating into Keurig’s market share.
You shouldn't have to hack your coffee
Many of these companies have declared their intention to make 2.0-compatible cups. Others have sued. Yet another third-party cup manufacturer is giving away a free clip that it says tricks Keurig’s scanner. And YouTube is full of videos showing how to hack the system.
Whether this stuff works is sort of beside the point. You shouldn’t have to hack your coffee, and that’s especially true for a company whose entire success is based on being super easy and convenient. Keurig’s latest earnings report proves that.
Verge Video from CES 2015: Samsung's virtual stovetop cooks with LED flamesEarlier this week, we showed you a video of John Wall making it rain at a strip club in Dallas. He reportedly spent almost $50,000 at the club and had dollar bills flying everywhere during his time there.
On an episode of the Jalen & Jacoby podcast that was recorded right after the video hit the Internet, Jalen Rose talked about what Wall did. And while some people criticized Wall for spending so much money at the strip club, Rose praised him for it and said that he was actually doing “charity work” in the club that night. He even went as far as to compare the $1 million donation that Russell Westbrook made to UCLA recently to the $47,000 “donation” Wall made to a handful of dancers.
“Russell Westbrook and John Wall both did a great charitable thing,” he said. “Russell Westbrook, giving $1 million to UCLA, it’s noble, it’s recognizable, it’s something that’s going to create a legacy for his name for years to come. It’s philanthropic work. Now, the charity that John Wall did, that’s the charity that makes it to the hood, and it also is a donation to those who are working really hard to entertain adults that evening. And when a customer does come in and spends that type of cake, everyone leaves with full bags. And you know what? I support full bags!”
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Rose went on to say that he doesn’t necessarily agree with the way Wall went about distributing the money—he insinuates that he used to hand his money to dancers at strip clubs rather than “make it rain” or “create a tsunami”—but he still thinks it was a good thing.
“My approach would be different,” he said, “but the premise still stands: He’s doing charity work. John Wall, a little bit different from Russell Westbrook, but he’s still contributing and giving back to the community.”
Well then. When you put it that way, maybe Wall should head to the strip club again this weekend!
Send all complaints, compliments, and tips to sportstips@complex.com.Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama has ordered the Justice Department to stop defending the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage for federal purposes as only between a man and woman, according to a statement Wednesday from Attorney General Eric Holder.
"The president has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny," Holder said.
The key provision in the law "fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional."
"Given that conclusion, the president has instructed the (Justice Department) not to defend the statute" in two pending cases in New York, Holder said. "I fully concur with the president's determination."
Obama has previously expressed his personal opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act but had never stated an opinion relating to its constitutionality.
The administration had a March 11 deadline to respond to two lawsuits against the measure in New York. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- which includes New York -- is the only federal circuit to have never decided the basic legal question of whether a law discriminates against gay men and lesbians.
Republicans immediately ripped the White House's decision, calling it a distraction at a time when they said the focus needs to be on the economy.
"While Americans want Washington to focus on creating jobs and cutting spending,the president will have to explain why he thinks now is the appropriate time to stir up a controversial issue that sharply divides the nation," said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
Representative Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called the move a "transparent attempt to shirk the (Justice) Department's duty to defend the laws passed by Congress."
"This is the real politicization of the Justice Department -- when the personal views of the president override the government's duty to defend the law of the land," Smith said.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said the administration had to make a decision before the court-imposed deadline. He stressed, however, that the law will continue to be enforced.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, praised the administration's decision, calling it a key step forward in the push for equal rights for gays and lesbians.
It "is a victory for civil rights, fairness and equality," Pelosi said. "I commend (Obama) for taking this bold step forward to ensure the federal government is no longer in the business of defending an indefensible statute."
Joe Solmonese, president of the progressive Human Rights Campaign, also praised the administration's course of action, calling it "a monumental decision for the thousands of same-sex couples and their families who want nothing more than the same rights and dignity afforded to other married couples."
"We applaud (Obama) for fulfilling his oath to defend critical constitutional principles," Solmonese said.
The Defense of Marriage Act was passed in 1996 by the GOP-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. It bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages and says states cannot be forced to recognize such marriages from other states.
In July, a federal judge in Massachusetts became the first to rule the law unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro said that "irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest."
The administration's decision comes on the heels of other major developments in the struggle over gay and lesbian rights. In December, Obama signed legislation that will repeal the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" policy and bring an end to the ban on openly gay men and women serving in the armed forces.
Courts in California are considering a legal challenge to Proposition 8, an initiative narrowly approved by that state's voters in 2008. It defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
Same-sex marriage is legal in five states -- Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Iowa and New Hampshire -- and in the District of Columbia. Civil unions are permitted in New Jersey.
CNN's Alan Silverleib, Tom Cohen and Bill Mears contributed to this reportCredit: DC Comics
Credit: DC Comics
In the last few issues of Batman Beyond, readers have gotten a slew of surprises - the disappearance of Tim Drake, the return of both Terry McGinnis and Bruce Wayne, and Dana discovering Terry's secret identity.
But at the end of Batman Beyond #5, readers found out that one of the small, side characters in the storyline was actually the Joker.
And according to Batman Beyond writer Dan Jurgens, there are plenty more surprises coming, as the book begins a new storyline in March 22's Batman Beyond #6 that features the villain Ra's Al Ghul. Newsarama talked to Jurgens to find out more about his plans for the Joker in the future, how recent developments will change the book, and how else "Rebirth" might tie into Batman Beyond.
Newsarama: Wow, Dan, you certainly sprung a surprise on readers at the end of last week's issue. Was the return of Joker a "resurrection" you've been planning for awhile?
Dan Jurgens: Bringing the Joker back was definitely one of the things I had in mind for a while.
One of the things that made Rebirth work for Batman Beyond was the idea of returning Terry McGinnis and Bruce Wayne to their proper places. However, I wanted to build another surprise into the Bruce Wayne story and that was bringing back the Joker as well.
Given the characters, it seems fitting. Especially since the Jokerz, a group of Jokeresque acolytes, have always been a part of the story. What better way to give them importance than by giving them their idol back?
Nrama: Will we find out where the Joker has been all this time?
Jurgens: Eventually, perhaps. I think the Joker is a somewhat better character when he’s shrouded in mystery and we don’t know every aspect of his life.
Nrama: The end of the issue said "The beginning..."; is the next "chapter" of Joker's story in the future already planned by you?
Jurgens: There are a couple of things I have in mind, but our next story takes us in a different direction. There are many facets of Terry, Bruce, and their future world that I want to explore.
Nrama: Now that Bruce is back, how does that change the dynamic of the book?
Credit: DC Comics
Jurgens: Terry was very isolated when he came back to put on the Batman suit. Bringing Bruce back allows us to not only continue to concentrate on Terry, but to explore a different aspect of his personality through his relationship with Bruce.
Terry McGinnis is most certainly not Bruce Wayne, yet both have been identified as Batman. So the question becomes, how well can Terry do the job when he’s not as driven as Bruce?
And as part of that, how does Bruce treat him?
Nrama: Will Max and Matt even be part of Terry's team anymore?
Jurgens: Max and Matt will absolutely be part of the team going forward. That’s actually one of the things that Bruce has to adjust to, and it isn’t necessarily easy for him.
Nrama: Terry had a new, prototype costume. Will he stick with that one (and is that his look going forward)? Anything else you can tell us about the costume?
Jurgens: The new costume becomes a bigger part of the story moving forward. There are reasons that Bruce had developed it and put it aside.
Nrama: Those aren't the only big changes in the book -Dana is aware of his life as Batman. How does that affect the story that's coming up?
Jurgens: Terry’s relationship with Dana touches on one of the things I talked about earlier, which is the way that his life is different than Bruce Wayne’s. I don’t see Terry being as driven as Bruce, and that makes him a substantially different Batman.
Again - the whole idea is to explore these characters through the ways they interact with each other.
Credit: DC Comics
Nrama: What can you tell us about the next big story, that teases Ra's Al Ghul?
Jurgens: The world 40-some years from now is a very different kind of place - one that offers tremendous opportunity for Ra’s.
And I think we all know that when Ra’s has an opening, he’s the kind of guy who seizes on it.
Nrama: Where does the story take place? And what kind of action will we see?
Jurgens: I always like Ra’s when we find him in the area of Tibet. That’ll be fun because I’d like to play with an environment a little different than Gotham.
Nrama: What characters will we see involved in the storyline?
Jurgens: Terry and Bruce will be front and center on this one, as well as Curaré, who was introduced on the TV show.
Nrama: You confirmed that the manipulation/kidnapping of Tim in the present DCU was tied to Tim's disappearance from the future. Can we expect any other ramifications of Rebirth (or present day events) in Batman Beyond?
Jurgens: Tim has his own very particular story coming up. In the meantime, Terry is really going to be the main focus on this book.
Nrama: What has it been like working with your art team on this book? What kind of things are you guys trying to bring to the book, particularly in the next storyline?
Jurgens: Bernard Chang has done such a wonderful job of building a very defined world of the future for Batman Beyond that I really can’t imagine anyone else doing the book! His Gotham City is appropriately futuristic and his version of Batman is just a fabulous extension of what was first created in show. There’s a very nice linear connection between what they did and what we’re doing. And Marcelo Maiolo has enhanced that with his color.
I’m very happy with it. They’ve made Batman Beyond one of the most unique looking books DC is producing.
Nrama: Anything else you want to tell fans about Batman Beyond?
Jurgens: One of things we’ve always tried to do is surprise readers. Given the fact that we take place in the future where we can really employ some freewheeling ideas, I’d like to think we have some pretty big surprises yet to come!The peloton took it easy, Sergio Paulinho took the win, and we talked about Stanley Bagshaw and the fruits that can fit whole into a person's mouth
Afternoon all and welcome to live coverage of stage 10 of this year's Tour de France. Today's 179km trip from Chambery to Gap (where the peloton will presumably pick up some plain T-shirts and a surprisingly expensive hooded top) marks the halfway point (in terms of stages at least) of Le Tour.
We have the Category 1 Côte de Laffrey and the Category 2 Col du Noyer, but this isn't the challenge that was presented by the monstrous Col de la Madeleine yesterday (as you can check out for yourself with out rather wonderful interactive guide). What a stage that was, by the way. The exertions of Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador on stage nine, coupled with the heat, the undulations of the stage, the fact that a French rider or two will be going all out for victory on Bastille Day and the almost-downhill sprint stage tomorrow means, I reckon, that we may see a little ceasefire today as Andy and Alberto gather themselves for the final day through the Massif Central that is Stage 12 and then the decisive stages through the Pyranees.
Our man William Fotheringham reckons we will be seeing more sweat and tears today. And Andy Schleck has certainly been producing some fighting talk:
"The others can also attack, but they don't. Right now it looks like it's Alberto versus me. It's possible he might be better in the Pyrenees. Me, too, you know. [PREGNANT PAUSE] I will be better in the Pyrenees than him."
12.28pm: Lance Armstrong produced a more-than-respectable ride yesterday and he might well be relishing today's stage - back in 2003, en route to his fifth Tour win, on the descent from La Rochelle (the same descent that provides the finish today) we saw one of his most memorable moments...
What's been happening on the road today: Not much. But they've only been out for 30km.
What's been happening off the road today: All sorts. Away from the Tour, the New York Times is reporting that subpoenas have been issued to witnesses in the Lance Armstrong inquiry. At the Tour, as I mentioned below, Andy Schleck has looked to crank up the pressure on Alberto Contador. On the site, William Fotheringham has blogged on Armstrong's improving status among French fans. And in personal news, I've been recovering from my first attempt at quizmastering at the Rose and Crown last night. Seemed to go quite well, although it was rather disconcertingly won by a team calling themselves 'I Belong To Glendenning' and no one in the building (apart from me) had the answer to: 'In Huddersgate (famed for its tramlines), up north where it's boring and slow, who resides with his grandma, at No4 Prince Albert Row? I mean, come on...
12.49pm: Out on the road we've got a little breakaway, with Sergio Paulinho of Radioshack, Mario Aerts of Omega Pharma, Dries Devenyns of Quick Step and Vasil Kiriyienka of Caisse d'Epargne 1min and a few seconds ahead of the peloton. None of them are French, so expect an attempt to claw them back pretty soon.
12.52pm: "Stuck as you are in the newsroom, are you trying to recreate the whole TdF atmosphere?" wonders Dan Levy. "Picnic table at the deskside from 10.30, throwing |
bring the headquarters of CEB, a business-services company, to Arlington. He also has shelled out $5 million for a Chinese paper plant, $300,000 for an engineering company expansion, $350,000 for a fitness-equipment maker, $65,000 for a packaging company and so on.
(McDonnell’s predecessor, Tim Kaine, did much the same. Among other things, he used the Opportunity Fund for Hilton hotels, Rolls-Royce and Maersk. Republicans accused Kaine of not using the fund enough. Democrats blasted McDonnell for having voted to cut it.)
The funds come from the state’s coffers, which are filled by Virginia taxpayers, which include businesses that might have done other, better things with the money. But politicians find the political allocation of economic goods irresistible because the benefits are clear and concentrated, while the costs are hidden and dispersed.
Despite his calls for tougher ethics rules, however, just three months ago McAuliffe vetoed one. The bill would have prohibited both him and his political action committee from taking money from companies that seek or get handouts from — you guessed it — the Governor’s Opportunity Fund.
Moreover, McAuliffe speaks about the state’s economy much as McDonnell did. “We need to … build a new entrepreneurial, innovative and dynamic economy,” he told leaders of the General Assembly’s budget committees a few days ago. “If Virginia is going to remain a leader in the global marketplace, we must renew our efforts to diversify our economy.”March 14, 2011
Marlene Martin, national director of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, looks back at the long struggle to make Illinois the 16th state without the death penalty.
ON MARCH 9, Gov. Pat Quinn made the death penalty history in Illinois by signing a bill abolishing executions and commuting all 15 current death sentences to life in prison without parole.
After taking more than a month to make his decision, Quinn wrote in his signing statement, "Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it. With our broken system, we cannot ensure justice is achieved in every case."
The fact is that Quinn had more than one good reason to sign this bill. He had 20--20 men who have been exonerated from Illinois' death row since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. Illinois holds the second highest exoneration record, the first is Florida.
Responding to the news, Illinois' first exonerated death row prisoner, Darby Tillis, said, "It's a great a great day, a great day--there is no death in the air."
Survivors of Chicago police torture (left to right): Victor Saffold, Mark Clements, Anthony Holmes and Darrell Cannon
The abolition of the death penalty in Illinois was many years in the making. Between 1977, when the death penalty was reinstated in Illinois, and 1999, 12 people were executed in Illinois--13 people were exonerated in that same time span.
That error rate was shocking to then-Gov. George Ryan, who imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2000. In 2003, Ryan cleared death row by commuting the death sentences of every death row prisoner--he also pardoned four men who had been tortured onto death row by Chicago police officers under the command of Jon Burge.
TILLIS POINTS out the long trajectory of this fight:
We worked hard to get the ear of Governor Ryan, we got exonerated and family members out there, and he heard their pleas. We kept on and got the ears of the politicians to see our point, and as a result, we have destroyed this dinosaur. It shows that when we stand together and don't give up, we can win.
Tillis says he believes Quinn signed the legislation because the death penalty nationwide has become discredited by the many innocent people being released--and the fact that the flaws of the system are now more apparent to people than they had been years ago:
It's so different now compared to when we first started. People used to look at us like we were the culprits. Now they see us, and they want to stand with us. They say, "Hey, can I hold that picket sign?" and "Keep up the good work." People can see that the death penalty is senseless--it won't cure the ills in society. They can see the corrupt and flawed nature of the system.
Nathson Fields, who spent 18 years in prison, 11 of those years on death row, agrees. "Twenty mistakes is too many--20 men who almost lost their lives," he said. "This is way overdue."
Nathson emphasizes the human capacity for error as a factor he believes swayed the governor into signing the bill: "It happens all the time. Humans make mistakes."
Of course, there are different kinds of mistakes. Sometimes, the "mistake" is a witness wrongfully identifying someone, which sends the wrong person to prison. But all too often, the "mistake" is the result of police who lie to suspects, plant evidence, and beat, coerce or threaten people into making a false confession. Another common "mistake" is prosecutors who hide evidence from defendants or purposely push for convictions, even when the evidence points elsewhere.
Then, of course, there are the corrupt judges who knowingly send the wrong person to prison and even to the death house. Both Nathson Fields and Darby Tillis were sent to death row after trials presided over by Judge Thomas J. Maloney. Maloney was later found guilty of taking bribes to fix cases and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. But the men he sent to jail remained behind bars.
Marvin Reeves spent 21 years in prison based on snitch testimony and the confession of his co-defendant Ronnie Kitchen, who was tortured by Chicago police until he falsely confessed that both men had committed a crime. As Marvin explained:
The police came out and lied about us, and nobody ever asked any questions. Now people are asking questions. They see my case, and Ronnie's, and Mark Clements', and they begin to ask questions and see the problems. They wonder why the prosecution didn't do a proper investigation. They begin to ask the hard question: Why? Why were we locked up?
Marvin believes the case of Anthony Porter was especially important in shifting how people view the criminal justice system in Illinois. Porter spent 18 years on death row, professing his innocence. More than 30 judges passed off on his case, and he came within 50 hours of being executed before journalism students from Northwestern University did what the court system never did--a proper investigation. Porter was proven innocent and released in 1999.
As Marvin says:
People didn't look at the criminal justice system like they do now--now after the Anthony Porter case, the case of the Ford Heights Four, the Rolando Cruz case. All of that convinced Governor Ryan to decide that he couldn't leave office in good conscience without commuting all those sentences. He said that not only was the death penalty system broken, but also it was irreparable. And now Governor Quinn sees the same thing. He's not going to say it, but a big reason for him signing the bill is Jon Burge and his cronies--all the exposure of these racist cops, judges and lying prosecutors. Governor Quinn sees the same thing Governor Ryan saw.
While many people agree that the criminal justice system is flawed, and often traps and incarcerates the wrong people, there's always the question of what to say when the guilt of a defendant is certain. Darby Tillis has thought long and hard about that question:
I used to say I would kill the person who killed my loved one if I saw him do it. But I had a change of heart on that. You have to look beyond the person to understand why they did what they did. In some of these communities in Chicago, they're so barren, so desolate--they're like a desert. When I go there, I feel nothing but pain and hurt. It feels deadly--there's such a lack of resources. When you grow up and live in a community like that, you become subhuman because you live like you're in a combat zone. Police are cruising around, and young men are out on the street with nothing to do in miserable circumstances. Just like the soldiers coming back from Iraq who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, so do the people in these desolate, crime-ridden, cop-patrolled communities. They're battlegrounds, and you don't hear any of the politicians saying anything about it. These problems need to seriously be addressed and not just by a program or two--it needs to be deeper than that.
THE BATTLE for abolition in Illinois has been fought on many fronts--the excellent investigative reporting by journalists for the Chicago Tribune who documented the flaws of the system, the many great lawyers battling it out in the courtrooms, the activists and exonerated who pounded the pavement and organized rallies and forums.
Abolitionists will have to keep their guard up, as two bills have already been introduced to reinstate the death penalty. No doubt these bills will have the backing of prosecutors angry that one of their prized tools is missing. The death penalty is often used to threaten suspects into falsely confessing and getting people to plead guilty to get a lesser sentence. Prosecutors will want to bring executions back.
"We just have to make sure to keep up the activist front," says Mark Clements, a national organizer with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty and a former prisoner who served 28 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit. Mark was convicted when he was 16 years old--had he been an adult at the time, he probably would have been sentenced to death, and he might not be here today.
"This is a great step forward, but this struggle is far from over," Clements said. "Innocent men and women and tortured men are still locked up, some without lawyers, some without hope. We have to be that hope, and keep up the struggle."
Darby Tillis says those who want to get rid of the death penalty for good have a bigger job ahead of us: "We have to align ourselves with people who want to build a safe and sound society. We've shown people what we can do when we come together. We can get justice if we work hard."NEW DELHI: More than 50% of land allotted to special economic zones SEZs ) across the country remains idle, and its very purpose was defeated with no significant increase in employment even as the government’s revenue foregone was to the tune of Rs 83,000 crore between 2007 and 2013, the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) has found.Exposing systemic weaknesses in tax administration, a performance audit on SEZs by the CAG revealed that ineligible tax deductions were extended to companies, some of which diverted land allotted to them to other uses. There was overall decline in manufacturing in these zones, said the CAG report, likely to be tabled in the winter session of Parliament.“Tax concessions to SEZs for the period 2007 to 2013 works out to Rs 83,104 crore on account of direct taxes and customs,” sources said, adding that this revenue foregone did not include loss to the exchequer on account of central excise and service tax that could have accrued if these companies were brought out of the SEZs. The audit also found that more than 50% of the land allotted remained idle even though the approvals dated back to 2006.The CAG report on SEZs is likely to be tabled in the winter session of Parliament.The revenue foregone, or loss to the exchequer, could be many times more considering other concessions availed by these companies such as stamp duty, VAT, CST etc could not be quantified in the absence of any monitoring mechanism, sources said.A similar study on functioning of SEZs was carried out by the parliamentary standing committee on commerce in June 2007 where it had estimated the duties foregone at over Rs 1.75 lakh crore from tax holidays granted to SEZs between 2004 and 2010.The land allotted for Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust SEZ.The purpose of setting up SEZs was to create largescale employment, investment, exports and economic growth. The CAG report, however, said national indices on economic growth, trade infrastructure, investment and employment generation did not show any upward trend due to SEZs.“Land acquired for public purposes was subsequently diverted (up to 100% in some cases) after de-notification,” the report said. “Seventeen states were not on board in implementing the SEZ Act with matching state level legislations, which rendered the single window system ineffective. Developers and unit holders were almost left unmonitored, in the absence of an internal audit set-up. This posed a huge risk for revenue administration,” the report added.In addition to all of the leaked pictures of Halloween costumes, toys and even supposed character designs related to the new film, a few new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Lego sets were recently revealed at the UK Toy Fair. Apparently, there are seven new Lego sets planned for the TMNT line, three of them being directly related to the new film from Paramount and Platinum Dunes. While there is box art for the four sets related to the Nickelodeon CGI Animated series, it shouldn’t be too surprising that they did not allow photographs to be taken of the movie tie-in sets. Regardless, fans who saw the toys up close and in person had some interesting details to reveal which had not yet been confirmed.
If you’ve been wondering what Splinter will look like, these Lego sets reveal at least one important detail about his design – he will be gray. Of course, these probably aren’t the final designs of the toys, so they could easily change the color at some point, but assuming they don’t, this is quite an interesting concept. Originally, Master Splinter was portrayed as a brown rat in both the 1987 Animated Series and the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie series. However, the character took on a gray appearance when the 2003 series came out and he has maintained a somewhat different look ever since. If we can determine that Splinter is in fact gray in the new film, does this mean his design is based off of the later 2003 series? Ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see what happens with this, but thankfully that’s not the only important detail revealed by these three new TMNT Lego sets.
Also included in one of the sets was a minifigure of Karai, Shredder’s daughter.
Fans have been wondering whether or not she would make an appearance in the new film, and this little leak may have just confirmed her role. It would appear that shortly after the news broke about Karai being in the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Lego sets, Minae Noji’s role was changed from undisclosed to Karai on IMDB. We don’t know if this change was officially made, or if a fan went in and changed it, but fans have been speculating that this might be the role she was chosen to fill since her involvement was announced. With a new TMNT Lego toy of Karai in the works, it seems pretty likely now that the character will make an appearance in Jonathan Liebesman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
I always knew Legos were awesome, but now that they’ve revealed vital information about the new movie, I’m loving them even more. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the new Lego Movie featured Michelangelo as a Master Builder! By the way, if you haven’t seen that film, you totally should. Hey, there’s a Ninja Turtle in it! How could you possibly go wrong with Legos and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? If you’re curious about the new TMNT Lego sets based on Nickelodeon’s animated series, check out the box art below. Here are the serial numbers and names for the three planned sets based on the new movie:
79115 Turtle Van Takedown
79116 Big Rig Snow Getaway
79117 Turtle Lair Invasion(updated below)
When Al Jazeera last December purchased Current TV in order to launch its own "Al Jazeera America" (AJAM) network, it seemed clear they had two general options for how the new network's brand could be built. AJAM could embrace the traditional attributes that has made Al Jazeera, at its best, an intrepid and fearless global news organization: willing to cover stories, air dissident views, and challenge power in ways that many other outlets, especially in the US, are afraid to do. Those excited by the entrance of a new Al Jazeera network into the US marketplace - and I included myself in that group - typically cited the urgent need for such an adversarial, bold and brave approach on the US airways from a large and well-funded TV news organization.
The alternative was that AJAM could try to replicate the inoffensive, neutered, voiceless, pro-US-government model favored by most US news organizations: as a way of appeasing negative perceptions associated with the Al Jazeera brand in the US. Those perceptions in some American precincts - that the network is "anti-American", "anti-Israel" or even "pro-terrorist"- stem from the network's coverage of US foreign policy (especially the War on Terror) that has been far more critical (in the best sense of the word) than most US news outlets were willing to be. For years, Bush officials fed this perception by accusing the network of being an anti-American source of terrorist propaganda. The US (accidentally, it claims) attacked al Jazeera bureaus on two occasions, killing its personnel. It even imprisoned an al Jazeera camerman, Sami al-Haj, for six years in Guantanamo without ever charging him with a crime.
Draining al Jazeera of its vibrancy and edginess and turning it into an imitation of CNN would be a way of trying to appease those negative views of the Jazeera brand. The target of such accommodation would be not only the parts of the US public which regard the network with suspicion, but at least as critically, cable carriers and corporate advertisers, whose willingness to be associated with the network is vital to its financial success, as well as US political officials, whom the network wants to appear regularly.
Because AJAM has not launched yet, debates over which course the new network has chosen have been mostly speculative. But one prominent Al Jazeera journalist, Marwan Bishara, the network's senior political analyst and host of "Empire", is insistent that the network has chosen the latter course of appeasement, fear and self-neutering.
Earlier this week, Bishara sent a scathing 1,800-word email to multiple Al Jazeera executives, directed particularly at those overseeing the new network. The missive, a copy of which was provided to the Guardian and whose receipt was confirmed by AJAM executives (published here), excoriates network officials for running away from the Jazeera brand due both to "the rush to act out of a personal ambition" and "to appease those who won't, or don't necessarily want to be, appeased". Such a re-branding effort, he wrote, "insult[s] the intelligence of the American people".
Bishara was especially incensed at the efforts he said the executives have undertaken to avoid having the news network be labeled "anti-American". Such efforts include, he claimed, promises made to distance the American network from both its flagship network in Doha (AJN) as well as the Al Jazeera English network (AJE) which encountered such difficulty inducing US cable carriers to broadcast it. The network has also scrapped its original plan to include substantial amounts of AJE programming in favor of all original, all-American programming. Bishara wrote:
"Have we signed a deal where AJAM program/content must be substantially different from AJE? Really!!!! What does substantially mean? Who have we made the agreement with and why? I asked several executives and not a single person can give me a categorical answer about the issue, which by itself is mind-boggling!!! (I have issues with AJE's formats, and at times perspectives, but we have so much to hold onto). "Does the fear of contractual obligations with carriers etc. mean it's necessary for some to do whatever they want with Aljazeera, including banning AJE altogether from America and web livestream, just when they themselves try to make the case for a 21st century type television news!!!!.... "And how have we moved from the main idea that the strength of AJN lies in the diversity, plurality and even accents of its journalists to a channel where only Americans work, when clearly that's not what American viewership wants, even according to the polls?
"Let me be clear. I reject flat out that we are polled in the United States as AJE journalists-programs-network in order to find out from Americans whether 'we' are 'anti-American'!! As I wrote to those who ran the poll in the US (and never gotten a response back). By merely posing the question we've sent the wrong message. "What does 'Anti-Americanism' even mean here? How did you define anti-Americanism to those polled! Do you estimate that criticizing the American government or its policies 'anti-American' [or] a fundamental 'American' trait and essential element of its democracy and freedom of speech, not to speak of the role of global media. "Do you think The Guardian newspaper asks whether its columnists are anti-American as it expands its presence in America? Or does John [sic] Stewart ask whether John Oliver is an anti-American Brit considering he's continuously ridiculing American power and at times culture? Since we are Aljazeera from Muslim Qatar, featuring an entire episode critiquing the Catholic Church, why not ask if we are anti Christian!... Shameful."
Bishara singled out one AJAM executive in particular, Ehab Al Shihabi, its executive director of international operations. Al Shihabi, whose background is in business and not journalism, has sparked criticism inside al Jazeera by proclaiming that the network "will be the voice of Main Street" and proudly touting a meeting with the Chicago Mayor, former Obama White House chief of staff and vehement "pro-Israel" advocate Rahm Emanuel.
Speaking directly to al Shihabi in his email, Bishara wrote: "personal ambition is leading you astray". He added: "You should make no more appearances in public forums or photo-ups with political characters, shady or otherwise, that would only hurt us on the long run." He also recommended: "stay clear of our content. Journalism is not your thing; do whatever you know how to do." Bishara concluded his email by highlighting the stakes: "If we fail America around the launch time, it will be ever more difficult to salvage a tarnished image and compromised credibility."
In an interview with me yesterday, Paul Eedle, AJAM's deputy news and editorial director responsible for programming, disputed many of Bishara's claims. "Marwan is a talented intellectual and these reflect his opinions," said Eedle, "but he hasn't been involved in the planning of AJAM from the inside". Eedle did, however, acknowledge that he has heard the same concerns and complaints from others both inside and outside the network.
Eedle referenced a recent column in the Toronto Star by former Al Jazeera English chief Tony Burman, opining that "the Al Jazeera America project has the odour of potential disaster". Burman cited a New York Times article by TV reporter Brian Stelter that began: "While it has a foreign name, the forthcoming Al Jazeera cable channel in the United States wants to be American through and through."
Stelter noted that AJAM scrapped its original plan to include content from AJE and instead: "now Al Jazeera America is aiming to have virtually all of its programming originate from the United States." Wrote Stelter: "It will, in other words, operate much like CNN (though the employees say they won't be as sensational) and Fox News (though they say they won't be opinion-driven)."
Based on that report and others, Burman wrote that one must have "completely lost your marbles" to believe that "American viewers will turn away from their current channels and switch to Al Jazeera to get their American news". Moreover, said the former AJE chief, "the rumoured shortlist of potential 'presidents' includes several of the people who have driven US cable networks, including CNN, to a level of utter mediocrity." It has been reported that the list of finalists to run the network include former CNN executives along with one from ABC.
The same concerns were raised in May when AJE silently removed an Op-Ed by Columbia Professor Joseph Massad that pro-Israel advocates such as Jeffrey Goldberg had attacked. Only after a week of controversy did AJE re-publish the Op-Ed, apologizing for having handled the matter so poorly.
One Al Jazeera insider, granted anonymity to speak critically of his employer, said one central problem was that the new network was relying heavily on risk-adverse US consulting and lobbying firms such as DLA Piper, Qorvis Communications, and David Axelrod's consulting group, "all of whom don't understand the Jazeera brand or the industry." He added that the consultants guiding network officials are squarely "from the American mainstream, not the critical left or even a critical movement that could speak for millions of people." He added that the Massad Op-Ed was taken down at the urging of a DLA Piper consultant, petrified of what impact it would have on the new AJAM brand. Al Shihabi's publicly trumpeted meeting with Emanuel was arranged by people who worked for Axelrod, he said.
It's "an identity issue", the Al Jazeera employee added, "and we'll likely end up being somewhere between MSNBC and CNN, which nobody will watch." Moreover, "they're very concerned about the Israel Lobby."
I asked Eedle about this perception that AJAM was, out of fear, attempting to embrace the inoffensive CNN model in order to placate an American audience and avoid offending anyone. I cited the fact that the network's most prominent on-air hires were fairly conventional former CNN hosts, including Ali Velshi and Soledad O'Brien (as disclosure: I had several discussions with AJAM officials back in January and February about doing some work with the new network, though those discussions never advanced beyond the preliminary stage; I also covered the US elections for AJE last November from Doha and have appeared on that network many times).
Eedle insisted that there was no attempt to distance the new US network from the Jazeera brand nor any attempt to copy CNN. To the contrary, he said, "the Jazeera brand is central to what we are doing", citing the fact that AJAM is using the well-known Jazeera logo. Moreover, he said, executives are "building a newsroom culture to embody the Jazeera spirit" by training its new hires, including those from CNN, "to break free of inhibitions they might have had and feel liberated and go for the story". He added that there is "no point in being a pale imitation of what others are doing".
Eedle said that after scuttling several planned starts, the network finally has a definitive launch date, though he would say only that it is scheduled "before the end of August". The network is retaining roughly 150 employees of Current TV, but none of its on-air personalities. As for al Shihabi's proclamation that the network will channel "the voice of Main Street," Eedle said al Shihabi's responsibilities are confined exclusively to business matters and that he has no role whatsoever to play in the content of programming.
As for negative perceptions of al Jazeera, Eedle said his message to US viewers will be simple: "give us a try and make up your own mind". While denying that the network's goal was to mainstream itself, he proudly pointed to the praise heaped on Al Jazeera by Hillary Clinton during the Arab Spring, and also said that "leading people on the Hill" consider al Jazeera to be good, solid journalism.
He acknowledged that they are attempting to Americanize the network in order "to avoid the fate that befell BBC America: being pigeonholed as an international channel way at bottom of the cable guide." Instead, he said, they "want to build an American channel for an American audience", one that will "compete with MSNBC, Fox, and CNN as a comprehensive news source for US viewers," though with a "more international dimension than most US networks". But, he insisted, "we are not stepping away from Al Jazeera core values."
There is certainly a gaping need for strong, fearless, adversarial journalism in the American TV landscape. There is a huge audience hungry for that type of TV journalism inside the US. A well-funded TV network with a new, aggressive, fearless investigative approach and a well-recognized global brand name could certainly succeed. Whether AJAM will seek to fill that need, or will run away from it, remains to be seen.
UPDATE
Eric Sedler, the Managing Partner of ASGK Public Strategies, David Axelrod's former consulting firm, emails to say this:
"Glenn, I am the managing partner of ASGK Public Strategies. There are two references to our firm that are incorrect. "First, you reference our firm as 'David Axelrod's consulting group'. As has been publicly reported, David sold his interest in ASGK in 2008. David has no role in the firm today. "Second, our firm had no role in setting up the meeting with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. "I understand the second point was made by someone to you. But it is factually inaccurate. "Would you be willing to correct those two points? "Thank you very much. Eric"
As he notes, the second point contradicts what the Al Jazeera employee stated. I asked Sedler whether Axelrod himself played a role in setting up the meeting with Emanuel and, if not, whether he knows who did. His reply: "I don't know who did but I know that Axelrod did not."Connacht in action Photo: Ross Cannon
Strong starting Connacht XV not strong enough for Grenoble
Pat Lam named what was an experienced starting XV for the first of their three pre-season games ahead of the start of the Pro12 in September. The likes of captain John Muldoon, Tom McCartney and Fionn Carr all started, but flattered to deceive in what began with a very promising opening for the westerners. From the start Connacht applied relentless pressure on the French visitors with the Connacht scrum dominating every encounter. The early pressure from Lam’s men resulted in four early penalties, as Grenoble struggled to get to grips with the early intensity. Connacht were camped in the Grenoble 22 with the Top 14 team struggling to repel the green waves. As Connacht bossed the breakdown, they heaved the Grenoble pack backwards, and the ball was released to Jack Carty, the Athlone man dashed over the Grenoble try-line on seven minutes to put Connacht’s first points on the board. Carty missed the conversion and there would be an immediate reply from the Grenoble team, as the French outfit worked their way to the edge of the Connacht 22. Out-half Clement Gelin lofted an up-and-under to the Connacht wing and flanker Mahamadou Diaby caught and grounded the ball. James Hart missed the following conversion and the scores were level at 5-5. It was a lively opening to the game and looked set to be a competitive encounter, as on 19 minutes Danie Poolman sprinted down the left wing, chipped over the top, catching his kick, but was bundled into touch by Xavier Mignot. Carty turned creator as he dashed for the line off another dominant Connacht scrum. He offloaded in the tackle and sent Ian Porter over for Connacht’s second. Carty converted to put Connacht 12-5 up with 23 minutes played. But that was as close as Connacht would push the tie, as two tries before half-time from Dubliner James Hart and Fabrice Estebanez pushed the French side out to a 19-12 lead.
Grenoble dominate second-half
In a reversal of the first-half, it was Grenoble who applied the early pressure and to good effect. The forwards gathered from a line-out on the 22 and barrelled their way down to the Connacht try-line. The ball was released to the backs, with Daniel Kilioni eventually touching down. The ever-reliable Gelin tacked on the extra points to make it 24-12 to the French side with 45 minutes gone. There is a strong Irish contingent in the Grenoble team, not least, head coach and ex-Connacht man, Bernard Jackman. It was one of his Irish recruits who would go over next for the French side as Belfast born Chris Farrell scored on 55 minutes to push Grenoble into an unassailable 33-12 lead. As the second-half ticked on and the Connacht players tired under the Galwegian sun, the French flair was turned on. A quick droup-out from their own 22 resulted in a fantastic team try that ended with Armand Battle touching down in the corner for Grenoble’s sixth try of the evening. In truth, Jackman’s men looked like scoring at will, especially when the ball was moved wide. Two more tries would follow for the French team who play their rugby at the Stade des Alpes. Nigel Hunt and Killoni would grab his second and Grenoble’s eight try of the evening, with Grenoble running out comfortable 52-19 winners.
Connacht youngsters impress
It wasn’t all bad for Connacht after the heavy defeat. While some of the elder statesmen of the Connacht team failed to stamp their authority on the game, some of the younger players and debutants signalled their intent for the forthcoming season with some good performances. Ultan Dillane put in a fine 60 minutes in the second-row, making two bone-crunching hits in the first-half, with one coming smack-back on the 30-minute mark. Rugby union convert and new boy Api Pewhairangi almost caught an intercept try on 16 minutes, but failed to gather and had a lively start to life at his new home at The Sportsground. Carty’s first-half try and assist showed he has started where he left off at the end of last season. New recruit and debutant Ben Marshall capped off his first game in the green of Connacht with a try, as he crashed over to the delight of the Sportsground on 63 minutes. Other notable displays from Connacht youngsters, came from Shane O’Leary as he converted Marshall’s try and kept the Grenoble defence honest.Canada Capitulates: Supreme Court Throws Away Government's Great Pharma Patent Victory
from the who-needs-the-law-when-you-can-bully? dept
Techdirt readers will probably recall a long-running saga involving corporate sovereignty, $500 million, the US pharma company Eli Lilly, and drug patents. In its claim against the Canadian government, made using NAFTA's Chapter 11, Eli Lilly insisted it should have been given some drug patents, despite Canada's courts finding that they had not met the requirements for patentability -- specifically that there was no evidence that the drugs in question provided the benefits in the patent. Eli Lilly said that Canada was being unreasonable in setting a slightly higher bar than other countries by demanding that a patented drug should actually do something useful. As Mike reported back in March, even the lawyers that made up the corporate sovereignty tribunal hearing this case agreed that Canada was within its rights to take this view. They not only dismissed the claim, but ordered Eli Lilly to pay Canada's legal fees.
This was a huge win for Canada in particular, and governments in general. At the time, it all felt a little too good to be true. And now seems it was: as infojustice.org reports, the Supreme Court of Canada has just overturned decades of precedent -- and implicitly the Eli Lilly ruling -- by making it easier for Big Pharma to gain patents on medicines that don't really work:
This reversal in AstraZeneca Canada Inc. v. Apotex, Inc. is particularly disconcerting because Canada had just won an investor-state arbitration award in the long awaited Eli Lilly v. Canada case upholding its more stringent promise/utility doctrine that had been used successfully to overturn two dozen secondary patents, particularly those claiming new uses of known medicines, where patent claimants failed to present evidence in support of the prediction of therapeutic benefit promised in their patent applications.
Thus Canada's Supreme Court has inexplicably thrown away the government's earlier victory, and undermined the country's more rigorous approach to granting pharma patents. Writing for infojustice.org, Brook K. Baker believes this stunning capitulation is a result of unremitting bullying from the US:
Canada had been under intense pressure from the US, which had placed Canada on its Special 301 Watch List for five years threatening that the promise/utility doctrine unreasonably harmed Big Pharma in the US and from the pharmaceutical industry itself which claimed that the doctrine violated global patentability criteria. President Trump's hardball campaign promise to rewrite or leave the North American Free Trade Agreement because of its failure to adequately protect US intellectual property interests may also have played a role. Likewise, President Trump's more recent assertions that US payers are unreasonably subsidizing biomedical research and development because other countries, like Canada, are paying lower prices for innovator medicines than insurers and other payers in the US may also have increased pressure on the Court.
It's really sad to see the Canadian court kowtowing like this, undermining its own independence and moral authority in the process. Weaker patents will lead to the Canadian taxpayer paying higher prices for less-effective drugs. Worst of all, the Big Pharma bullies, aided and abetted by a newly-aggressive US government indifferent to other countries' health problems, will be encouraged to push for even more patent protection all around the world. That will lead not just to higher prices, but to more suffering and avoidable deaths, as crucial medicines become unaffordable for poorer patients.
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Filed Under: canada, corporate sovereignty, isds, patents, trade agreements
Companies: apotex, astrazeneca, eli lillyOne hundred years ago today, Jack London died in Sonoma County, Calif., at the age of 40. He was famous for novels, like the “The Call of the Wild,” which were based on his adventures, trekking through the Klondike or sailing the South Pacific. He was the archetype of the macho writer — before Ernest Hemingway — having been, among other things, a Socialist, a hobo, a sailor, a war correspondent and an oyster pirate.
“They would steal the oysters that other people had caught,” his great-granddaughter Tarnel Abbott said. “It was rough. He could have been killed anytime during those escapades. His boat eventually was ransacked and burned. He had |
years merely trying to keep her head above water.
In her 2001 autobiography, “If They Only Knew,” Laurer tried to recall how many fathers she had growing up. “I had three, possibly four, if you count the boyfriend in between who never married my mom,” she wrote. Born in Rochester, N.Y., she would move several times (often depending on the man her mother was dating or married to), around New York and beyond. She battled bulimia, only stopping when the capillaries in her eyes burst from the force of vomiting and “stomach lining started showing up in the toilet,” she wrote.
According to her book, she had tumultuous relationships with both her biological father, Joe Laurer, and her first stepfather.
Throughout all this, before she made a living by chokeslamming, clotheslining and piledriving men on prime-time television, she found peace in the deep baritones of the cello.
Joanie "Chyna" Laurer was a female pioneer in the male dominated world of professional wrestling. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)
“I used to love to play the cello … and how big and unwieldy it was,” she wrote. “But there was something feminine about it, too — the curves, the shape, the way you held it.”
Determined not to be like her parents, Laurer set her sights on something bigger, though she wasn’t sure what. She started eating — keeping her food down — and lifting weights. When it came time to choose a college, she attended the University of Tampa, where she studied Spanish literature. But things didn’t go much better there. In her book, she wrote that she blacked out drinking one night. When she woke, she was being raped by two football players.
Perhaps as a result, her comfort zone shifted from playing the cello to taking care of her body. As her muscles grew, she graduated and began selling beepers. Though she could pull in $60,000 a year at the job, she hated it. And one night, she caught pro wrestling on TV.
It struck her like a bolt of lighting.
That’s what she wanted to do. But she didn’t want to play the role the woman were generally cast in — ornaments there to titillate male fans and do little more. She wanted to actually wrestle.
“The girl wrestlers?” she wrote. “Forget it. They were all T&A and not nearly as interesting. Wrestling. ‘I can do that!’ I remember shouting at the TV.”
And so she did.
The first stop was attending Walter Kowalski’s wrestling school.
Kowalski, known on the professional wrestling circuit by his stage name “Killer” Kowalski, was against training a woman until the 5-foot 10-inch Laurer lifted a man over her head. He was so impressed with her dedication, to say nothing of her strength — she told Time in a 1990 interview that she could bench press 365 pounds — that when it came time for her first match, he pitted her against a man, wrote Gladys L. Knight in her book, “Female Action Heroes: A Guide to Women in Comics, Video Games, Film, and Television.”
Eventually, Vince McMahon — founder of World Wrestling Federation, or WWF — would hire her, but it took weeks of convincing and even then she began as an assistant of sorts to the male wrestlers, Knight wrote. Because of her body size, she was called “monster” and “freak” by the media. Her male colleagues refused to enter the ring with her. Fans would “chuck batteries at me in hate,” she told the Guardian.
Throughout her time in wrestling, she tried not to appear too feminine. She wore tight, black, lingerie-reminiscent clothing, but threw men into ring posts. She got plastic surgery on her face and chose to get breast implants, but she spent $6,000 to get ones that wouldn’t “transform [her] into WWF Barbie,” she told the Guardian. Once, on stage, they burst. She spent so much time researching implants, there is one named the Chyna 2000S after her. She posed for Playboy and legally changed her name to Chyna, TMZ reported.
Mostly, she wrestled.
“She was a woman who dared to fight other men when it was not popular to do so,” Knight wrote. “She became one of the most popular wrestling personalities in history, a position normally reserved for men.”
The WWF even created a storyline in which she would fight against male chauvinists and, in the final match, win.
But even as she rose to prominence, she felt maligned.
“I’m still a woman in a male-dominated activity, but I’ve come a long way and had lots of fun,” she said.
In 2004, a sex tape, called “1 Night In China,” featuring her and her then-boyfriend Sean Waltman, was released by Red Light District. Chyna made several claims regarding the tape. Wrestling Inc. reported she said Waltman sold the tape without her permission. In a video interview with Vice, she said it was “a tape I didn’t want to come out.”
But it did, and it sold more than 100,000 copies, according to the New York Times.
“I felt violated, physically, sexually, financially,” she said. “It was in the midst of a tumultuous relationship, an abusive relationship.”
Then she chose to enter the adult film industry.
“There was a perception that was trying to be pushed on me that I was going to be shameless, and a slutty whore, and it was going to be disgusting. I decided to make lemonade out of lemons. That’s when I went to Vivid,” she told VICE, referring to the porn company that would produce her short career, suggesting that the release of “1 Night In China” without her permission led her to the industry.
“I felt safer with Vivid than I would have with the next boyfriend,” she said.
But that didn’t last long. In 2012, she attended the Exxxotica Porn Expo, where she passed out on three different days, according to Bleacher Report. (Waltman has made claims that she was an alcoholic and drug addict; she denied these rumors on “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” Jezebel reported.) Less than a year later, she announced that she was quitting the porn industry and moving to Japan to teach English, where she remained until last June.
Chyna arrives at the 29th annual Adult Video News Awards Show at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on January 21, 2012, in Las Vegas. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
“[I was] taking a break, removing myself, regrouping, getting it together and I’m ready to come back,” she told gossip site Too Fab. “It was amazing, it was a really great, spiritual journey for me. [And] it was amazing yesterday to come home. I didn’t know what the vibe would be, it doesn’t even feel like I’ve been gone that long.”
“I’m a different person now,”she told Vice. “I’m vegan. I’m still fit, but I’m doing yoga now.”
In the video, she starts crying.
“I went to Japan to regroup,” she said, choking back tears. “But I want to be able to come home and do my thing in my country with the hard work that I’ve done and everything that I’ve gone through. Be my own success.”
She had been back for less than a year when she was found dead Wednesday.The eternal war between newly arrived neighbors and businesses is reaching high volume in the Theatre District, where developers of a new luxury apartment tower say the booming bass from the club next door is blasting windows and rattling residents.
The developers and residents found a sympathetic ear in the city’s Licensing Board yesterday in their noise complaint against Bijou, a nightclub at 51 Stuart St. which was put on notice about its noise levels. A March 23 inspection that found readings of 112 decibels on the dance floor, far higher than the nighttime limit of 50 decibels. The club sits next to AVA Theater District, a 30-story, 398-unit apartment tower at 45 Stuart St. The AvalonBay-owned building opened in 2015 and monthly rents range from $2,860 to $3,845.
AVA manager Brian O’Neill said bad vibrations have been an issue since the building opened, and some residents are leaving.
He said the bass hum travels up the exterior of the neighboring building, going as high as the 24th floor, shaking windows and making residents miserable until the club closes at 2 a.m.
“You can feel the vibration in your body like you would an earthquake, you can feel the rhythm of the bass,” resident Lauren Ingram told the Herald. “No amount of white noise will do anything against that, earplugs won’t do anything against that.”
Karen Simao, an attorney for the club, said the AVA Theater District tower borders Bijou on its right and rear sides and creates an “echo box” that amplifies noise and vibrations, which had not bothered neighbors at a lower height in previous years. She said Bijou has been operating since 2011, and that AvalonBay knew it was building next to a nightclub when they built their project.
And promoters tell the Herald they think it’s unfair for new arrivals to complain about noise from a venue they moved next to.
“It’s one thing if you plunked a concert venue in Beacon Hill, this is the inverse — they plunked a luxury building in the Theatre District, a traditional entertainment zone,” said Chris Sinclair, founder of The Anthem Group, a local promoting company. “Don’t move next to the ocean if you don’t like the smell of salt.”
JC Diaz, executive director of the American Nightlife Association, said the pressure should be on developers to soundproof and insulate their buildings if they decide to build next to music clubs.
“They shouldn’t have been building next to the club in the first place,” Diaz said.
But Anne Cornell, a senior portfolio operations director for AvalonBay, put the onus on Bijou to change.
“They’ve been operating for six years, but the neighborhood’s changed, they need to be adaptable,” Cornell told the Herald. “They used to be here alone, now there’s 400 units here, they need to be mindful and respectful.”
Club owners said the they’ve raised speakers off the floor and hung them from the ceiling in an effort to reduce vibrations, and added a manual volume override so managers can turn down loud DJs. But Licensing Board Chairwoman Christine Pulgini said the club needs to take more action and work with AvalonBay to monitor their noise and vibrations over the next 60 days before reporting back to her, saying the bass blasts are “not going to be tolerated.”The people at Field Notes, the producers of the popular pocket-sized notebooks, seem to enjoy making limited-run editions. They’ve made so many, in fact, that anyone trying to collect them all is likely to wind up both crazy and broke. Getting your hands on the rarer books can often just be a matter of right place, right time.
Case in point, for the past few years Field Notes has been creating custom notebooks for the XOXO Festival, an art and technology conference in Portland, Oregon. While these special notebooks can be easily obtained at the conference, it’s a mad rush when they are sold online afterwords. And for the 2015 XOXO edition, it only took about 45-minutes before they became out of stock on the Field Notes website. So, if you weren’t online during this 45-minute window or couldn’t make it to the festival, you are pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you’re willing to pay a premium.
Originally sold for $10, a sealed 3-pack will currently fetch 40 to 50 dollars on eBay. Setting aside the artwork for a moment, there’s not anything particularly special about these books that make it worth that price. They contain 60# white paper with a light gray grid, they’re the standard 3.5 inch x 5.5 inch size, and they even use the usual “practical application” list on the inside back cover. Aside from hardcore Field Notes collectors who covet the notebook’s scarcity, there’s really nothing here to warrant a 400% price increase.
I will admit, however, that it’s hard to ignore those awesome cover designs, created by artist Brendan Monroe. If you’re so inclined, check out Monroe’s Instagram feed. He creates a lot of these black-and-white topographical paintings, and it’s easy to lose a chunk of time scrolling through his artwork. In fact, one big upside to carrying these designs in my pocket was that I got to color them in!
Overall, it’s a good special edition, if only for the artwork, and I hope to see Field Notes using other painters (or even more of Monroe’s designs) in the future. It really is a good way to discover artists, as I never would have otherwise heard of Brendan Monroe. Let’s just hope that next time they print a larger run.
Additional Notes:×
Ira Kalish, chief global economist for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (Deloitte Global), sheds light on China’s economic growing pains and their impact on the U.S. and global economies.
A powerhouse for economic growth during the early 2000s, China has been showing signs of deceleration since 2010. The slowdown across China’s retail, manufacturing, and construction sectors is having a ripple effect on the global economy, and U.S. business leaders and investors are on alert.
During a recent webcast, Dr. Ira Kalish, chief economist for Deloitte Global, discussed the impact of China’s growing pains on its trading partners. He also explained the problems caused by China’s shadow banking system and commented on the environment for business investment in the U.S. Kalish spoke with Deloitte LLP Deputy CEO Tom McGee during the webcast.
The bottom line: While the Chinese economy may be slowing, the U.S. outlook appears brighter and, for perhaps the first time in years, clearer (at least for the foreseeable future).
McGee: How did China’s shadow banking system come about?
Kalish: In China, the banking system is largely state run. The Chinese government establishes the interest rates that banks can pay to depositors, which effectively puts a cap on the amount of lending that takes place. As a result, state-run banks can’t satisfy the country’s huge demand for loans. They’ve gotten around this supply-and-demand issue by funding a shadow banking system. Specifically, the big banks have securitized their loans into “wealth management products,” which they sell to wealthy individuals who get a fairly high return. The banks then put the cash they earn from their wealth management products into off-balance sheet trust companies that, in turn, lend money at relatively high interest rates.
Why has China’s shadow banking system become problematic?
It has caused the supply of credit to balloon in China. Normally, an acceleration of credit leads to economic growth if money is invested well, but that’s not currently the case in China, where credit has expanded dramatically while economic growth has slowed. One problem is that credit has gone to loans that don’t make much economic sense. For example, local governments are borrowing money to build infrastructure, and it’s not clear they’ll be able to pay back a lot of those loans. Another example: Investors are borrowing money to build shopping centers and apartment complexes for which there is little demand. These conditions are likely to set up China for future financial problems. I don’t think it will be a Lehman-style crisis because the Chinese government is unlikely to allow one of the big banks to fail. The government will have to bail out these institutions, and they’ll have to force a cutback in lending. As credit creation diminishes and investment falls in China, economic growth will decline and it could decline quite a bit.
What impact might a substantial slowdown in China have on the global economy?
China’s economic growth has dropped from a high of 14.2 percent in 2007 to about 7.5 percent today. That decline has already had an impact globally, especially in other Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore that export a lot of goods to China. It’s also had an impact on commodity-producing countries like Brazil and Australia. Even though the U.S. is a big trading partner with China, the impact of its slowdown on the U.S. economy has so far been modest.
The Chinese government would like to maintain a 7.5 percent growth rate, which would be better for the global economy. If China’s growth were to fall below 7 percent—to, say, 4 or 5 percent—that would be problematic, both for economic and social stability in China and for the U.S. and global economies.
Do you expect U.S. business investment and M&A activity to pick up this year?
Growth of business investment has returned to a historically normal level, and we ought to see a continued increase in the M&A transaction environment. Banks are in much better shape and, therefore, are more willing to extend credit, especially to smaller and midsize businesses. Also, much of the uncertainty that led many companies to continue hoarding cash after the recession has diminished. Congress in February agreed to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, so businesses don’t have to worry about serious fiscal policy disagreements throwing off their capital spending and hiring plans for the year. And while some economic indicators were off at the beginning of 2014, likely due to the bad weather, we have seen improvements in consumer cash flow and the housing market. As a result, I expect to see an uptick in the pace of investment, as well as in the number of M&A transactions. I think there could be disproportionate growth in the most innovative industries, such as information technology and life sciences.
Was hoarding cash a wise strategy for weathering the recession?
Deloitte U.K., a member firm of Deloitte Global, did a study looking at companies that sat on their cash vs. those that invested. They found that companies that strategically deployed their cash experienced much higher returns on their investments, as well as faster profit and revenue growth. Those companies that held onto their cash are beginning to recognize the value of deploying it. That’s another reason I expect U.S. business investment to increase this year.Not sure why I got the short end of the stick on the past couple exchanges (GoT and Holloween), but this time I was fortunate enough to get a re-match!
I am grateful that this random stranger took the time and effort to do what my original match didnt do.
When I dumped out the contents of the package the first thing that fell out was the vibrator and I said out loud, "Allll righhht" in my best Matthew McConaughey voice. My wife was a bit creep'd out as she noticed the box looked opened already, but she was relieved when it was a delicious chocolate inside! A+ for the trick!
I checked the /username on the package, which i wont list here, and all I can say is GOD DAMNNN. Unless that was another trick, in which case A+++ for the effort. Either way, that was a better treat then all the candy in the world!
Thanks again!Healthy eating is associated with better self-esteem and fewer emotional and peer problems, such as having fewer friends or being picked on or bullied, in children regardless of body weight, according to a study published in the open access journal BMC Public Health. Inversely, better self-esteem is associated with better adherence to healthy eating guidelines, according to researchers from The Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Dr Louise Arvidsson, the corresponding author said: “We found that in young children aged two to nine years there is an association between adherence to healthy dietary guidelines and better psychological well-being, which includes fewer emotional problems, better relationships with other children and higher self-esteem, two years later. Our findings suggest that a healthy diet can improve well-being in children.”
Examining 7,675 children two to nine years of age from eight European countries – Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Spain and Sweden – the researchers found that a higher Healthy Dietary Adherence Score (HDAS) at the beginning of the study period was associated with better self-esteem and fewer emotional and peer problems two years later.
The HDAS aims to capture adherence to healthy dietary guidelines, which include limiting intake of refined sugars, reducing fat intake and eating fruit and vegetables. A higher HDAS indicates better adherence to the guidelines – i.e. healthier eating. The guidelines are common to the eight countries included in this study.
The authors found that better self-esteem at the beginning of the study period was associated with a higher HDAS two years later and that the associations between HDAS and wellbeing were similar for children who had normal weight and children who were overweight.
Dr Arvidsson said: “It was somewhat surprising to find that the association between baseline diet and better well-being two years later was independent of children’s socioeconomic position and their body weight.”
The authors used data from the Identification and Prevention of Dietary- and Lifestyle-Induced Health Effects in Children and Infants Study, a prospective cohort study that aims to understand how to prevent overweight in children while also considering the multiple factors that contribute to it.
At the beginning of the study period parents were asked to report how often per week their children consumed food from a list of 43 items. Depending on their consumption of these foods, children were then assigned an HDAS score. Psychosocial wellbeing was assessed based on self-esteem, parent relations, emotional and peer problems as reported by the parents in response to validated questionnaires. Height and weight of the children were measured. All questionnaires and measurements were repeated two years later.
The study is the first to analyze the individual components included in the HDAS and their associations with children’s wellbeing. The authors found that fish intake according to guidelines (2-3 times per week) was associated with better self-esteem and no emotional and peer problems. Intake of whole meal products were associated with no peer problems.
The associations were found to go in both directions; better wellbeing was associated with consumption of fruit and vegetables, sugar and fat in accordance with dietary guidelines, better self-esteem was associated with sugar intake according to guidelines, good parent relations were associated with fruit and vegetable consumption according to guidelines, fewer emotional problems were associated with fat intake according to guidelines and fewer peer problems were associated with consumption of fruit and vegetables according to guidelines.
The authors caution that children with poor diet and poor wellbeing were more likely to drop out of the study and were therefore underrepresented at the two-year follow-up, which complicates conclusions about the true rates of poor diet and poor wellbeing. As the study is observational and relies on self-reported data from parents, no conclusions about cause and effect are possible.
Dr Arvidsson said: “The associations we identified here need to be confirmed in experimental studies including children with clinical diagnosis of depression, anxiety or other behavioral disorders rather than well-being as reported by parents.”
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Notes to editor:
1. Research article:
Bidirectional associations between psychosocial well-being and adherence to healthy dietary guidelines in European children: prospective findings from the IDEFICS study
Arvidsson et al. BMC Public Health 2017
DOI: 10.1186/s12889-017-4920-5
The article is available at the journal website.
Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the article. All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central's open access policy.
2. BMC Public Health is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that considers articles on the epidemiology of disease and the understanding of all aspects of public health. The journal has a special focus on the social determinants of health, the environmental, behavioral, and occupational correlates of health and disease, and the impact of health policies, practices and interventions on the community.
3. A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology and BMC Medicine, specialist journals such as Malaria Journal and Microbiome, and the BMC series. At BMC, research is always in progress. We are committed to continual innovation to better support the needs of our communities, ensuring the integrity of the research we publish, and championing the benefits of open research. BMC is part of Springer Nature, giving us greater opportunities to help authors connect and advance discoveries across the world.This is the story of how I was sexually harassed during a magic show.
For context, about two weeks ago on a Monday night, I had the opportunity to go to the Magic Castle in LA, as my friend Tyler’s +1. He, along with other students from Harvey Mudd College, got to attend. The Magic Castle is self-defined as “the private clubhouse for the Academy of Magical Arts, Inc, a very special organization devoted to the advancement of the ancient art of magic.” If invited by a member, you can come dine and watch five different magic shows in three different venues throughout the castle. Formal attire is mandatory, e.g. their website tells gentlemen that, “While removing one’s jacket to watch a performance, dine or to wrap a female guest is acceptable, walking through the Castle sans jacket is not.”
(In retrospect, I really should’ve taken that comment as more of a red flag.)
I attended numerous shows, wandered through the castle, and dined with my friends. At 10 pm, we moved to the “Palace of Mystery” for the headliner of the night — Michael Finney (with a sort of “intermission act” whose name I cannot currently remember).
The following is my account of the events from that night, written the day after it happened. I have not edited it since (much), so the names are all names of my friends.
~~~
I was really tired before this show, and felt decently out of it. I had Tyler get me a Shirley Temple from the bar, because sugar, right? I was carrying the (empty) bottle of wine from dinner. We entered the large hall, which probably had about 10 rows of 8, on either side of the aisle. It was full. So 160 people?
I slid into a row, and Ari sat next to me, Tyler next to him.
The show started, and the magician came out. He’s an older, white-haired man. He started his show, did some good tricks, and turned some cards into glitter. He was funny. He made good quips. I decided I liked his humor.
After that bit, he asked for a female volunteer from the audience. I was feeling silly since I was so tired, and shot my hand up into the air. He was looking in my direction, so said, “that was the hand I saw first, ok you.”
As I walked on stage he said “Oh you’re even wearing red. I couldn’t have picked a better volunteer.” (Context: it’s a tight, short, red dress. I was wearing heels.)
Once I got onstage, our interactions started innocently enough.
I looked out into the audience, and realized I couldn’t see the faces of literally ANYONE in the audience. It was so bright.
He asked my name.
He asked where I was from. I answered “Seattle?” because
I didn’t know if he wanted the local/Claremont colleges answer I’m not actually from Seattle
He said, “The questions only get harder from here on out” or something like that, causing the audience to laugh
He asked what brought me there, and I paused, then went on a bit of a long-winded explanation of how a group of Harvey Mudd college students were there, but I went to Pomona College. He made fun of my answer saying, “Oh thank you for that explanation, I was so confused.”
He asked what my goal of college was, and I said that “We’re all actually graduating in 6 days.”
He made fun of me again, asking “who’s this ‘we’ you keep talking about? are you sure all of you are going to be graduating?” and I was like, “yes.”
He said, “Ok, so you’re about to graduate, what’s the goal after that?”
Me- “like what am I going to be doing in the real world?”
Him- “Yes, the real world, the one I’ve been in for 30 years.”
Me- “I’m going to work at Google. … as a Software Engineer.” (I wanted to bite any stereotyped female roles in the butt and assert my intelligence.)
He was like “ok wow” or something, and then we moved into magic.
He asked if I liked card tricks, and I said yes. He said, “Good, because we’re doing a rope trick. Do you like rope tricks?”
me- “sure.”
him- “I bet you do.” (bondage joke)
…and then it went downhill from there.
He gave me the rope to inspect, and I ran my fingers all along it.
him- “Wow ok are you a rope inspector? You look pretty comfortable with that rope…” (bondage joke)
Then he had me inspect the scissors, and asked me to check if they were real. I looked around for something to test cut, and he suggested my strap. He then made a comment that I don’t quite remember, but I remember not really understanding it. Some people in the audience laughed. I knew it was something about cutting my strap, and probably inappropriately sexual.
I was getting increasingly unamused.
He then held up the rope for me to cut in half. We had some exchanges, and when I’d pause and answer a question not completely confidently, he’d joke and say “Google’s gonna love you.” It was funny.
Then I had to cut the rope, and it was supposed to be in half. He held them up, showing that they were not the same length, chastising me for failing to cut it appropriately. I said, “you never told me to cut it in half.” He said, “oh, so length matters to you?” (penis joke)
It was then that I considered being like “I’m a lesbian I don’t care about penises.” (Context: I’m not a lesbian, but would be fine with people thinking that.)
But of course, I was onstage and a lot of things were happening very quickly, so I didn’t say anything.
So he continued with the rope tricks. I cut the rope in a lot of places, and at some point had two short pieces in my hand. He didn’t tell me what to do with them, so I just dropped them on the floor. He looked at them as if he was annoyed, and didn’t want me to do that. I don’t actually remember if he bent down to pick them up, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to bend over in my short/tight skirt on that stage.
At one point, he asked me to move toward the center of the stage, closer to him, to look out toward the camera, or fit in its view or something, “for liability reasons.”
I think this was a “ploy” to make me stand closer to him My immediate thought was “this isn’t being recorded you’re stupid that doesn’t make sense” “liability”? For what, like if I sue you for sexual harassment?
I had stepped toward him, but after he finished saying these things, I took a step away from him right after the “liability” comment.
Then, he asked me to stand in front of him, I did. I was wary. I had no idea what he was going to do. Then he held out the rope (with 3 knots on it) in his left hand on my left side. He told me he was going to hold out the rope in front of me, and I was going to blow off the knots. I was like “ok,” and then he reaches over with his right hand, placing it on my left hip and patting around.
I was like “what the hell is this man doing to me I’m so confused what does this have to do with the rope” and I just kind of looked at his hand.
I think I stepped away. I said “I’m not ok with this” very clearly.
He paused, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I was just trying to get the rope! Most people just hand it to me! I don’t have my eyes right now, just my hands.”
So I stepped back in place, then handed him the rope in front of me. So he was standing in back of me, holding the rope taut in front of my face. He asked me to blow the knots off. I blew the one farthest left, but he popped the one on the right. whoops?
Then he let me step out, popped the second knot, and as I was now standing to his left, held out the rope with the one in the middle still knotted. He asked me to blow on it. So I did, but he didn’t pop it. He told me to blow harder, so I did, only realizing too late where this was going. I stopped blowing pretty quickly. The knot still didn’t pop, and he said, “I don’t know why that didn’t work, I would’ve been off by now.” (blow job joke SO FUNNY NOT)
*my reaction to all these jokes was to just purse my lips and glare (at least, that’s what I was trying to do. to not laugh, especially. I did not at all want to indulge him.)
He said, “here” and just slid the knot toward my end, as if to make it easier for me. I sassily just slid it back to the middle. I was pretty done with this. He popped the final knot, revealing one full piece of rope. That was the finale. He handed me the last knot as a souvenir, then the applause started. He thanked me, and I half curtsied. He helped me down the stairs, though I tried aggressively not to need help. (but I was on heels and a little shaky [from the heels and the experience])
I got back to my seat, and Ari leaned over and said “I’m sorry.”
Jordan was two rows ahead to the right, and looked back at me and raised her eyebrows.
The magician went off stage, and the other act of the woman came on. In the middle of that act, Jordan looked back again and mouthed “are you ok?” I came her a thumbs up (or something). To be honest, I was just reeling. I was still processing everything that had just happened. I was trying to figure out if there was something else I could’ve done. Should I have refused more violently? Called him out and left the stage? Said I was a lesbian?
He came back after the woman’s act finished, and called up an older gentleman for the next trick. He made fun of how oblivious he was. I didn’t want to laugh, because this magician had just been so terrible to me. But he still actually had some good jokes and tricks. So I laughed a little.
The show ended. We stood up and started heading out the theater.
Some other women who go to Mudd saw me and someone said “Shannon you’re my hero.” Someone else said “I’m really glad you were the one up there to handle that well.” Someone else said “Yeah this was definitely the wrong audience for that.” Jordan mouthed at me if I was ok again, I said yes.
We then went to wait in line for the close up magic show. I was just still processing. No one really talked about it. I think Nathan said he was sorry. But then we talked about other things. And I realized that no one there knew me well enough to know that all I needed was comfort. That I wasn’t actually ok, that I was reeling and needed to talk about what just happened to figure out how I felt about it. Sometimes I think I do too good a job of masking my emotions and pretending everything’s just fine. When I had this thought, I teared up, but quickly blinked those tears away. As I write this now, I’m crying a bit. I still don’t quite know why this upsets me so much, but I thought writing it down might help.
When we finally got in the line in the small room for the close up magic show, a Harvey Mudd professor moved to sit next to me. He looked at me and said “You handled yourself well earlier.” I made a wry comment like, “well, from his perspective I could’ve probably handled myself better.” Nathan (to my right) said, “You could’ve also handled yourself much worse and would’ve been justified in that.” I didn’t really say much else, and neither did the professor. He didn’t really say anything else either, and just did a horrible job of comforting me. Yeah, I know he’s a Mudd prof, but he doesn’t know anything about me, and he’s also a part of this sexist magician society.
I was sitting there, still just thinking about it over and over again, thinking that magic was ruined for me forever, that I never wanted to wear that red dress again, that I wanted to burn the knot I had as a souvenir in my purse.
When we finally got inside the room, I sat in the front row with Priya on my left and Tyler on my right. I was acting so normal. I had this weird out-of-body knowledge that I was acting really normal on the outside, and that seemed weird to how I was feeling and thinking.
The next magician came out. He was hilarious. I couldn’t get over the tiny plunger. I couldn’t get over when he had to “warm it up” to pick up more than one card off the deck. The man was incredible. He was so funny. His tricks were so good. He showed an awareness of sexual harassment/comments on stage. (e.g. To the woman who was sitting up there: “you look bored.” Her: “sorry, it’s just resting Asian bitch face.” He looked a bit flabbergasted for a second and said, “That is something I could never ever say.”)
He seemed very smart and very well-informed. I liked him a lot. I think he single-handedly might have kept the night from ruining all magic for me. Him and his tiny plunger.
His name is Jon Armstrong, and he was voted best close up magician of the year.
~~~
UPDATE:
On Thursday, 5/14, I wrote Jon Armstrong the following email:
Hi there!
I saw your show on Monday night at the Magic Castle, around midnight. Completely understandable if you don’t remember me, but I was the girl in the red dress in the front row with the really loud laugh. I wanted to contact you to thank you. Earlier that evening, I had gone on stage to |
3. She did not shine academically, failing her O-levels twice. Her outstanding community spirit was recognised with an award from West Heath.[21] She left West Heath when she was sixteen. Her brother Charles recalls her as being quite shy up until that time. She showed a talent for music as an accomplished pianist.[21] Diana also excelled in swimming and diving, and studied ballet and tap dance.
After attending Institut Alpin Videmanette (a finishing school in Rougemont, Switzerland) for one term in 1978, Diana returned to London, where she shared her mother's flat with two school friends. In London, she took an advanced cooking course, but seldom cooked for her roommates. She took a series of low-paying jobs; she worked as a dance instructor for youth until a skiing accident caused her to miss three months of work. She then found employment as a playgroup pre-school assistant, did some cleaning work for her sister Sarah and several of her friends, and acted as a hostess at parties. Diana spent time working as a nanny for the Robertsons, an American family living in London, and worked as a nursery teacher's assistant at the Young England School in Pimlico. In July 1979, her mother bought her a flat at Coleherne Court in Earl's Court as an 18th birthday present. She lived there with three flatmates until 25 February 1981.
Marriage
Lady Diana first met Charles, Prince of Wales, the Queen's eldest son and heir apparent, when she was 16 in November 1977. He was then dating her older sister, Lady Sarah.[32] They were guests at a country weekend during the summer of 1980 when she watched him play polo and he took a serious interest in Diana as a potential bride. The relationship progressed when he invited her aboard the royal yacht Britannia for a sailing weekend to Cowes. This was followed by an invitation to Balmoral (the royal family's Scottish residence) to meet his family one weekend in November 1980.[33] Lady Diana was well received by the Queen, the Queen Mother and the Duke of Edinburgh. Prince Charles subsequently courted Diana in London. The Prince proposed on 6 February 1981, and Lady Diana accepted, but their engagement was kept secret for the next few weeks.
Engagement and wedding
The wedding of Charles and Diana commemorated on a 1981 British Crown
Their engagement became official on 24 February 1981.[18] Diana selected a large engagement ring that consisted of 14 solitaire diamonds surrounding a 12-carat oval blue Ceylon sapphire set in 18-carat white gold,[18] which was similar to her mother's engagement ring. The ring was made by the Crown jewellers Garrard. In 2010, it became the engagement ring of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.[35] The Queen Mother gave Diana a sapphire and diamond brooch as an engagement present.[36]
Following the engagement, Diana left her occupation as a kindergarten assistant and lived for a short period at Clarence House, which was the home of the Queen Mother.[37] She then lived at Buckingham Palace until the wedding.[37] Diana was the first Englishwoman to marry the first in line to the throne since Anne Hyde over 300 years earlier, and she was also the first royal bride to have a paying job before her engagement.[21][18] She made her first public appearance with Prince Charles in a charity ball in March 1981 at Goldsmiths' Hall, where she met the Princess of Monaco.[37]
Twenty-year-old Diana became Princess of Wales when she married the Prince of Wales on 29 July 1981 at St Paul's Cathedral, which offered more seating than Westminster Abbey, a church that was generally used for royal nuptials.[21][18] The service was widely described as a "fairytale wedding" and was watched by a global television audience of 750 million people while 600,000 spectators lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the couple en route to the ceremony.[18][38] At the altar, Diana inadvertently reversed the order of Charles's first two names, saying "Philip Charles" Arthur George instead.[38] She did not say that she would "obey" him; that traditional vow was left out at the couple's request, which caused some comment at the time.[39] Diana wore a dress valued at £9,000 with a 25-foot (7.62-metre) train.[40]
After she became Princess of Wales, Diana automatically acquired rank as the third-highest female in the United Kingdom Order of Precedence (after the Queen and the Queen Mother), and was fifth or sixth in the orders of precedence of her other realms, following the Queen, the relevant viceroy, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother, and the Prince of Wales. Within a few years of the wedding, the Queen extended Diana visible tokens of membership in the Royal Family; she lent the Princess the Cambridge Lover's Knot Tiara,[41][42] and granted her the badge of the Royal Family Order of Queen Elizabeth II.[43]
Children
The couple had residences at Kensington Palace and Highgrove House, near Tetbury. On 5 November 1981, the Princess's pregnancy was officially announced. In January 1982—twelve weeks into the pregnancy—Diana fell down a staircase at Sandringham, and the royal gynaecologist Sir George Pinker was summoned from London. He found that although she had suffered severe bruising, the foetus was uninjured.[45] Diana later confessed that she had intentionally thrown herself down the stairs as she was feeling "so inadequate".[46] In February 1982, pictures of a pregnant Diana in bikini while holidaying was published in the media. The Queen subsequently released a statement and called it "the blackest day in the history of British journalism."[47] On 21 June 1982, the Princess gave birth to the couple's first son, Prince William.[48] Amidst some media criticism, she decided to take William—who was still a baby—on her first major tours of Australia and New Zealand, and the decision was popularly applauded. By her own admission, the Princess of Wales had not initially intended to take William until Malcolm Fraser, the Australian prime minister, made the suggestion.
A second son, Prince Harry, was born on 15 September 1984. The Princess said she and the Prince were closest during her pregnancy with Harry. She was aware that their second child was a boy, but did not share the knowledge with anyone else, including the Prince of Wales.[51]
Diana gave her sons wider experiences than was usual for royal children.[18][52][53] She rarely deferred to the Prince or to the royal family, and was often intransigent when it came to the children. She chose their first given names, dismissed a royal family nanny and engaged one of her own choosing, selected their schools and clothing, planned their outings, and took them to school herself as often as her schedule permitted. She also organised her public duties around their timetables.
Problems and separation
Five years into the marriage, the couple's incompatibility and age difference of almost 13 years became visible and damaging. Charles resumed his relationship with his former girlfriend Camilla Parker Bowles, and Diana later began one with Major James Hewitt, the family's former riding instructor. Media speculated that Hewitt, not Charles, was Harry's father based on the alleged physical similarity between Hewitt and Harry, but Harry was born before the affair began.[51][56] In 1989, Diana confronted Camilla about her and Charles's extramarital affair at a birthday party for Camilla's sister, Annabel Elliot.[57][58] These affairs were later exposed in May 1992 with the publication of Andrew Morton's book, Diana: Her True Story.[59][60] The book, which also revealed the Princess's allegedly suicidal unhappiness, caused a media storm. Morton later revealed that in 1991 he had also conducted a secret interview with Diana in which she had talked about her marital issues and difficulties.[61] The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh hosted a meeting between Charles and Diana and unsuccessfully tried to effect a reconciliation. Philip wrote to Diana and expressed his disappointment at the extra-marital affairs of both her and Charles; he asked her to examine their behaviour from the other's point of view. The Duke was direct and Diana was sensitive. She found the letters hard to take, but nevertheless, she appreciated that he was acting with good intent.
During 1992 and 1993, leaked tapes of telephone conversations negatively reflected on both the Prince and Princess of Wales. Tape recordings of the Princess and James Gilbey were made public in August 1992,[66] and transcripts were published the same month.[18] The article, "Squidgygate", was followed in November 1992 by the leaked "Camillagate" tapes, intimate exchanges between the Prince and Camilla, published in the tabloids.[68] In December 1992, Prime Minister John Major announced the couple's "amicable separation" to the House of Commons.
Between 1992 and 1993, Diana hired voice coach Peter Settelen to help her develop her public speaking voice.[70] In a videotape recorded by Settelen in 1992, Diana admitted that in 1984 through to 1986, she had been "deeply in love with someone who worked in this environment."[71][72] It is thought she was referring to Barry Mannakee,[73] who was transferred to the Diplomatic Protection Squad in 1986 after his managers had determined that his relationship with Diana had been inappropriate.[72][74] Diana said in the tape that Mannakee had been "chucked out" from his role as her bodyguard following suspicion that the two were having an affair.[71] Penny Junor suggested in her 1998 book that the Princess was in a romantic relationship with Mannakee.[75] Diana's friends dismissed the claim as absurd.[75] However, in the subsequently released tapes Diana stated that she had feelings for that "someone", saying that "I was quite happy to give all this up [and] just to go off and live with him". She described him as "the greatest friend [she's] ever had", though she denied any sexual relationship with him.[76] She also spoke bitterly of her husband saying that "[He] made me feel so inadequate in every possible way, that each time I came up for air he pushed me down again."[77] Charles's aunt, Princess Margaret, burned "highly personal" letters that Diana had written to the Queen Mother in 1993. Biographer William Shawcross considered Margaret's action to be "understandable" as she was "protecting her mother and other members of the family", but "regrettable from a historical viewpoint".[78]
Although she blamed Camilla Parker Bowles for her marital troubles, Diana began to believe that her husband had also been involved in other affairs. In October 1993, the Princess wrote to her butler Paul Burrell, telling him that she believed her husband was now in love with his personal assistant Tiggy Legge-Bourke—who was also his sons' former nanny—and was planning to have her killed "to make the path clear for him to marry Tiggy".[79][80] Legge-Bourke had been hired by the Prince as a young companion for his sons while they were in his care, and the Princess was resentful of Legge-Bourke and her relationship with the young princes.[81] Prince Charles sought public understanding via a televised interview with Jonathan Dimbleby on 29 June 1994. In the interview, he said that he had rekindled his relationship with Camilla in 1986 only after his marriage to the Princess had "irretrievably broken down".[82][83]
In the same year, the News of the World claimed that Diana had made over 300 phone calls to the married art dealer Oliver Hoare.[85][86] These calls were proven to have been made from both her Kensington Palace apartment and from the phone box just outside the palace. According to Hoare's obituary, there was little doubt that she had been in a relationship with him.[87] However, the Princess denied any romantic relationship with Hoare, whom she described as a friend, and said that "a young boy" was the source of the nuisance calls made to Hoare.[88][89] She was also linked by the press to rugby union player Will Carling[90][91] and private equity investor Theodore J. Forstmann,[92][93] yet these claims were neither confirmed nor proven.[94][95]
Divorce
Journalist Martin Bashir interviewed Diana for the BBC current affairs show Panorama. The interview was broadcast on 20 November 1995.[96] The Princess discussed her and her husband's extramarital affairs.[97] Referring to Charles's relationship with Camilla, she said: "Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded." She also expressed doubt about her husband's suitability for kingship.[96] Authors Tina Brown, Sally Bedell Smith and Sarah Bradford support Diana's admission in the interview that she had suffered from depression, "rampant bulimia" and had engaged numerous times in the act of self mutilation; the show's transcript records Diana confirming many of her mental health problems, including that she had "hurt (her) arms and legs".[96] The combination of illnesses from which Diana herself said that she suffered resulted in some of her biographers opining that she had borderline personality disorder.[98][99]
The interview proved to be the tipping point. On 20 December, Buckingham Palace announced that the Queen had sent letters to the Prince and Princess of Wales, advising them to divorce.[100][101] The Queen's move was backed by the Prime Minister and by senior Privy Counsellors, and, according to the BBC, was decided after two weeks of talks.[102] Charles formally agreed to the divorce in a written statement soon after.[100] In February 1996, the Princess announced her agreement after negotiations with the Prince and representatives of the Queen,[103] irritating Buckingham Palace by issuing her own announcement of the divorce agreement and its terms. In July 1996, the couple agreed on the terms of their divorce.[104] This followed shortly after the Princess's accusation that the Prince's personal assistant Tiggy Legge-Bourke had aborted the Prince's child, after which Legge-Bourke instructed her attorney Peter Carter-Ruck to demand an apology.[105][106] Diana's secretary Patrick Jephson resigned shortly before the story broke, later writing that the Princess had "exulted in accusing Legge-Bourke of having had an abortion".[107][108]
The divorce was finalised on 28 August 1996.[109] Diana received a lump sum settlement of £17 million as well as £400,000 per year. The couple signed a confidentiality agreement that prohibited them from discussing the details of the divorce or of their married life.[104] Days before, letters patent were issued with general rules to regulate royal titles after divorce. Diana lost the style "Her Royal Highness" and instead was styled Diana, Princess of Wales. As the mother of the prince expected to one day ascend to the throne, she continued to be regarded as a member of the royal family and was accorded the same precedence she enjoyed during her marriage.[111] The Queen reportedly wanted to let Diana continue to use the style of Royal Highness after her divorce, but Charles had insisted on removing it.[104] Prince William was reported to have reassured his mother: "Don't worry, Mummy, I will give it back to you one day when I am King."[112] Almost a year before, according to Tina Brown, the Duke of Edinburgh had warned the Princess of Wales: "If you don't behave, my girl, we'll take your title away." She is said to have replied: "My title is a lot older than yours, Philip." Diana and her mother quarrelled in May 1997 after she told Hello! magazine that Diana was happy to lose the royal style. They were reportedly not on speaking terms with each other by the time of Diana's death.[114] By contrast, Diana's relationship with her estranged stepmother reportedly improved in the years before her death in 1997.[115][116]
Public life
Public appearances
Charles and Diana in Woombye, 1983
Diana's first official public appearance following her engagement was in a charity event at Goldsmiths' Hall in March 1981.[117][118] In October 1981, the Prince and Princess visited Wales.[21][119] Diana attended the State Opening of Parliament for the first time on 4 November 1981.[120] Her first solo engagement was a visit to Regent Street on 18 November 1981 to switch on the Christmas lights.[121] She attended the Trooping the Colour for the first time in June 1982, making her appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace afterwards. The Princess made her inaugural overseas tour in September 1982, to attend the state funeral of Grace, Princess of Monaco.[21] Also in 1982, Diana accompanied the Prince of Wales to the Netherlands and was created a Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown by Queen Beatrix.[122] In 1983, she accompanied the Prince on a tour of Australia and New Zealand with Prince William, where they met with representatives of the Māori people.[21] Their visit to Canada in June and July 1983 included a trip to Edmonton to open the 1983 Summer Universiade and a stop in Newfoundland to commemorate the 400th anniversary of that island's acquisition by the Crown.[123]
In February 1984, Diana was the patron of London City Ballet when she travelled to Norway on her own to attend a performance organised by the company.[21] In April 1985, the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Italy, and were later joined by Princes William and Harry.[21] They met with President Alessandro Pertini. Their visit to the Holy See included a private audience with Pope John Paul II.[124] In November 1985, the couple visited the United States,[21] meeting President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan at the White House. Diana had a busy year in 1986. She embarked with the Prince of Wales on a tour of Japan, Indonesia, Spain, and Canada.[123] In Canada they visited Expo 86,[123] where Diana fainted in the California Pavilion.[125][126] In 1988, the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Thailand and toured Australia for the bicentenary celebrations.[21][127] In February 1989, she spent a few days in New York as a solo visit. During a tour of Harlem Hospital Center, she made a profound impact on the public by spontaneously hugging a seven-year-old child with AIDS.[128]
Charles and Diana with the US Vice President Dan Quayle and his wife Marilyn following the enthronement of Emperor Akihito, 1990
In March 1990, she and the Prince of Wales toured Nigeria and Cameroon.[129] The President of Cameroon hosted an official dinner to welcome them in Yaoundé.[129] Highlights of the tour included visits by the Princess of Wales to hospitals and projects focusing on women's development.[129] In May 1990, they visited Hungary for four days.[128][130] It was the first visit by members of the Royal Family to "a former Warsaw Pact country".[128] They attended a dinner hosted by interim President Árpád Göncz and viewed a fashion display at the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest.[130] Peto Institute was among the places that were visited by the Princess, and she presented its director with an honorary OBE.[128] In November 1990, the royal couple went to Japan to attend the enthronement of Emperor Akihito.[21][131]
In her desire to play an encouraging role during the Gulf War, the Princess of Wales visited Germany in December 1990 to meet with the families of soldiers.[128] She subsequently travelled to Germany in January 1991 to visit RAF Bruggen, and later wrote an encouraging letter which was published in Soldier, Navy News and RAF News.[128] In 1991, the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where they presented the university with a replica of their royal charter.[132] In September 1991, the Princess visited Pakistan on a solo trip, and went to Brazil with Charles.[133] During the Brazilian tour, Diana paid visits to organisations that battled homelessness among street children.[133] Her final trips with Charles were to India and South Korea in 1992.[21] She visited Mother Teresa's hospice in Kolkata, India, in 1992.[134] The two women met each other again that year[135] and developed a personal relationship.[134] It was also during the Indian tour that pictures of an alone Diana in front of Taj Mahal made headlines.[136][137]
In December 1993, she announced that she would withdraw from public life, but in November 1994 she stated that she wished to "make a partial return".[21][128] In her capacity as the vice-president of British Red Cross, she was interested in playing an important role for its 125th anniversary celebrations.[128] Later, the Queen formally invited her to attend the anniversary celebrations of D-Day.[21] In February 1995, the Princess visited Japan.[131] She paid a formal visit to Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko,[131] and visited the National Children's Hospital in Tokyo.[138] In June 1995, Diana went to the Venice Biennale art festival,[139] and also visited Moscow where she received the International Leonardo Prize.[140][141] In November 1995, the Princess undertook a four-day trip to Argentina in order to attend a charity event.[142] The Princess visited many other countries, including Belgium, Nepal, Switzerland, and Zimbabwe, alongside numerous others.[21] During her separation from Charles which lasted for almost four years, she participated in major national occasions as a senior member of the Royal Family, notably including "the commemorations of the 50th anniversaries of Victory in Europe Day and Victory over Japan Day" in 1995.[21] The Princess's 36th and final birthday celebration was held at Tate Gallery which was also a commemorative event for the gallery's 100th anniversary.[21]
Charity work and patronage
In 1983, she confided in the then-Premier of Newfoundland, Brian Peckford, "I am finding it very difficult to cope with the pressures of being Princess of Wales, but I am learning to cope with it."[143] As Princess of Wales, she was expected to make regular public appearances at hospitals, schools, and other facilities, in the 20th-century model of royal patronage. From the mid-1980s, she became increasingly associated with numerous charities. She carried out 191 official engagements in 1988[144] and 397 in 1991.[145] The Princess developed an intense interest in serious illnesses and health-related matters outside the purview of traditional royal involvement, including AIDS and leprosy. In recognition of her effect as a philanthropist, Stephen Lee, director of the UK Institute of Charity Fundraising Managers, said "Her overall effect on charity is probably more significant than any other person's in the 20th century."[146]
The Princess at the official opening of the community centre on Whitehall Road, Bristol, in May 1987
Diana's extensive charity work also included campaigning for animal protection and fighting against the use of landmines.[147] She was the patroness of charities and organisations who worked with the homeless, youth, drug addicts, and the elderly. From 1989, she was president of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. She was patron of the Natural History Museum[148][149] and president of the Royal Academy of Music.[105][150][148] From 1984 to 1996, she was president of Barnardo's, a charity founded by Dr. Thomas John Barnardo in 1866 to care for vulnerable children and young people.[151][148] In 1988, she became patron of the British Red Cross and supported its organisations in other countries such as Australia and Canada.[128] She made several lengthy visits each week to Royal Brompton Hospital, where she worked to comfort seriously ill or dying patients.[134] From 1991 to 1996, she was a patron of Headway, a brain injury association.[148][152] In 1992, she became the first patron of Chester Childbirth Appeal, a charity that she had supported since 1984.[153] The charity, which is named after one of Diana's royal titles, could raise over £1 million with her help.[153] In 1994, she helped her friend Julia Samuel launch the charity Child Bereavement UK which supports children "of military families, those of suicide victims, [and] terminally-ill parents," and became its patron.[154] Prince William later replaced his mother as the charity's royal patron.[155]
Her patronages also included Landmine Survivors Network,[150] Help the Aged,[150][148] the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery,[150][148] the British Lung Foundation,[150][148] Eureka! (joint patron with Prince Charles),[150][148] the National Children's Orchestra,[150][148][128] British Red Cross Youth,[156][148] the Guinness Trust,[148] Meningitis Trust,[148][128] the Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund for Children,[148][128] the Royal School for the Blind,[148][128] Welsh National Opera,[148][128] the Variety Club of New Zealand,[157][148] Birthright,[148][158] the British Deaf Association (for which she learned sign language),[156][148][159] All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club,[148] Anglo-European College of Chiropractic,[148] Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland,[148] Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital,[148] British Sports Association for the Disabled,[148] British Youth Opera,[148] Faculty of Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons of England,[148] London City Ballet,[148] London Symphony Orchestra,[148] Pre-School Playgroups Association,[148][128] as well as president or patron of other charities.[148]
In 1987, Diana was awarded the Honorary Freedom of the City of London, the highest honour which is in the power of the City of London to bestow on someone.[160][161] In June 1995, the Princess travelled to Moscow. She paid a visit to a children's hospital that she had previously supported when she provided them with medical equipment. In Moscow, she received the International Leonardo Prize, which is given to "the most distinguished patrons and people in the arts, medicine, and sports".[147] In December 1995, Diana received the United Cerebral Palsy Humanitarian of the Year Award in New York City for her philanthropic efforts.[162][163][164] In October 1996, for her works on the elderly, the Princess was awarded a gold medal at a health care conference organised by the Pio Manzù Centre in Rimini, Italy.[165]
The day after her divorce, she announced her resignation from over 100 charities and retained patronages of only six: Centrepoint, English National Ballet, Great Ormond Street Hospital, The Leprosy Mission, National AIDS Trust, and the Royal Marsden Hospital.[166] She continued her work with the British Red Cross Anti-Personnel Land Mines Campaign, but was no longer listed as patron.[167][168]
In May 1997, the Princess opened the Richard Attenborough Centre for Disability and the Arts in Leicester, after being asked by her friend Richard Attenborough.[169] In June 1997, her dresses and suits were sold at Christie's auction houses in London and New York, and the proceeds that were earned from these events were donated to charities.[21] Her final official engagement was a visit to Northwick Park Hospital, London, on 21 July 1997.[21]
Areas of work
HIV/AIDS
The Princess began her work with AIDS victims in the 1980s.[170] In 1989, she opened Landmark Aids Centre in South London.[171][172] She was not averse to making physical contact with AIDS patients, though it was still unknown whether the disease could be spread that way.[134][173][174] Diana was the first British royal figure to contact AIDS patients.[170] In 1987, she held hands with an AIDS patient in one of her early efforts to de-stigmatise the condition.[175][176] Diana noted: "HIV does not make people dangerous to know. You can shake their hands and give them a hug. Heaven knows they need it. What's more, you can share their homes, their workplaces, and their playgrounds and toys."[128][177][178] To Diana's disappointment, the Queen did not support this type of charity work, suggesting she get involved in "something more pleasant".[170] In October 1990, Diana opened Grandma's House, a home for young AIDS victims in Washington, D.C.[179] She was also a patron of the National AIDS Trust.[128] In 1991, she famously hugged one victim during a visit to the AIDS ward of the Middlesex Hospital,[128] which she had opened in 1987 as the first hospital unit dedicated to this cause in the UK.[175][180] As the patron of Turning Point, a health and social care organisation, Diana visited its project in London for people with HIV/AIDS in 1992.[181] She later established and led fundraising campaigns for AIDS research.[18]
In March 1997, Diana visited South Africa, where she met with President Nelson Mandela.[182][183] On 2 November 2002, Mandela announced that the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund would be teaming up with the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund to help victims of AIDS.[184] They had planned the combination of the two charities a few months before her death.[184] Mandela later praised Diana for her efforts surrounding the issue of HIV/AIDS: "When she stroked the limbs of someone with leprosy or sat on the bed of a man with HIV/AIDS and held his hand, she transformed public attitudes and improved the life chances of such people".[185] Diana had used her celebrity status to "fight stigma attached to people living with HIV/AIDS", Mandela said.[184] In 2009, a panel including Sir Ian McKellen and Alan Hollinghurst chose Diana's portrait to be shown in the Gay Icons exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London.[186] In October 2017, the Attitude magazine honoured Diana with its Legacy Award for her HIV/AIDS work. Prince Harry accepted the award on behalf of his mother.[180][187]
Landmines
Diana chatting with US First Lady Hillary Clinton following a landmines campaign fund-raiser, June 1997
Diana was the patron of HALO Trust, an organisation that removes debris—particularly landmines—left behind by war.[188][189] In January 1997, pictures of Diana touring an Angolan minefield in a ballistic helmet and flak jacket were seen worldwide.[188][189] During her campaign, she was accused of meddling in politics and called a 'loose cannon' by the Earl Howe, an official in the British Ministry of Defence.[190] Despite the criticism, HALO states that Diana's efforts resulted in raising international awareness about landmines and the subsequent sufferings caused by them.[188][189] In June 1997, she gave a speech at a landmines conference held at the Royal Geographical Society, and travelled to Washington, D.C. to help promote the American Red Cross landmines campaign.[21] From 7 to 10 August 1997, just days before her death, she visited Bosnia and Herzegovina with Jerry White and Ken Rutherford of the Landmine Survivors Network.[21][191][192][193]
Her work on the landmines issue has been described as influential in the signing of the Ottawa Treaty, which created an international ban on the use of anti-personnel landmines.[194] Introducing the Second Reading of the Landmines Bill 1998 to the British House of Commons, the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, paid tribute to Diana's work on landmines:
All Honourable Members will be aware from their postbags of the immense contribution made by Diana, Princess of Wales to bringing home to many of our constituents the human costs of landmines. The best way in which to record our appreciation of her work, and the work of NGOs that have campaigned against landmines, is to pass the Bill, and to pave the way towards a global ban on landmines.[195]
A few months after Diana's death in 1997, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines won the Nobel Peace Prize.[196]
Cancer
For her first solo official trip, Diana visited The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, a cancer treatment hospital in London.[157] She later chose this charity to be among the organisations that benefited from the auction of her clothes in New York.[157] The trust's communications manager said, "The Princess had done much to remove the stigma and taboo associated with diseases such as cancer, AIDS, HIV and leprosy."[157] Diana became president of the hospital on 27 June 1989.[197][198][199] The Wolfson Children's Cancer Unit was opened by Diana on 25 February 1993.[197] In February 1996, the Princess who had been informed about a newly opened cancer hospital built by Imran Khan, travelled to Pakistan to visit its children's cancer wards and attend a fundraising dinner in aid of the charity in Lahore.[200] She later visited the hospital again in May 1997.[201] In June 1996, she travelled to Chicago in her capacity as president of the Royal Marsden Hospital in order to attend a fundraising event and raised more than £1 million for cancer research.[128] In September 1996, after being asked by Katharine Graham, the Princess went to Washington and appeared at a White House breakfast in respect of the Nina Hyde Center for Breast Cancer Research.[202] She also attended an annual fund-raiser for breast cancer research organised by The Washington Post at the same centre.[18][203]
Children with Leukaemia (later renamed Children with Cancer UK) was opened by the Princess of Wales in memory of two young cancer victims in 1988.[204][205][206] In November 1987, a few days after the death of Jean O'Gorman from cancer, Diana met her family.[204][205] The deaths of Jean and her brother affected the Princess, and she assisted their family to establish the charity.[204][205][206] It was opened by her on 12 January 1988 at Mill Hill Secondary School, and she supported it until her death in 1997.[204][206]
Other areas
In November 1989, the Princess visited a leprosy hospital in Indonesia.[207][170] Following her visit, she became patron of the Leprosy Mission, an organisation dedicated to providing medicine, treatment, and other support services to those who are afflicted with the disease. She remained the patron of this charity[166] and visited several of its hospitals around the world, especially in India, Nepal, Zimbabwe and Nigeria until her death in 1997.[128][208] She famously touched those affected by the disease when many people believed it could be contracted through casual contact.[128][207] "It has always been my concern to touch people with leprosy, trying to show in a simple action that they are not reviled, nor are we repulsed," she commented.[208] The Diana Princess of Wales Health Education and Media Centre in Noida, India, was opened in her honour in November 1999, funded by the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fund to give social support to the people affected by leprosy and disability.[208]
Diana was a long-standing and active supporter of Centrepoint, a charity which provides accommodation and support to homeless people, and became patron in 1992.[209][210] She supported organisations that battle poverty and homelessness. The Princess was a supporter of young homeless people and spoke out on behalf of them by saying that "they deserve a decent start in life".[211] "We, as a part of society, must ensure that young people – who are our future – are given the chance they deserve," she said.[211] Diana used to take young William and Harry for private visits to Centrepoint services and homeless shelters.[18][209][212] "The young people at Centrepoint were always really touched by her visits and by her genuine feelings for them," said one of the charity's staff members.[213] Prince William later became the patron of this charity.[209]
Diana was a staunch and longtime supporter of charities and organisations that focused on social and mental issues, including Relate and Turning Point.[128] Relate was relaunched in 1987 as a renewed version to its predecessor, the National Marriage Guidance Council. Diana became its patron in 1989.[128] Turning Point, a health and social care organisation, was founded in 1964 to help and support those affected by drug and alcohol misuse and mental health problems. She became the charity's patron in 1987 and visited the charity on a regular basis, meeting the sufferers at its centres or institutions including Rampton and Broadmoor.[128] In 1990 during a speech for Turning Point she said, "It takes professionalism to convince a doubting public that it should accept back into its midst many of those diagnosed as psychotics, neurotics and other sufferers who Victorian communities decided should be kept out of sight in the safety of mental institutions."[128] Despite the protocol problems of travelling to a Muslim country, she made a trip to Pakistan later that year in order to visit a rehabilitation centre in Lahore as a sign of "her commitment to working against drug abuse".[128]
Privacy and the media
In 1993, Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) published photographs of the Princess that were taken by gym owner Bryce Taylor. The photos showed her exercising in the gym LA Fitness wearing "a leotard and cycling shorts".[214][215] The Princess's lawyers immediately filed a criminal complaint that sought "a permanent ban on the sale and publication of the photographs" around the world.[214][215] However, some newspapers outside the UK published the pictures.[214] The courts granted an injunction against Taylor and MGN that prohibited "further publication of the pictures".[214] MGN later issued an apology after facing much criticism from the public.[214] It is said that MGN gave the Princess £1 million as a payment for her legal costs and donated £200 |
“Dome” field advantage.
Ironically, during last season the Falcons had to use silent counts because of crowd noise from the visiting teams’ fans who overtook the Georgia Dome.
Back in 2007 at the old RCA Dome, the Patriots accused the Indianapolis Colts of pumping in artificial crowd when Tom Brady was trying to call signals.
CBS-TV and the NFL said the mistake was not the Colts, but network’s error. It said that an unusual audio moment from the production truck was the cause of the noise.
Over the years, there have been suspicions of noise being piped into the now demolished Minneapolis Metrodome. Where the sound unofficially registered 118-decibel levels during the Vikings’ divisional playoff victory over Dallas in January 2010.
Seattle set the standard when their crowd of 68,331 at outdoor CenturyLink Field registered a noise level of 131.9 decibels during their victory over the 49ers in 2013.
The Seahawks claimed that they broke the previous Guinness World Record of 131.7 decibels, set two years ago during a soccer match in Turkey.
Generally, 130 decibels are considered dangerous enough to cause hearing damage, much like standing next to a jet engine.
FALCONS STORIES
Falcons to focus on adding another cornerstone
Quinn-Dimitroff partnership off to a strong start
Q&A with Falcons head coach Dan Quinn at the combine
Falcons coach Dan Quinn fired up to watch pass-rushers
Q&A with Falcons general manager Thomas Dimitroff on moving forward
Falcons to keep character filter on draft picks
Falcons close to re-signing kicker Matt Bryant
Falcons LT Jake Matthews recovering from offseason surgery
Falcons plan to extend WR Julio Jones contract
Falcons could target Denver TE Julius Thomas in free agency
Falcons' roster gutting could have big names (i.e. Steven Jackson)
Cutting the Falcons roster -- Should they stay or should they go?
COMBINE STORIES
Todd Gurley speaks about autograph-signing caper
Bucs appear set to cast future with Jameis Winston
Todd Gurley intriguing prospect to NFL teams
Alabama stars Cooper, Collins headed for first round
Chris Conley puts on a dazzling show at the combine
Waller, Smelter out to prove NFL standing at the combine
VIDEO DEPARTMENT
Watch: D. Led -- Falcons news at the combine
Watch: NFL Network's Mike Mayock at the combine
Watch: Jameis Winston to throw at the combine
Watch: Todd Gurley has interviews set up with 24 NFL teams
Watch: Falcons general manager Thomas Dimitroff at the combine
Watch: Falcons coach Dan Quinn at the combine
Watch: Rams GM Les Snead on the pass-rush talent at the combine
FALCONS COMBINE MEETINGS
Oregon DE Arik Armstead talked scheme with the Falcons
Falcons met with Alabama quarterback Blake Sims
Falcons to meet with Florida DE Dante Fowler Jr.
Falcons met with Wake Forest CB Kevin Johnson
Falcons met with Alabama safety Landon Collins
PHOTO GALLERIES
Photographs from the 2015 NFL scouting combine
Photos of players with Georgia ties at the scouting combine
Photos of NFL pass rusher set to enter free agencyZooey Deschanel and M. Ward, aka She & Him, have announced a new album for release this year. Volume 3 is the band’s fourth record, third of primarily original material. It features 11 new compositions by Deschanel, who wrote the record during breaks from filming her sitcom New Girl, as well as three covers. Guest appearances include punk icon Mike Watt, Tilly And The Wall, Pierre De Reeder from Rilo Kiley, and more. While there is no currently no information on which songs are the covers, it might be a fun game to go through the tracklist and take side-bets on which tracks were not penned by the band. Right now, I am banking on a cover of the Karen Chandler staple “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me,” Blondie’s “Sunday Girl,” and obviously Justin Bieber’s “Baby” with M. Ward filling in for Ludacris. The release will coincide with a summer tour. Check out the tracklist and dates below.
01 “I’ve Got Your Number, Son”
02 “Never Wanted Your Love”
03 “Baby”
04 “I Could’ve Been Your Girl”
05 “Turn to White”
06 “Somebody Sweet to Talk To”
07 “Something’s Haunting You”
08 “Together”
09 “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me”
10 “Snow Queen”
11 “Sunday Girl”
12 “London”
13 “Shadow of Love”
14 “Reprise (I Could’ve Been Your Girl)”
06/13 – Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium
06/15 – Grand Prairie, TX @ Verizon Theater at Grand Prairie
06/16 – Austin, TX @ ACL Live at the Moody Theatre
06/18 – Phoenix, AZ @ Comerica Theater
06/19 – Las Vegas, NV @ The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas
06/21 – San Diego, CA @ SDU Open Air Theatre
06/22 – Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre*
06/23 – Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Bowl*
06/25 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Red Butte Gardens
06/27 – Council Bluffs, IA @ Harrah’s Stir Cove
06/29 – Chicago, IL @ Aragon Ballroom #
07/01 – Ann Arbor, MI @ Hill Auditorium #
07/03 – Montreal, QUE @ Montreal Jazz Festival – Symphony Hall #
07/04 – Toronto, ON @ Toronto Urban Roots Festival #
07/06 – New York, NY @ Central Park Summerstage #
07/09 – Philadelphia, PA @ Mann Center for Performing Arts #
07/10 – Boston, MA @ Bank of America Pavilion #
07/11 – Vienna, VA @ Filene Center at Wolf Trap #
* with Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell
# with Camera Obscura
Volume 3 is out 5/7 on Merge. Find more information on tour tickets here.By Bob Allen
While a recent Baptist News Global story about a Baptist church in Ohio sprinkling an infant is newsworthy, baptizing babies isn’t as far-fetched as many conservative Southern Baptist churches assume, a seminary president said in a May 4 blog.
Jason Allen, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo., said the first-ever infant baptism at First Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio, made news because “by definition, a Baptist church does not baptize infants.”
Allen said progressives, however, aren’t the only ones revisiting the rite of “believer’s baptism” in Baptist churches.
“Within Southern Baptist life, we have been on a steady march towards infant baptism, routinely baptizing children younger and younger in age,” Allen said.
A North American Mission Board task force on baptism and evangelism in 2014 found the only consistently growing age group in Southern Baptist Convention baptisms is 5 and under. Allen said the trend should prompt careful reflection and remind Southern Baptists of some of the dangers associated with baptizing young children.
“As a convictional Baptist, it is hard for me to admit this, but when we baptize children too young to grasp the gospel and, as a result, whose hearts haven’t been affected by it, it is more troubling than a sprinkling of an infant,” Allen said.
“Why is this? Because when Presbyterians, for example, sprinkle infants, they anticipate the child will one day be converted. When we baptize young children we are testifying they have been converted.”
Allen said parents and churches should encourage children to follow Christ at every age, including the early years. “However, if we are not careful we can find ourselves routinely baptizing young children before they understand the gospel — or have been affected by it.”
“The point is not that a child cannot be converted,” he said. “The point is that we should do our best to make sure conversion has happened in our children before baptizing them.”
Allen said he isn’t for age-based criteria or a wait-and-see approach to baptizing new converts, and that spurious conversions occur regardless of the age.
Denominationally speaking, Allen wondered if in their zeal for increasing baptism numbers, some Southern Baptists haven’t always given enough thought about who should be baptized. He said that has contributed, in part, “to the plague of unregenerate church members” in the SBC.
“The challenge of unregenerate church membership is systemic within our convention,” Allen said. “With some 16 million members on our rolls, but only about a third of those in church attendance on any given Sunday, one doesn’t have to be exceedingly scrupulous to sense a problem.”
As a father of five, Allen said he understands parents’ urge to see their children converted. “I live with it daily, and strive to balance leading them to Christ without over-leading them into a premature profession of faith,” he said.
Allen described sensing that tension in a personal way once while presenting the gospel during a vacation Bible school rally.
“It became clear to me I could get most every kid in the room, including my own children, to raise their hand, express their desire to avoid Hell, and simply to ‘repeat after me’ to miss it,” he said.
Allen said the topic reminded him of a 2009 article in the BBC about atheists in the United Kingdom seeking “de-baptism certificates,” in part because their christening was involuntary.
“I sometimes wonder how many on SBC church membership rolls, who were baptized so young as to have almost no choice in the matter, would renounce their membership if presented with the option,” Allen said. “Or, perhaps more accurately put, if they realized they were still on a church’s membership roll in the first place.”
Previous story:
Aiming to deepen rite’s meaning, Baptist pastor in Ohio baptizes infantInterview: Wahabism a Saudi weapon to dominate India
India
oi-Vicky
New Delhi, June 27: How much of an influence does Iran have over the Sufi Muslims in India? A recent wikileaks cable suggested that Saudi Arabia wanted to match Iran's influence over India.
Read more: Wahabism, Terrorism and the 10 billion dollar India funding
The Shia community says that there is no influence of Iran in India as their community is extremely small. Syed Babbar Ashraf who heads the Sada-e-Sufia Hind or the Sufi voice of India says that the real agenda is the spread of Wahabism.
In this interview with OneIndia, Syed Babar Ashraf who has organized several anti Wahabi rallies says that what the Saudis intend to do is make this battle as a Wahabi vs the rest of the world.
The wikileaks cables suggested that Saudi Arabia wanted to match Iran's influence of India. How much does Iran influence the Sufis in India?
I don't think there is any influence of Iran on the Sufi Muslims in India. We are in minority here and a majority of the Muslims belong to the Sunni community. Even if we want to support Iran, all we can extend is moral support and nothing more than that. With such a small population, Iran would not be trying to have any influence over India.
What is the concern that the Saudis have raised?
The Saudis have only one agenda in mind. They want to ensure that every Sunni Muslim follows Wahabism. The only agenda is to impose the Wahabi culture in India and they are making excuses quoting the influence of Iran.
This is not a Shia vs Sunni war. This is about imposing Wahabism in as many places are possible.
Do you a major influence of Wahabism in India?
The Saudis are trying to impose Wahabism right from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. There are 8 different forums which finance the implentation of Wahabism in India. The main intention of imposing Wahabism is to break the unity among the Indian Muslims and create a conflict zone.
What is the modus operandi followed while imposing Wahabism?
It is pretty much a similar agenda which a super power has. These persons target areas where there is high poverty and illiteracy. The Wahabis have a lot of money with them and they try and buy out people.
They claim that they have come to India to dole out charity to the poor and needy. More than Mosques, they try and spread the ideology in universities. In almost all universities catering to Muslims, the Wahabis have been trying to stamp their authority.
Is there an Iran influence in India?
There is no influence of Iran over the Shia Muslims in India. The Shia community constitutes only 5 per cent of the Muslim population and the Sunnis are in majority.
Shias are found in pockets of Lucknow and Hyderabad and basically are in no position to have any influence and neither will any country trying influencing us. All we can do is give moral support and fight against Wahabism as it is aiming at dividing the Muslims and also threatening the peace of India.
Has Saudi restricted its Wahabi influence only to India?
The Saudis have various ways to spreading Wahabi influence. In some nations they will do it in the name of the al-Qaeda or ISIS while in others they would send their preachers and target through charity work as I earlier pointed out.
The Saudis want to be a legitimate power in every part of the world and they feel they can become that only with the spread of Wahabism. They are active in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia just to name a few countries. Basically it is all about control.
Your thoughts on the Kuwait Mosque attack targeted at Shia Muslims?
This is nothing but an attempt to spread extremism and hatred. They want to create a rift between the Sunnis and Shias over there.
Is Wahabism an ideological war on the world?
Yes it is all about ideology. Wahabism is officially allowed only in Saudi and Qatar. They want to spread this ideology to as many parts of the world and in this way the Saudis feel that they can ensure dominance.
OneIndia News75 Halloween Wallpapers? Scary Monsters, Pumpkins And Zombies
Halloween is around the corner and the atmosphere is filled with pumpkins, skeletons, bonfires, horror movies and other scary things spread across the houses, stores and, of course, web sites. Just the right time to spice up your desktop with an appropriate Halloween spirit. And for this purpose you may change your desktop wallpaper and prepare some traditional pumpkin carvings.
In this post we present some beautiful hight quality wallpapers for your scary Halloween party. These images do not contain any calendars. All images can be clicked and lead to a preview. [Links checked January/12/2017]
You may also want to take a look at the following related posts:
Further Reading on SmashingMag:
Halloween Pumpkin? Wallpaper
Scary bats and spiders, frightening skeletons, delicious candies and lollies and ominous black cats and carved pumpkins… All bundled up together and you have a perfect Halloween. Trick or treat! Designed by Soraia Mendes from Portugal.
Happy Halloween Wallpapers
Designed by Zanetine Web Design from India.
The Moons Glow
“It is a full moon tonight. The fall wind blows the clouds. The leaves have fallen from the trees and a happy pumpkin sits beneath a spooky tree. The tree and the pumpkin both welcome in the month of October.” Designed by Allison S. Hoge from USA.
Halloween
Designed by Violeta Dabija from Moldova.
Punpkin Scarecrow
Designed by Barbara Haider from Austria.
Scary Pumpkin
My is my favorite holiday. This calendar shows my desire to make Halloween a darker holiday than it has been in the past for me. Designed by Rachel Cobb from USA.
The Month Of Monsters
To me October is a really fun month, since this is the time of the year where all kind of monsters can hang out together, without caring what universe they come from. — Designed by Maria Keller from Mexico.
Creepy Pumpkin
Designed by Christopher Krahlisch from Germany.
Happy H.
Designed by Salma Ali from United Arab Emirates..
Night Of The Black Cat
Halloween is nearly upon us once again! I love black cats, so I decided to feature one surrounded by a moon-lit sky. — Designed by Eddie Wong from Ireland.
Halloween Cat
Designed by Mohamad Khatib from Lebanon.
Masks
Mistic Tribal Masks temporary exposition in Turin. They really remind to an alien atmosphere. Designed by Ester Liquori from Italy.
Will Miss You On This Halloween
Jack-o-lanterns and spooky ghosts are coming to fight the haunted house, witches all alive again! But this time don’t miss your friends. It’s time to scare the family, pals and mates with ghosts! Wish you a happy Halloween night again and again. Designed by Debobrata Debnath from India.
Childish
Children day is celebrated in October…in many countries around the world..They are the future.. The hope for a brighter tomorrow… Designed by Nishith from India.
Trick Or Treat
“As night falls there’s magic and mischief in the air.” Designed by Jason Knight (nativeBrand) from UK.
Creepy Ice-cream
To all ice-cream lovers, let’s get creepy this October! Designed by Carmen Ng from Singapore.
Halloween
The time of candies, ghosts, witches and fun. Designed by cheloveche.ru from Russia.
Feeling Sorry For All The Pumpkins
Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Brazil.
Zombie’s Grafitti
A mystical month like October diserve an trash art contribution so the dead can go back to life and haunt the living people. This wallpaper was made for terror e thriller lovers. Download and enjoy it! Designed by Vinicius Ervilha from Brazil.
Ghost
Designed by Tiago Santos from Portugal.
Misty Woods
October reminds me of cold nights. Halloween is a time when going up to creepy houses through misty haunted woods is acceptable, which also inspired me to design a moonlight misty composition. — Designed by Samantha Magaard from the United States.
A Very Bright Halloween
We want to remind everyone to stay safe this Halloween when trick-or-treating, maybe carry a portable lantern or flashlight. We also wanted to share some ideas we had for adding a special bright touch to your costumes this year - battery operated Halloween string lights! — Designed by Carla Genovesio (from Lights.com from the United States.
Moon Owl
Designed by Katerina Bobkova from Ukraine.
Scary Moon
Designed by Andy Murphy from Northern Ireland.
It’s The Most Terrifying Time Of The Year
The best time of the whole year. The weather get cooler and crisper, the leaves start to change, and all of the things that go bump in the night come out to play. — Designed by Casey Booth from the United States.
Skull Wallpaper
Designed by Rumake Web Agency from Russia.
Skeleton Theme
Designed by Shilpa Sharma from India.
Sweet Halloween
Designed by Cortando Pixeles from Argentina.
Ghostober
“I made this wallpaper a year ago, but i didntcame on time to send it to Smashing magazine.Serching other files i found it, and decide to finish it and post it, halloween is coming, hope you like this ghostsperms hehe!” Designed by Ricardo Delgado from México City.
Weird Season
Designed by Ryan Thompson from USА.
Happy H.
Designed by JD from the United States.
Weeny Scary
Designed by Cheloveche.ru from Russia.
It Is Coming
Fall always reminds me of a cozy atmosphere during evenings spent with candles, covered under my fluffy blanket. Everything is shining in warm orange light. Halloween FTW! — Designed by Izabela Grzegorczyk from Vienna, Austria.
Howl For October
No Halloween scary tales, witches and goblins fright us! We have our friend Wolfey whose howling scares away the dark, and we can wait for All Hallows Eve in the peace and comfort of our home. Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.
Festival Of The Dead
Shadows of a thousand years rise again unseen, Voices whisper in the trees, ‘Tonight is Halloween! Dexter Kozen.” — Designed by Suman Sil from India.
Spooky Town
Designed by Xenia Latii from Germany.
Cute Halloween
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, so I decided to create four of my favorite monsters. Designed by Maria Keller from Mexico.
Scary Monsters
Designed by Servanne from France.
Trick Or Treat!
It’s Halloween on the 31st (of course), and I think this poor kid might have picked the wrong house to go Trick or Treat-ing! — Designed by James Mitchell from the United Kingdom.
Trick Or Treat 2000
It is the year 2000, and robots rule the world. This is a photo of a recently completed fully-functional rod puppet, approx. 10” tall, set within a digital halloween scene via Photoshop. 0000101011001! (robot translation: Trick or treat!) Designed by Out of the Chair Design from Canada.
Dead Night
The month the dead walk (apparently). For everyone who celebrates Halloween, with costumes, trick or treats or just a simple desktop wallpaper. Designed by Bogdan Lazar from Romania.
Jack O Cal
“Jack O Lantern with 2010 October Calender in mouth. spooky halloween surrounding background” Designed by Lindsey Kellis from USA.
Skull Break
Designed by jadekone from Venezuela.
Eerie October
Designed by Jennifer Leigh Holt from Canada.
Pumpkin Spice Spookster
“A spooky, fun, orange-tastic wall for Halloween lovers of all ages.” Designed by Allen from USA.
Creepy October
Designed by Roland Szabó from Hungary.
Creepy October
Designed by Christina Mokry from Germany.
Ghost Friends
“Boney wanted to have friends but they are all ghosts.” Designed by Constantino Co from Singapore.
The Evil Screen
Designed by Misti Kenison.
Kill your boss (Do not take it seriously)
(Editorial Team) Yes, this is a controversial wallpaper. Please do not take it seriously and consider it to be a funny and scary Halloween wallpaper. Some bosses can be quite harsh sometimes, but that’s definitely no the reason to kill anybody. So we do not take any legal responsibilities for the side effects of you having this wallpaper on your desktop. Happy Halloween!
“When your boss yells that you are too immature to be a designer you are morally obliged to stop whatever youare doing, go to him and have an encounter.” Designed by Milana Adamov from Serbia.
Halloween Wallpapers Elsewhere
Think Halloween Only 1280× 960px. Designed by Zefhar.
Ghosts 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200.
Halloween Night Wallpaper 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x960 and 1600x1200.
Pacman Halloween 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200.
Horror, Scary Wallpapers
Skin Walkers 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200.
Halloween Pumpkin Wallpaper 1440x900.
Halloween Lights Pumpkin and gourd lanterns represent a more artistic side of All Hallow’s Eve. 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200.
White Chocolate Pumpkin This white pumpkin decorated with brown and orange graphics looks good enough to eat. 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200.
Wallcoo Halloween Haunts Over 50 beautiful Halloween wallpapers in various resolutions, at most 1920x1200.
Spooky Halloween 1024x768.
Paci Tubes Halloween Wallpapers 7 Halloween wallpapers in the resolution 1280x1024.
Pumpkins 1280x1024.
Pendemonium Only 1024x768.
Dangerous Mask 1600x1200.
Halloween In The Midnight Forest 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200.
Halloween Art Design Only 1024x768.
The Two And The Nightmare 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200.
This is the END (sl)THE A-League season kick-off is not too far away now.
We’ve had the FFA Cup and AFC Champions League to keep us busy, but the build-up to the 10th season of the A-League is reaching a crescendo.
Catch up on all the ins and out for 2014-2015 in our updated transfer centre.
ADELAIDE UNITED
INS: Jimmy Jeggo (Melbourne Victory), Dylan McGowan (Hearts, Scotland), Craig Goodwin (Newcastle Jets), Pablo Sánchez (Club Deportivo Lugo, Spain), Mark Ochieng (AIS), Ben Warland (AIS), Dylan Smith (AIS), John Hall (AUFC NYL)
OUTS: Jake Barker-Daish (released), Daniel Bowles (Brisbane Roar), Jeronimo Neumann (Newcastle Jets), Jacob Melling (Melbourne City), Jon McKain (released), Michael Zullo (end of loan spell)
New signing, Dylan McGowan. Source: News Corp Australia
PRE-SEASON RESULTS: P 11 W 8 D 1 L 2
Defeated Melbourne City 2-0 (Mabil 33’, Goodwin 45’); lost to Melbourne Victory 0-1 (Berisha 34’ (pen)); drew 1-1 with Perth Glory (Cirio 32’, Thwaite 38’); defeated NorZone All Stars 6-0 (Carrusca 23’ (pen), Djite 48’, Jeggo 58’, Mabil 70’, Ochieng 80’, Smith 90+2’); defeated Melbourne City 1-0 (Cirio 3’); defeated Alice Springs All Stars 10-0 (Kamau 8’ 75’, Djite 24’, Mabil 31’, Jeggo 47’, Cirio 51’, Elsey 78’, Ochieng 85’, Pablo Sánchez 88’, Smith 91’); defeated Adelaide Comets 4-1 (Kamau 16’, McGowan 30’ 74’, Costa 80’); lost 1-5 to Malaga (Djite 59’); beat Perth Glory 1-0 (Boogaard 68’); beat Metro Stars 3-0 (Isaias 51’, Jeggo 62’, Jeronimo 71’).
FFA CUP: defeated Wellington Phoenix 1-0 (Cirio 31’)
LAST YEAR: in the first season under Josep Gombau, the side recovered from an underwhelming start as they grew more accustomed to the Spaniard’s style of football, to finish in sixth spot.
THIS YEAR: fans will expect more improvement from the Reds with Gombau enjoying the benefit of a full pre-season and recruitment opportunity. There’s plenty of experience in defence, Spanish flavour will continue to ride the midfield, but there’s not a lot of depth to support Sergio Cirio and Bruce Djite.
TRADING GRADE: Par. No headlines grabbed but a couple of solid pick-ups, plus another potential gem from Gombau’s contact books, to build on last year’s work.
Ivan Franjic has headed to Russia. Source: News Corp Australia
BRISBANE ROAR
INS: Devante Clut (promoted from youth team), Daniel Bowles (Adelaide United), Jamie Young (Hayes & Yeading United), Mensur Kurtishi (FK Shkëndija), Adam Sarota (FC Utrecht)
OUTS: Besart Berisha (Melbourne Victory), Diogo Ferreira (Perth Glory), Matthew Acton (Yangon United), Ivan Franjic (Torpedo Moscow), Julius Doe Davies (Otelul Galati)
PRE-SEASON RESULTS: P 8 W6 D 1 L1
Drew with Central Coast 1-1; defeated Brisbane City 3-0; lost 2-0 to Sydney FC; beat Northern Fury 5-1; beat Newcastle Jets 4-0; beat Redlands United 3-0; beat Moreton Bay Jets 8-1.
FFA CUP: beat Stirling Lions 4-0.
LAST YEAR: Mike Mulvey’s side returned to the summit with a grand final triumph against Western Sydney Wanderers. A superb campaign.
THIS YEAR: Replacing Besart Berisha is Brisbane’s biggest quandary amongst an otherwise outstanding A-League squad. Daniel Bowles is a like-for-like to try fill the sizeable boots of the departed Ivan Franjic; there is still an embarrassment of riches in midfield, while the stage is set for Mensur Kurtishi, the club’s new Albanian marksman, Jean Carlos Solorzano, Dimi Petratos, Henrique and Kofi Danning to try fill Berisha’s goal quota.
TRADING GRADE: par. There’s still enough quality from last season but no Franjic and Berisha poses question marks with pressure immediately on their replacements. Late addition of Sarota is an excellent acquisition.
CENTRAL COAST MARINERS
INS: Liam Rose (AIS), Anthony Kalik (AIS), Malick Mane (on loan from IFK Göteborg, Sweden), Matt Nash (Bonnyrigg White Eagles, NSW), Richárd Vernes (on loan from Budapest Honvéd, Hungary)
OUTS: Justin Pasfield (Tampines Rovers, Singapore), Mile Sterjovski (Retired), Marcos Flores (Newcastle Jets), Adam Kwasnik (Retired), Bernie Ibini (Sydney FC), Marcel Seip (FC Emmen, The Netherlands)
Can Duke and Fitzgerald go to a new level this term? Source: Getty Images
PRE-SEASON RESULTS: P 5 W 3 D 2 L 0
BeatMariners Academy first grade 4-1, drew 1-1 with Melbourne City, drew 1-1 with Brisbane Roar.
FFA CUP: beat South Coast Wolves 1-0, beats Olympic FC 3-1
LAST YEAR: Fighting against all odds, Phil Moss stepped up into the top job and steered the Mariners, yet again, deep into the finals, where they were beaten by Western Sydney.
THIS YEAR: this time of year is fraught for tipsters when it comes to the Mariners. We should all know by now not to predict anything else but a push into the finals. The core of the side from last year remains, but can the likes of Nick Fitzgerald, Isaka Cernak, Kim Seung-yong and Mitch Duke push on to the next level?
TRADING GRADE: Fail, but the Mariners rarely cause headlines on paper, so why should it be any different this year? Stability is the greatest attribute at Bluetongue Stadium.
MELBOURNE CITY
INS: Damien Duff (Fulham), Jacob Melling (Adelaide United), Marc Marino (AIS), Robert Koren (Hull City), David Villa (New York City FC - loan), Connor Chapman (Newcastle Jets), James Brown (Newcastle Jets), Aaron Mooy (Western Sydney Wanderers), Erik Paartalu (Muangthong United).
OUTS: Orlando Engelaar (released), Sam Mitchinson (released), Patrick Gerhardt (released), David Vrankovic (released), Jeremy Walker (released), Harry Kewell (retirement), Aziz Behich (end of loan).
John van 't Schip (R) unveils new signing Erik Paartalu. Source: Getty Images
PRE-SEASON RESULTS: P 10 W: 4 D: 3 L 3
Defeated Ballarat Red Devils 6-0; UK tour drew 2-2 with Bury, 1-1 with Oldham Athletic, beat a Bolton Wanderers XI 5-1; beat Hume City 0-5; lost 1-0 to Adelaide United; beat FC Bendigo 4-0; drew 1-1 with Central Coast; lost 2-0 to Adelaide United 2-0.
FFA CUP: lost 3-1 to Sydney FC
LAST YEAR: for perspective on how long ago the 2013-2014 season was, use this club as a template. Last term saw the agony of John Aloisi’s coaching tenure and the side’s comedic inability to score, followed by John van ‘t Schip almost pulling off a finals miracle before they ran out of puff. They finished last.
Melbourne City Head Coach John van 't Schip has to fulfil big expectations. Source: Getty Images
THIS YEAR: it’s a new club, literally. The Manchester City glitz has arrived with a pre-season UK tour, the big names, and with that, comes expectation both on the field, and off it, where plenty are curious to see how many bums on seats turn up at AAMI Park.
TRADING GRADE: pass, with flying colours. Solid A-League players, Premier League players and an incumbent La Liga winner (albeit for a guest stint) arrive. Exciting stuf.
MELBOURNE VICTORY
IN:Carl Valeri, Besart Berisha (Brisbane Roar), Matthieu Delpierre (FC Utrecht), Daniel Georgievski (Steaua Bucharest), Fahid Ben Khalfallah (Troyes)
OUT: James Jeggo (Adelaide), Adama Traore, James Troisi (end of loan spell), Tom Rogic (end of loan spell) Francesco Stellar, Pablo Contreras (retired)
PRE-SEASON: P 9 W 9 D 0 L 0
All wins: Bentleigh Greens 3-0; Hume City 4-1; Port Melbourne 5-0; Richmond 3-0; Ballarat Red Devils 10-0; Adelaide United 1-0; Perth Glory 3-0.
FFA Cup: Bayswater SC 2-0; Tuggeranong United 6-0
Carl Valeri in action back at home in Canberra. Source: Getty Images
LAST YEAR: Kevin Muscat took over from Ange Postecoglou and had some hurdles to overcome in all areas of the field, but inevitably steered the club to one game off the grand final.
THIS YEAR: Muscat’s pre-season, Muscat’s recruitment – the excuses are gone, but the signs look good. All four recruits are of excellent pedigree and put the Victory right in the frame to enjoy a bumper season and create quite a mood in Melbourne alongside City.
TRADING GRADE: pass, they’ve got the A-League’s best striker, along with three recruits who bring tremendous experience and quality to an already impressive unit.
NEWCASTLE JETS
INS: Billy Celeski (Liaoning Whowin), Adrian Madaschi, Josh Barresi, Marcos Flores (Mariners), Edson Montano (on loan), Johnny Steele (New York Red Bulls), Jeronimo Neumann (Adelaide United), Sam Gallagher (Hà Nội T&T F.C.), Brandon Lundy.
Marcos Flores in Jets colours. Source: Supplied
OUTS: Connor Chapman, James Brown (Melbourne City), Josh Mitchell, Joey Gibbs, Ruben Zadkovich (Glory), Zenon Caravella, Adam Taggart (Fulham), Emile Heskey (released), Josh Brillante (Fiorentina)
PRE-SEASON: P 7 W 3 L 4
Defeated Weston Bears FC 8-1; lost 1-0 to Juventus; lost 4-0 to Brisbane Roar; 4-2 to Sydney FC; defeated North Queensland All Stars 3-0; defeated Wellington 2-1.
FFA Cup: lost 2-0 to Perth Glory
LAST YEAR: an underwhelming campaign in the Hunter, which saw Gary van Egmond depart and the side miss the finals again.
THIS YEAR: new coach Phil Stubbins has added a couple of players with key A-League experience, while Joel Griffiths and David Carney are back with a full pre-season under their belts. There will be great hope that Marcos Flores finds his mojo, while much will be expected of Ecuadorian striker Edson Montano and Northern Ireland international Jonny Steele.
TRADING GRADE: par – just. A solid effort at trying to replace last season’s departures, including Brillante, Taggart and Zadkovich, with an injection of quality, too.
Look out for Andy Keogh. Source: News Corp Australia
PERTH GLORY
INS: Youssof Hersi (Wanderers), Dino Djulbic, Ruben Zadkovich (Jets), Andy Keogh, Danny Vukovic (returning from loan spell), Diogo Ferreira (Roar), Adrian Zahra, Mitch Nichols (on loan from Cerezo Osaka), Jordan Thurtell, Richard Garcia (Minnesota)
OUTS: Jacob Burns (retired), Ryan Edwards (end of loan), Darvydas Sernas (end of loan), Adrian Zahra, William Gallas, Travis Dodd, Steve McGarry
PRE-SEASON RESULTS:
Defeated Newcastle Jets 2-0; drew 1-1 with Malaga; drew 1-1 with Adelaide United; lost 3-0 to Melbourne Victory;
FFA CUP: defeated Newcastle Jets 2-0.
LAST YEAR: a year that started with the promise of Alistair Edwards’s Glory revolution saw his acrimonious and controversial exit in December. Kenny Lowe came in but couldn’t manufacture a miracle run into the finals, while marquee recruit William Gallas provided little return.
THIS YEAR: can this year see promise fulfilled at nib Stadium? There’s some superb recruiting both in volume and quality, headlined by prolific scorer Andy Keogh mixed in with players who know what it takes to succeed in the A-League. Excuses have run out.
TRADING GRADE: pass.
New cavalry at Moore Park. Source: Getty Images
SYDNEY FC
INS: Shane Smeltz (Perth Glory), Bernie Ibini (Shanghai Donya – loan), Alex Brosque (Al Ain), Alex Gersbach (Australian Institute of Sport), Marc Janko (Trabzonspor), Christopher Naumoff (Promoted from Youth Squad), Anthony Bouzanis (Promoted from Youth Squad).
Sydney FC’s all time top scorer returns. Source: News Corp Australia
OUTS: Brett Emerton (Retired), Terry McFlynn (Retired), Alessandro Del Piero (Delhi Dynamos), Richard Garcia (Perth Glory), Marc Warren (APIA Leichhardt), Blake Powell (APIA Le |
or teacher, they will all say the same thing, that it won't work. None of these people have tried it, and really know nothing about water fuel. 2.) Forced supression. If the disinformation will not keep people's curiousity at bay, and if they have a suitable test engine, and time, they may end up figuring out how to run their car engine on water. When this happens there has always been forced supression. Forced supression is just what it sounds like. It includes threats to the inventor or offers to buy all rights to an invention, in order to keep it out of the public domain. The world is waiting for new technology to save the world. Water fuel is that technology. But the technology isn't new, it has simply been hidden from view. We are counting on the experts to help us save money and reduce pollution. Well that isn't going to happen. Unfortunately the experts are the same people who work for the the large corporations, the same corporations who have destroyed our planet for the last 100 years. The energy companies are absolutely not going to help us! They are going to keep raising prices, and keep creating the same gas guzzling cars and coal powered electrical generators for as long as they can. So long as people continue to be in the dark about water fuel, and other technologies, the energy companies are going to keep stealing our money. They are smart. They know what they are doing. Believe it or not, it isn't just the oil companies who are stealing our money with high fuel prices. The car companies keep producing fuel wasting vehicles. Fuel economy stays very poor considering the new technology that is available. From the 1960's all the way up to about 2006, the average gas mileage of vehicles went slightly down! This was according to the governmnent's own test data, and is available on a government website if you would like to take a look. Yes, the gas mileage went down over a 40 year time period. How can this be? This is such an obvious conspiracy that it would take an absolute fool not to see it. Fuel injection, computers, better engines, better spark plugs, better alloys, better engine control methods, and still fuel economy goes down? How is that possible? Today's fuel economy (MPG) on new cars is still unaccpetable. The people of the world are being ripped off. We are being given a raw deal on our fuel prices, and on the cars we buy. What is most unsettling about all of this is that nobody cares. People seem to enjoy paying for fuel that we don't even need. When the subject of water fuel is brought up to people, they seem completely uninterested. If you bring up the subject to a teacher they will just get upset and tell you that it isn't even possible, although they really know nothing about Brown's gas, which is not normal hydrogen! People who live here on Earth do not care about one of the most important issues that has ever existed in our known history. We can eliminate the use of fossil fuels, and power the world on water, and people don't even want to talk about the issue? With the extreme apathy in individuals, we cannot place all of the blame on the oil companies. People need to start talking about water fuel, and other alternative energy technologies, otherwise the war will be lost. I suggest that you share this website, and all other related websites, and videos, and try to spread the word. To get water fuel visible to the masses, it has to reach the masses, and the only way to do that is by a grassroots effort by people like ourselves. Every car manufacturer today could design a car to run on water. You could simply add some water to your fuel tank and drive away. The exhaust emissions would be absolutely pure. The by-product of HHO (Brown's gas) combustion is water. You start out with water, split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, then when it burns, it converts back into water. But when you burn Brown's gas (HHO produced from the electrolysis of clean pure water without an excessive amount of chemicals) something occurs during the burning process that draws in energy from the surrounding environment. Hydrogen and oxygen gas that is not produced from electrolysis does not carry the same electrical charge, and it is not Brown's gas. Many people misundertstand this very important concept. If you burn gas from a compressed cylinder that you purchse from a bulk gas supplier, it does not draw in additional energy from the ambient zero point field around us. This is why the theory that you "cannot get more out than you put in" is completely wrong. It ignores the proven aspects of Brown's gas. Yull Brown proved that Brown's gas has properties which are much different than regular non-electrically charged gases. The electrolysis process is the key to this whole thing. Electrolysis produces electrically charged HHO gas, which is Brown's gas. You cannot buy a container filled with hydrogen gas and mix it with oxygen to create Brown's gas. To make Brown's gas, which contains many more units of energy per volume than standard hyrogen and oxygen gas, you must produce it using electrolysis. The electrolysis process is what is responsible for creating Brown's gas. Brown's gas can power a car engine easily, on such small amounts of gas that there is no storage tank needed, whereas normal hydrogen is not as powerful, and you will need a very large volume of gas to be stored in containers aboard the vehicle, which is not practical. If you ever notice, the car companies do produce hydrogen powered concept vehicles, but they never use electrolysis to produce the hydrogen, they always store it in expensive carbon fiber tanks. By doing this, they avoid the entire issue of Brown's gas. You cannot make Brown's gas from using a compressed cylinder of hydrogen gas. Compressed hydrogen is just a normal flammable gas, it doesn't have any unusual characteristics. To get Brown's gas you need to produce gas using electrolysis. Brown's gas, because of it's strong electrical charge, is a form of zero point energy. It draws in a surplus of energy from the zero point field when it burns. Normal hydrogen gas is not a form of zero point energy, and that's why the major corporations never show you anything that has electrolysis, not even HHO welders. They avoid electrolysis devices at all costs because it might reveal the existence of zero point energy. Zero point energy devices are overunity, meaning you will be able to get more out than you put in. This is not magic, it is simply the process of collecting energy from the zero point energy field, which is electrical in nature. (Another way to collect zero point energy is to use a radiant charger.) To make Brown's gas you will need a water fuel cell with electrolysis plates, and a special DC power supply to generate the gas. You cannot generate this gas properly with AC, because it can cancel the electrical charge. Not all water fuel cells will generate Brown's gas. You have to find a way to create the strongest electrical charge possible on the water, otherwise the gas produced will only contain about 12% Brown's gas. A variation of Brown's gas is produced by the Joe cell. The Joe cell releases subatomic particles, called protons, which are actually hydrogen atoms that have been stripped of an electron, otherwise known as H+ ions, these particles act similarly to Brown's gas, but are able to saturate porous metals like aluminum and cast iron. A Joe cell is so efficient that it can operate an engine completely without gasoline, and without any significant current going to the Joe cell. The Joe cell also makes a very good "booster" to assist in fuel economy. When you do produce 100% Brown's gas, you can power you car on a tiny fraction of the gas. Your engine can be run on very small amount of Brown's gas, because when it combusts, it draws in additional energy from the ambient environment. When you ignite Brown's gas inside an engine using a high voltage spark, while it is compressed, it creates far more power than mainstream science can explain. It is because mainstream science has intentionally ignored the existence of Brown's gas. Water fuel is as real as it gets. It is NOT a myth. The only myth is the idea that we need fossil fuels to create energy. The scam also says that we cannot survive without fossil fuels, that when we run low on fossil fuels, our industries will stop, and the cars will stop too. That is not true. We have plenty of alternatives. There is absolutely no need for fossil fuels. We haven't needed them for at least 60 years. People have been building cars that run on water since the first day of the internal combustion engine.. This is the truth that has been hidden from us. Please start sharing the truth with your friends and family. The Earth needs our help with this issue. More Information about Water FuelAn FDA ruling approving the sale of genetically modified salmon has recharged the debate over the future of our food. But GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, have been part of our diet for years.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association says up to 80 percent of processed food sold in the U.S. is genetically modified, and most of it is not labeled.
The CEO of Monsanto, one of the world's largest producers of genetically modified seeds, says the company is committed to innovation in agriculture, but critics say it should be more transparent.
"I think part of the challenge is there's such misinformation of where food comes from... between what arrives on a plate and farmers do," said Monsato's CEO Hugh Grant. "So I think for companies like mine, we've got to work out in explaining what agriculture is and where food comes from."
According to an Associated Press-GfK poll, 66 percent of Americans support requiring food manufacturers to put labels on products containing GMOs. But Monsanto spent millions of dollars, lobbying against a GMO labeling ballot initiative in Colorado and Oregon.
Grant says states' adoption of mandatory GMO labels results in "confusion" and "more expenses," rather than transparency.
"A deep concern is that we'll end up with a patchwork quilt of state-by-state regulations where you'll end up in a place where you can't move a can of soup from one state to the other," Grant said. "The consumer is going to end up paying four or five hundred dollars more a year on their grocery bills."
Instead, Grant said he is in favor of federal labeling requirements, similar to the regulations that apply to organic foods.
Monsanto was embroiled in another controversy surrounding its popular herbicide, Roundup. Earlier this year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer said that its main ingredient, glyphosate, could cause cancer.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Roundup for use in America, but the majority of the studies the agency considered - 14 of the 23 studies cited in EPA's report -- was funded by Monsanto.
Grant dismissed the criticisms, and said he felt "very good about the safety of the product," and that it "has been studied extensively for more than 40 years."
Major food chain restaurants have also joined in on the GMO debate. Chipotle committed to leaving GMO foods out of its food supply, and McDonalds rejected using genetically modified potatoes.
"I think more and more of this is all interconnected so we've been spending more time talking to the food companies, more time talking to consumers," Grant said.
Grant also stressed that GMO foods played an important role in food security and climate change.
On Tuesday, Monsanto pledged to be carbon neutral by 2021 by working with farmers who use its products to help reduce carbon emissions.North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper on Wednesday claimed that many South Koreans citizens are comparing their President Park Geun-hye and the ruling Saenuri party to Nazis.
The newspaper included a number of “quotes” – which could not be corroborated as coming from any South Korean outlet – from South Koreans referring to their president as “Parktler” and her party as the “Sae-Nazi” party.
The Rodong also said that the South Korean government’s attempt to pass on fake information against North Korea reminded them of Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany.
This is not the first time North Korean state media has compared a rival state to Hitler: On March 14 of this year the Rodong said that “looking at the Obama administration makes us think that the long-gone Hitler and his puppets, who were once punished by history, have been reincarnated and come back to the throne of power.”
Then, on March 17, the Rodong also denounced South Korea’s actions against North Korean sympathizers (jongbuk) by describing the South Korean government as fascist, a “strangler” of democracy and human rights and using the “Parktler” and “Sae-Nazi party” epithets.
But a Google search revealed that the Korean key word “Parktler” (박틀러) had been used in only an internet post and a number of minor podcasts that included “Parktler” (박틀러) in their titles. No reference to “Parktler” or “Sae-Nazi” could be found in the mainstream South Korean media recently, or have trended in South Korean internet culture.
The Hitler comparison is a popular one in Korea when describing the rival state: In 2013 South Korea’s New Focus published an account asserting that Kim Jung Un had gifted Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf to his subordinates on his birthday. However, many experts have called this story false and thinly sourced.
Sohn Kwan-ju, editor of the Daily NK believes that using a well-known and universally loathed figure such as Hitler would help Rodong convince its readers.
“Among of North Korea’s official policies are anti-fascism and anti-imperialism. Using the world’s most hated fascist as a symbol would help its readers hate the South Korean government even more,” said Sohn.
The validity of the North’s claim, as to whether South Koreans were actually describing their leaders as “Parktler” or “Sae-Nazi” is immaterial, as the Rodong is for “internal use only.”
Picture: Fyodor TertitskyVIZ Media Announces Home Media Release Of BLEACH SET 3 On Blu-ray Share:
Catch The Latest Installment Of The Paranormal Action Adventure Anime Series In A New Blu-ray Edition
San Francisco, CA, October 16, 2017 – VIZ Media, LLC (VIZ Media), a premier company in the fields of publishing, animation distribution, and global entertainment licensing, continues to expand the Blu-ray catalog for the beloved anime series, BLEACH, with the release of Set 3 on October 24th.
BLEACH Set 3 includes four-discs, covering Episodes 56-83, and will carry an MSRP of $54.97 U.S. / $63.99 CAN. Episodes will be available with dialogue selections for dubbed English as well as subtitled, Japanese 2.0 audio, with episodes presented uncut and in their original 4:3 format. Special bonus content for this new home media edition includes a “Behind the Scenes of BLEACH” segment featuring interviews with the English voice cast along with an added segment on Kon’s U.S. Tour.
In the latest episodes, it’s Soul Reaper against Soul Reaper as captains Ukitake and Kyoraku face punishment from Head Captain Yamamoto. Yoruichi encounters her former subordinate Soi Fon in a deadly battle, while Ichigo struggles to survive his own fight with Captain Byakuya. Meanwhile, Captain Hitsugaya and Rangiku break into Central 46, but they’re not alone!
In the BLEACH anime series, for as long as he can remember, Ichigo Kurosaki has been able to see ghosts. But when he meets Rukia, a Soul Reaper who battles evil spirits known as Hollows, his life is changed forever. Now, with a newfound wealth of spiritual energy, Ichigo discovers his true calling – to protect the world of the living and the dead as a Substitute Soul Reaper.
The BLEACH animated films and TV series (distributed in North America by VIZ Media, rated ‘TV-14’) are based on the smash hit manga series created by Tite Kubo (also published in North America by VIZ Media, rated ‘T’ for Teens).
For more information on BLEACH manga and anime titles published by VIZ Media, please visit VIZ.com.
About VIZ Media, LLC
Established in 1986, VIZ Media is the premier company in the fields of publishing, animation distribution, and global entertainment licensing. Along with its popular digital magazine WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP and blockbuster properties like NARUTO, DRAGON BALL, SAILOR MOON, and POKÉMON, VIZ Media offers an extensive library of titles and original content in a wide variety of book and video formats, as well as through official licensed merchandise. Owned by three of Japan’s largest publishing and entertainment companies, Shueisha Inc., Shogakukan Inc., and Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions, Co., Ltd., VIZ Media is dedicated to bringing the best titles for English-speaking audiences worldwide.
Learn more about VIZ Media and its properties at VIZ.com.It’s looking less and less likely that a serious troop withdrawal from Afghanistan will happen in 2011.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Sunday that 2014 was the more realistic date for a drawdown.
“I think in summer of 2011 we can bring some troops home but we’re going to need a substantial number of troops in Afghanistan past that,” Graham told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour.
Graham said that 2014 “is the right date to talk about. That’s when [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai suggests that Afghans will be in the lead and I’m very pleased to hear President Obama talk about 2014.”
“What I want to talk about is winning. Having the ability to stabilize Afghanistan and be a good partner with the United States forever. That means we’re going to need military force for quite a while, post 2014 when the Afghans hopefully get in the lead,” Graham continued.
“It will be great to have a couple of air bases there in perpetuity to help the Afghans send the right signal to the regions,” he added.
But President Karzai told the Washington Post this weekend that he wants to see a scaling-back of the US war effort in Afghanistan.
The United States should end special operations forces raids that aggravate Afghans and could exacerbate the Taliban insurgency, Karzai said in an interview with the Post.
“The time has come to reduce military operations,” he told the paper.
At the same time Obama announced last year that he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, he also announced that a drawdown would begin in the summer of 2011.
“Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011,” Obama said in a speech.
After winning back the House in November’s midterm elections, Republicans signaled that the president’s 2011 deadline would be a target.
“Republican Representative Buck McKeon, who was all but certain to be the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, signaled that the party would ensure that US forces have the ‘time” to achieve their goals,” AFP reported.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said last week that NATO should endorse Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s 2014 timetable for withdrawal.
Last Wednesday, the Obama administration began to de-emphasize the 2011 date.
This video is from ABC’s The Week, broadcast Nov. 14, 2010.
— With a report from AFPHi,
I just thought I'd post an update on where we are at.
So as you know the funding to get a food van was unsuccessful. But that hasn't stopped us. The van would have acted as a vehicle to deliver our products and to get to various markets and events and also as a mobile kitchen.
Down to people's generosity and profits from the business we were able to buy on a budget, our red Citroen Berlingo. This has helped us massively as now we can drive to more events outside of Leeds including a pop-up in The Grove in Huddersfield a couple of weeks ago and we've also got a beer dinner coming up at Major Tom's in Harrogate. No more relying on taxis!
We have also moved into a commercial kitchen and we're step closer to going full tie with the business. Wish us luck! We have exciting developments in the pipeline which we will announce shortly. In the meantime here's the van.
Jim and Danare developing a new drone which wipes out the computers and electrics in a building but does not harm people.
Aircraft manufacturer Boeing successfully tested the weapon on a one-hour flight during which it knocked out the computers of an entire military compound in the Utah desert. The missile can penetrate the bunkers and caves believed to be hiding Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities, but could do some serious damage to anyone else if the weapon falls into the wrong hands.
The missile flew low over the Utah Test and Training Range, discharging electromagnetic pulses on to seven targets, permanently shutting down their electronics. The test worked so well that even the camera recording the event was disabled.
Dubbed the Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP), it is the first time a missile with electromagnetic pulse capability has been tested. The missile is believed to be equipped with an electromagnetic pulse cannon. This uses a super-powerful microwave oven to generate a concentrated beam of energy which causes voltage surges in electronic equipment.
Surge protectors have the chance to react and computers fry.The number of people who came into contact with Texas Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan has zoomed from as many as 18 to 80, health officials in Texas announced in a statement today.
Duncan, a Liberian man who is the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, is being treated in an isolation unit at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas after being brought to the hospital by ambulance earlier this week.
Medical authorities initially said that they were interviewing and monitoring 12 to 18 people, including five children, who had been in contact with Duncan since he arrived Sept. 19. But today Dallas Health Director Zack Thompson told ABC News affiliate WFAA that 80 people who may have come in contact with Duncan are being interviewed.
First Ebola Case in U.S., But CDC Vows 'We Will Stop It Here'
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Face-to-Face With Patients in the Ebola Ward
Thompson said four or five members of Duncan's family are under a "control order" to stay inside their homes.
It's not clear if these four or five people under the control order are the five school age children who were told to stay home from school.
Dr. David Lakey, Texas health commissioner, talked addressed the control order.
"We have tried and true protocols to protect the public and stop the spread of this disease," Lakey said in the statement. "This order gives us the ability to monitor the situation in the most meticulous way."
Authorities say the family members do not currently have symptoms of Ebola, which include fever above 100.5 degrees, headache, nausea, diarrhea or abdominal pain. The order will continue until at least Oct. 19.
Thompson said he was aware of news reports that Duncan had been vomiting before being admitted to the hospital, but said he was not concerned about the vomiting.
Duncan flew from Liberia to Brussels on Sept. 19. He continued to Washington’s Dulles Airport, before flying to the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport on a United Airlines flight.
Authorities with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have said airline passengers and flight crew members aren’t at risk for Ebola because Duncan wasn’t exhibiting symptoms until days later, but his diagnosis has left residents in Dallas on edge, with scrutiny for Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, which allowed the man to leave after he told a nurse he had come from West Africa.
Duncan returned to the hospital by ambulance two days later. He remains in an isolation unit, listed in serious condition.
Mark Lester, the executive vice president of Texas Health Resources, said a communication issue was responsible for the lapse.
“Regretfully, that information was not fully communicated throughout the full team,” Lester said.
Five children who members of Duncan's family have also been told to stay home
Authorities also scrubbed down area schools, trying to contain the disease’s spread.
Duncan spoke on the phone Wednesday with family members who live near Charlotte, N.C.
“We talked today (with Duncan) and we prayed together with his mother and sister here,” said Joe Weeks, who lives with Duncan's sister Mai.
Weeks said that the family is concerned that Duncan was admitted to the hospital and put in isolation on Sunday, but hasn't received the experimental Ebola drugs.
“I don’t understand why he is not getting the Zmapp,” Weeks said.
The manufacturer of the drug has said they have run out of the experimental medicine.
Duncan's former boss in Monrovia, Liberia, said the patient had been his driver for the last year or two until he abruptly left his job in early September.
"I really don’t know," why he left, Henry Brunson, general manager of Safeway Cargo, told ABC News. "He didn’t resign. He just left the office. He just walked away.”
Brunson didn't know where Duncan went until he saw him on the news as the Ebola patient in Dallas, Texas.
Duncan's identity emerged as Texas health officials outlined efforts to track and monitor the people Duncan was in contact with since becoming sick over the weekend.
Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention, said Wednesday there is a seven-person team in Dallas working with the local health department and the hospital to identify people who came into contact with Duncan.
Story continuesJames Franco will be narrating the first audiobook of Stephen King’s 1979 classic, The Dead Zone — the inspiration behind the Christopher Walken film of the same name, as well as the television series, led by Anthony Michael Hall.
In an interview clip, exclusive to Entertainment Weekly, Franco called King, “one of the most pleasurable authors to read.” He added, “Even though we’re from different generations, all his influences, and things that he references, and the subjects he’s interested in seem to be all the things that I’m interested in.”
On the work itself, Franco noted, “You’ll find that the parallels to now are hauntingly close. And, considering that this was written over thirty years ago, it makes it even spookier, the closeness of the parallels. … It basically shows that Stephen King is a psychic.”
Compared to the other audiobooks Franco has narrated (his own, Actors Anonymous, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five) he said, “The Dead Zone is about five or six times as long as those other two books.” Franco added, “It took many sessions to do The Dead Zone, over the course of many months.”
EW has an exclusive clip from the audiobook below. The Dead Zone audiobook is available now.
The full interview clip can be heard below.If you’ve been in a coma for the past week, MS14-066 (CVE-2014-6321) is a TLS heap overflow vulnerability in Microsoft’s schannel.dll, which can result in denial of service and even remote code execution on windows systems (the bug is exploitable during the TLS handshake stage, prior to any authentication). According to beyondtrust the problem exists in a function (schannel!DecodeSigAndReverse) which is used by the function responsible for verifying ECDSA (ECC) client certificates. The function passes the ECC signature to CryptDecodeObject and uses the returned length parameter to allocate some heap space, but then uses a separate value derived from the decoded object to copy to that memory (modifying the signature in a certain way will result in the copied memory exceeding the size of the buffer, causing a heap overflow).
The problem with MS14-066 is that in order to exploit the vulnerability, you’d need a service which uses schannel and accepts client certificates (this rules out Remote Desktop). As beyond trust showed us, IIS can be configured to require or allow client certificates, thus becomes exploitable. Obviously SSL client authentication is only used in special cases and IIS will ignore client certificates by default, so the bug should have very little impact.
If you read the TLS handsake specification, a client certificate can only be sent if the server first sends a client certificate request (Sending a client certificate without a prior request will result in the server telling you to go home and sober up, then forcibly closing the connection). IIS will only send a certificate request if client certificates are enabled, remote desktop will never. As it happens there is a second “bug” in schannel which makes MS14-066 far more dangerous. Microsoft’s schannel TLS implementation doesn’t exactly follow the standards and modifying the OpenSSL binaries to just stuff the client certificate down the servers throat, will result in it being processed anyway (uh-oh).
To test my theory, the first thing I did was install windows 7 32-bit in a virtual machine and setup IIS7 (making sure it is set to ignore client certificates), then I started a remote kernel debugging session and set a breakpoint on schannel!DecodeSigAndReverse (called by function responsible for handling client certificate) in lsass.exe, which processes SSL/TLS on behalf of most windows services (it’s a system service so any exploitation will always result in NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM privileges).
I started a normal TLS session to IIS with OpenSSL’s s_client to check the breakpoint was not hit (it wasn’t), next I modified the OpenSSL SSLv3 source to send a client certificates even though the server doesn’t ask for one.
Jackpot! It was even the same story with remote desktop (RDP), a protocol that doesn’t even support client certificates, I was still able to trigger a breakpoint. I don’t really understand much about ECDSA / ECC so I’m not sure exactly what to modify in the signature to trigger the heap overflow (I believe some people just modified random bytes until an overflow was triggers), but this is definitely exploitable on services that don’t allow client certificates, meaning that any un-patched system running IIS or RDP is exploitable (not just windows servers as previously thought).
For a more in depth look at ms14-066 see here – http://www.malwaretech.com/2014/11/ms14-066-in-depth-analysis.htmlNetflix Price Hike Could Cost Company Almost 500,000 Users Netflix's recent price hikes could cost the company almost 500,000 subscribers, according to one analyst. The streaming giant raised rates on new customers in May of 2014, but grandfathered all existing customers at that time for a period of two years. Now those existing customers are paying more, with pricing for the two-stream, HD streaming plan jumping from $8 to $10 a month on May 1. The hikes should impact some 17 million people, or 37% of Netflix’s US subscribers.
While the bump will net Netflix some $520 million in additional annual revenue each year, Nomura Securities analyst Anthony DiClemente states the hikes could cost Netflix around 480,000 annoyed subscribers. “We note that this has long been a tenet of our investment thesis on the domestic business, as slowing subscriber trends are more than offset by increased monetization,” DiClemente wrote in a research note Monday. In other words, just like ye olde cable company, Netflix will look to price hikes as subscriber additions grow in order to keep pleasing investors. It's worth noting that not all grandfathered Netflix customers saw the hike on May 1. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently stated the company is still slowly deploying the hikes, with some of Netflix's oldest customers seeing the hikes the latest. We will phase out this grandfathering gradually over the remainder of 2016, with our longest�-tenured members getting the longest benefit,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote in a letter to shareholders back in April. “We are rolling this out slowly over the year, rather than mostly in May, so we can learn as we go.” And while Netflix might lose 480,000 subscribers due to the hikes, they're also set to add around 500,000 new subscribers this quarter, blunting the impact. Most Netflix customers still find the service to be a significant value, especially when compared to cable. Though as the Netflix catalog shrinks (one analysis suggests Netflix's catalog shrunk by 36% in the last two years) and the monthly cost nudges upward, that dynamic will start to change. Netflix ended the first quarter with 81.5 million streaming subscribers globally, 47 million of which are in the United States. Netflix ended the first quarter with 81.5 million streaming subscribers globally, 47 million of which are in the United States.
News Jump Tuesday Morning Links Monday Morning Links TGI Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links - Valentines Edition Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links ---------------------- this week last week most discussed
Most recommended from 59 comments
tired_runner
Premium Member
join:2000-08-25
New York 19 recommendations tired_runner Premium Member Got the email today Two HD streams now costs $9.99, up from $7.99.
Still not bad navyson
join:2011-07-15
Upper Marlboro, MD ·Verizon FiOS
2 edits 10 recommendations navyson Member Netflix content has dropped 40% in the past few years
Here is the article
Exstreamist pulled numbers from uNoGS (unofficial Netflix online Global Search) and discovered that in the United States, Netflix only has a little more than 5,000 movies and TV shows available to its users. However, in early 2013, the service offered nearly 9,000 movies and shows, signaling a 40 percent drop in content - See more at: »
»www.techtimes.com/articl ··· -now.htm I was reading a report that stated that the content available on Netflix is 40% less now than it was from a few years now. Higher cost and 40% less content? Not good.Here is the articleExstreamist pulled numbers from uNoGS (unofficial Netflix online Global Search) and discovered that in the United States, Netflix only has a little more than 5,000 movies and TV shows available to its users. However, in early 2013, the service offered nearly 9,000 movies and shows, signaling a 40 percent drop in content - See more at: » www.techtimes.com/articl ··· JTH.dpuf mikesco8
join:2006-02-17
Southwick, MA 4 recommendations mikesco8 Member The Math works in Netflix's favor... If they lose 480,000 customers that translates to about $58 million a year in lost revenue. If Netflix is gaining $512 million a year from the price increase, it is a no brainer for them.
shimonmor
Premium Member
join:2000-12-30
Sedro Woolley, WA 4 recommendations shimonmor Premium Member Catalog slimming bigger issue for me I could live with the small price hike but the shrinking catalog and padding with junk will probably end my relationship with Netflix. Much of the catalog is duplicated by Amazon Prime, anyway. And Netflix concentrating on making their own shows doesn't appeal to me because the vast majority of their home-grown content is not entertaining. And to make matters worse...their DVD mail catalog is also shrinking...hard to find movies are no longer available which was one reason I dropped their DVD mail option.Online grocers BigBasket and Grofers have held merger talks, though these discussions are preliminary and have moved slowly so far, multiple people familiar with the matter told TOI on the condition of anonymity. If the deal goes through, it will be one of the most significant moves made towards bringing about consolidation in a cash-guzzling consumer internet economy, which has been heavily reliant on investor capital to grow in the recent years.Sources in the know said talks between the two parties, which started in November last year, will be brought up during BigBasket's board meeting scheduled for end of January. The next steps also hinge on BigBasket's financing round, which if done successfully may scupper the proposed deal. The Bengaluru-based grocery e-tailer has mandated investment bank Morgan Stanley for a $150million fund-raise, which is expected to close by April.Separately, people familiar with the goings-on said Grofer's heavyweight backers SoftBank and Tiger Global, ploughing fresh funds into the merged entity, could also be an important criterion for deciding the future course of talks. “If their fund-raise doesn't go too well, the merger is very likely to happen keeping in mind the $60-million cash that's in the bank for Grofers,“ said a source.When TOI contacted Hari Menon, co-founder, BigBasket, he said, “We do not respond to speculations like these. We are in a very comfortable position on capital availability.“ Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder & CEO of Grofers, said, “We don't comment on speculation. Our business has grown 50% over the last quarter and we continue to work on building a sustainable grocery business. Currently, we are not looking at any investments or strategic options,“ he said.Grofers, which emerged as one of the hottest on-demand delivery startups amassing $130 million, most of it in 2015, had a tough last year as interest around the express delivery sector has waned perceptibly. In order to conserve cash, Grofers spent the whole of last year pruning its business and cutting costs, which stagnated its growth dramatically.Cost per delivery on the express model has been the big impediment for startups like Grofers, making the business unviable and in constant need for capital. Most players levy minimal charges, which do not cover full delivery cost for them, making their path to profitability a big challenge.Over the past year, Grofers has been attempting to change its model from a pure-play express delivery outfit to one where it's stocking inventory through distribution centres similar to BigBasket. It also went back to its merchants for facilitating deliveries to cut costs. BigBasket, which too launched a 90-minute express delivery service last year, saw its sales grow 231% to Rs 563 crore in the financial year ending March 2016.But net losses zoomed to Rs 277 crore from Rs 61 crore, on the back of increased marketing spends like signing Bollywood actors Shahrukh Khan as a brand ambassador, spiralling cost per delivery, and expenditure incurred on setting up warehouses. Its investors include Abraaj Capital, Ascent Capital, Zodius Capital, World Bank's IFC, Helion Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, among others.While BigBasket claims to be clocking an average of 50,000 daily orders out of which 25% is on its express platform, Grofers does around 10,000 average orders per day. |
the era of global uncertainty.
*Fyodor Lukyanov is Editor-in-Chief of the Russia in Global Affairs journal – the most authoritative source of expertise on Russian foreign policy and global developments. He is also a frequent commentator on international affairs and contributes to various media in the United States, Europe and China, including academic journals Social Research, Europe-Asia Studies, Columbia Journal of International Affairs. Mr. Lukyanov is a senior member of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and a member of the Presidential Council on Human Rights and Civic Society Institutions. He holds a degree from Moscow State University.
Uncertain World: Why Hasn’t Obama Renewed US Foreign Policy?
Uncertain World: Russia and Ukraine on the Verge of a Decisive Choice
Uncertain World: 5 Years After the 5-Day War, Everyone’s Learned Their Lessons
Uncertain World: Central Asia: An Indicator of Russia’s Imperial Aspirations
Uncertain World: Confusion and Irritation Reign in Global Politics
Uncertain World: Agreeing to Disagree on Snowden
Uncertain World: Obama and Xi Agree to a Truce
Uncertain World: The Eurasian Union – Fending Off European Ailments
Uncertain World: Endgame Draws Near in Syria
Uncertain World: The Fading Line Between Domestic and External ThreatsGlenn Beck has a new book out.
A neutral way to describe its subject would be to say it's about the debate over gun laws. The cover puts it slightly differently: "CONTROL: Exposing the Truth About Guns." I'm pretty sure buyers of this book already believe themselves to know the "truth about guns"; what they're looking to Beck for is, well, ammo for the debate.
"Control" has some of that, some information that could be categorized as positive arguments for the widespread availability of firearms. There's a nice section on how multiple-shot, magazine-fed guns "date back at least to the 1600s" – a nugget of research Beck uses to argue that the Founders fully intended for the second amendment to cover high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic weapons. For the record, I am in favor of the right to bear antique pepperbox revolvers; Mark Twain wrote that his "carried a ball like a homeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult."
But for a book about killing machines, Control is oddly, determinedly defensive. The whole first section is devoted to addressing public figures' statements about guns and gun laws. In his introduction, Beck boasts that "my staff and I watched countless hours of cable news and read hundreds of newspaper columns and articles" in order to find "the quotes about guns and the second amendment that seemed to come up most often, the stuff that is so pervasive that it's barely even questioned anymore."
But from what actually appears on the page, they mainly seemed to watch CNN on weeknights, 9-10pm ET. To judge by the attention Beck lavishes on Piers Morgan – he's quoted 74 times – you'd think the magnitude of his influence on American culture ranges somewhere between God and Oprah. Stephen King – whose "Guns" essay is the second-most cited (26 times) source of "pervasive" anti-gun thinking – is at least a name people might recognize, and not confuse with an off-brand hotel chain.
Really, all that research seems to have done is provide padding for the "notes" section of the book, which appears at first glance to be authoritatively – or at least, exhaustively – sourced. But the citations are mostly for the anti-gun quotes ("Nicholas Kristof, interview by Piers Morgan, Piers Morgan Tonight, CNN, 8 January 2013"). When it comes to documenting the research that supposedly debunks anti-gun claims, Beck pulls the underclassman's trick of completely citing a source each time it's used. Beck puffs up the scant amount of research that says what he wants it to say (guns make us safer!) and never, as far as I could tell, sends readers to the papers whose findings show, again and again, that the presence of guns in a home puts lives at risk, and that lax gun laws correlate with higher body counts on a state by state basis. (And here are some of those studies.)
The body of Control is deceptively short; I thought I would breeze through it. The problem is that it's so riddled with incomplete, out-of-date, and selective data that I kept stopping every few pages, or paragraphs, to check Beck's facts. As some point, I should have probably just assumed that every factoid was somehow cherry-picked and stopped looking up the more substantive studies, but Beck's audacity begs to be challenged. His padded footnotes make him overbold – as when he concludes in a section on background checks, "there is not a single, credible academic study showing that these regulations reduce any type of violent crime."
It took me five minutes to find this depressing statistic from a study of convicted criminals in the journal Injury Prevention:
"Nearly three of ten gun offenders (73 of 253 or 28.9%) were legal gun possessors but would have been prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms when committing their most recent offense if their states had stricter prohibitions."
And sometimes, you don't even have to turn to Google to see that Beck's numbers just distract from overall realities. In dismissing the notion that America's high rates of gun ownership have any correlation to firearm homicides, Beck points out:
"In 2011, the US murder rate was 4.7 per 100,000 people and the gun murder rate was 3.2. Much of eastern Europe, most of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, all but one South American nation, and all of Central America and Mexico suffer from higher murder rates than we do."
Maybe my fellow citizens feel differently, but "America: not as many murders as Southeast Asia" just doesn't offer the kind of snappy slogan that makes me swell with national pride.
So look, I could spend a lot of time on this aspect of the book alone. Indeed, there is a veritable cottage industry in debunking the research of one of Beck's oft-cited (13 times) sources, law professor John Lott. Lott has been accused of fabricating research and admitted that he presented himself as a former student ("Mary Rosh") in online discussion boards to defend his work and generally praise him (Lott was "the best professor I ever had").
Beck's transgressions, in this particular case, however, are less colorful. Busting his unsteady command of evidence loses some of its thrill when, time and again, a couple of minutes of research shows that Beck is ignoring, distorting, or just incompetently representing the data he doesn't like. (My favorite example of the latter? Beck citing research that showed a decrease in firearm homicides in Australia didn't count, because "the overall numbers are so small that the change is statistically irrelevant.")
But let's cut to the chase: Beck is a moral monster and possibly insane.
Here, I refer you to his defense of the argument that gun rights advocates' arguments ultimately depend on the possibility of the US undergoing "Extreme Makeover: Dictator Edition." That's his joke: give him some credit … for at least the beat or two it takes to get to his earnest assessment of that program going live. He has thought this through: sure, he says, it would be difficult for armed citizens to completely hold off a tyrannical government. On the other hand:
"If things were ever to get to the point where armed conflict became necessary – especially if the underlying issue was an abandonment of the constitution by our leaders – we'd likely see most soldiers refuse to fight or even flip sides and join the masses."
I think Beck misunderstands the nature of tyranny. It's one of the few places where I can reasonably claim to be less optimistic about human nature than he is. Beck's imagination about apocalyptic scenarios runs to a state-of-nature framework:
"What happens when food supply lines get cut off, or an epic storm cuts a large swath of people off from the outside world? Would you rather be hunkered down with a handgun holding a maximum of seven rounds (which is now the limit in New York), or an AR-15 with a magazine large enough to ensure that your entire family is protected?"
I've seen people respond to "epic storm" situations and they do amazingly well. People give shelter to each other; they hand out blankets; they give blood and donate money. This is not to say that there isn't opportunistic crime; it's just that post-Sandy, most victims would have preferred a case of water to any kind of gun. (And that is why we hand out water and not guns.)
Political upheaval looks a lot different than the aftermath of a natural disaster, or even a single attack, or one individual's personal struggle. A sustained march toward oppression hardly ever has a moment when "soldiers refuse to fight." It's more subtle, a slippery slope that is far uglier and more global than the "first they limit the magazines, then they arrest the gun owners" fantasy Beck and his compatriots engage in.
Beck narrows in with obvious zeal on that small argument in his discussion of gun rights in Nazi Germany. Truly, Beck thinks he has found his nuclear-option example with the idea "You know who else hated guns? Hitler." To be fair, he documents the Nazi crackdown on firearms ownership pretty well. Or at least, he doesn't use statistics and so I'm less immediately suspicious. But this is how he rounds out the section:
"If there had been no gun control laws in Germany prior to Hitler, and the German people were as heavily armed as Americans are today, would things still have played out the same way? Obviously, no one knows for sure – but it's hard to make a convincing case that things could've been much worse."
Oh, OK, there's a caveat there, "obviously, no one knows for sure …" Wait, what? An armed citizenry might not have stopped the Holocaust, but it also wouldn't have "made it much worse"?
It's the "much" in "much worse" that gives me chills. He's leaving the door open for the idea that an armed citizenry might have made the Holocaust a little worse. To imagine a scale of tragedy on which the Holocaust isn't, you know, ten bespeaks a mind that is either locked tight against reality or just has a hideously misshapen sense of morality.
But, really, thank you for brining this up, Glenn. The rise of the Nazi regime does highlight a disturbing fact about tyrannical governments: the most successful ones don't subdue a country with violence alone, anyway. Most ordinary Germans didn't have guns, but Hitler didn't use violence against most ordinary Germans, either. The Nazi party, in fact, championed "ordinary Germans"; Hitler's genius lay in convincing those Germans in a particular definition of "German" – and ordinary, for that matter. The horror of the Holocaust is that guns are puny weapons against state-sanctioned genocide and pervasive racism against a minority population.
In a parallel bit of rhetorical theater, Beck dedicates Control to Martin Luther King.
"King owned several guns but was subjected to the worst kind of gun control – and deprived of his basic right to defend himself and his family – when police in Alabama denied him a concealed carry permit in 1956."
I would argue the "worst kind of gun control" is the kind that allowed James Earl Ray to get one. But never mind … the point is that tyranny succeeds not because the government turns on its citizens, but by turning citizens against each other. Arming them will just, to borrow a phrase, make things "much worse".The Army has updated its 17-year-old rule book on espionage to specifically require that troops alert authorities if they suspect classified leaks to the media.
The revision comes on the heels of the service's WikiLeaks debacle. Earlier this year, an Army intelligence analyst was charged with providing a classified video to WikiLeaks, an anti-war organization that runs what it describes as a whistleblower Web site.
More Wikileaks Coverage
WikiLeaks in Disarray, Says Former No. 2 Staffer
WikiLeaks Chief Slams Media Coverage
Rape Probe Against WikiLeaks Founder Reopened
WikiLeaks' CIA Report Called "Not Blockbuster"
Michael Moore Praises Suspected WikiLeaks Source
The new Army regulation, released Monday, requires that troops alert authorities if they suspect that classified information has been provided to anyone who isn't authorized to have it. It also directs the Army to create a central system to collect threat reports.
The guideline identifies media leaks as a threat for the first time. Soldiers also are required to alert authorities if classified information has been removed from the workplace.
The guidelines are much more specific than the 1993 version, which requires that troops report cases of treason or attempted intrusions into automated systems.
Pfc. Bradley Manning is charged with leaking video of a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver. WikiLeaks posted the video on its website in April.
Military investigators say Manning also is a person of interest in the leak of nearly 77,000 Afghan war records that WikiLeaks published online in July.
The Army regulation was first reported by the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News blog.
Steven Aftergood, author of Secrecy News, said he was somewhat surprised to see warnings of media leaks lumped in with cases of sabotage and subversion. The changes are most likely a reflection of the government's "increasingly aggressive posture" toward keeping its secrets from the public, he said.
"It's part of a larger picture of heightened sensitivity to external and internal threats," Aftergood said.
Lt. Col. David Patterson Jr., an Army spokesman, said the revision was not in response to the WikiLeaks case "but involved a comprehensive review and update process."It's currently illegal to rent out your home on sites like Airbnb in Vancouver unless you have a hotel or licensed bed and breakfast.
But as anyone who has perused the site knows, thousands of people are skirting the rules.
Now, a national organization called Fairbnb, comprised of a coalition of hospitality unions and other groups, is releasing a plan to crack down on illegal use of the site.
Their idea: make Airbnb responsible for the listings on their site, and make sure they follow the law.
Thorben Wieditz from the Fairbnb coalition says that while he believes Vancouver has taken the right approach — by proposing to limit short term rentals to primary residences and prohibit the use of secondary suites or laneway houses — the policy requires teeth to be effective.
"The regulatory approach in Vancouver stops shy of actually ensuring that their policy will be enforceable. This is why we issued this report — to highlight this quite big loophole," he said.
"It allows the city to put forward a regulatory framework that looks good, has all the right ingredients but it also allows Airbnb to further grow their unlawful listings — meaning multi-listing hosts and properties held by investors — without being held accountable."
Proposes permit system
Wieditz said that according to Fairbnb, the ideal approach would be to require that all hosts have a license or permit, to ensure all units being offered up are legal, safe and are principal residences.
"As soon as you generate a permit number, you have to ensure websites like Airbnb are only allowed to list, advertise, and profit off of properties that have a permit number."
Wieditz said this approach could help avoid situations that have played out in other cities, where in some cases landlords and investors have snapped up multiple units and turned them into full time rental properties.
"This policy would ensure that any available units that could potentially be on the long term rental market for Vancouverites are being placed back into the long term rental market," he said.
Wieditz said this approach is being considered by cities like Toronto and San Francisco.
The City of Vancouver has not yet commented on the report, but is set to hold public hearings on a new law that could allow some short-term rentals on Airbnb later in the fall.The house is in a neighborhood that is drawing interest, but is separated from the rest of Corktown and its popular stretch of Michigan Avenue. (Photo: Tanya Moutzalias / MLive.com)
Detroit — A house like 3420 Harrison might have faced demolition in any Michigan suburb. Fires, bad roof, missing windows, and unrelenting decay may have left no other option.
But this house is in Detroit, which holds thousands of other vacant houses. That’s a problem in the city, where one of its solutions is to find buyers — and avoid tearing too many down.
Some people see what these houses can be. And they have the stamina to make it happen.
That’s why 3420 Harrison is not just still standing. The house, built in 1890 in North Corktown, is finding a new life at the hands of Bill and Nsombi Aro.
The Detroit Land Bank Authority gave it a chance in spring 2016 with the city’s so-called “owner of last resort” listing it for a starting bid of $1,000 at auction.
When they saw it, Bill Aro said, “I said it was too far gone.”
But it spoke to Nsombi Aro. “She went ahead and bid on it,” Bill said.
Over the course of several months, the Detroit couple has nearly completed the renovation of the 1,400-square-foot house built in 1890 and plans to put it on the market to sell when its finished. (Photo: Tanya Moutzalias / MLive.com Detroit)
MLive reported reported the Aros weren’t the only bidders for the house: They went two rounds with “CutePuppy” on the Land Bank auction site, before scoring the winning bid. The final purchase price was $1,300, made within 5 minutes of the auction’s end time on April 24.
And with that bid, they reached a new milestone in their history of doing small-scale restorations in the city.
“This was in the worst condition,” Nsombi said.
The dramatic change in this house comes from the restoration, not a re-envisioning of the space. This isn’t a home where eventual buyers will find the ubiquitous “open concept” floor plan within a historic facade. The list of new features is short. A half-bath was added to the first floor, among some reconfiguring of rooms off the dining room. An unfinished attic space is becoming a large bathroom, complete with clawfoot tub salvaged from a previous restoration.
“Other than that, it’s the way it was,” Nsombi said. The couple lives in a historic home in Woodbridge. They met when both were engineers, but their careers evolved into home restoration. Now they manage their own small rental portfolio while Nsombi looks for new projects.
“He’s into saving structures,” she said. “It’s sad when buildings are gone when they could have been salvaged.”
But she looks for what’s worth saving in a home. It won’t be solely marketability, or ease of work. The right home has to speak to her, with its look or its history.
The house on Harrison did just that. They heard about it from a neighborhood Realtor, Margaret Palmer. It was an easy drive from their house, and they liked the area.
When the Aros saw the house up for auction at 4320 Harrison, Bill said “it was too far gone,” but Nsombi bid on it, saying it spoke to her. (Photo: Tanya Moutzalias / MLive.com Detroit)
North Corktown is separated from the rest of Corktown — along with the popular stretch of Michigan Avenue that includes destinations like Slows BBQ and Two James Distillery — by I-75. But the popularity of the area is spreading north. Of the real estate listings in mid-December, only two have structures: One is a three-unit rental selling for the land value, and the second is a $1.8 million loft.
That listing snapshot may surprise people who drive through. The North Corktown streets still show wide swings of home condition, along with swaths of vacant land with many lots used for urban farming. Residents include those who recognize what it’s becoming — and those with ties to its past. Corktown is Detroit’s oldest surviving neighborhood.
The Aros’ house on Harrison has its own history as part of a neighborhood that was home to many waves of cultures and backgrounds among the people making their home in Detroit. One neighbor has been around long enough to recall that, in 1947, a black serviceman bought it — and the National Guard spent a month there, in response.
The Aros support themselves through their real estate, but even with the original condition of the house on Harrison, they don’t see a lot of risk.
They self-finance, Nsombi said, so there are no lender requirements. The restoration costs their efforts and investment into materials and workmanship. They’re watching expenses closely, believing they’re within a profitable zone.
But that’s not all that motivates them.
“Even if we break even, we still did a public service,” Nsombi said of the restorations. “It’s an effort that I would want to give anyway.”
The choices the couple makes for the home reflect what they would want if they’d choose to live in it. They’ve decided it’s not an option, but they’re proceeding with the vision of what would make it their home.
Like many historic homes, Nsombi said, it will “draw a certain kind of person to it.”
The house is smaller than it looks, at about 1,400 square feet today. But it lives bigger, without wasted space for hallways.
That size is part of what made the renovation appealing, Nsombi said, since she said it was in the worst condition of any home they’ve worked on. “I thought: Who’d want this ancient house?”
It was a valid question, particularly with the fire damage.
But today, as they quickly move toward a finished product, it doesn’t take much to picture the house as a home again.
The Aros have dry-walled and installed new windows. They’ve replaced all interior doors. Some moderate reconfiguration means the first-floor bathroom is no longer too close to the kitchen, and a study now occupies the space. Laundry is added to the first floor, along with a pantry.
Much of the flooring, including the old pine planks upstairs, needed to be replaced. The expansion of the unused attic space included the addition of a skylight as they rebuilt the roof. An alarm system was installed following a couple of break-ins and materials thefts.
The dumpster in the vacant lot next door holds evidence of how much debris the couple found, including an estimated nine years worth of trash that had just been thrown down basement steps.
The upstairs floor trim survived better than downstairs, Bill said, so he’s able to use it. Beyond that, there’s not much left inside to show that the house was a home for a century.
A deco-style vanity remains upstairs in a bedroom. And a card for a Hastings Street pharmacy was found, prompting reminiscence about what used to be the main commercial street in the city’s Paradise Valley district, home to many African-Americans from the 1920s until it was demolished in the 1950s.
Once the house on Harrison is completed, the couple can bid on more Land Bank houses — and they see themselves doing that. Nsombi is looking in other areas, feeling inspiration in certain houses and their potential.
They’ve already recognized with a Midtown renovation that remaking a rundown house “can change perceptions of what a whole neighborhood is like,” Bill said.
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2hnJ6v4Image copyright Facebook Image caption Oliver Hall had travelled to Syria in August to fight against so-called Islamic State
A 24-year-old British man has been killed in Syria, the BBC understands.
Oliver Hall, from the Portsmouth area, joined Kurdish armed groups to fight against so-called Islamic State.
Another British fighter described him as a "lovely lad" who was "excited to be there".
Kurdish sources say Mr Hall was killed on 25 November while clearing mines in Raqqa. He is the seventh British man to have been killed in Syria with the Kurdish-led group the YPG.
In a video recorded by the YPG to be released in the event of his death, he said: "I came here of my own free will, knowing the risks and consequences that can follow.
"Greetings to all my family and friends, if unfortunately you are seeing this. Biji Kurdistan (long live Kurdistan)."
Kurdish representatives in London said Mr Hall was killed while "clearing and dismantling mines".
He had no prior military training before travelling to the conflict in August.
Kevin Benton, an ex-soldier and British volunteer who met Mr Hall in Syria, said: "He was so willing to learn, always asking questions and taking everything in. He wanted to stop Isis."
'Sadly missed'
There have been a series of deaths in recent months - Mr Hall is the fourth British volunteer fighter killed in the Raqqa operation since July.
He travelled to Iraq then crossed the border into Syria, according to friends, where he attended the training academy of the Kurdish armed units the YPG, known as the People's Protection Units.
After two weeks of military training Mr Hall joined a newly formed unit within the YPG made up of international volunteers from Britain and the US.
Image copyright YPG Media Image caption Oliver Hall is thought to be the seventh Briton to be killed with the YPG
"I spoke to him last week just to see how he was doing, he seemed happy," Mr Benton said.
"He wasn't a soldier before he came to Syria, but he was professional and was really keen to learn. He was a very popular guy, everyone liked him"
"He wanted to be at the front, and wanted to be right where the action was, and he wasn't scared to go.
"He will be sadly missed."
The Kurdish-led YPG are part of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces who have been fighting against Islamic State, assisted by airstrikes carried out by the international coalition.
In October there were scenes of celebration among SDF fighters as the battle for the IS capital Raqqa came to an end.
However, many bombs and explosive booby traps have been left around the city.
The YPG is not a proscribed group in the UK, but British authorities have warned that anyone fighting abroad with armed groups risks breaking counter-terror laws.
Authorities have issued repeated statements aimed at deterring people from travelling to Syria.
Many British volunteers who have spent time with Kurdish armed groups in Syria have been arrested and investigated by police on their return to the UK.
A statement from the Kurdish Solidarity Campaign in the UK said: "Our deepest sympathies are with the family and friends of Ollie Hall at this time.
"Ollie's family have requested that they are left alone by the media for now to be able to process this shocking and tragic news."
The British Foreign office has not commented.
Britons killed in Syria
Mr Hall's death brings the total number of Britons killed while fighting for the YPG in Syria to seven.
Jac Holmes: A 24-year-old former IT worker from Bournemouth, Mr Holmes died while attempting to clear landmines in the city of Raqqa.
Mehmet Aksoy: The 32-year-old British film-maker from London was killed in September 2017, after travelling to Syria in June.
Luke Rutter: The 22-year-old from Birkenhead, in Merseyside, was killed in June 2017 after his regiment were ambushed by IS forces in Raqqa.
Ryan Lock: A 20-year-old former chef from Chichester, Mr Lock died in December 2016 after turning his gun on himself to avoid capture.
Dean Carl Evans: The 22-year-old from Reading died in July 2016, while fighting in the city of Manjib.
Konstandinos Erik Scurfield: The 25-year-old ex-Royal Marine, from South Yorkshire, died in 2015 to become the first Briton killed while fighting against IS in Syria.Starting up a business down under
A NEW report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), a professional-services firm, suggests that Australia could start a lot more businesses. It predicts that high-tech start-ups could account for 4% of GDP and 540,000 jobs by 2033, up from 0.1% of GDP and 9,500 jobs today. The report offers signposts as to how the country might shift from mining coal to mining data. Australia has about 1,500 tech start-ups, mostly in Sydney and Melbourne. Vast untapped opportunities await in health care, an industry that will surge as the nation ages. Australia’s regulatory environment for entrepreneurs is friendly, and the country is admirably open to skilled immigration. In an annual survey of global entrepreneurship, 54% of adult Australians said they were interested in starting their own business, compared with nearly 70% of Italians. But 19% of Australians actually began the process, the highest proportion of the 21 countries in the report, whereas only 3% of Italians did so. Nonetheless, PwC frets that “fear of failure” is more common in Australia than in America or Canada, and this could be holding it back. See full article.
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This chart is taken from the April 27th edition of The Economist. A contact sheet of all this week's graphics is available to download.Labor organizer and Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) is a hero to Sen. Bernie Sanders. To a broad range of policies – workers’ rights, regulation of corporations, finance, taxation, and benefits for the poor – both Debs and Sanders apply socialist principles. But their socialisms are very different.
That they’re not the same begins with the events of 1910.
Bombs, betrayal, and Job Harriman’s failed campaign for mayor of Los Angeles helped determine what American socialism became in the 20th century.
Part 2: “The election of Harriman would result in an orgy of evil.”
Also in this series
Job Harriman’s gifts for organizing and oratory had helped the Los Angeles branch of the Socialist Party grow from just seven affiliated clubs in 1890 to a countywide network with members in Santa Monica, San Pedro, Glendale, Long Beach, Bellflower, Buena Park, Fullerton, and other communities. He had barnstormed the state while running for governor on the socialist ticket in 1898. In 1900, as the party’s vice presidential candidate, Harriman ran with Debs on the Socialist Party ticket.
Harriman was even better known in Los Angeles as the defender of union members jailed for violating the city’s anti-organizing and street meeting ordinances.
Harriman’s true opponents, however, weren’t at city hall. They were at the Los Angeles Times building on First Street, personified by Harrison Gray Otis, the paper’s fiery antiunion publisher, and in the boardroom of the Merchant and Manufacturers’ Association, whose members were just as reactionary as Otis. According to the San Francisco Bulletin, the members of the Merchant and Manufacturers’ had only one principle: “We will employ no union man.”
In addition to being an advocate of progressive causes, Harriman was on the right side of the ideological split within the socialist movement which separated the moderate majority that followed Eugene Debs from a faction led by Daniel De Leon, one of the founders of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
For Harriman, capitalism would be reformed by union solidarity, Socialist Party leadership, and the ballot box, not by bombs and bullets. 1910 tested each of these propositions.
The Socialist Party’s Los Angeles headquarters, 1911. Courtesy of the Photo Collection – Los Angeles Public Library.
It was a year of labor militancy. Garment workers were on strike in Chicago and New York. Transit workers led a citywide general strike in Boston and Philadelphia. Miners picketed in Colorado and Texas and steel workers in Pennsylvania. In Los Angeles, members of the press union local were still on strike against the Times. By the end of 1910, with the support of the member unions of the city’s Central Labor Council, butchers, trolley car drivers, painters, brewers, and workers in other trades would join them.
The Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, 1897. Courtesy of the Photo Collection – Los Angeles Public Library.
And it was a year of labor violence. Police used billy clubs to break up picket lines in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Strikebreakers used their fists. Union members fought back, sometimes with greater violence. Since 1906, the Iron Workers union had conducted a campaign of dynamiting non-union plants. By the -end of 1910, bombs set at 110 iron works around the nation had caused several thousand dollars’ worth of damage but as yet no injuries or deaths.
In June 1910, workers in the metal trades in Los Angeles, including members of the Iron Workers union, went on strike for a minimum wage guarantee and an eight-hour day. The Merchant and Manufacturers’ Association raised $350,000 from its members to break the strike with scab replacements. The scabs repeatedly clashed with union picketers through the summer and into the fall.
The city council, goaded by Otis and the Times, unanimously passed an anti-picketing ordinance (drafted by Merchants and Manufacturer’s Association lawyers) that additionally criminalized “speaking in public streets in a loud or unusual tone.” Union picketers refused to obey, and nearly 500 were arrested, crowding both the city jail and the courts. Harriman renewed his defense of jailed strikers, and few were convicted.
Union organizers made use of public sympathy for the strikers, forming 13 new locals by September and more than doubling union membership overall. The Los Angeles branch of the Socialist Party, with Harriman as its appealing image, nearly doubled its membership. Harriman – defender of free speech, crusading socialist, champion of progressive reforms like votes for women – was a natural candidate to be the next mayor of Los Angeles. The next municipal election would be at the end of 1911.
A socialist victory, mayoral candidate Job Harriman promised, would make private utilities public, reserve Owens Valley water for city customers (not real estate speculators), put the industrial property around the new harbor under city management, and make property taxes progressive.
Harriman and his slate of city council candidates (one of whom was African American) campaigned on a platform of reforms that were already popular among middle-class Angeleños. A socialist victory, Harriman promised, would make private utilities public, reserve Owens Valley water for city customers (not real estate speculators like Otis), put the industrial property around the new harbor under city management, and make property taxes progressive. To rally union member support, Harriman distributed 20,000 copies of a pro-union pamphlet written by the celebrated labor attorney Clarence Darrow.
Harriman’s opponent was incumbent Mayor George Alexander, a respected “good government” reformer who had won a recall election in 1909 that swept out the flamboyantly corrupt Arthur C. Harper, one of many political hacks that Otis and the Times supported. In the 1911 primary election, Harriman beat Alexander by nearly 4,000 votes in a three-way race but failed to reach an outright majority that would have prevented a runoff election on December 5.
Harriman and the Socialist Party, 1911. Courtesy of the author's collection.
1911 mayoral candidates George Alexander (left, courtesy of the USC Libraries – California Historical Society Collection) and Job Harriman (right, courtest of Wikimedia Commons).
Passage of a women’s suffrage amendment helped to decide the outcome of the 1911 election. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
A new class of voters would determine if Harriman and the socialists or the Good Government League would run city government. A California constitutional amendment had given women the vote in a special election in October, making California the fifth state to grant women suffrage. Both the socialists and Alexander’s backers hurried in November to register the estimated 60,000 women in Los Angeles who were now eligible to vote. Harriman confidently predicted that working women would vote their economic interests and give socialists control of city hall. The Good Government League hoped that middle-class women might hesitate to vote for Harriman and socialism. An article in Collier’s magazine pointed out that “women will decide who will be the next Mayor.”
“The election of Harriman,” Harrison Gray Otis fulminated on the Times’ editorial page, “would result in an orgy of evil, in a season of stagnation in businesses, in the curtailment of building, in the withdrawal of capital, in hunger in the homes and rioting in the highways.”
Fearing that the election might already be lost to the socialists, the Times reacted with its usual vehemence. “The election of Harriman,” Otis fulminated on the Times’ editorial page, “would result in an orgy of evil, in a season of stagnation in businesses, in the curtailment of building, in the withdrawal of capital, in hunger in the homes and rioting in the highways.”
But the choice wasn’t between revolution and reaction. Socialists under Harriman and good government reformers like Alexander advocated municipal ownership of utilities and public transit, the completion of the Owens Valley aqueduct and the Los Angeles Harbor, and social services for poor neighborhoods. What distinguished the two parties was socialist solidarity with labor union goals and tactics and the reformers’ distrust of them.
Otis and his son-in-law Harry Chandler, the paper’s general manager, had a personal, pecuniary reason to fear a Harriman victory. As partners in the land company that was poised to benefit from the new Los Angeles aqueduct, the two men knew that a socialist mayor and city council majority would wreck their plans for the thousands of dry acres they owned in the San Fernando Valley.
Even as the Harriman campaign gained momentum, the Iron Workers’ bombing campaign came to Los Angeles. About 1 a.m. on Saturday, October 1, while non-union typesetters and pressmen put out the Times' morning edition, a bundle of 16 sticks of 80 percent nitroglycerine, connected to a cheap alarm clock timer, exploded. The dynamite also ignited barrels of flammable printers’ ink. The fire quickly reached a damaged gas main. It consumed the interior of the building and collapsed its masonry walls. At least 20 Times employees died; 100 were more injured.
That morning, more time bombs were found at Otis’ home and the home of the Merchant and Manufacturers’ executive director. On December 25, while the hunt was on to find the Times bomber, another bundle of dynamite detonated at the Llewellyn Iron Works, partially wrecking the plant.
The still-smoldering ruins of the Los Angeles Times building, October 1910. Courtesy of the USC Libraries – California |
, said he had been upset when told he could not go on the outings.
The council says 22 schools are involved in the pilot scheme
'I'm really angry,' she said. 'I'm being penalised for working and wanting to do better for myself and my children.'
The 29-year-old self-employed cleaner was willing to pay for her son to take part but was told places were restricted.
She said: 'It's a nightmare. What sort of incentive does it give to these kids to want to go out and work if all their friends are allowed to go on fantastic trips but they aren't? I'm quite annoyed about it.'
Margaret Woodhouse, from Trafford Council's children and young people's service, confirmed 22 schools in the area had been included in the pilot scheme.
She said: 'It was a government requirement the money be used to support children from "economically disadvantaged" families within the area. Trafford Council chose to follow the guidance from the Training and Development Agency - responsible for allocating funding on the government's behalf - and use free school meals as its criteria.
'This ensures the funding goes to support children from lower-income families.'
But yesterday the Government said the council appeared to have missed the point of the scheme. Officials said the aim was to ensure all children were able to enjoy out-of-school activities - regardless of their parents' income.
A spokesman at the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: 'Our guidance is crystal clear that no child should be left out.
'Activities should be available to all children - with those who can afford it being able to pay and take part.'
Officials pointed to guidance saying the scheme should 'encourage those who can afford to pay to do so, while using the subsidy to make particular efforts to encourage the participation of those who are unable to pay'.
The spokesman added there was no stipulation the money be ring-fenced for those on free school meals.
'It is down to schools to use their professional judgments in deciding who is or is not eligible for a subsidy,' he said.
'We're clear that many groups can be covered, including children in care, young carers and those with special educational needs - not necessarily limiting subsidies to pupils on free school meals.'
Last night Trafford Council officials said activities had been restricted to children on free school meals only in the Partington area.
This was because of higher than average levels of children with families on state support. In other areas of Trafford running the scheme, paying parents had been able to send their children on the activities.
A Training and Development Agency spokesman said: ‘The extended services disadvantage subsidy is provided to schools specifically, and quite rightly, to help those children whose parents are less well-off and who have fewer opportunities, and a greater need than others.
‘Our guidance to schools clearly states that any new activities – from breakfast clubs to summer camps – should be open to all pupils and should be financially sustainable, including charging for activities where appropriate.’Have you ever SEEN so many whiny MEN on Twitter than over the past week? Minus the day AFTER Trump won the election of course.
Seriously.
And all it took was the NRA to put out a new ad with the lovely Dana Loesch in it; first they accused her of using the word ‘fist’ and THEN people like Mark here reported the ad to Twitter for hate speech.
This is the 5th "ad" from @NRATV & they are increasingly shocking and hateful, threatening Americans and institutions. I've reported them. https://t.co/qy0dcMLrti — Mark Hertling (@MarkHertling) August 4, 2017
Many thought he had reported the NRA to the FBI or other authorities but no, it was just on Twitter.
As if that makes it much better.
The Blaze! What a great journalistic organization. For clarification, I reported @NRATV to twitter for hate speech. https://t.co/wF3J9uizMi — Mark Hertling (@MarkHertling) August 6, 2017
Dude. It was a commercial. Grow a pair, will ya’?
"Hate Speech" is not an exception to the principle of free speech.
People get to disagree with, and offend, you out here.@DLoesch — Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) August 6, 2017
NU-UH! Offending him is hate speech or something …
Imagine the type of person who gets so offended BY A COMMERCIAL that they report it as hate speech.
And he’s proud of it.
Where in the first amendment does it define hate speech?? — The Tick (@TACP_TICK) August 7, 2017
Right there next to free healthcare and abortion.
fisk
/fɪsk/
verb
1.
(slang) to refute or criticize (a journalistic article or blog) point by point — Susan_Wright (@SweetieWalker) August 6, 2017
Too late, guys like Mark have already deemed it hate speech and thus it should be destroyed.
These people.
This faux concern is ridiculous on it's face. It's clear this is just a ruse to shut down opposing views, & this is fascist behavior. — Suz Snarknado (@ZannSuz) August 7, 2017
It’s what progs do best.
Related:
‘They SPIT at me’: Obianuju Ekeocha SLAMS Lefties for their discrimination and ‘Ideological Supremacy’
Because SERVANTS! Dianne Feinstein accidentally exposes the Left’s RACIST views on immigrationA New Accord
In the feature episode from Season 8.5, “A Step Between Stars”, the Undine use the link between the Solanae and Jenolan Dyson Spheres to make their way into the Alpha Quadrant, unleashing this powerful enemy on the squabbling factions of the Federation, Klingon Empire, and fledgling Romulan Republic. What are the Undine up to, and how will the factions deal with this threat? These questions lie at the center of the story being told in Season 9: A New Accord.
The upcoming season will continue the story with a new feature episode, a space battlezone, and several fantastic pieces of queued PvE content that all tie this story arc together. The Dev Team is excited to unveil some of our best work in upcoming blog posts about each of these new offerings.
With the Undine playing a central role in Season 9, the development team has put a lot of effort into updating this enemy. We’re also taking the time to update the existing Undine episodes to showcase the new Undine. Look for details in a series of upcoming Season 9 Dev Blogs.
It’s important to me that the Star Trek Online team not only focus on the new. We also need to keep improving existing game play. To this end, the release includes numerous fixes and improvements, including a re-envisioning of Kit items and other valuable improvements that we’ll explain in detail in the coming weeks.
My personal favorite improvement of Season 9 is the reworking of Earth Spacedock. ESD has served its role adequately as a hub for Federation Captains, but I’ve always felt that it was confining and frankly not a very fun place to visit. I challenged the STO team to come up with a new vision of ESD that would be so Star Trek that Trek lovers couldn’t help but drool over it when arriving there. The team did not disappoint! The new ESD is still being polished as I write this, but it’s already a stunning place to visit.
Season 9: A New Accord will be live in late April—only weeks away. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the fun events (like the Mirror Invasion Event detailed here in this Dev Blog) that are already live on the Holodeck shard, as well as the many preview blogs coming your way.
We are looking forward to bringing you more content with this new season, and we hope to see you all in-game!
Stephen D’Angelo
Executive Producer
Star Trek Online
Season 9 Dev News Blog Index
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Click here to learn more about Legacy of Romulus, our free-to-play expansion for Star Trek Online. Advance your journey of rebuilding the Romulan legacy with a Legacy Pack purchase! Click on the logo below to learn more about it.
Want more game details, screens, and videos? Like Star Trek Online on Facebook for more exclusive content and follow us on Twitter – tweet us your questions! And, subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest Star Trek Online videos.In a statement, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the violence against the police officers was unacceptable.
“And any other person who might use the right to peaceful protest as cover to initiate violence, cause mayhem or incite disorder — whether against the police, the people or property of our great city — should consider themselves on notice that New York City will not stand for it.”
Witnesses and accounts on social media described protesters being rounded up and put in police vans. There were also reports of objects being thrown at police officers and scuffles between officers and demonstrators.
The Stop Mass Incarceration Network organized the march, one of several across the country. About 400 people participated in the early part of the demonstration, which began at Union Square at 2 p.m. and wound down Broadway toward Police Department headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
Around 4:15 p.m., some of the protesters split off and went to the Brooklyn Bridge, where they broke through a police barricade. Some jumped over a fence and onto the westbound traffic lanes.When architects designed Kessler Park in the early 1920s, they left the oldest trees and laid the streets to match the natural landscape. Twenty triangular pocket parks were planned, and stone steps offered pedestrian passageways between hilly streets.
Sponsored Message
Some of those steps remain open and usable, such as the ones from Belleau Drive up to Windomere.
But at least one set of the original Kessler Park steps became overgrown with brush and bamboo and forgotten for years. These steps, from Kessler Parkway at Edgefield up to Canterbury Court, have become the subject of a neighborhood fight.
About a year ago, City Councilman Scott Griggs found bond money that could’ve paid to reopen and restore the steps. But some neighbors living closest to the steps, on Canterbury, opposed reopening them. So Griggs instead used the bond funds to extend the Coombs Creek Trail.
Since the steps are on a 30-foot public right of way between homes, a few neighbors took it upon themselves to clear the steps, working with machetes to cut away tall bamboo.
Because there are no sidewalks in the neighborhood, the steps are convenient for pedestrians wishing to walk from Kessler Parkway toward Colorado.
“It can be dangerous to walk on Edgefield,” says Kessler Park resident Don Sanders.
Sanders says neighbors living closest to the steps have shooed people trying to clear the steps and even threatened to call the police, claiming they were trespassing. One neighbor declined to comment. One did not return phone calls. And a third just moved in a few weeks ago.
Neighbors on Canterbury asked the city to close the steps because of safety concerns, so orange barriers block them at Edgefield and Canterbury, even though they’re usable.Chief Dan George, OC (July 24, 1899 – September 23, 1981) was a chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, a Coast Salish band whose Indian reserve is located on Burrard Inlet in the southeast area of the District of North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was also an actor, poet and author; his best-known written work was "My Heart Soars".[1] As an actor, he is best remembered for portraying Old Lodge Skins opposite Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man (1970), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor; also for his role in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as Lone Watie, opposite Clint Eastwood.
Early years [ edit ]
Born as Geswanouth Slahoot in North Vancouver,[2] his English name was originally Dan Slaholt. The surname was changed to George when he entered a residential school at age 5.[2] He worked at a number of different jobs, including as a longshoreman, construction worker, and school bus driver,[3] and was band chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation from 1951 to 1963 (then called the Burrard Indian Band).[4]
Acting career [ edit ]
In 1960, when he was already 60 years old, he landed his first acting job in a CBC Television series, Cariboo Country, as the character Ol' Antoine (pron. "Antwine"). He performed the same role in a Walt Disney Studios movie Smith! (1969), adapted from an episode in this series (based on Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse, a novella by Paul St. Pierre). At age 71, he received several honors for his role in the film Little Big Man (1970), including a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.[3][5] He continued to act in other films, such as Cancel My Reservation (1972), Alien Thunder (1974), The Bears and I (1974), Harry and Tonto (1974), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Shadow of the Hawk (1976), Americathon (1979), Spirit of the Wind (1979) and Nothing Personal (1980), and on television, including a role in the 1978 miniseries Centennial, based on the book by James A. Michener, as well as appearing in a 1973 episode of the original Kung Fu series and in several episodes of The Beachcombers.
He played the role of Rita Joe's father in George Ryga's stage play, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, in performances at Vancouver, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and Washington, D.C..
During his acting career, he worked to promote better understanding by non-aboriginals of the First Nations people. His soliloquy, Lament for Confederation,[6] an indictment of the appropriation of native territory by white colonialism, was performed at the City of Vancouver's celebration of the Canadian centennial in 1967.[7] This speech is credited with escalating native political activism in Canada and touching off widespread pro-native sentiment among non-natives.[7]
In 1971, George was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.[8] In 2008 Canada Post issued a postage stamp in its "Canadians in Hollywood" series featuring Chief Dan George.[9]
He died in Vancouver in 1981 at the age of 82. He was interred at Burrard Cemetery.
Accolades for Little Big Man [ edit ]
Musical career [ edit ]
In 1973, George recorded "My Blue Heaven" with the band Fireweed,[10] with "Indian Prayer" on the reverse. An album, Chief Dan George & Fireweed - In Circle, was released in 1974 comprising these songs and seven others.
Writing career [ edit ]
George was well known for his poetic writing style and in 1974, George wrote "My Heart Soars" followed by "My Spirit Soars" in 1983, both published by Hancock House Publishers. These two books were later combined to form "The Best of Chief Dan George" which went on to become a best seller and continues to sell well today. One of his better known pieces of poetry "A Lament for Confederation" has become one of his most widely known works.
Personal life [ edit ]
Dan George's granddaughter Lee Maracle is a poet, author, activist, and professor.[11] His granddaughter Charlene Aleck is an actress who performed for 18 years on The Beachcombers on CBC. His great-granddaughter Columpa Bobb is an actress and poet.
Chief Dan George's grand-nephew, Chief Jesse "Nighthawk" George, currently resides in Chesapeake, Virginia and is the Inter-Tribal Peace Chief for the State of Virginia.
Cultural references [ edit ]
Dan George's B.C. Entertainment Hall of Fame star on Granville Street, Vancouver, BC
He was included on the famous Golden Rule Poster under "Native Spirituality" with the quote: "We are as much alive as we keep the earth alive".[12]
Canadian actor Donald Sutherland narrated the following quote from his poem "My Heart Soars" in the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.[13]
The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air, the fragrance of the grass, speaks to me. And my heart soars.
Legacy [ edit ]
Filmography [ edit ]
Written works [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]Chinese workers have covered a giant steel bridge with butter because officials are fed up with traffic jams caused by people who slow down to watch suicide victims leaping to their death.
Government officials in Guangzhou in south east China ordered workers to smear butter on all of the climbable surfaces of the 1,000 foot long steel bridge.
Government spokesman Shiu Liang said: “We tried employing guards at both ends but that didn’t work – and we put up special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here. None of it worked – and so now we have put butter over the bridge and it has worked very well. Nobody can get up there and anybody who tries either falls”
Bridge guard Wong Man said: “The butter makes the bars and frames slippery and hard to climb onto, and we can easily catch them.”
In one month alone eight people committed suicide on the bridge and numerous others had climbed up threatening to commit suicide before changing their minds.
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The bridge guard said: “Each time somebody threatens to commit suicide to get media attention or sympathy over personal problems we end up with several hours of tailbacks and there were lots of complaints.
“Since we put up the butter there have been no problems with these attention seekers.”Amirahmadi launches bid to be Iran's next president
12/18/12
Source: Amirahmadi 1392
Academic rival set to replace Ahmadinejad in hotly-contested June elections
amirahmadi.com
A committee formed by prominent Iranian businessmen has nominated Dr. Hooshang Amirahmadi to contest next summer’s presidential elections in Iran.
The move comes as Iran plunges deeper into economic despair, the prospect of war with the United States and international isolation fuelled by crippling sanctions designed to thwart the country’s alleged nuclear programme. Yesterday, President Obama’s former advisor anticipated US military action in 2013 if diplomacy and economic sanctions failed to halt Iran's uranium enrichment programme.
A highly-regarded academic, Amirahmadi holds a Ph.D. in economic planning and international development from Cornell University and is a professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He served for many years as director of the University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
He is also a senior associate at Oxford University in the U.K. and helped found the Centre for Iranian Research and Analysis and the American-Iranian Council, an organisation devoted to improving the relationship between the United States and Iran and promoting civil society institutions in Iran.
The elections, expected to be the most fiercely fought since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979, have already seen almost 11 candidates nominated.
At a private function, the Committee to Elect Amirahmadi for President of Iran in June 2013 formally nominated their candidate.
“In our view, Dr Amirahmadi is the most qualified candidate to be the president of Iran” said Freydoon Khoie, a prominent businessman and Chairman of the Election Committee that promises an open, transparent and professional legal campaign.
Highlighting Amirahmadi’s international credentials, Khoie notes that the candidate has been a consultant for many worldwide organisations and governments, including the World Bank, the United Nations and the Governments of Mexico, Turkey, Iran, Haiti, and the United Arab Emirates.
Abbas Bolurfrushan, Vice Chairman of the Committee and another prominent and highly respected businessman, added that the aim of the international legal campaign is to generate support for Dr Amirahmadi among the Iranian community globally and within Iran itself. “As we get closer to the registration date with the Ministry of Interior [in Tehran] and file our application with the secretariat of the Guardian Council who is in charge of vetting candidates, the intensity of the campaign will build.”
Amirahmadi is running on a conciliatory platform promoting peace and reconciliation between all opposing political factions of Iranians and ending hostilities with the United States, Great Britain and others, while forging closer relations with all other nations. The principles of the free market economy, peace with the world and Iran as an ‘eternal nation’ underpin his 74- page campaign platform. Published last month, Amirahmadi’s manifesto is available online at www.amirahmadi.com.
In addition to his academic posts, Amirahmadi is the author of several highly-acclaimed works that address the plight of Iran and the wider region, including The Political Economy of Iran under the Qajars, Revolution and Economic Transition: The Iranian Experience and nine other volumes such as The Caspian Region: A New Frontier of Energy and Development, Small Islands and Big Politics: The Tunbs and Abu Musa in the Persian Gulf, The United States and the Middle East: A Search for New Perspectives, Iran and the Arab World, US-Iran Relations: Areas of Tension and Mutual Interest, and Urban Development In the Modern World.By DAISUKE FUNAI
Just a few months ago, on March 11, the unthinkable happened — a horrific crash that devastated my family and wrenched through everything we had ever believed in.
At the age of 23, Sho Funai — my baby brother, the perfect student, inspiring athlete, and generous friend who had just embarked on a promising engineering career — was struck in a fatal hit-and-run.
The driver was a then-18-year-old woman, Nikolette Gallo, who later confessed to having consumed alcohol and marijuana at a party earlier that evening. Sho was struck from behind and left to die.
Despite her confessions, she was not charged with any felony besides hit-and-run, due to a mishandled investigation and the lack of action in completing a reconstruction report of the crash.
Now, the driver is scheduled for sentencing on July 26 with the judge “strongly considering probation and some sort of custody or alternatives to custody at the time of sentencing.” That is, for the killing and abandoning of a pedestrian by someone admitting to drinking, the judge is considering the lowest punishment possible by law.
This letter is about injustice and an appeal for your help.
The world lost one of the best that day; my brother Sho was as good as they come. The 350 friends and family who attended his funeral spoke with grief, as well as fondness and appreciation for all that he had done in his short time with us. He was an athlete, respected for his abilities on the field as well as his unassuming grace and character off the field.
Sho’s academic achievements also hinted at the bright future he had ahead of him. From early on, he was a math prodigy, attending classes at the local high school while in elementary and middle schools. He won trophies for chess and graduated valedictorian of his high school.
He excelled at UC San Diego, majoring in structural engineering and graduating magna cum laude. He was admitted into the master’s program at the same school and received job offers from several companies, including Boeing and Goodrich Aerostructures, before finishing his graduate degree.
At the funeral, his academic advisor and mentor spoke of Sho’s advanced research on composite materials and contributions to airline safety. Sho had submitted his thesis, while working full-time at Goodrich, just weeks before he was killed. He was awarded his master’s degree posthumously on June 16.
He wasn’t just perfect on paper; it’s the way he did things too. And this is not just an older brother’s pride. His professor remembered not only a brilliant man who, at such a young age, made contributions to the aerostructure field, but also a person with integrity and character and one who approached everyone and everything with a smile. Sho’s life was full, his outlook on life and the future, second to none. It was infectious.
He was inspired and worked hard but never flaunted his gifts. He was an empathetic classmate who reached out to strangers. One classmate wrote: “I was desperately looking for a group and Sho was the one person who willingly invited me. … I knew who he was. He was the guy that went up during Structural Analysis and correctly drew influence lines on the board in front of our intimidating professor.”
Another friend spoke of how she had never been able to stay upset with Sho, because his attitude exuded love, understanding and politeness. He was the first to admit any wrongdoing. He was selfless and willing to sacrifice any of his own comfort, so that he wouldn’t rob you of yours, so that he wouldn’t inconvenience you. He was the guy that gave you the good seat and offered you the last cookie.
Perhaps he was polite to a fault, because it was that same courtesy and the tendency to put others first that put him in the situation that evening. Ironically, it was with the sense of deep responsibility that he chose to walk to the work party one mile from his home, so that he wouldn’t have to worry about drinking and driving.
It was with a deeply ingrained sense of chivalry and not wanting to burden others that he walked a colleague to her car but refused her offer for a ride home. And for that, he paid dearly.
But, on the other side of town, someone else made many different decisions. The decision to drink alcohol illegally. The decision to get in a car, despite having been drinking. The decision to leave the scene of a crime. The decision to leave a dying man on the road.
Having a loved one taken from you violently, knowing that his death was entirely preventable, inflicts unbearable suffering; it is a torment that no person should have to endure, especially parents. Yet, what has added to this sense of helplessness and frustration is the way in which this criminal case has unfolded.
There have been inaccurate stories floating around, but the media are not at fault. The criminal investigation necessitated a certain amount of caution, as prosecutors and detectives tried to cull together the facts.
According to police reports and verbatim interview transcripts (and contrary to local news reports), there is no conclusive evidence that Sho was walking in the middle of a freeway.
Sho had been out, celebrating a colleague’s birthday, with about 15 colleagues from his first job at Goodrich Aerostructures. As was customary for him, he had walked to the party to avoid drinking and driving. At the end of the night, he walked a colleague to her car and refused a ride home.
He’d just moved to Ocean Beach and had not been completely familiar with the area, and it’s likely he got lost on the way home. He was struck on the shoulder, past the crosswalk where the sidewalk of Sunset Cliffs Blvd turns into Highway 8. It was the next major street parallel to his apartment.
The official reports also confirm that Nikolette Gallo of Rancho Bernardo had been drinking. She admitted to drinking several shots of vodka and smoking marijuana before getting in a car that evening.
Another friend, Haley Bertrand, also drinking underage, had been driving the car earlier, claiming “she [Bertrand] felt like she was more safe to drive than Gallo was.” But according to Gallo, she took over driving because Bertrand was driving “too slow (sic).”
Despite the significant damage to her car—including a shattered windshield, dented hood, broken/dented bumper, dented fender, missing front grille, shattered headlamp, and missing fog lamp — she didn’t stop, and only turned herself in the next day, after seeing news reports.
Gallo’s judgment and/or vision was so impaired that she allegedly didn’t know she hit a person (claiming she thought she hit a sofa or some animal). When asked if they had discussed the possibility that they’d hit a person, Bertrand replied, “I don’t want to say yes.” Gallo has expressed no remorse.
Despite this evidence and California’s zero-tolerance laws, the district attorney informed us that they were not in a position to prove Gallo’s intoxication.
At the interrogation the next day, during which the officer “smelled alcohol on her (Gallo’s) breath,” she walked away to eat something and tested negative to the Breathalyzer.
A reconstruction report of the crash — which could have revealed vital evidence — was never completed.
Because she didn’t remain at the scene, because of a mishandled interrogation and because of a missing reconstruction report, Gallo’s admission wasn’t considered sufficient evidence for a DUI, and the defense has settled for a hit-and-run. She has not been, and will not be, charged with driving under the influence, vehicular manslaughter, or any other crime connecting her actions to Sho’s death.
The outcomes suggest that our laws provide incentive to leave the scene of a crime. Our justice system encourages drunk people to drive rather than walk, and to flee the scene rather than report an crash.
Without a hearing and behind closed doors, Judge Dwayne Moring has set a sentencing date, stating that he would “strongly consider’ probation and some sort of custody or alternatives to custody at the time of sentencing.” According to the DA, the judge has decided that since Gallo is young, has a job, and has no prior record, that the leniency of probation is warranted. Never mind that Sho was all of the above and broke no laws — yet is now serving a life sentence.
I am a reasonable man who believes in compassion and forgiveness, and I am aware of humanity’s many flaws. But I am also keenly aware that our society rests on the trust it places in our judicial system to bring about justice and peace. I cannot be at peace knowing that my brother, who walked to a work party to avoid drinking and driving, is paying a life sentence, while another who made many different decisions that evening can walk away with probation.
Had Gallo been playing with a gun and inadvertently shot Sho, would she still be granted this same leniency? And although I am not implying that race played a factor in this case, I do have to wonder about the lack of outrage over it, because it involved a white female driver and an Asian male pedestrian. Had this been a case of black and white, I can’t help but imagine that this would be a bigger deal.
I realize that no sentence will bring Sho back. I am disappointed that the district attorney was not more aggressive about pursuing a harsher indictment (i.e., not only felony hit-and-run but also driving under the influence resulting in death and vehicular manslaughter). And I am disappointed with the judge’s decisions.
I would like the judge to reconsider the case. I am asking that we hold our publicly elected officials accountable to the people they serve and represent.
That these decisions and this plea deal were made behind closed doors is legal yet lacks transparency. That the defendant was able to afford THE former district attorney for a defense before reaching this deal is their prerogative, but it doesn’t sit well. We do not know on what basis any decisions were made.
In addition to asking the judge to reconsider, what we can do now is work towards ensuring that the rest of the process is more transparent and that the judge takes the people’s voice into account in determining the sentence.
If the judge believes that probation is the appropriate sentence, then I implore him to explain publicly under which laws and factors he based his decisions. I would like him to explain how probation equates to the killing and abandoning of a man.
According to the DA, the judge is leaning towards his lenient sentence because the defendant is young, has a job, and has no prior record. I would like an explanation as to which laws and rules make these the most important for consideration.
I would like for the judge to explain how the following factors are then taken into account: that my brother was also young, that he had a full-time job at Goodrich and was completing his master’s in engineering, that he had a clean record and reputation as the “designated driver,” that he broke no laws. That the defendant has expressed no remorse for ruining so many lives.
I also ask that the judge explain to what end this lenient sentence will ultimately serve. Giving second chances to those who selfishly and recklessly broke laws which resulted in death — while knowing that there will be no such second chances for us — seems biased and unfair.
If the judge believes that this lenient sentence will rehabilitate the defendant, then I also ask that he consider the impact that this decision will have on us, Sho’s friends and society. What is the cost of teaching one woman a lesson? At least one man dead. A life sentence for family and friends. And improper lessons for society writ large.
What we will learn from such an outcome is that life is cruel and unfair. We will learn that the justice system is broken. We will learn that our laws provide incentive to leave the scene of a crime. We will learn that our justice system encourages drunk people to drive rather than walk. We will learn that it is advantageous to flee the scene rather than report a crash resulting in death. We will learn that people like Sho are too good for this world.
It is true what they say about people revealing their true colors in times of great adversity. And it seems equally true that people reveal their true colors in how they treat and behave towards others who are down, who are the most vulnerable and in need of help, empathy and space. Time has yet to heal, but we’ve faced the darkest and most difficult of days, thanks to the empathy and kindness of friends, colleagues, community members and strangers.
I am writing in appeal to that kindness that so many people have shown us over these last few months. If you feel that this case deserves more careful consideration, if you feel that a punishment of probation does not fit the crime, then I ask you to get involved. Here’s how:
1) Sign this petition.
2) Write a letter to Judge Dwayne Moring. As a publicly elected official, Judge Moring should make decisions that make sense to the people. We ask that the case and sentence be given careful reconsideration. You can send your letters to the address below; they will be accepting victim impact letters until July 17:
Reference: People vs. Nikolette Kristina Gallo (Case number CD239761)
The Honorable Dwayne Moring
San Diego Superior Court, Central Division
220 West Broadway, Dept. 30
San Diego, CA 92101
3) Attend Ms. Gallo’s public sentencing on July 26, 1:30 p.m. at the address above.
Holding public officials accountable for their work means being vocal. Come out to the sentencing and let the judge know your thoughts.
Thank you for your support.A series of photographs starring victims scarred by acid attacks in India have been released as part of a charity's work to highlight the problem. Photographer Rahul Saharan has worked with the Stop Acid Attacks campaign group for two years, and met the girls at its treatment and rehabilitation centre, Chhanv, in Delhi.
The girls have all been treated at the Stop Acid Attacks centre in Delhi Credit: Rahul Saharan
He told ITV News he was inspired by their stories to help promote the work of the charity, and to inspire victims into being confident when going out in public, rather than staying at home out of shame.
I want to change the perception of beauty, to which society has a very narrow approach. Everyone is beautiful and they must feel beautiful. It doesn't matter if you are skinny to healthy,dark to fair, tall to short,ebony to porcelain-skinned; the quirky, clumsy, shy, outgoing. Instead of taking professional models we took these beautiful girls as models, because they define beauty, courage, postiveness [sic], there is so much to beauty and these girls are strong. – Rahul Saharan
Rahul says he wants to 'change society's perception of beauty' Credit: Rahul Saharan
It's hoped the shoot will help others build their confidence Credit: Rahul Saharan
Rahul says he wants to help girls feel able to go out in public, rather than stay at home in shame Credit: Rahul Saharan
Among the five girls used as models is Ritu, who had acid thrown at her by two men on a passing motorbike as part of a property dispute. Rupa was attacked in 2008 on the order of her stepmother. She wants to become a clothing designer and employ other victims - and she even designed the clothes used in the shoot.
One of the girls, Laxmi, was attacked by an older man after she spurned his advances Credit: Rahul Saharan
Stop Acid Attacks says there are countless other examples of this kind of vicious attack Credit: Rahul Saharan
And Laxmi was pinned down and had acid thrown on her for spurning the advances of an older man seven years ago, and she launched a campaign for a change in the law to recognise acid attacks.Donald Trump will not push for investigations into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server or for the business practices of the Clinton Foundation, a Trump senior adviser signaled Tuesday.
A source with knowledge of the decision told MSNBC's Morning Joe that president-elect Trump won't pursue the probe that he promised supporters during the campaign, a move that Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway appeared to confirm during an interview on Tuesday morning.
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"I think when the president-elect... tells you before he’s even inaugurated he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content, to the members [of Congress]," Conway said. "And I think Hillary Clinton still has to face the fact that a majority of Americans don’t find her to be honest or trustworthy, but if Donald Trump can help her heal, then perhaps that’s a good thing."
Later Tuesday, Trump told the New York Times that prosecuting Clinton is "just not something that I feel very strongly about" and that it would be "very, very divisive" for the nation.
Trump is pressed if he has definitively ruled out prosecuting Hillary Clinton. “It’s just not something that I feel very strongly about." — Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) November 22, 2016
"I think it would be very very divisive for the country," Trump says about prosecuting the Clintons. — Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 22, 2016
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The president of the United States is not the one who unilaterally chooses to launch or not launch a criminal probe. But the announcement is still a reversal of a key - and highly unusual - pledge that Trump made repeatedly during his campaign.
Throughout the general election, Trump promised to appoint a special prosecutor to |
The county’s summer programs will be extended. Photo from CERDEC via Flickr.
In a move likely to please a number of parents of school-age children, the county’s Department of Recreation and the school system announced they are extending their summer programs.
The extension will accommodate parents without childcare options and is driven by the executive order signed last fall by Gov. Larry Hogan that requires public schools to open after Labor Day.
“The later start of the school year presented a challenge for many hard-working families who may not have an option to take additional time off from work,” said County Executive Ike Leggett in a press release. “Extending the summer camp offerings is an example of how our Recreation Department and public schools work together to ensure our children have the highest quality of programs and services and demonstrates how the county supports families who are juggling many responsibilities.”
The Recreation Department will add 40 more full or half-day programs to help meet the need.
The department also offers a number of camps to promote active and healthy lifestyles for children this summer. A summer program catalogue is available at ActiveMONTGOMERY.org. Print copies can be found at community recreation centers, parks, aquatic centers, senior centers and public libraries.
Camp registration is available at ActiveMONTGOMERY.org or by mail, fax to 240-777-6818 or in person at most recreation and parks, including community recreation centers, ice rinks, tennis centers, aquatic facilities and at the department’s offices at 4010 Randolph Rd.
For more information, call 240-777-6840.
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See something around town? Tag your photos on Twitter & Instagram with #SourceShots.I see it all the time: “Why would my mother do this?” “Why does my father say such things?” “Why would my sister think this way?” “Why did I get chosen to be the scapegoat?” Everybody wants to know the reasons behind the behaviour of their Ns, but has anyone stopped to question that desire?
If you are one of those “Why?” people, have you asked yourself how an answer to your question will help you? Think about that for a minute…would that knowledge improve your life in any way? Does constantly asking it, does the torture of wanting an answer, improve your life? And what are you avoiding while you focus on “why? why? why?”
feeling of finality or resolution, especially after a traumatic experience…” Do you really think you would have closure if you knew why you were chosen to be the scapegoat? Or do you think the knowledge would just bring you more pain and then elicit even more questions? Our culture likes the idea of “closure.” What does “ closure ” mean to you? The dictionary defines it as “AoforDo you really think you would have closure if you knew why you were chosen to be the scapegoat? Or do you think the knowledge would just bring you more pain and then elicit even more questions?
The first question, then, that has to be answered is “Why do you want to know?”
You want to know because you want to know if you deserved it or not. Why? Because, most likely unbeknownst to you, you have a hidden agenda at work, a hidden agenda based on never having accepted that your NParent is toxic and that there is no real hope that s/he will ever change.
So how does this work? Well, when you accept that something just is, when you truly accept it, you stop having feelings of angst about it. For example, how you ever wondered why something painted red fades to pink and then to almost nothing when exposed to the sun, but other colours hold up well? Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t…but does not knowing the answer to that question cause you any sense of anxiety? Of course not—because even if you have wondered about this in the past, you have no emotional investment either in having the answer or not having the answer. It is okay with you not to know.
So, if you truly accepted that narcissists are so ego-centric, so self-centred, that the feelings of others—including their own children—are of no concern to them, if you truly accepted that your NParent will treat you, the scapegoat, like crap no matter what you do, that you can’t fix it because it can’t be fixed, that your NParent will never change…if you truly accepted all of that, you wouldn’t be asking “why” because you would no longer have any emotional investment in their behaviour. You would understand, in the deepest, most profound manner, that their treatment of you is a manifestation of their disorder and is no reflection on you and that understanding would bring you both acceptance and peace.
But you are affected, you do have angst, you have emotional pain surrounding this, which indicates that, as much as you may have intellectually accepted that narcissists behave this way no matter what you do, you have not accepted this on an emotional level.
Why not? Because on some level you still have hope that somehow you can do something to change your N into a real, loving, nurturing, emotionally available parent. Your desire for that parent is so precious to you that you will deny reality and even take on guilt…perceive yourself as the responsible party, believe that you somehow caused her condition…in order to preserve the hope that this person can become the competent parent you were denied.
Because if you caused it, you can fix it. It is as simple as that. If your actions in some way created your parent to be rejecting or enmeshing or manifest whatever hurtful behaviour s/he engages in, then if you can figure out what you did and then you can UNdo it—or at least make amends for it—and then have the parent of your dreams. In the meantime, you can only feel guilty about your failures, failures your NParent will happily point out to you—and anyone else who will listen—at any available opportunity.
You have taken responsibility, in your subconscious mind, for your NParent’s behaviour and obvious negative feelings for you. Normal people do not develop negative feelings for others without a reason, so somewhere along the line you have assumed that you provided your NParent with a legitimate reason to feel negative about you. And now you feel guilt for that unknown (and, in truth, fictional) sin and seek ways to gain absolution for it from a person who has a vested interest in keeping you feeling guilty and perpetually penitent. All this from your belief that not only your NParent is normal and therefore has a legitimate reason for treating you like a criminal, but from your further belief that if you could just name the crime you committed, you have the power to fix it and thereby turn your NParent into the perfect, loving parent you have yearned for—and deserved—all this time.
So why do you want to know why? Because some part of you believes that this knowledge is the magic key. In knowing why, you will be able to “fix” it and then have what you want. If you just knew what you did wrong, you could undo it or fix it or make amends or apologize or do something to make it right so that the loving parent you pine for would emerge from the narcissistic shell.
If you could know for certain that it was not your fault, that you didn’t do anything wrong, then you can fix it by making your NParent realize how unjust s/he is being and how much you have been hurt by their treatment. This little part of you believes that once they understand they are being unfair and they are hurting you, their natural sense of justice and parental love will kick in and they will be sorry and soothe your hurts and change their behaviour and become that loving parent you so deserve.
It makes a lovely fairy tale, but you and I both know it ain’t gonna happen. That niggling little voice of hope is actually part of your Narcissist’s voice in your head, the promise that is never kept, the expectation never realized, the hope that can never be fulfilled. Narcissism is forever. Narcissists cannot be successfully treated because they don’t believe there is anything wrong with them, so they won’t cooperate with therapy…and there is no medication that targets the manifestations of narcissism. They are profoundly, deeply selfish and have no sense of empathy for the feelings of others. Appealing to a narcissist’s empathy or sense of fairness is like appealing to the sense of fairness and empathy of a granite wall: there is nothing there to appeal to, nothing to resonate with you or your feelings.
And there is nothing you could have ever done wrong that justifies the treatment they mete out. Nothing. Nada. Nix. You didn’t do anything to make them this way, they were this way before you were born and will be this way—or worse—until they draw their last breath. Your only mistake was to buy into the fiction that you are somehow responsible for their behaviour—that they are reacting to something you did—and therefore you have a chance to fix the problem: you aren’t and you can’t because it isn’t fixable.
By the same token, their apparent obliviousness to your pain and their lack of fairness, isn’t something that can be remedied because it is as much a part of them as their eye colour. It seems like they don’t care if they hurt you because they don’t…not because there is something wrong with you but because there is something wrong with them…and it is something they do not want to fix.
None of us has the power to change the fundamental nature of another human being. Even if we did, we don’t have the right to do so. Each one of us, narcissists included, has an inherent right to self-determination and to think we have the right to change another person to suit our needs is to think like a narcissist. Narcissists are the people who believe they are exempt from the need to respect the rights of others and have the right to demand others reshape themselves to serve their idea of what they should be.
So what is the point of asking “Why?”? It is the manifestation of a flea, a flea in which you harbour a subconscious belief that you have the right to change your N to suit your desires and needs, just as s/he has been trying to shape and mould you to fit theirs. You believe that the answer to the question is your best clue, your key, to creating an effective campaign to bring that N to heel so that you can get your needs fulfilled, regardless of what s/he wants.
The real answer isn’t what you want to hear, it isn’t what you want it to be because it won’t give you the clues you need to “fix” your Ns and turn them into the people you want them to be. The answer is simply “Because they are narcissists and that is what narcissists do.”
Nothing more profound, nothing more personal, nothing more insightful…no clues, no keys, just the simple fact that narcissists care only for themselves and that everyone around them—including their GCs—are mere pawns in their selfish games of self-gratification.Australia's largest casino is facing a public dispute with thousands of its gaming and hospitality workers who have rejected management's wage offer and are demanding more pay for late-night and "graveyard" shifts on weekends.
Delegates for the 5500 workers at Crown Melbourne – Victoria's biggest single-site employer – last week knocked back a pay rise offer of 2.75 per cent, and are now preparing to "go public" with large-scale protests in the CBD.
Crown Melbourne staff work at least 40 weekends a year. Credit:Justin McManus
Crown staff are ramping up pressure for an increase of at least 5 per cent a year and new allowances of up to $3 an hour for all weekend work that falls between 7pm and 7am.
The industrial feud is the latest to erupt over the issue of weekend pay, and comes just weeks before the Fair Work Commission will deliver a much-anticipated ruling on whether to slash loadings across several industries nationally.The march to the launch of Windows 8 soldiers on, as Microsoft has now opened the Windows Store for submissions from individuals in anticipation of the grand OS launch on October 26th. Previously, only those with company accounts were able to submit their applications for consideration in the Windows Store. The big news doesn't end there, however, as Microsoft has also added 82 new markets for app submission, which means that in total, developers from 120 markets may now publish their applications to the Windows Store.
In additional news, Microsoft has also revealed that many MSDN subscribers will receive a free, one-year developer account to the Windows Store -- eligible subscription levels include Visual Studio Professional, Test Professional, Premium, Ultimate, and BizSpark. Similarly, students that take part in Microsoft's DreamSpark program will have their subscription fees waived. As it stands, both Windows 8 apps and traditional applications may be submitted for inclusion in the Windows Store, however in the case of applications for the desktop environment, purchasers will be re-routed to individual developer sites to make their purchase and grab the download.Match Reports
Three Points, Two Goals and One Genius – Villa v Newcastle
Aston Villa 1
Newcastle United 2
Saturday 14 September 3pm
The scoreline and the result may well have been the same as the same fixture last season but this was a different performance from Newcastle United. Rather than hang on in the dying moments, Newcastle performed very well for large swathes of the game, only really allowing Villa to be in the ascendancy briefly in the middle of the second half.
With no first team players injured or unavailable (Jonas and Tiote both have to prove their form before being given those labels back) Pardew picked an aggressive and exciting team that gave a lot of Newcastle fans optimism before the three o’clock kick off.
The team gelled and played well for the most part with as comfortable a 2-1 victory as you’re likely to see. Despite a Villa equaliser, the Magpies never panicked and quickly found themselves in front once again before taking the sting out of the game and coasting to victory. Some in the press even branded the performance “consummate”. Who would have thought that so soon after the disastrous performance against Manchester City?
FORMATION
When the team sheets were announced before the game Newcastle fans were ecstatic to be shown what appeared on paper to be a 4-3-3. For much of last season the Geordie faithful implored Pardew to revisit the 4-3-3 that had been so devastating at the end of the 11-12 season when Newcastle came within a whisker of finishing in fourth place.
On paper it may have been a 4-3-3 but in practice it was more of a 4-2-3-1, a formation that failed time and again last season no matter how many attempts Pardew gave it. The difference against Aston Villa on Sunday was Newcastle for once had the players to fit, rather than crowbar players into uncomfortable positions (Cisse on the right wing, Sissoko as a No. 10).
Sissoko and Anita kept their places at the base of midfield after solid performances against West Ham and Fulham. The pair appear to complement one another nicely in the centre of the park, Sissoko the big bulldozer (although he showed some guile on the ball against Villa) and Anita the delicate passer.
Cabaye was played further forward, given more attacking duties – although he constantly pressured the Villa back four and refused to give them time on the ball. He tired towards the end, suffering the effects of missing two games (let’s not mention why) but the 90 minutes under his belt should work wonders.
Cisse was flanked be Frenchmen Ben Arfa and Remy, an attacking line up dating back to January in the dreams of some Toon fans when Remy was first approached by the Magpies.
MIDFIELD
With Aston Villa playing 4-3-3 and happy, in the first half at least, to sit back and soak up pressure, Newcastle enjoyed a lot of the ball early on and looked comfortable. Newcastle were far from deadly but created a lot of chances, albeit few clear cut.
Anita was solid again, but unspectacular. Of all midfielders he had the lowest amount of touches at just 39 and passes at just 34 (88% accuracy) but he made two tackles (one which led to Ben Arfa’s opener) and two clearances in what was a comfortable day at the office.
Ben Arfa will rightfully earn all the headlines after another virtuoso attacking display (more on this later) but Sissoko is going from strength to strength in the middle of the park and was easily Newcastle’s best midfielder on the day. With Cabaye ahead, Sissoko was able to concentrate more on his defensive duties and only break forward when he knew Cabaye was prepared to cover.
Sissoko was all over the pitch, completing 66 passes (almost double Anita’s) at 86% accuracy. The former Toulouse man also had one accurate through ball and four key passes, playing 90 minutes and shining. The only blot on his copybook when he lost Benteke for the equaliser, although he wasn’t helped by Krul’s goalkeeping.
Cabaye, starting for the first time since Arsenal’s bid on the eve of the Manchester City game was also solid but struggled to really impose himself on the game in the manner that Newcastle fans would hope. He gave away two fouls, one a booking and managed two shots, one which flew across the face of the goal just begging to be tapped in. If Pardew is to persist with him in a No. 10 role, he’ll have to improve at finding space for himself, he found himself marked out of the game for patches, being able to find space to work will be paramount.
Newcastle’s afternoon would’ve been a lot easier if Fabian Delph hadn’t been lined up against them. The Englishman continued his fine form with another excellent performance. He made a massive seven tackles, three interceptions and completed 50 passes. He can be very happy with his performance, unlike the rest of the Villa midfield.
DEFENSIVE UNITY
Last season, with Newcastle’s injury nightmare there was never an established back four. It may have taken Steven Taylor’s sending off against Manchester City but now it looks like Pardew has found his four. Santon, Yanga-Mbiwa, Collocini and Debuchy have shut down their opponents well so far this season; although Agbonlahor missed a golden opportunity, aside from that Villa rarely threatened. To limit any side at home to not a single shot on target from open play is a record to be proud of.
Yanga-Mbiwa in particular played very well on Saturday afternoon, doing his best to challenge Benteke physically but also showing maturity by standing off his man when far enough away from goal and instead challenging for the second ball. He picked up a booking but four interceptions, eight clearances while giving away just two fouls is a good record for any centre back. His positional play was excellent but when it was required he made two excellent sliding tackles.
FULL-BACKS
Before the game it was highlighted how key Debuchy would be in keeping Agbonlahor under wraps. The winger/striker is in good form at the start of this Premier League season and his runs on the left side of the pitch were always going to prove a handful to Debuchy.
Thankfully Debuchy played well and timed his tackles well all day, making six, Newcastle busiest player in that department. He also made eight clearances, tied with Yanga-Mbiwa. He had poor pass accuracy at just 71% but made up for it, winning 63% of his aerial battles and showing again that’s he’s good at judging the long ball.
Santon was marshalling Weimann and preferred to step up and make the interception (he made five all game) rather than be taken down the line. Because he didn’t have to worry about Weimann’s pace Santon was able to play more of an attacking role than Debuchy going forward but Debuchy still managed more touches of the ball. Debuchy to Ben Arfa was the most completed pass in the game as Newcastle exploited Villa’s inexperienced left back Antonio Luna, who had a poor game despite making five tackles, allowing Ben Arfa to cut inside and shoot far too often.
BEN ARFA – STAR MAN
It has become a bit of a press inside joke to label Ben Arfa mercurial. It’s a polite way of saying “patchy” or “unpredictable”. Thus far this season, Ben Arfa’s form has been anything but. He looks fit, confident and is improving game on game.
On Saturday afternoon he was a constant thorn in Villa’s side and the stats reflect just how important he was to Newcastle going forward. He scored one, assisted another and should have had a penalty when pushed over in the penalty area. He had four shots, three on target, five dribbles, while winning three free kicks and only being dispossessed once. Tells you all you need to know about a superlative performance.
The workrate provided by both Cabaye and Sissoko meant Ben Arfa wasn’t burdened by too much defensive duty and he enjoys the attacking freedom. In a post-match press conference he said himself he enjoyed his position: “I play high on the pitch. It’s my job to create chances and score and give assists.”
He was direct and bullied Luna all afternoon, consistently managing to get the ball onto his left foot for a shot. If his fitness stays at the current level (In a very short time Faye Downey has made herself invaluable to Newcastle) then Ben Arfa will shortly be back in contention for a French squad that has looked devoid of any creativity under Didier Dechamps.
SUBSTITUTIONS
For the second game in a row Pardew’s substitutions were well timed and proved very effective. Firstly, Remy came off for Gouffran. The full debutant had played a key role in creating Newcastle’s opening goal but was obviously tiring in the second half. Gouffran looked sharp and offered more defensively, his alertness paid off when he pounced on Guzan’s save and buried the ball into the back of the net to send Newcastle’s traveling fans into full voice.
Almost immediately after the goal Pardew subbed off the quiet but steady Anita for the more rambunctious and physical Tiote. The Ivorian did his job well, putting himself about the pitch and not allowing Villa any time on the ball to create a chance. Unlike last season it seems Tiote will have to bide his time to see first team action, with Anita and Sissoko currently the first choice duo.
The last sub of the game saw Cabaye come off to a standing ovation from the Newcastle fans. The ovation was more for staying at the club than the performance, Cabaye wasn’t as good as fans, and Pardew, know he can be, but it’s a step in the right direction after a very unsettling start to the season. His replacement, Sammy Ameobi, had little to do, making only two passes. One of which was incomplete.
SUMMARY
Never mind just a steady back four, Newcastle could well have their back seven sorted out for the forthcoming games unless injuries take their toll. There are some very encouraging signs on Tyneside that, despite the lack of investment over the summer, the club is moving in the right direction and Pardew did learn lessons last season.
The performance was not quite as brilliant as West Brom away at the end of 11-12 season when Newcastle ran out 3-1 winners but there’s the same potential there and the same optimism on Tyneside. Remy, Cisse and especially Ben Arfa are a front three that will cause a lot of defences problems. Get Cabaye anywhere near his best dictating the passes and threading in balls for them and teams will be scared.
Newcastle failed to get a shot on target at all in their first two matches, here they had eight. Next weekend it’s Premier League new boys Hull at St James’s Park and another possible three points.
You can follow Tom on Twitter @weeklynewsbay
Aston Villa: Guzan, Lowton, Vlaar, Okore (Clark 30), Luna, El Ahmadi (Kozak 67), Westwood, Delph, Weimann (Tonev 88), Benteke, Agbonlahor
Newcastle United: Krul, Debuchy, Coloccini, Mapou, Santon, Sissoko, Anita (Tiote 74), Cabaye (Sammy Ameobi 88), Ben Arfa, Cisse, Remy (Gouffran 63)
Ref: Mike Dean
Crowd 37,554 (2,800 away fans)
New issue of The Mag out now, available from any north east newsagents, or order single copies & subscriptions online.
[latest_issue]Bill Cosby: court documents open window into legal problems Read more
A man who wishes to have sex with a woman does not ply her with prescription sedatives, date rape drugs or excess alcohol to get her to say yes. A man like that uses substances to prevent her from saying no, because he doesn’t care if she says yes. A man like that wants a woman incapacitated in order to rape her, not in order to have sex with her – and such men admit as much to researchers.
According to documents obtained by the Associated Press and released on Monday, Bill Cosby stated under oath in 2005 that he had obtained Quaaludes to give them to young women with whom he wanted to have sex; he further admitted giving the drugs to at least one woman who later claimed he sexually assaulted her and said that he gave Benadryl to another woman who accused him of assaulting her while she was sedated. He settled the latter women’s accusations, in whose case he made these statements, without going to trial; the former woman is now suing him for defamation over his public denials of her allegations.
Bill Cosby documents 'go a long way to crediting' allegations, lawyer says Read more
But one cannot have sex “with” another person if that person isn’t conscious or participating; one can, however, violently imitate the act of having sex with someone by forcibly penetrating the victim’s body.
There is no “with” in the act of rape; rape is something that rapists do to somebody else.
Rapists and their apologists like to raise doubts about the certainty of victims’ experiences, to make the majority of men and women who are not rapists worry about having their lives derailed by false accusations. Bill Cosby has himself denied all the allegations of sexual assault (his lawyer called them “discredited”), yet 25 women have relayed similar stories to the press of being drugged and sexually assaulted by a man now revealed to have admitted in a deposition to acquiring barbiturates with the idea that they’d help him have sex with women.
Even if you want to believe Cosby’s assertions in 2005 that the drugs were intended to potentially facilitate consensual sex and not rape – and too many people have wanted to believe those assertions – the questions remain:
How many lifeless women are we expected to believe that Bill Cosby penetrated without knowing that he was doing something wrong?
How many women’s unconscious bodies are we to believe that Bill Cosby moved around to facilitate the completion of his desires?
How many women on Quaaludes are we to believe that Bill Cosby used without once considering that his supposed efforts to obtain consent through the alleged use of debilitating narcotics had been unsuccessful?
Rapists know – from the crying or the screaming, from the efforts to get away, or else at least the swearing, from the lack of movement and the complete unconsciousness of their victims, from the assertion and re-assertion of the word “NO” (or a combination of any and all of the above) – that they are not having consensual sex with a willing partner.
Rapists might be surprised when victims speak up, as many do not, and they might be shocked that they face legal or other administrative charges.
Rapists might even express the opinion that they never raped anyone – goodness knows, many people who commit crimes assert their innocence – but they’re not actually unaware that they victimized someone.
And certainly, anyone using Quaaludes to facilitate “sex” with uncertain or unwilling people after 1977 would’ve had some indication that the courts took a dim view of the practice after Roman Polanski’s conviction.
Research indicates that many rapists commit multiple rapes, particularly if their first efforts at non-consensual sex with unwilling partners result in few consequences.
Research indicates that rapists often use drugs and alcohol to facilitate their crimes.
Research indicates that they’ll consider raping people particularly if they know they won’t face consequences for their actions.
And research indicates that rapists target people that they know a disproportionate amount of the time.
Rapists are rarely the guys in the alley or the burglar in your bedroom: they’re people you know and trust, people you look up to, people with whom you or others might well have consensual sex under different circumstances. They’re people whom you believe implicitly are part of the majority of the population of men who aren’t rapists, people with whom you’d share a drink (or a Pudding Pop). They’re people with rich internal lives and sometimes even money and fame. They’re just also rapists, who rape because they like raping.Ubisoft is known for a lot of games and some of those games that the company happens to be over includes Far Cry 5 and Assassin’s Creed: Origins, two titles set to hit the market for mass consumption. However, according to several reports the company is still in a dangerous fight with Vivendi.
According to both Nasdaq via globenewswire.com and kitguru.net, the publisher and developer of many lesser and well known games, Ubisoft, seems to be in the process of buying back up to 4 million shares. The Globe states that…
“Ubisoft announced today that it has granted a mandate to an investment services provider with a view to repurchasing its own shares.”
If you don’t know, over the last year, the company known as Ubisoft has been fending off a hostile takeover from Vivendi. It’s worth noting that the CEO of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot, has made it clear that he opposes a Vivendi takeover. However, in a recent notice sent out to investors, Ubisoft makes mention that it plans to buy back 4 million shares between October 5th and December 29th of 2017. This move was said to have been authorized at a September investor meeting on the 22nd.
According to the latter publication site, Vivendi, as of now, holds a 27 percent stake in Ubisoft. And under French law it is said that if Vivendi hits 30 percent, then it is required to prompt a “buyout offer.”
The publication site further explains that it is unclear whether Vivendi will actually make a buyout bid for Ubisoft or not, but given the consistent rise obviously indicates that the company is planning to do so.
Nevertheless, Ubisoft is said to be in the process of buying back shares, which is said to help delay Vivendi’s potential buyout. The latter site notes that all repurchased shares “will be canceled and the liquidity agreement concluded by the company will be temporarily suspended” this is set to take place “during the execution of the mandate.”
With that said, do you want the Vivendi takeover to go through or do you think that Ubisoft will do better without said company?Politics
Is the focus on Asian investment in NZ overhyped?
Foreign investment in New Zealand often attracts political controversy - particularly when the money is coming from Asia. However, a new report suggests the fears don’t quite match the reality, as Sam Sachdeva reports.
In any debate about the scale of foreign investment in New Zealand, the most heated arguments tend to come around money flowing in from Asia.
For instance, NZ First leader Winston Peters has not been shy of warning of a growing “land grab” by Chinese investors in our country.
However, a piece of new research from the non-profit Asia New Zealand Foundation has attempted to bring together better information about the scale of - and changes in - Asian investment in New Zealand.
Using data from the Overseas Investment Office and Statistics New Zealand, the foundation makes the case that headlines about the growing influence of Asian investors here are not quite matched by the current data.
According to the research, the cumulative value of all Asian investment in New Zealand is still relatively small - less than 10 per cent of all foreign-owned assets, and about 17 per cent of all foreign direct investment.
The vast majority of foreign investment still comes from Australia (30 per cent) and the UK (19 per cent).
A complicating factor is the difficulty of unravelling company structures: as the report says, a 2015 study found that most Chinese investment was in fact made through companies registered in places like Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands.
Coupled with the rising number of foreign investments from companies with owners across multiple countries, it’s easy to see why the source of nearly a third of all foreign investments are classified as coming from “various” locations.
Investment primarily in primary
Despite this, the report says the evidence is still “reasonably consistent” in suggesting that the focus on Asian investors is overheated.
That’s not to say their influence isn’t changing. The number of investments approved by the OIO from Asian countries has more than doubled in recent years, up from 12 per cent of all approvals between 2006 and 2010 to 25 per cent between 2011 and 2015.
There has also been a change in where specifically the investment is coming from within Asia: the report speaks of a “relative shift” away from Japan, in favour of China and Singapore.
What about the location and area of investments?
Unsurprisingly, Auckland and Waikato make up the largest single chunk, with 21 per cent of OIO-approved investments going there.
The OIO data also shows that about three-quarters of Asian investment goes into our primary industries and property, with the remainder going to service and manufacturing.
“Crudely put, plants and animals together account for half of all OIO-approved investments from Asia.”
One problem with drawing too many conclusions from the research is what Asia NZ describes as a gap in the data, with no sector-by-sector breakdown for investments which don’t reach the OIO threshold.
As the OIO covers only sensitive assets like land, businesses worth more than $100 million, and fishing quota, that means there’s a paucity of data for the majority of foreign investment in small or medium manufacturing and service industries.
“This issue is too important to New Zealand’s future to be left to soundbites and uninformed debate.”
While some politicians and members of the public have an aversion to Asian investment here, it’s more than likely to increase.
With economic growth in “emerging and developing Asia” over the next two years set to be at twice the pace of Europe and the US, and six out of our top 10 trading partners now from the region, the report says Asian investment provides a great opportunity to strengthen trade and cultural ties.
“The terms on which we develop trade connections with Asia depend very much on the quality of the partnerships we forge through investment and personal interactions.”
Beyond growing profits, the report says Asian investment can also help to boost jobs in regional centres, providing more training for employees to improve their skills, and share vital knowledge of foreign markets and potential overseas partners.
The Government is certainly on the side of increasing, rather than cutting, ties to investors in Asia.
During his recent visit to Japan and Hong Kong, Prime Minister Bill English made a point of visiting companies already responsible for significant investment into New Zealand while touting for others to join them.
“We’re always open to new investment, we’ve got good relationships with these investors and others offshore, and New Zealand has a pattern of checking in with them about what’s working, what’s not working, and also what their tensions are.”
However, his comments about no “special conditions” for Chinese investors, or anyone else, suggested he is well aware of the firestorm that foreign cash can spark.
Asia NZ’s executive director Simon Draper says the foundation hopes its report will dampen down some of that controversy.
“This issue is too important to New Zealand’s future to be left to soundbites and uninformed debate.”by Justin Trudell
I got a resounding “meh” from friends when I mentioned going to the second night of Paul McCartney at Little Caesars arena in Detroit. I’ve since given up on trying to change their minds. It’s like arguing politics on Facebook, no matter how logical my argument, it will never change anyone’s mind. Instead, they will tag me in dozens of stories that prove me wrong. Why do I even need to defend the greatness of Sir Paul? Why isn’t this opinion common among the snobbiest of music snobs? Well, he’s always writing “silly love songs,” that’s why.
Compared to some of his contemporaries, McCartney is thought of as a simpleton songwriter. He didn’t write with the social awareness of Lennon, or the depth of Dylan, or the exploration of Waters. There’s something to be said for writing songs that resonate with so many people, no matter how simple. Paul McCartney is kind of a sap, and he’s exactly what we need in life.
McCartney played his plethora of career spanning hits to a sold-out crowd. He jammed out a gigantic set list of 39 songs with classic Beatles pop songs like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” to a few deeper cuts like “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and “I’ve Got a Feeling.” McCartney even treated us to the first song he ever recorded as a member of The Quarrymen (his pre-Beatles group with John and George) “In Spite of All the Danger”. It was a delightful trip through the years of one of the most accomplished musicians of all time.
After each song, McCartney gave us a hammy reaction, the on-stage equivalent of a “dad joke.” During “Hey Jude,” he asked just for the fellas to sing the famous chorus as he did some Hulk Hogan-like flexing. We laughed along with his silliness. He doesn’t take himself too seriously and we love it. The predictably older crowd seemed to enjoy his stories, his showmanship, and some tunes they’ve probably never heard played live before. This crowd loved him. And I couldn’t be happier to be a part of it, even if I had to go alone.
Monday afternoon the news of Tom Petty’s death spread and it sunk in that Paul McCartney won’t always be around. This may have been the last chance to see him play his sappy love songs live. The songs I’ve been hearing all my life |
“full peace of mind”; all the donations were registered legally. If so, there is little to stop Mr Temer from serving out his term. This accidental president could end up being a pretty consequential one.Want to start making money online with zero investment?
I recently received a question from someone asking me if there's a way to make money online without having to invest any money.
The answer is yes, and I'm going to break down exactly how you can make your first dollar online without spending a penny. The example that I will give is making money with Kindle publishing, as that's the primary method of making money online that I specialize in with my Kindle Money Mastery course.
Watch the video below to learn how:
(Click here to watch on YouTube)
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How To Make Money With Kindle Without Spending Money
So you want to make money online, but don't want to invest any money?
While this is 100% possible (and I'll show you how below), it isn't recommended (I will explain why later).
First, let me share with you exactly how you can make money with Kindle Publishing without investing any money.
1. Your Kindle Publishing Strategy
The first thing that you require is a method or strategy to be successful at making money with Kindle. While investing in a course that can show you HOW to be successful from start to finish is ideal, it is not necessary. There's plenty of people that have battled their ways to making money on Kindle by slowly figuring things out on their own and learning from trial and error. There might be some answers you can dig up to things on certain message boards or blogs which can help you along the way, so it can be done.
Yes, it will take you a lot longer by trying to do it by yourself. You will also be more likely to fail, experience more frustrations, and likely make some crucial mistakes that could have been avoided if you invested in a quality course to begin with. But it CAN be done without investing in a course and there's plenty of people that have proven that.
2. Discover A Profitable Niche For Your Kindle Book
You will need to discover a profitable niche or category for the Kindle book that you want to publish.
If you do have an idea for a Kindle book, how do you know it's going to sell and be successful?
Being able to identify whether or not there is a MARKET for what you want to create is one of the most important things to master in making money online. You not only have to know whether there's a market, but if the book idea you have will be PROFITABLE.
Your Kindle book idea may seem profitable, but what about the competition? Is the market or niche too competitive for you? Will you be able to compete with the Kindle books out there that have been around for awhile and are dominating the space?
These are all important things that you need to know before publishing a Kindle book.
This can be done on your own (if you have some online marketing experience, then that's plus), or you can use someone else's method of research (in a course), or invest in a software to help with your niche research (AK Elite, KDP Spy or Kindle Samurai).
Investing in a software is also not necessary in order for you to publish a Kindle book. I've found many profitable niches without using one, so it can be done on your own (although it does make things much easier and faster).
3. Create Your Kindle Book Cover
Once you've discovered the niche for your Kindle book, it's next time to come up with a killer title for it, which of course can be done on your own. A great course can help show you how to come up with a title that sells and optimize it for all the best keywords, but it isn't required.
Next is creating your Kindle book cover. You can do this if you have your own graphic editing software. While Adobe Photoshop is the best (it costs money), you can use whatever free softwares that your computer has come with.
Creating your own cover can require some creativity and skill. While I'd typically hire and outsource this for as low as $5, it CAN be done on your own if you choose to spend the time to learn how and go through the process.
4. Write Your Kindle Book
The next step is to write your Kindle book.
You CAN write your own Kindle book, even if you aren't a writer. I've seen many people do it and have success doing it. Heck, I wrote my first Kindle books without any experience writing previously. Writing is a skill that can be learned and developed. There are courses that can help you write your own book and show you how to do it faster than you could do it on your own, but again, it is NOT required.
If you aren't a writer (or hate writing), then the option that I recommend for people is to outsource this step and hire a ghostwriter. There's plenty of writers (and companies that I use) that can write your Kindle book for you on ANY topic you want for as low as $55-75 for a 5000 word book. This costs money and it's an option that is available for you. They will typically deliver the book within 7-14 days.
However, you can do it on your own without investing any money. It might take you longer than if you were to outsource it (it took me a year to write my first book – crazy, I know!), but it can be easily done if you want to write your own book.
5. Publish And Market Your Kindle Book
Publishing and marketing your Kindle book is the final step to have you get started making money.
You just need to sign up for a KDP account (Kindle Direct Publishing), which is free.
Then you can just easily follow the steps to upload and publishing your Kindle book which can then be live selling on Amazon within 24 hours.
Your Kindle book will then be ready to make money for you!
Of course, there is a lot you can do to promote and market your Kindle book, so that it gets selling. This is all stuff that can be learned on your own (just through searching the internet), or can be learned through investing in a course (again, costs money). It will take you longer and require more effort to learn how to market your book on your own, but it IS possible (if you don't want to invest any money).
There you have it… I just broke down 5 simple steps that you can follow to start making money with Kindle publishing.
It is absolutely possible to start making money online without investing a penny.
But after reading the steps above, my question for you is: Why the heck would you?
If there is a course or method that will show you how to make money online that are faster, easier and will save you frustration and failure… then WHY wouldn't you just invest some money and take advantage of it?
Let Me Show You An Easier And Faster Way…
It doesn't make any sense why someone would attempt to do something on their own and not to invest any money into learning how to do it effectively.
In my opinion, it is just stupid and very unintelligent to attempt to re-invent the wheel.
If you ever want to make money online (or do anything for that matter), the best advice I can give anyone is to invest in a course or program that can teach you how.
By investing in a great course or program, you are compressing time and speeding up your success massively.
Instead of attempting to do things on your own… find people that are already more experienced than you and hire them to do it for you!
This is exactly what I chose to do to grow my online business.
I did this with my Kindle e-books by deciding to hire ghostwriters writers to write 99% of my Kindle books for me. I also chose to do this for getting my e-covers designed. I have virtual assistants that work everyday to promote my Kindle books and market them.
In the same way, I hire copywriters, graphics designers, web designers, programmers, and everything else you can imagine for most aspects of my business. This is what allows me to grow faster and make more money online.
I attend seminars all the time, read books, and hire coaches/mentors to learn from.
YES… I could learn and do everything on my own, but it doesn't make sense to. My time is more valuable.
When you re-write yourself to think in terms of leveraging and outsourcing (learning from others is leveraging your time), then success becomes much faster and easier to attain.
Again, yes, you can do it all on your own… it is possible… but I don't recommend it.
Learn to work smarter, not harder. That's the one thing that all successful people do.
(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
votes, average:out of 5)Mario Pescante, an Italian who has been an IOC member since 1994, criticized the United States on Wednesday for including gay members as part of its Olympic delegation to Sochi next month.
Back in December, President Barack Obama named three openly gay athletes — tennis great Billie Jean King, figure skating legend Brian Boitano and hockey player Caitlin Cahow — to the American delegation. The move was interpreted as a not-so-subtle statement against Russian president Vladimir Putin and his country's legislative discrimination toward gays and lesbians.
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From the Associated Press:
''It's absurd that a country like that sends four lesbians to Russia just to demonstrate that in their country gay rights have (been established),'' Mario Pescante said at an Italian Olympic Committee meeting in Milan on Wednesday, in comments widely reported by Italian media. ''The games should not be an occasion and a stage to promote rights that sports supports daily.''
The Italian Olympic Committee would not confirm or deny Pescante's comments, but his speech was reported by the Gazzetta dello Sport and the ANSA news agency.
Asked for clarification later by The Associated Press, Pescante said he is not against gays.
''Of course not,'' the 75-year-old Pescante told The AP by telephone. ''I just wanted to make the point not to let politics interfere with the Olympics.''
Pescante is not a newcomer to the world of the IOC. He played a big role during the Turin Games in 2006 and even served as IOC vice president before resigning in 2012 when Rome's bid for the 2020 Games fell apart. As such, you'd think he'd recognize that human rights issues have always found a global forum on the Olympic stage.
Story continues
But even if this was the first time such issues were being brought up during the Olympics, Pescante should be ripped for labeling the mere presence of three gay athletes among a larger group as a disruptive political play.
As Cahow told USA Today last month:
"It's obviously a statement that's being made, but I think it's an incredibly respectful one," Cahow said. "Basically, the White House is highlighting Americans who know what it means to have freedoms and liberties under the constitution. That's really what we're representing in Sochi, and it's not at all different from what's espoused in the spirit of Olympism."
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Kevin Kaduk is a writer for Fourth-Place Medal on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at kevinkaduk@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!Watchmaker MB&F isn’t as well-known as Rolex or Timex, but that’s because the company’s unique creations—like a TIE Fighter-shaped music box that plays the Star Wars theme—are made for die-hard collectors. Its latest creation is a rocket-shaped pen inspired by the moon landing, and I’m desperately trying to justify its $20,000 price tag.
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Four years in the making, the Astrograph comes from a collaboration between MB&F and Switzerland-based pen maker Caran d’Ache, and is assembled from over 100 different machined parts. The pen, available with either a ball-point or fountain tip, is protected by an over-the-top cap which features retractable landing gear and even a tiny ladder for an equally tiny astronaut figurine.
Even the Astrograph’s obscene packaging, which doubles as a display stand for your elaborate writing instrument, celebrates space travel. It looks like something developed by the Thunderbirds’ engineers, not NASA, but the retro curves definitely add to the collectible’s charm.
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There will be four different versions of the Astrograph available, made from metals like rhodium and ruthenium, but each will be limited to just 99 pieces. At just shy of $20,000 it’s not like everyone in your office is going to be carrying an Astrograph, but it’s still nice to know you’re doodling your way through meetings with a rare collectible.
[MB&F via aBlogtoWatch]A Japanese author rushed to offer an explanation of his comments on a “comfort woman” statue that touched off a wave of criticism via social media in South Korea.
According to Japanese media reports Saturday, Yasutaka Tsutsui, author of “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time,” said he didn’t intend to insult the statue and claimed it was just a joke.
(Yasutaka Tsutsui`s Twitter)
“The comment was just a joke aimed to arouse a heated controversy over the issue,” he said.His novel, “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time,” was adapted into a film that was well received in Korea.“I didn’t mean to offend Koreans. I was born before the war, so I am aware of how Japanese people mistreated them. I have no objection to erecting the statue,” he said.Tsutsui posted online comments Thursday calling on Japanese people to sexually desecrate the girl statue erected in front of the Japanese consulate in the southern port city of Busan. He urged people to put sperm on the statue that symbolizes the victims of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery of Korean women.His comments came as Japan’s Ambassador to Korea Yasumasa Nagamine returned to Seoul on Tuesday after a three-month hiatus. The ambassador had been recalled to Japan in protest over the girl statue being placed in front of the consulate.Tsutsui wrote via his Twitter account Thursday, “The return of the ambassador means that Japan tolerates the statue.” He deleted the post after it sparked a torrent of criticism.Korean publishers handling Tsutsui’s novels expressed disappointment in his remarks.By Hong Dam-young ( lotus@heraldcorp.comGermany and Brazil were reported to be working together to draft a United Nations resolution Saturday, calling for the right to privacy on the internet and an end to excessive spying.
The news followed revelations this week that the United States’ National Security Agency had monitored email and telephone communications of top officials, including the leaders, of both countries.
The German magazine Der Spiegel reported Saturday that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile telephone had been listed in the NSA's Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002, which means it may have been bugged for more than a decade.
However, It's unclear if conversations were recorded or what information, if any, was collected. Both German and US spokespersons have declined to comment on the story.
Still, it was revealed that President Obama had apologized to Merkel on Wednesday, according to Spiegel, with the Frankfurt General Newspaper reporting that Obama had told Merkel he was unaware of the surveillance.
The magazine went on to cite a 2010 secret document that said NSA and CIA operatives had tapped communication in Berlin's government district and some 80 other locations around the world, including Madrid, Prague, Geneva and Paris.
Such relevations have tested international relations, with Germany preparing to send its top spy chiefs to Washington next week for talks with officials in the White House and the NSA over allegations the cell phone of Merkel was tapped.
Merkel said this week that relations with the US have been "severely shaken" by the snooping allegations, and "trust needs to be rebuilt."
The non-binding resolution calls for the expansion of international privacy rights under the International Covenant Civil and Political Rights — which came into force in 1976, long before the internet.
A draft of the resolution will be sent to the general assembly's human rights subcommittee next week. It would be put to the full general assembly late next month.
"This resolution will probably have enormous support in the GA [general assembly] since no one likes the NSA spying on them," an unidentified diplomat told Reuters.
While the resolution won’t have the power to stop or even restrain NSA spying, it would represent a strong rebuke of America's surveillance activities and ramp up pressure on Washington to end its excessive snooping on other countries.
More from GlobalPost: Europe demands answers over NSA spyingCLOSE Community members came out Wednesday night to speak out during the Phoenix Council meeting to discuss the end prayers.
Phoenix City Hall. (Photo11: Amy B Wang/The Republic)
A sharply divided Phoenix City Council voted 5-4 Wednesday to stop having an opening prayer at council meetings and instead observe a "moment of silent prayer," a move that blocks a group of Satanists from giving the invocation at its next formal meeting.
But the decision sparked protests from some residents and city leaders, who said having a moment of silence is akin to banning prayer and gives the Satanists a victory.
Followers of the Satanic Temple, a group promoting religious agnosticism, had been scheduled to give the prayer at the council's Feb. 17 meeting. News of the planned Satanic invocation became public last week and went viral almost instantly. Council members said constituents and others inundated them with comments.
That outrage was in full force Wednesday as more than a hundred people filled seats at the council's meeting, many opposing the Satanic invocation. The emotional testimony went on for more than two hours.
Council members had been expected to vote on a proposal intended to block the Satanists but keep prayer at meetings. Last week, four councilmen introduced a plan to let the mayor and council members take turns inviting different religious groups to give the prayer. Their aim: Indirectly uninvite the Satanists.
City Attorney Brad Holm said that would be a violation of the First Amendment, if applied retroactively. Holm said the city cannot change its invocation practice to specifically block Michelle Shortt, a temple member from Tucson expected to give the prayer.
However, Holm said the city could not allow anyone to give a spoken prayer going forward if it immediately adopts a “moment of silent prayer.” That way the city would not be excluding minority religious groups in order to favor a more widely held viewpoint, he said.
"But mayor and council cannot decide that this woman would not be allowed to offer her spoken prayer," Holm said, noting the Satanists had indicated they would sue. "Our view as the city's attorney's office and my view personally as the city attorney is that we would be likely to lose that case."
CLOSE WATCH: Phoenix councilman and Satanic Temple member discuss prayer controversy
Moment of silence
The notion of replacing the prayer with a moment of silence drew sharp criticism from many residents in the audience and some council members.
“It’s basically all voices must be heard or none at all.” Stu de Haan, a Satanic Temple member
"I am not for the silent prayer," said Pastor Darlene Vasquez, who began to cry at the microphone. “I want those who believe in the one true God to pray. It breaks my heart to hear what is going on."
Stu de Haan, a Satanic Temple member who submitted the prayer request, has said the group is trying to exercise its rights and ensure minority religious voices are included. He said the group does not believe Satan actually exists and instead views the biblical Satan as a metaphor for rebellion.
"If they don’t want to accept, constitutionally what must happen is that all voices must be taken down from the public forum," de Haan said last week. "It’s basically all voices must be heard or none at all."
No Satanists addressed the council at the meeting.
Councilman Sal DiCiccio warned that creating a moment of silence gives the Satanists a "big win." He said the Satanic Temple is not a real religion and that the group's ultimate goal has always been to ban prayer entirely. He said the religious community would collect signatures to put the issue on the ballot and overturn the council's decision.
“This is what that Satanist group wants. A moment of silence is basically a banning of prayer. It’s to agree to the Satanic goal to ban prayer.” Phoenix City Councilman Sal DiCiccio
"This is what that Satanist group wants," DiCiccio said. "A moment of silence is basically a banning of prayer. It’s to agree to the Satanic goal to ban prayer."
Mayor Greg Stanton and four members of the council voted to support the change, many echoing the concern that the city could wind up in a costly legal battle if it prevented a specific group from praying.
"The First Amendment to the Constitution is not ambiguous on this issue," Stanton said. "Discriminating against faiths would violate the oath that all of us on this dais took. I personally take that very, very seriously."
Stanton and council members Kate Gallego, Laura Pastor, Daniel Valenzuela and Thelda Williams voted to support moving to a "moment of silent prayer." DiCiccio and Councilmen Bill Gates, Jim Waring and Michael Nowakowski opposed the move.
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1X3RXhTRemember when disruption was a bad thing?
These days, a disruptive business model is akin to the innovation behind Henry Ford’s first assembly line. Hence, welcome to the disruptive winecrasher.com.
According to one of its two founders, Nancy O’Connell, “Winecrasher is using some of the Hotwire--Priceline (hotel room search) concept, applying parts of their models to selling wine.”
Winecrasher customers are given almost all the information—the wine’s color and varietal identity, where it’s from, its critical rating score and its Winecrasher discounted retail price. But like hotel room buyers who don’t know the name of the hotel until after they pay for the room, Winecrasher buyers do not know the wine’s brand identity until after they pay for it.
Each particular wine’s listing includes the Wine-searcher.com U.S.A. average price to compare with Winecrasher’s discounted price. By withholding the winery’s name until after the purchase a brand is protected from what Nissenson calls “public discounting”.
Niv Nissenson and Nancy O’Connell have been in the wine business for a while—he served four years as CFO to the Napa based wine retailer, Soutirage, Soutirage.com; she spent over ten years in bricks and mortar as well as online wine retailing, and at wineries. They know first-hand that in an industry with hundreds of thousands of individual wine labels on offer, the wine market is a breeding ground for indecision and apprehension.
O’Connell has been quoted: “The purpose of Winecrasher is to have people try all types of wine without fear or preconceived notions getting in the way.”
I fully agree with the concept, which is why I wondered how knowing the critic’s rating is not setting up a preconceived notion about the wine, and so I asked.
O’Connell: “I was speaking more to the effect of a preconceived notion of a brand…The critic rating is there to help guide the consumer. I guess, in a way, this helps to develop a preconceived notion about the wine, but we are trying to use it to guide people and make them feel good about their purchase…”
Winecrasher offerings are not private label or obscure wines; they are established brands. Still, the partners taste each wine to decide whether to list it and how to describe it.
In one of Nissenson’s quoted statements he said Winecrasher seeks to “provide the best value for consumers on every choice they make.”
That comment brought another question to mind: if you don’t know the brand name, are you making a value choice? I asked again.
Nissenson: “Every choice on our website is highly rated and at the best price in the market, so essentially every decision a customer makes is optimal.”
As something new in a business that is quite old, and often seems quite staid, Winecrasher’s business model is exciting, and its claim of offering top quality wine at the discounted prices listed on its web site is also threatening; it certainly is disruptive to wine retailing.
There’s an already established online behemoth bent on disrupting everything we know about how goods are bought and sold and it may soon insert a retailing disruption.
In his recent Silicon Valley Business Journal story, real estate reporter Nathan Donato-Weinstein covered amazon.com’s interest in the development of a drive-thru grocery store in Silicon Valley. The idea would be for consumers to order their groceries online and pick them up at the drive-in window of a dedicated Amazon facility.
The project has to be confirmed by the Silicon Valley powers that be, but if an almost 12,000 square-foot grocery distribution and pickup center proposed by developer Oppidan Investment Company is confirmed, and Amazon is its tenant, it will be among the truly disruptive models of our new world. Donato-Weinstein was unable to confirm tenancy but he said his sources talked about an Amazon rollout plan.
Why is the Amazon story relevant to wine?
Thirty-five states allow grocery stores to sell wine; California is one of them.
UPDATE: Regarding this previous post about shipping wine into Illinois, the governor signed the bill into law.President’s Speech Said Little About The State of the Union
It is disappointing that in a speech intended to help Americans understand the state of the union, President Obama failed to take note of the extent of the country’s economic pain and the role that Wall Street greed and the deregulation of financial markets played in creating the economic crisis. The country continues to confront a relentless mortgage crisis and stubbornly high unemployment. The nation needs seven million new jobs just to get back to where we were in December 2007 – and we need even more jobs than this today because we’ve had three years of growth in the working age population. Solving the jobs crisis – more than 14 million workers are unemployed and the figure rises to 25 million if we include those who are underemployed – needs to be at the top of the national agenda. Yet it received no mention in the President’s description of the State of the Union.
The State of the Union was very much focused on the future, and winning it. The unabashedly optimistic view of America as a country that is open for business and does big things apparently precluded any discussion of the past, of how we got into the recession and financial crisis, and any discussion of unpleasant realities like the millions of people who have lost their homes or their jobs and have plunged from economic stability into extreme economic insecurity.
While unemployment was not addressed, there were two concrete proposals in the SOTU.
First, the President called for a freeze on discretionary spending now and for next 5 years. But why now? The economic recovery is still fragile and most economists think it is far too early to reduce federal spending, which can slow the growth of GDP and make job creation more difficult. The proposed cuts are not likely to plunge us into a double dip recession – they are probably too small for that. But they are big enough to reduce vital services that citizens rely on – especially the vulnerable and the unemployed – and to make government less effective in serving the needs of people.
Second, while the President made no mention of policies to put unemployed workers back to work, he did propose help for corporations. According to President Obama, the recession is behind us. The stock market has come roaring back, corporate profits are rising, and the economy is growing. Yet, the President proposed cutting corporate tax rates. He also proposed removing unnecessary regulations in order to improve the ability of companies to innovate and create new, good jobs. But the economic crisis was not due to a lack of innovation or competitiveness – it was caused by an out-of-control financial sector that financed the expansion of the housing bubble. In contrast, the President said little about implementing new regulations where they are needed – for food safety, consumer protection, and to rein in finance.
To his credit, the President did propose an ambitious investment agenda to repair America’s deteriorating infrastructure and to enable the country to catch up to and exceed our competitors in areas like clean energy, high speed Internet, and high-speed rail as well as in educational attainment. Eliminating subsidies to oil companies and funding clean energy alternatives instead is a good start. But it is unlikely that this investment agenda can be adequately funded by eliminating waste and redirecting priorities. These investments are important for our nation’s future and should be funded by Congress. Most of the benefits will be realized in the future via more innovation, greater productivity growth. Less clear is where, in this era of globalization and ‘free’ trade deals, the good jobs will be located.
What President Obama did not say in the State of the Union is as important as what he did say. Rumors suggesting that he was going to propose cutting Social Security turned out to be unfounded. Despite the great pressure on him to endorse the recommendations of his deficit reduction commission and propose an increase in the retirement age and other reductions in benefits, the President provided instead a forceful defense of Social Security. He also did not suggest that we must impose austerity on the country now. In this he drew a sharp contrast between himself and his Republican opponents, both conventional and Tea Party members of Congress. He did warn, however, that Congress will ultimately have to target entitlements, reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and ‘find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security.The world's most expensive 1 bedroom apartment is located in Minami-Azabu, Tokyo - the most expensive neighbourhood in Tokyo. Now you may be thinking why the hell it costs so much for a measly 1 bedroom apartment. Well it isn't not ordinary apartment. It has a massive span of 4,434 square foot. All the furniture in the apartment was custom designed by Cecotti Collezioni. The walls, flooring and doors are made from the highest quality italian stone and wood. A custom designed kitchen made for a chef to make, cook and serve the food. There are original paintings by Japanese artist Hiroshi Senju located all around the apartment, all painted on site. There as a huge walk in wardrobe and a shoe storage unit which can shelve 200 pairs of shoes.
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[source]Ed Orgeron admitted Monday that he broke a promise last week.
The LSU head coach inserted himself into the offense, defying a pledge he made last fall in a campaign to land the full-time job. He invoked changes to offensive coordinator Matt Canada’s unit, tweaks that were visible during the first half of Saturday’s loss against Troy.
He’s stepping back now, the coach suggested in his weekly news conference with reporters.
“I wanted to simplify only the shifts in motions. I knew we were going to start two freshmen (offensive) linemen, so I wanted the guys to be in place so we knew how to block them,” Orgeron said. “That's all I've ever done. This is Matt's offense. He runs it. He calls it. He scripts the plays. This is his offense.”
The drama surrounding the offense and its quarterback loomed over the football program Monday. Orgeron fielded a half-dozen questions about the unit and the position, and the head man gathered his team leaders for a midday meeting to “foster leadership,” he said.
He explained why he made changes last week to Canada’s system, eliminating much of the coordinator’s staple, presnap movement, and using formations more similar to those used last season under interim coordinator Steve Ensminger.
Orgeron revealed the rotation over the past two weeks between starter Danny Etling and freshman Myles Brennan is not expected to continue into Southeastern Conference play, proclaiming again that Etling is “our starter.”
This all comes two days after one of the worst losses in the program's past 17 years, a 24-21 defeat to Troy in which the Tigers did not convert a third down (0 for 9), did not score in the first half and allowed more than 200 yards rushing.
“We know where we’re at right now. It’s not a good place,” defensive end Christian LaCouture said. “It sucks.”
Leaders held a players-only meeting after the game, hoping to rally a squad that dropped out of the two major rankings for the first time in a year and enters a tough stretch of games. LSU (3-2) travels to No. 21 Florida (3-1) on Saturday for the first of seven straight SEC matchups.
The biggest question mark entering that rivalry clash with the Gators? The offense, of course.
Less than 48 hours after criticizing his coordinator’s play-calling, Orgeron explained how and why he intervened in last week’s game. And he appeared to hand all control this week and potentially beyond to the man he signed to a three-year contract with a $1.5 million salary.
That change seemed to come at halftime of the Troy game, according to Orgeron.
In a meeting among the coaches, Orgeron agreed to allow the coordinator to shift back to his offensive scheme – and they inserted Brennan at QB, too.
The changes were obvious. LSU’s offense employed about 10 presnap movements in the first half against Troy. The Tigers used 12 presnap movements in the first two drives of the second half alone.
Coordinators have not been made available to reporters since the season began.
“That's totally up to Matt,” Orgeron answered when asked which offense LSU will move forward with. “I'm going to leave that totally up to him. And, again, I will say this, I stepped in last time for the first time. And I wanted to simplify things in order for us to have less penalties, better execution.
“At halftime, he felt like he needed to shift and motion more, which he did. And that's totally his option,” Orgeron continued. “This is totally his offense.”
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The unit is sputtering – not just rotating schemes but quarterbacks too.
Coaches inserted Brennan in the third quarter of each of the past two games, a way of preparing the rookie for potential playing time later in the year. He’s the immediate backup to a fifth-year senior who underwent back surgery in April and is consistently sustaining hits.
“Hopefully we can go four quarters with (Etling) in a very big football game,” Orgeron said Monday. “We've never planned to play Myles in one of the SEC games to just throw him in there. We're just preparing Myles in case Danny got hurt, that he has some snaps and can perform. And I think he has performed pretty well.”
Brennan is 10-for-18 for 160 yards with two interceptions and a touchdown. Etling is 62-for-102 for 921 yards with five scores and an interception.
The end of the unusual quarterback rotation – Brennan, for instance, was inserted with LSU trailing 17-0 Saturday – may bring an end to the scheme changes, too.
Orgeron announced Monday he made the changes to ease the burden on the offensive line, a group struggling with penalties and blocks and playing with two true freshmen last week.
There’s something more, though. The physicality from the group is lacking, the coach said.
“We're not playing the way we want to on both sides of the line of scrimmage,” he said. “That's one of the reasons I wanted to quit shift in motion, be more physical at the point of attack. But you know you're playing two freshmen there. The guys are moving, and they're challenging our two freshmen.”
Orgeron did not specifically address a question Monday about coaches “fighting each other,” as a reporter asserted.
He was, however, asked about Canada’s reaction to Orgeron injecting himself into the offense.
“All fine,” Orgeron said. “I'm the head coach.”Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said that he has not had any discussions about a future role in Government and did not have any particular future plans once he steps down from the leadership role next week.
He was speaking to Irish media in Chicago where he completed his final trip to the United States as Taoiseach.
Mr Kenny said he would stay on as a TD until the Dáil was dissolved.
He also said that he would be meeting with new Fine Gael leader Leo Varadkar upon his return from Brussels later this week and they would "have discussions".
He added that his advice to Mr Varadkar was "be not afraid" and that he would have his full support for whatever structure he would put on his new Government.
Mr Kenny said he was elected to be leader of Fine Gael fifteen years ago today and "it seemed so long ago".
He said the job had "required nine years of very high levels of activity to put a bit of courage back ingot be party, to give them a sense of belief in themselves, to fight to win the right to enter government".
The Mayo man also said that "a great deal of sacrifice" had been required from the Irish people and he was "happy on their behalf" that Ireland was now recognised as the fastest growing country in the European Union for the fourth year running.
He said the "new structure of government" had "no time to waste", and he urged them not to be afraid of the challenges that lay up ahead.
However, he warned that every action should be taken "in the interest fully and solely of the Irish people".
The Taoiseach said that he did not have any particular plans for the future other than to stay on as a deputy until the Dail was dissolved.
He said he hoped that Mr Varadkar would be elected as Taoiseach and that they he would "get on with the business of moving the country forward".
Mr Kenny said there were challenges up ahead but that he was "very happy" in himself "both personally as a citizen and as a politician" to move the responsibility on to the next generation". He said the foundations were now "very strong".
Asked if he was emotional to be on his last trip to the US, when one of his first trips as Taoiseach was to Chicago, he said "not really" and that he was "going to fly through the night" tonight to go to Brussels to attend the World War One centenary commemorative event at Messines.
He said 33,000 Irish, mostly young men, were involved and he found that "quite emotional".
He urged every Irish person to visit "Flanders and see those gravestones left and right as they travel through the small roads".
He said he would always remember "standing with [then] Prime Minister Cameron under the Peace Tower close to Messines and the local schoolchildren came out on a cold November's day. It went straight through me".
He |
your lips, it's not very easy to spread across your lips, because of its texture and it makes your lips feel really hot. And all of these things make me think that it's actually working. I've been using it almost the whole day today and I haven't had any flying dead skins, as usual. I tend to be a bit of a lip-picker as well - it really bugs me if there's a piece of dead skin on there. I use lip exfoliator at least once a day for that reason, but this lip treatments seems to just burn them off or heal them with magical powers. I love it. My only concern would be, because of the texture I'll most likely run out really quickly, as you have to apply quite a bit.Ingredients include sheabutter, snail extract and grape seed oil. It has high concentrates of collagen.And these are all the products! Thanks for watching and reading guys. I shall report back to how I feel about these products after using them for a while. Keep an eye out on my twitter or instagram - I will most likely share the good experiences there!As Clive Palmer relishes the power he will soon wield via his balance of power votes in the Senate, a perfect illustration has emerged of the conflict of interest between his influence over the political process and his business interests.
Palmer has the power to “game” votes in the Senate in a way that could, quite legally, earn him around $9m. There is no evidence he plans to do this. But a conflict of interest is not about what someone does, or even plans to do, it is about how they could use their position to advance their other interests. And Clive Palmer could use his party’s Senate votes to make $9m. Here’s how.
Under the current carbon price laws, high-emitting, trade-exposed businesses get free permits to cushion the impact of the price. Under the law they are also able to sell these permits back to the clean energy regulator at any time, and the regulator is required to buy them.
If the carbon price is still in place on 1 September, high emitting companies will be able to receive 75% of their free permit allocation for the next year. And, as noted last year by the research firm Reputex, if those companies felt certain the carbon price was about to be repealed, they could take a risk and get in ahead of that vote and sell their permits back. It would be a risk because if the tax was not repealed, the companies would still need the permits to meet their carbon tax liabilities. Reputex calculated the potential total cost of this loophole to the government to be $2b.
“Should the (carbon price) be disbanded from end of September 2014, Reputex notes that the government can expect companies to utilise the buy-back facility before the permits become worthless, with government facing a bill in excess of A$2bn to cash in nearly 87m freely allocated permits,” Reputex said.
But for Palmer there is no risk involved in taking advantage of the loophole. With Labor and the Greens voting against the repeal, his four-strong voting bloc will determine its timing. He is the only industrialist in the country who can know for sure when it will happen.
Palmer’s wholly-owned Queensland Nickel will get about 533,172 free permits this year. Next year, depending on production levels, they may get around 500,000, two-thirds of those permits available from 1 September. Between that time and the repeal of the carbon tax those permits could be sold back at $25.40 each, earning Palmer over $9m.
Asked about the possibility of companies making windfall gains in this way, the Department of the Environment said: “The government is committed to the repeal of the carbon tax with effect from 1 July 2014 and industry assistance arrangements, including the jobs and competitiveness program which will also be abolished with effect from that time.
“The government believes that any legislative issues associated with a short delay in the passage of the repeal legislation are manageable.”
Palmer had always said he would support the carbon tax repeal, but believed it should be retrospective, but in April threatened to block it if the government “played games” by including its Direct Action climate change fund in budget appropriation bills to avoid its defeat in the Senate. Palmer has long insisted his senators would vote against Direct Action.
The clean energy regulator recently confirmed Palmer’s Queensland Nickel still had an outstanding carbon tax debt of $2.68m, despite paying back a portion of his debt earlier in the year.
When the carbon repeal bills were before the lower house, Palmer abstained, conceding he had a conflict of interest. He insists his senators have no such conflict of interest, and will vote.
He currently claims he won’t speak to the government because it has offered his party seven extra staff members, but has refused to formally recognise it has “party status” because that requires five senators and MPs and Palmer has four – three senate seats and his own in the lower house.
He nevertheless had dinner on Wednesday night with the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and others at a Canberra restaurant.In the working and Service Dog world, the stocky, solid, sweet-natured Labrador Retriever is an iconic sight. They’re well-known not only for their prowess as a search and rescue K-9, detector dog and Service Dog, but also for their die-hard loyalty and friendship to all.
Labrador Retrievers: The Basics
Bred in Newfoundland from a stock of thick-furred, heavily-boned water dogs, the Labrador Retriever originated early in the 19th century as a sporting, hunting and working dog. The Labrador Retriever we know and love today began taking shape in the early 1900s as the breed caught the eye of fanciers and they began breeding to a working and conformation standard.
The Labrador Retriever is a sturdy, solid dog bred for one thing and one thing only: to pick things up, carry them around, and bring them back to his handler. While retrieving may be what the Labrador Retriever is bred for, this fleet-footed, muscular dog excels at nearly at task set to it. Extremely intelligent and trainable, the Labrador is quick-witted and a problem solver. Per the American Kennel Club breed standard, Labs should possess a “stable temperament,” weigh “55 to 75 pounds,” and be an “outgoing and devoted companion.”
Those qualities combine with a short, sleek, water-resistant coat, superb handler focus and the grit to keep working even when it’s tough to create a breed perfectly suited to assistance dog work.
Labrador Retrievers: The Puppy Stage
It’s important to remember that every well-trained Service Dog begins life like any other dog: as a puppy. Lab babies are high-energy, which lands them in some not so-good-situations with inexperienced owners. The Labrador’s calm demeanor and unshakable obedience are often touted, but what’s left out is the two-year kangaroo phase where they seem to have springs attached to their paws and chainsaws bent towards destruction in their mouths.
Labrador puppies chew. They mouth. They carry. They steal. They’re exceptionally happy, wiggly dogs who wish to share their joy at having ANYTHING, no matter how stinky, big, or smelly, in their mouths with anyone who happens to be near them. They’re exceptionally friendly and social dogs, which if not carefully managed, can morph into behaviors that will exclude them from service work.
While the Labrador Retriever puppy phase takes careful work to overcome, the resultant animal is a friend, partner, and confidant for life. A well-trained and socialized Labrador is a calm, steady and reliable presence in the face of any of life’s obstacles.
Labrador Retrievers: The Rest of the Story
Labs are large dogs and they shed year-round. They come in three colors: black, chocolate, and yellow. Each color has varying shades.
It’s been proven via decades of field trials that black coated dogs tend to be better field dogs, chocolate dogs have a calmer demeanor but often suffer from skin issues, and yellow-coated dogs fall somewhere in between. The jury is still out on whether that’s the case because black Labs are worked more in the field and chocolate Labs have been regulated to the job of “house pet” or if there are actual genetic ties to coat color and working ability. Because they tend to be seen as “friendlier” in the eyes of the public, yellow Labs tend to be favored as Service Dogs, but you’ll see a smattering of other colors as well.I haven’t watched any of the original Star Wars movies for a while, and as a matter of fact, I haven’t even thought about them either. Whether that is because we are really busy here at Bit Rebels at the moment I don’t know. However, now that I’m thinking about it, I need to dust off those DVD boxes and make a movie night out of it. You might wonder what it was that triggered this thought, and that is just what this whole article is all about. And, I think you might have figured that one out already. The urge to watch the original movies seems to come to me in bursts, and it’s usually when I stumble over something really Star Wars retro that I start thinking about them.
The one thing that triggered it this time was the awesome Star Wars illustrations by Ralph Mac Querrie. Not only are they inspirational and amazing, they also take you back to the days when the whole Star Wars franchise was still new and fresh. I am quite fond of those memories, and these images certainly bring it all back. If you’re not a hardcore Star Wars fan, you might not know that Mr. Querrie was the one who drew the original storyboard for the first Star Wars movies which landed George Lucas the budget to shoot the movies. Before he had a storyboard, he was met with utter rejection.
I think I have seen some fragments of the initial pitch at some point, and I hate to tell you, but it far from awesome. We’ve all seen the black and white storyboard as well, and I think those were used as a production guide rather than inspiration. So, if you want that retro Star Wars feeling back again, just remember to have a good look at these images and you will find yourself searching for that extended DVD set in your collection in no time. All I need now are some Pringles chips and a glass of Coca Cola, and I’ll be all good to go.Overgrowth alpha 227 is live!
[forums.wolfire.com]
[forums.wolfire.com]
[www.humblebundle.com]
The latest Overgrowth a227 early access build is here! You can get it DRM-free in the preorder forum, or you can grab it through your Steam account.Changelog:The points listed here are just a summary of all the changes. You can find the full change log here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pvWxaMbEdgUu53-RCr3oPfuWQlevbOvPeT3aiKe8P2s New content- Lugaru campaign is now playableGameplay- Disarm with judo throw- Pull out thrown knives to finish off enemy- Wolves are only vulnerable to weapons and jump kicks- Metal armor, only in Lugaru campaign right now- Knockout shield to keep characters from dying in one hit- Staff weapon properly implemented- Screen effects to signal damage and health- Slow motion when defeating last active enemy- Improved AIGraphics- Can now add fog to levels- Improved weapon sticking in characters- Snow shader- Improved lava shaderOther- Performance improved- Lots of bug fixesNote for MacOS Sierra users: The settings menu and editor GUI are not working as intended right now, but we are working on a fix and will release a hotfix once it’s done!If you find any bugs, please email a full description along with your system specs to bugs@wolfire.com To download the alpha, vist the preorder forum, use Steam, or log into your Humble Bundle accountWhite House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked during his afternoon press briefing yesterday if he could still confirm that “nobody on the Trump campaign, not even Gen. Flynn, had any contact with the Russians before the election.” His answer was, well, awkward: “I don’t have any — there’s nothing that would conclude me — that anything different has changed with respect to that time period.”
Thanks to a report by Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo for the New York Times, we now know that Spicer got it wrong. In the year before the election, several Trump “associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials.” As yet, there is no definitive evidence of collusion between the Russians and members of Trump’s team, but leaks from within the intelligence community show that there were sustained contacts.
Much of the news today will (rightly) focus on the political implications of this story. This interview is about the escalating tensions between President Trump and the American intelligence community. My interviewee is Glenn Carle, a 23-year veteran of the CIA and a former deputy officer on the National Intelligence Council. Here, I ask him if we’ve truly entered uncharted territory, and if he believes Trump’s ties to Russia have compromised our national security.
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Sean Illing
The president of the United States just tweeted that “Information is being illegally given” to the New York Times and the Washington Post “by the intelligence community.” Are we witnessing a shadow war between President Trump and the intelligence community?
Glenn Carle
Well, I think the talk of a "shadow war" diverts from the real issue because it focuses attention on some coherent, organized bureaucratic or institutional campaign to oppose the president. But none of that's the case. The issue is that Trump and his entourage, for a long period of time, have been associating with, meeting with, involved with, or working somehow with Russian intelligence.
Now, I've been aware of this for about a year. I've been jumping up and down, and I'm not the only one. And if I can figure it out as a professional intelligence officer who's no longer in service, then obviously active intelligence officers can figure it out too.
Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?).Just like Russia — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2017
Sean Illing
So how would you characterize this rift?
Glenn Carle
What's happened is that the organs of government sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States have been trying to do their jobs. Intelligence professionals take their responsibilities seriously. Whatever they do, they do it because they believe it is necessary, because they believe duty demands it. They’re not playing political games.
Sean Illing
Have we entered uncharted territory?
Glenn Carle
The narrow answer is yes, but it's much more than that. The real issue is what I've been saying [here and here] in public for many months: We are facing the gravest threat to our institutions and our government since 1861, since the country broke in half. This is a graver crisis than Watergate, which was about corruption, not the usurpation of our laws and our checks and balances. It's graver than World War II, when Hitler never actually threatened our institutions or occupation of Washington.
So this goes back to 1861. It's a huge societal and institutional crisis. We're dealing with a man in Trump who doesn't accept a fact-based reality, who only acts for his own self-aggrandizement, and who views any action that does not serve him as a threat that must be destroyed. And, on top of that, his team appears to have been colluding with Russian intelligence services.
This is a massive crisis for our norms and our Constitution, and we have to say so.
Sean Illing
Republicans like Rep. Devin Nunes, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, seem to be more concerned with the source of the leaks than with the revelations themselves. Perhaps there is a belief that these leaks are an act of retaliation by the intelligence community. How do you see it? Are intelligence officials pushing back out of a sense of obligation? Do they think he’s dangerous?
Glenn Carle
These sorts of accusations are outrageous and part of the problem. It's shocking to see such a betrayal of the oaths these people took to serve the nation. With only a handful of exceptions, nearly every Republican has marched in lockstep to protect their leader because it allows them to pursue their agenda — tax cuts for the rich, increasing voter restrictions on minority districts, the elimination of entitlement programs, etc.
So they have clearly put personal professional advantage ahead of their oaths.
Sean Illing
Now the talking point seems to be that we should be more concerned about the leaks than the actual revelations.
Glenn Carle
Again, that's totally outrageous. To say that the leaks are the real issue is like saying the guy who reported that he saw someone set fire to a building had dirty shoes. It's an egregious misdirection of attention.
Sean Illing
Do you think people in the intelligence community trust Donald Trump? Should they trust him?
Glenn Carle
No, of course not. We all should know this man very well at this point: If something seems to create an issue for him, he will denounce, denigrate, and attempt to destroy the person or the entity responsible for creating it. That's it. The law doesn't count for Donald Trump. Social convention doesn't count for Donald Trump. Institutional practices don't count for Donald Trump. Only Donald Trump counts for Donald Trump. Nothing else matters.
So no, we should not — and cannot — trust this man.
Sean Illing
There was a recent report by the Observer’s John Schindler that the CIA and the NSA are withholding information from the Oval Office out of fear that the Russians might have ears inside the White House Situation Room.
Do you buy that? If true, what does this mean?
Glenn Carle
I don't know for a fact that this is true, but I absolutely buy this as a possibility. I have publicly talked about the crisis that this circumstance poses to the national security establishment. What do you do if you think the officer in charge of you is the one who's betraying the oath and the obligations to protect the Constitution and the country?
If you resign, then someone else will take your place. If you report the information, it will be tabled or used against you rather than acted upon. If you go in-house, you risk having the information passed up the chain of command. So if I were put in this dilemma, I would do what I thought was necessary to protect the nation's secrets.
Sean Illing
So what’s left to do if you’re someone on the inside who understands the stakes and can see what is happening?
Glenn Carle
The only thing you can do is what is now happening: an aroused populace can protect democracy. You fight darkness by casting light upon it. So one should not characterize leaks, as the cowardly and self-interested Republicans have, as the issue. Leaks are the only option that one has in this existential crisis to protect the Constitution.Minions opened in China over the weekend, and its box office debut was, well, bananas.
Opening to an estimated $20.1 million, Minions earned the biggest opening day for an animated film ever in China. As a result, its box office total is now at $1.08 billion worldwide, making Minions the 15th biggest film ever (not accounting for inflation). Not only that, but it’s officially surpassed Toy Story 3 to become the second-highest grossing animated film of all time. Frozen, which has made $1.27 billion globally, is the current record-holder for the biggest animated movie ever.
After debuting in July, Minions earned the second biggest opening for an animated movie, bringing in $115.7 million domestically and falling just short of Shrek the Third’s $121.6 million. To date, Minions has made more than $331 million domestically.
Minions is just one more hit in a string of successes for Universal, which has had a banner year at the box office thanks to Jurassic World, Furious 7, Pitch Perfect 2, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Straight Outta Compton. Back in August, the studio officially crossed $5.53 billion at the global box office, setting the record for the highest-grossing year ever for a movie studio.
Related Stories
•Minions clears $1 billion at the worldwide box office
•Universal Pictures breaks box office records with highest-grossing year ever
•Universal sets international box-office record
WANT MORE EW? Subscribe now to keep up with the latest in movies, television, music, and more.Hello! It's about time we had another one of these threads again, since the last two were most excellent exercises in remembering and showing our most cherished moments from games past and present.The most important thing you need to remember is this: PLEASE DON'T FEEL THAT YOU NEED ANY SKILL TO PARTICIPATE. Most people prefer the more dodgy drawings, and if we were having an actual art contest other paint programs could be used too. It's all about remembering the games we've played and what we think makes them awesome.For me, last year was dominated pretty much by one game and its final bossfight(if you can't see it, try clicking here ):If anyone needs some rules laid down, here we go: MSPaint or some Mac equivalent only. Graphics tablets are fine since I use them. Spoilers are okay as long as they're not likely to cause a huge backlash in the thread (use your own judgement.) You can always just link to the image instead of posting it in the topic if you're unsure.Anyway,In a major feat of surgery a man has been fitted with what is being heralded the world’s first ‘bionic’ penis. The recipient of this combined technological and surgical feat, according to The Daily Mail, is Mohammed Abad, who lives in Edinburgh.
When Mohammed was 6 years old he was hit by a car and dragged around 180 metres down the road, which resulted in ripping his left testicle and penis. The accident damaged his penis and cleaved an entire testicle off and was immediately taken to the HRI. Doctors predicted that he won’t make it and gave him only 12 hours to live, but he survived and spent the next 18 months in and out of the hospital.
Now, thanks to a team from University of London, Mohammed, aged 43, has been fitted with an eight inch long replacement penis. The surgery took 11 hours to complete.
The penis is partly composed of skin grafts taken from Mohammed’s forearm. The penis can become erect through fluid being mechanically pumped into it. Mohammed can work the pump via a button situated close to his remaining testicle. Through this it may be possible for the man to start a family, although feelings of sexual sensation are unlikely.
Discussing the sexual aspect, perhaps unsurprisingly with The Sun newspaper, Mohammed said:
“When you want a bit of action, you press the ‘on’ button. When you are finished you press another button. It takes seconds. Doctors have told me to keep practicing.”
Earlier this year a man in South Africa became the first person to receive a penis transplant, donated from a deceased person. Given that Mohammed’s new penis is largely mechanical, his is the first ‘bionic’ penis in the world.2017 has been an outstanding year for NumFOCUS in a number of ways. Everything we’re able to accomplish is thanks to you, our community of supporters. In this post, we highlight a few notable stories from the year showcasing NumFOCUS’s growth and achievements—all made possible by you!
Two New “Firsts” for NumFOCUS Projects
Five NumFOCUS projects were used to power the LIGO Discovery that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics:
Jupyter
IPython
Stan
NumPy
Matplotlib
Learn more.
NumPy received its first ever grant funding, courtesy of the Moore Foundation.
Growth of the Community
New sponsored projects
Four new sponsored projects made NumFOCUS their home:
PyData Network Nearly Tripled in Size
The worldwide PyData community more than doubled, from just over 20,000 members at the beginning of the year to just under 56,000 now! (33 new chapters; 78 chapters total across 34 countries)
Congratulations to all of the PyData chapter organizers on your amazing work growing local communities of data science enthusiasts!
Local communities in New Delhi, India; Warsaw, Poland; and San Luis, Argentina also partnered with NumFOCUS to organize their inaugural PyData Conferences in 2017.Victor Oladipo, 6-5, Shooting Guard, Junior, Indiana
Video Analysis
Perhaps no player in the country has garnered more attention for his improvement from last season to this than Indiana's Victor Oladipo. After a solid sophomore year in which he emerged as a defensive specialist and energy guy for the Hoosiers, Oladipo has become dramatically more efficient on the offensive end as a junior, leading all top-100 prospects in effective FG% As we've mentioned before, Oladipo's intrigue as an NBA prospect starts with his abilities as a perimeter defender. An elite athlete with a chiseled frame and solid size and length for an NBA shooting guard, Oladipo combines his outstanding physical tools with a relentless motor, often overwhelming players at the college level as an on-ball defender and causing havoc off the ball.Oladipo makes his presence felt all over the floor defensively, playing with tremendous intensity and always finding ways to get his hands on the ball for deflections and steals, or flying in from out of his area to block a shot or come up with a rebound, thanks to his seemingly endless energy and outstanding speed, quickness, and leaping ability.Oladipo ranks second amongst all players in our Top 100 Rankings in steals per forty minutes, using his athleticism and anticipation skills to play the passing lanes, and also his quick hands to strip his man off the dribble. He has excellent lateral quickness and is able play his man very closely on the perimeter and still stay in front of him, while also being able to recover quickly in the event that he gets beat.With the ability to guard up to four positions at the college level, Oladipo projects to be able to defend all three perimeter positions at the NBA level, depending on matchups. He has the speed and quickness to cover point guards, and his athleticism, strength, and toughness should enable him to guard most small forwards as well. Coaches will likely value the flexibility Oladipo gives them on the defensive end, as they can cross-match and hide weaker defenders while putting Oladipo on the opposing team's top perimeter threat, regardless of position.While Oladipo's calling card as a prospect is his defense, it's the progression in his offensive game that has been the primary reason for his breakout season. After making only 18 of his 74 3-point attempts (24%) in his first two seasons at Indiana, he's connected on an excellent 19 of 37 so far this season (51%) from behind the arc, which ranks second among all top-100 prospects who attempt at least one 3-pointer per game.Oladipo's shooting numbers are likely a bit inflated at this stage with such a small sample size, but it's clear that he's put in the work to improve his jump shot. He looks more fluid and comfortable with his release than last year, and the ball seems to come off of his hands softer, with better rotation and arc on his shot.He's also done a very good job knowing his limitations as a shooter, as 74% of his jumpers this season have come off the catch with his feet set, and the pull-up jumpers he has taken have been good, open looks for the most part.NBA teams will likely want to see more evidence that his early season shooting is not a fluke, as well as see how he might adjust to the longer NBA 3-point, but his improvements are very encouraging and should suggest that the potential is there for him to become an adequate spot shooter in time, assuming he continues to put in the work.Oladipo still does much of his damage offensively when he can get out in the open floor, as over 28% of his used possessions this season have come in transition. He's an absolute blur leading the break with the ball in his hands or filling the lanes, where he's capable of finishing with highlight-reel dunks.In the half-court, Oladipo is primarily an opportunistic scorer at this stage, utilizing his athleticism and energy to make plays off of cuts and offensive rebounds (his 3.4 offensive rebounds per forty ranks first amongst all shooting guard prospects in our database). Over two thirds of his shot attempts come in the basket area, and he's converting on an outstanding 71% of those attempts, as he attacks the rim very aggressively and uses his good body control and excellent elevation to finish.As we've touched on before, Oladipo is fairly limited as a ball-handler and playmaker, with most of his opportunities coming off of straight-line drives on close-outs or when he can catch the ball on the move. Indiana Coach Tom Crean seems to be getting more comfortable using him as a creator, however, as almost 20% of his possessions have come in isolations or as the ball-handler in pick-and-roll sets. He is far more comfortable dribbling and finishing with his right hand at this stage and doesn't show much in the way of advanced ball-handling skills, but he's still able to get the basket at times, as he is very difficult to stop once he's built up a full head of steam and is able to utilize his blazing speed.Oladipo plays unselfishly and is showing a better feel for driving-and-kicking to open shooters, but since he's always playing at full speed, he has a tendency to be out of control and loose with the ball, as evidenced by the fact that he turns the ball over on almost a quarter of his used possessions.Playing on a very talented Hoosier squad, currently ranked as the top team in the country, should give Oladipo plenty of time to showcase himself in front of NBA scouts over the next couple months. With all the buzz he's receiving this season, and the fact that he's on track to graduate in three years, he likely will be tempted to declare for the NBA draft this summer, something he's reportedly strongly considering according to what we've been told.While Oladipo's offensive game is still a work-in-progress at this point and may limit his upside in the eyes of some NBA teams, but he brings tremendous value defensively and looks to have all of the makings of a solid role player, even with a lack of polish in his offensive skill set.His emergence as an efficient offensive player this season is very encouraging, though, and he's shown tremendous growth at his time at Indiana so far, after barely being a top-150 recruit out of high school. He is by all accounts a very hard worker and a gym rat, and he'll be able to hang his hat on the fact that he has a combination of athleticism and energy that can be matched by very few, something that will surely be appealing to NBA decision-makers.What is LSP?
The Language Server protocol is used between a tool (the client) and a language smartness provider (the server) to integrate features like auto complete, go to definition, find all references and alike into the tool
– official Language Server Protocol specification
The LSP was created by Microsoft to define a common language for programming language analyzers to speak. Today, several companies have come together to support its growth, including Codenvy, Red Hat, and Sourcegraph, and the protocol is becoming supported by a rapidly growing list of editor and language communities. See below for details on and links to current client and server implementations.
Why LSP?
LSP creates the opportunity to reduce the m-times-n complexity problem of providing a high level of support for any programming language in any editor, IDE, or client endpoint to a simpler m-plus-n problem.
For example, instead of the traditional practice of building a Python plugin for VSCode, a Python plugin for Sublime Text, a Python plugin for Vim, a Python plugin for Sourcegraph, and so on, for every language, LSP allows language communities to concentrate their efforts on a single, high performing language server that can provide code completion, hover tooltips, jump-to-definition, find-references, and more, while editor and client communities can concentrate on building a single, high performing, intuitive and idiomatic extension that can communicate with any language server to instantly provide deep language support.
The problem : "The Matrix" Go Java TypeScript... Emacs Vim VSCode... The solution : lang servers and clients Go Java TypeScript... Emacs Vim VSCode...
Current implementations
LSP is growing - fast. See tables below for the latest on adoption.
Microsoft currently maintains a parallel list of language server implementations in the core LSP repository. This site is designed to operate alongside Microsoft's list by providing more information about the capabilities of language servers and LSP clients, informing users which features to expect when they download and install a new language server and/or client, and communicating where to open-source contributors where help is needed.
Qualifications:
To be included on this list, language servers and clients must:
Be fully open source Be editor-agnostic for language servers or language-agnostic for clients Implement at least one of the key methods listed below
Key
Implemented WIP Not implemented
Language servers
Notes:
Language servers that support this feature are able to resolve / install a project's 3rd-party dependencies without the need for a user to manually intervene. Language servers that support this feature don't execute arbitrary code (some language servers do this when running build scripts, analyzing the project, etc.). Language servers that support this feature are able to operate without sharing a physical filesystem with the client. See this link for more information. Language servers that support this feature are able to identify symbols through SymbolDescriptor s. See this link for more information.
LSP clients
Contact us
Langserver.org is maintained by Sourcegraph.
To suggest additions or to update the status of a project, please file issues or submit PRs on this project at github.com/langserver/langserver.github.io
Icons from Glyphicons Free, licensed under CC BY 3.0.The following zines and pamphlets were published in November of 2016 by various anarchist publishing projects.
Please copy and distribute which ever of these titles seem interesting, use them to start discussion groups, and most importantly, as a means for developing the capacity to act.
As always, please let us know about new titles so we can highlight them in the next edition. Past round-ups can be found here.
We’d also like to encourage people to check out an archive of PDFs from Zinelibrary.info that offers a good chunk of the content that was previously available at Zinelibrary.info
Zines and Pamphlets Published in November 2016
Dispatches from Standing Rock: Against the Dakota Access Pipeline and its World
This zine—produced by Ill Will Editions—compiles five texts that appeared on anarchist websites around the end of October. They provide firsthand accounts from Standing Rock and the resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline. It provides a good background on what has happened, where the struggle can go, and how it can be intensified.
Download a Printable or Screen Reading PDF
NIGHTFALL #3
This is the third issue of NIGHTFALL, an anarchist publication covering the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. This issue features a good critique of sustainable development (somewhat specific to the local context, but deep enough that it could be helpful for people elsewhere), a critique of mainstream environmentalism, a historical piece on the Minnehaha Free State, and a round-up of local and global actions. It’s definitely a solid example of a locally-focused anarchist publication.
Download the PDF
Earth First! News – Samhain 2016
The Samhain 2016 edition of the Earth First! News features the usual round-up of “news from the eco-wars” highlighting environmental action around the world, addresses of eco prisoners, and a list of eco-action groups. Aside from these always useful regular features, this issue features an account of resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline. It’s a helpful piece for providing an overview of what has happened so far.
Download the PDF
Hands Off!
This zine was published in solidarity with 3 anarchists being held in Germany, suspected of participation in two different bank robberies. In response to the robberies (which took place in 2013 and 2014), the German state launched an international investigation that – with the cooperation of other intelligence agencies – targeted anarchists across Europe. This zine provides background on the investigations, the case in general, and various statements/communiques written about the case. It also chronicles the solidarity actions that have been undertaken in response to the repression.
Download the PDF
Anarchic Practices in the Territory Dominated by the Chilean State
This zine is a lengthy piece originally intended to be printed in an upcoming issue of Fire to the Prisons, but released early because of delays in the publication of the aforementioned magazine. It’s a helpful introduction to the anarchist space in Chile and the history of anarchy in the country. The introduction summarizes its intent:
“this article intends to approach issues that we believe are substantial in the development of the anarchist movement in the Chilean region, in order to depict the present state of the movement, leverage its strengths, overcome its weaknesses and to project its potential as a negationist force that denies the reality of compliance and spectacularity.”
Along with the text, it also includes a list of anarchist and anti-authoritarian prisoners held by the Chilean state.
Download the PDF
Spread Anarchy, Live Communism
This is an updated zine version of a talk given by the Invisible Committee at a conference in 2011. While at times it seems a little dated in light of events that have happened since its publication, the text provides a good introduction to the perspective articulated by the Invisible Committee in its books (see To Our Friends and The Coming Insurrection).
Download the Printable or Screen Reading PDF
Industrial Worker – Fall 2016
While not a zine per se, the newest edition of the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) long-running Industrial Worker publication was released last month. This edition features articles on the IWW’s role in the September 9 prison strike, news from IWW and broader labor struggles, and remembrances of comrades who have recently passed as well as historical events. There is also an article on why organized labor should oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline and a piece debating a strategy for future growth of the union.
Download the PDF
Fire to the Prisons! Solidarity with the prisoners on hunger strike in Greece March-April 2015
This zine compiles information on Greek prisoners who engaged in a hunger strike in 2015 and the attempts by various anarchists to show solidarity with that effort. The zine includes background information on the hunger strike, statements from prisoners, and communiques from various actions and |
, much smaller:
Nearly a third of voters say they have already cast their ballot and Obama leads by nine among this group. Obama also has a similar lead among the small group who have not voted but still plan to vote early. The candidates are essentially even among those who plan to vote on Tuesday. Not surprisingly, the number of persuadable voters has declined sharply as Election Day draws near. Forty-seven percent (47%) of voters say they are certain they will vote for Obama and won’t change their mind. Forty-three percent (43%) say the same about McCain. Six percent (6%) have a preference for one of the major party candidates but could change their mind, 2% plan to vote for a third party option and 2% remain undecided.
Basically, it’s that six percent that McCain is fighting for, and it’s a tough fight to say the least.
The Gallup Daily tracking poll, meanwhile, also shows Obama gaining on McCain and having double-digit leads under all three of Gallup’s scenarios:
PRINCETON, NJ — Barack Obama leads John McCain in Gallup Poll Daily tracking interviewing conducted Wednesday through Friday by an identical 52% to 42% margin among both traditional likely voters and expanded likely voters. Obama leads by a similar 52% to 41% margin among all registered voters. This is the first time since Gallup began estimating likely voters in early October that there is no difference between Gallup’s two likely voter models. Obama’s lead of 52% to 42% using Gallup’s traditional estimate of likely voting criteria takes into account past voting as well as current intentions. Obama’s identical lead using the expanded model takes into account only current voting intentions.
Gallup’s poll also indicates that Obama will enter Tuesday’s official voting with a “locked in” lead thanks to early voting:
Gallup’s interviewing conducted Wednesday through Friday shows that 27% of registered voters who plan to vote have already voted. The trend in early voting has trended consistently upward on a day to day basis, moving from 7% of registered voters, who had already voted during the period of Oct. 17-19, to the current estimate of 27%. Another 8% of registered voters still indicate that they plan on voting before Election Day itself. The vote choices of these early voters — all of whom are included in the likely voter pool since they are definite voters — skew more toward Barack Obama than the sample average. Thus, more and more of these Obama-oriented voters’ choices are being “locked in” to the likely voter pool through early voting, benefiting Obama.
The remaining tracking polls are generally consistent with Rasmussen and Gallup — Hotline has Obama up by 7, the Washington Post has Obama up by 9, and GWU/Battleground and Investor’s Business Daily have Obama up by four. More importantly, none of these polls shows any indication of the move toward McCain supposedly reflected in Zogby’s Friday number.
Three days out, this looks like a win for Obama.The New Old Media: Internet Entrepreneurs are finding that the Next Big Thing is … branching into “old” media to make a buck. Isn’t it ironic?
*From the March 10, 1997 issue of New York Magazine.
Internet entrepreneurs are finding that the Next Big Thing is…branching into “old” media to make a buck. Isn’t it ironic.
It’s coming-of-age time in Silicon Alley, that amorphous downtown hub where the Young Turks of new media churn out websites, CD-ROMS, and all things interactive. The boundless idealism, fluid cash flow, and fierce independence that characterized New York’s online industry in years gone by—that is, last year and maybe the year before—have given away to hard-nosed pragmatism, tight financial reins, and a willingness to forge strategic alliances with big business.
What’s more, there seems to be a newfound respect for old media, or at least the profits that can be made there. In fact, many cash-strapped content producers are trying to translate their nascent Internet identities into traditional media products. “The holy grail right now is to take a Web brand and leverage it in other media, like print, radio, and TV,” says Jason McCabe Calacanis, editor and publisher of the Silicon Alley Reporter, an industry newsletter.
Maybe that’s what multimedia meant all along. Yet not long ago, the digerati found old media to be, well, old. Books, magazines, shows, films—these ways of communicating were expensive, slow, and centralized. They weren’t interactive or digital or conducive to self-publishing the way the Web was. They weren’t the Next Big Thing.
By now, though, new-media entrepreneurs have realized that there isn’t much money yet to be made in Internet content. (Things have been better for companies providing Net-related technology, software, and consulting.). The main problem is that there aren’t enough eyeballs online to satisfy advertisers, who have approached the Web cautiously, spending about $320 million during 1996—less than one percent of what they spent on TV ads. (What’s more, the biggest advertisers on the Web turn out to be other Websites, creating even more of a financial vacuum within the industry.). The other basic way to make money online is via subscriptions, but few customers are yet willing to pay for content on the Net. So what’s a pioneer of online culture to do? Quite simple: Hedge your bets and go offline.
“At this point, I wouldn’t even entertain a project that only had a life as an online property,” says Tim Nye, the ambitious 30-year-old head of Sunshine Interactive Network. Nye recently sold a dramatic episodic series called The Vanishing Point to Microsoft for use on its online network, MSN. But Microsoft is also allowing him to develop a television version of the show, which revolves around a secret society, and he says he’s near a deal with one of the big three TV networks. “We’re not betting the farm on any one medium,” Nye says.
Others agree, saying there’s a need to spread the cost and risk associated with online media to offline ventures. N2K is an Internet-based entertainment company that sells CDs via the Web. Led by three veteran recording executives, the Silicon Alley company attracted attention last September when it persuaded David Bowie to release a single exclusively over the New. Some 240,000 copies were downloaded—for free—by listeners in 87 countries, according to vice-chairman Jon diamond. Revolutionary? Yes. A big moneymaker? Not really. So it’s not surprising that N2K is expanding into traditional media. In November, it started a record label with legendary producer Phil Ramone at the helm.
SonicNet, an acclaimed alternative-music Website based in lower Manhattan (founded, but no longer owned, by Tim Nye), is developing radio programming and a campus tour of rock and hip-hop acts. Music-oriented books, syndicated print, and TV programs are also in the works. Editor-in-chief Nicholas Butterworth (note the old-media title) says the fact that SonicNet already delivers audio and video online means that “the jump from what we do to radio and TV is not that big.” Indeed, the company’s ability to bring its growing audience of young, urban, affluent consumers to traditional media was one factor that made it an attractive acquisition for Paradigm Music Entertainment, an upstart record and radio company that bought the two-year-old SonicNet in January. Butterworth hopes to use his analog efforts to attract new customers to SonicNet’s digital home on the Internet, but notes that the real prize in old media is money. “You can’t support a Web business on advertising alone. You’ve got to look elsewhere,” he says.
The desire among these downtown companies to be players in paleomedia may not be surprising given that New York is a global center for all publishing and entertainment. Yet Silicon Alley is actually taking its cues from industry leaders outside New York who’ve already begun blazing the path from new media back to old. The creators of America Online’s Motley Fool financial service have published a best-selling book outlining their investment strategy and, until recently, ran a monthly column in Smart Money. Yahoo, the Web’s first popular search engine, now boasts a magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life. Microsoft’s e-zine Slate, which canned its plans to charge online readers, is offering a print version—for $70 a year. CNET, a Web-based news company, has launched four syndicated television shows about cyber life. And Wired Ventures, publishers of Wired magazine and the online service Hotwired, recently started a book-publishing imprint, a television show, and a news wire.
In one sense, the direction of all this movement seems counterintuitive. Just months ago, the buzz was that loyalists of traditional media were signing up for the digital revolution. (See, for example, Michael Kinsley leaving CNN for Slate, or MTV founder Bob Pittman going to AOL.) In another sense, though, there’s a logic to it. It’s not so much that talent is moving from one media sector to another but that various media categories are blurring. Already, “push” and “Webcasting” technologies—which bring images directly to your computer screen, instead of waiting for the mouse’s all-powerful click—are making the Web a lot more like TV. And with developments like interactive digital TV and channels like MSNBC, it’s hard to say where TV ends and the Internet begins.
There’s even a reluctance among new-media start-ups to be identified solely with the Internet. Dan Pelson, a co-founder of the online literary magazine Word, chooses his terms carefully when describing his new venture, Concrete Media, which so far has two Web-based properties: “We’re not an Internet company. We’re a media company that happens to have its expertise on the Internet.”
The crossover from new to old media can also be seen as part of a larger recent trend in contemporary entertainment toward multiple-medium, synergistic marketing. Particularly for megaconglomerates, it’s not uncommon to take one story line and make a film, release a soundtrack, spin off a book, launched a TV show, maybe put up a Broadway show. Cyber folk just seem to be catching up.
Or so it would seem. Some in New York’s new media scene claim they always saw the Internet as a cheap way to establish an identity that could be leveraged in other venues. “I never thought the Net could sustain us,” says Aliza Sherman, creator of a number of women-centered sites, including an online cartoon called Cybergrrl. “The technology is too primitive.” Sherman, who launched her business from her Manhattan apartment, now has a book deal and is considering TV offers.
This integration of old and new media may turn out to be a financial boon for the Web. But it may also be a sign that the Internet is entering an age of diminished expectations. Steven Johnson, editor of the successful online journal Feed, maintains that sites like his have attracted a solid audience and substantial advertising by being realistic about the medium’s limitations and capitalizing on its unique features (for example, the ability to build community online and the use of hypertext links to expose visitors to a wide array of material). Unlike some starry-eyes companies that added scores of staff members overnight and expected to generate Microsoft-like earnings, Johnson and Feed co-founder Stefanie Syman have hired few employees, established relationships with a variety of e-zines and with the New York Times online, and kept a sense of perspective. For example, while some analysts expect new-media companies to be profitable in twelve to eighteen months, Johnson and Syman note that it takes most start-up magazines and newspapers three to five years to make a profit—and Feed expects to be in the black after only two years.
It’s hard to argue with Feed’s levelheaded approach. But with all the savvy cross-platform strategizing now underway, one wonders about the fate of small websites that lack the clout to enter traditional media and reap profits. Will they be able to survive until the Web matures? It’s also not clear whether their bigger, synergy-minded counterparts are even planning to wait it out, or if they just see the Web as one big marketing tool to be discarded once other old media products take off.
No doubt, some good may come of this cross-pollination, but the fear of new-media die-hards is that those who go offline will fall prey to traditional media weaknesses: a tendency toward homogeneity, passivity, and dumbed-down material. Worst of all is the possibility that the Web will be reduced to simply another outlet in which—or from which—to exploit “branded content.” If this occurs, much potential will have been squandered, and what’s supposed to be the cutting edge of our cultural expression may get painfully dull.[There was a video here]
Former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, accused of sexual assault by 13 different women, and who prosecutors said targeted women of color (especially drug addicts, alcoholics, and sex workers, because he thought no one would believe them if they reported him) has been found guilty on 18 of the 36 counts he was facing, including four counts of first-degree rape.
In his closing arguments, BuzzFeed News reports, Holtzclaw’s defense lawyer Scott Adams said that Holtzclaw was an “honorable and ethical police officer.”
“He was aggressive, he was vigilant, and he was honest,” Adams said. “Without people like Daniel Holtzclaw patrolling the streets, what are we?” According to BuzzFeed, a woman in the gallery responded: “Safe.”
Last month, an Associated Press investigation found that, between 2009 and 2014, nearly 1,000 police officers nationwide were either decertified or lost their badges for crimes like rape, sexual shakedowns, and possession of child pornography.
The jury recommended a total sentence of 263 years for Holtzclaw. His formal sentencing is set for January.The Syrian Network for Human Rights has revealed that it has documented 74,607 cases of enforced disappearance across Syria since the outbreak of the revolution in March, 2011.
In a report published on Tuesday entitled “Prolonged Pain” the organisation said that “government forces” are responsible for at least 71,533 cases of enforced disappearance. That figure includes 7,319 members of anti-government forces and 64,214 civilians, among whom were at least 4,109 children and 2,377 women.
The organisation accuses Daesh of being responsible for 1,479 cases of enforced disappearance including 118 children and 87 women. The Fateh Al-Sham Front, meanwhile, is said to be responsible for 892 disappearances, including 41 children and 3 women. Forces linked to the Kurdish autonomous region are held accountable for at least 397 cases; 61 children and 11 women are among those who have disappeared. Armed opposition groups have, it is alleged, forcibly disappeared 306 people, including 29 children and 14 women.
The report labels the Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad as the worst in terms of enforced-disappearance crimes in the modern age. The practice has been deep rooted since the 1980s, during the rule of Assad’s father Hafez. Around 17,000 people, mostly from Hama, have suffered from this crime.
The human rights network called on the UN Security Council to assume its responsibilities with respect to forcibly disappeared persons in Syria. In the meantime, it insisted that pressure should be placed on the Syrian regime to give the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic access to all detention centres in order to investigate the horrendous allegation on human rights violations in therein and hold those who are responsible accountable for their crimes.Chernobyl disaster gave football star Stiliyan Petrov cancer, claims Bulgarian doctor
Petrov grew up 650 miles from doomed power station
Toxic cloud passed over his hometown
Communist leaders in Bulgaria 'hid threat to kids'
Aston Villa captain Stiliyan Petrov's cancer was caused by radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster more than 25 years ago, according to his national team's doctor.
The 32-year-old was diagnosed with acute leukaemia last month.
Dr Mihail Iliev, who has treated Petrov for 14 years in his capacity as Bulgarian national team medic, is blaming a toxic radiation cloud the star was exposed to when he was just six years old.
Stiliyan Petrov, accompanied by his wife and son, thanks the crowd support during the Aston Villa Chelsea game on March 31
On April 26, 1986 a power surge in reactor number four caused an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, sending a huge plume of radioactive material into the sky.
At the time Stiliyan Petrov was growing up in Montana, Bulgaria, 650 miles away from Chernobyl.
But the cloud of contaminated matter is believed to have passed over the city in the weeks following the disaster.
Dr Iliev, 61, claimed radiation levels in the north of Bulgaria were 1,000 to 1,300 times normal levels in late April, early May 1986.
He said a number of youngsters at the time, or born in the aftermath of the disaster, developed cancer - because Bulgaria's communist regime failed to tell people about the threat.
Dr. Iliev told The Sun 'It was in the late spring, the population was eating fresh radioactive vegetables and other foods. Many people who were kids back then suffered cancer because of this.
Chernobyl: Greenpeace believes the disaster will eventually cause 200,000 cancer cases
Dr Mihail Iliev, doctor to the Bulgarian football team, blames Chernobyl radiation for Stiliyan Petrov's cancer diagnosis
'We called them The Chernobyl Kids. Most were born in the same region as Stiliyan. '
Radiation from Chernobyl is known to have caused widespread birth defects across the former Soviet Union, but its effect on the inhabitants of neighboring countries is hard to measure
Levels of contamination were detected across much of Europe in the aftermath of the disaster and experts say the toxic cloud spread out and west across the continent with closest neighbours Belarus, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Norway and Bulgaria worst effected.
CHERNOBYL: 26 YEARS ON
A t 1.23am (2123 GMT), on April 26, 1986, an explosion at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant spewed a cloud of radioactive fallout over much of Europe, Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia.
The explosion released about 400 times more radiation than the U.S. atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Hundreds of thousands were sickened and once-pristine forests and farmland still remain contaminated now.
Dr Iliev is even more convinced Petrov's cancer is related, because there is no history of cancer in his family.
Dr. Iliev added, 'There are no other cases of such illness in this family, that is why I think Stiliyan is a victim of the old communist regime’s lack of information when the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded, and the radioactive cloud came to our country.'
The UN's World Health Organization says that among the 600,000 people most heavily exposed to the radiation, 4,000 more cancer deaths than average are expected to be eventually found.The First California Gold Rush
By 2tfx, 26th Sep 2014 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/3_v_rvsu/
Posted in WikinutWritingHistory
This is the story of the first gold discovery in California
The Oak of the Golden Dream
The story of the California gold rush is known by most Californians, James Marshall discovered gold in the American River at Sutter's Mill on January 28, 1848.
What is not as well known is the fact that this was not the first gold discovered in California. During the time of Mexican rule, Francisco Lopez a forty year old rancher was herding cattle on a relative's ranch near Los Angeles on March 9, 1842. with two friends Manuel Cota and Domingo Bermudez.
According to the legend, Francisco Lopez claimed to have fallen asleep under an oak tree dreaming about gold. When he woke up, He placed his knife into the dirt to dug up some wild onions. When he took the onions out of the ground, gold flakes clung to the roots!
Lopez's brother Pedro, who was the foreman at the Mission San Fernando too some samples to a Los Angeles merchant named Abel Stearns. The gold was then sent to a man named Alfred Robinson at the United States mint in Philadelphia. The gold was real and valued at nineteen dollars and ounce!
2000 miners from the Mexican state of Sonora soon arrived to work the mines.
Ygnacio Del Valle was named the first manager of the mining district.
In November 1842, two hundred ounces of gold were mined. By 1848 one hundred twenty five pounds was extracted before the mines were exhausted.
The news of the discovery reached the United States on October 1 1842 in an article by Sydney Morse in an abolitionist newspaper in New York City.
The area around Placerita Canyon was used in the early twentieth century as the location for Hollywood westerns starring William S. Hart, John Wayne and Gene Autry.
The old Oak Tree still survives in Placerita Canyon. It is still called the "Oak of the Golden Dream". It is designated as a California historic landmark number 168.
The Oak can be seen in Placerita Canyon State Park in Santa Clarita, CA. The park is run by Los Angeles County.Yesterday, myself and the staff had a roundtable about the best and worst G5 conferences. Since there was a ton of debate among the writers about which G5 conference is the worst, we wanted your opinion on which conference plays the worst football.
You voted and made your point loud and clear.
According to the poll CUSA is the worst G5 conference and its not even close. Its not surprising to see CUSA atop the list but what did surprise me was how large the gap was in comparison to the Sun Belt and MAC.
I put the Mountain West Conference just to see who would be foolish enough to think they are the worst G5 conference and eleven of you did. Those eleven folks have some explaining to do.
My vote went to the MAC largely because I don't feel like their bottom tier teams are as talented as CUSA or Sun Belt's bottom tier teams. But I understand that it's hard to make that argument when looking at Charlotte, North Texas, and what will pretty much be a new program in UAB.
More than anything its obvious that #Funbelt football has made obvious gains in the G5 ranks as the inclusions of Appalachian State and Georgia Southern have been home runs for the Sun Belt Conference.
With those two programs coupled with the steadiness that's been displayed at Arkansas State, the Sun Belt is no longer a forgone conclusion of being the worst conference. For now, that distinction belongs to CUSA.Abdul Azim Islahi*
Table of Contents
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Note of the editor
This article was presented to the Conference Encuentro internacional sobre tradición y modernidad en el pensamiento económico árabe-musulmán: La contribución de Ibn Jaldún organised in Madrid in 3-5 November 2006 by The Islamic Research and Training Institute, a member of the Islamic Development Bank Group, in collaboration with Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distance (UNED) of Spain, and Islamic Cultural Centre of Madrid: See the published version of the article. We thank Dr Abdul Azim Islahi for his permission to republish a slightly revised version of the article. The illustrations were added by the editorial board of www.MuslimHeritage.com.
* * *
Figure 1: The imaginary portrait of Ibn Khaldun in a Tunisian 10 Dinar banknote. (Source).
1. Introduction
Ibn Khaldun's theory of taxation has been considered an original and one of his most important contributions to economic thought. It is his theory of taxation that has cemented his position in the history of economics. The present paper has a limited scope. It aims at an analytical study of this theory. It is only one aspect of Ibn Khaldun's host of economic ideas. It also attempts to present empirical evidence that may support and strengthen his theory of taxation. Finally the paper examines its practicality and relevance today. But at the outset, as a background knowledge, it briefly presents Ibn Khaldun's life sketch, introduces his most outstanding work the Muqaddimah and the economic ideas found in this work. Since Ibn Khaldun's discussion of taxation is mixed with his discussion of expenditures of government at various stages, and they provide justification for taxation, this aspect has also been dealt with before taxation.
Ibn Khaldun does not discuss public finance in conventional way. This he leaves for works dealing with the government rules (al-ahkam al-sultaniyah). His focus of attention is taxation. He relates it with the government expenditure. Ibn Khaldun argued for low tax rate so that incentive to work is not killed and taxes are paid happily. According to him, when government is honest and people-friendly, as it happens to be at the beginning of a dynasty, "taxation yields a large revenue from small assessment. At the end of a dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessment". The effect of taxation on incentives and productivity is so clearly visualized by Ibn Khaldun that he seems to have grasped the concept of optimum taxation. He also analyzed the effect of government expenditure on the economy. He advocates a policy of wise and productive public expenditure. He has rightly been considered as the forerunner of the famous American economist Arthur Laffer, whose proposition adds that high tax rates shrink the tax base because they reduce the economic activity. Ibn Khaldun's ideas are ‘comparable with those of supply-side economics that emphasized incentives and tax cuts as a means of economic growth. This was the dominant theme during the 1980s. Thus, Ibn Khaldun's ideas on taxation and government expenditure bear empirical evidence and have great relevance today.
2. Life sketch
Figure 2: View of Tunis where Ibn Khaldun was born in 1332 in Civitates orbis terrarum, the world atlas of cities edited by the German geographer Georg Braun (1541-1622) (vol. 2 published in 1574). The atlas contains 546 prospects and maps of cities from all around the world. The image of Tunis is a bird's eye view looking down from the north, with the city, its waterways and fortifications clearly laid out below. The image shows the siege of Tunis by the Turks in 1574., which ended with the Spanish forced out of Tunis, which then became a Turkish regency. (Source).
Abu Zayd Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun (732-808/1332-1406), historian, statesman and social philosopher was born in Tunis where he was well brought up and received the best education, both religious and secular. He died in Egypt where he had settled down during the last years of his life. He was a descendant of a well to do Andalusian family that left Spain before its fall to Christians. His ancestry according to him originated from Hadramut, Yemen.
Ibn Khaldun lived during a period of turmoil and stagnation. To him it was not a ‘habitual or normal' situation, but as a phase of decline interrupted by vain attempts of revival. He studied this period of ossification punctured by intermittent crises (Lacoste 1984, p. 5). Rulers lost spirit of the religion, stability was replaced by anarchy; luxurious style of life did away with the simple living, and to stay in power with all these symbols of decadence, excessive taxation was imposed which acted as a powerful disincentive for undertaking economic activities. Arbitrary appropriation of people's property by the government resulted in slackening in enterprises. Trading houses owned by rulers weakened the competitive spirit of commoners.
Ibn Khaldun played a pivotal role in the politics of North Africa and Spain. He saw rise and fall of various governments, and enjoyed company of a number of rulers. He served them in various capacities – teacher, advisor, minister, ambassador, and judge. His turbulent career as a court official and statesman successively in the service of various rulers in North-Africa and Spain, in courts, in prison and sometimes in Bedouin encampments, his ambassadorial mission to Pedro the cruel, the King of Castile, his emigration in 1382 to Egypt where he held high judiciary and teaching positions during several periods and was out of official grace during others, his loss of family, friends and assets, his meeting with Tamerlane as an ambassador of Egyptian ruler, all these ups and downs enriched him with great experience in his life that helped him write his famous history and the most famous Muqaddimah – an introduction to his history. In the opinion of Spengler (1964, p. 304), "Ibn Khaldun must have acquired much of his quite solid understanding of economic behavior through his legal and administrative experience and through his contact with the pool of unwritten administrative knowledge." The French scholar Lacoste (1984, p.194) considers him "like a jewel in the midst of medieval Muslim culture."
3. The Muqaddima
Figure 3: Two pages from the reprint in 3 volumes of the Paris 1858 edition of the Muqaddimah by the French Orientalist Etienne-Marc Quatreme`re: Muqaddimat Ibn Khaldūn wa-hiya al-juz' al-awwal min Kitāb al-'Ibar wa-dīwān al-mubtadā' wa-al-khabar [The Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldūn which is volume one of the his World history], bi-tahqīq A. M. Kātirmīr (Beirut: Maktabat Lubnān, 1992). (Source). Ibn Khaldun has been ‘duly recognized by non-arabists as well as by arabists as one of the truly great and original scholars' (Rabi' 1967, p. 4). His work Kitab al-‘Ibar is of unrivalled value as a source of reference to the history of Arab and non-Arab nations until his time. His brilliant work ‘Al-Muqaddimah', conceived of as a theoretical introduction to his long book of history Al-'ibar, considered the most sublime and intellectual achievement of the Middle Ages, is a treasury of many sciences like history, psychology, sociology, geography, economics, political sciences, etc. It is, in the words of one eminent 20th century historian, "the greatest work of its kind that has ever been created by any mind in any time or place." (Toynbee 1935, p.322).
Ibn Khaldun was an eye witness to historical events. In many cases, he himself instigated historical events and altered their course. According to Charles Issawi (1950, p. ix), "the practical knowledge he gained in his political career led [Ibn] Khaldun to devise a path-breaking theory of history, in which the rise and fall of political dynasties depend on laws of social and economic change." The prime object of Ibn Khaldun's enquiries is a concrete social organization, a structured whole whose major determinants are the economy, politics and culture.
In addition to his personal experiences and insights, Ibn Khaldun also benefited from the cultural and intellectual inheritance of past scholars. "Ibn Khaldun, while profiting from their [other Muslim thinkers'] philosophical speculations, greatly surpassed them in his understanding of economic in nature, is rather loosely stated, in part because it was inferred from what had supposedly taken place in the five or six centuries preceding his time." (Spengler 1964, pp.289-90). In the opinion of Hitti, "Ibn Khaldun was the greatest historian and philosopher ever produced by Islam and one of the greatest of all time" (quoted in Lacoste 1984, p. 1.) To Marçais, "the work of Ibn Khaldun is one of the most substantial and interesting book ever written" (ibid). To Gibb (1962), "the true originality of Ibn Khaldun's work is to be found in his detailed and objective analysis of the political social, and economic factors underlying the establishment of political units and the evolution of the State, and it is the results of this detailed analysis that constitute the ‘new science' which he claims to have founded."
4. Economics of Ibn Khaldun
Figure 4: An annotated and collated edition of the Muqaaddimah by the Egyptian scholar 'Alī 'Abd al-Wāhid Wāfī: Muqaddimat Ibn Khaldūn, mahhada la-hā wa-nashara al-fusūl wa-al-faqarāt al-nāqisah min tab'ātihā wa-haqqaqahā wa-dabata kalimātihā wa-sharahahā wa-'allaqa 'alayhā wa-'amala fahārisahā 'Alī 'Abd al-Wāhid Wāfī. (Cairo, Lajnat al-Bayān al-‘Arabī, 1957-1962, in 4 vols., 1370 pp.)
With the development of modern Islamic economics in the 20th century, Ibn Khaldun's economic ideas attracted the attention of scholars. The pioneer writings in this respect include names of Salih (1933), Rif'at (1937), Abdul-Qadir (1941), and Nash'at (1944) in the first half of the 20th century. The earliest and prominent writers on the economics of Ibn Khaldun in the second half of the century include Irving (1955), Sharif (1955) and the famous economic historian Joseph J. Spengler (1964). All these writers based their comments on the Muqaddimah. Ibn Khaldun's economic ideas have attracted attention of researchers both from the East and the West. The Muqaddimah attracted increasingly scholarly attention and appreciation since its rediscovery in the West in the early 19th century (Rabi' 1967, p.23).
Ibn Khaldun's economic thinking covers topics like the theory of value, the price system, the law of demand and supply, division of labor, production, distribution and consumption of wealth, money, capital formation and growth, domestic and international trade, population, public finance, taxation and government expenditure, conditions for the progress of agriculture, industry and trade, slums and trade cycles, and the economic responsibilities of the ruler. He also hinted at some of ‘the macro-economic relations stressed by lord Keynes' (Spengler 1964, p.304), and his cycle theory of civilization is "a model reminiscent of J. R. Hicks's" (ibid, p. 293n).
According to Siddiqi (1992, p. 49), "a distinctive feature of Ibn Khaldun's approach to economic problems, noted by several writers, is his keenness to take into consideration the various geographical, ethnic, political and sociological forces involved in the situation. He does not confine himself to the so-called economic factors alone." Issawi (1950, p. 16) considers that "more clearly than many modern economists he saw the interrelation of political, social, economic and demographic factors." As we noted somewhere else, the most appropriate description of his inquiry is ‘Economic Sociology' (Islahi 1988, p. 246). In the light of his experiences, Ibn Khaldun first proposes a theory then supports it with evidence. Thus, his economics is based on empirical study. Boulakia (1971, p. 1105) admits that Ibn Khaldun "found a large number of economic mechanisms which were rediscovered by modern economists." He writes also: "Like most of the authors of the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun mixes philosophical, sociological, ethical, and economical considerations in his writings. From time to time, a poem enlightens the text. However, Ibn Khaldun is remarkably well organized and always follows an extremely logical pattern" (ibid, p. 1106).
According to Lacoste (1984, p. 154), "Ibn Khaldun believes that there is close connection between the organization of production, social structure, forms of political life, juridical systems, social psychology and ideologies." To Boulakia (1971, p. 1117), "Ibn Khaldun discovered a great number of fundamental economic notions a few centuries before their official births. He discovered the virtues and the necessity of a division of labor before Smith and the principle of labor value before Ricardo. He elaborated a theory of population before Malthus and insisted on the role of the state on the economy before Keynes. The economists who discovered mechanisms that he had already found are too many to be named (…) But, much more than that, Ibn Khaldun used these concepts to build a coherent dynamic system in which economic mechanisms inexorably lead economic activity to long-term fluctuations. Because of the coherence of his system, the criticisms which can be formulated against most economic constructions using the same notions do not apply here." Spengler (1964, p. 268) considers him as the "medieval Islam's greatest economist." The fact that at present, from among the past Muslim scholars, maximum number of works are available on Ibn Khaldun's economic thought has heightened, not lessened, the curiosity and further investigation about his contribution to the economy and the society.
Issawi (1950, p. 2) summarizes the special value of Ibn Khaldun's contribution by asserting: "Indeed, it is not too much to say that Ibn Khaldun is the greatest figure in the social sciences between the time of Aristotle and that of Machiavelli, and as such deserves the attention of everyone who is interested in these sciences. More than anyone of his contemporaries, whether European or Arab, he tackles the kind of problem which preoccupies us today."
5. Justification for taxes
Figure 5: A study in Japanese about Ibn Khaldūn's sociological theories: Ibun Harudūn no "Rekishi josetsu" [Ibn Khaldūn's Introduction to his World history] by Tamura Jitsuzo¯ hen (Tokyo: Ajia Keizai Kenkyūjo, 1964-65). (Source).
According to Ibn Khaldun "man is ‘political' by nature" (Ibn Khaldun 1958, vol. 1, p. 89) [1]. This requires a government and a ruler to look after people's affairs and control them. "Anarchy destroys mankind and ruins civilization, since the existence of royal authority is a natural quality of man. It alone guarantees their existence and social organization" (I: 304).
To perform its responsibilities towards the citizens and the |
repeat this epic howler, Atkins’s purpose doesn’t seem to be to describe the ACA as essentially worthless. But his claims are not true, and they’re not true in a very pernicious way — most importantly, it’s vastly too generous to Republicans. In the current context, it implies that TrumpCare is just a minor variation on the ACA. While it doesn’t go as far as the Heritage Plan would have, it would destroy the individual market in health insurance, make insurance worse in general, and effectively destroy Medicaid. Even when well-intended, flagrant untruths about the Heritage Plan and Republican health care policy preferences play right into Paul Ryan’s hands.
[H/T Murc]- Advertisement -
When: December 27, 2016, 9AM
Where: Entrance to Arizona Memorial, Route 99, Honolulu, Hawaii
For the meeting of President Obama and Japan's Prime Minister Abe at the Arizona Memorial on December 27, members of Veterans for Peace, Hawaii Peace and Justice, Revolution Books, World Can't Wait and other concerned organizations will gather to remind both heads of government of the need to preserve Article 9, the NO WAR article of the Japanese Constitution to prevent Japan from joining the U.S. wars of choice.
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53,000 U.S. military personnel (39,000 onshore and 14,000 afloat in nearby waters), 43,000 dependents, and 5,000 Department of Defense civilian employees live in Japan. Okinawa hosts a disproportionate share of the U.S. military presence with 50% of all facilities used by U.S. Forces Japan and about half of the U.S. military personnel are located in Okinawa, which comprises less than 1% of Japan's total land area.
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We will remind both heads of government of the dangerous US military aircraft, the widow-maker, the Osprey that crashed twice last week in Okinawa and that has crashed several times in Hawaii.
Concerned citizens also will have signs for issues concerning the U.S. military on Okinawa: "Save Henoko Bay from US military runways," "Save Takai from Ospreys" and "Close Futenma Air Base."
We will urge President Obama to Close Guantanamo Prison, Grant Clemency to Chelsea Manning and Pardon Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal.
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For more information, please contact:
Ann Wright, retired US Army Reserve Colonel (retired) and former US diplomat who resigned in opposition to the 2003 war on Iraq)
Phone: 808-741-1141; email: annw1946@gmail.comThis article is about the country in the Horn of Africa. For its capital city, see Djibouti (city). For other uses, see Djibouti (disambiguation)
Djibouti ( () jih-BOO-tee; Afar: Yibuuti, Arabic: جيبوتي Jībūtī, French: Djibouti, Somali: Jabuuti, officially the Republic of Djibouti) is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is bordered by Eritrea in the north, Ethiopia in the west and south, and Somalia in the southeast. The remainder of the border is formed by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden at the east. Djibouti occupies a total area of 23,200 km2 (8,958 sq mi).[2]
Djibouti has always been a very active member in the African Union and the Arab League.
In antiquity, the territory was part of the Land of Punt and then the Kingdom of Aksum. Nearby Zeila (now in Somalia) was the seat of the medieval Adal and Ifat Sultanates. In the late 19th century, the colony of French Somaliland was established following treaties signed by the ruling Somali and Afar sultans with the French[9][10][11] and its railroad to Dire Dawa (and later Addis Ababa) allowed it to quickly supersede Zeila as the port for southern Ethiopia and the Ogaden.[12] It was subsequently renamed to the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas in 1967. A decade later, the Djiboutian people voted for independence. This officially marked the establishment of the Republic of Djibouti, named after its capital city. Djibouti joined the United Nations the same year, on 20 September 1977.[13][14] In the early 1990s, tensions over government representation led to armed conflict, which ended in a power-sharing agreement in 2000 between the ruling party and the opposition.[2]
Djibouti is a multi-ethnic nation with a population of over 942,333 inhabitants. Somali, Arabic and French are the country's three official languages. About 94% of residents adhere to Islam,[2] which is the official religion and has been predominant in the region for more than a thousand years. The Somali (Issa clan) and Afar make up the two largest ethnic groups. Both speak Afroasiatic languages.[2]
Djibouti is strategically located near some of the world's busiest shipping lanes, controlling access to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. It serves as a key refuelling and transshipment center, and is the principal maritime port for imports from and exports to neighboring Ethiopia. A burgeoning commercial hub, the nation is the site of various foreign military bases, including Camp Lemonnier. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) regional body also has its headquarters in Djibouti City.[2]
History [ edit ]
Prehistory [ edit ]
Djibouti area has been inhabited since the Neolithic. According to linguists, the first Afroasiatic-speaking populations arrived in the region during this period from the family's proposed urheimat ("original homeland") in the Nile Valley,[15] or the Near East.[16] Other scholars propose that the Afroasiatic family developed in situ in the Horn, with its speakers subsequently dispersing from there.[17]
Prehistoric rock art and tombs in Djibouti.
Pottery predating the mid-2nd millennium has been found at Asa Koma, an inland lake area on the Gobaad Plain. The site's ware is characterized by punctate and incision geometric designs, which bear a similarity to the Sabir culture phase 1 ceramics from Ma'layba in Southern Arabia.[18] Long-horned humpless cattle bones have likewise been discovered at Asa Koma, suggesting that domesticated cattle were present by around 3,500 years ago.[19] Rock art of what appear to be antelopes and a giraffe are also found at Dorra and Balho.[20] Handoga, dated to the fourth millennium BP, has in turn yielded obsidian microliths and plain ceramics used by early nomadic pastoralists with domesticated cattle.[21]
Additionally, between Djibouti City and Loyada are a number of anthropomorphic and phallic stelae. The structures are associated with graves of rectangular shape that are flanked by vertical slabs, as also found in central Ethiopia. The Djibouti-Loyada stelae are of uncertain age, and some of them are adorned with a T-shaped symbol.[22]
Punt [ edit ]
Together with northern Somalia, Eritrea and the Red Sea coast of Sudan, Djibouti is considered the most likely location of the territory known to the Ancient Egyptians as Punt (or Ta Netjeru, meaning "God's Land"). The first mention of the Land of Punt dates to the 25th century BC.[23] The Puntites were a nation of people who had close relations with Ancient Egypt during the reign of the 5th dynasty Pharaoh Sahure and the 18th dynasty Queen Hatshepsut.[24] According to the temple murals at Deir el-Bahari, the Land of Punt was ruled at that time by King Parahu and Queen Ati.[25]
Ifat Sultanate (1285–1415) [ edit ]
Through close contacts with the adjacent Arabian Peninsula for more than 1,000 years, the Somali and Afar ethnic groups in the region became among the first populations on the continent to embrace Islam.[26] The Ifat Sultanate was a Muslim medieval kingdom in the Horn of Africa. Founded in 1285 by the Walashma dynasty, it was centered in Zeila.[27][28] Ifat established bases in Djibouti and northern Somalia, and from there expanded southward to the Ahmar Mountains. Its Sultan Umar Walashma (or his son Ali, according to another source) is recorded as having conquered the Sultanate of Shewa in 1285. Taddesse Tamrat explains Sultan Umar's military expedition as an effort to consolidate the Muslim territories in the Horn, in much the same way as Emperor Yekuno Amlak was attempting to unite the Christian territories in the highlands during the same period. These two states inevitably came into conflict over Shewa and territories further south. A lengthy war ensued, but the Muslim sultanates of the time were not strongly unified. Ifat was finally defeated by Emperor Amda Seyon I of Ethiopia in 1332, and withdrew from Shewa.
Adal Sultanate (1415–1577) [ edit ]
Islam was introduced to the area early on from the Arabian peninsula, shortly after the hijra. Zeila's two-mihrab Masjid al-Qiblatayn dates to the 7th century, and is the oldest mosque in the city.[29] In the late 9th century, Al-Yaqubi wrote that Muslims were living along the northern Horn seaboard.[30] He also mentioned that the Adal kingdom had its capital in Zeila, a port city in the northwestern Awdal region abutting Djibouti.[30][31] This suggests that the Adal Sultanate with Zeila as its headquarters dates back to at least the 9th or 10th century. According to I.M. Lewis, the polity was governed by local dynasties consisting of Somalized Arabs or Arabized Somalis, who also ruled over the similarly-established Sultanate of Mogadishu in the Benadir region to the south. Adal's history from this founding period forth would be characterized by a succession of battles with neighbouring Abyssinia.[31] At its height, the Adal kingdom controlled large parts of modern-day Djibouti, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Ottoman Eyalet (1577–1867) [ edit ]
Governor Abou Baker ordered the Egyptian garrison at Sagallo to retire to Zeila. The cruiser Seignelay reached Sagallo shortly after the Egyptians had departed. French troops occupied the fort despite protests from the British Agent in Aden, Major Frederick Mercer Hunter, who dispatched troops to safeguard British and Egyptian interests in Zeila and prevent further extension of French influence in that direction.[32]
On 14 April 1884 the Commander of the patrol sloop L'Inferent reported on the Egyptian occupation in the Gulf of Tadjoura. The Commander of the patrol sloop Le Vaudreuil reported that the Egyptians were occupying the interior between Obock and Tadjoura. Emperor Yohannes IV of Ethiopia signed an accord with Great Britain to cease fighting the Egyptians and to allow the evacuation of Egyptian forces from Ethiopia and the Somalia littoral. The Egyptian garrison was withdrawn from Tadjoura. Léonce Lagarde deployed a patrol sloop to Tadjoura the following night.
French Somaliland (1894–1977) [ edit ]
From 1862 until 1894, the land to the north of the Gulf of Tadjoura was called Obock and was ruled by Somali and Afar Sultans, local authorities with whom France signed various treaties between 1883 and 1887 to first gain a foothold in the region.[9][11][10] In 1894, Léonce Lagarde established a permanent French administration in the city of Djibouti and named the region French Somaliland. It lasted from 1896 until 1967, when it was renamed the Territoire Français des Afars et des Issas (TFAI) ("French Territory of the Afars and the Issas").[33]
In 1958, on the eve of neighboring Somalia's independence in 1960, a referendum was held in Djibouti to decide whether to remain with France or to join the Somali Republic. The referendum turned out in favour of a continued association with France, partly due to a combined yes vote by the sizable Afar ethnic group and resident Europeans.[34] There were also allegations of widespread vote rigging.[35] The majority of those who had voted no were Somalis who were strongly in favour of joining a united Somalia as had been proposed by Mahmoud Harbi, Vice President of the Government Council. Harbi was killed in a plane crash two years later.[34]
An aerial view of Djibouti City, the capital of Djibouti.
In 1967, a second plebiscite was held to determine the fate of the territory. Initial results supported a continued but looser relationship with France. Voting was also divided along ethnic lines, with the resident Somalis generally voting for independence, with the goal of eventual union with Somalia, and the Afars largely opting to remain associated with France.[11] The referendum was again marred by reports of vote rigging on the part of the French authorities.[36] In 1976, members of the Front de Libération de la Côte des Somalis also clashed with the Gendarmerie National Intervention Group over a bus hijacking en route to Loyada.[37] Shortly after the plebiscite was held, the former Côte française des Somalis (French Somaliland) was renamed to Territoire français des Afars et des Issas.[38]
Djibouti Republic [ edit ]
In 1977, a third referendum took place. A landslide 98.8% of the electorate supported disengagement from France, officially marking Djibouti's independence.[39][40] Hassan Gouled Aptidon, a Somali politician who had campaigned for a yes vote in the referendum of 1958, eventually wound up as the nation's first president (1977–1999).[34]
During its first year, Djibouti joined the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union), the Arab League and United Nations. In 1986, the nascent republic was also among the founding members of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development regional development organization.
In the early 1990s, tensions over government representation led to armed conflict between Djibouti's ruling People's Rally for Progress (PRP) party and the Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) opposition group. The impasse ended in a power-sharing agreement in 2000.[2]
Politics [ edit ]
Djibouti is a unitary presidential republic, with executive power resting in the presidency, which is by turn dominant over the cabinet, and legislative power in both the government and the National Assembly.
Governance [ edit ]
The President, currently Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, is the prominent figure in Djiboutian politics; the head of state and commander-in-chief. The President exercises their executive power assisted by their appointee, the Prime Minister, currently Abdoulkader Kamil Mohamed. The Council of Ministers (cabinet) is responsible to and presided over by the President.
The judicial system consists of courts of first instance, a High Court of Appeal, and a Supreme Court. The legal system is a blend of French civil law and customary law (Xeer) of the Somali and Afar peoples.[41][42]
The National Assembly (formerly the Chamber of Deputies) is the country's legislature,[41][42] consisting of 65 members elected every five years.[43] Although unicameral, the Constitution provides for the creation of a Senate.[41][42]
The last election was held on 22 February 2013. Djibouti has a dominant-party system, with the People's Rally for Progress (RPP) controlling the legislature and the executive since its foundation in 1979 (the party currently rules as a part of the Union for a Presidential Majority, which currently holds a supermajority of seats). Opposition parties are allowed (limited) freedom, but the main opposition party, the Union for National Salvation, boycotted the 2005 and 2008 elections, citing government control of the media and repression of the opposition candidates.[43]
The government is dominated by the Somali Issa Dir clan, who enjoy the support of the Somali clans, especially the Gadabuursi Dir clan. The country emerged from a decade-long civil war at the end of the 1990s, with the government and the Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD) signing a peace treaty in 2000. Two FRUD members subsequently joined the cabinet,[2] and beginning with the presidential elections of 1999, the FRUD has campaigned in support of the RPP.
Djibouti's current president, Guelleh, succeeded Hassan Gouled Aptidon in office in 1999.[44] Guelleh was sworn in for his second six-year term after a one-man election on 8 April 2005. He took 100% of the votes in a 78.9% turnout.[44] In early 2011, the Djiboutian citizenry took part in a series of protests against the long-serving government, which were associated with the larger Arab Spring demonstrations. Guelleh was re-elected to a third term later that year, with 80.63% of the vote in a 75% turnout.[45][46] Although opposition groups boycotted the ballot over changes to the constitution permitting Guelleh to run again for office,[46] international observers from the African Union generally described the election as free and fair.[47][48]
On 31 March 2013, Guelleh replaced long-serving Prime Minister Dilleita Mohamed Dilleita with former president of the Union for a Presidential Majority (UMP) Abdoulkader Kamil Mohamed.[49] In December 2014, the ruling Union for the Presidential Majority also signed a framework agreement with the Union of National Salvation coalition, which paves the way for opposition legislators to enter parliament and for reformation of the national electoral agency.[50]
Foreign relations [ edit ]
The Djibouti National Assembly in Djibouti City.
Foreign relations of Djibouti are managed by the Djiboutian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. Djibouti maintains close ties with the governments of Somalia, Ethiopia, France and the United States. Ties with Somalia are especially close, as Djiboutian Somalis often identify themselves with their brethren to the south. Relations with Eritrea are tense due to territorial claims over the Ras Doumeira peninsula. Since the 2000s, the Djiboutian authorities have strengthened ties with China. Djibouti is likewise an active participant in Arab League and African Union affairs.
Human rights [ edit ]
In its 2011 Freedom in the World report, Freedom House ranked Djibouti as "Not Free", a downgrading from its former status as "Partly Free".
There are occasional reports of police beating prisoners. Reporters Without Borders claims that Dirir Ibrahim Bouraleh died from injuries sustained under torture by Sergeant Major Abdourahman Omar Said from 23–27 April 2011. Conditions in the jails are considered worse, with no formal system of care.
Security forces frequently make illegal arrests.[51] Jean-Paul Noel Abdi, president of the Djiboutian League of Human Rights, was arrested on 9 February 2011 after reporting on opposition protests in connection with the Arab Spring earlier that month. According to Human Rights Watch, he did not support the protests themselves but objected to what he described as arbitrary arrests.[52] He was later released on health grounds but the charges remain.[53]
Military [ edit ]
Maryama base during a martial exercise in the Arta Region
The Djibouti Armed Forces include the Djibouti National Army, which consists of the Coastal Navy, the Djiboutian Air Force (Force Aerienne Djiboutienne, FAD), and the National Gendarmerie (GN). As of 2011, the manpower available for military service was 170,386 males and 221,411 females aged 16 to 49.[2] Djibouti spent over US$36 million annually on its military as of 2011 (141st in the SIPRI database). After independence, Djibouti had two regiments commanded by French officers. In the early 2000s, it looked outward for a model of army organization that would best advance defensive capabilities by restructuring forces into smaller, more mobile units instead of traditional divisions.
The first war which involved the Djiboutian Armed Forces was the Djiboutian Civil War between the Djiboutian government, supported by France, and the Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (FRUD). The war lasted from 1991 to 2001, although most of the hostilities ended when the moderate factions of FRUD signed a peace treaty with the government after suffering an extensive military setback when the government forces captured most of the rebel-held territory. A radical group continued to fight the government, but signed its own peace treaty in 2001. The war ended in a government victory, and FRUD became a political party.
As the headquarters of the IGAD regional body, Djibouti has been an active participant in the Somali peace process, hosting the Arta conference in 2000.[54] Following the establishment of the Federal Government of Somalia in 2012,[55] a Djibouti delegation also attended the inauguration ceremony of Somalia's new president.[56]
In recent years, Djibouti has improved its training techniques, military command and information structures and has taken steps to becoming more self-reliant in supplying its military to collaborate with the United Nations in peacekeeping missions, or to provide military help to countries that officially ask for it. Now deployed to Somalia and Sudan.[57]
Foreign military bases [ edit ]
Djibouti's strategic location by the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which separates the Gulf of Aden from the Red Sea and controls the approaches to the Suez Canal, has made it a desirable location for foreign military bases. Camp Lemonnier was abandoned by the French and later leased to the United States Central Command in 2001; the lease was renewed in 2014 for another 20 years.[58] The 13th Demi-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion is still stationed in Djibouti as the largest French military presence abroad, the only one commanded by a 3-star general. The country also hosts the only overseas Chinese support base and the only overseas Japanese military base.[59] The Italian National Support Military Base is also located in Djibouti.[60]
The hosting of foreign military bases is an important part of Djibouti's economy. The United States pays $63 million a year to rent Camp Lemonnier,[59] France and Japan each pay about $30 million a year,[61] and China pays $20 million a year.[59] The lease payments added up to more than 5% of Djibouti's GDP of US$2.3 billion in 2017.
Military Presence in Djibouti [ edit ]
In an continuous effort to focused on economic, commercial and peacekeeping activities, China has had some sort of military presence in Africa. To secure the national assets and gain a greater geopolitical influence, Beijing has committed to assigning an even greater military for in Djibouti specifically. China's presence in Djibouti is tied to strategic ports to ensure security of Chinese assets. The strategic geographical location of Djibouti makes the country prime for an increased military presence.[62]
Administrative divisions [ edit ]
A map of Djibouti's regions.
Djibouti is partitioned into six administrative regions, with Djibouti city representing one of the official regions. It is further subdivided into twenty districts.
Geography [ edit ]
Location and habitat [ edit ]
Djibouti is situated in the Horn of Africa on the Gulf of Aden and the Bab-el-Mandeb, at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. It lies between latitudes 10° and 13°N and longitudes 41° and 44°E, at the tripoint of the Somali Plate, African Plate and Arabian Plate.[63]
The country's coastline stretches 403 kilometres (250 miles), with terrain consisting mainly of plateau, plains and highlands. Djibouti has a total area of 23,200 square kilometres (9,000 sq mi). Its borders extend 528 km (328 mi), 125 km (78 mi) of which are shared with Eritrea, 342 km (213 mi) with Ethiopia, and 61 km (38 mi) with Somalia.[2] Djibouti is the southernmost country on the Arabian Plate.[64]
Djibouti has eight mountain ranges with peaks of over 1,000 metres (3,300 feet).[65] The Mousa Ali range is considered the country's highest mountain range, with the tallest peak on the border with Ethiopia and Eritrea. It has an elevation of 2,028 metres (6,654 feet).[65] The Grand Bara desert covers parts of southern Djibouti in the Arta, Ali Sabieh and Dikhil regions. The majority of it sits at a relatively low elevation, below 1,700 feet (520 metres).
Extreme geographic points include: to the north, Ras Doumera and the point at which the border with Eritrea enters the Red Sea in the Obock Region; to the east, a section of the Red Sea coast north of Ras Bir; to the south, a location on the border with Ethiopia west of the town of As Ela; and to the west, a location on the frontier with Ethiopia immediately east of the Ethiopian town of Afambo.
Most of Djibouti is part of the Ethiopian xeric grasslands and shrublands ecoregion. The exception is an eastern strip located along the Red Sea coast, which is part of the Eritrean coastal desert.[66]
Climate [ edit ]
Djibouti's climate is significantly warmer and has significantly less seasonal variation than the world average. Mean daily maximum temperatures range from 32 to 41 °C (90 to 106 °F), except at high elevations, where the effects of a cold offshore current can be felt. In Djibouti city, for instance, average afternoon highs range from 28 to 34 °C (82 to 93 °F) in April. Nationally, mean daily minimums usually vary from 15 to 30 °C (59 to 86 °F).[67]
The greatest range in climate occurs in eastern Djibouti, where temperatures sometimes surpass 41 °C (106 °F) in July on the littoral plains and the freezing point during December in the highlands.[67] In this region, relative humidity ranges from about 40% in the mid-afternoon to 85% at night, changing somewhat according to the season.
Djibouti's climate ranges from arid in the northeastern coastal regions to semiarid in the central, northern, western and southern parts of the country. On the eastern seaboard, annual rainfall is less than 5 inches (131 mm); in the central highlands, precipitation is about 8 to 16 inches (200 to 400 mm). The hinterland is significantly less humid than the coastal regions. The coast has the mildest climates in Djibouti. The 2015 Djibouti climate change bill has set a goal for the country to generate 100% of its energy from clean renewable energy sources by 2020.[68]
Wildlife [ edit ]
The country's flora and fauna live in a harsh landscape with forest accounting for less than one percent of the total area of the country.[69] Wildlife is spread over three main regions, namely from the northern mountain region of the country to the volcanic plateaux in its southern and central part and culminating in the coastal region.
Most species of wildlife are found in the northern part of the country, in the ecosystem of the Day Forest National Park. At an average altitude of 1,500 metres (4,921 feet), the area includes the Goda massif, with a peak of 1,783 m (5,850 ft). It covers an area of 3.5 square kilometres (1 sq mi) of Juniperus procera forest, with many of the trees rising to 20 metres (66 feet) height. This forest area is the main habitat of the endangered and endemic Djibouti francolin (a bird), and another recently noted vertebrate, Platyceps afarensis (a colubrine snake). It also contains many species of woody and herbaceous plants, including boxwood and olive trees, which account for 60% of the total identified species in the country.
According to the country profile related to biodiversity of wildlife in Djibouti, the nation contains more than 820 species of plants, 493 species of invertebrates, 455 species of fish, 40 species of reptiles, 3 species of amphibians, 360 species of birds and 66 species of mammals.[69] Wildlife of Djibouti is also listed as part of Horn of Africa biodiversity hotspot and the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden coral reef hotspot.[70] Mammals include several species of antelope, such as Soemmerring's gazelle and Pelzeln's gazelle. As a result of the hunting ban imposed since early 1970 these species are well conserved now. Other characteristic mammals are Grevy's zebra, hamadryas baboon and Hunter's antelope. The warthog, a vulnerable species, is also found in the Day National park. The coastal waters have dugongs and Abyssinian genet; the latter needs confirmation by further studies. Green turtles and hawksbill turtles are in the coastal waters where nestling also takes place.[71][72] The Northeast African cheetah Acinonyx jubatus soemmeringii is thought to be extinct in Djibouti.
Economy [ edit ]
Djibouti GDP by sector
Djibouti's economy is largely concentrated in the service sector. Commercial activities revolve around the country's free trade policies and strategic location as a Red Sea transit point. Due to limited rainfall, vegetables and fruits are the principal production crops, and other food items require importation. The GDP (purchasing power parity) in 2013 was estimated at $2.505 billion, with a real growth rate of 5% annually. Per capita income is around $2,874 (PPP). The services sector constituted around 79.7% of the GDP, followed by industry at 17.3%, and agriculture at 3%.[2]
As of 2013, the container terminal at the Port of Djibouti handles the bulk of the nation's trade. About 70% of the seaport's activity consists of imports to and exports from neighboring Ethiopia, which depends on the harbour as its main maritime outlet. The port also serves as an international refueling center and transshipment hub.[2] In 2012, the Djiboutian government in collaboration with DP World started construction of the Doraleh Container Terminal,[73] a third major seaport intended to further develop the national transit capacity.[2] A$396 million project, it has the capacity to accommodate 1.5 million twenty foot container units annually.[73]
Djibouti was ranked the 177th safest investment destination in the world in the March 2011 Euromoney Country Risk rankings.[74] To improve the environment for direct foreign investment, the Djibouti authorities in conjunction with various non-profit organizations have launched a number of development projects aimed at highlighting the country's commercial potential. The government has also introduced new private sector policies targeting high interest and inflation rates, including relaxing the tax burden on enterprises and allowing exemptions on consumption tax.[73]
A proportional representation of Djibouti's exports.
Additionally, efforts have been made to lower the estimated 60% urban unemployment rate by creating more job opportunities through investment in diversified sectors. Funds have especially gone toward building telecommunications infrastructure and increasing disposable income by supporting small businesses. Owing to its growth potential, the fishing and agro-processing sector, which represents around 15% of GDP, has also enjoyed rising investment since 2008.[73]
To expand the modest industrial sector, a 56 megawatt geothermal power plant slated to be completed by 2018 is being constructed with the help of OPEC, the World Bank and the Global Environmental Facility. The facility is expected to solve the recurring electricity shortages, decrease the nation's reliance on Ethiopia for energy, reduce costly oil imports for diesel-generated electricity, and thereby buttress the GDP and lower debt.[73]
The Djibouti firm Salt Investment (SIS) began a large-scale operation to industrialize the plentiful salt in Djibouti's Lake Assal region. Operating at an annual capacity of 4 million tons, the desalination project has lifted export revenues, created more job opportunities, and provided more fresh water for the area's residents.[2][73] In 2012, the Djibouti government also enlisted the services of the China Harbor Engineering Company Ltd for the construction of an ore terminal. Worth $64 million, the project is scheduled to be completed within two years[when?] and will enable Djibouti to export a further 5,000 tons of salt per year to markets in Southeast Asia.[75]
Djibouti's gross domestic product expanded by an average of more than 6 percent per year, from US$341 million in 1985 to US$1.5 billion in 2015.
Djibouti's gross domestic product expanded by an average of more than 6 percent per year, from US$341 million in 1985 to US$1.5 billion in 2015. The Djiboutian franc is the currency of Djibouti. It is issued by the Central Bank of Djibouti, the country's monetary authority. Since the Djiboutian franc is pegged to the U.S. dollar, it is generally stable and inflation is not a problem. This has contributed to the growing interest in investment in the country.[73][76][77]
As of 2010, 10 conventional and Islamic banks operate in Djibouti. Most arrived within the past few years, including the Somali money transfer company Dahabshiil and BDCD, a subsidiary of Swiss Financial Investments. The banking system had previously been monopolized by two institutions: the Indo-Suez Bank and the Commercial and Industrial Bank (BCIMR).[76] To assure a robust credit and deposit sector, the government requires commercial banks to maintain 30% of shares in the financial institution;[clarification needed] a minimum of 300 million Djiboutian francs in up-front capital is mandatory for international banks. Lending has likewise been encouraged by the creation of a guarantee fund, which allows banks to issue loans to eligible small- and medium-sized businesses without first requiring a large deposit or other collateral.[73]
Saudi investors are also reportedly exploring the possibility of linking the Horn of Africa with the Arabian Peninsula via a 28.5-kilometre-long (17.7 mi)[78] oversea bridge through Djibouti, referred to as the Bridge of the Horns. The investor Tarek bin Laden has been linked to the project. However, it was announced in June 2010 that Phase I of the project had been delayed.[79]
Transport [ edit ]
The Djibouti–Ambouli International Airport, the country's only international airport in Djibouti City serves many intercontinental routes with scheduled and chartered flights. Air Djibouti is the flag carrier of Djibouti and is the country's largest airline.
The new and electrified standard gauge Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway started operation in January 2018. Its main purpose is to facilitate freight services between the Ethiopian hinterland and the Djiboutian Port of Doraleh.
Car ferries pass the Gulf of Tadjoura from Djibouti City to Tadjoura. There is the Port of Doraleh west of Djibouti City, which is the main port of Djibouti. The Port of Doraleh is the terminal of the new Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway. In addition to the Port of Doraleh, which handles general cargo and oil imports, Djibouti currently (2018) has three other major ports for the import and export of bulk goods and livestock, the Port of Tadjourah (potash), the Damerjog Port (livestock) and the Port of Goubet (salt). Almost 95 % of Ethiopia's imports and exports move through Djiboutian ports.
The Djiboutian highway system is named according to the road classification. Roads that are considered primary roads are those that are fully asphalted (throughout their entire length) and in general they carry traffic between all the major towns in Djibouti.
Media and telecommunications [ edit ]
Telecommunications in Djibouti fall under the authority of the Ministry of Communication.[80]
Djibouti Telecom is the sole provider of telecommunication services. It mostly utilizes a microwave radio relay network. A fiber-optic cable is installed in the capital, whereas rural areas are connected via wireless local loop radio systems. Mobile cellular coverage is primarily limited to the area in and around Djibouti city. As of 2015, 23,000 telephone main lines and 312,000 mobile/cellular lines were in use. The SEA-ME-WE 3 submarine cable operates to Jeddah, Suez, Sicily, Marseille, Colombo, Singapore and beyond. Telephone satellite earth stations include 1 Intelsat (Indian Ocean) and 1 Arabsat. Medarabtel is the regional microwave radio relay telephone network.[2]
Radio Television of Djibouti is the state-owned national broadcaster. It operates the sole terrestrial TV station, as well as the two domestic radio networks on AM 1, FM 2, and shortwave 0. Licensing and operation of broadcast media is regulated by the government.[2] Movie theaters include the Odeon Cinema in the capital.[81]
As of 2012, there were 215 local internet service providers. Internet users comprised around 99,000 individuals (2015 |
Banker’s Row, a series of 20 houses of finance lining Main Street, each trying to be more opulent than the next. At the northern end, the Union Bank would construct a building that is truly one of the great architectural accomplishments in Winnipeg’s history. The familiar tower at the bend in Main Street has a long list of superlatives to describe its achievements. It was Canada’s first skyscraper, the tallest building in the country with its fastest elevator, the first tower to be more than 10 stories, one of the first to use a modern steel frame structure, its flagpole standing as the highest in the British Commonwealth.
To implement Union Tower’s structural complexity, the Fuller Construction company was brought in from New York, where the world’s tallest skyscrapers were being built. Fuller would transition its forces to Winnipeg after completing the iconic Flatiron Building in Manhattan, coincidentally designed by the same architect as Winnipeg’s Eaton’s Catalogue Building (Cityplace). They would introduce for the first time in Canada the modern system of construction using a general contractor, instead of the architect leading the process.
Midway down Banker’s Row, today sandwiched between the Woodbine Hotel and the Fox and Fiddle Pub, is the former Royal Bank designed by renowned Manhattan architects Carrère and Hastings, who were also responsible for the central library in New York. One of the most important libraries in the world, this national historic site has featured prominently in many movies, including the first scene of Ghostbusters, where it was haunted by the ghost of librarian Eleanor Twitty.
Winnipeg’s Manhattan connections would go well beyond Banker’s Row. No building is more synonymous with Winnipeg than the Hudson’s Bay department store on Portage Avenue, designed by New York-trained Barott and Blackader, apprentices of McKim Mead and White.
When Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Railways needed a design for its new terminal at the foot of Broadway, it would hire the finest trainstation designers in the world, turning to Warren and Wetmore in New York, who were simultaneously creating Grand Central Station. A Beaux-Artsstyle stone façade enclosing a majestic, sunlit central hall with a dramatic aqua-coloured ceiling dome, would be distinctive features common to both magnificent buildings.
Towering over Portage and Main since 1969, the Richardson Building has long stood at the centre of Winnipeg’s skyline, but it would take 40 years and two New York architects to be completed. In 1929, the Richardson family announced a striking new 17-storey tower for the site, designed by Columbia University-trained Arthur Stoughton. It would be the tallest building west of Toronto and dwarf every other structure in the city by at least 30 metres. Its ornate central tower was to be adorned with a large glowing clock and topped off with a giant rotating spotlight, illuminating the night sky. The design’s imposing Art Deco features looked as though they were lifted from the comic book pages of Superman’s Metropolis or Batman’s Gotham City.
The project was tendered and the contracts signed. Existing buildings on the site were demolished, but after digging a huge hole for the foundations, the Great Depression hit. Work was put on hold ‘temporarily,’ but a year later the hole was filled and a quaint little cottage-style gas station was built. Looking more at home in a rural town than at a major city’s most prominent intersection, it stood at Portage and Main for almost four decades. Stoughton would go on to become the first head of the department of architecture at the University of Manitoba, designing the Buller and Tier buildings on campus and influencing a generation of Winnipeg architects.
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When the project was revisited in the late ’60s, another New York architect was engaged. The notable firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) would design the current Richardson Building, the tallest tower in Western Canada at its opening. SOM has since become the world’s pre-eminent skyscraper designer, its latest work includes New York’s Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world.
Many of Winnipeg’s most important buildings have New York roots, but these architectural connections are rarely celebrated. With other strong influences coming from Toronto, Montreal and locally, supported by the only school of architecture on the Prairies, the city’s built heritage is far more diverse than the ‘Chicago of the North’ nickname suggests. The legacy of Winnipeg’s varied collection of historic buildings casts a long shadow on the present-day city. Their visual weight, colour and texture give Winnipeg a characteristic feel that is like no other city in Canada. The most successful architecture designed since this golden era, and those buildings that will be successful in the future, understand this diverse legacy and are sensitive to the influence it has on the unique physical character of our city.
Brent Bellamy is senior design architect for Number Ten Architectural Group.
bbellamy@numberten.comIs history repeating itself? Is Obama circumventing the law once again to bring in refugees, just like he did with the “refugees” from South America who were actually given rides on D.H.S. buses for protection???
Without knowing precisely what is going on, there is no doubt something nefarious is afoot. There is no reason for 30 buses of people to be flying on a UPS flight designated for parcels, under the cover of night, filled with people, who are met on arrival with buses already waiting, and whisked away in secret.
In the video, the person recording is in hot pursuit of up to 30 buses that he claims are filled with people he just watched land in Harrisburg International Airport on a UPS plane.
Upon the plane’s arrival, which was alleged to be a “parcel flight,” there were 30 buses already lined up, and ready to receive, what turned out not to be parcels, but dozens and dozens of people.
According to whoever took the video, he watched as the planes occupants were quickly escorted onto the buses that were already waiting, and then he began filming as the buses departed with all the “mystery flyers.”
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Understandably, the person recording is very excited, and almost flipping out over what he is filming. You can bet there is no above the board answer to who or why there were that many people secretly being flown in on UPS planes.
The video is shaky and tough to make out, but at one point one of the buses is identified as Bus #245 (a company name was not revealed), and what sounds like license plate number: J0191B.
ATTENTION CITIZEN JOURNALISTS:
Find out what company that license plate belongs to, and lets get some answers! Recall, just a day ago, the Washington Examiner reported:
N.J. Gov. Chris Christie said on the “O’Reilly Factor” Tuesday night that the federal government has resettled refugees in the Garden State without giving his administration any notice.
“We have refugees in New Jersey we don’t even know about,” the GOP presidential candidate told Fox News.
Christie claimed 75 Syrian refugees have been placed in New Jersey since January and that his staff was never advised because the federal government uses local charity organizations to resettle the refugees, omitting state officials from the process.
ALL SIGNS POINT TOWARD OBAMA TRYING TO CIRCUMVENT THE LAW ONCE AGAIN!
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THE VOICE OF REASONBIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Ketamine, introduced as an anesthetic in the 1970s and abused on the street as Special K, is showing promise as an effective treatment for depression in suicidal patients coming into the emergency room, University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers report.
In a one-of-a-kind study, suicidal patients entering the UAB Hospital emergency department are being treated with ketamine and it is relieving severe depression in a short time, said Dr. Richard Shelton, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiogy.
"What we are hoping with this emergency department study is that it will literally change how medicine is practiced in this area of care," Shelton said.
Shelton hopes ketamine would significantly reduce hospitalizations.
UAB Hospital sees about five suicidal patients a day, 150 per month. Half of those are hospitalized, which is expensive.
"With the fact that we are moving toward accountable care, one of the things we are trying to do is reduce people from having to go to the hospital," Shelton said.
Nationwide, half a million people come to the emergency department every year, he said.
"The advantage (of ketamine) is that it is so rapidly effective in so many people," Shelton said.
The depression-easing effects of ketamine can occur within 15 minutes.
Traditional antidepressants can take two to three weeks for effectiveness, and even then nearly two-thirds of the patients don't get completely well.
"The disadvantage (of ketamine) is that its effect lasts only five to seven days and you have to use IV to administer it."
A second study sponsored by Janssen Research & Development will involve treating people with severe depression and suicidal thoughts in an outpatient setting to determine how often it needs to be administered to keep its depression-lifting effects, Shelton said.
For that study, which is seeking participants, a nasal spray will be used to administer the drug.
Traditional antidepressants target two brain chemicals, norepinephrine and serotonin. Ketamine targets an entirely different brain chemical: glutamate, Shelton said.
In higher doses, ketamine has been used as an effective anesthetic, knocking patients out. It is used in this way most often in emergency departments and veterinary clinics on animals, Shelton said.
In moderate doses, ketamine provides a euphoria or a high and therefore it has a high potential for abuse. Over the years veterinary clinics have been targeted by thieves looking to obtain the drug.
But for depression treatment, the dose is low and side effects are minimal, he said.
A third trial under way at UAB is testing something called Glyx-13 by Naurex, Inc., a drug that also targets glutamate.
UAB is looking for male and female patients, from 19 to 64, who have been diagnosed with depression, to enroll in the outpatient ketamine study and the Glyx-13 study.
Those interested in more information can call (205) 975-2911.
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The Treaty of Rome – the founding document of what is now the European Union – opens with the declaration of the signatory heads of state that they are “determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union amongst the peoples of Europe”.
For those who were old enough to have voted in the 1975 referendum and who complain that they told that the EEC, as it was then, was merely a trade agreement, need only to look at this declaration, on page 3 of the HMSO version. A broader hint it would be harder to conceive, as to the true intentions of the organisation that has now metamorphosed into the European Union.
In actually, we have become members of an organisation which is “determined” on political union, its eventual destination a United States of Europe, of which the current institutions – with or without further modification – are the building blocks of its supreme government.
The essence of this organisation, as it currently stands, is that it is based on a supranational structure, meaning that its institutions are above – as in superior to – its members states.
The Commission has the monopoly of proposal over all but a tiny fraction of EU law, which means that no new law can be created, and no law can be repealed, without its agreement, and that law takes precedence over the laws made by member states. The Commission has the power to fine members for non compliance or non-performance, and the European Court of Justice is the supreme arbiter of the law, making it superior to all the courts in all the member states.
All of this we are expected to tolerate for the “privilege” of being able to trade with the other member states on preferential terms – something which other nations are able to do without having to be subordinate to the EU institutions.
Moreover, the rest of the world is able to arrange and manage trade cooperation in an equitable fashion, without resorting to supranational structures, which are replicated nowhere else in the world. Instead, other countries rely on intergovernmental cooperation, which has spawned dozens of organisations and institutions, the sum total of which are facilitating and managing global trade on a far larger scale than is the European Union.
It is our view that the British Government which took us into to the EEC in 1973 made a fundamental mistake in opting for membership of a supranational organisation, when more amendable (and ultimately more efficient) intergovernmental mechanisms were available – and still are to this day. They should not have taken us into such an organisation, where our objective was to promote trade, and its objective was political union.
It is this fundamental mismatch which is responsible for most of the tensions between the United Kingdom and the rest of the 27 member states that form the Union. These tensions can only be resolved by the UK leaving the EU and negotiation a new, different relationship based on intergovernmental cooperation.
In this, there are no half measures. The EU remains committed to pursuing political union, and even if it were to undertake reforms, it would not change its nature – it would remain a supranational organisation, which is not compatible with the maintenance of a Parliamentary democracy.
Therefore, we have no option but to leave the EU. This referendum gives us the opportunity to correct the historic mistake made by past governments in negotiating our entry, in taking us into the EEC and then in approving and ratifying additional treaties – for which they had no popular mandate. We fully support all endeavours to work with our European neighbours, but not on the current terms. We, the free people of the United Kingdom, seek cooperation, not subordination.
The choice offered by David Cameron will be a choice between that same subordination or the road to democracy. He will offer us associate membership or a close approximation. While superficially attractive, it offers no real solution to the fundamental problems a supranational entity creates and marks no real shift in our relationship with the EU entity.
Nothing he can offer changes the nature of the EU and he can make no guarantees about the destination of our continued membership. We have a better vision and a plan to take us there. The obvious choice is to leave.
LeaveHQ is an organisation campaigning for the Leave vote in the upcoming EU Referendum. Follow them on Twitter: @LeaveHQ
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The views expressed in this article are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Conservatives for LibertyHappy days are here again?
On Friday, the mainstream media was buzzing with the news that the U.S. economy had added 255,000 jobs during the month of July. But as you will see below, the U.S. economy did not add 255,000 jobs during the month of July. In fact, without an extremely generous “seasonal adjustment”, the number of jobs added during the month of July would not have even kept up with population growth. But the pretend number sounds so much better than the real number, and so the pretend number is what is being promoted for public consumption.
Why doesn’t the government ever just tell us the plain facts? Unfortunately, we live at a time when “spin” is everything, and just about everyone in the mainstream media seemed quite pleased with the “good jobs report” on Friday. However, as Zero Hedge has pointed out, the truth is that the “unadjusted” numbers tell a very different story…
As Mitsubishi UFJ strategist John Herrmann wrote in a note shortly after the report, the “jobs headline overstates” strength of payrolls. He adds that the unadjusted data show a “middling report” that’s “nowhere as strong as the headline” and adds that private payrolls unadjusted +85k in July vs seasonally adjusted +217k. In Herrmann’s view, the government applied a “very benign seasonal adjustment factor upon private payrolls to transform a soft private payroll gain into a strong gain.” He did not provide a reason why the government would do that.
Every month, the U.S. economy must create at least 150,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth. According to the unadjusted numbers, we did not hit that threshold, and so the employment situation in this country actually got worse last month.
In America today, there are 7.8 million Americans that are considered to be officially unemployed, and another 94.3 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”.
When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.
Rather than focusing on the headline “unemployment” figure, we get a much fairer look at the employment crisis in the United States when we examine the employment-population ratio. The following chart comes directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it shows that the percentage of Americans that are employed has never even come close to getting back to where it was just prior to the last recession…
Over the past couple of years we have seen a slight bump in this number, and that is good, but normally after a recession ends the employment-population ratio goes back to at least as high as it was before. Unfortunately, this has not happened after the last two recessions. The following comes from Wolf Richter…
The ratio always drops during recessions, but before 2001, it always climbed to higher highs during the recoveries. The 2001 recession and subsequent recovery changed this. For the first time, the ratio never fully recovered, never got even close to fully recovering. That was a new phenomenon: employment growth could no longer keep up with population growth. When the Great Recession hit, the ratio plunged from its lower starting point at the fastest pace on record (going back to 1948). The Fed’s efforts were all focused exclusively on bailing out bondholders, re-inflating the stock market, re-inflating the housing market, and generally creating what had become the official Fed policy at the time, the Wealth Effect (here’s Bernanke himself explaining it). This has re-inflated asset prices – many of them way beyond their prior bubble peaks. But the Fed’s astounding focus on capital accelerated the already changing dynamics of the economy, at the expense of labor.
Even the Wall Street Journal admits that we are in the weakest “economic recovery” since 1949, and now there are lots of signs that we have entered a brand new economic downturn. Here are just a few examples from Chad Shoop…
Ford, GM and Chrysler — three of the U.S.’ largest auto companies — reported sales for July that missed estimates: down 3%, 1.9% and up 0.3%, respectively.
Delta Airlines, one of the largest airlines in the world, said revenue fell 7% in July as part of its monthly performance update.
Macy’s, the biggest department store company, reported a decline in sales for July, leading to more aggressive markdowns and an industry-wide sell-off.
And lots of ominous signs continue to pop up on Wall Street as well. For one thing, the Libor rate has surged to the highest level since the last financial crisis. If you are not familiar with Libor, here is a pretty good explanation of it from Business Insider…
The Libor, or London Interbank Offered Rate, measures the interest rate at which banks lend to each other at different durations, and its sharp jump was a harbinger of the financial crisis.
And according to that same article, the Libor rate is now the highest that we have seen since early 2009…
In the past month, the Libor rate has spiked to rates not seen since the first quarter of 2009, the heart of the banking meltdown. Not to mention, the spread between the Libor and the Overnight Index Swap rate, which tracks the lending rate from the Federal Reserve, has widened, another potentially worrying sign.
But of course I have been quoting facts and figures like this for months, and yet U.S. financial markets continue to hold it together.
There are literally dozens of parallels between the global financial crisis of 2008 and what is happening in 2016, but Wall Street continues to defy the laws of economics.
Of course it won’t last forever, but it certainly has been a sight to behold.
And I am certainly not alone in my analysis. As I noted the other day, DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeffrey Gundlach is entirely convinced that stocks “should be down massively”…
“The artist Christopher Wool has a word painting, ‘Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids.’ That’s exactly how I feel – sell everything. Nothing here looks good,” Gundlach said in a telephone interview. “The stock markets should be down massively but investors seem to have been hypnotized that nothing can go wrong.”
For the moment, investors continue to pay extremely irrational prices for stocks, and the mainstream media is just giddy about the state of the economy.
So let us enjoy this very strange period of stability for however much longer it lasts, but let us also protect ourselves from the horrible crash that will inevitably follow.Old-timers in Canada’s small, but obsessively passionate soccer community remember where they were on Sept. 14, 1985.
Like fishing stories, the tales change. They differ from source to source. Everyone claims to remember the game while just a tiny crowd — around 13,000 — witnessed Canada’s 2-1, World Cup-clinching win over Honduras it in St. John’s, Newf.
Among them were a half-dozen reporters who travelled to The Rock that week to cover the last time — the only time — Canada qualified for a FIFA World Cup.
Thirty years later — and with Canada a month away from hosting Honduras in 2018 World Cup qualifying — one of those reporters, the Toronto Sun’s Lance Hornby, remembers being there.
He remembers the screams, the freeze. He remembers being part of one of the greatest, but largely untold moments in Canadian sports history.
"I wasn’t even covering soccer," Hornby reminisced. "George Gross, the Toronto Sun’s sports editor at the time, asked me at the last minute, ‘Would you like to go St. John’s?’
"The qualifier was under the radar. It was in the middle of the Blue Jays’ pennant drive so nobody was paying attention."
It was 1985. It was soccer. It didn’t matter.
The fact the Canadian Soccer Association elected to stage the game in an obscure location didn’t help in terms of publicity.
"When the Hondurans arrived it was s a Thursday," Hornby recalled. "They were fish out of water. They’d never seen a place like St. John’s."
It was payback for what the Central Americans put Canada through months earlier in Tegucigalpa.
Now customary, Honduras awkwardly staged their home match against Canada around 3 p.m., the hottest time of day. Anything to throw off their competitors from the north.
"Just as much as the jungle was terrible for Canada, this was the worst place to stick the Hondurans," Hornby reaffirmed.
Honduran fans had issues, too. Reports surfaced that some of their faithful turned up in Saint John, NB for for the deciding qualifier only to be told they were in the wrong place.
"Canada wanted to get back at them for staging the game in that condition," Hornby added.
The effects of that decision were obvious from the start. And the weather couldn’t have been better for the occasion: "Perfectly" cold and blustery.
"During the national anthems the Hondurans were freezing," Hornby remembered. "The Canadians were in short sleeves and the Hondurans were acting like they were going to the North Pole."
Meanwhile, the Newfies in attendance at King George V Park — hardly a soccer stadium at the time — were in fine form.
The environment was intimate, the fans so close to the pitch they were on top of the players.
"They had to bring in bleachers at the last second," Hornby said of the venue. "The people were rowdy.
"It wasn’t far from a cemetery. It was like a city park. The location, for Honduras, would have been out of this world."
When George Pakos scored the opener a quarter-hour in it was bedlam. The Canadians were 75 minutes from progression to Mexico 1986, with those in attendance knowing full well they were potentially witnessing history.
All that was threatened after Porfirio Armando Betancourt found an equalizer in the 49th minute before Canada’s Igor Vrablic calmed nerves through an eventual game-winner from a corner with under a half-hour remaining.
"Canada never had a moment like that," Hornby said, adding the Canadians belted out O Canada in the locker room post-game.
"You got the feeling you could be part of history. We heard tales pre-game about how the Hondurans stuck it to them down there. It was almost like Team Canada’s 1972 hockey team going to Russia.
"The celebration was incredible."
Similar to Team USA’s improbable hockey win over the Russians at the 1980 Olympics, Canada’s story usually ends there.
The fact Canada failed to score through three losses at Mexico ’86 the following summer rarely factors in.
It was about getting Canada to where it had never been, about getting to where it hasn’t been since.
About where it isn’t likely to return to any time soon.No charges will be laid over the shooting death of a West Auckland man after police decided the gunman was acting in self defence.
Allen George Lum, 41, appeared in the Waitakere District Court today where he pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of a weapon.
However, he was not charged over the death of 23-year-old Josh Roach, who shot Lum's son Ricky in the throat shortly before being fatally shot himself.
Roach and the Lums had been arguing about their shared driveway in the suburb of Ranui.
Defence lawyer Murray Gibson previously said Lum was defending his sons Trae and Ricky against the gunman.
After Ricky Lum was shot in the neck, the gunman then pointed the gun at Trae, so Lum fired in defence of his son.
Detective Inspector Bruce Scott of the Waitemata Police said there had been a "comprehensive" investigation into the death of Roach.
"The information and evidence that was obtained and collated throughout the enquiry was the subject of a thorough review by legal counsel.
"As a result, no charges relating to the death Mr Roach will be laid," Scott said.
Charges against Trae Lum were withdrawn.
Allen Lum will appear for sentencing in October.Another small distillery has been purchased by a giant.
The Sazerac Company acquired a Newport, Tenn., distillery that produced Popcorn Sutton. Sazerac only purchased the physical distillery and not the rights to the brand Popcorn Sutton.
What’s so special about this place? Its employees. Former George Dickel Master Distiller John Lunn and Master Blender Allisa Henley will remain employees.
According to a press release, the purchase will allow Sazerac to start producing Tennessee whiskey, using the Lincoln County process, a filtration process through charcoal chips before it goes into the barrel.
“We see a lot of potential in the distilling capabilities of this operation,” said Mark Brown, president and chief executive officer, Sazerac, in a press release. “We are excited to have the talents of John Lunn and Allisa Henley on board and we look forward to utilizing their expertise to start laying down true Tennessee whiskey.”
Sazerac says it will modify the pot stills for the Lincoln County process and expects to be running early 2017.
Stay In Touch!Kicking off the New 52’s lead Bat-family title ‘Batman’ in the most fantastic and unexpected fashion are respective writer and artist Scott Snyder & Greg Capullo. The first instalment of their take on the ever-darker adventures of the Caped Crusader, a story arc entitled “The Court of Owls” and the name of the first Hardback of the series, ‘Batman: Vol. #1‘ is a staggering achievement in every respect, and is bringing huge numbers of new and old fans back to the comic book medium.
Now, personally I’m accustomed to both artists’ work – Greg Capullo has worked previously on the ‘Spawn’ titles (a favourite of my older brother, in our youth); and Mr. Scott Snyder and I are well acquainted through his previous Batman work and, in my opinion one of the best modern Batman titles around – “The Black Mirror” – re-exploring what it really means to be the Batman through the eyes of one of DC’s most loved characters Dick Grayson, whilst Bruce is off establishing Batman Incorporated. “The Black Mirror” also introduces the idea of the City of Gotham itself being a character in the arc; the darkness ever pulling at every citizen – and maybe the real reason for the Batman? This idea of Gotham as its own looming evil seems to be permeating the entire Batman mythos and in my opinion, it’s better for it. Snyder demonstrates his ability to take a fresh, in-depth and fascinating look at the Dark Knight & his world; combining classic characters with clever plot twists and a feeling of something original within the standard Batman story. I could rant about “The Black Mirror” all day, but that’s for another article… Having proven himself to both fans and critics, it’s no surprise that DC have handed Scott Snyder the reigns to the primary comic series of the world’s most popular superhero.
And, once again, Snyder has outdone himself. Defying expectations, Snyder creates an entirely new and original set of criminal characters & their villainous plot, and within it and real threat to the Bat-family & the Caped Crusader himself – for so long, arguably since ‘Knightfall’, Batman has seemed almost unbeatable at every turn; on top of defeating every villain every time, in Frank Miller’s extremely popular interpretations of the Bat he beats Superman (“The Dark Knight Returns”) and Green Lantern (“All Star Batman & Robin” respectively), leading fans to believe Bruce Wayne is in fact the holder of Alan Moore’s infamous “Watchmen” character Ozymandias‘ pseudonym: “The Smartest Man on the Planet” – if he can outdo two of the most powerful protectors in the DC Universe, he’s pretty much set – No worrying that the Batman might lose…
Until now.
Snyder’s brilliant new villain, the seemingly unstoppable Talon officially put the fear back into Batman‘s dedicated fans. Is someone, or something finally going to get the better of the Dark Knight – for good? With a multi-generation-spanning story arc and a host of cameo’s from every member of the Bat-family & the almost every one of the Caped Crusader’s classic nemeses (within the first few pages! Quite an achievement from Snyder & Capullo respectively) “The Court of Owls” truly re-launches Batman into the New 52 the way we had all hoped – with critical & financial success, and the adoration of fans worldwide.
Immediately drawing the reader back into the darkest corner of Gotham City & the world of the Bat, in Arkham Asylum no less, “The Court of Owls” sets Batman off on an Alice in Wonderland-style trip down the rabbit hole to uncover the truth behind the place he has dedicated his life to – and it is nothing he, or any of his Bat-family cohorts could have anticipated (special note: very happy to see Snyder writing for Dick Grayson again, who’s shocking discovery in the “Court” should lead to some fascinating character developments in his solo Nightwing New 52 series). From Capullo’s striking and detailed artworks adding in details only noticeable on the second(,third or fourth!) read, to the misleading and ever-more-intriguing “whodunit”-style mystery, all the way down to the Bat’s struggle with his sanity spilling out of the pages and into real life; with the reader madly turning the book upside down and back again to decipher the truth behind Capullo’s incredibly complex artwork of Batman‘s twisted and haunting hallucinations.
I loved this Hardcover. Having lost count of the number of times I have re-read it, simply going over details for this review has led me right back to the first page to read and explore the story all over again. And with the set up for the second Hardcover “Batman Vol. #2: The City of Owls”, and its tie-ins with the other Bat-family members (compiled in “The Night of the Owls” Hardcover, released on 26th Feb. and my next purchase!), Snyder and Capullo are breaking new ground and showing off their abilities before they fully let loose in the highly anticipated “Death of the Family” arc, already completely released in individual issues (and hopefully released in Hardcover in the Autumn/Winter of this year) and show us all what they can really do with Batman and, of course, his true arch nemesis, the Clown Prince of Crime himself; The Joker.
Also stemming from Snyder & Capullo’s “Court” arc is another original New 52 series “Talon”, starring the ex-villain of the same name trying to make sense of himself and his surroundings in a world that passed him by long ago. If “The Court of Owls” is anything to go by, this will be a series well worth checking out as the character development, conflict and dark elements of storytelling are Snyder’s various fortes and an entirely original character in Batman‘s DC world fronted by Snyder is an extremely promising concept!
My advice? Buy this book. If you read one title from the New 52, Batman or otherwise (now in his many, many incarnations), make it Snyder & Capullo’s ‘Batman’. This staggering work of collaboration shows what can really be done in the comic book medium and lives up to, then smashes expectations of what you think a Batman story can, and should be. As biased as I am, if you’re looking to get into the Bat, or DC Comics in general, this is the place to start.
I promise you, you won’t be disappointed.
AdvertisementsChaim Yechiel Rothman, who spent almost a year fighting for his life at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem after being seriously wounded during a massacre at a synagogue in Haf Nof in November 2014, succumbed to his wounds on Saturday night.
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He was laid to rest on Saturday night at Har HaMenuchot cemetery in Jerusalem.
Rothman, 55, became the sixth Israeli to have been killed in the attack on the Jerusalem synagogue, following the four who were murdered at the site and a Druze police officer who died the following day from wounds sustained during an exchange of gunfire with the terrorists.
Chaim Yechiel Rothman, who died from his wounds a year after being injured during the Har Nof massacre.
The other victims of the attack were Rabbi Moshe Twersky, 59, who had made aliyah from the United States in 1990; Arieh Kupinsky, 43, who had lost his 13-year-old daughter Hannah two years previously; Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Goldberg 68, a father of six who made aliyah from the United States in 1991; Rabbi Kalman Levine, 50, who had nine children and five grandchildren; and Master-Sergeant Zidan Saif, 30, the Druze police officer who left behind a four-month-old baby and who was posthumously promoted to First Sergeant.
Rothman laid to rest in Jerusalem (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)
The two attackers were shot dead at the scene.[WARNING: Spoilers ahead from Saturday's episode of Outlander, "The Wedding," and future events from the books.]
Meet Mr. and Mrs. Jamie Fraser.
The moment fans of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series had been anticipating since the August debut of the Starz drama finally took place on the penultimate episode: Jamie and Claire's wedding. But the occasion wasn't the product of a lengthy courtship, it was merely an idea proposed by Dougal with the sole purpose of protecting Claire from the wrath of the ruthless Black Jack Randall. There were rules, of course, like consummating their marriage to make it official — a difficult task considering Jamie's virginity. To say their first intimate moment as husband and wife was awkward is an understatement. But ultimately, through a run of alcohol-aided conversations, Jamie and Claire have sex — lots of it.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Scottish star Sam Heughan, who plays Jamie, breaks down the biggest moments from Saturday's episode, "The Wedding," the "intimate" sex scenes and yes, that line about the horse.
You've been filming Outlander for more than a year. Has there been fan reaction to any particular moments that has surprised you?
I'm always amazed by the small things; there are a lot of little details that you maybe put in yourself as an actor and the fans always seem to pick up on him. For instance, I used words of Gaelic in the show just to express myself and fans will go out of their way to find out what they mean, and to then translate them [to English]. Little things that I sometimes think the viewer wouldn’t even notice. There was a reaction in episode four where I’m talking about Dougal and the scars he leaves, and I touched the back of my head because I was thinking about the scar that was on my head [when] Dougal knocked me out. I was amazed that fans picked up on that. They’re always watching and I’ve seen that they really dissect the episodes and slow things down and I think that’s wonderful — slightly terrifying as well. (Laughs.) But there are so many details in the show that I think, if the fans look deep enough, they’ll see a lot of things that are there that maybe on the first viewing they wouldn’t catch.
Those who have read the first Outlander book have been anticipating Jamie and Claire’s wedding episode for a while. Was this an episode that you circled on the calendar? How important was it to get the intricacies of the wedding and the aftermath right?
The wedding is a big episode for Jamie and for Claire. There are many big moments we have to get right and going back to the flogging that was another big one that we have to mark right. How we get from one to the next the writers have a bit more freedom in the way we portray it. Yeah, we got to get it right. But the subject matter — Caitriona [Balfe] and I have never done anything like this before, so it was a bit of a learning curve. We were lucky that the director, Anna Foerster, was |
activist Marcus Garvey once said:
A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture, is like a tree without roots.”
Now ours is not an industry much given to contemplating the past. And it is easy to take the existence of account planning for granted. After all, it has functioned now as a distinct agency discipline for almost half a century. In that time been exported, institutionalized, taught, iterated, segmented, and even celebrated. The story of account planning is a success story.
But if we are to shape the next fifty years, then we must rediscover our radicalism. For we are in danger of being that tree without roots, and it is only by rediscovering our past that can we hope to play a part in shaping the future.
***
The story of account planning story begins in 1968. While the streets of Paris were convulsing with the idealism and missiles of the student riots, in Swinging London, Stanley Pollitt and Stephen King began reengineering their agencies to accommodate what came to be known as ‘account planning’.
This much we all know. But it is easy to forget that at its inception, account planning offered the industry a truly radical philosophy. For the impetus for the creation of planning was an over-dependence on copy-testing persuasion scores, the abuse of rigid qualitative research methodologies, and a shortage of decent market data.
Account planning in other words, was borne of a frustration at the way research was being used in agencies. King and Pollitt were driven by the desire to create a way of working where the primary use of research was consumer understanding in the service, as Paul Feldwick has put it, of “intelligent strategy and creative communication”.
It aimed to expose and dismantle stifling and unhelpful research methodologies.
It devoted itself to developing a real and rounded understanding of the consumer, rather than simply selecting and polishing selling propositions.
It sought to place thinking about the response of the consumer at the heart of strategic and creative thinking.
It shifted the focus of advertising development from finding ways of selling people stuff, to finding ways of making stuff buyable.
And it placed the quest for effectiveness above all other agendas, both internal and external.
***
So where, forty-six years later, does account planning find itself today?
In parts of our industry it is in rude health, with sharp, brilliant, imaginative minds helping shape innovative and effective solutions to clients’ business issues. The APG’s Creative Strategy Awards and the IPA’s Effectiveness Awards both provide invaluable evidence of how intelligent, creative thinking can yield fresh ideas that move businesses.
Yet planning in many other quarters feels like a photocopy of a photocopy – reproduced, but with much of the original clarity lost.
In fact there is a palpable sense of confusion, uncertainty and anxiety within the planning community. We speculate whether planning is merely a subset of UX, whether marketing has been replaced by growth hacking, whether (God help us) the creative brief format should change, whether the big idea has been rendered obsolete by the small idea, and we entertain advice on what planning ‘should’ be by people with the flimsiest of strategic credentials.
Moreover, there is no sense that planners share a common philosophy, let alone a common body of accumulated marketing knowledge. So to confusion, uncertainty and anxiety, we can also add ignorance.
Turning to survey the role of planning within agencies we have the planner as creative apologist and ‘strategic setup’ writer. As translator of client briefs into something coherent and workable for creatives. As articulator of other people’s ideas. As powerpoint jockey. As trend spotter. As bad creative with a big vocabulary. As cheerleader for ‘innovation’. As conference speaker and panelist. As politician and manager of client relationships. As speculator about what the future holds. As salesperson for agency capabilities.
However valuable these contributions might be, none of them represent the core purpose of account planning. Alone they are planning distracted, and domesticated.
Now I am not suggesting that everybody in this room is guilty of all of this. The fact that you here are all members of the APG is a pretty good indication that your hearts and priorities are in the right place. Nonetheless, there are bad habits and behaviours, and there are plenty of planners outside this room that are guilty of indulging in them. They discredit the discipline, make it weaker, and jeopardize the possibility of great work.
And that is (to indulge in understatement) a pity, for the world brims with opportunity. New consumers are beginning to find the fruits of the marketplace within their reach and means for the first time. Technology is turbocharging, amplifying, and accelerating our Stone Age instincts, It is rewiring how businesses do business, and how they connect with consumers. New industries are emerging, entirely new business models are being created, and new players are disrupting and even obliterating old businesses. As it has always done, the world teems and swirls with the complexity and opportunity that always attends creative destruction.
If planning is to help businesses adapt, survive, and prosper in this world, it must regain its sense of purpose, and go back to its future as a radical movement.
Now by ‘radical’ I do not mean mean wayward, destructive, or self-consciously hip – coming from the Latin radicalis, meaning root, the original use of ‘radical’ meant going to the root, or essence. Planning in other words, was (and at its best continues to be) about going to the root of the matter. It was about asking questions – the obvious yet unasked, the awkward, the penetrating, the fresh and unexpected. It appreciated the fundamental truth that creativity begins with questioning.
Without radicalism – without the desire and tenacity to ask the smart, challenging, hard, good, fundamental and penetrating questions, without the interest, ability and fearlessness to get to the root of things – we cannot hope to produce intelligent strategy and effective creative communication. No amount of lateral thinking, digital savviness, powerpoint, eloquent brief writing, and hanging out with creatives can make up for that.
So some thoughts with on what radical planning takes seriously.
***
In a world characterized by constant change and innovation, planning will be knowledgeable about the fundamental principles of marketing and communications.
It is breathtaking how little planning knows about how businesses actually make money, and how brands grow and are sustained. It is equally depressing how uninterested many planners appear to be in any of this today. Planners who find this stuff too tedious, or beneath them, would probably be better off advising production companies, than advising clients on how to address their business issues.
In contrast, radical planning will take a keen interest in how our clients actually make money – in the business behind our clients’ brands.
It will know about the relative profitability of increasing volume or price, the difference between short- and long-term effects, and the economics of promotions.
It will understand the fundamental patterns of buying behaviour so that it can translate business objectives into realistic marketing objectives.
And it will understand the relative contribution of penetration and loyalty to brand growth.
It will understand how people really make decisions, and it will understand how people influence each others’ decisions.
It will understand the different ways that people process communications, from low to high attention processing, and the strengths and weaknesses of each.
It will understand how people respond to the same communications in different contexts (and on different devices), and why they will screen them out in some contexts and pay close attention in others.
And while the body of knowledge so far is not extensive, it will try and understand how communications affect people in ways that are not explicit.
Engagement, participation, loyalty, segmentation, differentiation… Marketing is full of myths, received wisdom, old wives’ tales, superstition, and zombie ideas (ideas that should have been killed by evidence, but which refuse to die). Too much of this is simply being accepted uncritically and unexamined, swallowed wholesale, and mindlessly regurgitated. So while enthusiasm for the new is one of the things that makes our industry such an endlessly stimulating one to work in, radical planning will understand that thoughtful examination is the necessary partner of enthusiasm, not its enemy.
Of course people don’t really need communications. They need brands and products that contribute to their lives. And so planning will seek to understand how people actually use and experience products and services – both the physical and the digital, how that makes them feel, and how this helps form habits that shape future behaviour. Indeed it will spend more time trying to understand how habits are formed than thinking about ‘loyalty’ or some other form of deep ‘engagement’.
We work at the ‘show-business’ end of business, not the business end of show-business. If we want a future in which we add value and are valued, we’d better start being interested in and knowledgeable about what keeps the wheels of business turning.
***
Secondly – though surely it should be unnecessary to demand – planning will be knowledgeable about how ordinary people live.
95% of all that’s awful about the output of our industry stems I’d argue, from the fact that it operates as ‘Adland’. Because to operate in the tiny world of ‘Adland’ is to live and work in splendid isolation from all that surrounds us. It is to see ‘consumers’ not people; to worry more about the accolade of one’s peers than people in the real world; to be out of step with culture, both fast and slow; to create work according to ‘rules’ that have no foundation other than corporate solipsism; to breathe in an environment filled with the exhaust fumes of our own rhetoric; to find inspiration only in the output of ‘Adland’; and to judge our work against other advertising, rather than all other things that interest and excite people.
Now the notion of the planner as “voice of the consumer” has fallen for good reason into disrepute. It had come to legitimize marketing’s slavish following of consumer research. But we are in danger of replacing it with ‘the voice of adland’, which is just as terrifying.
Radical planning will not have forgotten that its role is to bring a knowledge of the outside world into creative process.
In providing that window onto the world outside adland, it will know the basic stuff about demographics, lifestyles, incomes, etc. But it will go beyond this, and occupy itself as much to understanding societal and cultural change, as it currently does to understanding the shifting technological landscape.
And it will understand that the real world can be very different from the cloistered confines of adland.
Now I’m old enough to remember when when planners moderated their own focus groups. If this did nothing else it confronted us with the fact that most people lived very different lives from ours. Today, for all our glut of data and for all our ‘listening tools’, a great many planners are spectacularly and completely out of touch with ordinary people.
Radical planning will recognize that the lives of the people it seeks to influence can often be very different from our own. In reconnecting itself with reality, it will seek to dismantle the insulating assumptions, rhetoric, borders and behaviours that isolate ‘adland’ from the real world.
And in doing so, it will finally accommodate itself to the fact that for most of the time, most people are not terribly interested in brands, and that our primary task is not the nurturing enthusiasm of the few, but overcoming the indifference of the many.
***
The landscape is evolving and changing rapidly, but planning will have a good working knowledge of people’s media behaviours.
When I started in advertising, the media choices would be between TV, outdoor, print, and maybe if you were feeling adventurous, a bit of radio. Communications planning since then has of course changed dramatically. Marketers today are faced with a truly dizzying array of options, choices, and potential media combinations. Indeed almost anything can be a medium.
This complexity is compounded by the the explosion in the number of brands vying for consumers’ attention, and the endless tsunami of compelling, distracting, useful, or entertaining content that now surrounds us.
In this environment, gaining and sustaining competitive edge demands that imagination be married with a new degree of rigour and objectivity. As Kate Cox has observed, once upon a time media recommendations invariably began with the objective of “build rapid reach and frequency to raise awareness”. Today, the endless flexibility of digital interactions demands that we think through what each point of consumer contact does for a client’s brand and business.
However, there is in some parts of the planning community an almost wholesale ignorance as to the media diets and behaviours of different consumer segments. To some degree we can blame separation of the media function from the creative one. But it is not an excuse.
While it will not know more than the specialists, radical planning will have an understanding of the relationship people have with different media (in the broadest sense of the world) so that it can have useful and intelligent conversations with those experts.
It know the basics of what different channels, platforms, and devices can deliver – in terms of experience, audience, scale – as well as value to a brand and business.
For example, we talk about ‘second screening’, but exactly how many people do it, how much time do they spend doing it, when do they do it, and what are they doing on that second screen? Radical planning will know the answers because it will have got over the collective allergy or lack of interest in data that bedevils us today.
It will be able to distinguish intelligently between ‘wide’ channels that deliver reach and frequency and ‘deep’ channels that offer a more immersed consumer experience. And it will have the breadth of vision to appreciate that both can play a role.
And in contrast to our frequently naive response to media data and factoids, radical planning will be able to exercise a sense of proportion. It will be able to distinguish between apples and pears, and not fall for example, for comparing the audience delivered by a one-off broadcast with a video that has taken months and months to aggregate its views.
And it will be able to critique the sales patter of salespeople from, for example, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Certainly it would not have gushed quite so much at the 100m+ views that a certain three minute film garnered online. It would have known that this is tiny for a global phenomenon, and equates to about a 200 TVR campaign just in the UK. There’s really not much point us banging on about ‘big data’ if we cannot cope with this much smaller data.
And finally, radical planning will know the relationship between media investment and market share growth, and be able to have an informed voice in the setting of task-appropriate budgets.
Our ideas are nothing if they are not experienced by consumers, and mediating technology is increasingly part of the idea, rather than merely a delivery system for it. Planning must climb out of its pit of ignorance and begin to ask all the questions that communications and media planners have been asking for decades.
***
And finally, planning will be able to actually evaluate the effectiveness of the ideas it helps develop.
Our purpose is to help in the creation of work that works. And yet investigating how it worked in the marketplace is neglected by too many planners. How can we hope to have clients take creativity seriously – to encourage it, invest in it, and pay us for it – if we ourselves have absolutely no idea what its contribution to their business was?
Radical planning will take seriously evaluating the business impact of creativity.
Now evaluating communications responses – whether people saw it, remember it, liked it, etc. – is relatively easy. And of course people’s digital interactions give us even more things we can measure – searches, downloads, uploads, clicks, views, tweets, shares, likes, visits – the list goes on and on. All these things are easy to monitor and easy to count. They tend to move quickly, and they’re relatively easy to link to marketing activity. But despite our industry’s collective and frequently naive fixation with mindlessly counting these numbers, communications effects and media efficiencies are not evidence of effectiveness. Even if others do not, radical planning will grasp this distinction and understand that the end goal for clients is money and profit.
Properly radical planning will have a working knowledge of how to evaluate the effectiveness of our ideas.
It will know that short-and long-term effects are different kinds of communications responses, and it will know that they must be measured differently, over different time periods.
It will be aware that creativity is in all cases only one of the many factors, external and intrinsic, which may have driven sales or created a change in behaviour. So it will have an appreciation of how (I borrow here from the advice for entrants submitting cases to the Cannes Effectiveness Lions) distribution, pricing, competitive failure, share of voice, superior product performance, market monopoly, seasonality, price promotion, macro-economic pressure, cultural bias, legislation, average temperature, rainfall, force majeure, popular culture, fashion, politics are all potential factors in the fortunes of companies and the performance of brands, and that the influences on buying behaviour of consumers is almost infinite.
In working to identify the specific contribution of communications, it will know how to manually discount these factors.
It will have at least a working knowledge of the principles of econometrics.
And of course it will know that creativity makes money in different ways, whether that’s driving top-line sales, securing new distribution, supporting a price premium, reversing reputational damage, reducing the cost of sale, and so on.
If we really want to demonstrate to our clients that investing in creativity is good business (rather than just talk about it), then we must all take seriously the task of evaluating its business impact.
***
So, the fundamental principles of marketing and communications… how ordinary people live… media behaviours… and effectiveness. None of this is merely ‘nice-to-have’ theoretical knowledge – it has a direct bearing on what we choose to create. It shapes objectives, targeting, timing, channel and platform choices, investment levels, creative solution, and performance metrics. The fundamentals of what makes for good, effective planning have not changed.
Indeed the need for properly radical planning, for planning that has the intelligence, conviction, determination, and skills to involve itself in, ask, and address the fundamental questions is arguably more urgent than ever.
For while planning has long been obsessed with simplicity and reductionism, as Tracey Follows has noted, what clients really want is not so much help in coping with complexity, but certainty. Uncertainty can paralyze a business (think about all those corporations that have been amassing vast cash reserves) and surprise can jeopardize it.
Uncertainty is of course, a perennial challenge in business planning. But it’s probably fair to say that our world is volatile, complex and interconnected like never before.
Uncertainty of course cannot be eliminated. Risk is always the inescapable partner of return. But if planning is to help clients manage risk, then it must be radical.
So rather than be content with breezy confidence, a dollop of marketing buzzwords, some observations about the Zeitgeist, some references to Nike+, Zappos or other case study du jour, and some pretty powerpoint, it must commit itself getting to the very heart of things.
Now this is not to insist that the development of ideas is a linear and entirely rational process in which each step logically leads to the next. Nor is this to argue that rigour and radicalism are the only requirements for effective planning.
As Stephen King himself noted:
The whole process of advertising is not a safe, cautious, step-by-step build-up, because that would inevitably lead to me-too advertising for me-too brands.”
Hunch, gut, improvisation, lateral thinking, guess work, hypothesis, prejudice, intuition, even naiveté … they all have an essential and vital role to play in the development of strategy and ideas. Planners who fail to bring these elements to to the table are just as handicapped as planners who fail to bring to bear rigour and a desire to get to the root of the matter. Planners after all work with research, but in communications. As such their business is the same as everybody else’s – the application of imagination to clients’ business issues, helping create entirely new futures for our clients’ businesses and brands.
Planning then, is an essential part of the messy process, and is not just an upstream, conceptual discipline that does not get its hands dirty with the work. It is practical, pragmatic, and focused on execution, not mere abstraction.
However, without the skills and interest to get to the heart of the matter, planning is a body without a skeleton, and without this necessary infrastructure of knowledge and ability – without radical planning – we do ourselves, the work, and our clients a disservice.
Without planning that gets to the root of things, planning simply has no foundation. It speaks without authority, reduced to just another opinion – one everybody else is perfectly entitled to ignore. We are, after all, already over-supplied opinions.
Without radical planning, we also do creativity a disservice. We risk creativity being tasked with unreasonable, unrealistic, or inappropriate objectives, we deny the creative process the fuel of that old fashioned word, insight, and devoid of deep understanding, we render the development of successful ideas a roll of the dice.
And of course without radical planning we also do our clients a disservice.
At this point we should pause and shudder as we contemplate the fact that the average tenure of a CMO is now a paltry forty-three months.
The implications for the organisation are clear. Results (sometimes any results) must be delivered, and delivered quickly. Inevitably then, short-termism has become the scourge of the marketing world. And it is a scourge because real, significant, sustainable business results are felt in the longer term.
Only by getting to the root of things do we have any hope of helping clients set the right objectives, select the best tools, and marshal the appropriate level of resources. For as Laurence Green has observed:
Too often, our business has sliced and diced its tasks in the style of a sub-prime mortgage bundler. A corporate task set by the chief executive, reframed as a comms task by the marketing director, refined by the brand consultancy, and reduced by the ad agency to the stuff advertising can do: Grow awareness, nurture engagement. Too many links, too indirect and weak a connection between commercial possibilities and creative resolution.”
Without properly radical planning we – along with our clients – we will remain hostage to this kind of thinking and operating.
So if we want to take proper advantage of the ever-expanding canvas of creative opportunities, if we desire a broader application of creativity to clients’ business needs and issues, and if we are to go beyond only ever seeing and solving ad-shaped problems, then we must go beyond the merely superficial and apply ourselves more seriously to asking more, better, and different questions.
***
We should never forget that the emergence of planning as a discipline was driven by anger and indignation.
Anger at stifling and bogus research techniques.
Anger at spurious assumptions about how communications worked.
Anger at poor quality data that yielded no insight.
Anger at a research and marketing infrastructure that got in the way of work that worked.
The work and our clients today deserve this same degree of energy and fearless intelligence.
This same independence of thought.
This same commitment to cut through the self-serving rhetoric and rigour-free bullshit.
This same determination to look beyond the easy platitudes and lazy thinking.
This same relentlessly questioning spirit.
Planning is radical, or it is nothing.
***This is what our Republican Governor, Jodi Rell, said about the Charter Oak Plan last month on its one-year anniversary:
"A little over a year ago, I announced the start of a program I said would change the face of health care in Connecticut – change it for the better and change it forever," Governor Rell said. "Today that program is covering 10,257 individuals and another 5,884 applicants are eligible for coverage as soon as they select from one of three contracted health plans and begin paying monthly premiums. "That means more than 10,000 people who – a year ago – had no health coverage or could not afford the coverage they had now have affordable health care," the Governor said. "That is an accomplishment worth celebrating. From routine checkups to treatment for life-threatening illness, the program is filling a critical gap. "
link: http://www.charteroakhealthplan.com/...
This is how her press release describes the Charter Oak Plan:
There is no income test or asset limit to qualify for Charter Oak coverage. Enrollees earning more than 300 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) currently pay a flat, unsubsidized monthly premium of $259. Enrollees with incomes below 300 percent of the FPL pay reduced, subsidized premiums ranging from $75 to $200 monthly, depending on income and family size. Charter Oak’s annual, income-based deductible ranges from $150 to $900. The deductible does not apply to primary and specialist doctor visits, ambulance and emergency room care, behavioral health services, pre- and post-natal care, prescription medications and certain other benefits. The Charter Oak Health Plan is administered by the Department of Social Services.
link: http://www.charteroakhealthplan.com/...
It's still a new plan, but it's there, so I have some questions for my Honorable Senator from the State of Connecticut:
Is he planning on filibustering a federal public option because he feels that the people of the State of Connecticut don't want the rest of the country to enjoy a public option, even when they do?
Is Senator Lieberman to the right of Republican Governor Jodi Rell when it comes to health care, and does he believe that the people of the state of Connecticut are also the to the right of Governor Rell on this issue?
Is Senator Lieberman willing to come out and make a statement on the Charter Oak Plan - and for that matter the very popular Husky Plan - as these are both government-run health care plans? Is he in favor of one, or both, or neither?
Gosh, I would hate to say that any of this had to do with Senator Lieberman putting his personal political interests above his solemn duty to represent the people of the State of Connecticut.
It'd be nice to hear from the Senator on these open questions just so he can put that concern to rest.
UPDATE:
Oh, this just gets better:
"I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free. It's not," Mr. Lieberman said. "It's going to cost the taxpayers and people that have health insurance now, and if it doesn't, it's going to add terribly to our national debt."
link: http://online.wsj.com/...
Who? Who among your constituents who live in Connecticut think their public option is free?
Name ten.
UPDATE 2: Personal testimony on the Charter Oak Health Plan from dragonfire in the comments...
The Charter Oak Plan is yes a Public Option- I am in the program- I have gotten better service through Charter Oak & Community Health here then Blue Cross. Lab work 100% Covered
Preventive care 100% covered
1 Physical a year
Emergency room visit covered 100%
I went to a UCONN dermatologist-$35 co pay A good program- I pay a fraction of what I paid with Blue Cross. This Public Option works well- Lieberman need to be held accountable for not bringing this issue up. Others across the nation deserve the same type of program.
The people of Connecticut are good, kind, generous people. My friends and neighbors would not want to deny a fellow citizen access to healthcare just because they live in a different state. Senator Lieberman severly underestimates the character of his constituents if he's planning on filibustering a health care bill with a public option in their name.Eden Foods is an organic food business that's been operating out of Michigan since the 1960s. Eden's president and sole shareholder, Michael Potter, is anti-GMO, pro-macrobiotic diet, and believes in "full transparency–complete disclosure of ingredients and all handling" for Eden's products, which include things like mung beans, buckwheat noodles, plum vinegar, and dried sea vegetables. As a longtime Eden Foods consumer, I don't think it's unfair to describe the company as exactly what conservatives would dream up if they were parodying an organic foods brand.
Well, except for one thing: Potter is a Roman Catholic who says certain forms of birth control are abortion. And his lawsuit challenging the Health and Human Services (HHS) contraception mandate is one of three that the U.S. Supreme Court has ordered to be reviewed in wake of its June 30 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the controversial case concerning birth control and an employer's responsibility to provide health insurance that covers it. The Christian owners of corporate craft chain Hobby Lobby had said doing so violated their religious beliefs and the Supreme Court agreed, holding that requiring a closely-held company to provide the coverage was not "the least restrictive means" of accomplishing the government's goal (increasing insurance coverage for contraception) and therefore stood in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993.
Following the Hobby Lobby ruling, the Court ordered reviews of three similar cases wherein lower courts had rejected companies' requests to be exempted from the mandate: Autocam Corp. v. Burwell, Eden Foods v. Burwell, and Gilardi v. Department of Health & Human Services.
Autocam is a Michigan-based company that manufactures parts for cars and medical supplies. The Gilardi brothers operate two Ohio food distribution companies. In all three lawsuits, the companies objected to covering all forms of contraception (in the Hobby Lobby case, owners had merely objected to four specific types). The Gilardi case will now go back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia; Eden and Autocam will bounce back to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Of course, these three case are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. More than four dozen lawsuits against the Obamacare contraception mandate are pending by faith-affiliated charities, colleges, and hospitals, according to the Associated Press. And 49 lawsuits—many of them stayed in anticipation of the Hobby Lobby ruling—are pending from for-profit corporations. (See a full list of them here.)
In October, when the U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term, it is expected to hear a challenge from the University of Notre Dame—a challenge very similar to one from Christian college Wheaton. Unlike Hobby Lobby, Wheaton was eligible for the accommodation for religious nonprofits that HHS had already worked out. Under this workaround, religious employers who object to covering contraception must simply alert the government of their objection and which insurance company they use. Thereafter, the government will make arrangements with insurers to provide birth control coverage for the company's employees (a move which insurance companies seem to have accepted because plans that include contraception coverage wind up less costly to them those that don't).
But Wheaton says that merely filling out the form violates religious beliefs, since doing so would indirectly end up facilitating birth control coverage for employees. Last week, the Supreme Court granted the college an injunction against enforcement of the contraception mandate pending appeal.
The Court's decision in Wheaton doesn't resolve the merit of the school's claims (though for a clickbait-y mess of legal ignorance, check out this Dahlia Lithwick and Sonja West piece asserting that the court found the whole accommodation "unconstitutional"). Should Wheaton get its way, those who oppose the contraception mandate may be "close to the end of the line of what they can demand" under the RFRA, notes Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy:
Wheaton and some religious employers claim that the form HHS requires them to fill out and sign (EBSA Form 700) substantially burdens their religious belief because it directly facilitates the provision of contraceptive coverage to which they object. Yet as the order notes, religious objectors are able to notify the government of their objections to contraception coverage without using the form, and that nothing in RFRA would prevent the government from using this information to facilitate contraception coverage for relevant employees. This would suggest that should a majority of the Court find the existing accommodation insufficient, a RFRA-compliant accommodation based on a different form or reporting procedure should be relatively easy to create. Yes, some religious objectors might object to any form, but an objection to informing the government of one’s objection, due to the knowledge that the government may use this information in an objectionable fashion, would seem to fail for the same reasons that religious objections to paying taxes fail.
A small tweak to the existing religious nonprofit accommodation seems harmless enough, but there are reasons some supporters of the Hobby Lobby decision may object to the court coming down in full favor of Wheaton College. Michael Austin at IVN news likens it to the difference between exceptions and accommodations in education:
Accommodations include such things as providing sign-language interpreters, note takers, recorded textbooks, and extra time on tests. The guiding philosophy behind educational accommodations is that every student should have an equal opportunity to learn the material in a course and have that knowledge assessed by an instructor. From time to time, educators are asked to forgo that philosophy and make exceptions for students who are having difficulty in a course—to require less reading, or fewer tests, or lower grades for some students than for others. Exceptions often look like accommodations, but they are actually very much the opposite.
Austin thinks Hobby Lobby was looking for an accommodation, while Wheaton (and Notre Dame and the dozens of institutions involved in similar cases) is looking for an exception. "It will be tempting for the courts, and for Americans generally, to believe that religious exceptions proceed logically from religious accommodations," he writes. "But they do not. Accommodations and exceptions are fundamentally different kinds of things. One allows us to balance competing interests, while the other demands that we sacrifice one set of interests to another."
Under the RFRA, it really comes down to substantial burden—does it substantially burden a nonprofit's religious freedom to fill out a form objecting to covering birth control? I would say no. Though neither would it burden HHS substantially to change the reporting requirement in some way (say, by having employees at objecting companies fill out a form).
But all this implies we're actually arguing about what we say we're arguing about, and by this point it's clear we are most certainly not, at least not unilaterally. Both the federal government and some employers are using the contraception bit of HHS' essential benefits mandate as a way to protest or defend Obamacare, and what it stands for, at large.
One person who isn't afraid to admit this is Eden Foods' Potter. Though Potter's lawsuit against HHS is brought on First Amendment and RFRA violation grounds, Potter barely mentions his religious beliefs when he talks or writes about the case. In 2013, he told Salon's Irin Carmon that he didn't care about birth control per se but the "whole category of things that I don’t think any company should be forced to be involved with." In a press release the same month, Potter called it "discriminatory" that not all employers have to comply with the HHS mandate ("individuals who practice certain faiths are exempt, while individuals who practice other faiths are not") and lamented the "overreach" of HHS:Please enable Javascript to watch this video
There is a corner spot in the Airline Shopping Center at Airline and Labarre that is cooking up great poboys, hot plates, seafood specialties and rocking out catering orders as well. Jam's has only been in this new location for a short while, but they also were doing the same great stuff at a previous location just off of Veteran's Memorial Blvd.
Owner Amy Waller tells us that whether it was the old spot or the new location, she has been serving up classic New Orleans favorites like roast beef poboys, seafood dishes and an assortment of sides and appetizers with an accent on being made from scratch. Waller is very proud of her roast beef. Waller says the key to her roast beef poboy is how she slices the meat. She slices it very thin and knows it is right when it curls as it comes off the slicer. I have had many poboys. Folks here have varied approaches to the roast beef poboy. Some slice the roast beef. Some pull or shred the roast beef. Some places cook the roast beef down for so long that it virtually falls apart. You know, debris! I have to say that honestly I like them all. When it comes to Jam's roast beef, I really enjoyed the texture of the roast beef and I especially liked the deep, earthy flavor of the gravy. Amy kicks up her roast beef poboy by adding onion rings to it.
We also got to try Jam's Seafood and Eggplant casserole. This is served at the restaurant and is also a staple item on Jam's catering menu. It starts by cooking down the eggplant with the trinity and other vegetables and seasonings. Add the seafood and later the breadcrumbs and a few other select ingredients and you have a delightful and delicate stuffing that is packed with seafood-flavor. If you are eating this dish at the restaurant it is served on a fried eggplant boat. Wow! If Waller is preparing it for a catering gig, it is served in a pan and garnished with fried eggplant medallions. Catering is a big part of Jam's business, and after trying some of their dishes, it's no mystery why those catering orders keep coming in. So whether it is by the plate or the by the pan, there's ALWAYS something good at Jam's.Throughout Republicans' doomed push to replace Obamacare, two words struck fear into their hearts: "CBO score." No matter how much momentum the GOP built up for an updated bill, the Congressional Budget Office would project tens of millions of newly uninsured people and skyrocketing health-care costs, and Republicans would be on the defensive again. Democrats would express anger at the numbers; even centrists would chastise the GOP for being so cruel to so many. And what wasn't in those headlines? The budget savings. Few Republicans dared to argue that leaving millions uninsured was just fine because the government would save money, because so many rightly saw that reasoning as morally indefensible.
In short, during the first eight months of 2017, the starting point for any assessment of a health-care plan was a moral frame: "How many people would be left uninsured, and how many people will be stuck with unaffordable bills?" After Sen. Bernie Sanders's introduction of his Medicare for All Act, the media and political establishments regrettably have changed the debate's starting point to "How much does it cost?" That shift is a great shame.
Moral framings should not be something one can pick and choose when to invoke. While Obamacare has had its successes, 28.5 million people remain uninsured. Is their lack of insurance any less an outrage because they are already without insurance? Similarly, that the GOP's ideas would have increased out-of-pocket premiums by thousands of dollars was rightly seen as terribly callous. By the same logic, is it not an affront that Americans spend billions more on health care than people in other developed countries without better health outcomes? Is it now fine to deny remedies to people suffering under the country's broken health-care system because it might save the country some money? Those who invoke morality only as a reason not to go backward, never to go forward, lose credibility on both counts.
Nor should a moral calculus be ditched on grounds of |
total ratings). Despite that, she has amassed 167 million views and hundreds of parodies. It is the 22nd most viewed video on YouTube of all time, before it was taken down on June 16 as per Black’s request.
If you take a look at her ‘Friday’ video, you’ll see that the song lyrics are terrible, and the video just mediocre and the use of auto-tune was heavily criticized as well.She’s now a millionaire because of her publicity (albeit negative). ‘Friday’ was hated by the public, but proved to be a commercial success: in a matter of days, iTunes received 2 million downloads and with an iTunes payout of $0.70 per download, earning the singer about US $1.4 million in just a few days. Not bad for a thirteen-year-old.
3. Chuck Norris Jokes
Chuck Norris jokes are about the martial artist and actor Chuck Norris, stating exaggerated claims about Chuck Norris’ strength, ability, toughness, endurance, or everything else what makes him awesome. The claims are mostly absurd which is what makes them so hilarious. These jokes have spread around the globe via the internet.
The Chuck Norris jokes first appeared on Late night with Conan O’Brien, and started appearing on the internet. It was a huge hit. Chuck Norris himself was flattered and found them humorous, but tries to not take them seriously.
Some of our favorite Chuck Norris jokes are:
‘Chuck Norris counted to infinity… twice.’ ‘Chuck Norris has already been to Mars. That is why there are no signs of life there.’ ‘Chuck Norris doesn’t cheat death, he beat it fair and square.’ ‘Chuck Norris is the reason why Waldo is hiding.’ ‘Chuck Norris made a Happy Meal cry.’
4. Famous Dancing Baby
The famous dancing baby animation, also known as Baby Cha Cha, is a short 3D animation of a baby, dancing cha-cha to the intro of the song ‘Hooked on a Feeling’. This short animation is among the earliest examples of online memes, having spread through chain e-mails.
It has appeared in several shows and parodies, where it became a recurrent hallucination in the ‘Ally McBeal’ series.
We love babies, they’re cute and adorable, ergo babies sell. We love them more if they can do crazy things they normally can’t. The Dancing Baby Meme was so popular it even spawned many imitations, parodies, remixes. One such is the viral ad ‘Evian Roller Babies’ featuring babies dancing and hopping in skates.
5. People of Wal-Mart
People of Wal-Mart features heavyweight, poorly dressed and just plain crazy people who shop at Wal-Mart. The pictures are absurd, silly, weird, and some are just gross. You can check all the funny pictures on their official website. Basically the web site mocks the shoppers of Wal-Mart. This internet meme is not for everyone, as it may offend some people, but you’re invited to check it out or just leave.
6. Demotivational Posters
Demotivational posters are spoofs of the often clichéd motivational posters found in corporate offices and such. Like a motivational poster, it consists of a single picture, with a black border, with an all caps title in white, usually a serif font. Most often it is followed by a subheading in smaller font.
The purpose of motivational posters is to inspire, demotivational posters work the opposite: they are pessimistic in nature. These are among the most common memes today, seen all over the cyberspace and shared among social networking sites. There are now dozens of websites dedicated to generating these hilarious demotivational posters.
These posters are effective because they’re simple, sweet and fast. They’re really funny too. It shows that one strong, single picture can be very devastatingly powerful when paired with witty copy.
7. Y U NO Guy
Y u no guy is a cartoon featuring a highly annoyed face, with his hands out and palms outward, as if screaming ‘Y U NO?’. It characteristically uses ‘text’ style grammar. It first appeared on Tumblr on LOLTumblrWallpapers, which instantly received 10,000 reblogs.
Y U NO GUY is inspired by a character from Gantz, on Chapter 55: Naked King. His facial expression shows extreme rage and frustration.
Other internet meme characters that are part of the Rage comics include Cereal Guy, Lol Guy, Okay Guy, Forever Alone, PFFFFT, Troll face, Me Gusta and more.
Memes as Promotional and Marketing Tools
Memes should not be seen as a link building tool, but rather as an effective promotional and marketing tool. Viewers can relate better to a meme than a long article. Thus it is effective in creating a loyal online following base, where they can keep on coming back to your website. The meme can create ‘trust’ and ‘loyalty’ in your web base, an integral value in marketing.
But memes can travel from one site to another, from one social networking site to another, thus you cannot be the sole carrier of the meme even if you are the owner. How can your site benefit from the meme if this is the case?
Of course you are recognized as the source of the meme. As the internet meme gets more popular, searches increase and thus bring more visitors to your web site. Successful meme marketing is a lot like viral marketing. It builds up online credibility, increasing social popularity. More and more people come to your site web site. If they enjoy it, they share it to their fellow friends. Thus it creates a domino effect, reaching millions of viewers in a short time. Memes are like a self-replicating virus.
Memes may work like magic overnight, or they may take time to spread. Social networking web sites aid in spreading your internet meme. Because of this, social networking is the perfect avenue to test the success of your meme by tracking its popularity and reading comments and reviews. Memes are still largely unknown and mysterious even to the best researchers, but one thing is known: memes are one of the most important tools in online marketing today.
Now let’s take a look at some ideas that have gone viral.
12 Creative Design Ideas That Went Viral (And The Lessons You Can Learn)
In this post I’ll feature some web designs that went viral on StumbleUpon/Digg/other social media sites and the lessons you can learn from them. As you browse the designs, I’m pretty sure you’ll find some common patterns I overlooked. If you see that, let me know in the comments :) For now, let’s get started.
One more thing before we start. The lessons I’ll share are just principles and observations that come from my 3+ experience in viral marketing and getting over a million people to my websites. Feel free to disagree with some of the principles and let me know why in the comments below. Now, let’s REALLY get started :)
What can we learn from this: People want control. That’s one of the reasons games are more engaging than videos. This animation makes use of that principle by giving people an incredible control over the flying man. Even if you move your mouse a little bit, you should get him flying immediately. The lesson here is: If you’re making a game or an animation people can control, ask yourself how can you make it so even a small move with the mouse (smallest effort people can possibly take while sitting on a computer) can produce a ‘wow’ results.
What can we learn from this: Appeal to the general audience. Going niche doesn’t work if you want to go viral (except if the niche is fascinating for the general public, like astronomy). This infographic is a great example of appealing to the overall mass population. The name is ’10 Common Misconceptions Dispelled’, not ’10 Common Teeth Whitening’ or ’10 Common Acne’ misconceptions. In viral, fun and entertainment are a priority over being informative.
3. Horses Singing
What can we learn from this: There are so many principles behind this viral flash ‘game’, but I think what’s most important here is unexpectedness; when horses open their mouth, you expect that awful and loud voice. But these horses can sing; and they can actually sing in chorus! Imagine real horses doing that; one of the most annoying things in the world? :)
What can we learn from this: As a general rule of thumb, too much text doesn’t work in viral (see why in the next lesson). That doesn’t mean, however, that text doesn’t work at all. This example shows that. If you combine it with something insightful (like quotes), funny (once someone on Twitter made an account named “shit my dad says”), anything that brings emotions, you should have a good probability most people are going to like it.
What can we learn from this: I’ve actually known this OatMeal guy before he went viral on Digg. I expected his site to be great success, but never expected it would get viral to this extent! (his site is in the top 2500 most visited sites in the world according to Alexa). He taught me one very important thing with his designs. You see, there is a lot of text in some of his infographics. But it’s all illustrated, like a comics, and the text accompanies the graphic rather than the graphic accompanying the text. This is a very important distinction to make; if the text accompanies the graphic then you try to illustrate as many things as you can with the graphic, while the reverse is true with the graphic accompanying the text (like in this article, for example).
6. TypoOrganism ASCII (or, it’s Obama in ASCII!)
What can we learn from this: Ah, the power of associations. Combining technology + famous people = win. You could argue that we were making all these ‘associations’ in the previous examples as well (connecting pictures with emotions etc). But this is different. In this example, there is a politician, a celebrity. Some will like this and some will not. But they would both agree this is ‘fascinating’. A lesson/idea: You can take a present trend/famous person and make a creative design out of it. Like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.
7. Drawing Example
What can we learn from this: Most people like drawings. If you’re a drawing master, why not try and submit your masterpiece on StumbleUpon? Or alternatively you can find a drawing group on Facebook and post it there and see what happens (just make sure the group/page has enough members!) Drawings go viral on StumbleUpon.
What can we learn from this: People love beautiful stuff. Now, aren’t different things beautiful to different people? Not really. For example, if you show the 2 pictures above to different people. most will say they’re quite beautiful. Maybe 2 in 30 will say they don’t like the pictures. But the rest 28 will usually say positive stuff. And not surprisingly, beautiful things often go viral! They appeal to most (remember the second principle, appeal with information? Well this is same just you’re appealing with beautiful stuff).
If you want to see whether something you designed is beautiful or not, try sending it to 5 people (but don’t tell them it’s your design) and hear what they think.
What can we learn from this: Making a showcase of beautiful pictures/designs used to work quite successfully on StumbleUpon. This isn’t the case anymore (they still work, but not so phenomenal like previously), not because of the pictures but other factors. If you show same things to people all the time, they’ll become accustomed to those things and they’ll lose they effectiveness. The things they see will become ordinary and ordinary is the enemy of viral and buzz. So why am I telling you this? Because you can make twists for these showcase posts and make them ‘not-so-ordinary’.
Most people just throw a bunch of pictures for a particular topic, name it ‘x beautiful [theme] pictures’ and that’s it. Boring. Imitation works for getting viral, but not for long. Here are some ideas on twists you can make:
’10 Remarkably Similar, Yet Very Different [theme] Designs’
’10 Designs and Their Ugly Counterparts’ (you can show similar designs here, first the ugly one, and then the beautiful one)
10. Iconscrabble
What can we learn from this: Simplicity helps a lot. Especially if you have a site where people are just trying to do 1 thing (like search for something). If you’ve noticed, all the previous examples are kinda simple, they don’t have any extra parts that take your attention. They make you focus on the ‘meat’ and don’t do much fluff.
What can we learn from this: When this animation started, something strange happened to me. I started associating the animation with the essence of life, the stars, the universe…and I bet most people also did that when they saw this. Can you do this with your design? Can you insert an element which will help visitors associate your design with the essence of life? Some objects that can help you accomplish this are: stars, galaxies, planets etc. But it’s not just about what you present, it’s about HOW you present it. Just take a look at this animation and its slow motion. Think on how you can present your static/animation design. Slow motion usually helps a lot in the ‘how to present it’ part.
12. LAB – Freestyle Creativity
What can we learn from this: At the end, it’s important to mention that there are not specific rules for going viral. There is a dose of randomness in the viral formula. The more viral designs you see, the more you can ‘steal’ from them and then make your own ones. This is an example of what I call a ‘freestyle creativity’, the guy probably just said ‘I found this fascinating and other people will probably find it too’ and went with that design. There’s no rule that says you can’t do the same too.1. The Problem
I want to talk about P.C. culture precisely because we have a really hard time talking about P.C. culture. Hell, I feel like we've been arguing about it since the term was coined in the '90s through today. Whether it's conversations about the rich asshole, Milo, violent protestors, or even the general state of public discussion. We argue. But unwrapping what "PC" even means is so damn crucial to navigating the lynchpin of how it makes us divided. And the main problem with the PC discussion is that two different things often get conflated: there is the "politically correct" element and then there's the actual politics behind it. But the failure to separate them creates a kind of chaos that is used to drive further wedges and upend the moral discussion at the heart of the matter. And it might be damaging us beyond what you can even imagine.
But let's just take it a step at a time.
2. The Crux
Political correctness is defined as, "the avoidance, often considered as taken to extremes, of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against."
For the moment, I hope you can get past any associations you might have and understand that the intent behind being politically correct is clear: empathy with marginalized groups. This shouldn't be something that is all that controversial, at least from a basic place of sympathy for people who have it rough. And so political correctness becomes a prerogative because it is safe to say we have an endless history of no-one really speaking up for or considering these groups. And so, the inclination of being PC is something that is born from a place of caring. It is the inclination to be inclusive. That is what it wants. Plain and simple.
But it is the "often taken to extreme" part of the definition that begins the whole story of confusion and strife. Because, like most progressive issues, the popular dialogue on political correctness gets tied into the climate of how younger people or the most vocal among us are the ones who talk about it. And that means a lot of it is going to revolve around a kind of black & white thinking and righteousness. This reality is nothing new. And more importantly, lamenting the fervent nature of righteous people feels obvious, mostly because it's part of an even more obvious cycle. To wit, I see fervent 22 year olds espouse one politically correct thing, then go on to become a group of 25 year olds who feel disenfranchised by the specificity of what the 22 year olds under them are saying, and then they go on to become 30 year olds who roll their eyes at the entire process. This is not to say they lose their liberal belief set, nor what the political correctness is fighting for. Far from it. The eye roll is simply about growing up and getting better at communication. It's about wisdom over knowledge. It's about changing how we talk about the political climate, especially within the liberal community where it is so critical. It's about understanding that tangible progress is more important than being right. But as that cycle dances ever on, always with a new group of fervent people who think the old way of saying something is bad and the new way is good, the P.C. cultural discussion is both constantly moving and yet effectively stays "static."
This is how it is. And such a climate breeds a popular attitude among people where there is the fear of making a misstep, along with the belief that being P.C. is what makes you moral, along with the idea that pointing at all the bad people and saying they're bad is what makes you good (along with the failure to realize that merely saying the right thing is not the same as actually making a tangible difference in marginalized communities, but that's a whole other criticism). Alllll along with a certain vehemence for those who do not agree with this approach and do not fall in line. All of which just facilitates a sense of defensiveness from everyone outside that PC culture. And you get especially defensive when someone accuses you of being insensitive, of being racist, or sexist, or whatever -ist you can think of. You have probably been there. And this whole dynamic is exactly what many will tell you is to blame for our cultural divide. They'll tell you this is why PC culture has run amok and robbed us of a functional society that knew how to talk about problems before. They'll tell you that PC people are the enemies of free-speech. Hell, even ostensibly liberal SNL writers joke that listing more than two genders on an app is why democrats lost the election. And every bit of blame for why progressivism fails comes down to the errors in the fervent nature of political correctness.
And I think it's bullshit.
We get so caught up in the obvious criticisms of young people's fervor that we miss the most important aspects involved in the entire discussion, chiefly what they're trying to propagate and accomplish. It is to confuse vocalness with subject matter. It is a complete failure to understand everything that actually matters. But let's start with the most important aspect first: the defensiveness. Because I've definitely been there. If you write in the public space, especially when you talk about culture and politics, you will absolutely land in hot water at some point. And I have said things that were bad and/or look bad. I admit it whole-heartedly. I never meant to, of course. Hell, most of the time if you're being considerate you won't ever hear a peep. It's just the slip-up. And the feeling of suddenly getting attacked for a slip-up, especially when you mean well, can feel scary. It can breed an inherent feeling to be defensive and lash out at those who so obviously misunderstand you. But guess what folks? I know we experience everything in life by looking through our own eyeballs, but just try to remember that other people are saying this to you for a reason, that maybe they feel attacked by it. And much more importantly, don't ignore a certain reality: it is really easy to deal with someone who calls you out for not being P.C.
If you're cynical about this, here's a script you can use: "I'm genuinely sorry. I didn't mean to say anything offensive. I know I can explain what I meant and why, but that's not important. Because I understand where you are coming from, what you are saying, and I promise I will do more reading to better understand this issue. More so, I promise I will do better in the future." And it feels really good if you actually mean all that, folks. And when you take this tact, you'd be shocked how quickly you're just talking to a person. Talking about where you both come from, why the issue is important to you, and how you can move forward. It works. It works every time. And there are so many times I wish I did it even better than I did. There's never been a time it hasn't worked. Which all leads to a simple notion of understanding:
To disarm the fervent P.C. critic is to simply disarm yourself.
And more importantly, to understand what they are really after. Which is why we can't have the PC conversation be so focused on getting the other person to take down their walls. You have to start with your own. You always have to start with your own. Because often we're talking about people trying to create a sense of consideration for the most targeted and victimized groups in existence. And often, they are a part of those groups. But we are so bad at being wrong because we feel like we are under attack. To which I will ask, you think well-meaning white people didn't feel attacked by the Civil Rights Movement? Of course they did. And yet so many people who look at something historical like that and shake their head are the same people who get so defensive at the idea of learning if someone identifies as "he" or "she". All to the point that they will bristle at the very suggestion, when this mere consideration for another person costs them nothing. It is as innocuous as getting to know someone's name. So to accept this, is to understand our own inclination to kindness. It always starts with self.
And yet, this is just one half of the equation. Because there is another aspect of this that is crucial to understanding the PC conversation and that is the idea that words matter. To wit, a few years ago I used the term "mentally handicapped" in a column. In the comment section, I got called out for using such an offensive term. I did not realize it was offensive, so I sat there for a second, caught of guard, then gathered my composure. I basically did a statement like the one above, saying I would adopt to the newer term, but I told a story along with it. When I was still living in Boston there was a big movement to get rid of the word "retarded." You can imagine how many Bostonians bristled at this, partly because the phrase "Dude, that's wicked frickin retahded" is practically part of the cultural lexicon. But the effort was rightfully put forth and the word "handicapped" was called the new sensitive term that would help fix our understanding of the issue and show sensitivity. This is what I adopted and learned. And all these years later, the term handicapped is now offensive.
Now, many would throw up their hands at this exact notion and point out the obvious fruitlessness of caring about this, even saying that they're "just words". At best, what they are really criticizing is the belief that fixing the word is what fixes the issue. But it's not the word itself. It's never the word itself. This point, which many would use to criticize caring about word-choice, is also obvious. For it is always what is in our hearts that matters most, right? But this is the whole catch 22 point of this criticism: the word is what helps show what is in our hearts. It always is because it's communication. It's how we navigate the popular discussion of the issue at the given time. And thus, the word is a part of the evolution of our understanding. We may have come up with a string of new respectful words and it may change again and again. We've gone from n-word to negro to colored to black to African-American and yet the problems of fervent racism remain. But using the best word is merely a part of trying to get to the heart of truth in that continued cycle of fighting the larger issue itself. It is always looking for the word that best describes the soul of a thing. It is communicating. And yes, it takes so much more than communication. It takes people really throwing in with their heart and inclusiveness in the real world and not being segregated. But using sensitive words is just looking at the world around you saying that you are trying. It is looking at the disenfranchised and saying "I see you."
3. The Turn
So... The war on P.C. culture.
... It got weird.
I'm sitting here at point of paralysis, trying to casually explain the rise of internet trolls, 4 chan, hardcore gamer culture, lulz, twitter-eggs, gamergate, pepe the frog, the alt-right, the rich asshole and how they came all crashing together in spectacular ugliness, but it's like trying to explain the mathematics of quantum mechanics (this article actually does a good job). But for the purposes of this conversation just know that all display a combo of 1) being virulently anti-PC. 2) being the kinds of people who have really sad, internal existences and internet they can be anonymous and escape into. And 3) a core philosophy that sees the value of what I will call "the big joke."
That is to say that the world itself is a joke.
And I don't mean that like a comic who sees the humor in everything (we'll get to that comparison later). No, this means you, and especially anyone who dares care about absolutely anything in this world, is a joke. Especially serious things. Because life is suffering and caring and being serious is the path to suffering. That may sound like either a broad generalization or even a buddhist mantra, but it really is the best way to describe it, and instead of enlightenment, they are after the extremes of the lulz (laughter at another's expense). There's a reason The Dark Knight's Joker struck such a cord with this populace and it wasn't just his good performance, it was his mantra: "Why so serious?" It was his ability to reign terror and tear apart hypocrisy. It was the sense power that comes with having such a freeing attitude toward the cares of society. The pure, bleak joy of nihilistic glee. And yes, the way this philosophy was expressed could be as terrifying as when the Joker did it. The lulz is an almost pathological need to undo your seriousness. To undo what you care about. To not make sense. There isn't a side. There isn't a belief. The only goal is to burn down your side. After all, "Some men just want to watch the world burn." And what started years ago with trolls baiting you and the ensuing "don't feed the trolls" philosophy became a lot weirder and scarier when things starting turning political and organized (big surprise, cue their adoption of Bane). Because with the rise of Brietbart and a lot of other conservative thinkers who were literate in the attitudes of this internet subculture, the tenor changed. And the trolls, whether they knew it or not, became soldiers.
Watching this all happen in slow-motion was horrifying. Partially because it was hard to see, almost opaque, random signs accelerating. But when the spark of a nonsensical gaming conspiracy ignited in Gamergate, those with eyes on the culture started getting freaked out. The trolls were aligned in purpose now. And the targets had become intensely political. Those targets, mostly women and members of the trans community within the industry, found themselves on the end of constant harassment (the video game industry itself, rife with issues in this arena to begin with, was dreadfully underprepared to deal with it). To be fair, it was always this way for non-males in gamer culture, but suddenly it was all laser focused and centered around a "cause."
Enter Milo Yiannapoulous.
Of course, it wasn't just one person, but he was emblematic of everything. Suddenly there was a vocal force with an audience behind the Gamergate movement. See, Milo understood (and was a product of) this culture through and through. A master at throwing self-hatred back at the world, he was incendiary and willing to throw himself into this with reckless abandon. And armed with the conservative political aim, even emboldened by that support, he realized he could stoke anti-PC sentiment as the lynchpin into larger frenzy of extreme right thinking. You can see the blueprint in everything that he wrote. They preyed on young confused gamer kids who felt social anxiety about women. There was the popularization of the term "Social Justice Warrior" to undermine the empathetic aims of being PC and turning into some kind of pathological careerism. There was no attempt to parse anything over and sort out good from bad. There was only the intent to demonize. Individual or made-up events became entire bits of evidence of some grand conspiracy. In a case of turning Godwin's law into the boy who cried wolf, they used literal Nazi disinformation tactics to discredit opponents, all while eschewing the typical Nazi-language and instead creating a whole code-language and symbols (like Pepe) so they could use dog whistles in plain sight. They co-opted the language of the enemy to use against them. Suddenly, the troll army that never believed in sexism and racism was calling you sexist and racist. While there were impressionable people who actually got swept up into believing that, it was most evident in false accounts pretending to be LGBT popping up to discredit the games industry and say "I'm not your shield" (i.e. stop making liberal games in my name). When Tim Schafer made a joke about the tactic, gamergaters went right after him declaring him as being racist and homophobic. The goal was always to invert up and down. But most of all, they became masters of the strawman argument and cherry-picking. Like the source of gamergate itself, they would take a weak kernel of a seeming truth, or often something made up, then bash it into oblivion. They would make ornate long essays that connected various "dots" as "proof." They targeted anyone they could, especially the most vocal members of the opposition, and use information on their life to construe elaborate falsehoods from nuggets of seeming truth. All of this is not me trying to tell you that I'm dismissing something sight unseen. This was all constructed with the same conspiratorial insanity of how you get pizzagate. Trying to fight it, trying to reason with it, was like trying to fight smoke. It was only designed to confuse you. And it was all part of getting you to see the big joke.
And all the while, Milo didn't "do" any of this. He just knew expertly how to foster it. How to fan the flames. Go ahead, read those fucking articles about how feminism is worse than cancer if you want. Read everything he's ever done. Read the comments. Read how people were taking it. The goal was clear as day. I cannot explain the depths of the damage he caused. From the individuals he attacked to the holistic damage on the whole. And by working as Breitbart's "tech editor" (read: person who can make internet people angrier at the left) it became so supremely evident the whole PC war was just about undoing the fabric of liberal politics. It was a wedge that could be driven between the liberal community and those in the middle of the road. And so they fanned those flames and continued to indoctrinate into more extreme right thinking. And what did the trolls think of this newly specific political target that been given to them? Well, many became radicalized and part of the alt-right. And the rest didn't care. After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And all the while, those plugged into internet culture watched this happen. We screamed and we shouted about what was happening. It was awful. I thought about quitting the Hulk. And there would be glimmers of hope, a moment where Anita would make it on Colbert, or a mere article in the New York Times. But then the conversation just moved on, as it all festered and got weirder.
No one bothered to think we were the canary in the coal mine.
It feels so obvious in retrospect, but it was all part of the signal of a deep political shift in the country. Other writers have covered this much better, so there's no need to go into detail, but nobody suspected these people would find a hero in the rich asshole. But of course they did. It was the big joke, writ on the biggest possible scale. He's not their savior. He's The Joker. And he will help tear down the people who actually care about things. And so we find ourselves in this cultural maelstrom of trying to figure out how to navigate a public that wants to deal with the figures coming out of the wreckage of this. A public who doesn't realize they're battling smoke. A public that thinks people like Milo are just a new evolution of Rush Limbaugh or something. But as the line from Cormac McCarthy goes:
"You don't know someone until you know what they want."
And what Milo and the vocal anti-PC culture around him wants is radically different than they think. So the way we engage them is going to have to be different. Giving them airtime as a "side" in a "debate" is like booking baba booey and expecting something productive. This is a group of people who coined the term "becoming a hero" as a meaning for killing yourself (and hopefully taking others along with you). But surely this deserves empathy, right? Of course it does. I can't imagine the kind of life that would lead me into thinking that. But the mode of empathy is not in agreement in the discourse and finding common ground. It's stopping the game. The only mode of empathy is in trying to get past all that and to the source. It sounds silly, but the best analogy I can think of is how The Joker keeps telling the made-up stories of how he got those scars. They're all these tragic tales of woe designed to bait sympathy, right? But they're not true. They're just another joke. It's an ingenious (and terrifying) bit of characterization, but if you go outside that: there is a real reason to how he got those scars. And it's simply the one he's not telling. To that, the scars of the people perpetrating the heart of anti-PC sentiment are hiding the same. It's clear as day. So allow me to do something I never thought I'd ever do in my life.
Allow me to defend Milo.
Well, not really, we're too far gone for that. But let's call it having empathy for something under the heart of this situation. Because there is a poetic irony to the fact that Milo was undone by a failure to both understand and communicate nuance. In his conversation discussing the irrevocably formational relationships between older men and younger boys, what he was really trying to do (seemingly) was talk about the nexus of human development for people who have experienced this, and he did not go into details but it seemed like much of his own. It is part of a very real and honest conversation to be had about how young gay men grow up and navigate the world when they've been a victim of this abuse. He was trying to talk about something real. But, like everything Milo does, he did not communicate it from a personal place or even a place of empathy. He did not tell his story. Instead, he took it all and presented the most extreme version of a belief associated with it, which effectively justified Hebephilia. He didn't talk about being conflicted about this. He didn't acknowledge the horrific sides of such abuse. But all is par for the course from a firebrand who has never wanted to play the victim. And so, he was undone by a lack of understanding nuance, mostly his own. And because he spent his entire career avoiding nuance, being outrageous, using people's traumas against them, leveling straw man arguments and not having a single ounce of empathy in his damn soul, he was crushed under the massive weight of everything he has done. Especially in finally saying something that the GOP was radically not on board with, and he is going to quickly learn that the very people he rallied behind for support are the people who want nothing to do with him.
The truth is they never wanted anything to do with him. Just like the people he used, he was someone they could use and weaponize for an uglier purpose. Which brings us to the deep tissue part of his story. For in this discussion of Milo there is not nearly enough conversation regarding his actual psychology. I really don't want to play some pop psychologist, and I'm certainly not getting into the lame idea that gay people can't be conservative (of course they can). But this is a conversation about the power structures we build from the joking. Few think about what being "the jester" actually means in a larger social strata, but Patton Oswalt once wrote honestly about comedy and the nature of bullying while growing up. He was a young kid, easy to be picked on, but he was a funny kid. And what he did to protect himself was rally behind the bullies and make jokes about others they victimized and egging on - again, all as a way of protecting himself, a way of attaining control and safety. It is something he endlessly regrets now, but I look at Milo and I can't help but see that come to life in a spectacular way. I don't need to project internalized homophobia on Milo. He's outright said that gay rights are horrible and that he would cure his homophobia if he could. He was a conservative dream. A gay man who said that being gay was the problem and thus "couldn't" be a bigot. A guy who hated liberals more than they did. And it all reveals the most basic tragedy of someone who took all that as a way of attaining "safety" and never wanted to be the victim. And so Milo spent a career trying to gain the approval of those who most despise his very personhood. He spent that time egging on the bullies, making outrageous jokes, demonizing the people he didn't want to be as weak as. Not only is it almost boringly textbook, but where this all was going to go was inevitable. Because the thing about any of these controversial positions is that you get trapped in the cycle, then it can only spin out of control. The criticizing of others becomes a way of acceptance from those who also criticize and when the backlash becomes real, it just stiffens the resolve. And so it keeps going, more, more, more. Hoping to fill the void. But |
: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever,"--Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA contest."Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff."--Mariah Carey"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life,"-- Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for federal anti-smoking campaign"I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body,"--Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward."Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country,"--Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC."Half this game is ninety percent mental."--Philadelphia Phillies manager, Danny Ozark"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."--Al Gore, Vice President"I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix."-- Dan Quayle"We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"--Lee Lacocca"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein."--Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback & sports analyst."We don't necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people."-- Colonel Gerald Wellman, ROTC Instrutor."Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances."--Department of Social Services, Greenville, South Carolina"Traditionally, most of Australia's imports come from overseas."--Keppel Enderbery"If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there'll be a record."--Mark S. Fowler, FCC ChairmanNEWTON, N.H. (AP) — Authorities say four Massachusetts troopers fired their guns in a confrontation with a driver following a 40-mile, hour-long car chase that ended in New Hampshire.
Autopsy results show that 40-year-old Michael Brown, of Presque Isle, Maine, died of a gunshot wound to the neck June 15. Police initiated pursuit of Brown in Malden, Massachusetts, after recognizing that Brown was wanted in Maine in connection with several charges. The pursuit ended in Newton, New Hampshire, when Brown crashed into a tree and the troopers opened fire. Brown, who had a gun, died at the scene.
New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald says the troopers are Michael Caranfa, Robert Holland, George Katsarakes, and Daniel Purtell. Their law enforcement experience ranges from seven to 27 years. All are on paid administrative leave.
MacDonald said the incident is still under investigation.Share
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The 2018 Mercedes-AMG GT Roadster and GT C Roadster join three versions of the GT coupe, meaning this luxury sports car is now available in no less than five flavors. The Germans just love coming up with new permutations of each model, after all. The GT Roadster will serve as the “base” convertible, while the GT C is a higher-performance model.
Like every other AMG GT variant, the two convertibles use a 4.0-liter, twin-turbocharged V8 that sends its power to the rear wheels through a seven-speed, dual-clutch transmission. The V8 makes 469 horsepower and 465 pound-feet of torque in the GT Roadster, and 550 hp and 502 lb-ft in the GT C. Mercedes says the GT Roadster will do 0 to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds and reach a top speed of 188 mph, while the GT C takes just 3.7 seconds, and tops out at 196 mph.
Read more: Mitsubishi GT-PHEV concept to debut in Paris
The GT C isn’t just a more powerful version of the GT Roadster; it actually uses some hardware from the most hardcore AMG GT variant, the GT R coupe. That includes an electronic locking rear differential, AMG Ride Control adaptive suspension, and a rear-wheel steering system. At speeds below 62 mph, it steers the rear wheels in the opposite direction of the fronts to increase agility. At higher speeds, both sets of wheels turn in the same direction for stability.
Styling wise, the AMG GT looks just as good without a roof as it did with one. Both convertible variants get the “Panamericana” grille first seen on the AMG GT3 race car, and the GT C gets wider fender flares. Under the skin, the extra structural bracing was added to account for the loss of the roof, although Mercedes claims weight gain won’t be too significant, thanks to use of lightweight materials. The convertible soft top takes about 11 seconds to open or close, and can accomplish that feat at speeds up to 31 mph, Mercedes says.
The 2018 Mercedes-AMG GT Roadster and GT C Roadster debut at the 2016 Paris Motor Show, which opens at the end of this month. Both will go on sale in the United States by Fall 2017, with pricing to be announced closer to that date. In the meantime, Mercedes will launch the AMG GT R coupe and a new GT coupe base model, flanking the existing GT S coupe in price and performance.Milla Jovovich is just one more zombie slayfest away from completing her starring run across six Resident Evil movies, and she’s making the last go-round a family affair. In addition to her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson, directing his fourth movie in the series, Jovovich’s real-life daughter will take on a key role in the zombie series’ conclusion, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.
The actress and model took to Facebook Tuesday afternoon to answer fans’ burning questions about her farewell performance in the last installment of the movies. She revealed The Final Chapter‘s new version of the Red Queen, a diabolical supercomputer whose holographic avatar takes the form of a young girl in the 2002 Resident Evil movie, is played by Jovovich and Anderson’s first child, 8-year-old Ever.
“It was so amazing to work with you. You are [an] unbelievably talented actress, more talented than I’ve ever been. It was an honor and a privilege to work with you,” Jovovich said, responding to a question Ever herself submitted (“Mama, how was it to work with me?”) during the Facebook chat. “You’re such a great listener and you understand what it is to be real and natural and organic, and I give you so much kudos for that… you keep impressing me every single day.”
Ilze Kitshoff
The film’s first trailer, released Tuesday morning, sees Alice (Jovovich) returning to the ominous underground facility in Raccoon City where the bulk of the first film’s (bloody) action took place.
“Alice, humanity will cease to exist unless you return to The Hive,” the Red Queen says. “I don’t trust you,” Alice responds. Conflict ensues.
Jovovich also teased her interest in appearing in a video game version of the Resident Evil films, now that the series is finished.
“Listen, that’s not a me question. That’s more a Capcom question, but I would love to,” she said. “When I first did Resident Evil, I was just a big fan of the game… I always wanted to play a video game character… I would love to see Alice kick butt on people’s personal computers. Let’s do it! If enough people write in, maybe they’ll do it.”
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter hits theaters Jan. 27. Watch the Facebook Live video below to see Jovovich gush over her daughter’s performance, dish on working with new cast member Ruby Rose (and returning actor Iain Glen!), ponder the whereabouts of Jill Valentine (“You’re going to have to watch the movie to find out!”), and detail the struggle of battling freezing temperatures and a horde of pesky baboons that infiltrated the film’s set during production.
https://www.facebook.com/MTA New York City Transit is starting up a new tradition of rides to the past via its vintage fleet of subway trains. Following the success of the 1930s-era “Shoppers Special” trains which run on weekends during the holiday season, this summer the MTA will roll out the latest addition to its nostalgia fleet.
The “Bad Old Days Special” will re-create the experience of riding the subway late at night during the 1970s and 1980s using R32 rolling stock — the same subway cars currently utilized for C train service on the IND Eighth Avenue Line. The exteriors of “Bad Old Days Special” trains will be decked out in customized full-length train wrap made to look like they had been covered in graffiti. The interiors will also be wrapped with a graffiti livery inspired by images from the National Archives and will be festooned with copies of the New York Post and other garbage.
While the R32 trains were built in the 1960s, they were the dominant rolling stock used on the MTA’s B Division through the 1970s and 1980s. Today, the R32s are some of the world’s oldest metro trains still in regular operation.
“Fortunately we were able to re-purpose these R32s without any new capital funding due to the fact that C service ceases operation in the late evening and early morning periods and currently offers riders the least scheduled service in the entire system,” said MTA Chairman Thomas Prendergast. “This latest addition to our nostalgia train collection allows us to offer riders a glimpse at the past, while simultaneously giving them a glimpse of what the future could look like if the 2015-2019 MTA Capital Program isn’t approved soon.”
A subway ride from the “Bad Old Days” isn’t complete without witnessing a few unsavory characters. That’s why MTA New York City Transit has hired students from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to dress in period costumes and pose as transit riders from the Koch era.
Starting on Thursday, June 30, the “Bad Old Days Special” will run between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. and will make local stops on the Eighth Avenue Line from 168th Street in Washington Heights to Euclid Avenue in East New York.
April Fools.In case you’re just tuning in, a good in-house conversation among complementarians is going on between John Piper, Thomas Schreiner, and Andrew Wilson over whether or not women can teach in a church gathering under the authority of the elders. In order, see Piper here, Wilson here, Schreiner here, Wilson here, and Piper again here. Previously, Tim Keller has also presented Wilson’s side of things here, while John Frame has offered that same side here. (I’ve been told this conversation at Mere O is good, but I haven’t listened to it.)
Everyone agrees that there are times when women will open their Bibles and instruct men, as Pricilla does with her husband Aquilla when instructing Apollos (Acts 18:26). And everyone agrees that there is a certain kind of teaching that women must not do, based on 1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man.”
The question is, what are the criteria for saying when we are in the first domain versus the second domain? What’s the fence between one side and the other?
There are two things I hope to contribute here. First, I’d like to offer the simple observation that what seems to be driving the different approaches to 1 Timothy 2:12 are Presbyterian versus congregationalist conceptions of teaching and authority. And any congregationalist who agrees with Wilson or Tim Keller or John Frame is relying upon a Presbyterian understanding of teaching and authority (which is not to say a Presbyterian must adopt Wilson’s position). Second, I’d like to offer a more congregationalist distinction between authoritative teaching that occurs in the context of the gathered church, and teaching that occurs outside it.
WHAT THE PLAYERS HAVE SAID
Andrew Wilson distinguishes the two domains described above by distinguishing two different kinds of teaching—what Wilson calls big-T versus little-t teaching. Big-T teaching involves “the definition, defense, and preservation of Christian doctrine, by the church’s accredited leaders.” Little-t teaching is “a catch-all term for talking about the Bible in a church meeting.” Or: “explaining the Scriptures to each other in a peer-to-peer way, according to gifts.”
Wilson’s theological distinction between two different kinds of teaching is hardly unique. He’s backed up by no less than luminaries Tim Keller and John Frame.
Keller writes,
Elders are leaders who admit or dismiss people from the church, and they do “quality control” of members’ doctrine. These are the only things that elders exclusively can do. Others can teach, disciple, serve, witness…We do not believe that 1 Timothy 2:11 or 1 Corinthians 14:35-36 precludes women teaching the Bible to men or speaking publicly. To ‘teach with authority’ (1 Timothy 2:11) refers to disciplinary authority over the doctrine of someone. For example, when an elder says to a member: ‘You are telling everyone that they must be circumcised in order to be saved—that is a destructive, non-Biblical teaching which is hurting people spiritually. You must desist from it or you will have to leave the church.’ That is ‘teaching authority’—it belongs only to the elders.
And Frame writes,
Reformed theology has often distinguished between the special teaching office, which consists of the ordained elders, and the general teaching office, which includes all believers…Your committee unanimously holds that scripture excludes women from the special teaching office. Scripture plainly teaches this limitation in I Cor. 14:33-35 and in I Tim. 2:11-15. But scripture says with equal plainness that women are not excluded from the general teaching office…Paul in [1 Cor. 14:33-35] essentially forbids to women the exercise of the special office….I Tim. 2:11-12 also limits the teaching of women, but…here too Paul has in mind the special office rather than the general.
Schreiner, on the other hand, says teaching is teaching is teaching. He writes,
Piper’s distinction between the two domains is, honestly, a bit vague for me. He writes,
It seems to me that, as men and women relate to each other in the church, men are to lead, on the analogy of the way a husband leads at home (Ephesians 5:22–33)…Thus when I think about how this leadership by men is expressed in the church, I see the regular preaching of the word of God in the weekly worship gathering as the heart of that leadership.
To risk reading into Piper (and in a direction favorable to my own view!), he is saying that teaching is exercising authority, and that in the church’s gathering only men should teach because teaching is an exercise of authority.
TWO KINDS OF TEACHING VS. TWO KINDS OF SETTINGS
To summarize the two sides, Wilson, Keller, and Frame distinguish two kinds of teaching. Wilson calls it big-T versus little-T teaching; Keller calls it authoritative versus non-authoritative teaching; and Frame calls special versus general teaching. The point is, the teaching of an elder is somehow more authoritative than the teaching of any other church member. So you have more authoritative teaching and less authoritative teaching. (In once sentence in his essay, Frame says that what’s at stake is the “occasion” of teaching. But nothing else in his article fills out this idea. Everything else he says distinguishes not between occasions but between kinds of teaching.)
When this side turns to 1 Tim. 2:12, they might either argue that “to teach and to exercise authority” is a hendiadys (reading two words as saying one thing, like “nice and cozy”)—in spite of Kostenberger’s fairly thorough refutation of this position. Or they might say that the context of chapter 3 suggests Paul has a special category of authoritative teaching in mind here.
Schreiner and Piper don’t quite say this, but best I can tell (and, once again, to put my words in their mouths), it’s not so much two different kinds of teaching that are in view. Teaching is teaching. Rather, they perceive a distinction between the occasions for that teaching. You have teaching when the church is gathered, and you have teaching when it is not gathered.
Or to put it another way, Schreiner and Piper may admit of a distinction between big-T Bible teaching and little-t Bible teaching. Pricilla, we can say, was doing little-T teaching, as are women teaching women. But the criteria for this distinction depends upon the whole church gathered versus not gathered. The different kinds of teaching are the different settings: church gathered teaching versus not-gathered teaching.
When this side turns to 1 Timothy 2:12, they believe Paul is referring to teaching that occurs in the context of the church’s gathering. It’s not so much different kinds of teaching, then. To teach Bible is to teach Bible. It’s to open the Bible and explain it. And anyone can do that outside the church’s gathering. Paul’s interest in 1 Timothy 2 and 3 is how “one ought to behave in the household of God” (3:15).
CAN WE BE MORE SPECIFIC, PLEASE?
The challenge for either view is further specifying its criteria. What exactly is authoritative versus less authoritative? Can someone please explain to me how Bible teaching is ever less than fully authoritative? And when can we say the church is actually gathered—the main service? A Sunday School? A Tuesday night small group? Where’s the line?
Of anyone contributing to the conversation so far, Keller, in my mind, has done the best job of clarifying his position and explaining the distinctions he’s relying upon. Recall, he said that “Elders are leaders who admit or dismiss people from the church, and they do ‘quality control’ of members’ doctrine. These are the only things that elders exclusively can do. Others can teach, disciple, serve, witness…To ‘teach with authority’ (1 Timothy 2:11) refers to disciplinary authority over the doctrine of someone.”
Okay, there we go. That’s the kind of clarity I’m looking for. What Keller calls “authoritative teaching” (or Wilson calls “big-T teaching” and Frame calls “special teaching”) is teaching that specifically affirms what the church must believe as a matter of membership and discipline. When someone stands up and says, “You must believe X to be a member of this church, else we will exclude you or not permit you to enter in the first place,” he is teaching with authority.
I’m not sure Wilson is saying the same thing when he refers to “the definition, defense, and preservation of Christian doctrine.” This is just too vague. All teaching should define, defend, and preserve Christian doctrine, shouldn’t it? I mean, that’s what Pricilla and Aquilla were doing with Apollos, no? What Keller helpfully does is tie the concept of authoritative teaching to conditions for membership and discipline. It’s teaching, you might say, that writes the church’s statement of faith or book of order.
For our purposes here, I’m going to assume that Keller is doing the best job of articulating what Wilson and Frame also mean. If they mean something different, perhaps they can clarify.
WILSON’S VIEW EFFECTIVELY A PRESBYTERIAN ONE
And finally, after all that, we come to the first point I mean to make in this article. I don’t know what form of church government Wilson adopts, but Frame and Keller are Presbyterians, and they are thinking and talking like Presbyterians. I’m not saying their view of women teaching is inevitable within a Presbyterian framework of church government. I’m saying it’s consistent with a Presbyterian framework. I’d also say it’s out of sync with a congregationalist framework.
You might say, “Fine, so it’s Presbyterian. So what?”
So nothing. I’m not a Presbyterian but I love Presbyterians. I’m just saying it’s Presbyterian, that’s all. Know what your team believes. I will say, this view undermines the priesthood of all believers, which is the very thing that congregationalists like me go on and on about.
Let me explain. In a Presbyterian (and episcopalian) framework, the church officers hold the keys of the kingdom. They possess the authority to assess and make judgments upon doctrine and membership. Keller one more time: “Elders are leaders who admit or dismiss people from the church, and they do ‘quality control’ of members’ doctrine. These are the only things that elders exclusively can do.”
So when a Presbyterian refers to “authoritative teaching” or “special teaching,” he doesn’t just mean standing up, opening up the Bible, and speaking. He is combining that activity together with the activity of rendering judgment on doctrine and membership, like a judge renders judgment when he pounds a gavel. Authoritative teaching, as he defines it, is someone standing up and making the one-time announcement of what the church will henceforth believe on matter x. And it’s when someone stands up and says so-and-so is (or is not) a member by virtue of their adherence (or lack thereof) to our beliefs. It combines teaching as we ordinarily think of it and judgment.
When Keller says “authoritative teaching,” I would say he actually means “binding and loosing” from Matthew 16 and 18.
In this framework, we can say that the apostles and elders taught authoritatively in Acts 15 when they made a decision on circumcision and church membership. The Council of Nicaea taught authoritatively on homoousious insofar as that understanding of the Trinity became a condition of membership. The Council of Trent taught authoritatively when it anathematized believers in sola fide. The City Church in San Francisco taught authoritatively when it informed the church that “the church” now accepted homosexuality. And my own church taught authoritatively when it removed the requirement for abstinence from alcohol from our church’s statement of faith. All of these teaching moments, whether legitimate or not, combined teaching with an act of judgment about what must be believed as a condition of membership.
And to say it again: Presbyterians (and episcopalians) believe that only the officers have this kind of authority (with some qualifications which I don’t need to get into here). If I understand them correctly, then, this is the kind of authority that Keller and Frame and Wilson would restrict to men.
CONGREGATIONALISM AND PRIESTHOOD OF BELIEVERS
Here then is a great irony: I’ve heard a number of Baptists and congregationalists employing these brothers’ arguments to defend how women can preach and teach in a church setting. They argue that, so long as a woman teaches under the elders’ authority, she is working within Paul’s framework. Actually, it’s not Paul’s framework, it’s a Presbyterian framework they are relying upon.
In a congregationalist framework, both men and women possess the authority of the keys, which is to say, the authority of collectively rendering judgments upon doctrine and membership. This, right here, is the very heart of a priesthood of all believers:
And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord (Jer. 31:34). But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers (Matt. 23:8). And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual (1 Cor. 2:13; cf. vv. 10-16). But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. (1 John 2:27)
D. A. Carson explains that the concept of “teaching” in Jeremiah 31 is not just about information transfer. It’s not that these people will never have teachers. Rather, “in the context, it foresees a time of no mediators, because the entire covenant community will have a personal knowledge of God.” Each of them will possess the ability to judge between true doctrine and false. And this Holy-Spirit-given competence to judge belongs to every believer, male and female.
Within a congregationalist system, moreover, every believer, male and female, possesses not only the Holy-Spirit-given competence to judge true doctrine from false, but the Jesus-given collective authority to separate true doctrine from false for the purposes of membership in the church.
Now, I’m not making the case for congregationalism here. I’m simply observing that the authoritative space that Keller, Frame, and Wilson are trying to preserve for men, congregationalists would explicitly argue belongs to men and women in their collective capacity because men and women can be believers!
Keller says, “Elders are leaders who admit or dismiss people from the church, and they do ‘quality control’ of members’ doctrine. These are the only things that elders exclusively can do.”
Replace the word “elders” for “congregationalism” and you have a congregationalist’s view: “The whole church admits or dismisses people from the church, and the whole church does ‘quality control’ of members’ doctrine.”
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE GATHERING
A congregationalist also grants that there are two different kinds of teaching—call it big-T and small-t, if you like. And a congregationalist is even willing to say is one kind is “more authoritative” than the other.
But the distinction rests upon the church gathered and not-gathered. What makes big-T teaching authoritative is the fact of the gathering: where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there (Matt. 18:20). Within a congregationalist framework, the gathering itself possesses a kind of authoritative voice. We don’t exercise excommunication, for instance, when scattered (see 1 Cor. 5:4).
Now, the whole congregation—men and women—exercise the judgment of the keys in those gathered settings (say, through church discipline). But Bible teaching should not be confused with that word of judgment. Teaching is still teaching—opening the Bible and explaining it. And any Bible teaching that occurs within the context of that gathering, whether it’s performed by an elder or not, possesses an additional kind of oomph behind it. Yes, I said oomph. What I mean is, Bible teaching defines righteousness and binds consciences, always, because the Bible defines righteousness and binds consciences. That doesn’t mean people cannot second-guess someone’s teaching. It just means that one of the Bible’s purposes is to define righteousness and bind the conscience. Bible teaching inside and outside the church does this. But when a biblical word of instruction is given in the assembly, it will be tentatively treated as conscience-binding and righteousness-defining for the whole assembly, whether an elder is speaking or not. It possesses a kind of corporate endorsement of “This is what we believe,” at least until the assembly decides to exercise its corporate authority and throw out a false teacher. The assembly says to the neighborhood and the watching world and to every member, “Hey, we’re speaking for Jesus here. And this teaching is what we think Jesus is saying to all of us. ”
Even if a news reporter or visiting neighbor is not theologically astute, she or he probably has some inkling that what’s said in the pulpit on Sunday is more significant than what’s said from the pastor’s desk on Tuesday. The former is more an expression of the whole church—again, because the fact of the gathering is existentially, theologically, and exegetically significant: “where two or three are gathered”; “when you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus” (1 Cor. 5:4); “when you come together as a church” (1 Cor. 11:18).
So the authority of men and women gathered in Jesus’ name as a group of believers makes the gathering or assembly authoritatively significant. Which means, I cannot separate big-T and small-t teaching in the manner that Keller, Frame, and Wilson do. What distinguishes the two kinds of teaching is the assembly. Within the context of that assembly, all Bible teaching possesses an extra kind of conscience-binding, righteousness-defining authority. Notice, I did not say teaching “on church history,” or “sharing about my recent missions trip,” or even “my perspectives as a mom on biblical parenting.” I just said Bible teaching. All Bible-teaching in the context of the authoritative assembly is authoritative teaching, or big-T teaching, no matter who does it. Any Bible teaching outside of the authoritative assembly is little-t teaching.
There are two ironies in all of this. First, it’s the collective authority of men and women together in the gathering of the church that makes teaching in the gathering specially authoritative. But then God restricts this kind of teaching to men. That’s the first irony. But second, since the final veto belongs to the whole church, yes, women collectively share the highest authority in the church together with the men. Presbyterians do not say that.
SUNDAY SCHOOLS AND SMALL GROUPS?
What about a Sunday School? Is a 9 a.m. Sunday School with 1/10 of the church’s membership qualify as the church gathered? It does not, but I would say it’s still operating within the scope (or force field) of the gathered church’s authority. People will give the Sunday School teacher’s voice almost as much authority as they give the preacher’s voice. To put it another way, the Sunday school is an expression of the teaching ministry of the church as a whole. It is oriented to the whole church, aimed at the whole church, and is overseen in principle by the elders. It extends their teaching authority.
That said, I will concede this setting of Sunday School places us one step away from the center. We’re starting to move along a spectrum.
And then small groups? Again, we’re taking a further step away from the center and along that spectrum. To some extent, small group leaders are expected to teach with the authoritative voice of the gathered church. They, too, extend the elder’s teaching ministry. But surely the force of that authority is attenuated another step or two. And at some point, yes, we need to make a judgment call concerning when the church is no longer gathered, or when it’s no longer speaking with the authority of the gathered church. This is a matter of wisdom, and we may disagree about where wisdom places the line. What’s more, just because something is not formally “the church gathered,” like a small group, prudence may suggest restricting teaching to men because people perceive it as speaking with the authoritative voice of the church gathered.
But wherever we place the line, the basic principle remains: teachers teaching within the context of the gathered church, or teachers teaching with the authority of the gathered church, possess an extra measure of conscience-binding, righteousness-defining authority. And this is the kind of teaching that God, according to his always good and sometimes inscrutable purposes, reserves for men.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, a congregationalist should not assume he can adopt Presbyterian distinctions wholesale, such as the way in which Keller separates authoritative teaching from non-authoritative teaching, or Frame separates the special and general teaching offices.
A congregationalist will distinguish between two kinds of teaching around the exegtically concrete and very real-life concept of the gathering. Teaching that occurs there is different than teaching that occurs outside of it. Teaching inside the gathering has the authority of the whole church (men and women) behind it, even if it’s given by just men. Teaching outside the church does not speak for the whole church in the same way.
Insofar as the concept of church as gathering has been blurred by our multi-site and multi-service world, it’s not surprising to me that some congregationalists might challenge the distinction I’m relying upon. After all, they have already omitted or dramatically downplayed the concept of gathering from what constitutes a church since all the campuses or services don’t need to gather and can still be a church (this, too, is consistent with presbyterianism or episcopalisanism, e.g. the “Presbyterian CHURCH of America”).
But that’s another conversation for another day!YouTube
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an uncanny ability to memorize rap lyrics. If this sounds like a brag, I assure you it’s not. Bragging is an act that denotes pride, which is a sensation I feel none of regarding this particular skill.
Truth be told, it’s not something I’ve ever thought of as particularly noteworthy, it’s just something that unconsciously happens. Given an option, I would have undoubtedly channeled this aptitude for memorization into something much more useful a long time ago—like a career in medicine—but, unfortunately, it only seems to apply to rap lyrics. Sadly, I’ve never been on a plane and heard the captain transmit an urgent message, asking if there’s anyone on board who can recite the entirety of Big L and Jay Z’s “7 Minute Freestyle.”
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One of the side effects of possessing this mental repository of rap lyrics, however, is that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time throughout my life rapping in public. At 26 years old, I can now appreciate that there may have been a few, sporadic instances where this behavior was obnoxious. Did the older lady working at the grocery store really need to hear me rap the entirety of Kanye’s “Touch the Sky” at the tail-end of her tiring, 12-hour shift? Probably not, but, in my defense, I didn’t even realize I was doing it until my friend pointed it out.
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Such is the subconscious impulse of someone who possesses their own internal Genius database. And yet, on the opposite side of the equation, there are definitely scenarios where these impromptu karaoke sessions are warranted—encouraged even. Thankfully, after a lifelong process marked by much trial and error, I’ve finally gleaned enough insight to discern which type of scenario is which. And, much like an immigrant parent who moves to a new country to give their child access to greater opportunities, I’d like to think I endured those hardships so that you won’t have to.
In order to help you navigate this minefield, I’ve distilled all my learning into this brief guide for you to peruse: the unspoken etiquette of rapping in public.
1. Environment is Everything
The primary principle that governs whether a given instance of rapping in public is appropriate is the same principle that governs success in the real estate industry: location, location, location.
Here is a short list of locations where it is appropriate to rap in public: bars, house parties, wedding receptions, karaoke establishments, concerts*, etc.
*A quick note about rapping at concerts: While I can certainly appreciate the urge to try to rap louder than everyone else standing in your vicinity, I can assure you that doing so will, in no way, distinguish your “true fan-hood” from the sea of people who bought a ticket simply to take pictures and collect likes on Instagram. Your shallow fantasy that the artist is going to notice your veracity and pull you up on stage to rap with them is not going to come true, and the only thing you’ll succeed in is greatly diminishing the experience of other concertgoers around you. This isn’t one of those cases where you’re in the land of the blind, and you’re the one-eyed king. It’s more like, you’re in the land of the blind, and even though you have one eye, you’re wearing sunglasses and holding a cane, and you’re virtually indistinguishable from all the other blind people.
Here is a short list of locations where it’s not appropriate to rap in public: retail outlets, buses, commemorative museums, funeral homes, waiting rooms, etc.
2. Don’t Do It Unless the Flow Is On Point
Hearing someone stumble their way through an off-beat rendition of one of your favorite rap songs is a cringeworthy experience. It feels like when someone is trying to show you a magic trick and they keep incorrectly guessing the card you’d initially selected from the deck. It creates this awkward tension for both parties, as the embarrassed magician is ultimately forced to acknowledge their failure. “I swear I know how to do this trick,” they might say. “It’s okay, I don’t even like magic that much anyways,” you might reply politely.
When rapping along to a song, it’s important to keep in mind that knowing all the lyrics is only half the battle. Without the intricate cadence and breath control that can often take an artist years to perfect, you’re only going to embarrass yourself. It’s why I’ll never have the audacity to publicly rap along to Kendrick Lamar’s “Rigamortus.” As well as I know the lyrics, I wouldn’t dare disrespect the song—or myself—like that.
3. Be Conscious of Your Memorization Window
Have you ever seen a former basketball player attempt to dunk a basketball in their middle age? It’s not a pretty sight. They begin with full confidence, their mind filled with memories of the many years where they could effortlessly soar through the air. Midway through, however, their face changes, as they realize that their body no longer responds to mental cues the way it once did. It’s the closest thing you’ll ever see to someone instantaneously reckon with the inevitability of their mortality.
This is what happened to me the last time I tried to rap along to Lupe Fiasco’s “I Gotcha.” Eight years ago, I could rap along to the entirety of Food & Liquor without missing a beat. On this unfortunate day, however, I was reminded of the concept of the memorization window. I began rapping with full confidence, but after the signals between my brain and mouth were tangled several times, I soon realized that I could no longer recall the lyrics as flawlessly as I once could. Needless to say, it was an embarrassing experience for all those involved. Unfortunately for me, it also triggered the onset of a burdensome existential crisis.
4. Self-Censor. Obviously.
For the most part, this comes down to exercising your common sense. If you’re at a wedding reception |
points of high praise. Poole did note that puzzles can at times be too simple, with an aesthetic of "find item A to use on item B".[20] Commenting on the game's length, he noted that while short, "it's one wild ride while it lasts".[20] Bernard H. Yee of PC Magazine had similar thoughts in his review. He too felt the game was short, but praised the game's cartoon-like animation and visuals, voice acting and soundtrack. He noted that some adventure gamers might "grouse at the action-arcade fight sequences or grumble at the long narrative sequences" but felt that the game as "impressive and attention-grabbing".[21] PC Gamer US's editors later presented the game with a "Special Achievement in Musical Score" award, and argued that it "showed the world that every game can benefit greatly from a good musical score". The editors nominated Full Throttle as their 1995 "Best Adventure Game", although it lost to Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity.[28]
Charles Ardai of Computer Gaming World felt that the puzzles were not challenging enough compared to similar games of the era. He did note that this was the "ideal starter game" for those players who were not comfortable with more complex and difficult puzzles.[18] Ardai stated that players experienced in the adventure genre could still enjoy the game by treating it as a "highly interactive movie".[18] Macworld's Tom Negrino felt that the new pie menu system was a refreshing change to the traditional adventure game interface. He also gave high marks for the lack of a game over sequence and noted that any time the player fails a sequence it simply resets. He further praised the game's writing, voice acting and soundtrack.[22] In a review for GameSpot Jeffrey Adam called Full Throttle "arguably LucasArts' finest graphic adventure creation".[19] Adam did note two flaws in his review. The first is during on-motorcycle action sequences with rival gang members, in which he notes that, even considering an unlimited number of attempts, the sequences relied too much on twitch responses. The second frustration Adam noted was that he felt sometimes he resorted to randomly clicking on whole areas of the screen in hopes of finding a clue. He felt that this method did not allow players to use deductive reasoning.[19]
The game's humor was praised by PC Gamer's Steve Poole for its many LucasFilm and other cultural references. Specifically he cited two Star Wars references in the game. The first is during the demolition derby sequence in which rival driver is illustrated to look like George Lucas. The second is during a scene where Ben is talking to the reporter, Miranda. She says "Help me Ben, you're my only hope!", a play on Princess Leia's dialogue to Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars: A New Hope. Other references found by Poole were nods to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove and the 1993 LucasArts adventure game Sam & Max Hit the Road.[20]
Entertainment Weekly gave the game a B+ and praised the soundtrack, and the humor.[1]
Full Throttle was the second-place finalist for Computer Game Review's 1995 "Adventure Game of the Year" award, which went to Mission Critical. The editors noted that "it had wonderful graphics, animation and voice work and the story was good, too."[29]
Legacy [ edit ]
Cancelled sequels [ edit ]
In spring 2000, LucasArts began production of Full Throttle: Payback, an official sequel to continue the storyline of Full Throttle.[30] Since Tim Schafer had already left the company at the time, Larry Ahern, who was involved in the original game's development, was appointed the project lead and Bill Tiller, the art director. The story would have focused on Ben's efforts to foil a plan by a "large corporation" and the local governor to replace all paved highways with hover pads, robbing the bikers and truckers of their traditional ground. In the first half of the game, Ben would have prevented an assassination attempt on Father Torque, who now leads the anti-hovercraft rally, then team up with a "persistent undercover female reporter" to bring down the villainous governor. In Tiller's opinion, Payback "was going to capture the feel of the first game yet expand upon the milieu".[25] At the early stages, the project received positive feedback from other LucasArts employees but according to Tiller, it eventually fell apart because of disagreements on the game style between the production team and "a particularly influential person" within the management, which led to a series of "mistakes". The production ceased in November 2000, when 25% of the levels and about 40% of the preproduction art were complete. LucasArts never released an official statement regarding the game cancellation.[25] Both Ahern and Tiller left LucasArts in 2001, after Payback was cancelled.
In mid-2002, LucasArts announced Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels for Windows and, for the first time in the series, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The game was to be an action-adventure, with more emphasis on action and fighting than adventure, because the designers wanted the game to feel more physical than the first.[31] Hell on Wheels would have been set in El Nada, Ben's "old stomping ground", whose roads have been mysteriously destroyed. Ben believes that one of the new gangs introduced in the game, the Hound Dogs, are behind this but soon discovers a more sinister and murderous plot. Together with Father Torque and Maureen, he would have thwarted the unnamed villain's plan and protected "the freedom of the open road".[25] Sean Clark was named the project lead of Hell on Wheels and the development progressed smoothly until late 2003, when it was abruptly canceled. Just months prior to that, at E3 2003, a playable demo was shown and a teaser trailer was released by LucasArts.[32] Simon Jeffery (then president of LucasArts) said that "We do not want to disappoint the many fans of Full Throttle, and hope everyone can understand how committed we are to delivering the best-quality gaming experience that we possibly can" in the official press release. Critics cited poor graphics compared to other 3D action adventures of the time and Tim Schafer's lack of involvement in the project as possible reasons for its cancellation.[25] Additionally, Roy Conrad, the original voice actor for Ben, died in 2002.[33]
Critics considered development of new sequels to Full Throttle unlikely. LucasArts' interest shifted away from the adventure genre in later years, and failure to develop two sequels presumably hindered the possibility of a third. Also, nearly all developers who were involved with the original Full Throttle in 1995 had since left LucasArts.[25] LucasArts ceased all internal development in 2013, shortly after their parent company Lucasfilm was purchased by The Walt Disney Company.[34]
In a 2017 interview discussing the work on the remaster, Schafer said that he feels that the story of Full Throttle was essentially complete with the game, and does not envision creating a sequel himself.[15]
Remastered [ edit ]
A remastered version of Full Throttle, titled Full Throttle Remastered, was developed by Schafer's Double Fine Productions for release on Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. The remastered was announced on December 5, 2015, and was released on April 18, 2017.[35] Like Day of the Tentacle Remastered and Grim Fandango Remastered, the remastered version of Full Throttle includes updated graphics and sound, improved controls, and developer commentary.[36] Similarly, the game allows the player to swap between the original graphics and sound with the remastered versions.[37][38][39][40]
The game uses the original voice actors' dialog pulled from the original recordings, with Schafer calling Conrad's voice "irreplaceable". The remastered version premiered at the 2017 Game Developers Conference, where Schafer presented a remaking of a magazine pack-in demo that included recorded lines that had not been included in the full game.[41] Schafer said that fans had been critical of Full Throttle's relatively short length of about eight hours compared to other LucasArts games at the time which could take up to 40 hours. However, as he worked at the remaster, player expectations have changed, and he felt that Full Throttle would be much better suited at its length in 2017, comparing it to other fully polished, short games like Inside.[15]
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]No Cable or DSL Internet Access? BroadbandBLUE is Your Answer!
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Dial-Up: A Legacy "Technology"
Face it, dial-up just does not work for connecting with today's websites. A dial-up connection is too slow for all the bells and whistles of even a basic website in our web 2.0 world. If you depend on dial-up, you might as well be sending smoke signals or chatting on walkie talkies.
Satellite Internet Restrictions
A satellite connection, while better, is expensive and inconsistent. You have to buy a dish, and you usually end providing most of your own technical support. Your dish will require clear access to the Southern sky, and even when this access exists, adverse weather conditions will knock out your connection from time to time.
Despite the expense, satellite upload speeds may not support streaming applications like video and games. In fact, many satellite providers cap out your download speed at 700Kbps. If you're running an old Mac, forget it, satellite connections don't work at all for Macs older than version 10.1. If you have no other choice, satellite connections make sense, but they are hardly perfect or consistent.
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With affordable options and 24/7 customer service and technical assistance, BroadbandBLUE wireless broadband providers have promised no cap on data and downloads. Order Now! Rural addresses are always last to enjoy the benefits of technological network utilities. BroadbandBLUE wireless Internet solutions represent a huge step beyond dial-up and satellite connections and a chance for rural businesses and residences to fully experience 21st century technology.Homicides in Mexico jumped by more than a third in January, new figures showed, fueled by violence in states hit by an internal split in the Sinaloa drug cartel.
Murders were up by more than half in the northern states of Chihuahua and Sinaloa, according to official figures dated Monday. In Baja California there were almost 50 percent more.
DRUG LORD 'EL CHAPO' LAST OF A DYING BREED AS MEXICAN
CARTELS ENTER NEW ERA
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the powerful boss of the Sinaloa cartel, was extradited to the United States last month and is currently in a New York jail awaiting trial.
That power vacuum has led to an internal power struggle in the cartel, causing gang violence to surge in northern Mexico, Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos said earlier this month.
Mexico's government is focused on handling its largest diplomatic crisis for years, as U.S. President Donald Trump threatens America's southern neighbor with a border tax, deportations and a wall to keep out illegal immigrants.
MAN ON DEA'S MOST-WANTED LIST ARRESTED IN MEXICO, FACES
EXTRADITION TO THE US
In total, there were 1,938 homicides in January, up 34 percent from 1,442 in the same month last year.
Tomas Guevara, who studies crime at Sinaloa State University, said he thought that the more than 100 murders in his home state were mostly due to cartel infighting.
"The vast majority of these homicides are due to this problem... we're living in a very tense moment," he said.Latest News Message from the GM
Tickets for Storm’s upcoming Pink the Rink game against Sheffield Steelers can be ordered online HERE, or by calling the Box Office on 0161 926 8782, or in person at the box office. Face-off is Sunday 24th February, 17:30 face-off. Come and show your support as we kick-start Paint Altrincham Pink week, in aid of Prevent Breast Cancer!
Hi Storm Fans!
It’s been a really tough couple of weeks for us. Losing two close contests up in Scotland, the resulting suspensions from the Fife game and two short-benched losses against the Flames last weekend.
Saturday’s game in particular was really tough and not what I expect to see from this team, but the boys rebounded well away in Guildford on Sunday in a game that could have gone either way despite being 3 imports short.
One thing we won’t do is start to feel sorry for ourselves. The conference title may be gone, but the Playoff fight is very much on. We’re only 2 points away from a Playoff spot.
The Storm guys really love all the support you give us every game and we need it now more than ever. We are going through a tough patch with injuries and we need that home support more than ever. It’s unlucky to be going through this injury stretch right now but it’s character that will get us through.
I hope to see you all Sunday wearing pink and cheering loud.
Ryan Finnerty
There’s still a few players jerseys up for grabs to own and loan this season. More information can be found here. Keep your eye on the Official Supporters Club social media for information on kit club and upcoming events.This is a heads-up of graphics related things we plan to “drop” from future versions of Unity, a.k.a. Dropping of Things for Make Benefit Glorious Future of Rendering.
Sometimes when we try to make things better (better looking, faster, more flexible, etc.), we find that some old corner case or old hardware limitations get in the way. In general, we try to keep as much as possible working between versions of Unity, but sometimes the potential benefit of removing legacy functionality is just too great and said functionality hopefully affects very few people (if any).
So without further ado, here’s a tentative list of graphics related “it will stop working” items. Note that all these are “planned” and not actually done yet, so if you really, really need them to keep on working forever, let us know!
Shaders: Drop support for “precompiled” shader assets
A “precompiled” shader is the one that effectively comes “without source code”. Instead of having readable HLSL code in there, these shaders contain already compiled shader assembly or microcode or translated shader code for several platforms.
One problem with “precompiled” shaders (if you got them from somewhere) is that they will not work on platforms that might appear in the future. Say you’ve got a shader that was precompiled for DX9, OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2.0. This shader will not work on consoles, Metal, DX11 and so on! Hence using precompiled shaders is typically a bad practice for this reason alone.
Another reason why we want to remove support for them is because we want the shader serialization format to be much more efficient in disk storage, load times and runtime memory usage. The shader format we had so far was, shall we say, fairly inefficient text-based format that resulted in long shader load times and high memory usage. In our current experiments, we’re seeing big reductions in both of these (megabytes to dozens of megabytes saved depending on shader variant complexity, etc.) by changing to more efficient shader data format. However, that makes these “precompiled with old version of Unity” shaders not work anymore. We think that’s a fair tradeoff.
Advantages:
Shaders take up less space in your game data files (multiple times smaller).
Shaders load much faster, and especially the “hiccups on the main thread” while loading them asynchronously are much smaller.
Shaders take up a lot less memory at runtime.
“Show compiled code” in shader inspector will display actual shader disassembly on DX11, instead of a not-very-usable sea of vowels.
Disadvantages:
Precompiling your shaders (“show compiled code” from shader inspector) and then later on using that code directly will stop working.
Affects: People who precompile shaders, and people who got precompiled shaders from someone else.
When: Unity 5.3 (2015 December)
Hardware: Drop support for DirectX 9 Shader Model 2.0 GPUs
DX9 SM2.0 GPUs are fairly old and we’d like to drop support for them! This would mean that these GPUs would stop working in your Unity games: NVIDIA before 2004 (pre-GeForce 6000), AMD before 2005 (pre-Radeon X1000) and Intel before 2006 (pre-GMA X3000/965). In short, GPUs older than 10 years or so would stop working. Looking at the data, it seems that it’s only Intel GMA 950 aka 82945 GPU that is still sometimes found in the wild these days — so that one would stop working.
Note that we’re not dropping support for DirectX 9 as a whole! Often that is still the only practical option on Windows XP, which just isn’t going away… DirectX 9 rendering support (on Shader Model 3.0 or later GPUs) will continue to be in Unity for quite a while.
Advantages of doing this:
Less hassle for people writing shaders. Currently, all newly created shaders in Unity are compiled to “lowest common denominator” by default (shader model 2.0) and if you want any of more advanced features (vertex textures, dynamic branching, derivatives, explicit LOD sampling etc.), you need to add things like “#pragma target 3.0” etc. If we’d drop SM2.0 support, the minimum spec goes up and you don’t have to worry about it as much.
Way, way less hassle for us internally at Unity. You don’t want to know, for example, how much time we’ve spent on trying to cram Unity 5 physically based shaders into DX9 SM2.0 fallbacks. We could be doing actually useful stuff in that time!
Disadvantages:
Unity games would no longer work on Intel GMA 950 / 82945 GPU.
Affects: Windows standalone player developers.
When: Unity 5.4 (2016 March).
Hardware: Drop support for Windows Store Apps DX11 feature level 9.1 GPUs
Almost all Windows Store Apps devices are at least DX11 feature level 9.3 capable (all Windows Phone devices are). But there were one or two devices in the past that only supported feature level 9.1, so that dragged down the minimum spec that we had to support.
Advantages of doing this:
All WSA/WP8 shaders will be compiled to feature level 9.3, instead of 9.1, gaining some more functionality that wasn’t working previously (multiple render targets, derivative instructions in pixel shaders etc.).
We get to remove quite some code that had to deal with 9.1 limitations before.
Disadvantages:
Your Windows Store Apps would no longer support 9.1 devices (in practice this pretty much means “Surface RT tablet”). Note that Windows Phone is not affected, since all phones have at least 9.3 support.
Affects: Windows Store Apps developers.
When: Unity 5.4 (2016 March).
Shaders: Drop support for “native shadow maps” on Android OpenGL ES 2.0
Shadow mapping can be done using either “native GPU support for it” (sampling the shadowmap directly returns the “shadow value”, possibly also using hardware PCF filtering), or “manually” (sample depth from the shadowmap, compare with surface depth to determine whether in or out of shadow).
The first form is usually preferred, especially since many GPUs can provide 2×2 PCF filtering “for free”. On majority of platforms, we know ahead of time which of the shadow modes they support, however Android OpenGL ES 2.0 was the odd one, since some devices support “native shadow maps” (via EXT_shadow_samplers extension), but some other devices did not. This meant that for any shadow related shader, for Android ES 2.0 we’d have to compile and ship two variants of the shader to cover both cases.
However, we looked at the data and it seems that support for EXT_shadow_samplers on Android is extremely rare (1-2% of all devices). So we think it’s worth it to just remove support for that; we’d just always treat Android ES 2.0 as “manual depth comparison for shadows” platform.
Advantages of doing this:
Less shader variants to compile, ship and load at runtime on Android ES 2.0.
Disadvantages:
About 1% of Android ES 2.0 devices would no longer do hardware shadow PCF sampling, but instead do a slightly slower depth comparison in the shader. Note, however, that all these devices can use OpenGL ES 3.0 which has built-in PCF, so it’s better to include support for that!
Affects: Android developers targeting OpenGL ES 2.0.
When: Unity 5.4 (2016 March).Image copyright Think Stock/Getty Image caption Chris Headleand asks whether it is possible to create robots that seem to be ethical
From 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL to the Terminator's T-101, science fiction is full of cautionary tales about the dangers posed to man by robots.
In April, the United Nations held a summit in Geneva to examine the future of so-called lethal autonomous weapons systems, with some groups calling for an international ban on killer robots.
But is it possible to create robots that are, or at least seem, ethical?
That is the question being posed by one PHD student at Bangor University in Gwynedd - and with surprising results.
Image copyright Chris Headleand Image caption Chris Headleand's automated artificial beings crowd around a power resource in a simulation
Christopher Headleand, 30, is researching how electronic "agents" with the most simple programming can be made to behave in a way that may appear to be moral.
"The best we can do at the moment is to attempt to simulate ethical behaviour. We are not saying these robots are ethical but in some situations they can behave in a way which appears to an observer as ethical," he said.
"If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, for the purposes of a simulation, I'm willing to accept it's a duck."
Virtual simulations
He tests the agents - unconstructed, motor-operated vessels with simple sensors - using virtual simulations.
These test environments allow him to see how the automated artificial beings interact when they are programmed to carry out tasks like reaching a power source - effectively food - before they run out of energy and die.
The tests have seen agents programmed to be hedonistic and self-centred, while others are utilitarian and some are even altruistic.
Image copyright Chris Headleand Image caption The 'altruistic vessels' are seen here vacating the path to a power resource for others, with the grey marks showing the spots where they have selflessly died
In the case of the latter, Mr Headleand said: "We saw some agents that were sacrificing themselves to save others.
"If you start trying to describe this using language from psychology rather than engineering, that's the point where it becomes quite interesting."
'Panicked and swerving'
Mr Headleand pointed to the way penguins sometimes huddle to share and conserve heat in the wild, adding: "We were getting behaviour that was very similar.
"We were observing emergent behaviour such as different social classes of agents.
"Agents who were closest to the resources were really calm.
"But what was interesting, [those on] the outer circle, on the outer edges of the resources, were panicked and swerving around and constantly trying to dive in."
He added: "You start to look at these agents as simulated life, you start to anthropomorphise them."
Mr Headleand - whose work is supported by Fujitsu - said the use of robots in human affairs was becoming far more common and he believes "ethical machines" could one day play a part in certain industries, including manufacturing and the care sector.
"We are now moving towards the fact that it's life a lot more, in an everyday sense.
"But there is a safety implication there. How can humans work with these robots? How can we interact with them?
"Perhaps people would be a lot more comfortable working with robots if they displayed behaviour that appeared to be ethical."A massive collection of Nazi-looted paintings discovered last year in a Munich apartment includes works that art historians previously thought were destroyed and some other works that scholars didn’t know existed.
Earlier this week, Germany’s Focus magazine reported that in the spring of 2011, authorities discovered more than 1,400 paintings in the home of Cornelius Gurlitt, whom they were investigating for tax evasion (the magazine later corrected the date after the German government said that the seizure occurred in the winter of 2012). Gurlitt, the son of an art dealer, has been described as a recluse who made his living by occasionally selling the paintings at auction. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Gurlitt’s father Hildebrandt helped the Nazis sell artworks seized from Jewish families, and the discovery of his son’s art trove has led to questions about whether these works were also plundered during that time.
Early reports said that the collection contained works by masters such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. Art historian and investigator Meike Hoffmann showed slides of some of the paintings at a news conference on Tuesday. “It is a very emotional thing to see that all these works of art still exist and were not destroyed,” Hoffman told the BBC.
“You could conceivably set up a museum with this lot,” BBC arts editor Will Gompertz wrote. “Art historians all over the world will be preparing to rewrite biographies of several modern artists.” Among the 121 framed pieces and 1,285 unframed works that have been catalogued, experts have discovered previously unregistered works by Chagall, Matisse and Otto Dix. Add in works by artists such as Picasso and Gustave Courbet, and the collection is believed to be worth roughly 1 billion Euros ($1.35 billion). A customs spokesman told Focus that the artwork was stacked behind piles of old food tins and other junk in Gurlitt’s apartment.
Since details of the trove have come to light, questions have swirled about how Gurlitt managed to keep the collection a secret and why the German authorities took so long to reveal it had been seized. The discovery also pushed the legacy of Nazi war crimes back into the news. Experts estimate that more than 16,000 pieces of art were looted from Jewish homes by the Nazis during the Holocaust. “We know that from all the cases we have, that we’re trying to find…that 90 percent are still missing,” Ann Webber of the Commission for Art Looted in Europe told the BBC. “When I say ‘missing,’ some of them are in collections like this, and some of them are in museums that haven’t published what they have.”
Authorities now have to determine which pieces found in Gurlitt’s apartment were looted and how families can make claims, but those expecting some kind of criminal action will be disappointed. Augsburg’s chief prosecutor Reinhard Nemetz said that Gurlitt cooperated with authorities. There is no warrant for his arrest, and since he officially resides in Austria, German authorities say his whereabouts are unknown.“I feel sick. I think I’m going to throw up,” a prominent Saudi academic told me yesterday. “I was waiting for something like this to happen but I didn’t think it would be Raif. I’m thinking of his wife and kids. I really feel sick.”
On July 29, Raif Badawi, founder of the Free Saudi Liberals website, was sentenced to 600 lashes and seven years in prison. His crime? Insulting Islam, speaking ill of Saudi Arabia’s religious police and, most puzzling of all, “parental disobedience.”
Badawi is a 30-year-old man. Can an adult be imprisoned for disobeying his father? In Saudi Arabia, where all citizens are treated as children, the answer to that question is “yes.” The Saudi dictatorship doesn’t trust its citizens to speak their mind, and so impose paternalistic and draconian laws to keep in check those who might think differently.
Women in particular are infantilized, and their ability to move around, unaccompanied by a male guardian, is severely restricted. Women are banned from driving. They cannot go to coffee shops or restaurants with a male friend. And according to Saudi law, a woman cannot decide for herself to go on religious pilgrimage. She must have a man’s approval and be accompanied by her guardian.
Saudi Arabia is considered a close U.S. ally. Yet every few weeks a case like Badawi’s reminds us that despite a massive PR effort, the Kingdom remains a vicious tyranny that will lock you away for speaking openly about politics or religion.
In June, seven men were convicted and sentenced to prison terms up to 10 years for writing posts on Facebook about political protests. The men were held in prison for a year and a half before they were even charged and tried, according to international human rights organizations.
Also in June, two prominent women’s rights activists, Wajeha al Huweidar and Fawzia Al-Oyouni, were convicted and sentenced to a ten-month prison term on charges of inciting separation between a husband and a wife. Reportedly, they had tried to help a Quebec woman escape her abusive husband and bring her to the Canadian embassy in Riyadh. In fact, the Saudi government had been consistently harassing these women and used these trumped up charges to finally silence them.
And the list goes on.
The 23-year-old poet and writer Hamza Kashgari, who was accused of insulting the prophet Muhammad after he tweeted three short messages on Twitter describing an imagined meeting with the prophet, has spent almost a year and a half in prison, and his fate is still uncertain.
Khaled al Johani, a teacher in Riyadh, was thrown in prison in 2011 after he gave an interview to the BBC, calling for democracy in Saudi Arabia. He was released last year.
Since its creation in 1932, Saudi Arabia has been ruled by the male descendants of the kingdom’s eponymous founder, Ibn Saud. The current ruler, King Abdullah, has been lauded in recent years for taking steps toward reform such as the inauguration in 2009 of the King Abdullah Science and Technology University where men and women can study together - a first in the kingdom. And last year in Vienna, he opened the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue – a center supposedly aimed at promoting comity and respect between religions.
But if the Saudi king was really interested in dialogue and respect, he might have started in his own theocratic, gender-apartheid dictatorship. Why did he need to fund a $20 million a year center in Austria when his own country bans Christians from importing Bibles and building houses of worship? Why, indeed, did he need to fly to Europe for such ceremonial ribbon-cutting when in his own country he could have stopped the beheading of Abdul Hamid Al Fakki and Amina bint Nasser for “witchcraft”? If he cared about respecting people of other faiths, how about letting non-Muslims step foot in the city of Mecca where they are banned? Or not arresting people for celebrating Christmas? Why not stop the printing of Saudi textbooks that call Jews and Christians “apes and pigs”?
Let’s be clear. Saudi Arabia is still a brutal dictatorship that harasses and imprisons liberals, democrats, activists, bloggers and journalists. It’s a place where women don’t have freedom of movement or access to the same services as men. The guardianship system ensures that women are treated as children who needs a man’s permission to do anything of consequence.
We look away because Saudi Arabia buys Western arms and sells oil at a steady price. It may seem like a good, stable arrangement. But it’s a devil’s bargain and lurking beneath the surface are deeper trends--the same ones that led to chaos and collapse in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya and Syria in the past two years alone. Betting on Saudi stability is a crucial mistake.
Activists such as Badawi are silenced in order to sow fear among others who might dare to challenge the dictatorship. This week, by imprisoning the young campaigner, the Saudi government proved, yet again, that it cannot tolerate those who think differently. A government that treats its people with such contempt deserves respect from no one. And rather than maintain the cozy diplomatic relations with this tyranny, the West should apply massive pressure to get Badawi and other political prisoners released.
Saudi Arabia remains a barbaric dictatorship. It’s time the West start treating it as such.Lafourche Parish sheriff’s deputies are investigating a double shooting that occurred on Burma Road in Thibodaux.Deputies said the father of Abigail Creamer, 5, found Abigail’s body along with the body of her mother, Nakesha Carrere, 26, just before noon Sunday. Both suffered single gunshot wounds to the head.According to the Sheriff’s Office, the incident is believed to be a murder-suicide.Investigators said they found a detailed letter believed to be penned by Carrere inside the residence.No other information was released.Keep up with local news, weather and current events with the WDSU app here.Sign up for our email newsletters to get breaking news right in your inbox. Click here to sign up!
Lafourche Parish sheriff’s deputies are investigating a double shooting that occurred on Burma Road in Thibodaux.
Deputies said the father of Abigail Creamer, 5, found Abigail’s body along with the body of her mother, Nakesha Carrere, 26, just before noon Sunday. Both suffered single gunshot wounds to the head.
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According to the Sheriff’s Office, the incident is believed to be a murder-suicide.
Investigators said they found a detailed letter believed to be penned by Carrere inside the residence.
No other information was released.
Keep up with local news, weather and current events with the WDSU app here.
Sign up for our email newsletters to get breaking news right in your inbox. Click here to sign up!
AlertMeContributed by o4kapuk
The second global conflict in the world of Screeps spans across multiple alliances in multiple regions with battles in many theatres, just like the first one did. However, this time it is different: instead of a single worldwide battlefield, we saw a number of local conflicts between alliances, each one pursuing their own interests. Though the world was engulfed in flames of war, that set of conflicts was never officially recognized as a World War.
It’s also worth mentioning that most military conflicts took place in a healthy atmosphere of mutual respect, the community was not poisoned by unnecessary drama no matter how extensive the conflict was.
Acronyms
TC – The Culture
SUN – The Screeps United Nations
TK – ThunderKittens
CoPS – Greater North-Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere
YP – Ypsilon Pact
ud – Undefined
AYCE – All You Can Eat
Prelude
In Summer 2017, the political world of Screeps has seen a distinct division into two major blocks: The Culture plus Culture-friendly alliances versus SUN plus SUN-friendly alliances. SUN-friendly alliances and a number of unaffiliated players formed a non-political formation titled The Federation, and later Culture-like alliances formed The Coalition. It’s not surprising to see the two blocks in a state of cold war, and it’s equally not surprising the cold war eventually turned hot.
The Spark
Like the previous global conflict, this one began in the world’s core. First, in the beginning of June, TK successfully attacked many veteran players, both unaffiliated and TC members: Hernanduer, Dissi, tedivm, TooAngel, DarkTrooper, maka_RTH, NhanHo, AzuraStar, and others. They stated their invasion was “motivated by regional strategic expansion” and tried to negotiate with some players by offering a compensation for the land they wanted, but they didn’t disclose what territory they were trying to seize.
First Phase
On June 21, 2017, SUN declared war on YP for reasons that slightly varied depending on the source.
One thing is clear: prior to the conflict, YP tried to establish good relations with the alliances hostile to SUN. When SUN learned it, they decided to decrease YP’s influence in the south and/or punish YP for that (depending on the source).
Both sides agree the war was caused by a tragic misunderstanding between neighbors.
Since SUN is much bigger than YP and significantly more experienced in warfare, YP suffered heavily in the first days of the conflict: over 30 YP’s rooms were demolished very quickly while SUN didn’t lose a single room.
Daboross, an independent member of The Federation, joined the conflict at YP’s side to help them. Thus the first inter-Federation conflict broke out.
In the meantime, TC started doing what they were best at: economic warfare. Using insane amounts of previously earned credits, they inflated minerals/boosts prices (up to 2x-3x to normal) and at the same time dropped subscription token prices from ~2.5M to their historical minimum of 750,000 credits. These measures were supposed to impede the funding of war with real money.
Other alliances were standing aside until June 27.
Interestingly, the leader of YP, DoctorPC, issued several papers titled “UNITED” – a project to document events of the Screeps world which was received positively by all observers from all sides of the political spectrum.
Second Phase
On June 27, The Hive entered the conflict by declaring war on the entire Federation (including SUN, ud, and TK) to extend the war to the north. Things didn’t go well for The Hive: immediately upon entering the war, they started losing their rooms without any notable |
alongside original series creator Kriegman, who is in talks to also write the show. The reports were not confirmed by any of the participants.[20]
In popular culture [ edit ]Share. Portable to cost $200? Portable to cost $200?
Following yesterday's batch of NX rumors hinting at what Nintendo may have planned for its next console, additional information has surfaced by way of Macquarie Capital Securities in Japan.
According the firm's report (via Nintendo Life), Macquarie expects Nintendo to release NX as two separate units, with the portable element launching this November and its "console partner device" arriving in 2017.
Exit Theatre Mode
The company also speculates the portable version will be priced around $200. No estimated price for the console unit was provided, but Macquarie believes the pair of devices may have some type of AR component as well.
It's worth noting this report is also the source of yesterday's rumor that NX may work with smartphones, PCs and competing consoles, as the firm's Head of Research David Gibson provided the information to The Wall Street Journal reporter Takashi Mochizuki. We've reached out to Gibson for comment and will provide an update when we receive a response.
Exit Theatre Mode
This information is strictly analyst speculation, so take these reports with a grain of salt, as Nintendo has yet to announce any specific details on NX. It won't be long before we get official details from Nintendo, however, as company president Tatsumi Kimishima just recently reaffirmed that we'll hear more about the mysterious console later this year.
Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter and subscribe to him on YouTube.Nearly half a million displaced Syrians have returned to their homes since the beginning of the year, mainly to find family members and check on property, the UN refugee agency said.
The agency said it had seen "a notable trend of spontaneous returns to and within Syria in 2017".
Since January, about 440,000 people who had been displaced within the war-ravaged country had returned to their homes, mainly in Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, Andrej Mahecic, a spokesman for the agency, known as the UNHCR, told reporters in Geneva on Friday.
In addition, around 31,000 refugees in neighbouring countries had also returned, he said, bringing to 260,000 the number of refugees who have returned to the country since 2015.
READ MORE: Syria's 'de-escalation zones' explained
But Mahecic said this is a mere "fraction" of the five million Syrian refugees hosted in the region.
He said the main factors prompting the displaced to return home were "seeking out family members, checking on property, and, in some cases, a real or perceived improvement in security conditions in parts of the country."
He said it was too early to say if the returns might be directly linked to a palpable drop in violence since Turkey agreed at talks in Astana in May with Russia and Iran, allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to establish four safe zones across Syria to ban flights and ensure aid drops.
But this week, the UN's special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told the Security Council that since the May 4 deal, "violence is clearly down. Hundreds of Syrian lives continue to be spared every week, and many towns have returned to some degree of normalcy."
READ MORE: Russia - Syrian safe zones plan comes into effect
Mahecic nonetheless cautioned that "while there is overall increased hope linked to the recent Astana and Geneva peace talks, UNHCR believes conditions for refugees to return in safety and dignity are not yet in place in Syria."
"The sustainability of security improvements in many return areas is uncertain, and there remain significant risks of protection thresholds for voluntary, safe and dignified returns not being met in parts of the country," he said.
"Access to displaced population inside Syria remains a key challenge," he added.
But "given the returns witnessed so far this year and in light of a progressively increased number of returns", the agency had begun scaling up its operations inside Syria to better be able to address the needs of the returnees, he said.
Syria's war has killed more than 320,000 people and forced millions from their homes since it began in March 2011.A new report has revealed that the rice supply in at least 30 countries may have already been contaminated with genetically modified strains from US exports, thereby threatening worldwide contamination.
RETRACTION: An RT.com piece citing a ‘new report’ that US rice exports had been infected with unapproved GM crop strains was based on poor fact-checking & source-verification. The report was in fact 6 years old (as accurately pointed out on reddit) and merited more research on our part before publishing. We acknowledge our mistake, regret it and apologize. We’re doing the best we can to bring you news that matters, that you don’t see elsewhere, and as always appreciate and value your feedback.
A new report by the GM Contamination Register has disclosed US Department of Agriculture findings from 2006 and 2007, which show that the department detected traces of unapproved GM rice in over 30 countries. At the time, all of the Bayer CropScience varieties discovered had not been approved for cultivation or consumption abroad, and only one of the three types had been approved for domestic cultivation.
The USDA believes that the source of the contamination is field trials which occurred between the mid 1990s and early 2000s.The genetically modified LLRICE62, LLRice601 and LLRICE604 varieties are herbicide resistant. The trials were terminated in 2002 and none of these varieties ever made it onto the US market. But years later, traces of these strands were found worldwide.
The USDA report said the agency was unable to conclude whether pollen from the trials escaped and contaminated other fields or mechanical mixing was to blame.
News of the USDA’s findings comes after Monsanto’s unapproved GM wheat made its way onto an Oregon field, threatening US supplies and making other countries weary of importing US crops. GM wheat has not been approved for cultivation anywhere in the world. The US is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, and many of its trading partners are fiercely opposed to the use of GM wheat supplies. After news of the contaminated Oregon farm broke out, Japan and South Korea suspended some of its imports of American wheat, and the European Union urged its member nations to test for any contamination in its imports.
When experimental crop strains escape into general seed supplies, it is difficult to keep them contained, prompting some countries to pull US rice off their shelves.
“Scientific studies confirm that GM contamination is unavoidable once GM crops are grown in a region,” Earth Open Source wrote in a report. "'Coexistence’ rapidly results in widespread contamination of non-GM crops… through cross-pollination, spread of GM seed by farm machinery, and inadvertent mixing during storage.”
The USDA report notes that the rice contamination “has had a major impact on US rice exports,” prompting Russia and Bulgaria to ban US rice imports and causing numerous other countries to conduct strict certification and testing of all rice imports.
The report also notes that the contamination has affected US farmers financially, costing them billions of dollars to try to eradicate the unapproved varieties.
"The contamination episode has also affected seed producers," the report states. "[A]n entire non-GM rice variety Clearfield 131 was banned by U.S. regulators in early 2007 when it was found to be contaminated, costing producer BASF billions of dollars in losses."
Bayer has attempted to acquire approval for its contaminating rice strands. The USDA approved commercial growing of LL601 in 2006 and approved Canadian import of LL62 in 2006, but none of the GM rice strands are available on the US market.Credit: Marvel Comics
Credit: Marvel Comics
UNCANNY AVENGERS #25
RICK REMENDER (W ) • DANIEL ACUNA (A)
Cover by PAUL RENAUD
DEADPOOL 75TH VARIANT COVER BY TBA
AXIS tie-in!
• The dark path to AXIS starts here. An event two years in the making!
• The Red Skull and his S-Men have already begun the great vanishing, The Uncanny Avengers are too late.
• Havok witnesses the Skull’s greatest atrocity yet.
• Magneto vs Red Skull blood match that will result in a terribly altered Marvel Universe.
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AVENGERS & X-MEN: AXIS #1 (OF 9)
RICK REMENDER (W) • ADAM KUBERT (A)
Cover by JIM CHEUNG
Variant Cover by SKOTTIE YOUNG
DEADPOOL PARTY VARIANT COVER BY Chip Zdarsky
DEADPOOL PARTY SKETCH VARIANT COVER BY Chip Zdarsky
VARIANT COVER BY MILO MANARA
INVERSION VARIANT COVER BY TBA
PREMIERE VARIANT COVER BY TBA
YOUNG GUNS COMPLETE VARIANT COVER
ACT I: THE RED SUPREMACY
• The Red Skull has exploited the gifts of the world’s greatest telepath to broadcast pure hatred across the globe. Now, born of the murder of Charles Xavier, World War Hate has begun.
• Tony Stark discovers a secret truth that will upend not only his life, but also the lives of everyone he cares for.
• Can The Avengers and X-Men finally unite? Would their combined strength be enough to hold back the darkness of the Red Onslaught?
• Magneto murdered the wrong man, releasing the greatest evil the Marvel Universe has ever known. Now Rogue and Scarlet Witch are all that stand in its way.
40 PGS./Rated T+ …$4.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AVENGERS & X-MEN: AXIS #2 (OF 9)
RICK REMENDER (W) • ADAM KUBERT (A)
Cover by JIM CHEUNG
YOUNG GUNS VARIANT COVER BY MAHMUD ASRAR
INVERSION VARIANT COVER BY TBA
ACT I: THE RED SUPREMACY
• The heroes of the Marvel Universe storm the beaches of Red Skull’s Genoshian Reeducation camps. What they discover within will lead to a bleak new era.
• The revelation of Tony Stark’s dark secret promises to shatter the fragile alliance between A and X.
• The all-new Captain America pays a terrible price.
• Nova’s attempt at solving the crisis leads to disaster.
• Magneto betrays his alliance to join an army of evil.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AVENGERS & X-MEN: AXIS #3 (OF 9)
RICK REMENDER (W) • LEINIL FRANCIS YU (A)
Cover by JIM CHEUNG
YOUNG GUNS VARAINT COVER BY NICK BRADSHAW
INVERSION VARIANT COVER BY TBA
ACT I: THE RED SUPREMACY
• With the heroes lost, the world’s fate lies in the hands of the vilest syndicate known to man.
• Scarlet Witch is forced to join Dr. Doom, the man who unleashed her power to cause M-Day, or she will watch those she loves most die.
• The return of one of the Marvel Universe’s great villains!
• An Avenger quits, a heart is broken, and the world as we know it is gone.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AXIS: CARNAGE #1 (OF 3)
RICK SPEARS (W)
GERMAN PERALTA (A)
Cover by ALEXANDER LOZANO
AXIS TIE-IN!
• Carnage is back in NYC and the city will never look at him the same way again!
• Something incredible has happened to the symbiote serial killer in AXIS that will have Cletus and you reeling!
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AXIS: HOBGOBLIN #1 (OF 3)
Kevin Shinick (W)
Javier Rodriguez (A/C)
AXIS TIE-IN!
• Roderick Kingsley, the one and only Original Hobgoblin is back in the suit (for real this time! We swear!) and back in New York with a brand new mission.
• Robot Chicken writer Kevin Shinick (Superior Carnage, Superior Spider-Man Team Up) and fan favorite artist Javier Rodriguez (Daredevil) team up to bring you a Hobgoblin book unlike any you’ve ever seen!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
DEADPOOL #36
GERRY DUGGAN & BRIAN POSEHN (W )
MIKE HAWTHORNE (A)
Cover by David Nakayama
DEADPOOL 75th VARIANT COVER BY TBA
AXIS TIE-IN!
• Oh, man...you know that totally secret thing that’s gonna happen in AXIS?
• Yeah—that’s totally gonna affect Deadpool!
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AXIS REVOLUTIONS #1 (of 4)
DENNIS HOPELESS (W) • KEN LASHLEY (A/C)
AXIS TIE-IN!
• Companion series to Marvel’s newest blockbuster event, AXIS!
• Featuring stories from the Avengers and X-Men’s epic battle with the Red Skull!
• As the Red Skull broadcasts hate across the globe, will our heroes be able to quell the madness? Or might they just be swept up in it?
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
MAGNETO #11
CULLEN BUNN (W) • GABRIEL HERNANDEZ WALTA (A)
Cover by DAVID YARDIN
AXIS TIE-IN!
• The Red Skull is sending the world into a spiral of destruction…and Magneto is one of a handful of heroes with the means to stop him!
• But will the Master of Magnetism also crumple before the maniac who’s using the formidable telepathic powers of his deceased best friend to usher in his new, terrifying Reich Eternal?
• With the grudge personal on MANY levels, Magneto is amply motivated to be the one to take down the Skull once and for all!
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
LOKI: AGENT OF ASGARD #7
AL EWING (W)
JORGE COELHO (A)
Cover by LEE GARBETT
AXIS TIE-IN!
• Victor Von Doom has Loki sentenced to death - for the crimes of his future self!
• But with the Red Skull drowning Doom, Latveria and the entire world in a wave of unstoppable telepathic hate...
•...is there even a future left to save?
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
ALL-NEW X-FACTOR #15
PETER DAVID (W)
CARMINE DI GIANDOMENICO (A)
Cover by KRIS ANKA & JARED FLETCHER
AXIS TIE-IN!
• Washington is burning!
• Will Serval Enterprises’ X-Factor put out the fire?
• Or will they watch it burn?
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
Credit: Marvel Comics
CAPTAIN AMERICA #25
RICK REMENDER (w) • CARLOS PACHECO(a)
Cover by STUART IMMONEN
Variant Cover by STEVE MCNIVEN
Variant Cover by Adam Hughes
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Extra-Sized Issue!
• Who is the All-New Captain America?
• The conclusion to the story that began in Dimension Z as Zola strikes in unison with The Red Skull!
• The final fate of Jet Black!
40 PGS./Rated T …$4.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
DEATH OF WOLVERINE: THE LOGAN LEGACY #1 (OF 7)
CHARLES SOULE (W) • OLIVER NOME (A/C)
Variant Cover by SKOTTIE YOUNG
• Wolverine—the greatest X-Men ever—is dead!
• With this mutant powerhouse now permanently out of the picture, various factions of both good and evil are scrambling to fill the void left by Logan’s death!
• Will Wolverine’s Legacy be shaped by heroes who valiantly fought alongside him …or by those villains treacherous enough to have challenged him over the many years of his long life?
• The answers will be revealed in this special 7-issue limited series that spins directly out of the mega-popular DEATH OF WOLVERINE!
• This series will feature unique solo adventures of several instrumental figures in shaping Logan’s Legacy: X-23, Sabretooth, Daken, Lady Deathstrike and Mystique!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
DEATH OF WOLVERINE: THE LOGAN LEGACY #2 (OF 7)
TIM SEELEY (W) • ARIELA KRISTANTINA (A/C)
• Featuring X-23!
• When X-23 learns about the death of the man who has meant so much to her, who has shaped her purpose, her motivations, her LIFE…will she revel in the fact that her mission is over, or will she go ROGUE?
• And what does this mean for her relationship with the All-New X-Men?
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
DEATH OF WOLVERINE: THE LOGAN LEGACY #3 (OF 7)
TIM SEELEY (W) • ARIELA KRISTANTINA (A/C)
• Featuring SABRETOOTH!
• With Logan now gone forever, who will stop Sabretooth from finally annihilating everyone and everything in his path?
• Fighting Wolverine was his greatest thrill on the planet…the ultimate sport…but now that Logan is dead, Sabretooth’s rage takes on an entirely new shape and mission--unencumbered and unrestrained.
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
NIGHTCRAWLER #7
CHRIS CLAREMONT (w) • TODD NAUCK (a)
Cover by JAMIE McKELVIE
DEATH OF WOLVERINE Aftermath!
• Not so long ago, Nightcrawler was dead.
• Now, with a second lease on life, Nightcrawler struggles to find his place back in the land of the living.
• But now that his best friend, Wolverine, has taken his place in the afterlife, that struggle just got a lot more difficult!
• And he may just find his solace in the last place he (or YOU!) would imagine!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
DEATH OF WOLVERINE: DEADPOOL & CAPTAIN AMERICA #1
GERRY DUGGAN (W) • SCOTT KOLINS (A)
Cover by ED MCGUINNESS
Variant cover by DECLAN SHALVEY
• Did you know Wolverine is dead?
• I bet some people would love to get their hands on his DNA to clone him...
• Logan’s old pals Deadpool and Steve Rogers are gonna make sure that doesn’t happen.
48 PGS./Parental Advisory …$4.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
BUCKY BARNES: THE WINTER SOLDIER #1
ALES KOT (W) • MARCO RUDY (A/C)
VARIANT COVER BY SKOTTIE YOUNG
DESIGN VARIANT COVER BY Marco Rudy
ARTIST VARIANT COVER BY Steve Epting
DEADPOOL 75th VARIANT COVER BY TBA
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• Following the tragedy of Original Sin, what becomes of Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier? Find out in this new ongoing series.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
Credit: Marvel Comics
DEATHLOK #1
NATHAN EDMONDSON (W) • MIKE PERKINS (A/C)
Variant Cover by CLAYTON R. CRAIN
Variant Cover by SKOTT YOUNG
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“Enemy of My Enemy”
• After Michael Collins, there was Henry Hayes
• A medic who travels to war zones to heal the wounded, he has no idea that when he’s in the field, he’s activated by a mysterious group and becomes the ultimate weapon of assassination and war: DEATHLOK
• From the writer of BLACK WIDOW and THE PUNISHER comes a new take on the iconic cyborg character making waves on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
THANOS: A GOD UP THERE LISTENING #1-4 (of 4)
ROB WILLIAMS (W)
NEIL EDWARDS, PACO DIAZ, IBAN COELLO (A)
COVERS BY DUSTIN NGUYEN
• At the close of INFINITY, Thane discovered he was the son of Thanos and that his touch was death. • Now, accompanied by the constantly whispered advice of the Ebony Maw, he wants to discover his father’s history, and his own future.
32 PGS. (EACH)/Rated T+ …$3.99 (EACH)
Credit: Marvel Comics
Credit: Marvel Comics
GUARDIANS 3000 #1
DAN ABNETT (w) • GERARDO SANDOVAL (a/C)
COVER BY Alex Ross
sketch VARIANT COVER BY Alex Ross
VARIANT COVER BY Skottie Young
VARIANT COVER BY GERARDO SANDOVAL
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• Dive right into the action as the original Guardians of the Galaxy—Vance Astro, Yondu, Martinex, Starhawk and Charlie-27--try to save the future universe from the menace of the Badoon.
• But what happens when the Guardians discover something behind the Badoon…something even worse than they could have ever imagined?
• The very future itself is in danger, and the only possibility of salvation relies on the shoulders of this ragtag, bombastic group of underdogs. Thrown together by fate and fighting against intolerable oppression, how can they even hope to survive the first issue?!
32 pgs/Rated T+…$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
NEW AVENGERS #25
JONATHAN HICKMAN (W) • KEV WALKER (A)
Cover by JACKSON GUICE
DEADPOOL 75th VARIANT COVER BY TBA
IN 7 MONTHS…TIME RUNS OUT!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AVENGERS #36
JONATHAN HICKMAN (W) • STEFANO CASELLI (A)
Cover by STUART IMMONEN
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IN 7 MONTHS…TIME RUNS OUT!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AVENGERS #37
JONATHAN HICKMAN (W) • STEFANO CASELLI (A)
Cover by JAMIE MCKELVIE
IN 7 MONTHS…TIME RUNS OUT!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AVENGERS WORLD #14
NICK SPENCER (W) • MARCO CHECCHETTO (A)
Cover by JORGE MOLINA
• The UPRISING is over; now the NEW ORDER begins!
• Avengers World has become A.I.M. World.
• The Avengers can’t stop the combined might of A.I.M., The Gorgon and Morgan Le Fey.
• But what about the NEXT Avengers?
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
Credit: Marvel Comics
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #7
DAN SLOTT (W) • GIUSEPPE CAMUNCOLI (A/C)
Variant Cover by JAVIER PULIDO
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• Peer over the EDGE OF SPIDER-VERSE!
• Spidey teams up with Ms. Marvel in a high-flying (stepping in Kamala’s case) adventure!
• Who is Spider-UK and what does he have to do with SPIDER-VERSE?
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #8
DAN SLOTT (W) • GIUSEPPE CAMUNCOLI (A/C)
Variant Cover by RYAN OTTLEY
• Step over the EDGE OF SPIDER-VERSE!
• MC2 Spider-Girl finds herself and her family under attack from the mysterious forces behind Spider-Verse!
• Ms. Marvel gets Spider-Man out of a jam.
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
EDGE OF SPIDER-VERSE #4 (of 5)
Clay McLeod Chapman (W) • Elia Bonnetti (A)
Cover by Garry Brown
VARIANT COVER BY GREG LAND • A radioactive spider bites a high school nerd who is already something of a monster.
• Novelist Clay Mcleod Chapman (The Tribe) takes you to a universe where the story you know becomes as horrific as possible.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
EDGE OF SPIDER-VERSE #5 (of 5)
GERARD WAY (W) • JAKE WYATT (A/C)
VARIANT COVER BY GREG LAND EDGE OF SPIDER-VERSE
• What or who is SP//dr?
• Gerard Way (Umbrella Academy) makes his Marvel debut with Jake Wyatt (Ms. Marvel, Indestructible Hulk) establishing a new universe and the incredible Spider character who inhabits it!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
THE SUPERIOR FOES OF SPIDER-MAN #16
NICK SPENCER (W) • STEVE LIEBER (A/C)
• STILL NOT still not canceled!
• GANG WAR rages on at its rageful-iest.
• The Sinister Six versus EVERYONE!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
Credit: Marvel Comics
SPIDER-MAN 2099 #4 & 5
PETER DAVID (w) • ISSUE #4 - Will Sliney (a)
ISSUE #5 - Rick Leonardi (a)
CoverS by Francesco Mattina
Issue #4 - DEADPOOL 75th VARIANT COVER BY TBA
Issue #5 - Variant Cover by Rick Leonardi
ISSUE #4 -
• Scorpion v.s. Spider-Man 2099 v.s. Spider Slayers seasoned with a bit of social unrest!
• Miguel O’Hara continues the fight for his grandfather’s soul in a literal war zone.
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
ISSUE #5 -
• Morlun is hunting spiders of all kinds, across all dimensions and all times.
• By the end of this issue there will be only one Spider-Man 2099!
• Spider-Man 2099 co-creator Rick Leonardi returns for this landmark issue that will take you to the EDGE OF SPIDER-VERSE!
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
ROCKET RACCOON #4
SKOTTIE YOUNG (W/A/C)
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• THE FUR FLIES! Rocket and his dangerous doppelgänger face off!
• BETRAYED! Ensnared like some kind of terrestrial rodent, Rocket comes face-to-face-to-face-to-face-to-face with a few of the folks who want him dead!
• Can the everyone’s favorite gunslingin’ Guardian of the Galaxy make it out alive and clear his name?
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
LEGENDARY STAR-LORD #4
SAM HUMPHRIES (W) • FREDDIE WILLIAMS (A)
Cover by PACO MEDINA
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• The battle to end all battles--Star-Lord vs. Thanos!
• As Peter Quill attempts to return to Earth, he encounters the all-powerful Titan responsible for so much mayhem in his life.
• How can Star-Lord possibly get out of this alive?!
• Plus, a guest appearance by Kitty Pryde!
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #20
BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS (W) • ED MCGUINNESS (A/C)
HASBRO VARIANT
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• The FINAL CHAPTER of what really happened in the Cancerverse!
• Remember when Star-Lord and Nova were going to sacrifice their lives to take out Thanos?
• And remember how Drax was supposed to have died?
• Well, Nova seems to be the only one missing now. Time to get some answers here!
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
MARVEL 75TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION #1
BRUCE TIMM, JAMES ROBINSON, STAN LEE, TOM DEFALCO, LEN WEIN, BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS & MORE (W)
BRUCE TIMM, STAN GOLDBERG, PAUL GULACY, CHRIS SAMNEE, MICHAEL GAYDOS & MORE (A)
Cover by PAOLO RIVERA
• A super-sized celebration of 75 years of the World’s Greatest Comics!
• What happened the day the Marvel Universe was born? James Robinson and Chris Samnee have the answer!
• Legendary artist Bruce Timm adapts the very first Captain America story Stan Lee ever wrote, from 1941!
• As Spider-Man battles the Kingpin, Peter Parker’s pals –n- gals lament his absence, in a story by Tom DeFalco and Stan Goldberg.
• Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Gaydos guide Netflix’s Jessica Jones as she investigates a case with roots in the past of the Marvel Universe!
• Wolverine’s “father” Len Wein and Paul Gulacy recount an untold encounter between Logan and Sabretooth!
• And More!
56 PGS./ALL NEW CONTENT/ONE SHOT/ Rated T …$5.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
MOON KNIGHT #8
BRIAN WOOD (W) • GREG SMALLWOOD (A)
Cover by DECLAN SHALVEY
Variant Cover by DECLAN SHALVEY
• It’s a hostage situation in a high-rise and Moon Knight must come to the rescue.
• But in this cel-phone camera society, he’s doing it on the world stage!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
HAWKEYE VS. DEADPOOL #1 (of 4)
GERRY DUGGAN (W) • MATTEO LOLLI (A)
Cover by JAMES HARREN
VARIANT COVER BY Jason Pearson
• Trick or treat! It’s Halloween in Brooklyn, and that can only mean one thing -- disaster is right around the corner!
• Why are the bad guys dressed as good guys? And will Deadpool and Hawkeye kill each other before they figure it out? The blockbuster comic event of the fall returns for its official #1 issue (even though this is really issue 2, but what does a number really even MEAN anyway?)!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
HULK #7
GERRY DUGGAN (W) • MARK BAGLEY (A)
Cover by GARY FRANK
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DOC GREEN GETS HIS SITES ON MORE GAMMA TARGETS
• DOC GREEN versus SKAAR versus...hmm. We don’t want to spoil it
• But were you worried Doc Green forgot about the GAMMA CORPS?
• Plus, an appearance by a very unexpected green-skinned member of the of the HULK family.
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
ELEKTRA #7
WILLIAM HADEN JR. BLACKMAN (W) • MICHAEL DEL MUNDO (A/C)
• Elektra barely survived chasing her globetrotting quest to find the aging assassin Cape Crow, and now, she’s given herself a newer, deadlier assignment.
• Elektra’s mission to kill the leaders of the Assassin’s Guild takes her and her allies to the streets of New Orleans, where a vengeful Lady Bullseye waits in ambush.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
INHUMAN #7
CHARLES SOULE (W) • PEPE LARRAZ (A)
Cover by RYAN STEGMAN
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• Thought dead by most of the world since Infinity, King Black Bolt steps back into the spotlight!
• Black Bolt and Maximus have been busy over in NEW AVENGERS, but that’s not the whole story of what is going on with the Boltagon brothers!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
MS. MARVEL #9
G. WILLOW WILSON (W) • ADRIAN ALPHONA (A)
Cover by Jamie McKelvie
DEADPOOL 75th VARIANT COVER BY TBA
• As Kamala discovers more about her past, the Inventor threatens her future.
• Why is Lockjaw really with Kamala?
• The fan-favorite, critically-acclaimed, amazing new series continues as Kamala proves why she’s the best (and most adorable) new super hero there is!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$2.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
THE PUNISHER #11
NATHAN EDMONDSON (W) • MITCH GERADS (A/C)
• PRISON RIOT!
• A long trail of blood has led Frank here, but how much farther can he go?
• Abandoned in a South American prison, who could Frank possibly call for help…
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
NOVA #22
GERRY DUGGAN (W) • FEDERICO SANTAGATI (A/C)
DEADPOOL 75th VARIANT COVER BY TBA
• It’s Halloween and Nova goes to Westchester to join the students of the Jean Grey School for trick-or-treating!
• With Beast chaperoning, what sort of trouble can the kids get into? LOTS!
32 PGS./Rated T …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
HAWKEYE #22
MATT FRACTION (W)
DAVID AJA (A/C)
• Hawkeyes vs. Tracksuits. Final Round!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
BLACK WIDOW #11
NATHAN EDMONDSON (W)
PHIL NOTO (A/C)
DEADPOOL 75th VARIANT COVER BY TBA
• In the wake of Wolverine’s death, with Issac’s life on the line, Black Widow takes X-23 punching.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
DAREDEVIL #9
MARK WAID (W) • CHRIS SAMNEE (A/C)
• Matt Murdock has struggled mightily to rise above the tragedies that have plagued him in the past.
• Now, however, one of his oldest foes has unleashed a force that Daredevil cannot fight without being swallowed by his darkest moods and thoughts.
• Is this the beginning of a new, grim chapter in his life?
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
ALL-NEW INVADERS #11
JAMES ROBINSON (W)
STEVE PUGH (A)
Cover by Michael Komarck
CELEBRATING THE 75th ANNIVERSARY OF THE HUMAN TORCH AND SUB-MARINER WITH AN EPIC BATTLE!
• JIM HAMMOND, THE ORIGINAL HUMAN TORCH has been driven mad by the events of Issue #10. Now it’s up to NAMOR to stop his rampage!
• Plus the return of RADIANCE and the ALL-NEW IRON CROSS!
• And in England, SPITFIRE and UNION JACK must face a different kind of INVADER...
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
THUNDERBOLTS #32
BEN ACKER & BEN BLACKER (W)
KIM JACINTO (A)
Cover by DAVID YARDIN
• The Punisher vs. the Thunderbolts – FINAL CHAPTER
• Will the Thunderbolts prove to be the complete failure Punisher believes them to be?
• This final issue of the series will reveal all.
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$2.99
Credit: Marvel Comics
FANTASTIC FOUR #11 & 12
JAMES ROBINSON (W) • LEONARD KIRK (A/C)
ISSUE #11 - BEN GRIMM... PRISONER!
• While fighting a rogue’s gallery of powerhouse villains in prison BEN GRIMM finds an unlikely ally.
• With the information he’s learned, JOHNNY STORM’S best friend WYATT WINGFOOT is in danger, hunted by a mysteriously |
others. Note on nomenclature: Though people in the linear world sometime refer to this as generally “Kymaerica”, people at the times of Kcymaerxthaere referred to it, Kymaerica [S] and Kymaerica [N] as “Kymaerica”—apparently without distinction. But, in fact, all simply knew the difference. This was out of respect to the fact denizens of all three rejected the notion that theirs was some sort of junior subset. Interestingly, those of [Gallywyx], Unguscka, Ksycktamrkti and [pSambamsa Bdfadk], which, to a linear eye, appear to touch on the same general areas, preferred not to be lumped together as Kymaericans. Includes what we call Florida, a small part of Georgia, Oceanic Georgia and the Atlantic [feather] Includes part of linear Antarctica [Rimabelate] One of the few rezhns with crystalline-like straightline borders. South of what we would call Australia [Gallywyx] A rezhn best known for its suprisingly lush foliage What we would call the northern part of Nunavut Microrezhn3 One of a number of microgwomes that exist below the surface of the earth and are represented only a slowly shifting density in the geology. Lower triangle. Not perceptible to the eye MicroRezhn2 This is a symbol of the countless micro-rezhns containing gwomes upon gwomes and float through the night sky. (left triangle) Impossible to see Microrezhn1 MicroRezhn that floats around with no specific location at one time. Right triangle. MicroRezhn that floats around with no specific location at one time. Ksycktamrkti Largely consistent with what we call Greenland and much of Hudson’s Bay, many believe Ksycktamrkti is contiguous with Tsyckamarkti (the Ring rezhn). What we call Greenland, Hudson’s Bay and portions of Nunuvat. Klurrulurrudurrul An extreme rezhn consisting of what we call the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico—the Sigsbee deep. According to legend it was perfectly flat (recent research shows it is not exactly true) and the popular game known as the Klurrulurrudur is played on a vast flat surface named for this rezhn. Also: the original Tagans are believed to have come from here. What we call the Sigsbee Deep (part of the Gulf of Mexico) Unguscka The rezhn currently taken in by the Carribbean and portions of what we would call Mexico (south of the Isthmus canal) and Central America. Name may be related to a series of asteroid impacts in the rezhn. Areas that we call the Caribbean, southern Mexico, and Central America [Appears] The rezhn within the ring rezhn in what we would call the South Pacific. A portion of what we call the South Pacific Tsyckamarkti Sometimes called the Ring Continent by observers from the linear world, this rezhn is often, but not always, experienced as a ring by travelers in the Kcymaerxphaere. An apparently ring like area in the Southern Pacific ocean [pSambamsa Bdfadk] The rezhn taking in the swirl of what we call the Eastern Pacific, Antarctica, a bit of the coast of South America and the Galapagos Islands. The name is somewhat controversial and not universally accepted. Portions what we call the Eastern Pacific, Antarctica, a bit of the coast of South America and the Galapagos Islands.
[kyjgswq elmeipsycdlrdep] This name is currently accepted for the rezhn we know as the North Pacific, though there are other candidates. However, this name is quite popular among poets because of the tradition of composing verses with this acronym. Largely consistent with what we call the North Pacific. Kcyrguelyguo Largely consistent with the rezhn we call the Indian Ocean, this term is a somewhat ahistorical honorific—a tribute to Kergillin, generally acknowledged as the victor of the Battle of Some Times. What we call the Indian Ocean. [Bimaneji] There is some dispute of the accuracy of this term, but it is and was commonly used by pirates both contemporary and historical (including the so-called Libertalia). It took in the islands and waters of what we call the Maldives and Madagascar. Islands and waters of what we call the Maldives and Madagascar. [yQirwaelend] Another one of the terms we are doing research on. The name for this rezhn seems to be taken from the kirwelas, of which the Eqlmundi Kirwela of Culev Larsze is one of the most famous. The term refers to most of the lands we think of as the Indian subcontinent, Iran, the Andaman Islands, parts of China, Himalayas, and more. The areas we call the Indian subcontinent, Iran, the Andaman Islands, parts of China, Himalayas, and more. [rBaikylmaara] [rBaikylmaara] is one name for the area we think of as Russia in our linear world. Research is ongoing, particularly since the break up of the Tosiev Oniun as to whether this is the best reference point for this rezhn Most of the area we call Russia. Kymaerica [N] area d Kymaerica [N] is the lands and some waters quite similar to what we call linear North America, not exactly, but pretty close. Area D is one subset. Because, by the accident of the Geographer-at-Large’s birthplace, so much research has been done in the single rezhn of Kymaerica [N], we have divvied it up into 5 sub-areas for the purpose of this site. Kcymaerxthaeres would not have recognized these specific divisions. Area D in the linear world would be: the south and south east of the US, except for Phlorida Note on nomenclature: Though people in the linear world sometime refer to this as “Kymaerica”, people at the times of Kcymaerxthaere referred to it, Kymaerica [S] and [Sarkassum] Kymaerica as “Kymaerica”—apparently without distinction. But, in fact, all simply knew the difference. This was out of respect to the fact denizens of all three rejected the notion that theirs was some sort of junior subset. Interestingly, those of [Gallywyx], Unguscka, Ksycktamrkti and [pSambamsa Bdfadk], which, to a linear eye, appear to touch on the same general areas, preferred not to be lumped together as Kymaericans. Basically, from Texas east to take in the southeast of what we call the US (except Florida), plus West Virginia and DelMarVa. kymaerica [N; area E] Kymaerica [N] is the lands and some waters quite similar to what we call linear North America, not exactly, but pretty close. Area E is one subset. Because, by the accident of the Geographer-at-Large’s birthplace, so much research has been done in the single rezhn of Kymaerica [N], we have divvied it up into 5 sub-areas for the purpose of this site. Kcymaerxthaeres would not have recognized these specific divisions. Area E in the linear world would be: alot of what we call the midwest and northeast of the US and most of the eastern part of Canada.
Note on nomenclature: Though people in the linear world sometime refer to this as “Kymaerica”, people at the times of Kcymaerxthaere referred to it, Kymaerica [S] and [Sarkassum] Kymaerica as “Kymaerica”—apparently without distinction. But, in fact, all simply knew the difference. This was out of respect to the fact denizens of all three rejected the notion that theirs was some sort of junior subset. Interestingly, those of [Gallywyx], Unguscka, Ksycktamrkti and [pSambamsa Bdfadk], which, to a linear eye, appear to touch on the same general areas, preferred not to be lumped together as Kymaericans. Basically, in the US, take a line from North Dakota to Kansas and east along the Ohio to New England, and most of eastern Canada
Kymaerica [N; area B] Kymaerica [N] is the lands and some waters quite similar to what we call linear North America, not exactly, but pretty close. Area B is one subset. Because, by the accident of the Geographer-at-Large’s birthplace, so much research has been done in the single rezhn of Kymaerica [N], we have divvied it up into 5 sub-areas for the purpose of this site. Kcymaerxthaeres would not have recognized these specific divisions. Area C in the linear world would be: what we call Northern California and most of the West, west of Texas Note on nomenclature: Though people in the linear world sometime refer to this as “Kymaerica”, people at the times of Kcymaerxthaere referred to it, Kymaerica [S] and [Sarkassum] Kymaerica as “Kymaerica”—apparently without distinction. But, in fact, all simply knew the difference. This was out of respect to the fact denizens of all three rejected the notion that theirs was some sort of junior subset. Interestingly, those of [Gallywyx], Unguscka, Ksycktamrkti and [pSambamsa Bdfadk], which, to a linear eye, appear to touch on the same general areas, preferred not to be lumped together as Kymaericans. In the linear US, Northern California and its coastal districts, plus what we call Utah, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming. Kymaerica [N; area C] Kymaerica [N] is the lands and some waters quite similar to what we call linear North America, not exactly, but pretty close. Area C is one subset. Because, by the accident of the Geographer-at-Large’s birthplace, so much research has been done in the single rezhn of Kymaerica [N], we have divvied it up into 5 sub-areas for the purpose of this site. Kcymaerxthaeres would not have recognized these specific divisions. Area C in the linear world would be: the southwestern US (west of Texas) and most of Mexico Note on nomenclature: Though people in the linear world sometime refer to this as “Kymaerica”, people at the times of Kcymaerxthaere referred to it, Kymaerica [S] and [Sarkassum] Kymaerica as “Kymaerica”—apparently without distinction. But, in fact, all simply knew the difference. This was out of respect to the fact denizens of all three rejected the notion that theirs was some sort of junior subset. Interestingly, those of [Gallywyx], Unguscka, Ksycktamrkti and [pSambamsa Bdfadk], which, to a linear eye, appear to touch on the same general areas, preferred not to be lumped together as Kymaericans. Southern California and its coastline, Arizona, New Mexico from the linear US and the northern 3/4 of what we call Mexico. [solanalos] Pretty much the area in we call the western part of Arctic Russia. This is the name use by one of the gwomes, but not all. So its use here on the site as the name of the whole region may need to be revised. Part of what we call Arctic Russia (and the relevant parts of that ocean) The Faltese The famous Ocean desert floor off the west coast of what we call Afrika. This was the site of the cataclysmic Battle of Some Times. “Faltese” was the name used by certain of the armies that fought in that battle. We are still determining if that is the best name for us to be using on the site. It was also the lair of Kmpass. The ocean desert floor right off the coast of what we call Namibia. xAphrikk Most of the continent we call Afrika. The term “xAphrikk” is still controversial (the “x” is silent) and Kymaarra.com is trying to find some way of determining the best name to use. Most of what we would call Africa. [eKmdb] Home of the Desert Behlnajk, its beautiful whorls ceding and receding in the dunes. Important deserts from the aftermath of the Battle of Some Times. The term “eKmdb” is still controversial (very hard to pronounce for Cognate speakers) and Kymaarra.com is trying to find some way of determining the best name to use here. What we call the Middle East plus the Horn of Africa. Leddl (Trevn) This a subdivision of the rezhn of Leddl (for convenience of Navigation on the site). This is the site of Nobunaga-Ventreven’s dangerous crossing and the home of gnaciens. Most of what we would call continental Europe SOUTH of a border formed by southmost Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Slovakia.In its desire to maintain stability and its own interests, the same armed forces that refused to fire on protesters in February now appear willing to look the other way, or worse, as anti-Christian sectarianism turns violent
Riot police stand guard beside a car destroyed in Sunday night's clashes between Coptic Christians and soldiers in Cairo / Reuters
As Egypt's generals wrapped up their defiant presentation deflecting any and all responsibility for the killings of at least 26 people during a largely Coptic Christian demonstration on Sunday night, many Egyptians' initial bewilderment and fear had hardened into anger and foreboding. The Egyptian military's brutal attacks on the protesters represented a broader trend of limited tolerance for public displays of dissent and protest. But the attack was also distinctive for its sectarian overtones and its scale. Sunday night's killings in front of Cairo's radio and television building, commonly known as Maspero, were not simply a military attack on protest, but an episode in which the security forces sought to harness sectarian animus to bolster their crackdown and inoculate their actions. It's puzzling why the military leadership would choose to escalate at this moment. Whatever its intention, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the post-Mubarak body currently leading the country, has endangered the country's social fabric and risked unloosing civil strife.
The SCAF has been increasingly acting to quiet dissent, previously using the military to disperse protest by force, and now seeking political acquiescence through repressive, albeit calibrated, measures. Crackdowns appear to have targeted only those whom the SCAF might consider to be vulnerable and without a significant social support base -- in other words, people whose injury or death wouldn't provoke a wider popular backlash. In the mind of the military, then, repressing a largely Coptic protest would come at little social cost.
The armed forces are broadly reflective of Egyptian society. While the institution is not segregated, Christian advancement within the ranks is often limited by hierarchical discrimination. Although there is some degree of self-selectivity involved, the paucity of Copts within the upper ranks of the military reflects their withdrawal from the public sphere. It's part of a longstanding and deleterious change in how Christians participate in Egyptian society. The few high-ranking Christian officers -- such as Coptic war hero General Fouad Aziz Ghali, who played a key leadership role in the October 1973 war against Israel -- are exceptions to the rule. Egypt's Christians are excluded from leadership positions in key organs of the state -- including the one that now plays an increasingly prominent role in their country's future, the SCAF.
Egyptian society is divided and its communal bonds have deteriorated, a trend that has left broad segments of the Egyptian population desensitized to the plight of the country's Christians. It's unlikely that the Egyptian army acted out of hatred toward Christians -- even now, it's not in their character. But credible video evidence and eyewitness testimony from the Maspero crackdown show security forces standing by while vigilante groups attacked their Christian countrymen for no apparent reason other than malice. It certainly looks like outright collusion and cooperation, although we can't be sure without an independent non-military investigation (something the military is, of course, not permitting). Some troops were captured on video reveling in their assault on the Copts. Institutional self-interest is driving military decision-making, it seems, even at the risk of undermining national unity.
State television and official media, in their incendiary coverage of the events, didn't come off any better than the military. One presenter called for honorable citizens to take to the streets to defend the armed forces against a Christian attack. State television sensationalized the events by neglecting to mention the protester casualties while announcing outlandish figures for military casualties. At this stage, the exact number of troops killed -- if there were any -- has become a state secret. The exact nature of interaction between the SCAF and the Ministry of Information (which runs state media) is opaque, but the latter certainly appears to have become an outlet for the former to cultivate popular support. Whether by directive or force of habit, state media has been repeating nationalistic tropes -- trumpeting SCAF chief Mohammed Hussein Tantawi as a great leader, for example -- in its obsequious coverage of the SCAF.
Under the SCAF's few months of rule, the culture of impunity has continued and flourished when it comes to sectarian crimes. During the Mubarak era, the criminal justice system was often used selectively or manipulatively in response to anti-Christian attacks, exploiting Egypt's sectarian tensions for Mubarak's benefit. It was used as a political tool to deepen Coptic dependence on the state. Since Mubarak fell on February 11 the new leadership has appeared largely indifferent to sectarian incidents. This has triggered widespread concern and outrage among Copts as well as their many sympathizers, and further undermined the concept of what it means to be an Egyptian citizen. While the SCAF has supposedly prioritized law and order and stability, the machinery of the state has not been brought to bear against the perpetrators of sectarian violence, further eroding conceptions of citizenship.
Egypt's most coherent political force, the Muslim Brotherhood, has also responded to the rising sectarian violence with self-interest. After the attack, the group issued a statement that diverted responsibility from the armed forces while partially blaming Copts for the timing of their protest: "All the Egyptian people have grievances and legitimate demands, not only our Christian brothers. Certainly, this is not the right time to claim them." The Muslim Brotherhood, it seems, is too worried about how it will fare in the tenuous political transition to stand up forcefully for their Coptic fellow citizens.
Perhaps the most damning behavior has come after Sunday's violence, with the SCAF refusing to admit error even as the sectarian ripples continue to spread. Instead, it has sought to preserve the perceived legitimacy of the armed forces among much of the Egyptian people, who are still grateful for the military's refusal to fire on protesters during the January and February protests. While the SCAF is genuinely concerned about the country's stability, it has come to understand that stability as primarily a function of its own standing within society. Whether as a means to avoid conflict or further their own agenda -- though they seem to see these two things as synonymous -- the SCAF has appeared willing to indulge and coddle the forces of intolerance, even at the risk of precipitating broad-based communal conflict.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.As Sunday’s referendum, in which the people of Crimea will decide whether to join Russia, approaches, the images on Russian television are astonishing. They are more propagandistic and venomous than anything I can remember even from Soviet times. Breathless presenters whip up hysteria with bloodcurdling stories of atrocities being committed by the “neo-Nazi junta” now governing Ukraine. Overheated “victims” beg Putin to help, kindly Russians offer to give refuge to the terrified people fleeing Ukraine, and menacing music accompanies montages of swastikas, fascist thugs armed with clubs, and black-and-white images of Hitler’s troops and burning villages.
It is all apparently aimed at preparing the public to accept that there may be war, and that Russia will be fighting in a just cause. Yet I have a horrible feeling that President Putin believes all this stuff. He receives his information mainly from his trusted secret services – men like himself, schooled in the dark arts of KGB disinformation. I worked as a media consultant to the Kremlin from 2006 to 2009, close enough to gain a sense of Putin’s growing paranoia.
I believe this has three causes, the most important of which, perhaps, is his own terror of being dislodged by popular revolution. Putin believes the Ukrainian uprising was fomented entirely by the West. He puts two and two together and gets five. He saw Senator John McCain saluting the Maidan crowds, and heard Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State, discussing on the phone which opposition leaders she would like to see in the new government (and he made sure his spies made the tape of the conversation public). Putin has been convinced ever since the Orange Revolution in 2004, followed by the Moscow protests of late 2011, that there is, in one of his advisers’ words, a “Destroy Russia” project. And he is next on the list.
The second factor is Russia’s strategic security. And here I believe the West made a major mistake in believing it could build its own security at the expense of Russia’s. It has created a situation in which Moscow feels not just marginalised but threatened. Putin came to power longing to have Russia accepted again as a great power, but as an ally, whose word mattered. He thought he was getting somewhere when George W Bush gratefully accepted his help in the “war on terror”. But then America deployed a missile shield that Putin believes undermines Russia’s strategic deterrent, and Nato expanded into eastern Europe, despite earlier assurances that this would not happen. Putin felt humiliated. Tragically, he really thought he could be the West’s friend, failing to see that his own repressive policies made that impossible.
Crucially, in 2008, Nato promised Ukraine that it “will” be allowed to join. Even then Putin made clear that this would be the last straw. Perhaps Nato should have considered his psychology more deeply. You don’t ensure your safety from a growling bear by provoking it.
I believe Putin sees Ukraine’s decisive turn to the West now as inexorably leading to the Nato membership it was promised. This would further isolate Russia, bring a hostile alliance right up to its borders, and place its only warm-water naval base in enemy hands. Hence the scramble to get Crimea out of Ukraine as soon as possible – using every lie and pretext in Putin’s well-thumbed dezinformatsiya handbook to justify Russia’s annexation.
Which brings me to the third factor in Putin’s thinking – his unashamed presumption that Russia has the right and duty to protect Russians wherever they may be. He once described the collapse of the USSR as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century. He didn’t mean he regretted the end of communism, but he did regret the collapse of a huge multinational state, and the fact that 25 million Russians ended up outside their own country’s borders. His vow to “protect Russians” in Ukraine is the corollary of that. God forbid if he decides Russians in Latvia and Estonia also require “help”.
The annexation of Crimea is, it seems, inevitable. Putin’s men marched their propagandists so far up the hill, they can scarcely march them down again. What’s more, the referendum will be monitored by Russian observers, who know a thing or two about achieving the correct result. Plans are already in place to swap Crimea’s Ukrainian currency for the rouble, and the Russian Duma has scheduled a debate on the incorporation of Crimea for March 21.
So what can the West do? Not much. Insisting that Putin talk to Ukrainian leaders he regards as putschists is pointless. He won’t. Sanctions will not stop Putin either. It is also too late now to give him the assurances he has sought about Russia’s own security. He is convinced the West is out to get him, and has dug in for the long haul.
In Munich in 2007, Putin made a no-holds-barred speech which was essentially a cry of frustration at being ignored. We ignored it. And now he doesn’t give a damn what we think.
Angus Roxburgh was the BBC’s Moscow correspondent and is the author of 'The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia’ (I B Tauris)Right-Wing Media Dazed And Confused After Supreme Court's Reaffirmation Of Affirmative Action June 24, 2013 4:51 PM EDT ››› Blog ›››››› SERGIO MUNOZ
Right-wing media appear stunned as Justice Anthony Kennedy refused to join his more radical conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court and strike down affirmative action in higher education, instead reaffirming modern civil rights law that holds race-conscious admissions policies remain necessary for equal opportunity in today's society. Kennedy's 7-1 majority opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is essentially the reiteration of his controlling analysis in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), which affirmed the constitutionality and continued necessity of race-conscious programs that seek to prevent the resegregation of public education. In lockstep with conservative activists who are using the closely split Supreme Court as an opportunity to overturn decades of civil rights law, right-wing media have been repeatedly clamoring for the opposite of what just occurred in Fisher. So far, right-wing media coverage has been muted or is incorrectly pretending Kennedy's opinion breaks significant new ground. Fox News host Megyn Kelly on America Live - in addition to dredging up the myth that the plaintiff in question was rejected in the admissions process because of her race - was shocked at Fisher's utterly unsurprising reminder that government's use of race typically requires strict scrutiny from the courts. From University of California Irvine School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky's leading treatise, Constitutional Law, Principles and Policies, most recently updated in 2006: It now is clearly established that strict scrutiny is used to evaluate all government affirmative action plans. In Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena (1995), the Supreme Court said: "[A]ll racial classifications, imposed by whatever federal, state, or local governmental actor, must be analyzed by a reviewing court under strict scrutiny." The Court reaffirmed that strict scrutiny is the test for affirmative action programs in its most recent cases, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003). In Fisher, Kennedy wrote for a near-universal Supreme Court that has now sent a challenge to the University of Texas' affirmative action program back down to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit because it had not correctly applied the Court's precedent in this area of equal protection law. As has been the law since 1978, upheld most recently in 2003, the use of race as one factor among many in individualized and holistic considerations of applicants to institutions of higher education remains both necessary and constitutional to ensure the diversity of America's future leaders.
Explained by Kennedy six years ago in Parents Involved and newly confirmed in Fisher, there is no so-called "colorblind constitution" that requires American society to tolerate "racial isolation" in schools and deny all children and young adults equal educational opportunity:
[There is an] all-too-unyielding insistence that race cannot be a factor in instances when, in my view, it may be taken into account...The plurality's postulate that "[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," is not sufficient to decide these cases...To the extent the plurality opinion suggests the Constitution mandates that state and local school authorities must accept the status quo of racial isolation in schools, it is, in my view, profoundly mistaken. The statement by Justice Harlan that "[o]ur Constitution is color-blind" was most certainly justified in the context of his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson... In the real world, it is regrettable to say, it cannot be a universal constitutional principle. In the administration of public schools by the state and local authorities it is permissible to consider the racial makeup of schools and to adopt general policies to encourage a diverse student body, one aspect of which is its racial composition.
Accordingly, media outlets should not be shocked that in Fisher, Kennedy let it be known that he continues to believe properly tailored affirmative action programs remain constitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Similarly, if right-wing media believe that Kennedy's insistence in Fisher that educational institutions first exhaust "available, workable race-neutral alternatives" before turning to race-conscious attempts to create a diverse student body means affirmative action law is now "tightened" or "rein[ed] in," they haven't been paying attention. Not only did Kennedy explain this requirement that affirmative action should only be used as a necessary "last resort" in his 2007 Parents Involved opinion, the preference for "race-neutral" means for achieving diversity in higher education was specifically identified as imperative in Grutter v. Bollinger, which laid down the rules for modern affirmative action programs in 2003 that Kennedy clearly cites in Fisher.
If anything, Fisher is a reminder that former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's meticulous attempt in Grutter to forge a compromise on the need for race-conscious admissions policies to prevent segregated higher education not only remains crucial, it continues to be good law.
Indeed, the fact that conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito signed onto Kennedy's opinion without comment, as opposed to conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, who bluntly stated he is awaiting the opportunity to overrule Grutter, and Clarence Thomas, who compared modern civil rights law to the "outright racial discrimination...of slaveholders and segregationists," may mean that O'Connor's careful Grutter opinion has new bipartisan vitality.
Future opinions will reveal how committed those conservatives who joined Kennedy and the liberal Justices' stamp of approval for Grutter actually are. Perhaps Roberts and Alito have seen the wisdom of O'Connor's careful explanation of constitutional affirmative action. Or perhaps they have shied away from Scalia and Thomas' endorsement of the ahistorical and unprincipled right-wing challenges to stare decisis that the most recent challenges to modern civil rights law represent.
The end result is the same, however: universities' ongoing attempts to ensure that their doors are not barred to students of many different backgrounds, an effort that requires them to take account of race, remain constitutional.Tevez, who will undergo a medical in Manchester on Tuesday morning before being unveiled at Eastlands in the afternoon, has agreed a five-year deal worth £150,000-a-week, a month after rejecting a less lucrative offer to sign a permanent contract at Manchester United.
City have paid in excess of £25m to sign Tevez from his economic rights holders and become the player's sole owners in order to meet with Premier League regulations that prevent third-party ownership.
The club finalised the deal on Monday night, subject to a medical, after weeks of negotiations that gathered pace with a meeting between City officials and Tevez's representatives in Abu Dhabi at the end of May.
Tevez's arrival is a major coup for City, who have seen off interest from United, Chelsea and Liverpool to secure his signature, and manager Mark Hughes is now determined to add Adebayor to his squad after moving for the player in the wake of the withdrawal from the race sign Barcelona's Samuel Eto'o.
Arsenal are understood to be willing to sell the 25-year-old and discussions with City officials, led by chief football administrator - and former Arsenal player - Brian Marwood, took place on Monday.
But with AC Milan still interested in the Togo international following their failure to tempt him to the San Siro last summer, the London club are keen to hold out for their £25m valuation of the player.
Should Arsenal secure a deal to sell Adebayor, manager Arsene Wenger is likely to move quickly for the Bordeaux forward Marouane Chamakh as a replacement.
Hughes has moved for Adebayor following the club's decision to abandon the £25m pursuit of Eto'o last Friday.
But despite being given an indication that Arsenal are prepared to sell the former Monaco forward, City must overcome Adebayor's preference for a move to Milan in order to lure him to Eastlands.
The Italians came close to signing Adebayor 12 months ago, but Arsenal's refusal to sell, plus their decision to offer Adebayor a new £80,000-a-week contract, ensured that he remained at the Emirates.
Adebayor's discontent at Arsenal was evident throughout last season, however, and he was booed by the club's supporters towards the end of the campaign, having scored just 15 goals in all competitions.
The antipathy towards Adebayor from a large section of Arsenal supporters was borne out earlier this month with one fans' website producing a mock sales brochure, mimicking that produced by Michael Owen's representatives last month, in an effort to attract a buyer for the player.
City are determined to take Adebayor off Arsenal's hands, however, and they are keen to strike a deal in time for him to play some part in the club's pre-season tour of South Africa, which begins with the flight to Johannesburg on Wednesday.
Adebayor will form a mouth-watering partnership with Tevez and £17m signing Roque Santa Cruz at City if he accepts the proposal on offer at Eastlands.
City's interest in the England captain John Terry remains strong and the club are now waiting for developments between Chelsea and the player before deciding whether to make a third offer for the defender following two bids in excess of £30m made earlier this month.
Hughes has already spent in excess of £50m on Gareth Barry, Santa Cruz and Tevez this summer, but he will break the £100m barrier if moves for Adebayor, Terry and Everton's Joleon Lescott come to fruition.Last year ash from the eruption of an Icelandic volcano crippled European air traffic for almost a month. As another volcano on the island sends ash spewing into European airspace once again, hundreds of flights have already been cancelled in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano of Grímsvötn is expected to reach northern Germany at around 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning, a spokesman for the German Weather Service said. By 8 a.m. it should have spread to central and eastern Germany and reached a concentration above the critical level of two milligrams of ash per cubic meter in the north, according to official forecasts.
On Monday, German Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer had announced a general ban on flights once the concentration exceeds the two-milligrams level because damage to aircraft, especially aircraft engines, cannot be ruled out when the ash cloud is so dense.
European air traffic authority Eurocontrol estimated the number of flight cancellations on Tuesday at 500. It said Scotland and Northern Ireland were now largely covered by the ash cloud. Thousands of people were stranded at airports there on Tuesday.
Grímsvötn, Iceland's most active volcano, erupted on Saturday, raising fears of a repeat of the massive travel chaos caused a year ago by Eyjafjallajökull when thousands of flights were cancelled, large parts of European airspace were closed for days at a time, and mass disruptions continued for nearly a month.
Criticism of Flight Ban
Budget airline Ryanair questioned the decision by Irish authorities to cancel its flights to and from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. The airline said in a statement: "Ryanair strongly objects to this decision and believes that there is no basis for these flight cancellations and is meeting with the Irish Aviation Authority this morning to have this restriction on Ryanair flights removed as a matter of urgency."
Ryanair said it had operated a one-hour "verification flight" in Scottish airspace on Tuesday morning, taking off from Glasgow, flying to Inverness, on to Aberdeen and down to Edinburgh. "There was no visible volcanic ash cloud or any other presence of volcanic ash and the post flight inspection revealed no evidence of volcanic ash on the airframe, wings or engines," said Ryanair.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) criticized the British air traffic control authority, saying it was "astonishing and unacceptable" that the British government wasn't conducting its own tests on the cloud's density.
The British National Air Traffic Service (NATS), which controls traffic across Britain's airspace, said it was relying on forecasts by the official meteorological services.
If the eruption continues with the same intensity, the cloud could reach the west of France and the north of Spain in Thursday, Eurocontrol said in a statement.
G-8 Summit in Deauville Could be Affected
Spanish soccer champion FC Barcelona will respond to the possible disruption by flying to London earlier than planned for Saturday's Champion's League final against Manchester United at Wembley Stadium. The club said the team would fly out on Tuesday evening or Wednesday afternoon to avoid any delays caused by the ash plume.
Potential delays could also hamper the G-8 summit in the French northern seaside resort of Deauville in Normandy on Thursday.
The most high-profile victim of the ash cloud so far has been US President Barack Obama, who had to cut short his visit to Ireland and fly to London 10 hours earlier than planned.
Not As Bad as 2010?
European Union Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas said passengers in Europe faced a "week of challenges" but added that improved crisis management procedures introduced in response to last year's eruption meant that large-scale closures of European airspace were unlikely.
"Whilst fully respecting the imperative of safety, Europe is now equipped to respond with a graduated response rather than a one size fits all approach," Kallas told a news conference. "This should avoid blanket closure of our airspace."
"Although we are partly dependent on the weather and the pattern of ash dispersion, we do not at this stage anticipate the widespread airspace closures and the prolonged disruption we saw last year," said Kallas.
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could not say in comics. For example, comics about vampires, werewolves, and zombies were banned, as was the use of the word “crime.” Sexual depictions were outright forbidden.
The CCA began in 1954, and by the 90’s was considered an obsolete relic of a more censorious age. By 2011, the only publishers that still adhered to it were DC and Archie, and both of them abandoned it shortly afterwards. Today, it’s viewed the same way we view the Spanish Inquisition or Jim Crow laws: something barbarous that our ancestors did, but that we, with our advanced and progressive culture, would never do. For example, here’s a post from liberal, pro-feminist site Vox about “the insane history of how American paranoia ruined and censored comic books.”
The Return Of The Comics Code Authority
With #ChangeTheCover, feminists have brought the Comics Code into the modern era. The similarities are obvious: where the old proponents of the Comics Code said that comics were “seducing the innocent” into a life of crime, our modern censors say that comics will make men think that violence against women is “okay.” Just as the old censors were never able to find any criminals who traced their start to a violent comic book, the rapists and abusers who justify themselves by pointing to a Batman cover remain mysteriously elusive.
Also just like with the CCA, #ChangeTheCover’s proponents buttress their arguments with pseudo-academic hogwash. For example, here’s one would-be censor, Comicosity columnist Keith Callback, who wants you to know that this art is “not okay” because “the image has no accompanying narrative of recovery, just the victimization.”
If you need any further evidence that modern-day feminists are just latter-day Puritans, here are four items from the 1954 Comics Code:
Rape scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable.
Nudity with meretricious purpose and salacious postures shall not be permitted in the advertising of any product; clothed
figures shall never be presented in such a way as to be offensive or contrary to good taste or morals.
figures shall never be presented in such a way as to be offensive or contrary to good taste or morals. Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.
Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable.
Sound familiar? Any one of these could’ve shown up in Anita Sarkeesian’s demands for the gaming industry.
If you love freedom of expression and believe that authors have a right to say, write, and draw what they want, then feminists and social justice warriors are your enemy. Tell them to screw off, and support artistic freedom and the First Amendment.
Read More: Law and Order Shows The Extensive Damage Done By The Gaming MediaThe 50p tax rate will raise an additional £12.6bn over the next five years even if people choose to leave the country to avoid it, according to the government's own projections which will add to pressure on the Treasury not to scrap higher taxes.
By 2015-16 the 50% tax rate for people earning above £150,000 will bring in £3.2bn more than if the tax rate had stayed at 40% - rising from £1.1bn this year and totalling £12.6bn over the five year period. Compared with a 45% rate, 50% will bring in an additional £5.3bn.
The figures, contained in the government projections from last November and revealed in a parliamentary question tabled by the Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft, emerge as Osborne is coming under pressure from the City and economists to remove the 50p rate. In a letter to the Financial Times on Wednesday, 20 leading economists, including two former members of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee called for the top rate of tax to be removed claiming it was damaging growth and failing to generate significant revenues.
The chancellor is believed to be reconsidering the higher tax band and has asked the HMRC to evaluate its impact after the self-assesment deadline for its first year, in January. It should report in time for the budget. Osborne has previously said that "there's not much point in having taxes that are economically inefficient".
New figures have emerged amid calls from Labour for the government to commission independent research into impact of the higher tax band and signals from the Lib Dems that they would oppose the scrapping of the 50p rate.
Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, said: "If the Chancellor really wants to know how effective the top rate of tax is he should immediately ask the Office for Budget Responsibility, not just HMRC, to produce a report genuinely independent of government."
Lord Oakeshott, the Lib Dem peer and close ally of Vince Cable, said: "This gives the lie to the special pleading form the super rich and the Tory right for a hand out to the top 1% of taxpayers. This official treasury estimate, including possible behavioural reactions, shows the 50p top tax rate raising £12.6bn over five years. Warren Buffet in America and business leaders in France and Germany are calling for shared sacrifice - why are Britain's super rich so super selfish?"
The Treasury prediction takes into account the fact that people could opt to maximise their pension contributions, form a company or even leave the country to avoid paying extra tax.
However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies is poised to publish a paper suggesting that the impact of the 50p tax rate on the highest paid could trigger people to adapt to avoid paying the extra tax to the extent that it could even cost the country money.
In its Mirrlees Review, to be published next week, it reports: "It is not clear whether the 50% rate will raise any revenue at all. There are numerous ways in which people might reduce their taxable incomes in response to higher tax rates; at some point, increasing tax rates starts to cost money instead of raising it."
The IFS paper suggests that anything above the original highest rate of 40% would prompt people to find ways to avoid paying it. However, deputy director Carl Emmerson stressed that their figures were passed on data from the 1980s that have a high degree of uncertainty. " Even in 10 years time I don't think there will be a definitive answer to what tax revenues in, say, 2010-11 would have been had the top rate of tax been 40p not 50p."
A Treasury spokesman confirmed that the chancellor has asked for an analysis of the revenue raised by the top tax rate. "The government is committed to a competitive tax system, but in reducing the deficit, we have always been clear that those with the broadest shoulders should carry the greatest burden."Players who merit a rest almost a year after coming into their respective camps to begin preparing for the World Cup are stepping once more into the breach
A long season ends for Wales, England and Ireland and a three-Test tour starts to the leading three countries in the world rankings for players who in a year’s time will be heavily involved in the Lions tour to New Zealand. Talks about a global season rumble on, but the two hemispheres appear no closer than the Remain and Leave sides in the European Union referendum debate.
And so players who merit a rest almost a year after coming into their respective camps to begin preparing for the World Cup step once more into the breach. Player welfare remains a concept rather than a policy as tradition mingles with suspicion and far more is said than achieved.
Eddie Jones arrives in Australia expecting coordinated attack on England Read more
At least England have the Eddie Jones bounce in their luggage for Australia, six wins out of six in his tenure, including last Sunday’s surprisingly comfortable victory over Wales who as they sat in business class on the flight(s) to Auckland needed to find ways of meaning business again.
Perhaps the most interesting tour is Ireland’s to South Africa who, like the All Blacks, have shed a wealth of experience after the World Cup without having as much tested back-up to come in. And they have a new head coach in Allister Coetzee whose first squad of 31 players included 12 who were non-white, meeting the government’s transformation policy more than his predecessor, Heyneke Meyer. By the 2019 World Cup, the current 38% of non-white players must increase to 50.
Unless the transformation targets are met, there will be no official backing for the South African union’s bid to host the 2023 World Cup. Coetzee, the former Stormers’ coach, is taking over at a difficult time politically as well as on the field where only the Lions have been letting rip in Super Rugby, and then not against New Zealand sides after an early victory at the Chiefs.
There will be no Victor Matfield, Schalk Burger, the Du Plessis brothers, Bryan Habana, Fourie du Preez, Jean de Villiers or Ruan Pienaar facing Ireland. Coetzee’s first squad contains 14 of the 23 who were involved in the third-place World Cup play-off against Argentina last October and some of those called up, such as the Sharks’ fly-half Garth April, were not in contention even a few months ago, like the England prop Ellis Genge.
Whereas Meyer, as the World Cup dawned, reverted to experience, Coetzee is giving youth a fling, only partly through necessity. He has only picked three players who are based outside South Africa and his squad does not include anyone who was involved in the 2007 World Cup success. The Springboks have a core of experience: JP Pietersen and Tendai Mtawarira are the two survivors from the 2009 series against the Lions while Duane Vermeulen, Francois Louw, Eben Etzebeth, Adriaan Strauss, the captain and a cousin of the Ireland hooker, Richardt Strauss, and Willie le Roux are established internationals with Jesse Kriel and Damian de Allende a pair of centres who stood out last year.
The winners have gone. Nine of the 31 are uncapped while only eight have played more than 30 Tests. Ten of the team that started last year’s World Cup semi-final against New Zealand had won more than 30 caps and South Africa, throughout history the closest rivals of the All Blacks in terms of achievement, are at a crossroads, their future hinging on the mix and the quality of players who emerge from their development system.
Coetzee, like Jones, is looking to turn a team renowned for its prowess in the set pieces into one that does the unexpected in attack, which is one reason why April, a fly-half who attacks the line and gets the ball wide, has profited from the unavailability of Handre Pollard. “We cannot just chuck away what has been the strength of Springbok rugby,” said Coetzee. “We love abrasiveness and the collisions. That will never go away. One area where we can evolve is the speed at which we do things. That is what we need to get right. It is not something you will see overnight: the game is tough at the top, but if you have the right people and they buy into the plan, we can compete.”
The Stormers under Coetzee played with fluidity, but he will not have a honeymoon period. “South Africans are not very loyal: if you get beaten by the Irish, we are going to start digging up things we never knew about you,” Fikile Mbalula, the sports minister, told Coetzee after the head coach’s appointment earlier this year. And so Coetzee must blood a new generation of players, meet the transformation policy and win.
Ireland may not have had a Six Nations to remember after winning the tournament in 2014 and 2015, but they came back to draw with Wales after blowing a lead and lost by a point to France in Paris. They led England at one point in the second-half at Twickenham but were ultimately undermined by injuries at a time when they had to replace Paul O’Connell.
In charge of Ireland’s defence will be Andy Farrell, who a year ago was helping England prepare for the World Cup. They are not injury free and their head coach Joe Schmidt is not a Coetzee, or a Jones, when it comes to throwing in young players early, but on their first tour to South Africa since 2003, they will travel in more than hope.
Like England and Wales, they will have the advantage in the first Test of being better prepared with the southern hemisphere nations not having played an international since the World Cup. Jones and the Wales head coach, Warren Gatland, are returning to their homelands, which in the case of the former should be fun.
Jones has transformed the European landscape, leaving Wales and Ireland, the champions of the Six Nations between the last two World Cups, having to catch up. Gatland and Schmidt both made an immediate impact, but Wales and Ireland do not have the playing or financial resources of England which Jones is threatening to make the most of.
Gatland needs to get his mojo back having drawn into himself, giving Jones a free run with the media. Some Wales players lost their heads at Twickenham in the second half and need one of the most successful coaches ever in Europe to respond.
• This is an extract taken from The Breakdown, the Guardian’s weekly rugby union email. To subscribe, just visit this page, find The Breakdown and follow the instructions.Five McDonald’s Happy Meal Boxes.
Let’s take a look at five old McDonald’s Happy Meal boxes, and see how many tangentially related paragraphs they inspire. You may consider this a surrogate sequel to my article about old fast food bags.
God, I write about a lot of garbage!
Back to the Future Happy Meal!
Year: 1991
Wow, a Back to the Future Happy Meal?! Okay, sure, it’s based on the animated series rather than the movies, but this is still pretty Big Time.
(And besides, the seemingly little-loved cartoon series definitely had its charms, not the least of which being an impressive amount of continuity between it and the movies. The show actually remembered and factored in what happened in the films, whereas so many other movie-to-toon adaptations ignored everything but the names and gimmicks.)
The BTTF Happy Meal set included four toys — all of which being character figurines irremovably stuck inside action-packed vehicles. With apologies to Marty, the only one worth tracking down is Doc in the DeLorean… because DeLorean.
As for the Happy Meal box, it’s one of those neat ones that doubles as a playset after a little help from scissors. I loved boxes like that. True action figure playsets were expensive, and kids rarely got new ones outside of birthdays and major religious holidays. During the off season, a Happy Meal box that worked on the same principle as Castle Grayskull was even better than a toy DeLorean.
Makin’ Movies Happy Meal!
Year: 1993
It’s rarely happens anymore, but McDonald’s used to be just as big on “self-branded” Happy Meals as they were on the co-promotional ones. In fact, those Happy Meals arguably had the best toys — like little plastic fry containers that transformed into robots, or pull-back cars that let Birdie and the Hamburglar pretend they were DLC characters in a Mario Kart game.
Admittedly, the Makin’ Movies Happy Meal isn’t a very strong example. This was an oddball mix of scaled-down “movie production” stuff, like clapboards and plastic megaphones. (Remember how easy and simple the moviemaking process seemed as a kid? All you needed was a fancy chair, and paraphernalia borrowed from pro-wrestling managers.)
I never minded these “homegrown” Happy Meals. At the time, the various McDonald’s mascots were as thrilling as any cartoon character. I grew up never really understanding those jokes about skipping commercials, since to me they were often the best parts of the shows. I liked the Smurfs, but if I was gonna get up at 7:30 Saturday morning to watch them, they definitely needed Ronald during the intermissions.
Dinosaurs Happy Meal!
Year: 1992
Believe it or not, this was one of the best-ever Happy Meal sets. Actually, these Dinosaurs figures were even better than the bigger ones that you had to buy from KB Toys.
Attached to each well-detailed figure was a length of piping, ending in some kind of plastic thingamajig. When you messed around with that thingamajig, the figures moved their articulated parts, seemingly without your help!
Baby Sinclair, to some the show’s most irritating character, was still the clear breakout star. His Happy Meal figure — which shook in such fashion that it’d line up perfectly with 90% of Neil Young’s discography — must have been the chaser.
I have several of the boxes from this Happy Meal set, and while they’re all winners, nothing tops the sight of Baby Sinclair ravenously devouring fictitious cereal while his milk morphs into a speech balloon, as if to suggest that Baby Sinclair’s milk has its own thoughts. (This whole scene doubles as a game, too. You’re supposed to match up the broken cookie halves. Personally, I’d prefer to keep them separate, as there are so just so few cookies shaped like watermelon slices and mushroom caps.
Neopets Happy Meal!
Year: 2004
Confession time! I was working at Nickelodeon in 2005, when Viacom bought Neopets — then the world’s leading virtual pet site, with around a bazillion members and oodles of financial potential. While my team had zilch to do with the site, we were still instructed to familiarize ourselves with it, in case we ever needed to do any Neopets-related TV promos or internal tapes. (Ultimately, I did both.)
Well, lo and behold, I ended up becoming so obsessed with Neopets that I was still playing long after leaving Nickelodeon… and even after Viacom sold off the brand. I rarely go on these days, but I still make sure my accounts are safe, and that no jerks autoconverted my UC Faerie Kyrii.
Neopets, one of the stickiest sites for tweens, became the stickiest site for a guy in his twenties. And then in his thirties. For me, it was the great escape, both from real life and from my sorta unusual “web” life. There I dressed pictures of purple dragons in ridiculous clothing, and trained sentient apples to fight mechanized poodles. I have to admit… for a while, I was out of control.
Neopets was something I did in private, so I never paid much attention to the offshoot products. (I believe the Happy Meals came with lightweight plush dolls, acting as gateway drugs to make kids want the bigger retail varieties.) It’s pretty amazing that a goofy “fake pet” website grew popular enough to warrant a Happy Meal… and popular enough to make a giant television network to tell its employees to adopt Cybunnies.
Tiny Toons Happy Meal!
Year: 1992
Last up is the official Tiny Toons Happy Meal, featuring some kind of weird car toys that I can’t be bothered to describe more accurately.
I have bittersweet memories of Tiny Toons. I hinted at this in an older article, but the series debuted when I was in the sixth grade. The first year of junior high. I quickly learned that “kid stuff” had a new definition, and that if you didn’t want palms to the forehead, you had to be careful about what you admitted to liking.
Comic books? Those were fine. Toys? No way. Cartoons? Only if they aired in primetime, and especially if any characters made use of the word “ass.” It was a dangerous dance of knowing what to hide and what to cop to.
A show like Tiny Toons, even with its hip ‘90s lingo and references to things only forty-year-olds could’ve known about, was definitely not on the “admit list.” I saw the effects of ignoring this rule live and in person.
I dunno. Maybe I just cared too much about what other people thought? After all, it was around this same time that I had my first panic attack — ironically at McDonald’s — when a group of kids from school wandered in and saw me eating cheeseburgers with my mother, with a stupid Happy Meal box on full display. I can’t remember which Happy Meal, but the dates are lining up pretty perfectly: It may have very well been the Tiny Toons one.
Screw you, Buster Bunny. I wanted Julie to think I was cool.This weekend, I’m going to be riding Chinatown Express style down to the District of Columbia to hang out with one of the very best people, my friend Navarro.
I know Navarro from years of awesome friendship, but you may know him better as the brain behind the comic I linked to yesterday, Lifetime Supply (Feat. Navarro), a comic considered by some critics to be the finest Cowbirds in Love strip ever made.
Pretty hurtful since I didn’t even write it, but hey, what are you gonna do?
Anyway, what this means is I may not have time to really put my all into this comic this weekend. I probably won’t have access to a scanner. Maybe I’ll MS Paint it up like I MS Painted up Lifetime Supply. Maybe!
That’ll be real old school, which is perfect, because Navarro’s a real old school kind of guy.ParisDanish newspapers presented a united front on Thursday in solidarity with French satirical week Charlie Hebdo and in defiance of extremists who want to stifle the freedom of the press.
Dailies Jyllands-Posten, Politiken, Berlingske and Information all paid tribute to the victims of Wednesday’s terror attack in Paris that killed 12.
Politiken and Berlingkse both ran front page drawings, with the left-leaning Politiken showing a broken pencil continuing to draw and the right-leaning Berlingske depicting an issue of Charlie Hebdo riddled with bullet holes. Information, like many French newspapers, ran ‘Nous sommes tous Charlie Hebdo’ (We are all Charlie Hebdo), while Jyllands-Posten’s cover was pure black with a quote on “the free world’s united project to protect our democratic society”.
While Politiken, Berlingske and Information all reprinted numerous Charlie Hebdo covers, including the ‘Charia Hebdo’ cover from 2011, Jyllands-Posten did not.
Jyllands-Posten triggered global protests by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005. The editor behind those publications said Wednesday that French weekly Charlie Hebdo had "paid the highest price" for defending press freedom.
See also: Charlie Hebdo stood by Danish newspaper
"Charlie Hebdo didn't shut up... and they have now paid the highest price for that," former culture editor Flemming Rose told Jyllands-Posten.
"It sends a shiver down my spine. Thinking about the people in Paris, what they're experiencing now. In addition to shock, I'm not surprised. If you look at what's happened in Europe over the past 10 years, since Jyllands-Posten’s Muhammad cartoons were published, time after time there have been threats and even violence," he continued.
Jyllands-Posten reportedly raised security after the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo.
"Here at Jyllands-Posten we live with extensive security measures. There have been a whole raft of incidents concerning Islam and violence" over the past 10 years or so, he said.
Rose commissioned 12 cartoons of the Islamic prophet that were published on September 30, 2005, causing angry and sometimes deadly protests worldwide. The cartoons were reprinted by Charlie Hebdo in 2006.
In 2011, Pakistan-born Chicago resident Tahawwur Hussain Rana was sentenced to 14 years in prison for plotting an aborted attack on Jyllands-Posten and for supporting a banned Pakistani militant group.
In 2012, a Danish court sentenced three Swedish nationals and a Tunisian living in Sweden to 12 years behind bars for committing "terrorism" with a plot to kill Jyllands-Posten staff.It's no secret that Samsung scaled back on bloatware with the Galaxy S6, reducing the clutter and hopefully giving you a leaner, meaner smartphone. However, there's one more treat in store: you can cull many of the apps that are included, too. XDA forum member Jeshter2000 has noticed that a pre-release Galaxy S6 edge lets him disable or uninstall many of the preloaded programs, including some of those from Google and Samsung. If you'd rather ditch S Voice entirely and rely solely on Google's (frankly superior) native voice commands, you can. So long as this carries through to the GS6 you buy in stores, it'll represent a big change of heart for Samsung -- the company is notorious for bundling redundant, non-removable apps, but it's now determined to give you much more control.PoliZette Trump: Clinton Corruption a Threat to ‘Our Constitutional System’ GOP nominee hammers Clinton in wake of FBI bombshell, 'biggest political scandal since Watergate'
Donald Trump lambasted Hillary Clinton for her “corruption” that “threatens the very foundations of our constitutional system” during a rally Saturday in Colorado the day after the FBI announced it had reopened its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server.
The GOP nominee speculated the evidence newly found by the FBI must be “so overwhelming” because “they wouldn’t have done this unless it was overwhelming.” Trump urged the American people to fight back against the deeply entrenched corruption of the political establishment and Clinton at the voting booth come Nov. 8.
“A vote for Hillary is a vote to surrender our government to public corruption, graft and cronyism that threatens the very foundations of our constitutional system.”
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“A vote for Hillary is a vote to surrender our government to public corruption, graft and cronyism that threatens the very foundations of our constitutional system,” Trump told the crowd gathered in Golden, Colorado. “What makes us exceptional is that we are a nation of laws and that we are equal – we are equal under those laws. Hillary’s corruption shreds that foundational principle.”
Trump warned of deep cultural implications if the corruption of the political class and the distrust of the government among the people continued unchecked.
“But if our system isn’t properly run it becomes detached and the people become detached. Our society becomes unhinged and unplugged,” Trump said. “When the powerful can get away with anything because they have the money and the connections to rig the system, then the laws toward moral authority no longer exist.”
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Trump noted that, “real change also means getting rid of the corruption in Washington.”
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“This is the biggest political scandal since Watergate, and it’s everybody’s deepest hope that justice at last can be properly delivered,” Trump declared. “Hillary has nobody to blame but herself for her mounting legal troubles. Her criminal action was willful, deliberate, intentional and purposeful.”
The GOP nominee said the Department of Justice mishandled the initial investigation into Clinton’s emails and let her off the hook this summer.
“Hillary should have been convicted long ago. She should have been convicted,” Trump said. “This is what we mean when we call it a ‘rigged’ system. This is what we mean.”
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“Public corruption is a grave and profound threat to a democracy. Government corruption spreads outward like a cancer and infects the operations of the government itself. If the corruption is not removed, then the people are not able to have faith in their government,” Trump added. “It deadens and saps the spirit of civic participation when you see what’s gone on. Corruption decays our trust in institutions and our legal system itself. When the outcome is fixed, when the system is rigged, people lose hope – not only in the system, but in our country itself.”
With only 10 days left until Nov. 8, Trump asked the American people vote for change and to hold their elected officials accountable.
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“We must and we will save America and that is why my contract with the American voter begins with a plan to end government corruption and to take our country back from the special interests and the donors,” Trump said. “I want the entire corrupt Washington establishment to hear … the words of us – not me, it’s us. When we win on November 8th, we are going to Washington, D.C. and we will drain the swamp.”Chapter 4 The Role of the Jury IN a jury trial, the judge represents the letter of the law as voted by legislators and interpreted by the highest court of the land, and also considers the precedents of other court decisions. The prosecutor represents the interests of the society and the judicial system. The defense counsel represents the interests of the accused. But it is the jury that judges the validity of the law, its intent, and the guilt or innocence of the accused. A juror has the responsibility to vote his convictions, no matter what the other jurors vote. Frequently we hear of a jury’s vote which is not unanimous when the first polling is conducted. Eventually, however, all jurors finally yield to persuasion or to the pressure to support the jurors who are the strongest or most numerous voices in the group. Each juror’s vote of guilty or not guilty must be respected by other members of the jury and by the court. To yield one’s own conviction to the pressure of the majority is to fail in God-given responsibility as a juror. In reality, each juror stands as a judge. He/she represents the highest judge in the land. The judgment of the jury in favor of the accused cannot be overturned. If one juror withstands the pressures of his fellow jurors and maintains a "not guilty" verdict, even though the other jurors have voted for the "guilty" verdict, it is a hung jury and the judge cannot pronounce guilt on the accused. However, in such a case, the prosecutors do have the right to reprosecute the case in court. The juror must take his role seriously, and it is his responsibility to understand his duties and obligations. Ultimately, in any trial it is the jurors who are the judges. In that sense, the term judge is a misnomer. Sometimes, however, equally significant as the evidence that is presented, is the kind of evidence which the judge rules as inadmissible, or to be struck from the record. While such evidence may be legally inadmissible, it may have great impact upon the guilt or innocence of the accused. Of course every juror must take a common sense and responsible attitude to his duties. For the most part, judges will attempt to be impartial and to direct the trial according to the best principles of fairness. But it is important that jurors not take this matter for granted. If it were true that judges never erred in these matters, then there would be no likelihood of a higher court overturning a lower court judge’s decision. The juror must do all in his or her power to ensure that he/she is not so overawed by the law, nor by his own lack of legal training, as to allow himself to put aside his good judgment when evaluating the facts of a case. In 1794, the Supreme Court conducted a jury trial, and during that trial, stated, It is presumed, that the juries are the best judges of fact; it is, on the other hand, presumed that the courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your [the jury’s] power of decision Citizen’s Rulebook, p. 11 In another case, the State of Georgia versus Brailsford, et al., it was stated, You have the right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy. Ibid. In the case of U.S. versus Dougherty it was stated that, The jury has an unreviewable and unreversible power... to acquit in disregard of the instructions of the law given by trial judge. Ibid. It is almost certain that a majority of jurors who accept jury duty have no understanding of these principles; and without understanding of them there is no likelihood that they are going to exercise this responsibility in the jury deliberation. The Dougherty trial spoke of jury lawlessness as follows, Jury lawlessness is the greatest corrective of law in its actual administration. The will of the state at large imposed on a reluctant community, the will of the majority imposed on a vigorous and determined minority, find the same obstacle in the local jury that formerly confronted kings and ministers. Ibid. The term lawlessness used here does not mean that the jury has broken the law or that the jury is in danger of indictment. Rather it means that the jury displays a willingness to nullify bad law. (Ibid.) That is a power rarely understood by jurors. When a judge instructs the jury that it must judge according to the law as explained by the judge, this is in violation of the very intent of trial by jury, and of the protective justice of the nation. Jurors are at liberty to put aside any such instruction from the judge if it flies in the face of the concept of common justice. To follow such instruction from a judge will often lead honorable men and women on a jury, who, while recognizing the injustice of the law in respect to the person on trial, will nevertheless wrongly believe it their duty to convict the defendant because he has indeed broken the law. The greatest loyalty that a citizen can exercise in such circumstances, both to uphold the civil and religious freedom of the citizens of the nation and the intent of the Constitution, is to return a "not guilty" verdict in the face of the specific details of the law. For this principle to operate properly, the jurors must come to a trial without preconceived notions as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Nor are the jurors to come with an anti-government mind-set, otherwise such a juror will be inclined to vote in favor of the defendant, even when he is patently guilty of a hideous felony. In this way, the jury is able to maintain the justice of a nation, or to peaceably restore the liberty of the nation. (Ibid., p. 13). Such freedom is the cornerstone of the strength of a great nation. In an article published in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, entitled, "What Judges Don’t Tell the Jury," it was stated, At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the jury’s role as defense against political oppression was unquestioned in American jurisprudence. This notion survived until the 1850s when prosecutions under the Fugitive Slave Act were largely unsuccessful because juries refused to convict. Then judges began to erode the institution of free juries, leading to the abused compromise that is the current state of the law. While our courts uniformly state juries have the power to return a verdict of not guilty whatever the facts, they routinely tell jurors the opposite. Further, the courts will not permit the defendants or their counsel to inform the jurors of their true power. A lawyer who made... Hamilton’s argument would face professional discipline and charges of contempt of court. By what logic should jurors have the power to acquit a defendant but no right to know about that power? The court decisions that have suppressed the notion of jury nullification cannot resolve this paradox. More than logic has suffered. As originally conceived, juries were to be a kind of safety valve, a way to soften the bureaucratic right of the judicial system by introducing the common sense of the community. If they are to function effectively as the "conscience of the community," jurors must be told that they have the power and the right to say no to a prosecution in order to achieve a greater good. To cut jurors off from this information is to undermine one of our most important institutions. Perhaps the community should educate itself. The citizens called for jury duty could teach the judges a needed lesson in civics. Minneapolis Star and Tribune, November 30, 1984 As presented in Citizen's Rulebook. The issue of jury rights and responsibilities was featured on CBS Evening News, June 10, 1995. Anchorman Dan Rather stated, A jury is supposed to decide facts. Before a jury begins deliberating, the judge gives instructions about what the law is and how to apply the law to the case. But some jurors are now getting instructions from another source, and the message is that they should ignore any law they don’t agree with. Reporter Peter Van Sant commented, These people reporting for jury duty in El Cajon, California, are being told they have an absolute power: the power to simply vote not guilty if they don’t like the law that’s been broken. Van Sant was reporting upon the activities of an organization known as the Fully Informed Jury Association. Van Sant described the organization as— a collection of patriots who simply want jurors to know that they have power to judge the law as well as the defendant, that they can vote their conscience, even if it grieves the evidence and the judge’s instructions. An unidentified judge was quoted as telling a jury, You may not question the wisdom of any rule or law that I have announced to you. The convictions of the founding fathers of the American nation were on the side of the Fully Informed Jury Association, not that judge. An article in The Washington Times prescribed a rather ambivalent view of the concept of jury nullification. In the article, Ron Christie addresses the issue raised by unnamed legal scholars who advocate jury nullification [of a law] as a moral alternative to sentencing criminals guilty of non-violent crimes. Christie acknowledges the valid role of jury nullification in past history, e.g. in the cases of those who violated the 1793 and 1850 Fugitive Slave Acts. Thus many guilty of breaking the law were found not guilty by compassionate juries who determined that the particular law was unfair. Christie then asks, Is an unfair law a law at all? While this is a good question in theory, in practice a bad law is law until overturned by Congress, a court or a jury. (Ron Christie, The Washington Times, July 22, 1997) What concerns Christie is that whereas in the past jury nullification has been used to overturn unjust laws, presently he believes that many advocates of jury nullification are urging such nullification for laws that do serve a justifiable role. We agree with him that efforts to use nullification to overthrow laws against possession, use and distribution of street drugs is a dangerous misuse of jury nullification. But we would add that the misuse of jury nullification is not a ground for denying its use when unjust laws have been passed. We believe juries should seek, in future cases whenever possible, to nullify laws such as the limitation of human religious liberty as voted by the Supreme Court in Smith versus the State of Oregon, 1990. (See chapter 7 entitled "Erosion of the First Amendment," and for the protection of citizens against being subjected to torture in any form to obtain confessions, see chapter 8 entitled "The Supreme Court |
made public because it would "significantly undermine his ability to serve as a proactive co-operator".
So who has Papadopoulos spoken to since his arrest? And what sorts of topics could he have discussed?
Image copyright Reuters
According to Dan Dale of the Toronto Star, a former prosecutor told him the term "proactive co-operator" can indicate someone who is willing to wear a wire tap.
HotAir Blog goes through an extended what-if scenario that envisions how Papadopoulos could go about surreptitiously gathering incriminating details from members of Trump's campaign inner circle. He could ask for their "advice" on how to disrupt Mr Mueller's investigation after disclosing that he had been arrested.
"Suddenly those people woke up this morning and realised they'd had conversations with Papadopoulos recently about how to throw Mueller off the trail and only now do they realise he's been in cahoots with Mueller for three months," the theory goes. "Hoo boy."
Hoo boy, indeed.
Manafort hire shows bad judgement
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as his campaign manager Paul Manafort and daughter Ivanka look on during Trump's walk through at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland
Even if, as Mr Trump writes in a tweet, Manafort's alleged illegal activities occurred "years ago", before he took a senior position in the Trump campaign, it still reflects poorly on the then-candidate's personnel choices.
It was clear at the time Manafort came on board with Mr Trump that he had some questionable dealings in his past - including work for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, Philippine ex-leader Ferdinand Marcos and a group with ties to Pakistani intelligence.
Like many politicos in Mr Trump's orbit, Manafort was thrust into the campaign spotlight with little background vetting because more established hands wanted nothing to do with the upstart candidate's presidential efforts.
The decision to run with Manafort, who was backed by Trump confidante Roger Stone, has come back to haunt his presidency.
Manafort move could set stage for more indictments
Part of the case against Manafort - that he was operating as an undisclosed agent for a foreign government - echoes similar allegations made against another Trump associate, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
Flynn resigned his White House post after revelations that he had lied about discussing US sanctions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016. It was later disclosed that Flynn was also working for the Turkish government - something he didn't disclose on his relevant government forms.
If Manafort can face charges for his Ukrainian involvement, Flynn may be in jeopardy as well.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption How Michael Flynn became entangled in Russia probe
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern also theorise that Mr Mueller's case against Manafort for financial misdeeds relating to foreign income could serve as a blueprint for a future case against Mr Trump's own business organisation, which also brings in a fair amount of revenue from foreign sources.
"This is an indictment that should terrify Trump in that it shadows and hints at his own unlawful conduct," they write.
Mr Trump wasn't named in the Manafort indictment, but the message may have been sent nevertheless.
Will Manafort co-operate?
Image copyright Reuters
Then there's the million-dollar question. If Manafort and Gates are each staring at double-digit prison terms if convicted, might they follow Papadopoulos's lead and seek to strike a deal with Mr Mueller in exchange for leniency?
Papadopoulos, of course, is a figure from the edges of the Trump campaign. Manafort, for months, was at the heart of it.
Mr Mueller and his veteran team of prosecutors know how to build a case against a large enterprise. Start with the easy targets, then offer a deal. Work your way up from the bottom. Reward those who co-operate early, and throw the book at the hold-outs. Turn the screws, and have your targets constantly looking over their shoulders.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Manafort's indictment: Where did all the money go?
Manafort and Gates may have nothing to bargain with - the White House insists that there is nothing there. If they do, however, this rollercoaster ride is only just beginning.2015-2016 Ranking
The 50 Best Teachers In America
Our exclusive 2015-16 ranking of the best instructors as ranked by their peers
If our teacher survey were the Ryder Cup, they'd be adding all of Europe to the Great Britain & Ireland team (like they did in 1979) to try to make it competitive. That's how tough it is to unseat Butch Harmon.
Related: The best teachers in your state
Harmon dominated the voting for the eighth time in nine surveys since 2000. This year he finished with almost twice the votes (a combination of raw votes and top-10 ratings) of No. 2-ranked Chuck Cook. Harmon didn't coast after his record winning margin on the 2013-'14 survey. His students won more than a dozen events worldwide in the past two years, including Phil Mickelson at the 2013 British Open and Rickie Fowler at the Players Championship earlier this year.
Acclaimed teachers Jim McLean, David Leadbetter, Mike Bender, Mike Adams, Jim Hardy, Martin Hall, Todd Anderson and Hank Haney fill out the top 10. Jordan Spieth's rise didn't go unnoticed by the voting panel of more than 1,100 teachers nationwide. Cameron McCormick, Spieth's coach, made the highest debut at No. 17. He's joined by newcomers James Sieckmann, Chris Como, James Leitz and Joe Hallett. This list is the first since 2001 without Ben Doyle, the famous California teacher who passed away last December.
2014 Ranking in parentheses
★ New to the rankingYour car is always listening. Not for your voice, like the Amazon Echo or Siri, but for an electronic signal, such as the coded "unlock" signal from your electronic key fob. If it's a newer car model, you might not have to press any buttons; just approach your car and the doors will unlock automatically. In some cars, the engine will even turn on.
Wirelessly unlocking your car is convenient, but it comes at a price. Criminals can easily intercept the key fob's signal and open your car without setting off any alarms. If you have a true keyless car model, they might be able to just drive away. Let's look at how criminals pull this off and what you can do to keep your car safe.
How your car's security system works
As you've probably noticed, you can't just open your car with any old radio signal. You need your specific key fob to do the job, and there's a reason.
A key fob uses a computer chip to create a unique code that it sends to your car's security system. The car also has a chip that uses the same algorithm to generate codes. If the codes match up, the car opens. There's a bit more to it, but those are the basics.
How criminals attack #1
Since each key fob/car security pair is unique, and each one can create billions of codes, hackers shouldn’t stand a chance. But it turns out that a popular system from Megamos Crypto isn't as secure everyone thought.
Researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Birmingham found that by intercepting the wireless signal just twice, they could narrow down the possible combinations from billions to just 200,000. After that, a computer can figure out the code in just half an hour and unlock the car.
In a real-world application, a thief could sit on a street and gather wireless signals as car owners enter and exit their vehicles. Then overnight they could steal a number of cars. Click here to find out if your car is at risk from this kind of attack.
Still, it takes a skilled car thief or hacker to carry out this kind of attack, so the odds of it happening to you are slim. But thanks to always-on key fobs, there's another risk that's much more likely to happen.
How criminals attack #2
Always-on key fobs present a serious weakness in your car's security. As long as your keys are in range, anyone can open the car and the system will think it's you. That's why newer car models won't unlock until the key fob is within a foot of them.
But for less than $100, criminals can get an amplifier that detects key fob signals from up to 300 feet away and then transmits them to your car. In other words, your keys could be in your house, and criminals could walk up to your car and open it. This isn't just a theory; it's actually happening.
Steps to stop car thieves
Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take to keep hackers from stealing your signal. You can buy a signal-blocking pouch that can hold your keys, like the Hack-Blocking Card Pouch I sell in the Komando Shop.
If you don’t want to spend any money, you can stick your key fob into the refrigerator or freezer. The multiple layers of metal will block your key fob's signal. Just check with the fob's manufacturer to make sure that freezing your key fob won't damage it.
If you're not hot on freezing your key fob, you can do the same thing with your microwave oven. (Hint: Don't turn it on.) Stick your key fob in there, and criminals won't be able to pick up its signal. Like any seasoned criminal, they'll just move onto an easier target.
Since your key fob's signal is blocked by metal, you can also wrap it up in aluminum foil. While that's the easiest solution, it can also leak the signal if you don't do it right. Plus, you might need to stock up on foil. You can also make a foil-lined box to put your keys in, if you're in a crafting mood.
You should also be aware that this kind of signal stealing isn't a problem just for car key fobs. Newer passports and other I.D. cards contain radio frequency identification chips that enable criminals to use a high-powered RFID reader to steal your information from a distance. You don't need aluminum foil, however. Explore the line of stylish RFID-blocking wallets, purses and passport cases I sell in the Komando Shop.
Key fob hacking isn't the only danger to modern cars. Learn how hackers can take control of cars through their entertainment systems and other avenues of attack.
On the Kim Komando Show, the nation's largest weekend radio talk show, Kim takes calls and dispenses advice on today's digital lifestyle, from smartphones and tablets to online privacy and data hacks. For her daily tips, free newsletters and more, visit her website at Komando.com. Kim also posts breaking tech news 24/7 at News.Komando.com.?From Venture Bros. co-creator Jackson Publick’s blog:
We’ve recently signed a new contract with adultswim to produce two more seasons of The Venture Bros.
Doc
and I officially started writing last week. Though, in truth, we
technically started writing season 5 last year when we accidentally
brainstormed a handful of (we think) pretty hot new stories while we
were writing the season 4 finale. Our goal is to have enough scripts to
comfortably begin pre-production by June.
But wait…that’s not all!
Our contract also includes a long-form (60-90 min.) Venture Bros.
special. Don’t ask me when we’ll make it, what it’s going to be about,
or whether it’ll be on TV or direct-to-DVD, because we don’t have a clue
yet. Nevertheless: good news!
Tell them what else they get, Jackson…
We’ve been secretly working on an 11 minute Venture Bros.
special for the past couple of months. A sort of light-hearted, one-off
little aperitif we’re producing and animating entirely in-house at Titmouse Studios in NY and LA. It will premiere some time this summer.Governor Cuomo calls for an investigation into RG&E emergency response efforts Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Video
ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC-TV) - Governor Cuomo was back in Rochester on Saturday and says he is planning to launch an investigation into RG&E's emergency response efforts once the storm cleanup has passed.
Cuomo said that extreme weather should be considered the new norm and that utility companies, like RG&E and National Grid need to be prepared to handle these situations.
Cuomo praised National Grid for their power restoration efforts and said that RG&E did not do what they needed to do to be prepared.
"I do not consider three days to be an adequate response plan," said Cuomo.
Monroe County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo and Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren were also at the press conference. Both women encouraged residents to take advantage of the county and city shelters that are open.
Cuomo said that the next step, once Monroe County is out of the emergency stage, will be to conduct a damage assessment to see if the county qualifies for federal aid.Tag A Dutch cartoon of children playing tag, 1860s Players 2 or more Setup time 0 to 1 minutes Playing time No limit Random chance Low Skill(s) required Running, stalking, hiding, observation
Tag, also called it, tiggy or tick, is a playground game that involves two or more players chasing other players in an attempt to "tag" or touch them, usually with their hands. There are many variations; most forms have no teams, scores, or equipment. Usually when a person is tagged, the tagger says, "Tag, you're 'it'!".The last one tagged during tag is "it" for the next round.
Basic rules [ edit ]
Children playing a version of tag
A group of players (two or more) decide who is going to be "it", often using a counting-out game such as eeny, meeny, miny, moe. The player selected to be "it" then chases the others, attempting to get close enough to "tag" one of them (touching them with a hand) while the others try to escape.[1] A tag makes the tagged player "it". In some variations, the previous "it" is no longer "it" and the game can continue indefinitely, while in others, both players remain "it" and the game ends when all players have become "it".
There are many variants which modify the rules for team play, or place restrictions on tagged players' behavior. A simple variation makes tag an elimination game, so those tagged drop out of play.[2] Some variants have a rule preventing a player from tagging the person who has just tagged them (known as "no tag-backs", "no returns", or "can't tag your master").[3]
Base and truce terms [ edit ]
Players may be safe from being tagged under certain circumstances: if they are within a pre-determined area, off the ground, or when touching a particular structure. Traditional variants are Wood tag, Iron tag, and Stone tag, when a player is safe when touching the named material.[3] This safe zone has been called a "gool", "ghoul", or "Dell",[4][5] probably a corruption of "goal".[6] The term "gool" was first recorded in print in Massachusetts in the 1870s, and is common in the northern states of the US. Variants include gould, goul, and ghoul, and alternatives include base and home.[7] In the United Kingdom, the base is frequently known as "den". In much of Canada and parts of the northern United States, the state or home base of being immune from tagging is known as "times" or "T."
Players may also make themselves safe from being tagged by the use of a truce term. When playing the game tag, some may cross fingers as to let others know that they, the player, cannot be it. Yet, this rule may only come into play if the crossing of fingers is shown, if the fingers are not shown to the person that is it, then the crossing does not count.
Bans and restrictions [ edit ]
Tag and other chasing games have been banned in some schools in the United States due to concerns about injuries, complaints from children that it can lead to harassment and bullying, and that there is an aspect to the game that possesses an unhealthily predatory element to its nature.[8][9] In 2008, a 10-year-old boy in Omaha, Nebraska died from brain injuries suffered from falling onto a metal pole while playing tag.[10] A school dinner lady in Dorset was left partially paralyzed after a boy playing tag ran into her in 2004; her claim for damage was rejected by three Court of Appeal judges, who ruled that the boy had not broken any school rules by playing the game.[11]
A principal who banned tag in her school criticized the game for creating a "self-esteem issue" in nominating one child as a victim, and noted that the oldest and biggest children usually dominated the game.[12] A dislike of elimination games is another reason for banning tag.[13] In some schools only supervised tag is allowed, sometimes with a type of tagging called butterfly tagging—a light tap on the shoulders, arms or upper back.[14]
The president of the US National Association for Sport and Physical Education said that "Tag games are not inherently bad... teachers must modify rules, select appropriate boundaries and equipment, and make sure pupils are safe. Teachers should emphasize tag games that develop self-improvement, participation, fair play, and cooperation."[13]
Variants [ edit ]
British bulldogs [ edit ]
The game "British bulldogs" (sometimes also called Bullrush, Cat and Mouse, Red Rover, Cats and Mice, Sharks and Minnows, Spiders and Flies, or Octopus) is mainly played in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries. It is banned from many schools. One or two players start as the "bulldogs", who stand in the middle of the play area, while the other players stand at one end of the area. The aim is to run from one end of the area to the other without being caught by the bulldogs. When a player is caught, they become a bulldog themselves. The winner is the last player "free".[15]
Chain tag [ edit ]
This is a variant of Build Ups in which each person to be caught joins hands with "it", and the chain thus formed must chase the others as a pair. As more people are caught they too join hands with the "it" players, forming a lengthening chain. This variation is also called Blob, or in some places, Gargon. Only those at the ends of the chain are able to catch someone, as they are the only ones with a free hand. A variant has chains of four splitting in two.
Duck, duck, goose [ edit ]
How duck, duck, goose is played
In this game, usually played by young children, the players sit in a circle facing inward. One player, the "picker" or "fox", walks around tapping or pointing to each player in turn, calling each of them a "duck", until finally announcing one of his choosing to be the "goose". The goose then rises and runs around the circle in the same direction as the picker, attempting to return to their seat before the "picker" can sit back down in the vacated spot. In Minnesota, this game is referred to as "Duck, duck, gray duck".[16]
Freeze tag [ edit ]
Also known as Stuck in the Mud, Scarecrow, Sticky-Glue, Zombie Tag, Ice-and-Water (in Asia) or Ice-and-Fire (in Malaysia), players who are tagged are "stuck in the mud" or "frozen" and must stand in place with their arms stretched out until they are unfrozen. An unstuck player can perform an action to unfreeze them, such as tagging them, crawling between their legs, or "flushing" them by hitting their outstretched hand. The last person standing, for most games, is usually the next person who will be "it".
Kiss chase [ edit ]
Kiss chase, also referred to as Catch and Kiss, is a tag variant in which tagging is performed by kissing.[1] All members of one gender are "it" at once and chase players of the opposite sex until everyone is caught, then the roles are reversed.[17] A variant is that the player chosen to be "it" will, with assistance from players of the same gender, chase all members of the opposite sex and kiss one of them, who is then "it" on behalf of the other gender.
Last tag [ edit ]
Last tag was played in the early 20th century, when it was a way to say goodbye when leaving school for home. A player tags another and makes them "it" before leaving on their way home. There is no tagging back. It was a point of honor not to be left with the last tag. If a player is unable to tag anyone by the end of the game, they became "it" the next day.[18]
Octopus tag [ edit ]
Octopus tag is a mix between Red Rover and tag.[19] "It", or "octopus", attempts to tag the other players. The playing field is known as the ocean. The players, or "fish", line up along one side of the ocean. When the Octopus calls out, "Come fishies come!", they try to run to the other side without getting tagged. In a variation, once the fish run to the other side without getting tagged, the game pauses until the octopus starts it again. Upon getting tagged the fish become "seaweed" and must freeze or sit where they were tagged, but they can wave their arms around and assist the Octopus in tagging other fish within their reach. The last fish to be tagged becomes the next Octopus. This game can also be played in the water and then it is called Sharks and Minnows.[citation needed]
Team tag [ edit ]
Cops and robbers [ edit ]
Cops and robbers, sometimes called "jail", "jail tag", "team tag", "chase", "police and thief", "prisoner's base"[20] "jailbreak", "releaseo" or "manhunt",[18] has players split into two teams: cops and robbers.
A. M. Burrage calls this version of the game "Smee" in his 1931 ghost story of the same name.[21] The cops, who are in pursuit of robbers (the team being chased), arrest the robbers by tagging and putting them in jail. Robbers can stage a jailbreak by tagging one of the prisoners without getting tagged themselves.[22] The game ends if all the robbers are in jail. In a variant, the robbers have five minutes to hide before being hunted, and only one jailbreak may be allowed per robber.
Zombie tag [ edit ]
Humans vs. Zombies is a survival game of tag, where "human" players fight off increasingly large numbers of "zombies"; if a human is "turned" (i.e. tagged), then that player becomes a zombie in turn. At the game's beginning, there are only one or two zombies; the zombies multiply by tagging humans, turning them into zombies after a period of one hour. Humans can defend themselves from zombies by using socks, marshmallows, Nerf Blasters or any other toys deemed safe and appropriate; if a zombie is hit by one of these methods of defense, they are stunned (not allowed to interact with the game in any way) for 15 seconds. The goal of the zombies is to turn all the humans; the humans, meanwhile, must outlast all the zombies.
Manhunt [ edit ]
Manhunt is a mixture of hide and seek and tag, often played during the night. One person is "it", while the other players have to hide. Then, the person who is "it" tries to find and tag them. The game is over when all players are out. Manhunt is sometimes played in teams. In one variant there is a home base in which a player is safe. That version ends when all players who are not safe are out.
Prisoner's Base [ edit ]
In Prisoner's Base, each team starts in a chain, holding hands, with one end of the chain touching the base. The end two players on each team break from the chain and try to tag each other, taking them to their base if they do. The end pair progressively break from the chain and join the tagging. As with Cops and Robbers, prisoners can be freed by tagging them in the base. The game is thought to date back to the Renaissance period, and may be inspired by the act of bride kidnapping.[23] A game of Prisoner's Base was played by members of Lewis & Clark's Corps of Discovery against a group of Nez Perce.[24][25]
What's the time, Mr Wolf? [ edit ]
One player is chosen to be Mr Wolf and stands facing away from the other players at the opposite end of the playing field. All players except Mr Wolf chant in unison "What's the time, Mr Wolf?", and Mr Wolf will answer in one of two ways: Mr Wolf may call a time - usually an hour ending in "o'clock". The other players take that many steps towards Mr Wolf. They then ask the question again. Alternatively Mr Wolf may call "Dinner time!", and turn and chase the other players back to their starting point. If Mr Wolf tags a player, that player becomes Mr Wolf for the next round.
Ringolevio [ edit ]
In Ringolevio, there are two teams. In one version, one team goes off and hides. The other team counts to a number such as 30 and then goes looking for them. In another version, each team has its own "jail", a park bench or other defendable area. The game goes on until all of one team is in jail. In many ways, Ringolevio is similar to Prisoner's Base.
Variants requiring equipment [ edit ]
The "Blind man's bluff" variant requires a blindfold to be played
Some variants of tag use equipment such as balls, paintball guns, or even flashlights to replace tagging by hand.
Blind man's bluff [ edit ]
Blind man's bluff, also known as Mr. Blind Man, is a version of tag in which one player, designated as "it", is blindfolded and attempts to tag the other players, while the other players try to avoid them.
Computer tag [ edit ]
Research students developed a version of tag played using handheld WiFi-enabled computers with GPS.[26][27]
Flashlight tag [ edit ]
Flashlight tag, also called "Army tag", "Spotlight", and "German Spotlight",[28] is played at night. Rather than physically tagging, the "it" player tags by shining a flashlight beam on other players.
Fox and geese [ edit ]
A traditional type of line tag, sometimes played in snow, is Fox and geese. The fox starts at the centre of a spoked wheel, and the geese flee from the fox along the spokes and around the wheel. Geese that are tagged become foxes. The intersections of the spokes with the wheel are safe zones.[29]
Kick the can [ edit ]
One person is "it" and a can is placed in an open space. The other players run off and hide, then it tries to find and tag each of them. Tagged players are sent to jail. Any player who has not been caught can kick the can, setting the other players free from jail.[30]
Laser tag [ edit ]
Laser tag is similar to flashlight tag, but using special equipment to avoid the inevitable arguments that arise about whether one was actually tagged. Players carry guns that emit beams of light and wear electronic equipment that can detect the beams and register being hit. The equipment often has built-in scoring systems and various penalties for taking hits. Pay-per-game laser tag facilities are common in North America.
Marco Polo [ edit ]
An aquatic American variant of blind man's bluff, most commonly played in a swimming pool, although it may also be played while swimming in shallow natural bodies of water (typically the areas near the shores of oceans, seas, and lakes). The players may be swimming, treading water, or walking on the bottom of the pool or body of water. The person designated "it" is required to close their eyes, and shouts "Marco!" at regular intervals; the other players must shout "Polo!" in response. "It" must use sound localization to find one of the other players and tag them. The tagged player then generally becomes "it," and the process repeats.
Muckle [ edit ]
Muckle (sometimes called "muckle the man with the ball", "kill-the-guy-with-the-ball",[31] "kill the carrier", among other names) is the reverse of regular tag; all of the other players chase "it". This player is denoted by carrying a ball (usually a football). When they are caught, they are tackled, or "muckled". Whoever retrieves the ball first or whoever attacks the one who is it then becomes it. Sometimes the last player arriving to tackle the former ball carrier is the next person to be it; in other variations the player with the ball throws the ball up in the air, where it is caught by another player who becomes it.
Paintball [ edit ]
Paintball is a sport in which players use compressed air guns (called paintball markers) to tag other players with paint-filled pellets. Games are usually played on commercial fields with a strict set of safety and gameplay rules.
Sock tag [ edit ]
A tube sock is filled with a small amount of flour in the toe of the sock; the sock is then gripped by the leg hole and wielded as a flail. Striking a player with any part of the sock counts as a tag.[32][33]
Spud [ edit ]
Spud is a tag variant that is best played in large, open areas. Players begin each round in a central location. "it" then throws a ball high into the air. The other players run but must stop as soon as "it" catches the ball and shouts "Spud!" It may then take three large steps toward the player of his choosing before throwing the ball at that player. If the ball hits the target, that player becomes it, and the game starts over.
Team tag sports [ edit ]
In South Asia, two sports are variants of tag, played at the team level, sometimes internationally. In Kabaddi, raiders cross a dividing line to try to tag defenders, while continuously chanting "kabbadi" on one breath while over the line.[23] It is included in the Asian Games and even has a world championship, being played throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Iran, as well as in Indian communities in Canada, Great Britain, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. It was also demonstrated in 1936 Berlin Olympics. The other tag sport is called Kho Kho.
Tag or flag rugby is a non-contact variation in which each player wears a belt that has two velcro tags attached to it, or shorts with velcro patches. The mode of play is also similar to rugby league with attacking players attempting to dodge, evade and pass a rugby ball while defenders attempt to prevent them scoring by tagging - pulling a velcro attached tag from the ball carrier. However, the "tag" in "tag rugby" is derived from the "tags" that the players wear and the children's game of tag more closely resembles touch rugby whereby a touch replaces a tackle.
See also [ edit ]Photo by Taku Fuji
It’s a rarity for a Japanese idol band to make a big breakthrough with Western audiences, but oddity BABYMETAL have managed to make it and are selling out venues across the world outside of their home country. The band is currently in the midst of their world tour in support of their album Metal Resistance and made a stop at House of Blues in Chicago, IL on May 13th.
If you’re unfamiliar with BABYMETAL, then first off where have you been, as the group has been receiving more and more buzz ever since their introduction in 2014. BABYMETAL are essentially part your standard Japanese idol pop trio, part skilled metal backing band who delivers riffs so hard you would never expect it to mash up with cute dancing and poppy vocals. Perhaps it’s the novelty of it all that works so well and keeps audiences interested, which was indicated by the sold out crowd at the House of Blues.
Kicking off the show with the intense double bass drum-packed “Babymetal Death,” the trio of Yuimetal, and Moametal and lead vocalist Su-metal made their way out onto the stage bathed in a red light fitting for the metal personas, and were welcomed by the massive cheering from the fans. They continued on powering through tracks such as the unexpectedly hip-hop influenced “Iine!,” the carefree “Gimme Chocolate!!,” recent single “KARATE” filled with an undeniably catchy chorus, as well as power ballad “The One,” which is the only English-language song the band has recorded. They came back for an encore with “Road of Resistance,” a slow starter that picks up halfway through and had been the highlight of the crowd’s intensity and moshing throughout the evening. The talented backing Kami-band also got some of their own time at the front of the stage, delivering impressive solos and showcasing the skills that are responsible for the metal part of this whole crazy act.
Whether it was a language barrier or a focus on performance, the girls did not speak to the crowd much, aside from a quick “thank you” and “see you!” towards the end of the show, a contrast to some other Japanese pop acts who will spend possibly too long breaking out into chats. The focus here was on non-stop metal, and the band delivered nearly one and a half hours of it. Music should be enjoyable and entertaining, and BABYMETAL have achieved that mission. Breaking past the seriousness of typical metal, they have created something that is different but familiar at the same time. While some fans in the crowd that evening may take this whole thing a bit too seriously, it seems that the group has no problems keeping audiences interested and returning to the live performances that never fail to deliver, achieving their goal of bringing metal to the world.
The band continues their world tour with a series of headlining shows and festival appearances throughout the summer and will finish with a closing performance at Tokyo Dome in Japan on September 19th.President Donald Trump's FCC has put the kibosh on controversial Obama-era net neutrality regulations.
At its monthly meeting Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission, led by Republican Chairman Ajit Pai, voted to repeal regulation passed in 2015 that prevented broadband companies from blocking or slowing access to websites or services. The rules also prohibited broadband companies from offering paid-priority services that could lead to internet "fast lanes."
Aaron Robinson/CNET
While many people agree with the basic principles of net neutrality, those specific rules became a lightning rod for controversy. That's because in order to get the rules to hold up in court, the FCC in 2015 reclassified broadband networks so that they fell under the same strict regulations that govern telephone networks.
Pai, who has called those rules "heavy-handed," contending that they've deterred innovation and depressed investment in building and expanding broadband networks, says he's returning the FCC to a "light touch" approach to regulation.
In November, he released a draft copy of his repeal proposal to the public.
Now playing: Watch this: Beer helps explain battle brewing over net neutrality
In a last-ditch effort to get Congress to step in and stop the vote, protesters gathered in front of Verizon stores and at the the FCC headquarters in Washington, DC. And they mounted online protests. But in the end, the vote went ahead as planned.
"The internet as we know it is not ending," Pai said. "Americans will still be able to access sites they want to visit and services they want to use. There will still be cops on the beat the way things were prior to 2015."
In case you're still unsure of what all this net neutrality stuff means, we've assembled this FAQ to put everything in plain English.
What is net neutrality?
Net neutrality is the principle that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, regardless of whether you're checking Facebook, posting pictures to Instagram or streaming movies from Netflix or Amazon. It also means that companies like AT&T, which is trying to buy Time Warner, or Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, can't favor their own content over a competitor's content.
I understand what it means not to block or slow traffic. But what's paid priority all about?
In addition to rules that prevent broadband companies from blocking or throttling access to the internet, the FCC in 2015 included a rule that banned broadband providers from charging a company, like Netflix, an extra fee to serve its customers faster than a competitor.
Net neutrality supporters say that such fees could lead to a pay-to-play internet, with large companies like Netflix, Google or Facebook paying for speedier access, while startups, which can't afford the added cost, could get left out. And that could ultimately result in fewer choices for consumers and less innovation. It could also result in higher prices for consumers, as the added costs trickle down.
Is there any benefit to getting rid of these rules?
Broadband companies said the 2015 regulations were too restrictive. They also say they've voluntarily committed to not blocking or slowing internet access, so explicit rules are unnecessary.
While no ISP has announced specific plans to offer paid-priority services, several executives say they might in the future. They argue there are certain applications -- in medicine or in the development of autonomous vehicles -- that require fast, low-latency internet connections that a paid-priority service would deliver.
"You don't want your self-driving car operating on best-effort-delivery bandwidth," Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, said last month in an interview at the Economic Club of New York. "If you have any expectation of medical professionals using wireless networks for surgery or EMS or other types of medical applications, you don't want to outlaw paid prioritization."
If broadband companies don't plan to inhibit traffic and have no plans to offer paid priority, what's the debate really about?
Fundamentally, this debate has been about whether or not the FCC should have the authority to regulate the internet.
Big companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon say they're committed to protecting net neutrality. But opposed the FCC's reclassification, in 2015, of broadband as a public utility, which allowed the agency to regulate their broadband networks like the telephone network.
But without classifying broadband as a utility, the FCC couldn't impose its 2015 rules.
Why were internet service providers so opposed to classifying broadband as a utility?
Broadband providers feared the FCC would try to set prices on their services or would require them to share their infrastructure with competitors. Pai says that the regulations have already hurt businesses and that investments |
study. Flywheel started to fail at around 1500 concurrent users and began returning 502 errors, which explains its high error rate.
Average Response Time
Average Response Time is very significant because it directly affects the user experience and perceived load time. This metric measures the time each request takes “round trip” from the browser sending the request to the server, the server processing the request, and then the response from the server back to the browser. The Average Response Time takes into consideration every round trip request/response cycle for that minute interval and calculates the mathematical mean of all response times.
Peak Response Time
This metric also measures the same “round trip” that the Average Response Time does, but instead of averaging the time for all requests, Peak Response Time is simply the single longest (slowest) time for a single request.
Average Page Completion
Average Page Completion Time is a metric that measures the amount of time from the start of the first request to the end of the final request on a page.
In regards to the specific times in this study, the test shows unusually fast Average Page Completion times. After investigating why the pages were loading so quickly, it turns out that some of the pages on the dummy website were very simple with very few requests each. While users with real websites on these providers would expect to see slower average page completion times, the tests are still valid because all providers had the same simple pages.
Throughput
Throughput is measured by the number of kilobytes per second that is being transferred. This measurement shows how data is flowing back and forth from the server(s). High throughput is a mark of good web performance under load because it shows that there aren’t any bottlenecks blocking and slowing the data transfer. Low throughput, as seen in WebSynthesis, signifies that the server is overwhelmed and is struggling to pass data to and from the server.
Interestingly, GoDaddy pushed triple the amount of data through because their admin screen had more resources being loaded. Which is why the average throughput is so high. Despite the extra data to process, they still had significantly higher average response times than most of the other providers. Anytime a site makes more requests, it slows down performance. Therefore, without so much extra data it is fair to say that GoDaddy could have possibly been faster than all the others.
Ranking
From the final point tallies, we can see that there are three clear sections.
Top Performers: Pantheon, MediaTemple, GoDaddy, and Kinsta.
Good Performers: Nexcess, LightningBase, A Small Orange, and Pagely.
Fair Performers:: FlyWheel and WebSynthesis.
Conclusion:
Overall, most of the providers did surprisingly well under the full load of 2,000 concurrent users. Even though we wanted to rank them in a definitive order, the fact of it is that most providers did not reach failure rates at all in the test. So while we were able to rank them, there were several metrics where the difference between points was negligible (ie: 1 ms average response time difference between GoDaddy and Kinsta) but still calculated in our scores.
Additionally, the test utilized in our report is only part of the full ReviewSignal study. ReviewSignal ran tests at 1,000 users and the providers that crashed were not included in the tests at 2,000. Therefore, all of the providers included in this ranking should be considered great choices for scalable WordPress hosting.
This level of high performance in all 10 providers was unexpected with such a heavy load and we were very impressed by the results.Oliver Bridgeman again denies joining Al Qaeda in Syria, instead he is teaching kids rugby league
Updated
A Queensland teenager who converted to Islam and travelled to Syria has again denied joining a terrorist organisation and has posted a video of himself teaching kids rugby league.
Oliver Bridgeman, 18, left his home town of Toowoomba in March, leaving the country under the guise of doing aid work in Indonesia.
He reportedly joined the Al Nusra Front, the official Syrian affiliate of Al Qaeda, and several Islamist factions.
Nine Network's 60 Minutes tracked Mr Bridgeman down to a refuge camp in rebel-held territory near Aleppo in Syria's north.
He said he had been there for three months doing aid work and before that was in central Syria where he was distributing aid and rebuilding huts in refugee camps.
"I have a good relationship with different rebel factions purely because of my safety," he said.
"For me to travel across Syria, I need people to protect me from being kidnapped or something like that.
"I'm not part of Al Qaeda, I've never joined a rebel group. I'm an aid worker.
"I always wanted to have a hands-on approach, [to] do my bit to ease suffering.
"I don't think I betrayed my country. I still love Australia. It is still my home.
"I'm here to help people. I'm sacrificing my comforts at home to be here."
Mr Bridgeman set up a Facebook page a few days ago, saying it was needed to counter media reports which were "blowing everything out of proportion" and "writing blatant lies".
Even though Syria is in the middle of a civil war, the teenager said he had never feared for his life or safety.
A video was posted last night, showing Mr Bridgeman teaching Syrian children how to play rugby league.
"I wanted to get them away from some of the horrors that they have," he said in the clip.
"They obviously enjoy it.
"A lot of them are orphans and suffer from post-traumatic stress or have a lot of difficult social skills."
The Australian Federal Police warned anyone who fought illegally with militia groups in areas like Syria and Iraq faced life imprisonment upon their return to Australia.
"The AFP and Australian Government agencies have, for a number of years, strongly and consistently discouraged Australians from travelling to conflict zones such as Syria and Iraq to participate in hostile activities," a spokesman said.
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, terrorism, human, syrian-arab-republic, toowoomba-4350, mermaid-beach-4218, brisbane-4000, qld
First postedAs covered on Kotaku yesterday, photos of schoolgirls doing faux manga-style martial arts moves have been popping up on forums and threads in Japan. Those photos, however, are just the tip of the iceberg.
Numerous Japanese teens, it seems, are uploading photos of themselves doing the Kamehameha attack from popular manga and anime series Dragon Ball.
Many of the photos, which also could be influenced by these floating pics, were uploaded to Twitter within the last week or so. On Twitter, Japanese teens are saying that this is how they've recently been goofing off with friends.
During the 1980s, when the Dragon Ball anime was on primetime television, kids would unleash Kamehameha attacks on each for fun at school or in the park. The difference here is that teens these days can snap digital photos and upload them for instant internet fame.
Why now? It's perhaps because a new Dragon Ball anime, Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, is slated to hit Japanese movie theatres at the end of the month. This is the first Dragon Ball animated feature to get a theatrical release in 17 years — and the first one to get viral pics of teens doing its signature move.
More manga style attacks below:
はるにゃん汰, あんなっちぇ, CHAGE, つちやれな, Ari, はりみ(^q^), Ar!$A :*), ああたん, fmmgm, ほっっくら, AnJU, NATSUNO, どやま, きょうこ, ari, 市川 [Twitter via まとめ]On Monday, the popular "Sarcastic Rover" Twitter account offered a succinct description for how difficult it is to launch a probe from Earth and place it safely on the surface of Mars: "Landing on Mars is like tossing a baseball from New York to Tokyo and having it drop into a can of soup. Also the can still has a lid on."
While we can't vouch for the scientific fidelity of the analogy, it seems apt, as many probes that try to land on Mars find a grave instead of a scientific wonderland. Four of the five Soviet landers sent to Mars failed to reach ground safely, and the one that did, Mars 3 in 1971, survived for only about 15 seconds. In 2003, Europe's Mars Express orbiter released the Beagle 2 lander, but its solar panels never fully deployed, and the vehicle never phoned home. Only NASA has had success; impressively, eight of its nine missions to the surface of Mars have made it.
Now Europe is trying again with its ExoMars mission, consisting of an orbiter and lander. On Wednesday morning at 10:42am ET (15:42 UK), the European Space Agency's 1.65-meter wide Schiaparelli lander will enter the Martian atmosphere and make a harrowing six-minute descent to the red planet's surface.
Schiaparelli will rely on its heat shield from an altitude of 121km down to about 11km above Mars, slowing from a speed of about 21,000km/h to 1,700km/h. At that point, its 12-meter parachute should deploy and slow the spacecraft further before nine hydrazine-powered thrusters arrest its descent to a few meters per second. A crushable structure will absorb the impact force at the planet's surface.
Schiaparelli is intended to land on the Meridiani Planum, a relatively smooth, flat region close to the equator in the southern highlands. Once on the surface, the probe's limited scientific package is designed to operate for a few days. The primary role of Schiaparelli will be to demonstrate this landing technology so that a planned follow-up mission in 2020, complete with a rover, can also safely reach the Martian surface.
The ExoMars program has been in various stages of planning for nearly two decades. In 2008, NASA and the European Space Agency finally reached an agreement to share costs on the two missions, as well as an orbiter and landers. Both missions would search for life and test technologies for a mission to return samples of Martian soil and rocks to Earth.
However, in February, 2012, President Obama's budget called for the cancellation of NASA's participation in the ExoMars program to pay for the James Webb Space Telescope, which continued to run over its budget allocation. At that point, the European Space Agency turned to Russia, which has long wanted to return to Mars after a series of missions in the 1970s. The Russians provided a Proton-M launch vehicle for the mission, as well as some of its scientific payload.
In addition to the lander, the Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft will remain in orbit and attempt to detect a wide range of atmospheric trace gases, particularly methane. The Gas Orbiter's aim is to determine whether these molecules are formed by biological or geological activity. It should begin collecting high quality data next March. For now, all eyes are on Wednesday's harrowing descent.It’s finally come and gone! We are officially in the midst of a new CFL campaign, and already we have headlines to talk about. In the first week of competition, Montreal hosted Ottawa on Thursday night to kick off a new weekly night of CFL action. Friday saw a rematch of the 2014 Grey Cup with Hamilton playing in Calgary. Finally, Saturday brought us 2 matches; Toronto hosting Edmonton in Fort McMurray, and the Roughriders hosting the Blue Bombers to launch another season of rivalry. Of course through 4 games there were several standout performances, but only one would result in this week’s selection as the RIVALUS Featured Player for week 1. Here’s what went down:
In the week’s first game the newly revamped Ottawa REDBLACKS arrived in Montreal to take on the Alouettes. Consistent Ottawa pressure on the Alouettes’ offensive pocket saw not 1 but 2 quarterbacks leave the game for the Al’s as both Jonathan Crompton, and Dan LeFevour would leave the game due to pressure-induced injuries. The rookie Canadian quarterback; Brandon Bridge would take the remainder of Montreal’s snaps as the young-gun settle into a comfortable rhythm before sailing an errant pass that would be intercepted by veteran defender Jovon Johnson. With a reloaded offence, Ottawa moved the ball effectively which was enough to earn Ottawa the victory by a margin of 4 points at 20-16.
On Friday night, fans got to watch the annual Grey Cup rematch as the Hamilton Tiger-Cats took on the Calgary Stampeders. With the departure of shut-down corner Delvin Breaux, the Ticats had a potential hole in their defensive secondary heading into the new season. The addition of veteran back Johnny Sears Jr. seems to have alleviated any of those concerns though as the ball-hawk was able to contribute: 3 tackles, a sack, as well as 2 interceptions; one of which was returned for a defensive touchdown. In fact, Hamilton led in the first half despite the fact that they failed to register an offensive touchdown. Calgary was not intent on letting the Tabbies beat them at home though, as several players stood out for the Stamps. Jeff Fuller put on an offensive clinic as he caught 9 balls to the tune of 148 yards. On defence, Keon Raymond had a productive night tackling 8 ball-carriers, deflecting 1 pass, and returning an interception for a touchdown himself. It was the 2013 special teams player of the year though, that would leave his mark on the game as Rene Paredes easily converted on a 50-yard field goal to beat Hamilton 24-23 with no time remaining on the clock.
In the second of 2 games on Saturday, the first meeting of the CFL’s hottest rivals took place with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers taking on Saskatchewan at Mosaic. In what would eventually be seen as one of the worst starting weeks for CFL quarterbacks in recent history, Darian Durant suffered a ruptured Achilles tendon, which will see the Riders’ pivot out for the rest of the season. Without Durant in the huddle though, the Roughriders were still productive partly thanks to their success at running the football. Both Anthony Allen, and Jerome Messam had good outings as the 2 combined for 177 rushing yards. Ultimately though, it was Drew Willy and his own offensive unit that took this game. Willy completed 88% of his passes for 325 yards and 3 touchdowns. Paris Cotton had a stellar outing as he rushed for 108 yards over 13 touches. Nick Moore and Clarence Denmark combined for 188 yards in the air as the Bombers silenced the home crowd with a score of 30-26.
By process of elimination then, week 1’s RIVALUS Featured Player must have come from the matchup between the Edmonton Eskimos and their unlikely Albertan hosts; the Toronto Argonauts. Along the same storyline as in Montreal and in Saskatchewan, Saturday afternoon was not without loss for the Eskimos. Mike Reilly, the 2014 tough man of the Edmonton locker room, fell to a knee injury due to pocket pressure from the boatmen. Although Matt Nichols came into the game looking confident, the chemistry between he and the starting receivers appeared to be lacking. On the other side of this game, we saw Toronto’s incumbent starting quarterback on the sidelines in plain clothes as Ricky Ray was still recovering from his off-season shoulder surgery. With Ray out, it was the 4th year man; Trevor Harris’ turn to steer the Argos’ ship.
By the end of Saturday’s tilt in Fort McMurray, Trevor Harris had thrown for 347 yards to 8 different receivers. What’s more impressive though, is that those numbers came in a game where Harris completed 88.9% of his throws. More impressive still? This was only Harris’ second start in the CFL. To give credit where it’s due, Toronto’s offensive game plan was nothing short of outstanding. To underscore that fact, Brandon Whitaker was able to rush the ball 14 times for 117 yards in his first outing as an Argonaut. What was more impressive though, was the way Trevor Harris was able to seamlessly run the offense by: commanding the huddle, making his reads, and making veteran decisions under tremendous pressure. On several occasions Harris moved through his route progressions only to find that all of his targets had become would-be interceptions (thanks to the Eskimos defence). Not only did Harris protect the ball in those situations, on several occasions he either exposed a blown-assignment (Brandon Whitaker’s touchdown), made the veteran decision to throw the ball dead, or use his feet to extend a play himself. Harris was making decisions like a seasoned-professional, he was seeing the field like a true veteran, and he performed as consistently as anyone could have asked for. For those reasons Trevor Harris is week 1’s RIVALUS Featured Player.
Congratulations Trevor! We look forward to seeing the progress you make towards becoming an elite quarterback in the CFL!Here are a couple of mechamagical constructs, remnants of the Machine City that have survived to the modern day Clanking Ruin. They are not commonly available and represent rare and valuable, and deadly, and expensive, items retrieved from the Ruin, sometimes as considerable loss of life.
They could just as easily await discovery by explorers of the Clanking Ruin, which allows groups of players ot find, possible, fight or otherwise take control of, and return with as spoils.
The fun should not end there.
The Lunars would be very happy to commandeer such war machines, and are unlikely to take no for an answer. If they have sufficient strength, they are just as unlikely to want to pay for them.
Other powers, like Avorax, the failed Dragonewt Ascendant, might want to keep them under wraps so as to preserve the delicate status quo that maintains in Bayside, the rough and tumble community of looters, adventurers, and explorers that work the Ruin.
Similarly, the Ankeshel Collective of Sorcerers, who have a large and well-equipped, if rather unruly, army of ne'er-do-wells as a cordon between anyone and the deeper ruins, would be only too happy to relieve, beleaguered, possibly exhausted, returning explorers, of their treasures.
Other threats are also likely. Just about anybody would be happy to own such an item, even if they only wish to sell it.
The Reaver has previously been posted here. This one is commonly called the "Manticore Variant" because of the special (and rare) bolts its shoots from its prehensile metal tail. Other variants include the Gorgon, which incorporate a plasmechanical beam generator into its tail instead, and the Dragon, which has a slashing blade affixed to the tail in place of other weapon, and can spit gouts of fire over a large area. The Reaver is not notmally fitted with a Command Matrix, and is a "Thinking" Machine, a product of the Devourer, a particular design house of mechanical monstrosity that survives to the present day Clanking Ruin. This reaver has been "retrofitted" by some enterprising, and very brave, soul. The Attuner, through the Command Matrix, can control this reaver, even, with effort, access its memories - which could go back nearly one thousand years.
The other construct is a Walking Platform. Originally contrived for the nobles and powers of the Machine City, as a conveyance that lifted them above the hoi poloi, Walking Platforms were adapted to the battlefield early in the Ten Year Siege of Zistorwal. Indeed, their ability to move through rugged terrain, carrying and protecting potent mages or warriors, was formative to the notion of creating greater and larger war-engines (perhaps we can visit them in another post).
Both these war-engines require Attunement. The process of Attunement is detailed below, and included in each engine'e write-up.
Attunement Ritual: The prospective attuner rolls on his Theurgy, Sorcery or other Magical skill to craft a ritual that will aid in his attunement of the reaver. On a success, the number of POWer dedicated to the Attunement is reduced by 1. On a special success, the POW is reduced by 2. On a critical Success, the POW is reduced by 3. Attunement does not require tis stage, but it is often advantageous to attempt it..
Attunement Roll: To Attune, a roll of POW x5 or less must be successful. If the roll is POW x5, the Attuner dedicates 5 POW to the Attunement (see Below for Dedication). Each increment of POW less that 5, reduces the dedication of POW by that number (POW x4 = 4 POW, POW x3 =3 POW, etc).
Some items, like the Reaver, require greater POWer to Attune. In this case, the amount of POW required is +3, meaning that whatever the final result of the ritual and Attunement rolls, the Dedication requires 3 more POW. So a special success on the ritual (-2 POW) and a POW x4 roll on the Attunement roll (4 POW), would be modified by +3 POW. So, -2+4+3= 5 POW Dedicated to the Attunement.
POW Dedicated to Attunement cannot be used for any other purpose in the game without breaking the Attunement. It cannot be used to cast spells, devoted to gods, etc.Despite last year's revelation where some smartphones being sold in the US were found laced with a software that could send private data to servers in China, it seems as though nothing was learnt from the mistake. According to a recent study, it seems the group behind last year's privacy-invading software is still active and continues to send personal data to China, only more discreetly than before.
Shanghai Adups Technology, a firm based in China, was caught last year in November for having added a backdoor to the firmware of cheap smartphones like the Blu R1 HD sold in the US. The firmware was found to be sending personally identifiable information (PII) to servers in China via a back door. At the time, the Shanghai-based firm said it had mistakenly used code for China-based software in these firmware.
Researchers at Kryptowire discovered this back then and at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the security firm once again revealed that Adups' software is still sending data from the Blu Grand M smartphone to the company's server in china, CNET reports. This was discovered by Ryan Johnson, a research engineer and co-founder at Kryptowire in May, almost six months after Shanghai Adups Technology confessed it was a mistake.
"They replaced them with nicer versions," Johnson said. "I have captured the network traffic of them using the command and control channel when they did it." Following this reveal, a Adups spokeswoman said the company had resolved the issues last year and that the firmware "are not existing anymore."
Apart from the Blu smartphone, Johnson also found the firmware on the Cubot X16S. These cheap Chinese phones sent data that included a list of apps installed, the apps used, IMEI numbers, call logs, browser history, and more to China. In fact, Adups claimed last year that its software is present in over than 700 million devices in 200 countries, mostly targeting low cost phones.
Cases of spyware, malware, and ransomware have been growing in recent times. The Black Hat security conference comes following recent cyber-attacks like WannaCry and Petya ransomware. There have also been reports recently of Android-based malware like SpyDealer and LeakerLocker. All of these cases have raised an alarming concern over the safety of personal information over the digital space.
These cases also point out some serious vulnerabilities with the Android platform. Kryptowire said last year that it examined 20 pieces of firmware from low-end Android devices, all of which seemed to have vulnerabilities that could allow spyware apps. Notably, all of these devices also had a particular MediaTek chipset. The chipset comes with a pre-installed app called MTKLogger, which allowed for data surveillance of browser history and GPS, to name a few. While MediaTek claims to have resolved the issue, the security firm found the vulnerability still present till last week on the Blu Advance 5.0.
As of now, it's unclear what happens to the data when it reaches China. Adups has said that it would delete the data but that doesn't answer as to how has been used and to what capacity.
Update: Blu has provided a statement regarding the reports:NPR is cutting about 10 percent of its workforce through voluntary buyouts to cover a more than $6 million deficit, according to the organization, which also said Friday that it has appointed Paul G. Haaga Jr. as acting president and CEO to replace the outgoing Gary Knell.
Haaga has served on the NPR board since 2011, and said in a statement that it was “one of the most rewarding and exciting phases of my career.”
“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to lead one of the world’s leading providers of news, music and cultural programming on an interim basis and I look forward to working with my colleagues on the Board and senior leadership team to help this great organization build on its success,” he added.
Also read: NPR President and CEO Gary E. Knell Stepping Down
Haaga takes over for Knell, who’s departing for National Geographic Society. NPR’s search committee will be co-chaired by board members Florence Rogers and John Wotowicz.
Whoever gets the job will have some hard times ahead; NPR also announced its budget for 2014, which included expenses of $183 million and revenue of just $178.1 million. The organization admitted to an operating cash deficit of $6.1 million, which it hopes to eliminate through voluntary staff buyouts.
Also read: KPCC Fights Identity Crisis as It Tries to Reinvent Itself for Digital Age
The staff will be reduced by about 10 percent. A spokesperson for NPR declined to state how many people the cuts would effect, saying it would depend “on a number of factors/variables.”
Haaga begins on September 30.People have seen more of Ed Miliband than any other party leader over the course of the election campaign. Polling carried out by YouGov for The Times Red Box shows that more people have seen “a lot” or “a fair amount” of the Labour leader than any of his opponents.
There had been concerns that the Tories would use their superior funding to win the “air war” (campaigning though print and broadcast media), but this research seems to show that it is Labour are getting greater coverage.
The number of voters saying they had seen a lot or a fair amount of each party leader were:
Ed Miliband 70%, David Cameron 63%, Nigel Farage 61%, Nicola Sturgeon 60%, Nick Clegg 44%, Natalie Bennett 27%
It should come as a concern to CCHQ that the Prime Minister is failing to get significantly more coverage than either Nigel Farage or Nicola Sturgeon – especially as it had been the Tories’ plan to run a Cameron v Miliband presidential-style campaign.
With Ashcroft’s constituency polling consistently showing that Labour are proving the most effective party at contacting voters on the doorstep, meaning that the party could claim victory in both “air war” and “ground war”. But are the messages cutting through?ALPS Outdoorz makes all sorts of gear from packs to chairs to gun cases. One of their larger packs is the Commander. This is a huge external frame pack for large expeditions. This bad boy will hold everything except the kitchen sink – and even that’s up for debate.
The Commander starts off with 5,250 cubic inches of storage and that doesn’t even include strapping things to the outsides or the frame. Inside you’ll find a hydration pocket with port and several zippered compartments. Constructed of Nylon ripstop, This bag has a high durability rating and resists damage from abrasive surfaces. Nylon ripstop is a woven fabric that is made with special reinforcing threads in a crosshatch pattern, which occurs at regular intervals of approximately 0.2 to 0.3 inches. The fabric resists rips and resists further damage by preventing small rips from increasing in size. The zippered compartments have paracord zipper pulls and an edge of fabric over the zippers, which helps to prevent contamination from debris. There’s also a row of webbing with loops for attaching gear on the front of the pack bag.
The frame is made from lightweight aluminum and has a rectangular shape with rounded corners. There are three supporting internal cross-bars that are connected to the sides of the frame to provide rigidity and prevent twisting. The cross-bars are curved away from the back, which helps to keep the load away from your back. The frame can be adjusted for height variations by releasing the Clevis Pins and sliding the frame to the appropriate dimensions. The adjustable shelf is attached with Clevis Pins at the bottom of the frame and covered with nylon ripstop. Spring Clips are used to secure the Clevis Pins to the frame. Some of the nicer features on this pack is a rifle holder and side pockets with looped latch closures for securing the top flaps to the pockets.
Ergonomically speaking, ALPS got this one right. The shoulder harness and waist strap are padded and there’s a cinching strap for securing the shoulder harness across the chest. Snap buckles are used to connect the adjustable straps while the shelf has two adjustable straps with snap buckles on each side. The unit is made more secure with the use of lashing straps. We were traveling over rough terrain in the Yukon Territory and after 18 miles the first day, I’ve got to say my feet hurt more than my shoulders!
One of my favorite aspects of this rig is the frame webbing that is used for ventilation. The webbing is lightweight and provides a luxurious amount of padding. I also liked the fact that the frame is lightweight, adjustable and can be easily cleaned.
The Commander is available in the colors of clay or charcoal and weighs 2 pounds and 3 ounces(not including frame). Overall, we’re talking about a total weight of 7 pounds and 5 ounces. The equipment is 38.4 inches long, 16.8 inches wide and 6.3 inches deep.TOKYO -- Annual births in Japan are on track to drop below 1 million for the first time on record this year, casting into sharp relief an increasingly serious problem exacerbated by demographic and economic factors.
Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry survey results to be released soon are expected to peg total births at between 980,000 and 990,000, down from just over 1 million last year and the lowest-ever figure in data going back to 1899. Published data shows 990,000 births in the 12 months through July -- less than 40% of the record set in 1949 during Japan's postwar baby boom.
Much of the decline owes to a drop in the number of women in their 20s and 30s, who numbered about 13.66 million in October, down 20% from a decade earlier.
The total fertility rate, or the average number of children born to a woman who lives through her childbearing years if current trends continue, rose 0.03 point to 1.45 in 2015 thanks to such factors as an economic upturn. Though this represents an improvement over 2005's record low of 1.26, it remains too low to compensate for the dwindling number of women. A rate of 2.07 is needed to maintain Japan's population at current levels.
Marriages fell 0.7% on the year to 368,220 for the January-July period. The average age at first marriage has been trending higher, reaching 31.1 for men and 29.4 for women in 2015. Later marriages tend to mean later first births as well as fewer households with two or more children.
The aging of the second baby boom generation -- those born between 1971 and 1974 -- is another factor. Part of this cohort has turned 45, an age at which the number of births takes a sharp downward turn.
Japan's population is also set for a 10th straight year of natural decline this year, with deaths likely to outnumber births. The drop could reach a postwar high of 300,000.
About 16.87 million babies were born in China and about 3.98 million in the U.S. in 2014, United Nations data shows. Even France, whose population is about half Japan's, reported an estimated 760,000 births last year.
The Japanese government is making an effort to support families raising children. But many households that want to have children are unable to for economic reasons. Countries such as France offer generous support to parents. Reworking a social insurance system now tilted toward seniors' needs, such as medical and nursing care, will be vital to maintaining a stable population balance for economic growth.
(Nikkei)On this page you will find a selection of inclusion projects funded under the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP), the 7th Framework Programme and Horizon 2020.
Some projects aim to help visually impaired people, either by helping them to better understand digital graphical content or by trying to rehabilitate sensory-motor capacity of children.
BLINDPAD
For visually impaired people it is difficult to digitally get graphical contents. The objective of the project is to make graphical contents accessible through touch by building and field-testing a Personal Assistive Device for BLIND and visually impaired people. BLINDPAD will be a personal, portable and cheap solution to improve knowledge and independence.
@ blindpad
For visually impaired people it is difficult to digitally get graphical contents. The objective of the project is to make graphical contents accessible through touch by building and field-testing a Personal Assistive Device for BLIND and visually impaired people. BLINDPAD will be a personal, portable and cheap solution to improve knowledge and independence. blindpad ABBI
The aim of this project is the development of a new technology based on sensory-motor rehabilitation for visual impaired children. The ABBI project is a three-year long project that started in February 2014. The core idea of the project is based on a new understanding of the role of vision in the development of children with and without visual disability, namely that audio feedback about body movements might help to build a sense of space. The main device to achieve this objective is the Audio Bracelet for Blind Interactions (ABBI) that will provide spatial information on where and how the movement is occurring. @ abbiproject
There are also projects trying to help people with autism, by focusing e.g. on adapting written documents to their needs or by developing interactive games for them.
FIRST
The FIRST project developed a tool to assist people with autism spectrum disorders to adapt written documents into a format that is easier for them to read and understand. It empowers people with autism to read documents with confidence and autonomy. As a result, their social inclusion is increased as they gain better access to educational, vocational, cultural and social opportunities in Europe. The objective of this project was to enhance social inclusion for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders by creating a computer software program that adapts documents into a format that is easier for them to read and understand.
Video on how to use Open Book
The FIRST project developed a tool to assist people with autism spectrum disorders to adapt written documents into a format that is easier for them to read and understand. It empowers people with autism to read documents with confidence and autonomy. As a result, their social inclusion is increased as they gain better access to educational, vocational, cultural and social opportunities in Europe. The objective of this project was to enhance social inclusion for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders by creating a computer software program that adapts documents into a format that is easier for them to read and understand. Video on how to use Open Book ASC Inclusion
Research project that develops interactive games for children with autism to understand and express emotions through facial expressions, vocal intonation and body gestures.
Project website
The ABLE-TO-INCLUDE project tries to help people with an Intellectual Development Disorder (IDD).
ABLE TO INCLUDE
The project ABLE-TO-INCLUDE will integrate a set of existing technologies to create an open-source and context aware accessibility layer which, when integrated with current and future ICT tools, can improve the daily life of people with IDD by understanding their personal situations and helping them to interact with the information society.
Another project develops tools for children with dyslexia.
ILearnRW
The iLearnRW project aims to develop next generation tablet-based software that will support and motivate children with dyslexia aged 9-11 with their reading and writing.
For people suffering from hearing loss, research is underway to produce digital games in the field of hearing aid technologies and hearing loss in children and older adults, addressing social inclusion, generating new markets and creating job opportunities.
3D Tune-In
Over 90 million people in Europe currently suffer from hearing loss, and due to an ageing population this number is likely to continue to increase. While hearing aid (HA) technologies have dramatically advanced in the last 25 years, people’s perception and use of these devices have changed very little. The main idea of 3D Tune-In is to link the traditional gaming industry with the fast-growing game-based learning market and hearing device market, by applying scientific methodologies and technologies towards a new set of non-leisure applications which have real benefits for European citizens.
One of the projects is working on Assistive Technology solutions, while another one addresses the scientific problem of recovery of hand function after amputation or neurological disabilities like spinal cord injury or stroke. The Simon project will propose a mobile application to support impaired citizens in the use of public and private transport modes.This is just one more reason why the X-men would never have been assembled in today’s society. I would like to thank the mainstream media for their contribution to the mass paranoia we all know and love.
Today’s page was done by the very talented Chad Hurd:
Chad Hurd is a Maine native and is currently battling the heat of the deep south in Atlanta, Georgia. Chad started his career freelancing in comics and illustration, having various publications through Speakeasy Comics, Viper Comics, Dabel Brothers, and an issue of TMNT. He’s also done sketch card sets for Topps and Upper Deck. Since then, Chad has made the move into animation working as an illustrator on 70/30’s animated show The Xtacles. He currently spends his days as the Illustration Director for the FX show Archer.
We’ll see you on Wednesday, folks!
-sohmerScientists and scholars in Jerusalem have begun a programme to take the first high-resolution digital photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls so that they can be shown on the internet.
The Israel Antiquities Authority ends a pilot project this week which prepares the way for a much larger operation to photograph the 15,000-20,000 fragments that make up the 900 scrolls. The scrolls, first photographed in |
lbabies. Wusi and M got 7th place with Wusi losing to SupahSemmie and M losing to Ixis, On winners side, Owlbabies lost to Glutonny and MagiMagi lost to Cyve sending them both to losers. Owlbabies and SuperSemmie finished 5th place, with Owlbabies losing to Ixis bringing it back with a reverse 3-0 and SuperSemmie losing to MagiMagi. Props to Owlbabies for making UK’s number 1 have to work hard for his win, throughout his first major UK tournament showing. In Winners’ Finals, Glutonny defeated Cyve 3-1, sending Cyve to losers. In Losers Semis, Ixis lost to MagiMagi 1-3 with MagiMagi double eliminating Ixis. MagiMagi advanced to have a rematch against Cyve, the match was close but Cyve won 2-3. Grand finals were Glutonny vs Cyve. Cyve made it close but Glutonny took the set and avoided bracket reset and took the tournament 3-2. (All sets are on BYOController youtube channel).
1st Glutonny 2nd Cyve 3rd MagiMagi 4th Ixis 5th Owlbabies 5th SupahSemmie 7th Wusi 7th M
That’s the end of Albion 2, it was a stunning event that brought a lot of hype for the European Circuit. I would like to say major thanks to DAT Team for allowing me to report and do interviews on the event itself and the planning that went behind it. Secondly, thanks to BYO_Controller for streaming the event and Zowie for the monitors used, thirdly to Nintendo who actually brought ARMS which was always fun to play and was always busy and lastly, everyone that came and is reading this post. If you want to keep updated on what we do, follow us on Twitter @2ndwindgame.
Until Next time!
AdvertisementsPeach Cobbler
As you have probably read in my last blog post or on my
Also this past Sunday, my totally amazing boss bought the workers ticked to see Cake Boss on tour! Those pictures will be on my Hey everyone! As I'm sure you can tell.. I am NOT Kenzie. It seems that she has had some technical difficulties and whatnot.. but not to fear! We will save her post (which I'm sure will be AWESOME ) for another day.As you have probably read in my last blog post or on my facebook page, I've had a SUPER busy weekend. I made the cake for a friends wedding, along with 150 cupcakes to go with it! There are pics in my gallery if you would like to take a look! :)Also this past Sunday, my totally amazing boss bought the workers ticked to see Cake Boss on tour! Those pictures will be on my facebook page if you would like to look at them! It was sooooo much fun and I am so excited that I was able to experience that. So a huge THANK YOU to Dianne for the show! Now I know you're not all here to just hear me blabber on and on about my HUGE weekend... Of course I have an excellent recipe for you!
Peach Cobbler
Ingredients: 1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla
1 large can (29 oz) of sliced peaches Directions:
1.Preheat oven to 375. Pour melted butter into a 9'' square baking dish.
2. In a mixing bowl, stir flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
3. Stir in milk and vanilla, only until combined. Do not over mix!
4. Pour batter over melted butter in the baking dish.
5. Spoon out the peaches AND JUICE over the batter in the baking dish. you don't have to use all of the juice.. but make sure you get quite a bit in there!
6. Bake for 35-40 minutes (rotate halfway through baketime, as always) until golden brown on top.
7. Let it set for about 5 minutes before you cut into this bad boy. Serves great with vanilla icecream. :)
Also feel free to follow me on
If you have any comments or questions for me please feel free to comment below or
-Jenni I hope you guys enjoy this recipe, like I am! If you haven't yet, please like my facebook page to keep up on blog updates and recipes. :)Also feel free to follow me on pinterest If you have any comments or questions for me please feel free to comment below or send me a message. I would love to hear from you! :)-JenniIt seems that the effort by billionaires Charles and David Koch to take control of the libertarian Cato Institute is going poorly. “We are not acting in a partisan manner, we seek no ‘takeover’ and this is not a hostile action,” Charles Koch told Bloomberg News. When you are denying partisanship, takeover ambitions and hostile intentions in one sentence, you probably need to rethink your PR strategy.
The Koch brothers have long supported Cato, which they helped found in Washington in 1977. Recently, however, they have come to consider their creation politically unreliable. In a meeting with Robert Levy, the chairman of Cato’s board of directors, they expressed their intention to remake the institute into a party organ that would aid their effort to unseat President Obama. To do so, however, they need control of the board. They intend to get it by suing the widow of William Niskanen, a recently deceased board member, for control of Niskanen’s shares.
Whether they can pull off this coup is for the courts to decide. But the bigger question is: Why in the world would they want to?
In 2006, the first page of Cato’s annual report included an admiring quote from, well, me. “The libertarian Cato Institute is the foremost advocate for small-government principles in American life,” I wrote.
I am not exactly a libertarian. I’m a technocrat. I believe in the government’s ability, and occasionally its responsibility, to help solve problems that the market can’t or won’t resolve on its own. I find much of Cato’s hard-line libertarianism — to the point of purging Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey, libertarians who explored making common cause with liberals on select issues — naive, callous and occasionally absurd. And yet, it’s among a handful of think tanks whose work I regularly read and trust.
That’s because Cato is, well, “the foremost advocate for small-government principles in American life.” It advocates those principles when Democrats are in power, and when Republicans are in power. When I read Cato’s take on a policy question, I can trust that it is informed by more than partisan convenience. The same can’t be said for other think tanks in town.
The Heritage Foundation, for instance, is a conservative think tank that professes to pursue goals similar to Cato’s. Where Cato’s motto is “individual liberty, free markets, and peace,” Heritage’s mission is the advancement of “conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”
In practice, however, whatever the Republican Party wants, so does Heritage. In 1989, Heritage helped develop the idea of universal health care delivered by the private sector through an individual mandate. In the early 1990s, it helped Senate Republicans build that concept into a legislative alternative to President Bill Clinton’s proposed reforms. In the early 2000s, Heritage worked with then-Governor Mitt Romney to implement the plan in Massachusetts. Then, when Obama won office and Democrats adopted Heritage’s idea, Heritage promptly fell into step with the Republican Party and turned ferociously against it.
Similarly, when Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was developing his budget and needed a friendly think tank to run the numbers, he turned to the Heritage Foundation. And boy, it made those numbers sprint. Heritage’s analysis showed Ryan’s budget driving down the unemployment rate to 2.8 percent. When the mockery that ensued proved too much for the think tank to bear, it quietly replaced the analysis with another that didn’t include unemployment predictions.
On policy, I probably agree more frequently with the Heritage Foundation than with Cato. But I can’t trust Heritage. I trust Cato. I don’t agree with its health-care expert, Michael Cannon, who considers universal coverage an absurd and deleterious goal. But I take his analysis seriously, and his critiques have informed my thinking. I’m certainly more skeptical of single-payer programs than I would have been without having read his arguments.
Similarly, I never considered myself particularly concerned with executive power, but in his book “The Cult of the Presidency,” Cato Vice President Gene Healy convinced me that “we begin by looking to the president as the solution to all our problems, and we end up believing he’s the source of all our problems,” contributing directly to Washington’s dysfunction. That has grown into a recurring theme in my writing. This column, for example, bears Healy’s imprint at the top. (I pause here to note that Cato is literally giving away Healy’s book, and you should absolutely accept the offer.)
I never had very strong views on intellectual property, but Cato’s Julian Sanchez — who is a friend — has convinced me that our intellectual-property system has become a protection racket for incumbent firms and is an impediment to innovation.
The list could go on, but the point is this: The Koch brothers’ fortune is estimated at more than $60 billion, a couple of thousand times Cato’s annual operating budget. The brothers have started many advocacy organizations, many of which spend their time — and the Kochs’ money — trying to influence the next election. They could begin another such group, one dedicated to providing campaign-season ammunition, without noticing the expense.
What’s puzzling is why the Kochs started this campaign in the first place. It’s easy enough to see what they hoped to achieve: They would quietly take control of Cato and then leverage its credibility to help elect a Republican president. Unfortunately for them, the cries from inside Cato made the “quietly” part impossible. But it would have been impossible in any case: Cato’s credibility is derived from its independence; it wouldn’t last long separated from it.
What the Kochs have in Cato is an advocacy organization that matters in the years between elections, even when the brothers’ preferred candidate doesn’t win, even to people who don’t share their ideology. Cato is an organization that can have more than a marginal impact on elections. It can have a significant impact on policy and governance. That’s a level of influence that even the Kochs can’t buy. When two of the right wing’s most influential funders don’t recognize that, it should cheer liberals immensely.
For previous columns by Ezra Klein, go to postbusiness.com.Well, you probably are doing it wrong. jQuery’s html function is a very nice way to replace the contents of an element with new contents. Its usefulness is supposedly limited, though, according to the API documentation for this method. Every day jQuery users use this powerful method in a way that it was never meant to be used, and it works, but does that mean we should still do it?
What Am I Doing Wrong?
If you take a look at jQuery’s API Documentation for the html function, you’ll see that it has 3 method signatures. The first method signature has no arguments, so it’ll just return the HTML within that element. The other two signatures take a single argument: a string or a function that returns a string. Wait! It doesn’t take a DOM element? or a jQuery object? That’s right, html doesn’t accept anything except strings.
How I Learned That I Am a Bad Programmer
Instead of just telling you what you should be doing instead or why html still works when you send in elements, I’m going to walk you down my path of discovery. It all started last week when I was exploring LayoutManager for Backbone. I was looking through the code that was generated using the Backbone Boilerplate utility for Node.js to give myself a better idea of how LayoutManager is used, when I saw this little snippet of code:
1 $( "#main" ).empty().append(layout.el);
Confusion
I thought to myself, “Why didn’t they just use $('#main').html(layout.el);?” This puzzled me for a bit since I had recently learned (as shown in the Subview Rendering Trick article) that html first calls empty within itself, so there was nothing gained except maybe making it a little clearer that empty is called. Well I shirked that off to the side and decided not to think much of it until I came across the same code within the documentation for LayoutManager. So I decided to ask the developer why he would use empty().append() rather than html(). I was pointed to an article that the author had written about how html didn’t support this method signature.
Checking Out the Source
I checked it out myself, and sure enough the jQuery documentation did not support this signature. Well, if it doesn’t support the signature, then why does it still work? I decided to use James Padolsey’s jQuery Source Viewer to look into it. Here’s a stripped down version of the source for html :
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 function ( value ) { var elem = this [ 0 ] || {}; if (value === undefined ) { return ; } if ( typeof value === "string" && ) { elem = 0 ; } if (elem) { this.empty().append(value); } }
Remember, this is just a gist of what the source looks like for html. If you want to see the full source you can go here.
Let’s walk through this code for a bit. First it sets elem to either the first element in its list of elements or an empty object. Then it checks to see if you passed in any arguments and sends back an HTML string if you didn’t. Then it checks if we passed in a string. If we did, then it uses cleanData to remove event handlers and extra data bound to the elements, then insert the new contents via innerHTML. Then, if elem is truthy (it was set to zero at the end of the last if statement to prevent this from being true), then that means that the argument was neither undefined or a string (so it should be a function), so we’ll run it through empty().append(value).
The Realization
Well, that means it DOES support DOM elements and jQuery objects because append does! Not only is this true, but since we’re using append to catch the case where the argument was a function, why do we bother using the second if statement? We can use append for the cases where it’s a string too! Wouldn’t this be a great case of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)? Well that’s what I think anyway.
The jQuery Guy
I decided to put an issue up on the API’s GitHub area letting them know how I felt about this. At the time of this writing, I haven’t received a reply, but on the previous conversation (the one that I had with the author of LayoutManager) a jQuery team member posted this:
That will get you into trouble. Just because jQuery is open source does not mean that nuances of the current source code define the API. That is what http://api.jquery.com does. Every major release, we have people complain that we “broke their code” because we changed undocumented internals, precisely because they figured they could just read the source and expect it to work that way in future versions.
While he does have a point, I don’t see why they would make changes in a way that would remove empty().append() from there.
The “Right” WayOn his Facebook page early this morning, it was announced that legendary Texas singer-songwriter Guy Clark has passed away at 74. Clark was a celebrated fixture in folk music songwriting, having been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and winning a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album for My Favorite Picture of You as recently as 2014. His death comes after a lengthy battle with numerous health problems, including cancer.
Clark’s prodigious career encompasses 13 studio albums and countless songwriting credits, most notably for Jerry Jeff Walker’s “L.A. Freeway” and “Desperados Waiting on a Train”. His soulful music has been covered by many illustrious country and rock artists over the decades, including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Jimmy Buffett, and was influenced by his upbringing in Texas and life in Nashville. Clark’s songs were known for their lyrical intricacy, emotional richness and poetic qualities, which drew heavily from the singer-songwriter’s personal life and added depth to his music. Clark and his wife Susanna, whom he lost to cancer in 2012, were famed in Nashville as patrons of the local music scene.
Despite his renowned storytelling abilities and prestige in the folk music community, Clark was known for his humble dignity and quiet integrity, preferring intimate venues like clubs and theaters over packed stadiums for his performances and spending most of his life in Tennessee with family and friends. Currently, the musician is survived by his son Travis and grandchildren Dylan and Ellie.
Above, you can hear Clark’s final Daytrotter session in Nashville’s Big Light Studio from 2013.Mossad Black Ops and False Flags
2008
A Brief history of Mossad Black Ops and False Flags, Mossad: a shell organization for Jewish/Israeli terrorism all over the world. False Flags: Committing an atrocious act, and blaming another party or nation for it. The point is to turn public opinion against an entity, and have someone else fight your battles for you.
Lusitania Churchill, who was 1/2 Jewish, leaked intelligence to Germany that Lusitania carried munitions, and then it was sent it in a U-boat infested area. The ship was supposedly torpedoed, and a massive bomb exploded, killing 1200. This set the stage for Wilson to bring the USA into WW2, at a later date.
Kristallnacht When government officials were away, Jewish-paid thugs went on a rampage in Berlin and some border towns. Nazis were blamed, and world opinion favored Jews
Bromberg massacre An estimated 58,000 German civilians lost their lives in the massacres carried out prior to the 1939 invasion. A website on the atrocity at Bromberg explains how Polish Bolshevik Jews massacred 5,500 Germans, on one 'Bloody Sunday, in 1939. This was the flashpoint for the Polish invasion.
The King David Massacre July 22, 1946 Jewish terrorists blew up a hotel, and killed 91 British soldiers, and blamed the atrocity on Arabs. When later caught, they said the British had a list of their Arab spies and were going to turn them over to the Palestinians. The goal of the False Flag was to pit the British against the Palestinians.
Lavon affair In 1954, Israeli agents working in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including a United States diplomatic facility, and left evidence behind implicating Arabs as the culprits. The ruse would have worked, had not one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to capture and identify one of the bombers, which in turn led to the round up of an Israeli spy ring
RFK Assassination June 1968 Robert Kennedy is shot by a PLO bus-boy named Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy was running for President, and would have sought revenge over the Israeli killing of his brother. The use of a Palestinian was a little too 'Hollywood'.
USS Liberty....June 6th, 1967 Six fighters, three torpedo boats and two assault helicopters attacked the USS Liberty. There were 24 dead and 177 maimed. F-4 phantoms were enroute when President Johnson stopped the rescue. Israel's plan was to blame Egypt, and have the US retaliate against Egypt.
Black September 5, 1972 Eight Palestinian "Black September" terrorists seized 11 Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village in Munich, West Germany. In the rescue attempt by West German authorities, nine of the hostages, and five terrorists were killed. Israel, and it's Jews, are once again the victim, and the Palestinians are demons.
1976... Entebbe Israel faked a hijacking to Kenya (Idi Imin was an Israeli puppet), and then pulled a rescue, portraying themselves as elite commandos. Arabs looked like monsters and the Israelis, having suffered countless persecutions, have decided to fight back.
1982 Abu Nidal, who was an Israeli Black Ops agent, attacked the Jewish Goldenberg's delicatessen in Paris. 6 were killed, and 20 were wounded, of which 2 were Jewish.
Pan Am flight 73 A 747 was enroute from Karachi, to Frankfurt, to its final destination of New York. Four hijackers took control of the airplane, and for the next 16 hours, they held 379 passengers at gunpoint, while the pilots escaped. The plane was stormed and 20 died.
Beirut Marine barracks...October 23,1983 241 Marines died when a truck packed with explosives blew up a Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport
Achille Lauro...1985 Abu Abbas, and 15 Arabs, took over a cruise ship and threw a Leon Klinghoffer overboard. After two days of negotiations, the seajackers abandoned the ship. In this False Flag, the Israelis turned world opinion against the Arabs, while once again portraying themselves as victims.
English policewoman shot....1984 In 1984, Zionist Jews staged a protest outside the Libyan embassy in London. Approximately 25 English Bobbies were used for crowd control. During the middle of the demonstration, a shot rang out and a female Bobby named Yvonne Fletcher was hit and killed. The shot came from a building used by the Mossad to spy on the Libyan embassy, but the newspapers overlooked that and blamed Libya. Israel used this false flag murder of Policewoman Fletcher, to turn world opinion against Libya.
Alia airliner...1985 Nidal's Black September group hit a jet with an SAM as it took off from Athens airport. Although the rocket did not explode, it left a hole in the fuselage.
Lockerbie....Dec 1988 Mossad blew up Pan AM 103 and blamed it on Libya. Unfortunately, the plane was late and blew up overland, and all the evidence pointed towards Israel. Israel's goal was to demonize the Muslims, and lay the groundwork for 9/11.
AMIA....1992 Mossad blew up AMIA and the Israeli Embassy in Argentina. Over 100 killed, and practically all of them were Argentineans.
Luxor, Egypt... 1992 An attack on Luxor, by militants, in which 58 foreigners, most of them Swiss, were killed (71 Killed in total). Arabs blamed the Mossad. six gunmen disguised as police emerged from nearby cliffs and fired randomly at tourists visiting Luxor's Temple of Hatshepsut, the Egyptian Information Ministry said. The Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya group ( "Vanguards of Conquest" according to CNN) is a revival of the Jihad organization (Headed by Ayman Al Zawahiry) which killed president Anwar Sadat in 1981. Israel destroyed Egyptian tourism, and turned world opinion against Muslims.
Khobar Towers...1996 Khobar Towers was bombed. It housed an F-15 unit. Israel said it was done by Hezbollah, but US military investigators linked it to Mossad.
Karin-A...... 2000 Israel intercepted a ship, the Karin-A, in the Red Sea. The ship contained massive weapons, which Israel claimed were destined for the PLO. A Jewish arms dealer set it all up. As a result, world opinion turned on the PLO, and Israel's slaughter of rock throwing Arab children wasn't questioned.
Two airports attacked.....1985 Terrorists of Abu Nidal's Black Sept. struck at the Rome and Vienna airports. Nineteen were killed at Schwechat Airport and three at the Rome airport.
LaBelle Disco......1986 As part of a Libya False flag, the Mossad sent a series of false messages out of Tripoli, talking of an impending attack. The Mossad then bombed a German Disco, the Labelle Club, killing three and wounding 230. President Reagan was convinced it was a Libyan attack, and retaliated by bombing Libya World opinion turned against Libya.
OKC Murrah Building...1993 One of the Mossad's American arms, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), was concerned about the growth of Patriot movements such as Militias, so an attack was staged using a Timothy McVeigh patsy, who was out of Elohim City (Jewish-sponsored terror Mecca). The real brains behind the OKC bombing were Andreas Strassmeir and Daniel Spiegelman, who were/are both Jewish. The Zionists destroyed the Militia movement's credibility, and brought the FBI down on them.
Flight 840 TWA's Flight 840, a Boeing 727 flying from Rome to Athens with 115 passengers and seven crew members aboard, had already begun its descent toward the Athens international airport. Twenty minutes before landing, as it flew at 15,000 ft. over Argos, a town near the ancient site of Mycenae, an explosion shook the aircraft. Four were killed but 111 lived. Once again, Israel planted the seed of "Arab" terrorism.
World Trade Center.... 1993 In Dec. 1992, an Israeli soldier, Nissim Toledano, was kidnapped and killed. The Israeli government rounded up 1600 members of Hamas, and deported 415 of them to the no-mans land between the Israeli and Lebanese borders. In the brutally inhospitable weather, these 415 Hamas members were stranded without food and shelter. Furthermore, the Israeli authorities stopped any humanitarian aid from reaching these people. With media focus on the deportees, it triggered international outrage against Israel, which was followed by international pressure on Israel that refused to go away. This time, Israel had bit off more than it could chew. It was time to ‘deflect’ pressure off Israel.
Israeli intelligence services went into action. A detailed process that is too long to elaborate here, hatched a plan. In the third week of February 1993, a truck bomb exploded in the basement of the World Trade Center building. Muslims used as scapegoats took the blame for it, while the real culprits were safely back in Israel. Thus world opinion and pressure was shifted away from Israel.
Port Arthur Massacre.....1996 A 2-man Israeli Counter-Terrorism team wounded 25, and killed 35 at a remote tourist (It took them only 90 seconds in the Broad Arrow Cafe to kill 20.) center at Port Arthur, Tasmania. The blame fell on a mentally challenged man named Martin Bryant, Photographs of Martin Bryant had been digitally manipulated with the effect of making Bryant appear deranged. He has served as the designated patsy for this crime ever since.
Zionists got their long-awaited draconian gun control laws passed in Australia as a result of this massacre. funny how Bryant never even had a gun license.
Birmingham....1998 Birmingham abortion clinic bombed and two people killed. As a result of the bombing, abortion opponents were portrayed as lunatics, while the Jewish-dominated abortion industry special laws passed to protect their trade.
Egyptair 990 (MSR990).....1999 Israel planted a bomb in the aircraft tail (unconfirmed). the plane dived 60 miles south of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, in international waters, killing all 217 people on board. Included in the passenger manifest were over 30 Egyptian military officers; among them were two brigadier-generals, a colonel, major, and four other air force officers. Transatlantic commercial air traffic travels via a system of routes called North Atlantic Tracks, and Flight 990 was the only aircraft at the time assigned to fly North Atlantic Track Zulu. There are also a number of military operations areas over the Atlantic, called "Warning Areas," which are also monitored by New York Center, but records show that these were inactive the night of the accident. Air Traffic Controller Peter Zalewski was responsible for both New York Tower crashes and also was controller for Egypt 990 crash in 1999
USS Cole Sayanims in the Pentagon had the Cole directed to a part in Yemen, where Israeli agents had Arab patsies approach the Cole with a small boat, in order to be seen by crewmen, while they attacked it with a shape charge.
Sept 11.....2001 The most brazen of all Israeli attacks.
Flight 587....2001 Mossad blows up a Fl 587 out of NY, and it crashes in Rockaway.
Bali Bomb Mossad sets off a micro nuke on the island of Bali, killing 182. Israel blamed the attack on Al Qaeda (which is really an Israeli false flag patsy intel op), and the USA invaded Iraq.
Kenya missile.... 2002 In 2002, Israel claimed AL Qaeda shot two SAM missiles at a jet on take-off. Israel used this incident to help lay the groundwork for shooting down a US airliner.
Manila.... 2003 Mossad planted a bomb on a Manila ferry, killing 103. Israel blamed the attack on Al Qaeda.
CIA Bomb In Gaza....2003 Three CIA agents are traveling in Gaza, when a Mossad bomb exploded. Palestinians were blamed for the attack.
Madrid Train... 2002 Mossad killed 198 in the Madrid bomb blast. Al Queda was blamed.
2004 Mossad bombed two airliners over Russia. Israel claimed it was Al Qaeda.
http://800poundgorilla.100webspace.net/geeklog//article.php?story=2008070819475079Derek Carr All Smiles During Recovery... With Raiders Owner
Derek Carr Recovers From Fibula Fracture With Mark Davis At His Side
Breaking News
Raiders QB Derek Carr seemed to be in pretty great spirits Tuesday night while recovering from surgery on his broken leg.
Carr -- who fractured his fibula during Sunday's game against the Colts -- was hanging out in the lobby of an LA hotel, his leg elevated on pillows.
Raiders owner Mark Davis was at his side, checking in on Carr... from what we're told they have a pretty good relationship.
Carr ain't playing the rest of the season but says he still wants to help the team win -- meaning he'll probably hit film sessions hard with his replacement Matt McGloin.
#justmentorbabyFor weeks now, it has been rumored that Eminem’s new album Revival was set to drop on November 17, although it was never officially confirmed by Em or Shady Records. Now, that date has come and gone (as has his appearance on Saturday Night Live), and fans are left wondering what’s next. The latest rumors from HitsDailyDouble, which again remain unconfirmed by an on-the-record source, indicate that the project may have been pushed back to December 8.
Curiously, Eminem’s website has also been edited, as KanyeToThe user REDHEADDEAD points out. While it originally said “Eminem joins forces with Beyoncé for ‘Walk On Water,’ the first single off his forthcoming album Revival,” the later part of the sentence has now been removed. This comes the same day that “Walk On Water” debuted at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. While this would be great for a normal MC, it’s actually Em’s first lead single since 1998 not to debut in the Top 10, as Southpawer points out.
Thus far, there’s no indication about what could be going on behind the scenes. Whether the commercial performance of “Walk On Water” has anything to do with the album release date or the website edit remains unclear, mostly because nothing was ever officially confirmed. The status of “Walk On Water” as the lead single also remains ambiguous. However, it certainly seems odd that Em would book a Saturday Night Live performance just to promote a single, especially one that may just be a promo song.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens next, but for now you can catch up on all the lyrics to Eminem & Beyoncé’s “Walk On Water” on Genius now.Click here to start learning Norwegian for free.
So you are searching for a job in Norway. You go through all the newspapers and websites listing jobs and find an advertisement that is interesting.
Looks just like the job for you. So you write a job application in Norwegian as below.
Norwegian English Fra Steve Williams
Frognerveien 13
0952 Oslo Oslo, 10. jul 2012 Til
ABC restauranten
Kirkegata 18
0653 Oslo download the audio Søknad om jobb download the audio Jeg søker den ledige stillingen som servitør. download the audio Jeg har arbeidet 5 år som servitør i England.
download the audio Jeg kan jobbe fulltid.
download the audio Jeg håper på positivt svar. download the audio Med vennlig hilsen
Steve Williams download the audio Referanse: Dale Robert, leder, tlf. 11111111 From Steve Williams
Frognerveien 13
0952 Oslo Oslo, 10. July 2012 To
The ABC restaurant
Kirkegata 18
0653 Oslo Application for a job I am applying for the vacant position as waiter. I have worked for 5 years as a waiter in England.
I can work full time.
I hope for a positive answer. With regards
Steve Williams Reference: Dale Rober, Manager, tel. 11111111
You can learn how to write Norwegian letters by reading chapter 12 in Teach Yourself Complete Norwegian.
(Visited 1,578 times, 1 visits today)My post on Struggling Towards Reliable Capybara Javascript Testing attracted a lot of readers, and some discussion on reddit.
I left there thinking I had basically got my Capybara JS tests reliable enough… but after that, things degraded again.
But now I think I really have fixed it for real, with some block/wait rack middleware based on the original concept by Joel Turkel, which I’ve released as RackRequestBlocker. This is middleware to keep track of ‘outstanding’ requests in your app that were triggered by a feature spec that has finished, and let the main test thread wait until they are complete before DatabaseCleaning and moving on to the next spec.
My RackRequestBlocker implementation is based on the new hotness concurrent-ruby (a Rails5 dependency, great collection of ruby concurrency primitives) instead of Turkel’s use of the older `atomic` gem, and using actual signal/wait logic instead of polling, and refactored to have IMO a more convenient packaged API. Influenced by Dan Dorman’s unfinished attempts to gemify Turkel’s design.
It’s only a few dozen lines of code, check it out for an example of using concurrent-ruby’s primitives to build something concurrent.
And my Capybara JS feature tests now appear to be very very reliable, and I expect them to stay that way. Woot.
To be clear, I also had to turn off DatabaseCleaner transactional strategy entirely, even for non-JS tests. Just RackRequestBlocker wasn’t enough, neither was just turning off transactional strategy. Either one by themselves I still had crazy race conditions — including pg:deadlocks… and actual segfaults!
Why? I honestly am not sure. There’s no reason transactional fixture strategy shouldn’t work when used only for non-JS tests, even with RackRequestBlocker. The segfaults suggests a bug in something C; MRI, pg, poltergeist? (poltergeist was very unpopular in the reddit thread on my original post, but I still think it’s less bad than other options for my situation.) Bug of some kind in the test_after_commit gem we were using to make things work even with transactional fixture strategy? Honestly, I have no idea — I just accepted it, and was happy to have tests that were working.
Try out RackRequestBlocker, see if it helps with your JS Capybara race condition problems, let me know in comments if you want, I’m curious. I can’t support this super well, I just provide the code as a public service, because I fantasize of the day nobody has to go through as many hours as I have fighting with JS feature tests.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 stag reveller woke up from a boozy night out with more than just a hangover to worry about.
After rubbing the sleep from his eyes the party-goer was stunned to look in the mirror and discover he had a pair of glasses tattooed on his face.
The man, who has not been named, at first hoped it was just marker pens that pals had drawn on him but after furious washing the reality soon dawned on him.
With blue lines around his eyes and the side of his head, the life-size tattoo even had the word "Rayban" crudely etched into his skin.
And now the man in his fifties has spent TWO YEARS getting the shades tattoo lasered off his face.
(Image: Wales News Service)
The reveller, from Swansea, South Wales, was on a stag weekend in Blackpool when he had the Ray-Ban tattoo as a drunken dare.
He said: "I had no memory of getting the tattoo because I had gone out celebrating and when it happened I was drunk.
"Waking-up the morning after, I thought someone had used a permanent marker on my face.
"When I first came home, obviously I was subject to a lot of stares, but I kind of got used to the tattoo and decided not to get rid of it."
(Image: Wales News Service)
But on an evening out with friends he was confronted by someone in a pub who made fun of the tattoo.
He added: "The next morning I really started to think about what my family and friends thought.
"I didn't want them to be embarrassed when they were out with me, so I decided there and then I was going to get it removed."
The unnamed man went to 1192 Laser and Beauty Clinic in Swansea, South Wales, to have the removal.
Owner Donnalee Alford said it was one of the worst tattoo blunders they'd eve seen as it covered his face.
(Image: Wales News Service)
He said: "When I first met Donnalee I made it clear I was not sure if I really wanted the tattoo |
podium yells "There couldn't be a better time to live in Orlando! #WeDigPurple pic.twitter.com/tmLylFD9ww — Orlando City SC (@OrlandoCitySC) October 16, 2014
Jersey Unveil
City unveiled its inaugural MLS home kits on November 5 at Orlando Health’s downtown campus. While maintaining City’s prominent color purple, the new jersey showcased modern features that incorporated the Club’s history.
Orlando Health’s logo was also highly visible on the front of the jersey. The healthcare leaders extended their partnership with Orlando City on November 18, becoming the first jersey partner in MLS history to commit to an expansion club prior to being accepted into the league.
The jersey unveil also marked the launch of Orlando’ new ad campaign, which includes dozens of new advertisements and billboards that will canvas the City Beautiful.
It's all in the details. The USL-PRO logo sits behind the new crest. Right on top of the players' hearts. #CityKit pic.twitter.com/3QddeILDOF — Orlando City SC (@OrlandoCitySC) November 5, 2014
The Future:
As the clock continues to wind down, the next few months will provide several important opportunities for the coaching staff to construct the Lions’ roster as City continues to prepare for opening day.
Beginning with today’s Dispersal Draft, the MLS Expansion Draft on December 10th and the MLS SuperDraft in January 2015 will each play an important role in the Lions’ inaugural campaign.Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, acting as if on cue, are moving to block acquisitions of local businesses by Chinese companies.
Berlin, long open to Beijing’s investments, has just retracted its clearance of the $729 million purchase of chipmaker Aixtron by Fujian Grand Chip Investment Fund.
The move came just days before Berlin proposed EU rules giving member states the authority to stop Chinese takeovers in strategic sectors, especially when the potential acquirers are state entities. “We need to have the powers to really investigate deals when it is clear that they are driven by industrial policy or to enable technology transfers,” said Deputy Economics Minister Matthias Machnig.
Current German law permits the government to stop acquisitions of only defense companies, IT security firms, and businesses handling state documents.
German officials are not the only group worried. China’s largest foreign acquisition looks like it might run aground in Brussels. EU antitrust regulators have started a review of China National Chemical Corp.’s bid to buy Syngenta, the Swiss agribusiness giant, for $44 billion.
Even not counting the Aixtron and Syngenta deals, European regulators have blocked almost $40 billion in Chinese takeovers of businesses since the middle of 2015 according to Grisons Peak, an investment bank.
The blocking of acquisitions comes after a wave of Chinese investment. Grisons Peak puts the highpoint of China’s purchases at $95.6 billion in the first quarter of this year. Since then, takeovers have trended down, with just $49.4 billion in Q2 and $46.1 billion in Q3.
In the U.S., this month it was reported that, due to concerns raised by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, Blackstone Group called off the sale of Hotel del Coronado to China’s mysterious Anbang Insurance Group.
CFIUS, as the Federal interagency body is known, was also thought to be responsible for the killing of the sale of the lighting-components business of Royal Philips NV to a Chinese group led by GO Scale Capital for $2.8 billion in January.
So far, the U.S. has welcomed Chinese capital. As the Rhodium Group has reported, Chinese entities invested $18.4 billion in the U.S. in the first half of 2016, almost three times the $6.4 billion in the same period a year earlier and more than that invested all last year.
That upward trend—Rhodium calls it “tripling down on America”—may not last long. Ali Meyer of the Washington Free Beacon, the online news site, reports that the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, in its next annual report, will recommend that Congress give CFIUS the authority “to bar Chinese state-owned enterprises from acquiring or otherwise gaining effective control of U.S. companies.”
“The Chinese Communist Party continues to use state-owned enterprises as the primary economic tool for advancing and achieving its national security objectives,” notes the “final draft” of the Commission’s report. “There is therefore an inherently high risk that whenever a state-owned enterprise acquires or gains effective control of a U.S. company, it will use the technology, intelligence, and market power it gains in the service of the Chinese state, to the detriment of U.S. national security.”
There are many reasons for the concern in the EU and America over Chinese investment, but a common theme, as Commission member Larry Wortzel notes, is fairness. “There is no reciprocity,” he told the Free Beacon. “While Chinese companies can buy U.S. or Western companies, American and other Western companies are barred from buying key sector state-owned enterprises, if not all state-owned enterprises.”
And in Berlin the business community, which is skeptical of new curbs on Chinese investment, has expressed the same general concern. “The European economy must be allowed to do in China what the Chinese are allowed to do in Europe,” said Ulrich Grillo, head of BDI, a German industry association, to the Financial Times.
For decades, Washington, Brussels, and other capitals have not insisted on fair treatment for their companies, largely because of the lure of the Chinese market, but now that market is showing signs of softness in most segments.
Perhaps the best proof of the softness in China is the rush by Chinese entities to buy foreign assets. Although some acquisitions by state and private enterprises seem to be at the direction of the state, many deals are evidently not.
Last year, net capital outflow could have been as much as the $1 trillion reported by Bloomberg. Beijing has tried to staunch the outbound flow with drastic measures, but this year the outflow could be close to that staggering figure.
The outflow will undoubtedly pick up as the renminbi continues its decline. So far this year, the Chinese currency is down 4.4% against the greenback. The yuan will almost certainly weaken further when American interest rates go up, as Fed Chair Janet Yellen signaled in September, and as the Chinese central bank decreases support.
The fall of the renminbi tells us the Chinese people have lost confidence in their economy and society. A study just released by Hurun Report states over 60% of China’s rich plan to invest in overseas residences in the next three years.
Follow me on Twitter @GordonGChang and on Forbes. And find much more here.The families of three young men arrested after taking part in anti-government protests while under the age of 18, fear their sons are among four people reported to be facing execution tomorrow, Amnesty International said today.
The family of Ali al-Nimr expressed fears on social media that he, along with Dawood Hussein al-Marhoon and Abdullah Hasan al-Zaher, is among the prisoners referred to in a government-run newspaper article published today. The article said the scheduled executions will complete a wave of punishments for terrorism offences that saw 47 people executed on the same day in January.
“If these executions go ahead, Saudi Arabia will demonstrate its utter disdain for international law, which prohibits executions of people for crimes committed under the age of 18. Condemning these young men to death despite grave flaws in their trials and credible allegations that their ‘confessions’ were extracted under torture, would be a sickening example of the authorities’ disregard for human life,” said James Lynch, Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme.
“The Saudi Arabian authorities should immediately stop the planned executions and establish an official moratorium on executions. They must also order impartial investigations into allegations of torture by security officers, and undertake fundamental reform of the judicial system to put an end to such egregious violations.”
If these executions go ahead, Saudi Arabia will demonstrate its utter disdain for international law, which prohibits executions of people for crimes committed under the age of 18. James Lynch, Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International Share this Twitter
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Ali al-Nimr was arrested in February 2012 when he was 17 years old, and sentenced to death in May 2014 by the deeply deficient Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) in Jeddah for 12 offences that included taking part in anti-government protests, attacking security forces, possessing a machine-gun and carrying out an armed robbery. His mother told Amnesty International that there were “wounds and swollen bruises” on his body when she visited him in prison and that his treatment there had left him visibly frail and weak.
Dawood Hussein al-Marhoon and Abdullah Hasan al-Zaher were arrested on 22 May and 3 March 2012, when they were aged 17 and 16 respectively, and sentenced to death by the SCC in Riyadh in October 2014 on similar charges.
All three have said their “confessions” were obtained under torture and other ill-treatment in detention, but the court has refused to order an investigation into these allegations.
In January this year, Ali al-Nimr’s uncle, the Shi’a Muslim cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, was put to death along with 46 other people on the same day, after a politically motivated and grossly unfair trial. Like Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, the three young activists are members of Saudi Arabia’s Shi’a Muslim minority, which is subject to systematic harassment and discrimination. The mass executions followed reports in national media outlets close to the Saudi Arabian authorities that at least 50 people would soon be put to death in a single day.
Saudi Arabia’s use of the death penalty to silence dissent sends a chilling message to anybody who dares to speak out against the authorities James Lynch Share this Twitter
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“Saudi Arabia’s use of the death penalty to silence dissent sends a chilling message to anybody who dares to speak out against the authorities,” said James Lynch.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty at all times and in all cases without exception, but has described Saudi Arabia’s
arbitrary application of death sentences as particularly shocking due to the lack of basic safeguards in trials.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is legally binding on Saudi Arabia, makes clear that no death sentences may be imposed for offences committed by individuals under the age of 18.
Between August 2014 and June 2015 at least 175 people were put to death, usually by beheading and after deplorably flawed judicial proceedings - an average execution rate of one person every two days. Almost half of executions carried out in recent years were for non-lethal crimes.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A prominent U.S. prosecutor said the Trump administration fired him on Saturday after he refused to step down, adding a discordant note to what is normally a routine changing of top attorneys when a new president takes office.
New York U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s defiant exit, first announced on Twitter, raised questions about President Donald Trump’s ability to fill top jobs throughout his government.
Trump has yet to put forward any candidates to serve as the nation’s 93 district attorneys even as his Justice Department asked the 46 who have not yet quit to hand in their resignations on Friday. Key positions at agencies like the State Department and the Defense Department also remain unfilled.
As the federal prosecutor for Manhattan and surrounding areas since 2009, Bharara secured insider-trading settlements from Wall Street firms and won criminal convictions in high-profile corruption and terrorism cases.
He told reporters in November that Trump had asked him to stay in his post, and he refused to resign when asked to do so by the Justice Department on Friday. He said he was fired on Saturday afternoon.
“Serving my country as U.S. Attorney here for the past seven years will forever be the greatest honor of my professional life, no matter what else I do or how long I live,” Bharara said in a press statement.
The Justice Department confirmed that Bharara was no longer serving in the position and declined further comment.
Like all U.S. attorneys, Bharara is a political appointee who can be replaced when a new president takes office. Previous presidents have often asked outgoing U.S. attorneys to stay on the job until their replacements win confirmation in the U.S. Senate.
The Washington Post, citing two people close to Trump, said the president’s adviser Stephen Bannon and Attorney General Jeff Sessions wanted a clean slate of federal prosecutors to assert the administration’s power.
But the decision to replace so many sitting attorneys at once has raised questions about whether the Trump administration’s ability to enforce the nation’s laws would be hindered.
“President Trump’s abrupt and unexplained decision to summarily remove over 40 U.S. attorneys has once again caused chaos in the federal government,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a Democrat, said.
Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the firings showed “the independence of the Justice Department is at risk under this administration” and that lawmakers had to carefully evaluate Trump’s replacements.
Career attorneys will carry on that work until new U.S. attorneys are put in place, the Justice Department said.
Bharara said his deputy, Joon Kim, will serve as his temporary replacement.
Marc Mukasey, a defense lawyer whose father served as attorney general under Republican President George W. Bush, has been mentioned as a possible replacement. He did not respond to a request for comment.
HIGH-PROFILE OFFICE
Bharara’s office handles some of the most critical business and criminal cases passing through the federal judicial system. He has been overseeing a probe into New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s fundraising.
Bharara has successfully prosecuted state and local politicians for corruption, including former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. He won a lifetime sentence against the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, and a 25-year sentence for international arms dealer Viktor Bout.
He won a $1.8 billion insider-trading settlement against SAC Capital Advisors, the largest in history, which forced the hedge fund to shut down, and he forced JPMorgan Chase to pay $1.7 billion to settle charges related to its role in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara speaks during a Reuters Newsmaker event in New York City, U.S., July 13, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File photo
“His firing so early in President Trump’s tenure is somewhat unexpected, but if you had asked me a few months ago whether I expected Preet to still be in that job in March I would have said no,” said Matthew Schwartz, a former prosecutor under Bharara.
Trump has asked two U.S. prosecutors to remain on the job, according to the Justice Department.
U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein of Maryland has been asked to stay on as the Senate considers his nomination to serve as the No. 2 Justice Department official, and U.S. Attorney Dana Boente of Virginia, who is temporarily serving in that position, has also been asked to remain.President Donald Trump’s many conflicts of interest were affirmed in a new Federal Election Commission filing this week. Trump’s campaign paid to rent space at his own properties in New Jersey and Miami. The RNC also paid to hold an event at Trump’s newest hotel in Washington, D.C.
A Washington Post report found that the Trump campaign spent $9.6 million in December with $700,000 in refunds of improper or excessive contributions. Trump’s properties, however, reported impressive financial gains reigniting the debate that Trump’s conflicts of interests are not being handled properly.
“Trump and the party also directed more than $413,000 in December to Trump properties or family members. Altogether, the campaign and the RNC spent more than $14 million on Trump hotels, office rental, airfare, catering and other expenses over the course of the election.”
Just days after Trump was sworn in as president, the cost to join his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida doubled. The Trump Organization’s decision to increase the price of admission from $100,000 to $200,000 was due to the surge in applications to join the club after Trump won the election.
[Image by Drew Angerer/Getty Images]
After the price increase, the Trump Organization named Bobby Burchfield, a Republican Party lawyer, as an independent ethics adviser. The New York Times reported that the Republican Party lawyer’s appointment was a sign of the Trump Organization’s commitment to addressing the potential conflicts of interest.
This weekend, Trump’s conflicts of interest are back in the headlines for two events the president will be attending at his Mar-a-Lago resort. On Saturday, the first of two events throughout Super Bowl Weekend will be American Red Cross’ annual ball. Donors are paying $1,250 to $100,000 to attend the ball.
Common Dreams reports that thousands of protesters are expected to arrive before the event.
“The International Red Cross 2017 Ball is poised to be met with more than a thousand protesters who say the charity’s humanitarian mission conflicts with Trump’s authoritarian first week in office. Another five thousand have also registered their interest in the march, which will go from Trump Plaza to Bingham Island to greet the gala’s fireworks display.”
On Sunday, Trump will also be attending a Super Bowl watch party at the membership-only Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach.
[Image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images]
Trump’s refusal to sell his assets and open a blind trust for his businesses have amplified concerns about his conflicts of interest. New documents obtained and published by ProPublica show Trump set up a revocable trust where his son, Donald Trump Jr., and Trump Organization chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, will have legal authority over his assets.
The New York Times reports the trust gives the appearance that Trump is no longer involved with his business, but the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust clearly states the purpose of it is for the benefit of the president.
“I don’t see how this in the slightest bit avoids a conflict of interest,” Frederick Tansill, a trust and estates lawyer said.
“First it is revocable at any time, and it is his son and his chief financial officer who are running it.”
Trump’s decision to hold events at his properties for Super Bowl Sunday is a sign he is not trying to quiet reports of his conflicts of interest.
Even a joke or a tweet about the poor ratings Arnold Schwarzenegger is reigning in as the new host of The Apprentice can be construed as a conflict of interest. Trump is currently listed as an executive producer for the NBC reality show, and even though he only makes a five-figure salary, the show’s advertisers are technically lining Trump’s pockets by proxy.
Trump’s current ties to the The Apprentice, his Super Bowl party at Mar-a-Lago, and his business being paid by the RNC is just a few of the many examples proving that many more reports about the president’s conflicts of interests are inevitable.
[Featured Image by Pool/Getty Images]Outrageous! Tillerson State Dept. Dumps $700,000 into Hungarian Media to Defeat Conservative Leader Orban
This is outrageous.
Hungary’s Victor Orban is one of the few conservative Western leaders speaking out against open borders, globalism and George Soros.
Orban recently told an EU audience that George Soros and his allies are using mass immigration to destroy Europe’s “cultural and ethnic identity.”
Deep state operatives in the State Department despise Orban for his pro-democracy, anti-immigrant positions.
It was announced this week that the Tillerson State Department is spending over $700,000 to defeat Orban in Hungary.
This is outrageous!
Breitbart.com reported:
The U.S. State Department has courted controversy by announcing it will plough $700,000 into Hungarian media, angering the country’s anti-globalist, conservative government. The funding was announced by U.S. Chargé d‘Affaires David Kostelancik, who has previously appeared to openly criticise the Trump administration by alluding to “apparent inconsistencies in [U.S.] foreign policy” and remarking that “not every criticism of the government is ‘fake news’.” Breitbart London spoke to a State Department official who confirmed it supports what it calls “democracy and human rights programming” in many countries, and that its intentions in Hungary — a NATO ally — are to “support media outlets operating outside the capital … to produce fact-based reporting and increase their audience and economic sustainability”. The State Department also echoed Kostelancik’s claim that too many Hungarian news outlets are sympathetic to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s popular conservative government — which has earned powerful enemies by opposing the European Union on mass migration, building a highly effective border wall, and exposing the network of European politicians deemed “reliable allies” by billionaire open borders campaigner George Soros.The Hoosier Lottery is having a banner year, thanks in part to this winter’s record $1.6 billion Powerball jackpot mania and other efforts to better reach Indiana players.
The lottery is projecting that it will finish the fiscal year on June 30 with $1.2 billion in revenue—14 percent more than last year—and it is on track to return $275 million to the state.
“That’s exciting,” said Hoosier Lottery Executive Director Sarah Taylor. “That would be the most amount turned over to the state from the Hoosier Lottery ever.”
The lottery is expecting 50 percent more revenue from Powerball sales this year and a 13 percent increase in scratch-off sales. The lottery also reached $1 billion in sales about seven weeks earlier than it did last year.
The year will also mark the first time that IGT Indiana—the company formerly called Gtech Indiana, which took over management of the lottery three years ago—will meet the goals set under its contract.
But that’s largely because the goals are lower than they used to be.
The Hoosier Lottery Commission last June revamped its contract with IGT, dramatically reducing the revenue goals the company set when it bid for the state’s business back in 2012. At that time, IGT also agreed to pay the state a one-time sum of $18.3 million.
Under the new terms, the company had to turn at least $270 million in net income over to the state or face a penalty. Had the state’s take of lottery revenue topped $290 million, IGT would have received a financial incentive.
The original agreement between the state and private contractor set the goal for this year at $365 million.
The lottery is projected to end the year with $280 million in net income, most of which flows into the state budget.
“These last couple of years, they’ve had a shortfall payment to us,” Taylor said. “This year, I don’t think that is language that we will be discussing. This will be a banner year in that sense.”
Adam VanOsdol, a senior editor of INGroup’s Indiana Gaming Insight publication, said the lottery’s performance in light of the Powerball surge shows the former benchmarks were “unrealistic.”
Taylor Taylor
“Even though Powerball was great, they’re still barely meeting their targets,” VanOsdol said. “I think it was pretty obvious that the prior income targets were not very achievable.”
What if there’s no Powerball mania next year? IGT’s general manager, Colin Hadden, said he’s not worried about the company meeting its goals. He said IGT’s plan to meet next year’s target of turning over $291 million to the state is built on conservative estimates.
“We’re seeing some real pleasing performance and momentum in many areas of the business,” Hadden said. “We don’t know what the jackpots will do because it’s chance. We can’t rely on that. Our job is to make sure all areas of the business are performing well.”
The lottery is also working to release more appealing products and be more strategic about how those products are sold in stores.
“We’re trying to continue engaging players,” Taylor said. That includes TV commercials meant to make games come to life and making sure the lottery has a prominent point-of-sale presence in stores. There’s also an effort to create games that are specifically engaging to Hoosiers.
This year, the lottery had an Indy 500-themed scratch-off that it sold on-site through a retailer near the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
It also plans to release a Wheel of Fortune scratch-off game, which it will showcase in August at the Indiana State Fair.
“There’s lots of Wheel watchers in the state and we think we’ll have some fun activities for them to participate in,” Taylor said.
This year’s stronger performance has also meant additional money for convenience stores where lottery tickets are sold. Retailers get 6 percent of sales, said Scott Imus, executive director of the Indiana Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association.
“Certainly we’ve seen increased sales, particularly with the Powerball record jackpot in January,” Imus said.
But he said higher sales haven’t had a big impact because lottery tickets are “not the most profitable” products for stores. He said selling them is challenging to manage.
“It’s a big form of loss for retailers, with errors in ringing up sales or paying out winners, customers who steal tickets, employees getting bored and taking tickets thinking they can make their money back,” Imus said. “But we’re in the business to make life a little easier for customers, so it’s a product our members carry.”•This week, the well-known Buddhist web resource Buddhanet launched a mobile site: Buddhist eLibrary.
Merry Christmas to us. (fyi, Access to Insight can also be downloaded in full here for android and on itunes for iphones, or to your computer for offline browsing.)
The eLibrary is currently fairly sparse in its offerings and available online in 5 languages: English, Chinese, Thai, Portuguese, and Spanish, but further languages and materials are planned.
The site represents the combined efforts of the Buddha Dharma Education Association Inc. (BDEA), which is located at the Bodhi Tree Forest Monastery, NSW Australia, currently in partnership with Mahachulalongkorn University, International Buddhist College (IBC), and the Buddhist Maha Vihara (BMV).
Buddhanet and the eLibrary seek to “support the globalisation of Buddhist education and the systematic development of Dharma based pedagogy by establishing partnerships with Buddhist institutions worldwide. The eLibrary follows the principle of ‘One Dharma’, that is, promoting all Buddhist traditions and the diversity of cultures and languages they represent.”At a news conference, Dec. 12, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) slammed Republican lawmakers who "are reluctant to either review Russian tactics or ignore them." "The Russians are not our friends," McConnell told reporters. (The Washington Post)
At a news conference, Dec. 12, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) slammed Republican lawmakers who "are reluctant to either review Russian tactics or ignore them." "The Russians are not our friends," McConnell told reporters. (The Washington Post)
Republican lawmakers are increasingly at odds with Donald Trump on a number of high-profile domestic and national security issues, an early sign that the GOP-led Congress might resist some elements of the president-elect’s unorthodox agenda.
Although Trump maintains enthusiastic backing in many corners of the party, key members of the Senate and House have been outspoken in challenging his views of Russia and its interference in the U.S. election, warning of potential conflicts of interest arising from Trump’s far-flung business interests if he does not fully divest from his company, and criticizing the tough approach that he has taken to some companies, including his threat to impose a stiff tariff on firms that move jobs overseas.
There is also friction over Trump’s selection of ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state — with GOP advisers warning that a growing number of Republican senators may be unwilling to vote to confirm Tillerson because of his ties to Russia.
No other issue has so clearly divided Trump and top Republicans lawmakers as has his dismissal of U.S. intelligence agencies that attributed the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other political targets to Russian operatives. The tensions were exposed over the weekend: Trump belittled the CIA after a Washington Post report that the agency believed that Moscow favored Trump in the election, and several Republicans, including Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), joined with Democrats to call for an investigation into the matter.
President-elect Donald Trump as well as Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Dec. 11 reacted to the CIA’s assessment that Russia intervened to help Trump win the election. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
“The Russians are not our friends,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters Monday, voicing his support for an inquiry.
McConnell stopped short of endorsing a special select committee investigation, as some lawmakers have suggested, but said that the Senate Intelligence Committee is equipped to take on the matter.
“This simply cannot be a partisan issue,” he said.
McConnell also appeared to break with Trump in his assessment of the CIA, saying that he has “the highest confidence” in the intelligence community and that the CIA is “filled with selfless patriots, many of whom anonymously risk their lives for the American people.”
McConnell, meanwhile, declined to defend Tillerson against accusations that he is too close with Russia, telling reporters that he would not comment on a hypothetical “phantom nominee.”
McConnell’s reluctance to engage on Tillerson came after some of his allies on national security issues, including Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), raised doubts about the ExxonMobil chief’s background.
On Tuesday, Rubio expressed “serious concerns” about Tillerson’s nomination, noting that America’s top diplomat must be “free of potential conflicts of interest.” Rubio, however, left open room for compromise, saying he looked forward to “learning more about [Tillerson’s] record and his views.”
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Tillerson received the Order of Friendship from Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013, two years after ExxonMobil won a contract to explore for oil in a Russian-controlled area of the Arctic Ocean. The agreement has been frozen since the United States imposed sanctions on Moscow after Russia’s 2014 incursion into Ukraine.
Some senior GOP advisers fear that the Tillerson-Putin relationship will make Republicans reluctant to support the nomination. One adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said as many as seven might now be unwilling to vote to confirm him as the nation’s top diplomat.
McCain said he would give Tillerson a fair hearing if the oil executive is nominated, but on Monday the senator questioned his judgment for being close to the Russian president. Putin “is a thug and a murderer,” McCain said on CNN, “and I don’t see how anybody could be a friend of this old-time KGB agent.”
D.J. Jordan, a spokesman for Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), said Monday that the lawmaker “has a lot of questions about Mr. Tillerson and his ties to Russia,” though he added that Lankford is “hopeful that those questions will be addressed in the days ahead.”
A big test for Republicans
Taken together, the tensions between the president-elect and fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill reflect a major test for how the GOP congressional majorities will handle the unusual circumstances of the Trump era. Republicans, many of whom opposed Trump during the presidential primaries, want to work with him in many areas and avoid alienating his enthusiastic voter base. Yet some in the GOP are also assessing how to fulfill their constitutional duties as a check on a businessman-president who is unaccustomed to the public scrutiny inherent to a democratic system and unconcerned with past traditions of transparency, particularly when it comes to his personal finances. They also must prepare for the potential that Trump, who has effectively harnessed Twitter to skewer his critics, could turn his ire toward them.
Democrats, for their part, have little power to investigate Trump or thwart his nominations. In 2013, Democrats — angered by what they described as years of Republican obstruction — voted to scrap the rule requiring at least 60 senators to overcome a procedural hurdle and move to a final confirmation vote. Now, all of Trump’s nominees for the executive and judicial branches, with the exception of picks for the Supreme Court, can be confirmed on a simple majority vote.
With 48 seats in the Senate, Democrats in that chamber need to win over only a handful of Republicans to block a nominee, though doing so requires a degree of Democratic unity. That could be difficult, with 10 of the party’s senators facing reelection in two years in states that Trump won.
Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and his leadership team have urged senators set to serve as ranking Democrats on top national security, financial and domestic-policy committees to focus on hiring professional investigators able to quickly dive into the personal and financial backgrounds of Trump’s nominees, according to a senior Democratic aide. The hope is that Democrats will be able to dig up dirt on Trump’s nominees just as Republicans did to some of President Obama’s high-profile nominees in the early days of his administration.
The larger drama is likely to take place among congressional Republicans, who will face pressure to help Trump. So far, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) has demonstrated a reluctance to challenge the president-elect on some of the issues that have animated his GOP colleagues.
On Monday, Ryan dismissed calls for a probe into Russian meddling in the election, saying the House Intelligence Committee is “working diligently on the cyber threats posed by foreign governments and terrorist organizations.” He also appeared to criticize suggestions that Russia favored Trump, saying in a statement that “exploiting the work of our intelligence community for partisan purposes does a grave disservice to those professionals and potentially jeopardizes national security,” and “we should not cast doubt on the clear and decisive outcome of this election.”
Ryan also has waved off concerns about Trump’s potential conflicts of interest related to his global real estate and branding empire. Asked last week by a CNBC interviewer how he hoped the president-elect would handle his business after he takes office, Ryan said, “However he wants to.”
“This is not what I’m concerned about in Congress,” he said.
Trump had planned a news conference Thursday to reveal how he will handle the business while he is in office, but his transition team said Monday that he will do it next month. Trump has hinted that he will retain an ownership stake while putting his adult children in charge of the company’s operations, telling “Fox News Sunday” that “essentially I’m not going to have anything to do with the management.”
Late Friday night,Trump tweeted that he will hand over control of his businesses to his two adult son’s before Jan. 20.
Ethics experts and lawmakers in both parties have warned that if Trump retains his stake, he will face congressional hearings and, potentially, investigations into whether he has a direct and personal financial stake in the decisions he is supposed to be making in the public interest. They say that Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns has left the public largely in the dark about the full extent of the potential conflicts.
“Turning it over to his family and him still being a recipient of fruits of their labor does create conflicts in my mind,” said Graham, the GOP senator from South Carolina. “It will cloud his presidency if he doesn’t find a solution that puts it behind him.”
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a member of the House Oversight Committee and the new chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, told The Post last week that he expects Trump to divorce himself from the business “as much as you can have a blind trust and fully divest.”
“He has more counselors around him, with plenty of law degrees, that will give him great counsel on how to stay out of trouble,” Meadows said. He added that he expected Trump to build the proper firewall, but that “we have an oversight function that would be appropriate, and from my standpoint I think it’s incumbent upon the Oversight Committee to look at everything without a partisan lens.”
‘Vigorous oversight’
The chairman of the oversight panel, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), said it was premature to consider any sort of investigation, but he said the committee would provide “vigorous oversight” of the new president.
“He’s still a private citizen at this point, though he needs to get his affairs in order,” Chaffetz said. “Give him a little breathing space, I think that’s fair.”
Ethics experts have called for Trump to appoint an independent trustee, unconnected to his family, to lead an effort to sell his assets and reinvest the proceeds without his knowledge. Trump has appeared to brush off concerns about conflicts, noting that there is no legal requirement that he separate.
“When I ran, everybody knew that I was a very big owner of real estate all over the world,” Trump told Fox News’s Chris Wallace in an interview that aired Sunday. “I mean, I’m not going to have anything to do with the management of the company. You know, when you sell real estate that’s not like going out and selling a stock. That takes a long time.... I’m going to have nothing to with it. And I’ll be honest with you — I don’t care about it anymore.”
Trump said he was “turning down billions of dollars of deals” as he prepares to take office. “I’m not going to be doing deals at all,” he said. “Now that would be — I don’t even know if that’s a conflict. I mean, I have the right to do it. You know, under the law, I have the right to do it. I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do deals, because I want to focus on this.”
Several lawmakers who would be responsible for probing potential conflicts of interest said in recent interviews they are willing to give the incoming president time and space to figure out how he will deal with the situation.
“We haven’t even started the next Congress and we haven’t seen exactly how President-elect Trump is going to handle all this,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who leads the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee with jurisdiction over investigations. “I’m going to give him and his administration time to figure out what, quite honestly, is a very difficult situation.”
In other corners of the GOP, lawmakers say the calls to investigate Trump are coming primarily from his political opponents.
“There are going to be detractors from Trump [who] are going to try to make it sound like all the conflict of interest and all of that, and I don’t think people are really concerned about that except just the activists you run into on the Hill,” said Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Ok |
fixes. I've fixed the crash when opening contraband ammo boxes (thanks to "the wanderer") and I believe this also fixes a bug when dropping items into the Teraton fabricator pit.
More importantly, this version moves away from DirectX and uses normal GDI calls to blt each frame to the screen. The main advantage is that Transcendence will no longer switch resolution to run, but an added advantage is that the game will work better with Vista and (hopefully) WINE on Linux.
There is a small disadvantage, however: since GDI is a bit slower than DirectX, some computers may run Transcendence slower. If you have this problem, run Transcendence with the /dx switch to use DirectX. But most modern processors and graphic cards will show no difference.
As always, a complete list of fixes appears on the version history page. Thanks to all the players who posted bugs in the forums.
Nethack is still one of my favorite games. Depth and detail, along with playability and the illusion of simplicity, combine to make Nethack one of the best games of all time. I have always wanted to create a space adventure game with similar properties. The variety of enemies, weapons, and wondrous devices will hopefully provide some of the same depth to Transcendence, and the simple format should make it easy to learn and play.
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Grade 2012MY MSRP Prius c One $18,950 Prius c Two $19,900 Prius c Three $21,635 Prius c Four $23,230
OAL OAH OAW Wheelbase Curb weight 2012 Prius 176.4 in. 58.7 in. 68.7 in. 106.3 in. 3,042 lbs. 2012 Prius c 157.3 in. 56.9 in. 66.7 in. 100.4 in. 2,500 lbs.
• Highest rated city fuel economy of any vehicle without a plug• Introduces proven hybrid powertrain at a starting MSRP of $18,950• Wide array of available convenience features and premium technologyTORRANCE, Calif., Feb.8, 2012 – Following the North American debut of the all- new 2012 Prius c at the 2012 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Toyota Motor Sales (TMS), U.S.A., Inc., will bring this dynamically styled, five-door hatchback to market in March 2012, extending Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive to the subcompact segment.The letter "c" represents "city" in the Prius c name. Designed to function as an urban-friendly vehicle with an engaging driving experience, hatchback utility, and an EPA-estimated city fuel economy rating of 53 mpg, * Prius c offers the highest city mpg rating of any vehicle without a plug. The all-new Prius c joins the Prius Family, which includes the third generation Prius Liftback, the versatile new Prius v and the Prius Plug-in Hybrid, which will also be available in early 2012.With over two and a half million units sold worldwide, Prius remains the world's premier eco-vehicle brand, and it has established consumer trust in hybrid technology. With Prius c, Toyota will make the market's most proven hybrid technology available to subcompact car shoppers with a starting MSRP of $18,950.Unique Place in the Prius FamilyA gateway into the Prius Family, the new Prius c will find favor with younger shoppers seeking a smartly designed, fuel-sipping subcompact car packing advanced drivetrain and in-car technology. The Prius c will offer engaging driving dynamics and superior urban maneuverability. When the 2012 Prius c arrives in showrooms in March 2012, this all-new hatchback will offer:• The highest rated city fuel economy of any vehicle without a plug*; 53 mpg in the city, and 46 mpg on the highway, for a combined rating of 50 mpg*2012 EPA-estimated 53/46/50 city/highway/combined mpg. Actual mileage may vary.• A starting MSRP of $18,950 with a proven hybrid powertrain and premium technology• A premium subcompact car experience thanks to a wide array of available convenience and advanced in-car electronics features, including a standard 3.5- inch full color TFT multi-information display, Bluetooth® hands-free phone capability, USB port with iPod® connectivity, and available Display Audio system with Navigation and EntuneTMValue-oriented Hybrid in Subcompact SegmentThe Prius c will be available in four grades, offering desirable features, equipment, and enhanced capability providing consumers compelling value. The Prius c will offer many standard features such as automatic climate control; tilt-telescopic steering wheel with audio, climate, multi-information display and Bluetooth® hands free phone controls; and remote keyless entry with illuminated entry among a long list of standard equipment.The smaller scale of the all-new Prius c becomes apparent in comparison to the familiar proportions of the midsize Prius Liftback. This reduced vehicle size necessitated a challenging scaling-down of the Hybrid Synergy Drive to adapt the propulsion system to the Prius c. The Prius c is smaller and lighter than its midsize Prius Liftback stable mate with 19.1 inches less length (157.3 vs. 176.4 inches OAL), and 542 lbs. less weight than the Prius Liftback (2,500 vs. 3,042 lbs.). The Prius c rides on a wheelbase that is nearly six inches shorter than the midsize Prius (100.4 vs. 106.3 inches). In adapting the Hybrid Synergy Drive to the smaller Prius c platform, each of the system's major components were re-designed to reduce weight, scale and improve vehicle efficiency.Efficient PackagingThe Prius c's effective packaging design strategically situates key drivetrain components within the chassis to help optimize interior space and handling. The gasoline engine, transaxle and power- control unit are optimally positioned within the vehicle to help enhance weight distribution and lower the center of gravity, which aids handling. The hybrid battery is positioned directly beneath the rear seat while the fuel tank is beneath and just aft of the rear seat. Such positioning ideally distributes mass within the wheelbase improving weight distribution to help enhance handling. By strategically placing the hybrid drivetrain components and battery to maximize interior space, the Prius c is able to offer 104 cu. ft. of interior volume (87 cu. ft. passenger volume, 17 cu. ft. cargo volume with 2nd row up).The Prius c's smart packaging layout offers elements of convenience and ease- of-operation for driver and passenger. The vehicle has a 20.9 inch hip point (measured from the ground) and a 30.1-inch door opening height (measured from the hip point) to help ease ingress/egress events. The packaging of engine components low within the chassis allows for a lower hood angle, enabling a 9.0-degree angle of depression for the driver. This angle, coupled with a less intrusive A-pillar design help improve the driver's forward visibility. The Prius c's shorter 31.9-inch front overhang contributes to the vehicle's tight 15.7-foot turning radius, helping make it extremely maneuverable in urban settings.Youthful Exterior, Interior DesignThe Prius c exterior design projects a fun, youthful attitude for this all-new addition to the Prius family, while offering excellent aerodynamic performance. Adding to its character the Prius c's lower-body styling is wider below the beltline, and features sculpted rear flares to help express a sturdy, athletic stance that communicates a more agile driving experience.The rear design of the Prius c tapers the cabin toward the rear hatch to help enhance aerodynamic performance. Extensive aerodynamic features were engineered into the Prius c to help achieve a 0.28 coefficient of drag. The side mirrors incorporate fins and smooth shapes to aid aerodynamic performance.The Prius c's available exterior colors include vibrant hues that are unique and expressive. The available colors include three new colors – Habanero, Moonglow, and Summer Rain Metallic – along with Blue Streak Metallic, Absolutely Red, Black Sand Pearl, Magnetic Gray Metallic, Classic Silver Metallic, and Super White.The Prius c interior design seeks to create a space that is futuristic yet passenger friendly. The layout of the drive-system controls and the utility functions enhance the feeling of comfort. The thin, wide instrument panels, and placement of displays and controls, help convey a greater sense of spaciousness in a subcompact interior. The door trim, seat surfaces, and instrument panel feature treatments in lighter colors to help create contrast against the base black interior color.The Prius c displays key information on an easy-to-read, digital-display combination meter atop the center of instrument panel, which is offset toward the driver. Locating this digital gauge panel closer to the driver helps reduce the driver's eye movement, and the instrument cluster's revised forward position helps achieve an optimal focal distance from the driver.The Prius c is equipped with an advanced 3.5-inch Thin Film Transistor (TFT) full-color Multi-Information Display (MID) that helps the driver better utilize the advanced features unique to hybrid vehicles. The new color TFT display illustrates drive information and energy usage in a fun, easy-to-read manner. The display offers, Energy Monitor, Drive Information, and an ECO-Score display that illustrates driving scores for each portion of a trip.An ECO-savings display allows for gasoline costs and a comparison vehicle to be pre-set to help the system provide an ongoing estimate of the actual cost savings enjoyed driving the Prius c. The system can also display this data as a longer-term savings record, calculating savings and consumption over the span of months.The Prius c offers a Touch Tracer display that coordinates driver tactile action on the steering wheel controls to a visual indicator on the multi-informational display atop the dashboard to help keep the driver's gaze closer to the road.The Prius c's front seats have been designed to offer enhanced comfort and safety while reducing weight. The Prius c's seat design incorporates a urethane foam material that has been optimized to help reduce the seat's thickness, mass and weight while retaining comfort. The front seats offer improved seatback support with additional foam in the lower back and lateral bolster areas. They also adopt the Advanced WIL (Whiplash Injury-Lessening) structure that simultaneously support the head and lower back in the event of a collision from the rear.The rear seats of the Prius c are available as full-fold or 60/40 split fold, depending on trim level. A denser urethane foam material used in the rear seat structure enables a relatively compact seat design that enables greater luggage area.Seat fabrics available for Prius c include two different kinds of cloth and an available SofTexTM trim. The base seat fabric covering of the Prius c One grade has a solid color with various embossed patterns. The seat trim on Prius c Two and Three grades features a modern two-tone pattern with black bolsters and light blue-gray inserts which provide a pleasing color contrast. The Prius c Four includes premium SofTex trim with heated front seats, offered in black or light blue-gray.Lightweight trim materials are utilized throughout the Prius c interior to help reduce overall vehicle weight. Durable, highly rigid, lightweight materials cover the A- pillar, center pillar, and trim the rear deck area. Lightweight materials are also adopted for the luggage floor, and the floor carpet is composed of a highly durable material that also provides weight savings.The Prius c's door trim expresses a sense of advanced design with its shapes, contours and features. The USB port and auxiliary terminal are located in an open tray area in front of the passenger seat, which is ideal for storing of electronic devices.The Prius c utilizes an efficient, compact air conditioning system. Key air- conditioning system components such as the blower fan, and air flow conduits have been addressed to reduce size and weight, while improving efficiency to help reduce electrical consumption. The system also utilizes a clean air filter that removes pollen, dust, and larger airborne objects. In ECO mode, the air conditioning operation is suppressed to help improve fuel consumption. The Prius c's roof is lined with heat insulating material to help realize better HVAC efficiency.Display Audio and Connectivity with Entune®The Prius c offers three audio system configurations; the Prius c One grade's audio system features four speakers and includes AM/FM CD player with MP3/WMA playback capability, auxiliary audio jack, USB port with iPod® connectivity, hands-free phone capability, phone book access, and music streaming via Bluetooth® wireless technology. The Prius c Two grade has the same audio features with a six speaker system.The Prius c Three and Four grades include a Display Audio System with Navigation and EntuneTM that has six speakers. It includes a 6.1-inch touchscreen, SiriusXMTM Satellite Radio capability (includes a 3-month trial subscription to XM Select package), HD RadioTM with iTunes® tagging, and advanced voice recognition. Toyota's EntuneTM multi-media system functions through a smart phone interface that brings applications such as BingTM and Pandora® to the vehicle audio display. This audio configuration also features real-time traffic, weather, fuel prices, sports, and stocks.Prius c Hybrid Synergy DriveAs with other Prius models, Prius c relies on Toyota's revolutionary Hybrid Synergy Drive® and excellent aerodynamics to achieve outstanding fuel efficiency. The Prius c relies on the seamless operation of two power sources (a gasoline engine and an electric motor tandem) either in parallel or serial operation as a means of propulsion. During deceleration and braking, the electric motor/generator tandem creates energy that is returned to the Hybrid System's battery to help restore charge. The Prius c's gasoline engine and electric motors can work in tandem or individually to propel the vehicle while powertrain operations (level of power application, power split, and regenerative flow) are managed by computer control to best match the application of power to given conditions.The Prius c features a SULEV (Tier 2 Bin 3) compliant 1.5-liter in-line, four- cylinder gasoline (1NZ-FXE) engine that utilizes an efficient Atkinson cycle to improve its efficiency. This engine's Atkinson cycle modifies the engine's intake valve opening events to close later during the compression stroke. This delayed closure allows a portion of the intake charge to be forced back into the intake manifold to be used by the next cylinder, maximizing use of the fuel and improving thermal efficiencies. The 1.5-liter engine in the Prius c also adopts an electric water pump, a micro-polishing process that reduces friction of the reciprocating assembly, and a cooled Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) system that also helps improve efficiency.The Prius c's efficient gasoline engine is mated to a new transaxle assembly that is the most compact, lightweight transaxle designed for a Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive System which is a two-electric-motor full hybrid system. The new P510 continuously variable transaxle contains two high-output motors (one acts as a starter/generator), a power split mechanism, a speed reducer device, and an open-type differential.Several components within the Prius c's transaxle feature enhanced designs aimed at enhancing the function of the unit and improving drivability. By optimizing the designand spring characteristics of the transaxle's vibration damper, low noise performance is achieved as well as increased suppression of the vibrations transferred by the engine. The new compact electric motor/ generator design in the P510 transaxle is smaller and lighter weight than previous motors thanks to a new stator design with rectangular coil configurations to achieve higher outputs from more compact dimensions.The Prius c's hybrid system includes a 144-volt nickel-metal hydride battery pack that weighs 67.2 lbs. compared to the 201-volt battery in the midsize Prius that weighs 91 lbs. This battery positioning places mass near the middle of the Prius c's shorter wheelbase (100.4 inches), improving the vehicle's center of gravity to benefit stability and handling. The battery pack itself is comprised of 20 battery modules connected in series with each module containing six cells (total of 120 cells vs. 168 cells in Prius).The Prius c is equipped with a newly designed power control unit that is lighter weight and more compact to reduce overall hybrid system weight. The power control unit contains an inverter, a voltage boosting converter and an AC/DC converter. The system's inverter converts high voltage direct current (DC) from the battery to alternating current (AC) for consumption by motor/generator tandem, and takes the AC power generated by the generator/motor into DC power to charge the battery. The new power control unit weighs three lbs. less than the unit on the Prius Liftback, and it includes an improved cooling system. The inverter's efficiency is improved with a newly designed Insulated Gate Polar Transistor (IGPT) that helps reduce the hybrid system's energy loss to improve fuel efficiency.The Prius c hybrid system's DC-DC converter modifies the power generated by the DC 144v power motor/generator within the transaxle converting the electrical flow to DC 12 volt power. This 12-volt electricity is supplied to the vehicle's auxiliary devices and for maintaining charge of the12-volt battery. The size and weight of the Prius c's DC-DC converter has been reduced while the unit is able to realize improved performance and functionality.Three Driver Convenient Drive ModesPrius c offers three drive modes: Normal, ECO, and EV modes. Using a drive mode switch, operators can engage ECO and EV modes to best suit their driving needs.With Prius c's ECO mode, the engine's throttle opening is reduced by a maximum of 12% compared to normal operation to reduce energy consumption. Also, the air-conditioning system operates in such a way to help reduce energy depletion and enhance vehicle efficiency. For instance, when ambient temperature rises above a preset level, internal air recirculation is activated to minimize air ventilation loss. Also, the blower fan airflow volume can be reduced to encourage fuel efficiency.The Prius c also offers an EV mode that allows the vehicle to be driven a short distance using only the electric motor and hybrid battery for propulsion. The EV mode is well suited to situations when drivers seek to reduce noise while driving in residential areas, or limit exhaust emissions within indoor parking structures, for example. The Prius c can drive approximately one mile at speeds under 25 mph on solely electric power.Vehicle Structure Helps Enhance Handling and SafetyThe Prius c's body structure makes extensive use of light-weight, high-tensile steel to help reduce vehicle weight and help improve fuel economy. The use of high strength steel also lends the Prius c a rigid body structure that also helps enhance occupant safety and vehicle handling. The design of the body's front structure helps disperse impact energies around the passenger cabin, directing frontal crash energies around the passenger cabin and through the floor, rocker structures and A-pillar. The body features a side collision structure that utilizes multiple grades of steel to better manage impact deformity in addition to a reinforced center pillar and rocker panel that use 980 MPA grade steel. The Prius c's roof reinforcement structure uses 590 MPA grade steel to help better resist deformation.Unification of the front crash-box structure with the radiator support, and optimizing the shape of the front cowl improves the torsional rigidity and stiffness of the Prius c chassis, helping enhance front suspension performance. Strategically placed metal reinforcement members areapplied to the rear door periphery and surrounding the rear suspension to improve the rear structure's rigidity under load. Additional reinforcement metal placed around the rear door openings also help improve the vehicle's torsional rigidity. An aluminum rear bumper reinforcement member is used to help increase rigidity between the rear subframe members, reducing weight while helping control flexing of the subframe to improve handling.The circles and boxes denote area of the Prius c unibody that are supported with sound and vibration absorbing foam.The Prius c body structure design implements several countermeasures to help mitigate noise and vibration entering the cabin. A spray-type insulation coating is used beneath the vehicle, and its optimal thickness helps realize the best sound insulation benefit with the least weight penalty. The center floor cross member and under floor reinforcement have been joint to contribute to ensuring handling stability and improve sound insulation. Foam materials are also utilized in various sections of the unibody structure such as the A-pillar, the B-pillar and the ends of the rocker panels among other structuresSuspension and SteeringThe Prius c shares the suspension design with the Yaris subcompact. The front suspension consists of a Macpherson strut design, and the coil spring and shock-absorber characteristics have been tuned to help stability, flat turning and smooth ride comfort. The front-suspension- bushing characteristics have been tuned to help suppress vibrations transmitted to the vehicle on bumpy roads and help create a flat comfortable drive. A 24.2- mm stabilizer bar is equipped to the front of the vehicle to help enhance turning stability.The tuned torsion-beam rear suspension helps create enhanced ride comfort and provide a smooth, responsive steering feel. The coil spring and shock absorbers have been tuned to offer a high level of stability, flat cornering and smooth ride while minimizing road vibrations. The thickness of the rear beam member has also been optimized to enhance rigidity and provide greater rollover resistance. The Prius c rides on a relatively long 100.4-inch wheelbase, which also helps enhance the vehicle ride quality.Prius c is available with 15- or 16-inch wheel and tire combinations. Fuel- efficient tires that offer lower rolling resistance with improved road gripping performance have been adopted. Aerodynamic considerations helped shape the design of the wheels to help reduce wind resistance and improve fuel economy.The Prius c is equipped with a column- type Electric Power Steering (EPS) system, which offers reduced steering efforts and power consumption with the adoption of an efficient electric motor and reduction gear that increase power assistance. Among the equipment available for the Prius c Four grade are aluminum-alloy 16-inch wheels which are also accompanied by a quicker steering ratio. The ratio yields 2.28 turns lock- to-lock, compared to the 3.02 turns with the 15-inch wheel specification.The steering column is a lightweight, compact manual tilt/telescopic assembly. The Prius c's driver controls a D-shaped steering wheel that offers additional knee clearance for easier ingress/egress.SafetyThe Prius c is equipped with several active and passive safety elements. The Prius c is equipped with nine airbags, including driver and front passenger Advanced Airbag System, driver and front passenger seat-mounted side airbags, driver and front passenger seat cushion airbags, front and rear side curtain airbags, and driver's knee airbag.Star Safety SystemTM includes Vehicle Stability Control (VSC), Traction Control (TRAC), Anti-lock Brake System (ABS), Electronic Brake Force Distribution (EBD), Brake Assist (BA), and Smart Stop Technology (SST).The Prius c is equipped with a Vehicle Proximity Notification System (VPNS). To help the awareness of those around the vehicle, the VPNS will sound when the vehicle speed is above zero and below 15.5 mph, in EV mode or when engine is stopped, and the shift position is not in "P". The warning sound is a continuous polyphonic tone; the tone's sound pitch is coupled to vehicle speed with pitch of the tone increasing with vehicle speedPeace of Mind Warranty ProtectionToyota's 36-month/36,000 mile basic new-vehicle warranty applies to all components other than normal wear and maintenance items. Additional 60-month warranties cover the powertrain for 60,000 miles and against corrosion with no mileage limitation. The hybrid-related components, including the HV battery, battery control module, hybrid control module and inverter with converter, are covered for eight years/100,000 miles.The Prius c will also come standard with Toyota Care, a complimentary plan covering normal factory-scheduled maintenance and 24-hour roadside assistance for two years or 25,000 miles, whichever comes first.A Chinese firm rolled out what it claims is the world’s first-ever holographic smartphone on Thursday afternoon in Beijing.
Called the Estar Takee 1, the smartphone generates holographic images with four front-facing cameras that track users’ eye movements to create 3D images, an approach that’s been likened to technology employed with Amazon’s Fire Phone.
Digital Trends elaborates:
Does that make the world’s first claim redundant? Maybe not. A promo video, along with the official page advertising the device, all make it seem like the Takee takes its holographic effect and moves it beyond just the interface, and apply it to games, movies, video calls, and a variety of other interesting features. However, without seeing the device in action, it’s difficult to know exactly how true all this is. For example, the video shows the phone “projecting” a 3D image off the screen, whether it’s from an app or an incoming video call, which is really exciting. If it can really do it. The footage gives the impression everyone can see the holographic boy on the screen, but if the cameras are only tracking the user’s eyes, that probably won’t be the case. The same can be said for the explosions, racing cars, and 3D galaxies.
The cameras can recognize hand gestures, allowing the user to swipe in the air to unlock the phone and navigate home screens—a feature which Digital Trends points out has been boasted by an in-the-works Nokia Windows phone.
The phone otherwise features a 5.5-inch1080p screen, a 13-megapixel camera, 32GB of memory and a 2GHz octa-core MediaTek processor with 2GB of RAM. It will be available in black, white, and apparently one model will be wrapped in 18k gold.
Liu Meihong, CEO of ShenZhen Estar Displaytech Co., Ltd., said the company has invested millions of RMB in the invention and foresees the holographic tech being applied to online games, music, maps, navigation and possibly resurrecting Tupac.
Follow @shanghaiistNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The authors bring extreme climbing to life.... Perhaps no author can rationalize why some choose to risk their lives... for the thrill of conquering a mountain. The Ledge comes perilously close and tells a ripping true story at the same time.”—The Denver Post
In June 1992, best friends Jim Davidson and Mike Price stood atop Washington’s Mount Rainier, celebrating what they hoped would be the first of many milestones in their lives as passionate mountaineers. Then their triumph turned tragic when a cave-in plunged them deep inside a glacial crevasse—the pitch-black, ice-walled hell of every climber’s nightmares.
An avid adventurer since youth, Davidson was a seasoned climber at the time of the Rainier ascent. But the harrowing free fall left him challenged by nature’s grandeur at its most unforgiving. Trapped on a narrow frozen shelf, deep below daylight, he desperately battled crumbling ice, snow that threatened to bury him alive, and crippling fear of the inescapable chasm below—all the while struggling to save his fatally injured friend. Finally, alone, with little equipment and rapidly dwindling hope, he confronted a fateful choice: the certainty of a slow, lonely death or the near impossibility of an agonizing climb for life. A story of heart-stopping adventure, heartfelt friendship, fleeting mortality, and implacable nature, The Ledge chronicles the elation and grief, dizzying heights and punishing depths, of a journey to hard-won wisdom.
“Plunges readers into a dark, icy chasm from which escape seems impossible. Then it reveals the strength it takes to look up, and to start climbing.”—Jim Sheeler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of the National Book Award finalist Final Salute
“How [Davidson] rescued himself is the core of The Ledge, and its most gripping part. The physical effort and will involved are astonishing.”—The Plain Dealer
“A moving portrait of friendship and loss.”—The Wall Street Journal0 SHARES Share Tweet
ZOTAC today announced the VR GO backpack PC, a truly portable product that has been designed to deliver a mobile VR experience.
“The VR GO is an exciting innovation for everyone to finally enjoy VR the way it is meant to be experienced,” says Tony Wong, CEO, ZOTAC International. “We want to provide the best of both worlds to our users: Powerful VR in high resolution and fast framerates while enjoying true mobility in a compact, wearable form. The VR GO is the best way to VR.”
Let’s talk about the specs first. The ZOTAC VR GO is powered by an Intel Core i7-6700T quad-core processor with a 2.8 GHz base clock and up to 3.6 GHz Turbo boost clock. Powering the graphics is NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1070 8GB card with 8GB of GDDR5 memory. It also includes 16GB of DDR4 SODIMM memory, 240GB M.2 SSD storage, and a 2.5” SATA III HDD/SSD bay for additional storage. Display outputs include 3 HDMI 2.0 and 2 DisplayPort 1.3 ports. I/O ports on the VR GO include 6 USB 3.0 ports, Mic/Audio jack, Dual Gigabit LAN, 1 Wi-Fi SMA connector, Wi-Fi 802.11 ac, and Bluetooth 4.2.
The VR GO comes with 2 dedicated batteries, which are claimed to allow for up to 2 hours of play time. Users can extend play time further with hot-swappable batteries, providing nearly limitless action. This allows users to use the ZOTAC VR GO as either a wearable form or as a standalone desktop Mini PC when at home. IT comes with Windows 10 Home pre-installed, so you can dive in to the world of VR right out of the box.
Via: TechPowerUpThe French weekly, which gained tragic worldwide attention due to a terrorist attack on its offices in 2015, is starting up a German version as soon as December 1st, costing €4, according to German media news site Meedia.
A spokeswoman for the publication also confirmed to news agency AFP that the first edition would start with 200,000 copies printed.
The German version will consist mainly of articles and cartoons translated from the French, but its editors also want to create German content, she said.
According to Meedia's sources, the magazine attracted more interest in Germany after the attack in which 12 of its staff members were killed by gunmen linked to an al-Qaeda branch in Yemen. The phrase “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) spread through Germany and internationally on social media as a sign of solidarity.
Germans bought 70,000 copies of Charlie Hebdo's "survivors' edition", which appeared one week after the massacre, and sales of the French edition stand at about 1,000 a week in Germany today, according to AFP.
The continued interest in Germany led Charlie Hebdo to decide to start up a German version, according to Meedia.
Charlie Hebdo, which provides part of its content in English on its website, sells 60,000 copies a week on the newsstand and has 50,000 subscribers.
Its introduction in German would create more competition for Germany's two leading satirical monthlies, Titanic and Eulenspiegel.DUBAI (Reuters) - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Tuesday Saudi Arabia could not hide its “crime” of executing a Shi’ite cleric by cutting ties with Tehran, but Iranian authorities disowned an attack on the Saudi embassy in Iran.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (C) waves after he registered for February's election of the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that chooses the supreme leader, at the Interior Ministry in Tehran December 21, 2015. REUTERS/Raheb Homavandi/TIMA
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Sudan broke all ties with Iran and the United Arab Emirates downgraded its relations on Monday after the Saudi embassy in Tehran was stormed by protesters. Kuwait recalled its ambassador to Iran on Tuesday.
An angry mob broke into the embassy on Saturday night and started fires following protests against the kingdom’s execution of cleric Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent critic of Saudi policy, and three other Shi’ite Muslims as well as 43 Sunni al Qaeda jihadists.
“Saudi Arabia cannot hide its crime of beheading a religious leader by severing political relations with Iran,” Rouhani was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA in a meeting with Danish Foreign Minister Kristian Jensen in Tehran.
“We believe diplomacy and negotiations are the best way to solve problems between countries,” he added. “Regional countries can save the region from terrorism dangers through unity.”
The Iranian government has distanced itself from the attack on the Saudi embassy and even suggested foreign elements organized it.
Brigadier General Mohsen Kazemeini, the top Revolutionary Guards commander in Tehran, joined the condemnation on Tuesday.
“This was a very wrong and incorrect action and there is no way this ugly action can be justified,” he said, according to the Mizan Online news agency.
The comments appeared to be the first such criticism of the embassy attack by a member of the hardline Guards, who issued a harsh statement against Saudi Arabia about the execution of al-Nimr on Saturday.
Kazemeini said the attack could not have been carried out by “devout forces” and that it was “completely organized”.
An Iranian government spokesman earlier called the attack “suspicious” and “in favor of Saudi Arabia’s policies”.
“A few people - with whom it’s not clear which country’s interests they are serving - took advantage of people’s feelings,” ILNA news agency quoted Mohammad Bagher Nobakht as saying.
Iran’s Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi was quoted by Iranian media as saying “the latest action against the Saudi embassy could be planned and supported by infiltrated agents.”
President Hassan Rouhani has referred to the embassy attackers as extremists and said Iran should put an end to attacking embassies once and forever.
Iran celebrates the anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran every year and refers to it as the Second Revolution. Since then, Iranians have attacked several embassies in Tehran including those of Kuwait in 1987, Saudi Arabia in 1988, Denmark in 2006 and Britain in 2011.Toronto police are searching for a man who allegedly made racist comments at a woman before spitting on her.
Just after 9:30 p.m. on Sunday a woman, with her daughter and aunt, got on an westbound TTC subway at Victoria Park station.
It was reported that a man boarding the train tried to prevent them from getting on board. Once on the train he allegedly made derogatory racial comments directed at the woman.
When the man got up to exit the subway at Main Street station he allegedly spat in the woman’s face.
Police have released security images of the suspect to ask for the public’s help in identifying him.
The man is described as 25-45, wearing a black toque, black shirt, beige parka, black pants and beige construction boots with black tips.
Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 416-808-5400.Two State Department employees were fired and a third has been disciplined for improperly accessing Sen. Barack Obama's passport file, the State Department announced last night.
Senior department officials said they learned of the incidents only when a reporter made an inquiry yesterday afternoon. They said an initial investigation indicated that the employees -- all of whom worked on contract -- were motivated by "imprudent curiosity."
Bill Burton, spokesman for Obama's presidential campaign, called the incidents "an outrageous breach of security and privacy." He said this is "a serious matter that merits a complete investigation," adding that the campaign will "demand to know who looked at Senator Obama's passport file, for what purpose, and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach."
Undersecretary of State Patrick F. Kennedy, in a hastily arranged conference call with reporters, said he asked the State Department inspector general to open an inquiry into the matter and acknowledged that it might need to be expanded.
He also said he would brief Obama, who is locked in a tight race for the Democratic presidential nomination with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, today on the matter.
Kennedy said that he did not know yet whether any laws were broken or whether the employees shared the information with others. He said that the incidents, which occurred at three offices, on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14, should have been "passed up the line" much sooner and that officials were seeking to determine why they had not been disclosed earlier.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was briefed yesterday afternoon, requested a "full investigation," department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
The employees were each caught because of a computer-monitoring system that is triggered when the passport account of a "high-profile person" is accessed, department spokesman Tom Casey said. The system, which focuses on politicians and celebrities, was put in place in recent years, after the State Department was embroiled in a scandal involving the access of the passport records of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992.
In that case, a special prosecutor determined that officials at senior levels were knowledgeable about the passport breaches. That investigation cost $2.2 million, but no one was charged.
The department declined to release the names of the employees or the two companies for which they worked.
Kennedy said the contract employees -- who helped process some of the 18 million passport applications the department handles every year -- had access to personal records as part of their jobs in data entry, customer service and other administrative tasks. He said that contract employees undergo "public integrity checks," such as a review of police records, but that the department does not examine political affiliation. "That would be inappropriate," he said.
The employee involved in the March 14 incident has only been disciplined because that investigation is still continuing, said an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Though the workers were caught by a computer system that focuses on high-profile people, Casey said that a computer report is generated on every access to passport records and that spot checks are made to ensure that State Department employees are not violating the Privacy Act.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
OKLAHOMA - Oklahoma has been in the national media a lot in recent weeks - and not in a good way.
Decisions by our state lawmakers, from the budget to controversial bills, have made headlines for weeks.
Now, the business community is concerned.
The Chamber of Commerce does perception surveys, where they ask out of state business leaders what they think about Oklahoma.
They said the negative media attention is simply bad for business.
By now, you’ve probably seen one of the headlines.
'Oklahoma Makes the Poor Poorer' was the headline of an editorial in Sunday’s New York Times.
It criticized the Oklahoma legislature for targeting the working poor by cutting the earned income tax credit but keeping hundreds of millions of dollars |
. Nonetheless, the court struck down the entire 1894 income tax in the Pollock case, necessitating a constitutional amendment in order to enact a federal income tax.
When the Spanish-American war started in 1898, Congress enacted a variety of excise taxes as a means of paying for the cost of the war, and Congress reduced debt to the $1.2 billion pre-war debt level by 1900. Interestingly, the telephone tax of three percent on long distance calls — then affecting only the wealthiest families — was not abolished until 2006, 108 years after the war started.
As agitation for a new income tax increased in the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century, Congress enacted a one-percent corporate income tax (on income over $5,000) in 1909. Congress also passed the 16th Amendment out to the states for ratification that year. The latter would open up a vast new revenue stream for government, in addition to a means for the federal government to stick its nose into every family’s business.
American history before Congress enacted the income tax in 1913 (first imposed the following year) demonstrates that the federal government was able to pay its bills, keep the nation largely out of debt, and respect the privacy of American citizens. Even during wartime, Congress had a method of imposing direct war taxes that respected states’ rights and American citizens’ privacy.
The Congress did largely limit its legislating to constitutionally enumerated powers of the federal government during that time period. Only the multiplication of unconstitutional federal offices, along with the demand by Congress to manipulate decisions of American consumers, has necessitated imposition of the income tax. Or, conversely, the imposition of the income tax made a massive increase of federal offices possible. Ironically, despite the imposition of the income tax, Congress has more often engaged in deficit spending and racked up a massive peacetime debt since enactment of the 16th Amendment.
This article is an example of the exclusive content that's only available by subscribing to our print magazine. Twice a month get in-depth features covering the political gamut: education, candidate profiles, immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, guns, etc. Digital as well as print options are available!This article is about the 1958 crash of the aircraft carrying the Manchester United football team. For the 1960 accident, see 1960 Munich Convair 340 crash
The Munich air disaster occurred on 6 February 1958 when British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered runway at Munich-Riem Airport, West Germany. On the plane was the Manchester United football team, nicknamed the "Busby Babes", along with supporters and journalists.[1] Twenty of the 44 on the aircraft died at the scene. The injured, some unconscious, were taken to the Rechts der Isar Hospital in Munich where three more died, resulting in 23 fatalities with 21 survivors.
The team was returning from a European Cup match in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, having eliminated Red Star Belgrade to advance to the semi-finals of the competition. The flight stopped to refuel in Munich because a non-stop flight from Belgrade to Manchester was beyond the "Elizabethan"-class Airspeed Ambassador's range. After refuelling, pilots James Thain and Kenneth Rayment twice abandoned take-off because of boost surging in the left engine. Fearing they would get too far behind schedule, Captain Thain rejected an overnight stay in Munich in favour of a third take-off attempt. By then, snow was falling, causing a layer of slush to form at the end of the runway. After the aircraft hit the slush, it ploughed through a fence beyond the end of the runway and the left wing was torn off after hitting a house. Fearing the aircraft might explode, Thain began evacuating passengers while Manchester United goalkeeper Harry Gregg helped pull survivors from the wreckage.
An investigation by West German airport authorities originally blamed Thain, saying he did not de-ice the aircraft's wings, despite eyewitness statements to the contrary. It was later established that the crash was caused by the slush on the runway, which slowed the plane too much to take off. Thain was cleared in 1968, ten years after the incident.
Manchester United were trying to become the third club to win three successive English league titles; they were six points behind League leaders Wolverhampton Wanderers with 14 games to go. They also held the Charity Shield and had just advanced into their second successive European Cup semi-finals. The team had not been beaten for 11 matches. The crash not only derailed their title ambitions that year but also virtually destroyed the nucleus of what promised to be one of the greatest generations of players in English football history. It took 10 years for the club to recover, with Busby rebuilding the team and winning the European Cup in 1968 with a new generation of "Babes".
Background [ edit ]
G-ALZU at The Airspeed Ambassadorat Riem Airport shortly before the accident
In April 1955, UEFA established the European Cup, a football competition for the champion clubs of UEFA-affiliated nations, to begin in the 1955–56 season;[2] however, the English league winners, Chelsea, were denied entry by the Football League's secretary, Alan Hardaker, who believed not participating was best for English football.[3] The following season, the English league was won by Manchester United, managed by Matt Busby. The Football League again denied their champions entry, but Busby and his chairman, Harold Hardman, with the help of the Football Association's chairman Stanley Rous, defied the league and United became the first English team to play in Europe.[4]
The team – known as the "Busby Babes" for their youth – reached the semi-finals, beaten there by the eventual winners, Real Madrid. Winning the First Division title again that season meant qualification for the 1957–58 tournament, and their cup run in 1956–57 meant they were one of the favourites to win. Domestic league matches were on Saturdays and European matches midweek, so, although air travel was risky, it was the only choice if United were to fulfil their league fixtures,[5] which they would have to do if they were to avoid proving Alan Hardaker right.[4]
After overcoming Shamrock Rovers and Dukla Prague in the preliminary and first round respectively, United were drawn with Red Star Belgrade of Yugoslavia for the quarter-finals. After beating them 2–1 at Old Trafford on 14 January 1958, the club was to travel to Yugoslavia for the return leg on 5 February. On the way back from Prague in the previous round, fog over England prevented the team from flying back to Manchester, so they flew to Amsterdam before taking the ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich and then the train to Manchester. The trip took its toll on the players and they drew 3–3 with Birmingham City at St Andrew's three days later.[6]
Eager not to miss Football League fixtures, and not to have a difficult trip again, the club chartered a British European Airways plane from Manchester to Belgrade for the away leg against Red Star.[7] The match was drawn 3–3 but it was enough to send United to the semi-finals.[8] The takeoff from Belgrade was delayed for an hour after outside right Johnny Berry lost his passport,[9] and the plane landed in Munich for refuelling at 13:15 GMT.[10][11]
Aircraft and crew [ edit ]
The aircraft was a six-year-old Airspeed Ambassador 2, built in 1952 and delivered to BEA the same year.[12]
The pilot, Captain James Thain, was a former RAF flight lieutenant. Originally a sergeant (later a warrant officer), he was given an emergency commission in the RAF as an acting pilot officer on probation in April 1944,[13] and promoted to pilot officer on probation in September that year.[14] He was promoted to flight lieutenant in May 1948,[15] and received a permanent commission in the same rank in 1952.[16] He retired from the RAF to join BEA.
The co-pilot, Captain Kenneth Rayment, was also a former RAF flight lieutenant and a Second World War flying ace. After joining the RAF in 1940, he was promoted to sergeant in September 1941.[17] He was commissioned as a war substantive pilot officer a year later,[18] and promoted to war substantive flying officer in May 1943.[19] He shot down five German fighters, one Italian plane and a V-1 flying bomb. He was awarded the DFC in July 1943,[20] and promoted to flight lieutenant in September 1943.[21] After leaving the RAF in 1945, he joined BOAC in Cairo, before joining BEA in 1947. He had had experience with Vikings, Dakotas and the Ambassador "Elizabethan" class.[22]
Crash [ edit ]
G-ALZU burning at Munich The Airspeed Ambassadorburning at Munich
Thain had flown the "Elizabethan"-class Airspeed Ambassador (registration G-ALZU) to Belgrade but handed the controls to Rayment for the return.[23] At 14:19 GMT, the control tower at Munich was told the plane was ready to take off and gave clearance for take-off, expiring at 14:31.[24] Rayment abandoned the take-off after Thain noticed the port boost pressure gauge fluctuating as the plane reached full power and the engine sounded odd while accelerating.[25] A second attempt was made three minutes later, but called off 40 seconds into the attempt[26] because the engines were running on an over-rich mixture, causing them to over-accelerate, a common problem for the "Elizabethan".[25] After the second failure, passengers retreated to the airport lounge.[27] By then, it had started to snow heavily, and it looked unlikely that the plane would be making the return journey that day. Manchester United's Duncan Edwards sent a telegram to his landlady in Manchester. It read: "All flights cancelled, flying tomorrow. Duncan."[28]
Thain told the station engineer, Bill Black, about the problem with the boost surging in the port engine, and Black suggested that since opening the throttle more slowly had not worked, the only option was to hold the plane overnight for retuning. Thain was anxious to stay on schedule and suggested opening the throttle even more slowly would suffice. This would mean that the plane would not achieve take-off velocity until further down the runway, but with the runway almost 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) long, he believed this would not be a problem. The passengers were called back to the plane 15 minutes after leaving it.[29]
A few of the players were not confident fliers, particularly Liam Whelan, who said, "This may be death, but I'm ready". Others, including Duncan Edwards, Tommy Taylor, Mark Jones, Eddie Colman and Frank Swift, moved to the back of the plane, believing it safer.[11] Once everyone was on board, Thain and Rayment got the plane moving again at 14:56.[30] At 14:59, they reached the runway holding point, where they received clearance to line up ready for take-off.[31] On the runway, they made final cockpit checks and at 15:02, they were told their take-off clearance would expire at 15:04.[32] The pilots agreed to attempt take-off, but that they would watch the instruments for surging in the engines. At 15:03, they told the control tower of their decision.[32]
American newsreel footage reporting the crash
Rayment moved the throttle forward slowly and released the brakes; the plane began to accelerate, and radio officer Bill Rodgers radioed the control tower with the message "Zulu Uniform rolling".[33] The plane threw up slush as it gathered speed, and Thain called out the plane's velocity in 10-knot increments.[33] At 85 knots, the port engine began to surge again, and he pulled back marginally on the port throttle before pushing it forward again.[33] Once the plane reached 117 knots (217 km/h), he announced "V1", at which it was no longer safe to abort take-off, and Rayment listened for the call of "V2" (119 knots (220 km/h)), the minimum required to get off the ground.[34] Thain expected the speed to rise, but it fluctuated around 117 knots before suddenly dropping to 112 knots (207 km/h), and then 105 knots (194 km/h).[35] Rayment shouted "Christ, we won't make it!",[35] as Thain looked up to see what lay ahead.[36]
The plane skidded off the end of the runway, crashed into the fence surrounding the airport and across a road before its port wing was torn off as it caught a house, home to a family of six.[37] The father and eldest daughter were away and the mother and the other three children escaped as the house caught fire.[38] Part of the plane's tail was torn off before the left side of the cockpit hit a tree.[38] The right side of the fuselage hit a wooden hut, inside which was a truck filled with tyres and fuel, which exploded.[39] Twenty passengers died on board, and three died later in hospital.
On seeing flames around the cockpit, Thain feared that the aircraft would explode and told his crew to evacuate the area. The stewardesses, Rosemary Cheverton and Margaret Bellis, were the first to leave through a blown-out emergency window in the galley, followed by radio officer Bill Rodgers.[40] Rayment was trapped in his seat by the crumpled fuselage and told Thain to go without him. Thain clambered out of the galley window.[40] On reaching the ground, he saw flames growing under the starboard wing, which held 500 imperial gallons (2,300 L) of fuel. He shouted to his crew to get away and climbed back into the aircraft to retrieve two handheld fire extinguishers, stopping to tell Rayment he would be back when the fires had been dealt with.[40]
Meanwhile, in the cabin, goalkeeper Harry Gregg was regaining consciousness, thinking that he was dead.[41] He felt blood on his face and "didn't dare put [his] hand up. [He] thought the top of [his] head had been taken off, like a hard boiled egg."[42] Just above him, light shone into the cabin, so Gregg kicked the hole wide enough for him to escape. He also managed to save some passengers.
Fatalities [ edit ]
Crew members [ edit ]
Captain Kenneth "Ken" Rayment. Co-pilot. Survived but suffered multiple injuries and died in hospital five weeks later as a result of brain damage.
Tom Cable, cabin steward
Passengers [ edit ]
A plaque at Old Trafford in memory of the Munich air disaster
The Munich Clock, on the South-East corner of Old Trafford
Manchester United players
Manchester United staff
Journalists
Other passengers
Bela Miklos, travel agent
Willie Satinoff, supporter, racecourse owner and close friend of Matt Busby
Survivors [ edit ]
Crew [ edit ]
Margaret Bellis, stewardess (died 1998) [43]
Rosemary Cheverton, stewardess
George William "Bill" Rodgers, radio officer (died 1997) [44]
Captain James Thain, pilot (died 1975)[45]
Passengers [ edit ]
Manchester United players
Manchester United staff
Journalists and photographers
Other passengers
Vera Lukić, the wife of a Yugoslavian diplomat, and her baby daughter, Vesna. Both passengers were saved by Harry Gregg. At the time, Vera Lukić was pregnant with her son Zoran. [56]
Eleanor Miklos, wife of Bela Miklos
Nebojša Bato Tomašević, Yugoslavian diplomat (died 2017)[57]
Investigation [ edit ]
The crash was originally blamed on pilot error, but it was later found to have been caused by slush towards the end of the runway, slowing the aircraft and preventing safe flying speed.[58] During take-off, the aircraft had reached 117 knots (217 km/h), but, on entering the slush, dropped to 105 knots (194 km/h), too slow to leave the ground, with not enough runway to abort the take-off. Aircraft with tail-wheel undercarriages had not been greatly affected by slush, due to the geometry of these undercarriages in relation to the aircraft's centre of gravity,[notes 1] but newer types, such as the Ambassador, with nose wheel landing-gear and the main wheels behind the centre of gravity, were found to be vulnerable. The accident resulted in the imposition of operating limits for the amount of slush build-up permitted on runways.[citation needed]
Despite this conclusion, the German airport authorities took legal action against Captain Thain, as the one pilot who had survived the crash. They claimed he had taken off without clearing the wings of ice, which caused the crash, despite several witnesses stating that no ice had been seen.[59] De-icing the aircraft was the captain's responsibility, while the state of the airport's runways was the responsibility of the airport authorities, among whom there was widespread ignorance of the danger of slush on runways for aircraft such as the Ambassador.
The basis of the German authorities' case relied on the icy condition of the wings hours after the crash and a photograph of the aircraft (published in several newspapers) taken shortly before take-off, that appeared to show snow on the upper wing surfaces. When the original negative was examined, no snow or ice could be seen, the "snow" in the original having been due to the sun reflecting off the wings, which was clarified when examining the negative rather than the published pictures which had been produced from a copy negative.[59] The witnesses were not called to the German inquiry and proceedings against Thain dragged on until 1968, when he was finally cleared of any responsibility for the crash. As the official cause, British authorities recorded a build-up of melting snow on the runway which prevented the "Elizabethan" from reaching the required take-off speed. Thain, having been dismissed by BEA shortly after the accident and never re-engaged, retired and returned to run his poultry farm in Berkshire. He died of a heart attack at the age of 53 in August 1975.[60]
Aftermath [ edit ]
Twenty people, including seven of Manchester United's players, died at the scene of the crash. The 21st victim, Frank Swift, the journalist and former Manchester City goalkeeper, died on his way to hospital. Duncan Edwards died from his injuries on 21 February at the Rechts der Isar Hospital in Munich, and the final death toll reached 23 several days later when co-pilot Ken Rayment died as a result of serious head injuries.[28] Johnny Berry and Jackie Blanchflower were both injured so severely that they never played again.[61] Matt Busby was seriously injured and had to stay in hospital for more than two months after the crash, and was read his Last Rites twice.[62] After being discharged from hospital, he went to Switzerland to recuperate in Interlaken. At times, he felt like giving up football entirely, until he was told by his wife, Jean, "You know Matt, the lads would have wanted you to carry on."[63] That statement lifted Busby from his depression, and he returned by land and sea to Manchester, before watching his team play in the 1958 FA Cup Final.[63]
Meanwhile, there was speculation that the club would fold, but a threadbare United team completed the 1957–58 season, with Busby's assistant Jimmy Murphy standing in as manager; he had not travelled to Belgrade as he was in Cardiff managing the Welsh national team at the time. A team largely made up of reserve and youth team players beat Sheffield Wednesday 3–0 in the first match after the disaster. The programme for that match showed simply a blank space where each United player's name should have been. With seven players dead (Duncan Edwards died just over 24 hours later), and with only Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes fit to play out of the surviving players, United were desperate to find replacements with experience, so Murphy signed Ernie Taylor from Blackpool[64] and Stan Crowther from Aston Villa.[65] Three players, Derek Lewin, Bob Hardisty and Warren Bradley, were transferred to United on short-term contracts by non-League club Bishop Auckland. Bradley was the only one of the three players to play for the first team, and the only one to sign a permanent contract. The remaining places in the team were filled by reserve players including Shay Brennan and Mark Pearson.[66] In the aftermath of the crash, Manchester United's fierce rivals Liverpool (who would later be managed by Busby's good friend Bill Shankly) offered United five loan players to help them put a side together.[67]
There were changes in the backroom staff at the club too, following the deaths of secretary Walter Crickmer and coaches Tom Curry and Bert Whalley.[68] United goalkeeper Les Olive, still registered as a player at the time of the disaster, retired from playing and took over from Crickmer as club secretary,[68] while another former United goalkeeper, Jack Crompton, took over coaching duties after United chairman Harold Hardman had negotiated with Crompton's then-employers Luton Town for his release.[68]
United only won one league game after the crash, causing their title challenge to collapse and they fell to ninth place in the league.[69] They did manage to reach the final of the FA Cup, however, losing 2–0 to Bolton Wanderers,[69] and even managed to beat Milan at Old Trafford in the semi-finals of the European Cup, only to lose 4–0 at the San Siro.[69] Real Madrid, who went on to win the trophy for the third year running, suggested that Manchester United be awarded the trophy for that year – a suggestion supported by Red Star Belgrade – but this failed to materialise.[70]
Busby resumed managerial duties the next season (1958–59), and eventually built a second generation of Busby Babes, including George Best and Denis Law, that ten years later won the European Cup by beating two-time winners Benfica. Bobby Charlton and Bill Foulkes were the only two crash survivors who lined up in that team.[71]
A fund for dependents of victims of the crash was established in March, and chaired by the Chairman of the FA, Arthur Drewry.[72] The fund had raised £52,000 (equivalent to £1.19 million as of 2018) by the time of its disbursement in October 1958.[73][74]
Memorials [ edit ]
Old Trafford [ edit ]
Commemorative plaque in the Munich Tunnel at Old Trafford
The first memorials at Old Trafford to the lost players and staff were unveiled on 25 February 1960. The first, a plaque in the shape of the stadium with the image of a green pitch, inscribed with the names of the victims in black and gold glass, was placed above the entrance to the directors' box. Above the plaque was a teak carving of a player and a supporter, heads bowed either side of a wreath and a football inscribed with the date "1958". The plaque was designed by Manchester architect J. Vipond and constructed by Messrs Jaconello (Manchester) Ltd. at a cost of £2,100,[75] and unveiled by Matt Busby.[76]
Also unveiled that day was a memorial to the members of the press who died at Munich, which consisted of a bronze plaque that named the eight lost journalists. It was unveiled by Munich survivor Frank Taylor on behalf of the Football Writers' Association. The original plaque was stolen in the 1980s and replaced by a replica now located behind the counter in the press entrance.[75] The final memorial was the Munich clock, a simple two-faced clock paid for by the Ground Committee and attached to the south-east corner of the stadium, with the date "6 Feb 1958" at the top of both faces and "Munich" at the bottom. The clock has remained in the same position since it was first installed.[75] The clock was unveiled on 25 February 1960 by Dan Marsden, the chairman of the Ground Committee.[76]
When the stadium was renovated in the mid-1970s, the plaque had to be moved from the directors' entrance to allow the necessary changes. The plaque could not be removed without damaging it, so the old memorial was walled up within the Main Stand and a new memorial was made, simpler than the original, now consisting simply of a slate pitch with the names inscribed upon it, and installed in 1976.[75]
A third version of the memorial, more like the original than the second in that it included the stands around the slate pitch and the figures above it, was installed in 1996, coinciding with the erection of the statue of Matt Busby, who had unveiled the original memorial.[75] This third version was constructed by stonemasons Mather and Ellis from Trafford Park, and the second was put into storage. It is currently awaiting new display panels before being placed into the club museum's Munich display.[75] The third plaque and the statue of Busby were originally located on the north side of the East Stand, but the statue was moved to the front of the East Stand and the plaque to the south side of the stand after the stand's expansion in 2000.[75]
Munich [ edit ]
Wooden memorial
There are also two memorials in Germany. First, in the Munich suburb of Trudering, on the corner of Karotschstraße and Emplstraße, there is a small wooden memorial depicting Jesus on the Cross, decorated by a stone trough filled with flowers. The trough bears a plaque with the inscription: "Im Gedenken an die Opfer der Flugzeugkatastrophe am 6.2.1958 unter denen sich auch ein Teil der Fußballmannschaft von Manchester United befand, sowie allen Verkehrstoten der Gemeinde Trudering" (In memory of the victims of the air disaster of 6 February 1958 including members of the football team of Manchester United as well as all the traffic victims from the municipality of Trudering).[77]
Memorial stone
On 22 September 2004, a dark blue granite plaque set in a sandstone border was unveiled in the vicinity of the old Munich Airport on the corner of Rappenweg and Emplstraße, just metres from the wooden memorial.[78] With a design in the shape of a football pitch, it reads, in both English and German, "In memory of all those who lost their lives here in the Munich air disaster on 6 February 1958".[79] Underneath is a plaque expressing United's gratitude to the municipality of Munich and its people. The new memorial was funded by Manchester United themselves and the unveiling was attended by club officials, including chief executive David Gill, manager Alex Ferguson and director Bobby Charlton, a survivor of the disaster himself.[78] On 24 April 2008, the Munich city council decided to name the site where the memorial stone is placed "Manchesterplatz" (Manchester Square).[80]
On the 57th anniversary of the crash, 6 February 2015, Sir Bobby Charlton and FC Bayern Munich chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge opened a new museum exhibit commemorating the disaster at the German club's stadium, the Allianz Arena.[81]
Belgrade [ edit ]
There is a small display of artefacts in the Majestic Hotel, where the team stayed after the match. These include a menu card signed by 14 of the players, including the eight who were killed, a photograph taken at the meal and a match ticket. The menu card was acquired by the then British ambassador to Yugoslavia and was auctioned by his son in 2006.[82]
40th anniversary [ edit ]
In late 1997, John Doherty (a former United player who had left the club shortly before the disaster)[83] approached club chairman Martin Edwards on behalf of the Manchester United Former Players' Association to request a testimonial for those victims of the Munich disaster – both the survivors and the dependants of the ones who were lost.[84] Edwards was hesitant, but a benefit match was eventually sanctioned for a date as close to the 40th anniversary of the disaster as possible. Red Star Belgrade and Bayern Munich were touted as possible opponents for the match, and fans purchased tickets without the opponents even having been decided.[85]
In the midst of the preparations, former United player Eric Cantona, who had retired from football to pursue a career in film in 1997, expressed an interest in returning to Manchester United for a farewell match. Edwards took the opportunity to combine the two events into one.[86] Due to Cantona's acting career, his schedule meant that he would not be available in February and the match was moved to 18 August, with the opposition to be a European XI chosen by Cantona. Martin Edwards was criticised for turning the match into a publicity stunt, while Elizabeth Wood, the divorced wife of Munich survivor Ray Wood, compared the treatment of the Munich victims to that of "dancing bears at the circus". Nevertheless, the match earned £47,000 for each of the victims' families, while Eric Cantona recouped over £90,000 in expenses directly from the testimonial fund, rather than from the club.[87] The club has also received criticism from some quarters for its poor treatment of the survivors: Johnny Berry was forced to leave the flat he rented from the club to make way for a new player.[88]
On 7 February 1998, United played Bolton Wanderers at Old Trafford in the Premier League a day after the 40th anniversary of the disaster. The match kicked off at 3:15 pm to allow a minute's silence to be observed at 3:04 pm. Representatives from both teams laid floral tributes to those who lost their lives, with crash survivor and United director Bobby Charlton joined by Bolton president Nat Lofthouse in leading out the two teams.[89]
50th anniversary [ edit ]
Old Trafford's Munich Tunnel, renamed in 2008 on the 50th anniversary of the disaster.
A memorial service was held at Old Trafford on 6 February 2008. At the conclusion of the service, the surviving members of the 1958 team were the guests of honour at a ceremony to rename the tunnel under the stadium's South Stand as the "Munich Tunnel", which features an exhibition about the Busby Babes.[90]
On 6 February 2008, the England national football team took on Switzerland at Wembley Stadium. Before the game, pictures of the players who lost their lives at Munich were displayed on big screens, and England players wore black armbands. There was also a tribute to the Busby Babes in the match programme.[91] Originally, a minute's silence was not to have been observed on the day, due to the Football Association's fears that the silence would not be respected by fans of Manchester United's rivals;[92] however, they agreed that a minute's silence should be held. In the event, it was generally well-observed, but a small number of supporters made whistles and cat-calls and the referee cut the silence short after less than 30 seconds.[93] Minute silences were also observed at the Northern Ireland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland games.[90][94]
Commemorative scarves laid out on the back of every seat prior to the game
On 10 February 2008, at the derby match between Manchester United and Manchester City at Old Trafford, both teams were led onto the pitch by a lone piper playing "The Red Flag", and the managers – Alex Ferguson and Sven-Göran Eriksson – each laid a wreath in the centre circle. This was followed by a minute silence, which, despite previous concerns, was respected by all the fans.[95] Kevin Parker, secretary of Manchester City's supporters club, had originally suggested a minute's applause instead of a minute's silence, so as to drown out anyone who would disrupt the silence,[96] but this was rejected by the Manchester United management as inappropriate.[97] United played in strips reminiscent of those worn by the 1958 team, numbered 1–11 with no advertising on the front or players' names on the back, while City removed sponsors' logos from their kit and the image of a small black ribbon was heat pressed onto the right shoulder;[98] both teams wore black armbands in tribute to the victims of the Munich disaster. Manchester City won 2–1 thanks to first half goals from Darius Vassell and debutant Benjani.[99] Fans in attendance were given commemorative scarves – in red and white for the United fans, and sky blue and white for the City fans – which were held up during the silence.[100]
Tributes [ edit ]
Music [ edit ]
Several musical tributes to the Munich air disaster have been recorded, the earliest being the song "The Flowers of Manchester". Written by an anonymous author, later revealed to be Eric Winter, the editor of the magazine Sing,[101] the song was recorded and released by Liverpool folk band The Spinners on their 1962 debut album "Quayside Songs Old and New".[102] Manchester-born singer Morrissey also released a song called "Munich Air Disaster, 1958" as a B-side to "Irish Blood, English Heart" in 2004.[103] It later appeared on his live album, Live at Earls Court, in 2005[104] and his 2009 B-sides compilation, Swords.
Most recently, the English band The Futureheads named their album News and Tributes in honour of the disaster. The title track pays tribute to those who lost their lives,[105] and includes the verse:
Cut down in their prime, In silence, on that day, February 58, they got what they need, From Belgrade and back home to sleep
Film [ edit ]
Barry Navidi, producer of the 2004 film The Merchant of Venice, was reported to be working on a script for a Hollywood film about the Munich air crash. The Manchester Evening News reported on 22 April 2005 that the survivors had not been consulted and were concerned about how accurate the film would be.[106]
Bill Foulkes said that, if done right, the film could become a "tribute to the Busby Babes which could be seen for generations to come"; however, he expressed concerns about the accuracy of the film, given the filmmakers' lack of first-hand sources about what actually happened in Munich.[106] Fellow survivor Harry Gregg was more concerned about the portrayal of the players, particularly those who died, and whether their families' feelings would be respected.[106]
John Doherty, a player who had left United only a few months earlier, was less restrained, saying that "the only reason anyone would want to make a film like this is to make money" and that "while there may be a slight hint of truth in the film, it will be mainly untruths... Unless you were there, how could you know what conversations took place?".[106]
Television [ edit ]
On 10 January 2006, the BBC showed a drama/documentary retelling the story in the series Surviving Disaster. The programme was met with criticism from former United winger Albert Scanlon, who claimed that it was full of inaccuracies despite the production having consulted him about the content of the documentary. Errors in the programme included the depiction of Jimmy Murphy giving a pre-match team talk in Belgrade, despite him being in Cardiff at the time, and the plane being shown as only half full when nearly every seat was occupied.[107]
On 6 February 2008, the 50th anniversary of the crash, several television channels showed programmes about it:
UKTV History aired the BBC co-produced drama documentary Surviving Disaster to mark the 50th anniversary of the tragedy. [108]
to mark the 50th anniversary of the tragedy. MUTV aired a segmented documentary called Munich Remembered, aired throughout the day with memories of players, staff and supporters. [109]
, aired throughout the day with memories of players, staff and supporters. The BBC showed as part of its One Life series a documentary following United goalkeeper Harry Gregg retracing his route from England to Belgrade to Munich. He met and talked with some of the first rescuers who had arrived on the scene. He also met Vera Lukić, the pregnant mother whom he had rescued and Zoran, the son she bore two months later.[56]
Since the anniversary, two television programmes have been made about the disaster:
Other [ edit ]
The University of Salford honoured Munich victim Eddie Colman by naming one of its halls of residence after him.[114] Colman was born in Salford in 1936. There is also a network of small roads in Newton Heath named after the players who lost their lives in Munich, including Roger Byrne Close, David Pegg Walk, Geoff Bent Walk, Eddie Colman Close, Billy Whelan Walk, Tommy Taylor Close and Mark Jones Walk. Among those roads is an old people's home named after Duncan Edwards.[115] Edwards was also honoured with street names in his home town of Dudley; there is a small close off Stourbridge Road named Duncan Edwards Close,.[116] and in 2008, the Dudley Southern Bypass was renamed Duncan Edwards Way.[117][118] The road bridge over the Luas tram line at Fassaugh Road, Cabra, Dublin 7 is named after Liam Whelan.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ [ citation needed ] Aircraft with tailwheel undercarriages have the main undercarriage – about which the aeroplane rotates on take-off – positioned ahead of the aircraft's centre of gravity, allowing the aircraft to be flown off by application of up-elevator should deceleration be applied to the mainwheels on take-off when close to flying speed. On aircraft with a nosewheel, the main wheels are positioned behind the centre of gravity, causing a nose-down moment (force) should undue drag occur at the mainwheels, even if the nosewheel is already off the ground. This nose-down force reduces the elevator authority and makes it more difficult to keep the nosewheel off the ground, whereas the tailwheel undercarriage aeroplane already has its tailwheel off the ground at this point, and applying up elevator will usually lower the tail sufficiently for the aircraft to lift-off. On the nosewheel-equipped aircraft, the additional drag of the nosewheel in the slush reduces speed even more, as once the mainwheels have entered slush and initiated a downward force on the nose, the aeroplane has three wheels in contact with the slush, rather than just two. The tailwheel-equipped aeroplane |
. Today, a 110-foot diameter (34-metre) hole remains at the site – an example of the "lack of demand" that the city's architecture scene is experiencing.
However, Gensler has proposed a new supertall skyscraper called Gateway Tower for the site. The building would house a mixed-use program, with condos, rental apartments, two hotels and tourist attractions.
Having a mixed program would also help attract and retain investors, the firm said.
"Projected demand in the Chicago market is for a more diverse program, as well as a wide and inclusive range of experiences and commercial opportunities," said Gensler. "Diverse revenue streams hedge against market cycles and unexpected macro-economic demand shock."
The conceptual tower is the same height as the Spire – 2,000 feet (610 metres) – but does away with the twisting shape.
Instead, Gensler has conceived a thin, rectilinear tower that bends slightly as it approaches the ground. A large, supporting brace splays outward from the lower portion of building towards Lake Michigan.
The exterior of the glass skyscraper would feature X-bracing, similar to the iconic John Hancock Center by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the city.
The design is intended to offer a strong connection to the city, lakefront and Chicago Riverwalk – in turn enabling the tower to capitalise on the city's tourism dollars.
Related story "Lack of demand" is holding back Chicago's young architectural talents
More than 50 million people visited Chicago in 2014, generating $13.7 billion (£9.4 billion) in direct spending, according to Gensler.
"Our solution was to create an anti-tower, one that was not designed purely as an object to look at but rather one that is engaging at different scales to the entire city, one that would welcome newcomers as it simultaneously embraces locals," Gensler principal Brian Vitale told Curbed.
The proposal features amenities such as water taxi service, two entries to the Riverwalk and a skydeck that would offer "unparalleled views and premium experiences including a restaurant and sky garden".
It also includes a funicular that would transport visitors from the ground to mid-level amenities.
Gensler emphasised that the building's supertall height is necessary in order to draw tourists to the skydeck. It used the observatory at New York's Empire State Building, which collected $92 million (£64 million) in 2012, as a reference. The attraction reportedly generates more revenue than rent from all of the building's office tenants.
Gensler's plan, which won an internal, company-wide competition, is purely conceptual at this stage.
Specific plans for the Chicago Spire site "remain a mystery," according to Curbed.
Other schemes proposed for Chicago include an aerial gondola that would stretch over the city and a museum by MAD dedicated to film director George Lucas. New skyscrapers underway in the city include the supertall Vista Tower by Studio Gang, which features a trio of connected towers arranged in a row.
Calatrava's office declined to comment when contacted by Dezeen.A Duke University-led study has pinpointed how early childhood stress affects the adult brain’s response to rewards. Their findings suggest a possible pathway by which childhood stress may increase risk of depression and other mental health problems in adulthood.
Many studies have connected early life stress to later mental health issues for adults, but little is understood about the reasons for this connection. The new study published in the current issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the relations between early life stress and reward-related brain activity in adults.
Participants in the study were closely monitored beginning in kindergarten and then were scanned using brain imaging when they were adults. The participants were all part of the Fast Track Project, which in 1991 began tracking how children developed across their lives.
For this new study, researchers focused on the levels of stress that 72 subjects were exposed to early in development. At age 26, the study participants completed an experimental game to assess how their brains processed rewards and positive feedback. The scientists focused on reward-related activity in an area of the brain known as the ventral striatum, measured using fMRI.
“We found that greater levels of cumulative stress during childhood and adolescence predicted lower reward-related ventral striatum activity in adulthood,” said study lead author Jamie Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke’s Center for Child and Family Policy and the Duke Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
Hanson and colleagues found that early stress, specifically between kindergarten and grade three, was most strongly associated with muted responses to rewards in adulthood. Previous studies have identified this type of brain activity as a marker for increased risk of depression and anxiety.
“In participants with the greatest levels of early stress, we saw the lowest levels of activity in the ventral striatum in response to a reward,” Hanson said.
“We think reward-related ventral striatum activity is an important marker of mental health,” Hanson explained. “Past studies have focused on the processing of threat and negative emotion after early stress. Generating positive emotions may potentially buffer some of the effects of stress.”
The researchers say that a variety of early life stresses may affect whether children or not will grow up to be at risk for mental health problems. They add that further work in this area may lead to the development of new interventions that will help prevent negative mental health outcomes after childhood stress
Hanson’s co-authors on the study are Dustin Albert of the Bryn Mawr College Department of Psychology; Anne-Marie R. Iselin, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina-Wilmington; Kenneth Dodge, director of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy; Justin M. Carre, Department of Psychology, Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, Canada; and Ahmad R. Hariri, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke.
Funders providing support for the study include the National Institute of Mental Health; the National Institute on Drug Abuse; the U.S. Department of Education; the Center for the Study of Adolescent Risk and Resilience; and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development through the Center for Developmental Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
###
CITATION: “Cumulative Stress in Childhood is Associated with Blunted Reward-Related Brain Activity in Adulthood,” Jamie L Hanson, Dustin Albert, Anne-Marie R. Iselin, Justin M. Carre, Kenneth A. Dodge and Ahmad R. Hariri. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, October 5, 2015. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsv124. The study abstract is available at http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/10/05/scan.nsv124.abst.... The full text of the journal article can be found here in DukeSpace, the university's open access repository of research.Diplomats from all sides insisted until very recently that the Nov. 24 deadline for a deal was hard and fast. But on Monday, with no final agreement within reach, they extended the deadline until June 30.
In the Iranian Parliament, lawmakers erupted in their usual chants of “Death to America” after a lawmaker commenting on the deadline extension spoke of “the U.S.’s sabotaging efforts and its unreliability.”
The lawmaker, Mohammad-Hassan Aboutorabi-Fard, who is the deputy speaker of the Parliament, said Iran had learned from the nuclear negotiations that it had a strong hand to play. “Today, we can speak to the U.S. and its allies with the tone of power,” he said in remarks quoted by the Fars news agency. “A lesson can be taken from the recent nuclear talks that, for various reasons, the U.S. is not reliable.”
In a series of posts on a Twitter account used by his office, Ayatollah Khamenei accused the West of meddling in the Middle East and using Sunni militant groups to thwart the Arab Spring uprisings with intra-Muslim infighting, “in line with arrogant goals.” The Iranian authorities often use the term “arrogant powers” as shorthand for the United States and its allies.When I first started working as a flight attendant, a CEO of a telecommunications giant pinched me on the you-know-what. I didn’t know what to do, so I nervously laughed and ran to the galley where I would’ve cursed him out — if he hadn’t followed me there.
That’s when he did it again. Right in front of my crew.
We all just stood there in disbelief, staring at one another until he disappeared back to his first-class seat. No one said a word. We were all in shock.
I didn’t report it, largely because I didn’t know who to complain to. The union? Human resources? A 1-800 number? I had no clue.
And I figured it was the sort of thing that came with the job of being a flight attendant. I knew the airline wouldn’t want to be inconvenienced by a call to law enforcement over a nonviolent, though unruly, passenger. Especially since the only person offended was me, an employee.
We’ve come a long way from “We really move our tail for you,” and “I’m Cheryl, Fly me."
An ad from National Airlines 1971 campaign, featuring flight attendants by name. Image: National Airlines
But even in this age of “Keep Climbing” and “Fly the Friendly Skies,” sexual harassment happens much more often than it should. (According to a survey done earlier this year, 27% of the flight attendants that responded had been sexually harassed in the previous twelve months.)
Maybe it's because we come into brief contact with so many people. They come, they go, we never see them again. Anonymity can bring out the worst in people.
Flight attendants aren’t alone. My friend, Bob, a pilot, once had a female passenger put her hands on his behind when he tried to squeeze into a fully occupied exit row to peer out the window to get a look at what might have been a problem with the wing. “Woohoo! Get some!” another woman shouted. Passengers nearby laughed. Bob laughed too. When he returned to the cockpit and told the other pilot what happened, she laughed as well. So did I. Mostly because I can't imagine a pilot being treated that way. What it is about airplanes that makes people think it’s okay to behave that way?
When I tweeted I was writing about sexual harassment, a flight attendant on an Asian carrier reached out. Her company policy is to ignore in-flight harassment: It actually states that in her flight manual. And her manager, who is also her union rep, was quick to pull that section out after she complained about unwanted advances from a first-class passenger.
If a passenger reaches out to her in any way — say he invites her to dinner — she’s expected to respond with a thank you and give him a business card with her company email address on it. Once somebody sent her a bra with a note saying it would make her look more sexy. She was instructed to send a thank you. Because it might have come from a corporate VIP.
Whenever I write something serious I get comments that have nothing to do with the topic matter, but everything to do with how flight attendants look, and how great the service is on the foreign carriers. I can’t help but cringe. Wonder.
Ugh. It's 2014 for crying out loud! MT @tablamontreal More. RT @Lee_Cobaj: Vietjet: Safety is our number one priority pic.twitter.com/6MSfntmWOO — Heather Poole (@Heather_Poole) September 21, 2014
Whenever somebody asks what happened to the good old days when the “stewardesses” were glamorous and wore mini skirts and hot pants, I always point to one of my more senior coworkers and say, “There she is, still working!” Only she’s traded in her hot pants for reading glasses. Nothing wrong with that. People forget we’re human too. We’re allowed to grow old, just like passengers. Crazy, I know.
Of course it doesn’t help when airlines show off their sexy crew in calendars, or have safety videos featuring dancing flight attendants and swimsuit models. Because who cares about safety when the crew isn’t scantily dressed or getting down? It’s safety! Marketing the attractiveness of the flight crew is not in airlines' past, it's in its present.
I think that gives some passengers the idea that just because they bought a ticket they can do whatever they want. Say whatever they want. It’s our word against theirs, and we’re not paying customers.
A Virgin Australia promotional image, 2014. Image: Virgin Australia
Some airlines, particularly foreign carriers, offer contracts for flight attendants that very rarely get renewed more than once or twice. This enables those airlines to end employment contracts and keep their workforce young and fun. Sexy. (Also underpaid. In the U.S. new hires start out making between $14,000-$18,000 a year.) There are Middle Eastern airlines that make flight attendants resign after they become pregnant or get married, an Asian carrier with only one size of uniform, an Indian carrier who only hires females between the ages of 18-22. Males, on the other hand, can be older.
In the U.S. we have laws that protect employees, but harassment is still an issue.
“These young girls are just too afraid to say anything for fear of losing their job. Nothing has changed,” another flight attendant who has experienced harassment said.
“Most new hires want to please," a flight attendant who has been with an airline for almost a year wrote me on Facebook. "If we’re sweet, but short, some passengers are taken aback by it because it can come off as a little bitchy. It's just all those corny jokes..."
It’s been eighteen years since my incident with The Pincher. As a young woman just starting out I was afraid to speak up, afraid I might lose my job. With years of experience under my navy blue belt, I have no problem directly confronting an offender. But that's because I've developed a thick skin.
Now there's a form we can issue if a passenger gets out of line. It states authorities will meet the flight at its destination if there's a prolonged problem. I’ve seen it get used, but I think a lot of flight attendants are more likely to let things go. Nobody wants to delay a flight, write a report, or talk to a manager on a day off.
What happens next, I guess, depends on the scenario, based on a story from a coworker of mine who had a well-known jazz musician on board her flight years ago. He flashed her not once, not twice, but every time she passed the bathroom he had locked himself inside. Authorities met the flight... but decided not to press charges since she wasn't a passenger. Just a flight attendant.
Heather Poole is a flight attendant for a major U.S. carrier, and the author of the New York Times bestseller "Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet." You can follow her on Twitter at @Heather_Poole.Jens Bergensten, Oxeye Game Studio Unless Steam for Linux really takes off in the future, we're not sure it's the effort for us to offer our games on multiple platforms. It's very time consuming for such a small team as Oxeye has.
Mihai Gosa, KillHouse Games The stats were different in our first month since the Early Access release, where Linux was around 6%, it seems things have changed.
We also released a free demo for almost two months. That was before getting on Steam, but Linux downloads totalled at 5%.
The initial development time for porting on Linux was about 2 work days and another 3 days added in the following months for updates/fixes.
All the code written for the Linux port is contained within a single file of 1320 lines.
Most problems we had on Linux were compatibility issues, which were solved by using an older Ubuntu version for compiling the game. We also never managed to do proper alt-tab when the game is running full-screen, which seems to bring major anger to our users :(
Mac OSX initially took longer at about 3 days, mostly due to the programming IDE (Xcode) and the time it took to go buy a Mac machine, but didn’t have to do any fixes on it afterwards.
Since they’re both POSIX systems, parts of the code are common.
Even though it depends on factors like what technology/engine you’re using (we’re using a home-brewed engine) and how you architectured your code in the first place, I can’t imagine why more developers don’t do it.
Bottom line is Linux+Mac brought us 11% of the sales for a single week’s work, so yeah, it was definitely worth it.
Simon Roth, Maia Developer Linux was one of my target platforms from conception. I'm far more keen on supporting it than OSX, which has been nothing but trouble in comparison.
Since I use standard, Linux friendly libraries such as SDL, it's really a no-brainer to support. Using different compilers on multiple platforms is a good way to weed out complex memory bugs so even if it wasn't profitable to support, it would be worthwhile to me. Interestingly, due to the new GCC features and the low system overhead on Linux, Maia Linux often outperforms the other platforms in testing. It's also far easier to support currently, as Linux users are generally more technically proficient with their systems.
I primarily develop and test on Mint, as I prefer the "Windows" style GUI rather than Ubuntu's horrid new interface. I think Linux adoption was hit hard by Canonical totally losing the plot since around their 8.10 release.
For future games I will definitely support Linux, and am considering a controller support for the Steam box. I'd really like to see ATI put out some better drivers as the NVIDIA ones are currently a mile ahead.
Chris Simpson, The Indie Stone I remember though coming up with a figure of approx 3-5% linux back in the day we offered direct downloads, though obviously this is a much lower sample of people. In truth its not really easy for us to tell definitively, but for the large part if the cross platform support isn't too heavy, then its beside the point.
On the whole the low numbers don't bother us as we have a lot of pride supporting all three platforms, but more crucially we firmly believe in time those numbers are going to swing dramatically in Linux's direction with SteamOS, even if it takes a few years. We worked on a game using XNA, which is MS proprietary technology, and while MonoGame exists now, we were stung badly by MS's reckless abandon of it. And with Windows 8 and MacOS both taking worrying steps toward forced application signing and funnelling more and more through their own stores, it's not about making money but securing the future freedom of our game not to by tied into a closed system governed by a company who could just screw you on a whim. That's why Linux is and should be of prime importance to developers, particularly those doing alpha funding business models where they have to rely on income from a single game for years.
OH I should add, and this is of prime importance further to our numbers. We don't feel we've done a good job, even an acceptable job, at supporting Linux thus far, due to the problems we've had getting familiar with it as developers. As such we've probably lost a huge chunk of sales from Linux and to a lesser extent mac due to our poor support of them. We have a demo of the game we urge people to try before buying, and due to the nature of Linux and our inexperience we've yet to hit on a way to make our game 'just work' and this may have turned a good % of people on Linux off buying our game. we're improving this and hope to come up with a way to make PZ more accessible to Linux users without manual set up and such, so the numbers may look a lot more flattering to Linux at that stage.
The second part in my investigation into how well developers are doing on Linux with selling their games via the Steam store.I hope you all enjoyed the first part ; it was a good experience talking to developers and seeing their numbers, so I decided to reach out to more developers for your reading entertainment!They are listed from best to worse performing titles, so be sure to show your love for the lower ones.For the last 12 months77.1% Windows5.4% Mac OSX17.5% LinuxIf we count the whole lifetime though;96.2% Windows2.3% Mac OSX1.5% LinuxJust bear in mind it was released in 2008, the Linux version only got released at the end of 2012, so that 1.5% figure is actually really, really good.75% Windows16.2% Mac OSX8.8% LinuxThis is after Linux had a delayed released.89.0% Windows8.0% Mac OSX3.0% Linux (Ubuntu distributions account for 57% of the Linux users)Units sold:2.1% Mac OSX1.9% LinuxRevenue:4.9% Mac OSX4.2% LinuxSince 01.01.201391.46% Windows6.70% Mac OSX1.84% LinuxSales % per platform for the lastThe Windows figure is over inflated since many people redeeming Kickstarter keys were forced to use Windows for several weeks after Steam launch. Looking at the player figures or sales this month, the actual number is roughly 8% with Mac at 5% or so.97.5% Windows1.4% Linux1.1% Mac OSXThe developers where kind enough to show us that image when I requested it, so that makes:95.88% Windows3.57% Mac OSX0.55% LinuxAgain this number may seem small, but I doubt the guys at Facepunch Studios think it's not worth it (For those who don't know, Facepunch Studios created Garrys Mod). When you look at it that 5,621 * £14.99 selling price is around £84,258 give or take, that's without taking taxes and Steam's own share into account, but that's still a lot of money, probably more than some indie games will ever make.99.942% Windows0.05% Mac OSX0.008% Linux% of total revenue made since PZ appeared on Steam.Looks like it's time to show Project Zomboid some sales love don't you?Chris Simpson (known as Lemmy) from Project Zomboid's The Indie Stone had this to say:Again a big, big, thank you to all the developers who could spare time; we know they are always stupidly busy and not always doing fun things. Paperwork takes a lot of time to do!What do you all think of Part 2? Are you surprised or do you think it's still about right for where Linux is in the market right now?Part 1 (Click here for Part 2 »)
Twelve years ago, a 150-second TV broadcast changed our world; everyone everywhere owes a debt of gratitude to the man whose life it turned upside down—in his effort to protect ours. On August 10, 1998, eminent scientist Dr. Arpad Pusztai (pronounced Poos-tie) dared to speak the truth.
He had been an enthusiastic supporter of genetic engineering, working on cutting edge safety research with genetically modified (GM) foods. But to his surprise, his experiments showed that GM foods were inherently dangerous. When he relayed his concerns during a short television interview in the UK, things got ugly. With support from the highest levels of government, biotech defenders quickly mobilized a coordinated attack campaign trying to distort and cover up the evidence.
It worked for a while, but when an order of Parliament lifted Dr. Pusztai's gag order, the revelations touched off a media firestorm that ultimately kicked GM foods out of European supermarkets, and derailed the industry's timetable to quickly replace virtually all food with genetically engineered alternatives.
I recount the dramatic story of Dr. Pusztai below. In Part 2, I respond point-by-point to the biotech industry's denial and spin over the Pusztai affair, which is still being hyped in their new attack website.
Pusztai's Hot Potatoes
By early 1996, genetically modified tomatoes had been sold in US supermarkets for more than a year, and GM soy, corn, and cottonseed were about to be widely planted. But not a single peer-reviewed study on the safety of GM foods had been published, and there was not even an agreed-upon protocol for answering the question,"Is this stuff safe?"
The UK government was about to change all that, and Hungarian born chemist Dr. Arpad Pusztai was their man to do it. He beat out 27 competing scientists for a £1.6 million grant to develop a safety testing protocol; it was supposed to eventually be required for all GM food approvals in Europe.
A Spud with Fire-Power
Pusztai's team was working with the vegetable equivalent of a James Bond car—complete with built-in weaponry. A potato was outfitted with an assassin gene from the snowdrop plant; the gene produced"GNA lectin," a protein that kills insects.
How did Dr. Pusztai feel about the fact that his prestigious Rowett Institute was preparing to release killer potatoes into supermarkets worldwide? Fine, actually. He knew that the GNA lectin was harmless—not to insects mind you, but to us mammals. Dr. Pusztai was the world's leading expert on lectin proteins, and the GNA lectin was the one he knew most about. He had studied it for nearly seven years.
But when Dr. Pusztai fed the GM potato to rats using his new safety testing protocol, he got a shock. Nearly every system in the rats' bodies was adversely affected—several in just 10 days. Their brains, livers, and testicles were smaller, while their pancreases and intestines were enlarged. The liver was partially atrophied. Organs related to the immune system, including the thymus and the spleen, showed significant changes. Their white blood cells responded to an immune challenge more slowly, indicating immune system damage.
In all cases, the GM potato created proliferative cell growth in the stomach and small and large intestines; the lining was significantly thicker than controls. Although no tumors were detected, such growth can be precancerous.
Side Effects of Genetic Engineering Implicated
Dr. Pusztai and his team knew that the GNA lectin had not caused the damage. Other rats had been fed natural potatoes spiked with the same amount of GNA insecticide that the GM spud produced—and they did fine. The control group fed natural potatoes without added lectin were also in good shape. And in a previous experiment, Dr. Pusztai had fed rats an enormous quantity of the lectin, about 700 times the amount produced in the GM potato, again with no effect.
The damage to the rats, it appeared, came rather from the unintended side effects of the genetic engineering process. These effects (from gene insertion and cell cloning) may include massive collateral damage in a plant's DNA, with hundreds or thousands of mutations. Important natural genes can be inadvertently turned off, permanently turned on, deleted, reversed, scrambled, moved, fragmented, or changed in their activity level.
Dr. Pusztai wanted to find out precisely what went wrong in his potatoes, so he asked the government to provide more funds to conduct follow-up studies. But Prime Minister Tony Blair, his ministers, and his entire political party, were all unapologetic biotech cheerleaders trying desperately to promote them to a skeptical public. Exposing problems with GMO technology wasn't on the government's agenda. Additional funds were not forthcoming.
Biotech Damage Control Kicks In
The UK television show "World in Action" asked Dr. Pusztai for an interview. With permission from his Institute's director, he spoke generally about his concerns with GMOs based on the findings. He was careful not to reveal the details of his study, which was still unpublished.
His 150-second interview was aired on August 10, 1998. The European Press went wild and Dr. Pusztai was propelled to the status of hero at the Rowett Institute. The Institute's director, Professor Phillip James, took over all the publicity efforts, described the research as a huge advance in science, and wrote in a press release,"a range of carefully controlled studies underlie the basis of Dr. Pusztai's concerns."
On the afternoon of August 11th, two phone calls were allegedly placed from the UK prime minister's office, forwarded through the Institute's receptionist, to Professor James. Dr. Pusztai's hero status was revoked.
The next morning, the director suspended Dr. Pusztai after 35 years of service. He was silenced with threats of a lawsuit and his twenty member research team disbanded. The government never implemented their GMO safety testing protocol.
The Institute released numerous statements, some contradicting each other, others misrepresenting the research, but all designed to discredit Dr. Pusztai and the implications of his findings.
Seven months (and one heart attack) later, Dr. Pusztai's gag order was lifted when the Parliament invited him to testify. As the true details of the study began to emerge, the media responded. About 750 articles on GMOs were pumped out within the month.
Biotech advocates swung into action. According to a leaked document obtained by The Independent on Sunday, three government ministers prepared"an astonishingly detailed strategy for spinning, and mobilizing support for" GM foods."One of [the] ministers' main concerns," said the report,"was to rubbish research by Dr. Arpad Pusztai."
The ministers' campaign relied on the participation of certain scientists, including those in the Royal Society, who could voice uncompromising support for GMOs. According to the newspaper, many of these scientists, while promoted as"independent," had received compensation directly or indirect from the biotech companies. The Independent admonished the government's actions as a"a cynical public relations exercise."
But the spin campaign was too little, too late. By the end of April 1999, just 10 weeks after Dr. Pusztai's gag order was lifted, the public's distrust of GMOs reached a tipping point. Use of GM ingredients had become a marketing liability. Within a single week nearly every major food company committed to stop using GMOs in Europe.
Editor Threatened
With his data finally returned to him, Dr. Pusztai and a colleague submitted their paper to a renowned scientific journal, The Lancet. Its editor, Richard Horton, told The Guardian,"there was intense pressure on The Lancet from all quarters, including the Royal Society, to suppress publication." The paper passed the peer review and was set to appear on October 15, 1999.
On October 13, Horton received a call from a senior member of the Royal Society. According to the Guardian, Horton,"said the phone call began in a'very aggressive manner.' He said he was called 'immoral' and accused of publishing Dr. Pusztai's paper which he 'knew to be untrue.' Towards the end of the call Dr. Horton said the caller told him that if he published the Pusztai paper it would 'have implications for his personal position' as editor."
Although Horton declined to name the caller, the Guardian"identified him as Peter Lachmann, the former vice-president and biological secretary of the Royal Society and president of the Academy of Medical Sciences." Lachmann had been one of the co-signers on the Royal Society's open letter attacking Pusztai. He also had extensive financial ties to the biotech industry. In spite of his threats, The Lancet went forward with publication.
Courage, Integrity, and the Public's Right to Know
In the years since this controversy, Dr. Pusztai has given more than 200 lectures around the world on GMOs. He has been commissioned by the German government, academic publications, and others to do comprehensive analyses of GMO safety studies. In 2005, he received the Whistleblower Award from the Federation of German Scientists (VDW). And in 2009, he and his wife, Dr. Susan Bardocz—also an expert on GMO safety and formerly of the Rowett Institute—were presented with the Stuttgart Peace Prize for their tireless advocacy for independent risk research, as well as their courage, scientific integrity, and their undaunted insistence on the public's right to know the truth.
In 2008, on the tenth anniversary of his TV show, Dr. Pusztai reflected:
"On this anniversary I have to admit that, unfortunately, not much has changed since 1998. In one of the few sentences I said in my broadcast ten years ago, I asked for a credible GM testing protocol to be established that would be acceptable to the majority of scientists and to people in general. 10 years on we still haven't got one... "All of us asked for independent, transparent and inclusive research into the safety of GM plants, and particularly those used in foods. There is not much sign of this either. There are still'many opinions but very few data;' less than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published describing the results of work relating to GM safety that could actually be regarded as being of an academic standard; and the majority of even these is from industry-supported labs..."
Although pro-GM governments and the biotech industry continue ignore the mounting evidence of harm, there is now a movement among many medical doctors, scientists, and the public, to reject GM food, create a tipping point of consumer rejection against them in North America, and put GMOs back into the laboratory where they belong.
I describe Dr. Pusztai's story in more detail in the first chapter of Seeds of Deception; his findings are also featured among the 65 documented health risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in my book Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods.
New Website, Old Lies
Earlier this year, GMO advocates Bruce Chassy and David Tribe launched an attack site against Genetic Roulette. As part of their attempt to defend the safety of GMOs, they assail Dr. Pusztai's work by reiterating the same faulty, self-contradicting arguments that were made during the smear campaign.The United States faces a major crisis in primary health care, and unless Congress acts immediately it is likely to become much worse.
Millions of Americans are at risk of losing their access to health care because Congress did not renew funding for the community health center program at the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30. Unless we renew funding immediately, 70 percent of funding will be cut, the doors of 2,800 community health centers will close, and 9 million patients will lose access to quality health care. That is unacceptable.
Our nation’s community health centers provide affordable, high-quality health care to more than 27 million people. This includes not only primary health care, but also dentistry, counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs. For the 13 million rural patients served, community health centers often are the only health care provider for hundreds of miles. And they provide good jobs in communities that need them the most.
Community health centers not only save lives, they also save money. Instead of people ending up in expensive emergency room care, or in the hospital, they get the primary care they need, when they need it, at high quality medical centers. Compared to other providers, community health centers save on average $2,371 per Medicaid patient and up to $1,210 per Medicare patient. What’s more, community health centers have played a pivotal role in generating more than $49 billion in savings to the entire health care system.
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Not only do we have to renew funding for the community health center program, we must also improve and expand the National Health Service Corps — the program that provides debt forgiveness for young doctors, nurses, dentists, mental health providers, and pharmacists who are prepared to work in our nation’s most underserved areas. Without debt forgiveness, it is very hard to get new doctors to choose primary care — an area of medicine that does not pay the big bucks. It is also difficult to attract medical professionals into the underserved areas of our country where they are needed the most.
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It is widely acknowledged that we currently have the most wasteful, inefficient, and expensive health care system in the world. Despite spending almost $10,000 per capita on health care, twice as much as any other country, 28 million Americans have no insurance, even more are underinsured, with high copayments and deductibles, and we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. The rarely discussed truth is that thousands of Americans die each year because they cannot afford to get to a doctor when they should.
We must not allow a bad situation to get worse.
We cannot tell millions of low-income and working people in every state in this country that they will no longer be able to access the health care, dental care, mental health counseling, and low-cost prescription drugs they desperately need.
We cannot tell pregnant women that they will not be able to get the necessary prenatal care they require in order to have healthy babies.
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We cannot tell the young person addicted to opioids or heroin that there is no treatment available.
We cannot tell chronically ill senior citizens that they will have to survive without the prescription drugs they have used for years.
We cannot force community health centers, which provide some of the most cost-effective health care in the country, to lay off the doctors, nurses, dentists, and administrators who keep these centers going.
Historically, the community health center program has enjoyed widespread bipartisan support, and that support continues. Today, along with almost all Democrats, there are a number of Republicans who fully understand how important these centers are to the well-being of their states and want to see the program refunded.
The time for delay is over. Congress must act immediately to fully fund the community health center program and the associated workforce programs that provide them with the well-trained staffing they need.
Bernie Sanders is a US senator from Vermont.0 of 30
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What if the top 2017 NBA draft prospects could scour the league's current depth charts and find Future Them?
They can't, because duh. But let's pretend it's possible and then find their future selves for them.
Each of these top-30 prospects was plucked and ordered in accordance with the latest big board from Bleacher Report's Jonathan Wasserman. Comparisons will aim to identify realistic best-case scenarios for these kiddies.
Since we're limiting the scope to active talents, there must be some leeway. Decisions will take |
Gallo’s officially back and he’s averaging career-highs under Hunt’s tutelage. 17.5 points per-game, on 43.7-percent shooting from the field, and 42.0-percent shooting from three, are numbers that remind you of Gallinari before injuries tied him down the better part of the last two years.
Hunt’s spirit and game plan are also rubbing off on Kenneth Faried, whose days in Denver appeared to be numbered just one month ago. The Manimal has looked more and more like the Faried we saw last summer, at the FIBA World Championships, and the guy who made a name for himself under Karl’s up-tempo style. Hunt has been using Faried mostly at the five, and while he’s severely undersized there on the defensive end, he makes up for it by getting out in transition and beating his man down the floor.
Faried is averaging 16.6 points per game, while pulling down 11.3 rebounds in 32.5 minutes; about five more per game than he played under Shaw. His rebound percentage has improved from 17.0 to 19.1-percent, and his field-goal percentage has been upped from 49.1 to 54.1 percent.
Why have Faried’s numbers improved so much under Hunt? Faried is no longer being used heavily in isolation post up situations like he was under Shaw, which didn’t fit his skill set at all. He’s getting more and more of his buckets in transition and he is taking better (and more open) shots than he previously was.
Under Shaw, Faried was taking 37.4-percent of his field-goal attempts with a defender 0-2 feet from him, and he was making 48.6-percent of those shots. Under Hunt, Faried has lowered the frequency of shots with a defender 0-2 feet away, to 28.6-percent.
Here’s where we notice how Faried has been more effective offensively under Hunt. He has increased the amount of shots that he’s taken where the closest defender is 2-4 feet away, from 44.2-percent to 53.1-percent, a change that signals he’s taking less and less contested shots, and more of his offense is coming in the open floor.
All of a sudden Gallinari looks like an effective stretch-four, who can draw the defense’s attention with his shooting, and open up lanes for Ty Lawson drives.
Not to be outdone, Faried’s back to being a plus energy and effort guy who can produce in the right system. His recent string of games in this system makes his extension look not all that bad, with a salary cap that’s set to inflate like the Weimar Republic, circa 1923.
The Nugget’s body language on the floor, bench, and to the media has done a complete 180 since Hunt was tagged as the interim head coach, and it’s obvious that the players love playing for him
After the victory over Golden State last week, Faried was singing Hunt’s praises:
“He’s a great coach,” Faried said of Hunt. “He keeps everybody confident and wanting to play basketball and not wanting to give up on the season. He wants us to go out there and play basketball and have fun.”
Wow, remarkable comments coming from a team that straight-up quit on its coach just three weeks ago. Can anyone imagine a Nuggets player saying something like that about Brian Shaw? Not in a million years.
We still don’t know what Hunt’s status is at the end of this season, and his standing with the team is going to depend on how much turnover this roster is set to endure. If a full-scale rebuild occurs with owner Josh Kroenke and general manager Tim Connelly dropping their versions of Fat Man and Little Boy on this roster, perhaps a new face would be the way to go.
However, if some or most of this core returns, and guys like Faried, Gallinari, Lawson and Wilson Chandler (who has a seven million dollar team-option next year) are back, it might be a good call to keep Hunt around. Those guys enjoy playing for him and they play hard in a system that clearly plays to their strengths. It might just be what Denver needs to return to relevancy again.Under the tyranny of our present productivity-fetishism, we measure the value of everything by the final product rather than by the richness of the process — its rewards, its stimulating challenges, the aliveness of presence with which we fill every moment of it. In contemporary culture, if a marriage ends in divorce — however many happy years it may have granted the couple, however many wonderful children it may have produced — we deem it a failed marriage. What is true on the scale of personal history is triply true on the scale of cultural history, and few public marriages have been subjected to a more unnuanced verdict than that of Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. The twenty years between the time they met as first-year university students and the time of their final legal separation get compressed into one blunt word itself emptied of dimension: divorce. And yet those were the years in which Einstein did his most groundbreaking work, forever changing the course of modern science; years which produced the only progeny of the quintessential modern genius; years filled with enormous, all-consuming love, which comes to life in Albert Einstein / Mileva Marić: The Love Letters (public library) — a collection of fifty-four missives exchanged between the beginning of their romance in 1897 and their marriage in 1903.
Of course, the missives display the genre’s most prominent caveat — love letters are almost always exchanged by lovers during time apart, the distance only amplifying their desire and the longing adding a layer of intensity to their correspondence that may not exist in their daily life when reunited. And yet they capture a more intimate side of Einstein than any of his other published texts and reclaim the full dimension of a relationship gravely marred by our culture’s incapacity for nuance. In doing so, they are redemptive beyond the couple’s particular circumstances, reminding us of the dignity and dimension of all human relationships when untethered from the tyrannical verdict of their final outcome.
Young Albert and Mileva’s correspondence flows seamlessly from gentle taunting and sarcasm to besotted earnestness, always undergirded by a common tone of sweetness. Tucked between the amorous confessions are frequent discussions of science — in her first surviving letter, Marić confronts the paradox of infinity and tussles with the limits of science; in one of his early letters, Einstein shares the seed for his groundbreaking work: “I’m convinced more and more that the electrodynamics of moving bodies as it is presented today doesn’t correspond to reality, and that it will be possible to present it in a simpler way.”
Since the very beginning, Mileva was poised to be Albert’s equal — the only female student of physics in her university class and two years his senior, she was an intellectually and emotionally mature young woman. Einstein was immensely drawn to her. Like Vladimir Nabokov, who ended an earlier affair with an inferior partner when he fell in love with the brilliant Véra, young Albert grew disillusioned with his previous girlfriend, whom he quite bluntly described as a “foolish darling that can neither do, nor understand anything.” His feelings for Mileva were of a different order — they delighted in reading and discussing the scientific classics together, he frequently remarked on her intellect as superior to his own, and he considered her the grounding rational counterpart to the emotional roller coaster of his extreme moodiness.
Reading their correspondence, rife with deep intellectual companionship, steadfast affection, and extraordinary tenderness, makes one suddenly aware that while Einstein may have stood on the shoulders of giants as he made his monumental scientific breakthroughs, he also stood on the wings of love.
In his first surviving letter to Marić, penned while she was away visiting her family in Serbia, Einstein sets the sweetly sarcastic tone that permeates much of their correspondence:
Dear Fräulein, The desire to write you has finally conquered the guilty conscience I’ve had about not responding to your letter for such a long time, and which has allowed me to avoid your critical eye. But now, even though you are understandably angry with me, you must at least give me credit for not adding to my offense by hiding behind feeble excuses, and for asking you simply and directly for forgiveness and — for an answer as soon as possible. […] If you don’t my giving you some advice (entirely unselfishly?), you should return as soon as possible, because everything you need to catch up on your studies can be found tightly packed in our notebooks… You will, of course, have to give up your old peasant room which a Zurich philistine now occupies … serves you right, you little runaway! But now back to the books. Best wishes, your Albert Einstein
In an 1899 letter to Mileva, penned while visiting his family over spring break, Einstein articulates his sense of having found his soulmate in her:
I’m having a wonderful time at home; I’ve spent much of it tending to the innermost joys, that is to say, i’ve been eating a lot, and well, something which has already caused me to suffer a bit from our favorite poetic ailment, like the time at the Sterns when for hours I sat next to you, my charming table partner. It was then revealed to me in harsh tints how closely knit our psychic and physiological lives are.
But young Albert’s genius came at the cost of a certain social sensitivity. Seeing Mileva as his intellectual equal, he seemed to assume that she was impervious to what he considered the superficial concerns of most women — namely, beauty and the insecurities related to it. In a testament to the toxic and illusory dualism of beauty and brains — the patriarchy, after all, has pitted the two as a tradeoff for millennia — he makes a rather insensitive remark, which he no doubt believes to be a compliment: In reporting on his mother’s response to seeing a photograph of Mileva, who wasn’t considered conventionally beautiful, he writes:
Your photograph had quite an effect on my old lady. While she studied it carefully, I said with the deepest sympathy: “Yes, yes, she certainly is a clever one.” I’ve already had to endure much teasing about it, among other things, but I don’t find it at all unpleasant.
To be sure, Einstein didn’t think highly of his mother’s intellectual capacity — he often described his family by his favorite putdown, “philistine” — so the comment was likely intended as an expression of his conviction that Mileva was different from all other women. In a letter from home penned during summer break a few months later, he affirms this in a particularly poignant passage, speaking to the mystery of how personal identity evolves as he considers how his chosen life-path has diverged from that of his family and writes:
Here is Paradise. I live a nice, quiet, philistine life with my mother hen and sister… You, poor girl, must now stuff your head with gray theory, but I know that with your divine composure, you’ll accomplish everything with a level head. Besides, you are at home being pampered, as a deserving daughter should be. But in Zurich you are the mistress of our house, which isn’t such a bad thing, especially since it’s such a nice household! When I read Helmholtz for the first time I could not — and still cannot — believe I was doing so without you sitting next to me. I enjoy working together very much, and find it soothing and less boring. […] My mother and sister seem somewhat petty and philistine to me, despite the sympathy I feel for them. It is interesting how gradually our life changes us in the very subtleties of our soul, so that even the closest of family ties dwindle into habitual friendship. Deep inside we no longer understand one another, and are incapable of actively empathizing with the other, or knowing what emotions move the other.
For many of us, our romantic relationships are a way of building a new family from scratch, revising and improving the imperfections of our family of origin. But for Einstein, his life with Mileva was a particularly palpable alternative to the family for which he felt sympathetic affection but no intellectual respect. In another letter a few days later, he further solidifies this sense:
My aunt from Genoa is coming, a veritable monster of arrogance and insensitive formalism. I’m nevertheless enjoying each and every day of my vacation in this wonderfully peaceful place. If only you could be here with me for a while! We understand one another’s dark souls so well, and also drinking coffee and eating sausages etc…
By the end of the summer, they were already addressing each other by their pet names — Albert was “Johnnie” and Mileva “Dollie.” (Lest we forget, name-giving is a high act of intimacy.) “Dear Fräulein” became “Dear Dollie,” then simply “DD.” In a letter from September 28 of 1899, Einstein writes:
DD, It was nice of you, you sweet girl, to write me when you have so much strenuous work to do. But you should also know that your letters make me so happy that everyone teases me about it. You must have had to swallow a lot of book dust recently, you poor thing, but it will soon be over — I know how you feel. I’ve been quite a bookworm myself lately, trying to work out several ideas, some of them very interesting… I’ll be back at “our place” around the 15th. I’m really looking forward to returning because it’s still the nicest and coziest place I can think of.
Over the following year, Einstein’s family grew increasingly disapproving of his relationship with Mileva, which his mother termed “the Dollie affair” — they had come to believe that settling down at such a young age would compromise 21-year-old Albert’s career prospects. In a letter from July of 1900, penned while vacationing with his family, he recounts a tragicomic exchange with his mother over the matter:
So we arrive home, and I go into Mama’s room (only the two of us). First I must tell her about the exam, and then she asks me quite innocently: “So, what will become of your Dollie now?” “My wife,” I said just as innocently, prepared for the proper “scene” that immediately followed. Mama threw herself onto the bed, buried her head in the pillow, and wept like a child. After regaining her composure she immediately shifted to a desperate attack: “You are ruining your future and destroying your opportunities.” “No decent family will have her.” “If she gets pregnant you’ll really be in a mess.” With this last outburst, which was preceded by many others, I finally lost my patience. I vehemently denied that we had been living in sin and scolded her roundly, and was about to leave the room when Mama’s friend Frau Bär came in. She is a small, vivacious lady: an old hen of the most pleasant variety. We immediately began talking about the weather, the new guests at the spa, the ill-mannered children, etc. Then we ate, and afterwards played some music. When everyone had left, and the time came for Mama and me to say good night, it started all over again, but “più piano.” The next day things were better, largely because, as she said herself, “If they have not yet been intimate (which she had greatly feared) and we are willing to wait longer, then ways and means can always be found.” The only thing that is embarrassing for her is that we want to remain together always. Her attempts at changing my mind came in expressions such as: “Like you, she is a book — but you ought to have a wife.” “By the time you’re 30 she’ll be an old witch,” etc.
Mileva was only two years older than Albert, so that would have made her a 32-year-old “old witch.”
To seal his contempt for such judgments, he adds:
The people here and their way of life are so hopelessly empty… Every meal lasts one hour or more — you can imagine what hell that is for me… If only I could be with you again soon in Zurich, my little treasure! A thousand wishes and the biggest kisses from your Johnnie
Two days later, he writes:
My sweet little one I’m so happy to know that you’re back home again with your old lady, who is now fattening up my dear Dollie so she can rest in my arms healthy and happy once again, as plump as a dumpling… I just realized that I haven’t been able to kiss you for an entire month, and I long for you so terribly much. No one as talented and industrious as my Dollie, with her skilled hands, is to be found in this entire anthill of a hotel. Mama-in-law has already more or less made up with me and is slowly resigning herself to the inevitable… I long terribly for a letter from my beloved witch. I can hardly believe that we will be separated so much longer — only now do I see how madly in love with you I am! Indulge yourself completely so you will become a radiant little darling and as wild as a street urchin… Our hotel is a particularly excellent feeding establishment, but I feel uncomfortable among these indolent and pampered people. Especially when I see these overdressed, lazy women who are always complaining about things. It is then that I think proudly: “Johnnie, your Dollie is a different kind of girl.”
A few days later, Einstein — who had a lifelong interest in psychology — captures the root of his parents’ resistance in a remarkably insightful letter to Mileva, in which he addresses his views on gender equality more directly than he ever did elsewhere. Just a few years before George Bernard Shaw’s searing condemnation of marriage as an institution built upon the systematic oppression of women, young Einstein writes:
Papa has written me a moralistic letter for the time being, and promised that the main part would be delivered in person soon. I’m looking forward to it dutifully. I understand my parents quite well. They think of a wife as a man’s luxury, which he can afford only when he is making a comfortable living. I have a low opinion of this view of the relationship between man and wife, because it makes the wife and the prostitute distinguishable only insofar as the former is able to secure a lifelong contract from the man because of her more favorable social rank. Such a view follows naturally from the fact that in the case of my parents, as with most people, the senses exercise a direct control over the emotions. With us, thanks to the fortunate circumstances in which we live, the enjoyment of life is vastly broadened. But we mustn’t forget how many existences like my parents’ make our existence possible. In the social development of mankind, the former are a far more important constituency. Hunger and love are and remain such important mainsprings of life that almost everything can be explained by them, even if one regards the other dominant themes. Thus I am trying to protect my parents without compromising anything that is important to me — and that means you, sweetheart!
He then launches into a lyrical love letter brimming with the quintessential lover’s restlessness:
When I’m not with you I feel as if I’m not whole. When I sit, I want to walk; when I walk, I’m looking forward to going home; when I’m amusing myself, I want to study; when I study, I can’t sit still and concentrate; and when I go to sleep, I’m not satisfied with how I spent the day. …tender kisses form your Albert
By August, Einstein is back at the couple’s shared apartment, but Mileva is still with her parents in Serbia. He writes:
Though my old Zurich makes me feel very much at home again, I still miss you, my dear little “right hand.” I can go anywhere I want — but I belong nowhere, and I miss your two little arms and that glowing mouth full of tenderness and kisses. […] Have courage, little witch! I can hardly wait to be able to hug you and squeeze you and live with you again. We’ll happily get down to work right away, and money will be as plentiful and manure. And if it’s nice next spring, we’ll pick flowers in Melchtal. Tender kisses from your
Albert
A few days later, he once again bemoans the psychoemotional strain of being apart from his soulmate:
Dear little sweetheart, Once again I’ve let a few lazy days slip by without accomplishing anything. You know, the kind of days when you sleep late because there’s nothing important to do, then go out until the room has been made up, and then study until fatigue sets in. Then you loaf around for a while and half-heartedly look forward to dinner, listlessly contemplating highly philosophical questions while whistling a little… How was I able to live alone before, my little everything? Without you I lack self-confidence, passion for work, and enjoyment of life — in short, without you, my life is no life.
After a few habitual laments about his parents, he adds:
Don’t study too hard when your books come; rest instead, so you can become my old street urchin again. There is only one thing I ask of you, and that is to take care of yourself — if not, then I’ll spank you… With best wishes and tender kisses, the last especially, from your
Albert
By mid-August, Albert’s longing for Mileva has turned him so restless that pens her a playful poem, which he includes in a letter from August 20, masterfully translated by Shawn Smith:
Oh my! That Johnnie boy!
So crazy with desire,
While thinking of his Dollie,
His pillow catches fire. When my sweetie mopes around the house
I shrivel up so small,
But she only shrugs her shoulders
And doesn’t care at all. To my folks all this
Does seem a stupid thing,
But they never say a little word
For fear of Albert’s sting! My little Dollie’s little beak,
It sings so sweet and fine;
And afterwards I cheerfully
Close its song with mine.
He adds:
Oh how happy I’ll be to hold you close to my heart once again! … But in the meantime you should enjoy yourself, my only sweet little woman. […] But you haven’t written me in a long time, you wild witch! Are you afraid it will “miss its mark,” or are you just mad at me, you little rascal? Or do you want me to wonder and hunger for you?
That, too, he illustrates with a playful verse:
From him she now does hide away,
What should he make of this?
To him she is with all her soul
Devoted with a kiss!
In early September, he once again leaves on vacation with his parents, who launch another offense on the relationship. He reports to Mileva:
My parents are very worried about my love for you. Mama often cries bitterly and I don’t have a single moment of peace here. My parents weep for me almost as if I had died. Again and again they complain that I have brought misfortune upon myself by my devotion to you… Oh Dollie, it’s enough to drive one mad! … If only they knew you! But it’s as if they’re under a spell, thinking all the while that I am… I’ll only be able to recover from this vacation gradually, by being in your arms — there are worse things in life than exams. Now I know. This is worse than any external problem. My only diversion is studying, which I am pursuing with redoubled effort, and my only hope is you, my dear, faithful soul. Without the thought of you I would no longer want to live among this sorry herd of humans. But having you makes me proud, and your love makes me happy I will be doubly happy when I can press you close to my heart once again and see those loving eyes which shine for me alone, and kiss your sweet mouth which trembles blissfully for me alone… Kissing you from the bottom of my heart, your
Sweetheart
Two weeks later, he writes:
No matter what happens, we’ll have the most wonderful life in the world. Pleasant work and being together — and what’s more, we now answer to no one, can stand on our own feet, and enjoy our youth to the utmost. Who could have it any better? When we have scraped together enough money, we can buy bicycles and take a bike tour every couple of weeks.
Albert and Mileva were married fourteen months later, in January of 1903. Their first son, Hans Albert — to whom Einstein would one day write that beautiful letter of advice on the secret to learning anything — was born in May of the following year. They remained married for eleven years and together for eighteen, and although the relationship ended in divorce, Einstein did spend his formative years as a scientist enveloped in Mileva’s love and intellectual companionship. The apathy, listlessness, and distractedness permeating so many of the letters penned while away from her do make one appreciate just how creatively and spiritually nourishing their love, the full dimension of which comes to life in the remainder of Albert Einstein / Mileva Marić: The Love Letters, was for young Albert’s developing genius.
Complement these tender missives with the magnificent love letters of Vladimir Nabokov to Véra Nabokov, Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, Mozart to his wife, Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, Oscar Wilde to Bosie, and Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera.Riccardo Montolivo’s early dismissal meant Ajax spent an hour trying, and failing, to break down Milan’s deep defence.
Max Allegri made huge changes from the side which drew 2-2 at Livorno, bringing in six players – Stephan El Shaarawy was the most eye-catching inclusion, although he didn’t last long.
Frank De Boer also made a few changes. Bojan started upfront against his former club, while Daley Blind was at left-back with Christian Poulsen coming into the midfield.
This was far from open, but it was certainly entertaining. Montolivo’s red card forced both managers to change their plans quickly, and overall Ajax – the side needing the win – were unimpressive in their attempts to score.
Both sides press
The major feature at the start of the contest was the heavy pressing from both sides. This was expected from the away team – they pressed very effectively in the previous Champions League match against Barcelona, and after all, this is Ajax, and pressing has always been a key feature of their game.
But it was more surprising that Milan started so energetically. The problem area for Milan was the opposition full-backs, but they closed them down with a combination of their forwards, who started the game helping to start the pressure, but more notably with the two shuttlers, Montolivo and Sulley Muntari, who got out to the flanks quickly.
Ajax dominate
While they eventually found themselves with a one-man advantage, Ajax were on top even before Montolivo’s dismissal. The high-tempo contest suited their skillset, and it was particularly obvious that their defenders were more comfortable on the ball than their opposite numbers, and capable of playing good forward passes into midfield. Ajax were particularly flexible because their centre-backs, as well as their full-backs, could move forward in possession if Mario Balotelli and Stephan El Shaarawy were drawn out wide.
Ajax’s most promising area was down the right flank, where Lasse Schone, Davy Klaasen and Ricardo van Rhijn have an excellent relationship. That trio were responsible for most of Ajax’s good attacks against Barcelona, and here they constantly attacked Kevin Constant, taking advantage of his lack of protection from midfield. Schone and Klaasan regularly switched positions and allowed van Rhijn freedom on the overlap – they forced a corner which was headed onto the post by Poulsen, and then Klaasen had a shot well saved by Christian Abbiati following a right-wing cross.
10 v 11
Montolivo’s foul on Poulsen was punished with a straight red, and immediately Allegri made a change. El Shaarawy was removed with Andrea Poli brought on to play in Montolivo’s right-sided midfield position.
But rather than go with a simple 4-3-1-1, with Kaka still behind Balotelli, Allegri opted for a more solid shape. Poli played on the right of a midfield four, with Kaka tucked in on the left, from where he sprinted forward to join Balotelli on the break.
Ajax dominated possession easily during this period, however, with Poulsen completely free in front of Milan’s midfield, always ready to switch the play from side to side. Ajax weren’t creating a great deal, but the pressure was mounting on Milan because they found it very difficult to close down and win the ball in central positions.
4-3-1-1
Then, Allegri decided to switch to the 4-3-1-1 shape instead. Poli tucked inside and Kaka sat closer to Poulsen. The Dane’s influence was now limited, but this shape gave Ajax’s full-backs plenty of time to overlap down the outside, and Milan became exposed to a stream of crosses.
That said, Ajax didn’t perform particularly impressively in the period before half-time. The full-backs could have pushed 20 yards higher up the pitch, and the overall passing tempo was very slow. They seemingly understood their task – switch the play repeatedly to expose Milan’s narrow midfield – but they did everything extremely slowly.
Ajax change
At half-time, De Boer made an attack-minded change. Poulsen, the defensive midfielder, was no longer needed as Ajax were dominant (although it’s also possible he was hurt by Montolivo’s challenge, too) and therefore De Boer brought on an extra attacker instead, in Danny Hoesen.
Hoesen went upfront, with Bojan moving right and Schone brought back into the holding role. This move helped Ajax move the ball across the pitch much quicker, although they still struggled to play good combinations in the final third. Aside from a one-two between Klaasen and Bojan, they rarely penetrated the Milan defence and the majority of their shots were scrappy and off-target.
Instead, they looked right where Bojan stayed wide, Klaasen continued to get into decent supporting positions, and van Rhijn played almost permanently as an extra right-winger. Two crosses from that flank were badly misjudged by Abbiati, although Ajax never appeared to have a true aerial target in the box.
Sigthorsson
That’s why De Boer brought on Kolbeinn Sigthorsson as an extra centre-forward, in place of Bojan. He started from the wide-right position Bojan had been playing, but immediately moved into central positions to become a second striker. From the moment he came on, Ajax hit long diagonal balls from the left flank towards the back post, giving them a proper aerial option.
Allegri responded to this change by introducing a third centre-back. Kaka was removed, with Philippe Mexes on, and Milan now 5-3-1. Milan’s counter-attacking threat was non-existent, and Balotelli was asked to run the channels on his own – he won a few free-kicks, helping to ease the pressure.
De Boer’s final change was peculiar – midfielder Thulani Serero off, and Mike van der Hoorn, a young and error-prone defender introduced specifically to provide yet another aerial route upfront. But Ajax’s balls into the box continued to be extremely disappointing – they went for long diagonals from deep positions, rather than working the ball up towards the byline before crossing. This was peculiar considering they threatened when they got the ball into advanced wide positions – and considering Abbiati’s struggles at judging the crosses.
Klassen had a fine overhead attempt with the final kick of the game, but Ajax didn’t really deserve to progress – they did’t show enough quality to penetrate the Milan defence, and their crossing was merely hopeful.
Conclusion
One of the stranger football cliches is the idea that “sometimes it can be harder to play against ten men”, but Ajax will feel the saying is particularly apt this evening. They must have been delighted Milan were attempting to take them on at ‘their’ game – pressing and quick passing. On the evidence of the first 20 minutes, Ajax would probably have outpassed and outplayed the home side here.
But when Milan went down to ten, Allegri’s side sat extremely deep. Ajax didn’t really have any answer to this challenge – despite switching the ball wide frequently, their passing was often laboured and their crosses hit from extremely deep positions, playing into the hands of Milan’s centre-backs. The introduction of Sigthorsson helped a little, but Van der Hoorn’s presence smacked of desperation.
Related articles on Zonal Marking:On Monday the 25th of September, 93% of Iraqi Kurdistan voted for independence from the central government in Baghdad. This impressive result, on a high turnout of 72%, has been the cause of international anxiety. The USA had warned the Kurds against holding such a referendum; Turkey, Iraq and Iran were furious. Now that the expected ‘yes’ vote has been given so resoundingly, actions and words have become ever more severe.
The issue is this: the Kurdish peoples, spread out over the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, have for a long time been the largest cultural and ethnic group without a state of their own. For a long time, too, they have been persecuted and oppressed by the governments of the countries they have been part of. Most vociferous in his oppression of the Kurds was Saddam Hussein, whose forces in 1988 infamously conducted a chemical attack on the population of Halabja, a town in Iraqi Kurdistan, which killed thousands of civilians.
Not only have the Kurds faced oppression at ‘home’: they have had mixed support from the West. At its most generous, the West has supported a no-fly zone over Iraqi Kurdistan after the First Gulf War, as well as fighting alongside and supporting them against Saddam in 2003. The overthrow of that regime was an undoubtedly great thing for the Kurds. But Kurdistan has been betrayed by the West multiple times. The carving up of the old Ottoman Empire after the First World War left the Kurds nationless, and in the 1980s the US cut relations with the Kurds after supporting them against Saddam in the 1970s, thus leaving the path wide open for the Ba’athist’s genocidal rage to vent itself against them.
Given that the Kurds, one of the most democratic, politically liberal and feminist groups of people in the Middle East have been staunch allies in the fight against theocratic fascism, holding the line against Al-Qaeda and now Islamic State, one could hope for vehement support for them from the international community in the wake of Iraqi Kurdistan’s referendum result. This would be too much to expect however- Baghdad has stopped all flights to and from the region whilst Turkey has sent troops to the border and threatened to cut off oil pipelines. The US on Monday declared disappointment over the holding of the referendum. Syria does not acknowledge anything but a single unified Iraq; Iran also lectured the Kurds on the wrongheadedness of the vote.
Perhaps, instead of the West worrying about the potential fallout of the claim for national self-determination of the oppressed yet strong Iraqi Kurds, our governments should rejoice at this development. Why ever not- a democratic, liberal allied state in the Middle East would be the result. Since the hopes for a unified, secular Iraqi republic have gone awry, it is time to support the Kurds in this enterprise. It would not be easy, given the competing claims espoused by the regional powers, but it would be achievable and morally justified.
Perhaps the fact that the Kurds have democratically declared their independence should mean that talks should be started with central government, rather than Baghdad and others emanating aggressively against the people who held the front line against Islamic State when the Iraqi army broke and fled. Perhaps solidarity for the Kurds should be the rule of the day. And perhaps that might just mean the West finally supporting, without reserve, the world’s largest people without a state against the impositions of a government alien to them.
In memoriam, Jalal Talabani (Mam Jalal): 1933-2017- a hero of Kurdish freedom fighting.
Image: Ask Gudmundsen
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TweetThe first-ever magnesium-chloride-based fertilizer has been approved for use on organic U.S. crops. | Courtesy of wikipedia.org
U.S. organic farmers can now use the first magnesium chloride-based fertilizer, known as AgMag, to strengthen their crops and continue to meet the growing demand for organic products, Innovative Surface Solutions, the fertilizer's maker, said this week.
The innovative fertilizer is the first of its kind to be approved for organic farms in the U.S.
"The demand for organic foods continues to grow, and farmers are looking for cost-effective solutions," Greg Baun, president and CEO of Innovative Surface Solutions, said. "We are proud to offer North American farmers access to a liquid organic fertilizer that will increase quality and yields across a range of crop types and also contains natural fungal-suppressant properties. We continue to see excellent results from our trials with Cornell University; 2015 will be the fourth year and most comprehensive trials yet with more farms participating in New York and New England."
"Innovative's AgMa provides farmers with an organic option to strengthen their crops that is superior to traditional Epsom salts used by many organic farmers as a source of magnesium," Ray McDonald, general manager of Cangrow Crop Solutions and Innovative's Canadian distribution partner, said. "This magnesium chloride solution gives organic farmers access to the same benefits of this fertilizer that have been available to non-organic farmers in North America for more than 20 years."
"The organic certification of Ag Mag will be great for organic farmers," John Van Heusen, operator of Sugar Creek Farm in Ossian, New York, said. "I have seen year-over-year increases in both yield and quality by using AgMag on conventional crops. Now the same benefits can be experienced on organic farms."ATLANTIC CITY -- New Jersey's top Democratic and Republican state lawmakers agreed on at least one thing Wednesday: They're all opposed to the federal tax reform plans being touted by President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans in Washington, D.C.
State Senate President Stephen Sweeney also said if that bill becomes law, that might complicate a plan by incoming governor Phil Murphy, a fellow Democrat, to raise taxes on wealthy residents to help pump money into the state.
Speaking at the 102nd annual New Jersey League of Municipalities Conference, Sweeney, D-Gloucester, said the tax overhaul being considered in Congress would "devastate and destroy" the Garden State.
"They're going to devalue our properties and put an enormous tax burden on the people of |
bird species.
Modes of migration
The migration flights of birds follow specific routes, sometimes quite well defined over long distances. The majority of bird migrants, however, travel along broad airways. A single population of migrants may be scattered over a vast territory so as to form a broad front hundreds of miles in width. Such routes are determined not only by geographical factors—e.g., river systems, valleys, coasts—and ecological conditions but are also dependent upon meteorological conditions; i.e., birds change their direction of flight in accordance with the direction and force of the wind. Some routes cross oceans. Small passerine (perching) birds migrate across 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) or more of sea in areas such as the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean Sea, and the North Sea. American golden plover, wintering in the Pacific, fly directly from the Aleutian Islands (southwest of Alaska) to Hawaii, the 3,300-kilometre (2,050-mile) flight requiring 35 hours and more than 250,000 wing beats.
The speed of migratory flights depends largely on the species and the type of terrain covered. Birds in migration go faster than otherwise. Rooks have been observed migrating at speeds of 51 to 72 kilometres (32 to 45 miles) per hour; starlings at 69 to 78 kilometres (43 to 49 miles) per hour; skylarks at 35 to 45 kilometres (22 to 28 miles) per hour; and pintails at 50 to 82 kilometres (31 to 51 miles) per hour. Although the speeds would permit steadily flying migrants to reach their wintering grounds in a relatively short time, the journeys are interrupted by long stops, during which the birds rest and hunt for food. The redbacked shrike covers an average of 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) in five days as follows: two nights for migration, three nights for rest, five days for feeding.
Most migrations occur at relatively low altitudes. Small passerine birds often fly at less than 60 metres (200 feet). Some birds, however, fly much higher. Migrating passerines, for example, have been observed at altitudes as great as 4,000 metres (14,000 feet). The highest altitude recorded thus far for migrating birds is 9,000 metres (29,500 feet) for geese near Dehra Dun in northwest India.
Pelicans, storks, birds of prey, swifts, swallows, and finches are diurnal (daytime) migrants. Waterbirds, cuckoos, flycatchers, thrushes, warblers, orioles, and buntings are mostly nocturnal (nighttime) migrants. Studies of nocturnal migrants using radar on telescopes focussed on the Moon show that most migratory flights occur between 10 PM and 1 AM, diminishing rapidly to a minimum at 4 AM.
Most birds are gregarious during migration, even those that display a fierce individualism at all other times, such as many birds of prey and insectivorous passerines. Birds with similar habits sometimes travel together, a phenomenon observed among various species of shorebirds. Flocks sometimes show a remarkable cohesion; the most characteristic migratory formation of geese, ducks, pelicans, and cranes is a V with the point turned in the direction of flight.
Navigation
A compass sense has been demonstrated in birds; that is, they are able to fly in a particular constant direction, regardless of the position of the release point with respect to the bird’s home area. It has also been shown that birds are capable of relating the release point to their home area and of determining which direction to take, then maintaining that direction in flight. The navigational ability of birds has long been understood in terms of a presumed sensitivity to both the intensity and the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field. It has also been suggested that birds are sensitive to forces produced by the rotation of the Earth (Coriolis force); however, no sense organ or physiological process sensitive to such forces has yet been demonstrated to support this hypothesis.
Experiments have shown that the orientation of birds is based on celestial bearings. The Sun is the point of orientation during the day, and birds are able to compensate for the movement of the Sun throughout the day. A so-called internal clock mechanism in birds involves the ability to gauge the angle of the Sun above the horizon. Similar mechanisms are known in many animals and are closely related to the rhythm of daylight, or photoperiodism. When the internal rhythm of birds is disturbed by subjecting them first to several days of irregular light–dark sequences, then to an artificial rhythm that is delayed or advanced in relation to the normal rhythm, corresponding anomalies occur in the homing behaviour.
Two theories have been formulated to explain how birds use the Sun for orientation. Neither, however, has so far been substantiated with proof. One theory holds that birds find the right direction by determining the horizontal angle measured on the horizon from the Sun’s projection. They correct for the Sun’s movement by compensating for the changing angle and thus are able to maintain the same direction. According to this theory, the Sun is a compass that enables the birds to find and maintain their direction. This theory does not explain, however, the manner in which a bird, transported and released in an experimental situation, determines the relationship between the point at which it is released and its goal.
The second theory, proposed by British ornithologist G.V.T. Matthews, is based on other aspects of the Sun’s position, the most important of which is the arc of the Sun—i.e., the angle made by the plane through which the Sun is moving in relation to the horizontal. Each day in the Northern Hemisphere, the highest point reached by the Sun lies in the south, thus indicating direction; the highest point is reached at noon, thus indicating time. In its native area a bird is familiar with the characteristics of the Sun’s movement. Placed in different surroundings, the bird can project the curve of the Sun’s movement after watching only a small segment of its course. By measuring maximum altitude (the Sun’s angle in relation to the horizontal) and comparing it with circumstances in the usual habitat, the bird obtains a sense of latitude. Details of longitude are provided by the Sun’s position in relation to both the highest point and position it will reach—as revealed by a precise internal clock.
Migrant birds that travel at night are also capable of directional orientation. Studies have shown that these birds use the stars to determine their bearings. In clear weather, captive migrants head immediately in the right direction using only the stars. They are even able to orient themselves correctly to the arrangement of night skies projected on the dome of a planetarium; true celestial navigation is involved because the birds determine their latitude and longitude by the position of the stars. In a planetarium in Germany, blackcaps and garden warblers, under an artificial autumn sky, headed “southwest,” their normal direction; lesser whitethroats headed “southeast,” their normal direction of migration in that season.
It is known, then, that birds are able to navigate by two types of orientation. One, simple and directional, is compass orientation; the second, complex and directed to a point, is true navigation, or goal orientation. Both types apparently are based on celestial bearings, which provide a navigational “grid.”
Images: Migrating cranes on the Platte River in central Nebraska—Layne Kennedy/Corbis; Barn swallow—© Vadim Andrushchenko/Fotolia; Blackpoll warbler—© Stubblefield Photography/Shutterstock.com; Male common nightjar—Frank V. Blackburn; Wandering albatross—Mark Jobling; Golden plover—Kenneth W. Fink/Root Resources; Bird migration at Eddystone Lighthouse, illustration by Charles Samuel Keene for “Punch”—Photos.com/Jupiterimages.
SavePart 2 has been released, go read it now! (http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=36021532#post36021532)
629046 “Wow, this is great! I got buffed and now practically everyone buys me! I feel so popular!”
629070 “Yeah, enjoy it kid. You’ve got one patch until they nerf you, maybe two if you’re lucky.”
629046 “Aw man, really?”
629070 “Yeah, it was two patches until they nerfed me. Warmog’s as well. Seems to be a lot of people complaining about you though, you may not be so lucky”.
629046 “Jeez, that kinda sucks. Maybe it won’t be so bad, I mean the only reason everyone’s using me is cos health is so popular, maybe after a week or so people will learn to buy Randuin’s 629064 more and then I’ll--“
629076 “LOL they just hotfixed you”
629046 “What?!”
629070 “LOL omg that was fast, you didn’t even last a week!”
629081
629076 “Talk about your fifteen minutes of fame huh? It’s alright kid, I didn’t last that long either. People complained about me for so long, they nerfed me even further even while all the pros were spamming Locket of the Iron Solari 629055 and Runic Bulwark 629068 in tournaments.”
629046 *sniff* “It’s okay, I trust Xypherous, he works hard. I’m sure if we get overnerfed he’ll re-tune us so that we can still be viable.”
---Meanwhile at Riot HQ---
629078 “F*** IT THIS IS TOO HARD, FIRST BC THEN WARMOGS NOW BOTRK, I’LL JUST RE-BUFF AND RE-RELEASE EVERY SINGLE ITEM TO WHEN THEY WERE STUPIDLY OP”
---Next Patch---
629046 “Hey guys look, they reverted my nerf! I guess they changed their minds, huh?”
629070 “Never mind you, look at me! They reverted my nerfs too, my flat armor penetration isn’t even unique anymore!”
629076 “Omg jealouuuuuuus, they reverted my nerfs too, and since everyone’s gonna be stacking you again I guess I’ll be more popular than ever! But seriously, what is Riot thinking? I mean, your passive is non-unique now? What gives?”
629046 “Lord almighty, what happened here?! There’s burnt pieces of flesh and blood everywhere, what a massacre! What unholy force could have done this?”
629070 “Oh dear god in heaven. Guys, look over there.”
629069 629069 629069 629048 629069 629069 629069 “DEMACIAAAAAAAAAAA‼‼!”
629046 “Good grief! Why is Garen stacking all those Sunfire Capes? How terribly inefficient!”
629070 “Oh, right. You weren’t here to see this before, kid. Sunfire Cape used to have a non-unique passive, so champions like Garen could stack it to become unkillable while doing tons of damage. And you thought Warmog’s was bad.”
629046 “Whoa, that’s pretty crazy. But that’s fine cos I was designed to counter high health! You and I just have to work together with Last Whisper 629085, we’ll take these guys down in no time--“
629061 629061 629061 629054 629058 *dodge* *dodge**dodge**dodge**dodge**dodge* *dodge*
629046 “WHAT IN THE NAME OF HELL IS THIS BLACK MAGIC”
629076 “Oh yeah, there used to be this thing called ‘Dodge’ in the game. Phantom Dancer was pretty insane back then. Don’t even get me started on pre-nerf Jax stacking Phantom Dancers, that crazy mother could dodge the fountain laser.”
629047 “Step aside honey buns, let the REAL health counter do its work.”
629046 “Deathfire Grasp? What do you mean the REAL health counter? Your active deals the same amount of damage as mine!”
629047 “That’s the nerfed me. The old me dealt 25% of your current health + 4% per 100 AP. Evelynn 629086 could build AP and two-shot squishies LOL.
629065 “Pfft, amateur.”
629047 “Who the hell are you?”
629065 “Don’t you recognize me? I’m you, pre-pre-nerf DFG. When a champion deals spell damage I immediately deal 10% of your current health in damage, and that’s not even reduced for DoTs. You think Teemo’s 629087 OP with Liandry’s Torment 629088? Think again.”
629082 “Come here for a second”
629083 “You have slain an enemy”
629076 “WHAT IS HAPPENIIIIIIIIIINGGGGGGGG”
629070 “Oh my god! They killed Warmog’s!”
629046 “You bastards!”
629070 “Something is seriously wrong with League of Legends. It’s like they’ve reverted every single nerf for every god forsaken OP item ever released in this game!”
629046 “Good heavens, that Vlad 629090 stacking Hextech Revolvers 629051 just healed back to full from one minion wave!”
629070 “Hey, is that…? No way…”
629052
629075 *gasp* "COULD IT BE?”
629052 “Hey there sexy, looking for a good time?”
629075 “COME HERE MY PRECIOUS”
629057 “LOL JOKES" *removes Innervating Locket*
629074 629071 629073 629045 629062 “Fak u Moarjello”
629046 “****, that Jax 629054 from before is stacking Hextech Gunblades 629050 now. The horror.”
629070 “Good grief, Heart of Gold 629049 is back! With armor and non-unique Gp10 and everything!”
629079 “Whatup dawg”
629046 “What the hell are you?”
629079 “I’m Rabadon’s mother-lovin’ Deathcap 629091 and Zhonya’s sexy-as Hourglass figure 629092 in one magnificent package, fool.”
629093 “<3”
629046 “Who ever thought this was a good idea?”
629070 “Oh hey look, those items got their nerfs reverted too…”
---Meanwhile at Riot HQ---
629057 “Xypherous you fool! You reverted the nerfs on Trinity Force 629072 and Wit’s End 629077?! Do you realize what you’ve done? YOU’VE BUFFED IRELIA! 629053 HOLD STILL WHILE I SMITE 629094 THEE!”
629063 “DON’T TOUCH XYPH MORELLO HE BUFFED MY TRINITY FORCE, TONS OF DAMAGE‼!”
629078 “ARGHHH RIVEN ORIANNA RENEKTON LULU 629067 629060 629066 629056
BY YOUR OP POWERS COMBINED I AM CAPTAIN PLANET” 629059
629057 629063 629078 “YARGHHHHHHHHHHHH”
---
629080 “Hai guise great to be back - wow what the hell happened here?”
>>>Mini Update: Xin & Teemo (http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=35347483&posted=1#post35347483)<<<
629059 Yaaaay 2000 upvotes, I love you guise.
Keep this bumped and upvote!The Supreme Court decision effectively boosts efforts by Republican-controlled legislatures to put new ID requirements into effect before November
Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
A divided Supreme Court handed a big defeat to the Obama administration and numerous civil rights groups early Saturday morning when it ruled that Texas can enforce its 2011 voter ID law in November that some have called the strictest in the country. Three justices dissented from the ruling that rejected an emergency request that had been filed by the Justice Department and civil rights groups.
The decision appears to mark “the first time since 1982 that the Court has allowed a law restricting voters’ rights to be enforced after a federal court had ruled it to be unconstitutional,” notes Scotus Blog’s Lyle Denniston. A federal judge had struck down the law last week, saying that some 600,000 voters—mostly black or Latino—would face difficulties at the polls due to a lack of proper identification. The law, which was approved in 2011 but only came in effect in 2013 lays out seven approved forms of identification—a list many have questioned for including concealed handgun licenses but not college IDs, notes the Associated Press.
This marked the fourth time over the last few weeks that the Supreme Court has been forced to decide whether voter ID laws passed by Republican state legislatures can be used in November. The justices voted to allow changes in Ohio and North Carolina and stopped a new law in Wisconsin. “The common denominator in each seemed to be that it was too late in the election year to require the states to change the way they had planned to handle the elections,” notes the Washington Post. That was precisely the reasoning why a U.S. Court of appeals said the law could be used even though a district judge said it seemed to target minority voters.
The fact that the Texas ID law had been subject to a full trial on the ID requirements and a judge developed “an extensive record” on how the measure would block access to the polling stations made this case different from the others, according to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented along with Justices Sonia Sotmayor and Elena Kagan. “The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters,” Ginsburg wrote.
The president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund called the ruling “an affront to our democracy” as it “means hundreds of thousands of eligible voters in Texas will be unable to participate in November’s election because Texas has erected an obstacle course designed to discourage voting.”Join the California Center for Natural History and Save the Redwoods League for a snowshoeing adventure in Calaveras Big Trees State Park.
This is a unique opportunity to learn the natural history of giant sequoias, the biggest trees on the planet, and hear the latest research on how these trees are responding to climate change.
Come prepared for several hours of snowshoeing on moderate trails through giant sequoia groves. Bring snacks and lunch, and dress to be out in the snow. Unless there is severe weather, we will trek—rain, snow, or shine!
The morning of the hike, we will meet at the Calaveras Big Trees Visitors Center; more information will be sent to you upon ticket purchase.
You will be responsible for bringing your own snowshoes and poles (recommendations for rentals below). Be sure to reserve your equipment as soon as you purchase your tickets, since stores tend to be booked fairly far in advance. We will not have any to lend you on-site.
Cost of Event = $35.00, and does not include the park entrance fee of $10 per vehicle or the rental of snowshoes and poles.
*This event is sold out.*I met pod2g for the first time a few months ago at JailbreakCon. Before meeting him, I was a bit nervous because the man was already a legend in the jailbreak community. Besides his accomplishments, all I knew about Cyril (his real name) was that, like me, he was French.
Over the course of 4 days, Cyril and I became friends and learned about each other. We didn’t talk much about jailbreaking. Instead, we were just having casual talks about everything and just about anything. During that time, I was able to see Cyril interact with other people. Despite the fact that he is as close as it gets to gaining the rock star status, Cyril was incredibly humble, friendly, and accessible to everyone who would walk by to talk to him.
Cyril and I have stayed in touch ever since, exchanging a few messages here and there, checking out each other’s projects. Today, he agrees to answer a few questions for iDownloadBlog readers in this rare interview…
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who are you? What do you do for a living? Are you married, kids, etc?
My name is Cyril, I’m 32, I have two kids, not married. I am a Project Manager for a software company, but I’m taking a sabbatical leave for a few months. I’m currently in the process of creating my software and security research company. By the way, I’m looking for projects and clients to offer either my research, consulting, or training skills.
What kind of music do you listen to these days?
I’m a fan of Muse, Linkin Park, and more recently C2C.
What do you do when you’re not behind your computer? Do you have hobbies or passions?
I go out and have beers with friends. I like going to the movie. I’m there at least every other week. Besides that, I watch quite a few TV series. I love House MD and the Mentalist.
Can you walk us through a typical day in pod2g’s life?
These last few months, a typical day is: wake up, development research, lunch, software development, dinner, communication, software development until 3am. In short, 99% of work.
How did you start coding and hacking?
I started programming very early. At 5, I would copy BASIC programs from one of my father’s books on my ZX 81. Then I started writing my own programs, small games, applications, etc.
My best work was done on Atari ST where I wrote GF BASIC technical demos, and 68k assembler (for the purists out there: overscans, rasters, roto-zoom, etc…).
Why do you now work on iOS rather than another platform?
I’m an Apple fan, whether it is about iOS devices or desktop machines. I own a MacBook Pro and an iMac.
iOS is a watered down version of OS X, but everything is in there. It’s the same pleasure to have a UNIX kernel. When jailbroken, it gives you access to all the GNU and open source classics. Also, the source code of the XNU kernel is available online, and everyone can read the code and look for potential exploits. It gives a very high level of safety and reliability. Finding breaches and exploiting them becomes an important challenge, highly recognized in the industry.
iOS also has the largest and highest quality catalogue of mobile applications, with the app review process only increasing the quality level. The fact that Apple controls both the hardware and software limits market fragmentation. Most users have the latest version of iOS installed, and many of them usually get the latest hardware at some point.
We’re very far from the economic model of Android where prices rule the market instead of quality. Fragmentation is at every level of Android: OS version, hardware, manufacturers. This is a real nightmare for developers and security researchers.
The benefit of working on iOS is the guarantee that your work will reach a larger population and will be sustained for a few years.
What I can say regarding the Cydia ecosystem is that there are many talented developers (because it’s a real challenge to modify a system without having access to its source code), some tweaks are very clever, and there are countless themes and graphic mods.
This is not an accident if many tweak ideas are picked up and used in iOS and Android.
If I wanted to be the next pod2g, what advice would you give me?
First, this is not given to anyone. You must have some solid skills in development, but also in the understanding of how modern operating systems work. To start, you must read numerous books and white papers about the topic. The most interesting ones about hacking iOS are:
Only once you have assimilated the notions explained in these books will you be able to start working on jailbreaking.
The goal isn’t success. The goal is to help the community develop tools.
The secret is passion.
How many iOS devices do you own?
iPod touch 3rd Gen, iPod touch 4th Gen, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and iPad 3.
Are they all jailbroken?
All my devices are jailbroken except for the ones I use daily (iPhone 4S, and iPad 3). These two aren’t jailbroken for two reasons:
to force me to work on the iOS 6 jailbreak and because I am currently developing an official application, I want to be able to test it in a stock configuration
Do you use many jailbreak apps? What are your favorites?
I use few of them but here is my list of must-haves:
OpenSSH: to easily access the iPhone file system and for security research
SBSettings: for quick access to the iPhone settings
Barrel: I love the geekiness of it. Everyone knows your iPhone is jailbroken when you use it.
IntelliScreenX: so I can have access to my social network at the slide of a finger. It’s a beautiful app!
5 icons dock: to add Twitter without moving stock icons in the dock
Where do you see the jailbreak community in 12 months? Are we on the right track or have we hit a wall?
I’m very confident about the next 6 months. I honestly believe that iOS 6 will be jailbroken and that developers will keep coming up with more quality apps. Discussions about future tweaks during JailbreakCon have opened new doors. Creativity won’t stop.
Regarding future iOS versions, I don’t really know what to think. I believe Apple will make it harder and harder to find and develop jailbreaks in a timely manner.
My message to Apple is the following: why not stop the fight and let users install unsigned applications, just like it is possible on OS X? It could be done the right way to let people install tweaks while making sure piracy is limited.
I am convinced that it would allow iOS to gain market shares over Android.
What’s the question you’re asked the most? How do you usually answer it?
Besides questions about the release of the next jailbreak, I’m often asked about how to help or how to start jailbreaking. My answer is always the same: read the iOS Hacker’s Handbook. The problem is that people don’t really realize how hard it is. They think it’s as easy as installing something on the device and done.
Some hackers sell their exploits. Have you ever thought about working for profits? Why or why not?
My answer is linked to the next question. My goal is to reach as many people as possible with my work. That’s what drives me! Releasing a paid jailbreak would make it implode on its own, making it much less interesting to everyone.
If money is not you source of motivation, what drives you?
What drives me is mass market. Reaching the largest amount of people with a software. What can be more motivating than a jailbreak downloaded millions of times?
It seems you are the one person mainly responsible for the latest jailbreak although this jailbreak has been labeled as a release from the Chronic Dev Team. Do you sometimes feel like someone is stealing your show?
The Chronic Dev Team hasn’t much to do with the last two jailbreaks. The people who helped the most are, by alphabetical order: @MuscleNerd, @pimskeks, @planetbeing, and @saurik.
However, the Chronic Dev Team has a good infrastructure to offer (ie. web servers, IRC, etc). This allowed for a good team work and a release of the jailbreak under ideal conditions.
The members of this team are my friends, and it is thanks to our past collaboration that I was able to get the necessary knowledge. We are all in good terms and this is the reason why I wanted to share the stage with them.
I’ll admit that when I hear that the jailbreak was released by the Chronic Dev Team, it makes me jump off my seat, and it is the reason why I kinda stepped away from it these last few months.
What do you think about i0nic always teasing us with a new jailbreak that he won’t release to the public?
It’s quite depressing. He’s having fun creating trolls. On the other end, I believe it helps him strengthen his business. I can understand both sides.
You recently said you were not working on the iOS 6 jailbreak. What would make you change your mind?
There is a big chance I change my mind. I actually spent a few hours on it since WWJC, but I still don’t have enough time to work on it.
Working with @planetbeing motivates me a lot. He’s always very resourceful and he raises the bar.
It seems that the entire community is relying on you and a handful of other hackers. Can you feel a pressure from jailbreak users?
Yes I can feel a strong pressure, but I believe most of my followers understand that working on a jailbreak isn’t our full-time job and that we do our best to conciliate work life, personal life, and work on a jailbreak.
I often receive messages on Twitter telling me to slow down, to take our time, and maybe wait for iOS 6.1, etc…
During JailbreakCon, you mentioned that there aren’t enough hackers working on finding exploits. How do you think the community could “recruit” hackers? How to focus efforts and be sure that everybody is working together?
I thought about it a lot during JailbreakCon. Recruiting people to help is easier said than done, because these people must:
be crazy about iOS and OS X
be talented hackers
have time to dedicate to the task
not be part of a security firm, or else the work could be used for other ends
be loyal and not be looking for fame, because there is a risk to leak information that Apple could use to fix holes before the release of the jailbreak
I think the best spot to find these people is at HITB for example, because the people attending this kind of conference are definitely talented.
I have already created an IRC channel where I will invite people I’ll find interesting.
All eyes are currently on you. You have a profile that must be of interest to many companies, including Apple. Has Apple ever offered you a job? Would you be interested in working for Apple (or any other large company), or would you rather be independent?
I have been in discussions with Apple several times over a potential job there, but in reality, it won’t be possible. I want to stay in France so I can be close to my family and friends, and as a business owner, working for Apple would be against my best interests. We’ll see. 2013 will be a very important year for me professionally speaking.
Chpwn recently showed off a jailbroken iPhone 5 running iOS 6. Can you tell us what he did? Is it a good starting point for an iOS 6 jailbreak?
In short, this “jailbreak” is based on a developer certificate. It doesn’t alter the kernel allowing for a real, full jailbreak, which is why we call it a “failbreak”. It’s a very good start because it allows security researchers to have access to the file system, to modify any iOS file, and execute unsigned code at the root level. On the other end, this failbreak can’t be used as a public jailbreak.
If you’re not working on a jailbreak, can you tell us more about what you’re doing these days?
As I mentioned above, I don’t have much time because I am in the process of creating a company, and I’m actively working on a software. Since I have taken a sabbatical, my future revenues depend on this work, which is why I’m dedicating 100% of my time to it.
Is there anything you’d like to add? Maybe you have a message for someone?
I have two messages.
The first one is to my followers, whom I want to thank for their patience and their support. I can’t guarantee that I will work on a jailbreak in the next few days, but as soon as I have time on my hands, I’ll be back.
The second message is to Apple, because I was disappointed about the iPhone, which has no significant added value compared to the iPhone 4S, especially in France where there is no 4G LTE support. I can’t find the innovation in this product that I was able to find in previous models. You have to take risks, add new features while improving interactivity. I’m worried about the future, especially with this closed OS and pressure coming from Android.
Note: this interview was conducted in French and translated by myself (download French version). I tried to keep the spirit of the original version as much as I could. Cyril got to look at the translation and approved it.5 May 2015
Ms. Marge Dwyer, Harvard T.P. Chan School of Public Health
mhdwyer “at” hsph.harvard.edu
Dear Ms Dwyer:
Research-related fraud at Harvard institutions
A series of connected frauds surrounding research into climate change and related questions at Harvard has come to light because an environmental advocacy group had falsely accused Lord Monckton’s distinguished research colleague Dr Willie Wei-Hock Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics of having failed to disclose a funding conflict in a paper in the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr Soon, like all his co-authors, had received no funding for his research into climate sensitivity modeling. That did not stop Dr Charles Alcock, the Center’s director, from allowing it to issue a statement alleging Dr Soon had failed to disclose a conflict of interest and claiming that it proposed to “investigate” him, when in fact it had itself negotiated a contract with Dr Soon’s funder for solar research that forbade it or Dr Soon to disclose the funder’s identity. Dr Soon had played no part in those negotiations. The Center alone was responsible. Dr Alcock also falsely told a journalist that the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had no legal existence and alleged that, therefore, Dr Soon ought not to have described his affiliation as “Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics”, falsely implying that Dr Soon had improperly inflated his credentials.
Your name appears as the contact for a press release at http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/clean-power-plan-health-benefits-hinge-on-policy-decisions/, entitled Clean air and health benefits of clean power plan hinge on key policy decisions. The press release constitutes a gushing encomium of a commentary entitled US power plant carbon standards and clean air and health co-benefits by Charles T. Driscoll, Jonathan J. Buonocore, Jonathan I. Levy, Kathleen F. Lambert, Dallas Burtraw, Stephen B. Reid, Habibollah Fakhraei & Joel Schwartz, published on May 4, 2015, in Nature Climate Change: doi:10.1038/nclimate2598.
Two of the co-authors of the commentary, Buonocore and Schwartz, are researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Your press release quotes Buonocore thus: “If EPA sets strong carbon standards, we can expect large public health benefits from cleaner air almost immediately after the standards are implemented.” Indeed, the commentary and the press release constitute little more than thinly-disguised partisan political advocacy for costly proposed EPA regulations supported by the “Democrat” administration but opposed by the Republicans. Harvard has apparently elected to adopt a narrowly partisan, anti-scientific stance.
The commentary concludes with the words “Competing financial interests: The authors declare no competing financial interests”. Yet its co-authors have received these grants from the EPA: Driscoll $3,654,609; Levy $9,514,391; Burtraw $1,991,346; and Schwartz (Harvard) $31,176,575. The total is not far shy of $50 million.
Would the School please explain why its press release described the commentary in Nature Climate Change by co-authors including these lavishly-funded four as “the first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind”?
Would the School please explain why Mr Schwartz, a participant in projects grant-funded by the EPA in excess of $31 million, failed to disclose this material financial conflict of interest in the commentary?
Would the School please explain the double standard by which Harvard institutions have joined a chorus of public condemnation of Dr Soon, a climate skeptic, for having failed to disclose a conflict of interest that he did not in fact possess, while not only indulging Mr Schwartz, a climate-extremist, when he fails to declare a direct and substantial conflict of interest but also stating that the commentary he co-authored was “independent”?
Would the School please tell His Lordship, who has standing as Dr Soon’s lead author, how to lodge a complaint of research misconduct in respect of the massive, direct and undisclosed conflict of interest on the part of its researcher Mr Schwartz, and of the School’s misrepresentation of the commentary as “independent”?
Yours truly,
James Rowlatt
Clerk to Lord Monckton
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RedditClick through to see an incredible graphic chart of the Blazers season of injuries created by Dan Sweet.
-- Ben Golliver | benjamin.golliver@gmail.com | Twitter
Original Post by Dan Sweet...
Blazer fans have to be extremely impressed with the Blazers' performance this season despite the rash of injuries they suffered. I've been asking around everywhere for a complete breakdown of the team's injuries over 2009-10, but got nowhere, so I made one myself. The file is a resolution that is perfect for widescreen monitor wallpapers (if you can't find the size here, get it here), in case you need encouragement for any adversity you face in the near future.
via www.dan-sweet.com
Fellow Blazer superfan Brandon Goldner had the idea to show this information graphically, and he and Jens Odegaard helped with the research. Enjoy!Hello everyone!
We are back after two months of radio silence. A lot has happened and a lot is going to happen, so let’s get to it right away.
We had actually planned to write two Kickstarter updates on earlier dates, but each time we did, something unexpected came crashing into our faces, so we had to change our plans (and discard what we’d prepared to write because it wasn’t up to date anymore).
First of all, we encountered major development difficulties with a technical aspect of the project, mainly related to gamepad support. We discovered we had to overwrite almost our whole user interface solution (on the technical/core level only; aesthetically and from a gameplay perspective, it is almost the same). Our time estimates to do this were more than tripled, so that has kept our programmers busy for the past two months. (The rest of the team continued moving forward, but still, we were kind of blocked as to possible releases with the programmers being paralyzed with |
find their way in the city of Hartford circa 2325 ce, now ruled by the sinister and virtually omnipotent HartLife corporation. Our Fair City is a darkly funny, highly whimsical look at corporate consumerism all grown up. The skies are stormy, and the landscape is a vast frozen tundra. Lightning rigs high above the city gather energy from thunderstorms, mad scientists walk the earth, and adorably monstrous Molepeople dig tunnels deep underground to expand the city's habitable space. It's as fun as can be, and explores a unique and fascinating medium of storytelling.
We've made our initial $2,000 goal---but if you're interested, PLEASE feel free to pledge to Our Fair City. Money pledged above $2,000 can be incredibly useful to the quality and rapidity with which we release Season One, and to the possibility of Our Fair City going into Season Two and beyond!
Here are three big reasons we think you should consider donating now:
-The momentum behind this project is incredible. People are excited, the word is going out, the creators have even been recognized on the Chicago city buses (seriously, it was amazing). This is going to be the only kickstarter we run for this project, so if you want to be one of the Founding Donors on our website, one of the early-adopters who can say "I was there when....", this is your only chance!
-We'll be able to create our Season One t-shirts (pictures of those coming soon!), which not only hugely help our long-term survivability, but help us bring them to you as a donor reward!
-Any extra money at this early stage will allow us to bring you Our Fair City faster, better, funnier, and with 200% more lightning-rigs in the sky. Our early donors so far have already allowed us to vastly accelerate our release schedule--money pledged above the $2,000 level can vastly improve the quality and depth of our project!The UPSC issue disrupted proceedings of Rajya Sabha again on Wednesday after several members walked out expressing dissatisfaction at MoS (Parliamentary Affairs) Prakash Javadekar’s reply on the issue, who called an all-party meeting to find a solution. Source: Express Photo
As the controversy over the UPSC’s Civil Services Aptitude Test (CSAT) rages despite the Centre announcing some “respite” to the protesting aspirants, a member of the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday pointed out that the government’s stand on the issue was identical to a Delhi High Court petition filed in 2012 by Dinanath Batra.
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Speaking to The Indian Express, J D Seelam, Congress MP from Andhra Pradesh, said, “All that the government has done on the UPSC issue is to implement the measures suggested by Dinanath Batra in his petition to the Delhi High Court.”
Seelam alleged that the government has not addressed the two major concerns regarding the examination format – the issue of the CSAT paper being in favour of science and management students, and the demand of equal weightage being given to all prominent Indian languages and not just Hindi. In the Upper House, Seelam said, “What has the government done? They have not addressed these two legitimate and genuine requests.”
“There is a PIL in the High Court by Mr. Dinanath Batra, whom this government made the chairman of a committee on HRD. He wanted that English language comprehension skills of Class X-level of 22.5 marks be removed. The High Court went into this and said that it could not do that, and a committee could examine this issue. Without doing that, without answering the mathematical and technical part and solving the problem of everybody, they only addressed what Mr Dinanath Batra wanted to do, that is, remove English and make it Hindi vs English. This is the hidden agenda. That should not be allowed.”
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Incidentally, Batra, while taking to The Indian Express, said that he had met MoS in PMO Jitendra Singh over the issue. “Since the UPSC examination issue had come up, we had sought an appointment with the Minister. I, along with lawyer Monika Arora who was looking after the Delhi HC case, met him 15 days ago. The issues which were referred to in the HC petition were raised by us in that meeting. We were assured that the government will look into it.”
Admitting that the government’s announcement follows the suggestions listed in the petition filed by him in the HC, Batra said, “We think that we have been behind the motivation of this struggle. We had filed a petition in the High Court where we had taken excerpts from various government policies and decisions pertaining to languages. English had become the queen, while Hindi had been made a slave. Only 2.3 per cent students from Hindi medium qualified in the civil services recently against 45 per cent in 2011.”
In an order dated May 31, the Delhi HC had directed the government to constitute a committee within three months to look into the concerns raised by the petitioners. It also called for a decision “on the nature of the test of knowledge of English language in the Civil Services Examination i.e. whether it is to be only qualifying or competitive or mixture of both”. A three-member committee under Arvind Verma was constituted following this Delhi HC order.
“It is the contention of the petitioners that the said test of English Language Comprehension Skills affects the Hindi and other regional language speaking candidates taking the said exam,” the petition said.
It further adds, “That English test has to be removed to provide a level playing field to all aspiring candidates.”
The government had announced that English marks in CSAT-II will not be included for gradation or merit in the civil services preliminary examination. It had also said that students who took the civil services examination in 2011 will be given an extra attempt in the UPSC examination.
The UPSC issue disrupted proceedings of Rajya Sabha again on Wednesday after several members walked out expressing dissatisfaction at MoS (Parliamentary Affairs) Prakash Javadekar’s reply on the issue, who called an all-party meeting to find a solution. Not satisfied with the reply, CPM leader Sitaram Yechury said, “Do not apply delayings tactics. The government should say what is the status quo… this is not satisfactory. That is why we are staging a walkout.”
Dinanath Batra’s previous petitions that have made headlines
Earlier this year, a civil suit filed by Batra, who is the convener of Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, had resulted in the pulping of American scholar Wendy Doniger’s book on Hinduism.
In 2006, Batra had also filed a PIL against the National Council of Educational Research and Training where he raised objections to the use of militants for Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai among others.
In 2007, on Batra’s insistence, the state school curriculum of Madhya Pradesh had removed sections on sex education. Moreover, in 2008, he had filed another petition in the Delhi High Court demanding the removal of A K Ramanujan’s essay
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Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations from the Delhi University curriculum.Part One
Introduction
The always contentious, sometimes highly emotional, debate over D.T. Suzuki’s relationship to Japanese fascism continues unabated. Among other things this is shown by reader reactions to a recent article in Japan Focus entitled “Zen as a Cult of Death in the Wartime Writings of D.T. Suzuki". This debate can only intensify by the further assertion of a wartime relationship between D.T. Suzuki and the Nazis or, more precisely, a positive or sympathetic relationship between Suzuki and the Nazis. This article, in two parts, will explore that possibility though conclusive proof of such a relationship will not be included until the second part.
Fig. 1 - D.T. Suzuki
Satō Gemmyō Taira, a Buddhist priest in the Shin (True Pure Land) sect, who identifies himself as a disciple of Suzuki in the postwar years, adamantly rejects the possibility of a positive relationship between Suzuki and the Nazis. On the contrary, he insists that at least as far back as the fall of 1936 Suzuki clearly and publicly expressed his opposition to both Hitler and Nazi policies. Satō writes:
Although Suzuki recognized that the Nazis had, in 1936, brought stability to Germany and although he was impressed by their youth activities (though not by the militaristic tone of these activities), he clearly had little regard for the Nazi leader, disapproved of their violent attitudes, and opposed the policies espoused by the party. His distaste for totalitarianism of any kind is unmistakable1
In truth, I myself had long wondered about the possibility of some kind of relationship between Suzuki and the Nazis. After all, for much of the Asia-Pacific War the two countries were allied militarily. At the time I published the first edition of Zen at War in 1997, I was puzzled and intrigued by the following cryptic comment in The Essence of Bushidō (Bushidō no Shinzui), a book strongly backed by the Japanese military and published in November 1941, i.e., only one month before Pearl Harbor. Suzuki’s contribution consisted of a chapter entitled “Zen and Bushidō” (Zen to Bushidō). In his introduction, Suzuki’s editor, Handa Shin, wrote: “Dr. Suzuki’s writings are said to have strongly influenced the military spirit of Nazi Germany.”2
On the one hand it can be said that any Nazi use of Suzuki’s writings, if such existed, would be a separate issue from Suzuki’s personal attitude toward the Nazis. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but wonder if Handa’s assertion were true, especially as he offered no proof for his claim. Yet, where could one turn to prove or disprove Handa’s claim? Were the Nazi’s even aware of Suzuki’s writings, let alone influenced by them?
As I pondered these questions, I recalled a relevant passage in Kenneth Kraft’s book, Zen Teaching, Zen Practice. Kraft points out that the first American to make direct contact with D.T. Suzuki in postwar, occupied Japan was Albert Stunkard. Stunkard described his encounter as follows:
I was working in Tokyo as an army medical officer at Sugamo Prison, providing medical care for the men who were being tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.... One of the prisoners, later to become recognized as a religious thinker, was [Karlfried] Graf Dürckheim, a German. He used to talk to me about Zen. One day he mentioned Dr. Suzuki, with whom he had studied, suggesting that I visit Dr. Suzuki at his home in a small town not far from Tokyo.
I took up the suggestion and not long afterwards met Dr. Suzuki in his house on the grounds of Engakuji monastery in Kita Kamakura.... Dr. Suzuki welcomed me, took the letter of introduction from Graf Dürckheim, and led me inside his house, where he adjusted his spectacles and read the letter. He was slender and a bit frail, with a face dominated by huge eyebrows that curved upwards and outwards. When he had finished the letter, Dr. Suzuki asked me about Dürckheim and the other prisoners at Sugamo.”3 (Italics mine)
While I hadn’t paid much attention to this passage when I first read it, now it brought a flood of questions to mind, first and foremost who was Graf [Count] Dürckheim (1896-1988)? And why was Dürckheim imprisoned as a suspected war criminal? Further, why had a suspected German war criminal been studying with D.T. Suzuki during the war years?
Fig. 2 - Graf Dürckheim
More important, why had Suzuki accepted a suspected German war criminal, almost certainly a Nazi, as his student if, as Satō claims, Suzuki “clearly had little regard for the Nazi leader, disapproved of their violent attitudes, and opposed the policies espoused by the party.” Something didn’t add up. And as if all of these questions were not enough, I was particularly struck by the following comments posted on Wikipedia’s entry for Dürckheim:
Stunkard later became Suzuki's physician. That visit started a chain reaction of visitors to the Suzuki residence, one of whom was Philip Kapleau, author of The Three Pillars of Zen and founder of the Rochester Zen Center. Dürckheim thus was directly responsible for launching Zen into the American mainstream.4 (Italics mine)
Is it possible, I remember thinking, that a Nazi, imprisoned as a suspected war criminal, was “directly responsible for launching Zen into the American mainstream”? Perhaps this was just another of Wikipedia’s many inaccuracies or at least a rhetorical overstatement. Or was it? These were just a few of the questions that drove me to examine the record more carefully.
Suzuki’s Newspaper Articles in October 1936
In pondering where to begin my quest for more detailed information, it appeared that a chronological approach made the most sense, especially as it might reveal any changes in Suzuki’s thinking that occurred along the way. Thus, a close examination of his fall 1936 series of newspaper articles, describing a visit to Germany, seemed a good place to begin inasmuch as this series contained what appear to be Suzuki’s first public comments on the Nazis. Suzuki’s views of the Nazis appeared in the Japanese Buddhist newspaper, Chūgai Nippō, on 10, 11, 13 October 1936.
Although the Nazis had set up large and brutal concentration camps like Dachau for political prisoners as early as 1933, the policy aimed specifically at Jews, known as the “final solution” i.e., their extermination, had yet to be implemented. Nevertheless, various forms of Jewish persecution, as Suzuki himself notes, were already underway, most especially with the passing of the so-called Nuremberg Laws in September 1935. These laws included a ban on sexual intercourse between people defined as Jews and non-Jewish Germans and had the overall effect of preventing Jews from participating in German civic life, even visiting public parks or beaches.
While Suzuki defenders claim Suzuki could not have known in 1936 of the subsequent horrors of Hitler and the Nazis, it is noteworthy that there was at least one Buddhist organization in Japan that understood as early as 1933 just how dangerous and anti-Buddhist the Nazi movement was and strongly condemned it. This group was the "Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism" (Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei).
In May 1933 the All Japan Federation of Buddhist Youth Organizations (Zen Nippon Bukkyō Seinen-kai Renmei) held its third national conference. The federation was composed of more than four hundred and fifty separate Buddhist groups, one of which was the Youth League. League representatives proposed, among other things, that the Federation go on record opposing "anti-foreign, militarist and nationalist ideologies," including movements that promoted the same.
As one expression of such an ideology, Youth League representatives put forward a motion condemning the Nazi Party and its leader Adolph Hitler:
Hitler is a person who is thoroughly suppressing the Jewish people by force and casually burning cultural treasures without a second thought. Furthermore, Hitler crushes without exception all liberals and advocates of peace who are incompatible with the Nazi spirit. Outrages of these kinds are both inhumane and anti-Buddhist, and we must resolutely protest them.5
The response of the conference host, Ōtani University, to this and similar League proposals was, in an unprecedented move, to force the entire conference off-campus to find a new meeting site. Not only that, the All Japan Federation expelled the Youth League from its midst. Given that Hitler had only been appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 it can be said that the League’s representatives were very insightful in their understanding of the Nazis and what their existence portended for Europe, let alone Japan. While there is no proof that Suzuki knew of the events surrounding the Youth League, he was a professor of Buddhism at Ōtani University, and it is difficult to believe that he was unaware of the Youth League’s opposition to the Nazis or the price they paid for it.
Be that as it may, Suzuki went to England in 1936 where he delivered a set of lectures that he would publish as his famous Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture in 1938 (republished in the postwar era as Zen and Japanese Culture). Following the conclusion of his lecture tour in England, he went to Paris to conduct bibliographical research, and then on to visit some distant relatives living at the time in Rüdesheim am Rhein, a small village on the Rhine River west of Wiesbaden.
Fig. 3 - Rüdesheim am Rhein
In connection with his visit to Rüdesheim, Suzuki published a series of articles in the Buddhist newspaper Chūgai Nippō under the title “From a Spot on the Banks of the Rhine” (Rain kahan no ichigū kara). The initial sections of his article consisted of a fairly ordinary travelogue in which Suzuki described such things as visits to local churches and reflections on the cultural implications of the stone-based architecture of Germany versus the wood-based architecture of Japan. He then went on to describe the political events he observed while in Germany, including the following description of the Nazis and his thoughts about them.
I would like to express my appreciation to the late Kyoko Selden, Senior Lecturer in Japanese at Cornell University, and James Mark Shields, Associate Professor at Bucknell University, for their helpful suggestions and advice throughout the translation process. That said, the final responsibility for the accuracy of the translation, not to mention the accompanying commentary, is mine alone.
Translation
My relative has been living in this city [i.e., Rüdesheim am Rhein] for a long time and has many acquaintances. When he meets his acquaintances they exchange greetings by giving the Nazi salute and saying, “Heil Hitler!” When I asked my relative the reason for his celebration of Hitler, what he told me is briefly as follows:
Before Hitler arrived on the scene there were many political parties in Germany. As a consequence, political affairs were unable to find a direction and citizens became more and more depressed as time went on. They were at their wit’s end, wondering what was to become of them. Hitler, however, was able to unite the people and lead us with a definite goal in mind. Thus we have never experienced a greater sense of relief than we have today. While we don’t know much about politics, we have never enjoyed greater peace of mind than we have now. Isn’t that reason enough to praise Hitler?
This is what my relative told me, and I agree this is quite reasonable.
Changing the topic to Hitler’s expulsion of the Jews, it appears there are considerable grounds for this, too. While it is a very cruel policy, when looked at from the point of view of the current and future happiness of the entire German people, it may be that, for a time, some sort of extreme action is necessary in order to preserve the nation. From the point of view of the German people, the situation facing their country is that critical.
On occasion, in England, too, I have encountered Jews. I recently met a young self-professed wealthy poet who had been persecuted and expelled from Germany. After listening to his story, I felt sorry for him because he suddenly found himself living in poverty in a foreign land. As regards individuals, this is truly a regrettable situation.
Fig. 4 - 1936 Nazi Rally in Nuremburg
Recently the Nazis held a major rally in Nuremburg. At that time Hitler announced what may be considered to be the principles underlying the expulsion of the Jews. These principles are as follows:
The Jews are a parasitic people who are not indigenous, i.e., who develop no connection to the land. They are neither farmers nor industrial workers. Instead, they are merchants situated between producers and consumers. As such they are the class that extracts profits from both groups. In this respect, i.e., in intellectual terms, it can be said that they are far more developed than the indigenous German people. After the Great War [WW I] they rushed like a flood into Germany. Taking advantage of the German people’s exhaustion, they monopolized profits in the commercial sector while utilizing their power in the political arena solely to advance their own interests. As a result, the German people became increasingly fearful with the result that someone like Hitler appeared on the scene. That is to say, the expulsion of the Jews is an action taken in self-defense. It is the resistance of indigenous people to immigrants from outside.
The fact that they have no country is karmic retribution (J. gōhō) on the Jews. Because they have no attachment to the land and are wanderers, it is their fate to intrude into state structures created by others. As a result they are primarily involved in intellectual activities, an area in which they have shown great ability. Intellectual activities broadly interpreted means that they are members of the ruling class. In the case of today’s German people they find it extremely difficult to accept their country being disturbed by a foreign race.
This appears to be the feelings and assertion of Hitler and others.
It is for this reason that the Nazis fiercely attack Soviet Russia. They claim that the core of the Communist Party, beginning with Stalin himself, is composed of either Jews themselves or their relatives who have some connection to them and that, since people like these are up to no good, one of the great missions of the German people is to crush Soviet Russia. The speeches given by the leaders at the recent Nazi rally in Nuremburg, among others, were very extreme. They directly attacked the Soviet Union as their great enemy of the moment. They said as much as could be said in words, completely ignoring diplomatic niceties and attacking them viciously. From looking at the newspapers, you can get a good sense of their truly fierce determination. People are saying that if, in the past, the leaders of one country had done something like this it is inevitable that within twenty-four hours the other country would have declared war. In any event, the Nazis’ determination is deadly serious!
Fig. 5 - Hitlerjugend
The Nazis have focused their attention on youth movements, including engagement in volunteer labor and marching with spades on their shoulders with the goal of communing with nature. I believe this is something that is truly fine no matter in what country it takes place. I will, however, not immediately judge the rights and wrongs of a situation in which totalitarianism (J. zentaishugi) is overly emphasized and everyone has to wear military uniforms. That said, placing a spade on one’s shoulder and harvesting the bounty of the earth without payment as a form of mutual assistance is something I would most definitely like to have Japanese youth do.
Setting aside the question of Communism’s ideology, the people at its core are intellectuals who have never been intimately connected with the land. Furthermore, their ideology is something that has been directly imported from abroad and has no roots in the history of that country. Taking their claims to be absolute, they butcher those who oppose them without hesitation. This is something that others and I can in no way approve. While it is true that Nazis and Fascists also insist on totalitarianism, in one sense it can be said that theirs is a form of resistance to Communist actions. Or it can also be understood as turning the Communists’ methods to their own advantage.
Fig. 6 - Stahleck Castle
About an hour and a half boat ride south from the city of Rüdesheim is an old city on the other shore known as Bacharach. On the mountain behind this city is an old castle called Stahleck Castle. This has been restored in recent years as a lodging for male and female youth groups. The outside of the castle has been maintained as it was with stones piled one on top of another in what is clearly a solid structure. The interior, though plain, has been modernized and made into a well-appointed facility.
During the summer, youth groups are accommodated here where they lead a disciplined life and visit nearby historical sites. Nazi lecturers are invited to speak on such things as Nazi views and institutions as well as engage in discussions. The room where medieval knights once met is now used as a lecture hall, and in it is a bust of Hitler. The youth in the hall explained that this is the only bust that Hitler had made for youth groups. Although only half of the castle tower remains, I was informed there are plans to completely restore it in the near future. If I had more historical and architectural knowledge of old castles I would be able to share more interesting impressions but, unfortunately, I am unlearned in these matters so I cannot do any better than this.
In any event, in Japan there should be a better understanding of the purpose of the lifestyle followed in a Zen temple. I would like to have youth experience this. Further, inasmuch as youth in the True Pure Land sect [of Buddhism] and others have aspects that appear to be overly aristocratic I would like to see them, too, practice the lifestyle of Zen training monks (J. unsui), communing with the earth and developing the habit of unstintingly devoting themselves to labor. This is, of course, what the German youth movement is doing, but we have had a method of character building in Japan from ancient times.
At this point Suzuki ends his discussion of the Nazis and concludes his article with some final comments on differences he noted between Buddhism and Christianity based on what he had seen in Germany.
Comments
The first thing to be noted about the above is that it is one of two competing translations of the same material. Satō Kemmyō Taira, in collaboration with Thomas Kirchner, made a second translation that is available here: [Satō, Kemmyō Taira. “Brian Victoria and the Question of Scholarship.” The Eastern Buddhist 41/2, pp. 147-150].
Some readers may want to read Satō’s translation first before reading the following comments, although that is not necessary. What is remarkable about these two translations is how starkly they differ in their portrayal of Suzuki’s comments on the Nazis. Given Satō’s earlier comments it will not surprise the reader to learn that his translation serves not only to exonerate Suzuki from any possible Nazi sympathies, but also portrays him as a critic and a brave opponent of Nazi policies, especially their oppressive treatment of Jews.
By comparison, the translation that I provide here, presents Suzuki’s views in a more nuanced manner, suggesting at least some degree of sympathy or at least understanding of the Nazis and their policies. Readers familiar with Japanese are invited to read the article in the original as attached in Appendix II.
At any rate, these two translations, one that completely exonerates Suzuki and the other that implicates him, vividly demonstrate the crucial role played by the translator who, at least to some degree, ends up being an “interpreter” of the text’s meaning, especially in light of the often ambiguous nature of the Japanese original. It is also a vivid reminder of just how dependent the reader is on the competence of translators, including their political and religious affiliations as well as their personal agendas. In short, in the world of translations is definitely a case of reader beware!
Preliminary Background Remarks
So how then does one go about deciding which of two significantly different translations is correct? The traditional way, of course, is to undertake a lexical analysis, i.e., a careful word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase comparison of the original text with each of the translations. That is to say, to question which translation more accurately conveys the meaning of the original?
Those inclined to traditional textual exegesis are invited to read Appendix I of this article. There readers will find an introduction to the key differences between the two translations together with an analysis of the Japanese terms leading to these differences. The major difficulty with this approach, however, is that, at least for the non-specialist reader, these discussions can easily be viewed as semantic quibbling. Is there no better method than this?
The author’s view is that when faced with translations of political, not to mention religious, texts, it is helpful, even crucial, to examine the Zeitgeist or “spirit of the times” in which they were written. Further, examination of the prevailing Zeitgeist should be matched by a similar exploration of the inner world-view of the writer. While such studies may not in themselves be definitive in determining the meaning of a text, they can at least serve as a helpful guide to the probable or likely meaning of a text.
In short, the societal context within which a piece is written, coupled with the writer’s personal background, are important and often neglected methods for determining the meaning of a text. In Suzuki’s case, the question is not only the meaning he himself meant to convey, but also, what the editors of a major Buddhist newspaper would have allowed him to say in October 1936. As Sueki Fumihiko, one of Japan’s leading historians of modern Japanese Buddhism, points out: “When we frankly accept Suzuki’s words at face value, we must also consider how, in the midst of the situation as it was then, his words would have been understood.”6 In other words, what would Suzuki’s readers have thought he meant?
Fig. 7 - Signing of Anti-Comintern Pact
Societal Background
In examining the larger societal context, first and foremost is the fact that October 1936, the time these articles were written, was just one month before the signing of the first overtly military pact between Japan and Germany. Known as the Anti-Comintern Pact, it was signed in Berlin on November 25, 1936.7 Ostensibly it was directly against the Communist International (aka Comintern) but in reality it was directed against both the Soviet Union and Communism in general. The Pact read in part:
"recognizing that the aim of the Communist International, known as the Comintern, is to disintegrate and subdue existing States by all the means at its command; convinced that the toleration of interference by the Communist International in the internal affairs of the nations not only endangers their internal peace and social well-being, but is also a menace to the peace of the world desirous of co-operating in the defense against Communist subversive activities."8 (Italics mine)
The key element of this pact was the absolute rejection of Communism on the part of both the German and Japanese governments. This was not simply an expression of foreign policy but represented key domestic policy for both nations. In Japan’s case, the Japanese Communist Party had been immediately banned following its creation in July 1922. Further, between 1928 and 1937 some 60,000 people were arrested for harboring “dangerous thoughts” whether they were procommunists, radical socialists, anarchists, pacifists or simply labor organizers.9
Needless to say, Suzuki was not among those 60,000 arrested nor was he even questioned. This is despite the fact that, according to Satō, Suzuki’s newspaper article was “another example of Suzuki taking a public stance at odds with the ideology of the Japanese militarist government.”10 (Italics mine) As implied by the word “another,” Satō claims that throughout the war years Suzuki continued his opposition, however muted, to the militarist government, again without ever being questioned, let alone detained or censored, concerning anything that he wrote or said. If true this would be almost an unprecedented feat for that period.
Nevertheless, in light of the preceding background information, there is one area of broad agreement between the two translations, i.e., Suzuki was clearly opposed to the Soviet-style Communism. Among other things, this is because he clearly regarded it as a “totalitarian” form of government. Needless to say, his condemnation of Soviet-style Communism would have been widely welcomed in official Japan, as well as Germany, at a time when these two countries were about to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact.
Yet, it is significant that even in the course of condemning Communism in Russia Suzuki wrote: “Setting aside the question of Communism’s ideology, the people at its core are intellectuals who have never been intimately connected with the land.” (Italics mine) Is it possible that Suzuki was not opposed to Communism per se but, instead, to the Soviet version of that ideology? This is at least one possible interpretation of why Suzuki suggested Communism’s “ideology” should be exempted from discussion.
Personal Background
To further understand the plausibility of this interpretation, we need to have a basic understanding of Suzuki’s political orientation, at least at one period in his life. This topic has been but little studied yet is key to understanding not only Suzuki’s opposition to Soviet-style Communism, but even more importantly, his possible resultant sympathy for the Nazi movement. How is this possible?
First, we need to understand that in his youth Suzuki had been attracted to socialism. He first described his interest in a series of letters written to his close friend Yamamoto Ryōkichi (1871–1942). On January 6, 1901 Suzuki wrote:
Recently I have had a desire to study socialism, for I am sympathetic to its views on social justice and equality of opportunity. Present-day society (including Japan, of course) must be reformed from the ground up. I’ll share more of my thoughts in future letters.11 (Italics mine)
On January 14, 1901 Suzuki wrote Yamamoto:
In recent days I have become a socialist sympathizer to an extreme degree. However, my socialism is not based on economics but religion. This said, I am unable to publicly advocate this doctrine to the common people because they are so universally querulous and illiterate and therefore unprepared to listen to what I have to say. However, basing myself on socialism, I intend to gradually incline people to my way of thinking though I also believe I need to study some sociology.12 (Italics mine)
In a February 27, 1902 letter to Yamamoto, then head teacher at the No. 2 Middle School in Kyoto, Suzuki urged the latter to teach socialist principles to his students:
Although from its inception opposition to self-seeking has been a principle of socialism, if that is something that cannot be put into practice all at once, at least you could teach the principle of justice and clarify the great responsibility (or duty) the wealthy and aristocrats have for [the condition of] today’s society. If you feel it is too dangerous to oppose the present [social] structure, then how about simply hinting at these truths?13
Aside from indicating Suzuki’s strong interest in socialism, these passages also make it clear that even as early as 1902 Suzuki was aware of the danger facing those who taught socialist principles in a Japan that even then had begun to crack down on “dangerous thoughts” imported from the West. This awareness is, I suggest, critically important in explaining why Suzuki never openly advocated socialism following his return to Japan in 1909 following more than a decade long residence in the U.S. (1897-1908). Nevertheless he did once express his socialist sympathies, yet only to an English-speaking audience in his 1907 book, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism:
As long as we live under the present state of things, it is impossible to escape the curse of social injustice and economic inequality. Some people must be born rich and noble and enjoying a superabundance of material wealth, while others must be groaning under the unbearable burden imposed upon them by cruel society. Unless we make a radical change in our present social organization, we cannot expect every one of us to enjoy an equal opportunity and a fair chance. Unless we have a certain form of socialism installed which is liberal and rational and systematic, there must be some who are economically more favored than others.14 (Italics mine)
Fig. 8 – Cover of Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism
Needless to say, it is surprising to find a political statement of this nature in a book claiming to be an introduction to the Mahāyāna school of Buddhism, not least of all because Suzuki calls for a “radical change in our present social organization.” Yet, when placed in context, this passage is no more than a public expression of his January 1901 letter to Yamamoto in which Suzuki called for society to be “reformed from the ground up” in accordance with socialist values.
Further, Suzuki’s socialist sympathies could not help but impact on his understanding of one key Buddhist teaching—the doctrine of karma. For centuries karma had been invoked, particularly in East Asia, to explain, if not justify, why some people were born “rich and noble” and others unbearably poor. Simply stated, the claim was made that the rich were rich due to the good karma they had acquired through their meritorious deeds in this and past lives. On the other hand, the poor (including those born with physical impairments) were being punished for the evil deeds of their past.
In Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, Suzuki made a radical break with this traditional view, dismissing its advocates as no more than “pseudo-Buddhists.” Instead, Suzuki claimed:
No, the doctrine of karma certainly must not be understood to explain the cause of our social and economic imperfections. The region where the law of karma is made to work supreme is our moral world, and cannot be made to extend also over our economic field. Poverty is not necessarily the consequence of evil deeds, nor is plenitude that of good acts. Whether a person is affluent or needy is mostly determined by the principle of economy as far as our present social system is concerned.15
Once the cause of poverty was assigned to “our present social system” (i.e., a class-based, capitalist society) it was but a short step, at least in that era, to view socialism as the means to eliminate what Suzuki called “the curse of social injustice and economic inequality.”
Possible Interest in Nazi Socialism
As we have seen, Suzuki was clearly opposed to Russian-style, or Soviet Communism. Yet, there is no compelling evidence to suggest he abandoned his socialist sympathies following his return to Japan in 1909. One sign that he maintained them was his support for educational reform while teaching English at Gakushūin, the ultra-conservative “peers school” for the children of Japan’s aristocratic families. Lacking evidence to the contrary, Suzuki might best be described as a “closet socialist” following his return to Japan. Yet, even if this were true, how might it help to explain a possible sympathy for the Nazis?
Fig. 9 – Entrance to Gakushūin
In terms of understanding Nazi ideology, perhaps the biggest stumbling block in contemporary thinking is the failure to fully appreciate the meaning of the acronym “Nazi.” That is to say, this acronym has all but lost its original meaning, instead, having become a symbol for “evil” pure and simple. Originally, however, “Nazi” was an acronym formed from the first two syllables of the German pronunciation of the word "national." The full title of Hitler’s party |
It took me ten months to say now. I don't know. I think it has been some hundreds of years. He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing; they stayed dead. I'd had him. He was furious. I had thought AM hated me before. I was wrong. It was not even a shadow of the hate he now slavered from every printed circuit. He made certain I would suffer eternally and could not do myself in. He left my mind intact. I can dream, I can wonder, I can lament. I remember all four of them. I wish Well, it doesn't make any sense. I know I saved them, I know I saved them from what has happened to me, but still, I cannot forget killing them. Ellen's face. It isn't easy. Sometimes I want to, it doesn't matter. AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn't want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself: I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet AM has won, simply he has taken his revenge I have no mouth. And I must scream. The EndCentral bank governor Glenn Stevens has cut rates from 7.25% last August
The Australian central bank has cut interest rates to a 49-year low.
The Reserve Bank of Australia cut its benchmark rate by a quarter percentage point to 3%. Most economists had been predicting no change to rates.
"The contraction in the global economy continued during the first few months of this year," the central bank said.
Australia's government announced a 42bn Australian dollar ($26.5bn; £19bn) stimulus plan last month as the country faces its first recession since 1991.
Separately, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) kept its rates at 0.1%, as expected.
But the Japanese central bank expanded the collateral it will accept in return for loans to commercial banks, now accepting loans on deeds to municipal governments.
The BOJ already buys corporate bonds and short-term debt to help boost the balance sheet of its banks.It has been revealed that there are at least one hundred and seventy two illegal raves planned across London this coming weekend.
Following the closure of world famous nightclub Fabric, combined with the tragic occurrence of Studio 338 burning down less than a month ago, leaders of the London Rave Scene (LRS) have declared that nightclubs are now “dead in the water” and for authorities to “expect an up rise in kids getting fucked up in fields”.
“Fabric being shut down was a premeditated, malicious attack to turn that area of London into luxury flats,” announced Rob Neville, the official spokesperson for the LRS. “If Islington council and the Metropolitan Police think that closing Fabric will prevent thousands of people from taking drugs and listening to techno, they’re well and truly mistaken, you should see all the plans for this weekend.”
“All this closure has done is push a generation of ravers into putting on illegal events in abandoned warehouses, derelict flats, farms, fields and parks across the City,” continued Rob. “Any vacant space you can think of will be occupied with a very, very, very loud sound system and hundreds of people on drugs. If the old bill thought Fabric couldn’t handle its drug problem very well, you wait until they need to employ ten thousand extra bodies to cope with the demand of closing down illegal raves.”
Wunderground asked local raver Millie Dalston about her views on the rave scene, “I’m looking forward to a new era of illegal raves around the M25,” said a very excitable Mille. “Of course Fabric being closed is extremely sad but we’ve all seen the documentaries about rave culture in the eighties and nineties and I simply cannot wait to get that phone call at ten p.m on Saturday night telling me where I need to go. We have so many options this weekend, London will be one ginormous rave zone and I can’t wait to be apart of it.”In a blog post today, Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk announced the automobile manufacturer would be adding a titanium shield and aluminum deflector plates to the underbody of the popular Model S vehicle.
Last year two Model S vehicles caught fire following accidents that resulted in underbody damage to the cars and ultimately caused them to be totaled. These instances generated a substantial amount of media coverage and also prompted an investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). However as a result of the announcement from Tesla today, the NHTSA noted it would be closing its investigation.
Musk highlighted that in the two fires widely reported on the two drivers were unharmed, and said Tesla has already updated Model S software to ensure that, at highway speeds, their ground clearance was increased. However, the firm "felt it was important to bring this risk down to virtually zero to give Model S owners complete peace of mind."
As a result, Tesla has installed a triple underbody shield made of titanium and aluminum to all vehicles manufactured beginning March 6, and it will also provide them to all existing vehicles during routine service or immediately upon request.
Musk noted the first of the shields is a hollow and round aluminum bar to deflect objects, which is followed by a titanium plate. The final part is an aluminum shield that "absorbs impact energy, provides another layer of deflection and finally causes the Model S to ramp up and over the object if it is essentially incompressible and immovable."
Musk concluded his blog post introducing the shields by noting, "With a track record of zero deaths or serious, permanent injuries since our vehicles went into production six years ago, there is no safer car on the road than a Tesla. The addition of the underbody shields simply takes it a step further."
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ABC draws possible Tea Party connection with alleged Aurora shooter
ABC News has suggested that James Holmes -- the suspect in today's shooting in Aurora, Colorado -- may have a connection to the Tea Party.
ABC's Brian Ross reported this morning that there is "a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site... talking about him joining the Tea Party last year."
(See also: Full coverage of the Colorado theater shooting)
"Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes," Ross cautioned "but it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado."
(PHOTOS: Colorado theater shooting)
ABC News is the only network or cable news channel to suggest a possible Tea Party connection, according to a survey of the TV Eyes database at 9:30 a.m. ET, though they did not verify that the two individuals were one and the same. (This is the Tea Party Patriots page on which Ross based his report.)
The report has already set off alarm bells on the right. At Brietbart.com, the conservative news site, Joel Pollak has accused ABC News of "scapegoating."
"How interesting that Ross and ABC News should think to look to the Tea Party website first--and to broadcast politically volatile information without verifying if that 'Jim Holmes' is the same as the suspect," Pollak writes. "Look for more scapegoating from the mainstream media and the Democrats in the hours and days to follow."
(Also on POLITICO: Campaigns pause after shootings)
I have reached out to ABC News for comment on its report, and will update here if and when I hear back.
UPDATE: ABC News apologizes for 'incorrect' Tea party report:
ABC News and Brian Ross are apologizing for an "incorrect" report that James Holmes, the suspect in the Colorado theater shooting, may have had connections to the Tea Party. "An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect," ABC News said in a statement. "ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted." In a similar statement released minutes earlier, ABC News said the report was "incorrect" but did not include the apology. "Several other local residents with similar names were also contacted via social media by members of the public who mistook them for the suspect," the initial statement read.As his current team stand on the threshold of a 10th triumph in the European Cup, former Liverpool midfielder Xabi Alonso has reiterated his enduring affection for the Reds, Anfield and more.
The 32-year-old bewitched Kopites during his five years on Merseyside, exhibiting every pass, through ball and defence-splitter in the book courtesy of his sublime technique and vision.
In total, the Spaniard made 210 appearances for the club, registering 19 goals, as he helped Rafael Benitez's charges claim glory in the Champions League in 2005 and the FA Cup one year later.
Though he said his goodbyes half-a-decade ago, Alonso's reverence for the Reds and the crucial role his spell in England played in his personal development has not waned in the slightest.
"Liverpool was a very important part in my football career," the Real Madrid star told beIN SPORTS. "Especially when we played at Anfield, we achieved great things and we had great nights in Anfield.
"There is a passion and atmosphere that comes when you play in England in the Premier League. It's special and I had the privilege to play for five years for Liverpool, and it's a really special club.
"Anfield is a beautiful stadium and it has a certain charm and style that is very difficult to find in other stadiums. So I miss it a little bit; I really enjoyed the time that I spent in England, it was very important for my football career."
It is Spanish football that has proved the dominant force in European competition this season; Sevilla lifted the Europa League last week and tonight, Real will meet city rivals Atletico Madrid in the Champions League final.
In a cruel twist of fate, Alonso is restricted to a watching brief in Lisbon, as a yellow card during his team's semi-final, second leg victory over Bayern Munich brought a suspension for the showpiece.
The Spain international retains the respect and adulation of each group of fans he has represented throughout his storied and trophy-laden career - and the feeling is mutual.
He added: "I have been very committed to all of the teams that I have played for and each club that I have been a part of is very important to me.
"Because of that, I feel like part of Real Sociedad, Liverpool and Real Madrid family. They are in my heart and I will be very attached to them as well."
Watch the video here »Justin Braze
A 20-year-old Wisconsin Rapids man authorities say sold his neighbor's vehicle to a salvage yard while the neighbor was gone pleaded not guilty Monday in Wood County Circuit Court to charges.
Justin L. Braze is charged with felony counterfeiting a certificate of title and misdemeanor charges of theft and obstructing an officer. If convicted, he faces a maximum of 7 ½ years in prison. His next appearance is scheduled for Aug. 22.
According to the criminal complaint, on June 8, a Wisconsin Rapids man reported he came home after being away since May 31 and found his 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee, which had four flat tires, was missing.
Officers spoke to Braze, who said he saw someone with a flatbed truck take the Jeep away, according to the complaint. Another neighbor reported seeing the word "Valley" on the side of the flatbed truck.
The officer was able to trace the truck to Fox Valley Auto Salvage. The officer spoke to the company's owner, who identified a pictures of Braze. Braze had told the owner he wanted to sell his Jeep for scrap, according to the complaint.
Braze told the scrap business owner that he had lost the key and title to the jeep, but Braze filled out a missing title form, according to the complaint. The business owner paid Braze $300 for his neighbor's Jeep, according to the complaint.
Read or Share this story: https://www.wisconsinrapidstribune.com/story/news/crime/2014/07/14/man-pleads-guilty-selling-neighbors-jeep/12650275/With a $4,200 reward out for their feared leader Sudesh Kumar Patel, who goes by the alias Balkharia and has over 50 criminal cases outstanding against him, the bandits have been reluctant to leave the forests and mountains they call home in order to seek out their own water.
Parts of the state are experiencing drought conditions, with water sources drying up in the face of high temperatures and lower than average rainfall. In 2014, the annual monsoon only brought 26 days of rain — about half as much as expected.
Led by India’s "most wanted criminal," the horse-riding hoodlums residing in the state of Uttar Pradesh issued a “water tax” last week, demanding that supplies of water are hand-delivered to their remote hideouts if the villagers want peace in the area.
In the face of death threats, residents from 28 villages in water-scarce northern India are being forced to deliver 35 buckets of water a day to a gang of armed bandits.
Read more
In the face of death threats, residents from 28 villages in water-scarce northern India are being forced to deliver 35 buckets of water a day to a gang of armed bandits.
Led by India’s "most wanted criminal," the horse-riding hoodlums residing in the state of Uttar Pradesh issued a “water tax” last week, demanding that supplies of water are hand-delivered to their remote hideouts if the villagers want peace in the area.
Parts of the state are experiencing drought conditions, with water sources drying up in the face of high temperatures and lower than average rainfall. In 2014, the annual monsoon only brought 26 days of rain — about half as much as expected.
With a $4,200 reward out for their feared leader Sudesh Kumar Patel, who goes by the alias Balkharia and has over 50 criminal cases outstanding against him, the bandits have been reluctant to leave the forests and mountains they call home in order to seek out their own water.
Sword fight erupts at Sikh temple in India. Read more here.
It has been challenging enough for residents to get enough water for their own needs, and villagers are now forced to trek more than two miles in order to collect and deliver the water to the gangs. Many of the towns have joined forces to supply the bandits.
"People are having a harrowing time in meeting the demand," Mayank Yadav, an activist in one of the water-taxed villages, told the Hindustan Times. "Water is scarce and supplying entails lot of trekking to places where bandits are putting up."
Despite the burden, villagers have reportedly been reluctant to go to the police because they fear the wrath of Balkharia’s notorious thugs.
India's health minister mocked for proposing to ban sex education. Read more here.
Bandits, or dacoits as they are known in India, have plagued the country for approximately 800 years. But authorities have targeted dacoit gangs and their presence has been greatly diminished over the last few decades.
"A few bandits are still active in the ravines," local police officer Suresh Kumar Singh told the Associated Press. "They ask for water, food and shelter from the villages."
Balkharia’s particular gang showed up in the region over the last two years, after police proudly declared the area bandit-free in 2008.
India's Maoist insurgency kills police officers in jungle ambush. Read more here.
According to the AP, the orders for water could help police track down Balkharia and his group of crooks.
"Secrecy is the mantra of any gang," Deputy Inspector General Amitabh Yash said. But he added that, "If the supply line is exposed, the gang can be finished any day."
In September, police in the region launched new efforts to combat the thugs. Authorities estimate that there are more than 20 bandits carrying guns, but nabbing them has proved difficult as they avoid cell phones and move around every few days.
Follow Kayla Ruble on Twitter: @RubleKBCommunity
On June 06, 2016 Burlington Police investigated a report of a phone scam involving a 23 year old victim from Milton, VT. The female was contacted by an unknown suspect and told that her husband had been taken hostage and would be killed if she did not comply. The female was told that if she made any attempt to contact her husband or anyone else they would kill him. The female was told to send money via western union and once it was verified that the money had been sent, the husband would be released. It was ultimately determined that the husband was fine and the entire incident was a scam.
Further investigation revealed that there have been multiple reports from Williston, Bennington, and Burlington with similar circumstances. This scam is very concerning as the suspects are extremely convincing and have caused a significant amount of emotional and financial stress on the victims they have targeted.
The Burlington Police would like to remind people that these scams exist and to be extremely careful anytime someone asks for money to be sent via Western Union or any other money order service. If you suspect you are being targeted in a fraudulent scam please call your local police department immediately for assistance.
To view the original press release, please see our press release page on our website: www.burlingtonvt.gov/police/pressPresident Donald Trump’s first budget proposal this week will be like many of his policy ideas so far — big on showmanship and playing to his base, short on details.
The blueprint is expected to call for taking an ax to programs and agencies that Republicans love to hate like EPA, Energy, Interior, State, HUD and Commerce; foreign aid; the federal workforce; and Education and Labor training programs, while boosting defense spending by roughly $54 billion — and that covers only so-called discretionary spending, which accounts for just a third of the federal government’s budget.
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Agencies that are expected to see boosts include the FBI and Homeland Security, including Customs and Border Protection, since they will be crucial to carrying out the administration’s travel ban policy and the building of the so-far hypothetical wall with Mexico.
Other agencies will see anywhere from a 15- to 20-percent cut, said one policy expert on the transition team — with the EPA seeing a proposed cut north of 25 percent. “I am looking to see who is being protected,” said one source from Trump’s presidential transition team who worked on policy issues. “Other than that, I don’t expect to learn much more from the budget."
Yet none of this may matter to Trump’s base, who elected him based on his promise to upend Washington and dismantle the federal government. Voters rarely want to sweat all of the details; they want action. And Trump’s budget will offer that reward by pinpointing the winners and losers within the federal bureaucracy in broad strokes, according to transition sources.
Most agency cuts are expected to lack specificity, transition sources said; they will require each Cabinet secretary to find savings by eliminating programs, cutting the workforce or both.
The exception may be swaths of the EPA, Commerce, State and Energy departments, where the budget is expected to call for the wholesale elimination of programs involving solar energy, biofuels or anything that looks like the government propping up one sector over another, an idea that’s anathema to conservatives.
“Foreign aid is a complete waste of money,” said Stephen Moore, a senior economist at the Heritage Foundation who worked on the budget draft during Trump’s presidential campaign. Moore stressed that he had not seen the final blueprint. That document is being so closely held that even political appointees at various agencies have not seen it.
The White House plans to release a fuller version of its budget sometime in May.
“The big question is whether the political system can absorb these cutbacks,” Moore added. “If this was a business, they could cut by 10 to 15 percent. Some of the agencies should be cut 100 percent. The argument that President Trump needs to make is that businesses downsize. They suck in their gut. The government has not done that.”
Yet long-time Republican budget leaders and staffers remain skeptical of Trump’s first stab at budget politics because it will lack so many key details. The “skinny budget,” as the administration calls this proposal, will not tackle mandatory spending like Medicare or Social Security — entitlement programs that are the main drivers of cost for the government over the next decade and which Republicans have long wanted to overhaul.
Nor is the plan expected to include tax proposals, as budgets typically do. It also promises to boost defense spending by billions of dollars, without taking into account the budget caps still in place from the sequester — to override those to hit the spending level Trump wants, the Senate would need 60 votes to change the law, votes that are not assured.
“That makes the budget anorexic, not skinny,” says the former Republican director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. “It will be politics as usual. Trump’s base will like it. Other Republicans won’t. He’ll divide the GOP the same way he always does.”
For policy-making, the implications will be even starker. This lack of detailed accounting in Trump’s proposal will either force Congress to make many of the hard decisions in its appropriations bills, or simply delay congressional action entirely as leadership awaits further direction from the White House — a scenario that played out with the botched roll-out of the House Republican health care bill.
“The budget is not going to be that revealing,” said G. William Hoagland, the former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee. “We’ll have to wait until the full budget comes at end of April and in May. What the appropriators need are the account-level details.”
The possibility of wholesale elimination of departments, meanwhile, terrifies government workers, as well as the unions that represent them.
“If budgets cut require reductions in force, then federal workers will be concerned about their job and taking care of their family, but they’re also concerned about being able to care for everyone that their jobs are meant to support,” said Tim Kauffman of American Federation of Government Employees that represents roughly 700,000 workers across federal agencies.
For the past few weeks, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget has been negotiating with agency heads over proposed budget cuts behind-closed-doors. At the State Department, for instance, Secretary Rex Tillerson managed to negotiate cuts less severe cuts than the 37 percent outlined in earlier documents, POLITICO reported earlier this week.
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One State Department worker, who spoke anonymously for fear of being fired, said workers had been urged not to mention climate change in conversations with OMB officials as the department sought to save programs.
Similarly, State workers tried to rebrand any foreign aid and education programs as ways to boost American or female entrepreneurship, playing into the president’s desire to promote business growth, the State employee added.
This process of negotiations has been happening across agencies for the past few weeks, as the president assembles his first budget.
It’s been a scramble this year, as is often the case in the first year of an administration, said Sandy Davis, former associate director for legislative affairs at the Congressional Budget Office. Typically, the White House sends agencies the first draft of its budget proposal around Thanksgiving, allowing the agencies to go back and forth for weeks before a blueprint is released in the winter. “It’s truncated this year, which is typical for a new administration,” Davis said.
New OMB Director Mick Mulvaney was not even confirmed until mid-February. Prior to that, much of the budget policy was being run by a former Heritage Foundation and Senate Budget Committee staffer, Paul Winfree, who now works as the White House’s Director of Budget Policy.
Winfree also wrote Heritage’s budget blueprint in 2016, which has informed much of the administration’s thinking on its budget proposal — although Trump departed from the plan by declining to broach the dismantling of entitlements, except for Medicaid which comes in for big cuts in the House Republican health care bill.
Andrew Restuccia, Shane Goldmacher, Marianne Levine, Caitlin Emma and Darius Dixon contributed to this story.The daredevil Nik Wallenda successfully walked between skyscrapers on high wires suspended hundreds of feet above downtown Chicago on Sunday night, accomplishing the historic feat without a harness or a safety net—and in one case blindfolded.
In the two-plus hour long event that aired live on the Discovery Channel, Wallenda pulled off something incredible and set two world records in the process—walking on a high wire strung between three Chicago skyscrapers, all of which are taller than the Washington Monument. As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge, the daredevil aerialist did one of the walks on a significant incline and another blindfolded. The Discovery Channel aired the stunt with a 10-second delay so it could cut away if Wallenda fell to his death. But that precaution proved unnecessary.
“The big thing is the intimidation factor,” Wallenda said, adding that it’s hard “to look down from 600 feet in the air.”
For the first half of his two-part spectacle, Wallenda walked uphill on a wire suspended at what was supposed to be a record-breaking 15-degree incline, from Chicago’s 588-foot Marina Tower West to the top of the 671-foot Leo Burnett building on the other side of the Chicago river. During the show it was announced that the incline of the wire ended up being even steeper than anticipated, coming in at 19 degrees. That’s like walking up eight stories while suspended in the air 50 stories up, with winds gusting across the wire.
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Wallenda made it look easy. With his family watching and a crowd of fans cheering him from the ground below, Wallenda calmly grabbed his pole and headed out for an uphill walk. The performance went off without a hitch, but the wire was bouncing enough under his weight that he opted not to take a planned selfie halfway across the wire. He managed the first half in just six minutes and 50 seconds, running the last few steps to drop his pole and hug his children and wife.
The second half of the event saw Wallenda walk blindfolded between the two Marina City towers, which music fans would recognize from the cover of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Before the show, Wallenda had said that Chicago’s weather would most likely be his worst enemy—it is, after all, the Windy City.
“Whether those winds are too strong or whether the cable wants to freeze or there is a snowstorm, we just don’t know,” he said. The Discovery Channel had a weatherman on hand to keep an eye on the weather that had brought 20-foot waves to Chicago’s Lake Michigan over the weekend. The wind had died down some, but was still gusting through the city’s Skyscraper Canyon. As Wallenda prepared to walk blindfolded between the Marina Towers, he was worried about the crosswinds that could knock him sideways.
“It’s mentally draining,” said Wallenda of walking a tightrope without being able to rely on his vision.
In order to concentrate, Wallenda took out the earpiece through which he had been communicating with his father during the first walk, requiring his father to shout instructions through a megaphone. Before stepping on to the wire, Wallenda begged the crowd to be quiet so he could hear his father’s instructions. Wallenda finished the walk in just one minute and 16 seconds.
The 35-year-old tightrope walker is the great-grandson of Karl Wallenda of the famous Flying Wallendas circus family, and he has been on a high wire since before he was born—his mother, Delilah Wallenda, walked the tightrope while she was six months pregnant with him.
His years of experience don’t make his stunts any less harrowing to watch, though. After all, at the age of 73, his great-grandfather was killed attempting to walk between two buildings in Puerto Rico in 1978. The show aired some of that heart-stopping footage and while it may serve as a cautionary tale for most of the world, Wallenda saw it as a challenge. He completed his great-grandfather’s endeavor in 2011.
Despite the risks, Wallenda continues his thrilling stunts. In 2012, he made a record-breaking walk over Niagara Falls from the U.S. into Canada. and in 2013 he took a quarter-mile stroll on a wire suspended over the Little Colorado River Gorge. Each of those stunts drew close to 13 million viewers.
Contact us at editors@time.com.Chorus' staff are mostly employed managing its networks and providing support to customers, with the job of building and maintaining the networks assigned to contractors.
Network company Chorus says "tens" of staff will lose their jobs in a restructure.
The Wellington-based firm employed 1032 permanent staff as of the end of June.
A source said chief executive Kate McKenzie had told staff in an email that the company needed to become a smaller business and that the cuts would take effect shortly before Christmas, on December 8.
Chorus spokesman Nathan Beaumont confirmed the restructure but said speculation that as many as 200 jobs might go was incorrect.
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As Chorus was still consulting on the changes, it was not possible to give exact numbers, he said.
SUPPLIED Spark managing director Simon Moutter is reporting positive progress in its search for efficiencies.
The source said the staff changes would mean Chorus would provide less "proactive" support for its internet provider customers, providing them instead with help only when they asked for it.
However, Beaumont said the cuts had flowed from the deployment of new IT systems that integrated Chorus' systems "directly with retail service providers".
"Customers get a better experience and we are able to streamline our operations. Unfortunately that means we will not need as many people as we have now."
Overall satisfaction with UFB installations was at a record high "with very large volumes", he added.
Job numbers may also be coming down at Spark.
Managing director Simon Moutter said it achieved a 31 per cent year-on-year drop in the number of incoming calls to its contact centres in October.
That was thanks to automation and its move away from a troubled email outsourcing arrangement with Yahoo which caused customers to ring in with complaints.
But Moutter said job reductions that flowed from the efficiency gains were likely to be achieved through natural attrition rather than redundancies.
Since contact centre employees tended to stay only a relatively short time in their roles, it would simply be a case of Spark advertising fewer vacancies, he said.
NZX-listed Chorus is due to finish laying ultrafast broadband in 192 cities and towns by the end of 2022.
While it will still have work to do after that coordinating the connection of homes and maintaining its networks, the company has begun to look for future opportunities.
This month it agreed to wire up all the classrooms in 10 schools in the Far North and Gisborne with gigabit fibre-optic access points, as part of an agreement with Crown-owned education technology company N4L.
It is more common for schools to have a single gigabit connection, shared within each school through wifi.
Chorus and N4L are also running a trial with Haeata Community Campus in Christchurch that will extend the school's internet service out into the homes of students.
In a wider play, Chorus has expressed interest in installing 5G access points on its UFB network and wholesaling them to telcos, once the next version of mobile technology arrives in New Zealand.Gov. Cuomo proposed a state constitutional amendment Monday to protect a women’s right to an abortion in New York.
Cuomo announced the measure as President Trump is about to fill vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.
During an address to Family Planning Advocates in Albany, Cuomo said New York will protect abortion rights in case the Supreme Court overturns its own 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling that legalized abortion.
“We’re going to protect Roe v. Wade. We’re going to pass a constitutional amendment to write Roe v. Wade into the New York State Constitution. We’re going to protect a women’s right to choose,” Cuomo said to rousing applause.
“Let’s put it out on the ballot and let the people decide. New Yorkers want to protect a women’s right to choose.”
The proposed abortion rights amendment must pass the state Legislature in two consecutive years, then be approved by the voters in a statewide referendum to get enshrined in the New York constitution.
Before he spoke, Cuomo was introduced and greeted by Cecille Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards.
The divided Supreme Court has one vacancy following the death of conservative Antonin Scalia last year. Trump will select the ninth member, who would be the potential tie-breaking vote on abortion and other issues.Each team in the Vainglory International Premier League has played their first game. This Thursday, five of the top six teams who won their first match play again. Each of the match-ups will include one team from the Vainglory World Invitational, competing against a team from the qualifier tournament.
These matches will be taking place live, on OGN’s twitch.tv global channel at 5 AM PDT/2 PM CEST. Come watch as the top teams in the VIPL compete to determine the champions of the round robin stage, as only the top two teams of each group compete in the tournament bracket.
Here is the current bracket standings for the VIPL:
Group A Wins Losses Group B Wins Losses Group C Wins Losses Invincible Armada 1 0 Gankstars 1 0 Hunters 1 0 pQq 1 0 Beyond 1 0 Raid 1 0 Unknown 0 1 Tiger-Phobia 0 1 HACK 0 1 Victorious 0 1 Vap 0 1 Wild 0 1
Teams competing this week are marked in red. With the majority of the top half of the bracket competing this week, expect to see some crazy games. Here are the match-ups for this week.
a new challenger faces the world champs
Pqq vs invincible armada
In last week’s matches, pQq ruthlessly defeated their opponents, finishing with more than double the gold of their counterparts. Druid, pQq’s laner, finished with 175 creep score in a 15-minute game. Normally, this kind of farming feat would earn someone MVP honors, but Druid was overshadowed by the expert play of the rest of his team, who finished the game deathless.
Between non-standard picks, genius-level mechanical ability, and always seeming to be on the same page, pQq are one of the favorites to win the VIPL. This week, Rain and Mauloa will need to be perfectly in sync to compete against the reigning world champions.
There is a bit of history between pQq and Invincible Armada. In May, pQq and Invincible Armada competed in an EA tournament, which pQq went on to win in dominating fashion. The aggression of Rain, pQq’s jungle carry, was suffocating. He would fearlessly X-Retsu into the enemy team, while activating his Atlas Pauldron, giving him five long seconds to decimate the opponent of his choosing.
Invincible Armada has historically played a methodical game, allowing themselves the opportunity to establish the game that they want. Invincible Armada doesn’t attempt to crush their opponents with double-digit kill leads, but rather they play a conservative game, farming until they feel they can win team fights.
One of the key strengths of Invincible Armada is their ability to defend and protect Sangho, their lane carry. When Sangho and Druid go to battle in the lane I expect to see sparks fly and one champion to emerge.
Based on past experiences and performances of these two teams, I’m inclined to give the slight edge to pQq in this match, but it will come down to how well Sangho can hold his own against Druid.
the crystal vs weapon showdown
Beyond vs Gankstars
Gankstars are defined by the mechanical ability of IraqiZorro. Historically a dominant weapon carry, IraqiZorro showed a dominant performance in the first set of matches when Gankstars dispatched Tiger-Phobia seemingly effortlessly.
Beyond brings the opposite end of the spectrum with the best crystal carry in the VIPL, ForgottenWar. After his flawless transition from jungle Celeste to lane Skaarf I’m ready to see him play support Petal. ForgottenWar has yet to show an example of weakness in any of his matches on air.
Both of these teams won their first games, which means that this match will determine the top of Group B, and potentially a quarterfinal berth. I’ll be watching to see how Gankstars adapts to counter a double crystal comp, while also contemplating how Beyond adapts to the talented weapon team.
This game will be determined by pace; if Gankstars sets the early pace of the game they will take the win before the crystal comp of Beyond can scale. Conversely, if Beyond can survive the early aggression then they have the game. Gankstars |
bureaucracy is not the solution";
9) "Devil is in the details" - Americans want to know "what is in the fine print" of any proposed legislation;
10) "Caution: unintended consequences ahead" - "What will be the effects and impact of the CFPA [Consumer Financial Protection Act]?";
11) "Enforcement of current law trumps creation of new laws";
12) "The bailout provisions get the most visceral reaction";
13) "'Bureaucrats' are worse than 'bureaucracies'";
14) "Americans want to end the legalese and confusion in contracts";
15) "Just the facts ma'am";
16) "Personalize the impact";
17) "It's not reform" - "This is not a reform bill. It is the 'Stop the Big Bank Bailout bill.' This is important," Luntz points out.;
18) "Small business ownership is about the American Dream";
19) "No Surprise here" - "The strongest image ad we tested pertained to the bailout provisions and the 'lobbyist loopholes' for the casino industry.";
20) "The Final Word" - "The department store Syms used the slogan 'an educated customer is out best customer.' We could easily say an educated citizen is the biggest opponent or, your biggest ally against the creation of the Financial Reform bill and the CFPA."
Think Progress recently pointed out that Luntz's "client list reveals that he is in fact being paid by the finance industry":
- "Luntz client Ameriquest Mortgages: The proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) would eliminate predatory mortgages. Ameriquest, America's'sub-prime leader,' has been prosecuted by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal for inflating property values so borrowers could get bigger loans, imposing upfront fees without reducing interest rates as promised, and intentionally deceiving lenders with hidden penalties and interest rates on final loan documents."
"Luntz clients Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns: Under proposed financial reform, big banks, like Luntz clients Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns, would face a new structure designed to police financial products, prohibit predatory ones, and require clear forms and disclosures. The CFPA would also help regulate hidden bank fees and other bank abuses."
-
"Luntz client American Express: The CFPA would regulate the credit card industry, preventing predatory interest rates and fees.
Deja vu all over again
If much of this sounds familiar, that's because it is consistent with the Luntz playbook for defeating healthcare reform. In his 28-page report titled "The Language of Health Care 2009," Luntz laid out "The 10 Rules for Stopping the 'Washington Takeover' of Health Care." Anyone that has followed the health care reform from debate from the very beginning will not only recognize a number of the following talking points, but will likely think to themselves, "Hey, I've heard those lines before." In June of last year, Media Matters for America pointed out that in a press release issued by House Minority Leader John Boehner "criticizing a health care report by President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers," Rep. Boehner use five Luntz-created talking points in one sentence.
After laying out his talking points, Luntz emphatically states that Republicans "MUST be vocally and passionately on the side of reform."
The talking points:
1) "Humanize your approach" by talking only about individuals and not the "healthcare system";
2) "Acknowledge the 'crisis' or suffer the consequences" - reframe the meaning of "crisis." The script: "If you're one of the millions who can't afford healthcare, it is a crisis." "Or better yet" suggests Luntz: "If some bureaucrat puts himself between you and your doctor, denying you exactly what you need, that's a crisis";
3) "'Time' is the government healthcare killer" - "Delayed care is denied care." The script: "Waiting to buy a car or even a house won't kill you. But waiting for the healthcare you need - could. Delayed healthcare is denied care.";
4) "The arguments against the Democrats' healthcare plan must center around 'politicians,' 'bureaucrats,' and 'Washington.'... not the free market, tax incentives, or competition";
5) "The healthcare denial horror stories from Canada & Co. do resonate, but you have to humanize them." Luntz recommends using the term "government takeover" rather than "government run" or "government controlled." The script: "In countries with government run healthcare, politicians make YOUR healthcare decisions. THEY decide if you'll get the procedure you need, or if you are disqualified because the treatment is too expensive or because you are too old. We can't have that in America.";
6) "Healthcare quality = 'getting the treatment you need, when you need it." The script: "The plan put forward by the Democrats will deny people the treatments they need and make them wait to get the treatments they are allowed to receive.";
7) "One-six-does-NOT-fit-all." The script: Call for "the protection of the personalized doctor-patient relationship.";
8) "WASTE, FRAUD, and ABUSE are your best targets for how to bring down costs";
9) "Americans will expect the government to look out for those who truly can't afford healthcare." The script: "A balanced, common-sense approach that provides assistance to those who truly need it and keeps healthcare patient-centered rather than government-centered for everyone.";
10) "It's not enough to just say what you're against. You have to tell them what you're for." The script: When describing what you're proposing, use the word "more" as often as possible - There will be "more access to more treatments and more doctors... will less interference from insurance companies and Washington politicians and special interests."
"The document," Luntz pointed out, was "based on polling results and Instant Response dial sessions conducted in April 2009." And he noted that because "more than one quarter of the population will back significant government involvement in healthcare and a third support 'universal' care," the primary target is the "persuadables and generate support among wayward Republicans and conservatives."
The unexpected rise of the Tea Party movement and the Town Hall anti-healthcare reform shout-downs, the difficulty that Democratic Party leadership has had in corralling un-persuaded Democratic legislators, the Administration's inability to turn healthcare reform into the "cause of this generation," and the Luntz memo -- which provided the salient and oft-repeated talking points for the opposition, have led to healthcare reform's "who-knows-what's-going-to-happen" current status.
Does Luntz really believe that he's "all that." One can only say "you betcha! After checking out the promotional video titled "This is Frank Luntz" at his The Word Doctors website where "It's not what you say, it's what people hear.
The Word Doctors is a powerhouse in the profession of message creation and image management.
We have counseled Presidents and Prime Ministers, Fortune 100 CEOs and Hollywood creative teams in harnessing the power of language and visuals to change hearts, change minds and change behaviors. We have become a hyper-attentive nation that is quick to judge. The words and visuals you use are more important than ever in determining whether you win or lose at the ballot box, the checkout line, and the court of public opinion. We know the words that work. Do you?
Our confidence comes from decades of research, polling, and consulting to the opinion elite worldwide, with proven results that withstand the test of time.
Remember: "It's not what you say. It's what people hear."
Even the president took a little time out from exchanging thoughts with congressional Republicans to recognize Luntz in the audience: "I see Frank Luntz up here sitting in the front," he said. "He's already polled it, and he said... I've done a focus group and the way we're going to really box in Obama on this one or make Pelosi look bad on that one."
"But that's how we operate. It's all tactics, and it's not solving problems."
Luntz's world of word-craft has never been about "solving problems." It's always been about winning, and over the years, he's done pretty well in that regard.
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About author Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His Conservative Watch columns document the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.Other articles in this series:
This article will discuss immutability, and some of its variations in the topic of functional programming.
There are a whole series of benefits to using program variables that… well, that aren’t actually variable, but instead are immutable. The impact of immutability on software design can differ quite a bit, depending on the type of computing platform, and especially whether dynamic memory or concurrent memory access are involved.
When I took my first computer science course in college, the instructors extolled the virtues of immutable data. Here’s the message of the Functional Weenies Wizards: Functions that alter data are flawed and evil, and must be marked (e.g. the exclamation point at the end of set! in Scheme), like the Mark of Cain or the Mark of the Beast; functions that do not alter data are pure and good. I thought they were kind of extreme. (The FW is the guy in the corner at the party who walks up to you and says “Hey, I’ll bet you didn’t realize you’ve been using monads all along!” And when you hear the word “monad”, that’s your cue to run away. Or at least play the Monad Drinking Game and down another shot of Scotch.)
But in the intervening years, I’ve come around a bit to their view, and have become a Functional Wannabe. Yeah, mutability has its place, but there are some real advantages to striving towards immutability, and again, it really depends on the type of programming environment you’re in: if the cost of leaving the input data untouched and returning new output data is high, you’re often stuck with mutable data; otherwise, you really should make data immutable wherever possible.
This assumes you have a choice. Let’s forget for a moment about how you can make your programs use immutable data, and first just focus on the difference.
The Immutable and the Mutable
Consider two pieces of data, the first immutable and the second mutable.
The text of the Declaration of Independence The real-time contents of a stock portfolio, namely an unordered list of stock symbols, each with the number of shares owned.
Here’s what you can do with the Declaration of Independence, and what you can’t do with the stock portfolio:
Use copies of it rather than the original. If all we care about is the text, we don’t care whether it’s in one area of memory or another. If there are seven areas of our program that need access to the text of the Declaration of Independence, we don’t care if all seven refer to one chunk of memory, or three of them refer to one chunk and the other four another chunk, or if each has its own copy. With the stock portfolio, if we make a copy, the copy is going to be out of date and will not be updated if there are any changes. Any piece of software that wants access to the stock portfolio must get it from its source.
Use the original rather than copies. If no one can change the Declaration of Independence, it’s safe to give out references to it all day. (“Hey bud, wanna see the original copy of the Declaration of Independence? Just go to this bus station locker and look inside; here’s the combination....”) Whereas with the stock portfolio, if we want to give read-only access to other software programs, we have to be paranoid and create a copy, so that we can prevent malicious programs from altering the original.
Share access to it without any worry about the problems of concurrency. We can let a thousand different software routines access the text of the Declaration of Independence concurrently. It doesn’t matter. None of them are going to be able to change it, so there’s no risk of data corruption. The stock portfolio is another story. We can let only one software task at a time modify it, and while that modification is taking place, we can’t allow other software tasks to read it.
Simplify expressions at compile time. In compiled software, the compiler can precompute the number of words in the Declaration of Independence; we don’t have to execute operations at runtime to compute the number of words. But we can’t count the number of stocks in the portfolio at compile time, because it can change.
Cache the result of expressions computed at run-time. We could compute a million different statistics about the Declaration of Independence: the number of times the letter pairs ou, ha, or ty occur; the list of words in alphabetical order that score less than 12 points in Scrabble; the complete Markov chain transition matrix of two-letter sequences in the Declaration; the MD5 and SHA1 hashes of the full text; the ROT13 translation of the all the words with at least 10 letters… and so on. We can’t possibly compute them all in advance at compile-time, so it’s not worth doing. But if we do happen to compute some summary statistic once, we can save the results for later, because the Declaration of Independence will never change. We can’t do that with the stock portfolio though.
Store it in nonvolatile memory. In embedded microcontrollers, the amount of available program memory might be 5 or 10 times larger than the amount of available RAM. This means that RAM is more precious than program memory. We can store the text of the Declaration of Independence in program memory, leaving that precious RAM for something else. The stock portfolio is mutable, so we can’t store it in program memory.
Use it as a key in an associative array. Associative arrays are ubiquitous in software. They’re just sets of key-value pairs. Use the key to index a value. There are all sorts of data structures to do so efficiently. The only catch is that the keys have to be immutable (or at least comparable and/or hashable in an immutable way), otherwise we may not be able to find the value again.
Programming Language Support for Immutability
In some programming languages there are keywords that specify a degree of immutability. These are extremely useful, but you should be careful that you know exactly what these keywords mean if you do use them. C/C++ have const and Java has final, but these have different meanings, and neither one marks an object as truly immutable.
In C and C++, the const keyword has several usages. When applied to a program variable or function argument, it means that the code given access to that data is not allowed to change it, within the appropriate scope:
int doofus123(const data_t *mydata, data_t *mydata2) { const data_t *mydata3 = mydata2;... }
Here the variables mydata and mydata3 are marked as pointers to const data. The code within doofus123() is not allowed to change the data referenced through these pointers. But that doesn’t mean that this data is guaranteed not to change in other ways. The doofus123() function could change the data through the pointer mydata2, which points to the same location as mydata3. And we can’t assume that mydata and mydata2 point to different locations (if they do refer to the same data, this is called pointer aliasing), so there’s no guarantee that the data referenced by mydata won’t change.
In C++, if an object’s method is marked with const, it means that method cannot modify any of the non- mutable fields of the object, and that method can be called through a const * to the object, whereas non- const methods cannot be called via a const * :
class Dingus { int data; public: void setData(int x); int getData() const; }; Dingus dingus; const Dingus *pdingus = &dingus; int n = pdingus->getData(); // OK pdingus->setData(33); // illegal: pdingus is a const *
You should learn to use const! It’s the key to writing software that promises not to change data. The compiler will produce an error to stop you from inadvertently violating this promise, at least if you don’t circumvent the compiler and cast away the const qualifier. In an embedded system, it also allows you to mark initializer data in such a way that it can be stored in nonvolatile program memory rather than in generally scarcer volatile data memory:
const char author[] = "James Q McGillicuddy";
Neither the const * concept in C or the const & concept in C++ (data that the compiler will not allow you to change through const pointers and references) has an equivalent in Java; the Java final keyword applies only to the direct contents of a variable itself, and it just means that the Java compiler will not allow you to assign a final field more than once.
public class Doofus { private int x; public void setX(int newX) { this.x = newX; } } public class Dingus { final private Doofus doofus; public Dingus() { this.doofus = new Doofus(); } public void tweak() { this.doofus = new Doofus(); // illegal: doofus is final this.doofus.setX(23); // OK, we can call any public method } }
Neither language provides a way to mark data as truly immutable, however; we can only hide that data behind an API that prevents cooperating software from modifying the data.
The poster child in Java of immutability, or lack thereof, is the mutable java.util.Date class. If you want to use Date objects to record the date and time of your birthday or anniversary or upcoming colonoscopy, and you allow someone else access to those objects, you are giving them a blank check to change the fields of the Date object. To be safe, you need to make a defensive copy. That’s extra work that would be unnecessary if Date had immutable fields.
In fact, there’s a whole school of thought that everything should be immutable; the functional programming languages strongly encourage the use of immutable objects. When you want to change some object X, instead of altering its data, you create a whole new object X in its place. This sounds like a lot of extra work — but anytime you think that, go look at the advantages I cited earlier with immutable data.
An Example: The Immutable Toaster
The embedded guys who deal with plain old integer data types in C are probably looking at this and scratching their heads. Objects don’t enter the picture at all, and “new object” seems to allude to dynamic memory allocation, which a lot of us in the embedded world avoid like the plague. So here’s an example; let’s write a program that controls a toaster. It has an update function that’s called 10 times a second. Oh, and we need to modulate the heating element on and off, keeping it on at most half the time, not all the time, otherwise it will be too hot and have a tendency to burn the toast.
enum ToasterState { TS_INACTIVE, TS_TOASTING, TS_READY }; typedef struct TAG_ToasterInfo { ToasterState state; int16_t timer; bool heating_element_on; } ToasterInfo; void toaster_update(ToasterInfo *pti, bool buttonpressed, bool dooropen, int16_t dial) { if (pti->state == TS_INACTIVE) { if (buttonpressed) { pti->state = TS_TOASTING; pti->timer = 0; pti->heating_element_on = true; } } if (pti->state == TS_TOASTING) { if (pti->timer >= dial) { pti->state = TS_READY; pti->heating_element_on = false; } else { ++pti->timer; if (!pti->heating_element_on) pti->heating_element_on = true; if (pti->heating_element_on) pti->heating_element_on = false; } } if (pti->state == TS_READY) { if (dooropen) { pti->state = TS_INACTIVE; } } }
Very simple, you turn the dial to set the toasting time, press the button, the toaster turns on and starts a timer, toggling the heating element on and off, and when the timer exceeds the dial setting then the toaster turns off and waits for you to open the door before it will start again. Not much to it!
Can you find the bugs here? They’re subtle.
One problem is that we read and write pti->state all over the place in this function, and we muddle its new and old value. By “muddle”, I mean that we update pti->state at one point in the function, and then we read its value later, when we probably meant to refer to its original value at the start of the function. In this case, the effect is not that critical; it just means the toaster finishes what it’s doing a split second earlier, depending on the order of statements within the function; if we rearrange them, we might get state transitions that occur one iteration later.
The bigger problem is in the heating element toggle code:
if (!pti->heating_element_on) pti->heating_element_on = true; if (pti->heating_element_on) pti->heating_element_on = false;
This turns heating_element_on to true, but then immediately afterward, turns it to false. Again, we are muddling its new and old value.
You might think this is an obvious bug, and no sane person would write code that works that way. Why not just toggle heating_element_on :
pti->heating_element_on =!pti->heating_element_on;
Well, we could, in this case, and it would be correct. But that’s only because this is a really easy kind of behavior to design. What if we needed to do something more complicated, like run the heating element at 60% duty cycle, or if we needed to control the heating element based on a thermostat?
The problem with changing state variables in place, is that we have plenty of opportunities to write programs with errors, because the same name in a program now refers to different values, which are sensitive to the order in which we do things. Let’s say there’s some other logic in the program that needs to do something at the precise moment when the heating element is on and something else occurs. If this other logic precedes the toggle statement, then pti->heating_element_on refers to the previous heating element state, whereas if the other logic follows the toggle statement, then pti->heating_element_on refers to the next heating element state. And that’s a simple case, because there’s only one place in which the heating_element_on member is modified. In general it’s not that simple; there may be multiple places in the code where state can be modified, and if it occurs in if statements, then sometimes the state is modified and sometimes it is not. When we see pti->state or pti->heating_element_on, we can’t tell if these refer to the value of state variables as they were at the beginning of our update function, or a changed value at the end, or some intermediate transient value in the middle of calculations.
(Things get even uglier if there are complex data structures, like a linked list, where a pointer itself is modified:
plist->element.heating_element_on = true; // Line A plist = plist->next; plist->element.heating_element_on = false; // Line B
Here we have two lines, A and B, which both change mutable state, and the lines look the same, but they refer to two separate pieces of data.)
A better design for our toaster software uses separate data for input and output state:
void toaster_update(const ToasterInfo *pti, ToasterInfo *ptinext, bool buttonpressed, bool dooropen, int16_t dial) { /* default: do what we were doing */ ptinext->state = pti->state; ptinext->timer = pti->timer; /* for safety: default the heating_element_on to false */ ptinext->heating_element_on = false; if (pti->state == TS_INACTIVE) { if (buttonpressed) { ptinext->state = TS_TOASTING; ptinext->timer = 0; ptinext->heating_element_on = true; } } if (pti->state == TS_TOASTING) { if (pti->timer >= dial) { ptinext->state = TS_READY; ptinext->heating_element_on = false; } else { ptinext->timer = pti->timer + 1; if (!pti->heating_element_on) ptinext->heating_element_on = true; if (pti->heating_element_on) ptinext->heating_element_on = false; } } if (pti->state == TS_READY) { if (dooropen) { ptinext->state = TS_INACTIVE; } } }
To use this version of the update function properly, we need to avoid pointer aliasing, so that inside the function, we have complete freedom to change the contents of the next state, while still being able to assume that the contents of the existing state stays unchanged. So we can’t do this:
ToasterInfo tinfo; tinfo.state = TS_INACTIVE; while (true) { /* get inputs here */ toaster_update(&tinfo, &tinfo, buttonpressed, dooropen, dial); /* set output here based on tinfo.heating_element_on */ wait_100_msec(); }
But we could call the update function using a pair of ToasterInfo states:
ToasterInfo tinfo[2]; ToasterInfo *ptiprev = &tinfo[0]; ToasterInfo *pti = &tinfo[1]; ptiprev->state = TS_INACTIVE; while (true) { /* get inputs here */ toaster_update(ptiprev, pti, buttonpressed, dooropen, dial); /* set output here based on pti->heating_element_on */ /* swap pointers to state variables */ ToasterInfo *ptmp = pti; pti = ptiprev; ptiprev = ptmp; wait_100_msec(); }
Now when we are looking at the toaster_update() function, we can clearly distinguish the old value of the toaster state from the new value of the toaster state. And because we used const, we can have the compiler help catch our errors if we try to assign to any of the pti members instead of ptinext. Moreover, if we have the program stopped in a debugger, we can see both the previous state and the new state in their entirety, without having to do any clever sleuthing to infer this information.
This creates a little bit of extra work, but one of the key lessons of software design is that you have to make tradeoffs, and often you end up giving up a little bit of performance efficiency to gain improvements in code clarity, modularity, or maintenance.
This kind of approach (e.g. new_state = f(old_state, other_data) ), where we decouple the mutable state update from the computation of new state, is something I call “pseudo-immutability”. It’s not purely immutable, since we are storing a mutable state variable somewhere, but the data looks immutable from the standpoint of computing the new state, and the software design tends to be cleaner as a result.
A Tour of Immutable Data
One key idea when considering immutability is the value type. Values are just ways of interpreting digital bits, and the important point is what they are, not where they are stored.
Let’s say you have a software program that works with a complex number e.g. 4.02 + 7.163j; this is just a way of interpreting two 64-bit IEEE-754 floating-point values, one for the real part, and one for the imaginary part. This number exists independently of where it is stored. In fact, if we want to be purely functional, there is no storage: there are only inputs and outputs.
When we do have state containing a complex number, it happens to be just a transient place to store the 128 bits. The complex numbers themselves are nomads (“Hey, I’ll bet you didn’t realize you’ve been using monads all along!” “No, I said nomads, not monads, you creep!”) traveling from place to place, stopping inside a state variable only for a microsecond. One problem with the average approaches of programming using mutable state, is that this idea of transiency disappears. Instead, we get focused on some variable z containing a complex number, that lasts for a long time, and we poke and prod at it, and the name z might refer to an erratically changing series of values.
The alternative to a value type is a reference type, where a critical aspect of the data is where it is stored. If I have persistent mutable state in a software program, like a color palette for a window manager, the data lives somewhere, and unless I want to deal with potentially out-of-date copies, when I work with that color palette, I pass around a pointer to that data. The value of the color palette is a particular fixed choice of colors. But the window manager’s reference to the color palette is a unique container for those values; it lives in one place, and its contents can change. (In C, the term lvalue refers to a storage location, which, if it does not have a const qualifier, can be used on the left side of an assignment statement; the term rvalue refers to an expression which can be used on the right side of an assignment statement.)
Microarchitecture: Low level immutable data
Perhaps when you program, you picture RAM as kind of like one of those plastic storage containers with lots of little compartments. Locations 0x3186-0x319c contain your name; locations 0x319d-0x31f2 contain your address, and so on. At a low level, this is because RAM retains state by default: as long as we keep it happy, some pattern of bits at a particular location will stay the way they are. With static RAM (SRAM), we just provide a well-conditioned source of power; with dynamic RAM (DRAM), we have to activate refresh circuitry, which used to be part of the overall system design in a computer, but is now an intrinsic part of the memory module itself. In either case, the RAM requires an explicit write step to change its contents. On the other hand, if you look at the registers and data paths inside a processor, they are very functional in nature. Here’s the block diagram of the Microchip PIC16F84A microcontroller, from the datasheet:
The 16F84A has a register file for its data memory. The difference between a register file and SRAM is kind of a gray area that depends on the architecture and implementation. The classical definition of a register file is a small group of registers (one for each address in the register file) with separate input and output data ports; we can think of a register as a tandem group of D flip-flops, which are clocked data storage devices: during a particular clock cycle, the output of a flip-flop is constant, but at the rising edge of the clock signal, the D flip-flop’s input is captured by the flip-flop and propagated to the output during the next cycle. Memory in a D flip-flop is transient and only lasts for 1 clock cycle. If you want the data to persist in value, you have to feed the output back to the input. (Those of you who are more familiar with DSP than digital design can think of a register or a D flip-flop as a unit delay z-1.)
So a register file can be thought of as a bunch of D flip-flops and multiplexers: If you are writing new information to the register file to a particular location, the multiplexer for that register gets its data from the register file’s input port, whereas if you’re not writing to the register file, the multiplexer maintains each register’s value by getting its data from the previous value of the register.
The special-purpose registers of the 16F84A, like the program counter or the W register, are similar, but they have manually-designed data paths:
The W register is an 8-bit register which is always a function of its previous value and some other data. The exact function used depends on the arithmetic-logic unit (ALU). And this pattern is essentially the same as the “pseudo-immutable” approach I have been talking about:
new_state = f(old_state, some_other_data);
This keeps new and old state conceptually separate, as opposed to the average old mutable approach that causes us headaches:
// "state" refers to old values if (some_condition) { state.some_member = state.some_member + something_else; } // now "state" refers to new values if (other_condition) { state.other_member = state.some_member - another_thing; } // now "state" has changed again
So it’s not just the Functional Wizards who are using immutable data; at a low level, many microprocessors and microcontrollers utilize the same approach of separating input and output data.
Immutable Data Structures
Back to the high level of programming: there’s a whole subject of immutable or persistent data structures. The idea is that you don’t change the contents of data; instead, you create a new set of data.
This may seem wasteful and impractical, and in some cases it is. For example, if you have an array X of 1 million integers, and you want to change the 30257th element of X, it takes a lot of work just to create a new array with a new value for element #30257 and copies of all the other elements of X. Then if you don’t need the old array any more, you throw it away. Wasteful… except that general-purpose computers are fast and have lots of memory, and the high-level languages recycle unused memory through garbage collection. In Python, the numpy library uses optimized C code underneath to manipulate arrays, and although mutable data access is supported, there are many numpy methods that are functional in nature and create new copies of data rather than changing state in-place. The advantages usually outweigh the costs; we can design programs with fewer errors, and by separating input and output we can optimize the computation, by using parallel computations or a GPU to speed up functional programming, whereas mutating state prevents many of these optimizations.
But arrays are only one type of data structure.
For most of the usual mutable data structures, there are immutable equivalents. The classic example is the list. A mutable list might rely on a linked list implementation. Immutable lists also use linked lists, but they have that nice property, like any other immutable data structure, that the nodes of an immutable list won’t change. Here’s an example in Java:
public class ConsList<T> { private final T car; private final ConsList<T> cdr; public ConsList(T car, ConsList<T> cdr) { this.car = car; this.cdr = cdr; } public T head() { return this.car; } public ConsList<T> tail() { return this.cdr; } }
Really simple: a list consists of one item (the head() of the list) and a reference to the rest of the list (the tail() ). The names cons and car and cdr are weird names that date back to old LISP implementations, and perhaps it would have been better to get rid of cons, and use first and rest :
public class ImmutableList<T> { private final T first; private final ImmutableList<T> rest; public ImmutableList(T first, ImmutableList<T> rest) { this.first = first; this.rest = rest; } public T head() { return this.first; } public ImmutableList<T> tail() { return this.rest; } }
If we wanted to store the list (1,2,3,4) we would do it this way:
ImmutableList<Integer> list1 = new ImmutableList<Integer>(1, new ImmutableList<Integer>(2, new ImmutableList<Integer>(3, new ImmutableList<Integer>(4, null))));
We can visualize the list nodes as follows. Each contains a pair of references, one to the list head and the second to the remaining elements, with the end of the list denoted by a link to null :
Insertion at the beginning is easy:
ImmutableList<Integer> list2 = new ImmutableList<Integer>(5, list1); // this is the list (5,1,2,3,4)
Decapitation (removal of the head) is also easy:
ImmutableList<Integer> list3 = list1.tail(); // this is the list (2,3,4)
While these three lists are conceptually separate, they reuse many list nodes.
In fact, the reason these are called persistent data structures, is because the immutability of the data means that you can keep around references to older versions, and they will be unaffected by the changes to the data structure, since really there are no changes, only new structures made of nodes which may be newly allocated or may be shared with other immutable data.
Other operations (appending, or insertion/removal of interior nodes) are possible but require extra list node copies and take longer to finish. In Java, this type of list is a bit verbose to manipulate; in functional languages like LISP or Haskell, list node concatenation is a primitive operation that is much shorter to write in code.
Other data structures like queues, maps, trees, are also possible to implement using immutable techniques. There has been a great deal of research on efficient implementations of these structures, including so-called “amortized algorithms” for reducing the worst-case execution time for things like binary tree rebalancing, by spreading the occasional long operation into many short operations that extend into the future. It’s just like a home mortgage: instead of having to come up with $399,000 in one fell swoop, we go to the bank and get a 30-year 4.5% mortgage with a monthly payment of $2001. We can keep our worst-case costs per operation low by spreading them out over time.
The catch with this whole technique — whether you use complex amortized algorithms, or a simple list with cons cells — is that you need to use dynamic memory allocation, and you need to have some way of recycling unused data, namely reference counting or garbage collection. And that means that while it works great for high-level languages, in low-level languages like C or even C++, immutable data structures are difficult to manage. In C++ there are possibilities (C++11 introduced shared_ptr<> to facilitate automatic memory management; before C++11 the Boost libraries can be used for their own shared pointers); you can read about some of them in these articles.
So immutable data structures are probably out of the running in the low-level embedded world, at least until someone invents a technique for automatic memory management, that also satisfies the hard real-time, |
take into account, however, whether the shop has too much background noise to effectively communicate over the phone. We might not mind the sound of your voice, but the person you’re on the phone with might not be able to hear you over coffee grinders, steam wands and music."
Dustman adds, "We would prefer that people not Skype video because those conversations tend to get a bit more involved and eat up bigger chunks of Wi-Fi bandwidth at the same time."
Is It Ever Okay To Turn My Computer's Sound On?
Short Answer: Sound = never appropriate. Use your headphones, n00b.
All of our interviewees agreed that you should never use your computer's sound without having headphones hooked in.
The only exception? "If you’re meeting with multiple people and desperately need them to hear something, it’s not the end of the world, as long as you’re not blasting it," says Kasperowicz. And even then, it should be a really short sound clip, says Shipley. "I’ll only rarely do, say, a four-second sound clip if I want to show it to someone. And even then I’ll cup my [MacBook] Air’s speakers so I don’t bug people around me."
In the end, you don't want to look like a loser, right? Isaf explains, "Everyone just laughs at that person who is holding their laptop up to his ear trying to hear someone on Skype. Use headphones for other people's sanity and your own dignity."
What If I Need Extra Seats for My Belongings?
Short Answer: You only get one seat. Put your stuff on the floor.
Okay, we get it — you shelled out for that limited edition laptop bag, and the thought of putting it in the floor makes you feel a bit queasy. First off, if you're camping out in cafés, but buying top-notch computer accessories, perhaps you should re-evaluate your spending habits. Secondly, get over it. People are more valuable than your laptop bag. Put it on the floor.
Besides the fact that it's common courtesy, Pelsinger also explains why it may be better for your pocketbook: "In the big picture, using more than one seat and crowding out paying customers is a bad idea. It'll raise prices in the long term, and likely inspire greater crackdowns on the availability of Wi-Fi, outlets, etc." He adds, "I also think it kills the sort of café-culture that likely draws most people to do work there in the first place."
And what if people aren't around? Is it okay to occupy more than one seat? Shipley can clarify that for you:
"It’s not even okay to set your bag on a chair with the 'I’ll move it if someone looks at me' thought, because you discourage people from even approaching the spot. We make sure all our stuff is at our feet, or on our chair in front of us if we’re working standing up at the counter, which we started doing this year. We make darn sure not to even encroach on the spaces around us — like, keep our cups and napkins well 'on our side,' so that the places around us look inviting. And we tend to bus dishes for anyone who forgets, just so it doesn’t even appear that we’re staking out an entire table or counter."
Is It Kosher To Ask Others To Watch My Stuff?
Short Answer: Certainly! They'll watch your stuff, and you can watch theirs when they need it.
Dunning explains that watching your neighbor's belongings is "an unspoken rule of coffee shop etiquette." He continues, "We're not the airport — it's perfectly okay to keep an eye on someone's stuff while they use the restroom or step outside to make a phone call (so they don't disturb the other guests!). If no one else is in the café, ask the staff. The last thing you'd want is your stuff to disappear because you went to the restroom while the staff wasn't aware and someone just walks in and walks out with your stuff."
Kasperowicz warns, though, "You can't expect them to devote a huge amount of their attention or energy to the task." So, keep your requests within reason.
Are Group Meetings Welcome?
Short Answer: It depends on how many people the space can accommodate, but four is the magic number.
If you've spent enough time in the coffee shop at hand, you probably have a feel for how many people it can handle and when the busy hours are. If you're planning on setting up a group meeting, consult the baristas or call ahead to see if there's enough space for the time and date you have in mind.
In group situations, make sure to keep the noise level down and purchase drinks or food. Pelsinger suggests, "As a rule though, if you’re with a group of 10 and you are making more noise and causing greater distraction than five groups of two people, try to rein it in a little."
Dunning and Dustman agree that four people seems to be the tipping point. "Four people can be handled pretty smoothly, both for the lack of table rearrangement and maintenance of reasonable noise levels," says Dustman. "You can also pull a couple tables for four together to have a meeting for up to around eight people without too much trouble. We would just ask that everyone buy something and help out by putting the tables and chairs back where you found them."
What Can I Do on the Wi-Fi?
Short Answer: Be considerate, and keep to the basics of browsing the web and checking email.
Be grateful that your local coffee shop offers free Wi-Fi, and show it by limiting the amount of bandwidth you're using. Dunning puts it very nicely:
"This is impossible for the staff to control, so we depend on everyone to police themselves. But really, we should respect each other and keep coffee shop activities to the basics of browsing the web, email, etc. Uploading or downloading large files, using BitTorrent, or online gaming are not appropriate uses of free coffee shop Wi-Fi."
Pelsinger adds that continued abuse could lead to more coffee shops cracking down: "Just think about where that's going in the long term. More and more coffeeshops are limiting access, and to the extent it's completely wide open, use it responsibly. This means you don't need to spend the entire time downloading enormous files while simultaneously streaming video and Skyping. As a caveat, if you've got your own MiFi card, you can use as much bandwidth as you like."
Here's a general rule of thumb offered up by Kasperowicz: "If it’s taking up enough bandwidth that you notice your own Internet crawling at a snail’s pace, that might be too much. However, I think most shops with free Wi-Fi have a decent enough connection to avoid this, and I’ve never noticed it to be a problem."
Final Tips
We asked each of our entrepreneurs and coffee shop vets to give some final tips of advice for others hoping to master the coffee-shop-as-office lifestyle. Isaf says that in most cases, the trick is to follow the Golden Rule: "Don’t be 'that guy.' Everyone knows who 'that guy' is … don't be him." Here's a bit of insight to exactly what that means:Long before Sony tried to beat cable operators at the pay-TV game, it tried hard – very hard -- to join them.
During the 16 years leading up to the commercial debut of PlayStation Vue, the OTT-pay TV service from Sony that launched in three markets on Wednesday and will compete with cable operators and other MVPDs, the CE giant embarked on a variety of initiatives aimed at working directly with the MSOs.
Many of those occasionally successful efforts involved selling set-tops to cable operators, and developing conditional access schemes that aimed to drive a wedge into the old General Instrument/Scientific-Atlanta (now Arris/Cisco Systems) duopoly. Sony even tried its hand at helping to push the tru2way platform as part of an ambitious, but ultimately failed, attempt to establish a robust retail market for cable-ready devices equipped with the clunky CableCARD.
While all of those attempts were novel, most fell short. Here’s a look at some of Sony’s U.S. pay-TV efforts over the years.
September 1999: The Cablevision/Sony deal
Marking its entry to the U.S. cable market while also dealing a blow to GI and S-A, Sony struck a $1 billion-plus deal to supply interactive, digital set-top boxes to Cablevision Systems.
Sony’s partnership with Cablevision didn’t go well or last long. In 2002, Cablevision shifted gears, opting to hitch its digital wagon to S-A boxes and headends. Importantly, Cablevision got S-A to agree to integrate conditional access technology from NDS Group (now part of Cisco), which was already being used in Cablevision’s Sony boxes. This ensured that Cablevision was able to keep its set-top box options relatively open because it did not have to be tied to the hip to S-A’s PowerKEY conditional access system.
-December 2002: Sony Books “Passage” To Set-Top Glory
Back when we still had The Western Show, Sony used the event in Anaheim to trot out “Passage,” a technology/technique that enabled two different conditional access systems to run side-by-side at the headend without gobbling up a bunch of bandwidth. Boiled down, Passage was another shot at the cable box/security duopoly, viewed as a way to open up the door to new entrants.
It was an intriguing idea that gained some steam in the form of licensing agreements with Charter Communications, Comcast and even some device and chipmakers, including Conexant and Zenith/LG, but Passage never got beyond some trial work.
-May 2008: The Cable/Sony Tru2way MOU
Back when tru2way was still considered a possible path to retail nirvana for two-way video devices, Sony and what were then the six largest incumbent U.S. cable operators (Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House) struck a condition-laden, complicated, binding memorandum of understanding for “interactive digital cable products” – mainly set-tops – that aimed to forge a “common reliance” around the deployment and adoption of tru2way in devices and on the network.
Among the commitments outlined in the MOU, the MSOs were tasked with providing network support tru2way in all digital cable systems by July 1, 2009 (Charter had until July 1, 2010). While the MOU still didn’t result in a big set-top pay day for Sony, the MOU did help the cable industry fend off a rival interactive platform called DCR+ favored by parties such as the Consumer Electronics Association.
November 2008: Sony’s Set-Top ‘Set-Back’
When Sony was still playing the tru2way tune, it partnered up with Advanced Digital Broadcast (ADB) on an interactive “set-back” box that could be mounted behind a Sony Bravia TVs. The ADB-made set-back box is still finding deployment opportunities, but Sony’s interest in using it in tandem with TVs sold at retail died on the vine. However, it did make a temporary appearance in 2009 at a Sony retail outlet that used to be located at the Comcast Center in Philadelphia (Sony closed the store last year).
January 2011: Sony, TWC Do A TV Deal
Before the video app craze and authenticated TV Everywhere apps started to take hold, Time Warner Cable and Sony used the CES confab in 2011 to announce that the operator would deliver its full TV lineup to connected Sony Bravia TVs later that year without needing a separate set-top. The MSO’s TWC TV app is now offered on a several platforms, including Samsung smart TVs, but still hasn’t shown up on any Sony TVs.Israeli Cabinet Voted to Assassinate Arafat Year Before He "Died"
By Richard Silverstein
February 27, 2014 " Information Clearing House - " Tikun Olam- " - The Gatekeepers, originally a documentary film and now a book, continues to offer a wealth of inside information about the Israeli national security apparatus. The latest tidbit an Israeli friend gleaned is this September 2003 Yediot article recounting the decisions made during an Israeli security cabinet meeting chaired by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: He Will Be Gotten Rid Of The cabinet decision of last night to get rid of Yasser Arafat has no immediate impact since the timing has not been determined. Sharon, who formulated the decision [during the meeting], preferred to leave the matter vague and indeterminate between expulsion or assassination. The decision was supported by every member of the [security] cabinet except for Interior Minister Poraz, who opposed. Within 14 months of this meeting, Arafat was dead. It is about as clear as anything can be that the cabinet voted to give Sharon carte blanche to determine where, how and when to remove Arafat as a threat to Israel. Sharon could choose life (in exile) or death. We know the result. It almost doesn’t matter whether Swiss forensic scientists can prove he was poisoned and by whom. We know who did it. We just don’t know precisely how he achieved the result. There is a wealth of circumstantial evidence offered by an Israeli confidant of Sharon and others arguing that Sharon intended to kill Arafat. This news report adds another piece to the puzzle.Richard Gowan is the author of a new report from The Century Foundation, “Can Trump and the United Nations Just Get Along?” He is a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and teaches at Columbia University.
For Donald Trump, appearing at the United Nations General Assembly this week will be a personal and political reckoning. The president has long nurtured a love-hate relationship with the organization, never quite getting over his failure to win a contract to refurbish its Turtle Bay headquarters in the early 2000s.
Yet Trump also needs U.N. diplomacy to work more urgently than any other president in recent memory. While Trump has often bashed the U.N. as inefficient and anti-American, the crisis with North Korea has forced him to take the organization seriously. In the space of two months, the U.S. has persuaded China and Russia to sign on to two hefty packages of sanctions on Kim Jong Un’s regime in response to its missile and nuclear tests.
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Trump has publicly questioned whether the sanctions will work, and rightly so: Even advocates of the U.N. approach admit that the measures are unlikely to change Pyongyang’s calculation on their own. But as of now, the U.S. has no other way to stave off military action and keep China and Russia engaged on the crisis than working through the Security Council. The net result is that a president who once promised a unilateralist, or outright isolationist, foreign policy is leaning hard on the world’s main multilateral body to manage the main crisis on his agenda.
Some may see this as indicative of America’s weakening global position. For Trump, it may feel like just one more stage in a long saga with the U.N. As the president addresses his fellow leaders, his mind could wander back to his days as a construction magnate. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he repeatedly tussled with the institution over building projects. The trouble began when he put up the Trump World Tower, a charmless black behemoth on 1st Avenue, south of the U.N.’s iconic modernist headquarters.
Kofi Annan, the secretary-general at the time, grumbled about the tower and the shadow it cast in the neighborhood, but Trump was unmoved. He offered to overhaul the U.N, building, which was in a bad state by the early 2000s. He claimed that he could do the job, which cost more than $1.5 billion, for $500 million and warned that other contractors would play the U.N. “like the Pittsburgh Steelers playing my high school football team.” In 2005, he told a Senate committee reviewing the issue that he had a “dream” of moving the U.N. to the World Trade Center site to free up its Midtown East grounds for fresh real estate development (oddly, he also used the opportunity to argue that asbestos was a far safer building material than is generally recognized). But the international bureaucrats did not take his bait, and there were rumors that other wealthy New Yorkers had warned Annan not to trust Trump. Since then, he has often attacked the U.N. yet had a curious urge to put it right.
On the campaign trail last year, Trump belittled the U.N. as “not a friend of democracy, it's not a friend to freedom, it's not a friend even to the United States of America.” But in this, unlike his unorthodox critiques of NATO and America’s Asian alliances, he was simply repeating standard Republican attacks. More strikingly, Trump also mused about how much good he could do for the U.N. In May 2016, having wrapped up the Republican nomination, he told the New York Times that he was already mulling possible envoys to Turtle Bay. “The U.N. isn’t doing anything to end the big conflicts in the world,” he explained, “so you need an ambassador who would win by really shaking up the U.N.”
Trump’s obsession with the U.N. continued to oscillate between extremes after his election. He slammed the body as a club for diplomats to “have a good time” after the Security Council passed a resolution criticizing Israeli settlement-building in December. Yet shortly afterward, Trump had a “very positive discussion” with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres by phone on their shared interest in the organization’s “great potential.” A few months after taking office, Trump invited Security Council ambassadors for a surprisingly jovial lunch at the White House. Apparently forgetting that he was no longer campaigning, he reassured his guests that he was more convinced of the U.N.’s potential than “any candidate in the last 30 years would even have thought to say.”
“I see a day when there’s a conflict where the United Nations, you get together, and you solve the conflict,” he meandered on optimistically. “You just don’t see the United Nations, like, solving conflicts. I think that’s going to start happening now. I can see it.”
So Trump has long fancied himself as both a scourge of the U.N. and its potential savior. His administration’s policies to date have been similarly confused. Taking office in the wake of the Israeli settlements resolution, the administration initially threatened to exact cuts of 40 percent on U.S. contributions to international institutions. But Trump’s new ambassador in New York, Nikki Haley, quickly recognized that “really shaking up the U.N.” with these cuts would be almost impossible. When Haley aimed to slice a symbolically powerful $1 billion out of the U.N.’s $8 billion peacekeeping budget early this summer, she had to settle for $500 million, largely involving savings from old U.N. missions that were already shrinking.
Trump’s personal challenge to the U.N. system, announcing the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate change accords, has also backfired. Whereas the president may have hoped that some big energy producers like Russia and Saudi Arabia might follow his lead, precisely zero other countries have threatened to abrogate the agreement. Trump found himself embarrassingly isolated at this year’s G-7 and G-20 summits on the issue, and has even dropped some insubstantial hints that he could reverse his decision. Having found the international system rather more robust than expected, Trump and Haley have had to rethink their approach.
This week, the administration will try to rebrand the president as a constructive friend of the U.N. system. Trump is bound to criticize the organization on issues such as its bias toward Israel, but he will also a chair a special meeting on ways to make the U.N. secretariat and operations more efficient. Haley has forged a solid working relationship with Secretary-General Guterres around these questions. Guterres, a Portuguese socialist with a taste for philosophical discussion, is not an obvious chum for Trump. But as the former head of the U.N. Refugee Agency, he is also a critic of the organization’s sprawling bureaucracy.
Over the past few months, Guterres has rolled out a series of plans to rationalize the U.N. development system, run its peacekeeping operations better and cut through it knotty managerial regulations. Haley has adopted this agenda wholesale, seeing it as a smarter tactic to slim the system than the blunt instrument of cuts, and Trump will use his trip to New York to endorse it, too. Some 120 world leaders and foreign ministers are slated to hear the president expatiate on the issues such as the U.N.’s need to (in the words of communiqué pre-cooked by American, British and other diplomats in New York) “attract, develop and retain high-performing staff members, and to promote gender parity and geographic diversity.”
Given the president’s usual rhetorical themes, this might be a rather bizarre experience for all concerned. There’s no guarantee that Trump won’t ramble dangerously off script. But it is also possible that he will see this as his chance to resolve the managerial problems that stopped him from wrangling $500 million out of Kofi Annan a little over a decade ago. There is a small chance that Trump will be a passionate U.N. reformer.
Yet at the end of the day, the president’s relations with the U.N. will not be defined by his willingness to footle around in institutional reform debates. It will be decided by whether the Security Council can stick together over North Korea.
Pyongyang’s provocations this year have forced the administration to return repeatedly to the Security Council to condemn North Korea, and Haley has managed to negotiate two hefty packages of sanctions that rank high on the administration’s short list of foreign policy successes.
Without the U.N. option, it would be extraordinarily difficult for Trump to avoid a major bust-up with China and Russia over Korea. While Trump has questioned whether China is willing or able to bring Pyongyang to heel, Beijing is only likely to cooperate under the diplomatic cover of U.N. diplomacy.
The George W. Bush and Obama administrations went through excruciating periods of Security Council diplomacy over Iraq and Syria, respectively, but Trump’s position is arguably even more delicate. The Bush administration saw the Security Council as an obstacle to sideline on the road to overthrowing Saddam Hussein. The Obama team used protracted U.N. negotiations as a way to avoid calls for intervention against Damascus. But given North Korea’s progress on nuclear and missile technology, Trump cannot follow the Obama model and let U.N. talks drag on indefinitely. And if he follows the Bush route and steps away from the Council, the only real alternative is to prepare for military action against a much more daunting opponent than Saddam.
Haley declared last week that she would have no problem “kicking” the Korean issue to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, as he “has plenty of options.” The only slight problem is that many or all of these options involve the risk of a devastating war.
If the U.S. does eventually slide toward a full-scale war with North Korea, the Security Council will almost certainly split furiously, just as it did over Iraq in 2003. Trump has to hope that China will eventually use its leverage to keep the crisis in check. He may have to make concessions to Beijing — which insists that the U.S. should freeze its military exercises with South Korea as the basis for talks with Pyongyang — to keep the U.N. route alive. That would be hard for him to stomach, but he has very few credible alternatives.
So while Trump will dominate proceedings at the U.N. this week, and may even win some credit from other leaders for taking a more constructive approach to reforming the organization, he is ultimately in a highly vulnerable position in Turtle Bay. Even a gradual deterioration of relations with the Chinese and Russians in the Security Council could plunge his administration into a vastly deeper mess than it is in already. This prospect would haunt the thoughts of most presidents navigating the U.N. General Assembly.
But Trump’s mind may wander. How would he have refurbished the U.N.? He has never quite let this question go. In 2012, Trump tweeted that he was bothered by the “cheap” marble tiles behind world leaders speaking at the General Assembly. “I will replace them with beautiful large marble slabs if they ask me,” he added. Perhaps he will now renew the offer. It’s more fun to think about than nuclear war, after all.The Weather Service Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) network within the United States has recently been upgraded to include dual-polarization capability. Among the expectations that have resulted from the upgrade is the ability to discriminate between different precipitation types in winter precipitation events. To know how well any such algorithm performs and whether new algorithms are an improvement, observations of winter precipitation type are needed. Unfortunately, the automated observing systems cannot discriminate between some of the more important types. Thus, human observers are needed. Yet, to deploy dedicated human observers is impractical because the knowledge needed to identify the various precipitation types is common among the public. To most efficiently gather such observations would require the public to be engaged as citizen scientists using a very simple, convenient, nonintrusive method. To achieve this, a simple “app” called mobile Precipitation Identification Near the Ground (mPING) was developed to run on “smart” phones or, more generically, web-enabled devices with GPS location capabilities. Using mPING, anyone with a smartphone can pass observations to researchers at no additional cost to their phone service or to the research project. Deployed in mid-December 2012, mPING has proven to be not only very popular, but also capable of providing consistent, accurate observational data.
An app for smartphones allows citizen scientists to provide observations about winter precipitation type at the surface at least equivalent in quality to human-augmented Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) observations.
ARCHITECTURE. Section: Choose Top of page Abstract WHY THIS IS SUCH A GREAT... ARCHITECTURE. << CONSIDERATIONS. WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED AND... REFERENCES CITING ARTICLES The mobile Precipitation Identification Near the Ground project (now changed to meteorological Phenomena Identification Near the Ground in a recent upgrade to the app) originated in 2006 as a way to gather validation information to assess the performance of the HCA as a surface precipitation type classifier (Elmore 2011). In the project's initial form, observations were entered through a web page interface (Fig. 1). Observations were requested within a 150-km radius of the KOUN (Norman, Oklahoma) test bed radar because, at the time, it was the sole WSR-88D-based dual-pol prototype. Users provided their latitude and longitude, based on either their own knowledge or through any of a number of web-based geolocation services, the time of the observation, and, through radio buttons, the precipitation type. The resulting data were added to a large database system maintained at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL). While data collection through the web form continues, it has become clear that with the nationwide dual-pol upgrade to the WSR-88D, a more effective data gathering means is both needed and attainable.
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This led to a program based on the Severe Hazards and Verification Experiment (SHAVE; Ortega et al. 2009) wherein students actively probe areas of winter weather via telephone calls, seeking observations of precipitation type. While the winter SHAVE was successful, it became clear that targeting areas of transitional precipitation types, such as mixes, freezing precipitation, and ice pellets, is not straightforward; standard surface observations are inadequate; radar clues are ambiguous; and such regions are relatively small and transient in nature. One of us (Flamig) has substantial experience developing weather-based apps for iOS devices and offered to help develop one that would support widespread, easy submission of precipitation type observations. The iOS development of mPING and the Android version are functionally identical but follow different operating system guidelines and so look very different. So far, apps exist only for the iOS and Android platforms, as these make up about 80% of the devices currently in use. Versions for other platforms may be developed in the future. Among the key features of mPING are immediate feedback to users that their submission has been accepted and the ability to display and even download all submissions using a web-based display (viewable from within the apps). Up to 24 h of reports from across the continental United States and for any day back to November 2006 can be displayed. While users remain anonymous, the report density and frequency is such that when the display is centered on the user's location and magnified (zoomed in), individual reports are easily seen when they appear. The display can be seen using a desktop browser at www.nssl.noaa.gov/projects/ping/display/ (Fig. 2). A simplified display (with zoom capability) is used for mobile devices (www.nssl.noaa.gov/projects/ping/display/phone.php).
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CONSIDERATIONS. Section: Choose Top of page Abstract WHY THIS IS SUCH A GREAT... ARCHITECTURE. CONSIDERATIONS. << WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED AND... REFERENCES CITING ARTICLES We paid particular attention to simplicity. The user interface had to be very simple (Fig. 3), and data entry had to also be simple and intuitive, not because users lack sophistication, but because the app must remain unobstrusive. Users are extremely concerned about battery life, so the app has to be smart about the way it uses the GPS engine, which is a significant power drain. To both avoid confusion and to standardize the various types that can be reported, users choose from a limited number of precipitation types with a pull-down menu (Fig. 4). These types are test, none, hail, rain, drizzle, freezing rain, freezing drizzle, snow, wet snow, mixed rain and snow, mixed rain and ice pellets, mixed ice pellets and snow, ice pellets/sleet, and graupel/snow grains. Descriptions of the various precipitation types are internally documented within the app itself and also described on the mPING website at www.nssl.noaa.gov/projects/ping/types.php. For hail only, an additional parameter (size to the nearest 0.6 cm or 0.25 in.) is also required. Location and observation time (in UTC) are gathered from the device's internal GPS engine. Thus, only the precipitation type is provided by the user; all else is automatic. The WSHCA research at NSSL is focused exclusively on precipitation type so no intensity estimates are requested.
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To avoid rapid, inadvertent data submission while the device is being carried in a pocket or purse, a 5-min lockout timer is enforced so that observations can be entered at no higher frequency. The 5-min lockout timer also suppresses malicious attempts to rapidly enter misleading data. The most recent release of the app has relaxed the lockout timer to 30 s so that rapidly changing convective phenomena can be better captured. Both the mobile apps and the web page submit information via HTTP to a common database that validates user input (to prevent malicious attacks, but not to quality control the observations) and provides persistent storage of the public reports. All quality control is done in postprocessing. We have so far found that these crowd-sourced data are very high quality when measured by internal temporal and spatial consistency. It is clear to us that the vast majority of entries are made with the best intentions. Even so, mistakes occur and the occasional misleading report appears. Fortunately, misleading reports in particular are very obvious (e.g., 20-cm hail reports in the absence of convection, rain in midst of large-scale snow, reports of precipitation in areas known to be clear, etc.) and are easy to remove by hand through simple inspection.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work was supported by the NEXRAD Product Improvement Program by NOAA/Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. Funding was provided by NOAA/Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research under NOAA–University of Oklahoma Cooperative Agreement NA11OAR4320072, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NOAA, the U.S. DOC, or the University of Oklahoma.Divine Pleasures: Painting from India’s Rajput Courts—The Kronos Collections an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, June 14–September 12, 2016 Catalog of the exhibition by Terence McInerney with Steven M. Kossak and Navina Najat Haidar
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 262 pp., $50.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Poetry and Devotion in Indian Painting: Two Decades of Collecting an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, June 15–December 4, 2016
In the intense heat of the Indian summer of 1739, a Persian army could be seen heading in triumph away from the looted city of Delhi. Delhi was the capital of the great Mughals, the Muslim dynasty, originally of Central Asian origin, that had ruled much of India since the mid-sixteenth century. As the Persian army made its way homeward through the Punjab, it carried away with it piles of treasures gathered from across India by many generations of Mughal emperors.
At the head of the column rode Nader Shah. Nader was the son of a nomadic shepherd from the Iranian-Afghan borderlands of Khurasan. He had risen rapidly owing to his remarkable military talents. In 1732 he had seized the Persian throne. Seven years later, in the spring of 1739, he invaded Afghanistan, then descended the Khyber Pass into India. At Kurnal, north of Delhi, he defeated three merged Mughal armies—around a million men—with a force of only 150,000 musketeers.
Nader Shah lured the old-fashioned Mughal cavalry into making a massed frontal charge. As they neared the Persians, his light cavalry then parted like a curtain, leaving the Mughals facing a long line of mounted musketeers, each of whom was armed with the latest in eighteenth-century weaponry: armor-penetrating, horse-mounted swivel guns. They fired at point-blank range. Within a few minutes, the flower of Mughal chivalry lay dead on the ground. Then the Persians moved into Delhi and began to systematically strip it of its vast riches: “Now commenced the work of spoliation, watered by the tears of the people,” wrote a Delhi courtier a fortnight later. “Whole families were ruined. Many swallowed poison, and others ended their days with the stab of a knife…. In short the accumulated wealth of centuries changed masters in a moment.”
For a month, hundreds of conscripted laborers were employed in melting down and casting into ingots the mountains of plundered gold and silver jewelry seized by the Persians. Nader Shah eventually left, carrying with him the bejeweled Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan, in which was embedded both the Koh-i Nur diamond and the great Timur ruby—probably the two most valuable jewels in the world—as well as many other priceless treasures loaded on “700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses carrying wagons all laden with gold, silver and precious stones.” Hundreds of pack animals carrying jewels and solid gold were lost in the monsoon floodwaters as the army crossed the swollen river Chenab; others fell down steep cliffs as…Manchester United are facing a tough battle to prise Renato Sanches from Benfica this summer because the Portuguese champions are eager to keep the gifted teenage midfielder for another season.
Sanches, 18, a fast, powerful box-to-box midfielder, has been a revelation since breaking into the Benfica first team last October and is widely regarded in Portugal as the most exciting talent to emerge in the country since Cristiano Ronaldo.
United have had Sanches watched extensively in recent months and were due to dispatch a scout to run the rule over him playing the player for Portugal in their friendly against Belgium in Leiria on Tuesday night.
Benfica’s strong preference is to retain Sanches’ services for another 12 months in the belief that his valuation is likely only to increase although such a stance would also work as a strong negotiating tactic given the clamour among Europe’s leading clubs for him.
Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Barcelona are also among those interested but Benfica are thought to want at least €60 million (£47 million) with a substantial upfront payment in the region of £30 million.
United are mindful that the projected £61.6 million fee they paid Monaco last August for Anthony Martial, then a 19-year-old forward who was relatively unknown outside his native France, has raised the price for Europe’s most talented youngsters, just as the Premier League’s impending new £8 billion television deal is forcing up fees for English clubs."He offered me some cabinet positions, which I'm very, very thankful for. It just didn't work out in terms of my private life,” Rudy Giuliani said. | AP Photo Giuliani: Trump 'didn't forget' about me and Christie
Donald Trump may have passed over longtime loyalists Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie for positions in his administration, but the president-elect “didn't forget about us,” the former New York City mayor said Wednesday morning.
"He offered me some Cabinet positions, which I'm very, very thankful for. It just didn't work out in terms of my private life,” Giuliani said on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” Wednesday morning when asked whether he has any hurt feelings about being left out of the Trump administration.
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“You wanted a certain challenge,” Fox News co-anchor Brian Kilmeade interjected. “The only challenge you really wanted was secretary of state.”
“That's true. But he offered me jobs that probably at a different time in my life, I would have taken in a minute. They'd have been a great honor,” Giuliani said. “I've got a big law firm. I've got a big consulting firm. I am extremely busy. And at 72 years old, there was only one challenge I thought that really was left for me. The others wouldn't have been a challenge.”
The former New York City mayor, one of Trump’s highest-profile surrogates on the campaign trail, was widely considered to be a shoe-in for a job in the incoming administration. He was believed to be in the running for the job of attorney general or secretary of homeland security, but Giuliani made clear that he was interested in the position of secretary of state, a job that ultimately was given to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson shortly after Giuliani withdrew his name from consideration.
Christie, too, appeared likely to be on the receiving end of a job offer from Trump in the days immediately after the election but has thus far been shut out. The New Jersey governor’s name was floated for many of the same jobs Giuliani's name was raised for, including U.S. attorney general and secretary of homeland security, |
withstand collateral damage. They can withstand night raids. But murder is something that they totally abhor, and when that happens, they really want justice."
In a statement issued by his office, Karzai said the killings took place in the district of Panjwai, about 25 km (15 miles) southwest of Kandahar, southern Afghanistan's major city. Haji Agha Lali, a member of the provincial council, told CNN the soldier had attacked four houses in two nearby villages.
"We call this an intentional act," Karzai said. He said the dead included four men, three women and nine children, calling the killings "acts of terror and unforgivable." Another five people were wounded, he said.
JUST WATCHED U.S. service member detained in Kandahar Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH U.S. service member detained in Kandahar 04:27
JUST WATCHED Reid: Afghanistan timetable still works Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Reid: Afghanistan timetable still works 01:54
Map: Afghanistan
Capt. Justin Brockhoff, an ISAF spokesman, said the wounded Afghans were being treated in ISAF facilities. The allied command did not give its own estimate of casualties.
Brockhoff said officials do not yet have a motive for the shooting, which is under investigation by both NATO and Afghan officials. And Maj. Jason Waggoner, another ISAF spokesman, said the soldier "was acting on his own."
There were no military operations in the area, either on the ground or in the air, at the time, according to two senior ISAF officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. They said only one soldier, an Army staff sergeant, is believed to have been involved.
A U.S. military official told CNN later Sunday that the suspect is from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. The official said the soldier is assigned to a Special Forces unit.
A third ISAF official said Afghan troops spotted the soldier leaving his combat outpost around 3 a.m. Sunday and notified their American counterparts. The U.S. military did an immediate headcount, found the soldier was missing and dispatched a patrol to go look for him, the official said.
The officials said they have no knowledge at this point whether he had any previous medical or mental health issues in his record.
The patrol met him as he returned and took him into custody. He said nothing, and it was unclear whether they knew what had happened, the official said.
"We don't know what motivated this individual, and we're not sure where this is going to take us," Capt. John Kirby, an ISAF spokesman, told CNN. But he said ISAF's commander, Gen. John Allen, "has made it clear this investigation is going to be thorough. It's going to be done rapidly, in an expeditious way, and we're going to hold the perpetrator of these attacks to account."
The news brought a wave of condemnations from top American officials. In a statement issued by the White House, Obama said the U.S. military will "get the facts as quickly as possible and to hold accountable anyone responsible."
"I am deeply saddened by the reported killing and wounding of Afghan civilians. I offer my condolences to the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives, and to the people of Afghanistan, who have endured too much violence and suffering," Obama said. "This incident is tragic and shocking, and does not represent the exceptional character of our military and the respect that the United States has for the people of Afghanistan."
In a separate statement, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said he was "shocked and saddened" by the attack and said the suspect was "clearly acting outside his chain of command." Allen called the killings "deeply appalling," and acting U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham said his country was "saddened by this violent act against our Afghan friends."
"We deplore any attack by a member of the U.S. Armed Forces against innocent civilians," he said in a video statement, assuring "the people of Afghanistan that the individual or individuals responsible for this terrible act will be identified and brought to justice."
But Seraj, a member of Afghanistan's former royal family, said the killings are likely to play into the hands of the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist movement that has battled the U.S.-led coalition for a decade.
"They are really going to milk this for all it's worth," Seraj said, adding, "This is playing right into their program of psychological warfare against the Afghan people."
The Taliban has already said that the deaths were the result of a night raid by several soldiers and put the death toll at 50, but it regularly exaggerates casualty figures.
Seraj called for a joint U.S.-Afghan investigation into the killings, saying Afghans will want to see "quick and decisive justice."
"We cannot whitewash this and get this young man out of Afghanistan and send him back to the United States. That is the worst thing we can do at this time," he said. And he questioned how the soldier left his post in the pre-dawn hours, adding, "I know the Kandahar base. A fly cannot get in without being searched."
Kandahar and the surrounding region is the home of the Taliban, and eight of the 69 coalition troops killed in Afghanistan so far this year died in the province. But Kirby said the area has been "a big success story" for the allied campaign, and he said Allen has made clear that the coalition strategy won't be affected by Sunday's killings.
"As tragic as this incident is, it would be a larger tragedy to affect the mission at large and what we're trying to do for the country," he said.
"We're going to continue to be out there among the populace," he added. "We're going to continue to try to beat back this insurgency."
The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001, following al Qaeda's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people. The invasion quickly toppled the Taliban, which ruled most of Afghanistan and had allowed al Qaeda to operate from its territory. But the militia soon regrouped and launched an insurgent campaign against the allied forces and a new government led by Karzai.
The No. 1 U.S. target in the conflict, al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, was killed in a commando raid in neighboring Pakistan in May 2011. American and allied combat troops are scheduled to leave Afghanistan by 2014, and Karzai has been increasingly critical of the allied force.
Tensions ramped up dramatically in February, after a group of U.S. soldiers burned copies of the Quran, Islam's holy book, that had been seized from inmates at the American-run prison at Bagram Air Base. American officials from Obama down called the burning an accident and apologized for it, but riots left dozens dead, including six American troops. Hundreds more Afghans were wounded.
The war has cost the lives of nearly 1,900 Americans and just under 1,000 more allied troops to date.Batten down the hatches—Navy accused of pirating 585k copies of VR software
Bitmanagement Software says Navy “did not license” its virtual reality product
A German maker of 3D virtual reality software is accusing the US Navy of engaging in wanton piracy, and we’re not talking about piracy on the high seas. This is about digital piracy of software, according to a federal lawsuit brought by Bitmanagement Software. The company is seeking copyright infringement damages of more than $596 million (€543 million) from the Navy for allegedly stealing more than 558,000 copies of its BS Contact Geo software.
The amount of damages, if the Navy loses, could go up substantially. Bitmanagement also noted that, in addition to licensing fees, it is seeking pre- and post-judgement interest, punitive damages, legal costs, attorney fees, and statutory damages that could amount to $150,000 per infringement.
According to the lawsuit (PDF) filed in the US Court of Federal Claims:
In 2011 and 2012, Bitmanagement agreed to license its software to the Navy on a limited and experimental basis. those individual PC-based licenses authorities the Navy to install BS Contact Geo on a total of just 38 computers for the purposes of testing, trial runs, and integration into Navy systems. In order to facilitate such testing and integration of the software on Navy computers in preparation for the large scale licensing desired by the Navy, it was necessary for Bitmanagement to remove the control mechanism that tracked and limited the use of the software.
Based on the quality and performance of the BS Contact Geo—including the interactive functionality and high-quality graphics that make it particularly useful to large military organizations—the Navy determined that it would deploy the software on a larger scale, and began negotiations with Bitmanagement for the purchase of numerous additional licenses.
While those negotiations were ongoing, however, and without Bitmanagement’s advance knowledge or consent, the Navy installed BS Contact Geo software onto hundreds of thousands of computers. Bitmanagement did not license or otherwise authorize these uses of its software, and the Navy has never compensated Bitmanagement for these uses of Bitmanagement’s software.
Via ars technica
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The Register
Saturday, Oct 17th, 2009
Arms globocorp Lockheed Martin announced today that it has won a $31m contract from the famous Pentagon crazy-ideas bureau, DARPA, to reinvent the internet and make it more suitable for military use. Microsoft will also be involved in the effort.
The main thrust of the effort will be to develop a new Military Network Protocol, which will differ from old hat such as TCP/IP in that it will offer “improved security, dynamic bandwidth allocation, and policy-based prioritization levels at the individual and unit level”.
“New network threats and attacks require revolutionary protection concepts,” said Lockheed cyber-arsenal chieftain John Mengucci. “Through this project, as well as our cyber Mission Maker initiatives, we are working to enhance cyber security and ensure that warfighters* can fight on despite cyber attacks.”
Lockheed will be partnered with Anagran, Juniper Networks, LGS Innovations, Stanford University and – of course – Microsoft in developing the MNP. Apart from that, Lockheed’s own Information Systems & Global Services-Defense tentacle will work on amazing new hardware.
Full article hereA group of students is genetically modifying the green flowerless plant so it can be medicine or food for a future permanent human outpost on the planet Mars.
This is in conjunction with the so-called iGEM competition, the global student competition in Synthetic Biology. The Copenhagen team is called SpaceMoss and it is also trying to modify the moss so it produces an antifreeze gene to resist the extreme cold on the planet.
“We got the genes to modify the moss now and in a couple of weeks the transformations should be done,” says Jonathan Arnesen, a University of Copenhagen student who is on the SpaceMoss team.
Someday astronauts will be able to plant fields
“Going to Mars is difficult. Not only for the astronauts but also for whatever living organism they might bring with them. For in order to create a sustainable colony on Mars the would-be colonizers would need biological systems to sustain them, instead of relying solely on costly shipments sent from earth,” explains Jonathan Arnesen.
The iGEM SpaceMoss team plan to take the first steps in creating such a biological system. They have chosen moss because it is a hardy plant.
One of the two Mars Environmental Chambers the SpaceMoss group is using to test how moss thrives in a martian environment
“We plan to use the well studied species, Physcomitrella patens, and make the moss even more hardy by altering its genes to make it able to survive the extremely hostile martian conditions. For instead of having to grow plants in greenhouses isolated from the martian atmosphere, we believe that the astronauts could someday plant entire fields of usable plants on Mars,” says Jonathan Arnesen.
Subjecting moss to radiation, deep freeze
There are many factors on Mars that may prove fatal to living organisms, he explains, such as pressure, atmosphere or radiation.
“But as a first step, we focus on the very cold nights on Mars, where the temperatures in some regions go down to -153 degrees celsius but near the mid-latitudes go down to -60. To adresss this we will us a gene from an insect, the spruce budworm Choristoneura fumiferana. This gene allows the insect to survive very cold conditions by protecting the insect’s bodily fluid from the formation of ice crystals. We will insert this gene into the genome of Physcomitrella patens thus making it more resistant to cold.”
“At the same time, we are simulating martian conditions in the laboratory and testing which conditions will prove fatal to the moss. This is done by subjecting the moss to radiation, freezing temperatures and other martian-like conditions,” says Jonathan Arnesen.
Cool project
Moss, of course, does not provide much nutrition or obvious benefits for the astronauts. But the group also also intends to insert other genes, that allows moss to produce resveratrol, the healthy compound in red wine that has cardiovascular benefits for humans. If this works, then other compounds and medicines could be produced in moss as well. In this manner the astronauts could be provided with a sustainable supply of medicines that they can simple grow directly on the martian soil.
SpaceMoss is an interdisciplinary project that combines the fields of Astrophysics and Synthetic Biology. The team consists of nine students from both Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and the fields of physics and biology. Team members consider this as an advantage over the other teams:
”Our project is definitely cooler than the usual cross-faculty team work”, says SpaceMoss member Jophiel Wiis.
Members of SpaceMoss are trying to create a sustainable environment on Mars. Their project is part of a wider attempt to tease chemicals out of moss
For synthetic biology competition
The experiments and projects undertaken by the SpaceMoss group are interdisciplinary. The members get the chance to work at the Mars Environmental Chamber at the Niels Bohr Institute. The project is also underlined with plenty of creative ideas including a cartoon and short films.
”We definitely learn a lot. Even if you don’t know something about the research fields of the other team members, your are, on the other side, also a local expert in your field”, says another SpaceMoss member and UCPH student Christina Toldbo.
The iGEM competition for synthetic biology began in 2003 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and brings together graduate and postgraduate students from all over the world. For six months, the student teams are responsible for the whole research project. The students have to take care of everything from web design and entrepreneurship to outreach and funding.
There are 281 groups taking part in iGEM this year. The teams will meet in September in Boston for the final event, where they can win prizes for their work.
But the prizes aren’t the only take away from the competition. The students also take away a lot of new skills and knowledge about engaging in interdisciplinary research: ”Especially communication, because we all come from different fields of study”, mentions UCPH team member Victoria Sosnovtseva
The SpaceMoss group
universitypost@adm.ku.dk
Do you have a good story? We would like to hear from you. In the meantime, like us on Facebook for features, guides and tips on upcoming events and follow us on Twitter for links to other Copenhagen academia news stories.Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Newsweek writer!
Newsweek senior writer Kurt Eichenwald admits that President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, is "eminently qualified." However, he angrily proclaims that this nomination must be stopped because of a need for vengeance. Eichenwald doesn't try to hide that as an ulterior motive. In fact, he absolutely obsesses over it.
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Federal Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, must not be confirmed. Democrats must fight it to the bitter end. The preservation of the final, tattered remains of American constitutional government demand it. This has nothing to do with Gorsuch as a nominee. On first assessment, there is no doubt he is eminently qualified, perhaps more so than several other sitting justices were at the time of their nomination. He has done it all. His legal education is first-rate, with a law degree from Harvard and a doctorate in jurisprudence from Oxford. He has seen up-close how the Supreme Court works, serving as a clerk for Justice Byron White and then Justice Anthony Kennedy. For more than a decade, he has served as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, where he has gained a reputation as someone committed to the rule of law. He is a member of the Federal Appellate Rules Committee. There was a time in history when that would have been enough. And had someone with Gorsuch’s pedigree had been nominated by, say, George W. Bush in his first term, I would be supporting Senate confirmation under Article II of the Constitution—not because I agree with him on policy, which to me has usually been irrelevant in selecting a judge, because the High Court is not supposed to be filled with the equivalent of lifetime senators. If he is qualified, and has a philosophy of jurisprudence that is widely recognized as legitimate—which Gorsuch does—that would be enough.
That's what Eichenwald claims but I wouldn't be surprised if he still would have opposed Gorsuch even if these conditions had been met. Anyway, he lets us in on what motivates his fury:
But no more. Gorsuch, unfortunately, must be sacrificed on the altar of obscene partisanship erected by the Republicans in recent years. Temper tantrums designed to undermine the Constitution for naked political purposes cannot be rewarded. Our government cannot survive the short-term games-playing that has replaced fidelity to the intent of the founders’ work in forming this once-great nation. This goes back to the unconscionable decision of Republicans who refused to consider any nominee put forward by former President Obama following the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Obama nominated Merrick Garland, another eminently qualified candidate who served as Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the second most important court in the nation. But in a decision that will go down as one of the greatest abuses of the Constitution in the history of this nation, the Republican majority of the Senate declared they would not give Garland hearings, would not examine his qualifications, would not take a vote. Instead, they made up a rule – a nominee for the Supreme Court can only be considered for three-quarters of any president’s term. In the fourth year, confirmations have to wait until after the election. And so, the Supreme Court has been hobbled for coming up on a year—and, as the confirmation hearings will inevitably drag on, for months more to come.
Of course, Eichenwald coveniently forgets that it was the Biden Rule stated by former Vice President Joe Biden about a president making an election year nomination to the Supreme Court:
BIDEN: …in 1800, 1828, 1864, and 1956-the President himself withheld making a nomination until after the election was held. …it is time to consider whether this unbroken string of historical tradition should be broken. In my view, what history supports, common sense dictates in the case of 1992.
Eichenwald wants the Democrats to fight to the bitter end against Gorsuch. For what purpose? The absurd answer will make you think that he isn't operating on all cylinders but if you have been reading Newsbusters, you probably already knew that:
The end game: Force Trump to renominate Garland. Filibuster every nominee until he does. I have no illusions that the Senate would accept Garland; the Republicans still have the majority. Then Trump will come in with another nominee, almost certainly Gorsuch. Yes, even under that scenario, the Republicans will gain a seat on the court; they would have anyway, even if they had considered him during the Obama Administration, because the GOP had the senate majority then, too, and would have voted him down. (Democrats knew the price of a Trump victory could be the Republicans would get to name the next Supreme Court justice, and enough of the anti-Clinton types chose to sit out or cast their vote for someone who could not win anyway. They have relinquished the right to object.)
So, even though Garland would not win a Senate confirmation vote, a precedent needs to be established: the Senate’s confirmation responsibilities under the Constitution are not a joke, are not something where absurd rationalizations that pass for smarts on Fox News can be used to circumvent history and precedent. Nominees must be given hearings and votes. And yes, if that means letting the Republicans blow up the filibuster, let them do it.
So the Senate must now waste its time to satisfy Eichenwald's thirst for vengeance by holding hearings on Garland. Oh, and the idea of President Trump placing Garland's name into nomination will definitely happen...but only in Eichenwald's alternate reality.
Even with this utter silliness, Eichwald wouldn't be satisfied. He still wants to revive one of the worst political ideas ever:
Then, when a Democratic president is in office, the Democrats control the Senate, and there is no filibuster, show the Republicans a real exercise in raw power: Revive Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court and fill it with the most liberal justices around. If the Republicans insist on turning the judiciary into a political plaything, play the roughest game of hardball they have ever seen.
Wow! It sure sounds like poor Kurt Eichenwald is in need for some heavy duty Anger Management!By Vice Staff
They say eyes are the windows to the soul, in which case your hair is what? The roof? Like a roof, your hair is important but something that most of us hardly ever think about beyond its outward appearance. If you don't take care of it, it will rapidly be tangled with gunk and tennis balls and dead birds. Take Keith Morris, former Black Flag vocalist and frontman for the Circle Jerks and the recently formed OFF! He's been growing his dreadlocks in a variety of configurations for almost 23 years, and they now look like something that was snaked out of a gutter after a particularly bad rainstorm.
This is why, after pondering the cornucopia of disgusting junk that might be found in Keith's keratin helmet, we asked him and his fellow OFF! bandmates (who would serve as a control group, of course) to send us at least three grams of their locks. The plan was to mail the samples to a lab in Texas that specializes in "Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis." This not-exactly medically approved hair test determines which vitamins and minerals an individual is lacking and how many hazardous metals are constantly being pushed through his or her scalp. We thought it'd be a good alternative to a normal music feature, because writing about bands is usually about as interesting as taking a shit in your shoe and walking around the block.
The next time we heard from them, they told us that not everyone was into it. Initially, we figured it was Keith who was uncomfortable with the idea because he felt singled out due to the situation on his head. But for the record, we must state that Dimitri Coats, Steven Shane McDonald, and Mario Rubalcaba—three supposed punks who between them were in Burning Brides, Redd Kross, and Rocket From the Crypt—were, for whatever reason, scared of having their precious manes inspected by weirdo pseudoscientists in Texas. Keith, however, was totally game and immediately FedExed us a little furry cigar.
For science's sake, and because the rest of the band declined to participate, we tested three other samples alongside Keith's: a black guy's dread, some ginger strands from one of our photographer buddies, and a bunch of clippings we stole off the floor of a barbershop. After about a week, the lab sent us back pages of charts and graphs that we did our best to process and summarize into language that someone would actually want to read.
Hair A (Left) & Hair B (Right)
BRAYDEN OLSON (Hair A)
Brayden is a photographer with hair like Sideshow Bob's. He's also always up to no good (the day before we finished this article, he was stabbed by a cab driver in the arm for arguing over a fare), so we thought he'd make a great candidate for this project. The lab report's confusing "Nutritional Elements" bar graph showed that he has lots of minerals like calcium, manganese, cobalt, and iron in his system. We thought that was good, but then the following page told us that the calcium "is not being utilized properly," and this could lead to joint stiffness or low energy levels. Even more troubling was the presence of excess cobalt, which can be caused by exposure to paint or animal feed, and manganese, which is present in gasoline and fertilizer. The only explanation is that Brayden spends lots of time in a dung-filled flophouse, getting high on fumes from gasoline-coated rags. Clearly, this is not the ideal lifestyle in terms of balancing one's vitamin and mineral intake. According to the report, he should eat more oysters and pumpkin seeds but cut back on the pickled herring. If Brayden continues his bad habits, he's at risk for such ailments as fatigue, depression, and bradycardia, which apparently is a condition where your heart rate slows to under 50 beats a minute. Not good.
MYSTERY BARBERSHOP HAIR (Hair B)
What can you tell about a complete stranger from analyzing his or her hair? Not a whole lot. This dude's hair—we're assuming it's not a lady's because it looks like man-hair and we got it from a barbershop—is remarkably similar to Brayden's in terms of chemical composition. The big difference is that it contains a bunch of cadmium, which is often caused by either tobacco smoke or zinc smelters. He suffers from the same risks of fatigue, allergies, and bradycardia as Brayden (and, suspiciously, all of our other participants) and received the same sort of labyrinthine dietary advice: Eat less cabbage and kale but more rye bread, wheat germ, and blackberries, which contain high amounts of phytates (phytic acid in salt form).
Hair C (Left) & Hair D (Right)
(Hair C)
Finally, someone who is actually in pretty good shape! This dreadlock came from a guy who told us that he gave up drugs and alcohol years ago, and his clean living is apparent in the test results. His hair contained more than the usual amount of aluminum, but this isn't an issue because most food contains the substance. He also had an excess of vanadium, but that's not likely a cause for concern. The lab report said he was at risk for allergic reactions, itchy skin, and headaches—but doesn't everyone who lives in a large city have those problems all the time anyway? Like everyone else we tested, the report also suggested that he buy a bunch of nutritional supplements. In our professional opinion, though, he's going to be fine.
KEITH MORRIS (Hair D)
The first thing we noticed about Keith's results was that there's a ton of uranium in his hair. The report said that this isn't the type of uranium that turns people into superheroes or kills them, but we're still a little worried for him because it's fucking uranium. He also had a bunch of arsenic in his mane, but curiously the report focused more on his apparent excess of copper, which can have an "antagonistic effect on zinc." High concentrations of copper, the report warns, have also been associated with hair loss. Maybe Keith knows this, and that's why he's let his coiffure mat and clump for maximum coverage. The 25-page analysis also includes a chart marked "Tendencies" that lists ailments Keith should expect to experience unless he shifts his day-to-day habits toward metabolic optimization. In Keith's case, he could suffer from depression and unnamed allergy symptoms, which doesn't sound that bad considering he's walking around with the Fukushima reactor on his head. In fact, Keith's hair was probably the healthiest overall.
Catch OFF! live on our new music site Noisey.com.Posted by: Nick Shaxson in: Thoughts
From Rowan Bosworth-Davies, a voice of authority on financial crime, commenting on the excellent offshore investigations by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, together with the Guardian and the BBC:
All in all, it was a very grubby tale of greed and as blatant a piece of criminal law-breaking as you could expect. In one scene, a corporate services provider proposed that he would invite a local bank officer to come to a meeting in his offices to meet the purported launderer, and complete the banking formalities. Easier than going to the bank, was how he put it. What made it all so acutely depressing was that there was no evidence that HMRC had ever prosecuted any of the corporate services providers under their supervision, for any breaches of the Money laundering Regulations, or indeed for straight-forward money laundering itself.
And then some colourful but apt further commentary:
The real problem in all of this is that the Money Laundering Regulations have never been properly policed, and never effectively enforced. That is where the answer to money laundering interdiction lies, in the enforcement of the Regs, but why will no-one, absolutely fucking no-one, step up and take the lead on this?
Bosworth-Davies, a former detective with many years’ experience fighting financial crimes, notes that the UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA)
“have consistently refused to accept their Parliamentary responsibilities to enforce the Money Laundering law within the financial sector. HMRC cover another sector, and other agencies have input, but absolutely nothing gets done, and eventually the industry realises that there is no point bothering with a compliance regime because no-one enforces it. I have been forced to come to the conclusion that Government does not really want the AML [Anti Money Laundering] laws to be enforced – they cannot do so, because they spend such little time and effort insisting on enforcement.... in practice, just keeping their noses out of the issue, for fear that too much regulation and compliance with international laws might mean putting off some of the slew of dirty money that is constantly flowing around the world looking for a safe haven, from coming to the UK.”
For anyone who has even just dipped into Treasure Islands, they will see how true this is. This is the business model.
“we might as well fill our coffers with the profits from the drug trade and other people’s tax evasion, and as long as we pay lip-service to the FATF guidelines, and make sure that we don’t get put on some nasty blacklist (which we won’t because we make sure we are well-represented at FATF meetings), and as long as we keep pointing the finger of non-compliance at Iran or Pakistan or wherever, we will get away with it.”
So very unpleasantly true. And there is much more in there, well worth reading.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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The American people have long been ahead of all but a few good politicians when it comes to the unacceptable costs of the war in Afghanistan, and the latest Rasmussen poll shows 59 percent of likely voters now want the troops home either immediately or within a year. Ad Policy
But maybe—just maybe—Congress is finally beginning to catch up.
“Like a slow train coming,” said Matthew Hoh, a former Marine who resigned his Afghanistan post in protest and now is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.
Last week the cautious US Senate passed an amendment to an annual defense bill that would require President Obama to submit a plan for an expedited withdrawal that includes a timetable.
The previous attempt at similar legislation, introduced by former Senator Russ Feingold in May, garnered only eighteen votes. In June a bipartisan letter from twenty-seven senators urged only a “sizable and sustained” withdrawal of troops, but there was no call for a timetable. This time around Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley led the effort along with twenty cosponsors, including Republicans Mike Lee and Rand Paul, and it was approved by a majority voice vote with only the out-of-touch and increasingly irrelevant John McCain shouting, “No!”
“Romney and McCain have slammed President Obama for pulling US troops out faster than the Pentagon wants,” writes Robert Naiman, policy director at Just Foreign Policy, “but Wednesday night, the Senate said: ‘We think you aren’t pulling out the troops fast enough.’ ”
The amendment likely will next be taken up in a conference committee with the House where it has a good chance of making it into the final bill. (Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Republican Congressman Walter Jones are currently circulating a bipartisan letter to Obama urging an expedited withdrawal and reinvestment of those resources at home.) But whatever the outcome, Obama now has the political cover and pressure from Congress that was lacking two years ago when he announced his original surge plan, and last year when the administration announced that troops would remain through 2014.
“Most folks in the Senate like most folks in the country are tired of the war,” said Hoh. “Every week it’s one bad story after another—either there’s a tragedy, or an incident that highlights the absurdity of what we’ve gotten ourselves into. We can see that we’re in quicksand–the more you struggle, the more you thrash about, the more effort you put into it–the deeper you sink. So we’ve got to find a way to get ourselves out of there.”
Hoh believes that the Merkley amendment will come into play this May in Chicago when NATO holds a summit on its future in Afghanistan. The president will have the political support he needs to transition US troops more quickly. The meeting will also take place in the middle of the presidential campaign with popular opinion sending a resounding message.
“Politically the situation is completely different than it was two years ago, or even a year ago,” said Hoh.
Nation board member and peace activist Tom Hayden also sees an immediate impact of this vote.
“It sends a major message to Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai, who has been promoting a ten-year US commitment, and to the NATO/ISAF conference meeting Monday in Bonn,” he said. “The impetus to accelerated withdrawal [also] underscores the urgent need for political and diplomatic initiatives towards a power-sharing compromise.”
A half-trillion dollars later, and too many lives tragically lost or forever altered, the time to bring troops home is long overdue.
“The feeling that the war is ending, that there is no need to keep pushing for it, just isn’t true,” said Hoh. “It’s as violent as it’s ever been there, we’re further away from stability in Afghanistan and in the region than we’ve ever been, so certainly it’s not a victory yet in terms of getting us out of Afghanistan and getting a policy that will lead to stability in the region. But it’s an important step.”An eye-popping $28 billion is spent in the United States each year on preclinical research that can’t be reproduced by other researchers. That’s the conclusion of a provocative analysis published today in part by economists who based it on past studies of error rates in biomedical studies.
Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) today issued new criteria for grant reviews aimed at bolstering the reproducibility of NIH-funded research.
The lead author of the new price tag for reproducibility says it is meant to stimulate discussion. “We’re pointing to the economic cost, but we’re also trying to promote some solutions. That’s really the message of the paper,” says biologist Leonard Freedman, president of the nonprofit Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI) in Washington, D.C., of the perspective in PLOS Biology.
One expert, however, is skeptical of the $28 billion figure, saying it may overstate the extent of any problem.
To come up with the number, Freedman and economists Iain Cockburn and Timothy Simcoe of Boston University combed the literature for two dozen or so studies that tried to quantify how many biomedical papers are flawed because of specific problems such as a contaminated cell line. Looking across these data, they estimate that 53% of all preclinical studies have errors that mean they are not reproducible. The most common reasons included problems with reagents and reference materials (36%), study design (28%), data analysis and reporting (25%), and laboratory protocols (11%).
The 53% is roughly comparable to a handful of “top-down” studies that tried to reproduce a set of findings, Cockburn says. For example, a widely cited analysis by Amgen found that only 11% of 53 preclinical cancer papers could be reproduced in the company’s labs. Other studies found a rate closer to 50%.
From there, calculating the economic impact was simple. Rounding the 53% to a “conservative” irreproducibility estimate of 50%, the researchers multiplied by the $56 billion a year that NIH and other U.S. public and private funders spend on preclinical research. That yields $28 billion in irreproducible preclinical research.
Does that mean the money is being wasted? Not exactly, the authors say. Instead, they say that addressing irreproducibility would make that funding go much further. “This is a time to invest more, not less, with a relatively small part of that investment to improve the irreproducibility rate,” Freedman says.
Among other solutions, researchers should receive better training in study design, and vendors and scientists should sell |
signed on to sex on demand.
And as steadfast as these academics, writers and leaders may feel right now, I like to imagine that decades on, if they’re still around, that they’ll feel great shame. Even if they don’t, the world around them surely will.There’s some closure (literally and figuratively) for Move Loot, the furniture resale marketplace that we wrote earlier this month was up for sale. The startup — backed by nearly $22 million in funding from a list of top investors that included Y Combinator, GV, Index, Metamorphic and Sherpa — has shut down its business and sold access to its customer list to Handy, the home services company that offers cleaning and repairs on demand. TechCrunch understands that no other assets or employees are a part of the deal.
The news was made public in a letter sent to Move Loot customers earlier today. “We’re sorry to announce that as of today the Move Loot furniture marketplace is coming to an end and we have ceased operations,” the letter signed by co-founders Shruti Shah, Bill Bobbitt, Jenny Karin Morrill and Ryan Smith read in part. “We are partnering with Handy, the much-loved home services marketplace, to help our customers with all things home — from cleaning services to moving help to furniture assembly.”
To be clear, Handy is not automatically signing up Move Loot customers to Handy accounts. It is offering Move Loot customers a free hour of services as an introduction. While that hour could be used for cleaning or any other service in the Handy umbrella, we understand Handy was interested in marketing to Move Loot’s customer base specifically because it is developing a new line of business in storage.
(Possibly coincidental side note: It looks like at least some folks at Handy had their eyes on Move Loot for at least a year before now.)
Move Loot’s business was originally designed around selling furniture on consignment, meaning that it, too, once offered a kind of storage service of sorts. However, as Move Loot ran out of cash, it eventually pivoted to a peer-to-peer sales model.
Prior to the deal, TechCrunch understands that Move Loot had been speaking to other companies to sell all or part of its assets. One company in the frame was New York-based AptDeco, a YC alum from the same cohort at Move Loot, and also focused on reselling furniture and home decor through a peer-to-peer marketplace — but nothing came of that.
“Over the past two years we’ve been focused on growth, operational excellence, and customer satisfaction with a primary focus on profitability,” AptDeco’s co-founder Kalam Dennis told TechCrunch. “We have spoken with Move Loot regarding their interest in an acquisition. Ultimately we’re only interested in opportunities that align with the previously mentioned strategic goals.”
The bigger picture is that while there are some big juggernauts in the on-demand services market — from transportation companies like Uber and Lyft through to still-growing plays like delivery service Postmates — the space continues to be challenging because growth costs are high (partly because of marketing, partly because of the nature of some of these labor-intensive services) while margins are thin. As a result, we will likely see a lot more consolidation and closures as some startups run out of money, and others get snapped up in the bid for better economies of scale.
For its part, Handy is one of the home services players that — like Thumbtack — is hoping to be one of the last men standing, so to speak. The startup has raised more than $110 million in funding; has acquired a couple of smaller competitors; and is now quietly and slowly building out a portfolio of services to bring in more users.
Today, Handy’s mainstay remains cleaning, but it’s also trying out a business selling, delivering and assembling furniture; and this week it is changing how it lets customers order services. Users can now choose to request services from specific “Pros” — professionals on its books. This is one way to encourage more loyal customers, especially in services like cleaning where you might prefer to have the same person come to your home every week.
The fast rush of funding that Move Loot raised since first opening for business in 2013 made it appear like one of the anointed in the fight to take on Craigslist in the sale of pre-owned furniture. And it had a great message: “keeping quality furniture in homes and out of landfills” as its founders described it. But a closer look at the company revealed a lot of problems, too.
It grew fast and somewhat haphazardly, with expansions to cities like Charlotte, Atlanta, New York and Chicago. Some ex-employees on Glassdoor complained that inexperienced management was a problem.
And, more recently, Move Loot’s customers began to publicly complain on social media that the site was no longer accepting listings, that they couldn’t get items delivered and that deliveries were canceled with no explanation. The company’s customer support lines rang to voicemail. Promised refunds on cancellations didn’t materialize, forcing some customers to file disputes with their credit card company instead.
It’s not clear how many customers Move Loot had in the end, but for those who are affected, Move Loot has listed some details about how to go about removing credits from your account and tying up other loose ends. We’re copying those below.
And we’ll continue to keep an eye out to see if any other assets from Move Loot make an appearance.
From Move Loot’s farewell email:I find Richard Andreassen outside a camera store in Phoenix, Arizona, blasting thrash metal from his red pickup truck. Behind his truck is a trailer that acts as both his home and portable observatory. The outside of the trailer is covered in gorgeous snapshots Richard has taken of the night sky.
Autistic and hard of hearing, Richard doesn’t quite talk; he bellows in a turbulent inflection tinged by a nearly faded Long Island accent. He commands your attention, but even if you ignored him, you couldn’t disregard the beautiful celestial photographs he's taken—lunar phases, comets, deep space—and cemented to his mobile home using Liquid Nails and a staple gun.
“Wanna see inside?” Richard asks me. I nod eagerly. “Welp, don't tell no one, though.”
Richard has completely modified his truck into a mobile living space and observatory with some pretty ingenious tweaks. His “room” is blanketed in star motifs; even the ceiling's covered in the constellations he’s shot. A 13-horsepower gas motor is hooked up to his electronics: hand-built telescopes, an air conditioner, a coffeemaker, a stereo, and two microwaves, which he uses to heat up gallons of soapy water with which to shower.
“Ain't that [a] great idea?” Richard grins at me, describing his amenities— as the TV antenna and the fold-up La-Z-Boy chair strapped to his roof—as “luxuries.” I can’t disagree with him. Before these refinements, the trailer weighed 1,500 pounds; now it weighs nearly twice as much.
The trailer earned some recognition from the RTMC Astronomy Expo last year, awarding him the Warren Estes Memorial Award for “combining the visual, almost museum-like, appeal of [his] photos... with a utilitarian storage and transportation solution for [his] myriad astronomical instruments and accessories.”
Once a machinist for a military contractor, Richard has been on disability ever since an accident tore his rotator cuff. But when his mother suffered a stroke and needed to enter a nursing home, Richard was left to fend for himself. Luckily, she’d already set up the truck and camper for him 18 years prior. Their family doctor, whom Richard still sees periodically, agreed it would be best for him to live in the trailer from then on. Besides, Richard says he can’t afford rent and dislikes apartments because of all the drugs and smoking.
It’s obvious Richard is a little sensitive, especially to the heat. He can only show off his living quarters for so long before he starts growing beet-red and must return to the shade. It's in the low 90s—mild for Phoenix—and Richard can’t spend much time in the sun. So every year, from March to November, he packs up and heads to the woods in Northern Arizona, where he camps, spending his lonely nights stargazing, his telescopes and bootleg heavy-metal cassettes providing his company.
“I'm a single man, I have no girlfriends, I have no luck with them. Things never work out,” Richard explains. “You know what, ain't it better to be single in some ways? You get nothing but aggravation. I can't find the right person. I had girls into me. I had one girl that tried to rob me. So I have to be very careful. I don't trust no one.”
Richard was very close to his mother and brings her up every chance he gets. I learn she was almost 90 before she died, in 2010. She was confined to a wheelchair and suffered from dementia for a long time before finally passing.
“I did a lot of crying in the church. I had to stay in the forest. I don't want to go back to that day; I don't want to talk about that. I get crying too much,” Richard says. “But what do you do? We all have to go through that sooner or later. Don't that suck, though? It never goes away completely, doesn't it? I'm doing a little better. It is very hard when you lose your very close parent. I had a good stepfather. My mom married four times. All the other divorces, they were all bad, they all dead. I can't describe the feeling, but when you lose a very close mother or father, it rips you like the Devil. I don't want to go back to that day, though.”
Richard adds, “I promised my mom I would not give up.”
I don’t think I’m overreaching here when I say his mother would be proud. This guy’s degree of sustainability, especially rooted in a fervent passion he’s had for exploring the universe since he was 12, leaves me more than a little jealous.
Andreassen’s life is highlighted by astronomical events and little else. He already has travel plans for the next North American solar eclipse, in 2017. He can recall the exact day and date of all his pictures and is most proud of the above Venus transit photos from June 5, 2012. He says he drove all the way out to the desert in southern Utah and it took him 10 days to set up his equipment. He's also proud of the three weeks he spent in Australia, snapping images of the southern sky us northerners can’t see. He shows off these images and the boomerangs he’s also glued to his door. I ask to see his scopes, but was told they take too long to set up.
It’s interesting to see Richard’s interactions with other people that happen to wander by. A Jimmy John’s employee appears, giving out free mini-sandwich samples. It takes Richard a while to understand that they’re free, and when he finally gets one, he's utterly dismayed over the shredded lettuce and begins picking it out furiously.
“I can't fucking eat this,” he says. “Lettuce is deadly. It'll put me in the emergency room.”
A week later, I come back to check on Richard and see his newly developed photographs. He’s already mounting them, ready to glue them on when a scruffy-looking hippie wanders up, introducing himself as Frolic, and asks if we have any weed. I’m discussing UFOS with Richard, and he’s recalling strange objects he saw over New York in the 70s. I ask whether he believes in aliens.
“You know, there's a lot of something that did go on in the 1940s at Roswell,” he says and then contradicts himself. “Aliens been here already, they hiding. We don't know if they here yet, but…”
Frolic interrupts: “The guy that taught me how to grow medical cannabis in Northern California in the mountains, actually his grandpa was an actual government contractor for Area 51. He actually reverse-engineered the crash-landed craft from Roswell to actually make a bunch of the technology that's in use today—actually tablets and touch screens and stuff. But he was actually killed for it by the government because he had some of the technology in a private hangar of his stuff. And they were like, 'Oh, you can't have that stuff. We're going to take it and kill you…'”
Frolic goes on about Mars’s “Mayan” face (he meant Cydonia) and the nearby canyons that apparently trace the Pleiades constellation and Nibiru, the phantom planet threatening to collide with Earth. He also mentions that ancient aliens were somehow stealing gold from the “genetic slave race” they left on Earth, which was some time before chemtrails and blah, blah, blah. I’m really glad I didn't give him any of my pot.
People-wise, this is not a great recipe. All Richard agrees with is, “We're very sure Mars had some kind of life, about two, three billion years ago, when our Earth was still very, very hot... There's a lot of theories I don't like; I don't agree with them. Like there was another earth and someone bought earth and came and brought the earth here. I don't like a lot of the theories. We don't know.”
If that’s enough for Richard, that’s enough for me. I warmly shake his hand, thank him again for the fantastic tour, and go back to say goodbye. Admittedly, I look at the sky a little differently now, and I’m thinking of buying a trailer.
@filth_fillerDrugs don't cause drug addiction. The main factor that causes drug addiction is the environment and the disconnection one feels. The euphoria and pleasure that drugs provide is amazing. So if you're in a shitty environment where you cannot naturally access this euphoria and pleasure, then why wouldn't you do drugs?
Our current method shunning drug addicts will only further delve them into their addiction. It's when they're in a supporting environment with friends and family that care for them which gives them a fighting chance to beat their addiction. Science has suggested many times that lack of social support contributes to many physical and mental illnesses, and may even lead to further depression and/or drug abuse.
When I was a teenager, I was really hooked on weed. I know it's not cocaine, but as we've discussed, the drug itself plays a very small factor in the actual drug addiction. I was smoking so frequently that it completely controlled my life. Every time I got busted, my mum would completely flip out and go psycho on me. She would ground me, yell at me, remove me from all my friends, while constantly watching me like a hawk. I felt like I was in a prison cage which was a nightmare.
Did this help me quit weed? FUCK NO!
This made matters so much fucking worse (which she will never admit haha). The only significant difference this made was make my life more difficult and inconvenient because I had to be much more careful. I would pretend I'm taking a shit in the bathroom while I would sneak out the window and go to my carefully hidden bong kit ready in my back yard. The skills I acquired of smoking weed like a ninja became an art form actually.
The fact of the matter is, all I wanted was to feel connected, to talk to someone, anything! If my mum just talked to me like a human being, a friend, and tried looking at things from my perspective, things would have turned out a lot differently. Instead of turning my cage into an isolated one. That being said, I'm not blaming anyone as I take full responsibility for all my actions.
So could you see how throwing a drug addict into a jail cell - where they are disconnected from the outside world - have virtually no chance in quitting drugs? How can they? You've taken away all their basic human rights and on top of that, given them a criminal record that prevents them from getting a job, travelling overseas, and essentially having a life. No shit they're going to keep taking drugs, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I definitely would.
I'm going to refrain from talking about the war on drugs here, as this is a topic I will most definitely discuss in future blogs/videos, as this is a very deep topic which I'm very passionate about.
Addiction is everywhere, not just in drugs. People are addicted to all sorts of things ranging from internet and television to eating and fucking. What is the reason for us getting addicted to these activities? Is it purely the activities themselves that create a hook in our brains or is it something deeper than that, like the environment you are in or what's going on in your life?McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the over-the-counter division at Johnson & Johnson, said the plastic particles in Motrin — which were about the size of a poppy seed — originated at a third-party manufacturer of Motrin’s active ingredient, ibuprofen. The company did not name the manufacturer.
The company said in both cases that the risk to patients was low and it had received no reports of serious harm.
Still, some experts said the two recalls, announced over such a short span, raised questions about how well the company has improved its oversight after a string of manufacturing problems threatened its image as one of the world’s most trusted brands. The company has recalled everything from Tylenol to contact lenses and artificial hips in recent years, and is operating under a consent decree with the Food and Drug Administration in which it has promised to overhaul production at three manufacturing plants. One plant, in Fort Washington, Pa., has been closed since 2010.
“Even the most careful company is occasionally going to have a recall,” said Erik Gordon, who teaches business at the University of Michigan and follows the pharmaceutical industry. But given Johnson & Johnson’s history, he said, the recalls indicate “they’re not there yet. They have not repaired the damage that was done to Johnson and Johnson’s quality control infrastructure.”
Ernie Knewitz, a spokesman for Johnson & Johnson, said the company had been working to improve quality by creating a single, streamlined supply chain and shifting focus to the early detection of potential problems. This heightened attention, he said, has led to several product recalls. He added, “Our goal is to minimize recalls, and yet when we recall a product, we are acting in the best interest of the consumers of our products.”Nothing is official yet, but many different sources claim many different things, with one thing being common – new WRC TV deal is “almost there” and announcement should be “coming soon”. How soon is soon, we do not know.
In their official Monte Carlo preview, Volkswagen revealed TV schedule for, what I presume is, Germany, with Sport 1 and n-TV being the channels to watch for WRC news and reports. Austrian audience will get their fix on Servus TV, while their Czech neighbours can follow Sport 5 programme for WRC updates. Finally, Sport+ is being mentioned for France (thanks to @Slayer1983CH for updates).
Mind you, this is all unofficial and mainly taken from various sources on Twitter. I often assumed big manufacturers (both current and previous) are a bit more involved in the sport and thus can count on being exposed to more up to date information on not-so-public matters. Perhaps that is true, and Volkswagen, Citroën and M-Sport bosses are better informed about the issue of WRC TV, but undoubtedly big names, such as Škoda UK Motorsport are not.
Škoda UK Motorsport tweet was both alarming and very revealing about the matter.
“Okay, we ought to know these things, but we don’t. Does anyone know if next week’s Monte will be shown on UK telly?” Škoda UK said in their recent tweet.
Sure, Škoda is not a WRC team, and as such is not as “important” as current teams and manufacturers are, but don’t forget we’re talking about IRC champions here. Their links and connections are high and wide and if there was any information available, I am quite sure they would be able to get it. Yet, their tweet reveals there is no such information.
All we know for now is the recycled and worn out bit of unofficially sourced info, claiming new deal is being worked on and should be revealed over the next few <insert random time period>. If anyone knows more, well more power to them, but I repeat, all we heard from everyone is same obscure phrase. And nothing else.
Ultimately, I do have faith in WRC, FIA and Red Bull Media House, but zero information and apparent lack of any kind of will to communicate at least something is not very reassuring. Perhaps I do not understand the world of high business, but if the deals are being discussed, aren’t you allowed to say “we’re working on it”?
EDIT: For a list of broadcasters showing WRC in 2013 visit this page on WRC’s official website www.wrc.comIn last week's Runequest Thursday, I mentioned my fandom for the old Metagaming publication The Fantasy Trip, comprised of In the Labyrinth and its companion volumes Advanced Melee and Advanced Wizard. I also mentioned that I thought a lot of the spells in Advanced Wizard would convert well to my own A New Sorcery (for which you can click the attachment below to download a pdf of the core system and spells, as well as a bunch of additional spells, including the ones in this article), compiled from the numerous posts on D-infinity.net.
Last week, I converted Reveal/ Conceal. This week, I converted three more spells - all elemental in nature. And since that didn't finish scratching the Runequest-y itch I had today, I also created a Feat of Arms for Sorcerers who like Elemental manipulation.
So here goes:
Immolation [Fire] Range – 1 Yard POW Check – Yes
Cost to Learn – 500L
Magnitude – Variable
Time to cast – 1 Action
Duration – Instant
Immolation sends out a wave of fire in all directions from the caster, doing 1d6 fire damage to the total HP of all targets (friend or foe) within range of the caster on a successful POW vs. POW contest, excepting the caster herself. Protection and similar spells, and Resist Fire will reduce this damage. In the case of physical armor, use the lowest Armor the target possesses to determine the reduction. Damage is not done to a location, but only to the total HP of the target. Additional levels of the spell may be used to increase the fire damage by 1d6, or range of the Immolation by 1 yard. So a Level 4 Immolation could do 1d6 to all creatures within 3 yards of the caster, 2d6 to all within 2 yards, or 3d6 to all within a yard.
- Immolation is my version of Blast (Advanced Wizard)
Fresh Air [Air] Range – 10 Yards POW Check - No
Cost to Learn – 500L
Magnitude – Variable
Time to cast – 1 Action
Duration – 15 Minutes
Each rank of the spell delivers fresh untainted air to the one willing target, wherever she may be (underwater, in a cloud of noxious gas, entombed in the earth, etc.) for duration. Additional ranks may be used to extend the Duration according to the Duration Track.
Command Elemental [Elemental Runes, Mastery] Range – 10 Yards POW Check – Yes
Cost to Learn – 500L
Magnitude – Variable
Time to cast – 1 Action
Duration – 10 Rounds
Although sorcerers do not normally conjure true elemental beings, this spell allows the command and control of sorcerous elementals, or elemental beings on a POW vs. POW success against the elemental, or its controller if the elemental is controlled. In this way a sorcerer could wrest control of an elemental from another sorcerer, or command a true elemental that he encounters. Each rank of the spell grants the Sorcerer control of up to 10 SIZ (or one Cubic Meter if that is how the elemental is “rated”) of the elemental. If the ranks are insufficient to account for the whole of the elemental, the caster can still exert limited control over the portion he can command, reducing the SIZ, and damage of the elemental accordingly.
Additional ranks may be used to extend the duration or range according to the Duration and Range Tracks.
- Command Elemental is my veraion of Control Elemental (Advanced Wizard)
New Sorcerous Feat of Arms:
Elemental Transposition – POW 17, Sorcery 80%, Conjure/ Dismiss Elemental Spell at 80%.
Cost: 4 Hero Points, and you must train for 1d4+2 weeks with a tutor, paying what they demand.
You may spend a Hero Point to cause your body to transpose into an elemental state that matches any Conjure Dismiss Elemental you know at 80% or higher. You remain in this state for a number of rounds equal to your Manipulation Limit. For the duration you become an elemental creature of your SIZ and POW, and gain all the abilities AND limitations and vulnerabilities listed under the appropriate entry in Conjure/ Dismiss Elemental. If you interact with another element, or elemental, consult the Elemental Interactions table for details of how it affects you. If you attack with your elemental ability, you lose an equal number of temporary POW, but not SIZ or HP.
I have some more spells converted, non-elemental in nature, that I will post next week!Among those ejected from the Jan. 20 Donald Trump rally in Tulsa was OCCC student Anthony Leon.
Leon said he was surprised to find himself a target for removal – and later the center of media attention.
“Going (to the rally) started out as a joke, honestly,” Leon said.
He said he did not appear at the rally to protest but more to observe.
Waiting in what he described as a huge line outside the stadium at Oral Roberts University, Leon said he noticed people wearing T-shirts with slogans like “Hillary for Prison” and heard occasional shouts of homophobic slurs.
Leon and his friend Tater Cronin heard most of Donald Trump’s speech on making America great again, and how they (Americans) were going to win so much they’d get sick of winning.
“I think they assumed I was there to protest,” said Leon, a member of Oklahoma’s DIY punk rock scene.
Sometime into the rally, an individual he didn’t know beckoned to Leon. The man was Brandon Smits, who was wearing a “we come in peace” shirt with a Star of David badge saying “Mexican.”
Leon said he and Cronin walked over to where Smits was standing.
It was at this time, Leon said, the crowd began to turn on the three of them, Leon, Smits, and Cronin.
Leon and Cronin claimed they were assaulted by Trump supporters, with the three of them being manhandled, grabbed from behind, and screamed at, before local police intervened to escort the unwilling protesters out of the rally.
Cronin recalled being surrounded, screamed at, and harassed by rally attendees.
Cronin said they had attended a Trump rally in Missouri some time ago, before some of Trump’s recent comments regarding Muslims.
Cronin said this most recent rally in Tulsa was more intense in energy and rhetoric.
Leon said the entire experience in Tulsa was “surreal.”
Leon said they were also yelled at in the parking lot on their way out and were accused of being un-American among other things.
“How could you do this?” said one woman in a Trump shirt.
“I just don’t understand the Trump appeal,” said Leon, describing the candidate as feeding off of raw populism.
The Trump campaign could not be reached for comment.
Video of the rally and expulsions can be found on the Pioneer website.
Candidate Trump will be in Oklahoma City Friday, Feb. 26 at the Cox Convention Center.Chicago Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta has routinely summoned magic this summer with the flick of a wrist. As a surprise bonus, the prelude to the show is frequently as riveting as the show itself.
Editor's Picks Pirates must change approach against Arrieta, and must work on it now Buster Olney looks at what the Pirates can do to prepare for Jake Arrieta and the NL wild-card game; plus a wild-card check, note on the Yankees, more.
The anticipation mounts when Arrieta stares in for the catcher's sign, with a look of grim foreboding. As his eyes blaze beneath a cap brim flatter than the Texas plains, you half expect a tumbleweed to go rolling across the infield. On the rugged-hero stoicism scale, think Clint Eastwood in "Unforgiven."
Jim Richardson, the Baltimore Orioles scout who signed Arrieta out of Texas Christian University eight years ago, saw that relentless focus on display long before Arrieta grew a beard and embraced the "late bloomer" tag at age 28. Richardson has driven past a lot of mesquite and buffalograss through the years in search of power bats and big arms, so a specific image springs to mind.
"It's kind of like those old gunfighters in those westerns," Richardson said. "There's a confidence in his eyes. He's transmitting something to the hitter, like, 'Hey, I'm not afraid of you, but you better be afraid of me.' It's always been there."
During a recent road trip, Arrieta sat in the visiting dugout at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia and pondered the scouting report of the longtime talent evaluator.
Jake Arrieta leads the majors in wins (21) and is second in ERA (1.82). Charles LeClaire/USA TODAY Sports
"I like that," he said.
Richardson isn't alone in his assessment. Arrieta's wife, Brittany, recently expressed a similar sentiment about his mound countenance, although it wasn't quite as fraught with O.K. Corral imagery.
"She looked at different photos from several of my starts, and then she looked at me and said, 'You're scary out there,'" Arrieta said. "I told her, 'It's a different mindset.' The aggression out there is completely opposite how I am off the field. Something pretty much takes over in a competitive battle against the best players in the world. That's what I feel is necessary to be great, for me."
It's impossible for Arrieta to stand head-and-shoulders above the pitching pack this season when Los Angeles Dodgers twin towers Zack Greinke and Clayton Kershaw are doing such wondrous things every five days. But with his monumental second-half run, he might have a forehead lead over Greinke and two earlobes on Kershaw in the National League Cy Young Award race.
The most noteworthy moment of Arrieta's season came on Aug. 30 at Dodger Stadium, when he threw the first no-hitter by a Cubs starter since Carlos Zambrano in 2008. By punching out Justin Turner, Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley to close it out, Arrieta joined San Francisco's Chris Heston as the second pitcher this season to conclude a no-no by striking out the side in the ninth inning. The only other pitcher who can say that is Sandy Koufax, who whiffed the final six hitters to seal his perfect game against the Cubs in 1965.
Shortly thereafter, Arrieta took the podium in a pair of jammies and shared a bedtime story with the media before hopping on a charter flight in conjunction with Cubs manager Joe Maddon's "onesies" trip.
When Arrieta isn't partaking in fun team rituals, he's making the Elias Sports Bureau folks scurry for historical comparisons. He recently joined Orval Overall and Ferguson Jenkins as the third Cubs pitcher since 1900 to register 20 wins and 200 strikeouts in a season, and logged 18 straight quality starts to surpass the Cubs franchise record of 17 set by Lon Warneke in 1933.
In August, Arrieta became the first pitcher to go 6-0 with a sub-0.75 ERA in a single calendar month since Jim Kaat of the 1974 Chicago White Sox achieved the feat. And during one mind-bending stretch, he joined Bob Gibson of the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals as the second pitcher in 100 years to go 8-0 with a sub-0.50 ERA in an eight-start span.
Astonishingly, Greinke could finish as Cy Young runner-up despite a 1.68 ERA, which would be the fourth best in baseball since the start of divisional play in 1969. Only Dwight Gooden (1.53 ERA in 1985) and Greg Maddux (1.56 in 1994 and 1.63 in 1995) have done better. Kershaw, with his garden-variety 2.16 ERA, 0.89 WHIP and 294 strikeouts, appears to be the laggard in the conversation.
The current state of affairs comes as no surprise to Cubs catcher David Ross, who ranked Arrieta and White Sox lefty Chris Sale as the two nastiest pitchers he faced a year ago during his time in Boston.
"I look back at this season and I think, 'This guy is single-handedly carrying us to the playoffs,'" Ross said. "He's pitching in the best division in baseball and facing teams that have been in a playoff atmosphere, and he's dominating them.
"Calling a game for him is so easy. It's like reaching into a grab bag and pulling out a pitch. It's so good, you know it's probably going to work."
Escape from Baltimore
With his breakout performance in 2015, Arrieta joins a proud tradition of hard-throwing Texas right-handers who've made hay in the big leagues. Nolan Ryan passed the torch to Roger Clemens, who gave way to Josh Beckett, who preceded Arrieta, Corey Kluber, Homer Bailey and many others who grew up wanting to be Ryan and Clemens.
The Cincinnati Reds selected Arrieta out of Plano East High School in the 31st round of the 2004 draft, but he opted to attend Weatherford College in Texas and re-enter the draft. After Milwaukee selected him in the 26th round in 2005, Arrieta headed to TCU to play for coach Jim Schlossnagle and the Horned Frogs.
Once his body began to fill out, Arrieta's fastball spiked from 88-90 to 93-97 mph. He complemented the heat with a hard curve and an occasional slider, and threw the ball past college competition with such ease that he never needed to incorporate a changeup into the mix.
Arrieta had a mostly unsuccessful tenure with the Orioles before being traded to the Cubs in 2013. Rick Osentoski/USA TODAY Sports
All the raw materials for success were in place. But when Arrieta had a disappointing junior year for the Horned Frogs, it raised some yellow caution flags about him as a prospect.
When then-Baltimore scouting director Joe Jordan decided to take the plunge in the fifth round of the 2007 draft, Richardson felt a tinge of excitement mixed with uncertainty. Like most players under the Scott Boras amateur umbrella, Arrieta was a mystery man to interested teams. Unlike most draft advisers -- who engage in lots of back-channel talk as a prelude to pre-draft arrangements -- Boras puts his clients in witness protection and gives clubs no inkling of their price points or their intentions.
When the Orioles reached out and tried to determine what it would take to sign Arrieta, "it was crickets," according to Richardson. "On draft day Joe walks back into the room, and says, we're taking Arrieta if he's still there," Richardson said. "I said, 'Joe, I haven't been able to get anybody to return a phone call on signability.' Joe just looked at me and said, 'Do you not want him?' And I said, 'Yes, I just don't know what the money is.' Looking back, I have to give Joe a lot of credit. For Jake to still be there in the fifth round, that was lucky for us."
The Orioles selected Arrieta 159th overall and paid him a well-above-slot $1.1 million bonus. Then the hype began. In 2009, Baseball America ranked Chris Tillman, Brian Matusz and Arrieta as the franchise's Nos. 2-3-4 prospects behind catcher Matt Wieters, and observed, "The Orioles will be happy if they can build their future rotation around the trio."
Arrieta portended greatness in bits, pieces and tantalizing glimpses during his time in Baltimore. His fastball jumped, his breaking ball snapped and scouts routinely would peer over their sunglasses after two innings and observe that he had "no-hit stuff." Then Arrieta would come out and walk the leadoff man, lose his focus and quickly unravel. Two hours later, he would stand at his locker stall in front of reporters and gingerly sift through the wreckage. Over time, it had become increasingly apparent that he was not going to reach his ceiling in Charm City.
"I liked Jake as a teammate and I liked him as a person, but he needed a change of scenery here," said Orioles outfielder Adam Jones. "Sometimes you just need a change of scenery to go figure it out."
How significantly had Arrieta's star faded by the end of his run with the O's? When the Cubs sent Scott Feldman and Steve Clevenger to Baltimore in a July 2013 trade for Arrieta and Pedro Strop, the ESPN.com headline read, "Scott Feldman traded to Orioles."
Multiple sources said that Arrieta's problems in Baltimore stemmed in part from a strained relationship with former Orioles pitching coach Rick Adair, an old-school type who was not particularly receptive to young pitchers with free-thinking orientations. "Rick was hard on young pitchers," said one current Orioles player who declined to be named.
Another person familiar with the situation referred to Adair as a "my-way-or-the-highway guy with a cookie-cutter approach" that didn't resonate with Arrieta. Pitcher and pupil butted heads over hand positioning and numerous other subtleties of the craft.
In hindsight, Arrieta declines to single out Adair for his travails with the Orioles. But he acknowledges that his mind was cluttered with too much unproductive advice in Baltimore. He wasn't unlike dozens of other prospects who wind up feeling stifled and confused when an organization spends too much time dictating and not enough time trying to find a middle ground.
"It's not like a pity-me kind of thing," Arrieta said. "There are players in those type of situations every day, in the minors and at the big league level, whose careers are set back because of different individual circumstances.
"It's been that way forever, unfortunately. Maybe it's based on an overload of information or a constant focus on the wrong things. |
first $3.2 billion tranche has arrived on Wednesday.
It's essential to identify the conditions attached to this Mafia-style "loan." Nothing remotely similar to reviving the Ukrainian economy is in play. The scheme is inextricably linked to the IMF's notorious, one-size-fits-all "structural adjustment" policy, known to hundreds of millions from Latin America and Southeast Asia to Southern Europe.
The regime changers in Kiev have duly complied, launching the inevitable austerity package -- from tax hikes and frozen pensions to a stiff, over 50 percent rise on the price of natural gas heating Ukrainian homes. The "Ukrainian people" won't be able to pay their utility bills this coming winter.
Predictably, the massive loan is not for the benefit of "the Ukrainian people." Kiev is essentially bankrupt. Creditors range from Western banks to Gazprom -- which is owed no less than $2.7 billion. The "loan" will pay back these creditors; not to mention that $5 billion of the total is earmarked for payments of -- what else -- previous IMF loans. It goes without saying that a lot of the funds will be duly pocketed -- Afghanistan-style -- by the current bunch of oligarchs aligned with the "Yats" government in Kiev.
The IMF has already warned that Ukraine is in recession and may need an extension of the $17 billion loan. IMF newspeak qualifies it as "a significant recalibration of the program." This will happen, according to the IMF, if Kiev loses control of Eastern and Southern Ukraine -- something already in progress.
Eastern Ukraine is the country's industrial heartland -- with the highest GDP per capita and home of key factories and mines, mostly in the Donetsk region, which happens to be largely mobilized against the neo-fascist/neo-nazi-aligned regime changers in Kiev. If the current conflagration persists, this means both industrial exports and tax revenues will go down.
So here's the IMF prescription for the oligarch bunch -- some of them actively financing Right Sector militias: As long as you're facing a popular rebellion in Eastern and Southern Ukraine, relax; you will get additional IMF cash further on down the road. Talk about a crash course in disaster capitalism.
We want you to invade Meanwhile, the Obama administration's juvenile delinquent school of diplomacy remains on track: the plan is to entice Moscow to "invade." Benefits would be immense. Washington would destroy once and for all the emerging strategic partnership between the EU, especially Germany, and Russia, part of a more organic interaction between Europe and Asia; keep Europe perennially under America's thumb; and boost Robocop NATO after its Afghan humiliation.
Well, they are not juvenile delinquents for nothing. Yet this brilliant plan forgets a key component: enough competent troops willing to apply Kiev's designs. The regime changers dissolved the Berkut federal riot police. Big mistake -- because they are pros; they are unemployed; and now, holding a monster grudge, amply supporting Ukrainians in favor of federalization.
What the Ministry of Truth script imposed on all Western corporate media insists on labeling "pro-Russian separatists" are in fact Ukrainian federalists. They don't want to split. They don't want to join the Russian Federation. What they want is a federalized Ukraine with strong, autonomous provinces.
Washington is actively praying that the confrontation between the EU and Russia on the gas front spirals out of control. Natural gas will amount to 25 percent of the EU's needs up to 2050. Since 2011 Russia is the number one supplier, ahead of Norway and Algeria.
The bureaucrat-infested European Commission (EC) is now concentrating its attacks on Gazprom on the South Stream pipeline -- whose construction starts in June. The EC insists that the agreements already struck between Russia and seven EU countries infringe the laws of the EU (how come they didn't find that out earlier?). The EC would like South Stream to become a "European," not a Gazprom project.
Well, that depends on a lot of serious diplomacy and the internal politics of various EU member states. For instance, Estonia and Lithuania depend 100 percent on Gazprom. Some countries, such as Italy, import over 80 percent of their energy; others, such as the UK, only 40 percent.
It's like the EC suddenly woke up from its usual torpor and decided that South Stream is a political football. Günther Oettinger, the EU's energy commissioner, has been blaring the horn of EU competition laws called "the third energy package" -- which would essentially require Gazprom to open South Stream to other suppliers. Moscow filed a complaint to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Rigorous application of recently unearthed EU law is one thing. Facts on the ground are another. South Stream may cost up to 16 billion euros -- but it will be built, even if financed by Russia's state budget.
Moreover Gazprom, in 2014 alone, has already signed extra deals with German, Italian, Austrian and Swiss partners. Italy's ENI and France's EDF are partners from the start. Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria are deeply involved in South Stream. No wonder none of them are in favor of more sanctions on Russia.
As for any substantial move by the EU to find new supply sources, that's a process that should take years -- and should involve the best possible alternative source, Iran, assuming a nuclear deal with the P5+1 is struck this year. Another possible source, Kazakhstan, exports less than it could, and that will remain the case because of infrastructure problems.
So we're back to the Ukrainian tragedy. Moscow won't "invade." What for? The IMF's structural adjustment will devastate Ukraine more than a war; most Ukrainians may even end up begging Russia for help. Berlin won't antagonize Moscow. So Washington's rhetoric of "isolating" Russia is just revealed for what it is: juvenile delinquency.
What's left for the Empire of Chaos is to pray for chaos to keep spreading across Ukraine, thus sapping Moscow's energy. And all this because the Washington establishment is absolutely terrified of an emerging power in Eurasia. Not one, but two -- Russia and China. Worse: strategically aligned. Worse still: bent on integrating Asia and Europe. So feel free to picture a bunch of Washington angry old men hissing like juvenile delinquents: "I don't like you. I don't want to talk to you. I want you to die."“Lord Seaworth is a man of humble birth, but he reminded me of my duty, when all I could think of was my rights. I had the cart before the horse, Davos said. I was trying to win the throne to save the kingdom, when I should have been trying to save the kingdom to win the throne.”
–Stannis Baratheon, A Storm of Swords
The Seven Kingdoms of Westeros—the setting of George R.R. Martin’s epic saga, A Song of Ice and Fire. Now, press your claim to the Iron Throne over the entire realm of Westeros with the Westeros Two-Player Playmat for A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, now available for order at your local retailer and online through our webstore!
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Whether you’ve just taken your vows as a knight or you’re the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, the Westeros Two-Player Playmat is perfect for players of any experience level. Clearly marked, A Game of Thrones-themed templates ensure that both players always know the places for their characters, locations, plots, dead and discard piles, and gold pool. Finally, the playmat illustrates the full map of Westeros for you and your opponent to duel over, giving you a clear representation of exactly what you’re fighting for.
Fight for Your House
Whether you’re cheering your friend on in his first joust, or you’re taking the field with the new cards from the upcoming War of Five Kings cycle, you’ll find an ideal background and play surface with the Westeros Two-Player Playmat. Order your copy at your local retailer or online through our webstore today!Better Call Saul Switch Season 2 Episode 1 Editor’s Rating 3 stars * * * * * « Previous Next » Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill.
If only Jimmy had been able to exercise the same restraint as his future assumed persona, Gene. That guy knew what to do when faced with the option of going through an emergency-exit door or biding his time by the dumpsters until a custodian passed through. But the Jimmy we reconvene with in the opening bow of Better Call Saul’s second season doesn’t foresee eminent danger as a comeuppance for his every minor moral slip-up. He’d rather gamble with house money than live deluded by what he describes to Kim as the “sunk-cost fallacy” — toiling ahead for some nebulous, supposed reward.
For this Jimmy, light switches affixed with “always leave on” warnings or customer-only cucumber water are bluffs begging to be called, small steps toward an absolute belief that we either create our own reality or succumb to someone else’s. Jimmy isn’t quite Saul Goodman yet, and he’s a long way from Gene (thank goodness), but by the end of “Switch,” he’s anyone but James A. McGill, Esq. Or at least he’s trying to be.
In the interest of getting us back in sync, season one concluded with the following significant events for our fearful protagonist: Jimmy was betrayed by his cuckoo-bird older brother and legal mentor, Chuck; presumably turned down a make-good offer from another firm; lamented leaving more than a million untraceable bucks on the table between himself and parking attendant/criminal co-conspirator Mike because he was doing “the right thing”; and watched his old Cicero con-running buddy, Marco, kick the bucket rather ingloriously as they reenacted one of the trivial scams that marked the high point of Marco’s life.
Now, about that consolation gig: It would have actually been pretty sweet. Driven to get Jimmy out of their hair, Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill facilitated an opportunity for their longtime nuisance to snag a plum desk with Davis & Main, headed by partner Clifford Main (Ed Begley, Jr.). They were ripe and ready to work with the man who led the charge against fraudulent retirement home Sandpiper Crossing — or that’s what Howard Hamlin told them he did, anyway. Jimmy, to Kim’s great dismay, flatly turned down their offer and sauntered in the other direction. But alas, had Kim given him any indication that working for Davis & Main freed them up for romance, he could have put aside his pride and considered it a win-win. Instead, when pressed with the question of their romantic future, Kim did what she often does: Get flustered and wait for things to feel less uncomfortable.
And that’s the missing scene we didn’t see in last year’s finale: the one that bridges the gap between a tentative Jimmy rubbing Marco’s pinky rug for insight and him peeling away from Mike’s booth, determined to do wrong. We’ll see plenty more of Clifford and Co. in the coming weeks, as Jimmy eventually relents and accepts a corner office with Davis & Main, complete with errand boy Omar, his choice of cocobolo desk, snazzy abstract art, and a working fireplace. Though, that’s only because throughout the course of “Switch,” Jimmy realizes you can’t immediately swap out the version of yourself that people have come to expect — even if that was never the real you. Kim certainly won’t go all bush-league Bonnie-and-Clyde with Jimmy just because swindling a traveling Wall Street scumbag was enough of a rush to make her swoon. As everyone’s favorite Seinfeld guest might say while referring to himself in the third person, “Jimmy’s gotta take this thing slow.”
If only the saddest sack of them all, Daniel Wormald, had been so wise (let alone as prudent as Gene). Remember Daniel? He’s the guy who very much deserves his surname — a twerpy IT guy at a pharmaceutical company who peddles pills to cartel liaison Nacho, with Mike shadowing him as hired muscle. Well, Daniel has gotten a bit too laid back about his arrangement with Nacho; he’s leased a ghastly, flame-detailed Hummer with spinning rims that looks more like a Hot Wheels monster truck than something you’d dare be seen with at a clandestine drug deal. Mike knows better than to hitch his ride to this sap, and the two of them part ways. Shockingly, Daniel survives not only his solo encounter with Nacho, but also its immediate aftermath. Nacho prefers to rob his place blind, leaving not so much as a fingerprint behind. He’ll let the cops connect the dots about Daniel’s boutique narcotics operation.
Once you’ve made the choice to break bad, you’ve got to have survival instincts, business savvy, people skills, and, yes, modesty in order to take what’s yours. Daniel couldn’t see that. Hell, you could argue that good ol’ Walter White lacked that last attribute, hence his spectacular undoing. But Mike knows better, Jimmy’s catching on quick, and circumstance is about to marry them in the mission to get ahead. (And eventually, the tightrope of trying to stay ahead.) If you ask me, Gene has no reason to apologize. Unlike his one-time colleagues Mike and Walt, Gene/Jimmy/Saul is still breathing. Even if no one else lives to acknowledge it, he knows anyone who tosses garbage into that dumpster should be impressed to realize that “SG was here.”
Apart From All ThatBy Clancy Chassay / THE GUARDIAN, KABUL
They were walking to school in the southern city of Kandahar, a group of teenage girls discussing a test they had coming up, when two men on a motorcycle sprayed them with a strange liquid. Within seconds a painful tingling began, and there was an unusual smell as the skin of 16-year-old Atifa Biba began to burn.
Her friend rushed over to help her, struggling to wipe the liquid away, when she too was showered with acid. She covered her face, crying out for help as they sprayed her again, trying to aim the acid into her face. The weapon was a water bottle containing battery acid; the result was at least one girl blinded and two others permanently disfigured. Their only crime was attending school.
It was not an isolated incident. For women and girls across Afghanistan, conditions are worsening — and those women who dare to publicly oppose the traditional order now live in fear for their lives.
Member of Parliament (MP) Shukria Barakzai receives regular death threats for speaking out on women’s issues. Talking at her home in central Kabul, she closed the living room door as her three young daughters played in the hall.
“You can’t imagine what it feels like as a mother to leave the house each day and not know if you will come back again,” she said, her eyes welling up as she spoke.
“But there is no choice. I would rather die for the dignity of women than die for nothing. Should I stop my work because there is a chance I might be killed? I must go on, and if it happens it happens,” she said.
Barakzai receives frequent but cryptic warnings about planned suicide attacks on her car, but no help from the government. Officials advise her to stay at home and not go to work, but offer nothing in the way of security assistance, despite her requests. She said warlords in parliament who received similar threats were immediately provided with armored vehicles, armed guards and a safe house by the government.
Afghan women are feeling increasingly vulnerable as the security situation worsens and a growing number of Western and Afghan officials call for the Taliban to join the government.
“We are very worried that, now the government is talking with the Taliban, our rights will be compromised,” said Shinkai Karokhail, an outspoken MP for Kabul. “We must not be the sacrifice by which peace with the Taliban is made.”
Under Taliban rule, up until 2001, women were not allowed to work and were forbidden from venturing outside the home without a male escort.
Afghan women who defy traditional gender roles and speak out against the oppression of women are routinely subject to threats, intimidation and assassination. An increasingly powerful Taliban regularly attacks projects, schools and businesses run by women.
Six weeks ago, Lieutenant-Colonel Malalai Kakar was assassinated in her car on her way to work in Kandahar. She was Afghanistan’s highest-ranking female police officer and a fierce defender of women’s rights. Only 1.5m tall, she was known to have beaten men she found to be abusing their wives. Another senior female police officer was killed in the province of Herat in June.
Talking at a safe house on the outskirts of Kabul, Mullah Zubiallah Akhond, a Taliban commander from the southern province of Uruzgan, said the group’s attacks on women were always political and not based on any desire to target or punish women specifically.Forty years ago our nation's waterways had become a dumping ground for trash, sewage, oil, and chemicals. A small but powerful network of groups and individuals have used the Clean Water Act to take on powerful corporate and government polluters, and in doing so, have brought our rivers, streams, lakes, bays and ocean back from the brink.
In the 1960s, the Hudson River was ravaged by oil, chemicals and sewage, condemned as an open sewer. An association of blue-collar fishermen was so enraged at the conditions that they considered all forms of retaliation against the polluting power plant before taking to the court room to reclaim their river. Citizens are empowered under the Clean Water Act to bring their own lawsuits to stop illegal pollution discharges. This important feature of the law, and its use in the Hudson River valley, has been the catalyst for an international movement of Waterkeeper organizations who defend their communities against anyone who threatens their right to clean water.
Waterkeeper groups now span the globe -- including 12 active groups in California, who defend California's precious coastline and inland waterways against polluters. Waterkeepers fight for clean water so that our communities can fish, swim, and drink water without a trip to the hospital. Although we usually find ourselves vastly outnumbered by an army of lobbyists, experts and attorneys, law-breaking polluters and unresponsive government agencies,we prevail time and time again, protecting our waterways against polluting factories and toxic dumps.
Here in Los Angeles, we have had our fair share of victories for clean water over the years. In fact, just last week, Santa Monica Baykeeper and Natural Resources Defense Council reached a $6.6 million settlement to significantly improve beachwater quality along the Malibu coastline for millions of beachgoers who visit each year. The settlement requires the city to install devices to catch toxic stormwater runoff before it reaches the ocean, thus protecting swimmers from a range of waterborne illnesses including stomach flu, skin rashes, pinkeye, ear, nose and throat problems, dysentery, hepatitis, neurological disorders and other serious health problems.
Despite the water quality improvements won by the Clean Water Act, there is still considerable work to be done to achieve the act's fishable, swimmable, drinkable goal. Many lakes, streams, rivers, and beaches are plagued by excess contamination stemming from urban runoff and other more diffuse sources of pollution. Last year in California -- a state often heralded as an environmental leader -- the State Water Resources Control Board found a 170 percent increase in toxicity in rivers, lakes, bays and estuaries since 2006. In addition, some of the most famous and most visited beaches in Los Angeles, such as Malibu's Surfrider Beach and Topanga State Beach, still routinely fail to meet bacteria water quality standards for e. coli, fecal coliform and enterococcus set to protect the health of swimmers and surfers. Numerous Los Angeles County creeks and rivers are contaminated with bacteria, heavy metals, and trash and are unsafe for swimming and fishing.God may be the world’s most well-known reclusive celebrity author.
As is the case with any deeply popular celebrity, his fan club can somewhat intense and worrying, especially those who say that they met him personally and he Changed. Their. Lives.
Like it or not, God’s superfans are also his only available representatives, and that is a problem. Especially when those superfans attract and nurture a core of their own fans; people who worship at their feet in respect for the superfans’ stated positions as representatives of the Man Himself.
In the case of Judaism, the superfans are the rabbis, and occasionally the cult of personality surrounding certain rabbis can do very profound real world damage. This was the case with Rabbi Barry Freundel of Congregation Kesher Israel in Washington DC. I knew the man and his family, and I am now somewhat ashamed to admit that. People might want to ask me–hell, I’ve been asking myself–if I was ever able to catch the warning signs of what the man ended up becoming notorious for. The answer is no, not really.
Barry Freundel was a childhood friend of my father’s. He was always just “Barry” whenever his name came up, not some high-falutin’ Rabbi of Washington DC’s Most Prominent Congregation. My father used to laugh off tales of the man’s arrogance with “Well, that’s just Barry. Once a schmuck, always a schmuck.” My own interactions with the man were spaced years apart, and mostly from the perspective of a kid/teenager. It’s been over ten years since I last saw him in person, and his crimes (evidently) began in that period of time. What I didn’t know then, and I’m only just learning now, is the extent of the man’s larger-than-life persona.
He was not just a rabbi; he was the rabbi. He held enough sway in the world of conversions and Jewish education that even the overly stringent Israeli rabbinate would accept converts that he trained and signed off on. He was the Modern-Orthodox poster child; a man who firmly believed that Judaism is meant to move with the times while still staying faithful to its core tenets. He was, for many people wishing to join the Jewish religion without feeling like they were subscribing to a cult, the first and last stop of the process.
What Barry Freundel has wrought is an abuse of Jewish sanctity so staggering that few people in the world can fully appreciate it. There is probably no one else that could’ve done what he did to the same number of people for the same length of time without igniting some kind of suspicion. It was because he was who he was that such a thing was allowed to happen.
Think about it. If some male medical student asked a female patient to disrobe for “standard procedure” when she only came in with a sore throat, she would likely run screaming from the exam room and report the guy immediately. But if it was the foremost medical wiz in the US staring her down and saying that it was necessary to be naked for purposes of a sore-throat examination, those clothes would likely come off. Who knows what incisive medical intuition might be behind the request? What if there is something rare that the doctor suspects? Who would want to stand in the way of saving their own lives? It would be insulting not to comply.
The mikvah (ritual bath) is one of the oldest Jewish traditions, predating even traditional Sabbath observance. When a Jewish Temple stood in Jerusalem, anyone entering its bounds needed to first purify themselves in such a bath. Though some Jewish men still use it before the Sabbath and certain festivals, the mikvah‘s use as a means to ritual purification is relevant mostly to women nowadays. The primary use for a mikvah is to purify a woman who has just had her period; Jewish law deems her ritually impure and forbids sex during menstruation. It is supposed to be a place of peace, beauty and connection to the spiritual. Additionally, the culmination of the conversion process for both males and females is immersion in a mikvah. One enters a non-Jew and emerges a Jew; one enters impure and emerges pure.
When a woman uses a mikvah she is, as one of Barry Freundel’s victims stated, “at her most holy and her most naked.” There is meant to be absolutely nothing blocking complete immersion in the waters, and so the user needs to be as utterly naked as one can be. All clothing, cosmetics, nail polish, dry skin, dental retainers, contact lenses, hair extensions or press-on nails have to come off, as they are not considered under Jewish law to be intrinsic parts of the body and are thus impediments to purification. There in the private room, it is meant to be just the person and God.
But for scores of unsuspecting women, it was them, God and Barry Freundel in that room.
The rabbi held firm sway over his conversion classes and presided over a large mikvah that was constructed right across from his synagogue. He installed up to three hidden cameras disguised as household items such as a clock radio and a tissue box, none of which would look out of place in the building. Over a period of years, he recorded 150 women at their most vulnerable and their most naked. They trusted him; they took him at his word. If he said they should perform “practice dunks” to prepare for actual conversion, they did so immediately. If he asked them to do secret “re-dunks” because of a “problem” with their conversions, how could they say no? He was the rabbi after all, the ultimate authority on conversions and an advocate for women’s rights. Over and over, he found reasons for them to get naked on camera for him, and over and over, they listened. How could they not? How could anyone sincerely looking to get close to God disobey the recommendations of his devoted representative?
What has happened to Barry Freundel in the wake of his crimes is what should happen to every last overreaching member of God’s sometimes frightening superfan club. But abuse of power is hard to police, as a crucial aspect of the abuse is wielding that power without question. We don’t question other experts when they recommend things that seem strange, so why would we question a God expert? What if that very questioning means you will be looked at as foolish or insincere?
If anything, this tragedy underscores the need to emphasize critical thinking even within the bounds of faith, contradictory as that may sound. Belief in God should not equal belief in man; one can focus on connecting with spirituality without believing that any one person represents that spirituality better than everyone else, let alone that this person can dictate bizarre orders without explaining or qualifying them.
It is too late to undo the immense damage to the psyches of the women who became unwitting cam girls for a pervert at the moment they thought they were at their most private and spiritual. Sure, the departure of Barry Freundel’s job, his wife and his respectability are harsh punishment, as is the 6 1/2-year jail sentence, but the ripples of this crime will not fade away with the media coverage of it. Religion at its best is meant to foster a sense of connection to what is good, moral and spiritual. Religion at its worst is a weapon of suppression and, in this case, exploitation of innocents.
This must not be allowed to happen again. Religion must be reclaimed from the hands of those who seek to use it only to further their own agendas.
My heart is breaking for the women that have suffered and suffer still, and I hope that they will yet be able to draw the spirituality they once sought from the natural wonder and beauty that is our universe without it being sullied by the actions of one man whose own impurities will never be washed away by waters of any kind.
AdvertisementsLisk has been extremely active since its ICO early this spring, and its price has risen accordingly, recovering from the slump in altcoins. Lisk has risen by nearly 50% in the past seven days, displacing QTUM by market capitalization.
Users and fans have been extremely bullish, seeing Lisk climb to as much as 16%. The project has been active in contacting the community, organizing weekly meetups that regularly fill up. Two more meetups are coming up in November in Berlin and Rotterdam.
The project has expanded ambassadors program to increase visibility and organize events, in which community members host worldwide meetups. Until recently, Lisk had dedicated ambassadors, but now anyone from the community can apply. The program has been targeted toward Lisk enthusiasts and aims to move Lisk from more centralized promotion to a grass-roots effort.
Lisk is also expanding its team, looking for a videographer and video editor, and added four new members to its team at the end of October.
But aside from touring and riling up the community, Lisk has only made small updates on its project, adding to the blockchain explorer and improving the wallet. For now, it is unknown how useful the Lisk platform would be for building distributed apps. At the same time, Lisk is trying to rebrand itself and seek supporters in the gaming community.
The biggest task of Lisk is to build up its platform and invite the creators of distributed apps, or daps. Lisk bets on JavaScript developers, one of the largest communities. But so far, very few real distributed apps have been built.
Ethereum is at the moment the biggest platform offering the building of distributed apps, but so far very few working projects have been built, mostly distributed exchanges. EOS is another project aiming at building distributed apps, but the first product is expected in a few months.
At the same time, market price speculation is continuing for Lisk and similar projects, while waiting for more product announcements.RESET BUTTON : soothe + restore This mask calms irritated, angry skin – so you can start fresh again. Potent ingredients deliver a blast of skin-soothing ingredients that combat inflammation to gently and effectively calm skin. A powerful combination of antioxidants, hydration, and nourishment help strengthen the natural barrier of your skin. Your skin will be soothed and reset to reveal calmer skin, a more even tone, and a glow from within. CHUBBY CHEEKS : lift + plump Worried about fine lines and sagging? Combat gravity with shots of skin-firming power ingredients, and bring back the chubby cheeks you were born with. This mask contains collagen-boosting ingredients and a powerful dose of nourishment to help firm, plump, and smooth out fine lines and wrinkles. Conditioning agents, brightening ingredients, and a blast of antioxidants and hydration promote radiance and a glow with bounce. GOOD SKIN DAY : drench + nourish Having a bad skin day? This mask delivers hydration deep within the skin, vital minerals and vitamins, a blast of antioxidants, and brightening ingredients for a radiant glow and the ultimate good skin day. You will experience instant results, plus long-term benefits of improving skin from within.
The Must Know
The SuperSkin Ingredients and what they do for you:
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Lavender extract – a natural anti-septic and anti-fungal, lavender helps keep skin troubles at bay. As an anti-inflammatory, irritated angry skin is calmed down.
Propolis – a non-comedogenic anti-inflammatory ingredient – known as nature’s antibiotic – is beneficial for acne-prone skin.
Chamomile extract – this power ingredient calms down inflamed skin, is a natural antibacterial and anti-fungal ingredient to help keep bacteria at bay (read: acne), fights off free radical damage, and soothes damaged and angry skin effectively.
Licorice extract – acts as a powerful natural agent to restore skin and calm it down so that you can start fresh again.
Calendula extract – soothes and restores skin at once; helps heal and strengthen thin skin promoting calmer, stronger and more radiant skin.
Centella Asiatica – a beloved ingredient in Asia for its ability to heal damaged tissues (think: sun damage, laser peels-aftermath, scarring).
Skullcap Root – anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and skin brightening agent. This combination helps skin effectively combat signs of aging.
Bergamot – a natural anti-fungal, this natural ingredient helps keep skin pure.
Peppermint extract – helps soothe skin (peppermint oil is known to help alleviate itchy skin).
Rosemary extract – stimulates skin renewal and deeply hydrates skin.
Freesia extract – packed with antioxidants to help prevent damage to skin, and a natural anti-inflammatory calming skin down.
Aloe – hydrates skin and helps soothe and repair damage.
Tremella Mushroom – deeply hydrates skin and visibly restores and plumps it up.
Rosewater – soothes sensitive skin while hydrating and providing anti-aging benefits.
Chubby Cheeks
Ginseng – long celebrated in Asia as one of the most powerful collagen-boosting and skin-regenerating natural ingredients, ginseng helps reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles.
Snail Secretion Filtrate – purified snail mucin delivers incredible results – skin is dramatically firmer, brighter, hydrated. This natural, lightweight, scentless ingredient is one of the most popular ingredients coming out of Korea, due to its incredible ability to visibly plump up and restore skin.
Kidney bean – kidney beans have high amounts of antioxidants and flavonoids, which actively improve fine lines and wrinkles while fighting free radical damage. Kidney beans are also rich in zinc and Vitamin B6, which repair damaged skin.
Peptides – peptides are included in the formula to help boost collagen production; when combined with skin-replenishing, antioxidant-rich ingredients, the results are amplified.
Galactomyces – galactomyces visibly brightens skin and boosts radiance. This ingredient is a powerful antioxidant fighting free radical damage and at the same time strengthening the skin barrier.
Niacinamide – also known as vitamin B3, this hero ingredient is proven to brighten skin and decrease hyperpigmentation. This ingredient has also been shown to improve skin elasticity and restore bounce and plumpness.
Skullcap Root – anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and skin brightening agent. This combination helps skin effectively combat signs of aging.
Black Soybean – combats hyperpigmentation and improves skin texture.
Tremella Mushroom – deeply hydrates skin and visibly plumps it up.
Hyaluronic acid – intensively moisturizes skin
Camellia water – camellia is one of the longest used beauty ingredients in Korea for the rich benefits it delivers. Camellia water is high in oleic acid, nourishing Omega 3,6, and 9, as well as vitamins A, B, D and E. Consider this a vitamin-pack for the skin resulting in supple and healthier skin.
Adenosine – a cell-communicating ingredient that supports healthy cell function. Helps improve fine lines and deeper wrinkles.
Ylang Ylang – balances skin, improves skin tone, and is known to be a mood booster. Formulated with zero artificial fragrances, the very subtle aroma of the ylang ylang flower essential oil lifts your spirits as your face is being lifted and firmed.
Good Skin Day
Chia seed – known to be one of the richest botanical source of Omega 3 fatty acids. Remarkably, chia seeds contain the perfect 3-to-1 balance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 essential fatty acids for optimum skin nourishment. Chia is also a powerful source of Alpha Lipoic Acids, a potent antioxidant that helps minimize fine lines, decrease enlarged pores, and smooth skin.
Algae – optimizes minerals in skin to keep skin at maximum hydration; also boosts radiance.
Centella Asiatica – a beloved ingredient in Asia for its ability to help heal damaged tissues (think: sun damage, laser peels aftermath, scarring).
Lemon Peel oil – purifies skin and enhances skin’s clarity.
Olive oil – powerfully draws moisture to the skin + Aloe, which enhances the absorption of olive oil deep into skin for hydration at the deepest layers of your skin so that you can glow from within.
Avocado – powerful antioxidant to fight environmental stressors, helps reduce redness, irritation while regenerating damaged skin cells.
Soybean – helps combat hyperpigmentation and improves skin texture.
Hyaluronic acid – helps quench skin’s thirst.
Pumpkin – packed with enzymes that improves skin turnover resulting in more brightness and radiance.
Rosewood oil – helps repair skin making it a potent anti-aging ingredient.
Ceramides – strengthens your skin barrier to keep skin healthy and youthful.
Heartleaf and pine leaf oil – super-antioxidants that fight off free radical damage to protect your skin from pollutants and environmental stressors.Within hours of moving by executive order to dismantle U.S. actions on the climate change crisis, the Trump Administration asked a federal court to stand down on pending litigation over the Clean Power Plan. The legal salvo could keep regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel power plants in limbo for the foreseeable future.
The Justice Department on Tuesday asked the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which heard oral arguments months ago in a case challenging the landmark Obama-era regulations, "to hold cases in abeyance." Last February the Supreme Court issued a stay of the rules, and the appeals court has not yet ruled.
"The Clean Power Plan is under close scrutiny by the EPA, and the prior positions taken by the agency with respect to the Rule do not necessarily reflect its ultimate conclusions," the department said in a motion to the appeals court.
"Deferral of further judicial proceedings is thus warranted," it said.
Instead of facing an imminent but unpredictable ruling on the merits by the federal court best versed in the complexity of this case, the Justice Department and its client, the Environmental Protection Agency, asked for a standstill "until 30 days after the conclusion of review and any resulting forthcoming rulemaking."
Whether or not the appeals court defers its decision, the central pillar of the Obama administration's climate action plans seems likely to be on ice for at least a few years. Even if the appeals court disregarded this request and issued a ruling wholly upholding the Obama rules, the case would then face review by the Supreme Court.
According to the Justice Department's filing, the green groups and their allies "intend to file motions in opposition," which means that at the very least there will be a detour in the lengthy litigation.
New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said that he will file in opposition to the Trump administration's motion on behalf of a coalition of 23 states, cities and counties who are seeking to uphold the Clean Power Plan.
"The case was fully briefed and argued before the full D.C. Circuit six months ago, and the fate of the rule is now in the court's hands," Schneiderman's spokeswoman, Amy Spitalnick |
Using Explore Campaign Finance, users have the ability to dig deeper. You can click on any legend item to see the companies and PACs that make up that total, and then, going all the way down to the raw data, you can see the individuals from those companies who made the donations. For example, in the chart above, you might notice that the politician raises a lot more money from the financial industry now compared to the 1998 and 2000 election cycles. Which companies make up that increase? Which individuals are making these donations? With this tool, it’s possible to visualize this data. A groundbreaking visualization of who gives money to federal politicians. The next problem with tools like this is that people use them and find out fascinating things about their politicians, but then those insights get lost, because there is no effective way for those people to share what they discover with others.
So, for this project, we’re building in a way for people to submit all the interesting facts they find out about a politician, and we’ll list their discoveries on that politician’s page for the world to see. This data will be useful for voters, journalists or even the politicians themselves.
This project is launching with data from OpenSecrets.org, which has over 25 years of federal campaign finance data for more than 24,000 politicians. Obviously, it’s too much work for one person to research all of these politicians. I’m hoping that with the help of the Internet, we can crowdsource campaign finance research for every single politician in the database.
For the last 25 years, these politicians have never expected us to actually find much in this data, and I’m extremely excited to dig up dirt on things that politicians thought we would have long forgotten by now. If you’re excited about this project, and want to contribute, the Kickstarter campaign will be running for a few more weeks. The project will be open source, so you can contribute code as well, or stick this system on top of data from your state or country!
Solomon Kahn is a Sunlight Foundation OpenGov Grantee and the Director of Analytics at Paperless Post. He is also an Edmond J. Safra Network Fellow at Harvard University. He can be found online at solomonkahn.com or on twitter @SolomonKahn. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation.
Interested in writing a guest blog for Sunlight? Email us at guestblog@sunlightfoundation.comRep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) is pressing to end oil exports to North Korea, saying that doing so might push the reclusive country to the negotiating table with the U.S.
"Twenty years ago, President Clinton got them to the negotiating table by cutting off the oil. We haven't done that," Maloney told radio host John Catsimatidis on AM 970 in New York.
"We keep ratcheting up the sanctions, and one I'm calling for is to cut off the import of all oil products to North Korea," she said. "All I know is what brought North Korea to the table last time, when President Clinton was successful in getting them, was the sanctions that cut off the oil products."
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She also suggested prohibiting imports of luxury goods into North Korea, which she said would more directly target the country's wealthy class. Current sanctions, she said, most drastically affect average citizens.
Maloney's comments came after she joined a congressional delegation in traveling to Hawaii, South Korea, Japan and the border between North Korea and China.
Also on that trip were Sens. Ed Markey Edward (Ed) John MarkeySenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Ocasio-Cortez responds to Ivanka Trump: 'I actually worked for tips and hourly wages' Overnight Energy: McConnell plans Green New Deal vote before August recess | EPA official grilled over enforcement numbers | Green group challenges Trump over Utah pipelines MORE (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley Jeffrey (Jeff) Alan MerkleySenate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' Sixteen years later, let's finally heed the call of the 9/11 Commission Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks MORE (D-Ore.), Chris Van Hollen Christopher (Chris) Van HollenFemale Dems see double standard in Klobuchar accusations GOP braces for Trump's emergency declaration Senate buzz grows for Abrams after speech electrifies Dems MORE (D-Md.) and Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.).
Tensions between the U.S. and North Korea have boiled over in recent months amid advancements in Pyongyang's nuclear weapons and missile programs.
President Trump said last month that he would unleash "fire and fury" on the North if it continued to threaten the U.S. Since then, Pyongyang has threatened a strike in the waters near the U.S. territory of Guam and launched a missile earlier this week that flew over Japan.
At the same time, the U.S. and South Korea wrapped up annual joint military exercises, which ended on Thursday with a show of air might over the Korean Peninsula.
Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke by phone Saturday on ways to "maximize pressure" on Pyongyang after North Korean state media said the country had developed an advanced hydrogen bomb.
Earlier this week, Trump said that "talking is not the answer" for dealing with North Korea's destabilizing actions.The State of Georgia has just signed an unprecedented new law that removes all handgun carrying and possession permissions to allow lawful residents the ability to carry their concealed firearms just about everywhere including schools, churches, government buildings, nightclubs and bars. The National Rifle Association hails it as the “most comprehensive pro-gun reform legislation introduced in recent state history.”
Critics have appropriately dubbed it the “Guns Everywhere Bill,” with former Rep. Gabrille Giffords (D-AZ) calling it the “most extreme gun bill in America.”
But proponents of the legislation say it’s exactly what residents need to protect themselves from criminals.
Georgia Governor Nathan Deal signed into law today what supporters call a historic victory for the Second Amendment. The new law, called the “Safe Carry Protection Act”, vastly expands where guns will be allowed in the state. As of July 1st, licensed gun owners in Georgia and visitors from 28 other states will be allowed to bring a gun into a bar without restrictions and carry a firearm into some government buildings. Under the law, school districts will be able to decide whether they want some employees to carry a firearm, and religious leaders can decide whether to allow licensed gun owners to carry guns into their church, synagogue or mosque. Deal said the following about the bill: “People who follow the rules can protect themselves and their families from people who don’t follow the rules. The Second Amendment should never be an afterthought. It should reside at the forefronts of our minds.” While signing the bill, he said: “Our state has some of the best protections for gun owners in the United States. And today we strengthen those rights protected by our nation’s most revered founding document.” In addition to allowing licensed owners to carry in more places than ever, the bill also eliminates the fingerprinting requirement for renewing weapons carry licenses, prohibits the state from creating and maintaining a database of licensed weapons carriers, and repeals the state-required license for firearms dealers. Via The Daily Sheeple
While New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently launched a new $50 million campaign to disarm the citizens of his high-crime city claiming his efforts “will protect innocent children and innocent people,” Georgians realize that the only people who will be protected by disarming a law abiding public are the criminals predators who prey on those who have no way of defending themselves.
Georgia’s unprecedented legislation is not only a victory for protecting the founding principles of the Second Amendment, but for the law abiding citizens who no longer have to live in fear of violent offenders or a government that would punish them for exercising their right to protect themselves when faced with the threat of injury or death.Wisconsin Governor and potential 2016 GOP contender Scott Walker hit a small snag today: Over 25,000 pages of emails, released by a state court, that were collected during an investigation into whether Walker aides conducted political activity on the government’s dime. One of the emails, first spotted by BuzzFeed’s Evan McMorris-Santoro, contains a message titled, appropriately, “THE NIGHTMARE.”
THE NIGHTMARE, reproduced in full below, was forwarded in 2010 by Thomas Nardelli, who was Walker’s chief-of-staff when he served as Milwaukee County Executive, to an undisclosed number of recipients, including Walker’s deputy chief-of-staff, Kelly Rindfleisch. Walker, who was elected governor later that year, went on to earn national notoriety for passing legislation aimed at dismantling the political power of Wisconsin’s public-sector unions. (Nardelli became a full-time consultant.)
Nardelli isn’t the only Walker official known to make racist statements. The Republican fired his deputy finance director in December after the aide’s two-year-old tweets (one of which read, “I will choke that illegal mex cleaning in the library”) came to light.
Here’s the email:
THE NIGHTMARE In the nightmare I found myself nude in bed, and I was looking at a mirror on the ceiling, and I discovered that I am a Negro, and I’m circumcised! Quickly I sat up, found my pants and looked in the pockets to find my driver’s license photo and it was that same color, black. I felt myself being very depressed, downcast, sitting in a chair. But it’s a wheelchair! That means, of course, besides being black and Jewish, I’m also disabled! I said to myself, aloud “This is impossible! It’s impossible that I should be black and Jewish and disabled!” “It's the pure and holy truth,” whispers someone from behind me. I turn around, and it’s my boyfriend. Just what I needed!!! I am a homosexual, and on top of that, with a Mexican boyfriend. Oh, my God.... Black, Jewish, disabled, gay with a Mexican boyfriend, drug addict, and HIV-positive!!! Desperate, I begin to shout, cry, pull my hair, and Oh, nooooo...I’m bald!!! The telephone rings. it’s my brother. He is saying, ‘Since mom and dad died, the only thing you do is hang out, take drugs, and laze around all day doing nothing. Get a job, you worthless piece of crap... Any job!’ Mom? Dad? Nooooo... Now I’m also an unemployed orphan! I try to explain to my brother how hard it is to find a job when you are black, Jewish, disabled, gay with a Mexican boyfriend, are a drug addict, HIV positive, bald, and an orphan, but he doesn’t get it. Frustrated, I hang up. It’s then I realize I only have one hand!!! With tears in my eyes, I go to the window to look out. I see I live in a shanty-town full of cardboard and tin houses! There is trash everywhere. Suddenly I feel a sharp pain near my pacemaker.... Pacemaker?? Besides being black, Jewish, disabled, a fairy with a Mexican boyfriend, a drug addict, HIV positive, bald, orphaned, unemployed, an invalid with one hand, and having a bad heart, I live in a crappy neighborhood. At that very moment my boyfriend approaches and says to me, ‘Sweetie pie, my love, my little black heartthrob, have you decided what you are going to wear to Washington to see Obama?’ Say it isn’t so!!! I can handle being a black, disabled, one-armed, drug-addicted, Jewish homosexual on a pacemaker who is HIV positive, bald, orphaned, unemployed, lives in a slum, and has a Mexican boyfriend, but please, Oh dear God, please don’t tell me I'm a Democrat!
[Photo credit: Getty Images]As Southerners travel North and settle into foreign lands, their traditions are not always so easily accepted by the natives. In the South the dead are not buried, burned, or offered to other creatures, but are preserved by being placed in shallow, extremely saline lakes. The bodies decompose very slowly (if at all) or are eaten by local fauna, the few that brave the heat at least. The salt crystals that form on the bodies are then harvested and kept, usually in glass vials or pouches worn around the neck or in glass pots kept in houses and buildings. It is believed that the dead will watch over and protect any who have the crystals near them. This particular individual is on guard duty to keep pesky scavengers from pecking at the bodies. The Northerners see this as tainting their main source of salt, which is valuable when trading with foreigners, and will often go on night raids to remove the bodies from the salt flats. An effort is being made to section of designated areas where salt burials are permitted in order to keep the rest of the salt pristine.The traditional Southern (and to some extend South Eastern) belief is that the first people were born from the crystals and the salt lakes, and that all must return to the shallow expanses of reflective water, to be born again as crystals. It is said that for two or three nights a year the dead will rise and walk along the sky-waters and in a spectral form, their glittering outlines reflecting in the mirror-like waters. This phenomena is actually attributed to a small larva that lives in the harsh, salty environment for nearly a year, then during the hottest season it will molt into its winged adult form during the night when it is coolest, and will put on a massive bioluminescent light show to attract mates. Once mating and egg laying is done they will all perish, and provide food for their young.---I haven't figured out what to name these guys yet, so if you have any suggestions please share them! I imagine the word sounding sort of harsh, with hard consonants and such (no tongue or lips to make softer sounds with).Recently, about 400 senior executives of Cognizant accepted the company's voluntary separation package. Cognizant had announced this programme for directors, associate VPs and senior VPs a few months ago.
French IT services major Capgemini had reportedly asked over 35 VP, SVPs, directors and senior directors to leave in February.
Large IT services companies are all in the process of laying off employees on a scale not seen since the 2008-10 downturn. Those taking the hit first are mid- and senior-level professionals — those with 10-20 years of experience.
Layoffs in the senior slab in the tech sector have been predicted by the Experis IT Employment Outlook Survey from Experis IT-ManpowerGroup India for October 2017-March 2018. The survey found very little demand for senior-level IT executives among employers.
In the survey, merely 3% of employers wanted to hire people at the senior level. The highest demand was seen for candidates in the 0-5 experience slab, with nearly 56% of the 500 employers surveyed displaying an intention to hire people in this group. Another 41% wanted to hire those at the middle level (5-10 years).
A major reason for layoffs at the senior level could filling up of vacancies internally rather than going for external recruitment. Another reason is automation taking away traditional team lead jobs becoming redundant.
For example, project leaders are increasingly being rendered superfluous as automation kicks in big-time and newer, more specialised roles emerge in India's $160-billion IT industry.
Peter Bendor Samuel, CEO of IT consulting firm Everest Group, said industry growth has slowed and the 'arbitrage first' segment (traditional IT services) is in secular decline. "When this is added to the pyramid factory model, which requires new freshers to be brought in every year to keep cost low, it results in an excess of more experienced employees," he said in an interview to ET in May '17.The phone in your pocket gives you powers that were hard to imagine even five years ago. It can talk to you, listen, and give sensible answers to questions. It knows your fingerprint and recognises your face and those of all your friends. It can buy almost anything, sell almost anything, bring you all the news you want, as well as almost all the books, films and music you might want to look at. What’s more, it will even allow you to talk to your friends and to communicate with almost anyone.
The problem is that these powers are not yours – at least they don’t belong to you alone. They belong to whoever controls the phone and can be used to serve their purposes as well as yours. Repressive governments and criminal gangs are all contending to break into phones today, and this kind of hacking will increasingly become the preferred route into all of the computer networks that we use – the ones we don’t call “phones”.
Apple’s sudden forced upgrade to the iPhone operating system last week was a response to these anxieties. A dissident in the UAE appears to have had his iPhone hijacked by a very sophisticated piece of malware produced by a security company and sold legally, if in secret, to regimes that want to spy on their enemies. This offers its controllers complete knowledge of anything the infected phone is privy to: that’s all the contacts, all the messages of any sort, whether chats, texts or emails, all the calendars and even, potentially, any voice conversation that it overhears. It’s difficult to imagine a more assiduous or intimate spy. And once one phone has been subverted, it becomes a tool for spying into all other the networks to which it or the owner has access.
This is not exclusively Apple’s problem. The much more widespread Android system is reasonably secure only on some Samsung and LG models and Google’s own-branded Nexus phones, which are updated frequently and automatically to keep abreast of security vulnerabilities. Other manufacturers have access to the updates but few get them installed in a timely fashion. In the poorer parts of the world, where Android has an overwhelming market share, the problem is especially acute. The Iranian secret police bug their dissidents using a tool (in the jargon of the trade, an Android RAT) called KrakenAgent.
Beyond rogue nation states there is an unpleasant and insufficiently regulated market of legal firms that specialise in finding security vulnerabilities and selling them to the highest legal bidder, which normally means oppressive regimes; then there is a second tier of entirely illegal operators who sell tools to criminal gangs. Little of this is used for spying (though there is a market among jealous and abusive men for software that will enable to them to track their partners, one reason why some women’s shelters are reluctant to allow smartphones inside). Much more damage is done by “ransomware”, which encrypts and in effect steals all of a user’s data, to be released only on payment. Such assaults are becoming increasingly common. Twenty-nine NHS trusts were targeted by them last year. This is a global problem now. Since almost every country will want these powers for its own security services, if for no one else, what is developing is something like an international arms trade. International efforts to police it are urgently needed and the companies that sell us these powerful phones must also be pressed to live up to their responsibilities to keep them safe so that their power is not easily turned against their owners.Update: Body of missing Sointula woman has been found
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A missing Sointula woman’s car has been found in Campbell River, but there is no sign of Twyla Roscovich, family and police say.
The 38-year-old filmmaker was reported missing on Tuesday, said Port McNeill RCMP. She left her home in Sointula on Sept. 6 for medical treatment on Vancouver Island and used her bank card the next day in Campbell River.
Her last communication was a text message to her family saying she planned to camp outside Nanaimo in her car. Her phone has been off since.
On Wednesday, her family said via social media that Roscovich’s green 1997 Volvo station wagon had been found near the ferry dock in Campbell River.
Friends and family have been searching the beaches and waterfront in Campbell River and on Quadra and Cortes islands.
Roscovitch, who has a young daughter, worked with fish-farm opponent Alexandra Morton on the documentary Salmon Confidential.
She is about five-foot-nine and 160 pounds, and has blue eyes and brown hair.
RCMP ask anyone with information about Roscovich and her whereabouts to contact their police local detachment.A Gallup Institute study in 2012 said 30 percent of Egyptians are atheists. (AFP/File)
According to Al-Watan newspaper, Egyptian atheists have launched a campaign on Facebook to collect signatures for a party that they would call the “Egyptian Secular Party," which would include secularists, atheists and liberal thinkers. It would also be committed to defend freedom of belief and atheism, and work on removing Egypt's Islamic identity from the Constitution.
Co-founder, Mahmoud Awad told Al-Watan that there are four kinds of atheists in Egypt. “There are those who believe in the existence of God but not in religion, the agnostics who only doubt the existence of God, the indifferent ones who do not care to know if there is a God or not, and those who neither believe in God nor in religion,” he explained.
Hisham Auf, the representative of the founders, said they aim to collect 5,000 signatures from 10 different governorates to submit an application to the Political Parties Affairs Committee.
“The party will face the Al-Azhar's encroachment on society and its alliance with the Salafis, which the government is unable to do,” he said, adding that it will adopt secularism overtly, unlike other parties that shy away from announcing their real position.
“It will explain what secularism really means in order to refute the misleading definition propagated by the Islamists,” he said. “We do not intend to have a majority party, but rather a party of an influential minority.”
He added that the party will call for a modern constitution, based on the principle of citizenship, the abolition of religious parties, reducing the role of Al-Azhar in political life and its guardianship of thought, art and the media, and the right to civil marriage for Muslims and Christians.
He also said the party will also address inheritance and personal status laws, remove religious affiliation from ID Cards, call for abolishing laws penalizing the defamation of religion, and support freedom of creativity and art.
He said the identity of the party is "purely Egyptian." “Now is a good time to form the party, given the current differences between the Al-Azhar and the Salafis on the one hand, and the differences between the Salafis and secularists like Islam Beheiry and Ibrahim Eissa on the other,” he said.
The second article of the Constitution states that Islam is the state religion, Arabic is its official language, and the principles of Islamic Sharia are the main source of legislation.
Dar al-Ifta issued a report in December last year, saying that there are 866 atheists in Egypt, followed by 325 in Morocco, 320 in Tunisia and 32 in Yemen, considering it a great hazard to Arab societies.
However, The Guardian newspaper quoted a study of the Gallup Institute conducted in 2012, contending that 30 percent of Egyptians are atheists. The Burson Marsteller Corporation of New York said 3 percent of Egyptians are atheists, according to a poll conducted by the Eastern Michigan University after the January 25, 2011 revolution.Before he knew who had been killed, or even what was really going on, Mitt Romney slammed President Obama over attacks on U.S. diplomatic compounds in Libya and Egypt. The Republican presidential nominee saw an opportunity to score political points on foreign policy — one of his own weaknesses — and jumped on it.
That was cheap opportunism. But the fact that Romney doubled-down yesterday, after learning of the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his American staffers, is truly inexcusable.
There’s an unspoken rule that politics should pause when American blood is spilled overseas. And Romney also had pledged not to criticize the president on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. A promise, apparently, that he chose to break.
Romney continues to insist that a statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was “akin to an apology” and a “severe miscalculation.” He implied, wrongly, that it was a reaction to the attack, even though it was issued before the protests broke out. And he faulted Obama for it.
The statement from the embassy, made before the killings, was no apology. It was an olive branch to the people of Egypt who were offended by an amateur film made in the United States that insults the Prophet Muhammad. The statement said the U.S. government “condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”
The intention was to make clear to demonstrators that the U.S. government didn’t endorse this video, a perfectly legitimate point to convey as resentments in Egypt began to roil. It was not a reaction to the attack on the embassy, which happened hours later and was firmly condemned.
Later, after news broke Tuesday night that a State Department official had been killed in Libya, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Romney each put out a statement. Clinton condemned the attacks, saying, “There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”
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Here’s what Romney said: “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
That is a shameful distortion, an unforgivable attempt to score political points that is made worse by the timing so soon after these diplomats gave their lives. It serves as a reminder of what a novice Romney is when it comes to international affairs and how eager he is to put his most belligerent foot forward.
After news of the deaths was confirmed, Obama unequivocally condemned the attacks. So did the Libyan government.
The Obama administration reportedly suspects the violence may have been planned by terrorists. While noting that Libya’s security forces fought back against the mob, helped protect American diplomats and took Stevens’ body to the hospital, Obama said, “Make no mistake: We will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.”
Nevertheless, under the guise of outrage at Obama’s response, House conservatives yesterday called for stripping foreign aid to Libya and Egypt. They were echoing Romney and other knee-jerk Republicans, including Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who wrote this on Twitter: “Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and Pathetic.”
Those words describe well Romney’s undignified and unfounded political attack on a day of national mourning.Nearly 26 million Americans could be eligible for health insurance subsidies next year, but most don't know it.
That's because relatively few people are familiar with provisions in the Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare," that will provide tax credits to low- and middle-income consumers to help them purchase health coverage through state-run insurance exchanges.
Most of those who will be able to claim the subsidies are in working families with annual earnings between $47,100 and $94,200, according to a recent analysis by Families USA, a consumer advocacy group. More than a third of those eligible will be young adults between ages 18 and 34.
"There's a huge number of people who can get coverage this way and can get significant help," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA. "It's not just for the poor. It reaches deeply into the middle class."
Here's how the subsidies will work:
Starting in October, those looking to buy individual health insurance can enroll in plans offered through state-based exchanges, with coverage beginning in January. Consumers buying individual plans will be able to choose between four levels of coverage: platinum, gold, silver and bronze. The plans will differ in their premiums and out-of-pocket expense burdens.
People who are not in a government health insurance program, such as Medicaid or Medicare, and do not have access to an affordable plan at work may be eligible for help paying their premiums. The assistance is available to those with incomes of up to four times the federal poverty level -- this year, that's $45,960 for an individual or $94,200 for a family of four -- and will be scaled to ensure that folks don't pay more than a designated percentage (the exact target varies by income level) of their earnings toward the premium. The subsidy will be paid directly to the insurance company.
Related: 6 companies cashing in on Obamacare
The federal subsidies will be pegged to the cost of a "silver" plan, which will vary depending on where consumers live. Insurers will soon submit to the states and federal government details of the plans they'll offer in the exchanges, including the premium costs, but consumers may not learn the specifics until open enrollment starts in October.
Families USA crunched the numbers for a few different scenarios. By its estimates, a family of four earning $94,200 and purchasing a silver-level plan carrying a $12,500 annual premium will get a subsidy worth $3,550, which limits the cost of the premium to 9.5% of the family's income.
The government hasn't yet released its own estimates on how many Americans will be eligible for the subsidies, but Families USA believes that up to 26 million citizens will meet the criteria.
Not everyone eligible for those subsidies will actually sign up, though. The Congressional Budget Office is forecasting that only 6 million people will receive subsidized coverage through an exchange next year. It expects that number to grow to 22 million by 2017.
Many Americans are still in the dark about Obamacare provisions that could help them, said Matthew Buettgens, senior research analyst at the Urban Institute.
"Outreach is going to be crucial to creating viable exchanges in the early years," he said.
It will be a heavy lift. Only 62% of Americans are aware that subsidy assistance is available to individuals under the health reform law, according to a March Kaiser Family Foundation poll. And about two-thirds of the uninsured say they don't understand how Obamacare will affect them.
All Americans are required to carry health insurance as January 1, 2014, or face financial penalties, but if enrolling in coverage through the state exchanges is too expensive or too confusing, uninsured individuals might choose to skip it and pay the fines instead. That could lead to fewer healthy people enrolling -- which would make coverage in the exchanges more costly for everyone, since they would become populated primarily by people with greater medical needs.
"You want a broad range of people to enroll," Buettgens said.SEO Social
With the speed that things change in the SEO industry, one year is like seven dog years in other industries. As the end of a year rapidly approaches, year-end retrospectives that examine the changes from many different angles abound —from changes in how SEO is perceived in the organization to how the practice of SEO is changing in light of 2012’s algo changes.
A lot changed in the industry in 2012 but perhaps nowhere more than in the SERPs themselves. Given the extent of the changes in the SERPs and knowing that a picture is worth a thousand words, we mocked up the changes individually, showing a ‘Before’ and ‘After’ wherever possible, and also included a final mockup that encapsulates all the changes together. For each change, we identify the elements of the change and call out industry reactions. Sentiment analysis was done using Topsy with a deeper dive into individual tweets and article comments for additional insight.
The Menu Bar Migrates North
In fall of 2012, Google began experimenting with moving the menu bar from the left frame to the top of the search results. By November, Google solidified the change, announcing it with a post on their Inside Search blog. Although not a major change that directly impacted the actual contents of the search results like many of the other changes rolled out in 2012, the shift reflects Google’s ongoing willingness to tinker with layout and user experience in the SERPs and unified their SERP look-and-feel across tablet and mobile platforms.
Response Sentiment:
Sentiment analysis of this change actually showed very little sentiment, positive or negative. People seemed to notice the change, but did not voice much of a preference either way.
Knowledge Graph:
In May 2012, Google announced the Knowledge Graph, self-described as the “first step in the next generation of search”. The Knowledge Graph culled data from a variety of outside sources such as Wikipedia, Weather Underground, and Freebase.com to summarize key facts and images in a box in the right frame of the SERP.
This change was significant – not only because of the prominence Google is now giving results from outside data sources in their normally tightly controlled SERP – but because it signaled a sharp move for Google from a traditional ‘get-in-get out search engine’ to a ‘we-have-some-answers-for-you-right-here-knowledge engine’.
At SES San Francisco in August, Matt Cutts:
“[…]clearly mentioned that one of the key focuses for Google is to move away from being a search engine and focus on becoming a knowledge engine. Google is so committed to this that Google’s Search Quality team has been renamed to Google’s Knowledge Team.” source
In August, Google also released an expanded element called the Knowledge Graph Carousel which added a carousel view to the top of the search results for certain query types.
Response Sentiment:
As the Topsy graph below indicates, the reaction to the Knowledge Graph seemed overwhelmingly positive, with users appreciating the ability to get answers to their query without ever having to leave the search results page. Much of the commentary in the wake of its release also suggested that users believe the change foretells a future shift to additional ‘we-have-some-answers-for-you-right-here’ innovations in the SERPs.
Enhanced Search Results
Over the course of 2012, Google rolled out a number of enhancements that collectively we are calling—wait for it—enhanced search results.
Search Plus Your World: With SPYW, Google began rolling personal results into the SERPs, mixing images, social, and traditional results together. Although they came out strong in emphasizing Google+ content over what often seemed like more relevant traditional results, over the year they seemed to dial back the intensity to a more moderate level.
Response Sentiment:
Google initially took a lot of heat for Search Plus Your World, with accusations directed at them ranging from crossing the boundaries of privacy to anti-competitive practices. Analysis of the response after the initial rollout (as the Topsy chart shows below) was mostly negative, as users rebelled against the emphasis of Google+ results at the expense of more relevant traditional ones and the shock of seeing their personal results in what was traditionally a ‘private’ space. As time passed, and Google dialed back the intensity of the Google+ appearances and users adjusted to the change, people mostly stopped talking about it.
Zagat Ratings in the SERPs Google added reviews for many local queries from recently acquired Zagat and Google+ pages. While some were happy to have access to the free Zagat reviews in the SERPs, others were distressed at the amount of outdated content that surfaced due to the integration:
Author Rank: For websites that implement author markup on their website, author pictures will now appear in the SERPs. Over the course of 2012 Google themselves alluded to, and the sentiment from many industry thought leaders was, that authorship would become increasingly important in establishing subject matter authority. Even so, in August a Conductor study found that only 9% of the top tech blogs fully implemented authorship.
Response Sentiment:
Response to authorship was all over the map, with some appreciative of the opportunity to develop their personal brand in the SERPs and others resentful that Google is attempting to rank authors over one another as ‘authorities’. A perusal of tweet, articles, comments, and forums for this article also showed many who were confused with how to correctly implement author rank and others who were frustrated it did not work as expected.
Penguin Algorithm Update:
Perhaps the subject to get the most attention in the SEO community, the Penguin algorithm update hit the SERPS earlier in 2012. Designed to reduce web spam, the update initially caused a good deal of consternation for many, with reports of sites unfairly caught in the update. As the year marched on, however, the consensus, at least from a SERP quality perspective, was that quality was, in fact, improved for many queries in the SERPS. And, if a silver lining was to be had, the de-emphasis of poor content and linking in the search results drove SEOs to develop a new focus on content quality.
Sentiment Response:
Sentiment analysis showed a fairly negative response to the update, but to be fair, those who were talking about it were likely negatively impacted by the update. As time went on, people have continued to talk about but largely in the context of how to ensure they are producing quality content the algorithms will favor.
Conclusion: Understanding 2012's Changes and How they Impact You
2012 SERP Changes
In review, 2012 was a turbulent year in the SEO industry with lots of changes taking place, both in the industry and in the SERPs themselves. Understanding the changes—and how they might affect your online presence—is an important step towards ensuring you are keeping up with a rapidly evolving industry and taking advantage of opportunity wherever possible.
A version of this article appeared at Search Engine Watch on December 4th, 2012.Posted August 11, 2010 by Clint in Analysis, Politics. Tagged: Chilcot Inquiry, Iraq war, Tony Blair, WMD. Leave a Comment
The UK’s public inquiry into the Iraq war (the “Chilcot Inquiry“) has featured testimony from major figures at the time of the invasion and has further strengthened criticism of the war on multiple fronts. Testimony affirms that pre-war intelligence did not paint Saddam Hussein as a threat, that the coalition had decided to wage war before weapons inspections were completed, that non-military options were not seriously pursued and that, in the opinion of many, the war was illegal.
A selection of notable quotes from the inquiry:
“I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war, and that was the firm view of most international lawyers.” – Hans Blix, former United Nations chief arms inspector.
“Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam.” – Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director-general of MI5 (British military intelligence).
“We regarded the direct threat from Iraq as low.” – Eliza Manningham-Buller, former director-general of MI5.
“When I kept reading them [intelligence reports], I kept saying to myself, ‘Is this intelligence?’ It was not very substantiated but clearly was robust.” – Lord John Prescott, former deputy prime minister.
“The real problem, which I did draw several times to the attention of London, was that the contingency military timetable had |
record.
He added: "Our study of the use of honey and beeswax seems to show there was a northern limit to where they were living during the Neolithic, with no evidence being found in thousands of pottery shards found in Ireland, Scotland, Norway or Sweden."
Sweet tooth
The beeswax may have been used by prehistoric people to glue together stone arrows and spears or to make pots waterproof.
Honey may have provided a rare source of sweetness in their diet.
Prof Outram explained:"The plentiful supply of sugary foods is a very recent phenomenon, but in the past sweet foods were very hard to find and it is clear from our study that the earliest farmers in Europe had a keen interest in exploiting the valuable products of the honeybee."
Recent DNA studies suggest that the honeybee originated in Asia around 300,000 years ago and rapidly spread across Europe and Africa.
The bee's range contracted in Europe during the last Ice Age, but expanded in Africa.
Modern bees face multiple threats from climate change, pesticides and diseases.
Follow Helen on Twitter.Part-time clerk S. Chia has been waging a 16-year battle.
Since her divorce in 2001, she has been trying to get her former husband to pay the monthly maintenance of $500 for herself and their two children aged 18 and 20.
Following amendments to the Women's Charter in 2011, a new measure implemented by the authorities gave her extra ammunition: She was able to apply to court to get his employer to pay her directly from his salary. He was then working as a manager.
But he resigned the next month.
So she had to go back to court to apply for yet another enforcement order. He owes her about $10,000 in maintenance arrears.
"He won't pay until I take out an enforcement order. It's very tiring to keep taking out such orders," laments Ms Chia, who earns just over $1,000 a month.
Related Story Credit blacklist effective in getting defaulters to pay up
Her headache underscores the continued challenges that some broken families face in compelling breadwinners to provide financial support, despite more efforts since 2011 to make them do so.
Last year, there were 2,651 applications for the enforcement of maintenance orders. This is a drop of 11 per cent from the 2,979 applications filed six years ago.
Lawyers say the number of enforcement applications has been gradually falling since 2011, when a host of measures were implemented to tackle the problem.
For example, the courts can direct an employer to pay the defaulter's wages to the person entitled to it, as Ms Chia did.
Defaulters can also be ordered to attend financial counselling or perform community service.
Host of measures to tackle maintenance payment woes
Divorcees who are remarrying must also make a statutory declaration if they have any maintenance arrears. This is to remind them of their obligations to their former partners and to ensure their new spouses are aware of this.
If the person refuses to make a declaration or if the Registry of Marriages (ROM) suspects he or she is not telling the truth, the ROM will not issue a marriage licence for the couple, said a spokesman for the Ministry of Social and Family Development, under which the ROM comes.
The Straits Times understands that the ROM has not denied anyone a marriage licence so far because of this.
As of last December, 1,646 people who were remarrying have declared their maintenance arrears.
Lawyer Rajan Chettiar said of the falling numbers: "I think more people (who are supposed to pay maintenance) realise they cannot play punk and get away with it."
Lawyer Ivan Cheong notes that in recent years, more couples are settling their divorces and ancillary issues such as maintenance through mediation, instead of a more adversarial approach where they fight it out in court and a judge makes orders deciding who gets what.
When the couple agree during mediation on terms such as the amount of maintenance to be given each month, they are also more likely to comply with these terms. Hence, they may be fewer defaults, he said.
However, lawyer Malathi Das pointed out that not getting maintenance is still a major problem for many people, with over 2,000 enforcement applications filed a year.
Besides monetary woes, this often leads to other problems, lawyers say. For example, some women block their former husbands from visiting their children since they are not paying maintenance. And the children become estranged from their fathers.
Almost three in four applications last year were filed by women to get their former husbands to pay the sums meant to support them, their children or both. The rest of the applicants included current wives, and men who were chasing their former wives for financial support for their children.
An application for enforcement can be filed when at least one payment is not made.
Last year, the law was also amended to allow men incapacitated by illness or disability and who are unable to support themselves to ask for maintenance for themselves from their wives or former wives.
However, no man in such circumstances has filed for maintenance yet, a Family Justice Courts spokesman told The Straits Times.I’m going to pick on my colleagues over at Bloomberg Tech and their allegations that Bitcoin is suffering some sort of backlog. You guys are wrong! Bitcoin is doing just fine.
Complaining about a Bitcoin transaction backlog is like complaining that Ebay has a backlog because 90 people bid on a Honus Wagner baseball card and only one person got to win. I could bid a penny on Honus Wagner all day long, and still not get a card. That’s not a backlog; that’s just a crappy offer price.
See, a sad fact of capitalism is that goods and services cost money. Processing a bitcoin transaction is a service that miners perform in exchange for money, which they need to pay their electricity bills. Did bitcoin users presume that the network is a public service run by benevolent cryptoanarchists?
Bitcoin transactions are priced by size, like, BTC/kB. Transactions vary in size because you can combine multiple inputs and outputs and add programmable instructions. But a one-input-one-output transaction is about 192 bytes, and a reasonable fee for that transaction might be about 0.0002 BTC, or 25 cents. The fee is the same whether the transaction value is a million dollars or a nickel.
So here we have Roger Ver complaining that he paid $78 for his bitcoin transaction. Right, the transaction contained 416 inputs, so it was effectively 416 transactions squashed into one. 18.75 cents per transaction is not bad! And this is irrelevant, but the total transaction value was 32.5 bitcoin, or about $39,000. $78 is effectively a 0.2% transaction fee!
https://t.co/6EeRmpwLyF just paid $78 in TX fees for a single Bitcoin transaction. https://t.co/FVq16Vzqq9 pic.twitter.com/mOwHnaFPWP — Roger Ver (@rogerkver) January 5, 2017
Transaction fees have gone up recently, but overall transaction costs have stayed the same. Decreased, even. The cost of a transaction is what miners receive for including a transaction in a block. That’s the fixed block reward plus a fee from the user. The block reward is the creation of new bitcoins, which is effectively inflation, so people don’t really think about it, but it’s still a cost. Block rewards decrease by 50% every four years, and the last decrease was last July, so transaction fees had to increase to compensate. The good news is that the inflation rate has gone down.
The bigger issue is that people don’t understand how to calculate bitcoin transaction fees, so they submit cheapskate transactions and get all confused when miners don’t want to include them. Here is a pretty good tool for estimating transaction fees and expected wait time. A lot of the wallet software out there sucks and doesn’t do this for their users. Bitcoin could stand to be more user-friendly.
Finally, transaction fees are denominated in BTC, but people whine about them in dollars. Even if the transaction fees haven’t gone up much in terms of bitcoin, the dollar-denominated price of bitcoin has increased by a lot, so the transaction fees look a lot higher these days when considered in dollars. But it’s not Bitcoin’s fault that your stupid fiat currency can’t hold its value.
See Also:
Someone Wants to Stick a Fork in Bitcoin –BloombergView
Like this: Like Loading...It never ceases to amaze me how many sites completely ignore generally accepted password safety practices.
A few weeks ago, I applied for the Google Computer Science Summer Institute. Google outsourced the online application to eResources, who claims to be “Your Trusted Technology Partner.”
Earlier in the year, I had created an account on this site and filled out some basic information. For some reason, the password wasn’t saved in my password manager of choice, and I couldn’t remember it. After a few guesses, I hit the “Forgot Password” link, typed in my E-Mail address, and was sent the message shown below.
Yes. That’s right. They sent me my password. In plaintext. In an E-Mail.
Mind you, I’m not particularly upset that they sent me my password in an E-Mail (although it isn’t particularly secure). I don’t really care how they sent it to me. They could have sent twelve angry weasels each bearing one of the twelve keys necessary to open a secret underground fortress that contained my plaintext password deep in one of its seventeen dungeons. I would still be pissed. The issue isn’t that they gave me my password, the issue is that they had my password to give to me.
Passwords should never be in plaintext on the server.
There’s a common misconception with this. Just because it’s encrypted on your server doesn’t mean that it isn’t in plaintext. If I could somehow extract my password based on the information stored on your server, then as far as I’m concerned, you’re storing my password in plaintext. And that is not okay.
Why is this important? Well, it’s very simple. Your server might be compromised. The contents of your database might be released. Many internet users use the same password on multiple websites, and if you accidentally leak their password in plaintext, all of their other accounts are in immediate jeopardy. Plenty of high-profile sites have been compromised. It can happen to you!
What’s the alternative? Hash the passwords, and with a unique salt for each user. When a user submits their password to you, concatenate the salt and hash the combination. You may then store this hash (and the salt, separately) in your database and perform the same hashing routine each time a user tries to log in. Their passwords are never written to the database, and their passwords can’t be extracted from the hashes. Better yet, even if two users have the same password, their hashes are completely different (thanks to the salt).
More information on safely hashing passwords is readily available, you just have to look. For example, ensure you are using a suitable hashing algorithm.
Shortly after I noticed this basic password security violation, I notified both Google and eResources of the issue. I carefully selected a subject line likely to grab attention: “Password Security Concern”. A representative from eResources sent me back the following email promptly:
Eric – Thanks for expressing your concern. I will pass it on to the administrators of this program. While I recognize that this isn’t as secure as a reset password link, your password is stored in an encrypted format and then decrypted before it is emailed to you. Best regards, [Name Redacted]
While, yes, encrypting the passwords is more secure, it’s roughly the equivalent of preventing intruders from entering your house by simply closing the door. If I’ve somehow gained access to your database, I likely have the ability to access your code as well, which means I can just decrypt everything. Passwords need to be non-reversibly hashed.
Don’t get me wrong. eResources is not alone in their blatant disregard for even the most basic levels of password security. There are, unfortunately, thousands of other incompetent or uninformed companies on the web making the same mistakes. This, however, does not make the offense excusable.
Google certainly knows better than this, and has a direct responsibility to ensure that their users’ data remains safe. They have yet to respond to my email.
eResources is not Google, but by using them, Google endorses their product. Google is putting their scholarship applicants’ passwords on the line, and this is simply not acceptable.Subscribe to our newsletter Don't miss the latest headlines. Sign up for our Daily Digests.
There’s a really cool time-lapse video from the International Space Station bouncing around the interwebs right now. Watch and you’ll see dramatic images of the Northern Lights and a string of lightning storms as the space station swirls around the earth.
Being a bit of a geography buff, though, I can’t help but try to figure out specific locations based on the lights of different cities. And as the video sweeps across North America, I noticed a couple of “cities” that won’t appear on any maps.
For instance, over Alberta, we can clearly see the oil sands near Fort McMurray:
But then as the video sweeps toward the east, at about 0:34 another strange, enormous “city” appears in the middle of nowhere.
What could it be? Billings? Saskatoon? The parking lot of the Super K-Mart in Glendive?
As we move further east, more familiar locations appear, revealing our mystery “city.” It’s the lights from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota (and probably a fair amount of natural gas flares as well).
There have been numerous stories about the scope and impact of oil development in North Dakota. But none put it in quite such stark terms as this image.A state audit of the Howard County Public School System found limited financial controls led to the approval of millions of dollars in salaries, mileage expenses and construction projects without proper approval or procurement.
The findings, were released by the Maryland Office of Legislative Audits on Friday as part of a state-mandated audit conducted at least once every six years.
They come amid mounting concerns from the community and local elected officials about the school system's commitment to financial transparency and accountability.
State auditors were especially concerned about the school system's reliance on no-bid contracts, said Thomas Barnickel III, the office's legislative auditor.
"If you're a steward of public funds, you want to make sure the procurement process allows all vendors to openly participate so you can get the best price possible," he said.
The school system disputed the findings, which its internal auditor, David Clark, said were "unbalanced" conclusions by "inexperienced" auditors.
"We want the [state's] audit; it can provide a value, but we want it to be done well," Clark said, adding the audit was the "most difficult" experience for him in nearly four decades of work in the field.
State auditors defended their work, citing that staff members are led by experienced and objective auditors. At times, the school system resisted requests for timely information, access to documents and access for interviews, Barnickel III said.
The school system, which has an $808 million operating budget, came under fire this year when the Howard County Council and Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman refused to fully fund its record-high request of $856 million.
The contentious budget season spurred the council to call for an independent financial audit of the school system. That audit, which is not routine like the state's, is ongoing as a council-created committee reviews the school system's budget.
The state's ombudsman is also expected to release by January an investigation of the school system's handling of public information requests. The state Senate unanimously passed a bill in April that requested the investigation.
Despite increasing public pressure, schools spokesman John White said Thursday that he saw no reason for public concern.
"We are one of the most scrutinized systems in the state right now and probably the most transparent," White said, adding the school system is responding to all public requests for information.
In its report, state auditors found the school system awarded $15.3 million in total salaries for administrative staff in 2014, without the school board's approval as required by state law. The audit report addressed no other issues related to salaries.
For their report, state auditors for the Office of Legislative Audits reviewed the school system's financial records, particularly from mid-2013 through 2014.
Clark said the school board approved the administrative raises based on a salary scale set up years ago. He said state law does not require the board to re-approve that scale every year. He said state auditors raised concerns based on their "philosophy" and not issues "grounded in any law or state regulation."
In a critical response, the school board's chairwoman, Christine O'Connor, called the audit a "disservice" to the state and school system and questioned the state auditor's experience and understanding of financial audits.
"On the whole, we believe the audit delivered limited value at best; diverted attention away from meaningful and important school system initiatives and operations; and overall was a disservice to the state and HCPSS in our joint efforts to ensure accountability and improve performance," O'Connor said in a written statement. She also wrote that the audit "stubbornly resisted acknowledging the sound business practices we use."
State Del. Warren Miller, a District 9 Republican, said the "abrasiveness" of the school system's response was astounding.
"It just seems like [the school system] has been caught doing something they shouldn't have been doing and we have to be the adults and step in and fix this problem," Miller said.
Responding to the state report, State Del. Frank Turner said the school system should work to eliminate sole-source contracting – a long standing concern for state legislators.
"Senior management has little business making these decisions," Turner said. "The school system should openly listen to these recommendations and take the steps necessary to improve."
State Del. Vanessa Atterbeary, a District 13 Democrat, said the audit was shocking and validated concerns related to transparency.
"It all goes back to whether the people we have entrusted our children with are doing the best job that they can. Are they being transparent? Are they being truthful? This audit calls all of that into question," Atterbeary said.
With better cooperation from the school system, the cost of the audit could have been reduced, the report said.
Competitive bidding
The audit found senior management awarded $12.6 million in no-bid contracts without sufficient justification, suggesting the school system did not award contracts to the most qualified vendors at the best value, according to the audit.
School policy allows management to seek single-source contracts if it is impractical to seek competitive bids. The school board management failed to support why it did not seek competitive bids, according to the audit.
Clark said it was "unbalanced" for state auditors to fail to mention that 97 percent of its contracts are competitively bid.
Barnickel III, however, said that assertion was ungrounded because the audit mentions that the school's methods for handling the selection of goods and services were appropriate overall.
The audit also found that the school system did not select construction management firms by competitive bids as required by state law. The audit shows that in fiscal 2013 and 2014, the system entered into a dozen contracts worth $9.3 million with five construction management firms.
Competitive bidding helps ensure qualified firms participate in a fair environment that provides the best value for the school system, according to the audit."That lady is my hero" -MeeloYeah, that pretty much sums it up.----If you don't know who this is, get up, right now, and go watch Avatar: Legend of Korra. Do it. Right now. I'll wait...You do it? Awesome. Isn't she great? From the moment she stepped on screen I knew I was going to have to do some fan art for her. As the show progressed, I knew that I couldn't just do anything; I had to give her the best damn piece of fan art I could muster. And because of that, I've put off doing this for the last half a year, cause I knew I would get really sucked into it. Which I did. But if I mess with it any more at this point, I'm likely to ruin it.Thank you Michael Dante DiMartino & Bryan Konietzko for creating such a wonderful woman. She totally stole the show. <3 <3 <3Pose was referenced from this : [link]Mental Illness, Addiction, and Euthanasia
Regina Walker Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 20, 2016
photo by Regina Walker
Mark Langedijk was a 41-year-old divorced father of two young children living with his parents in the Netherlands.
On July 13, 2016, Mark was joined at his parent’s home by his older brother Marcel. They laughed, drank beer, smoked, and ate ham sandwiches. After a good night’s sleep, Mark’s physician appeared at his home and administered 3 injections. After the third injection Mark was dead by his own choice. He had requested and was approved for Euthanasia for chronic alcoholism.
Jane Doe (her real name has not been released) was a woman in her early 20’s living in the Netherlands who suffered sexual abuse from the ages of 5 until 15. As a result of this abuse she suffered significant psychiatric problems including post-traumatic-stress disorder, anorexia, depression, and hallucinations. Though she achieved some improvement in her symptoms after therapy she requested and was approved for Euthanasia.
Another case in the Netherlands that has recently made the news involved a 34-year-old mom of a three-year-old daughter who was approved for euthanasia in response to depression, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and a personality disorder.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines euthanasia as; “the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy.” The word Euthanasia comes from the Greek “euthantos” meaning easy death.
Euthanasia is illegal in most of the US though there are some states in which Euthanasia and Physicians Aid in Dying (PAD) is allowed (California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont and Washington). PAD differs from Euthanasia in that in cases of PAD, the individual self-administers the lethal injection.
When we hear of Euthanasia in the US, we mostly think of individuals who are removed from ventilators when it becomes clear there is no possibility of recovery. Additionally, the image of an end stage cancer patient who is enduring significant pain and is terminal comes to mind. That is no longer the case in other parts of the world.
The Netherlands has become known for it’s more liberal approach to Euthanasia. Though cancer is far ahead the number one diagnosis for euthanasia, psychiatric illnesses are increasing. In 2010, two people were euthanized in response to mental illness. In 2015, 56 people were. There are some who see this move in the Netherlands as courageous and compassionate. Still others view it as a dangerous slide into a questionable ethical area.
Mr. Langedijk battled alcoholism for eight years and was hospitalized for treatment 21 times. He was unable to sustain any significant length of sobriety and his interpersonal life as well as his physical health suffered as a result. Eventually, Mr. Langedijk determined that he was unable to bear the emotional pain his alcohol addiction was causing him. His older brother Marcel Langedijk, a journalist, described Mark as a “hopeless” alcoholic and though devastated by the loss of his brother, Marcel supported his decision to die.
The process that led to Mark’s July 14th death took a year and a half. It took approximately two years for Jane Doe’s request to be approved. Euthanasia was legalized in the Netherlands in 2002 and is permissible only under strict conditions and can only be performed by a physician. Conditions include a physician assessing an individual and being convinced that “unbearable suffering” is being experienced from which there is no hope of relief. The physician must then consult with at least one other physician about the case though the second physician does not have to agree with the decision of the first. Children from the ages of 12 to 18 are also covered by the Dutch euthanasia law. Each case is reviewed post-euthanasia by the RTE regional review commission. If this investigation finds that the case did not meet appropriate criteria, the review body can refer the case to the public prosecutor and health inspectors.
Dutch documentary filmmaker Elena Lindemans produced the award winning film “Mothers Don’t Jump from Buildings” in 2014. The film, made when Ms. Lindemans was 26 years old, tells the story of her mother who committed suicide in 2002 by jumping from a building. Her suicide occurred after Lindemans mother was unable to convince physicians to help her end her life. The film explores the social and personal consequences of a strict euthanasia policy for psychiatric patients and offers the view that euthanasia is a compassionate means for those suffering from psychiatric illnesses to experience a “good death”.
Paulan Stärcke is a psychiatrist at the End-of-Life clinic in The Hague. In May 2016 she presented at the Euthanasia conference in Amsterdam and screened Ms. Lindemans film. Stärcke expressed the belief that psychiatrists are “too hesitant” about agreeing to requests from mental health patients for euthanasia. Stärcke remarked “It is not execution; It is an execution of the wish of a patient. You can prepare for euthanasia, you can say goodbye and it can be a loving memory, not only hurt. Suicide is only hurt.”
Many ethical questions have been raised about the implementation of euthanasia for mental health issues. Additionally, concern has been voiced over the inclusion of children between the ages of 12 to 18 in the Dutch euthanasia law. Though these questions have validity there are no easy answers or obvious right or wrong.
In response to criticism over his brother’s death, Marcel Langedijk responded, ‘“You can close your eyes to it and keep telling yourself everyone is curable but the fact remains, not everyone is….My brother suffered from depression and anxiety and tried to ‘cure’ it with alcohol. He’s from a normal family, he did not want this to happen. He did not take an easy way out. Just a humane one…..I am just glad my brother did not have to jump in front of a train or live a few more years in agony before dying of his abuse. Alcoholism and depression are illnesses, just like cancer. People who suffer from it need a humane way out.”
by Regina WalkerJudge Merrick Garland, Obama’s pick to replace the late Antonin Scalia, “has a very liberal view of gun rights,” according to Judicial Crisis Network (JNC), a judicial group run by a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Garland is the chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was nominated by Bill Clinton. Garland’s nomination languished in the Republican controlled Senate until after the 1996 election.
Republicans did not specifically object to Garland’s liberal views, but rather said the DC court did not need another judge and objected to the additional “cost to taxpayers of $1 million a year,” according to Senator Chuck Grassley.
As deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division of the Clinton Justice Department, Garland supervised the prosecutions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in the Oklahoma City bombing case. He was responsible for major decisions in the case, including seeking the death penalty for McVeigh.
According to JNC chief counsel Carrie Severino, Garland’s judicial record “leads to the conclusion that he would vote to reverse one of Justice Scalia’s most important opinions, D.C. vs. Heller, which affirmed that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to keep and bear arms.”
The Court ruled during its 2007-08 term that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm and that the D.C. law banning handguns was unconstitutional.
“Ultimately, the Court agreed with Heller that D.C.’s ban on all functional firearms in the home is unconstitutional ‘under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights,” writes Robert A. Levy. “Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) did not sign the brief. In fact, he reportedly stated, prior to issuance of the Heller opinion, that he backs the D.C. gun ban and opposes all laws allowing concealed carry.”
In January Obama announced a series of unconstitutional executive actions, including prohibiting the sale of firearms between individuals.
“Mr. Obama will now require that anyone who sells a gun, that is even an ‘occasional’ seller will be required to perform a background check. By defining what an “occasional seller” is, the president is essentially interpreting the law, a job reserved for the courts,” Judge Andrew P. Napolitano wrote after the actions were announced.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch sent a letter to the states demanding the federal government receive complete criminal history records and criminal dispositions, information on persons disqualified because of a mental illness, and qualifying crimes of domestic violence.
The FBI also announced it will tweak its background check system. The changes include processing background checks 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and improving notification of local authorities when”prohibited persons unlawfully attempt to buy a gun.”
Republicans in Congress and state legislatures denounced Obama’s executive actions. “Congress must be swift to respond to any executive action, and there will certainly be legal challenges as well. This debate is about more than the Second Amendment. This debate is about standing up to an out-of-control President who refuses to follow the Constitution,” declared Alabama Rep. Bradley Byrne.”
.@RepMoBrooks: Assuming we can find a court that does its job of upholding the Constitution, these actions will mean nothing. — 1070 WAPI Birmingham (@wapiradio) January 5, 2016
If Merrick Garland is nominated there will be little guarantee the highest Court will uphold the Constitution. It is now up to Republicans to reject Garland and force Obama to find another candidate or delay the appointment until a new president is in the White House.The Internet played an unprecedented role in rallying voters during this year’s election. In the aftermath of the election, Web 2.0 tools are continuing to play a role in other causes, astonishing long-time advocates with the power and speed with which it gets their message out.
The latest example is a series of international protests scheduled for Saturday in opposition to California’s Proposition 8, the gay marriage ban that passed on Nov. 4. Join the Impact, a Web site built the morning of Friday, Nov. 7, has rallied hundreds of thousands of people who are gathering this weekend in eight countries, 50 states and 300 cities.
“This is the potential of the Web,” said Ben Elowitz, chief executive of Wetpaint, a company that builds Web sites for individuals and companies and built one for Join the Impact. “When Web 2.0 started, people started talking about giving ordinary people a voice online. This is the pinnacle of giving people a voice online. And people are taking that voice and making it meaningful with a megaphone.”
Amy Balliett, one of the two original organizers of the movement, has organized local demonstrations and fund-raisers in the past the old-fashioned way, with fliers around town and word of mouth. She said she was astonished at the momentum and speed that Join the Impact has picked up from the Web.
She contrasted it with the Stonewall Riot of 1969, which was a turning point in the campaign for gay rights. “Had they had social media, had they had the Internet, we would have been able to accomplish a lot more already, because they would have been able to keep the message alive and keep the community going,” she said.
A week ago, Ms. Balliett, who lives in Seattle, received a call from a friend, Willow Witte, who was trying to organize a local protest against the passage of Prop 8 in Cleveland but was not getting much traction. They decided to form Join the Impact to rally people around the country, and set up a Web site Friday morning. By Sunday night, it was getting 50,000 hits an hour and the server crashed, “which was a bittersweet problem to have,” Ms. Balliett said.
She found a new Web host, Hostdango, which gave Join the Impact a bigger server for free. It crashed the next day, so Hostdango gave them an even bigger one. On Monday morning, Ms. Balliett got a call from Wetpaint, offering to build her a new site where supporters could add their own information about protest locations and times.
Wetpaint lets individuals build Web sites for free and companies build them for a fee. HBO, Dell and T-Mobile have all built sites on the network. In four days, Join the Impact has become Wetpaint’s most-visited site, with over 1 million views.
“When I started this company, this is what I wanted to see,” said Mr. Elowitz of Wetpaint. “This generation of 20- and 30-somethings is so plugged in online that they’re really learning to use online as a platform for organization and activism.” His work has touched on marriage in the past — he is a co-founder of Blue Nile, the online diamond retailer that specializes in engagement rings, which is now a publicly traded company.
Join the Impact is also on Twitter and Facebook, which are also helping to “drive the masses,” Ms. Balliett said.
After the Saturday protests, the week-old organization will keep harnessing the power of the Web to fight for equality, she said. Next up: they are planning a “day without gays,” when they will encourage gay people to stay home and not contribute to the economy.On a late January day, near the end of the 41-day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a man named John Killman joined Ammon and Ryan Bundy and other protesters.
He spoke with a French accent and provided occupiers with food and firearms training. He was friends with many of them on Facebook.
There was a catch, however: John Killman didn't exist.
The discovery that Killman was an FBI informant hit just before the surprising outcome of the trial of seven refuge occupiers. The revelation may have sounded the death knell for a struggling prosecution, now faced with more questions about how informants may have influenced the case.
Killman's secret role wouldn't have come to light except for a chance conversation and fast detective work by defense attorneys.
***
It was during a lunch break in the waning days of the federal conspiracy trial of the occupiers when defense lawyer Lisa Maxfield picked up an intriguing lead.
Maxfield was interviewing a potential witness, Matthew Deatherage, about his role manning the gate at the refuge during the takeover.
Suddenly, he leaned toward her.
In a hushed voice, he revealed that "this weird French guy" had shown up "out of nowhere" at the bird sanctuary just a few days before the FBI arrested Ammon Bundy and other occupation leaders.
"I thought he was an agent provocateur," Deatherage told the lawyer.
He showed Maxfield what he said was the man's Facebook page. The only pictures were of a military-style rifle in front of a scenic background of arches under the name "John Killman." Most of his Facebook friends were people involved in the armed seizure of the refuge to protest federal land management.
Deatherage described how Killman, speaking with a foreign accent, had provided training on guns and military tactics.
"Oh, that guy!" chimed in defendant Shawna Cox, who was nearby in the eighth-floor courthouse room set aside for the defense. "You need to unmask him."
Later that night over beers and mussels in a downtown bar, Maxfield and fellow defense attorney Tiffany Harris decided they needed to smoke out the mystery man.
"Let's go get what we can get," Maxfield said.
If they could show that an informant egged on the occupiers, particularly in encouraging them to use guns, that could taint the government's evidence. Even at the 11th hour, they believed the effort was worth a try.
Their deadline sleuthing would soon expose Killman as Confidential Human Source No. 2. Their find pressured prosecutors to acknowledge to the jury that the FBI had gathered intelligence from a total of 15 informants in the case, including nine sent into the refuge.
Their work led to one of the most jaw-dropping moments of testimony during the five-week trial, threw the government's most inflammatory piece of evidence into question and raised reasonable doubt in the jury room during deliberations.
U.S. District Judge Anna J. Brown's instructions to the jury noted that informants are legal and a common FBI tactic and that authorities can use them "to engage in stealth and deception" to assume the role of a member in an alleged conspiracy. Yet police and trial experts say their use can boomerang, raising concerns about entrapment or collusion.
"It's one of the most challenging things in law enforcement to successfully use an informant, protect their life and hopefully use them again in the future," said retired FBI agent Clint Van Zandt. "The good FBI agents cultivate informants, send them into situations where an undercover agent couldn't pass muster. But it can always backfire."
Ferreting out 'John Killman'
From the bar on the night of Oct. 7, Maxfield immediately called her investigator, Rachel Philips, with the tip. She suggested Philips reach out to other refuge occupiers who might have encountered Killman.
Philips spoke with one occupier who confirmed that Killman was involved in the firearms training at the refuge boat launch. The next day, she reached Karl Koenigs, a Wisconsin man known by the nickname "Capt. Karl," who hadn't been indicted in the case but had been attending parts of the trial. He had spent three weeks at the refuge near Burns and said he commanded a unit of occupiers dubbed the "Alpha Squad."
Koenigs remembered Killman telling him and others at a morning briefing that he had been part of the Swiss army and involved in special forces. Killman shared tales of where he'd been and what he'd done.
Koenigs had something even better than memories of Killman. "Well, I got his phone number," he told the investigator.
Philips immediately dropped the number into a reverse directory and up popped an unusual name: "Fabio Minoggio."
A Facebook photo of Minoggio showed him posing in front of what looked like the Swiss Alps.
Defense lawyers showed this Facebook photo to Oregon standoff trial defendants to track down Fabio Minoggio, aka John Killman.
The lawyers passed the picture around to the defendants on trial for conspiracy to prevent federal workers from doing their jobs at the refuge. They agreed it showed the man they knew as Killman, though he appeared younger in the photo.
Maxfield -- who represented Neil Wampler of Los Os |
.
One member of the ring stashed pistols inside a stereo. Into the same shipping container went two Coleman beverage coolers, each filled with green paint and hiding a handgun. Meija-Fuentes bought used cars, tucked guns into their doors or other internal compartments, and sent them off to Honduras. Sometimes, Meija-Fuentes told investigators, he simply put the weapons in his luggage when flying home to San Pedro Sula.
AP The Meija-Fuentes ring operated without detection for at least two years until 2010, when a routine scan of a shipping container by Honduran customs officials revealed guns inside the Coleman coolers. As its leader, Meija-Fuentes was later sentenced to three years in federal prison.
There are 60,000 licensed gun dealers in the United States, an estimated 265 million civilian firearms, and countless private sellers offloading pistols and assault-style rifles from their private collections without any government oversight.
Limiting gun trafficking would be an enormous challenge even if there were broad political agreement on what should be done. As it stands, the issue — like all things involving guns in the United States — is hugely divisive, with the powerful gun lobby working to oppose any intervention that could be interpreted as implying that American gun owners and gun businesses are complicit in bloodshed.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton's administration helped draft the first international small-arms control treaty, known by the acronym CIFTA, which mandates strict monitoring of gun businesses and export controls. It has since been signed and ratified by all but three countries in the Western Hemisphere — one of which is the United States, the largest gunmaker and the largest retail gun market in the world, severely hindering the pact's effectiveness. Though Obama urged its ratification soon after his first inauguration, CIFTA hasn't been mentioned in Congress since 2009, when then-Senator John Kerry made one statement calling for its ratification.
Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president, responded to the Obama administration's wan pro-CIFTA push by warning "that anti-gun advocates will … try to use this treaty to attack gun ownership," even though the State Department sought the NRA's input when drafting the treaty.
As LaPierre was attacking one transnational effort to reduce gun violence in Central America, his colleague, the top NRA lobbyist Chris Cox, worked to derail another, giving House testimony against the Merida Initiative, a multi-billion dollar program launched under the George W. Bush administration to aid law enforcement in Mexico.
Part of the Merida Initiative included funding for Mexico to work with the ATF to trace American firearms back to their source. Cox pushed back against suggestions that American gun sellers and buyers had anything to do with cartel violence.
"The crisis in Mexico is being used as yet another pretext to restrict the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans," Cox said.
In late 2010, the Obama administration proposed a rule change that required licensed gun dealers in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to report to the ATF any purchases of multiple semiautomatic rifles designed to fire rounds larger than the tiny.22 caliber, since cartels favor military-style weapons like the AR-15 or AK-47. The rule was modeled on a provision of the 1968 Gun Control Act, which already mandated that all licensed gun dealers report bulk sales of handguns.
"This administration does not have the guts to build a [border] wall, but they do have the audacity to blame and register gun owners for Mexico's problems," Cox said.
After the rule was instituted in 2011, the NRA fought unsuccessfully to have it overturned in court.
The contretemps over the rifle-sale reporting rule came as the ill-fated "Fast and Furious" operation was blazing away as a full-scale political conflagration. The affair shook Mexican confidence in the United States as a law enforcement partner, says Eric Olson, the associate director of the Latin American Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a foreign policy think tank.
"People in Mexico said, 'What are you guys doing?'" Olson says. "'You're putting firearms into the hands of traffickers?'"
A woman walks past posters during a demonstration to demand for justice for the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa teachers' training college, in Mexico City, January 26, 2015. The posters read: (L-R) "Enrique Pena Nieto. Terrorist of state; Coronel Jose Rodriguez Perez, Terrorist of state; Angel Aguirre Rivero, Terrorist of state; Jose Luis Abarca, Terrorist of state." REUTERS/Edgard Garrido
The scandal led Mexico's president, Enrique Peña Nieto, to temporarily halt cooperation with the ATF after he was inaugurated in 2012.
With the ATF's domestic critics also lobbing barbed questions about the bureau's anti-smuggling efforts, federal law enforcement has taken a less aggressive approach in subsequent years. In 2016, there were just 71 federal prosecutions of cross-border firearms traffickers, fewer than half as many as four years before.
Last year, a Government Accountability Office report determined that even after "Fast and Furious," ATF and the various border security agencies have failed to adequately coordinate their anti-gun-trafficking efforts, finding a lack of understanding as to exactly where responsibility lies for keeping guns from illegally leaving the country.
For all his preoccupation with the threats he says immigrants pose, Trump has proposed no policies that might halt the hundreds of thousands of guns that drive refugees to the border.
Instead, the president is seeking to drastically reduce American support to the Latin American nations most affected by gun violence. His White House has proposed slashing $200 million from the State Department office that administers ongoing programs from the Bush and Obama eras that finance law enforcement and violence-prevention efforts in Mexico and Central America. According to a separate document obtained by Foreign Policy in late April, Trump wants to cut foreign aid to Mexico by 50 percent, to Guatemala by 36 percent, to El Salvador by 30 percent, and to Honduras by 28 percent.
The president has also proposed gutting the White House office that reviews a wide range of cross-border smuggling issues.
The ATF, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security all said in statements that the Trump administration had not directed them to change their approach to firearms trafficking. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has hosted his counterparts from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, but his office declined to comment on specifics of the meeting, or whether firearms trafficking was on the agenda.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks to the news media at the Palm Beach International Airport, Thursday, April 6, 2017, in West Palm Beach, Fla. AP Photo/Lynne Sladky The White House declined to comment for this story, instead providing a press release, sent out after Trump and his Mexican counterpart, Peña Nieto, spoke by phone in January, that affirmed the two countries' commitment to combating arms trafficking.
On May 18, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson hosted Mexico's foreign minister, Luis Videgaray Caso, in Washington for the second time, saying at a joint press conference that the two diplomats had "identified fresh strategies to attack the business model of these multi-billion dollar criminal organizations with particular emphasis on cash flow and the flow of weapons." A spokeswoman for the State Department would not specify what those fresh strategies might be.
The public statements of Trump and his cabinet secretaries notwithstanding, the president's unprecedented ties to the gun lobby are a strong signal he is unlikely to support new measures to crack down on cross-border firearms smuggling — and may in fact support efforts to roll back restrictions the NRA has long hoped to wipe from the books.
The group may see an opportunity in the Trump administration to undo the Obama-era rule requiring gun dealers in southwest border states to report to the ATF the sales of multiple rifles, one of the few enforcement tools that directly addresses trafficking of weapons to Central America. The NRA applauded a bill submitted this spring by Congressman Evan Jenkins, a West Virginia Republican, that would ban the ATF from imposing reporting requirements on gun dealers based on their geographic location. The legislation is under review by the House Judiciary Committee.
The rifle-reporting rule could also be reversed through executive action, an option floated in a January white paper by Ronald Turk, the deputy ATF director, which was widely viewed as a blueprint for a more NRA-friendly bureau.
Some Washington insiders with knowledge of Central America are incensed about the administration's positions on the border, guns, and foreign assistance.
"Given that violence is a driving factor for migration," says one Democratic Senate staffer with more than a decade of experience in the region's affairs, the Trump team's preferred remedies "fly in the face of logic."
From his adopted home in Los Angeles, José Luis Hernández has tried fitfully to keep his network of disabled migrants together. It's a difficult task, with his compatriots spread from the West Coast to suburban Maryland. He hopes the Trump administration will reconsider its policies. He wants someday to return to Honduras, but cannot if violent crime remains a menace there.
"The U.S.A. is a pretty place to come for a week as a tourist," Hernández says. "But I miss my country.
"The promised land we're looking for isn't the U.S. It's our own country," he adds. "We don't want to leave and risk our lives."
Though the homicide rate in Honduras has ebbed somewhat, shootings remain rampant. On the morning this article was being prepared for publication, a 46-year-old woman in San Pedro Sula was shot repeatedly by a stranger while riding a bus. Four days earlier, in an area near the Caribbean coast, an unidentified family of three was ambushed and murdered with what police said were several high-caliber weapons. Victims of other recent gun killings include bus drivers, security guards, bricklayers, activists, and engineers. The pervasiveness of the violence leaves few people safe.
A radical retreat from past efforts to reduce violence and the flow of American firearms to Central America could have dire ramifications. Should security in the region buckle further, the United States could find itself confronted with another massive surge of migrants like the one that dominated headlines three years ago.
"If the violence increases further, this has the potential to become a really serious refugee crisis," says Larry Ladutke, who manages Amnesty International USA's Central America and Mexico program. "Something along the lines of a failed state."BERLIN/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Euro zone economic growth ground to a halt in the second quarter as Germany’s economy shrank and France’s stagnated.
A worker is seen behind scaffoldings at a construction site near the Fernsehturm television tower in Berlin July 7, 2014.REUTERS/Thomas Peter
The zero growth reported by statistics agency Eurostat on Thursday was cause for alarm throughout the 18-nation region, which is already bracing for the impact of sanctions imposed on and by Russia over Ukraine.
Germany, Europe’s largest economy, contracted by 0.2 percent in the quarter, undercutting Bundesbank forecasts that gross domestic product would be unchanged. Foreign trade and investment were notable weak spots, the German Statistics Office said on Thursday.
“Today’s figures show that the upturn remains too weak to withstand external shocks” - such as the Russian sanctions - “meaning that GDP growth will probably remain stuck in stop-and-go mode,” said Peter Vanden Houte, chief euro zone economist at ING.
France fared little better; its GDP failed to grow for the second quarter in a row. That forced the French government to confront reality, saying it would miss its budget deficit target this year and cutting its 2014 forecast for 1 percent growth in half.
Italy, the euro zone’s third-largest economy, slid back into recession for the third time since 2008 in the second quarter, shrinking by 0.2 percent. Pressure grew on Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to complete promised structural reforms. [ID:nL6N0QC1T3]
Rome and Paris have led a drive to focus EU policy more on jobs and growth than on cutting debt. Germany and others have made clear they will only tolerate so much debate on that point.
Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann said on Wednesday that euro zone monetary policy should not aim to weaken the euro. Individual member states should take steps to boost growth, he said, rebuffing French calls for Germany and the European Central Bank to do more.
The European Commission said Thursday’s GDP report showed the importance of structural reforms. “The ongoing adjustment in the euro area today is a story of a deep structural change,” a spokesman for the European Commission told journalists. “External developments may increase uncertainty, but foundations remain intact.”
German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel blamed his country’s slowdown on threats from eastern Europe and the Middle East, and a weaker euro zone. Also, he said, construction continued during a mild winter, so the second quarter did not see the usual recovery in building work.
But German GDP should increase in the remainder of 2014, Gabriel said. “Growth rates in Germany will likely return to growth in the rest of this year, but the risks from abroad have, without doubt, increased,” he said in a statement.
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French GDP - link.reuters.com/xax37v
German GDP - link.reuters.com/jyd95t
Euro zone GDP table [ID:nB5N0N700L]
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A Reuters poll of economists conducted over the past week gave only a 15 percent chance that the ECB will start printing money this year, given its recent gambit to prime banks with more cheap money does not even kick in until September.
The poll put the chances of the ECB embarking on a quantitative easing program at one-in-three in 2015.
[ID:nL4N0QI4PQ]
France maintained its pro-growth, anti-austerity stance. “We must adapt the pace of deficit reduction to the exceptional situation... of growth that is too weak everywhere in Europe and the exceptional situation of inflation that is too weak across Europe,” the country’s finance minister, Michel Sapin, told Europe 1 radio.
There was no mention of the 2015 goal, when France’s public deficit is due to come into line with the EU’s cap of 3 percent of GDP. Sapin said Paris would cut its deficit “at an appropriate pace”.
Other euro zone countries were a little more robust. The Netherlands reversed a first-quarter contraction to expand by 0.5 percent, Austria was up 0.2 percent on the quarter and Finland eked out 0.1 percent growth.
Analysts mainly saw foreign trade and investment behind the disappointing data. Consumer demand probably helped second-quarter growth - retail sales rose 0.4 percent on the quarter.
Q3 ANY BETTER?
The worry for the euro zone is that sanctions imposed on Russia over the Ukraine crisis, and Moscow’s retaliation, will act as a further drag on growth.
The leading index of European shares.FTEU3 dropped 0.3 percent after the GDP reports. Yields on safe-haven German 10-year bonds fell to a record low.
Surveys suggest a rebound in the third quarter is growing less likely. The ZEW economic sentiment index released on Wednesday, for example, showed German analyst and investor morale plunged in August to its lowest in more than 1 1/2 years.
“Downside risks heading into Q3 have intensified, mainly due to the intensification of geopolitical tensions, the outlook for exports to Russia in view of the potential effects of sanctions on Russia... and the effect of heightened uncertainty,” said Evelyn Herrmann, an economist at BNP Paribas.
Greece, the crucible of the euro zone debt crisis, is showing some signs of improvement. Its economy shrank in the second quarter at the slowest annual pace since late 2008, supporting expectations that Athens will emerge from its six-year slump this year. [ID:nL6N0QJ20Z]
Related Coverage Euro zone growth grinds to a halt
“Bottom line is that the ECB will have to maintain an extremely accommodative monetary policy, even if the U.S. will see a first rate hike already in 2015. The bank will likely be pressured to undertake additional action if some of the downside risks materialize,” ING’s Vanden Houte said.
The European Central Bank left interest rates unchanged at record lows in July. But the bank signaled that it stood ready to take more action - perhaps printing money and buying bonds - if the region slides towards deflation.
“Looking ahead, recent leading indicators are not delivering a very promising message. Risks from Russia - directly and via second-round effects from CEE region - cannot be underestimated. Less dynamic growth for 3Q14 and 2014 is likely,” said Martina von Terzi, an analysts with UniCredit.Margaret Thatcher volunteered to buy her own ironing board and bed linen during confidential discussions about the cost of refurbishing her private apartment at No 10 Downing Street.
Correspondence between the prime minister's office and the Property Services Agency reveal that she felt unfairly impugned by questions about expenditure on ministers' accommodation.
The sum of £1,736 for fitting out Downing Street was given to parliament in answer to a question by the veteran republican Labour MP Willie Hamilton. Thatcher's office, however, had not been informed in advance of the release.
A furious exchange erupted behind the scenes. "No one here was consulted about the fact that you intended to publish this information. This must not happen again," her private secretary warned the Department of the Environment.
A full breakdown of the figure was demanded. It shows the costs in 1979 included £464 spent on replacing linen, £39 on "sewing carpet seams", £19 on an ironing board and £527 on cleaning carpets. In fact, the overall sum amounted to £1,836.
The prime minister's personal annotations are on the letter. The £123 for "repolishing furniture" is circled in blue ink. Below she scribbled: "We use only one bedroom. Can the rest go back into store. I will pay for the ironing board." She also offered to pay for "other things like sufficient linen for the one bedroom we use".
Her sense of household economy, typical of the postwar generation, caused problems for the Welsh secretary, Nicholas Edwards, when he proposed spending £26,000 on a ministerial "flatlet" in Cardiff later in 1981.
"It is a good idea," she noted in blue ink on the letter, "but not at that price. I just don't believe that a one-room and bathroom flat [conversion] can cost £26,000. Get some other estimates."
The cost was eventually slashed to £12,000 and her private office wrote to the Department of the Environment that "the prime minister was pleased to learn of the more economical arrangements which have been devised."March WEFT Associates Meeting
Thursday, March 7, 7pm-9pm
New location: Community United Church of Christ, 805 S. Sixth St., Champaign
Parking is available in the paved lot immediately to the west of the church and the spaces in the north of the parking lot. There is also a parking garage at 6th and John.
Fundraising
Thank you to everyone who helped make WEFT Fest possible again this year, musicians, volunteers, Seven Saints and all of you who came out to enjoy a beautiful afternoon of music.
Thanks to everyone who donated during our fall pledge drive. It's never too late to donate.
We're still raising money to deal with our tower and over-the-air service. The owner of the tower, where WEFT has broadcast from for more than 30 years, has let us know that the tower is in disrepair and will be taken down and not be rebuilt. The time frame is uncertain but this could happen in the next year. WEFT needs funds to move to another tower, as well as move our transmitter and replace our antenna. The estimated cost is a minimum of $50,000.
We want to maintain WEFT as a broadcast station despite this major setback. WEFT will be sponsoring special fundraising events; seeking grant funding, in-kind contributions, increased underwriting, and partnering with local businesses. WEFT needs a strong community commitment for this effort.
If WEFT is important to you, make your contribution today.
Thanks to all those who have donated so far.
Thanks in advance for your help keeping WEFT broadcasting over the air waves.
Listen Live!
Listen to WEFT's live broadcast in your browser, choose TuneIn to take WEFT anywhere on your smartphone or use your preferred streaming player on your computer.
Listen to WEFT on your schedule!
Visit our new ON-DEMAND listening option at Radio Free America.
WEFT 90.1 FM has teamed up with Radio Free America (RFA) to offer you an on-demand listening option for WEFT's locally produced programming. Click on "Full Archive" at WEFT's RFA page and then choose any calendar date listed and you'll see a list of recordings available from that date. WEFT will keep 130+ recordings of recent programs available for your on-demand listening.Nearly 300 anti-fascists were arrested on Saturday following attempts to prevent the far-right English Defence League (EDL) from marching in the London borough of Tower Hamlets.
Police revealed 286 people, the vast majority anti-fascists, were arrested for allegedly breaching conditions placed on the protests. Among those arrested were passers-by, legal observers and journalists.
In the week before the march police imposed conditions under Sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act restricting the areas in which protests could take place, promising breaches would be “dealt with robustly.”
On Saturday morning several thousand local residents and anti-fascists gathered in Altab Ali Park to listen to speeches from politicians and self-appointed community leaders before a bloc of around 700 organised by the Anti-Fascist Network (AFN) started to move towards the EDL.
Between 500-600 members of the EDL had gathered on the south side of Tower Bridge before crossing the bridge, entering the borough of Tower Hamlets and heading towards Aldgate for a rally.
Only around 100 of the AFN bloc came within sight of the EDL before being kettled, providing the only visible opposition to the far-right group on the day. Police reacted quickly to the bloc by attempting to throw up several cordons, eventually dispersing the crowd and forming a kettle on Commercial Street.
After the EDL had been marched back over Tower Bridge police began making mass arrests, arresting everybody in the two kettles and moving them onto buses leased from Hertfordshire-based bus company Sullivan's Buses and travel firm Stagecoach.
Arrestees were ferried to several outer-London police stations were they were processed and bailed with conditions preventing them from demonstrating against the EDL, British National Party and English Volunteer Force within the M25.
Support for arrestees who were predominantly met at police stations with food and beer was provided by Green & Black Cross, Legal Defence and Monitoring Group among others.
Unite Against Fascism claimed the day was a victory.Invest in the future. And especially invest in sustainable, effective job creation in the water sector. The result will be millions of new jobs — a significant result.
Photo courtesy of the Pacific Institute via ScienceBlogs.com Sustainable Water Jobs report now available from the Pacific Institute. Click to enlarge.
That is the key message from a new analysis just released today by the Pacific Institute on sustainable water jobs in the United States. That study, Sustainable Water Jobs: A National Assessment of Water-Related Green Job Opportunities, finds that proactive investments increasing efficient water use, improving water quality, expanding smart water treatment and re-use, and more will address growing problems associated with failing water infrastructure, deteriorating water quality, severe drought, and flooding, as well as create jobs in a wide range of professions.
The study identifies 136 different kinds of jobs at all levels of skill: from plumbers to landscapers, from technology specialists and engineers to irrigation experts. Thirty-seven of these job types are also projected to have high growth in the overall economy, with each offering more than 100,000 job openings across the country by 2020. That’s millions of new jobs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Peter Gleick is president of the Pacific Institute, an internationally recognized water expert, and a MacArthur Fellow.
The Pacific Institute identifies numerous sustainable water occupations that are accessible to workers without advanced degrees. Twenty-seven of the 37 occupations with 100,000 job openings by 2020 generally require on-the-job training, with some requiring previous experience and associate’s degrees or technical training, but not bachelor’s or graduate degrees. This translates to a more feasible pathway to employment for adults without formal education beyond high school – one of the groups around the U.S. suffering from especially high un- or under-employment.
One of the authors of the study, Eli Moore, noted, “This research indicates that water policy can expand demand for workers without bachelors or advanced degrees if occupational training programs and pathways to jobs are created.”
The study finds each investment of one million dollars in alternative water supply projects yields 10-15 jobs. The same million dollars invested in stormwater management would produce 5-20 jobs; in urban conservation and efficiency, 12-20 jobs; in agricultural efficiency and quality, 15 jobs; in ecosystem restoration and remediation, 10-70 jobs.
“Preparing people who need work to install and maintain water-saving devices and projects can heal our communities environmentally and economically,” said Annette Williams, Director of BEST Academy at the New York-based organization Sustainable South Bronx.
BEST Academy has trained people to work in river restoration, construction of rain gardens, and other water-related fields.
The report also looked at the wage ranges and quality of the new jobs: around half have median wages above the national median wage of $16.57 per hour, but job quality varies. Landscaping and agricultural workers, for example, tend to have lower wages and benefits than plumbers and welders. Unionization varies from the low four to seven percent of farmworkers and recreation workers to 20 percent of construction workers and plumbers. Under-representation of women and people of color in the current workforce in growing sustainable water occupations suggests that efforts will have to be made to achieve equity in these fields.
“It’s key to include local hiring and minority hiring requirements and incentives that increase contracting and hiring with individuals from local and disadvantaged communities,”said Moore. “Water utilities, state water agencies, and planning departments should consider job quality, training, and targeted hiring as an integral component of sustainable water project design and implementation.”
The bottom line? We know that there is already serious under investment in the nation’s water infrastructure. We know that the technology exists to greatly expand and improve our water use efficiency, treatment, delivery, and management systems. And now, thanks to this new assessment, we know that doing the right thing will also generate serious new jobs.
The report Sustainable Water Jobs: A National Assessment of Water-Related Green Job Opportunities can be downloaded free from the Pacific Institute website at www.pacinst.org/reports/sustainable_water_jobs. The website also offers six case studies of organizations that provide training and employment in sustainable water jobs, in Altadena, CA; Bronx, NY; New Orleans, LA; Santa Fe, NM; and two in Portland, OR – and a short video highlighting these organizations.
–Peter Gleick
Follow Peter Gleick on Twitter.
Originally published by Science Blogs on February 14, 2013.Compare personal checking accounts from banks and credit unions. In addition to reviewing the various checking accounts available to you in the below rate table results, you may also want to read about some of the history, features, and benefits of this type of product that we have outlined below. You may also want to view our list of reward checking accounts, which offer significantly higher rates on average, but do have minimum usage requirements.
Include credit unions with membership based on any industries that you or immediate family members currently or have previously worked in:
Standard Checking Accounts
They are available a dime a dozen – branded Gold, Silver, Green, High Interest, Free, Student, Sports Teams, etc. The vast majority of Americans have, at some point, opened a checking account at one of the 14,000+ banking institutions across the country. The plethora of choices represents features that accompany the core purpose of checking: to provide security for cash and easy access to it when needed to complete a transaction.
Checking Accounts Rate History – Average APY (%) Rate Trend over Time
History of the Checking Account
Checking account history dates back several millennia, at least to the Roman Empire, when private bankers began holding public deposits in depositories. They did so in order to add leverage to the lending system, and paid depositors interest on the monies they held. However, because of the Romans’ general preference for cash transactions, and the controversial practice of charging interest on loans, the banking system didn’t develop into its modern form until the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
Benefits of a Checking Account
When individuals open a checking account and deposit money into it today, it is the equivalent of giving the bank or credit union a loan with which they in turn use in various ways to make a profit. On the other hand, because it is arguably the most accessible financial product to consumers, it helps individuals to establish good credit and build a relationship with a financial institution that could pay off in benefits down the road.
Checking Account Features
There are many credit unions and banks with free checking accounts that come with perks like online banking, personal checks, debit and ATM cards (with free ATM usage), Bill Pay, mobile deposit, free ACH transfers and Direct Deposit. You must read the fine print on any account before opening, however, as a free checking account will usually charge a monthly fee for not meeting various requirements like a minimum monthly balance, a particular number of required debit card transactions, etc. Most non-reward checking accounts, though, do not have strict requirements in this regard. Overdraft fees are also something to consider, as financial institutions are now required to ask you if you want to opt-in to their overdraft coverage.
Some financial institutions offer high interest checking accounts. Internet banks and credit unions usually offer the highest rates and, depending on your situation, could be a savings boon to you with little or no extra effort. The rate table above is the most comprehensive list of standard checking accounts available nationwide, with filters to help you navigate based on institution type and location.The Government’s love affair with hiking the price of booze every time national binge drinking becomes a problem is apparently in line to continue under a reported new plan being considered by Federal and State officials. And it’s a plan that could see the price of the humble goon bag shoot to the freakin’ moon.
State and Federal ministers released a draft plan that, if implemented, would prevent the price of alcohol from falling below a certain level, in a bid to make booze more expensive and therefore, so their logic goes, curb binge drinking habits.
Under the plan, a price base of roughly $1.50 per standard drink would apply to all alcohol sales. This would see a slab of Victoria Bitter, for example, rise from around $47 to over $50. A similar price rise would be expected for bottles of wine, with a $7 bottle becoming a slightly-over-$10 bottle in that scenario.
But it’s the goon bag – the humble battler of Australian grog – that would be hit the absolute hardest. Under a $1.50 per standard drink base price system, a four-litre cask of white wine that right now retails for around $10 would increase in price up to a staggering $45 minimum, due to the fact that the container carries around 30 standard drinks.
READ MORE Young Aussies Are Binge Boozing Less But Ya Parents Ain’t, Says New Survey
The draft plan also proposes one flat taxation rate for alcohol, rather than the myriad of different tax rates for beer, wine, and spirits that currently exists. That flat tax would impact wine drinkers the hardest, given that wine is currently the least taxed of the three booze groups.
The draft also includes a number of different proposed measures, including restrictions on alcohol advertising during sporting events, linked ID scanners at venues to prevent repeat offenders from entering licensed premises, asking alcohol companies to put “readable, impactful health-related warning labels” on products, and undercover checks on bottle-os to ensure underage kids aren’t being sold booze.
For what it’s worth, Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt distanced himself from the plan last night, with a spokesperson for his office suggesting that the onus would be on the States to implement some or all of the draft plan’s proposals.
Still, $45+ for a shiny sack of cheap wine? That’s about as un-Australian as it gets, really.After completely changing what it means to be a viral music star in today’s ever-evolving social media-focused world, Musical.ly has been sold for a hefty sum, though exactly how much appears to be difficult to pin down.
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The app, which allows people to lip-sync to their favorite tunes and share the clips with other users (and beyond) has been sold to Chinese startup Jinri Toutiao, which is itself controlled by the ByteDance Technology Co. Jinri Toutiao has been burning through cash lately, snapping up Flipagram earlier this year.
While an exact figure in the purchase has not been released, Musical.ly is one of the hottest apps out there today, and it didn’t come cheap. Most sources are reporting that the musical program went for $800 million, while the Wall Street Journal is claiming that the final price tag could have been as high as $1 billion.
The three-year-old app didn't require much time to become a favorite with young people, as it combines many of the things they love the most: hit music, social media, their phones, video and recording themselves, all with the potential of making it big, though without having to prove real talent (at least in the conventional sense). In the years since it was first launched in China, Musical.ly has grown large enough to produce its own stars, and there are now personalities who have started making serious amounts of cash because of their followings.
As of earlier this fall, the app reportedly had up to 200 million registered users (though some reports claim the number of users was actually far lower), and while there is plenty of discussion about how best to monetize them efficiently and interact with the notoriously difficult to sell to crowd that uses the social media platform the most, anywhere there are that many people involved for as long as some people stay on the app, there will be companies finding ways to make cash from it.
Last year, the company raised at least $160 million in funding, proving it to be one of the most exciting names in the app economy, but now there are plenty of questions about what the future looks like for the popular mobile option. Has the growth stalled, or is this just the beginning for an app that many are still only catching onto? Time will tell, but founders Alex Zhu and Lulu Yang are surely celebrating their big win today.On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015
Simon & Schuster pulling Benghazi book
The publisher for Dylan Davies, the source of "60 Minutes" controversial Benghazi report, announced on Friday that they are pulling his book "in light of information" brought to their attention since its publication.
Threshold Editions, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS, said in a statement they are notifying stores that copies of the book, titled "The Embassy House," can be returned to the publisher. The book was released last week on Oct. 29.
"In light of information that has been brought to our attention since the initial publication of The Embassy House, we have withdrawn from publication and sale all formats of this book, and are recommending that booksellers do the same," Threshold Edition spokesperson Jennifer Robinson said in a statement. "We also are notifying accounts that they may return the book to us."
CBS had already come under fire for not disclosing that the CBS owned Simon & Schuster was publishing a book by Davies about his Benghazi experience. Both Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News and executive producer of "60 Minutes," and correspondent Lara Logan have said they regretted not including a disclosure.
Hadas Gold is a reporter at Politico.Minimum-Wage Reality
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My new e-mail friend, Democracy’s Herald, is quick to respond by e-mail to today’s Quotation of the Day. In particular, Mr. Herald dismisses my mention of minimum-wage legislation as an example of how governments impertinently and oppressively shield politically influential producers from the competition and free choices of politically weak producers and consumers. Quoting now Mr. Herald (original emphasis):
You’re in the echo chamber too much. Minimum wage laws are designed to protect workers FROM oppression. These laws RAISE worker’s pay.
I’ll point out here only in passing that the history of the national minimum-wage in the United States supports my contention: that legislation was meant to protect northeastern U.S. textile producers from their southern U.S. rivals. Burt Folsom explains here. (David Henderson, in his superb 2002 volume, The Joy of Freedom, has more on this history. David also updates that history – revealingly – through John F. Kennedy’s time in the U.S. Senate. [I’d give page numbers, and perhaps even a quotation, from David’s book were my copy not at my office while I’m now at home.] Oh, and my GMU Econ colleague Walter Williams explains the unsavory origins of South Africa’s minimum-wage.)
But let me content myself with relating here a hypothetical that I give to my principles students each semester. I ask my students:
Suppose that I – an ordinary and none-too-accomplished professor of economics at George Mason University – open the morning Washington Post to read the headline: Congress Enacts Minimum-Wage Legislation for Economists. I then excitedly read the accompanying report. The minimum-wage, to be binding on all employers of economists in the U.S., will ensure that every economist employed full-time and paid this mandated minimum wage will earn at least $500,000 annually. Why [I ask my students] am I excited by this story? Does my excitement spring from joy or from grief? [I assure my students that I would very much love to earn $500,000 annually – which is a sum multiple times my current annual earnings.]
Several students blurt out that I’m joyous to read such a headline.
They’re wrong. I’d be devastated. The reason is that I know that I’d lose my job as an economist. My options aren’t these: work full-time as an economist at my current annual salary or work full-time as an economist for a salary of $500,000 annually. The world doesn’t work that way, despite legislators and many of their constituents believing the contrary. Because my labor is not worth, to any employer, $500,000 annually – and because no alteration in my work patterns or duties can make me worth such a sum – no employer will pay me $500,000 annually to work as an |
consistently bring back a couple of findings: 1) that we derive far more happiness from experiences than we do from possessions, and 2) that we’re better off investing our energy in our relationships than the things we own.
Getting rid of unnecessary possessions can therefore indirectly improve our quality of life through the following ways:
Frees up more time and money to spend on experiences and with people. Forces one to invest more of their identity in their behavior and attitude and less in objects around them. Removes the stress of loss aversion and trying to hold on to what one already has. Saves money (always a stress reducer).
I’m sure one day I will own property and need to furnish a small apartment or house or something, but when I do go back to having permanent possessions, I’m sure that I won’t be invested in them in the way I used to be and the way most people are.
What Can You Get Rid of Today?
Now comes the fun part. Let’s talk about the useless crap you have that you can get rid of today. I’m going to start with the easiest objects to trash and move to the most difficult.Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham on Thursday warned President Trump not to take any action against the attorney general or the special counsel investigation Russian interference in the 2016 election, saying it could be the “beginning of the end” of his presidency.
“If Jeff Sessions is fired there will be holy hell to pay,” Graham (R-SC) said of reports that Trump is upset with his attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia probes and that he is mulling dumping him.
Graham, a former Republican presidential candidate during the 2016 run, also cautioned the president not to go after former FBI director Robert Mueller, who’s looking into whether Trump campaign officials colluded with the Russians.
“Any effort to go after Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency – unless Mueller did something wrong. Right now I have no reason to believe he’s compromised,” Graham said.
WATCH: Sen. Lindsey Graham says there will be “holy hell to pay” if AG Jeff Sessions is fired. Video via @VaughnHillyard pic.twitter.com/g4gqmzqOyl — NBC News (@NBCNews) July 27, 2017Your message has been sent successfully
Sen. Bernie Sanders' multi-state unity tour with Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez continued for a third day in Miami Wednesday, where he spoke to a crowd of approximately 2,000 at the James L. Knight Center.
“We are going to take on the billionaire class,” Sanders said. “Donald Trump did not win the election—the Democrats lost the election! That means rebuilding the Democratic Party, making it a grassroots party—a party from the bottom on up!”
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Sanders' "Come Together and Fight Back" tour began Monday in Portland, Maine. On Tuesday, he spoke in Kentucky, home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The tour will continue through April 23 in Texas, Nebraska, Utah, Arizona and Nevada.
“The Republican leadership doesn’t give a sh*t about people who are suffering," Perez told the audience.
Meanwhile, Sanders spoke of the "immoral" economics regarding the Republican governor's refusal to expand Medicaid, much like he had the previous night.
“You can un-elect him!” Sanders said of Rick Scott, whose decision affects nearly a million Floridians.
Sanders also touched on an issue rarely discussed at the federal level: gentrification.
“It’s a beautiful community which is under threat of incredible gentrification,” Sanders said of Miami's Little Haiti. “You have billionaires coming in who think it is okay to push you out, to push out small business people who have been there decades in order to build fancy condominiums.”
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In an extremely close contest, Hillary Clinton lost Florida to Donald Trump by just 1 percent in the 2016 presidential election.
Watch:Atlanta is a melting pot of cultures when it comes to the food scene, and African-American influenced dishes are some of the top options served up to foodies across the city.
RELATED: Photos: Black chefs on the Atlanta dining scene
The black food scene is sizzling with a variety of offerings ranging from soul food to island eats, each worth biting into.
Here are the 13 black-owned restaurants in Atlanta you should put on your must-visit list.
Smothered chicken, beets, green beans, corn bread, iced sweet tea and Key Lime cake from the Busy Bee Cafe.
Busy Bee Cafe
810 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. NW, Atlanta, 404-525-9512.
http://www.thebusybeecafe.com/home
Come to Busy Bee Cafe for soul food from Cajun fried turkey wings to sweet potato souffle. The restaurant, founded in 1947, is owned by Tracy Gates. Gates told Chef Emeril Lagasse that the love cooked into the restaurant's food sets it apart from other Southern food restaurants.
BQE Restaurant & Lounge
262 Edgewood Ave. NE, Atlanta, 404-996-6159.
http://bqelounge.com/
Stepping into the BQE Restaurant & Lounge takes you back to a New Orleans speakeasy with modern day fixings. The restaurant serves breakfast, lunch, dinner and brunch on Saturday and Sunday. Innovative dishes worth trying at the lounge are the red velvet chicken and waffles and The Edgewood turkey burger.
Jay's Kitchen Bar
3752 Cascade Road, Atlanta, 470-440-5090.
http://www.jayskitchenandbar.com/
Come to Jay's Kitchen Bar to taste the foods offered at the recently opened restaurant. The food spot founded by music executives Jomo Hankerson and Heather Wesley serves "gourmet soul food" from fried green tomatoes to peach pound cake.
RELATED: The most prominent black chef in the U.S. talks race in the restaurant industry
K & K Soul Food
881 Donald Lee Hollowell Pkwy NW, Atlanta, 404-685-1073.
http://www.kksoulfood.com/
Family business turned renowned restaurant K & K Soul Food has been up and running in Atlanta since 1968. Southern food staples, such as collard greens, fried chicken and sweet potato pie are on the menu.
Le Petit Marché's sandwich options include basil chicken and pesto with an olive pasta salad.
Le Petit Marché
1984 Hosea L. Williams Drive NE, Atlanta, 404-371-9888.
https://lepetitmarche.net/
Le Petit Marché, The Little Market beat the odds when it started in 2008 during the Great Recession. The food shop offers a wide array of eats, such as sandwiches, paninis and breakfast options.
Mango's
180 Auburn Ave. NE, Atlanta, GA, 404-698-3992.
http://mangoscaribbeanrestaurant.com/
Jamaican and Caribbean eats are offered at this downtown Atlanta establishment. Jerk chicken, fried tilapia salad and Jamaican patties are foods you can plan to find on the menu. If you have a sweet tooth, try the mango cheesecake or bread pudding.
Milk & Honey
5495 Cascade Road, Suite 100, Atlanta, 404-968-9266.
http://www.milkandhoneyatl.com/
Milk & Honey was started by Food Network's "Chopped: Redemption" winner Chef Sammy Davis. The award-winning chef features all-day brunch and rotisserie chicken on his menu. Some of the top 10 brunch offerings include lobster gumbo & grits and BBQ pulled chicken biscuit.
Photos of the members of the self-described Old Lady Gang are never far from view, and they are the mother and the aunts of “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star Kandi Burruss, who launched the restaurant with her husband. CONTRIBUTED BY HENRI HOLLIS Photo: For the AJC
Old Lady Gang Southern Cuisine
177 Peters St. SW, Atlanta, 404-692-4407.
http://oldladygang.com/
The restaurant started by singer-songwriter Kandi Burrus-Tucker and Todd Tucker has been featured on Bravo TV's "Real Housewives of Atlanta." The menu features items inspired by the "Old Lady Gang," which refers to Burrus-Tucker's family members. Expect to find Aunt Bertha's Fried Chicken and Aunt Nora's Fried Catfish Strips on the menu.
Rosie's Coffee Cafe
2330 Sylvan Road, Atlanta, 404-684-1111.
https://rosiescoffeecafe.com/
Come to Rosie's Coffee Cafe for breakfast, lunch and/or dessert. Fresh chicken salads, shrimp and grits and other eats are paired with coffee. A portion of the restaurant's profits goes to the Lung Cancer Foundation of America in memory of Rosie Gail, after whom the restaurant is named.
Photo: Courtesy of Yelp
Sweet Georgia's Juke Joint
200 Peachtree St. NW L05, Atlanta, 404-230-5853.
http://www.sweetgeorgiasjukejoint.com/
Sweet Georgia's Juke Joint brings back the rich history of Southern music and food into a modern establishment. Known for its crispy crawfish tails, freshwater rock shrimp and lump crab cake, the restaurant brings a ton of flavors to its Sunday brunch and dinner. The Juke Joint also has a location at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
The Spice House
2247 Cascade Road SW, Atlanta, 470-575-5999.
https://www.thespicehouse.com/
Sit down at The Spice House for foods with Caribbean notes, such as the jerk-stuffed burgers, turkey in Creole sauce and Caribbean spaghetti. Aside from the food, the restaurant also showcases live bands.
Tom, Dick & Hank
191 Ralph David Abernathy Blvd. SW, Atlanta, 404-343-3774.
http://www.tomdickandhank.com/
Come hungry when visiting Tom, Dick & Hank to fill up on the restaurant's Southern barbeque cuisine. Seafood, sandwiches, salads and plates can all be found on the expansive menu.
Twisted Soul Cookhouse & Pours
Apex West Midtown, 1133 Huff Road NW, Atlanta, 404-350-5500.
https://www.twistedsoulcookhouseandpours.com/house
Soul food with a twist is offered at Twisted Soul Cookhouse & Pours. Chef Deborah VanTrece incorporates global influences from her travels into the dishes on her menu. Foods on her menu include Creole gumbo, Chef Robert's fried chicken po'boy and moonshine mussels.A mysterious and malicious potato saboteur has terrified the farmers of Prince Edward Island, Canada, by placing pins, needles and nails into their prized tubers.
As PEI spends millions on metal detectors, the PEI Potato Board is offering 500,000 Canadian dollars ($400,000) for tips that lead to the arrest of the individuals responsible.
Alex Docherty, chair of the PEI Potato Board, said in a statement that the board was quintupling the reward to "maximize the chance that those responsible will be brought to justice.”
In October 2014, police investigated three cases in which sewing needles were found in PEI potatoes. Potatoes with nails were discovered in May and June of this year.
Nobody has been hurt by the sharp objects yet. Police are investigating, but have made no arrests. It's an unusually dark turn of events for the so-called Gentle Island, where the Anne of Green Gables novels were set.
The spike in spiking has alarmed PEI farmers, and with good reason. The island's potato industry is worth over CA$1 billion, and potatoes make up 50 percent of farm cash receipts. PEI farmers and packers have been forced to destroy inventory and spend CA$5 million on metal detectors, according to a statement. Of that, $2 million came from federal funds.
“It’s food terrorism,” Docherty told the Guardian. “The people doing this are cowards, lower than a snake wearing snowshoes. These are really evil people.”
"The fear is always there for other people will want to do the same thing because somebody got away with it," another potato farmer told CBC Canada.July 15, 2009 Silbury Hill, Wiltshire County, England - On the night of July 4 to 5, 2009, a crew of documentary filmmakers with high definition video cameras were camped on top of Silbury Hill from about 2 AM until sunup between 4 and 4:30 AM in the British higher latitude summer light. Atop Silbury Hill, the film crew was only a quarter-mile from the location of what many experienced crop formation investigators say is as spectacular a wheat formation as there has ever been. The pattern spans 350 feet in diameter with unusual shading and "immaculate" ground lay.
“The film crew said there was heavy dew on the laid down crop, yet there were no footprints and it was not disturbed. They said the headdress formation was immaculate.”
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There has been continued speculation in recent weeks regarding the Club's search for a new striker as West Ham prepare to make their historic move into the new Stadium during the summer.
With the prospect of European football next season a distinct possibility, Slaven Bilic and the Board are aiming high as they look to bring in even more quality signings so they can challenge once again at the top of the table.
Fresh reports in the last 24 hours have suggested the Hammers are close to making a move for Paris Saint-Germain forward Zlatan Ibrahimovic.
My understanding is that the Club have explored the option of signing the former Milan and Barcelona striker, but there is zero chance of a deal happening.
I have been told that the Board admire him as a player, but his contract would be out of all proportion to the wages earned by anybody at the Club or any player in the Premier League.
There has been a lot of speculation linking the Hammers with moves for Marseille striker Michy Batshuayi and Lyon forward Alexandre Lacazette.
My sources have told me that they are just two of a dozen potential strikers that the Board are looking at and the list will be reduced to two or three names by the end of the season.
Once the transfer window re-opens they will be ready to make their move for the striker they want.
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of West Ham UnitedFigure 1 : security infographic, click to enlarge
[Download full image 274KB]
The raw public data behind the infographic for those interested. Keep in mind the information comes from National Vulnerability Data (NVD) and CVEDetails which is an information aggregator of NVD. You may find these public resources interesting for your own projects or persuasive presentations on security.
(1) CVEDetails (NVD) Vulnerability
Provides the aggregated yearly information.
http://cvedetails.com/browse-by-date.php
(2) Better or Worse?
Source for the quote.
2013 IC3 Annual Report, http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2013_IC3Report.pdf
(3) IC3 Complaints
Graph data for the number of complaints.
2013 IC3 Annual Report, http://www.ic3.gov/media/annualreport/2013_IC3Report.pdf
(4) Trust is Dead?
“…$180 billion or a 25% hit to overall IT service provider revenues [by 2016].” James Statan – Forrester
http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-08-14-the_cost_of_prism_will_be_larger_than_itif_projects
* Hat tip to writer Kashmir Hill from Forbes for the web link to James article.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/09/10/how-the-nsa-revelations-are-hurting-businesses/
(5) Vulnerability Mixer
http://cvedetails.com/vulnerabilities-by-types.php
(6) Year with the most reported vulnerabilities to date?
2006
http://www.cvedetails.com/browse-by-date.php
(7) Most vulnerable product ever?
Java and Flash not in the top 10
http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php
(8) Most vulnerable web browser?
Internet Explorer, not even close
http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php
–MiltonI can’t believe it’s been four months since my last post! Things have been so busy with the work and house…I haven’t had time to do much baking. But I did make these cupcakes last month for Father’s day, and they were a hit!
These were inspired by a tutorial I saw on Cake Central on how to make hi-hat cupcakes. They reminded me of the Mr. Softee cones, which I was first introduced to when I moved to New York. So I looked up how to make ice cream cone cupcakes, and to my surprise, you can actually pour the batter into the cone and bake it right in there for the same amount of time you would use for a cupcake liner. You can still bake them in a cupcake tin, just put one cone in each hole.
Then you make the hi-hat frosting, freeze for 10 minutes to solidify, and dip in melted chocolate. Easy! I used red Mercken Melts so they would look like a Mr. Softee cone. Also, because my husband hates regular chocolate (weird!).
What is cool is that when you cut it down the middle, there is cake all the way to the bottom! The cone gets a little softer and chewy, and takes on the taste of the cake. I used my go-to recipe for vanilla buttermilk cupcakes for this one.
The only real difficulty is how to transport these. My sister-in-law showed me some pics online of a setup where people cut holes in a foil tin and sat the cupcakes in the holes. I decided to do a variant of this, and got one of the chafing dish stands to help.
These are really fun to make, and also really fun to eat! Perfect for summer.Most Europeans believe that the number of migrant workers from other EU countries has been bad for their country and would like to restrict freedom of movement, a new opinion poll suggests.
The research by polling firm YouGov, which was released on Thursday (11 December) interviewed more than 6,000 people across six EU countries - the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Finland - as well as Norway.
Swedes were the only country surveyed where a majority agreed that EU immigration had benefited their country.
Meanwhile, although majorities in Britain, Germany, Denmark and Finland all believed that immigration had been bad for them, French people were the most hostile. Only 9 percent agreed that immigration had been beneficial for France, while 53 percent disagreed.
Several national leaders have made moves to clamp down on the access EU migrant workers have to welfare benefits, led by UK prime minister David Cameron. Cameron would like to impose a cap on the total number of EU migrants and wants EU nationals to work for at least four years before being able to access the UK benefits system.
Meanwhile, the German government tabled legislation in August aimed at tackling abuse of the welfare benefits system and restricting access to child allowances.
Asked whether migrants should be allowed to claim benefits, a large majority in all six EU countries said that migrants should be required to work for at least one year before being able to access benefits, and should find work before being allowed to move abroad.
However, the three Scandinavian countries disagreed that annual quotas on EU migrants should be imposed. The strongest support for quotas was in the UK and France where 64 percent and 58 percent, respectively, supported their introduction.
The introduction of quotas has been rejected by EU leaders on the grounds that this would breach the bloc's commitment to freedom of movement, one of its four fundamental freedoms.
Elsewhere, the poll suggests that Europeans are highly cautious about their economic futures.
A majority of respondents in the UK, France, Sweden and Finland felt that their family’s economic prospects would deteriorate over the next year, while Britons were the only group to believe that their country’s economy would be in a better condition in a year’s time.
After suffering a double dip recession in 2008 and then 2010, the UK is now one of the fastest growing economies in the EU, while both France and Germany, the two largest economies in the eurozone, have seen growth of less than 1 percent in 2014. French and Finnish respondents were the most gloomy about their economic prospects.
A referendum on the UK’s continued EU membership would also be on a knife-edge according to the poll, with ‘No’ supporters marginally ahead by 43 percent to 38 percent.The core trio behind It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia assured reporters at Friday's Television Critics Association press tour that their comedy, already renewed through a 10th season to air in 2014, has a very long shelf life.
Stars and executive producers Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day were adamant that an 11th season was still on the table, despite recent comments Howerton made in Rolling Stone about the show ending -- which he later called a misquote.
PHOTOS: Always Sunny's Kaitlin Olson and THR's Comedy Actress Roundtable
"Not for sure," they said in near unison, when asked if they would end with 10. "I still feel like we're doing our best work," added McElhenney. "Yes, we're nine years into it, but we only do 10 episodes a season, which allows us to be fresh."
The three, joined by fellow stars Kaitlin Olson and Danny DeVito, explained that the shorter seasons and small production have made it a relatively easy job to tackle on top of their other work.
"At only 10 episodes a season, you really don't run the risk of burning out," said Day.
Case in point: The panel kicked off with a clip from an upcoming episode about gun control -- a subject the series tackled once before. McElhenney credited the evolving spectacle of hot button issues makes them easy to revisit and approach at different angles.
The 10th season of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which will move to laugh-centric FXX when it returns in September, will bring the series' episode count to at least 114. Not only will that make it the longest-running comedy in cable history, it will match the number of episodes produced of DeVito's iconic late '70s comedy Taxi.
"I was just head over heels in love with them for some reason," DeVito said of his decision to join Sunny in the second season. "It's really a high point in my career."Earlier this week, we reported on the social justice warrior-led backlash against LambdaConf over their refusal to ban Curtis Yarvin, developer of the Urbit programming environment, over his “neoreactionary” political writing.
In the wake of LambdaConf’s decision and statement in defense of political diversity, pressure from social justice warriors caused many of the conference’s sponsors to pull out. At one point, LambdaConf’s list of sponsors was reduced to just one.
In response, the political and tech blog Status 451, edited by computer scientist Meredith L. Patterson, set up an online fundraiser to help recoup LambdaConf’s sponsorship losses. Writing on their fundraiser page, the organisers said:
No conference can be all things for all people. Some spaces are political, and people should be free to choose to enter those spaces, or not. But other spaces, especially professional spaces where we earn our livings or advance the state of our arts, should be allowed to check politics at the door. We oppose the ideological crusade of these activists to force all conferences to cater to their agenda or be de-funded.
At the time of this story’s publishing, the campaign had raised over $16,000, exceeding the initial goal of $15,000. In addition to the fundraiser, Status 451 are also officially sponsoring LambdaConf with their own donation of $3,000.
Christopher Allen and Julie Moronuki, co-author of Haskell Programming From First Principles, also decided to buck the trend and continue sponsoring LambdaConf. In a blog post on her personal website, Moronuki wrote that she made her decision after seeing women and minorities come under fire from white SJWs for supporting LambdaConf.
I know from past experience that members of marginalized groups tend to get the most flak for taking unpopular stances, for deviating from what the rest of their “group” thinks. I have too many gay (and also women, and black, and Hispanic) conservative friends who are ostracized by the gay (or feminist, black, Hispanic) community for voting Republican to not understand this. So I wanted to take my stand publicly and show solidarity with them now, not just at the conference. (If you’re asking how I can be friends with people who vote Republican, maybe you should come back to this post after you get out of your bubble and rehumanize yourself.)
LambdaConf’s sponsorship page has also been updated with two new sponsors, data visualisation company SlamData and custom software creators SoftwareMill. These sponsors were announced after the controversy over Curtis Yarvin erupted, although it’s unclear if their sponsorships constitute a specific endorsement of LambdaConf’s position on political diversity, as Status 451’s does.
Nevertheless, the money pouring in to Status 451’s crowdfunder is a sign that many in the world of tech are quietly supportive of LambdaConf’s stance.
You can follow Allum Bokhari on Twitter, add him on Facebook, and download Milo Alert! for Android to be kept up to date on his latest articles.United Nations: Women’s equality under study
Marking the 15th anniversary of the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, the UN Commission on the Status of Women last week began two weeks of evaluating the results of conference recommendations for undoing state sanctioned legal discrimination against women. The Inter Press Service report cited, as new challenges to equality, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the global economic downturn, which has “revealed stark evidence of the gender-differentiated impact of the crisis.” In 1995 women represented 10.5 percent of the world’s parliamentarians, yet their number still remains below 20 percent despite the call then for increased representation. A spokesperson for New York based Equality Now said that, “despite commitments to repeal all gender-based discriminatory laws, many remain in force.”
Yemen: Conflict eases, instability continues
A Saudi-organized conference of international donors unfolded in Riyadh last month, two weeks into a truce between the government and Shi’ite Houthi rebels backed by Iran that eased armed conflict lasting seven years. Rebel fighters abandoned conflict zones on February 25. The fact that 250,000 people have been displaced indicates a humanitarian crisis. Economic aid from western banks and agencies, targeting instability in the Arab world’s poorest country, is aimed at stemming violent extremism. Meanwhile in South Yemen, a burgeoning South Yemen independence movement staged two days of rallies timed with the donor conference. Ali Salem al-Baid called for “two days of southern anger,” reported the AFP news agency. That veteran southern political personality had led the effort to unify Yemen in 1990.
Cuba: State visit zeroes in on U.S. blockade
Ending his third Cuban visit as Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva suggested in January that the U.S. blockade “has no political, economic explanation. The Cold War has ended.” Quoted by Granma newspaper, he called upon President Obama to show “the same audacity as did the American people in choosing him as president and lift the blockade against Cuba.” Host President Raul Castro declared a day earlier, as quoted by PressTV news, “We want to discuss with the government of the United States all the problems … all, all, all,” but only under conditions of “absolute equality.” He admitted, “Here there is not the maximum freedom of expression … But if the United States would leave us alone, there could be that maximum freedom.”
Photo: http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-3284808576Check out the full DC Comics January 2017 solicitations with full cover art in the below gallery!
The full DC Comics January 2017 solicitations have been released, and in the gallery viewer below, you can now check out all the artwork, synopses and product images for more than 100 different upcoming releases, including the launch of a Justice League/Power Rangers crossover.
Although no artwork has been released, the DC Comics January 2017 solicitations also include the following listings:
SUICIDE SQUAD #9
Written by ROB WILLIAMS
Art and cover by RILEY ROSSMO
Variant covers by LEE BERMEJO
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
A “JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. SUICIDE SQUAD” tie-in! Finally, discover the true history behind [REDACTED BY ORDER OF TASK FORCE X DIRECTOR AMANDA WALLER].
On sale JANUARY 11 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
SUICIDE SQUAD #10
Written by ROB WILLIAMS
Art and cover by GIUSEPPE CAFARO
Variant covers by LEE BERMEJO
Retailers: These issues will ship with two covers each. Please see the order form for details.
A “JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. SUICIDE SQUAD” epilogue! She’s lost a prisoner, her darkest secrets have been revealed and she’s unwittingly unleashed a major threat upon herself and Task Force X. It’s one very bad day for Amanda Waller as she tries to tie up loose ends and clean up her mess. But some sins can’t be undone in this special epilogue to JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. SUICIDE SQUAD.
On sale JANUARY 25 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
JUSTICE LEAGUE #12
Written by TIM SEELEY
Art by CHRISTIAN DUCE
Cover by TONY S. DANIEL and SANDU FLOREA
Variant cover by YANICK PAQUETTE
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
A “JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. SUICIDE SQUAD” tie-in! Behold the rebirth of one of the DC Universe’s most cunning villains as [REDACTED].
On sale JANUARY 4 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
You can also check out the DC Comics December 2016 solicitations from last month and check back soon to see what January will be bringing from Marvel Comics.
Which of the DC Comics January 2017 solicitations are you most excited for? What would you like to see announced from the publisher next month? Let us know in the comments below!Update: this post was updated on 09/11/2015 to use Babel 6, rather than Babel 5.
I’ve spoken and written previously about using tools like jspm to let you write web applications in ES6 and take care of the details, leaving you free to focus on writing your app and not the tooling around it. Today we’re going to talk about how we can author and publish modules written in ES6, but doing so in a way that’s generic enough to allow the consumer to use your module in Node or through a client side library like jspm, Webpack or Browserify.
The process isn’t as complicated as you might imagine; thankfully we can offload most of the work to Babel, and the only requirement on our part is to run our ES6 through Babel before publishing the module to npm.
Let’s get started by first creating a new project, and installing Babel as a developer dependency. We’ll use Babel to convert our ES6 into ES5. This means that whilst we’re able to embrace ES6 as the module author, if the person using our module is unable to, they don’t have to. There’s no extra burden on the end user to do extra work or configuration to use our module.
npm init npm install --save-dev babel-cli
As of Babel 6 it’s been split into two modules. babel-cli is for using Babel from the command line, and babel-core is for use through NodeJS. We’re going to run Babel on the command line, so we’ll install the CLI.
The module we’re going to build is a tiny one that takes a GitHub username and uses the new fetch API to make a request to the GitHub API for a list of repositories that the user owns. Note that at the time of writing, the fetch API is only supported in Chrome, but a polyfill exists. If you want a polyfill that works in both Node and in the browser, Matt Andrew’s Isomorphic Fetch is your best bet.
It’s up to you if you want to include the polyfill in the module, or suggest to users that they use it. Personally I prefer to let the end user decide, they might not need a polyfill, or have a particular favourite, and I don’t want to force that on them.
Because we’ll be converting our source code into code that we then publish, I like to create a directory, typically named src, that holds our source code. Let’s create src/githubby.js, that exports the function I mentioned previously:
export function getReposForUser ( username ) { let url = `https://api.github.com/users/ ${ username } /repos` ; return fetch ( url ). then (( response ) => response. json ()); }
This code makes use of a few ES6 features, including ES6 modules, block scoping, template literals and arrow functions. This code won’t run in many environments right now, and that makes our module pretty useless. We can use Babel’s command line tool to convert this code:
babel -d lib src/
This tells Babel to take every JavaScript file in the src directory, and output a corresponding compiled file into lib. However, as of Babel 6, this won’t do anything by default. Babel doesn’t provide any transforms by default, you have to tell it what transforms you want it to perform. Luckily for us Babel also provides a number of presets to quickly configure things. One such preset is babel-preset-es2015, which configures Babel 6 to transform our code into ECMAScript 5 code. First, install the preset:
npm install --save-dev babel-preset-es2015
And then create a.babelrc file to tell Babel to use that preset:
{ "presets" : [ "es2015" ] }
Now when we run Babel 6, our code will be transformed as we expect. If we take a look at lib/githubby.js, you’ll see a file that looks similar to the below:
'use strict' ; Object. defineProperty ( exports, '__esModule', { value : true, }); exports. getReposForUser = getReposForUser ; function getReposForUser ( username ) { var url = 'https://api.github.com/users/' + username + '/repos' ; return fetch ( url ). then ( function ( response ) { return response. json (); }); }
You can see that Babel has converted our code into JavaScript that is widely supported across browsers and environments like NodeJS.
The final step is to set up our module such that when we publish it to npm, we first rerun Babel to generate the files in the lib directory. We also need to tell npm which file it should load when our module is imported by another.
Firstly, we can add an npm script called prepublish in our package.json file:
"scripts" : { "prepublish" : "./node_modules/.bin/babel -d lib src/" },
There’s a very good reason that we call this script prepublish. When we want to push our module onto npm, we’ll run npm publish. This is a command built into npm. When we run npm publish, it will first look for a script called prepublish, and run that if it exists.
To tell npm which file it should load by default, we need to edit the main property in our package.json file to point to our generated lib/githubby.js file:
"main" : "lib/githubby.js",
With both of those set up we can now run npm publish to publish our module for all to use:
jack/jsplayground-example > npm publish > jsplayground-example@1.0.0 prepublish /Users/jackfranklin/git/jsplayground-example > babel -d lib src/ src/githubby.js -> lib/githubby.js + jsplayground-example@1.0.0
Now we have a module that we’ve authored entirely in ES6 that is published in a way that makes it usable to as many different consumers as possible. Nothing in our module is specific to the browser or specific to Node, and a person using this module could be using it in the client or on the server, and it will work just as well on both. In a future article I’ll look at the different ways we can consume this module. If you’d like to grab the code and check out the module for yourself, you can check the example repository on GitHub.
Don't miss my latest course, React in Five! This course will help you level up your React skills by covering lesser known parts of the React API. Each video is less than five minutes long, and the first four are free to watch. Get started now.R.D. Boozer is an astrophysics researcher, host of the Astro Maven blog and author of the book "The Plundering of NASA: an Exposé" (lulu.com, 2013). He contributed this article to SPACE.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
NASA has pushed back its first crewed flights to the International Space Station (ISS) from 2015 to 2017 — after Congress allocated less money to the Commercial Crew program than President Barack Obama's administration says the space agency needs. That's two extra years the United States must pay Russia to taxi American astronauts to the ISS, two years when that same money could instead support American jobs back home.
In the Commercial Crew Development program (or Commercial Crew), NASA is helping companies develop launch vehicles and spacecraft to transport astronauts to the ISS with partial financing while the companies pay the remainder of the development costs themselves. Indeed, it's amazing that the Commercial Crew has made any significant progress, since it received just over one-third of its total requested funds for the period covering the last three years.
Worse, NASA's inspector general says insufficient funding of Commercial Crew may cause an even longer delay of the first crewed flight — to 2020. That puts the first expedition near the end |
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Yes, technology has helped all Chinese speakers save many hours we can spend watching brilliant cat videos instead. And because we love cats, we want you to save even more time by helping you figure out which are the best Chinese dictionaries to use.
Our review of the best free Chinese dictionaries available for Chinese learners
From online dictionaries to applications, we’ve selected our favorite free Chinese dictionaries to help you improve in Mandarin. We tested 3 categories of Chinese dictionaries: online Chinese dictionaries, pop-up dictionaries, and offline mobile dictionary applications. Depending on your needs, we know you’ll find one or several Chinese dictionaries for you in this selection.
Fair warning: We’ve left the hardest task to you: picking the one that fits you best! Ready? Let’s explore these Chinese dictionaries!
Free Online Chinese Dictionaries
Online dictionaries might be for you if you like to spend time online and need to look up words. Instead of thumbing through your paper dictionary, all you have to do is to open a new tab in your browser and look up the Chinese character’s meaning or pronunciation in pinyin!
Ninchanese Dictionary
Ninchanese dictionary has been made with Chinese learners in mind. The design is very clean and neat. It has everything you need to understand a Chinese character meaning and how to use it.
Pros:
Very accurate words meanings
The simplified and traditional form of Chinese characters
Chinese character strokes
Sentences examples
Character decomposition with all key element like Chinese components to understand the deep meaning of a character
Compounds of character where you find other character formed with the character
Related words of the Chinese character to know when you’ll find the character in multiple characters
Cons:
Some words could have synonyms. But The Nincha Team update Chinese character every day. Don’t hesitate to contact us.
MDBG
MDBG is actually the first Chinese dictionary you come across when you google “Chinese dictionary”. MDBG focuses on being a good reference for Chinese learners by offering detailed information about characters such as the pronunciation, the meaning, the strokes order, the examples and so on. They’ve become quickly popular among the Chinese learning community. Did you know MDBG is also maintaining CC-CEDICT? CC-CEDICT is an open source database to which everyone can contribute to create a complete Chinese to English dictionary with pronunciation in pinyin for the Chinese characters. CC-CEDICT is also used by many Chinese dictionaries such as Perapera, Zhongwen Chinese popup dictionary, Pleco and others.
Pros:
Lots of data are provided about the characters, with:
Stroke animations that show the characters stroke by stroke and character decomposition
Handwriting input: you can draw characters with your mouse to look them up and that’s pretty awesome! It’s very useful when you come across a character you neither know how to pronounce or what it means.
Example sentences, for a better understanding of how words are used in context.
Clean interface which helps a lot to easily find the words you’re looking for.
Advanced search function. You can search almost everything: single characters, words, pinyin, English of course, but also look up words by character components, Cangjie input method and more. You can also ask for the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciation.
A new feature is the “Look up All Chinese Words in a Text” option, that shows the meaning of each Chinese word in a text you upload. The + : you can choose the mouse over translation option to highlight definitions as you’re reading.
HSK level: Next to each word, its corresponding HSK level is indicated. That way you can learn words that fit your HSK level, just like on Ninchanese!
Cons:
Its basic interface. MDBG is not the most colorful and playful interface to use for sure. But, as they say, don’t judge a book by its cover, right?
We’d love to have more extra features but this is not the purpose of this online Chinese dictionary.
Many useful and practical tools are brought to Chinese learners with this dictionary. MDBG is definitely a good online dictionary to have by your side if you need a complete one with cool tools.
Bab.la
Bab.la is a pretty good online dictionary and translator you can use to translate from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English. As you may know, its translator offers many languages you can switch from to target your search. This online dictionary provides the learners with all the main stuff you expect from a Chinese dictionary: translations, pronunciations, and synonyms, as well as special features, such as a phrasebook, quizzes, and more.
Pros:
Lots of synonyms are provided whenever you look up words. That’s really interesting to get to know the slight differences between the words.
The clear interface, that makes you want to look up tons of words.
The audio so you can hear the pronunciation of each word.
Context sentences, that show you how and when to use a certain word.
A forum, for linguistic doubts in case you need a grammar explanation. It can be also very useful to share your Chinese learning journey with others, just like in the Ninchanese Slack community, and ask them their opinion about a topic.
A phrasebook which is divided into 6 sections from travel to business. This phrasebook gets you prepared for every situation you’re going to face in China, depending on your profile.
Quizzes. Playing small quizzes can be a good help when learning Chinese.
Cons:
Lack of extra tools such as stroke orders explanations.
The lack of Chinese specialization. We’d love to have more specific features for Chinese learning.
To sum up, Bab.la is a good dictionary you can rely on especially if you want to explore the background of language learning, with forums in many foreign languages.
Let’s move to the last online Chinese dictionary we reviewed: Ichacha, which is a dictionary available in a few languages such as Japanese, Korean, French, Russian, and English. Ichacha translates all those languages into Chinese and vice-versa.
Ichacha
Ichacha looks like a paper dictionary. When looking up a word, you get all its uses: from nouns to verbs. A large broad of examples is also provided.
Pros:
Data mining technology is definitely Ichacha’s strength. The use of data mining data technology to collect new and trendy Chinese words is a great plus. It’s really cool stuff to know all the vocabulary used by native speakers.
Several versions: you can access the English version but also the traditional Chinese version.
Example sentences: putting the word you’ve just learned in a context is certainly the best way to remember it.
Cons:
The interface is not the prettiest.
Not really easy to handle the dictionary at first. When getting started with this dictionary you may feel a little bit lost, but once you know your way around, it’s fine.
The ads. You can get easily disturbed by the many ads displayed on the website.
Ichacha is an unconventional Chinese dictionary that makes Mandarin learning more accessible. The translation of new words adds a fantastic feature to this dictionary.
Online dictionaries are a great help since they’re very complete, we agree, but what if you don’t want to open a new tab in your browser to look up words? Have you ever thought of installing a popup dictionary? Chinese popup dictionaries are great complements to online dictionaries, and also work as standalones. Let’s see what the best Popup Chinese dictionaries are!
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Free Popup Chinese Dictionaries
Popup dictionaries are really useful when you’re reading a text online in Chinese and need to know the meaning of some words. Pop-up dictionaries instantly translate a word you don’t know as you hover over it. Just hover over the word with your mouse and the translation appears. Neat, huh?
Installing a pop-up dictionary
Chinese Pop-up dictionaries are usually plugins or extensions you add to your browser. Install them, activate them if needed and let the magic happen. Once activated, you’ll simply need to hover over a word in Chinese to see its pronunciation and meaning. Not all is wonderful about these plugins, but one thing’s for sure: they make reading Chinese online wonderfully easier. All you have to do is to hover a word with your mouse! We all wish we could use them on paper texts too. But, as they don’t exist (yet), here are two awesome pop-up Chinese dictionaries you can use online.
We all wish we could use them on paper texts too. But, as they don’t exist (yet), here are two awesome pop-up Chinese dictionaries you can use online.
Zhongwen Chinese popup dictionary
Zhongwen Chinese popup dictionary is available in Chrome. Once you’ve added it to your Chrome extensions, you can activate this popup dictionary extension by clicking on the little logo in the toolbar. You’ll then be ready to translate everything you want just by hovering over words with your mouse!
Pros:
The translation of expressions and loanwords.
It identifies well whether you’re highlightings a group of words, an expression or a single word.
Its keyboard shortcuts: for instance, when you press the letter “g” button on your keyboard while hovering a word, you’re redirected to a wiki page explaining Chinese grammar rules related to that word. “T” takes you to Tatoeba, where you’ll see example sentences containing that word.
The easy use of the plugin, once it’s installed, all you’ll need to do is to switch on and off the little icon to activate the pop-up dictionary or not. Easy!
Cons:
Too useful. I mean, you can easily get addicted to this popup dictionary and that can keep you from improving your Chinese. Use it only when you really need it.
Only available on Chrome and Apple’s Safari. What a loss for all the people that want to learn Chinese and don’t have the Chrome browser or a MacBook.
This popup dictionary doesn’t always recognize the new and trendy Chinese words because they’re not in the database.
If you hate complicated things, then this pop-up dictionary is for you! As it is easy to install and to use, it’s very useful on a daily basis.
The next pop-up dictionary we’ll talk about is PeraPera, which has different features. It’s going to be hard to choose!
PeraPera
Perapera is available both in Firefox and Chrome. Whenever you meet a Chinese character or word you don’t know, hover your mouse over it and Perapera will translate it for you.
Pros:
Available in both Firefox and Chrome.
You can save and export words to study them later. It’s a pretty cool way to remember and learn the words you run into on Chinese websites.
Multiple display options: should it display tone marks, pinyin, zhuyin, simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese? It’s all up to you.
Cons:
Same as the Zhongwen Chinese popup dictionary. You can be tempted to rely on Perapera all the time and stop using your brain to read the characters you actually already know. That’s not the best way to learn Chinese.
Not many keyboard shortcuts.
Pop-up dictionaries are useful tools that will help you improve your Chinese reading skills, but make sure you also know how to manage without them as well! Don’t depend on them; it’s easy to get addicted to over-hovering!
Now that we’ve seen online Chinese dictionaries and pop-up dictionaries, you can guess what’s next: Mobile dictionary applications!
Free Mobile Chinese Dictionaries (Android and iOS)
Time to talk about mobile Chinese dictionaries. As you don’t always carry your computer with you, having a Chinese dictionary on your smartphone can be very practical, especially if you’re traveling, or walking in the street.
Another cool thing about dictionary applications is that you can usually use them offline. That way, when traveling, you won’t need to spend all your money on internet access to look up words. Instead, whenever you decide to go for a little adventure in the middle of nowhere with no Internet Connection, or in a foreign country, let say, China, install one of these 3 dictionary apps, and you’ll be able to translate every word you need offline.
Lastly, dictionaries applications are also full of awesome extensions that can help you improve your Chinese. These mobile Chinese dictionaries in this shortlist will become your go-to on the do Chinese resources for sure!
Hanping (Android)
Hanping is a great Chinese dictionary app. The interface looks friendly with all the vivid colors. First impressions last. Hanping offers two versions: the Lite version which is the free one and the Pro version, which is the not so free one. As for the content, in addition to translations, words pronunciation and Anki flashcards export options, you’ll find tools like handwriting recognition, multi-syllable audio recordings, search-by-radicals, home screen widgets, vertical Zhuyin, and other useful extensions in both the Lite and the Pro versions.
Pros:
Dynamic search. This feature is pretty awesome, when you’re looking up words the first result will be your target word and the following results Hanping shows you, are all started with your target word. And if you’re looking for a multi-syllable word, then you will get all words that contain those characters in that order (even if other characters are in between).
Idioms. Hanping contains lots of Chinese idioms that are really useful for Mandarin learners thanks to predefined word lists containing popular idioms and words that are frequently used in China.
Cantonese version: You can also download Hanping Cantonese app using CantoDict data, for those interested in Cantonese.
Its popup dictionary add-on for your mobile device. A little pointer appears on your screen and it translates words live. No matter which version you’ve downloaded (lite, pro or Cantonese), you can use this add-on which comes separately (paid).
Free full-screen handwriting recognition. Hanping offers handwriting recognition. This is definitely a must-have tool for a Chinese dictionary.
Cons:
Only available on Android.
The paid add-ons. You have to pay for them, but some of them are worth it.
Hanping also has an OCR app called Hanping Camera that uses an innovative barcode scanner style design to read Chinese text in the wild, without having to touch your screen.
If you’re interested in Hanping but can’t decide whether or not you should get the Pro version, it depends on the extensions you want to add in. For some, the Lite version can be sufficient as it’s quite complete for a free Chinese dictionary. So give the Lite version a try and see if you want to upgrade to the Pro.
Pleco (iOS & Android)
Pleco is one of the most popular mobile Chinese dictionaries, how could we not mention it in our review? This app is available both on Android and iOS, which makes it more accessible to everyone. What about its features? Pleco offers a wide database to search from, in which you can look up words, translations, synonyms, pronunciation, stroke order, example sentences and more. This application also gives the users the option of adding licensed Chinese dictionaries (for a fee). Let’s explore Pleco’s features in our pro and con section below.
Pros:
Handwriting recognition. You can look up words just by drawing the characters in simplified or traditional Chinese. Plus, it’s okay if you get the stroke order wrong, Pleco’s recognition deals with scribbles very well.
A screen reader to make you more familiar with Chinese words you don’t know. You can look up Chinese words everywhere on your phone by tapping on a floating button. This tool is probably one of the best on Pleco as the word analysis is very accurate.
Its clipboard reader: copy a text you want to look up words in, go to your clipboard reader in Pleco and you’ll be able to look up all the words you want. Great for when you’re chatting in Chinese in Wechat
The document reader, which works like the screen reader but for files (paid add-on on IOS and Android)
OCR system: The OCR system (Optical Character Recognition) is a recent update of Pleco that allows you to instantly translate words you don’t know by using your mobile device’s camera or by tapping the word on a picture. Magic! Your phone is now a Chinese learning weapon capable of translating any sign in the streets!
The examples that show you how to use the word you’ve just looked up.
Detailed information about the word: Pleco shows you the components contained in the characters, the characters contained in the word you’re looking for, but also compound words that contain the character you’re looking up.
A large choice of dictionaries to add. If you have specific needs or just want to compare dictionaries definitions, Pleco offers several free and paying dictionaries you can add. That allows you to see more various definitions, content, explanations, and definitions that sites that offer mono-dictionaries.
A free Cantonese version that comes with four Cantonese dictionaries, like cantonese.org for instance.
Cons:
Paying IOS features. Most of these awesome tools like the screen reader, are only available for free on Android. Sorry, Apple lovers, you’ll have to pony up.
Many extra features. Too many, perhaps? Pleco provides lots of tools for their users, which is cool, but it can be hard keeping up with all the new extensions.
In case you’re hesitating between the add-ons that can be installed in Pleco, try the screen reader tool. Very practical when you’re exploring on the web! If you have an iPhone, then Pleco is definitely made for you!
What about other good free online Chinese dictionaries?
You may use or find other online Chinese dictionaries or applications we haven’t reviewed here.
Here are some of them:
Line Dict, which replaced the well-loved Nciku, a now defunct Chinese dictionary, and learning tool.
Youdao, a well-known online dictionary and Android app which can be difficult to use for beginners since it’s all written in Chinese. But still, it’s a very useful dictionary for advanced learners.
YellowBridge, a free online Chinese dictionary in which you can find examples, synonyms and learn about each character’s history, and more.
Arch Chinese, an online dictionary in which you can learn the meaning and symbol of each Chinese character according to their shape and history.
Final words
We hope you’ll find this review of these 8 free Chinese dictionaries helpful to you! From online dictionaries to applications, we’ve selected our favorite ones and added their pros and cons. All you have to do now is to choose the method you prefer to decipher Chinese characters and words and bury your Mandarin paper dictionary for good! The uprising of the machine starts now! Do you already have a fave Chinese dictionary? Which of these do you use the most and why? Tell everyone in the comments!
Wondering what to read next? How about knowing how many Chinese characters and words exist in Chinese and how many you should learn? We just wrote a blog post about that!
The Nincha Team Stay in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest.On July 25, 1911, Bobby Leach became the first man to go over the Falls. He was a circus stuntman from Cornwell, England, and claimed he was going to be the first to face the "triple challenge": making a barrel trip through the rapids to the whirlpool, parachuting from the Upper Suspension Bridge into the river upstream of the rapids, and going over the Falls in a barrel.
Leach accomplished the first two challenges in 1908 and 1910. Then, on the afternoon of July 25, 1911, Bobby Leach climbed into his 8-foot-long (2.4-meter) steel barrel at Navy Island. This is a section where the Niagara River's current heads toward the Canadian shore. It took 18 minutes for Bobby to reach the Falls and another 22 minutes for someone to recover him once he plummeted to the base, where the barrel got stuck in the rocks. Bobby Leach survived but broke his jaw and both kneecaps. He spent the next six months in the hospital.
Bobby eventually left the hospital and toured the world with his barrel. In 1926, while in New Zealand, he slipped on an orange peel, fracturing his leg. His leg became infected and was amputated, and Bobby Leach died of complications two months later.Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
According PlayStation Turkey VP Sercan Sulun in a video posted to the Turkish CNN video game website Multiplayer, The Last of Us will soon be coming to the PlayStation 4 as both a physical and digital release.
NeoGaf user "Quirah" (as posted by user "chadskin") posted a translation writing that Sulun says, "Sequel is not coming right now as far as I know, but I can say that [the] first game will be released this summer for PS4 as a physical and digital copy with enhanced graphics," in response to a question about a potential The Last of Us sequel.
At this point, this rumor has not been officially confirmed by Sony, and the announcement would be very strange since The Last of Us is also a rumored PlayStation Now title. The up-res gambit worked for the Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition update, but sometimes executives are just confused/wrong. Just a few years ago, the managing director of Ubisoft Brazil announced that Assassin's Creed IV was going to be set in Brazil.
But what do you think? Is there any truth to Sulun's claim?As the US oil and gas industry has boomed in recent years it has also started to experience a shortage in workforce causing the historically male-dominated industry to consider a new demographic.
Paul Caplan, president of Rigzone, said in a recent interview with KUHF News that during the first quarter of 2013 women secured nearly half of all new jobs in the oil industry. He suggested that this could be a major turning point for the industry in which about 80% of all employees are male.
“If you look at the overall makeup of the professional workforce in the oil and gas industry, you see that only 18% of the industry itself is women. So, that half of the hires in the first quarter were women is, I think, a sign that some of the programs that the major oil companies and service companies have been putting into play in terms of trying to attract more women to the industry is actually now taking hold.”
Related article: Future Energy Consumption Could Fall Due to Financial Collapse
According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, North America’s shale boom created around 8,000 jobs last year in the oil and gas extraction sector, meaning that it now employs a total of 193,200 people. Pipeline transportation added an extra 700 jobs, boosting the number of employees in that sector to 44,600, and the petroleum and coal products manufacturing subsector grew by 1,700 jobs to a total of 114,900.
CNN carried out their own survey of the women taking jobs in the oil and gas industry and determined that most are moving into white-collar and desk jobs.
By. Joao Peixe of Oilprice.comThe Life of Buddha
Gautama Buddha, the historical Buddha, lived between 563 and 483 BC in the area known now as the Indo-Nepalese region. As a bodhisattva, he had passed through thousands of existences before coming to Earth for his ultimate transmigration.
This last lifetime he began as a son of the King of the realm Sakya, Sudhodana, who ruled at Kapilavastu, in Ancient India on the border of present-day Nepal, and was born in a village called Lumbini into the warrior tribe called the Sakyas (from where he derived the title Sakyamuni, meaning "Sage of the Sakyas").
According to ancient tradition, Queen Maya, his mother, first had a dream of a beautiful white elephant coming down into her womb, and this was interpreted as a sign that the Buddha, or a universal emperor, was about to be born. When her time came, Queen Maya went into the garden and gave painless birth to the bodhisattva. He immediately walked, spoke, and was received by Brahma.
Five days after his birth, the young prince received the name of Siddhartha. When his parents took him to the temple, the statues of the gods prostrated themselves before him, great were the rejoicings of the people over the birth of this illustrious prince. Also at this time a devout old man named Asita came down from the Himalayas to meet the newborn prince. An ascetic of high spiritual attainments, Asita was particularly pleased to hear this happy news. Having been a tutor to the King, he visited the palace to see the royal baby. The king, who felt honoured by his unexpected visit, carried the child up to him in order to make the child pay him due reverence. To the surprise of all, the child's legs turned and rested on the matted locks of the ascetic.
Instantly, the ascetic rose from his seat and recognizing in the young child the 80 signs that are pledges to a highly religious vocation, and foreseeing with his supernormal vision the child's future greatness, saluted him with clasped hands. The Royal father did likewise. The great ascetic smiled at first and then was sad. Questioned regarding his mingled feelings, he answered that he smiled because the prince would eventually become a Buddha, an Enlightened One, and he was sad because he would not be able to benefit from the superior wisdom of the Enlightened One owing to his prior death and rebirth in a Formless Plane.
After seven days Queen Maya died, and her place as mother was taken by her sister, whose devotion and love became legendary.
When the young prince was in his twelfth year, the king called the wise Brahmans in council. They revealed that Siddhartha would devote himself to asceticism if he cast his eyes on age, sickness, or death ~ and, if he were to meet a hermit.
Wanting his son to be a universal monarch instead, the king surrounded the palace with a triple enclosure and guard and proclaimed that the use of the words death and grief were forbidden. The most beautiful princess in the land, Yasodhara, was found for his bride, and after Siddhartha proved himself in many tournaments calling for strength and prowess, when he was 16, the two were wed.
Siddhartha was kept amused and entertained for some time by this privileged life behind the palace walls until one day his divine vocation awoke in him, and he decided to visit the nearby town. The king called for everything to be swept and decorated, and any ugly or sad sight to be removed. But these precautions were in vain for while Siddhartha was travelling through the streets, an old wrinkled man appeared before him. In astonishment the young prince learned that decrepitude is the fate of those who live life through. Still later he met an incurable invalid and then a funeral procession. Finally heaven placed in his path an ascetic, a beggar, who told Siddhartha that he had left the world to pass beyond suffering and joy, to attain peace at heart.
Confirmed in his meditation, all these experiences awakened in Siddhartha the idea of abandoning his present life and embracing asceticism. He opened his heart to his father and said, "Everything in the world is changing and transitory. Let me go off alone like the religious beggar."
Grief-stricken at the idea of losing his son, the king doubled the guard around the walls and increased the pleasures and distractions within. And at this point, Yasodhara bore him a son whom he called Rahula (meaning "chain" or "fetter"), a name that indicated Gautama's sense of dissatisfaction with his life of luxury, while the birth of his son evoked in him much tenderness. His apparent sense of dissatisfaction turned to disillusion when he saw three things from the window of his palace, each of which represented different forms human suffering: a decrepit old man, a diseased man, and a corpse.Yet even this could not stop the troubling thoughts in his heart or close his eyes to the realizations of the impermanence of all life, and of the vanity and instability of all objects of desire.
His mind made up, he awoke one night and, casting one last look at his wife and child, mounted his horse Kataka and rode off accompanied by his equerry Chandaka. At the city gates Siddhartha turned over his horse to Chandaka, then he cut off his hair, gave up his sumptuous robes, and entered a hermitage where the Brahmans accepted him as a disciple. Siddhartha had now and forever disappeared. He became the monk Gautama, or as he is still called, Sakyamuni, the ascetic of the Sakyas.
For many years Gautama studied the doctrines until, having felt the need to learn more elsewhere, he traveled and fasted. His two teachers had showed him how to reach very deep states of meditation (samadhi). This did not, however, lead to a sense of true knowledge or peace, and the practice of deep meditation was abandoned in favour of a life of extreme asceticism which he shared with five companions. But again, after five or six years of self-mortification, Siddhartha felt he had failed to achieve true insight and rejected such practices as dangerous and useless.
Resolved to continue his quest, Siddharta made his way to a deer park at Isipatana, near present day Benares. Here he sat beneath a tree meditating on death and rebirth. Discovering that excessive fasts destroy strength, he learned that as he had transcended earthly life, so must he next transcend asceticism. Alone and weak, he sat beneath the sacred Bodhi tree of wisdom, and swore to die before arising without the wisdom he sought.
Mara, the demon, fearful of Gautama's power, sent his three beautiful daughters to distract him. When that failed, Mara sent an army of devils to destroy him. Finally Mara attacked Gautama with a terrible weapon capable of cleaving a mountain. But all this was useless, and the motionless monk sat in meditation.
It was here that Siddharta attained a knowledge of the way things really are; it was through this knowledge that he acquired the title Buddha (meaning "awakened one"). This awakening was achieved during a night of meditation, which passed through various stages as the illumination that Gautama had sought slowly welled up in his heart. He knew the exact condition of all beings and the causes of their rebirths. He saw beings live, die and transmigrate. In meditating on human pain, he was enlightened about both its genesis and the means of destroying it.
In this first stage he saw each of his previous existences, and then understood the chain of cause and effect. In the second he surveyed the death and rebirth of all living beings and understood the law that governs the cycle of birth and death. In the third he identified the Four Noble Truths: the universality of suffering, the cause of suffering through selfish desire, the solution to suffering and the way to overcome suffering. This final point is called the Noble Eightfold Path, this being eight steps consisting of wisdom (right views, right intention) ethics (right speech, right action, right livelihood), mental discipline (right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration), which ultimately lead to liberation from the source of suffering.
When day came, Gautama had attained perfect illumination, and had become a Buddha. The rays emanating from his body shone to the boundaries of space. He stayed in meditation for seven more days, and then for four more weeks he stayed by the tree. Through his process of enlightenment he discovered that all sentient beings in this universal life possess buddhahold, and all are future potential buddhas.
From that time he had two alternate paths: he could enter Nirvana immediately, or else he could stay and spread enlightenment. After Brahma came in person to beg him to preach the law, Buddha yielded and stayed on the earth. For many years he traveled and taught his wisdom about the force of love and the destruction of all desire.
Although initially hesitant to share his insight on the grounds that humanity might not be ready for such a teaching, the Buddha decided to communicate his discovery to those willing to listen. His first converts were the five ascetics with whom he had lived when he himself followed the lifestyle of the ascetic. To these he preached his first sermon in the Deer Park at Benares, outlining to them the Four Noble Truths. Out of this small group the community of monks (or Sangha) grew to about 60 in size and came to include Buddha's cousin, Ananda, and his son, Rahula. Later the Buddha was persuaded by his stepmother and cousin to accept women into the sangha.
The remaining 45 years of the Buddha's life were spent journeying around the plain of the Ganges, teaching and receiving visitors.
"There are two extremes which are to be avoided: a life of pleasure ~ this is low and ignoble, unworthy and useless, and runs counter to the affairs of the spirit; and a life of fasting ~ this is sad, unworthy and useless. Perfection has kept its distance from these two extremes, and has found the middle way which leads to repose, knowledge, illumination, and Nirvana. So here is the sacred truth about pain: birth, old age, sickness, death, and separation from that which one loves, are pain. And this is the origin of pain: it is thirst for pleasure, thirst for existence, thirst for impermanence. And here is the truth about the suppression of pain: it is the extinction of that thirst by the destruction of desire.
"Charity, knowledge and virtue are possessions that cannot be lost. To do a little good is worth more than accomplishing works of a difficult nature. The perfect man is nothing unless he pours out kindness on his fellow creatures, unless he consoles the abandoned. My doctrine is a doctrine of mercy. The way of salvation is open to all. Destroy your passions as the elephant would trample down a reed hut. But I would have you know that it is a mistaken idea to believe that one can escape from one's passions by taking shelter in hermitages. The only remedy against evil is healthy reality."
And so Buddha travelled and preached. He performed many miracles, and converted his family and many followers. During his life the Buddha had taught that no one was to succeed him as leader of the Sangha. Instead, his followers were to take his teaching and rule as their sole guides. By the time he reached the age of 80, Sakyamuni began to feel old. He visited all of the monasteries he had founded and prepared to meet his end.
Before the Buddha's death, he became severely sick. He journeyed northwest to the banks of the river Hiranyavati, walking with his disciples, and ate the food offered by a blacksmith. His illness had progresses, and at the end, he came to the river and took a bath. Then he made a rope bed among eight sal trees, with each direction having two. He lay down on his side, right hand supporting his head, the other resting on his body. All later reclining Buddhas (called Buddha's Nirvana) are in the same posture.
The Buddha's disciples kept watch on him after they were told the Buddha was going to nirvana. At night, a scholar of Brahman went to see the Buddha, but was stopped by the Buddha's disciple Ananda. Hearing this, the Buddha called the scholar Subhadda to his bed and spoke him. Thus the scholar became the Buddha's last disciple. The final exhortation of the Buddha to his disciples was that they should not be sorry for losing their tutor. (See the last sermon of the Buddha for further elaboration.)
Growing weaker, he spoke one last time: "Do not say we have no master now. The doctrine I have preached will be your master when I have disappeared. Listen, I beg you: ALL CREATIONS ARE IMPERMANENT ; work diligently for your liberation."
Having pronounced these final words, Buddha went into the jhana stages, or meditative absorptions. Going from level to level, one after the other, ever deeper and deeper, he reached ecstacy. Then he came out of the meditative absorption for the last time and passed into nirvana, leaving nothing whatever behind that can cause rebirth again in this or any other world.and finally passed into Nirvana.
After his death, Buddha's remains were cremated, as became the Buddhist tradition. The passing away, or the final nirvana, of the Buddha occurred in 483 BC on a full moon day in the month of May, known in the Indian calendar as Wesak.
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SouledOut.org HomeThe Killers (also known as A Man Alone) is a 1946 American film noir directed by Robert Siodmak and based in part on the 1927 short story of the same name by Ernest Hemingway.[2]
It stars Burt Lancaster in his film debut, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, and Sam Levene.[3] The film also features William Conrad in his first credited role, as one of the killers referred to in the title.[4] An uncredited John Huston and Richard Brooks co-wrote the screenplay, which was credited to Anthony Veiller.
In 2008, The Killers was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Plot [ edit ]
Two hitmen, Max and Al (William Conrad and Charles McGraw), come to a small town, Brentwood, New Jersey, to kill Pete Lund, known as "The Swede" (Burt Lancaster). The Swede's coworker at a gas station warns him but, strangely, he makes no attempt to flee, and they kill him in his hotel room. The Swede is soon revealed to |
of the company’s spinoff company, Ford Smart Mobility LLC.
Chariot, which has been operating in San Francisco since 2014, is part of a recent trend of bus startups that use algorithms to develop transit routes based on user demand. Using the app, customers can book a seat in one of the companies blue-and-white shuttle vans for around $4 a trip.
And unlike its flashier, more tricked-out competitors, Chariot has managed to successfully navigate the twin challenges of high-stakes venture capitalism and municipal bureaucracies to emerge as one of the only bus startups left in the Bay Area. Chariot founder and CEO Ali Vahabzadeh, as well as the rest of the company’s leadership, will move over to Ford to work on the build-out.
Hackett said he hopes Chariot can fill in the gaps in cities’ transit maps, as well as compete with increasingly popular (and cheap) carpooling services like UberPool and Lyft Line.
“If you think of mass transit on the lefthand of the page, and private car ownership on the right, you know the livery systems, the Lyfts [and] the Ubers, are more expensive to operate per mile than your own personal car, and mass transit is the cheapest,” he said. “This shuttle is next-in-line as the most efficient to mass transit. Cities are going to love this because it’s going to be highly accessible based on pricing.”
“Cities are going to love this”
Private shuttle services, especially those operated by huge tech companies like Facebook and Google, have been magnets of criticism from those who correctly note they are mostly unavailable to most low-income residents who lack transit options. But Fields argued that Ford’s new shuttle company will be different.
“This will allow us to serve underserved parts of the communities,” Fields said. “Today your options are if you’re living in the city, you either take mass transit, which is low-cost but you’d need to rely on their route, so you need to go to the metro station or the bus stop, which could be out of the way, versus a dynamic shuttle, which costs less than a taxi or a rideshare service. The shuttle comes directly to you. We think this will actually be an aid to underserved areas.”
This isn’t Ford’s first flirtation with quasi-public bus services. Last February, the company teamed up with Bridj, a data-driven pop-up bus company, and the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority to roll out a fleet of shuttle vans that residents can summon with the tap of an app. Ford has also unveiled several “smartbike” prototypes in recent years that it envisions as part of a broader mobility system that integrates cars, bikes, and various other forms of transportation into a seamless, networked whole.Philanthropy wants to change the world: make it a better place, protect the environment, create social equality, end hunger, stop conflict. Here at Water For People, we want to ensure that people around the world have safe drinking water and a decent place to poop -- not just temporarily, but for generations to come.
Water For People is grateful for the support from a diverse group of philanthropists and donors. All of them have asked us to realize better ways to implement philanthropy and accomplish real impact. This has caused us to rethink how we approach our goal to bring full water and sanitation coverage by 2018 to 30 districts across 10 countries: India, Rwanda, Uganda, Malawi, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.
Essentially, it means we work differently to transform the very nature of the development effort and fundamentally change the game by:
Catalyzing Investment
As an organization we insist on investment from in-country government institutions and communities, the private sector, and other organizations to not only share the costs of project implementation but also create the financial environment to support the long-term capital expenditures required to maintain systems, replace them when necessary, and improve them over time. Our investment fueled by philanthropy is catalytic and in the end seeks common cause with local district and state government agencies and sparks solutions that can thrive over time without the further need of philanthropy.
Last year, Water For People's contributions to development projects of $7.6 million spurred another $4.6 million of investment from local governments, their communities, and other non-government organizations (NGOs). Moreover, we have strong evidence that the private-sector partners we have worked with, especially in our Sanitation as a Business program, are beginning to garner additional investment from banks, development partners, and microfinance institutions -- further proof that our initial financial support is achieving the objective to attract funding from others.
Being Obsessed with Monitoring and Evaluation
Monitoring and evaluation is vital to fully understand the progress of development work and implement adjustments that reduce development time and improve success. Not only is this the right thing to do for the people we serve, but it is the only way we can prove advancement toward our goals. To determine that our programs are working we guarantee post-project monitoring for at least 10 years and instill this capability with our local partners so that it will continue long after we're no longer part of the picture.
We cannot afford to replicate failure and this is why we developed FLOW, Field Level Operations Watch. Now Akvo FLOW, it helps us determine whether our water and sanitation projects are working or failing, and injects a new level of transparency, efficiency, and accountability to our work. Using Android cell phones, combined with GPS and Google Earth software, Akvo FLOW gives the local government, community members, partners, and others the ability to record and display information online to know whether a project is up and running, broken, or on the verge of disrepair and requiring maintenance.
Akvo FLOW has been used by the World Bank to map water points in Liberia, IRC (International Rescue Committee) to create baseline data in Ghana on the sustainability of water services and in Burkina Faso to monitor water services delivery, as well as by Water and Sanitation in Africa to access the functionality of wells. In all, organizations across 28 countries now rely on Akvo FLOW to collect, manage, analyze, and display geographically-referenced monitoring data.
Another example of rigorous evaluation is our Re-Imagine Reporting (RIR) online platform. With the support of the Skoll Foundation, the Case Foundation, and Cisco, we launched this initiative in March 2013 to better enable a holistic opportunity to learn and improve. Philanthropy is becoming less interested in typical nonprofit reports that focus on investments made and the number of people served. Instead, they want systems such as RIR that enable their nonprofit partners to know what is working and what needs to be fixed to advance impact.
Fostering National Movements
It's imperative that our work has the potential for achieving widespread social change versus "completed projects" or "beneficiaries served."
And we're seeing this happen.
A national movement is taking off in Honduras where we have proved that full water coverage for an entire district can be accomplished. To date, eight NGOs in addition to Water For People have joined this movement: CRS, CARE, Living Water International, Pure Water for the World, World Vision, IRC, Save the Children, and Agua Para el Pueblo. IRC, CRS, CARE and Water For People have collaboratively hired a national-level coordinator to lead this effort. This alliance intends to implement programming in nine municipalities in addition to the three where Water For People is already working. The movement is called Para Todos Por Siempre ("Everyone Forever"), and it has real potential to bring safe drinking water to all of Honduras.
Bolivia is another country where a national safe drinking water movement is gaining momentum. Water For People has signed agreements with the Departmental Government of Cochabamba and an association of 12 municipalities whereby it will provide technical assistance to implement an inclusive full water coverage approach, which has been successful in the district of Cuchumuela where we work.
Today, philanthropy is no longer just about smart grant-making; it is now about influencing the behavior of others, bridging spheres of influence, and leveraging combined resources -- both financial and nonfinancial -- to fundamentally alter international development.
Real impact requires us to revolutionize the way that philanthropy works, a challenging prospect for nonprofits, but necessary and achievable.The message and lingering effects of the Occupy movement, in addition to long-repressed progressive contingents in the Democratic Party, should not be underestimated in considering Sanders’s appeal.
Sanders is tapping into this rich vein of “Enough-is-enough!” outrage and long-simmering alienation in ways that no prominent politician has dared in quite some time. The media emphasis on Sanders’s refreshing authenticity minimizes his deeper importance and resonance: He is not simply speaking with integrity, but speaking truth to power. His phenomenal rise, in the face of staunch (and tone-deaf) opposition from the Democratic Party mainstream, shows that a vast portion of the country is ready for far more significant change than establishment politicians—or most media—dare to admit.
As the nomination battle unfolds, whether Sanders wins or not, the key question becomes: How will progressives, change-minded Independents, and social movements transform this tremendous political energy into a movement that can demand and exact change? Because even in victory, a President Sanders will need a sturdy popular wind blowing his political sails and reform agenda toward success. Given the heavily centrist, pro-corporate core of the Democratic Party, Sanders’s rise should not be mistaken for party overhaul just yet; nor should those supporting Sanders’s agenda put too much stock in the Democratic Party as potential salvation. What’s needed, in one form or another, is an ongoing independent movement that is as truth-talking, principled, and politically brave as Sanders himself.
Sanders has seized and amplified a significant moment in American political history. His remarkable campaign, now seriously contending for the nomination against a political establishment firewall that is rapidly eroding, doesn’t threaten the Democratic Party—it threatens the elite party leadership (the Clintons, the DLC, et al.), which has spent decades distancing itself from (and therefore alienating) working people, the poor, immigrants, and many communities of color. In fact, Sanders’s success actually creates an opportunity for the Democratic Party to be of greater service to its traditional base—working people of all races—by addressing fundamental issues of corporate power and accountability, economic inequality and redistribution, and human priorities over for-profit special interests.
Ultimately, this victory is not about Sanders or even progressives—it’s about creating a shift that could have real consequences for real people. Elections, by definition, are not revolutions. But they create choices and momentum. What Sanders’s achievement signifies goes far beyond mass support for an authentic antiestablishment voice. It means that a huge and growing portion of the country (national polls consistently show Sanders beating all Republicans by significant margins) would like to see at least a goodly measure of economic justice, Wall Street accountability, and truth-to-power political courage. It’s more than the Democratic Party has dared to offer for decades.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.WASHINGTON—GOP officials claimed credit Thursday for the Libyan people’s liberation from Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s despotic 42-year rule, saying that without the Nixon administration permitting Qaddafi to take control of Libya in the first place, there never would have been a tyrannical regime to topple. “In 1969, Qaddafi staged a coup, abolished the monarchy, kicked out American forces, and demanded U.S. oil companies share more revenue or else face expulsion—had Nixon and his Republican appointees done anything at all to stop Qaddafi during this time, Libya wouldn’t be celebrating his downfall today, in 2011,” explained Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), calling the Libyan uprising a clear feather in the GOP’s cap. “So once again, the Libyan people have only the Republican Party to thank, because without our brilliant foresight, there would have been no Qaddafi dictatorship, and without a Qaddafi dictatorship, there would never have been a reason for the uprising. Understand? Again, this is our accomplishment, and ours alone.” Before thanking reporters for their time, Graham quickly added that Barack Obama had failed on every level and will always fail on every level.
AdvertisementAGARTALA, June 21: CPI-M in Tripura was accused of not allowing the entry of a few Muslim families to a local mosque in South Tripura under Shantirbazar sub-division after they joined the BJP recently.
The district administration said that they have also been informed about the incident but no formal communication is yet to reach from the deprived family.
“If anybody is found interfering other’s right of religion for whatever issue, the administration will take appropriate steps to secure citizens’ fundamental rights”, said District Magistrate of South Tripura C K Jamatia.
Meanwhile, BJP Minority Morcha President Md Jasimuddin stated that the matter was informed to Superintendent of Police (South) detailing the threats and intimidations by the CPI-M cadres. He said about 200 minority people of 25 families residing in Madhyatilla hamlet of Shantirbazar had deserted CPI-M and joined in BJP last month despite strong prevention from the ruling party cadres.
ALSO READ: MANIPURI MUSLIM WOMEN WARNED ON CONTESTING ELECTIONS!
“The families were initially warned for social isolation and stop government facilities. Later, they were stopped from offering MGNREGS work and other government facilities as soon as they joined BJP. Finally, a week ago CPI-M party mobilised muslim religious leaders to stop those families there,” Jasimuddin alleged.
Initially, the residents opposed the fatwa of the imam that asked them not to entire in the mosque because they joined in BJP, which favoured Hinduism and working against Islam, alleged Babul Hossain, a resident of the locality adding that the imam was forced to issue fatwa against them violating Islam code.
The BJP delegation led by Jasimuddin met the district SP demanding full security of the families and asked to ensure that they can go the local mosque to offer prayer and stated, “We have assured of deploying additional force in the village and to take appropriate action if anyone tries to prevent them from entering into the mosque”.
Though the priest’s fatwa was not his religious stand but at the instance of the CPI-M of which the priest himself is a leader and were openly threatened of social boycott if they don’t return to CPI-M fold, Jasimuddin added.
(Agencies)
Featured image(courtesy): The WeekWarning: Graphic content
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Police are rescinding an officer’s award following the public release of a video that shows him shooting a suspect on the ground.
Officer Daniel Aguirre received the department’s Combat Cross Medal in May. Officials said he was being honored for shooting a robbery suspect who pointed a gun at him during a struggle last year.
But Al.com published police video Tuesday night that shows the suspect, Aubrey Williams, on his hands and knees and dropping to the ground as an officer standing above him shoots twice. The officer then kicks away a gun that was on the ground.
The police department released a statement shortly after the video’s release, saying it was rescinding Aguirre’s medal under further review.
Williams recovered and is charged with attempted murder.Song Name
% Ballots w/ Song
# Votes
Master of Puppets
4,072
One
3,601
For Whom the Bell Tolls
3,432
Fade to Black
3,400
Battery
3,238
Seek and Destroy
3,198
Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
2,914
Enter Sandman
2,868
Blackened
2,763
Sad But True
2,722
The Frayed Ends of Sanity
2,653
Nothing Else Matters
2,637
...And Justice for All
2,631
Ride the Lightning
2,612
Orion
2,584
The Unforgiven
2,487
Whiskey in the Jar
2,373
Creeping Death
2,367
Harvester of Sorrow
2,238
The Four Horsemen
2,037
Fight Fire With Fire
1,975
Wherever I May Roam
1,869
Fuel
1,613
Whiplash
1,574
Until It Sleeps
1,519
Dyers Eve
1,417
Hit the Lights
1,345
The Day That Never Comes
1,309
Disposable Heroes
1,258
The Call of Ktulu
1,235
Damage, Inc.
1,136
The Memory Remains
1,128
St. Anger
1,122
My Friend of Misery
1,122
To Live Is To Die
1,046
Die, Die My Darling
1,044
Eye of the Beholder
1,015
The Thing That Should Not Be
998
The Shortest Straw
946
King Nothing
924
The Unforgiven II
921
Turn the Page
895
Mama Said
818
Leper Messiah
816
All Nightmare Long
811
Motorbreath
785
Jump in the Fire
711
Trapped Under Ice
709
Through the Never
707
So What
614
No Leaf Clover
608
No Remorse
602
Holier Than Thou
556
I Disappear
552
Am I Evil?
548
Of Wolf and Man
544
Hero of the Day
528
The God That Failed
519
Cyanide
517
Metal Militia
509
Frantic
483
Ain't My Bitch
479
Bleeding Me
440
Escape
440
Don't Tread on Me
417
Phantom Lord
385
The Unforgiven III
382
(Anesthesia) - Pulling Teeth
358
Broken, Beat and Scarred
335
Stone Cold Crazy
331
The Outlaw Torn
327
Last Caress/Green Hell
321
The Struggle Within
309
That Was Just Your Life
304
Breadfan
281
Devil's Dance
267
Blitzkrieg
256
Mercyful Fate
255
Some Kind of Monster
255
Astronomy
254
Suicide and Redemption
235
Fixxxer
234
Wasting My Hate
225
Hell and Back
221
Overkill
220
My Apocalypse
212
When a Blind Man Cries
210
The End of the Line
206
Hate Train
191
The Unnamed Feeling
190
Low Man's Lyric
185
The Judas Kiss
179
Ronnie Rising Medley
179
The House Jack Built
177
- Human
161
Carpe Diem Baby
153
Remember Tomorrow
147
Sabbra Cadabra
143
Killing Time
137
Loverman
133
Just a Bullet Away
132
Shoot Me Again
124
Better Than You
118
Rebel of Babylon
112
Sweet Amber
111
Helpless
111
2 x 4
110
Tuesday's Gone
100
Bad Seed
95
Thorn Within
91
The Wait
87
Ronnie
82
Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue
81
Where the Wild Things Are
79
Invisible Kid
78
We're a Happy Family
77
The Prince
76
Prince Charming
76
The Small Hours
74
All Within My Hands
73
Crash Course in Brain Surgery
73
Commando
72
Cure
72
Attitude
72
Stone Dead Forever
71
It's Electric
68
Too Late Too Late
67
53rd and 3rd
65
Damage Case
59
Dirty Window
54
Purify
53
My World
49
Cretin Hop
46
Today Your Love...
44
Poor Twisted Me
41
Slither
40
The More I See
34
Free Speech for the Dumb
34The fragile three-day-old Syrian cease-fire negotiated by the U.S. and Russia appears increasingly troubled with Moscow accusing Washington of failing to rein in rebel militias, and insurgent commanders saying there is little point to the truce while Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, continues to block U.N. aid from reaching the besieged city of Aleppo.
On Thursday, a Russian military spokesman accused the U.S. of covering up the actions of rebels it supports in Syria.
"As of the third day (of the truce), only the Syrian army is observing the regime of silence," he said. "At the same time, the'moderate opposition' led by the U.S. is increasing the amount of attacks on residential districts."
The U.S. State Department also voiced skepticism about Russia’s level of commitment to the cease-fire, and said more time and effort would be needed to coordinate airstrikes and set up a joint command center.
“I don't think that anyone in the U.S. government is necessarily taking at face value Russia's or certainly not the Syrian regime's commitment to this arrangement,'' State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.
Toner, though, also said the only thing that really matters is President Barack Obama’s commitment to the deal.
“Our system of government works in such a way that everyone follows what the president says,” he said.
The immediate source of the dispute is the refusal of rebel factions to withdraw 500 meters from a key route into insurgent-controlled parts of Aleppo, the Castello Road.
But rebel commanders told VOA they won’t do so until Syrian army and foreign Shi’ite militiamen drawn from Iran and other Mideast countries start pulling back too. Rebel anger is mounting about the cease-fire agreement — parts of which have not been published or divulged by Moscow and Washington.
“As far as I can see the agreement was written by the Russians,” says Zakaria Malahefji, the political officer of Fastaqim Kama Umirt, an Aleppo-based Free Syrian Army militia. He told VOA that the only reason FSA groups and other rebel militias have observed the cease-fire is “for aid to get to the people of Aleppo and help civilians who desperately need food and medicines.”
Cease-fire meaningless without access to aid
But without humanitarian assistance happening, there is little purpose, as far as the rebels are concerned, for the cease-fire. “All it is doing is to strengthen Assad,” he says.
The main U.S. motive for pushing for a cease-fire was a humanitarian one and to get aid into Aleppo and to other besieged areas of Syria. Aid agencies as well as the United Nations are ready to supply relief to an estimated six million people inside Syria, including 250,000 trapped in eastern Aleppo.
The cease-fire deal is meant to allow for “unimpeded and sustained humanitarian access” to besieged areas.
Speaking to U.S. public broadcaster National Public Radio Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said about the cease-fire deal: “What's the alternative? The alternative is to allow us to go from 450,000 people who've been slaughtered to how many thousands more? That Aleppo gets completely overrun? That the Russians and Assad simply bomb indiscriminately for days to come, and we sit there and do nothing?”
But as of Thursday, U.N. aid trucks have not been given the go-ahead by the Assad regime to enter northern Syria from Turkey. More than 20 trucks laden with food and medicine have been on the border between Turkey and Syria waiting for clearance from Damascus, which insists all aid must be approved first before crossing into the country.
UN envoy blames Damascus for delay
U.N. Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura, who says hundreds of trucks are ready to be loaded with aid, blamed Damascus for the delay — a hold-up that’s endangering the whole truce. He says the U.N. has not yet received facilitation letters from Damascus that would allow aid deliveries to begin.
He also says the dispute over the Castello Road is complicating the aid issue. De Mistura says the blocking of aid is a clear breach of the cease-fire agreement. But despite the problems, the envoy told reporters that the Russian-American agreement “is and remains a potential game-changer” and has produced a reduction of violence, adding that “by and large it is holding and is, in fact, substantial”.
Under the agreement struck between Washington and Moscow the warring sides are meant to step back from the Castello Road. Two checkpoints are then meant to be established on the road overseen by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and with security provided by Russian soldiers.
Rebels say they are not comfortable with giving up territory they have fought so hard to keep and which has seen considerable loss of rebel lives.
“There is fear because the regime exploits every opportunity,” Malahefji said.
Overall, the cease-fire has broadly held since coming into effect on Monday evening when the major three-day Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha, started. Both rebels and the regime have accused each other of violating the truce.
But monitoring groups have not reported civilian deaths since the cessation of hostilities went into effect — except in territory controlled by the jihadist Islamic State group, which is not covered by the cease-fire deal.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 23 civilians, including nine children, were killed in an airstrike in the IS-held town of Mayadeen. It is unclear whether the strike was carried out by the Russians, the Syrian Air Force or the U.S.-led coalition.
Despite the flare-ups of tensions, de Mistura said that “by and large,” the truce is holding. He did, however warn that authorization from Damascus for aid trucks to enter Aleppo is “something that needs to happen immediately.”Earlier this year Mexico’s energy secretary (SENER) presented new guidelines for the interconnection of small solar systems to the national electricity grid.
The revised regulations are designed to boost rooftop installations by making it easier and more attractive for residential and commercial consumers to invest in solar energy. The new rules apply to solar systems with an installed generation capacity less than 500 kilowatts (kW).
At the end of last year, Mexico reached 220 megawatts (MW) of distributed rooftop solar generation capacity based on figures from SENER. In 2016, it is estimated that 100 MW of distributed solar energy projects were installed. This number is forecast to more than double in 2017 to 240 MW, which would put Mexico at 460 MW of distributed solar energy by the end of 2017. Growth in this market segment is due to a 25% increase in the price of electricity for high consumption domestic users last year and similar rate increases for commercial users. This combined with lower solar panel and component pricing has reduced the average return on investment from five to four years.
The government hopes the new rules will help them reach their goal of 500,000 domestic rooftop solar systems interconnected to the grid, or 5 percent of all homes in Mexico. The government states this would save the country $5.9 billion pesos, or about US $314 million, in subsidized electricity generation costs that are currently provided to assist Mexican families with the high cost of electricty.
The new distributed solar regulations form a part of the Federal government’s broader energy reform agenda and long-term goal to generate 25% of the country’s electricity from clean sources by 2018, 35% by 2024, and 50% by 2050.
The key changes to the interconnection rules are as follows:
Interconnection times cut down to 13 days
The manual simplifies the interconnection process, shortening the application processing time and installation of the two-way ‘smart’ meter.
The new regulations signed into law, allow a maximum of 13 days to interconnect a solar system to the grid.
A maximum of 18 days is permitted for more complicated interconnection applications.
The CFE will no longer review interconnection applications
Previously, the CFE was responsible for the review and approval of interconnection applications and installation of the two-way “smart” meter.
Moving forward, the new independent grid operator, CENACE, will be in charge of the review process and meter installation.
The change was made to remove a potential conflict of interest with the CFE’s new solar subsidiary company and remove uncertainty on how long it will take to interconnect solar systems to the grid.
Larger solar systems allowed
Residential customers are now allowed to interconnect solar systems up to 25 kilowatts of capacity (previously 10 kW was the maximum capacity permitted).
Low voltage commercial customer’s interconnection limit was increased to 50 kW capacity (previously 25 kW).
The simple interconnection process remains in place for solar systems up to a maximum capacity of 500 kW.
It should be noted that solar systems up to 50 kW are regulated under Mexico’s attractive net metering laws, which values excess solar generation at the high retail rates. Whereas, solar systems between 50 and 500 kW are required to enter into a net billing scheme, where excess electricity generation is sold into the wholesale power market at nodal pricing. You can actually download an app on your smartphone to see the day ahead nodal prices in your region of the country.
To see if Mexico stays on track to meet their long-term clean energy targets, keep your eyes on an upcoming announcement by the secretary of energy set for April 28th. The government is expected to announce the start of its third renewable energy auction. The auction process is expected to be completed by mid-October, with winners announced shortly thereafter.
Project developers are eagerly awaiting the announcement as 2016 was a ground-breaking year for the Mexican renewable energy sector. Last year, 4,731 megawatts of lucrative long-term power purchase agreements were awarded (60% solar, 40% wind). These projects are expected to generate approximately US $6.1 billion of investment.
By Jarrett Leinweber for TYT
Jarrett Leinweber, M.Sc., is an entrepreneur, environmental and sustainable energy specialist. He provides consulting services and is a developer of solar energy and electrical infrastructure projects. He can be reached at jleinweber@electrifica.com.mx.
Comments
commentsIf four girls attending a Q & A with Nancy Pelosi this morning are any indication, the House Democratic Leader and her choice of issues to obsess over aren’t exactly home runs with the younger crowd.
Pelosi was participating in a discussion hosted by Politico when the publication brought up the so-called scandal involving Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Dissatisfied with Sessions’ recusal, Pelosi said, “There’s a whole Russian connection of personal, political and financial Russian connection of President Trump and his administration and his campaign.
“So if, in fact, these meetings were innocuous, why did he deny that he had them? The fact is, he’s the highest — he’s the top cop,” Pelosi said of Sessions.
“He’s the highest law enforcement officer in the country. He’s supposed to tell the truth.
“What does that say to the lawyers in the Department of Justice. What does that say to the American Bar Association and their standard of professional conduct? To Alabama? They have standards of professional conduct. He’s a lawyer there,” she continued.
At that moment, CSPAN cut to four girls sitting in the audience.
One girl fixed her hair, adjusted the coat on her lap and let out a sigh while moving around in her seat.
The girl next to her turned to watch.
Another girl stretched a kink in her neck.
But Pelosi kept talking.
“And the very idea that they’re making excuses and splitting hairs and this or that, this is, um, we have not seen the end of this,” Pelosi said.
Neither had those unfortunate girls, as the Q & A wasn’t even half over.“This is what the Western does—it releases you… And more important—it releases the characters. They can be more primitive; they can be more Greek, like Oedipus Rex or Antigone, you see, because you are dealing again in a sweeping legend.”
—Anthony Mann
“The desert settings appear to stretch at least as far as the orbit of the planet Neptune. And the barrel of each gun looks to be roughly as large as the Holland Tunnel. … What I wanted even more than the setting was that feeling of epic size.”
—Stephen King, on viewingThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The beginning of Man of Steel (2013) opens on the alien planet Krypton as Russell Crowe races to be with his pregnant wife. He flies on the back of some kind of creature, I think. (It’s been three years.) Things explode all around him. Some pursuing jet fighter (or something) shoots at him. All hell is breaking loose. The world is literally coming to an end. Really, though, he’s trying to get to his pregnant wife. There is so much stuff happening, but not a whole lot going on. If there’s a reason so many cinephiles still laud Italian director Sergio Leone’s “Spaghetti” Western films, we might start there in explaining it.
Because despite a lack of exploding cities or armies of computer-generated robots or stunning reveals of parentage, without a post-credit teaser tying it to the same “cinematic universe” as the Lone Ranger, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly feels grander and more mythic than contemporary movies about actual mythic characters. It’s redundant at this point to say that it’s the platonic ideal of the Spaghetti Western. It would appear to be entirely composed of silly Western tropes (ridiculously exact marksmanship, the jangly music cues that insinuate themselves into the scene, the hero in a battered poncho) if not for the fact that it fathered them.
I submit that it isn’t a film audiences today would respond well to: The pace is meandering, the plot contains a few holes that require the sort of mental fill-ins that are completely forbidden by today’s scriptwriters, and there are long stretches of seething, brooding silence where not a lot happens (but a great deal is going on). The violence seems quaint.
Yet, like the fatalistic samurai epics and acidic noir that gave birth to it, director Sergio Leone’s closing entry in the unofficial Man With No Name Trilogy remade the badass cinema landscape.
“John Wayne once wrote me a letter telling me he didn’t likeHigh Plains Drifter. He said it wasn’t about the people who really pioneered the West. I realized that there’s two different generations, and he wouldn’t understand what I was doing. High Plains Drifter was meant to be a fable.” —Clint Eastwood
The Western had fallen on hard times when Sergio Leone and other directors like Fred Zinnemann (High Noon), Budd Boetticher (Seven Men From Now), and Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) came along in the ’50s and ’60s to turn it into a drier, crueler genre. The cowboy B-movies of the ’30s and ’40s had become too expensive to make and yielded too little returns in an age when television was rising and cinema attendance falling.
The term “Spaghetti” Western was slapped on Leone’s three landmark films (For a Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars Moreand finally, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) as something of an insult because of how obviously they had been produced in Europe with Italian actors. For his own part, Leone argued that it was perfectly reasonable a foreign filmmaker chose to make his mark on such an American genre.
“Several great directors of Westerns came from Europe: Ford is Irish, Zinnemann Austrian, Wyler is from Alsace; Tourneur, French. I don’t see why an Italian should not be added to the bunch,” Christopher Frayling quotes him as saying in Once Upon A Time In Italy.
Leone, the son of a film director and an actress who spent his childhood in Rome under Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, took some of his inspiration from John Ford’s films, which ranged from bygone classics like 1939’s Stagecoach to John Wayne vehicles like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. which used the actor’s aging eminence solely to add a layer of tarnish to it (much as Clint Eastwood would do in Unforgiven and Gran Torino).
In belatedly eulogizing Ford in 1973, Leone seemed aware both of where he’d diverged from Ford and what he’d kept the same. Saying that his own Westerns were less “innocent and enchanted” than Ford’s, he nevertheless wrote: “I could never have shot Once Upon a Time in the West or even The Good, the Bad and the Ugly if John Ford hadn’t shown me, when I was a boy, the Arizona desert with its baking wooden towns bathed in an intense, astonishing kind of light.”
If the mythic American West that Leone built out of sets in the Spanish desert seemed harder and harsher than the frontier spirit Ford often evoked, it might have been some of Leone’s dealings with Americans as a boy that dispelled the heroic notions those beloved films had instilled into him. As a teen in 1943, he was present as triumphant American G.I.s rolled through Rome, having defeated the fascists who had blacklisted and shunned his family. He was grateful they had liberated him, but found them to be flawed humans.
“I found them very energetic, but very deceptive,” Leone recalled. “They were soldiers like any others … I could see nothing, or almost nothing, of the great prairies and demigods of my childhood.”
GB&Uwas released in 1966 and found its way to America in 1968, where it debuted to the same astounding success as it had around the world and saw United Artists scrambling to re-dub and release the other two films Eastwood and Leone had made together. A year later, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch hammered a nail in the coffin of the idealistic singing cowboy forever, and the American West became a bleak place for violent men.
Blondie: “You see, there are two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig. —Blondie, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
A group of gunmen strides down the dirt street of an abandoned town, waiting for some unseen cue before charging into a building—only to be completely gunned down by Tuco (Eli Wallach), a bandito with a rap-sheet to match the size of his vengeful temper. A hired killer called Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) rides out of the desert like some kind of apparition, coolly sits down at the table of a family man, eats his food, takes his money, and then guns him down. And Tuco enters into a proposition with a (not actually blond…) gunman named Blondie (Clint Eastwood), whose rasping voice and lightning-fast pistol enter the frame before his face ever does.
The film follows each of these protagonists in their quest for $200,000 in buried Confederate gold as they wander from one apocalyptic tableau to the next: A vast and lifeless desert, a Catholic church filled with war casualties, a prison camp |
's side quests (
In all but Torment's case, the IE games' conceit of coupling modern RTS-like gameplay with the tactical, squad-based combat of traditional D&D succeeds completely, despite the concept being so at odds with itself. The games give you the frantic thrills of StarCraft's rushed micromanagement with greater input required per unit and the tactical control of a pause-button.
What might be the most direct predecessor to the Infinity Engine games bears mention here: without the unique ingenuity of 1992's 'Darklands', had Baldur's Gate's gameplay ever assumed the form it did? Maybe – but surely someone, somewhere at Black Isle or BioWare must have fired up Microprose's historical RPG and thought, "hey, this is pretty cool".
By the way, Darklands is a forgotten gem that any IE-fan should definitely go play.
This style of gameplay, dubbed 'RTwP' (Real Time with Pause), was BioWare's attempt to bridge the tactical construct of yesterday's dungeon crawls with the, at the time, insanely popular top-down strategy gameplay of tomorrow, StarCraft having just been released. The mutated compromise they developed as a result is often criticized, but not for entirely respectful reasons. Most criticism boils down to the fact that there is little overlap between the people who enjoy the fast-paced, action-per-minute-driven battles of an RTS and the people who enjoy pondering endlessly over decisions in a turn-based game. For those strange creatures who do appreciate the mix, the Infinity Engine set the standards for everything that would follow. Add in some modern coding with modder DavidW's "Sword Coast Stratagems", which balances a few systems and makes the AI surprisingly sophisticated for an engine released in 2000, and the result is a combat experience iterated upon to near perfection, perhaps more so than any other game in computer RPG history.
What will probably be your first dragon fight in Shadows of Amn awaits you at the end of a major side quest with its own a score of subquests and a lengthy dungeon crawl.
Somehow, even the terribly outdated character system – "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd edition" – with its poor balance and horrid lack of character customization options, has been gracefully woven into these games. The designers correctly chose to focus their efforts on AD&D's spell system, which might be the one part of the game worth preserving. Much of the actual enjoyment of an IE-game is pausing to set up a particularly devastating spell, then unpausing and controlling the positioning of your characters, adapting to the new state of the battlefield.
Systems & Sorcery
The character system is worth dwelling on as we start to delve into the IE games' spiritual descendant, Pillars of Eternity. (And no, we are not counting Dragon Age here, because despite an honest attempt from the first game, Dragon Age 2 and 3 made it quite clear that BioWare had no actual ambition of refining the formula, but rather meant to capitalize on nostalgia for the IE games).
Pillars of Eternity is nothing if not the story of how to rethink an iconic character system. In so many facets of its development, Pillars stays true to the IE formula: the combat controls are so similar only hardcore fans who have played the IE games multiple times can tell the difference. Graphically, the game interposes avatar sprites of characters on gorgeous 2D images. You have six party members who bark at each other and at you, and you have a completely open world map with smaller "point of interest" locations to visit, sometimes gated by story progression. Exploration is handled by "painting" a black background consisting of fog of war with your characters' line of sight as you move through the area. When you click on an non-party character, it brings up a dialogue screen with multiple, fully written-out lines of responses for you to choose between.
The character system on the other hand has undergone an overhaul so massive that any resemblance to the original remains almost symbolic. Yes, both systems are class-based, yes both systems have you level-up to gain new abilities and yes, there is even a remnant of the "Vancian" spell system in there, since spells are limited to daily castings – though even here, the system lacks the trademark D&D spell memorization.
To understand how and why Pillars of Eternity takes such an extensive departure from the genre's D&D origins, we must take a moment to discuss the character system of the IE games, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd edition, in more detail.
One thing that has definitely declined over the years is cover art.
It is impossible to make a concise statement on the vision behind Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, because their simply was none. In the rulebook's foreword, creator Gary Gygax speaks of a creating a consistent framework for games, of adding uniformity to campaigns and of shedding the arbitrary distinctions so often present in rules systems at the time. He even speaks of the need for BALANCE™, which is ironic since it has made the Lead Designer of Pillars of Eternity, Josh Sawyer, so reviled by the same grognards who revere Gygax and who claim system design was perfected with AD&D.
Yet in the substance, Gygax' intro reads like a politician's glorious statement of intent before he inevitably breaks every campaign promise.
To start with, AD&D's biggest sin is that it is arbitrary in the most literal sense of the word: "based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system." The irony that Gygax himself mentions arbitrariness as a hazard to avoid in system design is completely baffling considering the fact that arbitrariness might well be considered the defining trait of AD&D.
Why do all attributes go from 3 to 25 specifically? Why does Strength have a special 01-100 sub-attribute only if you are a specific class and only if you have a score of exactly 18? What is the reasoning behind the reversal of the to-hit roll, asking you to go backwards on the number line instead of forward? Why do Clerics only have access to seven spell levels while Wizards have access to nine? Why do you roll for hit points until level 10 at which point you gain minor, static increases? Why does a Ranger need 150,000 experience points to progress from level 8 to 9, while a Wizard needs 45,000? Why must an Illusionist have a minimum Dexterity of 16? Why do Clerics gain bonus spells for high Wisdom, while a Wizard gains no similar bonus for high Intelligence? Why is it easier to save against the same spell cast from a rod or wand rather than if a mage cast it? Why is the difficulty of resisting a spell based solely on the target's level and not on the caster's? Why are certain combinations of multi-classing restricted from certain races? Why does dual-classing work on an entirely separate system, and how do you forget everything you learned about shooting a bow and arrow because you decide after 10 years of rangering to pick up clericing? Why is there a specific attribute for "bending bars" and why is it handled by a percentile roll when "Open Doors" is not? Why do thieving-abilities work on a completely different, percentile-based system compared to other skills and class features?
Why, why, why, why, why?
"No no, I assure you, everything in this table was implemented with the utmost care to abstract reality and make for good gameplay." Riiiiiight.
The answer to all of these questions – the answer to almost any question regarding the system design of AD&D – is: "because the designer felt that is how it should be."
Or in more modern terms: for shits and giggles.
In addition, AD&D is actually a fairly simplistic system despite the "advanced" moniker. Most level-ups will result in a hit-point gain, perhaps a THAC0 increase (or decrease, depending on how you want to look at it) and little else, unless of course you happen to be casting spells, in which case you might be granted a couple of spell slots. How many times do you level up in the IE games, only to simply click "OK" and move on? Paradoxically, AD&D at once embodies this superficial simplicity yet is designed to be more convoluted than is actually necessary for the thin substance it represents.
I really only included this picture to hammer home the point that modern fantasy art ain't got shit on the 80's and 90's.
Most of the very best tactical cRPGs of the past are great despite the shackles of AD&D, not because of them. Of the AD&D games, the one praised the most for its character system is Wizardry 8, which offers a staggering range of classes, races and customization options, all of which are viable in the game. Yet this praise is also damning to AD&D, because Wizardry 8's system is so heavily modified you can barely recognize Dungeons & Dragons beneath it all.
Gary Gygax is worthy of respect for putting more narrative, context and adventure into what was once merely wargames. If not for him, we would have never experienced the wonder of roleplaying games backed by interesting and unique gameplay systems. The fact is, though, that AD&D is massively inferior to nearly every rules system that has followed it.
Which brings us to Pillars of Eternity.
This Ain't Tabletop No More
It was no surprise when Lead Designer Josh Sawyer
Rather, Sawyer's personal distaste of the system played a significant role.
The switch from D&D is the single-most impacting change that Pillars of Eternity makes to Ye Olde Infinity Engine, and as the original Kickstarter rolled out, it was an oft-cited reason to be skeptical of the game. I was among the skeptics since for all my dislike of AD&D I love the version of Dungeons & Dragons that followed it. This system, called "3.5" for short, is, despite its non-existing game balance, an incredibly fun sandbox in which to customize RPG characters and toy around with different builds. If you crave balance to the degree that Josh Sawyer does, D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder are kryptonite, but if you love having an infinite array of character customization options at your disposal, they just about represent the pinnacle of RPG design.
Josh Sawyer wanted something else. He wanted to finally bring RPGs fully into the digital realm. He insisted that tabletop and computer RPGs were so different that rules systems needed to be designed with the specific medium in mind. And he wanted what has made him infamous amongst the basement-dwelling, character sheet-loving "grognards" of the tabletop world: game balance.
Knowing that Sawyer was going to design a new system from the ground up was my main concern about Pillars. The open license version of D&D 3.5,
Clearly a man who understood the Infinity Engine, had extensive tabletop experience and a precise idea of how to evolve RPG design. The terrible dad jokes came with the territory.
Would Sawyer deliver a game with the core of the IE games intact but with their sole, lackluster component fixed?
In that case, count me in.
Le Petit Éternité
When I first finished Pillars of Eternity, it was with an odd sensation of disappointed near-fulfillment. Like I just eaten a fine meal seasoned with ash. Everything from the gameplay to the story showed infinite promise, but nothing quite delivered on the theoretical potential.
Very early in the development process, Lead Designer Josh Sawyer vocalized his dislike of total fail states in system design. Central to this dislike was a distaste for 'hard counters', like a fire elemental being completely immune to fire damage. For this reason, Sawyer also initially designed Pillars of Eternity's system with no misses, substituting them with "grazes" that dealt less damage. He also based his armor-system on gradual damage reduction rather than outright evasion. Furthermore, Sawyer announced his goal was to make every skill, talent and attribute of his system useful. Not necessarily equally good – but the intention was to make sure that there were no "traps" – abilities which were downright awful.
In theory, I lauded these goals, which were predictably criticized by grognards everywhere for being implicitly poor design. The grognardian criticism was based on the idea that there must be bad abilities and pitfalls in order for players to feel rewarded for building a good character. I certainly do not mind systems that do this – I am an avid Pathfinder player in my spare time, after all – but I also fail to see why it should be a general rule. With Pillars of Eternity, Sawyer was attempting to give the player a framework of classes and abilities that they could toy around with to their heart's content, safe in the knowledge that all combinations of assets in the system would at least provide some measure of functionality.
Cries of "OMG WHY IS STRENGTH IMPORTANT FOR A WIZARD" quickly rose as Sawyer laid out his plans to balance the classic attributes of an RPG. The criticism was that the system had been gamified to the point where it no longer abstracted reality, while Sawyer maintained that mechanics existed to play well and be balanced. Thus, every attribute should have something to offer every class.
On the surface, Sawyer reached his goals. Pillars of Eternity had plenty of customization options even on release. A multitude of talents, backgrounds and races with unique and spiffy racial traits made every character feel fairly unique. Due to the vast range of classes to choose between it certainly felt like you were diving into the best character customization since Neverwinter Nights 2 (which, incidentally, was also developed with Josh Sawyer as Lead Designer and, for all its faults, has the most expansive character customization of any computer RPG).
More than anything else, Sawyer drew inspiration from the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which many consider to be a failed experiment, but which Sawyer lauded for its game balance and uniformity. 4th edition compromised on the fundamental difference in feel between classes to provide "something to do" during combat for all classes, to do away with the "boring auto-attacks vs. exciting spellcasting"-feel that characterized fighting and spellcasting classes respectively in earlier editions of D&D.
Yeah so there's no dynamism or marvellous fantasy concept in this picture to pique your narrative interest and it looks like a cartoon, BUT ISN't IT COOL HOW THE SWORD IS LIKE A GIANT RAZOR-SAWBLADE THING AND YOU CAN TOTALLY PLAY A DRAGON. Sic transit gloria mundi.
In many ways, Pillars of Eternity succeeded completely in shedding itself of the problems of older fantasy character systems while maintaining distance from some of the aspects of 4th edition that received the harshest criticism. Your fighter, though a simpler unit to control than your mage, did not just stand there and "auto-attack", but he wasn't just a melee spellcaster either - rather, he had a range of passive abilities which heavily influenced the outcome of fights. Paladins had less of these implicit battlefield-controlling options but had an array of spell-like buffs at their disposal.
The careful balancing and uniformity of Pillars' system came at a steep price, however: the changes you made to a character on creation and level up felt completely minuscule at the game's launch. A huge part of this was thanks to the universality of the abilities in the system and the fairly minor impact of each system asset.
Since the Mass Charm that worked so well for you in the last 20 encounters would work equally as well in the next 20, switching tactics was, for the vast majority of encounters, reduced to a matter of style. In dire cases, even gaining access to high levels of spells would yield no excitement, as the level 2 immobilizing spell you had grown so fond of would suit you just as well at level 10. Often, your character did not grow into new possibilities, unlocking doors that were formerly closed to her, but rather got additional, redundant choices.
The actual spiritual successor to the IE games? It sure looked the part alright.
This was probably the biggest weakness Pillars of Eternity dealt with at launch. And it was, despite my reluctance to award the AD&D grognards with a win here, precisely because the game did not have the necessary encounter variety to make up for the lack of hard counters. While I personally do not share the narrow-minded pessimism that hard counters are a necessity for tactical variety in combat, the simple fact is that Pillars of Eternity provided no alternative to make up for their absence. As such, the lack of immunities and complete fail states led to the problem that once you found any sort of working strategy, finishing the game was entirely trivial.
Even so, Pillars of Eternity's combat showed great promise. The Path of the Damned difficulty setting was like an expanded Sword Coast Stratagems mod, with meticulously placed monsters, additional enemies and increased battlefield complexity. Specifically, difficulty settings in Pillars of Eternity have different monsters appearing in the same encounters, but Path of the Damned rolls them all into the same encounter, increasing difficulty substantially. In addition, monsters are given a bump to all stats, as well as an Accuracy and Defense bonus on top. Even if the lack of competent AI and functional monster defenses really hurt the execution of Path of the Damned at launch, the principle of the design and the actual variety between difficulty levels, as opposed to simple hit point bumps, was something seen all too rarely in RPGs and games in general.
Sawyer also turned the extremely fast (even faster with the 'Haste' spell) and frantic combat of the IE games into a slower, more methodical beast by severely limiting the movement speed of characters and with the inclusion of the Engagement system that punished player and enemy alike for moving indiscriminately across the battlefield. This choice was controversial among dedicated fans of the original Infinity Engine games, as it further removed Pillars from its Real Time Strategy roots and made trash fights, which were no issue in the IE games, a slog to wade through. On the flip side, the deceleration also made movement and positioning a much more engaging and challenging part of the game.
The theory of a fantastic game was there, the basic structure of something greater than we currently had. If the problem was that lack of monster defenses and AI made otherwise great content trivial, maybe there was light at the end of the tunnel?
Halfway Between Inspired Originality and Tired Cliché is Nowhere at All
The game's setting, I suspect, was doomed to cause trouble. The player-base demanded a classic fantasy world, Obsidian wanted to deliver something that, like Torment, was intellectually challenging and Sawyer, being a history buff, wanted to ground it all historical realism.
Like a dish cooked with too many exotic spices causing the final product to be a tasteless mish-mash, the result was that Pillars felt surprisingly bland despite the multitude of interesting things going on. Pillars' themes of colonialism and religion seemed compelling and spoke of more mature ambitions than the average RPG, but it quickly became apparant that the execution left a lot to be desired.
Obsidian has handled the limitation of having to deliver an engrossing story within an established world well enough before: by using their writing to deconstruct the setting as in 'Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords' or, as in Neverwinter Nights 2's expansion 'Mask of the Betrayer', by simply choosing an incredibly exotic part of the stock fantasy setting to excuse their trademark, eccentric writing. Unfortunately, Pillars' noble aspirations to include serious and stimulating writing clashed hard against the shackles of classic fantasy tropes. The core of Pillars of Eternity – the idea that souls are a tangible, world-defining fact – feels tacky and contrived for most of the game, and it is difficult to accept hard historicism delivered through the teeth of humanoid fire elementals and other loony fantasy characters that do not cause regular townsfolk to bat an eyelid.
The main problem with the setting is that Pillars of Eternity is so concerned with delivering its heavy lore that most characters do not act like characters but rather deliver their lines much like walking Wikipedia articles. After playing Pillars of Eternity for a while, you start to dread clicking the 'Talk' icon hovering over random NPCs, because all too often, initiating dialogue is functionally identical to clicking hyperlinks on everyone's favorite, digital encyclopedia.
"Dump your descriptive text on me, please, mr. Random NPC." Real people do not talk like this. (Image blatantly stolen from RPG Codex user CptMace without permission.)
The odd part is that the lore of Pillars is deliberate genuinely different than that of most fantasy worlds and at times even fascinating. What makes it all fall apart is not the substance, but the delivery. Immersion in deep lore comes through context and meaning, not by a look-up in the in game character-equivalent of a campaign-setting book.
Our fault for asking Pallegina about her work. Apparantly it can't be explained without the use of some mystical language that seems to be a mix between English, Italian and gibberish. ( Once again, the image was stolen from user CptMace in an act of intellectual theft most vile.)
A good contrast to the majority of the core game's writing is Durance. This gruff, sullen priest companion is an aggressive spin on Planescape: Torment's more reclined, crisis-of-faith character 'Dak’kon'. Durance exemplifies how to handle lore dumps in an engaging way. He is a passionate, engaged bullshitter whose story tells us everything about the Dyrwood without resorting to massive blocks of text with nothing but exposition. Instead of telling us literal facts about the setting like "Dyrwood is very independent and because of all the hardships its inhabitants are very driven and nationalist folk", we implicitly learn the lore of the region through Durance's teachings and the tall tales he tells. The stories Durance tells are themselves engaing; the lore we pick up on the way is merely incidental.
While we may be inclined to be lenient towards Pillars' task here – explaining such a vast body of lore through short bursts of text – consider how Planescape: Torment had a much more confusing, lore-heavy world, yet most of what we know of Sigil, we are told through its characters acting, behaving and being themselves. Our knowledge of the Mercykillers is not derived from Vhailor's 6-page rant about the structure of the order, but through debating its principles with him. We know of the Sensates not because we read the Codex entry in our journal, but because we go to the Sensorium and delve into the sensory stones. We come to understand the ideology of these factions because we experience their fundamentals for ourselves rather than having it explained to us through meager description. To prove this is not simply the famous rose-tinted glasses talking, there are actually exceptions. The Harmonium, a faction you may not even remember despite playing Torment, make up a rare example of Torment faltering, leaning on dry description to explain their place in sigil.
But mostly, Torment is more elegant than this. We know that Dak'kon doubts himself not because he tells us "Oh by the way, protagonist, I currently have a crisis of faith" but because we slowly come to that realization ourselves by talking to him and experiencing the increasing fragility with which he describes the teachings of Zerthimon, until he finally reveals to us that we have surpassed his own understanding.
Even Edér, who so frequently receives praise for being well-written in comparison to other companions in Pillars of Eternity, often downrights tells us about his core emotions outright, rather than just letting that show through his stories about his brother.
Hold up Dak'kon, I don't get it. Are you saying you have a crisis of faith? Why not just tell us "I have a crisis of faith," then?
Paint With All the Colors of the Ashtray
Pillars of Eternity also champions the new wave of RPG dialogue writing that uses desaturated, descriptive text in between a character's sentences to describe the scene, the mood or the appearance of the character. You know the kind:
"So-and-so", the massive man said with a stern countenance, his breath smelling like the crotch of a Glanfathan crone. "But also this-and-this", he added with a playful gleam in his eye, making you dread his erotic intentions.
Paradoxically, the fact that the developers have chosen to desaturate the colors of this descriptive text show that somewhere, deep down, they realise its extraneousness. As much as it must pain writers who had their initial inspiration and experience from the world of books, we are reading dialogue in a video game here, not a novel. What the characters say is meant to convey the emotion and poignancy of the scene. Simply describing facial expressions and emotional states is akin to a movie using voice-over to explain the innermost thoughts of its characters. Even when David Lynch does it, it rarely, if ever, works.
There is a place for this kind of stage-setting, but only if it used for a specific purpose - to characterize an important trait of a character or draw the player's attention to a specific circumstance. All too often, however, Pillars of Eternity and other, modern RPGs use the gimmick merely for fluff, filling the dialogue with a needless abundance of wordiness that players quickly learn to gloss over. In the end, the desaturation of the descriptive text becomes a convenient measure for players to quickly skip over reading it and, more often than not, nothing is lost as a result.
Planescape: Torment had a lot of descriptive text because everyone you met was a weird demon/angel hybrid with hollow space-eyes that held the cosmic horrors of the endless planes. It also did not color the text differently, because when it was used, it was just as important as the dialogue. Do I really need an essay to describe how a Dyrwoodan hobo chews his food before he spouts what might be a relevant line of dialogue?
One novel concession that does work in Pillars of Eternity, however, are the text adventures. Instead of overtaking the dialogue screen with superfluous text, these small, contextual puzzles constitute an entire mechanic of their own, allowing the developers to take your character through events that cannot be handled by the game's core engine. The text adventures allow you to rescue people from burning buildings, test your character's attributes and skills in innovative ways and close off or open up hidden paths through areas. A few seem unnecessary and have too few implications in the game or only exist to describe things you can plainly see from looking at an area, but many represent well-timed shifts in game pace. They slot naturally into the game and give Pillars of Eternity a tabletop feel that the Infinity Engine games rarely produce.
It is a mechanic so naturally fitted to roleplaying games that I would not mind if it became a staple in the genre, included in nearly every game.
The White March expansion improved on the text adventures in most ways. Above, a text event with multiple skill checks, attribute checks, different results if you send in specific companions as well as more than a few success and fail states. Below, a text event that can grant you one of the special Soulbound weapons from the expansion - weapons with special upgrade requirements and related quests.
All in all, I have no wish to be too rough on the setting and style, here. Most of it is crafted so methodically and with such an eye for detail it sets itself squarely apart from much of the fantasy slog video games present us with. How many other fantasy roleplaying games manage to discuss so pertinent themes as colonization of wild habitats, structural determinism and the essence of governance without becoming preachy or pretentious?
The graphical representation of it all is also sublime, and everything from the gorgeous backdrops to the details in the dialogue box is beautifully painted.
It is simply that while Pillars of Eternity's setting has more serious aspirations than most RPGs, it fails to live up to them.
(For further reading on how many of Pillars' problems with over-exposition and infatuation with "deep lore" are genre-wide, I recommend (For further reading on how many of Pillars' problems with over-exposition and infatuation with "deep lore" are genre-wide, I recommend RPG Codex user Darth Roxor's excellent editorial on the subject.
All Is Not Well That Ends Well
Pillars of Eternity's story bases itself entirely on a twist-and-reveal gimmick. The twist in itself is executed fairly well, and the last one or two hours of the game, after entering Sun in Shadow, is where the story starts to take shape and become enjoyable. In that final part, the game provides both the player and the villain with much-needed motivation and contextualizes the setting in an interesting way.
Until that point, however, everything is nonsensical and veiled, to the point where you, as a player, lose interest.
One of the main causes is the complete lack of reason we are given to care about the main villain, Thaos. In fact, up until the very end, we literally know nothing about him. To compare him to the villains of Baldur's Gate, Thaos' ambition is initially clouded like Sarevok's, but as a character Sarevok is so simple and menacing, even a child can guess that his motives are cataclysmic. Baldur's Gate chose a simpler route than Pillars of Eternity and, as a result, does not have to dwell much on its antagonist. Irenicus is more complex than Sarevok and because of this, the game dedicates significantly more screen time to him. His story unfolds step by step, giving us clues to his exile, his lost love and his aspirations to godhood to keep us interested. The very starting area of Baldur's Gate II and the following cutscene is entirely devoted to setting up Irenicus' character because he is so important to the plot.
Thaos is not only even more complex, but also more than just the main villain. He is the central figure around which every single element of the main story - including you, the protagonist - revolves. Yet even the most minute details of his murky reasoning and hidden alliances are completely obfuscated until the very end of the game. In exchange for a good reason to track him down, the writers fall back on the player's impending, but vaguely defined, doom, which just about ranks number one as far as forced motivation goes.
As Thaos is at the core of everything the game is attempting to "be about", this essentially means that the entire story of the game takes place during its final hours. Until then, we are just chasing a ghost because of an undefined connection to an event we did not understand that had an effect on us that is never explained, though we are told we have to chase Thaos, lest we expire.
So how do you make a story spanning over 80 hours work when you cannot give any details whatsoever until the last hour? The writers of Pillars of Eternity clearly could not answer that question. They tried desperately, even throwing Thaos' old love interest at us who, unsurprisingly, has nothing to say about the man, because remember: due to the game's twist, we cannot learn anything of substance about him until the end.
This more or less constitutes your entire knowledge about the plot until the end of the game.
Pillars of Eternity is at its very weakest when it asks you to click through dialogue scenes of your character's past life as a member of Thaos' organization, The Leaden Key. Because the story must be devoid of actual meaning or detail to conceal the plot twist, these flashbacks are given to us using placeholder expressions like "The Inquisition" or "The Woman" - descriptors that describe nothing because we are not informed about their meaning until the end. The flashbacks exist to fool us into thinking the first 75 hours of the game has a main plot, when the reality is that most of it is told in the last five.
Where the main plot fails, however, Pillars of Eternity tells many smaller stories that work better. The childless Gilded Vale is a haunting place, expertly constructed and connected to every theme present in the rest of the game. Where the importance of souls seems overstated or under-explained in the game's main story, the Hollowborn are a brilliantly horrifying invention. Gilded Vale has been driven mad by the slow deterioration caused by the curse. Citizens react with mistrust, the artists have drawn a township and its surroundings in unrestrained decay, and the lord of the land has turned corrupt from personal grief and the burden of government. It is the story of King Théoden from Lord of the Rings, but instead of a literal Wormtongue whispering lies in his ear, it is circumstance that has driven Lord Raedric to madness and despair.
Everything from the way Raedric slumps in his chair to the lighting in the keep supports the themes at play in this story.
When Pillars of Eternity zooms out and attempts to juggle all of its themes in a large, overarching story, or when it tries to cram the detailed setting into characters spewing descriptive dialogue, it fails. But in a few places, when it zooms in, the obvious capabilities of Fenstermaker, Patel and Veras shine, as does Sawyer's interest in how mundane, historical troubles like childlessness can be given a creative fantasy spin and suddenly spark our imagination.
Would You Like Some Consequence With Your Choice
Gilded Vale also works as a vehicle for one of the main subplots: how the constant progress in the field of animancy is causing controversy through the Dyrwood. During your playthrough, many quests, faction interactions and companion banters point towards this Gordian knot of political strife: how will the administration of Defiance Bay handle the scientific developments in the field of soul manipulation?
Despite the writing's flaws, this plot is set up well enough and handled with a maturity that completely shames the majority of modern computer roleplaying games. Yet here, too, Pillars of Eternity undercuts its own designs. All threads in the animancy plot converge at a massive trial-like event, harking back to one of the most (cruel voices would say the only) lauded parts of Obisidian's earlier roleplaying effort, Neverwinter Nights 2. In Pillars, your character gets to be a deciding factor in how Defiance Bay – the capital of the game's region – reacts to the growing influence of animancy. As you argue your points, nobles, faction leaders and other characters present at the event comment on your progress and the way you have handled yourself during the game. Some use it to your advantage, highlighting certain actions you took as praiseworthy, while others condemn you for them. It is a majestic piece of reactivity that puts you on the edge of your seat as the game suddenly brings up choices you made on a whim and imbue them with new meaning. Will the citizens of Defiance Bay react favorably to animancy and view it as the key to ending the Hollowborn curse, or will they detest it for being its cause? In contrast to the player's status as 'THE WATCHER', which is entirely unearned by you as a player and forced on you by the writers, your role during the animancy hearings feels like the result of your own actions.
The main character gets a chance to argue her case based on past decisions at the final animancy hearings. Too bad none of it matters in the slightest.
And then, at the apex of the scene's tension, it all falls apart.
As Defiance Bay is about to make its choice, Thaos assumes control over an animancer present at the meeting and assassinates what is essentially the mayor of the city, causing everyone to side against animancy. The entirety of what you just witnessed – your every choice being weighed, you arguing your case, defending your past choices and listening to the NPCs commenting on them – is entirely nullified by the writing's heavy-handed intrusion.
Pillars of Eternity makes a big deal about giving you agency, and then explicitly annuls its own ambition because the main plots necessitates it.
Fortunately, Pillars of Eternity's reactivity is much more subtle and less defeated by its own plot in most other areas of the game. Once again, Raedric's Hold in Gilded Vale is a high point, with a staggering number of ways to reach the end of the quest, multiple solutions once you reach that end and a few long-term consequences, like the lord of the castle returning as a vampire. During my first playthrough, I completely missed an entire area of the castle with its own sub-quests as well several alternate ways to complete the main path.
Winter Came
Had I written this review before August 25, 2015, perhaps it would have ended here - with mixed feelings punctuated by the aforementioned metaphor of a finely cooked meal seasoned with toxic ash.
However, on this date, Pillars of Eternity changed from a promising, but unfulfilling, game, into a masterpiece.
'The White March', Pillars of Eternity's expansion, is a testimony to what iteration and continued passion for a project can do for quality. Its narrative removes the tiresome focus from the player's role as the writer-imparted chosen one, except when it uses that gimmick for the explicit purpose of clarifying details about the story and resolving the conundrums of its main plot step by step. The story is simpler this time, less ambitious and more connected to Pillars' roleplaying roots. In many ways, Stalwart and its surroundings take the lessons learned from Gilded Vale and blows them up to fit an entire expansion. We meet believable characters with clear motives here and more importantly: we keep pushing to reveal the secrets of the ominous Durgan's Battery, secrets that are exposed to us in satisfying bits, each bit both feeding us information and deepening the wider mystery. Rather than every step bringing us another nonsensical flashback, we instead meet characters with something on the line; people, monsters and artifacts that each give us a piece to the puzzle.
With regards to atmosphere and art, Sawyer uses The White March as an excuse to return to his dearly beloved Icewind Dale and borrows in no small part from places like Dorn's Deep. The White March takes what made those areas work and grounds them in a historicism that works much better this time, because this time, most of it is delivered as the incidental byproduct of what characters actually experience and not through tiresome exposition.
The areas of The White March and Durgan's Battery absolutely reach the same heights of quality that Icewind Dale climbed to some 15 years earlier.
Just when we think we have finally uncovered the riddles of the Dwarven bastion, the game throws an even greater enigma at us: the giant Eyeless, a seemingly cataclysmic force of invaders with unknown |
the article for important intellectual content: V.J. Howard, B. Hutto, N. Colabianchi, J.E. Vena, M.M. Safford, S.N. Blair, S.P. Hooker.
Final approval of the article: K.M. Diaz, V.J. Howard, B. Hutto, N. Colabianchi, J.E. Vena, M.M. Safford, S.N. Blair, S.P. Hooker.
Provision of study materials or patients: M.M. Safford, S.P. Hooker.
Statistical expertise: B. Hutto.
Obtaining of funding: V.J. Howard, M.M. Safford, S.N. Blair, S.P. Hooker.
Administrative, technical, or logistic support: V.J. Howard, M.M. Safford.
Collection and assembly of data: V.J. Howard, B. Hutto, M.M. Safford, S.P. Hooker.Ronnie Rocket Directed by David Lynch Written by David Lynch Starring Dexter Fletcher
Michael J. Anderson
(both attached at different times)
Ronnie Rocket is an unfinished film project written by David Lynch, who also intended to direct it. Begun after the success of Lynch's 1977 film Eraserhead, Ronnie Rocket was shelved after Lynch felt he would be unable to find financial backing for the project. He instead sought out an existing script on which to base his next film, settling on what would become 1980's The Elephant Man.
Ronnie Rocket was to feature many of the elements which have since come to be seen as Lynch's hallmarks; including industrial art direction, 1950s popular culture and physical deformity. The script featured a three-foot tall man with control over electricity; Lynch first met Michael J. Anderson when tentatively casting for this role, and later cast him in Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive as a result.
Overview [ edit ]
Ronnie Rocket concerned the story of a detective seeking to enter a mysterious second dimension, aided by his ability to stand on one leg. He is being obstructed on this quest by a strange landscape of odd rooms and a threatening train; while being stalked by the "Donut Men", who wield electricity as a weapon. In addition to the detective's story, the film was to show the tale of Ronald d'Arte, a teenage dwarf, who suffers a surgical mishap which leaves him dependent on being plugged into an electrical supply at regular intervals; this dependence grants him an affinity over electricity which he can use to produce music or cause destruction. The boy names himself Ronnie Rocket and becomes a rock star, befriending a tap-dancer named Electra-Cute.
The film was to make use of several themes that have since become recurring elements within David Lynch's works, with a write-up for The A.V. Club describing its contents as "idealized 1950s culture, industrial design, midgets, [and] physical deformity".[2] In addition, the film features two separate but connected worlds, another hallmark of Lynch's writings. The film's art direction would have featured a heavily industrial backdrop, setting the action against an "oil slick, smokestack, steel-steam-soot, fire-sparks and electrical arcs realm", similar to the direction ultimately taken in the depiction of Victorian England in The Elephant Man and the planet Giedi Prime in Dune. Although Lynch's first two feature-length films were shot in black-and-white, he had hoped to film Ronnie Rocket in color, inspired by the works of French film-maker Jacques Tati. Lynch planned to experiment for some time in order to find the right balance and application of color for the film.
Background [ edit ]
After releasing 1977's Eraserhead, a black-and-white surrealist film and his début feature-length production,[6] Lynch began work on the screenplay for Ronnie Rocket. Lynch and his agent Marty Michaelson, of William Morris Endeavor, initially attempted to find financial backing for the project. They met with one film studio on the matter, with Lynch describing the film to them as being "about electricity and a three-foot guy with red hair"; the studio never got in touch again.
Lynch also met Stuart Cornfeld during this time. Cornfeld had enjoyed Eraserhead and was interested in producing Ronnie Rocket; Cornfeld was working for Mel Brooks and Brooksfilms at the time, and when the two realized that Ronnie Rocket was unlikely to find sufficient financing to be produced, Lynch asked to see some already-written scripts to work from for his next film instead. Cornfeld found four scripts he felt Lynch would be interested in, but on hearing the name of the first, the director decided his next project would be The Elephant Man.
Lynch would return to Ronnie Rocket after each of his films, intending it at different stages as the follow-up not only to Eraserhead or The Elephant Man, but also Dune, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. After producing The Elephant Man, Lynch had planned to cast Dexter Fletcher in the title role.
In 1987, after having released Blue Velvet, Lynch once again attempted to pursue Ronnie Rocket. While scouting actors for the eponymous role, Lynch met Michael J. Anderson, whose work in short films the director had previously seen. As a direct result of meeting Anderson during this time, Lynch would cast the actor in a recurring role in the television series Twin Peaks, with his first appearance coming in 1990's "Episode 2". Anderson would also appear in Lynch's 1990 short film Industrial Symphony No. 1, and the 2001 film Mulholland Drive. Lynch also visited northern England to scout a possible filming location; however, he found that the industrial cities he had hoped to use had become too modernized to fit his intended vision.
The project has also suffered setbacks due to the bankruptcy of several potential backers; both Dino De Laurentiis's De Laurentiis Entertainment Group and Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope were attached to the project at different times; both production companies went bankrupt before work could begin. Lynch had stayed with Coppola in the latter's home in Napa County, California, while Coppola and musician Sting read the script several times; however the failure of 1982's One from the Heart forced Zoetrope to file for bankruptcy.
Legacy [ edit ]
Having been temporarily unable to begin production on the film for some time, due to De Laurentiis owning the rights, Lynch stopped actively pursuing Ronnie Rocket as a viability in the early 1990s. However, he has never officially abandoned the project; frequently referring to it in interviews as "hibernating".[2] The director has expressed interest in filming the project in the same manner as Eraserhead, using a small crew, building the sets himself and living on them during the length of the production. He has also claimed that he will revisit the film when he is at the stage in his career "when I don't really care what happens, except that the film is finished".
Speaking of the film's difficulty in attracting financing, Fletcher has said "I should imagine that the big money heads at whatever studio it was couldn't get their brains round it at all. It's fine for the artist to read and enjoy, but for accountants it was probably a very different proposition. But that's David Lynch all over in a lot of ways". The Guardian's Danny Leigh has compared the script's reputation among film fans to those of Sergei Eisenstein's unproduced adaptation of An American Tragedy and Michael Powell's unmade adaptation of The Tempest. Leigh recalled having read a photocopied version of the script in the early 1990s, and felt that it "might have aged far better than Wild at Heart".[19] Film-maker Jonathan Caouette has expressed interest in reviving the project, though he believes Lynch will "do it someday".[20]The state of Missouri is threatening to resurrect the use of the gas chamber for executions, as an alternative to its dwindling supply of lethal-injection drugs.
The state's attorney general, Chris Koster, has warned that unless Missouri is allowed by the state supreme court to press ahead quickly with pending executions under its current lethal-injection protocol, its drug supplies will expire. In that case, the state might have to turn to the only other option open to it – the gas chamber.
"Unless the [supreme] court changes its current course, the legislature will soon be compelled to fund statutorily-authorised alternative methods of execution to carry out lawful judgments," Koster said. Under Missouri law only two forms of execution are permitted: "… by means of the administration of lethal gas or by means of the administration of lethal injection".
Koster's extraordinary statement, raising the possible return of the gas chamber, is a sign of the increasing fall-out on the 32 death-penalty states of the boycott on sales of medical drugs for use in executions. Drugs companies in America, Europe and Asia have refused on ethical grounds to sell their products to corrections departments, and the European Commission has imposed tough restrictions on the export of anaesthetics to the US.
As supplies became harder to procure, Missouri last year became the only state in the nation to turn to an execution protocol that used just one lethal injection, of the anaesthetic propofol in doses 15 times stronger than in usual surgical procedures. The new protocol was quickly challenged by 21 of the state's death row inmates, who argued the one-drug protocol was a violation of the US constitution, as it created "an unprecedented, substantial likelihood of foreseeable infliction of excruciating pain in the course of executing the plaintiffs".
In the wake of the legal challenge, the Missouri supreme court has refused to schedule any more execution dates until the question of the constitutionality of the new method of death is settled. That in turn has set the clock ticking on the state's limited supply of propofol.
Koster has filed new motions with the court this week, in which he pleads with the judges to be able to go ahead with the executions of two death row inmates, Joseph Paul Franklin and Allen Nicklasson, before the drugs expire. "The department has only three quantities of propofol remaining. The oldest quantity expires this October, the next batch expires in May 2014, and the newest supply expires in 2015. As each supply expires, the department's ability to carry out lawfully imposed capital sentences diminishes."
In the context of this logistical supply problem, Koster told the Kansas City Star that the gas chamber might be "the last option we have to enforce Missouri law".
Missouri switched from hanging as its preferred method of judicial killing to the gas chamber in 1937. The last time such an execution was carried out in the state was in 1965. In 1995, the US court of appeals for the ninth circuit in California ruled the gas chamber unconstitutional, under the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Four years later a death row prisoner in Arizona skirted round the ban, by volunteering to die in that fashion.
Joseph Luby, an attorney with the Death Penalty Litigation Center in Kansas City who helped bring the legal challenge to the use of propofol in Missouri, said he would be surprised if the courts allowed the state to revive the gas chamber. "Its use has fallen into disrepute not least in the Western mind post World War Two. We see gas chambers as problematic for reasons that don't need spelling out."
Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center saw the Missouri attorney general's invocation of the gas chamber as a political ploy, directed at the state supreme court. "He's trying to prod the court into dropping its objections and setting execution dates by threatening that Missouri might have to go back to the dark ages if they don't act soon," he said.Today we’re excited to welcome a new member of the Dropbox family under unusual circumstances. Though he’s joining us now, his contributions to Dropbox date back to day one, all the way to the very first lines of code.
Some people only need to be introduced by their first name, and the BDFL is one of them. Dropbox is thrilled to welcome Guido, the creator of the Python programming language and a long-time friend of ours.
From the beginning, it was clear that Dropbox had to support every major operating system. Historically, doing so presented a serious challenge for developers: because each platform required different development tools and programming languages, developers had to write the same code multiple times.
We didn’t have time for that, and fortunately Python came to the rescue. Several years earlier, Python became my favorite programming language because it had a balance of simplicity, flexibility, and elegance. These qualities of Python, and the community’s work to support every major platform, let us write the code just once before running it everywhere. They have also influenced our greater design philosophy at Dropbox as we set out to build a simple product that brings your life together.
It’s been five years since our first prototype was saved as dropbox.py, and Guido and the Python community have been crucial in helping us solve interesting challenges for more than 100 million people.
So we welcome Guido to Dropbox with admiration and gratitude. Guido inspires all of us and has played a critical part in how Dropbox ties together the products, devices and services in your life. We’re delighted to have him as part of the team.Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu came out against the alleged Israeli strike on the Syria-Lebanon border earlier this week, as well as criticizing President Bashar Assad's for inaction over the attack, Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported on Saturday.
The foreign minister, who was traveling to Belgrade, Serbia for an official visit, told reporters, "Why didn't [Bashar] al-Assad even throw a pebble when Israeli jets were flying over his palace and playing with the dignity of his country?" according to the newspaper's report.
Davutoglu continued: "Why didn't the Syrian Army, which has been attacking its own innocent people for 22 months now from the air with jets and by land with tanks and artillery fire, respond to Israel's operation? Why can't al-Assad, who gave order to fire SCUD missiles at Aleppo, do anything against Israel?"
Turkey does not know the precise details of the alleged attack, the foreign minister said, adding that if Israel were to attack any Muslim country, Turkey would respond, Hurriyet reported.
Additionally, the foreign minister claimed that the Syrian president has made a secret deal with Israel.
"Is there a secret agreement between al-Assad and Israel? Wasn't the Syrian army founded to protect its country and its people against this sort of aggression? The al-Assad regime only abuses. Why don't you use the same power that you use against defenseless women against Israel, which you have seen as an enemy since its foundation," Hurriyet cited him as saying.
The alleged Israeli attack early Tuesday was apparently on an arms convoy bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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In the hours and days after the airstrike allegedly carried out by the Israel Air Force, conflicting reports surfaced regarding the nature of the strike. Syria accused Israel of attacking a research center in Jamarya, but denied that an attack on a convoy transporting SA-17 surface-to-air missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon had taken place, as was previously reported.
On Friday, Time Magazine reported that Israeli jets attacked several targets in Syria in addition to the reseach center, which is outside Damascus.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. AP
Approximate path of alleged Israeli strike on Syria's border with Lebanon, Jan. 30, 2013, according to foreign reports.Newfoundland and Labrador's premier says the prime minister has changed the rules mid-game for a fishery fund to compensate for Canada's free trade deal with Europe.
Paul Davis emerged from a 45 minute meeting on Friday with Stephen Harper in Ottawa to accuse the federal government of reneging on agreed terms.
"They've changed the conditions," Davis said in an interview.
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"It certainly paints a picture that the prime minister sent his people to negotiate but it was not in good faith," he said.
"It's either that, or they've simply reneged on their deal."
The premier's position is that federal negotiators agreed to a joint $400-million fund, of which Ottawa would pay $280-million.
Davis maintains the cash was in exchange for the province giving up minimum processing rules under the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement that helped protect fish plant jobs.
In a statement after the meeting, the Prime Minister's Office said an unspecified amount is available for related losses.
"The minimum processing requirements fund was always intended to compensate hard-working Newfoundlanders and Labradorians for demonstrable losses as a result of the removal of these requirements," the statement said.
"It was never intended to be a blank cheque."
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Davis has threatened to pull his province's support for CETA if the dispute cannot be worked out. He said late Friday he'll meet with his cabinet before deciding on that or whether he'll enforce the processing rules.
At issue is a fishery transition fund touted as an unprecedented injection for a struggling industry when it was announced in October 2013 by then-premier Kathy Dunderdale. At the time, she said $280 million would come from Ottawa to pay for marketing, research and to support displaced workers. The province was to cover the rest.
While provincial Liberal Opposition critics blasted it as a sellout, Dunderdale talked up access to lucrative European markets and how the $400-million fund would help make up for any lost jobs.
CETA is popular with groups in the province such as the Association of Seafood Producers that want punishing tariffs lifted.
But conspicuously absent from the news conference announcing the deal last fall were any federal ministers to share in the joint credit.
Davis said Ottawa is now belatedly trying to put a cash value on those minimum processing requirements and limit its funding commitment to the province.
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"The prime minister feels that we have to demonstrate a loss in the fishery. It was never part of the discussions."
Davis has not pinned a dollar value on the rules meant to guarantee that a certain amount of seafood is processed in often rural communities before it's exported. He has talked instead about the cultural worth of the requirements and how dropping them was a major policy shift for his governing Progressive Conservatives.
Davis has stressed on one hand that lifting minimum processing obstacles for the European Union won't hurt the provincial sector and would offer unfettered access to valuable new markets.
On the other hand, the premier says Ottawa's $280-million commitment was a key prerequisite for giving up such protections.
Documents tabled in the legislature include an email from Bill Hawkins, then the chief of staff to federal International Trade Minister Ed Fast, dated a week before Dunderdale announced the fishery fund last year.
In it, he refers to a "transitional program of up to $400 million." He also said the federal government looked forward to fleshing out details.
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The CETA deal with the 28-member European Union was signed earlier this year, but it could be another two years before it's fully implemented as details and legal text are finalized.
Any refusal by Newfoundland and Labrador to lift minimum processing rules could trigger complaints under the pact which, if upheld, may result in penalties against Canada.Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mike Segar/Reuters Veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz says there is much more than a political lane available for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) to join the presidential race as an independent candidate.
"It's an interstate highway," he said in a Thursday memo.
Luntz's reasoning came from a nationwide poll of 900 likely voters conducted by his firm, Luntz Global Partners.
The survey found that 29% of Americans would support Bloomberg in a theoretical three-way race between the former mayor, GOP front-runner Donald Trump, and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Trump would receive 37% of the vote, while Clinton would emerge with 33%.
In a three-way race with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Clinton, Bloomberg would receive 28% of the vote. Clinton, meanwhile, would come out on top with 37% while Cruz would take 34%.
"The numbers are clear and compelling: there is definitely room for a second billionaire in this election," Luntz wrote in the polling memo. "The last viable independent candidate, Ross Perot, got as high as 39% in the polls, finally settling at 19% on Election Day. But recall, he started the race in single digits. Bloomberg would start with more than a quarter of the vote - and the potential for much more."
Bloomberg also would outscore Clinton, Cruz, Trump, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) among self-identified independent voters. Bloomberg would pick up more than 40% of independent voters in the poll — no matter if Rubio, Trump, or Cruz is the Republican in the race. Among Trump, Cruz, Rubio, and Clinton, none would garner more than 35% of the independent vote when Bloomberg is inserted into the race.
"The key takeaway: the only accurate projection of the impact of a Bloomberg candidacy is that he would hurt both party nominees," Luntz wrote. "With this electorate, a Bloomberg independent candidacy would be more than just a potent force. If he runs, he will draw voters from Trump's column, from Clinton's column, and quite literally turn this election upside down."
The numbers painted a significantly better potential picture for Bloomberg than a recent Morning Consult survey, which found Bloomberg grabbing 13% in a hypothetical three-way race. The survey also put Trump's support at 37% and Clinton's at 36% in such a scenario, but found that a Bloomberg entry would hurt Clinton more than Trump.
Rumblings about a potential Bloomberg bid have grown louder after The New York Times reported on Saturday that billionaire former mayor asked those close to come up with a campaign plan for an independent presidential bid.
The billionaire former mayor reportedly saw an opening if Trump or Cruz were the Republican nominee and if the Democratic nominee were also someone he saw as a flawed candidate. Luntz's poll did not test a hypothetical three-way race that included Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Clinton's main rival for the Democratic nomination.
The 73-year-old Bloomberg has reportedly said that he'd be willing to spend $1 billion of his fortune to run for the White House, according to The Times. He will reportedly make his decision by early March.One of the major improvements that I’m really looking forward to with Windows Phone 8.1 is with the native web browser. With the introduction of Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to Microsoft’s mobile platform, the usual limitation we experienced with the current browser will soon be gone. And the most exciting feature that will be very useful to users is the support for downloading files via IE11 – specifically, music files!
We spotted screenshots that prove the upcoming appearance of downloading via web browser from Vietnamese tech forum Techrum. The images showed how users can now download music files, saved them in their WP handsets, and finally opening the files in the Music Hub. With the said feature, WP users will have an easier way of getting their favorite songs, not needing to connect frequently to PCs just to download and transfer files. But what if the file format is not recognized? No worries, you can still save it in a Downloads folders, similar to the one found in Windows 8 devices.
With the new features expected in Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft is definitely more prepared to match what rival platforms can offer to smartphone users. Improving the native web browser is just a small portion of what we are about to see with the next upgrade for WP8, so we are very excited to try the other add-ons when the preview for developers version is finally released to the public. After all, Windows Phone 8.1 is what we can call a true upgrade of the OS. Microsoft will not just add numbers in the platform name for nothing, unlike other phone makers who introduced updates that don’t really have anything new to offer (if you know what I mean!).
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commentsThis article is about a simplified presentation of electromagnetism, incorporating special relativity. For a more general article on the relationship between special relativity and electromagnetism, see Classical electromagnetism and special relativity. For a more rigorous discussion, see Covariant formulation of classical electromagnetism
Relativistic electromagnetism is a physical phenomenon explained in electromagnetic field theory due to Coulomb's law and Lorentz transformations.
Electromechanics [ edit ]
After Maxwell proposed the differential equation model of the electromagnetic field in 1873, the mechanism of action of fields came into question, for instance in the Kelvin’s master class held at Johns Hopkins University in 1884 and commemorated a century later.[1]
The requirement that the equations remain consistent when viewed from various moving observers led to special relativity, a geometric theory of 4-space where intermediation is by light and radiation.[2] The spacetime geometry provided a context for technical description of electric technology, especially generators, motors, and lighting at first. The Coulomb force was generalized to the Lorentz force. For example, with this model transmission lines and power grids were developed and radio frequency communication explored.
An effort to mount a full-fledged electromechanics on a relativistic basis is seen in the work of Leigh Page, from the project outline in 1912[3] to his textbook Electrodynamics (1940)[4] The interplay (according to the differential equations) of electric and magnetic field as viewed over moving observers is examined. What is charge density in electrostatics becomes proper charge density[5][6][7] and generates a magnetic field for a moving observer.
A revival of interest in this method for education and training of electrical and electronics engineers broke out in the 1960s after Richard Feynman’s textbook.[8] Rosser’s book Classical Electromagnetism via Relativity was popular,[9] as was Anthony French’s treatment in his textbook[10] which illustrated diagrammatically the proper charge density. One author proclaimed, "Maxwell — Out of Newton, Coulomb, and Einstein".[11]
The use of retarded potentials to describe electromagnetic fields from source-charges is an expression of relativistic electromagnetism.
Principle [ edit ]
The question of how an electric field in one inertial frame of reference looks in different reference frames moving with respect to the first is crucial to understanding fields created by moving sources. In the special case, the sources that create the field are at rest with respect to one of the reference frames. Given the electric field in the frame where the sources are at rest, one can ask: what is the electric field in some other frame?[12] Knowing the electric field at some point (in space and time) in the rest frame of the sources, and knowing the relative velocity of the two frames provided all the information needed to calculate the electric field at the same point in the other frame. In other words, the electric field in the other frame does not depend on the particular distribution of the source charges, only on the local value of the electric field in the first frame at that point. Thus, the electric field is a complete representation of the influence of the far-away charges.
Alternatively, introductory treatments of magnetism introduce the Biot–Savart law, which describes the magnetic field associated with an electric current. An observer at rest with respect to a system of static, free charges will see no magnetic field. However, a moving observer looking at the same set of charges does perceive a current, and thus a magnetic field. That is, the magnetic field is simply the electric field, as seen in a moving coordinate system.
See also [ edit ]There’s officially an excuse worse than “the dog ate my homework” when it comes to sucking at school.
An Australian male student from Adelaide University has taken excuses to a new low after telling his professors that he needed to retake an exam due to period pain.
Either he really needs this education, or he has zero idea about male anatomy.
According to a short news broadcast, university officials were pretty pissed about the excuse – uh, yeah – but are being forced to take it seriously because of the student presenting them with a legitimate medical certificate signed by a doctor.
Does this mean everyone in Australia is straight-up dumb?
Officials are said to be investigating the matter, but according to the school’s website, such exemptions are up to the university’s discretion.
Regardless of his stupidity, you have to hand it to the guy – he’s got serious balls. Not only did he walk into his class with his cocky head in the air and deliver that excuse to his professors, but he also took it to a f*cking doctor, who he somehow conned into writing him an excuse note.
This takes serious skill, and we like to give credit where credit is due.
Male Adelaide uni student to re-sit exam after claiming he suffers ‘period pain.’ | @BelindaHeggen reports. #7News https://t.co/WSqWcGDotc — 7 News Adelaide (@7NewsAdelaide) December 7, 2015
[H/T: Playboy]By: Ragini Chatterjee, Research Associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
Over the past several months a series of protests, demonstrations, and court dates have caused Jamaicans to revisit their existing anti-sodomy laws; which were first enforced in 1861. Currently, these laws “[criminalize] consensual homosexual relations between adults,” and as a result, violations of basic human rights against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community have occurred [1]. Basic human rights, specifically those affecting protection of LGBT rights, have not been appropriately addressed in the Caribbean community. LGBT advocates within the region fighting the anti-sodomy campaign fear being persecuted under other punishable crimes for the lack of protection from the government; which is in clear violation of the standing constitution.
According to Human Rights First, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms approved by the Jamaican Parliament in 2011 gave protections against most forms of discrimination. However, in regards to the issues of gender identity and sexual orientation, no said protections were provided. As a result, hundreds of homosexuals have been imprisoned, beaten and killed.
The issues of LGBT rights have been increasingly raised in recent months due to former University of the West Indies (UWI) professor Doctor Brendan Bain, who testified in favor of the anti-sodomy law in the high-profile Caleb Orozco buggery case before the Belize Supreme Court. As a result, Bain was fired from his teaching position at UWI. He lost his leadership role at the Caribbean HIV/AIDS Regional Training Network (CHART) as well, due to the organization’s strict anti-stigma and anti- discrimination training policies after making comments on homosexuality which contradicted the views of his university, organization, and the public norm. This was a huge victory for the LGBT community, not only in Jamaica, but also for the entire Caribbean region. The trial highlighted the necessity for protection of LGBT rights in the Caribbean, demonstrating how these rights are public liabilities and how homosexuality should not be criminalized.
With the public’s support on this issue, many health professionals have looked into Bain’s claims and have noted some inconsistencies. Bain had testified on behalf of church groups defending the existing anti-sodomy law and had reported that a “high concentration of HIV [came from] within the male homosexual community and emphasized [the] high health costs,” that came as a result[2]. Many have concluded that Bain’s testimony conflicted with his role as a leader in regional HIV prevention, which in turn has rendered him largely unpopular among the HIV/AIDS prevention and LGBT communities. Since the trial, however, Bain’s testimony has been dismissed factually by many international health agencies, who have all agreed that the continued “criminalization of sodomy worsens the problem” and suggest that the laws should be changed to fit the way of the times[3].
With this in mind, the Global Voices, a human rights organization, denounced Bain’s firing by stating that
“the majority of HIV and public health experts believe that criminalizing men having sex with men and systematically discriminating against them violates their human rights, as well as [placing] them at a higher and more severe risk, [reducing] their access to services, [forcing] the HIV epidemic underground, and thereby increasing the HIV risk…”[4].
This statement alone proves that in spite of clear discrimination prompted by the anti-sodomy law, the number of drawbacks that could come from this continued enforcement outnumbers the benefits to the overall public. Bain’s firing was a step in the right direction for the enforcement of LGBT rights.
However, with these changes come some potential concerns. According to the Jamaican Observer, there is a growing concern that Bain’s firing, due to his prominent position in CHART, might “[limit] access to all scientific research and information related to HIV/AIDS, and [prevent] medical experts and research professionals from carrying out their mandates”[5]. There was also concern that there were no just grounds for Bain’s firing, besides the issue of unpopular opinion. Other agencies and advocacy groups, like Real Change for Jamaica (RCJ) have stated that they believe that Bain used his personal opinion on the matter as a clinical research statement: “[Bain] had an obligation to reveal that most experts and essentially all the international/Caribbean health organizations’ disagree with his position”[6]. In addition, RCJ emphasized that Bain was ethically wrong for not saying this in court. As such, RCJ is known for holding a strong stance against “agenda driven experts, regarding public health policy, testifying on behalf of churches and their bible derived agenda”[7]. Consequently, the organization has been against Bain since the beginning of the trial, working alongside LGBT advocates.
Along the same lines, according to the United Belize Advocacy Movement (UBAM), Marcela Romero of Red de Personas Trans de Latinoamerica (Transgender Network of Latin America; REDLACTRANS), another international HIV/AIDS alliance, stated: “If there is no human right, there is no prevention. [We need to talk about the] intersection of stigma and discrimination affecting trans-individuals”[8]. However, in order to counter discrimination, the government’s involvement in the matter is crucial. According to UBAM, gender and sexuality issues on legislation, as previously suggested, were not considered a priority. Currently huge barriers exist in the fight for equality, but, with the Bain firing, there is potential for some leeway to occur in the near future.
The Bain firing has managed to make international headlines, with LGBT advocates within the region and the United States making claims stating that all people have a human right to live the way they see fit. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is a current spokeswoman for gay and lesbian rights, and is known for her 2011 gay rights speech in Geneva in which she made clear that, “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people [are] human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity, who have a right to claim that, which is now one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time”[9]. Here, Clinton claims that basic human rights shouldn’t be based off of color, creed, or sexuality.
While it is up to the Court system to determine how this problem is handled in the short term, it really boils down to how the Jamaican government handles the matter, and how its leaders wish to progress as a country. Bain’s dismissal from the University is currently being leveraged to spark debate and in turn is helping the country progress the way it should. It is hoped that through these types of demonstrations, the LGBT community will be able to receive the rights they so deserve.
Please accept this article as a free contribution from COHA, but if re-posting, please afford authorial and institutional attribution. Exclusive rights can be negotiated. For additional news and analysis on Latin America, please go to: LatinNews.com and Rights Action.
Sources
[1] Associated Press. (2014). Protest over Jamaica university firing AIDS doctor. The Americas. Retrieved June 9, 2014, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/protest-over-jamaica-university-firing-aids-doctor/2014/05/26/e3d16c6c-e51a-11e3-a70e-ea1863229397_story.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ramos, A. (n.d.). Belize protestors call for fund to fight Professor Bain’s case. Amandala Newspaper. Retrieved June 9, 2014, from http://amandala.com.bz/news/belize-protestors-call-fund-fight-professor-bains-case/
[4] Ibid.
[5] Were Jamaican Professor’s Statements Supportive of Anti-Homosexuality Laws? • Global Voices. Global Voices Overall RSS 20. Retrieved June 9, 2014, from http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/05/22/were-dismissed-jamaican-professors-statements-supportive-of-anti-homosexuality-laws/
[6] REAL CHANGE FOR JAMAICA- DISCUSSION FORUM (RCFJ). (n.d.). rcfjdiscussionforum. Retrieved June 12, 2014, from http://rcfjdiscussionforum.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/real-change-for-jamaica-discussion-forum-rcfj/
[7] Ibid.
[8] Belize Advocacy Movement. (n.d.). Belizean LGBT Rights Violations. Belizean LGBT Rights Violations. Retrieved June 9, 2014, from http://unitedbelizeadvocacymovement.blogspot.com/
[9] Wong, C. (2011, December 6). Hillary Clinton On Gay Rights Abroad: Secretary Of State Delivers Historic LGBT Speech In Geneva (VIDEO, FULL TEXT). The Huffington Post. Retrieved June 16, 2014, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/06/hillary-clinton-gay-rights-speech-geneva_n_1132392.htmlGet the biggest football 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
Wayne Rooney believes it’s time for England to once again be winners.
The Three Lions captain remembers the excitement that gripped the nation during Euro 96 when he was a 10-year-old schoolboy growing up in Liverpool.
But the bottom line is that Gazza and Co were glorious LOSERS. And Rooney’s aim for Euro 2016 is to end the 50 years of hurt.
“I was talking about Euro 96 the other day and I mentioned what it would be like if we produced a team that actually won a tournament,” said Rooney.
“It’s as if they won the tournament, the way they’re remembered, so imagine if we could go one better and win it? We’d be remembered forever |
ISIS and expressed their intent to carry out attacks resembling the recent Paris and Brussels attacks.
"These Americans need an attack," El Bahnasawy allegedly stated to the officer, saying he aspired "to create the next 9/11."
El Bahnasawy allegedly told the undercover officer that he was in contact with an ISIS affiliate about attack plans officially sanctioned by a branch of ISIS active in Pakistan, and introduced Haroon to the agent.
In May 2016, El Bahnasawy, while in Canada, purchased an "array of bomb-making materials," including 18 kilograms of hydrogen peroxide, a key ingredient in making improvised explosive devices. Batteries, thermometers, aluminum foil and Christmas lights were also purchased.
'A day that will change history'
That same month, El Bahnasawy informed the agent that he had been in communication with Salic, known to him as "Abu Khalid" and "the doctor," about acquiring more funding for the attacks. El Bahnasawy provided the man's contact information to the agent to facilitate the transfer.
On May 11, $423 US was sent from the Philippines to help fund the plan, the U.S. Justice Department says.
Meanwhile, El Bahnasawy shipped the bomb-making materials to the United States and allegedly told the agent he wanted to practice shooting at the cabin, which would need refrigeration for the purpose of making explosives.
On May 12, the undercover agent sent Salic a photo of the hydrogen peroxide purchased by El Bahnasawy. It's alleged the man expressed to the agent that he would pray for the success of the attack.
On May 20, Haroon deemed Times Square the "perfect spot" for the attack, the release alleges. In the course of his communications with the agent, the man allegedly discussed attacking as early as Memorial Day (May 30, 2016), saying, "that's a day that will change history."
Public never at risk, RCMP says
El Bahnasawy travelled to the New York City area on May 21, 2016, in preparation for staging and ultimately carrying out the attacks, allegedly with Haroon.
U.S. law enforcement monitored the trip in co-ordination with Canadian law enforcement and El Bahnasawy was arrested that night in Cranford, N.J. The two others were subsequently arrested — one in Pakistan and the other in the Philippines.
El Bahnasawy pleaded guilty last October to seven charges, including:
Conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.
Conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries.
Conspiring to bomb a place of public use and public transport.
Conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.
Attempted provision and provision of material support and resources to terrorists.
Conspiracy to provide material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization, i.e., ISIS.
Attempted provision and provision of material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization, i.e., ISIS.
He is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 12, 2017.
Asked if El Bahnasawy will appeal, Shroff would not confirm but did say, "In every terrorism case in which the United States plays some role, there's always a concern about the length an undercover [agent] will go."
In a statement to CBC News Friday, the RCMP said that at no time was the safety or security of the public at risk during the investigation.
"Abdulrahman El-Bahnasawy is a Canadian citizen who was part of an international plot to commit terrorist attacks in the United States and the charges are a direct result of his involvement and role," the statement said.Working in R&D since '95, Mark became Magic head designer in '03. His hobbies: spending time with family, writing about Magic in all mediums, and creating short bios.
For those who might be new to my column, today is an article I do every year called "State of Design." It is modeled after a speech the president of the United States gives each year, where he talks about how he feels the country is doing. My equivalent is to write an annual article where I look over the previous year of design, talk about what I felt went right and what went wrong, and then discuss how I feel Magic design is doing. Each year, I create three goals for the upcoming year and look back at the three goals from the previous year to see how we did. This is my tenth State of Design column (yeah, saying that makes me feel old).
Here are my previous nine articles:
I always start by asking the same question: How was the last year for Magic design? My answer for the last year is good but not great. Theros is currently the best-selling Magic set of all time. I've received a lot of positive comments about the Theros block. In addition, players are very upbeat about the other Magic products we've created during the last twelve months. But none of that means this last year was perfect. We did a lot of things right but we also made a few mistakes. My goal with Magic design is to constantly improve, making each year better than the year before it. In some ways, I feel we did this; but, in some others, we didn't. I'm going to talk about all that today.
Traditionally in this article I begin by discussing what we got right:
Highlights of 2013/2014
We Nailed the Top-Down Design
When we started designing Theros, I felt as if I had Innistrad on my shoulder. I was so happy with how the top-down design went with that set that I was a little dubious I would be able to do another top-down design that resonated as well. Greek mythology was also a lot trickier than Gothic horror. People's experience with the horror genre comes from movies and television—things that allowed players a shared world. Greek mythology is something most people have experienced through books, a medium where readers get to create their own takes on the world they are reading. This meant that different people would have different expectations.
Also, watching zombies or vampires through mass media meant you had a sense of how they function and what they do. We didn't have that with Greek mythology. How do a group of zombies act? Everyone knows that. How do centaurs behave? Nowhere near as clear.
Returned Centaur | Art by Lucas Graciano
What this meant was that we had to approach this top-down design differently. I am quite happy to say, I believe we succeeded. The Gods were a huge success. The flavored mechanics were mostly successful. The individual cards that hit upon all the myths were super popular. I feel like there were a lot of expectations and that we managed to hit most of them all while creating a set where the very play reinforced these themes.
We Rehabilitated a Mechanic
One of the most important things we did this year was to try an experiment where we took a mechanic that failed the first time through and brought it back with a new makeover. Obviously, that mechanic was devotion (formerly chroma from Eventide), and it was a huge success. One of the ways you could tell I considered this task important was that I made it one of our goals for this year. Magic design is a finite resource and if we're planning to make a game that outlasts us all, we have to be careful about how fast we eat up design space.
There are many solutions to this problem, but an important one is having the ability to reexamine mechanics we've already done. If good ideas were executed poorly, we have to be able to find them and try to give them new life. I started with a mechanic I had a lot of faith in, one that I knew had more potential than its initial reaction. Nonetheless, failure in this experiment would have set back plans to try to do this more often, so I'm very happy it was a success.
We Found a Whole New Format
It's important for us to keep trying new things, but not every product we make is going to be a runaway success. So when we make one, it's a cause for celebration. Shawn Main had an idea for a very quirky product, a Limited product where you had to draft it and then play multiplayer and there were things that affected the draft. When Shawn first pitched the idea, it sounded offbeat, and while R&D had a lot of faith, there were many in the company who were skeptical.
Well, Conspiracy is now kicking major butt. I've had so many positive responses to it, even from players who never thought they would play a product like it in a million years. I love how Magic is constantly reinventing itself and Conspiracy is a perfect example of how there are many untapped great ideas still waiting to be found.
Art by Michael Komarck
So congrats, Shawn (and his design team, and Dave Humpherys and his development team), you guys did a great job.
While many things went well this last year, there were a few things that didn't go quite as smoothly:
Lessons of 2013/2014
We Messed Up on Born of the Gods
One of the banes of Magicdesign is third sets. They're just tricky to do. We have to innovate enough to make them fresh after eight months of players being exposed to the block, but we can't deviate too much or else it doesn't feel connected. Obviously, one only needs to look at sets like Rise of the Eldrazi and Avacyn Restored to see that we've gone to great lengths to try and make third sets work.
But wait, wasn't Born of the Gods the second set? Yes, it was. See, I was so concerned with making sure the third set worked that I made the second set give up too much. We finally made a worthy third set only to realize it came at the cost of the second one.
Let me quickly jump in and say that this problem was not because of Ken Nagle, the lead designer of Born of the Gods, but because of me as the head designer. I'm the one who called the shots and decided what went where and, if the second set was lacking, it's because I was saving stuff for the third set. Which leads us to the next lesson:
We Mishandled Enchantment Matters
Players have been wanting an enchantment block for a long time. We finally gave them one, but in doing so I took away something they were expecting. You see, I knew the expectation of an enchantment block would be things that would allow players to craft enchantment-heavy decks. It's what we did with artifacts, it's what we did with the graveyard, it's what we did with tribal. We finally focused a block on enchantments and then didn't let players build the decks they had been dreaming to build when we finally did an enchantment block.
Oakheart Dryads | Art by Johann Bodin
It's not that the block didn't deliver this, because it did. It just delivered it too late. I knew the third set needed us to withhold something, and "enchantment matters" seemed like the perfect fit. It was a mechanical area we didn't have to use early on but something that, when we did, would tie everything together. It sounded so good on paper. Here's the problem: Design isn't just about execution of your vision, it's about matching expectations.
I feel we succeeded in meeting the player expectations of a block inspired by Greek mythology but we failed, at least for two-thirds of the block, to deliver what players had expected of an enchantment block. I had tried early on with messaging to keep players from this expectation, but I was fighting human nature and, as I always say, that's a losing battle. When you revisit a theme you can do something different, but the first time you do it, you have to meet some basic expectations.
Looking back, I needed to find a different hook for Journey into Nyx and I needed to spread the "enchantment matters" throughout the block. Maybe I could have just withheld it from Theros and started handing out the goodies in Born of the Gods. What I do know is making players wait eight months (during which they didn't know it was coming) for something they expected to see Day One.
We Should Have Kept Monstrosity for the Whole Block
One of the problems with a block is the pressure to both keep everything you've introduced while also doing new things each set. I worked very hard in Theros block to find reasons not just to add things but also to take things away. Looking back, choosing to do that with monstrosity was a mistake. The original plan was to have monstrosity in the first set, tribute in the second set, and then a "+1/+1 matters" mechanic in the third set. This obviously didn't work out and we ended up bringing back monstrosity.
With 20/20 hindsight, it's clear that we shouldn't have done tribute. We could have saved it for another day and monstrous could have stayed. It would have meant that Born of the Gods only had one new mechanic, inspired, but I think that would have been okay (especially if we had designed it to be easier to build around). Monstrosity had plenty of design space left and it was very flavorful.
Third and Goal
Now that I've talked about the highs and low of the year, it's time to look back at the goals I set for this year and see how we did. Remember that success of the goals is not based on the attempt, because I always choose things I know we're going to try, but on the reception of the playerbase. Did all of you like the thing in question? Let's see how we did. As you will see, the goals were tied into the year's highs and lows.
2014 Goal #1: Show That We Understand How to do Top-Down Design
One of the popular topics on my blog has been what other real-world influences would make for good top-down designs. I feel like this topic is kind of symbolic of how players have responded to top-down design. It isn't "Should we do more?" it's "What should we do?" which makes me feel that Innistrad and Theros blocks have connected well with the players.
But let's try a different criteria. What does all our player feedback tell us? The Gods, especially the monocolor ones, scored very well. The individual cards that strongly conveyed a Greek trope (Chained to the Rocks, Rescue from the Underworld, etc.) scored well. The mechanics, in Theros especially, which were closely tied to the flavor, also scored well.
The biggest complaints were about areas that we didn't manage to make cards. Where was Hercules? The Golden Fleece? The minotaur in the maze? But mostly, people seemed pretty happy that we hit most of the expected Greek-mythological tropes. I'm going to chalk this goal as a success. A full thumbs up.
Chained to the Rocks | Art by Aaron Miller
2014 Goal #2: Show That We Can Execute an Enchantment Block
This goal's success is a little fuzzier. I feel we did a good job with the enchantment creatures. We introduced them in a way that made them organic and they helped create a unique play environment. Bestow proved to be a little more complex than we had thought, but players embraced the mechanic.
Players seemed less happy about the absence in the first two sets of the global enchantments and, as I talked about above, they really missed having no "enchantment matters" cards in either Theros or Born of the Gods.
My takeaway is that, had this been the second enchantment block we had done, where we had done all the low-hanging fruit the previous time, we would have been good. The fact that this was the first real enchantment block (I'm told Urza's Saga block doesn't count) and we withheld a lot of low-hanging fruit until the third set meant we didn't execute to meet player expectations as well as we could have, at least early on. I give this half a thumbs up.
2014 Goal #3: Show That We Can Reinvigorate a Mechanic
If anything, we succeeded with devotion a little too well. Development really thought it was fun, so the team pushed it, and the mechanic turned out to be the most influential Theros mechanic in Standard. The feedback on devotion was very positive (until it started warping Standard), but this is a design review and not a development one, so I'm looking more at the initial response.
Gray Merchant of Asphodel | Art by Robbie Trevino
Here, by the way, are the lessons I learned from the experience:
Flavor is key —Chroma is a flavorless word. Devotion is not. Having devotion means something helped give the mechanic an emotional weight that chroma never had.
—Chroma is a flavorless word. Devotion is not. Having devotion means something helped give the mechanic an emotional weight that chroma never had. Focus is important —Chroma worked anywhere. Devotion just cared about the permanents on the battlefield. That focus made it easier to know what you were supposed to care about and made deck building pretty straightforward—put permanents with a lot of mana symbols in your deck, probably stay in monocolored.
—Chroma worked anywhere. Devotion just cared about the permanents on the battlefield. That focus made it easier to know what you were supposed to care about and made deck building pretty straightforward—put permanents with a lot of mana symbols in your deck, probably stay in monocolored. Execution is crucial—Erik Lauer hit in on the head about one of the biggest reasons for chroma's failure: "None of the cards were any good." We worked hard with development to make sure we made cards the team would be able to push.
It's pretty clear that this goal was a huge success. Another thumbs up.
That means we went two-and-a-half for three. Pretty good. Let's take a look at next year's goals:
2015 Goal #1: Prove We Can Handle the Volume Without Excess Complexity
Khans of Tarkir block has a lot going on. A lot going on. The block structure is one of the hardest ones we've ever attempted. The set is bringing back morph, one of the most complex mechanics we've ever done. It has five distinct, different, three-colored wedge groupings, each with its own mechanic. We're doing all that while trying to make the mechanics tie into a very involved story while still keeping New World Order. And that's just the first set in the block.
This goal is to accomplish everything we're trying without confusing the players. Will the themes come through? Will the mechanics interact like we want? Will all of it resonate?
Art by Jason Chan
I believe it will, so I'm optimistic about this goal, but it's definitely the most moving parts I've had in a post–New World Order block. This goal is basically: Can we pull it all off without overly confusing the players?
2015 Goal #2: Demonstrate That the Block Model Works
The three sets in this block are connected through a complex web of mechanics. It's early, so I can't explain exactly what I mean, but as the block evolves you all will get a chance to see for yourselves. Never before have all the mechanical pieces been so interconnected. This goal looks at the relationship between all the mechanics and asks, "Did the execution live up to the ideal?" We have a cool block structure. Did it work?
2015 Goal #3: Execute Properly on "Dewey"
Two years ago, I talked about how the trouble set of the Return to Ravnica block was going to be the execution of Dragon's Maze. One of my goals was about that execution. I feel "Dewey" is the same thing, but for Khans of Tarkir block. It is quite literally the set the entire block hinges on. Can we make a small set that is different things to different large sets? Can it draft well with Khans of Tarkir and then draft well, but differently, with "Louie?"
Dragon's Maze failed in its execution goal. Can Dewey fare better? Can we create a set with its own identity that compliments two different large sets—sets that are very different from one another? That's what this goal is testing.
And That's the Year That Was
My "State of Design" articles are meant to be introspective, which means I'm very eager to find out how you all think the last year's worth of design went. Write me an email or connect to me through any of my social media (Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, and Instagram) to tell me your take on the current state of design.
Join me next week for an article I guarantee you everyone is going to be talking about.
"Drive to Work #148 & 149—Unhinged, Parts 2 & 3"
My two podcasts today are Parts 2 and 3 of my five-part series on the design of the silver-bordered set Unhinged.Miss Lonelyhearts is Nathanael West's second novel. He began writing it early in 1930 and completed the manuscript in November of 1932. [1] Published in 1933, it is an Expressionist black comedy set in New York City during the Great Depression.[2]
Plot summary [ edit ]
In the story, Miss Lonelyhearts is an unnamed male newspaper columnist writing an advice column for the lovelorn and lonesome, a duty that the other newspaper staff considers a joke. As Miss Lonelyhearts reads letters from desperate New Yorkers, he feels terribly burdened and falls into a cycle of deep depression, accompanied by heavy drinking and occasional bar fights. He is also the victim of the pranks and cynical advice of Shrike, his feature editor at the newspaper.
Miss Lonelyhearts tries several approaches to escape the terribly painful letters he has to read: religion, trips to the countryside with his fiancée Betty, and affairs with Shrike's wife and Mrs. Doyle, a reader of his column. However, Miss Lonelyheart's efforts do not seem to ameliorate his situation. After his sexual encounter with Mrs. Doyle, he meets her husband, a poor crippled man. The Doyles invite Miss Lonelyhearts to have dinner with them. When he arrives, Mrs. Doyle tries to seduce him again, but he responds by beating her. Mrs. Doyle tells her husband that Miss Lonelyhearts tried to rape her.
In the last scene, Mr. Doyle hides a gun inside a rolled newspaper and decides to take revenge on Miss Lonelyhearts. Lonelyhearts, who has just experienced a religious enlightenment after three days of sickness, runs toward Mr. Doyle to embrace him. The gun "explodes", and the two men roll down a flight of stairs together.
Major themes [ edit ]
The general tone of the novel is one of extreme disillusionment with Depression-era American society, a consistent theme throughout West's novels. However, the novel is a black comedy, characterized by a dark sense of humor and irony. Justus Neiland,[3] among others, has pointed out the use of Bergsonian laughter, in which “the attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a machine.” [4]
The novel can be read through a Marxist lens as a condemnation of alienation and the colonization of social life by commodification, foreshadowing the stance of the Situationists and Guy Debord in particular. Miss Lonelyhearts is unable to fulfill his role as advice giver in a world in which both people and advice (in the form of newspaper ads, for example) are mass-produced. People are machines for the sole purpose of laboring as far as the rest of society is concerned (thus Miss Lonelyhearts' name), and any advice for them is as mass-produced as a manual for a machine. Lonelyhearts is unable to find a personal solution to his problems because they have systemic causes. West, who worked in the newspaper business before writing Miss Lonelyhearts, is also an advice giver of a sort as a novelist. Miss Lonelyhearts is similar to a détournement because it uses a form to critique the same form. The novel also condemns itself by condemning art, which is repeatedly derided by Shrike and compared to religion as an opiate of the masses.[5][6]
Many of the problems described in Miss Lonelyhearts describe actual economic conditions in New York City during the Great Depression, although the novel carefully avoids questions of national politics. Moreover, the novel is particularly important due to its existential import. The characters seem to be living in an amoral world. Hence, they resort to heavy drinking, sex, and parties. Miss Lonelyhearts has a "Christ complex", which stands for his belief in religion as a solution to a world devoid of values.[7]
Adaptations [ edit ]
1933 film [ edit ]
In 1933, the novel was very loosely adapted as a movie, Advice to the Lovelorn, starring Lee Tracy, produced by 20th Century Pictures—before its merger with Fox Film Corporation—and released by United Artists. Greatly changed from the novel, it became a comedy/drama about a hard-boiled reporter who becomes popular when he adopts a female pseudonym and dispenses fatuous advice. He agrees (for a hefty payment) to use the column to recommend a line of medicines, but finds out they are actually harmful drugs when his mother dies. He then agrees to help the police track down the criminals. The movie ends with the main character happily married.
1957 Broadway play [ edit ]
In 1957, the novel was adapted into a stage play entitled Miss Lonelyhearts by Howard Teichmann. It opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on October 3, 1957 in a production directed by Alan Schneider and designed by Jo Mielziner and Patricia Zipprodt. It starred Pat O'Brien. It ran for only twelve performances.
1958 film [ edit ]
In 1958 the plot was again filmed as Lonelyhearts, starring Montgomery Clift, Robert Ryan, and Myrna Loy, produced by Dore Schary and released by United Artists. Although following the plot of the book more closely than Advice to the Lovelorn, many changes were made. The movie greatly softens the cynical edge of the original book, and the story is once more given a happy ending—the woman's husband is talked out of shooting Miss Lonelyhearts, who finds happiness with his true love, and Shrike is considerably kinder at film's end.
1983 film [ edit ]
The film was adapted by Robert E. Bailey and Michael Dinner into a 1983 TV movie, Miss Lonelyhearts, starring Eric Roberts in the lead role. Eric Roberts would coincidentally play the lead role in the unrelated 1991 film Lonely Hearts.
2006 opera [ edit ]
In 2006, composer Lowell Liebermann completed Miss Lonelyhearts, a two-act opera. The libretto was written by J. D. McClatchy. The opera, which received its premiere April 26, 28, and 30, 2006 at the Juilliard Opera Center, was commissioned by the Juilliard School for its centennial celebration. The opera was co-commissioned by two other schools: USC's Thornton School of Music as well as the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
The opera was co-produced by the Thornton School of Music Opera Program at University of Southern California, and received its West Coast premiere at the school on April 20–22, 2007. Both premieres were directed by renowned stage director and Thornton faculty member Ken Cazan.
In popular culture [ edit ]Statement by official on Christian woman sentenced to death for apostasy was taken out context, foreign ministry now says
Sudan has denied a Christian woman sentenced to hang for apostasy would be freed soon, saying quotes attributed to a foreign ministry official had been taken out of context.
Meriam Ibrahim was sentenced to death on 15 May under the Islamic law that has been in place since 1983 and outlaws conversions under pain of death.
Abdullah Alazreg, a foreign ministry under-secretary, told the media on Saturday Ibrahim "will be freed within days in line with legal procedure that will be taken by the judiciary and the ministry of justice".
But the foreign ministry said the release of the 27-year-old, who gave birth to a baby girl in prison on Tuesday, depended on whether a court accepted an appeal request made by her defence team.
A ministry statement said what Alazreg actually told media on Saturday was "that the defence team of the concerned citizen has appealed the verdict... and if the appeals court rules in her favour, she will be released".
Alazreg said "the government does not interfere in the work of the judiciary because it is an independent body", the ministry said. "Some media took what the under-secretary said out of context, changing the meaning of what he said."
After Azraq's comment Saturday, Ibrahim's husband, Daniel Wani, said he did not believe she would be freed.
"No one has contacted me and I don't think it will happen. We have submitted an appeal but they have not looked at it yet, so how is it that they will release her?" he said.
Ibrahim's lawyer Mohannad Mustapha had expressed doubts she would be released or that charges against her would be dropped.
"The only party who can do that is the appeals court but I am not sure that they have the full case file," he said on Saturday.
Earlier this week, Mustapha said a hearing due to take place on Wednesday was postponed because the file was incomplete.
Ibrahim was born to a Muslim father but said during her trial she had never been a Muslim herself.
The court gave her three days to "recant" her faith and when she refused, she was handed the death penalty and sentenced to 100 lashes for "adultery".
Under Sudan's interpretation of sharia, a Muslim woman cannot marry a non-Muslim man, and any such relationship is regarded as adulterous.
Her case sparked international condemnation, with David Cameron denouncing the "barbaric" sentence.
Wani, a US citizen, visited Ibrahim and the baby on Thursday after being denied access earlier in the week, and said both were in good health.The Republican Party does not require a presidential candidate to win eight states to qualify to be placed in nomination at its upcoming Cleveland convention, GOP officials say.
The Republican National Committee's "Rule 40(b)" makes eligibility for the GOP nomination contingent upon winning a majority of the convention delegates in at least eight states or territories, an achievement generally accomplished by winning at least eight primary or caucus elections. However, Rule 40(b) only applied to the 2012 Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., that nominated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Party officials and knowledgeable sources have confirmed over the past few days that Rule 40(b) doesn't exist for the purposes of the upcoming convention. That means at this point, the three candidates left in the race, front-runner Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are all eligible for the nomination, as, possibly, are the Republican contenders who have since suspended their campaigns.
Ben Ginsberg, a Republican elections lawyer who was involved in rule-making process for the 2012 convention, said that Rule 40(b) isn't transferrable to the 2016 convention. Ginsberg explained to the Washington Examiner that what was passed in 2012 applied only to 2012, and that the 2016 convention must pass its own rule determining nomination eligibilty.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus confirmed Ginsberg's assessment on Sunday during a television interview. "There will always be a perception problem if people continue to miss — to not explain the process properly. So, the 2012 rules committee writes the rules for the 2012 convention. The 2016 rules committee writes the rules for the 2016 convention," he told CNN.
The party's nominee is never officially crowned until he receives the vote of at least 1,237 elected convention delegates. But the exercise has been a formality for so long, with conventions functioning as made-for-television pep rallies, the public has essentially assumed that the winner is determined by their votes in the primaries and caucuses held in most states and U.S. territories.
This year, the Republican Party could face a contested presidential nominating convention for the first time since 1976, as Trump, who leads in the hunt for delegates, could conclude the primary season short of 1,237. Trump's delegate count stands at 678, followed by Cruz at 423 and Kasich at 143. That has attracted extra scrutiny to the rules governing the four-day convention, set to begin July 18. The process is shrouded in confusion.
For instance, many political observers have long assumed that Rule 40(b), approved four years ago by the convention rules committee that met just prior to the convention, was a permanent fixture of the RNC rulebook. The regulation was pushed to block Ron Paul from having his name placed in nomination in Tampa. Paul was well short of delegates and would have lost. But Romney, the presumptive nominee, wanted to avoid the appearance of a divided party.
This has led to erroneous reporting that only Trump has satisfied requirements for having his name placed in nomination at Cleveland, while Cruz and Kasich still have not. The misunderstanding stems from perplexity about the rules process.
Every four years, a rules committee comprised of elected convention delegates (about two from each state and territory delegation) meets during the week just prior to the convention to determine the regulations that will govern the convention. Every convention rules committee approves a rules package that includes regulations that determine eligibility for candidates to have their names placed in nomination on the convention floor.
Those rules apply only to that particular quadrennial convention.
If the July convention in Cleveland is contested, most of the 2,472 elected delegates will be free to vote for whichever candidate they choose after the first ballot, if the winner of that tally fails to garner 1,237. Their choice of candidates could be limited in part by the rules of eligibility as written by the convention rules committee that will meet in Cleveland just prior to the convention itself.
GOP insiders announced Monday that a 2012 rule that required the GOP nominee to be someone who had won at least 8... in Campaigns on LockerDomeMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Wlodzimierz Umaniec has been jailed for two years for defacing a Mark Rothko painting at London's Tate Modern gallery.
A man has been jailed for two years for defacing a Mark Rothko painting at London's Tate Modern gallery.
Wlodzimierz Umaniec, 26, of Worthing, West Sussex, had previously pleaded guilty to criminal damage to property valued at more than £5,000.
Witnesses saw a man daub the mural, Black on Maroon, on 7 October before fleeing the gallery.
Tate Modern has said the damage was much worse than originally feared and could take up to 20 months to repair.
Polish national Umaniec, who co-founded the artistic movement "yellowism", stepped over a barrier in the gallery and daubed his name and the words "12, a potential piece of yellowism" before running off.
Image caption Wlodzimierz Umaniec is the co-founder of the yellowism art movement
The court heard that he went to the gallery intending to put his "signature" on a picture, but decided to damage the painting only at the time he saw it on display.
Judge Roger Chapple, at Inner London Crown Court, told Umaniec: "Your actions on the 7 October of this year were entirely deliberate, planned and intentional."
Speaking about "yellowism", Judge Chapple said it was "wholly and utterly unacceptable to promote it by damaging a work of art" which he called a "gift to the nation".
He said it was "abundantly clear" that Umaniec was "plainly an intelligent man" and told the court he had described Rothko as a "great painter" in a letter he had written to him.
Explore the collection American artist Mark Rothko considered one of the outstanding figures of Abstract Expressionism
His paintings typically feature rectangular expanses of colour with soft, uneven edges Source: BBC Your Paintings View a slideshow of Rothko paintings
The judge also said the incident had led to galleries reviewing security arrangements at a cost to themselves and the taxpayer.
"The effects of such security reviews is to distance the public from the works of art they come to enjoy," he said.
Gregor McKinley, prosecuting, said Sotheby's had given Tate Modern a verbal estimate of pre-damage value of between £5m to just over £9m.
He added work to restore the painting would take about 20 months and cost about £200,000.
Paintings by Russian-born artist Rothko often sell for tens of millions of pounds.
Earlier this year, his Orange, Red, Yellow sold for £53.8m - the highest price paid for a piece of post-War art at auction.
'Everything is art'
Black On Maroon was donated to the Tate in 1969 by Rothko himself.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Speaking the day after the incident, Wlodzimierz Umaniec told the BBC he did not "deface" the painting
Outside court before the sentencing, Ben Smith, who called himself a "yellowist", attempted to explain the concept: "Everything is equal. Everything is art.
"Everything is a potential piece of yellowism."
A spokeswoman for the Tate said: "Tate is pleased that the court has recognised the severity of this incident and its consequences when sentencing Wlodzimierz Umaniec to two years in prison."On the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, we rated Michelle Obama’s statement that the White House "was built by slaves" as True.
As we wrote in our fact-check, "Strictly speaking, the White House was not exclusively built by slaves; it was built by a combination of slaves, free blacks and whites. But slaves were significantly involved in the construction of the White House, so we have no quarrel with the way Obama worded her claim."
Shortly after we published our fact-check, we began receiving complaints from readers.
"It was typical false race-baiting comment made true by PolitiFact," wrote one reader. "What a shame."
"I grow weary of the drumbeat of the media that just can't let bad news go," wrote another.
"I fear (Obama has) gotten a break either because of her politics, or her race, or both," wrote a third.
The backlash over Obama’s words garnered additional attention the following night, when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said that while Obama was "essentially right," slaves involved in the construction of the White House "were well fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government."
At PolitiFact, we appreciate feedback, and we’re used to taking flak from dissatisfied readers. But what struck us as unusual about the blowback from this fact-check was the sheer diversity of arguments that readers made about why we were wrong. We found none of the arguments to be compelling, and the rating of |
to produce sufficient highly-refined material for a bomb.
Rouhani said a date could be set for the next round of talks later this month during the UN General Assembly in New York, where meetings between Iran and some of the powers are expected.Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has declared her intention to run for the presidency as she sets her sights on elections due to be held in 2015.
Addressing world leaders and heads of business at a major economic forum in the capital Naypyidaw, the Nobel Peace laureate called for the amendment of the military-drafted constitution which prevents her from leading the country.
The current constitution blocks anyone whose spouses or children are overseas citizens from leading the country.
If I pretended that I didn't want to be president I wouldn't be honest. Aung San Suu Kyi
Myanmar opposition leader,
"I want to run for president and I'm quite frank about it," the veteran democracy activist told delegates at the World Economic Forum on East Asia.
"If I pretended that I didn't want to be president I wouldn't be honest," she added.
Suu Kyi's two sons with her late husband Michael Aris are British and the clause is widely believed to be targeted at the Nobel laureate.
Helen Clark, administrator of the UN Development Programme, who was at the forum in Myanmar, welcomed Suu Kyi's candidacy.
"I was signing appeals for Aung San Suu Kyi's release from house arrest going back many, many years when I was prime minister of New Zealand," Clark said in an interview with Al Jazeera.
"I very much hope that the constitutional changes will be made, which would enable her to contest, a free and fair election for the leadership of her country".
President Thein Sein's quasi-civilian government has made a number of political and economic reforms that have led to the lifting of most Western sanctions.
Hundreds of political prisoners have been freed, democracy champion Suu Kyi has been welcomed into a new parliament and tentative ceasefires have been reached in the country's multiple ethnic civil wars.
Suu Kyi, who was herself locked up by the former military government for a total of 15 years, remains hugely popular in Myanmar and her National League for Democracy party is widely expected to win the elections if they are free and fair.A Christian group at North Carolina State University (NC State) won a substantial legal victory, as the university agreed to revise a speech code that blocked them from talking to fellow students without a permit.
Until now, NC State’s speech policy included a provision stating that groups had to obtain a permit prior to approaching students, whether it’s for commercial or non-commercial speech.
Grace Christian Life sued the school in April, arguing the policy was selectively enforced in order to keep the group from handing out fliers or inviting students to upcoming events. The group claimed they were first ordered to obtain a permit, and then after doing so, they were told they could only speak with other students if they remained behind a table set up by the group.
NC State defended the permit process, saying it was necessary for maintaining safety and order on campus.
But just three months later, NC State gave in, adopting a new speech policy that completely eliminates the permit requirement for non-commercial speech.
The settlement comes a month after Judge James Dever granted a preliminary injunction against NC State’s speech policy, finding that Grace Christian Life was very likely to succeed in its challenge.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that backed the lawsuit, lauded the outcome in a statement.
“Students of any religious, political, or ideological persuasion should be able to freely and peacefully speak with their fellow students about their views without interference from university officials who may prefer one view over another,” the group said in a statement. “NC State did the right thing in revising its policy to reflect this instead of continuing to defend its previous policy, which was not constitutionally defensible.”
Follow Blake on Twitter. Send tips to blake@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Copyright 2016 The Daily Caller News FoundationCricket South Africa has admitted that it is powerless to prevent players joining English counties on Kolpak deals, as recent Test cricketers continue to turn their backs on international careers. The loss of high-quality cricketers in the country has fuelled fears of a player drain, similar to that which the Springboks rugby union side has faced.
At least five players who have played Tests since November 2015 have joined or are set to join English counties as they flee quotas, seek better pay and look to move before Brexit could nullify the EU ruling that allows South Africans to play in England as non-overseas players.
The Guardian understands that the off‑spinner Dane Piedt, who played against England this year, and at least one squad member for the recent tour of Australia (although not one who played in the Test series, which the Proteas won 2-1) are seeking to move to English cricket. Kolpak players can play domestic cricket in South Africa in the English winter, but forfeit their international careers while under contract in England.
Faf du Plessis becomes South Africa Test captain after AB de Villiers resigns Read more
Already, the spinner Simon Harmer has joined Essex, Stiaan van Zyl has moved to Sussex and Derbyshire have signed Hardus Viljoen to spearhead their pace attack; all three players are in their 20s. In October, the former under-19 international Colin Ackermann joined Leicestershire, too.
Kolpak players in county cricket have long been a contentious issue in that they dilute opportunities for England‑qualified players even though they raise the quality. In a 2008 game between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, 12 of the 22 players were on Kolpak deals. As eligibility regulations have tightened, the number of players registered as Kolpaks has reduced in recent years, with the number between 3% and 4% during the 2016 season.
Piedt, who is 26 and played the most recent of his seven Tests in August, believes he is unlikely to be signed by a county as an overseas player and is therefore happy to play as a Kolpak. The paucity of high-quality spin in the County Championship means that, like Harmer, he is well placed to earn a deal, although he has not yet formally spoken to any counties.
The arrangement provides players with greater job security, but also greater remuneration; with the Rand weak, Van Zyl – who played 12 Tests before being dropped in August – has a contract with Sussex that is understood to be worth roughly three times as much as his deal with the Cobras in Cape Town.
“We cannot restrain individuals from plying their trade,” Haroon Lorgat, the chief executive of Cricket South Africa, said. “Over and above our regular reviews of the domestic playing rules and regulations to ensure it is fit for purpose, we will continue to rather focus on making sure that we have the best systems to produce the best cricketers in numbers.
“We have realised a long time back that the world is a global village with people very mobile. Like in every other country and across every other profession, South African citizens will venture abroad to take advantage of stronger currencies and employment opportunities.
“This mobility affects all professions and is not limited to cricketers who ply their trade in English counties.”
The motivation to leave at this time is heightened by uncertainty over the perceived impact of Brexit. Players who have already signed Kolpak deals – Van Zyl and Viljoen are both contracted until 2019 – believe they will be unaffected, but that things could change in 2017.
“I have been told that players are choosing Kolpak deals now for fear of losing this opportunity once Brexit is implemented,” Lorgat said, but the ECB told the Guardian it was too early to know the impact of the referendum vote.
“Regarding the wider impact of Brexit,” said an ECB spokesperson, “it is too early to predict the outcome in this area. We await more information on the legal situation post-Brexit and will then need to hold further detailed discussions with our stakeholders, the government and other sporting bodies before we can comment further on the potential implications for cricket.”
Lorgat was less forgiving of those citing paths blocked by quotas and transformation targets for their departure. CSA this year introduced a system requiring national teams to contain an average (across a year) of six players of colour, two of whom would be black African. Piedt would be the first non-white player to sign a Kolpak deal since the new targets were brought in.
“Any player citing transformation or targets is looking for a soft excuse as he or she might not be prepared to work hard enough to fight for a place in our representative teams,” Lorgat said.
“We only select the best as was evident in our recent successes against Australia. You don’t whitewash Australia or beat them seven times in a row without choosing your best.”For updates, stories, video and features about the NBA playoffs, go to cnn.com/nba
The Warriors drubbed the Memphis Grizzlies 125-104 to become the all-time winningest team for one season, besting the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls by one victory.
"It's a great way to finish off what was an amazing regular season. I just told our guys I never in a million years would have guessed that record would ever be broken," said Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, who played on the Bulls' record-setting team.
Shooting guard Klay Thompson said the team played hard every contest.
"That's hard to do for 82 games," he said. "We're going to enjoy this tonight, but we have a quick turnaround this weekend."
The Warriors are now 16 victories away from more glory as they are set to defend their NBA title in this year's playoffs. The top seed is theirs, assuring home-court advantage for the second year in a row.
"Congrats to the @Warriors, a great group of guys on and off the court. If somebody had to break the Bulls' record, I'm glad it's them," President Barack Obama's Twitter account said.
Stephen Curry led the Warriors with 46 points, 30 of which came on 3-pointers.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver also congratulated the record-setters.
"The team held itself to a high standard throughout the season, playing with purpose every night and captivating fans around the world with its free-flowing style, spectacular shooting and flair for the dramatic. Kudos to the entire Warriors organization," Silver said.
NBA playoffs For updates, stories, video and features about the NBA playoffs go to cnn.com/nba
Stephen Curry: 'You've got to go for it'
In an interview with CNN's Andy Scholes earlier this season, Stephen Curry didn't hide from it: The Warriors want this record.
"There's not many opportunities that you probably have to go after that record," Curry said at the time. "Obviously, going to win a championship, that's the main goal. But there's a reason that we're still talking about that '95-'96 Bulls team that was able to accomplish the 72-10 record. They were on a mission that year and ended up winning the championship as well. So that's kind of where we want to be.
Curry, seen here April 7 against the Spurs at Oracle Arena in Oakland, California, leads the NBA in scoring with 29.9 points per game.
"But when you have a shot at history and being the best regular-season team in the history of the NBA, I think you've got to go for it."
On Tuesday, Curry talked about staying in the present and slowing down to enjoy what's going on now.
"We put so much energy and effort into today. Enjoy it," Curry said. "Tomorrow's not promised, obviously, so why cheat that experience?"
Michael Jordan: 'Go get the record'
The Warriors' milestone victory came the same day that the NBA said goodbye to one of its longtime stars, Kobe Bryant, who went out with a flourish by scoring 60 points in a win over the Utah Jazz.
For much of the 1990s, 2000s and beyond, Bryant's Los Angeles Lakers had been California's dominant pro basketball team. But that's no longer the case: The Lakers finished the 2015-2016 campaign with the Western Conference's worst record (and NBA's second-worst).
That's in sharp contrast to Warriors, who proved from the start they're California's best team, the league's best and, objectively speaking, history's best.
They started the season 24-0, far and away the best start in NBA history. The previous longest win streak to start a season was 15-0, by the 1948-49 Washington Capitols and 1993-94 Houston Rockets.
Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records The Boston Celtics celebrate after winning the NBA championship in June 2008. It was the 17th title for the Celtics -- the most in league history. Take a look back at some of the greatest records set in the NBA Finals. Hide Caption 1 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most NBA titles (player): Bill Russell, seen here with legendary coach Red Auerbach, won 11 titles in his 13 NBA seasons. The big man won all of them with Boston, starting in 1957 and ending in 1969. Hide Caption 2 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most career points in the NBA Finals: Nobody's scored more than Los Angeles Lakers guard Jerry West, who put up 1,679 points over nine NBA Finals. West and the Lakers usually ran into the buzz saw that was Boston in the 1960s, but they did win a title in 1972. Fun fact: The NBA logo is a silhouette of West. Hide Caption 3 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most points per game in an NBA Finals series: Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls won six NBA titles during his career. But "His Airness" might have been at his peak in 1993, when he averaged 41 points in a six-game victory over Dan Majerle and the Phoenix Suns. Hide Caption 4 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most points in an NBA Finals game: The Lakers' Elgin Baylor scored 61 points during a Finals game against Boston on April 14, 1962. The Lakers won that game but went on to lose the series in Game 7, pictured here. Hide Caption 5 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most common matchup in the NBA Finals: The Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers have played each other 12 times in the Finals. The Celtics won the first eight meetings, but the Lakers broke the streak in 1985 and 1987, pictured here. The teams also split a pair of Finals in the 21st century. While the Celtics have a league-best 17 titles, the Lakers are right behind them with 16. The Chicago Bulls are the next closest at six. Hide Caption 6 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most Finals MVP awards: Michael Jordan was named the Most Valuable Player for all six Finals he played in. The Bulls guard holds his 1998 award here next to head coach Phil Jackson. Hide Caption 7 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most 3-pointers made in an NBA Finals game: Golden State's Stephen Curry hit nine 3-pointers in Game 2 of the 2018 NBA Finals. He had 33 points as the Warriors took a 2-0 series lead over Cleveland. Hide Caption 8 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most assists in an NBA Finals game: The Lakers' Magic Johnson had 21 assists in Game 3 of the 1984 NBA Finals. Boston won the Finals that year, but Johnson and the Lakers got their revenge one year later. Hide Caption 9 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Lowest-seeded team to win it all: The 1995 Houston Rockets -- led by future Hall of Famers Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon -- were the Western Conference's sixth seed when they went on to win the title. The Rockets also won the championship in 1994. Hide Caption 10 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most blocks in an NBA Finals game: Dwight Howard blocks a shot by the Lakers' Pau Gasol during the 2009 NBA Finals. It was one of nine blocks the Orlando center had in Game 4. Hide Caption 11 of 12 Photos: NBA Finals: The greatest records Most steals in an NBA Finals game: They called him "Big Shot Bob" for his clutch shooting, but Robert Horry was a fierce defender as well. Horry had a record seven steals in Game 2 of the 1995 NBA Finals. Horry won seven titles during his career: two with the Houston Rockets, three with the Los Angeles Lakers and two with the San Antonio Spurs. Only one other player -- John Salley -- has won NBA titles with three different teams. Hide Caption 12 of 12
And what makes it all the more impressive is the Warriors dominated the first half of the season without their coach on the sideline. Kerr, who led the Warriors to a 67-15 record and the NBA championship last season, missed the first 43 games of the 82-game season because of complications from offseason back surgery. Luke Walton was the interim head coach until Kerr returned.
Golden State forward Draymond Green said he didn't think at the time that breaking the record was realistic, even after the 24-0 start. But once the Warriors won their 50th game, he realized they were still on pace and it was a real possibility.
Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr (right, talking to forward Draymond Green) was a member of the Chicago Bulls' 72-10 team in the 1995-96 season.
But even after breaking the record Wednesday night, there's still work to do.
"In Chicago, they have a championship banner that says 72-10," Green said before the game. "If we don't win a championship, we're not approaching a banner that says -- God willing -- 73-9, unless you win a championship. As bad as I want this record, we need to get something else to go along with it."Jan 22, 2013
Weberman Sentenced For Life
Brooklyn frum counselor Nechemya Weberman, 54, was sentenced to 103 years in prison for abusing a young girl.
By COLlive reporter
Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes Tuesday announced the sentencing of Nechemya Weberman to 103 years in prison for abusing a young girl over the course of 3 years.
Weberman, a Satmar chossid who counseled troubled youth, was convicted on the top count of Course of... Conduct Against a Child in the First Degree on December 10, 2012 before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice John Ingram.
"If there is one message to take away from this case it is that this office will pursue the evil of... abuse of a child no matter where it occurs in this county," Hynes said in a statement.
"The abuse of a child cannot be swept under the rug or dealt with by insular groups believing only they know what is best for their community.
"In this case it took the courage of a young woman to drive home the point that justice can only be achieved through the involvement of civil authorities charged with protecting all the people."
Weberman, 54, was counseling the victim beginning when she was 12. From 2007 to 2010, Weberman abused the girl multiple times, mostly in his office, according to the statement.
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Series of classes by therapist Chaim Itche Drizin:
Part 1: Untold Truth About Child Abuse
Part 2: Protecting Children From Abuse
Part 3: When a Child is a Victim
Part 4: Can a Molested Victim Ever Heal
Part 5: Why Does 1 in 20 Hurt Others?After the series of attacks Nov. 13 that killed at least 129 people in France, Iranian Minister of Intelligence Mahmoud Alavi is warning that the Islamic State could have its sights set on Iran.
At a Nov. 15 security conference in Tehran, Alavi warned that one of the most dangerous threats to Iran comes from the same terrorist group that attacked Beirut and Paris. While Alavi said Iran has taken the necessary precautions, he added, “The recent bombings are a serious warning to us that needs the consideration of specialists.”
Alavi did not say whether the potential threat emanates from inside Iran or from groups in neighboring countries.
Gen. Ahmad Reza Pourdestan, commanding officer of the Iranian army's ground forces, spoke Nov. 16 of concerns about having IS on Iran's western and eastern borders. He said attacks on Diyala province in Iraq, on Iran’s eastern border, led to the decision that if IS forces reach within 25 miles of Iran’s borders, its military will take action.
Pourdestan said that in northern Afghanistan, Taliban and IS forces have joined together to “invade Iran,” but he added that IS forces are currently unable to do so.
Iran has forces in Syria and Iraq, fighting both IS militants and armed groups that oppose the Syrian government. Iran says its soldiers are “advisers,” but dozens of Iranians have died since large-scale operations began in September. Pourdestan said these soldiers are from the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force but if necessary, the Iranian army is also prepared to send in soldiers.
Though Pourdestan speaks of a military campaign, the threat of IS attacking Iran from within is certainly possible. According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Iraq had warned France, the United States and Iran that IS had plans to attack inside their countries.
Iran has made a number of arrests that authorities claimed were related to IS. In June 2014, Iran’s Intelligence Ministry arrested 30 individuals it claimed were members of IS. In September, Turkish officials said three Iranians who had traveled to Turkey with the intention of joining IS in Syria were arrested.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani offered his condolences to France for the terror attacks. Hard-line Iranian officials and media have blamed Western policies in Iraq and Syria for the creation of IS. The head of Iran’s judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani, said Nov. 16 that US officials whose policies helped create IS should be tried. Hussein Amir-Abdollahian, deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs, said Nov. 16 that Iran had warned regional and Western countries that by supporting unrest in Syria, the "unrest would infect their own countries as well."
Some of the most shocking media coverage after the Paris attack came from the hard-line Persian-language daily Vatan-e Emrooz. The newspaper's front page showed a body on a Paris street, covered in a white sheet, with the headline, “Here you are, Shaam.” "Shaam,” a reference to Syria, also means "dinner" in Persian. The headline is from a popular show in Iran, “Here you are, dinner.” The subheadline, alluding to French support for fighters opposed to the Syrian government, read, “The West finally tasted its cooking in Syria.”The disgraceful judges of Britain’s High Court – who have gone along with torture, extraordinary rendition, every single argument for mass surveillance and hiding information from the public, and even secret courts – have ruled that it was lawful for the Home Office to detain David Miranda, a journalist as information he was carrying might in some undefined way, and if communicated to them, aid “terrorists”.
Despite the entire industry, both private and governmental, devoted to whipping up fear, it is plain to pretty well everyone by now that terrorism is about the most unlikely way for you to die. A car accident is many hundreds of times more likely. Even drowning in your own bath is more likely. Where is the massive industry of suppression against baths?
I had dinner inside the Ecuadorian Embassy on Sunday with Julian Assange, who I am happy to say is as fit and well as possible in circumstances of confinement. Amongst those present was Jesselyn Radack, attorney for, among others, Edward Snowden. Last week on entering the UK she was pulled over by immigration and interrogated about her clients. The supposed “immigration officer” already knew who are Jesselyn Radack’s clients. He insisted aggressively on referring repeatedly to Chelsea Manning as a criminal, to which Jesselyn quietly replied that he was a political prisoner. But even were we to accept the “immigration officer’s” assertion, the fact that an attorney defends those facing criminal charges is neither new nor until now considered reprehensible and illegitimate.
As various states slide towards totalitarianism, a defining factor is that their populations really don’t notice. Well, I have noticed. Have you?At least 13 states across the United States have introduced bills that seek to ban Islamic law this year, with Texas and Arkansas enacting "anti-Sharia" legislation, researchers have observed.
Researchers and critics fear that right-wing legislators are increasing anti-Muslim sentiment as Islamic law, known as "Sharia", was targeted by some 194 bills between 2010 and 2016, according to a report by the University of California, Berkeley's Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.
Of that total, 18 bills were signed into law in 12 different states.
"The anti-Sharia law movement, by way introducing and enacting anti-Sharia law bills across the United States, seeks to legalise the othering of Muslims, as well as to perpetuate a fear of Sharia, Islam and ultimately Muslims," said Basima Sisemore, a researcher and an author of Legalising Othering: The United States of Islamophobia.
In June, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law House Bill 45, which prevents the use of "foreign laws" in state courts, specifically in cases that entail marriage or legal issues regarding parents and their children.
Republican State Representative Jeff Leach and Representative Dan Flynn authored the bill. Neither replied to Al Jazeera's request for a comment by the time of publication.
The two legislators had introduced several versions of the bill in the past, but House Bill 45 was the first to be enacted.
Both Flynn and Leach have told media outlets that the law was not designed to single out Muslims.
Yet, in an April 2014 email (pdf) to his constituents, an apparently paranoid Flynn claimed that the British government had approved many "Muslim religious precepts" that institutionalise "discrimination against women and children".
He said: "There is no question the Judeo-Christian heritage we covet and aim to protect is under attack. We the American people must wake up and recognise the spiritual warfare raging in America."
House Bill 45 was signed into law four months after Arkansas enacted a similar bill, which also barred "foreign laws" in state courts.
'Threatens American democracy'
Sisemore argued that these bills have a negative effect on Muslims by stoking fear and bigotry at a time when US President Donald Trump is targeting the religious minority.
"The consequences of introducing or enacting anti-Muslim laws extend beyond the conspicuous intent to subvert Muslim Americans' citizenship and civil liberties, as has been demonstrated by the rise of anti-Sharia rallies that swept across the US in June of this year," she told Al Jazeera.
"The underlying reality is that anti-Muslim legislation threatens American democracy and the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans."
The underlying reality is that anti-Muslim legislation threatens American democracy and the civil and constitutional rights of all Americans. Basima Sisemore, researcher
In June, fewer than six months into Trump's presidency, rising Islamophic sentiment exploded and anti-Sharia rallies were held in some 28 cities across the country.
The marches were called by ACT for America, which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) watchdog describes as the largest grassroots anti-Muslim group in the US.
Claiming to have more than 500,000 members, ACT for America supports Trump.
Its members have campaigned for strict legislation that targets Muslims and refugees in recent years.
Those rallies drew the participation of white supremacists, armed militia groups and neo-Nazis.
Yet, participants of the anti-Sharia marches were massively outnumbered by counter-protesters, among them anti-racists and anti-fascists who clashed with the anti-Muslim demonstrators.
'Unfairly targeted and vilified'
Critics accuse Trump of inciting anti-Muslim sentiment.
One of the president's first executive orders barred travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Iran and Yemen.
The measure sparked large protests at airports in several cities and was later struck down in court. Trump, who denied accusations that the ban targeted Muslims, introduced an updated version of the order that excluded Iraq.
Yet, as the US Supreme Court was preparing to consider its legality this month, Trump signed a revised executive order that dropped Sudan and added Venezuela, North Korea and Chad.
During Trump's presidential campaign, he vowed to put a freeze on Muslims entering the country and refused to rule out creating a database to track American Muslims.
Although the anti-Sharia movement was born in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001, critics say Trump has effectively energised it.
Nathan Lean, author of the Islamophobia Industry, argued that Trump's rhetoric has "unfairly targeted and vilified Islam's followers with half-truths, outright lies and blatant incitement".
Speaking to Al Jazeera by email, Lean said that uptick in anti-Sharia laws is part of a concerted effort "to nurture an atmosphere of extreme scorn in which Muslims are seen as the enemy".
He added: "Once [Muslims] are branded as such, it becomes easier to persecute them, and violence towards them - which we have seen - is a natural consequence of this."
Hate crimes on the rise
In the 10 days following Trump's election alone, there was an average of 87 hate incidents a day, according to the SPLC. Many of these incidents involved racist rhetoric or violence that targeted Muslims.
Although the rate of such incidents has since levelled off, hate crimes have not stopped.
In a report published in July, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found that the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes increased by 94 percent during the first six months of 2017.
On September 16, a passenger attacked a Muslim Lyft driver in Evergreen, Washington. As he hit and choked the driver, the assailant yelled: "Where the f*** do you come from?"
The local CAIR chapter has called on police to investigate the incident as a hate crime.
That same month, a Lyft driver of Middle Eastern heritage in Houston, Texas, was physically and verbally assaulted by a passenger. The assailant, 39-year-old Matthew Dunn, was subsequently charged with a hate crime.
Corey Saylor, director of CAIR's Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia, accused Trump of "whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment".
"Trump's deployment of anti-Muslim sentiment during the election campaign had a significant contributing factor [in the rise of hate crimes]," he told Al Jazeera by telephone, "and I wouldn't say he has since let up on it."
Follow Patrick Strickland on Twitter: @P_Strickland_Crackdown On a January morning this year, James Risen wrapped his navy wool coat tight against the cold as he walked into the front entrance of the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. He had fought for more than seven years, and all the way to the Supreme Court, to avoid this moment. Now that the day had come, he was in fact early and sat alone on a bench in the vast hallway outside U.S. district-court judge Leonie Brinkema’s courtroom. His lawyer Joel Kurtzberg ushered him inside. A pre-trial hearing in the matter of United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling was now in session. Noting that the government had subpoenaed Risen, Judge Brinkema asked him to take the stand shortly before 11 o’clock. He did so, sitting with an expression somewhere between hostility and boredom, his gaze fixed in front of him. The person nearest to Risen, other than the bailiff, was the defendant, Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. agent who faced 10 felony counts, including 7 under the Espionage Act, for allegedly leaking confidential secrets to Risen for his 2006 book, State of War. Sterling’s case had been on hold for years, awaiting Risen’s testimony—which Risen, a New York Times reporter, had fought to withhold, potentially on pain of imprisonment. The prosecutors thought they had won their battle after the Supreme Court, in June 2014, declined to consider Risen’s appeal. But just weeks before this pre-trial hearing, they had seemingly been undercut by their boss, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder, who did not authorize them to ask Risen to identify confidential sources—a move that may not have been as conciliatory as it appears. But Assistant U.S. Attorney James Trump and the prosecution still wanted Risen to confirm some basic facts—facts they could methodically combine with other facts into a compelling circumstantial case. Trump asked Risen to confirm that he was the author of his own book, as well as of several articles that bore his byline. Risen responded with barely disguised disdain. Trump then asked Risen if he had any confidentiality agreements with his sources for a key chapter in State of War. Risen carefully repeated—nearly verbatim—what he had written in a 2011 affidavit, which was that he had used both identified sources and confidential sources for his reporting, period. Trump asked the question again, and Risen gave the same reply. After two more rounds of this, Trump allowed a long pause, and then testily asked, “Do you understand the question I’m asking you, sir?” Risen replied, “I do.” Then he repeated his answer. Judge Brinkema broke in and told Risen, “It’s a simple question”—either he had confidentiality agreements with his sources or he didn’t. Risen didn’t budge. “That’s not my interpretation of the question,” he said. “I don’t want to provide information to help the government create a mosaic to establish certain facts in this case.” Read more: Subscribe now for access. The full issue is available March 11 in the digital editions and March 17 on national newsstands. In narrow terms, the trial centered on Sterling. But Risen regards the government’s pursuit of his own testimony as punishment for his coverage of policies that have defined the country since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Risen has much journalistic company. In recent years, the news pages have not been filled with stories about prison time for the architects of the 2008 financial meltdown. But journalists as a group have been pursued as never before. The track record of the Obama administration—which has invoked the rarely utilized 1917 Espionage Act, enacted during World War I to deal with spies, to prosecute current and former government employees for sharing information with the press—is a surprising one for a team that in its early days promised increased openness and stronger protections for whistle-blowers. By Kevin Wolf/A.P. Images In May 2013, Obama’s Justice Department informed the Associated Press that it had, over a period of two months, seized records for more than 20 phone lines associated with the agency’s staff. Soon after, it seized phone records and e-mails between a Fox News reporter and a State Department contractor. It has investigated the relationship between multiple New York Times and Washington Post reporters and their government sources. President Obama said that he was “troubled” by the impact his administration’s leak prosecutions could have on the press, and in response the Justice Department recently revised its policies on how it obtains information from reporters. The revisions raise the bar that investigators must clear to seize a journalist’s records in some cases. But there are gaping loopholes that leave journalists and their sources vulnerable. Meanwhile, the leak investigations continue across the country. In late 2014, Eric Holder, the outgoing U.S. attorney general, signed off on a subpoena request for a 60 Minutes producer, only to pull back upon learning that the producer planned to resist. The cases cited above are some of the most high profile—others are doubtless under way but remain secret—and also don’t include cases at the state level or those involving independent writers and activists. In that category, Barrett Brown, an author and freelance journalist who reported frequently on the hacker collective Anonymous, was in January 2015 sentenced to 63 months in prison after admitting to threatening an F.B.I. agent and linking to information hacked by Anonymous. The cases have occurred as the government confronts “mega-leaks” of classified information—by the organization WikiLeaks and by N.S.A. contractor Edward Snowden. Journalists such as the independent filmmaker Laura Poitras, who reported on WikiLeaks and the Snowden documents, and David Miranda, who transported information related to the Snowden material, have undergone border harassment at the hands of both U.S. and British authorities. Since 2009, six current or former government employees and two government contractors have been indicted or prosecuted under the Espionage Act for leaking information to the public. There were only three such prosecutions under all previous U.S. presidents combined since 1917. Several former Justice Department lawyers and other administration officials say that there has been no deliberate crackdown on leakers and no specific intention of targeting journalists. As they explain it, the increased focus on journalists and their sources is simple mathematics. These days, there is an unprecedented amount of classified information in government vaults; leaks are inevitably more frequent—and so, therefore, are prosecutions. Moreover, because the information is often digital, the pathways are easier to track and cases are easier to build. Risen, government officials say, was swept up in this dynamic, but there was no particular campaign against reporters. Risen himself believes otherwise. Shortly after Dennis C. Blair was appointed as the director of national intelligence, in 2009, he asked for a list of government officials who had been prosecuted for leaking classified government information. While there had been 153 cases referred to the Justice Department in the previous four years, not a single referral had led to an indictment. That meager tally, according to Mr. Blair’s comments to The New York Times in 2013, “was pretty shocking to all of us.” He went on to describe a series of meetings and phone calls with Attorney General Holder in which they fashioned a more aggressive strategy to punish leaks. “My background is in the Navy,” Blair was quoted as saying, “and it is good to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others.” Whatever the government’s motivation, seeking Risen’s cooperation was a fool’s errand. “Most |
Mark 10:31); and yes, through the “good” death of God’s Son, humanity can receive true life (Rom 5:10).As indicated in the explanation of the determination of the national average wage index (AWI), the latest annual change in the "raw" average wages is applied to the last AWI to obtain the next one. Such raw average wages are the average amounts of net compensation (as distinct from total employee compensation) listed in the table below.
An average is just one measure of central tendency for any set of data. Another measure is a median. For our wage data, the median wage (or net compensation) is the wage "in the middle." That is, half of the workers earned below this level. The table below shows that the median wage is substantially less than the average wage. The reason for the difference is that the distribution of workers by wage level is highly skewed.View Caption Hide Caption Former Miami Dolphins cornerback Will Allen, shown stretching before a 2009 game. (Damon Higgins/The Palm Beach Post)
Former Miami Dolphins cornerback Will Allen committed 23 federal felonies and faces decades in prison, according to an indictment issued last week by the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts.
Already facing federal civil charges, Allen, 36, was arrested last month on criminal charges of defrauding investors. The indictment seeks to ring up Allen on 12 counts of wire fraud, six counts of aggravated identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and four counts of illegal monetary transactions.
If convicted, Allen faces up to 20 years on each charge of wire fraud and shorter sentences for the other felonies. At a hearing Monday, Allen pleaded not guilty.
Allen, who also played for the New York Giants and now lives in Davie, ran a company that made high-interest, short-term loans to professional athletes. To fund the loans, he raised money from investors. However, the loans were phony, federal prosecutors say.
The indictment says Allen fabricated five loans, three to football players and two to baseball players. He raised money from investors to fund the phantom loans but used the proceeds for various expenses, prosecutors say.
A sixth loan, to the NHL’s Jack Johnson, was legit, but Allen inflated the amount in documents he provided investors. Allen loaned $3.4 million to Johnson — the Columbus Blue Jackets defenseman who filed for bankruptcy last year — but said the loan was for $5.65 million.
The FBI says most of the fraudulent proceeds went to Allen, including $4.1 million to Allen personally and $61,080 to casinos where Allen had accounts. The feds say Allen’s accomplice, Susan Daub, received $239,000. Daub is accused of committing 20 felonies; she also pleaded not guilty.
See more coverage:
Will Allen stiffed Pro Player Funding on a high-interest loan in 2010. In 2012, he started a company making high-interest loans to pro athletes.
Allen calls Jack Johnson deadbeat, Johnson calls Allen loan shark.
Former Dolphin Bryant McKinnie also defaulted on high-interest loan.
Read the SEC complaint.Two of the most famous street art murals in Berlin are under threat of destruction. The buildings on which the murals were painted are to be bulldozed in order to make room for a new housing development, reported the Local.
The murals, located on Curvystraße in the city’s Kreuzberg district were painted by the Italian street artist Blu in 2007 and 2008 (see “Berlin’s Top 5 Graffiti and Street Art Murals“). One mural depicts a headless man straightening his tie and wearing gold watches on both wrists connected by a chain. The second shows two figures trying to unmask each other one twists his fingers into a ‘W’ (West) and the other into an ‘E’ (East).
According to the Local, the real-estate investor Artur Süsskind and architectural firm Langhof plan to tear down the buildings and replace them with 250 apartments, a kindergarten, a supermarket, and an open air terrace facing the Spree River.
Meanwhile an online petition was started by Berliner Jascha Herr, calling for the artworks to be protected under Germany’s monument protection statute. Herr writes in his petition:
The city of Berlin loves to promote its alternative scene—and more precisely the cultural value of its artists—but it simultaneously discards them. It is simply about selling to investors who only see personal profit in the alternative landmarks of the city. But the cultural identity of the city belongs to all of us.
A spokeswoman from the senate department of urban development, Petra Rohland, told Der Tagesspiegel that monument protection can only be granted if the buildings and artworks are of historical, urban, or cultural significance. She added that the most recent sites granted monument status are from the 1970s. “Perhaps this street art is simply to young,” she speculated.
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Creative Building Children 4 years old or more Lego 2006–2008
Lego Adventurers Adventurers, exploration Egypt (1998–1999)
Amazon (1999)
Dino (2000)
Orient Expedition (2003) Lego 1999–2003
Lego Agents Agents Lego 2008–2009
Lego Alpha Team Spies Lego 2001–2005
Lego The Angry Birds Movie The Angry Birds Movie Columbia Pictures 2016
Lego Aqua Raiders Underwater exploration Lego 2007
Lego Aquazone Underwater exploration Aquanauts (1995–1996)
Aquasharks (1995-1996)
Aquaraiders (1997)
Hydronauts (1998)
Stingrays (1998) Lego 1995–1999
Lego Atlantis Underwater exploration Lego 2010–2011
Lego Baby Baby Lego 1983–1990, 2000–2001, 2004–2005
Lego Belville Girl-oriented Lego 1994–2009
Lego Ben 10 Ben 10 buildable figures Cartoon Network 2010–2011
Lego Bricks and More Children 4 years old or more Lego 2009-2010
Bionicle Buildable figures Lego 2001–2010, 2015–2016
Lego Castle Castle Classic Castle (1978–1979, 1983)
Black Falcons (1984–1992, 2003)
Crusaders (1984–1992)
Forestmen (1987–1992)
Black Knights (1988–1996)
Wolfpack (1992–1994, 2003)
Dragon Masters (1993–1995, 1998)
Royal Knights (1995–1997, 2003)
Dark Forest (1996)
Fright Knights (1997–1998)
Knights' Kingdom (2000)
Knights' Kingdom II (2004–2006)
Castle (2007–2009)
Kingdoms (2010–2012)
Castle (2013–2014) Lego 1978–2014
Lego Clikits Girl's jewelry Beads
Accessories Lego 2003–2006
Lego Dacta Education Duplo
Technic Lego 1972–2011
Lego Dino Dinosaurs Lego 2012
Lego Dino Attack Dinosaurs Lego 2005
Lego Discovery Discovery Channel Discovery Channel 2003
Lego Fabuland Fabuland Lego 1979–1989
Lego Fusion Lego 2012–2014[3]
Lego Galidor Galidor Lego / Tom Lynch Company 2002
Lego Games Board games Heroica Lego 2009–2013
Lego Harry Potter Harry Potter Philosopher's Stone
Chamber of Secrets
Prisoner of Azkaban
Goblet of Fire
Order of the Phoenix
Half-Blood Prince
Deathly Hallows Warner Bros. 2001–2007, 2010–2011
Hero Factory Hero Factory Lego 2010–2014
Lego Homemaker Lego 1971–1982
Lego Island Xtreme Stunts Stunt performers Lego 2001–2003
Lego Jack Stone Juniorized action sets Lego 2001–2002
Lego The Lego Movie The Lego Movie Lego/ Warner Bros. 2014–2015
Lego Little Robots Little Robots CBeebies 2003–2006
Lego Master Builder's Academy Master Builder's Academy Lego 2011–2013
Mixels Small creatures Series 1–9 Lego 2014–2016
Lego Model Team Advanced vehicle models Lego 1986, 1990–1999, 2004, 2006
Lego Monster Fighters Monster Fighters Lego 2012–2013
Lego Ninja Ninjas Lego 1998–2000
Lego Pharaoh's Quest Pharaoh's Quest Lego 2010–2011
Lego Pirates Pirates Imperial Soldiers (1989–1991)
Pirates (1989–1997, 2009)
Imperial Guards (1992–1995, 2009)
Islanders (1994–1995, 2001)
Imperial Armada (1996–1997, 2001)
Pirates (2009)
Pirates (2015) Lego 1989-1997,
2001,
2009,
2015
Lego Power Miners Mining, underground monsters Lego 2009–2010
Lego Quatro Quatro Lego 2004–2006
Lego Racers Racing Xalax
Drome Racers
Radio Control
Willams F1
Power Racers
Ferrari
Tiny Turbos
Lamborghini
Air Stomper Lego, Lamborghini, Ferrari 2001–2012
Lego RoboRiders Motorcycle-based robots Lego 1999–2001
Lego Rock Raiders Mining, underground monsters Lego 1999–2000
Lego Scala Jewelry (1979–1980)
Ball-jointed dolls (1997–2001) Lego 1979–1980, 1997–2001
Slizer/Throwbots Buildable action figures Lego 1999–2000
Lego Space Space exploration Classic Space (1978–1988)
Blacktron (1987–1990)
Futuron (1987–1990)
Space Police I (1989–1991)
M-Tron (1990–1993)
Blacktron Future Generation (1991–1992)
Space Police II (1992–1993, 1998)
Ice Planet 2002 (1993–1995, 1999)
Unitron (1994–1995)
Spyrius (1994–1996, 1999)
Exploriens (1996–1997)
Roboforce (1997)
UFO (1996–1999)
Insectoids (1998–1999)
Life On Mars (2001–2002)
Mars Mission (2006–2009)
Space Police III (2009–2010)
Alien Conquest (2011–2012)
Galaxy Squad (2012–2013) Lego 1978–2013
Lego SpongeBob SquarePants SpongeBob SquarePants Nickelodeon 2006–2012
Lego Spybotics Spy-based robotics Lego 2003
Lego Time Travels Time Cruisers Time Cruisers (1996)
Time Twisters (1997) Lego 1996–1997
Lego Ultra Agents Agents Lego 2014–2015
Lego Vikings Vikings Lego 2005–2007
Lego Wild West Wild West Lego 1996–1997, 2002
Lego Williams F1 Williams F1 Williams F1 2002–2003
Lego Winnie the Pooh Winnie-the-Pooh Disney 1999–2001, 2011
Lego World Racers World Racers Lego 2010The tides rise and fall in the life of a professional fighter and this is a reality Al Iaquinta has come to know well. Yet, rather than sit and wait for the next break to roll in, the New York native has decided to push ahead on his own terms.The Ultimate Fighter alum turned top-15 lightweight made headlines late last year by taking a self-imposed exile from fighting based on unhappiness over his current contract. In turn Iaquinta took up a job as a real estate agent, and the start of that career did what it could to take his mind away from the MMA world.Earning an honest living without taking the hard knock bumps and bruises of the fight game held plenty of appeal, and it's been a break enjoyed in full."I'm kind of playing it day by day," Iaquinta told FloCombat. "I'm enjoying doing the real estate thing and been doing it for six months and making almost as much money as I am fighting, which killed my body and I spent 10 years doing. I don't know to be honest. You have to weigh out what's worth it, you know?"Yet in turn, Iaquinta is, has been, and will always be a fighter at his core, and a break in the tides of life brought him back to familiar ground. He'll face Diego Sanchez at UFC Fight Night 108 in Nashville on April 22, but scrapping with "The Nightmare" isn't a full fledged dive back into the fold.The fight is simply good enough for right now, and Iaquinta will base his future as it comes."I just feel like fighting right now," Iaquinta said. "That's really what it is. Back in November I was busy training for a fight, had bills to pay and needed to start making money. Things are a bit different now. I've found some success in the real estate world, and I'm pretty motivated doing that. I have a bit more space to get in there and do some training. I'm excited about that."I hate that I'm the co-main event and getting paid what I am, but I love fighting. I used to do it for next to nothing because I loved it. I'm going in there to have fun and see what happens."While there is uncertainty aplenty in Iaquinta's long-term future in the fight game, there is absolutely zero question the caliber of fight he'll have on his hands in Tennessee.For the past decade plus, Sanchez has been going to war with the best fighters the lightweight and welterweight divisions have to offer, and his tenacious aggression hasn't faltered in the slightest despite the battles waged.Iaquinta appreciates and respects everything Sanchez brings to the table and is looking forward to scrapping it out with the UFC staple."I'm fighting an absolute lunatic," Iaquinta laughed. "I'm fully aware of that and that's cool with me. I dig it. He's f*cking nuts but he's won a lot of fights. I met the guy and I like him. We met one night in the city because we were both sponsored by Torque. We talked about his upcoming fight against Joe Lauzon at the time and I told him how to beat Joe since I'd just done it. Diego didn't listen, but what can you do?"During a recent stop on the #FCRoadTrip tour, FloCombat sat down with Sanchez in his native Albuquerque. During the interview Sanchez showed ample respect for Iaquinta, especially the Serra-Longo product's no-nonsense approach to duking it out inside the Octagon. It's a point Iaquinta recognizes and embraces as he makes his return to the cage."No bullsh*t, just fighting," Iaquinta said. "That's it for me, and how nice would that be if it were how things were? Doesn't it suck things aren't as simple as they should be with this? I think so."I think if I fight my fight and work a similar game plan as I did against Joe [Lauzon] the win will come. Myles Jury also took him down a lot and I've been working hard on my wrestling. The only trouble I get into is when I get a little crazy on the ground, but I haven't shown anything yet compared to what I'm capable of doing in my ground game."I think Diego is definitely a guy I could do that against because after watching the Myles fight it's a big possibility," he continued. "It's going to be a fun fight and we'll see what happens after that."Hey everyone,
This week we're bringing you the drop tables for Legios, God Wars Dungeon 2 and Nex. We hope you enjoy reading about how they work!
Legios
It's worth explaining some of the misdirection surrounding Legios before the drop rate is revealed. On launch, the drop chance for getting an Ascension Signet from a Legio was 1/64, but we later hotfixed this silently to it's current rate as we weren't getting as many in-game as we wanted (amount of people killing Legios was fine). In trying to not cause a mass panic sale, we were a little coy about confirming the new drop rate.
1/50 chance to get an Ascension Signet from each Legio
1/2,056 chance at Ascension grips (can only drop on a Slayer task)
1/64 chance at Ascension keystones from any Ascension creature, except from Scutarius where its 1/50 chance. There is also an equal chance for each keystone regardless of type.
God Wars Dungeon 2
This drop table is a little bit complicated so I'll try and explain it as simply as I can. All four God Wars Dungeon 2 bosses "share" the same drop rate for rare items, and that drop rate is affected by either Reputation, Challenge Mode or wearing Ring of Fortune/Luck of the Dwarves equally.
There are two random numbers created for rare items within God Wars Dungeon; there is the roll for uniques which we'll call Unique Roll and a roll for the different boss essences which we'll call Essence Roll..
The base chance for both rolls are:
1/512 chance for a particular unique item from a boss (Anima core armour, weapons etc)
1/128 chance for boss essence
Reputation changes
God Wars Dungeon 2 has a number of different unlocks that affect the drop chance from bosses. There's the 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% upgrades, depending on your reputation with a particular faction. It's worth noting, although obvious, that having a 100% drop chance increase on Helwyr doesn't impact any other boss.
So what happens is that we change both Unique Roll and Essence Roll depending on what your reputation is to the below values. (Reputation unlock = Unique Roll and Essence Roll)
0% bonus = 512 and 128
25% bonus = 448 and 112
50% bonus = 384 and 96
75% bonus = 320 and 80
100% bonus = 256 and 64
Challenge Mode
If the fight was in Challenge Mode, it also infers a better chance at both Unique Roll and Essence Roll after reputation bonuses have been applied.
What happens is that the roll we got from the reputation is again further scaled in Challenge Mode with a slight buff. Here are all of the calculations on the numbers. "Loot bonus" is the extra % buff that you have from reputation. For example, if you had 50% drop increase then your Loot bonus would be 50.
Unique Roll
0% bonus = 512 * ((90 - (loot bonus/5))/100) which is 512 * ((90 - 0) / 100) = 460
25% bonus = 448 * ((90 - (Loot bonus/5))/100) which is 448 * (90 - 5) / 100) = 380
50% bonus = 384 * ((90 - (Loot bonus/5))/100) which is 384 * (90 - 10) / 100) = 307
75% bonus = 320 * ((90 - (Loot bonus/5))/100) which is 320 * (90 - 15) / 100) = 240
100% bonus = 256 * ((90 - (loot bonus/5))/100) which is 256 * (90 - 20) / 100) = 179
Essence Roll
0% bonus = 128 * ((90 - (loot bonus/5))/100) which is 128 * ((90 - 0) / 100) = 115
25% bonus = 112 * ((90 - (Loot bonus/5))/100) which is 112 * (90 - 5) / 100) = 95
50% bonus = 96 * ((90 - (Loot bonus/5))/100) which is 96 * (90 - 10) / 100) = 76
75% bonus = 80 * ((90 - (Loot bonus/5))/100) which is 80 * (90 - 15) / 100) = 60
100% bonus = 64 * ((90 - (loot bonus/5))/100) which is 64 * (90 - 20) / 100) = 44
Luck Interaction
If you're wearing Ring of Fortune or Luck of the Dwarves, a further 1% is taken off the numbers after all other bonuses have been applied. Here that is for all of the different reputation thresholds, on and off Challenge Mode.
Unique Roll - Normal Mode
0% bonus = 512 * 0.99 = 506
25% bonus = 448 * 0.99 = 443
50% bonus = 384 * 0.99 = 380
75% bonus = 320 * 0.99 = 316
100% bonus = 256 * 0.99 = 253
Essence Roll - Normal Mode
0% bonus = 128 * 0.99 = 126
25% bonus = 112 * 0.99 = 110
50% bonus = 96 * 0.99 = 95
75% bonus = 80 * 0.99 = 79
100% bonus = 64 * 0.99 = 63
Unique Roll - Challenge Mode
0% bonus = 460 * 0.99 = 455
25% bonus = 380 * 0.99 = 376
50% bonus = 307 * 0.99 = 303
75% bonus = 240 * 0.99 = 237
100% bonus = 179 * 0.99 = 177
Essence Roll - Challenge Mode
0% bonus = 115 * 0.99 = 113
25% bonus = 95 * 0.99 = 94
50% bonus = 76 * 0.99 = 75
75% bonus = 60 * 0.99 = 59
100% bonus = 44 * 0.99 = 43
The chance for a rare is 1/Unique Roll depending on the different number of bonuses applied to it, and the same for boss essence being 1/Essence Roll. This means that a chance at any unique item from a GWD2 boss is X/177 with all of the bonuses applied where X is the number of uniques available from the boss.
This means that the best chance at unique items from GWD2 is by having maxed out reputation bonus for drop chances, in challenge mode and wearing a tier 3 luck ring or higher is:
1/177 chance at a particular unique item
1/43 chance at that boss' essence
Nex
1/50 chance for Ancient emblem if you have an appopriate defender
1/128 for Torva Helm, Body or Legs
1/128 for Pernix Helm, Body or Legs
1/128 for Virtus Helm, Body or Legs
1/128 for Zaryte Bow, Virtus Wand or Book
1/128 for Torva, Pernix or Virtus Boots
1/128 for Torva, Pernix or Virtus Gloves
Just for some fun, here are the chances at getting Saradomin Brews and Super Restores from Nex. There are two separate rolls!
7/128 chance for 30 4 dose Super Restores and 10 4 dose Saradomin brews
29/128 chance for 30 4 dose Saradomin brews and 10 4 dose Super Restores
Thank you for reading this week's drop rate announcement. Next week we're going to be revealing Raids, God Wars Dungeon 1, Kalphite Queen and Chaos Elemental!!
Mod Timbo and the RuneScape Team
Mod Timbo | Senior Game Designer & Balancer
| Senior Game Designer & Balancer @JagexTimbo on Twitter! on Twitter!American baseball player
Andrew James Van Slyke (born December 21, 1960) is an American retired Major League Baseball (MLB) center fielder.
Career [ edit ]
Van Slyke earned All-American honors in baseball as a senior at New Hartford Central High school in New Hartford, New York.
He was drafted in the first round (sixth overall pick) of the 1979 Major League Baseball amateur draft by the St. Louis Cardinals. Called up from the AAA Louisville Redbirds, he made his Major League debut with the Cardinals on June 17, 1983, collecting a double, a run batted in (RBI) and making three putouts in the outfield without an error.[1]
In 1985, he was one of five Cardinals to steal at least 30 bases. He stole 34 that season, part of the "Whiteyball" era.
The first two years of his career Van Slyke played first base, third base and all three outfield positions. He mostly played right field the next two years on the strength of his throwing arm, occasionally platooning with Tito Landrum, sometimes substituting for Willie McGee in center field. On September 21, 1986, he hit a rare inside-the-park home run.[2] During spring training 1987, he was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates along with left-handed hitting catcher Mike LaValliere and minor league pitcher Mike Dunne for catcher Tony Peña. The trade occurred on April 1, with Van Slyke initially believing that it was an April Fools' Day joke.[3] In Pittsburgh, he mostly played center field alongside stars Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla.
During the 1991 Gulf War, when the MLB decreed all players would wear both the Canadian and U.S. flags on their batting helmets as a patriotic gesture, Van Slyke scraped the Maple Leaf off his helmet, stating "I guess the people in Quebec won't be upset because the last time we were there they booed [the Canadian] Nation Anthem". MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent ordered that the Canadian flag decal be reinserted onto the helmet.[4]
Once Van Slyke became a full-time outfielder, he showed off one of the most accurate and powerful throwing arms in the majors, so much that the "Slyke Zone" was established at Three Rivers Stadium. From 1985 to 1994, he was frequently among the league leaders in outfield assists. From 1985 to 1988, he posted seasons of 13, 10, 11, and 12 assists, respectively. As center fielder for the Pirates, he won five consecutive Gold Gloves from 1988 to 1992.
Van Slyke with Detroit
Van Slyke played for four teams in his career: the St. Louis Cardinals (1983–1986), Pittsburgh Pirates (1987–1994), Baltimore Orioles (1995), and Philadelphia Phillies (1995). He played his final game on October 1, 1995. In his 13-year career, Van Slyke appeared in three All-Star games (1988, 1992, 1993), won five Gold Glove Awards, two Silver Slugger Awards, and ranked in the top 10 in many offensive categories in varying seasons.
Prior to the 2006 season, Van Slyke was named first base coach for the Detroit Tigers by manager Jim Leyland, under whom he had played in Pittsburgh. Van Slyke served in that capacity on Leyland's staff for four years through the 2009 season.
When Lloyd McClendon was named the Seattle Mariners' manager prior to the 2014 season, Van Slyke was hired to be the team's first base coach. He also worked as the assistant hitting coach and outfield instructor through the 2015 season.
Transactions [ edit ]
June 5, 1979: Drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in the first round (6th pick) of the 1979 amateur draft.
April 1, 1987: Traded by the St. Louis Cardinals with Mike Dunne and Mike LaValliere to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Tony Peña.
October 21, 1994: Granted free agency.
April 21, 1995: Signed as a free agent with the Baltimore Orioles.
June 18, 1995: Traded by the Baltimore Orioles to the Philadelphia Phillies for Gene Harris.
November 3, 1995: Granted free agency.[5]
Salaries [ edit ]
1983: St. Louis Cardinals: $35,000
1984: St. Louis Cardinals: $40,000
1985: St. Louis Cardinals: $170,000
1986: St. Louis Cardinals: $335,000
1987: Pittsburgh Pirates: $550,000
1988 # : Pittsburgh Pirates: $825,000
: Pittsburgh Pirates: $825,000 1989: Pittsburgh Pirates: $2,150,000
1990: Pittsburgh Pirates: $1,200,000
1991: Pittsburgh Pirates: $2,180,000
1992 # : Pittsburgh Pirates: $4,350,000 (Including $100,000 earned bonus)
: Pittsburgh Pirates: $4,350,000 (Including $100,000 earned bonus) 1993 # : Pittsburgh Pirates: $4,900,000 (Including $250K signing bonus and $50K earned bonus)
: Pittsburgh Pirates: $4,900,000 (Including $250K signing bonus and $50K earned bonus) 1994: Pittsburgh Pirates: $3,550,000 (Including $250K signing bonus)
1995: Baltimore Orioles: $600,000 (including $50,000 earned bonus)
1995: Philadelphia Phillies: Undetermined
# = MLB All-Star Game selection
Hall of Fame candidacy [ edit ]
Van Slyke became eligible for the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001. 75% of the vote was necessary for induction, and 5% was necessary to stay on the ballot. Of the 32 total candidates,[6] Van Slyke received no votes and was eliminated from future BBWAA voting.[7]
Career after baseball [ edit ]
Having retired from baseball, Van Slyke has begun pursuing a career as an author, focusing on books centered on baseball. In 2009, he authored Tiger Confidential: The Untold Inside Story of the 2008 Season (with co-author Jim Hawkins). In July 2010, he published The Curse: Cubs Win! Cubs Win! Or Do They? (with co-author Rob Rains), a book in the subgenre sports fiction about the Chicago Cubs finally breaking their one hundred year curse and playing in the World Series.
Personal life [ edit ]
Van Slyke has four sons, three of whom played college or professional sports. Scott Van Slyke has played for the Los Angeles Dodgers and as of 2018 plays for the Doosan Bears of the KBO league;[8] Jared Van Slyke was a defensive back on the University of Michigan football team;[9] and A. J. Van Slyke played baseball for the University of Kansas and for four seasons in the St. Louis Cardinals' minor league system.[10]
He attended New Hartford Central High School in New Hartford, New York, Class of 1979. His father was the school's principal.[11]
See also [ edit ]How to skip the introduction of a Youtube video?
To view directly a part of a video that you feel relevant to your visitors, or to skip an introduction that is too long and intrusive, a parameter must complete the code to embed provided by Youtube.
&start=a number of secondes
The number of seconds is displayed on the video panel.
This option must be added to both URLs, so that the complete reader has this form:
<object width="425" height="344"> <param name="movie" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/G4evlxq34og&hl=fr&fs=1&start=190"> </param> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param> <embed src="https://www.youtube.com/v/G4evlxq34og&hl=fr&fs=1&start=190" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"> </embed> </object>
Demonstration:
This demonstration gives explanation about a commercial exoskeleton that multiplies your force by 5 or allows disabled people to walk.
Consider the case where you do not want to embed the video in a page but put a link on the video instead, you have to options.
Use a parameter recognized by Youtube:
#t=3m20s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4evlxq34og#t=3m20s
The parameter is a number of minutes followed by the m letter and a number of seconds followed by the s letter.
HAL-5, démonstration.
Update June 2011
Now is possible to display a menu with the right mouse button and to save the URL of the video with a starting time.
This tutorial is now deprecated for an URL, but it remains useful to know how to modify the starting time when the readed is embedded in the page.The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has issued a warning alerting users about malware that targets the Android mobile operating system.
Image via Android Police.
When purchasing a Smartphone, know the features of the device, including the default settings. Turn off features of the device not needed to minimize the attack surface of the device.
Depending on the type of phone, the operating system may have encryption available. This can be used to protect the user's personal data in the case of loss or theft.
With the growth of the application market for mobile devices, users should look at the reviews of the developer/company who published the application.
Review and understand the permissions you are giving when you download applications.
Passcode protect your mobile device. This is the first layer of physical security to protect the contents of the device. In conjunction with the passcode, enable the screen lock feature after a few minutes of inactivity.
Obtain malware protection for your mobile device. Look for applications that specialize in antivirus or file integrity that helps protect your device from rogue applications and malware.
Be aware of applications that enable Geo-location. The application will track the user's location anywhere. This application can be used for marketing, but can be used by malicious actors raising concerns of assisting a possible stalker and/or burglaries.
Jailbreak or rooting is used to remove certain restrictions imposed by the device manufacturer or cell phone carrier. This allows the user nearly unregulated control over what programs can be installed and how the device can be used. However, this procedure often involves exploiting significant security vulnerabilities and increases the attack surface of the device. Anytime a user, application or service runs in "unrestricted" or "system" level within an operation system, it allows any compromise to take full control of the device.
Do not allow your device to connect to unknown wireless networks. These networks could be rogue access points that capture information passed between your device and a legitimate server.
If you decide to sell your device or trade it in, make sure you wipe the device (reset it to factory default) to avoid leaving personal data on the device.
Smartphones require updates to run applications and firmware. If users neglect this it increases the risk of having their device hacked or compromised.
Avoid clicking on or otherwise downloading software or links from unknown sources.
Use the same precautions on your mobile phone as you would on your computer when using the Internet.
The intelligence note from the IC3 was issued last week, and highlighted on Monday by Apple 2.0. It noted there are various forms of malware out in the wild that attack Android devices.Two forms of malware cited byt he IC3 are Loozfon, which steals information from users, and FinFisher, which can give nefarious hackers control over a user's device.Loozfon can lure in victims by promising users a work-at-home opportunity in exchange for sending out an e-mail. Visiting a link in the e-mail will push Loozfon to the user's device, allowing the malware to steal contact details from the device's address book.The FinFisher spyware highlighted by the IC3 allows for a mobile device to be remotely controlled and monitored from anywhere. FinFisher is installed by simply visiting a Web link or opening a text message that disguises itself as a system update.IN addition to highlighting Loozfon and FinFisher, the IC3 intelligence note also offers users a number of safety tips to help protect their mobile device. They are:The presence of malware on Android has been known for some time, while Apple's tightly controlled iOS platform is far less susceptible to malware. This summer, one piece of malware did manage to slip through the cracks and was temporarily available for download on Apple's iOS App Store.Northern White rhinos are sub-species of the White rhino Four rare Northern White rhinos have been flown from a Czech zoo to Kenya, in a desperate attempt to save the species from extinction. Animal experts hope the rhinos - two males and two females - will breed in their natural habitat in Africa. Only eight Northern White rhinos are known to survive worldwide, all of them in captivity: six in the Czech Republic and two in the US. The last four living in the wild in Africa have not been seen since 2006. 'Dangerous' plan On Sunday, the four rhinos from the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic were packed into crates and loaded onto a Boeing 747 bound for the Ol Pejeta reserve in central Kenya as part of the "Last Chance to Survive" project. Moving them [the rhinos] now is a last-bid effort to save them and their gene pool from total extinction
Rob Brett, IUCN "We plan to give the remaining individuals with breeding potential their last chance of normal and regular reproduction in a secure location in the wild," said zoo director Dana Holeckova. Rob Brett, member of the African Rhino Specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature ( |
noticed the sifting screens are now missing entirely and the card gets picked automatically(at least with aescalon). So for Mystic it's just a random draw with no picking, and for scout it's like nothing happened since you never get to see the card that gets picked. If this really works.... It's actually better for the scout to die :OYou would know the next 3 cards instead of just 1.I also have a feeling scout does not always work like it should, but haven't been able to find the exact issue with it.EDIT: I did not find a way to replicate the scout bug. It always drew what it was supposed to. But it might just be a more complicated bug that doesn't happen too often.And about the "bugfix" on resummoned sifting creatures: I noticed the sifting screens are now missing entirely and the card gets picked automatically(at least with aescalon). So for Mystic it's just a random draw with no picking, and for scout it's like nothing happened since you never get to see the card that gets picked.
_________________
Strategic Angels _________________Cutting a Laminate Countertop
Post-formed countertop (the kind with the integral backsplash and drip edge) is quick and easy to install -- as long as you don't have to cut it. Then it's awkward to handle, the backsplash requires a separate cut, and the plastic laminate chips easily.
Commercial fabricators use large stationary saws with 12"- or 14"-dia. blades to cut their countertops to length. Few of us have that type of equipment, but you can get accurate results with a circular saw and a shop-built jig. The jig mimics the simple guide a lot of people use to cut plywood, but it has a second (shorter) leg that wraps around the backsplash.
I built my jig out of scrap 3/4" plywood and used some leftover 1/2"-thick pine for the cleats that guide the saw.
Make the jig base slightly wide, then trim it with your saw. Then install the cleat on the short leg of the jig and trim that side of the jig as well. Because the edge of the jig is now perfectly aligned with the saw's blade, you position this edge on the countertop right on the line where you want to make your cut.
To use the jig, clamp or screw it to the underside of the countertop. Before making the backsplash cut, I set the countertop on sawhorses so it rests on the backsplash. This lets me make a nearly horizontal cut rather than trying to hold the saw vertically. (NOTE: When cutting countertop, use a fine-toothed plywood cutting blade to minimize chipping in the plastic laminate.)
Once you've got the backsplash cut, set the countertop on sawhorses and cut the wide section. The teeth of the saw blade enter the face of the plastic laminate, so chipping is minimal or nonexistent. You'll want to hold onto the cut-off section so it doesn't snap off near the end of the cut and damage the laminate.
Freshly cut laminate has a sharp edge, so be careful when handling it. You can use 220-grit sandpaper and a sanding block to smooth the edge.It was a great story – or at least it would have been.
U.S. broadcast journalist Peter Klein was heading to Africa to cover the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and found a fresh angle that would continue the conversation, he says – but it required a couple of extra production days. "And the guy who ran the newsroom said: 'I love the story, but we've blown every penny of our foreign budget on Iraq.'"
Mr. Klein, the Emmy-winning, long-time 60 Minutes producer who is now director of the school of journalism at the University of British Columbia, has an ambitious plan: To establish at UBC the Global Reporting Centre (GRC), which would produce in-depth journalism on complex international issues using a different kind of funding model – philanthropy.
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"I really feel if you take the profit motive out of global journalism, you could have an exceptional global journalism," says Mr. Klein, 44. "Really, it does come down to money."
He's not starting from scratch. The GRC would be an extension of the school's International Reporting Program, which each year sends 10 master's students out into the world to report deeply on a neglected global issue, such as illegal logging in Russia, Indonesia and Cameroon; the societal costs of the Thai shrimp industry; or the murder of indigenous people in Brazil.
"Pretty obscure stuff. Not the kind of thing that people sit around at their dinner table worrying about necessarily, because they don't know about it," says Mr. Klein, who this week departed for India as part of the class's current project on global mental health. (Students have also been dispatched to Jordan, Benin and Togo.) "And yet we've gotten audiences really engaged and interested in these topics."
The program was set up in 2008 with a $1-million endowment from philanthropist Alison Lawton's Mindset Social Innovation Foundation – enough to fund it for 10 years. "Her only limitation in terms of the donation was: 'I want to help you guys do stories that are undercovered globally, just sort of neglected stories,'" Mr. Klein says. "'And you should try to get some reach. Don't just do this as a little class project that you put on the school website.'"
To ensure that reach – and credibility – the program has partnered with various established media outlets, including The Globe and Mail (as well as The New York Times, PBS, CBC and others).
With the endowment, the program is funded until 2018. By then, Mr. Klein plans, the education program will fall under the umbrella of the GRC, which he aims to launch next year.
He's developed the concept, has great journalism world contacts, and has trained dozens of young reporters. Now, he has millions of dollars to raise.
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'Hope around philanthropy'
To call this a disruptive time for news organizations would be burying the lead in understatement. As newsrooms continue to deal with the digital age fallout(witness a huge shake-up at The New Republic in the U.S. this week), it is "absolutely crucial" that new ways are found to fund journalistic endeavours, says Kelly Toughill, director of the University of King's College School of Journalism in Halifax.
"I think it's the central dominant issue of our age," says Prof. Toughill, who teaches a course on emerging business models in journalism. "It's not just about finding new sources of funding; it's about finding new business models that translate into long-term sustainability."
Philanthropically funded public-interest journalism is becoming a big part of this conversation, particularly in the United States, where organizations such as ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Center for Investigative Reporting are contributing to a thriving non-profit journalism culture – particularly for domestic investigative reporting. In a study last year titled Nonprofit Journalism: A Growing but Fragile Part of the U.S. News System, the Washington-based Pew Research Center identified 172 digital non-profit outlets launched between 1987 and 2012.
"There's a lot of hope around philanthropy," Prof. Toughill says.
Anyone who listens to NPR is familiar with the frequent shout-outs to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which supports public-interest journalism (in addition to being the Genius Grant givers and other initiatives). Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay Inc., is pouring multimillions into his independent not-for-profit startup First Look Media. The sole shareholder of the media group that owns The Guardian is a trust – set up to ensure editorial independence "in perpetuity." Mother Jones is a non-profit funded by a foundation. In Canada, The Walrus is published by a charitable foundation.
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Then there's crowdfunding: Vancouver's The Tyee recently raised more than $100,000 to send a reporter to Ottawa. Jesse Brown, the freelance journalist behind breaking the Jian Ghomeshi story, crowdfunds for subscribers to support his Canadaland podcast. You'll find a journalism section on Kickstarter, proposed "transmedia" projects on Indiegogo, and a U.S. startup Beacon Reader – all crowdfunding specific works of journalism. (Projects currently crowdfunding on Beacon Reader include an examination of post-apartheid South Africa, and a look at how language barriers diminish the culinary experience in Paris.)
"I think it's become the new model already," Mr. Klein says of non-profit, public-interest journalism. "Not that awards should be the be-all and end-all, but certainly it is one indication of stories that have been successful in some respects, that have had impact. The stories that tend to win awards, that tend to have the high profile, are fully or partly funded by non-profits."
This culture of foundation-sponsored journalism, however, does not exist in Canada the way it does in the U.S., where it has had far more traction. "Americans tend to look more toward charity to solve social problems whereas Canadians tend to look more toward government to solve social problems," says Prof. Toughill. "We, for example, have something called the CBC and the U.S. has nothing comparable to that. So the structure of our news industry is very different. We already have a recognition that quality journalism is a social good, so we're already 10 steps ahead in funding that through the CBC."
Mr. Klein, who is American (and a permanent resident in Canada; his wife is from Vancouver; his kids are dual citizens), recognizes that there is not the same level of "interest and engagement from the philanthropic community in Canada" on this issue. He knows he has his work cut out for him.
A business plan for the Global Reporting Centre proposes an annual budget of $2.5-million – which would require an endowment in the range of $30-million (with the same kind of naming rights opportunities offered in other areas of philanthropy). The budget, however, will ultimately depend on what he can actually raise. He doesn't anticipate having that $30-million in place before launching the centre in September, 2015, but he's not going to wait for those funds to get going.
However, attracting an endowment is key to this ambitious vision. "I don't want to spend all my time going back to the usual suspects and raising funds all the time, and there's only a certain number of people who are going to want to support this," Mr. Klein says. "And we really want to have that independence to be able to focus on the editorial."
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'Follow the money'
The question of editorial independence looms large in discussions about philanthropically funding media.
"I personally have real concerns about philanthropy as a long-term source of sustainable journalism," Prof. Toughill says. "I think there are some dangers in philanthropy around conflict of interest the way there are with any funding sources. But they're perhaps more acute if you put all of your trust in one or two donors."
Those who do this kind of journalism, or want to, will ask: What's the difference between mainstream media accepting advertising dollars from corporations, and alternative media outlets accepting sponsorship cash from foundations or others?
Prof. Toughill points to a "fundamental disconnect" in the model. "Charitable organizations are set up to achieve very specific aims, whether the aims are to alleviate child poverty or to improve the quality of the air, to improve the environment," she says. "And that's sort of fundamentally at odds with traditional journalism, which deliberately avoids trying to further specific aims. So, we have some interesting creative tension here. I think there's lots of promise. But I wouldn't bet the future of the information needs of my society on a philanthropic model."
You have to trust that good journalists will not allow the opinions of their funders (philanthropic or not) to bleed into their stories, but if dollars are tied to areas of coverage (environmental, health), will certain subjects receive more coverage than topics that are perhaps perceived as less sexy?
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Mr. Klein says he is "absolutely" aware of this concern.
"Which is why I think it's important for any non-profit journalism organization to have really diverse funding. What do we always say in journalism? Follow the money. That also applies to us," he says. "I think it's critical to have a really diverse kind of funding so you can walk away if you have to. And that's another reason we were trying to endow this. Once it's endowed, it's arm's length. You can't pull the money if you don't like the story we do."
'Something with integrity'
In their last class before heading abroad for their global mental-health project, International Reporting Program students summarized their plans for their teachers, including Mr. Klein and David Rummel.
Mr. Rummel, a veteran journalist whose credentials include the major U.S. networks and The New York Times, asked the students to think about what they want to get out of each of their interviews, and the other elements they'll need on the ground for their stories.
Student Hala Kamaliddin is part of the team that, for the global mental-health project, landed in Jordan this week to cover the trauma experienced by Syrian refugees.
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Born in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War, Ms. Kamaliddin, 28, lived through the Persian Gulf War, and witnessed multiple subsequent bombings in the country of her birth before moving to Canada in 2005.
"Watching how these things were covered both by Arabic and Western media, there's a lot of room to improve," she said during a break in class. She said it's important to be on the ground and tell these stories "to give you a much more realistic and truthful picture; something with integrity."
While the ambitions for the Global Reporting Centre are much broader, the work of the International Reporting Program has received some traction and acclaim, with a list of awards, including an Emmy for Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground. Last month, its China's Generation Green project won a gold medal in the category of Best Interactive at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.
And the work has had impact. Mr. Klein proudly explains that another project, profiling the lack of access to pain medication in India, Ukraine and Uganda, has been used by physicians and human-rights activists to advocate for change, and that there has been some progress as a result. "That's a much bigger reward for us than any little plaque."The company also announced that it planned to raise $6 billion in capital through an equity offering. And it said that it would cut its dividend, starting in the third quarter, to 25 cents a share from 35 cents. Fannie Mae shares fell as much as 11 percent in premarket trading, but recovered in regular trading and were up about 5 percent.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were created by Congress but are owned by investors, suffered more than $9 billion in mortgage-related losses last year, and analysts expect those losses to grow this year. Freddie Mac is to report earnings next week.
Analysts say the companies are sitting on billions of dollars in additional losses that they have not yet fully acknowledged, analysts say. If either company stumbled, the mortgage business could lose its only lubricant, potentially causing the housing market to plummet and the credit markets to freeze up completely.
And if Fannie or Freddie fail, taxpayers would probably have to bail them out at a staggering cost.
“We’ve taken tremendous risks by loosening these companies’ purse strings,” said Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida and a former secretary of housing and urban development. “They could cause an economywide meltdown if they got into real trouble and leave the public on the hook for billions.”
Concerns over the companies’ finances had prompted a fierce behind-the-scenes battle between nervous government officials and the two companies. Bush administration officials, the Federal Reserve and lawmakers all believed that the companies’ financial safety cushion was far too thin and had pleaded with them to raise more capital from investors.
Freddie and Fannie, which are enjoying new growth and profits, had largely resisted those pleas, people briefed on the talks say, because selling new shares could dilute the holdings of existing shareholders and drive down their stock prices.
Moreover, the companies are using their newfound clout to push Congress and their regulator to roll back the limits that were imposed after recent scandals over accounting and executive pay, according to participants in those conversations.
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On Tuesday, Fannie Mae’s regulator said that it would lift the limits that it had imposed. The regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, said it intended to reduce the capital surplus requirement after the company raised more capital. The regulator said that it would lower the surplus that must be retained to 15 percent from 20 percent. The requirement was reduced from 30 percent in mid-March.
More Capital Sought
As a result, high-ranking government officials are now quietly threatening to publicly criticize the two companies if they do not soon raise large amounts of capital, people with firsthand knowledge of those threats say. William Poole, a president of a Federal Reserve bank who has since retired, has warned that companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are “at the top of my list of sources of potentially serious trouble.”
A report last month by the agency overseeing the companies said that they pose “significant supervisory concerns” and that Freddie Mac suffers “internal control weaknesses.”
Lawmakers are pushing to rein in the companies with new legislation. Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who leads the Banking Committee, will soon take up legislation giving the government broad authority over the companies. Lawmakers say it is likely a bill will pass this year.
“They are on real thin ice financially,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee. “And the way the law is written right now, there is very little we can do to correct that.”
The companies say such criticisms are without merit. Their latest regulatory filings, they note, show a combined financial safety net that exceeds required minimums by $7 billion. The companies raised $13 billion from investors last year and say any future losses will be offset by new revenue and by money they have already set aside.
Criticisms Rejected
“The irony is that right now I’m seeing the best opportunities since I’ve been in this business,” said Daniel H. Mudd, chief executive of Fannie Mae, in an interview conducted last month.
The companies also say that they have not demanded anything. Rather, they say, the limitations have been dropped because of the companies’ commitment to financial transparency and aiding the housing recovery.
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But others remain concerned. Though the companies’ main regulator, James B. Lockhart III, director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, has voiced strong confidence in the companies, a high-ranking member of his staff said some officials had begun considering the worst.
“It’s not irrational to be thinking about a bailout,” said that person, who requested anonymity, fearing dismissal.
Fannie and Freddie do not lend directly to home buyers. Rather, they buy mortgages from banks and other lenders, and thereby provide fresh capital for home loans. The companies keep some of the mortgages they buy, hoping to profit from them, and sell the rest to investors with a guarantee to pay off the loan if the borrower defaults.
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Because of the widespread perception that the government would intervene if either company failed, they can borrow money at lower interest rates than their competitors. As a result, they have earned enormous profits that have enriched shareholders and managers alike: from 1990 to 2000, each company’s stock grew more than 500 percent and top executives were paid tens of millions of dollars.
Those profits were threatened earlier this decade, however, when new competitors emerged and after audits revealed that both companies had manipulated their earnings. The companies were forced to replace top executives, pay hundreds of millions in penalties and consent to strict growth limits.
To keep profits aloft and meet affordable-housing goals set by Congress, the companies began buying huge numbers of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, the highly profitable loans often taken out by low-income and riskier borrowers. By the end of last year, the companies had guaranteed or invested in $717 billion of subprime and Alt-A loans, up from almost none in 2000.
Then the housing bubble burst. In February, the companies revealed a $6 billion combined loss in the fourth quarter of 2007, and both companies’ stock prices fell more than 25 percent in less than two weeks. Freddie Mac fell to $17.39 on March 10 from $24.49 on Feb. 28, while Fannie Mae declined to $19.81 on March 10 from $27.90 on Feb. 28.
Despite those troubles, lawmakers had few alternatives to asking Fannie and Freddie to buy more and riskier mortgages.
“I want these companies to help with affordable housing, to help low-income families get loans and to help clean up this subprime mess,” said Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. “Otherwise, why should they exist?”
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Demands for Repeals
But now that the government depends on Fannie and Freddie to keep markets humming, the companies are making demands of their own — namely, repealing some of the limits created after the scandals and even some established by law.
Last year, in return for buying billions of dollars of subprime mortgages to help stabilize the market, executives won the right to expand their investment portfolios. In March, the companies agreed to raise more capital within the year. In exchange, they received an additional $200 billion in purchasing power.
Last month, the companies promised to pump money into the more expensive reaches of the housing market. In return, Congress temporarily raised the cap on the size of the mortgages they can buy to almost $730,000 from $417,000.
“We have to bow and scrape and haggle each time we need help,” said a senior Republican Senate assistant who spoke only on the condition of anonymity.
Each time Congress or regulators have given the companies new room for growth, their stock prices have risen. But so far the companies have balked at raising more capital. That hesitation has lawmakers concerned that when the companies raise money this year, it will not be enough.
In a March meeting, Freddie Mac’s chairman, Richard F. Syron, bolstered those fears by saying the company would put shareholders’ interests first. Michael L. Cosgrove, a spokesman for Freddie Mac, said Mr. Syron was committed to both satisfying the company’s public mission and creating shareholder value. Fannie Mae, which is in a regulatory-imposed quiet period because it will soon release financial information, declined to comment on capital-raising issues.
As worrisome as the need for new capital, some analysts say, are the companies’ books.
A report released earlier this month by Mr. Lockhart, the regulator, noted that although Freddie and Fannie had a combined $19.9 billion of “unrealized losses” on mortgage-related investments, neither company had reduced its earnings to reflect those declines. That is because they judged the losses to be temporary — in essence wagering that the mortgage market would recover before those assets were sold. Such a wager is permitted by the rules but difficult for outsiders to analyze.
Fannie Mae declined to discuss unrealized losses. Mr. Cosgrove, the Freddie Mac spokesman, said the company discloses all financial choices and downgrades all potentially impaired securities when appropriate.
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The regulator’s report also noted that Freddie used accounting choices that gave it an immediate $1 billion capital increase. While those and other tactics are technically permitted, the regulator said, they deserve scrutiny.
“Companies can make assumptions that cause very large differences in what they report,” Mr. Lockhart said in an interview. He has repeatedly said that the companies are making good progress and have fixed many of their problems. But at least one accounting choice, he said, “concerns us.”
Mr. Cosgrove said Freddie Mac’s accounting choices had been the best way to reflect financial realities.
Both companies have also recently changed their policies on delinquent loans, which they previously recorded as impaired when borrowers were 120 days late. Now, some overdue loans can go two years before the companies record a loss.
Fannie Mae declined to discuss the accounting of impaired loans. A representative of Freddie Mac said marking loans as permanently impaired at 120 days does not reflect that many of them avoid foreclosure. But the biggest risk, analysts say, is that both companies are betting that the housing market will rebound by 2010. If the housing malaise lasts longer, unexpected losses could overwhelm their reserves, starting a chain of events that could result in a federal bailout.
A version of those events began in November, when Freddie Mac’s capital fell below congressionally mandated levels. The company stemmed the decline by selling $6 billion in preferred stock. But it might not manage that again if there is another unexpected loss, analysts say.
“The last two years have shown the real need for a stronger regulator,” Mr. Lockhart said. If his agency did not curb the companies’ growth earlier this decade, he added, “they would be part of the problem right now instead of part of the solution.”At the end of a long day at work, the only thing you want to do is get home quickly. You’re exhausted from dealing with your boss, terrible colleagues or crazy clients. But traveling home is just another drawn out nightmare to endure, thanks to the woes of the transport sector. The only reliable and affordable means of transportation for a common city dweller in Addis Ababa is the state operated city buses. Apart from the long stretchy queues, these buses are overcrowded and groaning heavily under the weight of the city residents. Not to mention the endless traffic jams. This is the daily transit scenario in the streets of Addis Ababa.
Long queues for city buses are a fact of life in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
The scene above was the common case of daily transit until the Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (LRT) project launched in December 2011. The rail is a first in clean initiative in the horn of Africa to enhance public mobility. The light railway of Ethiopia is the first urban metro light rail scheme to be built in a sub-Saharan country outside of South Africa.
The Ethiopian Railways Corp. (ERC) began construction of the double track electrified light rail transit project in 2012. It stretches 23 kilometers covering the better part of the city, and is a welcome relief for the city residents. The light railway consists of two lines running for a total distance of 32km with underground and over ground sections, 39 stations, and two operators that are the Ethiopian Railways Corporation and Shenzhen Metro. The 41 three-section 70% low-floor light rail vehicles are designed to run in pairs at up to 70 km/h. All have tinted windows and rubber components specified to resist premature aging from the effects of strong sunlight at altitudes of 2400 m.
Rugged interiors are built to last in Ethiopia's strong sunlight and high elevaton
ERC intends to register the Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit project as a Clean Development Mechanism project. The rail project is one of the pillars of a green growth strategy in the transport chapter of Ethiopia’s Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE), to consolidate greenhouse gas emissions of the country at 2010 levels. The vision of this rail project was to see a modern railway infrastructure and service by an efficient railway company that supports Ethiopia’s endeavor in building a globally competitive economy that uses electricity and connects the country’s development centers and links with ports of neighboring countries.
The Climate-Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) strategy (PDF) lays down a plan for Ethiopia to develop a carbon neutral, green economy by 2025. According to the CRGE strategy report, under the BAU scenario, emissions from the transport sector will increase from 5 Mt CO2e in 2010 to 41 Mt CO2e in 2030. The development and implementation of a National Railway Network and the Light Rail Transit and supported projects (Transit Oriented Development) will result in significant GHG emission reductions of 9 Mt CO2e/year by 2030.
Two tracks run a total of 32 KM in the city
Building electrified railways lays the base for low carbon transport in Ethiopia and will assure clean transport tomorrow. Railroads can contribute towards severing Ethiopia’s economic growth from diesel fuelled trucks. Availability of reliable and clean transport is a precondition for Ethiopia’s development. Trains can make use of a domestic energy source, hydropower, and help fuel the economy in a green way. The clean character of the fuel without emission of greenhouse gasses and the durable economic structure without dependency on imported fuels is sustainable.
Years ago the air was cleaner, but with the drastic growth in population, more than 4 million, the number of 20 year or older vehicles and developmental projects, the air is polluted above the traffic gridlock. The light rail train as cleaner public transist gives a reprieve to the public, combined with the hope for more electric cars, it is expected to reduce the annual greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector to less than 9 tonnes by 2030. It is an environmentally friendly venture aimed at combating the ever growing pollution in the city. It is not only convenient, providing transport for over 15,000 people per one direction and 60,000 in all four directions, but affordable for the residents. It is a milestone in helping Ethiopia sustain its growing economy, as Ethiopia is one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
The Light Rail Train has brought glimmers of hope to the common man. At the very least, one can get home easily at the end of the day without the crazy hassle of looking for and struggling in transit. The commuting city residents can breathe easier using clean transit as they take part in building their nation.On the heels of Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman’s remarks this morning that Paramount will be returning to TV production, Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Brad Grey just announced that the company is joining Sony TV as co-producer on CBS‘ Beverly Hills Cop pilot and potential series, based on the hit Paramount movie franchise. Dauman earlier today teased Paramount’s Beverly Hills Cop involvement, noting that the company plans to “get back, with very little investment, into the television production business.” Sony TV put the project, written by Shawn Ryan and exec produced by Ryan and Eddie Murphy, together and sold it to CBS where it has gone to pilot directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. As part of Sony TV’s rights deal with Paramount, the movie studio had the opportunity to join in, something which it is now doing. (Though the co-production deal is not official yet.)
Paramount used to have one of the largest TV studios, Paramount Network Television, which went to CBS in the 2005 split of Viacom, where it was merged with CBS Prods. Grey has plenty of experience to guide Paramount’s return to TV — he comes from a TV producer background as the head of Brad Grey TV, whose slate has included HBO’s The Sopranos and Real Time With Bill Maher and NBC’s Just Shoot Me!. Here is Grey’s memo:Did you know that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis, was trained by Mossad and the CIA? Were you aware that his real name isn’t Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai but Simon Elliot? Or that he’s a Jewish actor who was recruited by the Israelis to play the part of the world’s most wanted terrorist?
If the messages in my email in-box and my Twitter timeline and on my Facebook page are anything to go by, plenty of Muslims are not only willing to believe this nonsensical drivel but are super-keen to share it with their friends. The bizarre claim that NSA documents released by Edward Snowden “prove” the US and Israel are behind al-Baghdadi’s actions has gone viral.
There’s only one problem. “It’s utter BS,” Glenn Greenwald, the investigative journalist who helped break the NSA story, told me. “Snowden never said anything like that and no [NSA] documents suggest it.” Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner, has called the story a hoax.
But millions of Muslims across the globe have a soft spot for such hoaxes. Conspiracy theories are rife in both Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities here in the west. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” unleashed a vast array of hoaxers, hucksters and fantasists from Birmingham to Beirut.
On a visit to Iraq in 2002, I met a senior Islamic cleric who told me that Jews, not Arabs, had been responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He loudly repeated the Middle East’s most popular and pernicious 9/11 conspiracy theory: that 4,000 Jews didn’t turn up for work on 11 September 2001 because they had been forewarned about the attacks.
There is, of course, no evidence for this outlandish and offensive claim. The truth is that more than 200 Jews, including several Israeli citizens, were killed in the attacks on the twin towers. I guess they must have missed the memo from Mossad.
Yet the denialism persists. A Pew poll in 2011, a decade after 9/11, found that a majority of respondents in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon refused to believe that the attacks were carried out by Arab members of al-Qaeda. “There is no Muslim public in which even 30 per cent accept that Arabs conducted the attacks,” the Pew researchers noted.
This blindness isn’t peculiar to the Arab world or the Middle East. Consider Pakistan, home to many of the world’s weirdest and wackiest conspiracy theories. Some Pakistanis say the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai is a CIA agent. Others think that the heavy floods of 2010, which killed 2,000 Pakistanis, were caused by secret US military technology. And two out of three don’t believe Osama Bin Laden was killed by US navy Seals on Pakistani soil on 2 May 2011.
Consider also Nigeria, where there was a polio outbreak in 2003 after local people boycotted the vaccine, claiming it was a western plot to infect Muslims with HIV. Then there is Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, where leading politicians and journalists blamed the 2002 Bali bombings on US agents.
Why are so many of my fellow Muslims so gullible and so quick to believe bonkers conspiracy theories? How have the pedlars of paranoia amassed such influence within Muslim communities?
First, we should be fair: it’s worth noting that Muslim-majority nations have been on the receiving end of various actual conspiracies. France and Britain did secretly conspire to carve up the Middle East between them with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. They also conspired to attack Egypt, with Israel’s help, and thereby provoked the Suez crisis of 1956. Oh, and it turned out there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq in 2003 despite what the dossiers claimed.
I once asked the Pakistani politician Imran Khan why his fellow citizens were so keen on conspiracy theories. “They’re lied to all the time by their leaders,” he replied. “If a society is used to listening to lies all the time... everything becomes a conspiracy.”
The “We’ve been lied to” argument goes only so far. Scepticism may be evidence of a healthy and independent mindset; but conspiracism is a virus that feeds off insecurity and bitterness. As the former Pakistani diplomat Husain Haqqani has admitted, “the contemporary Muslim fascination for conspiracy theories” is a convenient way of “explaining the powerlessness of a community that was at one time the world’s economic, scientific, political and military leader”.
Nor is this about ignorance or illiteracy. Those who promulgate a paranoid, conspiratorial world-view within Muslim communities include the highly educated and highly qualified, the rulers as well as the ruled. A recent conspiracy theory blaming the rise of Islamic State on the US government, based on fabricated quotes from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, was publicly endorsed by Lebanon’s foreign minister and Egypt’s culture minister.
Where will it end? When will credulous Muslims stop leaning on the conspiracy crutch? We blame sinister outside powers for all our problems – extremism, despotism, corruption and the rest – and paint ourselves as helpless victims rather than independent agents. After all, why take responsibility for our actions when it’s far easier to point the finger at the CIA/Mossad/the Jews/the Hindus/fill-in-your-villain-of-choice?
As the Egyptian intellectual Abd al-Munim Said once observed, “The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they keep us not only from the truth, but also from confronting our faults and problems.” They also make us look like loons. Can we give it a rest, please?
Mehdi Hasan is an New Statesman contributing writer, and works for al-Jazeera English and the Huffington Post UK where this column is crosspostedA clown who has twice been elected to Brazil’s Congress under the slogan “It can’t get any worse” has said he is too embarrassed by his fellowpoliticians to run again.
Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva, known as Tiririca, this week has said he is ashamed of his colleagues – more than half of whom are reportedly under investigation for corruption – and will not run again in 2018.
As a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Tiririca had continued working in a circus on weekends and he said he was returning to clowning full-time.
“I am embarrassed,” said Tiririca, which translates as Grumpy, in an eight-minute rant to a nearly empty session – his first address to Brazil’s lower house in his seven years in office.
“I walk with my head up high because I did nothing wrong, but many of you do not have the guts to do that. You even put disguises to go out. Being a congressman is a shame.”
Tiririca won office in 2010 with more than 1.3 million votes, outpolling every other candidate in Brazil’s largest state, São Paulo. He was re-elected by a landslide in 2014.
Tiririca used his speech to Congress to blast the sloth and corruption of many of his 513 colleagues. “We are well paid to work, but only eight of 513 actually show up here often. I am one of those eight and I am a clown,” he said.
One congressman, Celso Jacob, is serving |
for Utah's chief rival, BYU. As a result, Pepsi has agreed to omit the blue background in its on-campus signage. Additional info here.
• It's hard to believe now, but as recently as 10 years ago, almost every college football team had only one helmet design -- except for Washington State, which wore silver helmets at home and red on the road. Now most teams have a wide range of helmet options, including the Cougars, whose new set offers enough mix-and-match combinations to last several seasons (additional photos here).
Endless mix/match possibilities for Washington State. pic.twitter.com/T1ZPJvC1lb — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 7, 2017
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SEC
• Arkansas is planning some sort of memorial tribute -- maybe a jersey patch, maybe a helmet decal, maybe something else -- for former coach Frank Broyles, who died earlier this month. Details to follow shortly.
• Subtle change for Auburn, which is going with three-dimensional nose bumper lettering:
Auburn going with 3-D nose bumper lettering this year. pic.twitter.com/jwGpPAgmyk — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 7, 2017
Also: Auburn will be using a new football design this year, with a tiger eye motif:
In addition, Auburn has a sharp-looking 125th anniversary logo, but a team representative has confirmed that it will be used only for marketing purposes and will not be worn as a jersey patch or helmet decal.
Per team spox, Auburn football's 125th-anniversary logo will be used for marketing, not worn on jersey or helmet. https://t.co/oMal2paWGs — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 10, 2017
• Some very subtle changes for Florida, the most notable of which is that the Gatorhead logo on the pants has been moved from the hip to the upper-right thigh, so it no longer interrupts the pants striping. Speaking of which, the striping pattern on the orange pants now matches the sleeve striping on the jersey. The Nike logo, which had been on the right thigh, has been moved to the left side.
Biggest change is the Gatorhead no longer breaks the pant stripe and is now located on the front @UniWatch @PhilHecken pic.twitter.com/gQIovBT66h — Brock Brames (@BrockBrames) August 1, 2017 Looks like a minor tweak to the @GatorsFB uniforms - pants now have a Gator head on the right hip. Nike swoosh moves to left hip. @UniWatch pic.twitter.com/8Rtof24mFR — Ryan King (@RKingGator) July 18, 2017
• Georgia has switched to a new Nike template, the primary result of which is that the Bulldogs no longer have to wear that annoying Flywire collar -- a huge upgrade.
Good look at how UGA is updating to new jersey template this season. Major upgrade to the collar. (h/t @aawagner011) pic.twitter.com/wNjq6jDukG — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) July 20, 2017
• Kentucky's longtime home, Commonwealth Stadium, no longer exists -- at least not by that name. Thanks to a new naming rights deal, it is now known as Kroger Field.
The new name will be easy to remember because they're stenciling it onto the turf:
New Kroger Field logos being put in Lexington pic.twitter.com/ptxnPpihfm — Matt Jones (@KySportsRadio) August 21, 2017
• LSU's shoulder stripes were short, then they were long, and now they're short again:
In addition, the Tigers are going with 3-D neck bumper lettering this year.
We've seen 3-D lettering on nose bumpers for several years. Now teams are going to 3-D *neck* bumper lettering, as seen here for LSU. pic.twitter.com/DVVXzeZK03 — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 7, 2017
• Mississippi State has adjusted its sleeve striping and collar trim. The black outlining on the sleeves and collar is gone and gray striping has been added to the sleeves, which mirrors the striping on the pants:
Mississippi State changing sleeve stripes and collar trim this season. Old version on left, new on right. pic.twitter.com/cFmOIHKD0a — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 23, 2017 New gray striping on Mississippi State's sleeves matches gray stripe on the pants. pic.twitter.com/LnOq7FIlpy — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 23, 2017
Mississippi State adding state outline decal to back of helmet and going with raised neck bumper lettering this year. pic.twitter.com/ocuLj9yvRN — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 23, 2017
In addition, the Bulldogs have added a Mississippi outline decal to the back of their helmet, and have also gone from flat to raised neck bumper lettering:
• Missouri has simplified its look by scrapping the contrasting shoulder yoke and sleeves:
Mizzou apparently dropping the contrasting yoke/sleeves this year. Old version on left, new on right. pic.twitter.com/xlouWN2MVR — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 7, 2017
• Thanks to a new tailoring template, Ole Miss's shoulder stripes have gotten significantly shorter.
Old Miss changing templates this year, resulting in shorter shoulder stripes. Old version on left, new on right. pic.twitter.com/j5VA8gJJ7a — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 8, 2017
• Tennessee quarterback Quinten Dormady plans to wear loose, long-ish sleeves this season -- a look that is evocative of former Vols signal-caller Peyton Manning (additional info here).
Vols QB @qdormady says he'll rock the Peyton sleeves this fall. "You're looking at them. This is what I'll wear." pic.twitter.com/xfpWCYUh3X — Jesse Simonton (@JesseReSimonton) August 13, 2017
• Texas A&M has a new maroon alternate uniform with black accents, which will be worn against Mississippi State on Oct. 28. The helmet has a maroon-to-black gradation that will supposedly have different looks depending on the angle from which it is viewed (additional photos and info here):
• The players aren't the only ones who wear uniforms. Over at Vanderbilt, the school's on-field mascot, Mr. Commodore, has a new uniform of his own:
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Sun Belt
• Appalachian State is another school adding raised lettering to its neck bumpers:
Got some new swag in for our helmets today, adding a back 3D bumper to join our front bumpers. Thanks to @3DBUMPERS for helping us out! pic.twitter.com/lvx7hjMikL — App State Equipment (@appstequipment) August 18, 2017
• No photos yet, but Arkansas State equipment manager Jason Jones says the team has new uniforms with reflective numbers and letters.
In addition, there's a new logo marking the 10th anniversary of the team's name change from Indians to Red Wolves. At present, there are no plans for it to appear on the uniform.
Arkansas State has new logo marking 10th anniversary of changing team name from Indians to Red Wolves. Will not be worn on uniform. pic.twitter.com/Ig1Pi8qFpV — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 3, 2017
Also: Plans are afoot to make improvements and expansions to the north end zone at Centennial Bank Stadium (additional info and renderings here):
Arkansas State planning expansion of north end zone at Centennial Bank Stadium. Details: https://t.co/8oZhHJW78x pic.twitter.com/hsCFfa3QbY — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 8, 2017
• Coastal Carolina is joining the FBS in 2017 and marking the occasion by adding a teal alternate jersey:
The TEAL is real. Check out the Teal tops we will be wearing in our first #FBS season.https://t.co/bRDYF4YENL#BallAtTheBeach | #BAM pic.twitter.com/C4SAH0eWXZ — CCU FOOTBALL (@CoastalFootball) August 2, 2017
In addition, the Chanticleers are dropping their matte-black helmets and going back to black glossies with gold flake, which is what they wore from 2003 through 2013.
Coastal Carolina, now in FBS, scrapping matte-finish helmets (left), going back to black with gold flake. pic.twitter.com/WFZtWSyYAT — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 8, 2017
• Georgia Southern is another school switching to matte-finish helmets.
Georgia Southern switching to matte-finish helmets this year. (Numbers will be added, as usual, once season starts.) pic.twitter.com/Gt7CJQessG — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 2, 2017
Also: A team spokesman says the Eagles will wear two alternate uniforms this season, but the dates, opponents and designs haven't yet been announced.
• Georgia State has switched outfitters, changing from Nike to Under Armour. The team's new set includes blue, white and black elements that can be mixed and matched (additional info here):
• Back in 1987, when Louisiana-Monroe was still known as Northeast Louisiana and played in Division 1-AA, the school won the D-1AA national championship. The team will honor the 30th anniversary of that achievement by wearing 1987-inspired uniforms this season and will bring back the "P-40" military tribute uniforms that were first worn in 2015.
In addition to the tribute uniforms, the P-40s are coming back this year. pic.twitter.com/OXWDsI0fdh — Adam Hunsucker (@Adam_Hunsucker) August 14, 2017
• New Mexico State has added a new all-black design to its uniform mix (additional info here):
The reveal of the new all-black unis for the 2017-18 Aggies!!#AggieUp #MakeAPlay pic.twitter.com/lQvCox8TDs — NM State Football (@NMStateFootball) August 12, 2017
• Texas State has a new gold jersey with reflective letters and numbers:
The Bobcats also have a new set of secondary logos.
Texas State reveals a new secondary mark based on the #TXST acronym pic.twitter.com/GHoEaKzaDi — RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) August 3, 2017
• Troy has removed the "T" logo from the sleeve of its red jersey and replaced it with three stripes:
Troy removing logo from sleeve, using stripes instead. Old version on left, new on rigth (h/t @thomasgleaton). pic.twitter.com/LF2ADvENDQ — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 20, 2017
The Trojans have also updated their red helmet, which has gone from matte to chrome:
Troy adding chrome red helmet to its headwear options. Had matte red last year (h/t @Clintau24). pic.twitter.com/VPyPlXrYY3 — Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) August 21, 2017
In addition, the Trojans used a rather unorthodox method for selecting the uniform combination for their home opener:
What are we wearing in our first home game? Watch and find out 👇#RTW pic.twitter.com/8KRwB9Pc1a — TROY ATHLETICS (@TroyAthletics) July 14, 2017
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Additional notes
• It's a little early to be thinking about the 2018 College Football Playoff, but here's what the patches will look like:
@PhilHecken @UniWatch Here's what the 2018 CFB Playoff patches will look like this season pic.twitter.com/N3DJbgLYIw — Robert Hayes🐧 (@GuitaristRobDog) May 31, 2017
• The new Schutt F7 helmet, whose shell features two distinctive flex panels, has been getting a workout from several schools. Here's a sampling of how it looks with an assortment of FBS logo and striping treatments:
• The NCAA has adopted a series of rules changes, one of which is uni-related: The definition of horse-collar tackles now includes grabbing a player by his nameplate area. (There was also talk of requiring players to wear knee pads this season, but that change has been pushed back to 2018.)
Phew! Did we miss anything? Yeah, probably. If you know of any college football uni updates that weren't covered here (FBS schools only, please), you know what to do. Thanks.
Paul Lukas will have his annual NFL season preview on Sept. 5. If you like this column, you'll probably like his Uni Watch Blog, plus you can follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Want to learn about his Uni Watch Membership Program, check out his Uni Watch merchandise, be added to his mailing list so you'll always know when a new column has been posted or just ask him a question? Contact him here.You are here: Home Blog / How I Saved $13,000 For Travel In Just Seven Months
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How I Saved $13,000 For Travel In Just Seven Months 253
How was I able to save enough money to travel long-term? It had very little to do with being a travel blogger. When I started Adventurous Kate, my goal wasn’t to live off my blog (not that I would have objected to that!) — it was to run one of the world’s top travel blogs.
My initial plan was to travel Southeast Asia for seven months. I budgeted $1,000 per month (in retrospect, I should have budgeted closer to $1,500), plus airfare to and from Asia ($1,500), travel insurance ($800), gear ($700), student loan payments for seven months ($1,232) and some extra financial cushion ($1,500 — should have budgeted $2,000 or more).
My goal was to save $12,800 — which I dropped to $12,500 when I spent $280 less than I expected to on airfare.
I started with very little savings in February, having just paid off debt. From February 2010 until September 2010, a period of just seven months, I managed to save that money.
I am going to be 100% honest with you and show you exactly how I did it.
On February 6 — incidentally, the same day Adventurous Kate went live — I started a new job as an account manager at a search marketing agency outside Boston. My salary was $50,000 (up from $48,000 at my last job) and my take-home pay after taxes was almost exactly $3,000 each month, or $1,500 on each semi-monthly paycheck.
At that time, I was still saving up for the RTW trip I would take “someday,” or the apartment in New York City that I would get with my sister. I decided to save aggressively. It wasn’t until March that I decided to travel through Southeast Asia for seven months instead and to start in October.
Monthly Expenses
My first task was to figure out my essential expenses. They were as follows:
Rent (half of one-bedroom split apartment in Fenway, downtown Boston): $800
Utilities: app. $100
Student loans: $176
CharlieCard (public transit pass): $59
Gym: $90
Netflix: $10
Chiropractry: $80
Food: app. $300
Social activities and impromptu food purchases (bars, movies, going out for lunch or dinner, nights out with friends): $200
Miscellaneous Expenditures: $150
Total: $1,965
If I managed to watch my expenses, I would be able to save $1,000 per month. If I changed my lifestyle, I’d be able to save even more.
Changing My Lifestyle
I took a look at my spending and saw that I had a lot of ways to trim my expenses. It was easy to eliminate things like trips to Vegas and cocktails at fancy bars with the girls. The everyday things were much harder.
As much as it broke my heart, I gave up my gym membership. This was the only time I have ever been in shape — I found a gym that I loved, a high-end women’s gym with lots of fun classes. It was sad to give it up.
I stopped shopping at expensive grocery stores like Whole Foods and switched to the super-cheap Trader Joe’s.
I stopped dating. I used to be on OKCupid and go on dates all the time. While most of the guys insisted on paying for everything, I’d always chip in for our second round of drinks or more food. That added up quickly.
I changed my social and food habits. Instead of going out for dinner with friends, we’d go out for coffee or just hang out and watch movies at home. Instead of stopping for a burrito on the way home from work, I’d have one of the Trader Joe’s eggplant parmesans I’d purchased.
And, most significantly, I decided to move home when my lease ended. It made sense both financially and logistically and wasn’t a huge sacrifice, considering that my family lives just outside Boston.
My lease was due to end on August 31, which meant that my last time paying rent would be July 1 (as I had already paid the last month’s rent). I expected the full security deposit back as well ($775). After that, I could move home to either of my parents’.
NOTE: This is the part where a lot of people said, “Oh, she lived with her parents, that’s how she saved, the rest of this piece is irrelevant.” Dude. That was for seven weeks out of the seven MONTHS. I did it because my lease ended in August 31 and my trip started October 20. Was I really going to find another apartment and move all my stuff there for less than two months? I was very lucky to have the option to move home. If not, I would have slept on friends’ couches and paid them for it.
Saving Cash
The very moment I woke up on payday, I transferred the money from my Schwab checking account to my HSBC savings account — my “travel account.” I got paid $1,500 twice a month, on the 15th and on the last day.
I would allow myself no more than $500 every two weeks to spend on groceries, student loans, doctors’ appointments, everything. On the 15th of the month, I would transfer $1,000 to my travel account. On the last day of the month, I would transfer $100 to my travel account (accounting for $800 for rent and $100 for utilities).
If there was anything left over in my Schwab checking account on payday, I would transfer it to my savings account. If there was $43 left on the last day of the month, I would transfer $143; if $27 remained on the 15th, I would transfer $1,027.
Keeping a maximum of $500 in my checking account at all times prevented me from overspending.
After July 1st, with no more rent to pay, I began transferring $1,000 from each paycheck.
Extra Income from Freelance Work
A few months back, I found a gig writing about Boston nightlife for AOL Travel, which I found on Craigslist. I wrote short posts five times per week and got paid $20 for each one. After a few months, the job was eliminated, but they soon hired me back for a similar project.
Additionally, shortly after I started my new job, a former boss of mine came to me wanting to hire me for a project. Talk about brilliant timing.
As a travel blogger, you shouldn’t expect to make any money for the first year — but there are exceptions. I was one of them. I started selling my first ads at about five months in.
Everything that was supplemental — everything from AOL, my side gig, or ads on my sites, went straight into my travel account.
I got most but not all of my security deposit back as well, netting me another $740.
A Day in the Life of Money-Saving Kate
6:15 AM: Alarm goes off. I snooze for about 30 minutes.
7:06 AM: The last chance I have to jump on the D line if I want to make it to work on time.
8:30 AM: Work begins. I hate my job and draw a notch at every 30-minute interval that passes.
1:00 PM: Lunch break. I spend it taking an hourlong walk around town, stopping for a $1.29 wrap from Dunkin Donuts on the way back.
2:00 PM: Back to work. I eat the wrap and the food I brought from home: a yogurt and an apple.
5:30 PM: Work over. Time to head home.
7:00 PM: Home. I have a Trader Joe’s eggplant parmesan for dinner and watch a bit of TV.
8:00 PM: Freelance work time. Writing for AOL, working on the project for my old boss, working on Adventurous Kate.
2:00 AM: Collapse into bed.
Believe me, I know how unhealthy this schedule was. I felt like I was losing my mind. I spent my weekends sleeping and didn’t do anything but work during the week. Which, of course, kept me from spending money.
I don’t recommend living like this for longer than a few months — but I am ultimately very happy that I did. I saved a LOT of money. And because I was eating so little, I lost 20 pounds as well.
Moving Home
I moved home to my mom’s house outside Boston at the end of August. Within days, she was horrified by my work habits and I immediately scaled back, going to bed at 1 instead of 2.
While I was no longer paying the $59 per month for public transportation, I was paying much more to 1) get my car back on the road, 2) pay my car insurance and 3) pay for gas. Commuting by car from north of Boston to metro-west took an hour each way. I also paid my mom a small amount for rent and groceries.
Within a week of putting my car back on the road, my car broke down. It turned out that it needed $900 worth of repairs. I felt like crying.
I didn’t succeed in hitting my savings goals every month. Sometimes expenses creeped up on me, and I didn’t always save as much as I had hoped. But I kept going.
Purchases
I had a list of items that I needed to buy for my trip, which I did over the course of several months. Buying some of the more expensive items in New Hampshire helped me save on sales tax. Here is my packing list from that time.
Backpack (REI Venturi 40L): $100. (This backpack has since been discontinued. Today I use the Pacsafe Venturesafe 45L, $200, which is a million times better and still works great as carry-on.)
Sandals (Tevas): $40 with REI savings
Portable safe (a.k.a the most important thing I pack): $70
Toshiba Netbook: $400
Sneakers: $85
Little items: everything from solid shampoos from Lush to tank tops from Target. Estimated $200.
Six months of travel insurance: $400. I use and recommend World Nomads. Do not scrimp on this. If you get seriously injured and need an air ambulance to another country, it could save you and your family hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And then came the biggest purchase: my plane ticket. I spent a lot of time looking at different routes and timetables on Kayak — Boston or New York to either Bangkok, Hong Kong, or Singapore. Finally, I found a round-trip ticket from New York to Bangkok on KoreanAir for $1220.
(Looking back, I shouldn’t have booked a round-trip ticket. I ended up getting it only partially refunded because I chose to fly back via England instead.)
And Then I Left
My job couldn’t have been a worse fit for me, and I knew within a few days that taking it had been an enormous mistake.
My original plan was to work until October 15, saving up the maximum amount of money before departure on October 20. But as time and those little notches added up, I told myself that I didn’t have to last quite that long. Maybe October 1 would be okay.
But on the morning of September 14, I had had enough. I picked up my belongings and simply walked out. I drove a few blocks away, parked, and emailed my resignation from my iPhone.
I drove myself home and got back to work immediately — on Adventurous Kate, my labor of love and new (if scant) source of income. I told myself that I would need to make about $1,500 in advertising over the next eight months to make up for the lost income from leaving my job early.
And there you have it!
By the time I left on October 20, 2010, I had saved just over $13,000.
Kate’s Tips for Saving Money for Travel
You don’t need to make $50,000 a year and have a few freelance jobs to save money quickly and dramatically. The single most important thing you can do is as follows:
1) Start a savings account strictly for travel expenses. Pledge not to touch it until you start traveling.
2) Calculate your monthly expenses and figure out where you can cut back. Figure out the bare minimum you need to live, giving yourself a small cushion (around $100-200). Calculate the difference from your monthly paycheck.
3) The moment your paycheck comes in, deposit the ENTIRE difference into your travel account. DO NOT touch your travel account. Will you run out of money? Not if you’re careful. If funds get low, spend a few days eating lentils and watching TV and going for walks until you get paid again.
As for unforeseen expenses, like my car repairs and higher-than-expected bills, I put them on my credit card and used my next paycheck to pay for it instead of taking it out of my travel savings.
Saving money is not easy. It takes work and it takes sacrifice. I lived a very difficult life for several months. But it was absolutely worth making my dreams come true.At a recent conference, the founder of one technology titan asked another if it was even possible to build a platform-technology company outside of Silicon Valley. It was a fair question, given the dominance of Google (GOOGL), Facebook (FB) and Apple (AAPL). But from where I sat, it seemed easier to build a company of that size today almost anywhere except Silicon Valley.
Others have had the same thought. A spate of start-ups and now venture funds have recently left Silicon Valley for LA ( Snapchat ), Chicago (Keepsake), Seattle (Sherbert) and even Ohio (Drive).
The company where I work, Redfin, understands this impulse better than anyone. We are real estate brokers, with technology used by 10 million-plus people each month looking to move. And the simplest trend we see in American life is that Silicon Valley is no longer just the place talented people move to; it's the place those people are moving from. (Tweet this)
In 2011, 1 in 7 people in the Bay Area searched Redfin.com for homes outside of the Bay Area. Now it's 1 in 4. As Adam Wiener, our chief growth officer, announced to other executives last month: "The dam has broken."
In the past four years, the number of Bay Area people searching for Seattle homes has quadrupled; for Portland homes, that number has quintupled. For every 13 Bay Area people searching for a home, one is now searching in the Pacific Northwest alone.
(Source:Redfin.com)
And these aren't just idle online searches. One of our Denver employees had a simple answer for where she is now meeting our clients: "at the airport," with many flying in from northern California.
Silicon Valley transplants have become so common that Redfin's Boston agents just this week reported resentment among locals who can't compete. "My God, they are pouring in," Redfin's Boston broker, Alex Coon, wrote me this morning, "particularly in Cambridge and Somerville."
Read More Silicon Valley real estate reaches bubble levels
The result? According to Matt Zborezny, the Redfin agent for that area, 20 percent above asking price is the new norm.
Folks are leaving Silicon Valley, mostly because they can't afford to stay. For the first time ever, the median price for a Silicon Valley home just exceeded $1 million. That's about double what it is in other tech cities, like Boston or Seattle, and triple what it is in aspiring technology hubs, like Portland, Denver or Austin.
(Source:Redfin.com)
Those in technology who can afford to stay in Silicon Valley all know it as one of the most beautiful places to live in the world, but a wariness has sunk in as folks from other walks of life are forced to leave: coffee shops are wall-to-wall with aspiring entrepreneurs, and restaurants buzz with talk of valuations and venture capital. It can be too much.
Just today a journalist who has covered technology from San Francisco for nearly a decade told me that people here seem more focused on money than in the past. If that's true, it isn't entirely by choice: People hop from job to job and deal to deal because sometimes that's the only way they can afford to stay.
According to compensation data company PayScale.com, Silicon Valley engineers earn nearly 50 percent more than their Boston counterparts; in Seattle that difference is smaller, but still significant, at 12 percent. Nowhere is the pay difference large enough to offset the cost of housing.
For these mostly entry-level jobs, the median level of experience is two to four years, with marketing managers at five to six years. At the most competitive companies, salaries are significantly higher.
In our own experience at Redfin employing engineers in Seattle and San Francisco, we've noticed that as Google, Facebook and Dropbox have opened Seattle offices, the differences in engineering pay, especially among recent graduates of top computer-science programs, have disappeared. But the pay of all the people responsible for the actual day-to-day operations of the business-in accounting, marketing or human resources-is more closely tied to the local cost of living. This is why, as Glassdoor reports today, the best places for jobs in America are now up-and-coming tech hubs like Raleigh and Austin, ranking ahead of San Jose or San Francisco.
Read More The 10 most expensive real estate markets in the US
Story continuesThree-time NBA champion Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat may be on the verge of leaving South Beach after 12 seasons. Wade has a player option at $16.1 million and wants to stay in Miami, but it appears the contract talks for an extension between the two sides are far apart.
— Have you seen the ‘Bleed Purple and Gold’ phone case? —
With the Heat brass seemingly unwilling to meet Wade’s desired extension, it seems as though the veteran guard could be headed elsewhere. If the two sides can’t see eye-to-eye before June 29, Wade will likely opt out of his deal to become an unrestricted free agent and the Los Angeles Lakers may be a destination for the future Hall of Famer, according to Ethan J. Skolnick of Bleacher Report:
…. (6th) Finally, if Wade went anywhere, at any point, I've typically heard L.A. as an option. But I still expect Heat to sort this out. — Ethan J. Skolnick (@EthanJSkolnick) May 28, 2015
All the buzz surrounding the Lakers heading into free agency this summer has the storied franchise linked to Kevin Love. Los Angeles will certainly express interest in Love if the veteran forward opts out of his deal with the Cleveland Cavaliers, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to convince him to come to Los Angeles.
As usual, the Lakers are rumored to be interested in every big-name set to hit the open market in July. The list of players include Marc Gasol, LaMarcus Aldridge, DeAndre Jordan, Goran Dragic, Jimmy Butler, Kawhi Leonard, Rajon Rondo and Greg Monroe.
The consensus seems to be Rondo will be headed to Los Angeles with a decent chance of Love also joining him in purple and gold. Wade becoming available may make things interesting with the Lakers potentially seeing value in bringing in the aging superstar.
Unfortunately, even though Wade may be an option the Lakers explore, signing the 33-year-old may be a step in the wrong direction. When healthy, Wade is one of the best guards in the league without question. Although he excels when healthy, the veteran has never played a full 82 games in any of his 12 seasons in the league. In fact, Wade has played in 69 games or less in the past four seasons with the Heat.
With the Lakers having constant injury problems over the last few years, the last thing the team needs is to bring in an aging injury prone star on the downside of his career. Wade may be a great piece for the Lakers as a backup if they were in title contention, but at this point, it seems like the wrong move.
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Please enable Javascript to watch this videoJin Xing is the first transgender celebrity in China, and a progressive icon for many. She enjoys many titles: an accomplished dancer, founder of a modern dance company, a single mother of three adopted children, a talk show host, a business woman, and a wife of an interracial marriage. Now, she is once again under the spotlight for hosting a new dating show: one that features parents choosing potential daughters-in-law for their sons.
The first episode of Chinese Dating aired on Christmas Eve, and caused a storm of outrage on the internet that still continues. In the show, parents sit on chairs that move forward when they approve of one of the single girls on stage. Emphasis is put on youth (under 30), good looks, simple past relationships, a good career, a gentle attitude and family-centered values. And for men, wealth. When a girl with a doctorate degree stepped on the stage, the following caption appeared on screens: “but where’s the good looks that we agreed on?” The chauvinistic comments and the patriarchal, misogynistic standards led Quartz News to publish a video titled: “A new hit Chinese TV show proves sexist ideas still persist there.”
Yet Jin Xing has told the audience that she is proud of the show: “I told you, I don’t host average shows”, and presented it as in line with her harsh but fair attitude. (She once told the Huffington Post: “My words aren’t like massage oil — they’re like acupuncture needles, they go right to the nerve and twist it.”)
What has happened to Jin Xing, once an icon of progressive attitudes around gender and sexuality?
The military male dancer turned woman celebrity
Jin Xing was born in 1967 in Shenyang in northern China. Her father was a staff officer in the People’s Liberation Army, a highly privileged position in China, and her mother a translator. This background allowed Jin to enjoy many privileges. By age nine, she was admitted to a prestigious troupe and trained in traditional dance and acrobatics. Both are considered strong propaganda tools in China.
With her dancing talents, Jin quickly rose to the high ranks in the military. However, her ambitions and visions for life were beyond the confines of the army. In 1988, she received a scholarship from the Asia Society and left for New York to study modern dance and improve her English. In 1994, after returning to China at the age of 26, Jin once again joined the establishment: she was hired by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China.
So far, it might seem that she had chosen a life of mainstream success in the People’s Republic. However, Jin then felt increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin, and eventually made a decision: to have gender confirmation surgery and become a woman. In 1994, Chinese doctors had almost no experience with such operations, but she still she felt a pull to make the change at home. “I need the chi, I need the earth. I need them to protect me,” she said at the time. “In a Western environment maybe the technology is there, but my soul is too lonely.”
The news that Jin was to be the first person to openly undergo gender reassignment surgery became a national sensation in China. This is no easy task in any country, in particular Chinese society where one’s marital status is a dinner table topic and family is at the core of social values. Luckily, her parents were supportive, which she has said became the backbone of her confidence in her new life. However, a lack of oxygen to one of her legs during the 16-hour surgery put her whole career in jeopardy. The doctors were adamant that Jin would have trouble walking again, let alone dancing. They even signed her disability papers. In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, Jin described this period as the most difficult of her life: “I almost committed suicide. I wanted to become a woman, but I didn't want to be handicapped. I didn't want to lose my leg… Maybe I needed to sacrifice more to get to what I wanted. It's not that easy to get what you want. If it was so easy, everyone would do it.”
Her military experience proved to be useful and her own resilience paid off: after being released from the hospital in 1995, Jin immediately began intense physical therapy. Over the following year she made a full recovery and eventually — and rather miraculously — returned to the stage as a woman.
A recovered Jin went through a re-incarnation. She founded her own modern dance troupe in Shanghai, and her story brought her nationwide fame. She was invited to be a judge on a local version of the show ‘So You Think You Can Dance’. Her sharp-tongued comments often brought aspiring performers to tears, which earned her the title of Poisonous Tongue and made her an even more beloved TV personality. Her popularity eventually led to her own show, the ‘Jin Xing Show’, a wildly successful programme featuring dance competition and viewed by an estimated 100 million every week.
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contain any text you like, or even nothing at all. When the Pi boots, it looks for this file; if it finds it, it enables SSH and then deletes the file. SSH can still be turned on or off from the Raspberry Pi Configuration application or raspi-config ; this is simply an additional way to turn it on if you can’t easily run either of those applications.
The risk with an open SSH port is that someone can access it and log in; to do this, they need a user account and a password. Out of the box, all Raspbian installs have the default user account ‘pi’ with the password ‘raspberry’. If you’re enabling SSH, you should really change the password for the ‘pi’ user to prevent a hacker using the defaults. To encourage this, we’ve added warnings to the boot process. If SSH is enabled, and the password for the ‘pi’ user is still ‘raspberry’, you’ll see a warning message whenever you boot the Pi, whether to the desktop or the command line. We’re not enforcing password changes, but you’ll be warned whenever you boot if your Pi is potentially at risk.
Our hope is that these (relatively minor) changes will not cause too much inconvenience, but they will make it much harder for hackers to attack the Pi.
Is there anything I need to do to protect my Pi?
We should stress at this point that there’s no need to panic! We are not aware of Pis being used in botnets or being taken over in large numbers; your own Pi is almost certainly not currently hacked.
It’s still good practice to protect yourself to avoid problems in future. We therefore suggest that you use the Raspberry Pi Configuration application or raspi-config to disable SSH if you’re not using it, and also change the password for the ‘pi’ user if it’s still ‘raspberry’.
To change the password, you can either press the ‘Change Password’ button in Raspberry Pi Configuration, or type passwd at the command line, and follow the prompts.
This issue has caused quite a lot of discussion at Pi Towers. The relaxed approach we’ve taken thus far has been for very good reasons, and we’re reluctant to change it. However, we feel that these changes are necessary to protect our users from potential threats now and in the future, and we hope you can understand our reasoning.
How do I get the updates?
The latest Raspbian with PIXEL image is available from the Downloads page on our website now. Note that the uncompressed image is over 4GB in size, and some older unzippers will fail to decompress it properly. If you have problems, use 7-Zip on Windows and The Unarchiver on Mac; both are free applications which have been tested and will decompress the file correctly.
To update your existing Jessie image with all the bug fixes and these new security changes, type the following at the command line:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install -y pprompt
and then reboot.
Please note that installing this update on an existing Raspbian install will not change the status of SSH on that machine; if SSH is enabled, installing the update leaves SSH enabled, and vice-versa.Summary: A small group of people with Alzheimer’s who received an experimental blood plasma infusion from young donors showed some improvements in their condition, researchers report.
Source: Stanford.
Stanford University School of Medicine investigators have reported success in an early-phase clinical trial examining the safety, tolerability and feasibility of administering infusions of blood plasma from young donors to participants with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. There were also some signs suggesting improvements in participants’ conditions.
Results from the PLASMA trial, short for Plasma for Alzheimer’s Symptom Amelioration, were presented Nov. 4 at the 10th annual Clinical Trial on Alzheimer’s Disease conference in Boston by Sharon Sha, MD, a clinical associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford and the trial’s principal investigator.
Sha noted that the finding of safety wasn’t surprising, given that blood-plasma infusions have long been in widespread use for other indications and are considered extremely safe. More surprising, she said, were hints of recipients’ improvement on tests of functional ability: the capacity to perform basic tasks essential to independent daily life, such as remembering to take medications and being able to pay bills and prepare one’s own meals.
The PLASMA trial was designed to test a hypothesis advanced by Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, Stanford professor of neurology and neurological sciences and a senior research career scientist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, whose research has shown that factors in the blood of young mice can rejuvenate the brain tissue and improve cognitive performance in old mice.
Larger studies needed
Sha, the clinical core co-leader of the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and the medical director of the Stanford Neuroscience Clinical Trials Group, cautioned that these assessments were based on caregiver reports and that the number of participants in the study — 18 — was small. Further studies on larger numbers of participants will be necessary before conclusions about efficacy can be reached, Sha said.
The trial took place at Stanford Hospital and was sponsored by Alkahest, a privately held biotechnology company headquartered in San Carlos, California. Alkahest holds intellectual property associated with the treatment regimen. Wyss-Coray, a co-founder of the company and chair of its scientific advisory board, continues to work full-time at Stanford. He was not involved in the clinical study.
The trial proceeded in two stages. In the first stage, nine participants with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease were given four weekly infusions either of plasma — the liquid, cell-free part of blood — obtained from donors 18-30 years old, or of placebo (a saline solution). Neither the participants nor those administering the infusions knew which of the two infusions any given participant was getting. Then, after a six-week “washout” period, the regimens were reversed: Those initially receiving plasma got four weekly infusions of placebo, and vice versa.
“Those participants served as their own controls,” said Sha.
Multiple tests and questionnaires to ascertain mood, cognition and functional ability of the participants were administered to either participants or their caregivers before and after the first four-week infusion period, and again before and after the second four-week infusion period.
The total time elapsing between a participant’s first and final visits, including a preliminary screening and a final visit, approached six months. The participants needed to make nearly a dozen round trips to Stanford, accompanied by their caregivers. So, to reduce the travel burden, the investigators decided to modify the design for their next group of nine participants. These newcomers all received young-donor plasma infusions, and they and their caregivers, as well as the administrators, all knew it. This change cut the time between the first and final visits to 10-12 weeks for the second group of participants, and required commensurately fewer trips. These participants, like the first group, received the full battery of mood, cognition and functional-ability assessments.
Only a single, minor instance of a trial-related adverse event — excessive itching — occurred. Sha said this wasn’t entirely unanticipated, as it can arise as a side effect of the infusion of any blood product. Another participant had a stroke, but this was considered unrelated to the treatment; the participant had received only four infusions of saline and, furthermore, had suffered the stroke at the end of the ensuing washout period, during which no infusions of any kind were administered.
Improvements in functional ability
An analysis of assessments once all participants had been treated showed no significant changes in participants’ mood or their performance on tests of cognition involving tasks such as memorizing lists or recalling recent events, Sha said. These kinds of changes are typically observed only in clinical trials whose durations exceed one year, she added, so the absence of an effect here wasn’t particularly unanticipated.
But on two of three different assessments of functional ability, participants showed statistically significant improvement — this, despite the trial’s small size.
“That was surprising, to me,” said Sha. “The trial wasn’t powered to show efficacy.”
At first, the investigators suspected that the report of improvements in functional ability might have been driven by the second group of participants, who along with their caregivers and the investigators themselves knew they were getting plasma; this could perhaps predispose caregivers to optimistic reporting. But examination of the data indicated that, to the contrary, it was the first group of participants — who had no idea whether they were getting plasma or placebo — who showed the most improvement in functional ability after receiving plasma infusions.
“Our enthusiasm concerning these findings needs to be tempered by the fact that this was a small trial,” Sha said. “But these results certainly warrant further study.”
Alkahest has stated in a news release that based on the safety profile and signals of efficacy seen in the PLASMA trial, it is planning to advance the clinical development of a next-generation, proprietary plasma-derived product for the treatment of mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease.
“I’m excited to see that giving repeated infusions of plasma to elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease is safe and that we can move forward to larger studies,” Wyss-Coray said. “But I’m also realistic enough to know that it is very easy to cure diseases in small animals and a million times more difficult in humans.”
About this neuroscience research article
Source: Bruce Goldman – Stanford
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: The findings were presented at the 10th annual Clinical Trial on Alzheimer’s Disease conference in Boston on November 4, 2017.
Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article
MLA
APA
Chicago Stanford “Clinical Trial Finds Blood-Plasma Infusions for Alzheimer’s Safe and Promising.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 5 November 2017.
<http://neurosciencenews.com/alzheimers-blood-infusion-7879/>. Stanford (2017, November 5). Clinical Trial Finds Blood-Plasma Infusions for Alzheimer’s Safe and Promising. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved November 5, 2017 from http://neurosciencenews.com/alzheimers-blood-infusion-7879/ Stanford “Clinical Trial Finds Blood-Plasma Infusions for Alzheimer’s Safe and Promising.” http://neurosciencenews.com/alzheimers-blood-infusion-7879/ (accessed November 5, 2017).
Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.The 3rd edition of the Underground Effect organized by Saato Project was held in Paris la Defense from 19th to 24th of Sept 2017.
Many activities were programmed! Great vibe atmosphere on the famous esplanade of “La Defense” in Paris. Listening to the Hip Hop sound of 2 Djs, GroovShakra and Mayah Level and graffiti artists from all around Europe gathered for live performances.
It was also an opportunity for the public to learn about stenciling with Raf Urban! Lucky people!
And for urban art fans to buy some great artworks of the artists.
This 2017 session brought together a selection of very talented artists! The event allowed everyone to meet artists, discover their talent and see them paint in front of their eyes with bewilderment. The eyes of the children explosive with happiness!
What a lineup! SmugOne who needs no introduction, the Spanish Belin, the Portuguese Mr Dheo, the English Mr Cenz, the French Dege, Russ, Stom500, Kalouf, Mumie, RNST and great discoveries like the Greek Insane 51 who i’ve met several times during my Urban art reports, the Belgian Nean in this lineup was likely to be the most surprising discovery, the amazing artworks of the Swiss artists Bane and Pest of the Kenyan Wisetwo and finaly the fabulous artwork of my Italian friend Vesod.
A great moment of artistic sharing that allowed all to appreciate the artist’s artworks, and for neophites to discover street art and graffiti.
We look forward to the Underground Effect 2018 edition.
Underground Effect 2017 Photo Gallery:MOORHEAD – The metro area’s first medical marijuana dispensary is expected to open here this summer.
The CEO of Minnesota Medical Solutions, which is licensed to operate four dispensaries in the state, said he expects to sign a lease on a Moorhead location in the next week or two.
“We found three sites, and we’re in the final stages of negotiating one of them,” said the CEO, Dr. Kyle Kingsley. He declined to reveal the site’s address.
The dispensary will offer marijuana products to patients suffering from terminal illness, cancer, HIV/AIDS, seizures and glaucoma, among other medical conditions, according to the state Department of Health.
Kingsley hopes to open the dispensary by the end of July.
The dispensary will sell oils, tinctures and pills made from marijuana extract for medical use, he said. The plant form of marijuana will not be sold.
Only patients with qualifying conditions, their parents and registered caregivers will be allowed in the store, he said.
Kingsley said he will schedule an “open forum” before opening the Moorhead dispensary so people here can learn more about how his business will operate.
City Manager Michael Redlinger said he does not anticipate “any problems or issues” with the dispensary.
“We fully expect it’s going to be an operation that will be like other commercial medical operations,” Redlinger said.
Minnesota Medical Solutions, one of two licensed to run marijuana dispensaries in the state, plans to open one in Minneapolis on July 1 and another in Rochester “shortly thereafter. “And then it’ll be Moorhead,” Kingsley said.
Kingsley said his company began harvesting marijuana plants at his Otsego greenhouse farm this week.As we heard from Intel at its Computex keynote, the merger between A4WP (Alliance for Wireless Power) and PMA (Power Matters Alliance) is finally a signed deal as of today, which is a big step toward delivering the next generation of wireless power -- one that can transmit farther while also covering a wider range of wattage -- to consumers. Intel's SVP Kirk Skaugen, the very same man who's been pushing for the totally wireless PC since last year's Computex (the photo sort of explains why), added that we'll be seeing this magnetic resonance technology, aka Rezence, being integrated into next year's laptops, keyboard, mice and other devices. For those who can't wait, the exec also expects to see Rezence-enabled add-ons for mobile devices during the transitional period. "This will be a journey just like Centrino: We didn't invent wireless notebooks; we just made wireless ubiquitous."FARGO - The Mid America Steel riverfront site in downtown Fargo has the potential to bring the city closer to achieving a vision included in its developing master plan focused on the future.
"It's a large site and most importantly right on the river and right where the river bends," said Scott Page, a consultant with Philadelphia-based Interface Studio, a city planning and urban development company. "This is a critical opportunity for downtown, not just downtown Fargo, but also downtown Moorhead. We look at this as an opportunity to really create... a new collection of mixed-use development."
Mid America Steel, which has been downtown since its founding in 1905 as Fargo Foundry Co., was bought out by the city and the Fargo-Moorhead Diversion Authority in June for a total of $22 million.
Interface Studio has been working on Fargo's plan since June.
Page gave a presentation Tuesday, May 23, at the Fargo Theatre on the draft recommendations for a downtown master plan and offered attendees a chance to vote on project priorities. He briefed the City Commission on a similar presentation Monday evening. Mayor Tim Mahoney said the purpose of Tuesday's meeting was for community members to provide some "final direction" to the ongoing study of downtown and to direct commissioners "where we should head."
"This is an important step, but by no means the end," Page said.
Conceptual drawings are merely ways of starting conversations and to see if the work so far is "hitting the right note," he said. He said he doesn't like the phrase "master plan," since major developments like this involve a great deal of flexibility, so it's more like an "umbrella vision."
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Page presented a conceptual drawing of what the city-owned land at 205 NP Ave., the Mid America Steel site, could look like, along with other key areas downtown.
Besides a retention pond to help with localized flooding, the Mid America Steel site could combine retail and open space to encourage people to engage with the river. With direct access to the riverfront, Page said it allows for events that are "celebrating the river," which was a suggestion a lot of people told him they want to see embraced in the master plan.
The river is what makes Fargo unique and attractive to the community and visitors, he said, and the master plan intends to highlight and market those qualities.
On the website Downtown InFocus, where information is regularly updated on developing the master plan, an interactive map allows anyone in the community to offer suggestions for downtown - 30 percent deal with transportation and 20 percent on river access. A few of those ideas focused on what to do with the Mid America Steel site, like developing a convention center, hotel, performance arts center or a sort of "post-industrial development" that would be a park, mixed-use site like Minneapolis' Mill Ruins Park.
More information about Fargo's downtown master plan is available at www.fargoinfocus.org.Agile Results is a simple system for time management. Agile Results is fully explained in the action guide, Getting Results the Agile Way.
Getting started with Agile Results is easy. Here's how:
On Mondays, ask yourself, "What are three wins I want for this week?" Each day, ask yourself, "What are three wins I want for today?" On Fridays, ask yourself, "What are three things going well?", and, "What are three things to improve?"
Say your answers out loud first, and then write them down. Writing your answers down helps them stick. Saying your answers out loud helps simplify your answers. If you get tongue tied or elaborate or lost when you say your answers, then find another way to say them until they are simple, clear, and concise.
Clarity is the key to driving results.
If you do nothing else, but want to get started right here, right now – then simply grab a piece of paper and write down three wins that you want for today. Congratulations – you’re doing Agile Results.
One way to remember the heart of Agile Results is to simply remind yourself of the following mantras:
Three wins for the day
Three wins for the week
Three wins for the month
Three wins for the quarter
Three wins for the year
It's simple, but highly effective. If you get in the habit of nailing your three wins, you will spin circles around others that don't. You will also build an important muscle when it comes to articulating your wins. You will suddenly be perceived as somebody who demonstrates clarity in purpose and results. You gain trust as a productive member of the team.
Most importantly, you build your belief in you as somebody who can make things happen. This little momentum goes a long way and will help you rise above the crowd and stand out in terms of execution excellence.
Agile Results works. It works because it does the following:
You focus on outcomes, not activities. The outcome is the end-in-mind or the "win." When you know this secret, you no longer waste time on tangents and activities that don't contribute to your bottom line results. This helps you find short-cuts and amplify your value. You focus on value, not time spent. Rather than focus on spending time, you focus on flowing value. This forces you to pay attention to what is valued and who values it. Value is in the eye of the beholder. You stop spending time on things that don't matter, based on what you want to accomplish. Time is a first class citizen. This is a big deal. Each week is a fresh start. Each day is a fresh start. Each day is a new chance to define new wins for that specific day. Each week is a new chance to do a reset and decide on the big wins that you want for the week. This focus on daily, weekly, and monthly results. You get energy on your side. One of the secrets of getting results is using your own energy patterns to your advantage. It makes you aware of your most productive hours and you use those hours to tackle your greatest challenges and do your greatest work. For example, my power hours are 8:00 A.M., 10:00 A.M, 2:00 P.M, and 4:00 P.M. The quantity and quality of work that I can produce during those hours is unmatched. It's when I do my heavy lifting and it's how I do ten hours of work within a single hour. It's crazy effective, because knowledge work is intimately bound to your brain being in its most resourceful, relaxed, and ready state. You focus on meaningful results. It's not about doing more. It's spending your precious life force on the right things. You link what you do to your values. Because you are driving for wins, you make it a game. Making it a game links it to fun, as well as helps you see and *feel* your progress. It's strategy in action. You first identify "Why" do something, before "How." You trim your To-Do Tree of all the ineffective, non-essential things, to make space for the stuff that really matters. It's a system. Agile Results combines some of the best methods for thinking, feeling, and taking action into one simple system. The system works by combining ideas like focusing on outcomes over activities, chunking big work down into acitonable steps, using your best energy for your best results, and setting helpful limits using The Rule of Three to avoid overwhelm and overload. It helps you stay light-weight and on top of your game. It's flexible. The agile part is the flexible part. It's how you respond to change. Because of it's simple nature, and the fact that it's a collection of principles, you can adapt them to suit you. Rather than change yourself to suit the system, you use the system to bring out your best, using your own style as a catalyst, taking advantage of your unique skills, your specific values, and your most productive and creative hours.
I could say more. But I'd rather you just test the system for yourself. If you don't already have the book, check it out online at http://GettingResults.com, or buy the Kindle version on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Results-Agile-Way-ebook/dp/B005X0MFD2
If you want to absolutely change your game and drive your results to the best in your life, then take the Agile Results 30 Day Challenge.
In a world of ever-increasing competition, you have to get every advantage on your side. Use Agile Results to get the system on your side and to help you flourish like you've never flourished before.
You Might Also LikeThe taxi dataset is one of the most popular on our site and for good reason, it is not often that you can get behind the wheel of a supercomputer for free.
Still, without direction, it can be hard to uncover the insights in the data that often give our audiences a rush.
With that in mind we will be creating a series of these “cheatsheets” to help you grasp the power of speed at scale. Each post will talk about how to interact with the GPU-powered relational database (MapD Core) using our visual analytics engine (MapD Immerse).
Start by executing the following tasks on the taxi demo (it can be found here).
When you are done, you should be ready to explore on your own.
When you fire up the demo, you will be looking at this default dashboard.
You can make changes to your heart's content, but you can’t save those for obvious reasons.
Let’s start by clicking on cash. What’s the overall trend?
Click on Credit (only Credit) and note the exact day that credit card readers were mandated by law in NYC.
Create a time block on the Trip Distance window (upper right) and drag it across. Can you identify what is happening with the colors as your trip distance goes from shorter to longer? What distance effectively shows you the boundary of every borough in Manhattan?
It can be easy to forget you have filters on. One way to know is to look at the filter icon in the upper left. Clicking that will clear all your filters. You can can also clear individual filters one by one.
Let’s clear the filter on trip distance.
Let’s take this for a spin by zooming into JFK airport. Create a time block on the # of Records by Pickup Time Window around 2010. Drag the time block to the right.
What happens during 2013? It is worth noting that as you drag that time window across, you are executing four queries simultaneously against the 1.2B rows. If you have a good connection it shouldn’t even pause when you drag it.
Unclick all your filters again.
While we are on the subject of airports, locate LaGuardia. Just to the south of LaGuardia is Citi Field (where the Mets play). You should notice some extreme seasonality to the traffic. If you look closely you can see when the Mets were in the World Series in 2015 because the rides keep coming well into the month of October.
There is another spike every September. What besides baseball season could cause that? Hint: narrow your focus to the Area of Interest.
Let’s bring the business level data into the equation.
Let’s start by deleting a few charts to make room for our new charts. Simply hit the x in the upper right corner of each chart.
Next select apply chart and let’s build out a list of all the businesses in NYC. We will look at the stores that taxis dropped off at and the number of people that were dropped off there. The data uses the latitude and longitude of the end of the trip and we select the business within 30 meters (about 100 feet) of that dropoff.
The first dimension is dropoffstorechains and the second one is # of records. The default is table but let’s select rows. Click Apply.
Let’s add a heatmap.
Heatmaps require an X and Y axis. In this case, let’s make the X axis the dropoffdatetime but select “Extract” and choose Day of the Week. To “select” that just click outside of the window. For the Y axis, we choose dropoffdatetime again, but under “Extract” we select hour.
Next we select the # of records under measures and viola, we have a heatmap. Click Apply.
Your dashboard should look like this:
From here you can filter by store to see traffic patterns. Looking at Krispy Kreme for example we see that most folks frequent the legendary donut shop on weekends. We also see some folks starting relax their diets on Friday (think office goers buying for colleagues).
This same behavior let’s you explore different chains and different parts of the city. Take for example the Alphabet City neighborhood. If you were a CIA analyst doing pattern of life analysis - what would your takeaway be? Hint, look at when dropoffs concentrate. What is going on in that area at that time of day (or more appropriately night)? How could you validate that behavior?
Last tidbit before you run amok through the city. The platform supports custom SQL. To access that functionality select filters, then custom, then type your query. For example, if we wanted to see all the rides for which the tip amount was greater than 20% we would craft the following SQL statement:
tip_amount > cast(.2 as float) * fare_amount
Then from filter, we would select Custom and enter the query. Now you can see who tipped and what the trends were.
If you have gotten this far, you are well on your way to unlocking many of the secrets held by this dataset but more importantly you are learning how to drive a supercomputer. There are dozens of additional attributes you can graph, plot and heatmap - all of which will slice through the 1.2 billion rows like a knife through butter courtesy of the world's fastest data exploration engine.
Again, if you find something cool, point it out on Twitter. If we add it to this post, we will send you a hoodie.
In the meantime - enjoy!The Sydney Roosters have today announced that dynamic young utility Connor Watson has extended his arrangement with the Club until at least the end of 2018.
20 year-old Watson expressed his delight at extending his contract with the Tricolours.
“I’m very excited to extend my time with the Roosters,” said Watson.
“I’m learning so much from Robbo and the coaches, and this is where I want to build a career.
“I know I still have a lot of improvement in me, and hopefully I’ll keep learning and improving and secure an opportunity to play some good footy for the Roosters,” he added.
Roosters Head Coach Trent Robinson said it was exciting to have Watson extend his arrangement with the Club.
“I’ve really enjoyed watching Connor’s development over the last few years,” said Robinson.
“Connor is a natural ball runner who trains hard. He’s also a great young man, so I’m really looking forward to continuing to work with him and watching his development over the next few seasons,” he added.
Watson made his NRL debut in round 7 of the 2016 season, playing 16 games in his rookie year.
This announcement caps off an exciting week for the Roosters, with the Club surpassing 10,000 Members last Thursday.
This is the fastest that the Roosters have ever reached 10,000 Members, with more than 9,000 of those Membership renewals and 1,000 new Members joining the Club.
The Roosters extend their thanks to the 10,000-plus Members who have pledged their commitment to their team by renewing or joining as a 2017 Roosters Member.
Further information about the Roosters extensive range of full season and flexi Membership options can be found by visiting membership.roosters.com.au.A view of the NBA logo at the NBA All-Star Jam Session at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. (Photo11: Bob Donnan, USAT)
The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association have committed to donate $1 million towards the ongoing Hurricane Harvey relief efforts taking place in Houston and surrounding areas, it was announced Tuesday.
"Our thoughts are with the city of Houston and all those affected by flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey," the NBA and NBPA said in a joint statement. "(We) have jointly committed to donate $1 million to organizations including the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund, American Red Cross, and other non-profit groups working in the Greater Houston area to bring relief to those impacted."
Also on Tuesday, Houston Rockets owner Les Alexander upped his donation of $4 million to $10 million to help with the response and recovery. Other NBA players, including Rockets point guard Chris Paul and numerous members of the Washington Wizards, have made donations as well.
'GET OUT NOW': Levee breached near Houston in Hurricane Harvey aftermath
MORE HARVEY: What we know now
IN TEXAS: President Trump gets briefing on 'epic' storm damagePakistanis lose rights to free speech, assembly, property rights, lawyers RAW STORY
Published: Monday November 5, 2007
del.icio.us
Print This Email This The Associated Press took a look at some of the restrictions of rights suspended by President George W. Bush's key terrorism ally General Pervez Musharraf Sunday. They follow. Protection of life and liberty.
The right to free movement.
The right of detainees to be informed of their offense and given access to lawyers.
Protection of property rights.
The right to assemble in public.
The right to free speech.
Equal rights for all citizens before law and equal legal protection.
Media coverage of suicide bombings and militant activity is curtailed by new rules. Broadcasters also face a three-year jail term if they "ridicule" members of the government or armed forces.“This is our moment in history. We cannot choose to go backwards,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said. | Getty House Democrats seize on anti-Trump strategy
BALTIMORE — House Democrats have come here to regroup, reconnect and rally around a message to take back the House in 2018. Their political playbook already seems written, in fact, and it’s pretty simple: We’re not Donald Trump.
“This is our moment in history. We cannot choose to go backwards,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Democrats in a closed-door welcome ceremony. “This man in the White House is incoherent, incompetent and dangerous. And we have to protect children and other living things from him. We will do it.”
Story Continued Below
One after another, Democratic leaders, clad in their best retreat chic, hammered home that simple idea in their opening news conference. The main message: Republicans created the president, and they will have to answer for every single controversy he creates over the next four years.
“It’s not just about the contrast between Democrats and Donald Trump,” Pelosi told reporters. “It’s about the Republicans in the Congress. There’s hardly anything that Donald Trump has said that the Republicans haven’t said sooner and for longer periods of time, in the worst way.”
If their plan sounds vaguely familiar, it is. House Democrats tried the same thing in the run-up to the 2016 election, tying House Republicans to whatever the Trump controversy du jour was, with dismal results. Democrats picked up only six House seats, despite predicting big gains for weeks ahead of the election.
But Democratic leaders and aides think this time will be different and that if they play their cards right, the strategy could even help deliver them the double-digit wins they need to take back the House in 2018.
This time they have a much longer runway to link individual House Republicans to Trump’s actions. And the stakes are much higher — whereas before, Trump was preaching from behind a powerless pulpit on the campaign trail, he’s now sitting behind the resolute desk in the Oval Office and his policies have real world implications for voters.
In a little more than two weeks, Trump has turned the world upside down with a chaotically implemented executive order on immigration, daily name-calling attacks on Twitter, and unfounded claims of widespread voting irregularities.
House Democrats are betting voters won’t be able to stomach four years of Trump if his chaotic reign continues and will be looking for someone to blame in 2018 when Trump’s name isn’t on the ballot.
“Our Republican colleagues understand that what the White House does, they either have to answer for or they have to condemn. They can’t have it both ways,” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley of New York told reporters.
Democrats also are counting on a little luck: Midterm elections generally favor the party not in the White House, a message Pelosi hammered home during the closed-door caucus meeting on Wednesday.
“History is on our side. And so, we have to remember that,” she told her colleagues in a nod to the 2006 elections that swept Democrats into power and Pelosi to the speakership under Republican President George W. Bush.
The message, essentially “Let Trump be Trump,” is something Pelosi has been preaching for months. During the campaign, she repeatedly referred to him as “the gift that keeps on giving,” predicting he would hand Republicans huge losses in both the House and Senate.
After the election sent Democrats licking their wounds and questioning their longtime House leadership regime, Pelosi again renewed her declarations about Trump as a pitch for why the caucus should keep her in power for at least two more years.
But that doesn’t mean she’s ignoring the Democrats who rallied around Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who challenged her for the position as minority leader. Ryan and others sharply criticized Pelosi, saying that under her leadership Democrats failed to craft any kind of campaign message other than being anti-Trump and that it cost them big time with working-class white voters.
Pelosi privately met with Ryan as well as Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, Debbie Dingell of Michigan and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio to talk about crafting a strategy to reach voters in former manufacturing strongholds who were once devoted Democrats.
Democratic aides say they will eventually shift to a positive economic message that Rust Belt Democrats can run on. But for now, aides say, the focus is on slaying the giant and proving to the voters who sent Trump into the White House why his policies will fail.
House Democrats’ strategy is basically this: They’ll publicly goad Trump on subjects he’s clearly sensitive about, like insinuating he’s being blackmailed by Russian President Vladimir Putin; and on other issues, like Obamacare and tax reform, they’ll get out of the way and let Trump and House Republicans fall on their face.
House Democratic Caucus Vice Chairwoman Linda Sánchez of California on Wednesday summed up the strategy this way: “kicking a little ass for the working class.”Looking for news you can trust?
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When the final aye of the roll call vote was recorded on the electronic panel above the West Chamber of the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln yesterday, the crowd in the galleries overlooking the floor couldn’t contain their shouts of relief. Or maybe it was disbelief. The wooden benches were filled with death penalty opponents who had come hoping to see the senators of the unicameral Legislature override Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto of a bill repealing the state’s death penalty law—but they had good reason to worry they no longer had the necessary votes. After enduring more than two hours of heated debate (ranging from tearful stories of personal evolution to bellowed passages from the Bible), the override received exactly the 30 votes required. The death penalty was officially abolished in Nebraska, and activists whooped and clapped, prompting gavel-pounding and calls for order.
Repeal of the death penalty has been championed by liberals in the Legislature since 1973. Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha, who sponsored this year’s effort, has tried to repeal the death penalty 36 previous times in his four decades as a Nebraska legislator. He secured passage in 1979 but didn’t have enough votes to override Gov. Charles Thone’s veto. In 1992, the repeal was introduced with 25 cosponsors, but support unraveled before a floor vote. Yet, ironically, what made yesterday’s successful override possible was not Chambers himself but rather a new class of 18 first-year senators, who arrived all at once because of term limits originally passed in an effort to ouster Chambers. “I wish that I could say that it was my brilliance that brought us to this point,” he said in opening debate on the bill, “but this would not be true, and we all know it. Had not the conservative faction decided it was time for a change, there’s no way that what is happening today would be happening today.”
This new group of conservatives were won over to Chambers’ viewpoint by a variety of factors—the cost of pursuing death penalty cases in a state that has executed just three death row inmates since 195 |
segments.
Daniel Newman, Author, The New Rules of Customer Engagement “The success or failure of B2B companies will depend largely on their ability to forge one-on-one relationships with their customers. The faster they adopt the 1:1 marketing structure, the better they will be at meeting their collective business goals.”
Marketing in B2B is one-to-one. The emergence of account-based marketing is the product of the same need.
B2C marketing on the hand stresses majorly on branding. One-to-one marketing is simply beyond the realm of B2C marketers because of their inability to create extensive user profile like B2B marketers can with the help of CRM. Furthermore, even if they build the profile, holding 1:1 communication with such volume is only an idealistic thought. So, for B2C marketers, the success lies in their ability to create micro-segments and creating personalized offerings for each of them.
Mathew Sweezey “Much of B2C advertising is still branding, making it highly subjective. Most B2B marketing is not. It is tactical, and all tied to a central database, usually called a CRM.” via Clickz
Therefore B2B marketing is more like a process. The reason being that they solve a problem which is experienced by entities displaying certain common traits in terms of size, industry type, revenue, use-case etc. Since the discipline of marketing is based on first identifying the consumer and then strategizing accordingly, in B2B, understanding your users is not a recurring or exhaustive affair.
For most companies, there are established rules and portfolios and scope of creativity is only limited to how the quickly and efficiently the concerned individual can execute it.
While B2C is largely dependent on tests and experimentation. To accomplish that they need products that are capable of making sense of the enormous data dump that shoots up every day and lets them use that data to create powerful engagement campaigns.
5. Pricing
Key Takeaway- In B2B the pricing is based on the number of contacts. In B2C it’s the number of volume of data they capture mostly quantified by the number of Active Users.
In B2B each lead is contactable, for only then they are going to be qualified as lead, and like we discussed, the function of the MAP is lifecycle management of each lead. B2B MAPs are therefore priced on the basis of the number of contactable leads that you want to manage via the platform.
Some examples
Hubspot
Autopilot
Because of this contact-based pricing, B2B MAPs can get extremely expensive for B2C companies.
Mike Templeton is the CEO of a Utah-based marketing company- Foxtail Marketing.
In web-based B2C product there are millions of users and approximately only 10-30% of them are contactable. In mobile products this number would be between 40-80% (for opt-out rate of push is increasing). But since the number is still beyond the scope of one-to-one communication they collate data to create high definition atomic units of users also called segments and engage them with right incentive
The B2C companies thus charge on the basis of the number of unique users you want to track and engage. The industry term to quantify such users is MAU(Monthly Active Users)- the number of users who engages with the product in a month.
Localytics
WebEngage
Several companies define MAUs in their own way, which is also explicated in pricing page of Localytics. “Some other platforms consider any user you send a message to as an MAU, even if the user never actually opens your app. With these platforms, you’ll need to purchase a larger number of MAUs if you want the ability to re-engage inactive users.”
But ultimately boils down to the number of users you wish to engage. Like Urban Airship prices on the basis of reachable users or addressable users.
So basically both B2B and B2C charges on the basis of the number of users but one considers the number of contactable ones and other does the number of trackable ones.
‘Number of contacts’ is the fundamental scale on the basis of which pricing is done but it is not the only condition. Almost all the platforms club the features together and create several slabs of pricing depending on the requirement.
Conclusion
Both the platforms are learning from each other and the definitions are converging. For instance, B2C features like retargeting, multi-channel engagement are showing up in B2B. On the flipside, lead nurturing, close loop reporting etc that were earlier in the territory of B2C are now being picked up by B2B platforms.
In a few years, there wouldn’t be much difference between them to warrant a post like this. Until then 🙂U of L has announced that Louisville center Gorgui Dieng has suffered a broken left wrist and will be sidelined for an "undetermined" amount of time.
Dieng suffered the injury during the Cardinals' semifinal win over Missouri in the Battle 4 Atlantis. An x-ray taken at Jewish Hospital when Louisville returned from the Bahamas on Sunday night revealed a broken scaphoid bone in his left wrist. His prognosis will be updated after further examination from a hand specialist on Monday.
U of L head coach Rick Pitino said on Saturday that if Dieng's wrist was broken he would probably miss 4-6 weeks. Though the official prognosis won't be known until Monday, it seems unlikely that Dieng will be available until after Louisville's Dec. 29 game against arch-rival Kentucky.
Dieng, who set Louisville's single-season record for blocked shots a year ago, is averaging 8.2 points and 8.0 rebounds through five games this season. He produced his 13th career double-double against Samford with 10 points, 13 rebounds, 5 assists, 4 blocks and 3 steals.
Seeing sad Gorgui in street clothes is going to be the hardest part of all.
Not the best two-day stretch we've ever seen.In the first show of 2019 we welcome back Remedy Recovery owner, friend of the show and all around big mouth, Joe Schrank. We hear his opinion on medicated assisted treatment and some of his remembrances of Chris. Like that time Chris tripped Ecstacy while managing Joe's sober loft in Brooklyn surrounded by bottles of clients urine. Then we hear from major Network News anchor Laurie Dhue. Laurie drops a little Dopey, like the time she was blowing lines before meeting George Bush at the White House. She also reflects on her many years in recovery. Lastly, but certainly not leastly, the vivacious, beautiful and brilliant Linda joins Dave. They talk about his recent and traumatic trip to the dentist for a dreaded tooth extraction, and on breaking the million downloads barrier. They also get into thoughts on New Years and we hear the latest in the Dopey saga that is Artie Lange. Plus reviews, a voicemail, a new, possibly worst installment of the Stash Word and much much more on the first Dopey Episode of the year.Hey, so I got the list!
Because a ton of us are crazy about AUs in this fandom, I thought it would be fun to compile a list of AUs a lot of us know and love. And some of them we might not be familiar with but let’s broaden our horizons!
Day 1: Pirate AU. Have our girls roll along the high seas as swash-buckling bandits.
Day 2: Coffee Shop AU. A classic, of course. Go back to the roots of the fabulous song “Hey Blondie”!
Day 3: Classic Romantic Movie AU. Pick your favorite romantic film and do a crossover!
Day 4: Marvel/DC Universe AU. Pretty much speaks for itself. I’ve seen a lot of Captain American Winter Soldier stuff out there. Let’s take a crack at the other ones, too!
Day 5: Roadtrip AU. Nothing is better than a good roadtrip! Some old HCs were circulating around and it’s a great AU with many possibilities.
Day 6: Sci-Fi AU. Cyborgs? Dystopian? Go for it!
Day 7: Your Favorite AU. Now, this can be anything! From a fic, from your personal HCs, Canon-verse! Whatever you want!
So it’s all next week! Submissions will begin on Sunday April 26, 2015 12:01AM PST to Saturday May 2, 2015 11:59PM PST.
Have fun!
~athpluver~My earliest memory of the first Die Hard is watching it with my dad on a rented VHS tape. I must have been pretty young at the time, but my parents never put any movies off-limits as long as one of them was there to watch, too.
I don’t really remember the movie itself from that screening, but I can distinctly recall my father explaining the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, telling me about aspect ratios and why Die Hard got a special video release to make it look like it did in the theater.
Years later, I went to film school and, lo and behold, “Die Hard” was the very first textbook reference for my freshman cinematography class. The teacher played scenes on mute, showing off the visual mastery that John McTiernan and Jan de Bont worked into just about every shot.
These days, I could do the same thing with the script, breaking it down and explaining, scene by scene, how flawlessly the exposition is delivered. I could chart the rising action and falling action and point out how, 25 years later, the film is still the gold standard for Hollywood action movies.
But that’s not why I love Die Hard.
I mentioned it to Bruce Willis in our video interview earlier this week that Die Hard is a rare film crafted for both the best and worst of times. It’s something that I love sharing with friends and family and something that I turn to cheer me up when theres no one else around.
“I’m looking at Nakatomi Tower right now!” my friend Ian shouted at me over the phone a few years ago.
One of my best friends growing up, Ian had moved from Maryland to Los Angeles a little while after I did to follow his dream of being an actor. He had been in town for a month or two and was doing extra work for an episode of “How I Met I Your Mother” on the Twentieth Century Fox lot. From the top of one of the parking garages, you’ve got a perfect view of Nakatomi Plaza.
In real life, the building is called Fox Plaza. It’s a 35-story skyscraper that stands adjacent to the Century City-based studio. It’s my favorite landmark in Los Angeles and the perfect example of the city’s delicate balance between reality and fiction.
Ian, the biggest Die Hard fan I know, actually dressed as Ellis last Halloween and I knew he’d be thrilled when I invited him to come with me to a press screening of the new film, A Good Day to Die Hard, on the Fox lot. What’s more, the night was set up to celebrate the original film’s 25th anniversary and, just before the screening, Bruce Willis revealed — via explosions — a massive painted mural (which you can watch for yourself by clicking here.
It was after the film, though, that things were supposed to get really cool: Fox was throwing a party inside the actual Nakatomi Plaza.
Walking through the lobby is like being in a dream. The front isn’t entirely a perfect match for the Nakatomi lobby, but by the time you hit the elevators, you’ve actually stepped into Die Hard.
The party was held on an empty upper floor and I was later told that it was sheer happenstance that allowed the space to be between tenants during the 25th Anniversary celebration. Neither Ian nor I was expecting the space to look anything like the Christmas party in the film, but we were both ecstatic to find out that it looked very much like one of the unfinished floors where John McClane hides out.
“We need to take our shoes off,” Ian said, determined, as we got off the elevator.
I weighed the notion of running around a party of fancy studio executives and professional peers barefoot for all of a second before I realized he was right. If you’re ever lucky enough to attend a party at the top of Nakatomi Tower, you better do it right. It wasn’t long before we were in our undershirts, too, and had somehow managed to get a handful of partygoers to follow suit and even more to stand around cheering us on.
That’s one of the best things about Die Hard. Everybody gets it.
Flash back to another night some time ago. I’m standing alone on the roof of that same parking garage next to Fox Plaza. It’s my birthday and I hate my birthday and, every year, make a concentrated effort to spend it alone and get it over with as soon as possible. This particular year it’s even worse because I’m two months out of being on the receiving end of a breakup and have spent most of the day wondering if she’s going to call.
I’d been invited to this screening, though, on the Fox lot where they were to show off a brand new print of the original Die Hard which, up until that night, I had never actually seen on the big screen. As curmudgeonly as I was feeling, that was an offer I couldn’t turn down.
The film ends and it’s after 10pm. I’m heading back to my car and looking up at the building from the movie I’ve just left. Despite the day, it’s making me smile. My phone is still off, though, from being inside the theater and I suddenly get this sick feeling in my stomach with the realization that, when I turn it on, I’m probably not going to find a missed call.
So I’m standing there in the shadow of Nakatomi Tower and clutching the phone in my pocket. It’s silly, I know, but I’m thinking of John McClane walking across broken glass barefoot and I’m thinking about how sometimes you have to do things you know are going to hurt if you’re ever going to get past them. What else can I do? I turn the phone back on.
“I don’t care if it’s good or bad,” Ian tells me as we sit down for A Good Day to Die Hard. “This is already one of my favorite movies.”
I like when stories do that. When they grow to become something that belongs to you and every time you revisit them, they matter more for the weight of the experiences you’ve carried them through. I like that John McClane is, for all intents and purposes, the last man on Earth and that he’s still able to find friendly voices in the night and use their help to save the day.
Sooner or later, you find those kinds of voices in the real world. Sometimes they come from a story that gives you a push to keep on going when you’d rather do anything else and sometimes they comes from a buddy who is able to remind you how important it is to be as enthusiastic as you can about whatever life brings your way.
Every silly bit of it.
Silas Lesnick is a staff writer for ComingSoon.net. You can follow him on Twitter @silaslesnick. Also, check out previous entries of “Imaginary Stories,” An Unexpected Journey Through the Heart of Middle Earth, Tanks for the Memories, Arnold Schwarzenegger, How to Watch Movies and The I in Spider-ManONE of the most frequent times to commit a homicide in Australia is on a Sunday night between midnight and 6am.
The most common place to be killed is in the home and it is more likely than not that the killer is either a mate or a lover.
An Australian Institute of Criminology report has found that stab wounds were the most commonly recorded cause of death in Australia. Photo: Paul Harris Credit:Paul Harris
Their weapon of choice is increasingly going to be a knife instead of a gun and there is almost a 50 per cent chance the killer or victim has been drinking.
The Australian Institute of Criminology has released a report examining the 510 homicides across the country over 24 months between July 2008 and June 2010.THIS WEEK SAW two high-profile rows between the government and opposition over what’s being done to increase the provision of social housing in Ireland.
On Thursday afternoon, Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen and Tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald clashed in the Dáil over the number of social housing units currently being built.
And on Thursday’s Tonight With Vincent Browne, Sinn Féin’s Eoin O’Broin and Junior Minister Damien English accused each other of not telling the truth over the number of new social housing units provided last year.
In a two-part series, TheJournal.ie‘s FactCheck responds to reader requests, and steps in to resolve both disputes and find the truth of the matter.
Tonight, we’ll deal with Cowen and Fitzgerald’s row in the Dáil, and on Tuesday, we’ll referee O’Broin and English’s on-air argument.
(Send your FactCheck requests to factcheck@thejournal.ie, tweet @TJ_FactCheck, or send us a DM).
Claim: 8,500 social housing units are currently under construction
What was said:
Source: Oireachtas.ie
In the video below, you can watch excerpts of the exchange in Thursday’s Leaders’ Questions, and a breakdown of the facts, but these are the most relevant statements:
Barry Cowen: On Tuesday, for example, the Taoiseach was here and he waxed lyrically about the fact that there was over 8,500 [social housing] units presently under construction.
And I…lost my head in trying to point out to him that that wasn’t at all true. (Emphasis added).
(Later)
Frances Fitzgerald: There are 8,500 social housing units being built across the country at the moment.
The Facts
In response to our request for evidence, Fianna Fáil cited figures contained in the Department of Housing’s most recent Social Housing Construction Status Report, which was published on Monday.
FactCheck did not receive a response from the Department of Justice, or Fine Gael, on behalf of Frances Fitzgerald.
This week’s status report stated that, as of 31 December 2016, there were:
8,430 social housing units at some stage of development
social housing units at some stage of development 2,687 were at the capital appraisal stage, which means funding has not yet been approved, but the project is being considered
were at the stage, which means funding has not yet been approved, but the project is being considered 1,279 were at the pre-planning stage, which involves a check on whether the design meets guidelines, a value-for-money assessment, and other elements
were at the stage, which involves a check on whether the design meets guidelines, a value-for-money assessment, and other elements 490 were at the pre-tender design stage
were at the stage 1,493 were at the tender report/Turnkey approval stage, which involves two final assessments of costs and procurement, before the project is approved for tender to the private sector
were at the stage, which involves two final assessments of costs and procurement, before the project is approved for tender to the private sector Construction had started on 1,829 units
Source: For a full-size version of this chart, click here
So as you can see, the Tánaiste was mistaken in her claim that “there are 8,500 social housing units being built across the country at the moment”.
There are 8,430 at some stage of development, but only 1,829 are actually being built at the moment.
It should also be noted that 2,687 of those 8,430 (32%) are at the capital appraisal stage, which means they may or may not even be approved for funding and construction.
Barry Cowen was therefore right to say it was untrue that ”there was over 8,500 units presently under construction”.
Enda Kenny’s contradictions
But it’s worth noting that in the Dáil on Tuesday, the Taoiseach made contradictory statements on this issue.
At first, Kenny offered a breakdown of the 8,430, accurately listing the number of units for each stage of development, and correctly stating that 1,829 units were currently under construction.
However, he later contradicted this by saying “There are 8,430 homes currently under construction”, adding:
That means blocks, concrete, block-layers, plasterers, chippies, site works – 8,430.
As we’ve shown, this is false. That description only applies to 1,829 of the 8,430 units at some stage of development, some 22%.
Conclusion
Frances Fitzgerald’s claim was that “There are 8,500 social housing units being built across the country at the moment”.
We rate this claim FALSE. As our verdicts guide explains, this means “The claim is inaccurate”.
This is the third time we’ve fact-checked a claim by Frances Fitzgerald. She has now received verdicts of TRUE, Half-TRUE and FALSE. You can read her FactCheck file here.
TheJournal.ie’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here.
For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here.Today in my freshman class, we’re beginning our discussion of Plato’s Republic. In Book II, there is a discussion of which Greek myths are appropriate to share with children. It always makes me think of the similar issue regarding Bible stories, which in turn makes me think of this video:
Even some stories that are regularly told to children contain rather horrific or gruesome details – the turning of Noah’s Ark into a story about cute animals rather than the mass extermination of most of humankind and animalkind, or David’s battle with Goliath as though it is merely a child standing up to a bully and does not end with a beheading.
Some churches place a lot of emphasis on telling Bible stories to children. Given that the Bible is in fact a collection of books and other literature for adults, and many stories end up being changed in order to be shared with children, I’d be interested to hear from a wide range of people of varying religious and non-religious perspectives. Should the Bible be shared with children as it is, in a watered-down form, or not at all? Is the Bible rated R “?Mario Balotelli is set to miss out on facing Juventus yet again due to the shoulder injury he picked up during AC Milan’s 1-0 Champions League defeat to Atletico Madrid last Wednesday. Mario Balotelli fell awkwardly against Atletico Madrid last week to injure his shoulder.
• Paul: Doubts remain
The Italy international has not faced the Bianconeri in a competitive fixture since April 2010 -- when he came on as a substitute in Inter Milan's 2-0 win at the San Siro -- and only returned to Serie A last summer after a two-and-a-half-year spell at Manchester City.
The 23-year-old striker has yet to face Juve in a Milan shirt with injuries and suspensions denying him since his return to Italy, and that record seems set to continue as he has been unable to train with the Rossoneri for almost 10 days.
Despite Balotelli’s absence, Milan beat Sampdoria 2-0 last weekend to continue their recent revival under new coach Clarence Seedorf, with only Juve having a better record in the last six matches.
Milan defender Cristian Zaccardo told Milan Channel that his side need to keep up their fine form in order to overcome Antonio Conte's side, and believes the players have rediscovered their appetite under Seedorf.
"We need to build on our recent performances when we play Juve," Zaccardo said. "We know we're up against the top side in the table, but we also know that we've now found a good balance and can say a thing or two ourselves.
"It's going to be a big test for us and it won't be easy, but we have what it takes to do well. We've rediscovered our enthusiasm."Newscast/UIG via Getty Images
What does it feel like to lose $75,000,000 in bitcoin? James Howells tries not to let it get to him. And strictly speaking, he knows where his coins are — they're under 200,000 tonnes of garbage at a landfill in Newport, South Wales.
Back in 2009, Howells set an old laptop to mining bitcoin – back before you needed specialised hardware – eventually totting up 7,500 coins. He later broke up the Dell M1710 into parts to sell on eBay, but kept the hard drive tucked away in a drawer in case bitcoin ever did take off. Four years later, he'd forgotten about his horde, and during a clean out, the hard drive was accidentally binned, presumably landing in Newport landfill.
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At that time, his bitcoin stash was already worth millions. Thanks to the digital currency's value skyrocketing from between $300 and $1,000 in 2013 to more than $10,000 this week, his pile is now worth $75 million.
Why isn't he frantically digging through refuse? For that matter, why aren't you? The council won't allow it – it's dangerous and difficult. "I haven’t actually tried to search for the hard drive yet as I haven’t been given permission to look despite having financial backing in place and engaging the local council a number of times," Howells tells me via email. "Digging up a landfill is not as easy as just digging a hole in the ground." It would require diggers, plenty of specialist help, and, Howells says, be the first such excavation that wasn't related to a criminal investigation in the UK – though such an effort has been done in the US to retrieve dumped ET Atari cartridges.
Read next How to make sense of bitcoin's unrelenting death spiral How to make sense of bitcoin's unrelenting death spiral
A spokesperson for Newport City Council said it has been "contacted in the past about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain bitcoins". But the costs of digging up the landfill, and storing and treating the waste, would run into the millions and cause a "huge environmental impact on the surrounding area". And there's no guarantee the drive would be found or still work.
The landfill contains around 350,000 tonnes of waste, with 50,000 added annually, the spokesperson said. "It is likely that the hardware would have suffered significant galvanic corrosion due to the presence of landfill leachates and gases," they added.
Millions in costs, dangerous conditions, no promise of a reward... but what a reward if found. Newport City Council has faced budgetary concerns this year – the head of the council has warned that council tax will increase amid services cuts – and Howells believes bitcoin will eventually be worth so much they will have no choice but to let him search. "And obviously they would get a nice percentage as a gift or donation."
If this all makes you want to hop a train to Newport with a shovel in hand, be warned that aside from being dangerous, the landfill is not open to the public and "any potential treasure hunters" would be committing a criminal offence, the council spokesperson noted. And the effort required to search for the drive means you're sure to be noticed.
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Howells still has the public address, so he can check that his coins haven't moved; if you do find the hard drive, note that the data is encrypted, so you'll need his help either way. "If they ever moved I would know," he says. "It's a little like looking at your bank account containing millions of dollars but not being able to spend it." If you doubt his good humour about the whole story, he follows that statement with a "lol".
Howells is always aware of the bitcoin price, but not because of his missing treasure. "I have multiple tickers running with prices in different fiat currencies, but that's not because I’m obsessed with the price because of my lost coins," he said. "I’m still active in the bitcoin space and still involved with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies on a day-to-day basis promoting, tweeting, trading, development, research, learning." His interests now lie in Bitcoin Cash, the result of a hard fork in August, and he has plenty more to say about the post-fork discussion and the future of digital currencies than he does the lost coins.
If he had access to his digital fortune, he believes he'd have sold up some of it by now anyway, partially to invest in rival currencies. "Who knows for sure... honestly I probably would have sold 30 per cent or 40 per cent at around $1,000 in 2013 to invest in property and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and kept the rest in bitcoin," he says. "I know for sure I would not have sold them all because I believe the bitcoin price will be much higher than $10,000 long term. Even $100,000 is a conservative figure." If that ever happens, his missing bitcoin will be worth $750m – which may well be enough to get Newport Council's attention.WIKIMEDIA, SAM DROEGEHumans are face-recognition specialists. We can pick out faces better than other patterns, but not all animals excel like we do. A few groups of large-brained social animals, including macaques and sheep, are known to recognize each other by facial features, and among insects the talent is especially rare—only a handful of paper-wasp species are known to do it.
To uncover the genetic basis of wasp face recognition, researchers analyzed gene expression in the brains of paper-wasp species that had been trained to recognize faces and compared that with wasps trained to recognize patterns. As reported today (June 14) in the Journal of Experimental Biology, they found that the brain gene-expression patterns involved in face- and pattern-recognition are different.
“There is something special about face learning, and we can detect this on the level of brain gene activity,” study author Ali Berens, now at Monsanto, tells The Scientist in an email. “The activity of hundreds of genes change in the brain during facial recognition. This illustrates that brain responses to relevant social stimuli (like faces) can be highly specific on the level of genes.”
“There’s obviously a difference cognitively in wasps that are learning a face as opposed to just any old pattern,” Seirian Sumner, a wasp researcher at University College London who was not involved in the work, tells The Scientist.
Previous research by study coauthor Elizabeth Tibbetts, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, and her colleagues had revealed that Polistes fuscatus, which has variable facial markings, is face-specialized, or recognizes faces better than it does other visual stimuli. Tibbetts has found that P. fuscatus wasps use face recognition to maintain dominance hierarchies in their colonies. Wasps of sister species P. metricus, on the other hand, have plain faces and do not exhibit face-specialization.
WIKIMEDIA, INSECTS UNLOCKED
In order to probe the brain activity that separates face specialization from face learning, Tibbetts, Iowa State University biologist Amy Toth, and Berens, then a PhD student in Toth’s lab, compared genes expressed in the brains of both wasp species after a face-recognition exercise.
For each species, the researchers trained one group to distinguish between patterns and another group to distinguish between P. fuscatus faces. For the “faces” group, they put each wasp in a two-pathway maze with an electrified floor, where each path led to a chamber containing an image of one of two wasp faces. “At one end, associated with one of the faces, we block the electricity so it’s sort of a safe zone for the wasps to go to,” Berens explains. By 40 trials, the wasps had learned to recognize the face associated with safety and escape the shock, proving that they could distinguish between the two images. The researchers trained another group of wasps to recognize patterns and repeated the experiments for both species.
They found that the two species were equally good at recognizing patterns, but as expected, P. fuscatus better fled shocks when the maze contained faces than when it contained black-and-white, abstract patterns, such as a bullseye. P. metricus, on the other hand, correctly identified patterns more often than faces.
WIKIMEDIA, HECTONICHUSNext, the researchers freeze-killed the wasps and analyzed the mRNA composition of their brains. Within each species, they compared the expression of transcripts from face-trained and pattern-trained wasps to identify those that were either up- or down-regulated between face and pattern training.
The researchers also compared these so-called differentially expressed transcripts between the species. They found that there was no overlap between differentially expressed transcripts of the two species, “which I think we were sort of surprised by,” Berens says. “It appears that there is some distinct molecular changes to brain gene expression during face specialization compared to face learning in paper wasps,” she adds.
The expression of different genes in the brain suggests that distinct groups of neurons, and/or different numbers of those neurons, may be involved in face recognition and specialization, Cornell evolutionary biologist Michael Sheehan, who did his PhD research in Tibbetts’ lab and is currently collaborating with Toth but was not involved in the current work, tells The Scientist.
“There’s probably something different that is going on in their brain when they see a facial image, which is similar, actually, to what happens in humans and some other species of vertebrates,” Sheehan says of P. fuscatus. In humans, specialized brain regions are devoted to facial recognition, and some evidence suggests that this might also be true in sheep. “We don’t necessarily know yet whether that’s the case in wasps, but this data suggests that there are differences in brain activity.”
Although the two species express altogether different genes when recognizing faces, gene ontology (GO) analysis suggested that those genes may have some overlap at the functional level. For instance, some converged on oxidoreductase activity and G-protein coupled signaling.
“What’s nice about this paper is it doesn’t look at one or two genes; it looks at the whole pattern, but now the questions is putting that into the context of which neurons are actually lighting up,” Sheehan says.
A.J. Berens et al., “Cognitive specialization for learning faces is associated with shifts in the brain transcriptome of a social wasp,” Journal of Experimental Biology, doi:10.1242/jeb.155200, 2017.Is time of complacency over for David Cameron?
David Cameron’s associates sometimes quip that he has only two modi operandi: complacency and panic. And it is widely agreed that he saves his best for the latter. As he prepares for Britain’s EU referendum, the Prime Minister appears to belatedly to be shifting into that state.
Over the next few months he is facing a three front battle: the EU renegotiaton with Brussels and other member states, the fight within his party in Westminster, and the campaign which the British people will decide.
On the first front, the government is trying to create a sense of momentum – and briefing that many EU member states are not just supporting his policies on benefits – they are preparing to implement a variant of it for themselves. While Cameron is unlikely to get everything he asks for, it looks like a deal with Brussels is to be found. But even before having secured that deal, Cameron has already gone into campaign mode, placing himself firmly behind the In.
The second is his own party. In the run-up the EU summit on 19 February, there is lots of talk of Cameron pulled three surprise concessions out of his hat to get the party on board. A special path for Britain, allowing it to be in the outer circle of a two-tier Europe; a deal on Europe’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (which would entail not being bound by it and which may include the establishment of an equivalent of the German constitutional court); and the creation of an “emergency brake” on EU migration to Britain, enabling the government to block new arrivals if public services become overwhelmed. He hopes to use these concessions to reach out to two prominent swing voters: Home secretary Theresa May and London Mayor Boris Johnson. The vote of these two heavyweights could play a crucial role in convincing the Conservative base. On this front Cameron scored a minor coup last week by getting Nick Herbert to lead the Conservative campaign to stay in the EU. Herbert, who 15 years ago had headed the campaign to keep Britain out of the euro, had until recently worked closely on the anti-euro campaign with Dominic Cummings, the campaign director for Vote Leave.
But the most challenging front could be the British public - an audience that has hitherto been neglected. The remain campaign has been long convinced that the way forward is to emphasise that - with possibly only 20 weeks left before the referendum - there is still not a credible account on how Britain outside the EU would look like. Cameron is likely to play relentlessly on this, striking fear of the unknown into the hearts of undecided voters. The Spectator Magazine claims “Project Fear” is back: much like the successful Scotland campaign, the In-campaign will expose the contradictions and flakiness of the sceptics. One of the striking developments is the way the Spectator is claiming that Cameron will broaden out his account of the risks of Brexit to encompass national security as well as economic security. Apparently, Cameron will increasingly emphasize the geopolitical dangers of leaving the EU and the general danger of going alone in a dangerous and uncertain world. Britain leaving the EU is what Putin and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi want, is the message.
That David Cameron is getting serious on all three fronts is encouraging and shows that the time of complacency may indeed be over. It is not before time: the latest polls suggested over 50% of Britons may vote to leave the EU.
Read more on: European Power,EU instruments,Cohesion & Governance,Britain in Europe,London officeSANTA CLARA — Thanks to their past two painful postseason departures, the 49ers know all about the practical NFL playoff-survival shortlist.
You want to win a Super Bowl? You need to be healthy, you need your quarterback playing his best, and you need a defense that can hold up against the greatest offenses.
Everything else — including a high seed for home-field advantage — is secondary, as the 49ers have learned.
That’s why inside linebacker NaVorro Bowman was bubbling with optimism about their late-season charge — into their penultimate regular-season game against Atlanta on Monday and potentially far beyond.
Not necessarily as a championship favorite this time, but as a potential lower seed peaking at the right time.
“We’re healthy, everyone’s smiling, feeling good,” Bowman said late last week. “You know, we can make a run at this thing. I think everything’s happening for us right now at the right |
loyalty to the Knicks doesn’t seem all that strong after he hinted several times last season he might be open to playing elsewhere if he didn’t approve of how the front office tackled free agency this summer.
In five years with the Knicks, Anthony’s love for the team has never shone as brightly as Noah’s did in his first week.
When Noah talks about the Knicks and his hometown, he comes across as genuine, proud and motivated to do right by the Big Apple.
“I want the people of New York to be proud of their team,” Noah told the New York Post. “And to me, that’s just as important as anything. Building an identity, and making sure that the people are like, ‘You know what, this is our squad.’”
And Noah isn’t the only new Knick who is truly excited to be here. Brandon Jennings, signed to back up Derrick Rose at point guard, has been vocal about how badly he wanted to be drafted by the Knicks in 2009 — New York passed on him at No. 8, and he went to Milwaukee two picks later. It seems that desire never dissipated.
Despite being from Compton, California, Jennings appears to have a true appreciation for the franchise and the city’s basketball roots.
“It’s the mecca of basketball, New York,” Jennings told MSG. “How can you not be excited to play in the Garden every night? It’s always sold out. The energy’s crazy. I just can’t wait.”
But obviously Jennings’ admiration for the Knicks doesn’t reach Joakim Noah level. Whose does? Noah’s infectious enthusiasm for his new team, in fact, might have already played a role in landing free agent shooting guard Courtney Lee.
“He reached out, and he’s so passionate on the phone. He’s hungry. He’s eager,” Lee told MSG. “He was just so animated, and he was just telling me we could do something special.”
Maybe the Knicks will fulfill Noah’s prediction of accomplishing something special. Maybe they won’t.
But you get the feeling if the 31-year-old former NBA Defensive Player of the Year’s body can just hold up, he’ll bust his tail for his hometown, he’ll help instill a renewed sense of pride in a franchise that could use it, and perhaps he just might influence the next generation of talented New York hoopsters to dream about someday, too, suiting up for the Knicks.
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@khadimsy1 signing with the VA Tech Hokies pic.twitter.com/qE0ZEqAu8d — Steve Smith (@OHACoachSmith) November 11, 2015
Oak Hill Academy (Mouth of Wilson, VA) senior power forward/center Khadim Sy has signed a letter of intent with Virginia Tech. Sy, a 6’10”, 230-pound prospect, is expected to be the only recruit Virginia Tech signs in this Early Signing Period for Division 1 men’s basketball.
“We are excited to add an Oak Hill alum to the Hokie family for the first time in over 30 years,” Tech head coach Buzz Williams said in a press release on Hokiesports.com. Click here to read the full release. “Khadim has been coached at an elite level since he arrived in the states and fills a need we had in our second class. Throughout the two years we have recruited him, he has continued to improve at a consistent rate as a player, and I believe his ceiling is very high. More importantly, he has the character and work ethic that we want those in our program to be about on and off the floor.”
The Senegal native, a consensus 3-star recruit, considered offers from Georgia Tech, Kansas State, Purdue, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest before verbally committing to the Hokies on October 26, 2015. When he arrives in Blacksburg next year, Sy will join a Tech frontcourt that is projected to include Johnny Hamilton, Zach LeDay, Satchel Pierce and Kerry Blackshear. Hamilton and LeDay are projected to be seniors in 2016/2017, while Pierce will be a junior and Blackshear will be a sophomore.
Sy is one of six Oak Hill Academy senior basketball players who signed with major Division 1 schools today, joining Harry Giles (Duke), Joe Hampton (Penn State), Mario Kegler (Mississippi State), Braxton Key (Alabama) and Rodney Miller (Miami).Image caption Pc Julie Neve (left) and Sgt Lynne McKevitt face disciplinary action, police say
Two police officers are facing disciplinary action over their conduct after a Newcastle teenager was killed by a speeding patrol car.
Hayley Adamson, 16, died after being hit by the car driven by Pc John Dougal in May 2008. He was later jailed.
Minutes after the fatal crash a dog handler sent to the scene was overheard referring to Hayley as a "scumbag".
Northumbria Police said she and another officer, who behaved inappropriately during Dougal's trial, faced action.
The Northumbria force expressed "shock and horror" at the behaviour of the officers and said an apology had been made to the teenager's family.
Dougal was driving his patrol car at more than 90mph when Hayley was struck in Denton Road, Scotswood, on 19 May 2008.
At his subsequent trial it emerged he was following at night what he wrongly thought was a stolen car at 94mph in a 30mph zone without flashing lights or sirens.
He was convicted of causing the death of the teenager by dangerous driving and jailed for three years.
Image caption Pc John Dougal accelerated to 94mph without his blue lights
Northumbria Police has now told the BBC's Inside Out that two other officers face being disciplined after their conduct was investigated.
Dog handler Pc Julie Neve was heard referring to Hayley as a "Scotchy Scumbag" after her death - a reference to the area of Scotswood close to Hayley's home.
The second officer faces action after behaving inappropriately during Dougal's trial at Newcastle Crown Court.
The teenager's family complained that Sgt Lynne McKevitt repeatedly tutted in court whenever Hayley's name was mentioned.
Supt Jo Farrell said: "On a personal and professional level I am shocked and horrified that somebody would respond in that way.
"An internal discipline investigation was carried out and Hayley's family were consulted throughout that investigation.
"Disciplinary action is going to be taken against the officers concerned."
Inside Out aired on BBC 1 at 1930 GMT on Monday and can be watched again on iPlayerBy By Christopher Szabo Sep 18, 2010 in World London - This week saw commemorations of the Battle of Britain in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries worldwide. The “Battle ” reached its height in mid-September 70 years ago. On Thursday, September 16, a statue of New Zealander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, was unveiled in Waterloo Palace, London. Sir Keith was in command of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command’s number 11 Group, which was responsible for defending London and south east England, according to the official RAF The As a result, German dictator Adolf Hitler announced two days later that the invasion of Britain would be postponed. Because Germany was unable to get air superiority over Britain, an invasion was out of the question. The term is attributed to Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, who What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. This was the first major defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII and many consider it the turning point of the war, which ended after much more bloodshed, five years later. The pilots who bore the brunt of the fight are referred to as “The Few,” based again on a statement by Churchill. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" Out of 2,936 RAF pilots, 595 were not British. The majority of the foreigners (145) were Polish, many of whom had fought over their own country in 1939 at the beginning of the war and over France earlier in 1940. Others came from New Zealand (127), Canada (112), and 88 from the then Czechoslovakia. There were 32 Australians, 28 Belgians, 25 South Africans, 13 Frenchmen, 10 from Ireland, seven Americans and one each from Jamaica, Palestine and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The "opposition", Germany's main fighter throughout WWII, the Messerschmitt Bf 109. Wikipedia In the Stringbag, the official magazine of the Friends of the South African Air Force (SAAF) Museum, Phil Scanlan writes about the 25 South Africans who officially flew in the Battle. In addition, like Sir Keith Park, another of the commanders, that of number 10 Group, Sir Quintin Brand, was South African. Scanlan writes of South Africa’s top scorer in the war, Group Captain Adolph Gysbert Malan, who not surprisingly, did not use his first name and was known from his earlier career as “Sailor”: Group Captain A.G. "Sailor" Malan. South African Military History Society Sailor Malan has been described as the RAF’s greatest Battle of Britain pilot, whilst (fighter ace) Al Deere reckoned he was the finest shot he’d ever seen. Malan became famous for his “10 Rules of Air Fighting” which was sent to fighter bases through the UK. The rules are: 1. Until you see the whites of his eyes. Fire short bursts of one to two seconds only when your sights are definitely "ON". 2. Whilst shooting think of nothing else, brace the whole of your body: have both hands on the stick: concentrate on your ring sight. 3. Always keep a sharp lookout. "Keep your finger out". 4. Height gives you the initiative. 5. Always turn and face the attack. 6. Make your decisions promptly. It is better to act quickly even though your tactics are not the best. 7. Never fly straight and level for more than 30 seconds in the combat area. 8. When diving to attack always leave a proportion of your formation above to act as a top guard. 9. INITIATIVE, AGGRESSION, AIR DISCIPLINE, and TEAMWORK are words that MEAN something in Air Fighting. 10. Go in quickly - Punch hard - Get out! All that was 70 years ago, but historians say if the battle had gone the other way, Nazi Germany might have won the war, or at least been far harder to defeat. Even so, it took another five years for that war to end. Sunday, September 19, will see seven former pupils of Malvern College, Herefordshire, southwest England, be remembered at a special service, the Malvern Gazette reports.On Thursday, September 16, a statue of New Zealander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, was unveiled in Waterloo Palace, London. Sir Keith was in command of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command’s number 11 Group, which was responsible for defending London and south east England, according to the official RAF website. The Battle of Britain refers to a series of air battles fought over most of Britain in 1940 between the Nazi German air force, or Luftwaffe, and the RAF but which saw south east England bear the brunt. The fighting lasted from July 10 to October 31 and reached its height on September 15, when British forces, including anti-aircraft guns as well as fighter aircraft, shot down 60 invading German aircraft, both bombers and fighters. The RAF lost 26 planes.As a result, German dictator Adolf Hitler announced two days later that the invasion of Britain would be postponed. Because Germany was unable to get air superiority over Britain, an invasion was out of the question.The term is attributed to Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, who said after Germany had conquered France:This was the first major defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII and many consider it the turning point of the war, which ended after much more bloodshed, five years later.The pilots who bore the brunt of the fight are referred to as “The Few,” based again on a statement by Churchill.Out of 2,936 RAF pilots, 595 were not British. The majority of the foreigners (145) were Polish, many of whom had fought over their own country in 1939 at the beginning of the war and over France earlier in 1940.Others came from New Zealand (127), Canada (112), and 88 from the then Czechoslovakia. There were 32 Australians, 28 Belgians, 25 South Africans, 13 Frenchmen, 10 from Ireland, seven Americans and one each from Jamaica, Palestine and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).In the Stringbag, the official magazine of the Friends of the South African Air Force (SAAF) Museum, Phil Scanlan writes about the 25 South Africans who officially flew in the Battle. In addition, like Sir Keith Park, another of the commanders, that of number 10 Group, Sir Quintin Brand, was South African.Scanlan writes of South Africa’s top scorer in the war, Group Captain Adolph Gysbert Malan, who not surprisingly, did not use his first name and was known from his earlier career as “Sailor”:Malan became famous for his “10 Rules of Air Fighting” which was sent to fighter bases through the UK. The rules are:1. Until you see the whites of his eyes. Fire short bursts of one to two seconds only when your sights are definitely "ON".2. Whilst shooting think of nothing else, brace the whole of your body: have both hands on the stick: concentrate on your ring sight.3. Always keep a sharp lookout. "Keep your finger out".4. Height gives you the initiative.5. Always turn and face the attack.6. Make your decisions promptly. It is better to act quickly even though your tactics are not the best.7. Never fly straight and level for more than 30 seconds in the combat area.8. When diving to attack always leave a proportion of your formation above to act as a top guard.9. INITIATIVE, AGGRESSION, AIR DISCIPLINE, and TEAMWORK are words that MEAN something in Air Fighting.10. Go in quickly - Punch hard - Get out!All that was 70 years ago, but historians say if the battle had gone the other way, Nazi Germany might have won the war, or at least been far harder to defeat. Even so, it took another five years for that war to end. More about Britain, Germany, South Africa, Canada, Poland More news from Show all 6 britain germany south africa canada poland new zealand australiaPLAYOFF SEEDING CRITERIA
The six postseason participants from each conference will now be seeded as follows:
1. The division champion with the best record.
2. The division champion with the second-best record.
3. The division champion with the third-best record.
4. The division champion with the fourth-best record.
5. The wild-card team with the best record.
6. The wild-card team with the second-best record.
The following procedures will be used to break standings ties for postseason playoffs and to determine regular-season schedules.
NOTE: Tie games count as one-half win and one-half loss for both teams.
TO BREAK A TIE WITHIN A DIVISION
If, at the end of the regular season, two or more teams in the same division finish with identical won-lost-tied percentages, the following steps will be taken until a champion is determined.
Two teams
1. Head-to-head (best won-lost-tied percentage in games between the teams).
2. Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the division.
3. Best won-lost-tied percentage in common games.
4. Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the conference.
5. Strength of victory.
6. Strength of schedule.
7. Best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed.
8. Best combined ranking among all teams in points scored and points allowed.
9. Best net points in common games.
10. Best net points in all games.
11. Best net touchdowns in all games.
Three or more teams
(Note: If two teams remain tied after the third step or other teams are eliminated during any step, tiebreaker reverts to step 1 of the two-team format.)
1. Head-to-head (best won-lost-tied percentage in games among the teams).
2. Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the division.
3. Best won-lost-tied percentage in common games.
4. Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the conference.
5. Strength of victory.
6. Strength of schedule.
7. Best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed.
8. Best combined ranking among all teams in points scored and points allowed.
9. Best net points in common games.
10. Best net points in all games.
11. Best net touchdowns in all games.
TO BREAK A TIE FOR THE WILD-CARD TEAM
If it is necessary to break ties to determine the two wild-card teams from each conference, the following steps will be taken.
1. If the tied teams are from the same division, apply division tiebreaker.
2. If the tied teams are from different divisions, apply the following steps.
Two teams
1. Head-to-head, if applicable.
2. Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the conference.
3. Best won-lost-tied percentage in common games, minimum of four.
4. Strength of victory.
5. Strength of schedule.
6. Best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed.
7. Best combined ranking among all teams in points scored and points allowed.
8. Best net points in conference games.
9. Best net points in all games.
10. Best net touchdowns in all games.
11. Coin toss.
Three or more teams
(Note: If two teams remain tied after the third step or other teams are eliminated, tiebreaker reverts to step 1 of applicable two-team format.)
1. Apply division tiebreaker to eliminate all but the highest-ranked team in each division prior to proceeding to step 2. The original seeding within a division upon application of the division tiebreaker remains the same for all subsequent applications of the procedure that are necessary to identify the two wild-card participants.
2. Head-to-head sweep. (Applicable only if one team has defeated each of the others or if one team has lost to each of the others.)
3. Best won-lost-tied percentage in games played within the conference.
4. Best won-lost-tied percentage in common games, minimum of four.
5. Strength of victory.
6. Strength of schedule.
7. Best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed.
8. Best combined ranking among all teams in points scored and points allowed.
9. Best net points in conference games.
10. Best net points in all games.
11. Best net touchdowns in all games.
12. Coin toss.
When the first wild-card team has been identified, the procedure is repeated to name the second wild card, i.e., eliminate all but the highest-ranked team in each division prior to proceeding to step 2. In situations where three or more teams from the same division are involved in the procedure, the original seeding of the teams remains the same for subsequent applications of the tiebreaker if the top-ranked team in that division qualifies for a wild-card berth.
OTHER TIEBREAKING PROCEDURES
1. Only one team advances to the playoffs in any tiebreaking step. Remaining tied teams revert to the first step of the applicable division or wild-card tiebreakers. As an example, if two teams remain tied in any tiebreaker step after all other teams have been eliminated, the procedure reverts to step one of the two-team format to determine the winner. When one team wins the tiebreaker, all other teams revert to step 1 of the applicable two-team or three-team format.
2. In comparing division and conference records or records against common opponents among tied teams, the best won-lost-tied percentage is the deciding factor since teams may have played an unequal number of games.
3. To determine home-field priority among division titlists, apply wild-card tiebreakers.
4. To determine home-field priority for wild-card qualifiers, apply division tiebreakers (if teams are from the same division) or wild-card tiebreakers (if teams are from different divisions).
5. To determine the best combined ranking among conference teams in points scored and points allowed, add a team's position in the two categories, and the lowest score wins. For example, if Team A is first in points scored and second in points allowed, its combined ranking is 3. If Team B is third in points scored and first in points allowed, its combined ranking is 4. Team A then wins the tiebreaker. If two teams are tied for a position, both teams are awarded the ranking as if they held it solely. For example, if Team A and Team B are tied for first in points scored, each team is assigned a ranking of 1 in that category, and if Team C is third, its ranking will still be 3.
TIEBREAKING PROCEDURE FOR DRAFT ORDER
If two or more teams are tied in the selection order, the strength-of-schedule tiebreaker is applied, subject to the following exceptions for playoff teams:
1. Teams not participating in the playoffs shall select in the first through 20th positions in reverse standings order.
2. The Super Bowl winner is last and Super Bowl loser is next-to-last.
3. The losers of the conference championship games shall select 29th and 30th based on won-lost-tied percentage.
4. The losers of the divisional playoff games shall select 25th through 28th based on won-lost-tied percentage.
5. The losers of the wild-card games shall select 21st through 24th based on won-lost-tied percentage.
If ties exist in any grouping except (2) above, such ties shall be broken by strength of schedule. If any ties cannot be broken by strength of schedule, the divisional or conference tiebreakers, if applicable, shall be applied. Any ties that still exist shall be broken by a coin flip.PHD CANDIDATE (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY)
My Ph.D. thesis made the following contributions:
Development and evaluation of content-aware transparency. Content-aware transparency (CAT), allows a user to interact with otherwise hidden content by varying the levels of transparency within different regions of a window. In our implementation, we render important regions opaque and unimportant regions transparent, with a smooth opaque-to-transparent gradient in between. Based on properties of the overlapping material, various image-processing filters are applied to obstructed content to help disambiguate the overlapping material. We designed, implemented, and evaluated a user interface that employs CAT. Our user study showed that participants were more effective with the use of CAT and also preferred user interfaces that employed CAT over ones that did not. We also developed a set of CAT interaction techniques that allow users to unambiguously interact with objects rendered with CAT: pop-through, focus filter, and mouseover pie menu. The pop-through technique allows a user to directly manipulate an obstructed object. The focus filter technique allows a user to temporarily restore obstructed image-processed content to its unfiltered form. The mouse-over pie menu technique allows a user to select an object to interact with from a pie menu of all objects that are currently under the mouse cursor�s position.
Development and evaluation of content-aware scrolling. Content-aware scrolling (CAS) allows a user to scroll along a document path defined by the user or system, varying the direction, speed, and zoom of scrolling depending on the document�s content and the task at hand. We designed, implemented, and evaluated a user interface that employs CAS. Our CAS Document Viewer automatically extracts the reading path and search paths within text PDF documents, as well as the faces path within photographs containing people�s faces, and allows one to traverse these paths using traditional scrolling gestures (e.g., using the mouse scroll wheel). Our user study showed that participants greatly prefer using CAS to peruse unfamiliar documents. CAS also significantly outperformed both traditional and vector (i.e., free) scrolling in short distance navigation tasks.
Development of content-aware layout. Content-aware layout (CAL) takes into consideration the contents of windows on a user�s desktop to determine if and where they should be placed on the screen by applying constraints to content within the windows, rather than to the windows� bounds. We developed a testbed application to demonstrate how CAL could be useful when perusing text documents. When a user selects text within a window, CAL rearranges other windows containing that text, horizontally aligning the search results of those windows with the selected text. Similarly, a user can perform a search across all open windows, such that search results are horizontally aligned in the center of the screen. Portions of windows not containing search results are used as available screen space, such that windows can overlap without obstructing any search result in a neighboring window.
Development and informal evaluation of a content-aware user interface combining CAT, CAS, and CAL. CASTLE (Content-Aware Scrolling, Transparency, and Layout Environment) incorporates coordinated implementations of CAL, CAT, and CAS to help users visualize and interact with related information across multiple windows. Using CAL, similar content across multiple windows is horizontally aligned on the screen. Content that would otherwise be obscured can be seen through unimportant regions of an overlapping window using CAT. Users can scroll through search results within and between neighboring windows by simply using the mouse scroll wheel. Transitions within windows are performed using CAS, while transitions between windows are performed with CAL. In an informal study, physicians used CASTLE to peruse patient status notes and reported that they are able to make otherwise important inferences much more easily and quickly than with their current system.Lighting artist Mike Marra talked about his recent environment, showing how he created the lights, produced vegetation, ivy, and architectural elements.
Introduction
Hey there! My name is Mike Marra and I’m an Associate Lighting Artist at Sledgehammer Games. I graduated from Ringling College of Art and Design in May of 2016 and have spent my first year in the industry working on the upcoming Call of Duty: WWII, a game that I’m extremely proud to have been apart of creating.
The majority of my day-to-day as a lighting artist consists of lighting interiors, exteriors, and in-game cutscenes. My additional responsibilities include, color correction with lookup tables, fog adjustments, capturing skyboxes, and scripting lighting related events like flickering lights, interior to exterior transitions, depth of field changes, and exposure shifts.
Whitebox
The barn environment started out as a series of tests in what I call my “Whitebox” level. A Whitebox is basically a controlled lighting environment with minimal geo in which you can test things without having to compile a full map. It’s a great tool for rapid prototyping and quick idea generation. I used my Whitebox to test materials, skyboxes, and work out exactly what I wanted to create. Think of it like sketching for a 3D artist!
Skybox
During my research I was surprised by the lack of information about realistic skyboxes inside of Unreal Engine. So I’d say my biggest takeaway from this entire project was figuring it out on my own with trial and error.
After watching a few tutorials I decided to try bringing in a panoramic sky and using it as a skybox. I brought in the pano as an HDR to be used in the skylight and a TGA to be used as the skybox texture. For the skybox geo, I used the default skysphere and applied my own material to it. Here was my first result:
This was not the result I was hoping for. The texture was flat and lacked subtle variation in the colors that you would expect to see in the real world. Then, by chance I stumbled upon a node that completely changed the game, “DeriveHDRfromLDR”.
From my understanding this node takes lighting information from an LDR image and converts it into a “fake” HDR image. With a little tweaking to the material, white balance, and exposure, I achieved the result I was looking for. The most important input here is the HDR Intensity. This basically controls the exposure/brightness of the sky. As you can see, the sky actually became brighter than the rest of the scene and the depth of the clouds was tremendously enhanced!
Keep in mind that this material isn’t a quick fix. In order to get a truly accurate sky inside Unreal you need a multilayer solution. The three most important factors that contribute to the overall look of a sky are in my opinion exposure, scene color, and white balance. If you can get these 3 things and the sky material correct, you will be in good shape.
Ground
The ground started from an awesome Gumroad tutorial video I watched a while back by Aaron Kaminer. He breaks down this shader in a way that’s easy to understand and shows you how to make it parameterized. You can find it here.
I made a few changes to the material, mainly altering the textures/roughness to be much more wet and muddy. From here, I just applied the material to a ground plane and used the mesh paint tool to paint in my puddles! I used a high poly plane for this and utilized tessellation. This material is designed around using heightmaps so tessellation is key here.
I spent a good amount of time online looking for moody images. Being a Lighting Artist, I’m naturally obsessed with creating moods in my own artwork. I really loved how the foliage and water looked together so I thought it would be fun to play off those elements and build a scene around them.
Spending time gathering good reference is crucial to setting up a solid foundation for your artwork. I spent easily a few hours trying to find the right images. Take the time to research and it will pay for itself in the end.
Kitbashing
The next step was to make the barn. Utilizing the reference I gathered, I was able to progress quickly. A big part of my workflow is reusing assets I’ve made for other projects. This frees up time so I can focus on what I love, Lighting! I created the barn by painstakingly placing each wooden plank until I was happy with the shape and silhouette. The material for the plank consisted of a basic tiling texture and a simple single value for both the spec and roughness. Nothing fancy here.
The one issue I ran into while kitbashing was that it was obvious I was using the same plank everywhere. To combat this I rotated and flipped the geo in areas where I felt it was obvious so that the texture would be somewhat offset.
Foliage
With the barn kitbashing complete, the next step was to bring in foliage. I am lucky enough to have a 3D Artist friend named Sarah Lynn Reynolds who allowed me to use the awesome plants she had created in a previous project. You can some of her work here. I placed all 4 variations she made into the Foliage Paint Tool and went to work.
Lighting
The next step once I was happy with the placement of foliage was to take another quick pass at the sun direction. I tried a few variations to see how different sun directions affected the overall mood of the scene.
As you can see, changing the sun direction had a huge impact on the mood. While the sun direction in these two shots gave more form to the barn, I feel like I lost the ominous/creepy vibe the original lighting had. I decided to keep the original and use spotlights in key areas to “fake” the light in an artistic way, adding rim lights to objects in the scene to give them more form and enhance the depth.
I used spotlights to rim light the hay barrels (1) and left side of the barn (2). I also added a large spotlight behind the barn (3) to break up the lighting on the ground.
Polish
Once I was happy with the Lighting, I moved onto the polish phase of the project. I knew I wanted to add some sort of overgrowth to the barn but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Then, I remembered this neat little tool an old instructor told me about called Ivy Generator. You can find it here.
This program allows you to bring in an OBJ, set a growth point, and generate procedural vines on it. Once it’s done you can export the mesh and use it how you see fit.
The only downside is that the vines are extremely high poly and need cleanup if you care about optimization. I wasn’t concerned with the poly count so I brought them in as is. Aside from altering the diffuse textures to some I found on the Ivy Generator website, I used the same shader as the grass in the scene.
With the ivy placed, I did one last tweak to the diffuse texture of the barn to get a little more color variation in the scene. This was my final result:
I hope this breakdown helped you understand my process and you’ll be able to apply some of what I’ve shown here to your next project. If you’re interested in seeing more of my work or just saying hello, you can visit my website or ArtStation!
Mike Marra, Associate Lighting Artist at Sledgehammer Games
Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev.
Follow 80.lv on Facebook, Twitter and InstagramTAYLOR SWIFT
Country girl turned chart-stomping industrialist Taylor Swift is back. With a bold new synthpop sound and opinions on love, loss and martyrdom. Just don’t mention Twitter trolls.
Taylor wears BOSS
Taylor wears BOSS
I don’t know about you, but Taylor Swift is feeling 24. If Tay at 22 was, as her slumber party anthem goes, “happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time”, this year she’s clearer of mind: strong, sceptical, indie and willingly off the market. “RIP me!” she yawped recently to Graham Norton, and she wasn’t kidding. 1989, her fifth album released in late October, demands that you forget all you know about the Pennsylvanian. Early signs that she was out of love and liking it popped up on her Instagram feed six months ago. “There are far better things ahead than any we have left behind,” goes the CS Lewis quote she blogged. Then, in an interview with The Guardian in August, the country-pop crossover came clean. “[Having a relationship] isn’t really possible right now. It just doesn’t seem like a possibility in the near future. It doesn’t ever work.” Swift – whose lovably goofy Colgate grin and Appalachian drawl make her the tween dream to take home to your parents – isn’t exactly intimidating, but she’s tougher in person than you’d expect. There’s an emotional grit to her new songs that may surprise the legions of fans who scream and cry along to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” on Vlogs and dissect Tay’s lyrics for relationship advice. The message in lead single “Shake It Off” is pretty clear: stop being a dick on Twitter. “Heartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break. And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. Baby, I’m just gonna shake it off,” chants Swift, pleading for the demise of social media trolls and take-down tormentors. Gliding towards me with a puppet-like weightlessness, the singer balances a latte on the flat of her hand. “Twitter’s dark underbelly is that it gives people a veil of anonymity: they can have a terrible day at work, and feel awful about themselves, and then come home and get drunk and call someone ugly on Instagram,” she laments. “If people don’t have anyone to talk to about [their problems], they go online and just say wicked, gross, cruel, mean-spirited things about people. I wrote ‘Shake It Off’ for my own situation, but also for the situation that everyone finds themselves in now. It’s not a celebrity issue, it’s a people issue.” Elsewhere, the album’s closer “Clean”, co-written by Imogen Heap, is a true-blue confessional about the lingering hurt of a shattered relationship. Swift tells me its parting shot, “Ten months sober, I won’t give in, now that I’m clean, I’m never going to risk it” is her top lyric on the record. It’s a tantalising analogy about heartache and the single life. Compare it to her favourite moment from Red — “You call me up again just to break me like a promise” sung on the Jake Gyllenhaal break-up anthem, “All Too Well” — and it’s clear Swift is feeling decisive.
Taylor wears MARC JACOBS
Taylor wears MARC JACOBS
“I’ve been with myself for so long now, I like it,” admits the singer, who’s also been linked with John Mayer, Taylor Lautner and Joe Jonas in the past. “I’m not willing to give up that independence for anyone. Basically, there’s the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest chance you might find someone you can have a real and long-lasting relationship with. In my teenage years, I was enamoured by the idea of romance because I thought it was going to be this ‘happily ever after’ situation. Wait!” she says, as if to skewer our tense start, “is that my damned hat my publicist is wearing? She looks great in it!” If a little emotionally damaged, sonically 1989 is anything but difficult. In fact, Swift has discussed her fear of the “tricky” fifth album. In her eyes, many artists reach a stage in their career where textures and otherworldliness replace focused melodies and heartfelt messages. “Samples and beat-dropping and pointless collaborations…, there are a lot of different ways that you can get distracted from the fact that people just want to listen to a good song,” she says. Don’t expect any build and drop action — modern pop’s dire signature move. Instead, 1989 references the whip-crack productions of 80s maestros Phil Collins, Giorgio Moroder and The Human League, rather than towing the line. Co-producer Jack Antonoff’s skittering beatwork for “Out of The Woods” — a paean to broken kinship that many have said nods to her fling with Harry Styles — is a million miles from any of RedOne’s or Stargate’s tired, floor-ready recitals. For millennials who spent their uni days stealing snogs at 80s nights, the bold, massive, marching drum-led tune will ring loud. Then there’s brilliant opener “Welcome To New York”, where droning “Electric Dreams”-esque synths meet calls to “dance to a new soundtrack…”, to “dance to this beat forevermore.” But Pro-Tools pop hasn’t always done it for Swift, whose self-titled 2006 debut, and follow-up |
sent a letter to President Barack Obama requesting a classified briefing on Russian involvement in the election, including “Russian entities’ hacking of American political organizations; hacking and strategic release of emails from campaign officials; the WikiLeaks disclosures; fake news stories produced and distributed with the intent to mislead American voters; and any other Russian or Russian-related interference or involvement in our recent election.” The signatories were Cummings, Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip, Rep. John Conyers, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the foreign affairs committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the homeland security committee, Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the armed services committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee. They wrote:
We are deeply concerned by Russian efforts to undermine, interfere with, and even influence the outcome of our recent election. This Russian malfeasance is not confined to us, but extends to our allies, our alliances and to democratic institutions around the world. The integrity of democracy must never be in question, and we are gravely concerned that Russia may have succeeded in weakening Americans’ trust in our electoral institutions through their cyber activity, which may also include sponsoring disclosures through WikiLeaks and other venues, and the production and distribution of fake news stories.
In September, Schiff joined Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, to release a statement blaming Russia for the hacks of Democratic targets during the campaign:
Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the US election. At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election—we can see no other rationale for the behavior of the Russians. We believe that orders for the Russian intelligence agencies to conduct such actions could come only from very senior levels of the Russian government.
The Obama administration has reached the same conclusion. In October, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security released a joint statement declaring, “The US Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” A week after the election, the director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, was asked about the WikiLeaks release of hacked information during the campaign, and he said, “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.” He added, “This was not something that was done casually. This was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily.”
“This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”
For some reason, Moscow’s effort to influence the presidential election has not been as big a story as, say, Trump’s tweets about the musical Hamilton or Alec Baldwin. That may be because Democrats, busy licking their wounds, have not aggressively sought to keep the issue front and center. (Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have not said much on this subject.) And most Republicans have shown little interest in investigating an assault on American democracy that helped their party win the White House and retain majorities in both houses of Congress. But Cummings has been trying mightily to kick-start a public investigation. (Presumably, the FBI, CIA, and NSA have been looking into Russian hacking related to the election, but their investigations are not designed to yield public information—unless they result in a criminal prosecution.)
With the legislation to establish an independent commission, Cummings and Swalwell are opening another front. In the coming days, they will be signing up co-sponsors and looking for Republican support. Their bill provides a proposal that concerned voters—including upset Democrats and activists—can rally behind. (Were this measure to pass next year, Trump, who has steadfastly refused to blame Moscow for the hacks of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, would have to decide whether to sign it.)
In his recent letter to Chaffetz, Cummings noted, “Elections are the bedrock of our nation’s democracy. Any attempt by a foreign power to undermine them is a direct attack on our core democratic values, and it should chill every Member of Congress and American—red or blue—to the core.” So far, few Republicans, including Trump, have acknowledged feeling that chill, and there’s certainly more opportunity for the Democrats to turn up the heat.Utility board wants council to delay Terminal 1 homeless shelter proposal
The Portland Utility Board is encouraging the City Council to postpone any decision on turning Terminal 1 into a homeless shelter until the fair market value of the property is established through the surplus sale process that is currently underway.
The board was established to advise the council on issues related to water and sewer rates. Terminal 1 is owned by the Bureau of Environmental Services, which operates the citys sewer system and stormwater management programs. The 12-member board wrote the council on Aug. 8, two days before it is scheduled to consider a proposal by Commissioner Dan Saltzman to open a homeless shelter in a 96,000-square-foot warehouse on the property, which is zoned for industrial uses.
BES no longer needs Terminal 1 North to service its customers, and has followed proper disposal processes according to the citys surplus property policy. Any proceeds from the immediate sale would be returned to the BES Construction Fund, to comply with bond requirements and best practices. These added construction fund resources will allow BES to delay or decrease future bond sales for construction projects and address much needed investment in aging infrastructure, helping to delay or slightly reduce rate increases, the letter says.
Under the surplus sals process, BES is scheduled to receive bids for Terminal 1 through Aug. 15, just five days after Wednesdays hearing on Salesmans proposal. The Portland Utility Board letter says the council should take no action on the proposal before then.
The PUB therefore encourages the City Council delay any action regarding Commissioner Saltzmans proposal to allow the fair market value of the property to be determined by the sale process," according to the board's letter. "This will set a baseline for future negotiations while respecting the disposition process and prior commitments to BES customers. Failing to meet these prior commitments is detrimental to improving trust between city bureaus and the citizens of Portland. Disrupting the process at this late junction erodes the trust of the business community with regard to the disposition of property by the utilities; it could impact the value of city property by increasing perceived risks and transaction costs.
Potential for jobs?
Saltzman is proposing that BES lease Terminal 1 to the Portland Housing Bureau, which he oversees, for $10,000 a month. In its letter, the PUB says that amount is well below market rates for such properties, although its actual value needs to be set through the surplus sale process.
Commissioner Nick Fish, who oversees BES, opposes Saltzmans proposal. He says it should be sold to a private employer who will create high-wage industrial jobs, a position the board supports.
As a large piece of industrial land on the river, Terminal 1 North holds the potential for job creation, economic growth, and increasing the tax base. Taking the site out of industrial use, even temporarily, means the potential loss of this alternative, according to the board's letter.
If the council approves the proposal, the PUB recommends a series of steps to reduce BESs potential liability on the property. It also believes a cost-benefit analysis should be done comparing Terminal 1 to other options for homeless shelters.
You can read the PUB letter here.
Industrial sanctuary
Saltzmans proposal is also opposed by the Northwest Industrial Neighborhood Association, the official city neighborhood association representing the area that includes Terminal 1. It also sent a letter to the council arguing against using the warehouse for a homeless shelter on Aug. 8.
Among other things, the letter notes Terminal 1 is located in the Guilds Lake Industrial Sanctuary, which the council established to maintain industrial land and jobs.
The Guilds Lake Industrial Sanctuary is meant to be just that protected lands zoned for industrial use. Changing this will have adverse impacts on our business owners, our employees, Portlands economy as a whole and the future of industry in our city, according to the letter.
You can read the NINA letter here.
You can read an earlier Portland Tribune story on the issue at www.pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/317870-197367-city-needs-to-work-with-deq-on-terminal-1-homeless-shelter.Pardon a Forstallism in the headline (“blow-away”), it’s actually a fitting description of AMD’s just announced Radeon HD 7970 graphic card powered by the Tahiti GPU. Traces of support for Tahiti-driven AMD GPUs have recently been found in a beta of OS X Lion 10.7.3, indicating Mac Pro users will probably be able to pop in this beauty inside their system for a pretty significant boost in the oomph department. According to HotHardware, the 7970 is between 1.2x and 1.6x faster overall than the previous-generation 6970. It also blows Nvidia’s reference GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB card out of the water with between 1.16x and 1.31x faster performance.
Gamers will especially love this card due to its increased memory bandwidth, compute performance, fillrate and tesselation (up to 25 percent faster compared to the custom EVGA GeForce GTX 580 3GB card). “To put it simply, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 is the fastest, single-GPU powered graphics card we have ever tested thus far”, the publication wrote.
Plus, the 7970 is the best-in-class performer in terms of power consumption (“idle power was the best, bar none”). Summing up, HotHardware’s Marco Chiappetta concluded that the powerful Radeon HD 7970 is “the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card money can buy”. So, when can you get your hands on one of these?
This card won’t retail – AMD is shipping it to OEMs only beginning January 9, 2012 for MSRP $549. If history is an indication, Apple should adopt the Radeon HD 7970 in the flagship 2012 Mac Pro model or offer it as a build-to-order option. Some other caveats from HotHardware’s exhaustive review:
We do not think, however, that AMD is going to be able to meet or exceed the performance of today’s high-end dual-GPU powered cards, even with future driver updates. As it stands today, the Radeon HD 6990 remains the fastest graphic card money can buy, with the GeForce GTX 590 finishing just behind. It’s going to take two Tahiti GPUs to surpass the performance of those cards. Of course AMD is already working on a solution for that as well, codenamed “New Zealand.
AMD’s new Tahiti GPU powering this card is aimed at enthusiast gamers. It is part of their Southern Island series of GPUs, all code-named after southern islands (Cape Verde, Pitcairn, Tahiti and New Zealand) and fabbed on TSMC’s 28-nanometer process. The Tahiti GPU inside the 7970 is also AMD’s first GPU to feature their Graphics Core Next architecture, in addition to PCI Express 3.0 connectivity, DirectX 11.1 support, ZeroCore, PRT and multi-point audio.
If you’re interested to learn more, check out Engadget’s handy reviews round-up or visit the official web site.Mr Qasab now says he is not the attacker pictured in the photograph The man alleged to be the sole surviving gunman in last year's Mumbai attacks, Mohammad Qasab, has retracted a confession that he took part. Giving evidence in his defence, Mr Qasab, a Pakistani national, said he had been forced by police to confess after being repeatedly beaten up. He said he was not the man seen in pictures wielding an assault rifle during the attacks. Mr Qasab faces 86 charges, including waging war on India and murder. The November 2008 attacks left 174 people dead, including nine gunmen, and strained ties between India and Pakistan. The BBC's Prachi Pinglay said Mr Qasab looked calm in court as he repeatedly denied having anything to do with the attacks, insisting he had been framed by the police. A special court in Mumbai (Bombay) is prosecuting him and a verdict in the case is expected early next year. 'Completely wrong' Giving evidence in court, Mr Qasab said that all previous confessions he had given in relation to the attacks were false and made under duress. He said that an identity parade in which he took part had been "manipulated" by police. Troops battled for three days to regain control of Mumbai in November 2008 He said that he had never been to any of the locations where the attacks took place and prior to his appearance in court had never even seen an AK-47 assault rifle. He said that numerous eyewitness accounts of his role in the attacks were "completely wrong". Mr Qasab said that Mumbai police had arrested him 20 days before the attacks on a beach in the state of Maharashtra and later went on to frame him. He said he was in custody when the attacks took place. He told the court that the man widely photographed as the sole surviving gunman in the attacks "was not me, but someone who resembles me". In what our correspondent says was an apparent sign of his lack of belief that he will receive a fair trial, Mr Qasab urged the judge in the case to send him to jail as soon as possible. On Wednesday the prosecution concluded its case in the trial. In all, 610 witnesses have testified since the case began in March. Our correspondent says that Mr Qasab's latest comments mean that the main defence argument is one of identity. Mr Qasab originally denied the charges against him but in July, in a dramatic outburst in court, he admitted his role and asked to be hanged. His plea was not accepted and the trial continued. Following the attacks, India suspended peace talks with Pakistan. After initial denials, Pakistan acknowledged that Mr Qasab was one of its citizens and that the attacks had been partially planned on its territory. Last month, a court in Pakistan charged seven people in connection with the attacks, including the suspected mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, who is the alleged head of the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionThe IRS is defending its decision to let illegal immigrants claim up to three years’ refunds on income even if they never paid income taxes, telling Congress in a new letter last week that agency lawyers have concluded getting a Social Security number triggers the ability to go back and ask for previous refunds.
President Obama’s new deportation amnesty could grant Social Security numbers to as many as 4 million illegal immigrants, making many of them eligible for tax refunds under the Earned Income Tax Credit even for years when they cheated on their taxes, by working off the books and not filing tax returns.
“Section 32 of the Internal Revenue Code requires an SSN on the return, but a taxpayer claiming the EITC is not required to have an SSN before the close of the year for which the EITC is claimed,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen wrote in his letter to Sen. Charles E. Grassley on Wednesday.
The IRS’s chief lawyer had reached that conclusion in 2000, and the agency has newly confirmed it, Mr. Koskinen said.
Mr. Grassley called that a mockery of the law and said he will try to write a bill specifically prohibiting it.
“The tax code shouldn’t reward those who broke our immigration laws,” the Iowa Republican and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said in a statement.
PHOTOS: Top earning dead celebrities
The tax issue has become one of several flash points over Mr. Obama’s deportation amnesty, which grants tentative legal status, Social Security numbers and work permits to illegal immigrants who qualify. The newly legalized workers would also likely be eligible for driver’s licenses, and could even be more attractive than native-born workers to some employers trying to figure out ways to save money under Obamacare mandates.
Mr. Koskinen has previously said that illegal immigrants must be able to prove they worked off-the-books in order to claim the EITC, and it’s unclear how many of the population Mr. Obama is aiming to cover would be able to offer such proof.
The three-year time frame is part of general tax law, allowing anyone who didn’t file to go back and claim a refund for up to three previous year’s worth of taxes.
But the IRS lawyer’s ruling creates an odd circumstance where illegal immigrants who cheated by not paying taxes before can see if they would benefit from refunds. If they do benefit, they could file, but if they don’t benefit they could continue to avoid taxes for those years.
Mr. Obama’s new amnesty program does not require payment of back taxes.
Congress is currently snared in a fight over Mr. Obama’s deportation amnesty, with House Republicans insisting it be ended and trying to tie continued funding for the Homeland Security Department to provisions that would halt the amnesty.
Democrats are universally opposed, and Senate Republicans, caught in the middle, have begun to side with Democrats, arguing that homeland security money must keep flowing no matter what.
A federal court has put Mr. Obama’s expanded amnesty on hold, finding that the president likely skirted federal law in issuing the new policy without first going through a period of public comment and review.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.I might not enjoy the outside world as much as I should. However when I do I still have a few of my gadgets with me. We all carry batteries these days. Most of us own at least one portable battery that we charge up just for an outside trek where we will be away from a charger for a bit. The big problem with that is what happens when that is empty? Well Suaoki knows the struggle is real. They have sent us out one of their 16W solar battery chargers. This super compact charger is ready to handle all of your charging needs then soak up some of those sweet rays and do it all again and again.
One issue that people tend to have with solar items is that they can be slow or only charge up to a certain percent. Good thing about the Suaoki charger is that it is high-powered and rated 25% higher than most solar chargers out there. Check out some of the stats below.
High Conversion Efficiency: 16 watt SUNPOWER mono-crystalline solar panel increases conversion efficiency up to 25% which is much higher than common solar panel charger(not greater than 15%)
Intelligent Technology: with intelligent chip built-in, the charger can automatically and quickly identify the current of your equipment and speed up the charge process
Dual USB Output: provide enough power to charge two devices at the same time when you run into embarrassing power outage moments
Ultra Portable: triple fold design (6.22” x 7.56” folded) and lightweight (13 OZ) make it very easy to pack into your backpack
Thoughtful Details: well-placed eye-hole, mounting loops around the panel and 4 carabiner hooks allow easy attachment to backpacks, bicycle, tent, etc.
With the built-in USB ports you can run two devices charging at once. Suaoki also had design in mind when building this as thy made it easy to hook or hang from a backpack or any item so that you can let those rays in. Great build quality as well. I feel like that this could handle me doing anything outside that I might be able to throw at it. Compact and ready to fold up and go where you need it as well. At $47.99 on Amazon you can’t go wrong if you are looking for a solar charger. Check it all out on Amazon and grab one for yourself now.
[button color=”green” size=”medium” link=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00YOCXGOW” icon=”” target=”true”]Check out Suaoki on Amazon[/button]This month marks a key anniversary in the LGBT rights movement. Forty years ago, voters in my home area of Miami-Dade County were herded to polling booths in record numbers for a special election specifically centered around a trailblazing ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. Motivated by lies and a general misunderstanding of gay and lesbian people, residents voted to repeal the ordinance by huge margins, sparking a national conversation about LGBT nondiscrimination that continues to rage today.
Miami was one of the first cities to pass such an ordinance, in 1977, when a national conversation had hardly even begun about LGBT freedom — a testament to our values of inclusion and fairness for all. But almost immediately, singer and evangelical activist Anita Bryant launched the hateful "Save Our Children" campaign, spreading lies about gay people and utilizing her platform to perpetuate the shameful myth that gay people were "trying to recruit our children into homosexuality." It was one of the first organized campaigns opposing the gay rights movement, and as a result, Miami's ordinance was overturned, with 70 percent of voters supporting repeal. LGBT advocates were outraged, and it led to a coordinated reaction, one of the first times since the Stonewall protest that the movement came together to fight back.
The ramifications of that ballot fight continue to this day. Now, in 2017, we're seeing similar rollbacks to existing nondiscrimination protections, particularly for transgender people. Last year, North Carolina became the first state in the country to bar transgender people from using public restrooms and facilities that correspond with their gender identity. Texas lawmakers are convening a special legislative session to consider similar legislation. And in February, President Trump's administration rescinded nonbinding federal education guidance that instructed schools on how to best support transgender students.
As a gay and transgender man, I find it disheartening to think that slightly over one generation ago, I wouldn't have had any law to protect me from being fired, thrown out of my home, or harassed and humiliated at a place of business because of who I am. When I came out as a transgender man in college, I felt vulnerable and fearful for my future. I didn't know if my conservative family would accept me. Although they had a lot of questions and did not understand what I was going through, they made clear to me that their love was unconditional and that I would always be their child no matter what. I was very fortunate.
That level of acceptance is uncommon even today, but it's becoming more so as more people meet transgender people and become more familiar with who we are. For those who do not yet understand — and for those who oppose our very existence — we need laws in place to protect us from discrimination. Opponents of LGBT equality continue to use harmful rhetoric about who LGBT people are, and their framing and focus has shifted to targeting transgender people. Because the transgender population is so small, few people have the opportunity to interact with us one on one, and so it can be difficult to separate truth from fiction. The truth is, transgender people have the same ambitions, goals, and dreams as anyone else. We want to raise families, take care of our loved ones, and create the best lives we can for ourselves. We want to be treated fairly and equally under the law and in our communities.
Miami-Dade should celebrate how far we've come since the days of Anita Bryant's antigay campaigning. Since then, the City Council has passed a comprehensive ordinance that explicitly protects LGBT people from discrimination in any area of life. Miami's economy flourishes because of the tourism generated by our inclusive culture and our reputation as an LGBT-friendly destination.
But the work's not over. In other parts of Florida, LGBT residents lack these protections and are vulnerable to discrimination in housing, employment, and public places. Florida legislators should update state nondiscrimination law to include LGBT people. We must continue the work, strengthen support for LGBT people, and leave no gaps in our law until we achieve equality for all.
is the director of public education at Freedom for All Americans, the national campaign to secure comprehensive nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people. As the son of Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, he is the first openly transgender child of a member of Congress. He lives in Miami.Wolf WPA Military Classic,.223 Remington, FMJ, 62 Grain, 500 Rounds is rated 4.7 out of 5 by 63.
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Rated 4 out of 5 by Matt from Good ammo I figure this would be perfect ammo for my Norinco type 84s or any 5.56 AK platform when it puts huge dents in brass casings afterwards it's no good to collect for hand loading so the steel cased is the way to go.The fiscal cliff showdown exposes the GOP’s stubborn favoritism toward the wealthiest Americans.
The GOP insists those crucial social insurance programs be sacrificed to prevent the entitled rich from once again paying the income tax rates that they did during the boom years of Bill Clinton.
Republicans, the party of the nation's entitled rich, are holding a knife to the throat of America's frail recovery.
The GOP sore losers have America up against a wall. Republicans don't care that the majority of the country voted for a candidate who promised to raise taxes on the rich. Republicans don't care that an even larger majority—60 percent—told election day pollsters they wanted those taxes raised. Republicans don't care about majority-rule democracy at all. They're demanding ransom—extension of tax cuts for the rich. If Americans don't submit, Republicans will slash the nation's economy.
“Back away from your Social Security, your Medicare, your Medicaid,” the Republicans are ordering. The GOP insists those crucial social insurance programs be sacrificed to prevent the entitled rich from once again paying the income tax rates that they did during the boom years of Bill Clinton. The party that lost the Presidency, lost seats in the House and lost seats in the Senate is willing to take down the economy, to eviscerate programs like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration rather than require the entitled rich pull their weight as citizens of the country that enabled them to live lives of unprecedented luxury.
The candidate Republicans chose as their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, stated the party's position loud and clear last spring and reiterated it during a post-election phone call with his millionaire financiers. Romney told funders in May that he had no intention of “worrying about” 47 percent of Americans who he described as moochers, citizens he slandered with the allegation that they refuse to “take personal responsibility.”
In the phone call, Romney claimed that the Americans he referred to as government moochers all voted for President Obama because the Democrat gave them “gifts.” Romney, a quarter-billionaire, described the administration's plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest as a “gift” to students. The Republican candidate born into wealth and pampered in private schools characterized as a “gift” the requirement in Obamacare that health insurance companies provide prescription contraceptives without co-payments.
The rich boy said President Obama bought women's votes for $10 co-pay forgiveness. But for Republicans, it's never the other way around. Romney and the GOP don't think they were buying the votes of the rich with their promise to add another 20 percent break on top of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest.
That's because they believe they're entitled. They derisively refer to the social safety net programs that prevent the nation's poor and elderly from being reduced to eating cat food as “entitlements.” But it's the entitled rich—Romney, the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and their ilk—who demand that America give them “stuff” like tax breaks for sending jobs overseas, like tax loopholes for hoarding their assets in the Caymans, like government-paid roads and sewers and rail lines to their businesses.
The entitled rich and their political party don't seem to get the fact that they lost the election. One hundered and thirty CEOs have ponied up $43 million to make sure the so-called fiscal cliff problem is resolved their way. They're saying, basically, they're willing to give up one of the “couple of Cadillacs” they drive if the middle class just accepts cat food as its meat course. The CEOs, calling themselves the “Fix the Debt” coalition, claim they'll pay a secret amount more in taxes if the 99 percent suffers cuts to its social safety net and endures slashed government programs.
Republicans in Congress won't even go that far. Their legislation would give more to the rich and less to everyone else. They've proposed, for example, extending the estate tax cuts that benefit the richest 0.3 percent of American families when their millionaire relatives die, an estimated 7,000 people in 2013. At the same time, Republicans are demanding an end to child tax credit and earned income tax credit enhancements that help 13 million families get by, families that include 26 million children. Those 7,000 entitled rich people and their Republican representatives believe 26 million kids can always join the grandmas dining on cat food. Tastes like chicken, right?
Congress and the President are confronted with a deadline in these hostage negotiations. On Jan. 1, half a trillion in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts are scheduled to take effect for the remainder of fiscal year 2013. It's called the fiscal cliff because many economists believe the combined effect during a weak recovery would shove the economy back down into recession.
Democrats don't want to risk damaging the economy. They've proposed extending the tax cuts for the 98 percent right now. The richest two percent would benefit from these breaks as well, receiving them on the first $250,000 of their earnings. Everybody gets something. This proposal passed the Democratic-controlled Senate. The Republican-controlled House refuses to even vote on it.
Republicans aren't talking about extending tax breaks for the 98 percent. Instead, they're threatening the economic life of the country if they don't get what they want—tax breaks for people who don't need them.
Law enforcement experts discourage paying off blackmailers and kidnappers.
President Obama is right to take that advice and refuse to pay the ransom Republicans are demanding to appease the entitled rich.
Full disclosure: The United Steelworkers union is a sponsor of In These Times.More than 79,007,940 people are looking forward to Obama’s Last Day… are you?
Change Is Coming!
On 01.20.17 this country will have a new President. On inauguration day 01.20.17 as we say goodbye to President Obama, we will begin a new chapter in our nation’s history.
Our Obama’s Last Day hats, Obama’s Last Day tee shirts, Obama’s Last Day stickers and Obama’s Last Day buttons call out that Change Is Coming! Think long and hard as the next campaign starts to heat up.
Everything comes to an end …more than 59,142,004 people did not vote for President Obama. What would that number be today?
The countdown to 01.20.17, the end of Barrack Obama’s term as President has started. Make sure that 01.20.17 marks the start of a new era… Join the countdown with an Obama’s Last Day 01.20.17™ Countdown Clock.
Update: Our store has closed down.Texas Stars Update Logos, Colours to Match Dallas
The American Hockey League’s Texas Stars unveiled their new logos and colour scheme, an update to reflect the relatively new look of their NHL affiliate in Dallas.
Texas had been using a colour scheme and logo set loosely based on the previous look of the NHL’s Stars, their crest had also featured a “STARS” wordmark in gold with the “A” designed as a green star.
“The colours and themes have worked so well in Dallas and they’ve become synonymous with Stars Hockey. It’s exciting for us to have the Texas Stars represented in the same Victory Green that we take great pride in.” – owner Tom Gaglardi.
The new mark is very similar to a previous Texas Stars alternate logo, which was also worn on their road uniform. The new alternate logo is a roundel with the Texas state flag in green, black, and silver inside a circle featuring a team name (time to update our roundel graphic!), this is also based off of the Dallas Stars alternate logo.
Logos were created by the design teams of the Texas Stars, Dallas Stars, and Reebok; new uniforms will be revealed during the summer.Share Pin +1 Share Shares 775
Here’s the ugly truth about hip new phones coming out every few months, they cause lust and shallow values. That’s right; every time the new iPhone is out, I want the new shimmy. I go ahead and replace my old trusty without a thought or passion! Hey wait a minute, isn’t this our life story too? Anyways, the point is, the least we can do is forge a deep emotional relationship with our gadgets, deep enough to hang on to them for quite some time and just for the sake of posterity keep upping their modular innards to keep them up to date! Something like this Modai Phone.
Don’t miss the cute animations in the comic story…just click the pic to see it all!
Designer: Julius TarngThe in-depth study by Professor David Blake of the Cass Business School proves that Brexit will allow the UK to become the World's financial centre once it is no longer constrained by Brussels rule. The paper is another demolition of the Project Fear claims made by Remoaners that the City of London would collapse as a major financial centre if Britain leaves the EU. It comes amid more evidence of Britain's Brexit boom as the country benefits from the vote to Leave the EU.
GETTY London is set for a new golden era following Brexit
With high employment and such a large number of opportunities on offer, the UK jobs market has turned into a sellers' market James Reed
The boost to the economy saw the FTSE 100 go stratospheric hitting a 7444 intraday high and finishing the day up almost 38 points. Meanwhile employment group Reed reported 250,000 vacancies, the highest for seven years just 24 hours after the Government published record employment figures. The figure was an increase of 7 per cent on a year ago, with big rises for work in health, manufacturing and consultancy as well as among charities and voluntary groups.
Reed chairman James Reed said the figures showed that the UK's "charge" towards full employment continues. He said: "With high employment and such a large number of opportunities on offer, the UK jobs market has turned into a sellers' market. "This means that jobseekers in many sectors can afford to be selective."
GETTY The boost to the economy saw the FTSE 100 go stratospheric
He suggested that British workers could benefit from EU citizens finding it more difficult to come to the UK in a move which could boost wages for domestic workers. He said: "If candidates from the EU are put off from applying for jobs in the UK due to Brexit or the lack of a guarantee of EU citizens' rights to stay in the UK after Brexit, then the scales could tip even further." In a sign that the UK continues to attract the world's biggest investors, Toyota announced it is to put £240million into upgrading its Burnaston plant in Derbyshire.
GETTY James Reed suggested British workers could benefit from EU citizens
The company said the move was "a boost" for its competitive in Europe. Welcoming the announcement, business and energy secretary Greg Clark said: "Our automotive sector is one of the most productive in the world and Toyota's decision to invest £240 million upgrading its Burnaston plant is a further boost to the UK auto sector." In his report Professor Blake laid out a five point plan on how the City of London - the biggest economic engine in the British economy - can become the world's financial centre with Brexit.
Top 10 countries that want to trade with UK after Brexit Thu, February 16, 2017 These are the top 10 trade partner prospects for the UK moving forward Play slideshow 1 of 11
One of his top recommendations to the Government is to keep any transitional arrangement with the EU to the minimum and get out of Brussels influence as quickly as possible. If the EU wants to punish Britain he also recommends a more competitive regulatory regime for the financial sector. And he says the UK should reach out to encourage overseas expansion of financial services. Prof Blake said: "Brexit is a golden opportunity for the City of London to become a World Financial Centre which takes the lead in the new digital revolution of blockchain and fintech.
GETTY Professor Blake laid out a five point plan on how London can become the world's financial centreAt a time when unsettling rumors of impending war seem inescapable, there’s something altogether fitting about a concert presenting two giants of Persian classical music at a West Berkeley center for yoga and meditation. Tehran’s Hossein Alizadeh and Los Angeles-based Pejman Hadadi conclude a North American tour Saturday at the Rudramandir Center on Bancroft Way.
Alizadeh is best known in the West as a founding member of the Masters of Persian Music, an ensemble that has helped raise the international profile of Iran’s millennia old classical tradition. Hailed as his generation’s most vivid and eloquent instrumentalist, he’s a visionary composer, and virtuoso of the Persian plucked lute, or tar. In Iran, where the 1979 Islamic revolution led to a stark generational gap as older masters fled overseas, Alizadeh provides invaluable continuity as an artist steeped in the vast body of traditional melodies known as the Radif, a vocabulary intimately intertwined with the rhythms of classical Persian poetry.
“Classical musicians are ranked in a well-respected hierarchy based on whether they have studied with a certain number of masters and learned the goushehs of the dastgah,” says Abbas Milani, director of Stanford University’s Iranian Studies Program, referring to the modes and melodies that make up the Radif. “There’s a consensus that Alizadeh is someone who has delved deeply but also innovatively |
crazy night (6.23). I chose to push past these slights and continued with the general gist that my foursome were the heroes of this mighty quest called life. But then came the episode of infamy, The Bakersfield Expedition (6.13), where the guys experienced adversity in the form of a person throwing garbage at them and calling them nerds, a police officer suggesting that he should call their mothers, and weird looks from a diner full of people. Sheldon’s reaction was offensive to hear: “We’re an imaginary landing party who had real-life garbage thrown at us by real-life strangers who think we’re idiots. And to tell you the truth, I’m starting to feel like one. I want to go home now,” because it told people who like cosplay that they were idiots for doing what they did and that other people’s judgements matter.
This, from the show that made a point of attending San Diego Comic Con every year? How the writers and creators put out an episode like this and simultaneously go to the convention waving the flag of, 'we’re a nerd positive show so like us’ shows an incredible disconnect and disrespect for the fans. It was our love for paintball and Halo and Mystic Warlords of Ka'a and Klingon Boggle and Secret Agent Laser Obstacle Chess that got them a growing fan base needed for syndication, not a bunch of angsty viewers looking to live their romantic fantasies, and yet we’ve been relegated to the past. I mean, geez, at least our stuff was funny!
Given the backgrounds Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Raj offer, they had their science and hobbies like Dungeons & Dragons, comic books and video games which functioned as outlets in order to dream and explore and grow while at the same time escape bullies and dysfunctional home lives. By the writers having removed the counterbalance to the show, i.e. the push for acceptance of the individual, the message is sent that roleplaying games and comic books and building model rockets are things that we nerds do because we can’t get a girlfriend/boyfriend, because the moment we get one we all grow up and put these things aside. Or in other words, nerd-dom is a phase that is incompatible with their notion of what constitutes adulthood.
That’s why it was critical that Sheldon was the one who dismissed their Star Trek costumes, the man who regimented his life around events such as Comic Book Wednesdays and Vintage Video Game Fridays. It’s why Sheldon’s turning away from Spock (9.07) signaled the end of the Sheldon Cooper I knew and loved. It showed that the writers had no clue as to Spock’s significance, making him out to be nothing more than a half-human fraudster that fooled a young Sheldon into thinking that one can exist without emotions. It showed that they don’t understand Spock and, by extension, Sheldon.
Spock always said that he didn’t have emotions but we, through Jim Kirk, knew better. Spock’s emotions were deep and powerful, which is why he practiced kolinahr. Through their friendship we got to see what true love was: Spock could appreciate Kirk’s passion without succumbing to it (most of the time), while Kirk admired Spock’s intellect (although he enjoyed teasing him). Yes, there was a chance for both to learn from each other, perhaps even influence each other, but neither asked the other to go against who they fundamentally were.
We have a similar window in which to see Sheldon’s range of emotion and her name is Penny. Penny, who made him screech into a phone when she called him 'Moonpie’ (2.17) and flash a look of death when she used all the laundry machines (2.07). Even more remarkable is that she’s the one who made Sheldon cry. His lips trembled as he gently handled the Leonard Nimoy napkin before he darted to his room to fetch her Christmas presents (2.11). Sheldon cared enough about Penny to violate his own policies and drive her to the hospital despite the threats of a fiery death and lethal germs (3.08). Like Spock and Kirk, Sheldon and Penny came to an understanding that they were of equal standing even though their talents were so opposite.
Penny is critical to Sheldon’s development as a well-rounded character because she offered him a chance to experience things beyond his world on his own terms. This is why their scenes are so memorable—they’re truly moments when worlds collide (“Penny, Penny, just to clarify because there will be a discussion when you leave, is your objection solely to our presence in the apartment while you were sleeping, or do you also object to the imposition of a new organizational paradigm.” 1.02) and we get to see how their worldviews are different without taking sides as to which one is right. Since the show has gone on to pick a side as it were, i.e. 'normalcy’ over 'individuality’, the Sheldon and Penny scenes are less frequent. This is a terrible loss, not only for the show’s humour, but also for the power of friendship. That a member of the corn queen’s court could be friends with a Star Trek loving child prodigy sends a positive message that we can be accepted for who we are, despite our differences.
Being an outsider and yet being okay with that, okay with being you, that’s what Spock was all about. It’s the lesson Sheldon took to heart and put into motion—he was unapologetically himself. He was Homo Novus, arrogant, stubborn, an alpha personality who didn’t let the trivial get in the way of what he wanted or was interested in. This is what’s crucial to understanding how Sheldon worked as a comedic element as the humour he brought was twofold: what he found trivial, such as social relationships and human contact (1.12). Added to this was what he found to be important like 8:15 laundry nights, scheduled dinners, comic books, Star Trek, sci-fi and fantasy, and anime as compared to what 'normal’ people like Penny and the general viewership value.
It could be argued that there was a third level to Sheldon’s humour which occurred when he bothered to actually take a look at what'regular folk’ were doing. The most devastating observation came about when he called out Penny for being a hypocrite about Leonard’s 'toys’: “Little Miss 'grownups don’t play with toys’. If I were to go into that apartment right now, would I find Beanie Babies? Are you not an accumulator of Care Bears and My Little Ponies? And who is that Japanese feline I see frolicking on your shorts? Hello, Hello Kitty!” (1.14). This exchange challenged the general audience to see that action figures and other collectibles weren’t limited to nerd culture, that it was merely the subject matter that differentiated and that one wasn’t superior to the other.
Showing the commonalities helped make nerd culture more accessible and understood rather than mocked and dismissed. Big Bang Theory was at its best when it did this (Penny: “Wow, so in your world, you’re like the cool guys.” Howard: “Recognize.” 1.13), but the message got lost and ultimately abandoned as the seasons progressed. For some reason, Bernadette and Amy were not allowed to like nerd interests outside of academia and yet were presented to the guys as the only options for them if they wanted female companionship (Penny to Howard: “If you let her go, there is no way you can find anyone else. Speaking on behalf of all women, it is not gonna happen, we had a meeting” [5.16]; Amy to Sheldon: “I am the best girlfriend you’re ever gonna have” [6.15]). Perhaps this was an attempt to create more humour by setting up a dichotomy but all it did was place Sheldon and Howard in a position where they were ridiculed by those who say they love them.
The joke that the women were putting up with their child-men is cliché so it’s disappointing that the writers have chosen to rely heavily on it to depict their relationships. I know lots of people who are married, have kids, a mortgage, good job and yet like role playing games and anime. Their spouses don’t see them as being any less adult and even if they don’t participate in nerd hobbies, they don’t belittle their husbands or wives for doing so.
This is not the case for Sheldon and Howard as in the later seasons both had been reduced to little more than children. Sheldon, in particular, had managed to fulfill Amy’s description of being “a sexy toddler” (4.21). Suddenly the man who could “shoot close enough to a raccoon that it craps itself” (3.06), and create three-person chess was now chasing balloons and couldn’t maneuver himself through a revolving door without stubbing his toe and needing a teddy bear (8.09). He’s become whiny and mean-spirited and terribly egocentric. Not that he didn’t have an ample amount of pride and ego before, in fact often getting his comeuppance for succumbing to them, but that didn’t mean his entire character was foolish and mean. Sheldon was an eccentric with alternative tastes, not a child, and he marched without caring if he had a band with him or not—a wonderfully positive message sent to viewers who themselves might have felt the pressure to conform rather than be themselves.
This is why it’s painful to see Sheldon’s colourful wardrobe replaced by beige and bland 'date-night’ clothes. Cue the humour as Amy dragged Sheldon kicking and screaming into a new self-perception that he ultimately accepts as being what he wanted all along i.e. a'real boy’ as symbolized through the act of coitus.
I’m not against Amy and Sheldon being a couple. What I am against is their being an ordinary couple. There should have been more meme theory moments (4.20), not boyfriend/girlfriend sing along nights. You don’t know how many times I wished Sheldon and Amy would “treat our relationship as if it were a crashed computer and restore it to the last point we both agree it worked” (4.21) because the last time their relationship worked was season four when they were friends who respected each other—and were funny. Amy the girlfriend is all about change, but the writers have skewed it so that it’s only for her benefit. I watched Sheldon continually deflect her sexual advances until he gave in, suggesting that she knows what he wants better than he does. This, above all else, is what is wrong with the later seasons because Sheldon has changed from the iconic character he was, not to benefit his character, but to fulfill a pitiful attempt at maudlin romance. He’s been worn down to the point where he no longer sees the wonder in Spock.
He no longer sees the wonder in himself.
Sheldon isn’t crazy, his mother had him tested. And that’s true, Sheldon isn’t crazy, he’s awesome. Right from the beginning I was in awe of him, the alien genius who loved trains and Spock and comic books. Yet for all of his bigger than life presence Sheldon was also the most delicate of the show’s creations because so much of him was shaped by how the show chose to depict individuals: when the writers were empathetic, Sheldon was king and his eccentricities knew no bounds—a veritable goldmine of humour; when they mocked them, the very same traits became stupid and contrary to the ‘adult’ plot and were thus eliminated. Gone are the Bazingas, inability to deceive, romantic disinterest and his germ phobia, and his Cooper factoids, routines and even his genius are in jeopardy. Gone, too, is the humour.
It’s a mistake to contain Sheldon within the walls of normalcy because it has caused the entire show to become boring, formulaic and not nearly as funny as it once was. I don’t want marriages and babies, I want to see a group of friends who shared similar interests and accepted each other’s eccentricities—even Sheldon’s though they didn’t understand them. They all had a shared loyalty to each other that I could see lasting into their eighties where they’d be sword-fighting with their canes.
Most of all, I want an unapologetic Sheldon whose individualism and passion are his defining attributes. He isn’t a robot and the notion that he required humanizing, in fact insisting that he was half a man, is insulting. Yes he was selfish, but he was also loyal: assisting Leonard got him pantsed by Kurt (1.01); he moved out of the apartment so as to protect Penny’s secret (2.01); and gave Raj a job to keep him in the country (3.04). He wasn’t a physical coward as he risked his life putting the rocket fuel in the elevator (3.22), and returned with Leonard to, again, confront Kurt (2.14). He stood up for Leonard against Penny’s insult about collectibles and did his best to address the wrong he did to Howard with the security clearance (4.07). Sheldon was an Other, different and unique, but he was always human, even at his most alien.
It’s why I can unabashedly say that the Sheldon Cooper of the early seasons is my Spock.
And why I can say with absolute certainty that those who work for the show don’t understand what that means.
ILOS ANGELES — The body of a mystery man was decomposing in his car in the ritzy Pacific Palisades neighborhood in Southern California for nearly two weeks before he was found by authorities, an attorney said.
Inside his home, detectives discovered more than 1,200 guns, scopes, 6.5 tons of ammunition, bows and arrows, knives, machetes and $230,000 in cash after he was found on Friday.
They also located eight of the 14 vehicles stashed around Los Angeles registered to the man, including an SUV designed to drive underwater.
Who he was and how he came to accumulate the arsenal and vehicles are questions authorities are still trying to answer.
Veteran defense attorney Harland Braun represents the man’s fiancée Catherine Nebron and identified him as Jeffrey Alan Lash.
That’s also the name authorities are working with and they’re in touch with a relative to try to officially identify the body, said Craig Harvey, coroner’s chief of investigations.
Lash and Nebron were together for 17 years and she believed him when he told her that he worked as an undercover operative for unnamed government agencies, Braun said Wednesday.
“The story itself sounds totally crazy, but then how do you explain all this?” Braun said. “There’s no evidence he was a drug dealer or he stole these weapons, or had any criminal source of income, no stolen property, all the stuff you’d look for.”
There’s no indication the man was doing anything illegal with the weapons, LAPD Deputy Chief of Detectives Kirk Albanese said. Detectives were reviewing everything, but so far the guns appeared to be registered to him. Many were still in boxes or had price tags.
Braun said Nebron and two friends were in a car at a supermarket early July 4, when Lash felt hot and had trouble breathing.
“He wouldn’t go to a hospital and didn’t want any 911 call,” Braun said. When he died, Nebron parked him in a car down the street from the condo they shared, the lawyer said.
Authorities don’t believe there was any foul play involved, but won’t give a cause until there is more investigation.
Lash told Nebron the government agencies would take care of his body and the items in the home, so Nebron and her friends took a trip to Oregon, distraught.
When they returned about 10 days later, Nebron was shocked to still see Lash’s body in the car.
She contacted Braun, and together they called police, who found the body, guns and more.
Neighbors thought Lash was dying of cancer because he appeared to be degenerating over the past year, but Lash told Nebron that he had been exposed to nerve-damaging chemicals on a mission and his condition was worsening.Imagine Curtis Evoy’s surprise one morning four years ago when outside his office door, he found a small orphan with an attached note, “Please give me a good home.” It was a prickly situation. The orphan was a long-thorn cactus, the note stuck through one of its needles.
Allan Gardens accepts about 90 per cent of donated plant specimens, but please no more ficus trees. ( Barry Gray / The Hamilton Spectator file photo )
“Some people form real attachments to a plant, like it’s a pet,” says Evoy, superintendent at Toronto’s Allan Gardens Conservatory, which regularly receives requests to take in a beloved plant — usually over the phone, not abandoned on the doorstep — when the owner can no longer care for it. “Some of the plants are on their last legs, but to the people, they’re beautiful.” Ideally, a cherished plant will be passed down to a close relative or friend, but sometimes there’s no one. Evoy gets on average a call a month, but more in the fall when plants have gotten too tall or heavy for the owner to keep lugging inside. Allan Gardens accepts about 90 per cent of them, he says. Unusual specimens are added to the conservatory’s collection and the ordinary ones shoehorned in. If Allan Gardens can’t take it, he might offer it to another conservatory. But please, says Evoy, no more ficus trees.
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The most unusual one he adopted is a five-foot-tall baobob tree, grown by a woman from South Africa who had brought the seed with her to Canada. One woman who was very sick with cancer came in with three prickly pear cacti. “She had a big cry,” recalls Evoy. “She had taken care of them for years.” About eight inches tall when she dropped them off, they are now three-feet tall and flowering. They found a good home.Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
Even the most die-hard Nintendo fanboys could be forgiven for not knowing about the 64DD.
The 64DD was a magnetic drive that snapped onto the bottom of the Nintendo 64, slated to run bigger, rewritable games, and give the massively popular console internet connectivity. After four years of development delays the 64DD finally launched in Japan in 1999. Only 10 games ever came out for it—fewer than the equally embarrassing Virtual Boy—and Nintendo eventually scrapped the US release.
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Since flopping on the consumer market the 64DD has become highly valued among collectors, and over the years some rare developer units and prototype discs have surfaced. They can sell for thousands of dollars each. YouTuber MetalJesusRocks thought he had both, but it turned out he had something much more precious.
The working 64DD unit MJR got through Craigslist had one very strange feature: the boot-up screen was in English. Why would such a thing exist if it was never released on American soil? His first theory was that it could have been a developer unit, but Mark DeLoura, a former lead engineer at Nintendo, helped disprove that. This was an honest-to-goodness retail model that had gone through quality assurance (hence the unusual “lot check” sticker on the front).
To make matters stranger, the copyright date on the bottom of the unit is 1996, 1997—a full two years before the add-on appeared in Japan. Maybe this was part of an initial run of early models before Nintendo decided to scrap the US release? Whatever the reason, the existence of an English-language retail model of this rare and largely-forgotten peripheral was long considered a myth according to MJR.
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Though his 64DD did come with one of those rare blue prototype discs, he’s been unable to get the system to read the disc’s contents. So if you have any information on how to see what’s on it, send him a tweet.Google Play Games is a platform that allows gamers from around the world to easily connect with one another, and today it’s getting a new feature that will make this easier than ever. Google has just announced and update to the Play Games app on Android that will let you record and share gaming footage from your favorite mobile titles in 720p or 480p resolution.
To start recording, simply head to the Play Games app on your mobile device, select the game you’d like to play, them tap the record button. You can choose to add in a video of yourself, complete with commentary, via your device’s front-facing camera and microphone. Once you’ve recorded your gameplay, you can quickly edit the video an upload it to YouTube.
The addition of this new feature is similar to the update that just rolled out for YouTube Gaming, which allows users to record and live stream games directly from their Android devices. Google says that gameplay recording through Play Games will be rolling out to the U.S. and U.K. over the coming days, and will be available in more countries soon after.Bleacher Report’s Mike Tanier recently created a list of the most underrated players in NFL history — players who not only were snubbed from the Hall of Fame, but almost lost to the historical record despite greatness (or near-greatness) as an athlete. Tanier peppers the list with some current players he thinks are not receiving their due praise as well, like Philip Rivers.
Of the 25-player list, only one Viking appears — Jim Marshall. It makes some sense that there’s only one Vikings player on a limited list. After all, there are 32 teams and the Vikings are not among the group of teams with a Super Bowl ring to their names.
Still, the Vikings only have six Hall of Famers from their incredible 1969-76 run, despite having the best record in the NFL over that period. While they weren’t able to get over the final hump, many of the individual players from that era — and other eras — deserve high praise.
Each day this week, we’ll look at some of the players in the Vikings’ past who deserve to be better remembered, but we’ll start with the defensive end Tanier isolated: Marshall.
Marshall is certainly worthy of the recognition. If counting unofficial sacks since 1960 (instead of merely official sacks since 1982), Marshall’s 127 sacks ranks 23rd, ahead of Hall of Famers like Andy Robustelli (37th), Elvin Bethea (42nd) and Charles Haley (50th).
With 30 fumble recoveries, he ranks second all-time among defensive players in the statistic (behind Rod Woodson and just ahead of Jason Taylor).
This historical sack list is one I’ve been updating every year, and the initial work comes from football historian John Turney. Because internet archives get deleted and his work gets reported in dribs and drabs, over half of the database now comes from manually filling in the holes.
That work allows us to do some interesting analysis that might highlight why a player like Marshall has been more notorious as a Hall of Fame snub than a repeat finalist.
There are some criticisms that Marshall is a bit of a compiler — that he was never particularly impressive in one year but lasted a long time to accumulate those statistics.
Though that’s somewhat fair and true, it’s not enough of a criticism that it makes sense to dismiss his Hall of Fame candidacy. After all, Jerome Bettis’ efficiency numbers weren’t great, but he compiled enough yards over a long career for a Hall of Fame berth.
If peak production is important, Marshall does pretty well over his best three-year span — beating out Julius Peppers’ best three-year span in his own peak. Marshall averaged 12.2 sacks per 16 games in his best three-year span, while Peppers averaged 11.5 sacks per season in his own best span. So too with Terrell Suggs (10.2), Howie Long (11.7) and he’s within rounding error of Chris Doleman’s 12.2.
His peak production is particularly impressive after adjusting for era.
One can compare a player’s overall body of work with the opportunities they’ve been presented with. In the 1970s, for example, teams passed significantly less often and there were fewer games in a season. On the other hand, sack rates were higher per pass attempt — in 1976, 9.1 percent of drop backs ended in a sack. That was the highest rate in the Super Bowl era. In 2016, it was 5.8 percent — the lowest that rate has ever been in league history.
After accounting for pass attempts, games played (and missed) and league-wide sack rates, Marshall ends up with the 24th-best peak among all sack producers (defensive linemen and outside linebackers) in the Hall of Fame and ahead of inductees like Taylor, Kevin Greene, Richard Dent, Robustelli, Rickey Jackson, Elvin Bethea, Lee Roy Selmon, Doleman, Charles Haley and Long.
This kind of analysis doesn’t give credit to iron men who miss few games, so it understates Marshall’s overall impact by giving credit to players who missed games.
Marshall, at the time, was generally recognized as the third-best lineman among the Purple People Eaters behind Alan Page and fellow defensive end Carl Eller. That meant he was a perpetual also-ran in postseason recognition; he was selected as a second-team All-Pro defensive end four different years by various organizations (United Press International, Newspaper Enterprise Association, New York Daily News and Sporting News) and generally has limited postseason honors.
His Wikipedia page lists four Pro Bowl appearances, but two of those years (1968 and 1969) were the only ones without AFL participation and the only ones listed for Marshall in the Vikings media guide. His Pro-Football-Reference page only lists those two as well.
His best sack years 1969 (14), 1964 (11.5), 1963 (10.5) and 1968 (10) are fairly underwhelming as career-bests. His contemporaries would often hit 15 sacks in their best year, sometimes 20.
Each of the following players had peaks over 15 sacks in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Deacon Jones, Coy Bacon, Jack Youngblood, teammates Eller and Page, Cedrick Hardman, Harvey Martin, Bill Stanfill, Elvin Bethea, Jack Gregory, George Andrie, Jethro Pugh, Jim Katcavage and Verlon Biggs. Jones, Bacon, Martin and Katcavage exceeded 20 in their peak years (Jones multiple times).
Given the spotty nature of stat keeping in that era, especially for sacks for players that had short but bright careers, there’s a good chance there are even more players with 15-plus sack seasons.
It’s easy to see why Marshall was passed over so many times for All-Pro and Pro Bowl honors. Still, consistency deserves a reward as well. It may be better to be consistently elite like Jones and Page were, but being consistently the third-, fourth- or fifth-best pass-rusher for nearly 20 years of play merits recognition.
Because awards are apportioned via individual seasons, the NFL never honors players over the course of a three- or five-year period. As discussed above, Marshall’s three-year peak is fairly good among Hall of Fame and near-HOF contemporaries. In fact, the three-year adjusted peak rankings of that list of 15-sack players bodes well for Marshall:
As a reminder, career compiler Bethea is in the Hall of Fame.
These three-to-five year peak periods range from 1961 to 1978 (mirroring Marshall’s overall career) meaning that at any one time, only two or three of the above players would actually be rivaling Marshall for total sack numbers. If one looked just at the 1967-71 stretch, where Marshall was most productive, there are few players that would beat him.
Some of these sack totals are estimated rather than confirmed; Ike Lassiter’s sack total uses known quantities for 1967 and 1969 but assumes a fairly generous 1968 result. Some players, like Mel Branch, Dan Birdwell and Diron Talbert don’t even have reasonable estimable metrics for their totals. Doug Atkins ended his career in 1969, so he can’t really be a competitor in the five-year category.
Those statistical problems aside, we can examine the larger point: Marshall’s three-year peak saw him as the second- or third-most productive defensive end (Pugh was a tackle), depending on Lassiter’s true total — above the more celebrated Eller. Marshall performs about the same over the five-year span, with the lone exception of defensive end Biggs leapfrogging him (Page does as well, but like Pugh, he was a tackle).
The NFL doesn’t offer a three-year “Pro Bowl” or honor, meaning that defensive ends who put together sack totals of 9.5 one year, 18.5 another year and 6.5 the third year will end up receiving more postseason honors than one with 13.5 sacks each of those years — despite earning six more sacks overall in that time span.
Marshall is a difficult player to figure out because of his consistency — there are no explosive one-year totals to point to, and therefore little in the way of single-season awards. Despite the lack of those awards, he deserves much more respect in Hall of Fame discussions than he generally gets and certainly qualifies as underrated.
But there are other Vikings that may deserve consideration for such a list, not just Marshall. We’ll cover those as the week continues.
RelatedSen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) ripped Senate Republicans on Monday evening for writing their healthcare bill behind closed doors.
"So I say to the Republican leadership: What are you afraid of? Bring that bill out," Sanders, who is also a member of Democratic leadership, said from the Senate floor.
Sanders added that GOP senators "should be embarrassed" by the secretive process to hash out ObamaCare repeal-and-replace legislation, and lawmakers need to have a "series of hearings."
"It should tell you something that major, major legislation is being written at this moment and most Republicans don't have a clue what's in that legislation," he said.
Sanders's speech comes as Democrats take over the Senate floor on Monday evening to protest the GOP's closed-door effort, with Republicans expected to force a vote on legislation as soon as next week.
Sanders, like other Democratic senators, compared the months of public haggling over the Affordable Care Act to the current legislative effort, in which GOP senators are discussing their forthcoming proposal during a string of closed-door meetings.
"I find it amazing that those same Republicans seem to think it's OK for legislation to be written behind closed doors and not have one single committee hearing," Sanders said.
Sanders urged every Democratic senator to fight "in an unprecedented way" to help stop the GOP legislation.
"Our job right now is to make sure that this disastrous Republican proposal never sees the light of day," he said.
No Democratic senator is expected to support the GOP legislation, but they don't have the ability to block the bill on their own. Republicans have 52 seats. They can afford to lose two GOP senators and still have Vice President Pence break a tie.
Democrats are stepping up their effort to publicly push back against the GOP legislation. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said from the Senate floor earlier that Democrats are willing to gum up the procedure in the chamber to keep the bill from passing.
Sanders held a Facebook Live event with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) earlier Monday, noting he would reintroduce a single-payer healthcare bill.
"I would hope that we would come forward, as a nation, and join every other country on Earth... and say that healthcare is a right of all people, not a privilege," he added from the Senate floor.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) defended the GOP process earlier on Monday, saying there would be an "open amendment process."
"I think we'll have ample opportunity to read and amend the bill," McConnell said when pressed on whether lawmakers would have at least 10 hours to review the bill.IT IS fitting that the black-and-red flag of Angola is hardly distinguishable from that of its ruling party. The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) has led the country since independence from Portugal in 1975. At the parliamentary election in 2008 it won 82% of the vote; in 2012 it won 72%. Few doubt it will win again when Angolans go to the polls on August 23rd.
Many Angolans credit the MPLA with bringing peace to the country after nearly three decades of civil war that ended in 2002. The party then presided over an oil-fuelled boom, with annual GDP growth averaging 7.2% between 2003 and 2015. New roads, railways and other infrastructure won it the support of voters. But just in case, the party is also accused of beating opponents, bribing local chiefs and keeping a tight grip on the media.
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There are signs, though, that the MPLA’s stranglehold on Angolan politics is loosening. Its leader, José Eduardo dos Santos, is stepping down as president after 38 years in power. His handpicked successor, João Lourenço, does not have the same standing within the party—nor does he inspire the same fear in its opponents. Moreover, 66% of the country’s 28m people are under 25. Many will be voting for the first time. With little memory of the war, they tend to be more cynical about the MPLA.
The party’s lustre has faded as the low price of oil turned Angola’s boom into a bust. In April the official statistics agency reported that GDP shrank by nearly 4% last year (it has since removed the figure from its website). The unemployment rate hovers above 20%. Foreign firms are leaving the country because of a shortage of hard currency. On the streets of Luanda, the capital, a dollar changes hands for more than double the official rate. Many Angolans wonder why the country’s oil wealth has not made them better off.
A big part of the answer is corruption. According to reports, the government is unable to account for billions of dollars in public funds over the past decade. In 2012 the IMF documented shoddy book-keeping at Sonangol, the national oil company. Anti-corruption investigators in China have probed its deals with Angola—and made arrests. Big oil-for-infrastructure contracts, often involving Mr dos Santos’s inner circle, seem to be deliberately opaque. The country ranks 164th of 176 on the Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by Transparency International, a watchdog.
Still, few Angolans seem to be giving up on the MPLA. Polling data are fuzzy, but a survey conducted in July, before serious campaigning began, found that 61% of them plan to vote for the party. It is expected to lose support in Angola’s cities and may even lose most of the seats in Luanda, where the party was founded. The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), the MPLA’s civil-war adversary and the main opposition party, and CASA-CE, a coalition of parties formed in 2012 by a former UNITA leader, stand to benefit. CASA-CE’s push for political and economic reforms is resonating with young urban voters.
The largest party in parliament selects the president, so Mr Lourenço, a former defence minister, will certainly get the job. He enjoys strong ties to the army, but some question whether he has the clout to clean up the government and implement much-needed reforms. He was not the first choice of Mr dos Santos, who is said to have wanted a successor from his own inner circle. Opposition from within the party forced him to back away from that plan. But he is not completely giving way to Mr Lourenço. Though he is stepping down from the presidency, he will continue to lead the MPLA. His eldest son will still run Angola’s sovereign-wealth fund, while his daughter heads Sonangol.
“The MPLA needs to free itself of the control of dos Santos,” says Marcolino Moco, who served as Mr dos Santos’s prime minister and is now a critic of the government. But without a strong mandate, Mr Lourenço may find it difficult to do what is necessary. The government must devalue the currency, say analysts. Fast-rising debt, which helped the government maintain spending in the run-up to the election, may force Angola to ask the IMF for help. For any benefits to trickle down to the masses, Mr Lourenço must tackle corruption. To do that, he must stand up to the elite in his own party.Nate Silver, the poster boy of data scientists, says the key to success in that field isn’t fancy degrees or tons of book learning — it’s finding data you’re interested in and really digging in, according to a recent Harvard Business Review blog.
Silver came to fame with his FiveThirtyEight Blog, which is moving from The New York TImes to ESPN. With the big data era upon us, there’s been a ton of discussion about what sort of degrees and credentials are needed to get a lucrative data scientist position. Some universities — backed by vendors in need of data scientists — now offer advanced degrees in the subject.
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So Silver’s contention that education is no substitute for experience is somewhat contrarian. But he stuck to it. “… Getting your hands dirty with the data set is, I think, far and away better than spending too much time doing reading and so forth,” Silver said in a Q&A with HBR’s Walter Frick.
And, in case the point wasn’t clear, he added: “I think the applied experience is a lot more important than the academic experience. It probably can’t hurt to take a stats class in college.”
It’s a a little ironic that this endorsement of self-taught skills appeared in a Harvard Business School blog, but what’re you going to do?Three-quarters of Metro Vancouver neighbourhoods are too expensive for the typical family to buy a home in, according to an interactive affordability map created by The Vancouver Sun.
According to the map, a family with an income of $80,000 before taxes could not afford to buy the typical home in 76 per cent of the region’s neighbourhoods, including most of Vancouver, the North Shore, Burnaby and Richmond.
In contrast, several neighbourhoods in north Surrey, Langley and Maple Ridge would be within such a family’s budget.
According to the map, a family would have to make about $110,000 a year before half of Metro Vancouver’s neighbourhoods became affordable to them and $150,000 before three-quarters were within their price range.
If you're on a mobile device, please click here to see the map.
Click here to see a larger version of this map.
Tsur Somerville, director of the University of B.C.’s Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate, said the map illustrates what many middle-class families have already realized: That to buy a single-family home, they need to move out to the Fraser Valley.
“It is |
Department of Transportation.
National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre endorses U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt during a campaign stop at the NRA National Sporting Arms Museum in Springfield, Mo., Aug. 11. (Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK file photo)
Read or Share this story: http://oshko.sh/2bEdIqDMonday's cabinet shuffle reveals two weaknesses in the Trudeau government: an indifferent, if reasonably stable, front bench outside its core team of top performers, and a real problem in Alberta.
An enfeebled ministry is typical of modern governments everywhere. The ever-accelerating pace of events concentrates power in the leader's office. Justin Trudeau had promised a return to true cabinet government, in which autonomous ministers operated as a powerful committee chaired by the prime minister. In reality, power rests in only a few hands.
The second problem is, for Liberals, chronic. Mr. Trudeau hopes to hold and, if possible, expand his beachhead of four Alberta MPs. Instead, thanks to expulsions and shuffles, he risks losing that toehold.
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Adam Radwanski: PM could use a few more experienced cabinet hands
With the NDP struggling to remain relevant in Quebec, the next election could reveal an old and not-very-healthy situation in which the Conservatives own the Prairies and B.C. outside the lower mainland, the Liberals dominate in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, and the two parties fight for control of Greater Toronto and Vancouver.
As it was for the father, so too might it be for the son.
The elevation of former TV host Seamus O'Regan to Veterans Affairs Minister puts a popular and well-known MP into cabinet and ensures that Newfoundland and Labrador retain representation, following the departure for personal reasons of Judy Foote.
But Kent Hehr's demotion from Veterans Affairs to Sports and Persons with Disabilities is more problematic. Mr. Trudeau and his advisers obviously felt the Calgary MP wasn't living up to his responsibilities in a file that always seems to bedevil federal governments.
The problem for the Liberals is that they only have four Alberta MPs, and that number could soon be reduced to three, if reports that Calgary MP Darshan Kang is about to be expelled from caucus over allegations of sexual harassment prove correct.
Edmonton MP Randy Boissonnault is charged with handling LGBT issues. Edmonton's other Liberal MP, Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi, is virtually invisible. Albertans can rightly wonder how well their interests are represented in this government.
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Moving Jane Philpott from Health to the new Indigenous Services file reflects both satisfaction with the Markham-Stouffville MP's handling of the recent health-care negotiations and unhappiness with the slow pace of progress on Indigenous issues under Toronto MP Carolyn Bennett, who keeps half of her former job as Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs. Think of them as Minister for Indigenous Affairs where things might get done, and Minister of Indigenous Affairs where they won't.
Ms. Philpott may be on her way to the inner circle – the small team of powerful ministers that a prime minister trusts to manage the crucial files, with all the others kept on a short leash.
During the Conservative era, only Jim Flaherty, Jim Prentice, John Baird and Tony Clement had the full confidence of the micro-managing Stephen Harper. The Liberal inner circle is equally small.
Chrystia Freeland has taken over responsibility for, not only foreign affairs, but trade as well. (When was the last time you heard of International Trade Minister François-Philippe Champagne's involvement in the North American free-trade negotiations?)
Bill Morneau is sovereign in the realm of Finance, while Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale has become Minister Responsible for Putting Out Fires. And Environment Minister Catherine McKenna has also been given wide latitude.
Most of the remaining members of cabinet do their jobs knowing that the Prime Minister's Office is keeping a watchful eye on them all.
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As a government matures, stars dim and shine. Carla Qualtrough's promotion from Sports and Persons with Disabilities to Public Services reflects Mr. Trudeau's growing confidence in her abilities. And Ginette Petitpas Taylor has rocketed from parliamentary secretary in Finance to Minister of Health.
But over all, this shuffle is more a minor managerial restructuring than a panicky rearranging of deck chairs. This Liberal government remains in control of its mandate, and deservedly confident of its prospects in the lead-up to the next election.
Even if things are starting to look rather dim in the West.JERUSALEM — A Palestinian attacker opened fire early Tuesday at the entrance to a settlement outside Jerusalem, killing three Israeli security men and critically wounding a fourth, Israeli police and medical services said, in one of the deadliest attacks in a two-year spate of violence.
Gaza's Islamic Hamas rulers praised the attack but stopped short of taking responsibility for it. Israeli officials said the attacker was a 37-year-old Palestinian father of four who appeared to have acted alone.
The attack comes at a tense period amid the Jewish high holidays and is likely to complicate the mediation efforts of U.S. peace envoy Jason Greenblatt who had just arrived in the region for meetings with Israeli and Palestinians leaders.
Speaking at his weekly Cabinet meeting, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attack was partially a result of systematic Palestinian incitement and said he expected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to "condemn this attack and not try to justify it."
Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said the attacker approached the back gate entrance of the Har Adar settlement, hiding among dozens of Palestinian day laborers who were being checked by security forces.
The man aroused police suspicions and was asked to stop, Samri said. At that point, he pulled out a weapon and began opening fire from a short distance. The attacker, who held a valid permit to work in Israel, was then shot dead by other forces at the scene.
The Magen David Adom medical service said that in addition to the three killed, a fourth Israeli man, 32, was evacuated to hospital in critical condition. The casualties were identified as Solomon Gavria, a 20-year-old policeman, and two private security guards.
Har Adar is an upscale community west of Jerusalem, straddling the seam line between the West Bank and Israel proper — and an unusual target in the wave of violence that Israel has been coping with over the past two years.
Israeli at the scene where the Palestinian man opened fire, killing three Israelis and wounding another
Shay Retter, the head of Har Adar's security committee, said that between 100 and 150 Palestinian laborers typically enter the community each day for work. Local residents said they knew the attacker from previous work he had carried out in the community and were shocked to hear what he had done. The military imposed a closure on the nearby Palestinian village of Beit Surik, the home of the attacker.
Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said he saw no difference between Palestinian terrorism and radical Islamic terrorism targeting sites in Europe and elsewhere.
"Before talking about any kind of negotiations, the world must demand of the Palestinian Authority to stop its incitement and encouragement of terror," he said, alluding to Greenblatt's visit and his goal of securing concessions for Palestinians.
Minister of Intelligence Israel Katz was even blunter.
"The attack is also a message to special U.S. envoy Greenblatt," he said. "Israel's security was and yet remains the supreme consideration in the government's policy, and is above any other consideration of improving and easing the lives of the Palestinians."
Netanyahu pledged that as a punitive measure, the attacker's home would be demolished and working permits of his extended family would be revoked.
However, Israel's internal Shin Bet security service downplayed ideology as a motive, saying the attacker was plagued with personal issues.
Gaza's Islamic Hamas rulers praised the attack but stopped short of taking responsibility for it.
The attacker was identified as Nimr Mahmoud Ahmed Jamal and the Shin Bet said its preliminary investigation indicated there was significant violence in his family. His wife had recently fled to Jordan and left him with their four children, it said.
Since September 2015, Palestinians have killed 51 Israelis, two visiting Americans and a British tourist in stabbings, shooting and car-ramming attacks. Several of these attacks were carried out by individuals struggling with domestic and emotional issues whose acts were subsequently cloaked in nationalism.
During that same time, Israeli forces have killed over 255 Palestinians. Israel says most of them were attackers and others died in clashes with Israeli forces. Most of the attacks have been stabbings against security forces, primarily in the West Bank.
Israel blames the violence on incitement by Palestinian religious and political leaders compounded on social media sites that glorify violence and encourage attacks. Palestinians say the attacks stem from anger and frustration at decades of Israeli rule in territories they claim for a state.
The frequency and intensity of attacks has lessened of late but such an incident, coming amid the Jewish high holiday, threatened to ignite them anew.
Gaza's Hamas rulers called Tuesday's assault a "heroic operation" that was a "natural response" to Israeli aggression against Palestinians and proved that the Palestinian uprising was still alive.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said "the cruel terror attack proves once again the daily front that our security forces face in the most important mission — protecting and defending the safety of the citizens of Israel."
Sign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing!About a fifth of Mali's rare desert elephants have been killed this year as ivory poachers exploit a security vacuum in the country's north, the United Nations has said, warning of a growing threat from Islamist militants roaming the region.
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At least 57 elephants died between January and June among the West African country's only herd of around 300 animals, the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA said in a statement.
"[The poached elephants] represent about 20 percent of the remaining (Malian) population and were killed in areas where insecurity is present," MINUSMA said, adding that forest rangers were frequently targeted by jihadists bands.
The WILD Foundation, which helps protect Mali's northern Gourma herd, estimates that around 90 of the mammals have been killed since late 2014.
Tens of thousands of elephants once roamed the savannahs stretching between West Africa's shores and the Nile basin but poaching and habitat loss have dramatically cut their numbers.
Roughly 7,000 animals are thought to remain in West and Central Africa, of which some are thought to be genetically distinct from the more numerous elephants further south. They are often scattered in small, isolated groups of less than 100 and are at risk of local extinction.
Mali's Gourma elephants, once a magnet for tourists visiting the nearby desert city of Timbuktu, are one of the last two desert herds in the world. The other is in Namibia.
The decline in Mali has accelerated in recent months because of rising insecurity and a decrease in army protection, according to Amy Lewis from WILD Foundation.
Jihadist threat
Northern Mali’s vast desert expanses have been a hotbed of conflict ever since independence from France in the 1960s.
The Malian army was chased out of the region in 2012 by a loose alliance of local Tuareg rebels and jihadist groups. It returned a year later helped by a French military intervention, but Islamist militants continue to roam the area and exploit trafficking corridors.
Sophie Raviers, the UN’s environment representative in Mali, suspects the illegal trade in elephant tusks is financing the region’s motley band of jihadist groups.
“Our investigations point to links between the poachers and armed terrorist groups,” she told FRANCE 24’s sister radio RFI. “[The poachers] help finance these groups through ivory trafficking.”
Environment activists have welcomed the Malian government’s decision to beef up ranger patrols in Gourma, while calling for the deployment of soldiers as well.
“Several studies have shown that the deployment of army units in areas where elephants migrate helps reduce the number of poaching incidents,” said Raviers.
Mali’s nature conservation authority has also called for military backing, noting that isolated rangers were easy targets for smugglers and terrorist groups.
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS, AFP)Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Percy Steven and Roger Lockyer, and Whitney Bacon and Megan Evans talk about what their civil partnerships mean to them
On 19 December 2005, the UK's first civil partnerships took place.
In the 10 years that have followed, nearly 140,000 people have entered into one, while more than 9,000 same-sex couples have since married.
Two couples whose lives were changed by civil partnerships describe what it meant to them.
When Percy and Roger met on a blind date in 1966 homosexuality was still illegal.
As an actor and an academic in their 20s and 30s, the image of "Swinging London" and its sexual liberation was largely a myth.
They lived their lives in private with sympathetic friends, or in "sub rosa" nightclubs where you gave a false name and kept one eye on the exit in case of a raid.
Burglaries at their home went unreported for fear the authorities would be more interested in their relationship. At any one moment they risked arrest, prosecution and jail for falling in love with the wrong person.
'A full citizen'
"We were young and it was exciting in a way and almost an adventure," Roger Lockyer, 88, a former history professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, told the BBC.
"But looking back at it from now one realises that potentially it could be awful. The subject of homosexuality was really taboo it was so awful that you couldn't discuss it with anybody."
Nearly 50 years later, the couple, whose relationship spans many significant stages of gay liberation, are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their civil partnership.
They made history by becoming one of the first same-sex couples in the UK to say "I do" in a legally-recognised ceremony.
Last year, they converted their civil partnership into a marriage.
Image copyright Matthew James Arthur Payne Image caption Megan Evans and Whitney Bacon blog about their relationship
Sitting in the book-lined Marylebone home he shares with his 76-year-old husband Percy Steven, Roger said: "I remember distinctly walking down the street after the ceremony thinking, 'I am as legal a person as anybody else, I am a full citizen at last'.
"I never believed that moment would come. I thought 'good God is this a fantasy?'"
Their ceremony captured the imagination of the world, and interviews were broadcasted on UK, US, Australian, French, German and Italian television.
Roger added: "I think it was a revelation for the government, who thought a few couples might sneak out of the woodwork, and there was almost a flood; a great number of people asserting their rights after living in the shadows for as long as half a century."
The passing of the Civil Partnership Act 10 years ago this week - with cross-party support in Parliament - marked a sea-change in gay rights.
Gay rights landmarks
1967 - Private homosexual acts between men aged over 21 decriminalised in England and Wales
1980 - Homosexuality decriminalised in Scotland, then in Northern Ireland in 1982, and in the Isle of Man in 1992
1994 - Age of consent for gay men lowered from 21 to 18. It was lowered to 16 in 2001
2000 - Ban on openly gay members of the armed forces lifted
2005 - Civil partnerships come into effect in the UK
2014 - Same-sex marriage laws come into effect in England, Wales and Scotland
2015 - Republic of Ireland votes to legalise same-sex marriage
Across the UK, hundreds of gay and lesbian couples were granted many of the same legal and civil rights as married heterosexuals, albeit with a few outstanding differences around issues such as pensions in the private sector.
Couples could no longer be kept out of hospital rooms where their partner lay dying. They would no longer lose their home or business because of unjust tax laws and they had parental rights over children.
By 2015, more than 138,000 people had a civil partnership - with more than 18,000 people joining their hands in marriage since the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 came into force in England and Wales in March 2014 and in Scotland in December of that year.
Last month, two gay couples in Northern Ireland took the Stormont administration to the High Court, claiming the ban against gay marriage breached their human rights.
Image copyright ANDREW DUNSMORE Image caption Roger Lockyer said he had to hide his relationship with Percy Steven
Ben Summerskill, former chief executive of the group Stonewall, said civil partnerships were a vital "test run" that paved the way for many of the gay rights granted in the last decade, including those around fertility treatments and adoption, as well as marriage.
"We shouldn't forget, it was a pretty tough battle at the time," he said.
"Great swathes of the House of Commons and House of Lords were doggedly opposed to civil partnerships. The Church of England was doggedly opposed to civil partnerships.
"I think probably David Cameron would not have been persuaded to be quite so radical if he hadn't seen ages earlier that this had been introduced and the sky hadn't fallen in.
"The world for young LGBT people has changed transformatively in a generation."
'Live happily ever after'
Two of those young people are Megan Evans and Whitney Bacon, who run a blog and post on YouTube, with 40,000 subscribers.
Their relationship - and subsequent civil partnership - has made them into online role models for young gay women around the world.
But when they met on social media site MySpace in 2006 they were more than 7,000 miles apart in the UK and the US.
Megan, 28, a gay rights activist who works in HR in Windsor, Berkshire, said: "I set our blog up in 2009 called What Wegan Did Next, because we're 'Whitney and Megan - Wegan' - one of our friends gave us that name a few years ago and it's just stuck.
"Initially I just wanted to document our long-distance relationship and also put ourselves out there as a feminine lesbian couple and that we're proud to be gay."
Image copyright PA Image caption Two couples in Northern Ireland took the Stormont administration to the High Court over gay marriage
She added: "I couldn't live in America with Whitney because gay marriage wasn't legalised then. And for four years every time I went back home to the UK without her, it was really sad.
"I think I always hoped that equality would catch up and that by the time I was able to get engaged and get married that it would be legal - and luckily enough it was."
They had a small civil partnership ceremony in a register office in Windsor in September 2012, followed by a champagne tea with family and friends.
Thanks to their legally-recognised union - bolstered by years of YouTube footage and blog posts - Whitney's visa was finally approved and the pair moved into a cottage in Windsor.
They are planning to convert to a marriage in 2017 and have children.
Whitney, 27, who grew up in Kentucky, added: "When I was young I always had this vision of meeting this amazing, blonde, beautiful girl with a nice British accent, but I never thought it would become a reality.
"It was amazing to know that I could have a civil partnership, which is pretty close to a marriage and it would also pave the way for me to move to the UK for she and I to live happily ever after.
"If it wasn't for that who knows where we would be."Cella Energy used nanotechnology to develop microbeads that can trap hydrogen and release it when heated
One of the biggest stumbling blocks on the road to hydrogen power has long been the difficulty in storing the fuel. Hydrogen atoms are so small that they can slip between the spaces in molecules of other materials, and the gas can be a hazard if it escapes.
But a cheap and practical way of storing hydrogen has been developed by a British company. Cella Energy used nanotechnology to develop microbeads – about the size of a grain of sand – that can trap hydrogen and release it when heated. The energy can then be used safely to power vehicles – drivers could simply top up with microbeads on filling station forecourts. What's more, the beads are not just for hydrogen vehicles - they also work in standard combustion engines, in which they can be used as an additive to help the petrol burn more cleanly, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Cella's invention, developed at its lab in Oxford, was in the limelight on Tuesday after the company scooped this year's Springboard award from Shell.
Stephen Voller, chief executive, said the prize was "a great boost [that] will give us real credibility in the eyes of customers and potential investors alike". Cella received £40,000 from Shell, which the company will use to scale up its technology to an industrial scale.
Second place in the awards went to VPhase, a Chester-based company, for a voltage optimisation product for households. This works on the basis that standard voltage is variable, meaning some devices are using more energy than they need to run. So installing the device should result in instant savings on electricity bills.
Among the runners-up and regional winners from the 200 small businesses that entered were Ashwoods Automotive, with a product that lengthens the life of electric car batteries, and Naked Energy, with a solar panel that generates both electricity and hot water in cool climates.
The Springboard awards have been running since 2005, in which time 53 companies have shared more than £2m.O'Connell Street
A'multitasking' grandmother who repeatedly kicked a man on the ground as she held on to a pram has been given a suspended sentence.
Michelle Conroy (47), of Arch Court, Roscommon Town, Co. Roscommon, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to violent disorder at Lower O'Connell Street, Dublin, on December 27, 2012. She has 14 previous convictions.
Judge Desmond Hogan had previously adjourned sentencing in July after hearing the evidence in order to prepare a probation report.
He said she had shown a "blatant disregard for the public". He remarked that she had been "multitasking" as she kicked Michael Joyce on the ground while also holding a pram containing a small child.
Conroy was due to be sentenced on Monday but failed to show up in court. A bench warrant was issued for her arrest but cancelled when she appeared yesterday.
Judge Hogan imposed a two-year sentence, suspended in full for two years. He noted a probation report which stated Conroy was at a moderate risk of re-offending.
Pushed
Garda Michael Galligan told Tony McGillicuddy BL, prosecuting, that CCTV footage showed Mr Joyce walking into Londis on Lower O'Connell Street as a group of two men and three women with two young children walked towards the shop.
The two men had their faces covered and Kathleen Sweeney, daughter of Conroy, went into the shop and pushed Mr Joyce out onto the street. The group then set upon Joyce and kicked and punched him on the ground.
Conroy was seen kicking Mr Joyce at least eight times as he lay on the ground. The males had knives and were attempting to stab him, but Conroy was not involved in that. Mr Joyce managed to get to his feet and flee. Gardai were alerted and an ambulance was called.
Gda Galligan agreed with defence counsel, Brian Gageby BL, that the kicks Conroy landed would not have been "damaging". He said she was pushing a pram with a child in it and had one hand on the pram as she was kicking the man.
Mr Gageby said Conroy was a mother of nine and her troubles stemmed from those of her children who were involved in drugs and criminality.
He said she had been under the misguided illusion that she was protecting her children.
Mr Gageby said she had suffered psychiatric difficulties and had moved to Roscommon shortly after this incident.We are often told that there is a consensus that global warming is real and human caused. Because of this, a group of global warming skeptics put together a petition to sign that indicates there is a consensus that the evidence is weak or nonexistent for anthropogenic global warming. So, here we have competing consensus claims on the same issue. What is a skeptic to think? To find out, read on…
Misleading by Petition
Just What is the Consensus on Global Warming?
by Gary J. Whittenberger Ph.D.
Is global warming a real phenomenon, and if so, are humans causing or contributing to it by burning fossil fuels and will it lead to an increased frequency and/or severity of natural disasters? The American public looks to science or scientists to help answer these questions. A petition circulated by a small group of scientists is creating quite a stir, arousing considerable praise and disdain from groups on different sides of the global warming issue.
The petition drive was begun by Dr. Frederick Seitz, now deceased, and is now led by Dr. Arthur Robinson and his son, Dr. Noah Robinson, both members of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), who remain the chief organizers and expositors of the petition project. Seitz was a physicist and past president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University. The two Robinsons are both chemists and Arthur Robinson is the current director of OISM. According to the website which reports the details of the petition and is presumably authored by Arthur Robinson, “the purpose of the Petition Project is to demonstrate that the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of humancaused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong.”1 Robinson asserts not just that his collection of 31,072 signatures on a petition has refuted the claim of “settled science” and “overwhelming consensus” among scientists with regard to global warming, but that “The very large number of petition signers demonstrates that, if there is a consensus among American scientists, it is in opposition to the humancaused global warming hypothesis rather than in favor of it.”2 Not only has Robinson failed to substantiate either of his assertions, he is misleading the American public by implying that his petition fairly represents relevant expert opinion.
To understand the problems with Robinson’s “Global Warming Petition Project”, we must first examine how the petition itself was distributed and how signatures were collected. To a sample of persons on the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science,3 Robinson sent a petition packet consisting of a petition card, a return envelope, a cover letter from Seitz, and a 12-page review of the literature on the human-caused global warming hypothesis authored by the two Robinsons and Willie Soon.4 The two main assertions stated on the petition card were that there is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide and other gases is causing harmful atmospheric heating and climate change and that the U.S. government should reject the Kyoto Agreement and any other similar proposals. Arthur Robinson not only requested that recipients return the signed petition card, if they agreed with its assertions, but also arranged for the recipients to distribute petition packets to their colleagues. He also enabled other persons to obtain petition packets by simply requesting them through his website, and this procedure ultimately produced five percent of the returned petition cards. Thus, signed petitions were solicited in three different ways.
Although the website for the petition indicates that checks of credentials and identity were performed for signatories of the returned petitions, and invalid petitions were excluded, how the checks were performed is not described. Signed petition cards were accepted only if they came from persons who had “obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields”.5 In the end, “valid” and signed petition cards were obtained from 31,072 persons with degrees in the following fields: Earth science (3,697 persons or 12% of the total); computer science and mathematics (903 or 3%); physics and aerospace sciences (5,691 or 18%); chemistry (4,796 or 15%); biology and agriculture (2,924 or 9%); medicine (3,069 or 10%); and engineering and general science (9,992 or 32%). The breakdown according to educational level was: PhD (9,021 or 29%); MS (6,961 or 22%); MD and DVM (2,240 or 7%); and BS or equivalent (12,850 or 41%).5 On his website Robinson fails to report the cross-tabulations of fields of expertise and levels of education for his petition respondents. For example, we aren’t told what percentage of the persons with Earth science expertise had Ph.D. degrees.
Although in one interview Robinson called his petition project a “survey”6, it is definitely not a survey, and because it is not a well-designed scientific survey of the views of a group of relevant experts, its results cannot be used to reach the conclusions about “consensus” that are asserted and hoped for by Robinson. In the first place, Robinson presents neither a dictionary nor an operational definition of “consensus”. He wants to reach conclusions about a consensus, but he spends no time telling us what he thinks a consensus is. According to Merriam-Webster’s Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary, a “consensus” may refer to general agreement, unanimity, judgment by most of those concerned, or group solidarity. Of course if we use the “unanimity” definition of “consensus”, then Robinson’s Global Warming Petition Project shows that a consensus of persons with science degrees, even those with relevant degrees, does not support the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. But this is a trivial conclusion; we knew this before the petition drive! The “unanimity” definition of “consensus”, however, is not the one in which the American public is interested.
If Robinson had been conducting a true survey, he would have offered an operational definition of “consensus” before he started his inquiry. Robinson misleads the public to think that a consensus is defined by some large absolute number of persons. It is not. It is determined by a large percentage of persons in a relevant sample. Does Robinson, or the general public, think of a consensus as agreement within a given group at a level of 75%, 90%, or some other percentage? He does not tell us. He reports only the number of persons who sent back signed petition cards, but he reports neither the total number of persons to whom he sent petition cards in the first place nor the number of persons to whom he sent petition cards who subsequently returned only messages of disagreement. Since Robinson chose to conduct a petition project rather than a well-designed scientific survey, he cannot reach valid conclusions about any consensus, and he should not have attempted to do so.
Had Robinson been interested in finding out the truth about the views of relevant scientists rather than pursuing his own political agenda, he would have given a great deal more consideration to sample selection. Who is a relevant scientific expert when it comes to evaluating the human-caused global warning hypothesis? Robinson seems to have very lenient inclusion criteria. He even seems to think that persons with Bachelors degrees in mathematics and engineering are relevant and qualified experts on the issue. This seems to make about as much sense as considering electricians to be experts on plumbing because they have certificates from trade school just as plumbers do.
In a recent e-mail communication with an acquaintance of mine in which he defended his broad inclusion criteria, Robinson said “In fact, climate science is a very simple discipline. The data is [are] very limited and very easily understood—as is illustrated in our review article…”7 I wonder what percentage of climatologists or Earth scientists would agree with Robinson about this. Robinson doesn’t seem to have much respect for their area of specialization. What reaction might Robinson have if scientists who are not chemists called his area of research on “deamidation of peptides and proteins”8 a “very simple discipline with very limited data which are very easily understood”. I think that the American public would be interested in knowing the views of a more restricted sample than the one used by Robinson. For the main hypothesis concerning human-caused global warming, it would be desirable to know the opinions of scientists with doctoral degrees in climatology or Earth science who had spent most of their lives studying the relevant phenomena. A survey of a large random sample of these scientists would be illuminating and helpful.
There are other flaws in Robinson’s project. If Robinson had been conducting a real survey rather than a petition drive, he would not have allowed three different ways for persons to participate in his project. Instead he would have arranged for persons to participate in only one way; he would have randomly selected participants from a well-defined, qualified and relevant population of scientific experts. Furthermore, in his petition project Robinson simply asked persons with science degrees to sign the petition if they agreed with its content. But did they agree with all 20 overlapping propositions embedded in the four sentences of the petition? Did they agree with most of them? Did they agree with at least 50% of them? We don’t know. In a real survey, Robinson would have constructed a questionnaire in which his respondents could have addressed each of the 20 propositions in which he was interested or possibly each of the main propositions actually stated in Al Gore’s popular book, An Inconvenient Truth, for which Robinson expresses great disdain.9 At the least, in a survey Robinson would have provided five response options for each proposition, something like “strongly disagree, moderately disagree, neither disagree nor agree, moderately agree, and strongly agree”. Or he might have provided a similar scale using anchors such as: “definitely false, probably false, uncertain if false or true, probably true, definitely true”. These response options would have allowed participants the opportunity to more fully express the subtlety and variety of their positions. Robinson may be a brilliant chemist, but he seems to know almost nothing about the behavioral sciences, especially about conducting sound scientific surveys.
Finally, the petition drive can be viewed as an “attempt to persuade” since it included the article reviewing the literature on global warming written by Robinson himself and two others, and it included the cover letter of endorsement from Seitz. The article and cover letter are bound to be biased towards Robinson’s point of view. If Robinson had been interested in finding the truth about expert opinion instead of manipulating that opinion, he would have done one of the following: 1) Sent a questionnaire with no accompanying review article or endorsement letter. (Probably the best option.) 2) Sent a review article not written by himself but by an independent expert representative of qualified climatologists. Or 3) Sent two review articles by two qualified climatologists from different perspectives, reaching different conclusions about humancaused global warming.
In conclusion, through his Global Warming Petition Project, Arthur Robinson has solicited the opinions of the wrong group of people in the wrong way and drawn the wrong conclusions about any possible consensus among relevant and qualified scientists regarding the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. His petition is unqualified to deliver answers about a consensus in which the public is interested. He has a right to conduct any kind of petition drive he wishes, but he is not ethically entitled to misrepresent his petition as a fair reflection of relevant scientific opinion. He has confused his political with his scientific aims and misled the public in the process.
The Author, Gary Whittenberger, is a free-lance writer and psychologist, living in Tallahassee, Florida. He received his doctoral degree from Florida State University after which he worked for 23 years as a psychologist in prisons. He has published many articles on science, philosophy, psychology, and religion, and their intersection.
FootnotesShelter :: Charlie & Meg's House
This utmostly beautiful and sensitive house was built by our neighbours Charlie and Meg for their baby Ely. Despite Charlie growing up there and them both having lived for years in a caravan on the very same spot, the house was initially refused planning permission. Finally, after two years of negotiation, their home has been granted permission under the Welsh 'One Planet Development' policy. This means that they will be allowed to live there, so long as they can continue to prove a low ecological footprint and that they are making a living from the land. Hooray, and thanks to all who supported them.
In their own words:
Why we wanted to build our own home
We both grew up in Pembrokeshire. Charlie spent his childhood on this same smallholding, building tree houses and dens and helping his father work the land. After meeting each other we both decided we wanted to remain here to raise a family. Having very little in the way of money to buy a house and not wanting to get dragged into renting or getting a mortgage for a place we did not wholeheartedly want to be in, we decided to try and create our own home within our means. We were fortunate that Charlie’s parents were happy to give us the opportunity to build a place on the site where we were already living in a static caravan. Having family living close together means we are able to maintain the family smallholding for the next generations. We are going back in time when it was common for families to stay together and keep the fabric of the community firmly knitted together.
The nature of our home was influenced by the Lammas eco community which sprung up on neighbouring land. Through Lammas we met people, who gave us the confidence to feel we could build our own home. Although Charlie had no previous building experience, other than the odd bit of DIY, he was given the opportunity to work alongside a variety of skilled people on the construction of the Lammas community hub building. Through serving this “apprenticeship” Charlie gained enough expertise and met a great bunch of folk who were kind enough to offer their time and skills.
Charlie writes:
On the smallholding we have a small woodland, from which we were able to harvest all the timber we required for the building. I was apprehensive to start the build, as I’d never done anything like this before and didn’t really know where to begin, but with the persuasion of my old friend to “just start” and his ability to do just about anything, the site was cleared and the initial structure was raised. I had considered a few different designs for the house but when it came to it, it sort of designed itself. Using timber straight from the tree is an organic process, not really lending itself to straight lines, or too much pre planning. I was influenced by Simon Dale’s house at Lammas, and he gave me good advice, but much of the building was trial and error. Our budget was small and we wanted to use recycled and locally sourced materials as far as possible. It was important to us to make the house as energy efficient as we could, and to use natural materials when we could. There are many potentially carcinogenic materials used in conventional buildings, and we wanted to avoid using these. The following points highlight the main features of the house we ended up with:USA - 2007: Charles Bloom color illustration of a young Jesse James (in red) being restrained as he and his mother watch his stepfather being tortured by Union soldiers. (The Kansas City Star/MCT via |
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The generously button tufted front of the Reeves Bar Stool contrasts beautifully with the printed fabric wrapped around the back and overlaid with an exposed wood frame. Both front and back of the lofty stool are detailed with hand applied nail head trim. The bar stool is available in Parch, a light open-grained finish, or Mist,... The generously button tufted front of the Reeves Bar Stool contrasts beautifully with the printed fabric wrapped around the back and overlaid with an exposed wood frame. Both front and back of the lofty stool are detailed with hand applied nail head trim. The bar stool is available in Parch, a light open-grained finish, or Mist,...
view product >>
Description
The generously button tufted front of the Reeves Bar Stool contrasts beautifully with the printed fabric wrapped around the back and overlaid with an exposed wood frame. Both front and back of the lofty stool are detailed with hand applied nail head trim. The bar stool is available in Parch, a light open-grained finish, or Mist,... The generously button tufted front of the Reeves Bar Stool contrasts beautifully with the printed fabric wrapped around the back and overlaid with an exposed wood frame. Both front and back of the lofty stool are detailed with hand applied nail head trim. The bar stool is available in Parch, a light open-grained finish, or Mist,...
view product >>
Description
The generously button tufted front of the Reeves Bar Stool contrasts beautifully with the printed fabric wrapped around the back and overlaid with an exposed wood frame. Both front and back of the lofty stool are detailed with hand applied nail head trim. The bar stool is available in Parch, a light open-grained finish, or Mist,... The generously button tufted front of the Reeves Bar Stool contrasts beautifully with the printed fabric wrapped around the back and overlaid with an exposed wood frame. Both front and back of the lofty stool are detailed with hand applied nail head trim. The bar stool is available in Parch, a light open-grained finish, or Mist,...
The generously button tufted front of the ReevesThe generously button tufted front of the ReevesThe generously button tufted front of the ReevesGroup Sues Calif. Over Bill Banning Reparative Therapy for Gay Teens
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A conservative legal group has announced that it will file suit against the State of California over its recent passing of a law banning reparative therapy for homosexual minors.
Liberty Counsel announced the suit on Monday, bringing it on behalf of families, counselors, and the National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).
"The California governor and legislature are putting their own preconceived notions and political ideology ahead of children and their rights to get access to counseling that meets their needs," said Liberty Counsel in a statement.
"This law undermines parental rights. Mental health decisions should be left to the patient, the parents, and the counselors – not to the government to license one viewpoint."
On Saturday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 1172, which was introduced by State Senator Ted Lieu. SB 1172 called for stricter regulation of reparative therapy, also known as conversion therapy. This included requiring more paperwork for adult patients and banning the practice for Californian minors.
In an earlier interview with The Christian Post, Roy Sotero, a spokesman for Sen. Lieu, explained that the bill was meant to protect LGBT youth from the harmful practice of conversion therapy.
"Many leading medical and mental health associations believe that homosexuality and homosexual desires are not a mental disorder, and therefore there is no need for a 'cure.' All medical evidence has shown that you cannot change a person's sexual orientation," said Sotero.
The bill passed the California State Senate in June with a vote of 23 to 13 and the Calif. General Assembly in August with a vote of 51 to 22.
Originally, SB 1172 had a provision wherein adults seeking reparative therapy had to provide an "informed consent" form. However, that part was removed during the amending process.
In addition to Lieu, the bill had the co-sponsoring of several LGBT organizations including the Center for Lesbian Rights, Equality California, the Courage Campaign, and Lambda Legal.
Clarissa Filgioun, Equality California board president, said in a statement that they were happy with the bill's passage into law.
"We thank Senator Ted Lieu and Governor Brown for their efforts in making California a leader in banning this deceptive and harmful practice," said Filgioun.
"Governor Brown today reaffirmed what medical and mental health organizations have made clear: Efforts to change minors' sexual orientation are not therapy, they are the relics of prejudice and abuse that have inflicted untold harm on young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Californians."
NARTH, a major conversion therapy provider being represented by the Liberty Counsel in their suit, released a statement expressing disappointment but no surprise to Brown's decision.
"NARTH is saddened but not surprised by this unprecedented legislative intrusion and will lend its full support to the legal efforts to overturn it," reads the statement. "Anecdotal stories of harm are no basis from which to ban an entire form of psychological care. If they were, the psychological professions would be completely out of business."
Barring successful legal action on the part of the Liberty Counsel, the law will take effect on Jan. 1. This will make California the first state in the nation to enforce such regulation against the reparative therapy practice.Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Pakistan has noticed their share of the $100 billion per annum climate cash they were promised has not started appearing in their bank accounts.
Pakistan needs access to global funds to cope with climate change
By Awais Umar
Published: August 14, 2017
ISLAMABAD: The world’s geographical history shows that climate change is not a new phenomenon as scientists have tracked historical changes in the drivers of climate change such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and continental drift.
…
According to the Global Climate Risk Index, Pakistan is ranked number 7 in the list of most vulnerable countries, suffering economic losses of $3.823 billion in the last two decades due to climate change and climate extremes.
At the 2016 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Federal Minister for Climate Change Zahid Hamid said: “We emit less than 1% of total annual global greenhouse gases, yet we are ranked amongst top 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change. Millions of people are affected and colossal damage is caused on a recurring basis.”
…
At the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) under UNFCCC, the developed countries agreed to pay at least $100 billion every year to the developing countries as a climate adaptation fund till 2020.
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We should look for funds to build capacity of the workforce, improve the technological resource base and strengthen institutions for renewable energy sources.
“It’s our need to consume coal to meet our development targets to fulfill needs of the growing population. We can cut out GHG emission if we are provided with sufficient resources, technology, capacity and finances to move for green energy and renewables,” said Mountain and Glacier Protection Organisation (MGPO) CEO Aisha Khan.
…Clifford J. Rogers believes the Battle of Agincourt (1415) is “probably the most richly documented of all medieval battles,” but nothing beats visiting the actual battlefield.
Here is what you can expect if you visited Agincourt today.
The people of Agincourt do not hide the fact that tourists streaming through their town are there for the battle. There is a Medieval Times feel, as cartoonish wooden props are sprinkled throughout the town. It may seem hokey, but I am sure kids love it. Military History requires some imagination, so just ignore it!
There is an extensive battle museum with interactive exhibits, videos, and relics from the period. I spent over an hour going through everything.
Among the relics is the only archaeological discovery from the battlefield, a French spur found in 1936. This alone is worth the price of admission.
Some of the exhibits in the museum are geared toward kids, but adults can enjoy them too. However, I am not sure who the target audience is in some instances. For example, the statue of Henry V with a projected face, quoting Shakespeare was odd. Unfortunately, the projection of Henry’s face was slightly off, producing a horrific effect that made him look like he had a stroke.
As for the battlefield, you have to be tenacious if you want to do more than drive around it. The map the museum hands out has you do a circle around the battlefield. Notice the clashing swords in the center of the map with no indication of where to park and walk out to that spot.
The kind Frenchman running the gift shop in the museum initially refused to tell me the best spot to park in order to trek the battlefield. He was concerned about the “dangerous” streets teaming with cars. I immediately had flashbacks of darting across Market St in downtown Philadelphia. After I pushed him a little, he gave me some tips.
The only monument on the battlefield is a medieval-looking one, erected in 1991. There were other monuments here before, but they fell victim to wars and revolutions of the past 600 years.
The obelisk bares only the town name and date of the battle. Simple and perfect.
Next to the monument is a map of the battle. While useful for interpretation, the whole setup is roughly 1,000 yards from the actual fighting.
There are two superb spots to see where the action took place. The first spot is on the corner of Hameau de la Gacogne and Rue de Tramecourt. You will need to park your car on the side of the road, cross the street to the west, and get your shoes dirty. This is the intersection.
This marks the right flank of Henry V’s initial position on the battlefield. Here, he sat for hours while the French did the same 1,000 yards to the northwest. This would have been his view.
Henry eventually decided to move his line forward so that his longbowmen could be in range of the French knights.
You can access Henry’s second position on Rue Henri V. This is the same view the English longbowmen and men-at-arms would have had as 1,000s of mounted knights charged their way. The longbowmen would have had time to fire roughly 85,000 arrows before the first knight reached the English lines.
Eventually, the French sent in men-at-arms who charged to their death. Estimates vary, but Clifford J. Rogers believes that of roughly 14,000 Frenchmen upwards of 6,000 died. Among the ranks of the English were a mere 8,000 men, inspiring Winston Churchill to rank Agincourt “as the most heroic of all the land battles England has ever fought.”
Recommended Reading
My favorite book on Agincourt is Anne Curry's The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations. Curry breaks down all the known written histories of Agincourt over the centuries, providing English translations and rich commentary on each. If you are looking for something with a little more narrative, her Agincourt: A New History is superb as well. In this work, she provides the latest insights on the numbers of men in service to Henry V.
In terms of a guide book, you cannot beat Agincourt 1415: A Tourist's Guide to the Campaign by Peter Hoskins and Anne Curry. Along with overviews of the campaign and battle, it provides location details.0
I like John Carter. It’s not a perfect film by any means, but Disney spent years trying to get an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series of sci-fi novels off the ground, and I think director Andrew Stanton and his screenwriting partners Michael Chabon and Mark Andrews did a swell job of bringing the story to life. Most strikingly, Stanton’s world building in the film is magnificent; you really feel like you’re on Barsoom for the film’s two-hour runtime. I was really hoping to spend more time in Stanton’s John Carter world in future sequels, but unfortunately the film failed to catch on with audiences at the box office and its bloated budget made turning a profit near impossible. Disney’s marketing was all over the place, and many thought the film looked derivative despite the fact that it was Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars that inspired subsequent sci-fi classics ranging from Superman to Star Wars.
However, it now looks as though there’s a glimmer of hope for those keen on seeing more John Carter of Mars movies, as word comes today that Disney’s option of the property has run out and the rights have reverted back to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., which intends on moving forward with further films. More after the jump.
It was announced today (via The Playlist) that the movie, television, and merchandise rights to John Carter of Mars have reverted back to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Moreover, they hope to produce new feature films:
“We will be seeking a new partner to help develop new adventures on film as chronicled in the eleven Mars novels Burroughs wrote. This adventure never stops. Along with a new TARZAN film in development by Warner Bros., we hope to have JOHN CARTER OF MARS become another major franchise to entertain world-wide audiences of all ages.”
It’s more than likely that this means a total reboot seeing as how Stanton’s John Carter still belongs to Disney, I believe, but man I would love to see Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. bring Stanton back into the fold. The filmmaker is hard at work on Finding Dory at Pixar at the moment, but he remains passionate about the world of John Carter. He even gave fans a glimpse at what might have been recently by unveiling the logos for his proposed sequels, confirming he had already begun working on the script for Gods of Mars.
There’s no guarantee that another studio will be willing to pony up the money needed to produce a new John Carter of Mars film, especially after how audiences reacted to John Carter, but if a studio does decided to option the rights I certainly hope the material finds a good home. What do you think, readers? If John Carter of Mars is to be rebooted, what studio and director should take on the material? Sound off in the comments below.CLOSE Panera is acquiring sandwich rival Au Bon Pain. This is a reunion for the two brands, which were united under a single company in the '80s and '90s. USA TODAY
Panera Bread is buying the Au Bon Pain chain. (Photo11: Darren McCollester, Getty Images)
Panera Bread is buying the cafe restaurant chain that its CEO Ron Shaich co-founded more than three and half decades ago.
Both chains are fast-casual chains known for their sandwiches, salads, soups and pastries. Au Bon Pain currently has 304 locations worldwide, including many in hospitals, universities, transportation hubs and urban office buildings.
The acquisition will enable Panera, a chain that promotes its healthy offerings, to catapult into new types of retail environments, it announced Wednesday.
“With the acquisition we are announcing today, we are bringing Au Bon Pain and Panera together again," Shaich said in a statement.
CLOSE Panera Bread is the latest food brand gobbled up by European conglomerate JAB Holdings. Video provided by TheStreet Newslook
St. Louis-based Panera didn't disclose the terms of the deal. which is expected to close during the fourth quarter. Au Bon Pain officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Au Bon Pain news came half an hour before Shaich announced that he's stepping down step down as CEO effective Jan. 1, but will remain chairman of Panera’s board of directors.
He said he'll continue to work on strategy, communications and acquisitions for Panera, plus focus on his personal investments and initiatives for JAB, which acquired Panera in July.
Replacing Shaich as CEO is Blaine Hurst, Panera’s president who joined the company in January 2011 after a stint as president at Papa John’s.
More: Panera to print calories, added sugar info on its fountain-drink cups
More: Which quick-serve chains have the most loyal customers?
More: No, you're not at Panera: McDonald's goes "artisanal" with fancy sandwiches
"This is the right time for me to step down as CEO while still staying involved in the business as chairman," Shaich said. "I’ve now completed 36 years as a leader of our company and I’m particularly pleased to be able to say that Panera has been the best-performing restaurant stock of the last 20 years."
His denouement is very much like that of Howard Schultz, who stepped down as CEO of Starbucks in April to become executive chairman. Both men are known for their outspokenness on social issues and for spending more than 30 years building small cafe companies into global brands that have become one with their own identities.
Panera CEO Ron Shaich is stepping down, but will remain chairman of the board. (Photo11: Bloomberg, Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Shaich prides himself on Panera's push into digital, 100% clean menu and loyalty program.
Shaich and Louis Kane created Au Bon Pain in 1981 and the company went public a decade later. In 1993, Au Bon Pain acquired the Saint Louis Bread, which was renamed Panera. Six years later, Au Bon Pain was sold off.
CLOSE A group of reclusive, coffee-loving German siblings could become the next owners of Dunkin’ Donuts. Nathan Rousseau Smith (@FantasticMrNate) reports. Buzz60
Luxembourg-based investment firm JAB, which also controls the Krispy Kreme chain and coffee brands Keurig and Caribou, acquired Panera out $7.5 billion this summer and took the company private.
Last month, Wall Street speculated that JAB wanted to buy Dunkin' Brands, which includes another mighty coffee chain Dunkin' Donuts.
As of late September, Panera had 2,050 locations in 46 states and Ontario, operating under the Panera Bread, Saint Louis Bread Co. or Paradise Bakery & Cafe names.
Follow USA TODAY reporter Zlati Meyer on Twitter: @ZlatiMeyer
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2AlHYi8Whatever your position in your company, being involved with projects that run smoothly is crucial to a positive outcome. If tasks are organized in a haphazard way, then the flow is likely to be unproductive and slow.
Having systems in place that can be utilised on multiple projects not only saves time, but clarifies expectations prior to every project. The good news is - there is an easy way to achieve this - by using checklists, templates and processes.
In this article, we will show you exactly how to use checklists, templates and processes, outlining the benefits of all three. You’ll also learn how to combine them together to devise a system that will help your whole team collaborate more efficiently.
The end result? A more productive workforce, who not only understand the project layout better, but communicate with ease.
What is a checklist?
A checklist is exactly what it says – it is a list of items to be checked off for successful completion of any task. It can be defined as a list of tasks that should be completed in a certain order, to ensure nothing is forgotten. They can be used for any task, in any industry.
Checklists are used extensively in the healthcare industry, and there is a lot of evidence that they not only improve team-work and communication, but save lives too. In fact, a research study in 2008 demonstrates deaths were cut by 47%, just by using checklists in the operating rooms. Translate this into other forms of business, and the results are the same.
Let’s take a look at an example. Imagine your task is to promote a certain product through different social media channels. The company may have certain ways of handling this, plus different accounts, so in order that all aspects of the task are covered, you produce a checklist. It may read something like this:
Shorten URL through bit.ly.com Write short CTA with new URL Post to Twitter Respond to comments Write short article for LinkedIn with CTA plus URL at end Post article in LinkedIn Respond to comments Search for related questions in Quora.com Respond and direct to URL
Each item will have an order of priority plus a deadline, and as it is met, you simply check it off.
The next time you promote on social media, you follow the same checklist, just change the deadline and the URL. If you are away, or someone else takes on the role (after you get promoted following your great work!), the checklist is still in place.
Checklists focus attention on the job at hand, and ensure nothing is missed. There are at least seven benefits to using checklists, which include:
Organization – checklists provide a logical structure Motivation – being able to observe progression motivates you to continue Productivity – as you tick, you get more done! Creativity – devising checklists helps your mind think out of the box for ideas you may not have otherwise thought of Delegation – as you work through checklists it may become clear that certain tasks are more suitable for a different team member Saving lives (think first aid systems) – following a checklist makes sure nothing is forgotten - forgetting to do 30 heart compressions could be the difference between life and death Excellence – when nothing is forgotten, quality of work is the end result.
When to use checklists
Any time you are involved in a repetitive task, use a checklist. It saves time and effort - after all, why reinvent the wheel?
Checklists can be used for any task, small or large. They can be used for something as simple as packing to go on vacation, or for a more complicated task, such as a technical system requirement.
Try to keep your checklists as simple as possible, while ensuring you cover all the necessary aspects. Stick to one page if possible, with an easy-to-read font. Steer away from writing on the back of envelopes (they get lost), but consider an online format that you can easily access, and preferably share with other team members if necessary.
You can use something like Evernote or Box notes to create simple checklists and share them easily. Alternatively, you can create checklists in your favorite task management software, by creating a subtask for each item.
What is a template?
A template is a sample document that has standard details already completed in a pre-formatted way. This document can then be readily adapted to fit different needs. This can be done by hand or with automated software. It enables you to maintain the same branding and layout of all your documentation across all your tasks and projects.
For example, you may need to send a standard letter to different companies or people; with a template all you need to do is change the details of who the letter is going to. Or perhaps you need to fill in risk assessments for different events; with a template it is much easier to change the detail according to the event, rather than start from scratch.
What a template offers is consistency. Templates offer a method of maintaining the same look across all your correspondence, helping to build the business brand. Not only do they save time, but they allow any member of the team to step into a role and be able to produce the same quality documentation.
Advantages to using templates are numerous, and include:
Credibility of the firm
Identifiable to the company
Accuracy of documentation across the company
Timesaving
Prevent fraud by making it more difficult to copy
Easily categorized into management systems
Easily accessible to all employees
Easy to search and index by search engines.
When to use templates
When one or more people find themselves re-creating the same document multiple times, a template should be created and used.
Templates can be used any time you need to present similar information, thus saving you time. Templates come into their own when you and your team are likely to create the same presentation or document numerous times, with minor changes each time. Other suggested reasons include:
Following set standards
Copying a formula that has previously worked and learning from previous lessons
Keeping methods simple
Giving guidance
Providing information for a set task without overloading
Working with particular audiences who appreciate a certain brand
It is easy to work with templates when the company has prepared and stored them in advance online, allowing all the team to have access when required, with ‘fillable’ options.
It is fairly simple to create templates using standard word-processing software, then store them in task management programs. For more complicated templates, graphic design software could be used to similar effect.
Most office software programs, such as Microsoft or Open Office, offer a range of templates; some are available with the software program, and there is also an option to search for more online.
If you use Google Docs, you can also tap into their ready-made templates. The same applies if you are developing websites or using Wordpress; there are plenty of themes and templates that you can adapt to your own needs, saving time and investment.
What is a process?
A process is a list of all the tasks that need to be done to complete a project. It is often defined as a series of linked tasks which lead to the end result of accomplishing an organization goal. To work well, it usually relies on a systematic flow of checklists and templates, all of which tie in together to create the finished project.
Sticking with our example above, promoting social media may have just been one task within a process. Imagine the overall project is promoting a new product and increasing sales; if the company has a set process in place every time a product is launched, the efficiency of the project is increased.
So a simplistic new product promotion process could be:
Team meeting to assign tasks Blogging campaign - pre-launch Prepare emailing Promote through social media Plan ad campaign Execute campaign Monitor results Analysis
The aim of a process is to provide a structure to the project. If you have wondered why customer service representatives sound so rehearsed, it’s probably because they have a process to follow. It’s like navigating a map or flow-chart, that takes you in a certain direction (which is hopefully a successful business completion).
Mapping out the process has many business advantages, including:
Getting the team involved and improving morale, by offering an easy solution
Discovering minor problems in advance, giving an opportunity to prevent them
Viewing the whole project at-a-glance
Getting rid of unnecessary steps, and thus save time
Comply with auditing
Bring new employees up to speed quicker
Share best practices.
When to use processes
Your company should use business processes any time they want to utilise a system that makes “an organization’s workflow more effective, more efficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment”. It is also an effective way of linking different departments if there is a cross-over within the project.
There’s evidence that suggest using workflows in nursing has a big effect on work patterns, communication methods and roles. Studies have also been completed in other areas, concentrating on how integrating IT services into a central process, thus improving communications, can have a profound effect on productivity.
To put these practices into place, your company should be looking to devise an organised system that will help grow the business through increased efficiency.
The good news is that your processes, checklists, and templates can be followed for all future similar projects. So the work you put in originally will still be reaping rewards in many years to come, saving time and increasing productivity.
Use processes and workflows any time you have repeat projects that only require small changes. Once your process is in place, it will only require minor changes to make it adaptable to similar projects.
How to put into practice
Checklists, templates and processes can easily be incorporated into workflows, giving a step-by-step guidance on how to complete the tasks and project. They also need to be accessible for everyone involved in the project, plus duplicable for any future projects for ease-of-use.
The most efficient way to achieve this is by using a centralised system that all stakeholders can use. Implementing a task management system allows your team to collaborate on projects using checklists, templates, processes and more. When you have devised and saved all your documentation, it can then be accessed and implemented on multiple projects and tasks.
With everything for a particular project in one place, it’s easy to organise, monitor, communicate and store all the relevant information. Evidence shows that planning projects in advance has major effects on productivity; including saving time and increasing overall performance.
Disadvantages
Although using checklists, templates and processes have many advantages, do be aware that occasionally they can backfire if not handled well. For example, if the job entails creativity and spontaneity they may not be the best tool to use, as they rely on prior planning.
They can also make a job too repetitive if over-used, leading to monotony. This could lead to decreased motivation with a knock-on effect on confidence levels.
However, the positive aspects outweigh any risks; just ensure the systems match the project.
And finally …
Hopefully we’ve shown you how having an organised system in place, that includes checklists, templates and processes, will increase the efficiency of how your business operates.
Not only are the benefits enormous, but with the online tools available to you, they are also easy to install. By adapting them to suit your needs, checklists, templates and processes will save you time, money and frustration, allowing the whole team to work smarter.Apart from giving thanks for all of the positive things we’ve experienced this year, Thanksgiving is a common time for sharing ideas.
With the holiday near, we thought it might be helpful to provide tools for communicating the potential of Bitcoin with your friends and family.
The following tips are meant to help an experienced Bitcoin person have a more thoughtful discussion with loved ones about the technology. While these tips are focused on Thanksgiving, they may also be useful to people around the globe at any holiday gathering.
0. Don’t Let Bitcoin Gobble up the Holiday
While this guide is meant to help you introduce Bitcoin around Thanksgiving, remember that this holiday is an unusual opportunity to share in the lives of your close and extended family.
1. Downplay Your Enthusiasm and Expertise for Bitcoin
No matter what the idea is, people need time to adjust to new information. Even if your family knows you to be a Bitcoin enthusiast, and you read /r/bitcoin every day, downplaying your expertise (and belief Bitcoin’s importance) will allow everyone to join in the feeling of wonder over the course of discussion.
2. Listen First
The topic of Bitcoin commonly receives a bi-polar response. Some praise Bitcoin and others are starkly concerned. More common than either of these reactions is confusion. The word “Bitcoin” is known to many, but most people know almost nothing about it.
When someone asks for your opinion on Bitcoin, begin by asking how they feel about it. If you take some time to understand what they know, including misperceptions, it will allow you to respond in a way that gives you the best opportunity to be understood.
3. Avoid the Details
Given how quickly discussions can change, focus on Bitcoin’s high-level points first. (For example, see the Why section of the Bitcoin wiki) If you lead off with Side Chains, Smart Contracts or the recent pivoting of the Bitcoin Foundation you’re going to hear “pass the cranberry sauce” before you can share important basics.
4. Dispel Falsehoods, but Own Up to Bitcoin’s Faults
Many people believe that Bitcoin is only good for purchasing illegal items and serving as plunder of hackers. The media loves to report on the Silk Road, so this may be a loved one’s only exposure to the currency. The best thing you can do is to agree with what is true. For example, few would argue that illegal activity was not important to the establishment of market value for Bitcoin.
By showing a reasonable regard for the reality of Bitcoin’s (sometimes) dark past, you are in a more authoritative position to discuss the technology’s future.
One way to handle this subject is to remind your conversant partner that the Internet itself has provided the tools for revolution against autocracies, but it is also still used to steal the personal and financial information of millions.
5. Put Bitcoin in a Global Context
In some western countries, financial tools like credit cards are commonplace. Most people in the United States do not worry about the price of milk changing drastically week to week. However, not everyone is aware that the Argentine peso has suffered from hyperinflation, replacement and devaluation repeatedly over the past few decades.
It also may be useful to remind someone that many adults around the world do not have bank accounts (50%). Smartphone adoption is growing quickly. Half of all people around the globe are expected to be using them by 2019. In many parts of the world, payments using Bitcoin or its technology offer the potential of allowing people to leapfrog traditional banking the way mobile phones have landlines.
People who can not rely on their government to create a stable banking system anytime soon may be able to rely on Bitcoin in the meantime.
6. Acknowledge that Bitcoin is not a Sure Thing
By acknowledging that Bitcoin is not guaranteed to “work” you leave open the potential for learning. Not everything humans set out to do succeeds at first. Just ask Franz Reichelt.
By leaving open the possibility Bitcoin itself may not work, it may allow new people to more thoughtfully consider why it just might.
Resources to Share
We recommend you share the following resources with newcomers to Bitcoin:
1. Current Price – Preev.com. People are most often astonished by Bitcoin’s “high” value and sometimes-volatile price swings. Looking up the current price is an easy and fun thing for someone new to the technology.
2. Current News – Coindesk.com. Easy to consume and regularly updated with Bitcoin-specific news, Coindesk is quickly becoming the “TechCrunch of Bitcoin.” No matter your feelings about the site, it is a good place to start for a beginner interested in the currency.
3. “How do I get some?” – Coinbase.com is another common question once people have learned enough to want to play around with the technology. We believe Coinbase offers the best possible first experience for creating, filling and maintaining a Bitcoin wallet today.
Conclusion
In closing, the entire Gliph team would like to share our thanks for all of the support provided by the Bitcoin community in 2014. Thank you, and Happy Thanksgiving!Moscow’s city budget is $50.8 billion per year. This is $4 billion less than Chinese megalopolis Shanghai ($54.1 billion) and $15 billion less than ranking leader New York ($65.9 billion)Berlin comes 4th with $28.6 billion and London 5th with $20.6 billion.The annual budget of Russia’s capital is enough to provide Madrid with all its needs for more than 8 years.The money would be enough to build Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior 97 times overPhoto by Shutterstock.
The Russian capital's budget is the world's 3rd-largest
Moscow’s city budget is $50.8 billion per year. This is $4 billion less than Chinese megalopolis Shanghai ($54.1 billion) and $15 billion less than ranking leader New York ($65.9 billion)
Berlin comes 4th with $28.6 billion and London 5th with $20.6 billion.
The annual budget of Russia’s capital is enough to provide Madrid with all its needs for more than 8 years.
The money would be enough to build Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior 97 times over
Photo by Shutterstock.
All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.Greetings Citizens,
Let’s get right to it…
Art
One word – Growth! The team is really expanding, we’ve been adding extra desks here there and everywhere, making plans for how we can get our projected staffing levels squeezed in, we are two floors, who knows – maybe another soon! :P
Lots of concept work going into props needed for the Idris, additional style guide work, Idris Front turret, Freelancer interior revision, Idris mess hall and a new fighter ship from Aegis. We have hired two new internal concept artists and this will really help us proceed to define and clarify many areas of SC.
UI
Screens, screens, and more screens – Power, Shields, Global Overview, Missiles, Idris interior screens PLUS Gav has been working on the Idris hanger decals, Comms relay screens and the Airlock screens as well as updating FPS HUDs to fit in with the line work and a new ammo system.
Environments
This month the environment team in the UK has been hard at work sprinting through full production on the “baby PU” large world map. There will be multiple POI (Points of Interest, or things to see!) for you to explore within this large world sandbox so we are trying to make sure that each of them feels interesting and dynamic. There will be plenty of cool places to discover and rewards for the adventurous space traveller, but in the mean time we need to continue to polish, polish, polish to get something outstanding out to you guys; believe us, it’s time well-spent and you’d notice the difference if we didn’t. Additionally, we are working in delivering in art passes, as time goes by the areas will update and increase in fidelity and function – initially rooms will be quite basic working with the core set, then from there we’ll identify the functions of the rooms and really start to give personality to the space stations.
Ships
Ships are ripping along! There has been a lot of movement on the Idris interior and exterior, the Retaliator modules (now being constructed in-game) and the Avenger. We’re building both the single and double cockpit versions, along with living quarters and rear modules for the variants. The process of bringing the Vanguard into the game has started, with an aim to get it fighting in the game sooner than later. The Starfarer Captain’s room and airlock have been finished, and work is ongoing on the Cutlass damage system and cockpit fitting.
Props
The Prop team has been heavily focused on delivering assets for the CitizenCon deliverable. We’ve been working on some rather special hangar objects and rewards. Some ship specific props have been worked on and they should be coming to a ship near you soon. A fair chunk of bug fixing has been happening for FPS fixing up physic proxies and making sure you can shoot without clipping the edges of collision shapes and through gaps in the props. (That’s why “polish” is often essential and isn’t just cosmetic. It has a real impact on how functional versus how buggy these early builds may feel you as a player!)
A small amount of work has been invested in supporting new game modes where possible, making sure the other teams have what they need to flesh out their ideas. Finally we have been helping out with creating a new ship weapon and have started looking at the new ship component system.
VFX
What a busy month it’s been – no change there then! The VFX team have continued to “sanity check” existing effects since the major game-dev merge and 3.7 integration the previous month – which basically means checking through our particle libraries to make sure all |
Julianna Margulies. [Image by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images]
The Good Fight’s second season is likely to feature similar appearances from members of The Good Wife’s cast. However, according to the Inquisitr, Julianna Margulies, who played the show’s lead character Alicia Florrick across its seven-season run, previously ruled out starring in The Good Fight.
“The reason I declined was because I thought it would be a disservice to those women and they will carry that torch,” she said when asked about her decision not to return for the new series.
That being said, Margulies didn’t rule out making a guest appearance in the future.
[Featured Image by CBS All Access]After decades of debate, failed legislation, five public meetings and thousands of letters, the federal government has decided to undertake a comprehensive environmental review on how to swap about 50 square miles of state-owned land inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area with U.S. Forest Service land outside.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Forest Service agreed to buy about two-thirds of the state-owned land inside the wilderness area, about 56,000 acres, and has applied for federal funding to pay for it. The remaining 30,000 acres will be exchanged for federal forest land outside the BWCA, a prospect that has polarized opinions between conservationists and pro-development interests.
The ownership dilemma goes back to 1849, when the U.S. government gave Minnesota 8.3 million acres to pay for schools. Most of the “school trust” land was eventually sold or leased, but 86,000 acres remain inside the BWCA. How to exchange it has long been a source of friction between conservationists who want to protect it, and those who would like use it for logging and mining revenue for the state.
Various compromises have proposed swapping some or all of the land for federal land elsewhere. A 2012 proposal for an acre-for-acre swap passed the U.S. House but never got a vote in the U.S. Senate.
Now the state and U.S. Forest Service have reached a compromise that calls for both a purchase and a land swap. But the forest service has been inundated this year with thousands of letters and packed public hearings about the swap. Conservation groups want ecologically valuable acres protected, while pro-development interests want land with mining and logging potential. Some 20,000 people signed a Change.org petition to oppose the swap unless it included a plan to permanently protect the remaining school trust land.
As a result, the forest service has decided to complete an in-depth environmental impact statement, said spokeswoman Sandy Skrien.
“The interest and response was greater than we anticipated,” she said.
The review will include all the comments made so far, and will rely on an expert panel to define the scope of the review and analyze the environmental issues. The first draft is expected to be completed in early 2016, and the final one will be done in about a year.A new law went into effect in Tajikistan on April 29 that bans giving newborn babies last names with Russian-style endings.
Tajiks often Russify their surnames when the nation was part of the Soviet Union. The move to now ban the practice is part of a drive by the post-Soviet government to establish a more traditional national identity.
Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon has discouraged the use of Slavic names to boost patriotism, having changed his own surname from Rakhmonov in 2007 in a move that prompted ministers, civil servants, and his own children to follow suit.
He also ended the use of Russian as an official language in 2009.
Under the new law,"-ov" and "-ev" endings are prohibited. Children must be given surnames with endings that are native to the country, including "-zod," "-pur" and "-far."
Some resistance has emerged among Tajiks who work abroad in Russia.
Tajikistan has previously banned naming children after wild animals and household objects such as axes and brooms, or otherwise giving them first names that are "alien to national culture and tradition."
The country is drawing up a list of 3,000 acceptable first names for children.
Based on reporting by AFP and TASSThis just in! Hasbro has dropped a major announcement regarding Cybertron Con 2016!
As outlined in the press release below, the Shanghai event running July 29th-31st will feature some major guests, including voice actors like Peter Cullen, IDW creatives like James Raiz, and designers like Hisashi Yuki! For more detailed info check out the press release below, and the Cybertron Con site. Here’s the quick TL;DR version:
• Toy Exhibit – Cybertron Con 2016 will treat visitors to a unique toy exhibit which will include hundreds of the most iconic Transformers toys from each point in franchise history
• Peter Cullen Appearances – The original Voice of Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen, will be in Shanghai to hold fan meeting panels and limited autograph sessions on each day of the convention
• Other Notable Appearances – Cybertron Con will include panel discussions and autograph opportunities with many of the most notable names in the Transformers franchise, including: Transformers Prime concept artist Walter Gatus, Hasbro Development director of Hasbro’s TV and film division Josh Feldman, Takara Tomy designers Shogo Hasui and Yuki Hisashi and veteran writers from the Transformers IDW comic series Sara Pitre-Durocher, James Raiz and Alex Milne
• Larger than Life Bots – The event will feature a five-meter high Optimus Prime statue, as well as a number of other costumed Autobot and Decepticon characters roaming the expo floor
• Limited Edition Collectibles – Attendees will have the chance to purchase many limited edition Transformers merchandise, including San Diego Comic-Con special edition products
• TF Tmall – Cybertron Con will include the launch of the TF Tmall flagship store, which will host a series of promotions and other surprises throughout the convention
• Fan Art Competition – Fans can share their Transformers-related works of illustration, coating and modeling and have them rated by special guests. Winners will receive huge prizes and the potential opportunity to work on official Transformers production
• Family Zone – A special area for the tiniest Transformers fans, the Family Zone will allow kids and parents to create their own Transformers characters at the 3D Brush Workshop, partake in a coloring game and much more.
Sounds great, right? Discuss Cybertron Con HERE in the Allspark Forums! Not an Allspark member yet? Click HERE to create your free account!
Now, on to the press release…
Cybertron Con Landing in Shanghai this Summer
Hasbro Brings Authentic Transformers Global Celebration to Chinese Fans
July 12, 2016, Shanghai – Today Hasbro Inc. officially announced that the 2016 TRANSFORMERS Cybertron Con will be presented to Chinese fans at the Shanghaimart Expo in Shanghai from July 29th to 31st. The convention will be the largest Transformers fan celebration ever held in China, offering attendees the chance to engage with the brand, experience some of the latest toys and consumer products, view exclusive previews of Transformers content and meet some of the most notable names associated with the franchise, including concept designers, illustrators, writers and voice actors.
From the earliest toy series launched by Takara, to Hasbro’s popular G1 TV series, through comics, video games and feature films, the Transformers brand has become deeply rooted in the hearts of fans around the world. The original animated series debuted on TV in the 1980s in China and has become a shared childhood memory for a generation. TRANSFORMERS Cybertron Con will take fans on a journey through the history of the Transformers franchise, exhibiting hundreds of the most iconic toys released between the brand’s launch in the early 1980s through some of the best-selling items available today.
The convention will also offer fans the chance to interact with a five-meter high Optimus Prime Statue and costumed characters of other notable Autobots and Decepticons which are customized for Shanghai Cybertron Con.
One of the biggest VIP guests at Cybertron Con will be Peter Cullen, the voice actor behind Optimus Prime. Peter has worked on the Transformers franchise for more than 30 years and has provided his talents to each of the blockbuster feature films inspired by the brand. He will host fan meeting panels on both days of the convention, with a limited 150 autograph opportunities each day for fans to buy.
Other notable attendees will include Walter Gatus (concept artist of Transformers: Prime), Josh Feldman (Development director of Hasbro’s TV and film division) and Takara Tomy designers Shogo Hasui and Yuki Hisashi from Takara Tomy, who are responsible for numerous well-known Transformers characters. The two designers will attend the autograph session for three days and attend the Q&A session at main stage on Saturday and Sunday.
TRANSFORMERS Cybertron Con will also feature appearances from Sara Pitre-Durocher，James Raiz and Alex Milne, who have each written for IDW’s Transformers comic series.
Fans in attendance can also take part in a fan works contest, in which Transformers-related works of illustration, coating and modeling are to be rated by special guests. Amateur competitors from China can bring extraordinary works with them. If you have some talent to offer, join the Fan Art Competition before July 15, 2016, and showcase your passion and imagination with the best of your works. This Fan Art Competition are endorsed by Hasbro and IDW. Winners will be rewarded with abundant of prizes, as well as potential opportunities to work on official Transformers production. This is truly a dream come true for the fans.
Devoted players will turn the trial play area of the Game Zone into a battlefront. For collectors, Hasbro will bring San Diego Comic Con special edition products to 2016 Cybertron Con. Additionally, over 20 Hasbro authorized dealers will be on hand selling various products, including hundreds of types of authorized toys. Their booths will occupy much of the 8500 square meter exhibition hall.
Fans are also welcomed to bring their children to the family zone at TRANSFORMERS Cybertron Con, which is orchestrated for parent-child interaction. Kids can create their own Transformers’ characters at 3D Brush Workshop, enjoy the unique Transformers coloring game, and send postcards with exclusive stamp on it to their beloved superheroes at Transformers-themed post-office. There are also various interesting games waiting for the new generation of fans to have a try.
Additionally, TF Tmall flagship store will be launched officially on the same day of TRANSFORMERS Cybertron con opening, in which, there will be a series of promotions and some surprises brought from the Cybertron Con. Please visit our Tmall or Cybertron Con Website for more information. Stay tuned!
“TRANSFORMERS Cybertron Con in Shanghai is an important event for Hasbro and the Transformers franchise as a whole,” said Michael Zhang, Country Head, Hasbro China. “The Chinese public has been extremely receptive to the Transformers brand, and it’s exciting to bring such a marquee event to them directly. Hasbro strives to offer fans new and immersive brand experiences, and this convention will deliver on that with rich content, engaging exhibits and live interactions.”
Vicky Au, the Managing Director from FM Group, organiser of 2016 TRANSFORMERS Cybertron Con, said to the reporters: “I’m sure the TRANSFORMERS Cybertron Con in Shanghai will be an unprecedented celebration. FM Event will try its best to ensure that fans and audience at the Con have a wonderful time. There is even one more good news: ‘Transformers Challenge’, the large indoor sport challenge event licensed by Hasbro, will be launched on August in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Every challenger will wear a RFID bracelet which records the score of each challenge to redeem souvenir. Come together with your friends and families in summer!”
To find out more about Cybertron Con, please click www.cybertroncon.cn
ABOUT
About HASBRO
Hasbro (NASDAQ: HAS) is a global company committed to Creating the World’s Best Play Experiences by leveraging its beloved brands, including LITTLEST PET SHOP, MAGIC: THE GATHERING, MONOPOLY, MY LITTLE PONY, NERF, PLAY-DOH and TRANSFORMERS, and premier partner brands. From toys and games, television programming, motion pictures, digital gaming and consumer product licensing, Hasbro fulfills the fundamental need for play and connection with children and families around the world. The Company’s Hasbro Studios and its film label, ALLSPARK PICTURES, create entertainment brand-driven storytelling across mediums, including television, film, digital and more. Through the company’s commitment to corporate social responsibility, including philanthropy, Hasbro is helping to build a safe and sustainable world and to positively impact the lives of millions of children and families. Learn more at www.hasbro.com, and follow us on Twitter (@Hasbro & @HasbroNews) and Instagram (@Hasbro).
About FM Event
FM Event is a Hong Kong based event and marketing company specializing in projects and events planning, management, merchandizing and brand licensing. The company have three core businesses in the Asia regions, including projects and events planning, projects and events management and exhibitions planning and management. With the help of their worldwide network and extensive experience, FM Event can always seize the opportunity and provide professional services to the customers in the global market. They committed to provide their customers with unique one-stop service to cater to different needs of our customers. In 2015, FM Event had organized “Breast Cancer Awareness Day” for MetLife and it was awarded “The Marketing Events Awards 2015, Best Event – CSR”. FM Event have organized many mega shows and events for different governments and international corporations, like MetLife Hong Kong Badminton Open Championships, [email protected] Hong Kong, Macau Tower Crazy Jump Day, Documentary of the 15th Anniversary of Macau SAR establishment by CNC, Macau Shopping Festival 2014, Shenzhen Mission Hills Centreville Slide The City Carnival, Monopoly World Championship 2015, Transformers Expo (Taipei), Transformers 30th Anniversary Expo (Macau & Singapore) and the 55th & 56th Asia-Pacific Film Festival.
For more information, please visit www.fmgroup.com.hk
About ReedPOP
ReedPOP is the world’s largest producer of pop culture events. In 2006, it started NYCC, which becomes one of the largest comic cons in the world, attracting fans, stars and enterprises from around the globe. Based on NYCC’s success, ReedPOP is committed to bring pop culture to every corner of the world, let fans savor their favorite cultural contents and explore new market opportunities for enterprises. Today, comic cons can be found in Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, England, Germany and other countries and regions.
ReedPOP’s global exhibiting enterprises and cooperation partners include Marvel, DC, Lucasfilm, Lego, Sony, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Nintendo, Penguin Random House, Kodansha, LG, Chevrolet, AT&T, WETA, Square Enix, Cartoon Network, Ubisoft, Microsoft, and Warner Bros.By Jordan McPherson — OnlyGators.com Contributor
Leave it to a veteran to make a play when it matters the most.
With 32 seconds remaining in the 2014 American Lacrosse Conference Tournament Championship, junior midfielder Nora Barry scored the crucial game-winning goal to lift the Florida Gators to a 9-8 win over the Northwestern Wildcats on Sunday in Evanston, Illinois.
Florida (17-2) fell behind early in the contest but rallied to outscore the hosts 7-1 in the second half.
The game was tied 2-2 early in the first half when Northwestern (12-6) scored five consecutive goals to end the period with a 7-2 advantage.
The Wildcats led the Gators in almost every statistical category after the first 30 minutes, including draw controls (7-3), shots (13-7) and saves (4-2).
Northwestern attacker Alyssa Leonard — the NCAA career leader in draw controls — posted a game-high five in the opening period, forcing Florida to spend the majority of the first half on defense. Leonard finished the contest with eight of NU’s 11 draw controls.
UF’s lone goals before intermission came from freshman M Mollie Stevens at the 23:53 mark and freshman A Sammi Burgess with 13:51 left in the half.
The Gators’ two goals tied their lowest first-half output of the season, while The seven scored by the Wildcats were greater than or equal to the total number or goals the visitors had allowed in nine of their previous 18 contests.
Adjustments had to be made if Florida wanted to win its first ALC Tournament title since 2012 — and head coach Amanda O’Leary ensured her team corrected its mistakes at halftime.
Burgess opened the second half by finding the back of the net just 25 seconds into the period, and sophomore A Lauren Lea brought in another goal two minutes later to cut UF’s deficit to three.
Northwestern A Kara Mupo put the Wildcats’ last point on the board with 25:45 remaining in the contest, extending her team’s lead to 8-4.
The Gators took control from there.
Florida went on a 4-0 run over a span of 12:58 to tie the game. Junior M Shannon Gilroy scored her first goal of the game and NCAA-leading 76th of the season to start the run, with Lea, sophomore Devon Schneider and Stevens adding goals of their own to keep the Gators in contention.
Solid defense ensued for the next nine minutes. The stat sheet was bare.
Barry then broke the silence, scoring the final goal and giving Florida its first lead of the day — the only lead it needed to capture the crown.
With the win, Florida finished the 2014 campaign undefeated in conference play — winning all eight contests by a combined score of 90-66.
The Gators will now wait to find out their seed in the 2014 NCAA Tournament with the selection show set to begin Sunday evening at 9 p.m.A student at a Texas high school says he was given a two-day in-school suspension for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, sparking a debate on social media about whether the school district violated the teen's First Amendment rights.
Needville High School sophomore Mason Michalec told KHOU.com he refused to stand for the Pledge because of his opposition to government spying.
"I’m really tired of our government taking advantage of us,” Michalec said. "I don’t agree with the NSA spying on us. And I don’t agree with any of those Internet laws."
The 15-year-old has refused to stand for the Pledge for most of the year, but he ran into trouble when a different teacher noticed he was staging a silent protest.
“And she told me, 'This is my classroom. This is the principal’s request. You’re going to stand,'" Michalec told the station. "And I still didn’t stand and she said she was going to write me up."
Michalec said that after he was punished with two days of in-school suspension, the principal warned him that he would face more suspensions if his protest continued.
"I’m angry and frustrated and annoyed that they would try to write me up for something I have the right to do," the teen told KHOU.com.
Some residents in the small town outside of Houston said the school made the right decision.
"The soldiers are out there, they’re doing their job and he should stand up," Needville resident Jo Castillo told the station. "You’ve got a lot of things here that a lot of people don’t have, that’s respect, that’s freedom."
Dean Reese, a war veteran, said the school is sending the wrong message.
"The kid’s well-spoken and he’s well-informed," Reese said. "It’s not like he’s ignorant, he’s not doing it to make people mad. He’s doing it because of his personal beliefs."
School officials declined to comment to KHOU.com on the incident.
Click here for more from KHOU.com.by Josh Davis
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
~Lilla Watson
“Whatever you do, don't go to work for a big INGO. It'll drive you crazy”
The year was 2004, and my favorite anthropology professor was giving me her two cents about where I ought – or rather, ought not – to go with myself and my newly minted BA. I'd been something of a teacher's pet to her, so she had a pretty good handle on my personality and personal politics. By way of explaining her advice that I avoid International Non-Governmental Organizations in my career search, she proceeded to tell me about an experience she'd had while working with a women's health INGO in far-Western Nepal.
This INGO had received a big grant to work on women's health issues in one of the most remote, impoverished and under-served areas of the world. Nepal is a country on the periphery of the global economy – what the UN calls a “highly-indebted and poor country” – and the village the INGO had chosen to work in was on the periphery of the periphery. On the face of it, the project seemed like it would be a windfall for the villagers.
However, it quickly became clear to my professor that the needs of the villagers were not the main concern of the INGO. They used the money to hire an outside expert who specialized in building infant intensive care units in remote areas of the “third world,” who came to the village and promptly started building an infant ICU.
The facility was, admittedly, first-class, with it's own generator and all the latest in medical hardware. The INGO reported that this effort would surely lower infant mortality in the area, which was well above global averages. The villagers were, however, not impressed. In fact, they were down right angry. “I don't want to sound callous,” my professor told me, “but saving a few marginal babies is not going to help anybody – clean water is.”
The villagers complained bitterly among themselves – in a language that the “expert” didn't understand – about all the money wasted on this useless project, while the women's health professionals patted themselves on the back and pocketed their “first world” salaries. “That kind of shit happens all the time,” my professor said with a sigh. “You'd hate it.”
What my professor was describing was an extreme example of what I called in my last blog entry “the White Savior Complex.” In fact, the Savior Complex is not exclusively a white problem, but manifests itself along class, sex, gender and educational lines, as well as any other axis of privilege that you care to name. Anywhere the privileged seek to ally with the unprivileged, the Savior Complex is almost certain to rear its ugly head.
Life is Like a Game of Monopoly™
In a recent email discussion with a colleague, I said that I think the underlying problem is one of mistaking condescending paternalism for solidarity. This was her response, in part:
I perceive a savior spectrum. On one end are people steeped in the nonprofit industrial complex, who are keenly aware that their livelihood is contingent on maintaining a dysfunctional holier-than-thou codependent relationship with those they "help." On the other end are those with so little self-awareness that even as microaggressions, microassaults, and microinvalidations are spewing out of their mouths, actually believe that they are saving the “downtrodden.”
This perspective correlates pretty well with my experience of things. The condescending paternalism, these “microaggressions, microassaults, and microinvalidations” are not, I rush to add, the result of any ill intent on the part of the “saviors,” at least not usually. Rather, I think, it is a result of the natural human tendency to give oneself credit for one's successes, and conversely to blame others for their failures, regardless of how much success and failure are independent of actual merit.
There was a recent experiment performed by some social-psychologists at UC Berkeley, in which subjects played rigged games of Monopoly in which one player was give certain advantages (starting with twice the money, rolling extra die, collecting extra money for passing 'Go'). The researchers found that after only 15 minutes of playing this obviously rigged game, privileged players started to display marked changes in behavior. Advantaged players became louder and more forceful in moving their game pieces, some took more than their share of pretzels from a communal bowl – one was even heard afterwards explaining his strategy for success! As the lead researcher commented, this last is a telling example of “how we make sense of advantage.”
For some reason, it is psychologically difficult for most of us to admit that our success, or lack thereof, may have more to do with circumstances beyond our control than it does with our own effort or skill. Even when outcomes are rigged in an overt way, our minds perversely insist on attaching praise or blame to individual participants in the “game.”
A rigged game of Monopoly is an apt analogy for our economic system. From the very beginnings of our country, our economic, political and social systems have created haves and have-nots (and have-mores, as George W. Bush once quipped) through the real-life equivalent of rolling three die and getting $400 for passing Go. The people I've described as “saviors” are those who have benefited from this rigged game and who imagine that that fact indicates their superiority – in some sense – over those whom the game has been rigged against; and who seek to use this imagined superiority to help those who have been cheated. This is the equivalent of the advantaged Monopoly player explaining his strategy for success to the disadvantaged player. In the context of the experiment it's simply humorous, in real life it is both maddening and degrading.
This is why I react so strongly any time I get a whiff of this dynamic. It may be hard for those whose life experience has never put them on the receiving end of this kind of condescension to realize exactly how damaging this type of behavior is. But if you've ever been treated like an ignoramus because you work a manual labor job, or been lectured to about financial responsibility by someone who makes four times as much as you do, you know just how disempowering and insulting this behavior can be – and nonetheless so for the perpetrator's complete obliviousness to what they are doing.
Experience is the Best Teacher
I didn't start to really understand the dynamics of social oppression (class-based, in my case) until I got to experience it first-hand, working in the many low-wage jobs that currently fill my resume*. Imagine going to a job every day where everyone from the manager on down to the teenage customers treat you like a less-than-human underling. Imagine being expected to keep your head down and your mouth shut, being expected to just show up and do what you're told – always. Imagine being put down and degraded in a multitude of ways both explicit and implied, day after day, month after month, year after year.
Now imagine hearing yourself and your friends and family being discussed by those who have treated you this way as if you were nothing more than problems to be solved, inconvenient objects to be dealt with – like a pothole or a downed power line. Imagine someone comes from that world of privilege, telling you they want to help...and then proceeds to treat you like a parent treats a child...and a slow child at that.
The psychological fall-out from a lifetime of this type of degradation is hard to overstate, and difficult to imagine for those who have never been subjected to it. Unfortunatley, lots of us don't have to imagine, having already lived it. Lots of us are living it everyday. But if you've spent your entire adult life within the confines of academia, or in comfortable salaried positions at well-funded non-profits or corporations or in government, then it might be difficult to wrap your head around – especially if you've never even been informed of the problem**.
True solidarity, in my mind, absolutely requires that we treat each other as equals. Projects that come from the top-down, that are initiated and directed by the privileged for the supposed benefit of the unprivileged, mitigate against people being able to see each other as equals across class, race and other lines of privilege. I'm not prepared to say that top-down projects cannot ever lead to a true sense of equality among those involved, but achieving that outcome becomes much more difficult when you're starting from a place of unequal power.
Learning is a Two-Way Street
What is required is a humility on the part of all involved, but especially on the part of those who enjoy social, political, and economic privilege in the current state of affairs. Solidarity requires that each person come to the work, whatever it may be, with an openness to others and a willingness to be changed by the process and by the other people engaging in the process – all the other people. Showing up to practice solidarity with a plan already in place for what the beneficiaries of your solidarity need to do is a sure sign of the Savior Complex and an indication that your project needs a serious re-think. In my opinion, anyway.
Long time co-op developer, practitioner, and member of the Cooperative Hall of Fame, Melbah M. Smith exemplifies this kind of humility, and sets an example that we would all do well to follow. In the recent presentation she gave in honor of Black History Month, Melbah recounted her experiences helping to train cooperators in the rural South:
Whenever I would go to a group to do training...leaving the office may be at 5:00 and driving two hours to get there maybe for a 7:00 meeting – I would meditate on what am I going to talk about, what am I going to share tonight after having prepared during the day to go there. Once I presented, and on my way back, I would say "My, I learned so much tonight! I learned so much tonight from the people that I was talking to. I had prepared and yes what I prepared was well received, but I also received what they had to give to me." I think that was a great teacher, right there.
The Savior Complex makes this kind of mutual learning impossible, as it starts from an assumption that teaching can flow only from the top down, never from the bottom up. This assumption is damaging for everyone involved, even the saviors themselves, who fail to take the opportunity to learn what they might, and so remain more ignorant than they need to be. But, as is most often the case, it is those at the bottom – those who are expected to shut-up and listen, those who are the subjects of social and economic “experiements,” those who are members of “target populations” – who really get damaged by all this. No amount of good intentions will ever change that.
* Which is what I actually ended up doing with my newly minted econ degree. Montana's labor market isn't the best...
** Consider yourself informed.
Go to the GEO front pageThis movie shows the progression of NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) investigation for the mission's first three years following its restart in December 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/JHU NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its third year of survey data, with the spacecraft discovering 97 previously unknown celestial objects in the last year. Of those, 28 were near-Earth objects, 64 were main belt asteroids and five were comets.
The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 693 near-Earth objects since the mission was re-started in December 2013. Of these, 114 are new. The NEOWISE team has released an animation depicting this solar system survey's discoveries and characterizations for its third year of operations.
"NEOWISE is not only discovering previously uncharted asteroids and comets, but it is providing excellent data on many of those already in our catalog," said Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It is also proving to be an invaluable tool in in the refining and perfecting of techniques for near-Earth object discovery and characterization by a space-based infrared observatory."
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of the planets in our solar system into orbits that allow them to enter Earth's neighborhood. Ten of the objects discovered by NEOWISE in the past year have been classified as potentially hazardous asteroids, based on their size and their orbits.
Credit: NASA
More than 2.6 million infrared images of the sky were collected in the third year of operations by NEOWISE. These data are combined with the Year 1 and 2 NEOWISE data into a single archive that contains approximately 7.7 million sets of images and a database of more than 57.7 billion source detections extracted from those images.
The NEOWISE images also contain glimpses of rare objects, like comet C/2010 L5 WISE. A new technique of modeling comet behavior called tail-fitting showed that this particular comet experienced a brief outburst as it swept through the inner-solar system.
"Comets that have abrupt outbursts are not commonly found, but this may be due more to the sudden nature of the activity rather than their inherent rarity," said Emily Kramer, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at JPL and lead author of paper on the NEOWISE study. "It is great for astronomers to view and collect cometary data when they find an outburst, but since the activity is so short-lived, we may simply miss them most of the time."
The tail-fitting technique identifies the size and quantity of dust particles in the vicinity of the comet, and when they were ejected from the comet's nucleus, revealing the history of the comet's activity. With tail-fitting, future all-sky surveys may be able to find and collect data on more cometary outburst activity when it happens. A paper detailing the tail-fitting technique and other results of the study was published in the March 20 volume of the Astrophysical Journal.
Originally called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the spacecraft was launched in December 2009. It was placed in hibernation in 2011 after its primary astrophysics mission was completed. In September 2013, it was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission: to assist NASA's efforts to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. NEOWISE also is characterizing more distant populations of asteroids and comets to provide information about their sizes and compositions.
Explore further: Asteroid-hunting spacecraft delivers a second year of dataUpdate: We just received a statement from Hunter Todd about the event in which he confirms that he did search the backpack of a woman because she was wearing a hijab and says he had to do it to protect his audience. Find his entire statement at the end of this post.
Last weekend marked the end of the 46th annual WorldFest. The film festival, third oldest in North America, bills itself as a "competitive International Film Festival" and lists as part of its mission/vision statement a desire to "add to the rich cultural fabric of the city of Houston." The actions last Saturday of festival founder/CEO Hunter Todd would appear to show that every vision has its limits.
According to a widely distributed blog entry by writer Amanda Rudd, which quoted a Facebook post by the author's brother, Todd insisted on searching the bag of a Muslim student (and only her bag) when a fire alarm went off at one of the "master classes" he was introducing at the Westchase Marriott. When asked why he was searching the student's bag, Todd responded, "[B]ecause she is a Muslim and a suspicious character, now sit down."
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Mike Rudd, the student who confronted Todd writes in his Facebook post:
Before the morning seminar at WorldFest this morning, everyone was gathered in the seminar room for the lectures start when the hotel's fire alarm went off. The founder and director of WorldFest, Hunter Todd, told everyone to stay in the room before he went to a Muslim UH student and classmate of mine, and demanded to search her bag. She tried to show him her pass to prove she was supposed to be there, but he demanded to search every single pocket of her bag anyway. I'd like to add he did so with a great deal of rudeness and attitude. She complied and showed him the her bag, after this he walked off and didn't ask to search any of the dozens of other bags in the room.
Another student at the seminar, who prefers to remain anonymous, pointed out the student in question was wearing a hijab and niqab, and added:
He demanded to search her bag, even after she had shown him her VIP Gold Pass to the festival. This young woman was also a University of Houston student, and she complied with Todd's request. She started with the back pocket, then he rudely and condescendingly said "There's another zipper." She showed him the contents of her entire backpack while I watched, stunned. Afterwards, he walked back to the front of the room without questioning or addressing anyone else in the crowded seminar.
Rudd, apparently alone among those in attendance, objected to Todd's behavior. Todd's response (according to the other student):
"You're the kind of person I hate the most - an obnoxious little bastard. Now sit down or I'll have you thrown out." Rudd answered, "All right, that's fine," and pulled out his phone to call our professor for advice. Todd freaked out, lunged at Rudd, grabbed him with both hands and tried to take his phone.
Rudd states at this point he left the room to avoid further escalation. His next step was to call WorldFest and lodge an official complaint about Todd's behavior. The phone was answered by a woman named Kathleen, but the conversation quickly went south. Again, according to Rudd:
I told her I was calling to file a complaint about a racial incident involving their founder and director and asked her what her position was at WorldFest. Ignoring this, she asked my name. I told her I would not give my name until she told me what position she held. More rudely she said "you called us now tell me your name". I told her that in this situation I would not give her my name or any info when I did not know who I was talking with. This is when she yells loudly in the the phone "TELL ME YOUR NAME RIGHT NOW!"
Rudd says he hung up and started contacting members of the press about the incident. "Kathleen" may be Kathleen Haney-Todd, WorldFest's program director and wife of Hunter Todd.
As of this writing, Todd has not responded to emails asking for a comment. WorldFest's Twitter account (@worldfest) has been silent since 10:21 AM Saturday. Curious, considering Sunday was the |
Fungimin Oral Gel in Bangladesh )
Oral gel 24 mg/ml (20 mg/g)
Oravig 50 mg once daily buccal tablet:
In 2010, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Oravig (miconazole) buccal tablets once daily for the local treatment of oropharyngeal candidiasis, more commonly known as thrush, in adults and children age 16 and older. Oravig is the only local, oral prescription formulation of miconazole approved for this use in the U.S.[citation needed]
External skin treatment: (brands: Desenex and Zeasorb in US and Canada, Micatin, Monistat-Derm, Daktarin in India, UK, Australia, Belgium and the Philippines, Daktar in Norway, Fungidal in Bangladesh, Decocort in Malaysia)
Topical cream: 2%
Combination: hydrocortisone/miconazole cream with 1% and 2%, respectively (Daktacort in UK, Daktodor in Greece)
Dusting powder: 2% powder with chlorhexidine hydrochloride (mycoDust)
Vaginal treatment: (brands: Miconazex, Monistat, Femizol or Gyno-Daktarin in UK)
Pessaries: 200 or 100 mg
Vaginal cream: 2% (7-day treatment), 4% (3-day treatment)
Combination: 2% cream with either 100 or 200 mg
Pharmacology [ edit ]
Miconazole inhibits the fungal enzyme 14α-sterol demethylase, which reduces production of ergosterol.[7] In addition to its antifungal actions, miconazole, along with ketoconazole, is known to act as an antagonist of the glucocorticoid receptor.[8]
Remyelination [ edit ]
Miconazole has been shown to promote remyelination of neurons in chronic progressive multiple sclerosis mouse models.[9]
Physical properties [ edit ]
The solubilities of miconazole nitrate powder are 0.03% in water, 0.76% in ethanol and up to 4% in acetic acid.[10]
Other uses [ edit ]
Miconazole is also used in Ektachrome film developing in the final rinse of the Kodak E-6 process and similar Fuji CR-56 process, replacing formaldehyde. Fuji Hunt also includes miconazole as a final rinse additive in their formulation of the C-41RA rapid access color negative developing process.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Medical [ edit ]
Micatin
Miconazole (National Institutes of Health)
United States Patent 5461068 Imidazole derivative tincture and method of manufacture
Photographic [ edit ]This great book shows the thought process and technique behind traditional Japanese architecture. Whether you are an architect or simply have an interest in the fine details of this process, this book is one of the best. It is filled with over 56 b/w designs, floor plans, joinery and schematics. As this style of building requires a dedicated apprenticeship, people should not necessarily view it as a "how-to" book, even though it does explain the process in fine detail.
There is excellent coverage of measurement, and I especially like the detailed section on tatami layout. The wealth of floor plans alone justify the purchase. There is also 4-pages worth of b/w scrolls, depicting a palace layout (and one frame displaying some high quality calligraphy), and the "architect's scroll" which shows a fairly comprehensive collections of joints. There are numerous joints shown throughout the book, and together with "The Complete Japanese Joinery" and The Art of Japanese Joinery" anyone interested in this subject should be set.
The book describes what the Japanese house is and how it is built. The author argues that the traditional Japanese house seems better suited as a pattern for contemporary housing than any other residential architecture form. He bases this argument of the following distinctive features:
-modular order of system and form
-flexibility of space partition and room function
-compository potential of tatami mats
-expressive diversity within comprehensive standardization
-integrartive qualities of Japanese design
The book presents considerations of the form, system, and detail of space layout, the dimensions and measurements, and how the various components are combined. The book is great for anyone with an appreciation for this form, but the author seems to have clearly geared it towards architects, whom he challenges to explore this form for integration into modern design.
There are few books that cover the process like this, and I highly recommend it. Be sure to Look inside and check out the table of contents to make sure it is what you are looking for, as this is a technical book that is not for everyone.Alabama prosecutors want to see former House Speaker Mike Hubbard in prison. For five full years.
And they want to be sure he will serve it all.
A sentencing memorandum filed tonight in the Hubbard case - in preparation for Hubbard's July 8 sentencing on 12 ethics convictions - asks for an 18-year base sentence, split to serve five years in state prison. That would be followed by 13 years of probation.
The state is asking Lee County Circuit Judge Jacob Walker to use his gavel as a hammer, not only to punish Hubbard for his serious crimes, but as a deterrent to other public officials.
The 18 years is less than the 20-year maximum Hubbard could face on each charge, but is equal to the number of years he spent in the Legislature. The five years is the maximum that can be given as a split sentence - which is time he would have to serve -- but is also the length of time he served as Speaker.
Fitting.
"The sentence is appropriate because Hubbard betrayed the public's trust and, even now, refuses to accept responsibility for his actions," prosecutor Mike Duffy wrote.
The state also asked that Hubbard pay $1,125,000.00 in restitution, which is described as Hubbard's "ill-gotten gain."
"In the course of committing the 12 felonies for which he stands convicted, Hubbard directly enriched himself and his businesses by $1,125,000.00," Duffy wrote. "Further, Hubbard's felonious enrichment occurred after he spearheaded the Republican takeover of the legislature based in large part on the promise of strengthening the State's Ethics Laws and cleaning up what he termed the "culture of corruption."
Mike Hubbard (AP)
It seems like a lot of time, but in the grand scheme of corruptions schemes it's not.
Former Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford is serving 15 years in federal prison for illicit gains that came to $236,000, the filing pointed out. Prosecutors went down a rogues gallery of corrupt public officials who are now Hubbard's peers, citing sentences and the amounts of money involved.
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich: 14 years for $1.5 million.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin: 10 years for $500,000.
Jefferson County Commissioner Gary White: 10 years for $22,000.
Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman: 6 years and 6 months for $500,000.
Alabama two-year college chancellor Roy Johnson: six years and six months for $440,000.
Alabama State Sen. Edward "E.B." McClain: 5 years and 10 months on $300,000.
There are more. Many more. They serve both as comparison and reminder for why Hubbard needs to serve time. Because the state has seen what happens when corruption is allowed to flourish. All we need do is look back at the corruption that upended the two-year system, that drove Jefferson County to bankruptcy.
"Hubbard breached the trust of his constituents in District 79, his fellow House members who elevated him to Speaker, and every Alabama citizen by violating the Ethics Laws a dozen times," prosecutors wrote. "His betrayal... warrants a strong, meaningful sentence in order to punish him, deter other public officials from violating the Ethics Laws, and help restore the people's trust in their government."
It will be hard to restore the people's trust in their government. It has been shaken to its core.
But the conviction of Hubbard, the man once widely considered to be the most powerful figure in Alabama politics, was a statement. Sending him to state prison would speak even louder.
It would say Alabama has not given up on the idea of clean government. Alabama has not given in to the inevitability of corruption. Alabama demands better from its public officials.
Alabama must demand better.
Hubbard-State's Sentencing Brief by John ArchibaldIn my first post after the fateful election of 2016, I wrote you a deeply considered letter grounded in my respect for the law and hopeful that you would pursue a presidential path of comity. I followed that letter with another one some months after to express my profound disappointment in your leadership, although in a post script I left a little door open for the future prospects. I am writing this final letter to you as president to let you know that I have closed that door. Your remarks in the aftermath of Charlottesville, combined with so many other demonstrations of inadequacy and failed leadership, reflect the absence of that most fundamental traits required of a president: a moral compass.
Is the nostalgia you feel about “heritage” a vestige of what must be very complicated feelings about your father, a man who marched with white supremacists and who unabashedly discriminated against Blacks? It seems to me you have an unreflective affection for him, one that does not take into account from where your own blind ambition starts. That perpetual sense of being wronged, your emotional trademark, bespeaks of truth you see not. The anger, the drive, the projection. And then, of course, the narcissism. That hurt came from a mother who favored a brother, doesn’t it? You needed your father’s approval to compensate for what your mom failed to give. And now you have attempted to subject this country to consequences of your own wounded past.
I have nothing but compassion for every person’s story, but not for when people act out their hurt. An explanation is not an excuse. As I write today, you sent out tepid support for the protesters yesterday who came out in support of equality and civil rights. Maybe it’s P.R., maybe your new chief of staff composed that message and made you do it. Maybe it is from your heart. It doesn’t matter anymore, Mr. Trump. Your failure to stand for what this country has historically fought for so valiantly in the past -- the end of slavery, the overthrowing of legal segregation, democracy over fascism, equality and civil rights -- in the moment when this country needed it most tells us you failed the test. Although I would rather you support those positive qualities than not, your path to understanding is best conducted on your time, not ours, as this country goes forward.
Resign. The presidency is bad for your business. It will never provide you with the emotional balm that you seek. That goal is not one that can ever be achieved by external accomplishment. Show us you have, in the final analysis, the courage to go home, and for once, be quiet. In that solitude, you may actually come to find the release you want. And give the rest of this country the opportunity to heal itself.This means that Debian will become one of the first projects outside Sun to support the filesystem.ZFS is a combined filesystem and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. It is now owned by Oracle.
According to the project, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port that consists of GNU userland using the GNU C library on top of FreeBSD's kernel, coupled with the regular Debian package set.
Millan said in a post on his blog that while ZFS support had not been available in the beta1 images available for Squeeze, it was now available in the images for netbooting.
As Squeeze moves towards its release, the Debian team puts in place policies that ensure what packages can be incorporated into the distribution. This cutoff ensures that the release is not overly delayed.
Millan said that he had initially posted saying that Squeeze would not have ZFS support as the version of Parted, the package used for partitioning hard drives during installation, had not been migrated to Squeeze. And the release policy in place did not appear to allow this migration.
"However, the release team kindly decided to make an exception that allowed this, and after Parted had migrated the changes in Debian-Installer itself went in quite smoothly," he wrote.
(This article has been corrected to reflect the fact that support for ZFS will be in the GNU/kFreeBSd port of Debian.)The Olympics provide a rare opportunity to see what human beings are capable of. We marvel at what is possible when humans push themselves to the edges of their ability. Most people consider performance enhancing drugs to be antithetical to the notion of sport, as they create an un-even playing field. But could they be utilized to usher in a new era of sport, and scientific discovery?
On the surface, I agree with those who seek to ban drugs from sport. The fun of sport lies in the knowledge that every competitor is on a level playing-field, this is vital, and ensures that the winner has fairly defeated his opponents, with no special advantage that wasn’t also available to them. If it transpires that the winner has secretly used drugs to gain an unfair edge over his opponents, the joy immediately evaporates. Hence a great effort is made to prevent performing enhancing drugs from ruining what is so central to the essence of sport.
But what if we created a new playing field, a new sporting class, where participants are allowed to utilize everything science has to offer them in developing their skills, without fear of penalization? Think about it, what would it be like to watch someone run the 100m knowing they have done absolutely everything in their power to be as fast as possible? Utilizing a spectrum of performance-enhancing drugs, gene therapies, modified diets in conjunction with sophisticated training regimes.
What would it be like to watch a race knowing that every competitor has done this? There would be no inherent unfairness in this; they could have chosen to augment their body in any way they wished, with any combination of drugs or therapies they consent to.
Some people may object to this on the grounds that an athlete would become only as good as the team of scientists and doctors behind him, but there is another sport where this is obviously true, and it doesn’t seem to hinder the enjoyment of millions of fans, and that sport is racing. Formula 1 drivers do everything they can t develop their reaction speeds and driving sensitivity, but they are hugely dependent on the quality of their equipment, and by extension, the abilities of a team of mechanics and engineers that work for them behind the scenes. Does this make racing a joyless sport? Not at all, it is a thrilling sport, made all the more exciting for knowing there is nothing hindering the speed of the winner except the laws of physics, and the sometimes frustrating progress of science.
Why do we arbitrarily limit the speed of our runners, or the distance of our jumpers, the strength of our weightlifters and throwers, by banning drugs from ALL sport? Obviously I’m not supporting the notion of introducing performance enhancing drugs to every single sport; I’d still like to watch events in which the competitors could only use natural means to succeed. However, I very much desire to watch a different Olympics, alongside the traditional one, a new Olympics, a meta-lympics, where records are obliterated with regularity, as athletes attain near super-human levels of physical proficiency and skill.
The brilliance of science married to the determination of the athlete, with the common pursuit of glory. I am reminded of JFK’s speech about the importance of putting a man on the moon, an endeavour which many people considered a waste of time and money, he said to them:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
In 1969 the USA put two men on the surface of the moon, just to see if it was possible, just to see how far our species could go. But this mission had an unintended reward; economists estimate that for every dollar spend on the Apollo missions, 14 dollars returned to the US economy. This was due to sheer tidal wave of scientific progress that was created. Thousands of new patents were filed, new devices invented and the best minds in the country were brought together to their mutual benefit. Not to mention the long term investment the moon-landing represented in terms of the new generation of engineers and scientists that it inspired.
Think what the meta-lympics could accomplish for science to this generation. The space race provided a catalyst for scientific discovery in the 1960s, and likewise, rival teams of pharmacologists and doctors working on perfecting athletic ability could make overwhelming contributions to medical science.
Who is to say that the cures for muscle wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy wouldn’t be discovered by doctors and scientists working in the meta-lympics? Or a panoply of new drugs for neuro-muscular diseases, such as Parkinson’s or Huntington’s, being developed by the same labs that worked for a team of athletes? I see no convincing moral argument against such a sporting event, as long as the doctors and scientists were competent and the athletes were consenting, and understood fully the nature of the risks associated with each drug and treatment they were offered.
Some people may object on the grounds that it “encourages drug use”, however this is spurious, I think it more likely that it would reduce drug-abuse in regular sport. Suppliers of growth hormones, EPO and other drugs would have been just given a massive new (legal) market in the form of the meta-lympics. Why would they choose to deal underhand to regular athletes for little profit when they could simply focus their energies in making, and researching, drugs for the meta-athletes? Could there be a Lance Armstrong in the age of the metalympics? I think there’d be no market for him, no reason to aid him. If he wants to use drugs he could join the meta-lympic cycling team, and if not stick to regular cycling. There’d simply be no reason to cheat in the conventional sense of the word.
By ‘legitimizing’ the drug culture in sport, and giving it an outlet, we would not only create a new era of sporting glory, but protect regular sport from deception, whilst also furthering the goals of medical science. Here’s to the meta-lympians.
AdvertisementsSEATTLE (Reuters) - The city of Seattle sued U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday over its executive order seeking to withhold federal funds from “sanctuary cities,” arguing it amounted to unconstitutional federal coercion.
FILE PHOTO: The skyline of Seattle, Washington, U.S. is seen in a picture taken March 12, 2014. REUTERS/Jason Redmond/File Photo
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray told reporters the Constitution forbade the federal government from pressuring cities, “yet that is exactly what the president’s order does. Once again, this new administration has decided to bully.”
“Things like grants helping us with child sex trafficking are not connected to immigration,” Murray said, adding: “It is time for cities to stand up and ask the courts to put an end to the anxiety in our cities and the chaos in our system.”
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions threatened on Monday to strip Justice Department grants from cities and other local governments that choose to shield illegal immigrants from deportation efforts.
Trump, who made tougher immigration enforcement a cornerstone of his campaign, directed the government in his Jan. 25 executive order to cut off funding to sanctuary jurisdictions. That order has yet to be put into effect, but Sessions’ announcement seemed to be the first step in doing so.
Trump administration officials say the immigration crackdown is focused on illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes.
Responding to the Seattle lawsuit, a U.S. Justice Department representative said in a statement: “Failure to deport aliens who are convicted of criminal offenses makes our nation less safe by putting dangerous criminals back on our streets.”
Seattle’s action was the latest legal salvo over the Trump immigration order from local governments across the country, including the city of San Francisco and California’s Santa Clara County.
Police agencies in dozens of “sanctuary” cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, have barred their officers from routinely checking on immigration status when making arrests or traffic stops. They have also refused to detain people longer than otherwise warranted at the request of federal agents seeking to deport them.
Supporters of the policy argue that enlisting police cooperation in rounding up immigrants for removal undermines communities’ trust in local police, particularly among Latinos.
Murray said the goal of Seattle’s lawsuit was to have the courts declare that federal authorities “cannot force our local police officials to be involved in federal immigration activities.”By David Snell*
Is the biggest tax system issue for New Zealand’s election the one we can’t see?
Disruptive forces are fundamentally changing the tax world as we know it. The three primary forces of disruption – technology, globalisation and demographics – mean tomorrow’s tax system may be unrecognisable from that we have known for many years.
We are on the verge of an artificial intelligence and robotic process automation-led revolution in tax policy and administration. The power to harness data to set policy and to smartly target enforcement has been barely tapped.
For example, the power of data can be used to reach into business transactions in real time. Combined with the ever increasing transparency of tax-related information between IRD and other tax authorities, the ability to move to a digital-based approach to revenue raising - centred on a more accurate set of withholding taxes - is real, both for business and individuals. IRD’s technology- led transformation is making steps in this direction, albeit less bold than appeared likely when the transformation project kicked off.
Yet in New Zealand, most political parties are ignoring the power of disruption and are instead focusing on worthy but ultimately second-order issues. On business tax, the issue grabbing the lion’s share of attention is the taxation of multinationals. Little, if any, evidence has been put forward in support of the case for change in New Zealand but it is clear reform has become inevitable.
The current National-led government is part way through wide ranging reforms to implement the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) recommendations. The rules will address the use of artificially high interest payments to shift profits offshore, companies which artificially avoid having a taxable presence in New Zealand, and companies exploiting mismatches between different countries’ tax rules. It seems fair comment to suggest other political parties would go further.
Labour has stated it would introduce a diverted profits tax aimed at multinational tax avoidance. It would also increase staff for tax investigations. Similarly, New Zealand First will address multinational tax issues as part of a tax evasion crackdown. Whether these measures will raise $200 million per annum, as the government predicts, or perhaps the $300 million Labour has suggested – we think both figures are overestimates – this will amount to less than 3% of the total corporate tax take of around $12 billion each year.
Multinationals already, rightly, pay substantial amounts of tax in New Zealand. Any number of complex additional rules are likely to generate confusion and may have a material negative impact on inbound investment and the New Zealand economy. But they are unlikely to change the fundamentals of our tax landscape.
Enthusiasm for incentives
The second emerging election policy issue is a greater enthusiasm for tax incentives. While the current National-led government has stuck to the New Zealand orthodoxy of a broad-based approach to revenue gathering, opposition parties are signalling greater use of the tax system to achieve desired policy outcomes. The incentive of choice is - as always - the research and development tax credit, with Labour, New Zealand First and the Greens all supporters.
Economically, the case for an incentive centres on the spillover effect: successful innovation “spills over” to the wider economy rather than being captured solely by the innovative business concerned. In terms of governments providing a degree of support for private research and development, the argument holds well. In practice, grants such as those delivered by Callaghan Innovation, and tax credits, both face criticisms around heavy-handed administration, rewarding applicants skilled in exploiting inevitably fuzzy definitions of research and development rather than encouraging true innovation through additional research spending.
Should a research and development credit return to New Zealand, we can expect to see some innovative claims for tax credits but whether we will see an increase in commercially viable research carried out here is less clear cut. Innovation, though, does have a strong claim on public funds. The case for other incentives proposed – including a reduced tax rate for exports, immediate deduction for capital expenditure on physical assets up to $20,000 and exempting electric vehicles from fringe benefit tax (respectively New Zealand First and Green policy) – is less well developed. Such incentives are expensive and the shortfall in revenue must be made up by all other taxpayers.
As well as the rise in popularity of tax incentives, political parties are seeing greater opportunity to use tax as a corrective tool to punish perceived bad behaviour by property speculators, with Labour and the Greens seeking to widen the tax net for capital gains on property, excluding the family home.
Such measures face challenges: property speculation (purchase with intention to resell) is already taxable; the base will be small as long as the family home is excluded; and the prospects of any profit-based capital tax raising revenue in the short term are slim, given that growth in property prices has stalled.
TOP's radical approach
The Opportunities Party (“TOP”) is much bolder when it comes to the taxation of housing. TOP’s number one policy priority is tax reform. It proposes to deem a minimum rate of return on all
productive assets, including housing and land. Those that declare at least that level of income will be unaffected. Those that do not will pay more. While this radical policy would be phased in over time, it has the potential to change the economics of business investment and of the buy/rent choice in a big way.
Put simply: investments not returning at least that minimum rate over time – such as rental property – are likely to become uneconomic, and the market would eventually respond by changing prices and supply. Some businesses could fail more quickly due to the minimum tax charge. TOP’s proposal is bold and has some economic substance but the transition to a different tax system would be painful. It seems exactly the kind of idea worthy of reference to Labour’s proposed tax working group.
Periodic Tax Working Groups, such as 2001’s McLeod Review and 2009’s Victoria University review, can challenge existing frameworks and set out a pathway for reform. To maximise the benefit from any working group, any review needs to be run by a team of talented people with varied skillsets, have unconstrained terms of reference (for example, not ruling out changes to particular taxes on the grounds of political expediency), be seen as independent from the government, communicate openly and effectively and be well-resourced.
A review with a mandate of, for example, “How should New Zealand implement a capital gains tax excluding the family home?” would be a missed opportunity to address any wider concerns with our tax system. No pre-election commentary would be complete without reference to personal taxes.
The current National-led government has already legislated for reductions targeted at low-to-middle income families, kicking in from 1 April 2018. With the average wage pushing $60,000, far too many middle-income families are faced with a 30% marginal tax rate even before working for families abatement and student loan repayments are taken into account. There seems no further relief ahead until at least 2020.
Labour has stated it will reverse the April 2018 cuts although has no plans to increase the current top rates. The Greens propose introducing a new top tax rate of 40 percent on income over $150,000 per year to help fund changes to our social safety net. A good tax system needs to balance efficiency, equity/fairness and ease of administration. The tax system needs to be a coherent whole, with individually sensible reforms making sense in terms of the preferred long term vision.
In coherence terms, in a rapidly changing disruptive world, my challenge to all political parties is to set out that long term direction more clearly. To date, we see many specific policies but far less on the bigger picture.
*David Snell is an executive director at EY.Heat tint (temper) colours on stainless steel surfaces heated in air
Introduction
The colour formed when stainless steel is heated, either in a furnace application or in the heat affected zone of welds, is dependent on several factors that are related to the oxidation resistance of the steel. The heat tint or temper colour formed is caused by the progressive thickening of the surface oxide layer and so, as temperature is increased, the colours change. Oxidation resistance of stainless steels
However, there are several factors that affect the degree of colour change and so there is no a single table of colour and temperature that represents all cases. The colours formed can only be used as an indication of the temperature to which the steel has been heated.
Factors affecting the heat tint colours formed
Steel composition
The chromium content is the most important single factor affecting oxidation resistance. The higher the chromium, the more heat resistant the steel and so the development of the heat tint colours is delayed.
Atmosphere
The level of oxygen available for the oxidation process also affects the colours formed. Normally heating in air (ie approx. 20% oxygen) is assumed. In welding, the effectiveness of the shielding gas or electrode coating and other weld parameters such as welding speed can affect the degree of heat tint colour formed around the weld bead.
Time
Laboratory tests done to establish the published heat tint colour charts have usually been based on heating for one hour. As exposure time is increased, the temper colours can be expected to deepen ie make it appear that a higher exposure temperature may have been used.
Surface finish
The original surface finish on the steel can affect the rate of oxidation and the appearance of the colour formed. Rougher surfaces may oxidize at a higher rate and so could appear as deeper colours for any given set of conditions. As the colours formed are by light interference, then the smoothness of the surface can also affect the appearance of the colours formed. There is no specific data published that compares the effect of surface finish, but it is worth noting that surface finish can influence the conclusion on heating temperature, from the colours seen.
Heat tint colour chart
The table below represents the temper colours that are likely to form on stainless steel type 1.4301 (AISI 304) if heated in air.
THIS INFORMATION MUST BE USED WITH CARE WHEN INTREPETING THE HINT TINT COLOURS OBSERVED ON STAINLESS STEEL SURFACES AS THE HEATING CONDITIONS ARE NOT SPECIFIED.
Colour Formed Approx Temperature C pale yellow 290 straw yellow 340 dark yellow 370 brown 390 purple brown 420 dark purple 450 blue 540 dark blue 600
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3/13/2006 03:29:00 PM posted by Razib
How the Kurds saved the West? How the Kurds saved the West?
There is a reason that history has the fragment story within it. While popular science often has to enliven the narrative with biography, scholarly history often drives the personalities into the background as it attempts to extract the general trends and social dynamics which scaffold the lives which we find so compelling. Because of its openness to story-telling history can spawn titles like
But aside from its narrative magnetism history can also illuminate the way we view the world around us, our biases and blinkers. Though I believe that the depredations of "Post Modernism," broadly interpreted, have done a disservice to genuine scholarship, modern skepticism's emergence in the humanities was likely an inevitable byproduct of the excessive hubris of scholars and thinkers who remade the past in their own image (I'm looking at you
Stripping away a name can change perspective a great deal sometimes. Consider this, until yesterday I did not know that the Eastern Roman Emperor, The fact of interest to me is that the Isaurians are likely the ancestors of the local Kurds of southern Anatolia! Another fact of interest is that the emperor
Why am I going over this? Here are the dates of the reigns in question:
Zeno: 474-491
Leo III: 717-741
Here are two other dates of interest:
September 4th, 476, the last Western Roman Emperor is deposed
717-718 The
In other words, Zeno and Leo III occupy essential hinging points of Western history. Zeno consolidated the Eastern Roman Empire as the Western Empire fell to barbarians. Leo III battled back the last attempt by the Arabs to conquer Constantinople. Nevertheless, the title is probably deceptive. We have no way of knowing whether the West would or would not have survived the fall of Constantinople, or if Byzantium would have been weakened if Zeno had been more proactive in defending the interests of civilization in the West (the barbarian rulers of Italy were generally not a big change from the Roman ruling class in any case). Also, the "Kurds" as we know them did not exist over 1,000 years ago, the tribe of the Isaurians did. It seems likely that the Isaurians spoke an Iranian language which is genetically ancestral to the local dialects of Kurdistan in the region of Southern Anatolia where they once resided. But the
My point is that we tend to see the past as an extension of the present, and we foist upon it our modern categories. It might be a curiosity to us that Byzantium was fundamentally a Greek culture which perceived itself as Roman and was led by Emperors of non-Greek origin (often Armenian). That this warrants our notice tells us about our modern notions of the nation-state, and less about the tensions which existed in the undiscovered territory of the past....
There is a reason that history has the fragmentwithin it. While popular science often has to enliven the narrative with biography, scholarly history often drives the personalities into the background as it attempts to extract the general trends and social dynamics which scaffold the lives which we find so compelling. Because of its openness to story-telling history can spawn titles like How the Irish Saved Civilization. Many historical narratives are begging to be shaped into an evocative yarn.But aside from its narrative magnetism history can also illuminate the way we view the world around us, our biases and blinkers. Though I believe that the depredations of "Post Modernism," broadly interpreted, have done a disservice to genuine scholarship, modern skepticism's emergence in the humanities was likely an inevitable byproduct of the excessiveof scholars and thinkers who remade the past in their own image (I'm looking at you Will Durant!).Stripping away a name can change perspective a great deal sometimes. Consider this, until yesterday I did not know that the Eastern Roman Emperor, Zeno, was born with the name Tarasicodissa. Zeno is a Greek name, so though I knew that this emperor's origins were a bit rough, I did not think much upon his background. But it turns out that Tarasicodissa was an Isaurian! This did not surprise me, I knew he had some association with the Isaurian soldiers recruited from the depths of Anatolia. Who were the Isaurians? A group of barbarians who provided troops for the Eastern Roman Empire who resided somewhere in central Anatolia. That was all I knew...until I read this Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia can be unreliable, so I doubled-checked some facts in google print! Another fact of interest is that the emperor Leo III was also an Isaurian.Why am I going over this? Here are the dates of the reigns in question:Zeno: 474-491Leo III: 717-741Here are two other dates of interest:September 4th, 476, the last Western Roman Emperor is deposed717-718 The Second Seige of Constantinople by the ArabsIn other words, Zeno and Leo III occupy essential hinging points ofhistory. Zeno consolidated the Eastern Roman Empire as the Western Empire fell to barbarians. Leo III battled back the last attempt by the Arabs to conquer Constantinople. Nevertheless, the title is probably deceptive. We have no way of knowing whether the West would or would not have survived the fall of Constantinople, or if Byzantium would have been weakened if Zeno had been more proactive in defending the interests of civilization in the West (the barbarian rulers of Italy were generally not a big change from the Roman ruling class in any case). Also, the "Kurds" as we know them did not exist over 1,000 years ago, the tribe of the Isaurians did. It seems likely that the Isaurians spoke an Iranian language which is genetically ancestral to the local dialects of Kurdistan in the region of Southern Anatolia where they once resided. But the historic origin of the Kurds is to some extent a recent creation of post-18th century nationalisms, the Kurdish language is characterized by wide dialetical range.My point is that we tend to see the past as an extension of the present, and we foist upon it our modern categories. It might be a curiosity to us that Byzantium was fundamentally a Greek culture which perceived itself as Roman and was led by Emperors of non-Greek origin (often Armenian). That this warrants our notice tells us about our modern notions of the nation-state, and less about the tensions which existed in the undiscovered territory of the past.... Haloscan CommentsiApplyGreensboro: Apply for Jobs Online
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specific purpose of serving as a protected residence for the terrorist leader.
The house was huge—eight times the size of any of its neighbors, easily visible in satellite photographs—in a wealthy neighborhood not far from the center of the city. It was heavily secured, with walls as high as 18 feet in some places, topped with barbed wire, and a seven-foot high parapet around the top floor, suitable to concealing an unusually tall resident (Bin Laden reportedly stood nearly six foot five inches).
The house was valued at over $1 million, but the two brothers who were listed as owners had “no explainable source of wealth,” and the structure had neither telephone nor Internet access, evidently for security reasons. The residents burned their trash rather than leave it on the street for pickup.
While President Obama claimed in his Sunday night speech that US intelligence agencies only learned of the compound’s existence in August 2010, diplomatic cables obtained by the whistleblower web site WikiLeaks suggest that the US government learned of the Abbottabad site sometime in 2008, based on interrogations of an Al Qaeda leader, Abu al-Libi, detained at Guantaamo Bay.
WikiLeaks published a Twitter posting Monday giving some details of the cable, but a fuller release of material is expected. According to the posting, al-Libi had been chosen to be a special messenger for Al Qaeda in 2003 and was to be based in Abbottabad. He moved his family from Peshawar to Abbottabad in July 2003 to carry out this assignment.
Abbottabad has been variously described as a regional city and a distant suburb of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, a short helicopter ride away. It was certainly a focal point for the activity of Pakistan’s huge military apparatus, which has ruled the country for most of its 65-year history.
The city of 100,000 is strategically located, just inside the territory of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa state, where most of Pakistan’s Pashtun-speaking population live—ethnically related to the largest population group in Afghanistan—and only a few miles from the heavily militarized Pakistan-occupied portion of Kashmir.
A brigade of the Pakistani army’s Second Division makes its headquarters there, and so also have, in past years, Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas who sought to infiltrate the Indian-held portion of Kashmir and conduct terrorist attacks. One Pakistani-born columnist compared the city to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the US Air Force Academy is located, featuring the same noxious combination of military brass and religious fundamentalists.
There are conflicting accounts of the role of the Pakistani security forces in the actual raid. Pakistani officials claimed Monday that their forces had actually assisted in the attack, but this was dismissed by Obama administration officials, who claimed that Islamabad was only told of the raid after bin Laden was dead.
According to the British Guardian, the four helicopters carrying the Navy SEALs lifted off from Ghazi airbase in northwest Pakistan, where they would certainly have been observed flying east towards Abbottabad, not west towards the mountainous region on the Afghanistan border, the usual zone of operations for the US special forces. The helicopters flew straight into one of the main centers of the Pakistani military, in the middle of the night, supposedly without anyone noticing.
It seems clear that a critical issue in the timing of the raid was the complex and murky relationship between the US intelligence apparatus and its Pakistani counterpart. One important question involves the possible connection between the raid’s planning and the activities of Raymond Davis, the American CIA agent arrested by Pakistani police in January after killing two men as they drove past his car in Lahore, the biggest city in Punjab province. The Davis affair touched off two months of increasing and public acrimony between the US and Pakistan.
After intense diplomatic pressure by the Obama administration, Davis was released from Pakistani custody on March 16 and quickly flown out of the country—two days after Obama convened the first of five meetings at the White House to plan the raid on Abbottabad.
Top US officials involved in the raid’s planning and execution held meetings with their Pakistani colleagues in the weeks immediately preceding the attack, and after operational planning meetings had begun at the White House. CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was said to have been in overall charge of the operation, met with Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of the Pakistani ISI, on April 11.
Two weeks later, General David Petraeus, the US commander in the Afpak theater, visited Pakistan and met with General Ashraf Kayani, the current military chief. Two days after that meeting, White House officials made it known that Panetta would replace Robert Gates as secretary of defense, while General Petraeus would succeed Panetta as CIA chief.
General Kayani was in Abbottabad only a week before bin Laden’s capture, giving the commencement speech to a new graduating class at the Pakistan Military Academy. He told the graduates that his forces had “broken the back” of Islamic fundamentalist militants. “Let me assure you that we in Pakistan’s army are fully aware of the internal and external threat to our country,” Kayani said, speaking only a few hundred yards from the home of the Al Qaeda leader.
At least two other top Al Qaeda figures had been arrested previously in Abbottabad: Tahir Shehzad, an alleged Al Qaeda intermediary who had met with several French-born militants; and Umar Patek, the most recently arrested, in January 2011, a leader of the Indonesian Al Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiya.
Another curious issue is the treatment of bin Laden’s body. The claim that the US military disposed of the corpse at sea within 24 hours because of its deep respect for Muslim religious precepts doesn’t pass the laugh test. It seems certain that the body was bin Laden’s, since his supporters have confirmed the Al Qaeda leader’s death in statements to the press, but there is a smell of cover-up in the hurried dumping of the body, which more resembles the aftermath of a gangland hit.
Out of all this fragmentary information and loose ends, at least one conclusion seems evident: the least plausible story is the official one, promoted both by Washington and Islamabad for their separate reasons, that US intelligence only learned of the compound last August and only confirmed bin Laden’s presence there in the last few months.
It is obvious that bin Laden was the guest, if not the prisoner, of the Pakistani security services. If the American media were really to probe the circumstances of bin Laden’s life in Pakistan, instead of merely parroting the talking points of the Pentagon and CIA, it would have to raise the question of what US intelligence agencies, not just the Pakistanis, knew about bin Laden’s whereabouts over the past nine years.
In perhaps the most remarkable passage in Obama’s Sunday night speech, he recounted giving the order to incoming CIA Director Leon Panetta, in January 2009, to make finding and disposing of bin Laden the agency’s number one priority. The obvious implication—almost ignored in the US media—is that under the Bush administration, targeting bin Laden was NOT a priority.
This only raises further questions about the longstanding connections between bin Laden and US intelligence agencies, since he got his early training in terrorist methods as a CIA contractor in the mujahideen war against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. No serious analysis of the 9/11 attacks can avoid the conclusion that sections of the US intelligence apparatus protected the Al Qaeda operatives and looked the other way as the plot unfolded.Hothead Games – they behind Deathspank and Penny Arcade Adventures – have announced a Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy project. And that’s just about it. Their very brief press release explains that the game is to be published by Megadodo Publications, which is a form of joke. Other than that, it doesn’t even explain that it’s a game – merely a “new edition” of The Guide. Videogamer are reporting that it will be on digital platforms, but none has been named. Although Hothead tends to release across the board, so it seems likely it’ll come our way.
What a license to take on. Will they be as ambitious as Adams was himself when he had a go? (You can read Victoria Regan’s Gaming Made Me all about it.) Will it be an adventure, action, fourth-person turn-based platformer? What do you reckon?Rizzi appears to have a large online footprint, with several Facebook accounts and dozens of BMX biking photos and videos posted to Instagram, YouTube and Vine. Various profiles suggest he is in his early twenties.
The Spectator didn't get a response from any of the four friends identified by a Tyler Rizzi on Facebook as "having my back" during the Jackson Square fracas.
But online, the argument continued.
"The video has been viewed by over a million people. That means over a million people have seen what horrible people those security guards are," reads a Saturday post on a Twitter account attributed to Rizzi, who has more than 6,000 followers and is listed as having lived in Toronto and attended Humber College.
Dozens of supportive messages were posted on Facebook and Twitter, often from people self-identifying as riders, commiserating about security guard hassles or worrying about the potential loss of sponsorships for Rizzi, who appears well-known in the Ontario BMX community.
"It's nice to see riders sticking together," commented one poster.
"Clearly I ride bmx and bmxers stick together," said another poster in response to a critical comment.
But a second video on Rizzi's Twitter account, later made private, purports to show him tangling with a different security guard in Toronto last year.
A snippet of a man cocking his fist and advancing on a uniformed guard is included in a separate BMX promotional video posted by a Tyler Rizzi that was still visible Saturday.
A screenshot from what looks like the same video is visible on an Instagram account for tylerrizzibmx with the caption: "Screenshot Throwback to filming street in Toronto the other week, always a good time downtown ha ha."
News of the second video spawned a new wave of online reaction — not all of it positive.
"After seeing a SECOND incident of that Tyler Rizzi kid fighting with a different security guard, it's clear he's a kook," said a Tweet from an account labelled Ride BMX Magazine.
A poster identifying as Rizzi on Twitter responded more than once to critics Friday and Saturday. "All the people that are talking s--- would have ran away in that situation. Sorry I have the balls to stick up for myself and my friends," one such post said.
mvandongen@thespec.com
905-526-3241 | @Mattatthespec– Julia Greeley was born into slavery in Hannibal, Missouri. But her cause for sainthood was opened on Sunday in Denver, where her life of devotion and service continues to inspire.
“She’s a model for me,” said Mary Leisring of the Julia Greeley Guild.
“We’re all called to be saints, and it just goes to show that an ordinary person can become extraordinary. For some of us, she’s already a saint,” said Leisring, who directs Black Catholic ministry in the Denver archdiocese.
Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila of Denver opened Greeley’s cause for canonization on December 18 at an early morning Sunday Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception.
The U.S. bishops heard the case for her canonization from Archbishop Aquila in November at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual assembly.
Then the bishops unanimously voted to allow the archdiocese to investigate her life and her virtues, marking the beginning of the initial phase of a possible canonization.
Greeley bore slavery’s wounds on her body. One time as a slave master beat her mother, the whip caught her right eye and destroyed it.
She was freed in the 1860s when slavery was abolished.
Around 1880, she traveled to Denver and served as a housekeeper for Colorado’s first territorial governor William Gilpin and his wife Julia.
Greeley converted to Catholicism at Denver’s Sacred Heart Parish. She became devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to the Eucharist. She joined the Secular Franciscan Order in 1901 and helped spread the Sacred Heart devotion to Denver’s firefighters, among many others.
Despite her meager income, she was famous for aiding her neighbors in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood.
Wearing a floppy hat, oversized shoes, and dabbing her bad eye with a handkerchief, Greeley was regularly seen pulling her red wagon of goods to deliver to the poor and homeless of the city. She often did this at night to avoid embarrassing the people in need of assistance.
She died June 7, 1918, the Feast of the Sacred Heart. A constant stream of people paid their last respects to her.
Because she was born into slavery, her exact age was never known. She was estimated to be 80 years old.
When the first phase of the investigation into her possible sainthood concludes, the archdiocese’s investigators will send a report to the Vatican. The Pontifical Congregation for the Causes of Saints will decide then whether to continue the process.r
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Translator: TranslationChicken
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Editor: TranslationChicken
(Thank you Roanz, Kizarat, Chris, Ahbahl, Fox, Bagel, Vimal, Lucky, Relaxing Gaming, Rodolfo, Ben for helping me with proofreading on the Live Draft! <3)
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ALL RIGHTS BELONG TO TAPPEI NAGATSUKI, THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR OF RE:ZERO, THIS IS A TRANSLATION OF THE FREE JAPANESE WEB NOVEL INTO ENGLISH
JAPANESE WEB NOVEL SOURCE: HTTP://NCODE.SYOSETU.COM/N2267BE/225/
Previous Part 2/3: https://translationchicken.com/2017/12/29/rezero-arc-4-chapter-59-sweet-pastries-and-unsweet-stories-part-2-3/
===
It had only been the fourth day since Subaru left for the Sanctuary. The ungodly amount of information he had gathered in so short a time was shocking, but Frederica’s eyes widened even further when she heard Subaru’s question.
[Frederica: No, I don’t know the details. I understand that the Sanctuary was created by the late Witch of Greed in order to conduct some sort of experiment, but……]
[Subaru: You don’t? Really? You sure you don’t want to change your answer?]
[Frederica: I wouldn’t know what you are suspecting of me, but my answer will not change. The Sanctuary had been the Witch’s experimental grounds and the Boundary drawn by the Witch still stands, not to be dispelled until the Trials are completed. That is as much as I know]
In closing, Frederica slowly shook her head. Subaru had no way to verify whether she was telling the truth, but she didn’t appear to be be lying.
In other words, Frederica didn’t seem to know the truth about the immortality experiments. That would also mean that she had no idea about the byproduct of those experiments,
[Subaru: Wait. Then, Frederica…… you don’t know anything about the command authority used to control the replicants?]
[Frederica: Repli……cants? No, I’ve never heard of such a thing]
Her denial was in the same vein as before.
Hearing her answer, Subaru fell speechless as he relinquished his weight onto the sofa.
[Frederica: My apologies. It seems my answers did not meet your expectations]
[Subaru: No, no it’s fine. It’s not your fault…… Frederica, how many years ago was it when you left the Sanctuary? If you don’t mind me asking?]
[Frederica: It was about seven years ago when I left the Sanctuary to serve in the Mansion. Ram arrived a little later than I did, so you could say I am the oldest servant here]
Rem’s name was not among Frederica’s reminiscences, nor did the extent of her knowledge of the Sanctuary change from the previous loops.
Letting out a sigh, Subaru decided that the likelihood that Frederica was withholding information from him was nearly zero. Despite changing his approach, her answers remained the same, which could only mean that they were probably true.
Frederica had no knowledge of the immortality experiments, and was probably unaware of the Lewes replicants as well. Either the Leweses were able to seamlessly hide their daily rotations, or the meticulous Frederica today used to be more of a klutz when she was younger.
[Subaru: But then, what about Garfiel? When did that guy find out the truth about the Sanctuary……?]
If Garfiel held the command authority over the replicants, he must have known about the facility. Even if not for that, he was most likely the one who destroyed it afterwards.
There was no doubt that Garfiel knew about the experiments conducted on Lewes Meyer. If he knew this while his older sister didn’t, then he must have found out after his sister had left the Sanctuary. Or, perhaps, it was because he knew that he chose to stay behind?
[Subaru: ――Ah]
Coming to that thought, Subaru suddenly noticed the crucial piece he had overlooked. The moment he realized this, he simply couldn’t believe his own stupidity.
[Subaru: If that guy holds command authority over the replicants, then doesn’t that means he’s met the same conditions I did? That means, that guy’s also considered an Apostle of Greed, doesn’t it……]
That is to say, there needed to be no better proof that Garfiel had met the Witch of Greed, Echidona.
Subaru hugged his head, resenting the fact that he didn’t realize this earlier. If Garfiel had met with Echidona, that would explain why he was the one holding the command authority. Whether it was his prejudice against the Trials or his empathy towards Emilia’s failures, that would explain all of it.
[Subaru: Frederica. ――Garfiel challenged the Trials before, didn’t he?]
[Frederica: ――! How did you-]
[Subaru: It’s only because all sorts of clues were pointing to it that I managed to get there. Though of course, I’m guessing he failed…… but what exactly happened?]
An affirmation from Frederica was as good as Subaru wrapping his fist around the central piece of the puzzle.
Letting out a sigh in front of Subaru’s excited pursuit, Frederica closed her eyes as if to draw from the depths of her memories.
[Frederica: ……I am not the only one who wished for the Sanctuary to be liberated. There was a time when my little brother also strived so that grandmother and the others could one day see the outside world. My brother was very young then, when he sneaked into the Tomb to challenge the Trials. And I remember how jealous I was of his recklessness]
[Subaru: Frederica… have you ever gone in there?]
[Frederica: I myself never had the courage to do so. Even though I knew that passing the Trials would mean the liberation of the Sanctuary, I was always told that I cannot go in there. That was why I was so envious of my little brother when he ran straight inside]
He could almost see it.
Even more reckless than he is now, the young Garfiel must have gone into the Tomb full of confidence for only the simple desire to let those he cared for catch a glimpse of the outside world.
But,
[Frederica: When my little brother didn’t come out, I was so regretful that I didn’t stop him that I went to find grandmother…… and though grandmother also hesitated for a moment, she decided to go in after him. I sat there praying, and, after a short while, she brought my little brother back to me. But…]
――Do not go into the Tomb again. Forget everything you saw today and never speak of it to anyone.
That must have been what Lewes asked of her.
Listening to this story, Subaru recalled the contradictions in Lewes’ words from before. There was the Lewes who claimed to have entered the Tomb, and the Lewes who claimed she never did.
It was only when he learned of the existence of multiple Leweses, coupled with the constraint that they cannot lie, that this contradiction was resolved.
And, it was only after the present conversation that he realized,
[Subaru: Garfiel had challenged the Trials. And there, he must have met the Witch of Greed. All sorts of things are finally starting to make sense…]
Why Garfiel felt the way he did towards the Trials, and why the command authority was in his hands.
The question now was what he saw in his “Past”, why he wanted to stop Subaru from liberating the Sanctuary, and why Echidona never told Subaru about Garfiel. The answers to all of them lay inside the Tomb.
[Subaru: I’ll definitely need to see Echidona at least one more time…]
And expose every secret that all-knowing Witch tried to hide from him.
Subaru quietly made up his mind as Frederica watched him in silence.
Sensing her gaze, Subaru scratched his cheek and muttered [Sorry],
[Subaru: For all sorts of things. And for asking you questions you didn’t want to be asked]
[Frederica: It’s fine. I know it is necessary. I’ve received such orders from the Master as well. If telling you this…… could help Emilia-sama liberate the Sanctuary, then I don’t mind at all]
[Subaru: The Sanctuary will definitely be liberated. There’s a reason I have to make sure that it comes to pass, and I’ll use any means necessary to do it. But as for how much of that matches Garfiel’s plans for it, I’ll have to put that lower down the list]
[Frederica: …………]
[Subaru: I have no idea what Garfiel’s thinking. In the worst case, he’ll be against me at every turn, but I won’t make any compromises. As much as I should apologize, it will be for the greater good]
In order to forestall the disasters approaching the Mansion and the Sanctuary, Subaru must sweep aside everything that stood in his way.
Listening to Subaru’s answer, Frederica firmly closed her eyes once more,
[Frederica: Please take care of my no-good little brother]
――She lowered her head and replied.
-=Chapter 59 End=-
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Next Chapter: https://translationchicken.com/2017/12/31/rezero-arc-4-chapter-60-a-tale-of-the-end-of-the-end-part-1-3/
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Let me know if you find typos ❤
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Chapter 60 Live Draft:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/re-zero-arc-4-60-16135563
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Next Chapter: https://translationchicken.com/2017/12/31/rezero-arc-4-chapter-60-a-tale-of-the-end-of-the-end-part-1-3/Andrea Rodriguez, The Associated Press
BAINOA, Cuba -- Some people keep guinea pigs or hamsters as pets.
But in Cuba, where a larger, more exotic rodent runs wild, Ana Pedraza and her husband prefer the hutia.
With a rope-like tail and long front teeth, the hutia looks like a giant rat, only cuter, some would say. They live in Cuba and other Caribbean islands where they are sometimes hunted for food.
But Pedraza and her husband Rafael Lopez say they only want to want to protect and take care of the animals, which measure nearly a foot long (about 30 centimetres), with the largest ones weighing in bigger than a small dog.
The couple began collecting hutias about five years ago when they found one languishing on a roadside and named her Congui. They found her a mate and now have more than a half-dozen hutias in their home about 25 miles (40 kilometres) east of the capital, Havana.
Congui and her brood like to drink sweetened coffee and munch on crackers and vegetables. Her son Pancho enjoys an occasional nip of rum.The Simple Guide To London Olympic Venues
A great guide to help you understand the venues that are going to be used during the London Olympics. We look at the Olympic Park which has the Stadium, Copper Box, Basketball Arena,Velodrome and others. We tell you about Earls Court the Excel arena and many other locations, such as Old Trafford and Weymouth. Providing you with information on how to get there, areas of interest around the area. More
This ebook is designed to help you get the most out of your visit to the London Olympics. Everything you need to get to your Olympic is all here in one book. The layout is designed so that you see the venue and the general area of London it is in. A short description is followed by the best way to get to your venue, National Rail, London Underground or Dockland Light Railway (DLR). Links to other methods such as the London Overground, bus/coach services, river or park and ride. Several areas of interest in close proximity to the venue are also provided. London is a beautiful city so you may even have the opportunity to walk or cycle. There are lots of links in this ebook, usually I dislike doing this but as this is a guide and many of you will want to discover other things I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Enjoy.BabyMetal were the big winners of the 5th Annual Loudwire Music Awards, triumphing in three categories in the fan-voted polls.
First off, BabyMetal's "Road of Resistance" was voted Best Metal Song of 2015 by an overwhelming margin. There were 20 nominees in total, and "Road of Resistance" managed to acquire more votes than all the other nominees combined. Featuring DragonForce members Herman Li and Sam Totman, "Road of Resistance" came through with over 78 percent of the popular vote.
BabyMetal's dominance continued into our Best Live Act of 2015 category, beating all fellow nominees combined once again. BabyMetal toured the world in 2015, hitting Japan, North America and plenty of European countries, further securing their ever-expanding fan base. No band came close to beating BabyMetal in the vote, with the act racking up over 75 percent of the vote.
Japan's newest metal sensation also seized the vast majority of votes in our Most Devoted Fans category. In the most heavily voted category of the 5th Annual Loudwire Music Awards, BabyMetal came out on top, gaining over 58 percent of the total ballots.
Congratulations to BabyMetal and their legions of hardcore fans for all three Loudwire Music Awards victories!First, Celestia isn't that stupid, that blind, or that weak.
Chrysalis is that good an actress, was able to ad-lip through any OOCs that even Twilight even when she suspected something, never once thought 'impostor' and was even able to play an attempt to expose her to her advantage, and Shining Armor's true love to Cadence was indeed stolen and sucked up by Chrysalis DID power up Chrysalis that much.
So please stop downgrading Chrysalis just to make Celestia look incompetent.
Second, Celestia is NOT responsible for Luna becoming Nightmare Moon. That was Luna's own choice to give into her jealously and anger (like all of us). Her sins are her own. Celestia was using six Elements when before she had only had to qualify for part of them (since it's implied she share their use with Luna before, who was now evil), so no wonder she wasn't able to use them at their true power to heal her sister.
If she had told Twilight the full nature of her plan, it would have resulted in Twilight Sparkle (as she was at the start of G4) treating it as a science project and any friendships she forged would have been artificial and IMHO resulted in the Elements not recognizing a friendship that was only genuine on one end, since for Twilight the friendships would have been just a means to an end.
With Discord, the Elements were now bound to Twilight and her friends, so Luna and Celestia facing Discord was no longer an option.
And please excuse me for going on a meta-level, but remember there is only so much you can show and explain in a half-hour cartoon, and the writers only have so long to edit before something needs to air, and changes from Hasbro can come at any moment, and that Celestia's role in the show, IMHO, is to serve to the idea that there ARE authority figures you can and should trust (like parents, teachers, etc) until proven otherwise, (this is purely my opinion and in no way canon or a final say, and just my point of view on the subject).
So please, to those out there, please stop trying to paint Celestia as the picture of incompetency.
This is just a personal MLP:FIM venting. Just me blowing off some steam. Feel free to not read if that sort of thing offends you. (No, I have not seen Equestria Girls or Season 3 yet).KENOSHA, WI —A Carthage College sophomore from Munster, Indiana, has been accused of performing oral sex and fondling one of his teammates on the football team in a school dormitory over the weekend.
Lawrence Gaines, 19, has been charged with second-degree sex assault-intoxicated victim. If convicted, Gaines faces up to 25 years behind bars, or a $100,000 fine, or both.
According to a report from the Kenosha News published midday Thursday, the 18-year-old victim told Kenosha Police he and Gaines had been at an off-campus party. The man said he was heavily intoxicated and passed out in Gaines' dormitory room when they returned to campus. When the man woke up, he was missing his pants and noticed Gaines fondling his genitals and giving him oral sex.
According to Gaines' criminal complaint, the victim told authorities that "he figured since (Gaines) was his friend, he would take care of him if he was drinking."
Read the story and see courtroom photos from the Kenosha News Here: Carthage athlete charged in sex crime Football player accused of assaulting passed out teammate
According to the criminal complaint, the victim told authorities that he drank two 40-ounce beers and had a couple of shots at the party Saturday night, and that he left the party at about 12:30 or 12:45 a.m. Sunday morning, noting that he left with the same guys he went with. He told authorities when he got back to campus, "he threw up and did not remember much after that."
According to the criminal complaint, when the victim awoke, he found himself not in his residence, but in Gaines' dorm instead. After the incident with Gaines, the victim reportedly stumbled back to his room in tears.
image/shutterstockThe original Mirror's Edge came out nearly a decade ago, and immediately garnered attention with its unique first-person running gameplay. This success was not followed immediately by a sequel, which seems strange for EA (since when does EA leave money on the table?). Instead, it's taken this long to get another Mirror's Edge game, and there's a companion app live in the Play Store in preparation for tomorrow's release.
Mirror's Edge Catalyst will allow more open exploration with the trademark first-person parkour leaping and running. The visuals are getting a big upgrade with the Frostbite 3 engine (the first game was Unreal 3), which powers games like Star Wars: Battlefront and the upcoming Battlefield 1. Since Catalyst is more open than the original, the app will act as a handy map of the city, but that's not all.
One of the key options of Mirror's Edge Catalyst will be the "Social Play" features, allowing players to compete against each other in challenges. The companion app will tie into this, showing you where your friends are in the city, and telling you when your times have been beaten. The app also lets you manage your user generated content and challenges. The game comes out tomorrow in North America, but you can install the app right now, for all the good it will do you.House Republicans have added more than a half-billion dollars to the defense budget, even as Pentagon officials are struggling to meet their target of cutting spending by $487 billion over the next decade.
Lawmakers who added the money say it is needed to restore what one Republican staffer called “phoney” savings the Obama administration claims in its budget for modernizing and maintaining military facilities.
Critics claim the extra cash is a “slush fund” for potential pork-barrel projects in lawmakers’ districts.
Both the defense authorization bill recently passed by the House and the defense appropriations bill currently awaiting its turn on the floor contain the additional funding, described as being for “restoration and modernization of facilities.”
The total across all three armed services is nearly $600 million in the House authorization bill and more than $770 million in the appropriations bill, according to an analysis by defense budget veteran Winslow T. Wheeler, of the Project on Government Oversight, a government spending watchdog.
The annual defense authorization bill primarily deals with policy issues, but contains spending guidelines. The appropriations bill actually allocates the money every year.
Showdown with Senate
The extra half-billion in facilities funding is part of the reason why the House bills would add about $3.7 billion to President Obama defense budget request for fiscal 2013.
The additional funding has set the stage for a battle between the GOP-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate, which is expected to pass bills that reflect the administration’s efforts to reduce the deficit by trimming projected Pentagon spending.
The two chambers’ bills have to be combined before they can proceed to final passage and presidential signature.
The extra half-billion dollars in the House billls “is money without stated purpose or direction,” said Mr. Wheeler, who spent three decades as a Capitol Hill staffer overseeing Pentagon budgets for both Republican and Democratic members of Congress.
“That has slush fund written all over it,” he told The Times.
Congressional staffers insist the money is needed to maintain and repair military buildings.
“The funding provided will support Department of Defense identified requirements for facility upgrades, renovation, and needed improvements,” said Jennifer Hing, communications director for the House Appropriations Committee.
But Mr. Wheeler said that, once the bills are passed by both chambers and the money is appropriated, members of the Appropriations and Armed Services committees will start phoning or writing Pentagon officials with “suggestions” about how the money would be spent on pork-barrel projects at military bases in their home districts.
This process, known as phone- or letter-marking, has largely replaced the now-banned practice of earmarking — where lawmakers would fund pet projects by inserting the money directly into the funding or policy bills.
“Lawmakers can create these large pots of money, then go back and write or call the agency heads to ask them to direct the money to their pet projects,” said Stephen Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, another non-profit budget watchdog.
“If the lawmaker is a senior member of the appropriations or oversight committee for that agency, you can bet [agency heads] will pay close attention,” he said.
‘Phoney savings’
Republican staff aides from both committees said the money is needed to restore what one aid called “phoney” efficiency savings the administration is claiming in its budget.
“They just doubled the amount of time [they estimate for budgetary purposes] their buildings will last, cut the maintenance budget and called it efficiency savings,” said one Armed Services Committee staffer.
“These aren’t efficiency savings, they’re phoney savings.”
“In the end it’s going to cost more to do it that way” because buildings will need to be replaced sooner without the necessary maintenance, the staffer added.
Independent budget watchdogs, however, say lawmakers should provide more detailed guidance to the Pentagon about how they expect the money to be spent.
“In the current budgetary environment, the committees need to be more transparent about why and exactly how they disagree with [Pentagon] budget priorities,” said Laura Petersen, a senior analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Observers say that phone- and letter-marking are bipartisan practices. Although many Democrats voted against the House defense authorization bill, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, supported it.
He said the bill “provides our military with the resources and equipment necessary to accomplish their missions and safeguard national security.”
Officials have long complained about such additional spending, noting that budgeting is a zero sum game.
“When something is added to our budget that is not needed, we are forced to take out something that matters,” Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said this week.
“Deferring maintenance is a fact of life for businesses” in the current economic downtown, said Mr. Ellis.
“It ought to be for government as well,” he added.
In addition to the extra facilities funding, the House bills would also keep billions of dollars worth of National Guard aircraft the administration wants to scrap.
They would also fund the continued production of Global Hawk surveillance drones and restore cuts to purchases of Abrams battle tanks and Virginia-class submarines.
The House budget plan, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, pays for the additional defense spending with cuts to social welfare programs.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Digg Caught Red-Handed Censoring Ron Paul Stories
Self-proclaimed 'digital democracy' expunges articles after just a single bury Prison Planet | January 17, 2008
Paul Joseph Watson UPDATE: After just one bury, this article too was deleted from Digg's upcoming category. The self-proclaimed 'digital democracy' Digg.com has been caught red-handed artificially suppressing and censoring Ron Paul stories by expunging them from the website with just one bury, despite the fact that thousands of other Digg users are voting the stories up. Digg allows users to vote stories up (digg them) or vote them down (bury them). The content of Digg's main page, which receives millions of readers a day, is decided upon this apparently democratic system. For months allegations have been flying around concerning how stories about Ron Paul, which routinely receive well over a thousand diggs, rarely make it to the main page on Digg as a "popular" item. (Article Continues Below) Speculation centered around organized armies of Neo-Con bury brigades that flag each other when new Ron Paul stories emerge and bury them en masse to prevent wider exposure. The fact that hordes of trolls are stomping around Digg acting as electronic thought control police has been widely documented in the past. However, the popularity of Ron Paul is so mammoth that Digg has been forced to employ extra measures of censorship to block hundreds of stories about the Congressman from becoming viral. It has now emerged that Digg has either directly implemented a policy to expunge Ron Paul stories from the website or that it has empowered " |
French socialists presided over bloody colonial wars against nationalist movements in Africa and Asia. Social democracy also took the side of Washington during the Cold War, endorsing ‘the global counter-revolutionary crusade which capitalist governments have been waging since World War II under the leadership of the United States’.46 It should have been possible for social-democratic parties to oppose the anti-democratic policies of the USSR in Eastern Europe, without giving its blessing to equally harmful US interventions in Asia or Latin America.
So far as domestic political conflicts are concerned, Miliband does not consider the selective ‘recoil from violence’ of social democracy to be entirely admirable. Not that he ridicules aversion to civil war, arguing that ‘it is only people morally and politically crippled in their sensitivities who would scoff’ at such a feeling.47 But it can sometimes pave the way for exactly what it is meant to avoid: ‘There are circumstances when the best—even the only way—to avoid civil war is to mobilize all available forces for the struggle, and thus compel the Right to pause and possibly to retreat; and preparing for struggle is also a condition for winning, if a confrontation becomes inevitable.’48
Radical alternatives
Social democrats have often argued that whether or not it would require violence to bring about a socialist alternative to capitalism is academic: popular support for such an alternative is lacking in the developed capitalist societies, and those who remain intransigent opponents of capitalism will also remain trapped on the margins of political life. Against this view (now very much part of the ‘common sense’ which underpins mainstream political debate), Miliband insists that the historical record tells a different story: ‘The notion that very large parts of ‘the electorate’, and notably the working class, are bound to reject radical programmes is a convenient alibi, but little else.’49
This claim is certain to be contested, and requires clarification. First of all, Miliband argues that it would be wrong to identify support for radical change with the desire to carry out an armed insurrection against the state: ‘It may well be that class-consciousness and revolutionary consciousness must eventually come to encompass a will to insurrection... but the will to insurrection which this would entail must be seen as the ultimate extension of revolutionary consciousness, as its final strategic manifestation, produced by specific and for the most part unforeseeable circumstances.’50 To insist that workers must be willing to mount barricades if their support for socialist goals is to be assumed sets the bar much too high, and does not get to the heart of the matter:
The real issue has mostly been the more humane management of capitalism on the one hand, or radical reform on the other. On this issue, it cannot be said that ‘the electorate’ has spoken with an unequivocal voice. In fact, a majority of voters has quite often, especially since WWII, given electoral support to parties precisely committed to programmes of radical reform. The problem does not lie with the voters, but with leaders who do not themselves believe in the radical programmes they find themselves saddled with; and they are therefore all the less likely to defend them with the vigour and conviction which the advocacy of such programmes requires.51
This is not a simplistic tale of ‘bad leaders’ betraying the working class. As we have seen, Miliband identifies the structural features of the bourgeois-democratic state which make it such an unreliable tool for programmes of radical reform. Social-democratic parties which are committed to playing the game of capitalist democracy by its rules, and make no attempt to mobilize their mass support once electoral victory has been secured, will sooner or later be forced to abandon such programmes.
If support for radical reform has been available (not at all times, of course, but frequently enough to be counted on), why have leaders of staunchly ‘moderate’ leanings remained in charge of social-democratic parties? The immersion of these parties in the established political structures is one important factor, as ‘bourgeois democracy greatly fosters ‘moderation’, both in trade union leaders and in parliamentarians of social-democratic disposition.’52 Those leaders come under intense pressure to abandon radical objectives: ‘For those who submit to it, there is advancement, praise, honour; for those who resist it, there is denunciation, often of great virulence, from a multitude of sources.’53
The same hierarchical structure which gives parliamentary leaders a commanding position of authority over their supporters has often been replicated inside the social-democratic parties. Miliband disagrees with the view that all mass organizations are bound to undergo this process, thanks to the so-called ‘iron law of oligarchy’. In the working-class parties of Europe, the development of ‘oligarchy’ has largely been driven by the need for moderate leaders to prevent radical supporters from influencing key decisions: ‘It is easy to see why leaders want and need more power: that power is required in order to contain and defeat the pressure exercised by left activists and others of similar disposition.’54
When left activists attempt to challenge these barriers in a determined manner, the leaders of social-democratic parties have another trump card to play: support from the mass media. Right-wing and establishment media outlets will invariably take the side of the ‘moderate’ leadership against their grassroots opponents: ‘While they may not support with any enthusiasm social-democratic leaders in struggle with left opponents, they can be relied upon to attack left critics with great violence. A climate of opinion is thus created which is highly favourable to leaders, and this is likely to have an effect on large numbers of activists.’55 This goes a long way towards explaining why social democracy has remained under the control of leaders who sometimes pay lip service to programmes of radical reform, while lacking the will or the means to put them into practice.
We have not yet mentioned what may be the most significant reason for the dominance of ‘moderate’ currents within the labour movements of the developed world: namely, the evolution of the Communist parties (CPs) which had been founded to challenge social democracy. The authoritarian nature of the Soviet state, and the subordination of the Communist movement to that state, did much to discredit the whole idea of socialism: ‘One of the great triumphs of dominant classes in the West has been their appropriation of democracy, at least in rhetoric and propaganda; and it can hardly be doubted that Communist practices, from elections with 99.9 per cent majorities to the brutal suppression of dissent, have been of the greatest help in the achievement of this appropriation.’56
Regarding the CPs themselves, Miliband identifies two key deformities, ‘their total subservience to Stalin’s policies and purposes... [and] closely related to this, their mode of organization... the combination of sectarianism and opportunism which characterized Stalinism, together with sudden changes of policy imposed from Moscow, blighted their politics and blunted their political effectiveness.’57 While the CPs of Western Europe began to distance themselves from Moscow after Stalin’s death, and could no longer be described as ‘subservient’, their internal structures remained deeply marked by the Stalinist era. Whatever liberalization did take place was strictly circumscribed:
There was a time, not so long ago, when the need for discipline was invoked to silence all criticism inside Communist parties, and to expel the critics. This is no longer the common practice. Criticism is tolerated, so long as the critics do not try to render themselves effective by seeking to come together, and by together pressing their views upon the party... the contradiction is blatant between Eurocommunist protestations of commitment to democracy on the one hand, and commitment to undemocratic practices inside Communist parties on the other.58
The association of Communism with the most repulsive features of the Soviet dictatorship, and the tight regimentation imposed by CPs on their own members, proved to be extremely damaging in the contest with social democracy that spanned much of the twentieth century. Countless people who might have found a radical alternative to the social-democratic parties attractive were alienated by the actually existing Communist movement.
Revolutionary reformism
The deficiencies of the Communist parties prevented them from playing the role desired by Miliband as the agents of ‘revolutionary reformism’. This apparently paradoxical term calls for explanation. While Miliband firmly insists that mass support has been available for radical change in the developed capitalist world, he is careful not to exaggerate the revolutionary character of this backing: ‘It is undoubtedly futile to expect any large measure of popular support for programmes whose central premise is that a clean sweep must be made of everything to do with the existing social and political order, so that it may be replaced by a totally new social order whose shape and character tend to be only very loosely and vaguely sketched out.’59
For Miliband, account must be taken of ‘the extremely strong attraction which legality, constitutionalism and representative institutions of the parliamentary type have had for the overwhelming majority of people in the working-class movements of capitalist societies’.60 He describes the ‘rejection of insurrectionism’ as ‘the largest and most important fact about the working class in advanced capitalist countries since 1918’.61 This does not mean that the working class has been uncritically supportive of the existing political regime in those countries:
The rejection of insurrectionism must not be taken to signify an enthusiastic endorsement of bourgeois democracy, parliamentarism and representative institutions. On the contrary, there is very deep and widespread scepticism about all of this, and the chances are that it has always been so. For the working class in general, it is probably the case that ‘politics’ has been a term charged with many negative and suspect connotations. But this scepticism about bourgeois politics has never meant any kind of commitment to its obverse, namely the politics of insurrection and violent revolution.62
It was this popular rejection, rather than the dictates of Moscow, which drove the Communist parties of Western Europe to abandon insurrectionary politics. To be sure, the Soviet leadership encouraged this turn for its own reasons, but ‘if it had not corresponded to very powerful and compelling tendencies in the countries concerned, the abandonment of the strategy would have encountered much greater resistance in revolutionary movements, notwithstanding Moscow’s prestige and pressure and repression’.63 If insurrectionism is off the agenda, what, then, is the nature of the alternative suggested by Miliband?
‘Revolutionary reformism’, he argues, will involve ‘intervention in class struggle at all point of conflict in society, and pre-eminently at the site of work. It also involves electoral struggles at all levels and conceives these struggles as an intrinsic part of class struggle, without allowing itself to be absorbed into electoralism and parliamentarism’.64 A full engagement with electoral politics is required: ‘The alternative, amply demonstrated by long experience, is for parties intent upon radical change to remain confined in a very narrow political space.’65 The belief that it is possible to by-pass the representative structures which already exist, or to engage with them in a marginal and tokenistic manner, is illusory. Radical socialists must take those structures very seriously and build up support within them, while conducting ‘a permanent critique of the limitations and shortcomings of bourgeois democracy, of its narrowness and formalism, of its authoritarian tendencies and practices.’66
Is this not simply a re-packaged version of the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ which dominated social-democratic perspectives in the early years of the movement? Not quite. Miliband is keenly aware of the danger that such electoral engagement will lead to ‘unprincipled compromise, the opportunistic dilution of programme and purpose’ but argues that such perils ‘may at least be greatly attenuated by a democratic, open, responsive party life, with leaders and representatives truly accountable to the members of the organizations which had made their election possible’.67 Nor does his strategy rule out extra-parliamentary struggles—in fact, they are to play a critical role in socialist advance.
Perhaps the most crucial difference is that Miliband’s favoured course ‘does not postulate a smooth and uneventful transition to socialism by way of electoral support and parliamentary majorities. It acknowledges that, in the context of capitalist democracy, such a transition requires a massive degree of popular support and commitment... ‘revolutionary reformism’ is also bound to be very conscious of the fact that any serious challenge to dominant classes must inevitably evoke resistance, and will be determined to meet that resistance with every weapon that this requires.’68
The starting-point for a transition to socialism, in this perspective, must be an electoral victory and the formation of a government committed to radical reform. A radical commitment of this nature is essential, as ‘minority participation by the Left in an essentially conservative government is most likely to have as its main result the compromising of those on the Left who enter into it’.69 Any radical government elected in one of the advanced capitalist states would most likely be a coalition, which would need ‘a core, a solid centre; and this would have to be provided by the representatives of a socialist party able to exercise a major influence in the coalition, without any presumption of a privileged position’.70
The goal of socialists should be to establish an economic system ‘where the commanding heights of the economy, including its strategic industrial, financial and commercial enterprises, and some of the lesser heights as well, come under one form or another of public or social ownership, under the scrutiny and regulation of a democratic state, itself strictly accountable’.71 This model would be clearly distinguished from the East European version of a planned economy by its democratic character, but also by the fact that ‘state ownership need not be thought of in terms of single, monopolistic corporations, but rather as areas of economic activity ruled wherever possible on the principle that more-than-one is better than one’.72 Social ownership could assume different forms, and the system as a whole might be termed a ‘mixed economy’—but one in which the balance between public and private ownership was reversed.
As the new government moves towards this goal, initiating far-reaching anti-capitalist reforms that undermine the power of economic elites, it will have to except ferocious opposition. Crucially, this opposition will come from within as well as outside the state system: ‘By far the larger part of the state personnel at the higher levels, and at least a very large number in the lower ones as well, are much more likely to be ideologically, politically, and emotionally on the side of the conservative forces than of the government.’73 There can be no illusion that the machinery of the state will lend itself to radical purposes as readily as if it was called upon to act in defence of the social order. The new government and its supporters must recognize that ‘to achieve office by electoral means involves moving into a house long occupied by people of very different dispositions—indeed it involves moving into a house many rooms of which continue to be occupied by such people.’74
One of the most urgent tasks, then, will be to change the personnel administering the state:
It is not realistic to believe that the project can be advanced if people in key positions in the state apparatus—most of whom could be expected to be ranged in a spectrum encompassing bitter hostility at one end and lack of enthusiasm at the other—were not replaced with people who believed wholeheartedly in it, and who were willing to bend all their energies and intelligence to its success.75
But merely re-shuffling the personnel at the top levels of the state is not nearly enough. Against a powerful alliance of conservative, anti-socialist forces, whose class power will not have been liquidated by an electoral defeat, a radical government can only prevail if it is able to rely on strong popular support. Even that will not be enough, however, if such backing is not mobilized effectively—hence Miliband’s call for a strong partnership between the government and new structures that will give its supporters real decision-making power. A transition to socialism must involve ‘radical changes in the structure, modes of operation, and personnel of the existing state, as well as the creation of a network of organs of popular participation’.76
Miliband uses the term ‘dual power’ when referring to the relationship between these new structures and the state. This is a departure from the original understanding of the term by Marxists in the early twentieth century, who had in mind a situation which saw new organs of working-class power confronting a parliament dominated by conservative forces and seeking to overthrow it. Miliband argues instead that the new structures will be ‘intended not to replace the state but to complement it... the organs of popular participation do not challenge the government but act as a defensive-offensive and generally supportive element in what is a semi-revolutionary and exceedingly fraught state of affairs.’77 Despite their pragmatic origins, the structures of ‘dual power’ should become a permanent feature of the new political order taking shape.
The ‘semi-revolutionary and exceedingly fraught’ conditions which the new government is likely to encounter deserve some attention. We have already noted Miliband’s argument that ‘there are circumstances when the best—even the only way—to avoid civil war is to mobilize all available forces for the struggle.’ He does not believe that civil war is the inevitable outcome of any attempt to uproot capitalist social relations. But he considers it very likely that there will be at least some violent clashes during the transition. Against those who see this as sufficient argument against any project of radical change, Miliband would doubtless point to the routine violence of the status quo, even in the most stable bourgeois-democratic states, which his work carefully itemises. To accept the capitalist order is to accept this violence.
Not that Miliband is one of those radicals who likes to remark that ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’, as if that disposed of the question of violence. His views on the subject are closer to the maxim ‘those who wish for peace prepare for war’. In the aftermath of the bloody coup against the radical Popular Unity government in Chile, Miliband noted that the pacific strategy of its leaders had in fact made the disaster more likely:
Considering the manner of Salvador Allende’s death, a certain reticence is very much in order. Yet, it is impossible not to attribute to him at least some of the responsibility for what ultimately occurred... Allende believed in conciliation because he feared the result of a confrontation. But because he believed that the Left was bound to be defeated in any such confrontation, he had to pursue with ever-greater desperation his policy of conciliation; but the more he pursued that policy, the greater grew the assurance and boldness of his opponents.78
Radicals must be ready to take decisive measures against violent opposition to their project, and ‘it is a typical class logic which denies to a government committed to radical change the powers which all capitalist governments have assumed to prevent radical change and to defend the status quo’.79 Such measures will have to be kept under tight control, however, and peaceful opposition to a socialist government should be tolerated without question: ‘The suppression of all opposition and the stifling of all civic freedoms must be taken to represent a disastrous regression, in political terms, from bourgeois democracy.’80
As it takes shape, socialist democracy must ‘embody many of the features of liberal democracy, including the rule of law, the separation of powers, civil liberties, political pluralism and a vibrant civil society, but it would give them more effective meaning’.81 This will involve ‘the fostering of many centres of power outside the state, in a system of autonomous and independent associations, groupings, parties and lobbies of every kind and description, expressing a multitude of concerns and aspirations woven in the tissue of society’.82 Socialist democracy is bound to assume different forms from one country to the next, just as capitalist democracy does today.
Miliband departs from the view of many anti-capitalist radicals in arguing that the state (albeit a radically transformed one) will not be abolished or ‘wither away’ once capitalism has been eliminated:
The building and consolidating of socialist democracy will long require a state to carry out essential tasks which the state alone can accomplish: for instance, the decisions which must ultimately be made about priorities regarding the allocation of scare and essential resources; the adjudication of a diversity of competing claims in societies where division and conflict, though greatly attenuated, would continue to occur; the ultimate guarantee of civic, political, and social rights which give much of its force to the notion of socialist pluralism; and so on... just as society would check state power, so too would the state, democratically invested with the capacity to do so, constitute a check on the power of popular institutions and agencies.83
Finally, Miliband rejects the claim that any socialist experiment in a single country is bound to fail, due to the globalized nature of the world economy and the pressure which capitalist states can bring to bear against any departure from the established rules of the game. Without denying the existence of a very real problem, he insists that a radical government could overcome economic sabotage ‘if it adopted drastic measures, worked out well in advance of the assumption of office, to protect the currency and the economy from the de-stabilizing operations of financial markets and hostile governments and institutions’.84 While the other capitalist powers would be sure to oppose the agenda of the new government, they do not form a monolithic bloc with a unified strategy: real divisions of interest among those powers could be exploited to create some breathing space.
Moreover, ‘a radical government, confronted with national and international capitalist hostility, would attract a good deal of support from labour and socialist forces in other countries... this support would find translation into pressure upon governments at least to desist from hostile policies and actions.’85 In the period before the assumption of power, it would be essential, to establish close bonds with progressive forces in other states, making it easier to organize solidarity action across national boundaries. The problems raised by the global nature of capitalism ‘are not insuperable, provided that the government has the will to overcome them. Will alone is not enough: but it is the absolutely indispensable point of departure.’86
Capitalism or freedom
After Ernest Mandel’s death in 1994, Robin Blackburn recalled the last time he saw the Belgian revolutionary speak in public, at a debate with Felipe Gonzalez three years earlier:
The Spanish Prime Minister unwisely elected to lecture Mandel on the virtues of constitutionalism and respect for human rights. Mandel drew a stark picture of the plight of Europe’s thirty million unemployed and attacked social democracy for its capitulation to the deflationary dictates of the Bundesbank. He also drew attention to the contradiction between Gonzalez’s oration and the fact that several thousand young pacifists were languishing in Spain’s jails as he spoke. There can have been very few in the hall, or watching on TV, who did not see the frail, seventy-year-old Ernest Mandel as the vigorous and principled defender of socialism and Gonzalez as the miserable, compromised prisoner of power.87
Having narrowly escaped death in the Nazi camp system during the Second World War, Mandel was hardly likely to under-estimate the differences between bourgeois democracy and the worst forms of authoritarian rule—indeed, he was always careful to reproach socialists who failed to appreciate such differences.88 But Mandel never ceased to maintain that ‘private property and capitalist exploitation... result in the violent restriction of the practical application of democratic rights and the practical enjoyment of democratic freedoms by the big majority of the toiling masses, even in the most democratic bourgeois regimes’.89
The control over economic production exercised by the big capitalist firms is itself an affront to democracy, and greatly limits the power of citizens to influence the state through the ballot box: ‘In the face of so-high powered a concentration... the relationships between parliament and government officials, police commissioners and those multi-millionaires is a relationship burdened very little by theory. It is a very immediate and practical relationship: and the connecting link is the pay-off.’90 Like Ralph Miliband, however, Mandel does not see the disproportionate influence of the capitalist class over state policy merely as a reflection of its much greater resources. The bias is firmly rooted in the character of the state itself:
The power of the state is a permanent power. This power is exercised by a certain number of institutions that are isolated from and independent of so changeable and unstable an influence as universal suffrage... the state is, above all, these permanent institutions: the army (the permanent part of the army—the general staff, special troops), the police, special police, secret police, the top administrators of government departments (‘key’ civil servants), the national security bodies, the judges, etc.—everything that is ‘free’ of the influence of universal suffrage.91
The selection process ensures that people in the top ranks of the state system are likely to come from a narrow social background. This is true even when entry to the civil service is determined by apparently ‘meritocratic’ examinations: ‘There’s a progression in these examinations that gives them a selective character. You have to have certain degrees, you have to have taken certain courses, to apply for certain positions, especially important positions. Such a system excludes a huge number of people who were not able to get a university education or its equivalent, because equality of educational opportunity doesn’t really exist.’92
Even if men or women from a humble background are able to clear these hurdles, they will ultimately be ‘absorbed and integrated into the bourgeois class, even if only through the size of their incomes and the inevitable accumulation of capital to which they lead’.93 The ideological conformity of the state elite will also be ensured by the simple fact that they have to perform roles that are difficult to reconcile with a progressive or socialist outlook: ‘One cannot be an effective prison guard desirous of promotion if one systematically organizes escapes of prisoners; history has never know a convinced and practizing pacifist chief of staff.’94
The bourgeois-democratic state can be seen as an arbiter between different social interests, but ‘the arbiter is not neutral... the top men in the state apparatus are part and parcel of the big bourgeoisie. Arbitration thus does not take place in a vacuum; it takes place in the framework of maintaining existing class society. Of course, concessions to the exploited can be made by arbitrators; that depends essentially on the relationship of forces’.95 Welfare reforms should thus be seen as tactical moves intended to preserve the social order, which do not change the class nature of the state, and may be retracted when the balance of power shifts once more in favour of capital.
So far, Mandel’s critique of bourgeois democracy is very similar to that of Ralph Miliband. But he introduces another element, arguing that the nature of parliamentary democracy itself helps the capitalist class to maintain its position: ‘The characteristic feature of bourgeois democracy is the tendency towards atomization of the working class—it is individual voters who are counted, and not social groups or classes who are consulted.’96 As Mandel elaborates: ‘Within indirect representative democracy the ‘citizen’—including the wage-earning citizen—is an atomized and alienated individual, subject to the thousand and one pressures not only of bourgeois ideology but also and more important of patterns of labour and consumption which are fashioned by capital and dominate his entire existence.’97
In the course of the struggle for socialist democracy, this atomization will be transformed by the growth of new political structures:
Once the self-organization of the masses is set in motion, and varied mechanisms of direct democracy are created, the ‘citizen’—and primarily the wage-earning citizen—is no longer isolated and is less and less alienated. He becomes conscious of his strength through force of numbers. He transcends his individual prejudices by participating in collective decision-making. He is not content merely to drop a slip into a ballot box. He participates in processes of decision-making, in the application of these decisions, and the verification of their application.98
Mandel’s argument for ‘council democracy’ will be explored further in the final section summarizing his views on the transition to socialism. It forms a critical part of his arguments against bourgeois democracy—from Mandel’s perspective, it is not just the uneasy co-existence of an elected government with the power of big capital that compromises parliamentary democracy. Its structure is inherently flawed, quite apart from the class context in which it has to function.
The illusions of reformism
Mandel describes reformism as ‘the illusion that a gradual dismantling of the power of capital is possible. First of all you nationalize 20 per cent, then 30 per cent, then 50 per cent, then 60 per cent of capitalist property. In this way the economic power of capital is dissolved little by little’99. This perspective is entirely lacking in realism, because the capitalist class will react furiously to ‘any real shift of economic power away from the banks and the big monopolies... such a reaction generally takes the form of massive capital flight, investment strikes, sabotage of production, and organized runaway inflation; and it takes the form of preparation for a violent overthrow of the political regime’.100 In the face of such militant opposition, a left government must either radicalize its programme, taking swift action to break the power of capital altogether, or retreat. The normal course followed by social democracy has been one of compromise and accommodation to the capitalist order.
If the permanence of the capitalist system is accepted by left-wing parties, this inevitably limits the scope for reform. The best opportunities for social democracy have opened up at a time when dominant classes feared that their power might be broken altogether unless they made concessions. This explains why the period immediately after 1945 saw extensive reforms adopted in Western Europe: ‘The war had exacerbated social contradictions and radicalized the popular masses. The bourgeoisie and its power structures emerged discredited by the whole of their conduct during the war. Radical reforms were the minimum price to pay to avoid revolution.’101 Even at such a promising moment, social democracy had to pay a heavy toll in return for the acceptance of reform, lining up behind US capitalism in its clash with Moscow and sharing the responsibility for colonial wars:
There was a way open for the social-democratic leaders to refuse to take on joint responsibility for the Cold War in Europe, while avoiding the Stalinist model: to opt for a workers’ state based on the widest pluralist socialist democracy, maintaining and extending democratic political freedoms. They deliberately rejected this choice. They accordingly bear the responsibility, except in the neutral countries, of having supported the imperialist Cold War.102
The Cold War itself was another factor prompting greater openness to reform, as the western capitalist powers wished to reduce the attraction of the Soviet model: no return to the conditions of the Great Depression could be tolerated. The long period of economic growth that followed the war provided the necessary space for increases in wage rates and social spending.
At one time or another, capital and labour may strike political bargains that involve concessions to the latter. But there can be no permanent ‘social contract’, still less social peace: ‘Periodically—not permanently, not at the same time in all countries—a sudden sharpening of the class struggle is unavoidable under contemporary capitalism. It results from the combination of many factors, which do not necessarily coincide with economic depressions, although the decline of the rate of profit and the sharper economic contradictions make new reforms unacceptable to the system as such and force it to retract some gained in ‘better times’.’103 If economic expansion creates more space for reform, the contraction which must eventually follow does the opposite:
Historically, the development of those public services in bourgeois society from which the toilers primarily benefit is always linked to periods of rapid expansion of production, incomes, and capitalist profits... the capitalists can make these concessions only when the economic situation is good. To hope for such increases of social services in an atmosphere of economic crisis and decline in the rate of profit is an idle illusion. The only sort of public spending the bourgeoisie seeks to increase in such an atmosphere is direct and indirect subsidies to capitalist companies.104
Having retreated from any ambition to replace capitalism with a socialist economic system during the post-war ‘Golden Age’, social democracy was caught unawares by the global recession of the 1970s and forced to abandon reforming goals that clashed with the need to restore profitability: ‘Imprisoned by their desire to run the economy in a purely ‘technical’ way, the socialist leaders approached the depression without any overall economic project that was fundamentally different from the project of big capital. Indeed for a long time, they obstinately denied the reality of the depression, or minimized its extent. This led them to endorse the austerity policies advocated by the bourgeoisie. In the countries where they were in power, they took the initiative themselves in implementing these policies.’105 Social-democratic parties have now become complicit in the erosion of reforms which they helped bring about themselves at an earlier stage.
Stalinism and Euro-communism
The Communist movement which offered an alternative to social democracy was severely compromized by its subordination to the USSR. Writing in the 1970s, Mandel referred to ‘the hideous mask the privileged and oppressive bureaucracy of the Soviet Union has clamped on socialism for decades’.106 That ‘hideous mask’ largely determined popular views of Communism during the hey-day of Soviet power. The ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union ‘transformed the Communist parties from instruments of socialist revolution and defence of the world proletariat into instruments of the policies and interests of the USSR’.107 It would be many years before they were able to function autonomously, and Communist links with Moscow were only sundered altogether by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
When discussing the turn of the European Communist parties towards a parliamentary, reformist strategy from the 1930s onwards, Mandel assigns a much higher responsibility than Ralph Miliband to the dictates of Soviet policy: ‘The CPs made the turn of 1935 out of fidelity to the Soviet Union as they understood it—in other words, loyalty to the Soviet bureaucracy, on which they increasingly depended both materially and politically.’108 This change of direction was not simply a response to political conditions in the countries of Western Europe, but was ultimately determined by the needs of the Soviet Union.
Mandel was a leading critic of the ‘Euro-communist’ project which emerged in the 1970s, as the CPs of Western Europe finally moved out of the shadow of the USSR and began to articulate a line of their own. He summarises their key arguments as follows:
The Euro-communists hope to avoid, at all costs, a head-on collision between the bourgeoisie, with its state apparatus, and the working class and the masses. According to the Euro-communists, such a head-on collision is harmful (it leads to inevitable defeat for the working class), unnecessary (there are other ways to eliminate capitalism), and contrary to the needs of a ‘democratic transition to socialism’ (it forces the labour movement on a road similar to that which led to the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union). Consequently, it is necessary to have a gradual transition to socialism, which respects the basic institutions of parliamentary democracy.109
For Mandel, the idea of a legal transition to socialism, within the boundaries of the established system, is a contradiction in terms: ‘Under the capitalist system, ‘legality’ protects capitalist private property. It conserves and sanctions hierarchy and blind discipline within the army, gendarmerie and police.’110 To respect the law, ultimately, is to accept the continued existence of capitalism, with all that entails. The structures of the bourgeois state must be dismantled, above all its repressive bodies—otherwise they will be used to strangle the workers’ movement.
Nor can a ‘head-on collision’ between the working class and the bourgeoisie be avoided. The Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer had referred to the experience of Salvador Allende’s government as proof that any such confrontation must end in a crushing defeat. Mandel, on the contrary, insists that ‘the Chilean defeat resulted from unrealistic and treacherous attempts to avoid, brake, or fragment mass mobilization, mass self-organization, and mass armament (including organization of the soldiers and systematic attempts to disintegrate the bourgeois army) in the face of unavoidable class polarization and preparation for an armed coup by the capitalists’.111
The orientation of the Euro-communists, according to Mandel, was not simply a case of misguided strategic thinking. He notes the line of continuity between their project and the Popular Front strategy adopted by the CPs at Moscow’s behest in the 1930s and 1940s (the main difference being that the Euro-communists were now prepared to assert their independence of the USSR and criticize the lack of democracy in the Eastern bloc). The explicit adoption of a ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ owed much to the fact that the West European CPs had been deeply immersed in the reigning political system for decades: ‘These powerful positions, and their length of uninterrupted tenure, inside the institutions of bourgeois democracy have led to a phenomenon identical to that which occurred during the 1910-20 period inside classical social democracy: the birth of a Euro-communist labour bureaucracy integrated into bourgeois society.’112
This ‘labour bureaucracy’ was unwilling to adopt a strategy that might endanger its own status, and thus favoured gradualism. It could maintain its dominant position because of the authoritarian internal life of the CPs. At the close of the 1970s, Mandel described the features of that regime as it operated within the French CP in the following terms:
An apparatus of full-time officials largely cut off from the working class and from civil society, which does not see any other way of making a living than within the apparatus itself. A leadership which manipulates the base, which assures its own survival by automatic co-optation of the middle ranks of this apparatus. A right to ‘discussion’ of a base strictly partitioned into cells or local sections—a partitioning powerfully reinforced by the rule of unanimity (of ‘collegial solidarity’) that the members of the leadership observe in their dealings with the base. The myth of the ‘party which is always right’ or the ‘central committee which is never mistaken’, which underpins ideologically the bureaucratic structure.113
A structure of this type gave massive advantages to the leadership and prevented dissenting members from effectively challenging its line. This helps explain the weakness of any challenge to Euro-communist strategies from within the CPs.
Dual power and revolution
Having condemned the strategies of social democracy and Eurocommunism, Mandel must of course have his own answer to the obvious response: what do you propose instead? While he does not reject ‘insurrectionism’ in the same terms as Ralph Miliband, he is quite happy to acknowledge that some models of revolution are not likely to be relevant in the heartlands of advanced capitalism: ‘There are going to be no repetitions of the 1918 German revolution or the 1941-45 Yugoslav revolution... are these particular kinds of revolution the only ones which can achieve the overthrow of capitalism? Are ‘catastrophic’ conditions necessary? No.’114 Mandel puts forward an alternative scenario for a radical break with the status quo:
Workers will become more and more radicalized as the result of a whole series of social, political, economic or even military crises... once they are radicalized, they will launch more and more far-reaching campaigns during the course of which they will begin to link their immediate demands with a programme of anti-capitalist structural reforms, until eventually the struggle concludes with a general strike which either overthrows the regime or creates a duality of powers.115
The French general strikes of 1936 and 1968 are for Mandel classic instances of a working-class protest movement that could have developed along such lines. The road to social transformation does not—or at any rate need |
ers ARCHGOAT give us a small foretaste of what we can expect on their highly-anticipated next full-length album, to be released in 2018. They deliver on this occasion a new EP entitled "Eternal Damnation Of Christ", containing two devastating, brand-new Satanic hymns.
01- Black Mass Mysticism
02- Eternal Damnation Of Christ
You can stream it below :
Eternal Damnation Of Christ by ARCHGOAT
"Eternal Damnation Of Christ" will be released on 7" EP and will be available exclusively on their upcoming live dates (starting in Italy) for the time being.
ARCHGOAT will ravage these stages right on your doorstep, don't miss them!
26/08 - Pori (FI)
29/09 - Parma (IT)
30/09 - Bülach (CH)
01/10 - Oberhausen (DE)
02/10 - Paris (FR)
03/10 - London (UK)
04/10 - Dublin (IE)
05/10 - Glasgow (UK)
06/10 - Manchester (UK)
07/10 - Antwerpen (BE)
08/10 - Arnhem (NL)
10/10 - Berlin (DE)
11/10 - Gdańsk (PL)
12/10 - Varsovie (PL)
13/10 - Wroklaw (PL)
14/10 - Weinheim (DE)A fit of high dudgeon has gripped many of my Republican friends, ex-friends, and soon-to-be-ex-friends now that Donald Trump has all but won the Republican nomination. My advice to them: get over it. This presidential race will look like Alien vs. Predator. I'm for Predator, without a second's hesitation, because he's our Predator. For all his faults Donald Trump would be (and I'm confident will be) an incomparably better president.
I'm not pleased about the outcome of the primaries. I supported Ted Cruz and helped out in his campaign with economic research and news analysis. Yes, Trump is a vulgarian with poor impulse control. I don't like him and find his vulgarity objectionable and his insulting remarks about Mexicans (for example) deplorable. The mother of my children is Mexican, and I take this sort of thing personally. If I ever have the opportunity I will give Trump a black eye.
But there's a war on--three different wars, in fact. To remain neutral is moral cowardice; to choose the wrong side would be downright wicked.
First, there is a war on between Judeo-Christian principles and the political correctness inspired by the Frankfurt School and the French existentialists. Lunatics have seized control of our universities and have stamped out dissent with the zeal and vigilance of the Spanish Inquisition or the Taliban. The distinguished historian Paul Johnson said it best in a Forbes essay:
America has been a land of unrestricted comment on anything–until recently. Now the U.S. has been inundated with PC inquisitors, and PC poison is spreading worldwide in the Anglo zone. For these reasons it’s good news that Donald Trump is doing so well in the American political primaries. He is vulgar, abusive, nasty, rude, boorish and outrageous. He is also saying what he thinks and, more important, teaching Americans how to think for themselves again.
If the foxes haven't yet seized control of the hen-house, they are running the hatchery. With the universities in the hands of the American Taliban, we can't educate a new generation of Americans. Trump is a bitter antidote, but as Johnson argues, he may be the antidote we need. One might add that he's the antidote we deserve.
Second, there is a war on between civilization and barbarism. Hillary Clinton says that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. That's partly her liberal ideology, partly a kowtow to the Arab donors who gave the Clinton Foundation $40 million. Hillary, in short, sells her virtue for both fun and profit. Donald Trump cut through the Gordian Knot of political correctness by proposing a temporary ban on ALL Muslim immigration into the United States, which an absolute majority of Americans supports. After some stumbles about acting as a neutral intermediary between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, Trump has come down unambiguously on the side of Israel, supporting continued construction in the Judea and Samaria settlements (and that's the acid test). It's not just that Trump has a daughter who is a serious and observant convert to Judaism, and that he is surrounded by pro-Israeli advisers: he instinctively despises sniveling, backstabbing losers and likes tough, smart and determined winners.
Third, there is a war over the future of the American economy. Clinton promises more of the same slow suffocation of American enterprise that gave us eight years of under-performance from Obama. Trump offers a supply-side tax plan with a 15% top corporate rate. My old friend and former colleague Lawrence Kudlow thinks it would be a huge improvement, and I agree.
One, two, three. These are the existential issues facing America: our culture, our safety, and our prosperity, and Trump is on the right side of all of them. Well, mainly on the right side: his meandering on the abortion issue outrages religious conservatives like the brilliant Catholic writer Joseph Bottum, a friend and former colleague at First Things magazine. Social conservatives feel offended by his offer to let Caitlin Jenner use the ladies' room at Trump Tower. Trump isn't a social conservative. But those issues are not the purview of the presidency, but rather of the legislature and the courts. Who do you want to appoint the next Supreme Court justices--Trump or Hillary Clinton?
There is also the matter of Clinton corruption on the grand scale, in particular the use of the Clinton Foundation to solicit hundreds of millions of dollars of donations from despicable Third World kleptocrats and their cronies. Peter Schweizer's book Clinton Cash shows that Bill and Hillary are the worst scoundrels ever to crawl out of the cesspool of American politics. What enrages me is not merely their thievery but their sociopathy: They like flaunting the rules, just to show that they can get away with anything. Hillary won't get away with my vote, not unless Hitler or Goebbels were to rise from the grave and run for president against her. Goering, I'd have to think about.
Then there's the matter of foreign policy. Trump is dismissive of NATO and inordinately appreciative of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It's a matter of priorities. Writing in the New York Times May 5, made this noteworthy observation about China's response to Trump:
In China, a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s criticism, he is widely viewed as a pragmatist who is less hawkish and less focused on human rights than Mrs. Clinton is. His proposal to impose high taxes on Chinese goods receives little attention there, and his talk of China’s “raping” the United States in unfair trade deals has been met with shrugs, as if to say that charge is nothing new. Instead, the conversation focuses on Mr. Trump’s business success or his pronouncements on preventing foreign Muslims from entering the United States, an attitude that jibes with the antipathy in much of China toward the Muslim population in the western province of Xinjiang.
Radical Islam is an existential threat to Russia and China, who live in fear that the United States will once again back jihadists to destabilize them, as we did during the Cold War, when the Reagan administration armed Afghani jihadists against their Russian occupiers. One in seven Russians is Muslim. For the past dozen years the American foreign policy Punditeska has proclaimed that Russia would collapse of its own demographic weight. That was calamitously wrong, as I warned in this space. Russia is the last redoubt of the nasty old European nationalism that gave us so much conflict in the past. It is not a revived Soviet empire seeking to conquer the world, but a come-from-behind spoiler, burning with resentment at its would-be relegation to the scrapheap of former great powers. Nonetheless, jihadism is infinitely more important to Moscow than its border with the Baltic states.
Mitt Romney was wrong. Russia isn't the biggest threat to the United States. Russia doesn't want to destroy us. It wants to gain influence and power at our expense. Radical Islam is the biggest threat to the United States. Radical Islam wants to destroy us. I'm for collaborating with Russia against radical Islam where convenient and thwarting Russia in other matters where it suits us. We have a lot of conflicting interests and some common interests. The right way to deal with Russia is case-by-case. As for NATO: Germany is swimming in tax revenues, but won't spend enough on defense to keep more than one out of four of its fighter aircraft in service at any given moment. I'm for a strong NATO, but we don't have one and can't get one whether we want it or not.
Trump says he'll rebuild the U.S. military and our missile defense in particular, but avoid committing U.S. forces overseas. The neo-conservatives never will forgive him for this. It means that they are out of a job, and when they say that Trump means "the end of the Republican Party," they mean the end of the Republican Party that used to employ them. Robert Kagan and Max Boot have gone to the Clinton camp.
A Trump presidency almost certainly means that Chinese and Russian influence will grow faster and with fewer obstacles than it might have otherwise. That is not entirely a bad thing: the West is too squeamish to deal with the monstrous mess that radical Islam has created. I am not comfortable with Trump's isolationism. If he rebuilds America's military prowess (and especially our missile defenses), as he proposes to do, other errors can be fixed. If we don't restore our military power, nothing else we do will matter. Can you imagine Hillary Clinton rebuilding the American military?
To those who abandon the Republican Party in this hour of crisis, I say: Good riddance! Go now, and never come back. Your bad advice and dogmatic arrogance brought America from a lone pinnacle of greatness in 2001 to second-rate status in 2016, the fastest decline of a dominant power since Napoleon invaded Russia. Go pester the Democrats, and do as much damage to them as you did to us Republicans.One of the thing I love with our music scene, is seeing how deep and how large it is becoming. New bands are popping up every week, and in this summer season, it's the same thing for festivals.
So today, I'm proud to be partnering up for a killer giveaway with a festival I never heard of before (despite being the 3rd edition this year), and what a shame it is for me! Because, yeah, the PsyKA Festival, happening in Karlsruhe, Germany, has a lineup that will surely make a lot of fuzzers drool over it! More leaning towards the Psych side of the Heavy scene, be prepared to expand your mind during 3 days full of psychedelic/acid rock, spacerock, 60/70-retro-rock, post-rock, stoner and desert rock.
PsyKA Festival Vol. 3 Lineup
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More details about PsyKA Festival here :click to enlarge Photo by Monivette Cordeiro
Breaking: Disney union workers overwhelmingly reject #DisneyRaise offer. “We deserve more,” union leaders say pic.twitter.com/OQ22l9ohua — Monivette Cordeiro (@monivettec) December 21, 2017
To the sounds of gleeful cheers, thousands of Disney union workers in Orlando overwhelmingly rejected the theme park company's proposed pay raise, which union leaders called "poverty wages."Workers belonging to six local unions that make the Service Trades Council Union voted Tuesday and Wednesday on Disney's contract offer. Out of the 38,000 Disney cast members that make up the STCU, 9,117 voted against against accepting the contract (93 percent), while 643 voted to move forward with Disney's proposal.When negotiations started earlier this year, union leaders originally wanted an increase for workers to $15 per hour. Out of the 38,000 cast members the unions represent, 23,000 workers make less than $12 an hour, and out of those, 8,000 earn $10 an hour. Disney estimates the average hourly wage for one of its workers is about $13.34 including overtime and premium pay, and its starting wages are almost $2 more than Florida's minimum wage.In its latest contract offer, Disney proposed an increase of 6 to 10 percent raise over two years for non-tipped full-time and part-time workers. That means cast members who made $10 per hour would only get a 50-cent raise in their first year. Other workers who earn more would get a 3 percent raise in the same time frame. Disney also offered its employees a one-time $200 bonus and promised no increase in health care costs.reached out to Disney representatives for a comment, but did not receive an immediate response.Susie Easton, 26, was counting votes one by one with her fellow Teamsters union members on Wednesday at Disney's Contemporary Resort. Easton earns $10 an hour as a parking hostess at the Magic Kingdom after working at Disney for three years. On her salary, Easton can only afford to share an apartment with roommates, but she knows people who can only afford to live in motels. A 50-cent raise wouldn't do much for her – she says she would still have to skimp on food at least one week out of the month to have enough money to pay her rent and bills."It's something, but it doesn't help our path out of poverty – it's not a living wage," Easton says. "It's not fair. We deserve more. Guests come to visit Disney because of the cast members. That's who they're coming to see. That's who's out there making magic for guests. We're doing all the hard work so we do deserve more money."Because workers rejected Disney's offer, the theme park company and the unions will have to go back to the bargaining table. In earlier negotiations, Disney requested a federal mediator."This is a historic day for our union and Orlando," says Jeremy Haicken, president of UNITE HERE Local 737. "Disney workers overwhelmingly said we deserve more, our families need more, Central Florida needs more. We're going to go back to back to the table next year, and we're going to demand more."In a statement, a Disney spokesperson said the company was "disappointed" in the union vote."We are disappointed that the union rejected our fair and reasonable offer of a 6 to 10 percent wage increase over the next two years and we will continue to work with the union on negotiations," spokesperson Andrea Finger said.The next trend in hiring managers could be a doozy.
Hall of Fame shortstops, anyone?
Barry Larkin appears to stand a better chance of becoming the next manager of the Cincinnati Reds than Cal Ripken does of becoming the next manager of the Washington Nationals. But both ideas, at the very least, are intriguing.
Article continues below...
Nats officials, at least for the moment, say that manager Matt Williams is safe — the team is not contemplating a change at the end of the season and not considering Ripken as a replacement. The Nats, however, trail the Mets by 5½ games and Williams is struggling to maintain the confidence of his players, other major-league sources said.
The Reds, tied for last in the NL Central, have started rookie pitchers in 26 straight games, something for which manager Bryan Price is not responsible. But how exactly will the Reds sell tickets next season if they trade closer Aroldis Chapman and right fielder Jay Bruce — or for that matter, even if they do not?
John Maroon, a spokesman for Ripken, said, “Nobody has contacted him so there is nothing to consider. If someone were to contact him he might have something to say but as of now this is all media speculation.”
Ripken, however, recently confirmed to ESPN 980 Radio in Washington that he had “serious discussions” with the Nationals about managing before they hired Williams during the 2013-14 offseason, adding, “it never really got down to the point of choice.”
Rizzo is fond of Ripken, sources say. So is Nats principal owner Mark Lerner, the son of managing principal owner Ted Lerner. The Nats selected Ripken’s son, Ryan, in the 15th round of the 2014 draft.
None of that, however, means the team is ready to consider Ripken as manager. Some club officials attribute the team’s disappointing season to a series of injuries to key players; the Nats’ lineup was whole for the first time on Tuesday night, and the team thrashed the Padres, 8-3.
Williams, though, upset left fielder Jayson Werth on Saturday after failing to include the veteran in his initial lineup, sources said. The two spoke, Williams inserted Werth into the lineup, and Werth went 2 for 4 with an RBI in the Nats’ 6-1 victory over the Brewers.
The incident with Werth might have stemmed from nothing more than Williams trying to take extra care with a player who recently missed more than two months with a left wrist contusion. Werth had similar blowups with the team’s previous managers, Davey Johnson and Jim Riggleman, sources said. But Williams’ problems with his players extend beyond Werth, according to others with knowledge of the situation.
Ripken, during his radio interview last week, said, “I think the world of Mike Rizzo. I think he has done a fantastic job. I like how he thinks. I like how he talks. If you’re looking at a potential position, who wouldn’t want their first managing job with a team built the way it was built? It was interesting discussions.”
Does Ripken want to manage?
“I’ll be 55 this month,” he said (Ripken’s birthday was Monday). “If you look at the stages of your life, that’s not old by any standards, so there’s an opening for a lot of things left in my life, and maybe that’s one of them.”
Ripken, if he chose to manage, almost certainly would prefer to stay close to his home in Maryland rather than move to say, the Midwest or West. But the Orioles, for whom he played exclusively from 1981 to 2001, are not expected to replace Buck Showalter anytime soon. And the Nationals, if they dismissed Williams, might not want another first-time manager.
Williams is one of a number of former players who became managers without any previous experience in the position. Unlike most of those managers, Ripken is not recently retired; his last season was 2001. And unlike Twins manager and fellow Hall of Famer Paul Molitor, who retired in ’98, Ripken has not apprenticed as a coach. Still, Ripken as a player had one of the game’s keenest minds, and he has stayed in touch with the majors as a broadcaster for TBS.
In any case, the sight of Ripken in anything other than a Baltimore uniform almost certainly would be jarring to Orioles fans, who took pride in the fact he spent his entire playing career with his hometown team.
Larkin would face no such conflicts if he became manager of the Reds; it would be the equivalent of Ripken taking over the Orioles. Larkin, a native of Cincinnati, spent his entire playing career with the Reds, from 1986 to 2004.
Talk at the All-Star break that Larkin could replace Price before the end of the season proved unfounded. But Larkin in recent months has surveyed former Reds teammates about whether they would join his coaching staff if he became manager, sources said.
The Reds are in a period of transition, “rebooting” with younger players. The recent trades of pitchers Johnny Cueto and Mike Leake and outfielder Marlon Byrd were the first steps in that process. Chapman and Bruce could be the next to go; the team is expected to revisit the possibilities of moving them this offseason.
The question for the Reds then will become if they want Price to remain their manager through such a phase, or if they prefer a fresh hire. Larkin, who managed Brazil in the most recent World Baseball Classic and currently serves the Reds as a roving instructor, would be the obvious and perhaps only choice for a new manager.
Both Price and GM Walt Jocketty are under contract only through 2016. Jocketty, who has made a series of well-regarded trades in the past nine months, is close with owner Bob Castellini and likely will remain in his position.
Price, completing his second season as manager after four years as the Reds’ pitching coach, is a different question. Castellini might not want to replace him when he has a year left on his contract. But the Reds’ current homestand, in which they’ve averaged crowds of 25,981 over eight dates, could be a glimpse of the team’s near future.
Since 2013, the Reds’ average attendance has been slightly more than 30,000 and ranked in the top half in the majors. But the team will lack the attraction of hosting the All-Star Game next season and likely will field a roster that is not expected to contend.
Managers generally do not sell tickets, but the hiring of Larkin would figure to be a marketing coup at a time when the Reds also expect to sign a new local television contract, replacing the current deal that expires after ‘16.
Ripken, likewise, would be marketing gold in Washington.
Two potential openings. Two Hall of Fame shortstops.
It would be a doozy of a trend.My grandmother used to tell me that while painful, mistakes always make the most interesting stories and teach the best lessons. I certainly, do not go out to an account hoping to trash out someones network so I can learn stuff. If that was the case, the only thing I would learn is resume building 101. The one credo I have lived my life by is: "If anything is worth doing, it's worth overdoing" and that includes mistakes. Man, I have made some whoppers! In effort to further the field, purge my guilt and hopefully spin a good yarn, I present to you three big ole network hose jobs brought on directly by my mistakes. The names have been changed to protect me from getting my tail kicked... again... Oops 00x01: Unix file removal So there I am. A fresh IT goober with about 15 minutes of experience. Fresh on the heels of figuring out how symbolic links work and making my own cron jobs, I am pumped up with confidence. So I did the WORST thing a noob can do: I started reading the manual of my beige colored HP-UX server. This is equal to a hypercondriac being restricted to only surf to WebMD. I came across the command rm. I could end the story there couldn't I? Hey IT is all about service, and MY users could easily use more disk space... So I started deleting files with old file dates, thinking IF I made a mistake, I had a backup right? What! That is only the data and not the OS? Where did I put those 900 system floppies... 6 hours of angry calls later... Lesson Learned: Just because you have Read The Friggen Manual doesn't mean you UNDERSTAND The Friggen Manual. Maybe that's why my wife hasn't bought me that; "Physicians Desktop Reference" I have been wanting... Oops 00x02: 911 call centers and redundancy I'm a proud Dad. I admit it. I mean my kids always keep their bail bond under 200 bucks and they only drag race on backroads. Now, part of any dues-paying process for an IT geek is being on call. This on call the weekend, I had to go into a 911 call center to make sure certain jobs ran, tapes where full and just a general system walk through. It's the 911 system so up time is critical. Especially in this town. Man it was so rough they had an ammo reload station at every door exiting the building. So my son wanted to go into work with me. Man...I shed a tear, thinking of my son getting hooked on IT at an early age and going on to develop cool new stuff...(sob) that's my boy! So there I am plugging away in the MMC of my DEC VAX when all the sudden, the screen goes blank. Then it flickers to life, then blank again, then flickers, then blank again. This must be a loose cable on the CRT... a phone started to ring, then two, then all of the lines. The 911 center was offline and as I turned, I saw my son turning the CPU unit rocker switch, OFF then On. He liked that snapping sound it made. Isn't that cute? Luckily VAX is very resilient and only half the 911 center went down. But bringing the other half back up was a HUGE job, made the newspaper and I learned some new cuss words that day. Lesson Learned:Your kid is cute to YOU. Do not bring them into someplace as mega awesome as the data center with all the blinking lights and buttons, then be a irresponsible and not watch them. I have tunnel vision when it comes to troubleshooting...not Dad vision... In short; No kids or magnets in the Data Center Oops: 00x03: Windows is NOT Unix I am not a Microsoft hater. I know that folks need to make money. To me Windows is THE reason that computing is at the level it is now. Let's face it, as geeks we are comfortable with the command line. I believe that many folks would not even have a system if all they had was a Bourne shell. That being said, as a Unix goober, I am guilty of looking at Microsoft systems like I look at a 3 year old's drawing of a dog...awwwww...isn't that cute! It has DNS! Yeah, that punk attitude cost me at a customer bigtime. I was called out to work on a DNS issue. I know BIND well, this is Microsoft, HOW HARD CAN IT BE... I went about updating the zone file directly like I would on any BIND machine and that's where the problems started. Apparently, not all updates are in the main zone file. But in the process of troubleshooting this, I wondered; "why is the DHCPClient enabled on a server with a static IP?" Let's disable that obvious misconfig. Bad idea, seems Windows DNS uses this service to dynamically update it's A, SRV and CNAME record through this channel. A little time passed and all of the sudden folks cannot connect to Exchange! Apparently, the Exchange Global Catalog does not like not knowing where stuff is in the hierarchy. Microsoft Support showed me a Windows command I never forgot: c:
etdiag /v /l /test:dns This showed me which servers have active DNS records. A fail on ANY line is problem. Lesson Learned:Don't be an OS snob. Features may have the same names, but work completely different. Oh and, use the primary interface of the OS. I learned to love GUI on MS. Now back to you! What mistakes have you learned some of your most valuable lessons from? Post 'um in and share the love! As for me, I have to go fix a Unix file access problem... chmod -R 777 / should work right? Jimmy Ray Purser Trivia File Transfer Protocol More than 350 new animal species were discovered in the eastern Himalayas, including the world's smallest deer and a flying frog.
Join the Network World communities on Facebook and LinkedIn to comment on topics that are top of mind.Recording Date -
28 / July / 2013
Music picked by -
[everyone]
The Gang -
Puke, Andrew, Julia, Nick
EPISODE 100!
Welcome to the 100th episode of Puke & the Gang.
This show features clips, interviews, and lost recordings from the past 2 years.
Thanks to all of our wonderful listeners for the support and encouragement to be the most offensive liberty minded podcast around.
Welcome to Episode 100!
Show Intro Compilation
With special appearance by Anthony Harvey!
June 6, 2010 - Sexual Fetishes
Dale, Luthor, and Puke’s Sunday Edition of Free Talk Live is kicked off the air in Keene.
Lost Recording - Nick Invitation
Nick invites Puke and Andrew to the Sunday Edition of Free Talk Live.
March 27, 2011 - The First Time Together
Nick, Andrew, and Puke; a match made in heaven.
April 17, 2011 - Flee Talk Rive
Nick, Andrew, and Puke make fun of Chinese people during the Sunday Edition of Free Talk Live.
June 6, 2011 - A name is born
Nick is not happy with the last FTL Sunday Edition being dubber “Puke & the Gang” on the FTL BBS.
Sometime in 1998 - Nick’s First Show
Young Nick interviews his sister in a closet.
Andrew eats a Strawberry!
Interview - Dale Everett
Claimed creator of Puke & the Gang, host of “Flaming Freedom” podcast.
Lost Recording - Mark Edge
Mark Edge (Free Talk Live) realizes that the Sunday Shows of FTL must be stopped.
Episode 001 - The Nonsense Begins
Puke, Andrew, and Luthor record the very first Puke & the Gang
Interview - Scotty McWilliams
Puke’s Army buddy reveals just how stupid Puke can really be.
Episode 006 - Mandrik
Mandrik becomes the first guest on Puke & the Gang when Andrew sees him in a grocery store and offers a hand job if Mandrik will come on the show.
Interview - Mandrik
Mandrik (some Greek asshole), purveyor of bacon grease at George’s Famous Baklava.
Episode 007 - Double O Seven
The first (and essentially last) themed episode. James Bond, in case you didn’t know.
Interview - Ali Havens
Ali Havens reveals her first impressions of being on Puke & the Gang. She expected a discussion on liberty and Ron Paul. She left disappointed.
Episode 014 - The Little Mermaid
Nick watches Little Mermaid porn while remotely connected to his work computer.
Little Mermaid Porno
BREAK - Bicycle Race
Episode 015 - The First Really Drunk Show
Kelly (Sex, Lies, & Anarchy podcast) keeps a progressively drunker Andrew and Puke on topic.
Interview - Tony Longface
Andrew’s childhood friend reveals all.
Episode 026 - Luthor Gets Angry
We don’t like angry Luthor.
Lost Recording - Luthor Quits
Cue maniacal laughter.
Episode 044 - Julia’s First Guest Appearence
Julia gets her feet wet for the first time. She is not Luthor’s sister, Luthor is her brother.
Lost Recording - Press Release
Julia got a lot of media attention for joining Puke & the Gang.
Episode 046 - The Chunnel
Puke & the Gang invent a new meaning to the word.
Lost Recording - Science
Dr. Stephanie Murphy conducts a scientific study on Puke & the Gang.
Secrets - Nick’s Solo Shows
Nick fills in for the rest of the gang from time to time. We call these Secret Shows. We don’t really know why.
Episode 050 - One Year Anniversary
Booze; and plenty of it!
March 25, 2012 - Bitcoins
Anonymous listener generously donates 10 bitcoins to Puke & the Gang. This pays for our new table and equipment.
Episode 056 - Racial Tolerance
We have none.
Interview - Rainbow McCandypants
Julia’s best friend tells a hilarious tale of debauchery and shenanigans. It will never be told again.
Episode Unknown - Andrew’s Mom
Andrew’s mother makes the mistake of calling while we are recording. Questions of circumcision ensue.
Episode 075 - Cosmo
Andrew’s attempts at hilarity are thwarted by Nick’s complete lack of comedic timing/understanding.
Episode 078 - Liberty Forum 2013
The first live edition of Pukefest is recorded.
POOP!
We love to talk about it.
Episode 077 - Brett Veinotte Poop Anxiety
Brett (School Sucks Project) reveals his greatest fears.
Episode 089 - CVS Poop Anxiety
Andrew can’t find a place to shit!
Episode 095 - Porcfest Poop Anxiety
Shitting in the woods is for the bears.
Episode 092 - Poem
Nick finds a piece of literary genius in his new home.
Interview - Marcus Connor
Marcus (Brainless Tales) forgets that the mic is on; gives his true feelings about Puke & the Gang.
Thank you!
Voice Overs:
Stephanie Murphy ( www.SMVoice.info )
Zeus
Skits / Quips / Interviews:
Mark Edge
Anthony Harvey
Ian Freeman
Ali Havens
Marcus Connor
George Mandrik
Alyson (Canadian) HeartsLiberty
Dale Everett
Mike Stevens
Luthor Miranda
Tony Longface
Scotty McWilliams
Rainbow McCandypants
Puke’s Coworkers
Booze / Food / Fundage:
Mike in Tacoma
Jacob Petlon
Nichole (2%) LaRoche
Joe Sampson
Clip suggestions:
Brad Meyer
Black Jeebus
Tyler Jones
Robert Wence
Thanks to all the listeners/friends that we neglected to mention. We’ve had so much great support over the past two years. We hope the next two (and beyond) years will be just as much fun.
Tell your friends, share this episode, harass your coworkers, click all the buttons!
Outro Plugs -
Lost Recording - Upcoming Guests
Everyone wants to be on Puke & the Gang.
Photos
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The new studio table if finally done!
Huzzah!
Puke approves!
But he doesn’t approve that much.
Andrew getting set-up.
Goodies form listener Jacob P.
Goodies from listener Mike in Tacoma.
Listener Brad’s letter.
Luthor brought moonshine soaked pears.
Everything in it’s place.
Luthor making jerk rub.
Photos of the gang.
Tom brought Piziliziniak something nor other.
Snack!
Julia made cock-ies.
Julia also made carrot cake!
Luthor made grilled jerk chicken.
“You guys want some chicken?!”
The secret marinade gets applied.
Achiever indeed.
Luthor has a left hand.
Ali is a fan of the chicken. So is Kitty, the dog.
Ravage (the studio cat) does tricks for meat.
About to start.
Our studio audience.
Soon strawberries…soon.
Cock cookie compilation.
It’s damn exciting stuff.
Andrew knows what he’s doing.
Andrew eats a strawberry!
Andrew also hates blueberries.
He went for a second one though!
Nick also dislikes strawberries.
Tom finds a new friend.
Luthor is shocked by Ali’s interview.
“I have to cut the cake?”
“Well then prepare for death, cake!”
Almost, but not quite the right technique.
There you go retard.
Mission accomplished.
This is how Colleen and Nick greet each other on the Break Show.
Andrew tries the moonshine.
Nick’s spilled wine ordeal after the Liberty Forum “Pukefest” recording.
Photos taken by Marcus.Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
At a live show Saturday night in Phoenix, former ABC star George Lopez made a joke that someone in his audience wasn’t happy about. “There are only 2 rules in the Latino family,” he said. “Don’t marry somebody black and don’t park in front of our house.” A woman in the front row reportedly stood up and gave him the middle finger in response to that “joke,” and that really set him off.
In a video of the incident published by TMZ, Lopez can be seen throwing the kind of tantrum perfected by high school bullies around the world in which you compensate for an inability to craft thoughtful responses to criticism by repeating obscenities and veiled threats ad nauseam until getting your way.
After noticing the woman standing and presumably shooting him the bird, he says, “Sit your fuckin’ ass down! Sit your fuckin’ ass down! I’m talking, bitch. So sit your fucking ass down!” The rest of the audience loves this, so he keeps going and going, like the Energizer bunny’s haggard older brother.
The profoundly juvenile public scolding understandably becomes too much for the woman to handle, so she and her friends get up and leave. “Four seats just opened up front,” Lopez announces, and the audience cheers.
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[TMZ]
ICYMI, Christie Brinkley is Jesus.
AdvertisementIt's 1996 and four pre-tweens are breakdancing and lip-syncing to hip-hop songs on a South Korean daytime television show. They can't be any older than eight or nine, but they perform with the gusto and professionalism of seasoned entertainers. One is wearing a beanie and baggy jeans like a Wu-Tang Clan Mini-Me. His name is Kwon Ji-yong and he is now known as G-Dragon. A decade after this performance he will go on to become the leader of one of the world's biggest K-pop (Korean pop) bands, Big Bang. But not before he is put through one of the country's famously strict bootcamp-style training programs for idol musicians.
This month, Australians can see the results of this rigorous system, and the idiosyncratic twist G-Dragon and his four bandmates put on the idol genre, as the group tour the country for the first time. Their two gigs at Allphones Arena are set to be the biggest K-pop concerts to hit the city since 2011's star-studded K-pop Music Fest sang and danced to a half-empty ANZ Stadium. Demand for the quintet was so high that the first date sold out in 24 hours, resulting in the almost immediate addition of a second show (the band's Melbourne show at Rod Laver Arena has also sold out).
K-pop band: Big Bang
"To be honest, we were a bit surprised, even though we know that Big Bang are arguably the biggest K-Pop boy band in the world," says Jamaica dela Cruz, the host of TV and radio show SBS PopAsia, when asked about the response to the tour. "It's not so much that we doubted Big Bang's popularity, it's more that we were thinking Australia has a comparatively smaller market, and that international fans are more likely to [go and see them] |
in places like technology magazines and it aimed at the tree hugger demographic. Green Techies already know about the Bolt and its advantages (because they read sites like Electrek). Why not pull a Tesla and call the Bolt what it is: an insanely fun HotHatch that might be Chevy’s quickest car off the line to 30mph – which is an absolute blast to drive. Not only that, it has tons of room in a micro-footprint, has Android Auto/CarPlay, great sound and is great for runs to the store or school.
And hey, after a few weeks, I even started to appreciate its sporty looks.
Tie in Automation and Car/Ridesharing
GM’s Cruise Automation is building a driverless system based on the Chevy Bolt. Why not play that up not just as marketing but make driverless a future upgrade path for the Chevy Bolt. GM is also playing with car sharing with Maven, again with Chevy Bolts. Finally, leverage the partnership with Lyft (again, GM is using the Bolt) here as well.
“Can’t make the monthly payment on the high-end Bolt? Give a few rides a month to make ends meet”
Change Politics so that people can feel good about buying a Chevy
It might sound petty to some but the biggest obstacle I had to buying my Bolt was GM’s politics. I’m not talking about GM’s controversial decision to kill the EV1 here. I’m not talking about the Ignition switch recall which GM knew about for almost a decade yet let over 100 people die. I’m not talking about GM’s lobbying to block Tesla from having dealerships in many US states.
Although that doesn’t help.
I’m talking about GM’s funding of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and Global Automakers. This group lobbies against California being able to have its own lower emissions standards and more importantly it lobbies against the stricter fuel standards that the government already has agreed to.
The group also opposes the Motor Vehicle Owners’ Right to Repair Act for good measure.
This isn’t just GM but just about every major carmaker, inexplicably including those who make EVs.
Why does GM partake in this garbage if it can hold a leadership position in electric vehicles? The optimist says that this is a legacy policy that will eventually change. However, the pessimist says that GM and others actually would rather keep building polluting internal combustion cars and putting their money in the AAM is proof of that.
Either way, GM should drop its membership in the AAM immediately.
Can Pam Fletcher change GM?
GM’s stock price has risen almost 50% since May. Things seem to be heading in the right direction in electrification, car and ride sharing and autonomy. Fletcher is trained as an Engineer along with CEO Mary Barra educated at its own GMU/Kettering Engineering school which is worlds better than being run by marketing people (see Ford/Mark Fields).
That doesn’t mean the transition will be easy and flawless. There are long-held institutions that need to be changed. We wish her the best.This article is over 1 year old
Labor frontbencher describes Queensland convention’s vote as ‘appalling’ and says resolution at odds with multiculturalism
Liberal National party conference calls for ban on headscarves for children under 10
The Liberal National party state conference in Queensland has overwhelmingly voted against a limited Muslim immigration ban but has voted to call for headscarves to be banned for young children.
The main resolution had called for the federal government to ban immigration from countries with sharia law, with those in favour saying it was was “culturally incompatible “ with Australian values.
However, those arguing against it said that immigrants should be judged on a case-by-case basis and are often fleeing persecution under sharia in those countries.
Malcolm Turnbull: 'We've done more in past year than we did in previous three' Read more
Ultimately the resolution was defeated by what the LNP president, Gary Spence, described as an “overwhelming” majority of attendees.
An emergency resolution calling for a general ban on clothing that obscures the face was also defeated, however a second emergency resolution calling for a ban on headscarves for children under the age of 10 was passed.
The delegate moving the motion to adopt the resolution, Brooke Patterson from the Southport State Electoral Council, said she was a P&C member at a local school and had been asked to design appropriate uniforms for young girls that incorporated “sexual modesty coverings”.
“We need to debate this now, otherwise in three months there will be a Muslim uniform in state schools in Queensland,” Patterson said.
Another delegate, Wendy Ko from the Surfers Paradise SEC, argued against the resolution, saying the Liberal National party should be in favour of freedom of religion.
“We shouldn’t even be having this discussion,” Ko said. “I don’t think anyone has the right to tell an Islamic family how to raise their daughter.”
Ultimately the resolution was passed.
The Queensland Labor government frontbencher Leeanne Enoch later on Sunday said she was disappointed by that result.
“I think it’s absolutely appalling, we live in a multicultural society,” Enoch told reporters. “They’re talking about what children should wear in schools – that is the dark ages.”First off we want to say a huge thank you to our Clan for the outstanding success of this years Samhain Release. We are humbled and our hearts are filled with gratitude. We truly have the Greatest Clan EVER!!
Now, we have a couple of important announcements to share with everyone. The first one is bittersweet. 1. No Yule Release -
We will not be doing a Yule Release this year. Due to the overwhelming success of our Samhain Release we still have nearly 100 orders in queue that we are trying to get processed and shipped. And a good majority of them are quite large. We are sorry, but there is no fathomable way for us to have a Yule Release and still get those Yule orders out in time to arrive by Yule morning. And we cannot make any promises that orders placed after today will arrive in time for Yule gift giving. 2. Mystery Plunder Bags -
Once again we will be offering our hugely popular Mystery Plunder Bags. These are plain brown paper lunch sacks filled with one full pound of plunder! These are in very limited quantities and always sell out super fast! So keep a watch for when we announce them. 3. Changes to General Catalog -
Starting in 2017 our General Catalog will look much different. We will be scaling it down to a much more manageable size in order for us to more efficiently process orders and ship them in a more timely manner. Many scents will be moved seasonal or limited edition categories. We announce a final "buy" on the 2016 General Catalog soon where you will have the opportunity to stock up on favorites that will be moved to seasonal categories. A list will be provided in the next few days. Thank you so much for your continued support. We appreciate each and every one of you. Bright Blessings, Donna & MattBeing located in Decatur, Ga., we have the distinct advantage of living just a quick ride away from music mecca Athens, Ga., home to the University of Georgia and one of the country’s most vibrant music scenes. One event that takes advantage of the town’s multitude of burgeoning musicians is Athfest—a yearly music festival held in historic downtown Athens. The annual event hosts local stars as well as national names on s several outdoor stages and in-town venues.
One way the thriving festival supports the local scene? They release yearly compilation CDs, and this year’s is packed with Paste favorites. From Athens staple Patterson Hood to electro-pop outfit Reptar to country-rockers Futurebirds, the compilation is just another reminder of the artistically-thriving city and the kind of music it produces.
You can stream the album in the player below. If you’re around the Athens area (or in the mood for a road trip), be sure to snag a ticket to the CD release party this Thursday, May 3 at Little Kings Shuffle Club. The evening will feature compilation artiss Ruby Kendrick, Sam Sniper, and PAcificUV. Music begins at 9 p.m., and you can RSVP online.
Video Platform Video Management Video Solutions Video Player {SEO} AthFest 2012 Compilation Tracklist:
1. Patterson Hood & The Downtown 13 – “After It’s Gone”
2. Ruby Kendrick – “Do Me Right”
3. The Corduroy Road – “All Around This Town”
4. Hope For Agoldensummer – “Stars Shine Down”
5. pacificUV – “Float”
6. Tumbleweed Stampede – “Lost Boys”
7. FLT RSK – “Before Night Falls”
8. Reptar – “City Of Habits”
9. Casper & the Cookies – “Drug Facts”
10. White Violet – “Everyday Is Listening”
11. Futurebirds – “Megachills”
12. 40th Street Candid Coal People – “Ambivalence In D”
13. Clay Leverett & The Buzzards – “Back To You”
14. Yo Soybean – “An Old War In The New South”
15. Sam Sniper – “Nothing Kills Me”
16. Dodd Ferrelle – “Rain Comin’ Over The Mountain”
17. Ken Will Morton – “Hitting Ditches”
18. Vespolina – “I Don’t Love You
19. Efren – “If My Heart Don’t Fail Me”Donald Trump doesn’t think the election is rigged anymore — slamming recount efforts underway in at least one swing states by his former opponents.
The Commander-in-tweet was back on social media Sunday morning unleashing a digital smackdown on Hillary Clinton, who he said is being hypocritical by joining in on Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s funding of the recount in Wisconsin.
“Hillary Clinton conceded the election when she called me just prior to the victory speech and after the results were in. Nothing will change,” the President-elect tweeted at 7 a.m.
He went on to quote Clinton to point out why the recount is a waste of money.
“Hillary’s debate answer on delay: ‘That is horrifying. That is not the way our democracy works. Been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections.”
His Twitter tantrum extended over the 160-character limit for multiple tweets, causing one of his lengthy quotes to become disjointed.
“We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a -,” one tweet quoting Clinton ended.
It then picked up with, “during a general election. I, for one, am appalled that somebody that is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.”
Trump also quoted her saying that his continued refusal to accept the election’s results during the campaign was “truly horrifying.”
He ended with a quote from Clinton’s concession speech, where she said, “Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”
“So much time and money will be spent – same result! Sad,” Trump added.
Stein has already raised more than $5 million for recount efforts in Wisconsin and has mentioned pursuing others in states that came close including Michigan and Pennsylvania, both of which Clinton lost by a little more than 100,000 votes.
Throughout the campaign, Trump repeatedly said the election was “rigged,” citing voter fraud, a media collusion against him and his own party’s lack of support as reasons why he wouldn’t commit to the final results.
At the final debate back in October, when asked if he would accept the election’s results regardless of the winner, he infamously replied, “I’ll tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense.”We are a cordial bunch here at the Pregamer, but one week a year the gloves come off. It’s HATE WEEK and it’s time to wrap it up with a no-holds-barred, merciless, hide yo' kids, irreverent attack on the terra-takers. What we mean to say is, we’ll say some things the Prairie Poachers won’t like and hope that Joe Mixon isn’t around to [video evidence destroyed].
One of the keys to a successful life is the ability to empathize. Since we are Longhorns, and ipso facto are already successful in life, we are quite proficient in the skill of empathizing. As such, we will lower our station and put ourselves in rival shoes in an attempt to understand what it feels like to be… a Sooner.
Being a Sooner fan feels like when you forgot about that cup of coffee you poured ten minutes ago and now it’s cold.
Being a Sooner fan feels like the opposite of how we feel when that Jim Beam commercial with Mila Kunis comes on.
Being a Sooner fan feels like being awarded a participation trophy.
Being a Sooner fan feels like your bag of chips got stuck in the vending machine, and your arm is just a few inches short.
Being a Sooner fan feels like watching "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader" for Jeff Foxworthy but having a weekly reminder that you must answer no to the title.
Being a Sooner fan feels like your life is a 40-mile commute on Mopac.
Being a Sooner fan feels like being the other Manning brother.
Being a Sooner fan feels like when this week’s new episode is a recap/flashback episode.
Being a Sooner fan feels like Jack did when Kate wouldn’t move over on that floating door.
Being a Sooner fan feels like the alternate timeline where Trump wins the Presidency.
Being a Sooner fan feels like you accidentally liked someone’s Instagram from 2 years ago.
Being a Sooner fan feels like if the next Star Wars movie is bad.
Being a Sooner fan feels like finding out Pluto isn’t a planet, over and over.
Being a Sooner fan feels like when they closed Texadelphia.
Being a Sooner fan feels like the day AFTER the Trudy’s trifecta.
Being a Sooner fan feels like when an airline loses your luggage.
Being a Sooner fan feels like ‘bend over and cough’.
And finally…
Being a Sooner fan feels like living in Arlington, where even the MLB team you house puts Dallas on their T-shirt.
OK, you’re right, we’ve gone too far. In the end you have to count yourself lucky when you have a rival that you can play in a historic and unique setting every year, a rival that you can actually get excited to play when your team is 1-3. We’ve never tasted that Oklahoma Suks beer, but if you have a can handy raise it high and join us in a hearty cheer. To our brothers and sisters up across the river, may your mediocre career keep food on the table, may your cousin be an adequate parent to your children, and may your annual vacation to Oklahoma City treat you to a nice appetizer at Chili’s!
OU sucks. Hook ‘em.
War Tactics
Genghis Khan nearly conquered the world. If not for a few setbacks with his progeny and succession, we may all be speaking Mongolian and eating at the world’s only existing restaurant: P.F. Chang’s. He is unquestionably one of the greatest military minds of recorded history, and one of his favorites in the playbook was the "feigned retreat."
Essentially, the Mongols would simulate panic, fear, disorganization, and convince anyone who wasn’t privy to the gameplan that they were retreating in utter disarray. After drawing out the foe, they would unleash a devastating and coordinated counter-attack to an over-confident and out-of-their-element foe.
Now besides showing off the value of the obviously well-rounded education received at UT, what does this have to do with OU?
When Bobby "Western Xia Dynasty" Stoops leaves Oklahoma--with a team of mainly Texans (49 on the OU roster!)--for the green fields of Dallas, Texas, he will be getting involved in a land war in Asia. And he will come charging after the "vulnerable" Longhorns...but what if it was all a ruse?
What if Nick Rose intentionally missed those kicks and Fumbles McShrimpontheBarbie wasn’t just allergic to catching a snap? What if Walt Anderson is a sworn General for the Longhorn Army and Alan Eck was just following orders? What if ScipioTex was just stoking the flames to really (REALLY) sell it? What if they made it SEEM like TCU was playing against an average 3A high school team? What if Bevo isn’t actually dying of a broken heart? What if this is the greatest feigned retreat in the history of sport?
This was all a part of Charlie’s master plan. Now, in honor of winning out the rest of the season and heading to a respectable Bowl Game, let’s go build the perfect bowl at Genghis Grill. For Genghis Strong.
Oklahoma, a state not blessed with natural beauty in either land or creature, looks to buck that ugly trend with these beauts from Adidaz.
This is Why DKR Banned Xanga:
You may have heard that Twitter was aflutter with Texas bickering this past week. What the LAMESTREAM MEDIA failed to show you was the context around the tweets. The Pregamer would like to issue a formal apology for our instigating role in the distracting headlines. One of these days we’ll learn to keep it in our pants. In our drafts. We meant to say in our drafts.
Better Know a Roster
You know the typical OU fan, now you better know the roster.
Du'Vonta Lampkin (DT, Fr.) - In Spanish, his name loosely translates to "I’Wanta Blumpkin." Not that he’d know that...
In Spanish, his name loosely translates to "I’Wanta Blumpkin." Not that he’d know that... Jack Aubel (LS, Fr.) - Pronounced "Jackable." You could go the #StraightOuttaCompton route, or you could go the sophomoric route here. Regardless, say your kid’s name out loud before finalizing it.
Pronounced "Jackable." You could go the #StraightOuttaCompton route, or you could go the sophomoric route here. Regardless, say your kid’s name out loud before finalizing it. Dakota Austin (CB, Jr.) - The inverse results of CNN’s "Best Places to Live" list.
The inverse results of CNN’s "Best Places to Live" list. Najee Bissoon (S, RSo.) - Literally the best video ever recorded of someone playing the bassoon was Stephen Colbert...not playing it. Cool namesake, Najee.
Literally the best video ever recorded of someone playing the bassoon was Stephen Colbert...not playing it. Cool namesake, Najee. Grant Bothun (WR, RJr.) - If Berman called him Grant "Higgs" Bothun, he’d redeem decades of being the worst, leather.
If Berman called him Grant "Higgs" Bothun, he’d redeem decades of being the worst, leather. Eric Delay (WR, Fr.) - I can already see a bright future for this kid. Attaining the highest possible industry and tax bracket that an OU degree can avail: "Well wur back once a‘gin fer your daily hotakes on Oklahoma BOOMER! SOONER! Football. Only on 94.7, whur we broadcast at 4:59, cuz we don’t wait for no 5-a-clock hour. That’s rught. It’s [Opening chords to "Boomer Sooner" begin] DELAY. OF. GAME."
I can already see a bright future for this kid. Attaining the highest possible industry and tax bracket that an OU degree can avail: "Well wur back once a‘gin fer your daily hotakes on Oklahoma BOOMER! SOONER! Football. Only on 94.7, whur we broadcast at 4:59, cuz we don’t wait for no 5-a-clock hour. That’s rught. It’s [Opening chords to "Boomer Sooner" begin] DELAY. OF. GAME." Derek Farniok (T, RSr.) - Little Lord Farniok.
Little Lord Farniok. Neville Gallimore (DT, Fr.) - this guy sounds more "landed gentry" than "land thief."
this guy sounds more "landed gentry" than "land thief." P.L. Lindley, (LB, RSr.) - I swear I read him in 7th grade English -- which is, ironically, the average reading level for the state of Oklahoma.
I swear I read him in 7th grade English -- which is, ironically, the average reading level for the state of Oklahoma. P.J. Mbanasor (CB, Fr.) - On PBS Kids: P.J. the Mbanasorus!
On PBS Kids: P.J. the Mbanasorus! Matthew Romar (DT, RSo.) - You know what you get when you cross a Romar with a Boomer?
You know what you get when you cross a Romar with a Boomer? Jaxon Uhles (FB, RSo.) - This is the 2nd Jaxon we’ve played in 6 games. Quit rubbing it in, world.
This is the 2nd Jaxon we’ve played in 6 games. Quit rubbing it in, world. Stanvon Taylor (CB, Jr.) - In accordance with his Austrian heritage, it is actually "Stan von Taylor." Okies just naturally assumed it was two first names.
Presidential Watch: Week 6 (17 of 44)
While we know there could never possibly be a president from the state (is it even a state? Weren't we going to demote it to Commonwealth in exchange for Puerto Rico?), the list must be updated.
Josh Adams (RB, FR) - Notre Dame
(RB, FR) - Notre Dame Sam Bush (OL, SO) - Notre Dame
(OL, SO) - Notre Dame Jay Hayes (DL, SO) - Notre Dame
(DL, SO) - Notre Dame Elijah Taylo r (DL, FR) - Notre Dame
r (DL, FR) - Notre Dame Ty Carter (CB, RS SO) - Rice
(CB, RS SO) - Rice Driphus Jackson (QB, RS SR) - Rice
(QB, RS SR) - Rice Cameron Johnson (WR, FR) - Rice
(WR, FR) - Rice Sam Pierce (OL, RS FR) - Rice
(OL, RS FR) - Rice Jalen Jefferson (LB, SR) - Cal
(LB, SR) - Cal Dylan Harding (S, So.) - OSU
(S, So.) - OSU James Washington (WR, So.) - OSU
(WR, So.) - OSU Johnny Wilson (OL, Fr.) - OSU
(OL, Fr.) - OSU Shaun Nixon (TB, RS FR) - TCU
(TB, RS FR) - TCU Cody Ford (OL, FR) - OU
(we even spelled a word the "Okie Way" in case some find their way here)
Forecast Tejas Chaos: The past couple years have not been kind for the Sooner's either, losing some recruiting ground in state to rising competition. They still beat us by 14. That's about as funny as I can get this week. Kyle Carpenter: VY Pump Fake: Guys, I can’t stop streaming Najee songs. What is this sorcery? Now I’ve started a Kenny G song simultaneously. Someone please help. Oh, the game? I’m so mellow I can’t even fight it. OU by 10.
Parting Shot(s)
We couldn't pass up a chance to add a final heaping of We couldn't pass up a chance to add a final heaping of Boomer-Que on your platesA 48-hour national strike in Chile got off to a violent beginning Wednesday when unions and student groups demanding sweeping reforms across education, healthcare and taxation clashed with police. 36 people were injured.
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AP - Protesters supporting a 48-hour strike called by student groups, unions and opposition politicians threw up burning barricades and clashed with police Wednesday to demand fundamental changes in Chile.
The government said 36 people - 19 police officers and 17 civilians - were injured and 348 people detained over the course of the day. Earlier, police Maj. Christian Kuntzman said one injured officer was shot in the hand.
The day began with a long and noisy pot-banging protest known as a “caceroleo,” conducted by students who have been boycotting classes for three months to demand improvements in public education.
Treasury Secretary Felipe Larrain had said the strike would cost Chile $200 million a day in lost production, but it was unclear Wednesday how much of a shutdown the strikers achieved.
Although Santiago’s buses and the subway mostly functioned normally, most people stayed out of the capital’s normally busy city center, leaving only light street traffic. Most stores were open, but got few customers and many employees stayed home.
Other cities and provinces around Chile also were unusually quiet.
President Sebastian Pinera said at the government palace that “fortunately, as of now, the country is functioning with considerable normality.”
Arturo Martinez, president of the organized labor coalition that organized the strike, denied that.
“This country is not normal today,” Martinez said. “The authority is not capable of saying the truth.”
Martinez said union demands include changes in pensions, health care, education, taxes and a new labor code. “And we propose a new constitution,” he added.
Public transportation functioned normally in Santiago, with the exception of some suburbs where rock-throwing protesters forced drivers to abandon routes. In various areas around the capital, activists put up barricades, blocked traffic and faced off against riot police who responded with tear gas and water cannons.
Hospitals had warned anyone but the gravely ill to stay home as a precaution, but the government said only 6 percent of health care workers joined the strike.
Unions put out far different numbers. Raul de la Puente, president of the government workers union, said that “more than 80 percent are in solidarity.”
Polls say that after three months of mass student protests, most Chileans disapprove of Pinera’s government. His approval rate has fallen to 26 percent, the lowest of any elected Chilean president.
Three high school students gave up a 37-day-old hunger strike Wednesday at their parents’ request, but said they would keep up the fight for education reform.
One of them, Gloria Negrete, who was hospitalized and reported near death, said they gave up “for our health, for the precarious state that each of us were in, because our parents were suffering.”
About 40 other students in schools around Chile continued their hunger strikes to keep up pressure on the government, which has only partly responded to demands that include calls for free schooling and improvements in the quality of Chile’s education.
Pinera reached out to union and student leaders Wednesday, saying: “They always have the doors open to dialogue. The government is ready to talk directly with them.”Indiana will become the latest Republican-led state to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, Gov. Mike Pence (R) announced Tuesday.
Pence outlined the alternative expansion plan that he and the Obama administration had agreed upon, which builds on an existing state program.
“I believe that Medicaid is not a program we should expand, but one we should reform. That’s exactly what we are doing,” Pence said, although the proposal is still using Medicaid expansion dollars to extend coverage, and is only possible through a federal Medicaid waiver.
Using the Healthy Indiana program, which sets up health savings accounts, Indiana will require enrollees above the poverty level to make monthly contributions. If they fail to do so, they could lose some benefits. Those below the poverty line have the option to make additional payments to receive better coverage, but it is not required.
Contributions under the program will not exceed 2 percent of an enrollee’s annual income. Pence’s plan also includes a work-referral component, though there is no requirement for enrollees to participate.
About 350,000 low-income Indianans are expected to be covered by the Medicaid expansion.Most speculation on a successor has focused on Taro Aso, an outspoken, conservative former foreign minister who is now secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party. Mr. Aso, whom Mr. Fukuda defeated to become prime minister last year, has not said whether he will run again.
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The Liberal Democrats will convene to select their new leader. Since they control the lower house of Parliament, which chooses the prime minister, their selection will automatically acquire the post. The selection process is expected to take about two weeks, during which time Mr. Fukuda will remain in office.
Mr. Fukuda, whose brief and unsuccessful term makes him unlikely to be one of the most favorably remembered Japanese prime ministers, fumed that he faced an uphill battle almost as soon as he took office. His short stint in office was also marked by a series of missteps and scandals, including allegations of graft at the Defense Ministry and his own cavalier comments about the government’s apparent loss of the pension records of tens of millions of Japanese.
Despite his political credentials, he proved incapable of breaking a parliamentary deadlock that delayed the selection of a new central bank chief and the renewal of a law allowing Japanese ships to refuel American and other vessels involved in the war in Afghanistan. These setbacks, along with the owlish Mr. Fukuda’s own colorless style, hurt his approval ratings, which dropped below 30 percent in recent polls.
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“To be honest, from the beginning, longstanding problems appeared one after the other, and I had to face them,” Mr. Fukuda said at the news conference, which was nationally televised. “Dealing with them worked me to death.”
He said he wanted to get out of the way for a new leader to break the current stalemate in Parliament, where the opposition controls the upper house, and to prepare the party for the elections.
“This is the perfect timing to not cause people too much trouble,” Mr. Fukuda said.
However, business leaders and opposition politicians were quick to criticize his abrupt exit, especially after Mr. Abe’s sudden departure.
“It is an utterly irresponsible way to quit,” Kozo Watanabe, a senior adviser at the Democratic Party, was quoted as saying by Kyodo News. “I cannot help worrying about what will happen to this country’s politics.”
Indeed, a lack of strong leadership has plagued Japan, even as it has grappled with a host of new problems, including the rise of neighboring China and a slowdown in its $4.7 trillion economy. The resignations of both Mr. Fukuda and Mr. Abe, who led short-lived, unpopular governments, have highlighted the lack of stability here since the popular Junichiro Koizumi stepped down two years ago.CTVNews.ca Staff
A sweeping Auditor General’s audit of the Senate has cost taxpayers $21 million, and uncovered troubling expense claims from 10 more sitting and former senators, CTV News has learned.
The 10 senators filed questionable expenses amounting to more than $100,000, sources told CTV’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife.
Just as the questionable spending of Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, Patrick Brazeau and Mac Harb were sent to the RCMP, sources say the latest cases will be, too.
“There are people who were saying, ‘Oh, there is just a couple of bad apples,” said NDP MP Paul Dewar. “Well, now it’s potentially 14. That’s a lot of apples.”
Just two weeks ago, Senate Speaker Leo Housakos vowed quick action, saying senators who have improper expenses will be referred to “other authorities.”
It’s not known how many of the 10 are sitting senators.
CTV has also learned that the sweeping investigation cost taxpayers $21 million, making it the most expensive audit ever conducted on Parliament Hill.
Sources say 142 auditors, many of them hired on contract from private firms, were given security passes for the Senate.
For the past two years, federal auditors combed through the expenses of 117 current and former senators.
“There are a lot of people who are hurting in this country and will be scratching their heads and going, ‘This is 2015 -- what the hell is going on?’” Dewar said.
The audit identified 30 additional senators who had problems with expense claims, including trips that did not appear to involve parliamentary business.
These expenditures are not enough to trigger an RCMP investigation, but the Senate will require them to re-pay money, sources say.
The auditor general’s office declined to comment on the findings until the report is released in the first week of June.
With a report by CTV’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert FifePrefiled in the South Carolina by State Senators Lee Bright and Danny Verdin is Senate Bill 249 (S0249), the Firearms Freedom Act (FFA). The bill states that:
A personal firearm, a firearm accessory, or ammunition that is manufactured commercially or privately in South Carolina and that remains within the borders of South Carolina is not subject to federal law or federal regulation, including registration, under the authority of Congress to regulate interstate commerce.
Since 2009, 8 states have passed similar legislation as law – Montana, Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, Idaho, Alaska and Arizona. And, here at the Tenth Amendment Center we expect to see at least a dozen other states consider Firearms Freedom Acts in 2011.
The United States Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate Interstate Commerce between the states, and 18 USC 922 makes it unlawful for any person not licensed as a manufacturer or dealer in firearms to engage in the business of manufacturing or dealing in firearms. Collectively, the Interstate Commerce Clause and 18 USC 922 are used by the federal goverenment as a means to regulate, control and often-times ban, firearms.
The South Carolina Firearms Freedom Act addresses this by exempting firearms, firearm accessories, and ammunition manufactured and retained in the state from all federal firearm control laws including registration, as firearms that meet these criteria cannot be regulated by the federal government because they have not traveled in interstate commerce.
“Basically, we’re saying if the gun is made here, South Carolina is going to say what kind of regulations apply,” Bright said. “We feel that South Carolinians should be able to determine how to protect themselves — not the federal government — which is why most people have firearms.”
*******
CLICK HERE to view the Tenth Amendment Center’s model legislation, the Intrastate Commerce Act, which takes the FFA principle to its full extent – all goods grown and made in state are under state, not federal, purview.
CLICK HERE to view the Tenth Amendment Center’s Firearms Freedom Act Legislative Tracking Page
CLICK HERE to view the Tenth Amendment Center’s printable Firearms Freedom Act Brochure (pdf)
*******
Michael Boldin [send him email] is the founder of the Tenth Amendment Center. He was raised in Milwaukee, WI, and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA. Follow him on twitter – @michaelboldin and Facebook. http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.comSAN DIEGO, Calif. (CBS 8) -- A local aeronautics firm called SciFly, LLC is changing the way we see the ocean with cutting-edge camera technology.
It could be a game changer for search and rescue operations, and scientific surveys; and it's being developed right here in San Diego.
The core technology behind SciFly is a cluster of camera lenses mounted on an airplane, which can filter out specific colors and even see below the surface of the water.
"There is a suite of five cameras that is able to look at very narrow wave lengths of light and different colors," said pilot Eddie Kisfaludy, CEO of SciFly based out of Montgomery Field.
Kisfaludy took News 8 on a demonstration flight over the San Diego coastline.
"Today, we're looking for whales. The way that works is it looks for a specific color and ignores the rest of the ocean," said Kisfaludy, while flying the SciFly plane.
The cameras stream live video to a laptop, allowing the SciFly system operator to quickly spot a pod of gray whales below.
The sophisticated filters make it effortless to spot the whales swimming below the surface.
"This system is like putting on polarized sunglasses but times ten," said Kisfaludy. "We're able to look really deep through the water with a series of cameras, and filters and software."
The cameras also pick out a group of dolphins and track their every move.
The software pinpoints the animals on the surface and below the water, then automatically identifies them in a matter of seconds.
And it's not just marine mammals that SciFly can find.
"We can find people, we can find a lost ship wreck, and an aircraft that has crashed, all using a system that's automated," said Kisfaludy.
Typical search and rescue planes fly below 1,000 feet, while spotters scan the ocean with the naked eye. The operations are time-consuming -- when precious minutes and hours count -- while looking for a person or a crash site at sea.
The SciFly plane flies at 5,000 feet and is able to cover a much larger area more efficiently than traditional searches.
"We can have one pilot and one system operator covering 100 square kilometers in one hour. That's a lot of ocean," said Kisfaludy.
And while the technology is still in the development stage, the future possibilities are practically endless.
"What we're trying to do is provide a camera system that sees more of the ocean a lot faster and easier and automated. It alleviates the stresses of looking with your eyes," Kisfaludy said.
SciFly technology was developed for the military, which used it to search from the air for chemicals and weapons in war zones.
The company is doing test flights weekly above San Diego to identify new applications for the device.
Some of the footage used in this video report was shot using a GoPro camera.This Butternut Squash Focaccia with Caramelized Onions just makes me happy. So many of my favorites in one bread! There are recipes out there for focaccia topped with squash, but I found few that used it, or sweet potato, as the base for the dough itself. This one is a compilation of many after hours of research on how to adjust the moisture content. It turned out perfectly and tastes absolutely delicious!
I just love the golden color of the bread which is further enhanced by the deep, rich color of the slow cooked apple cider onions. You can enjoy it on its own, use it as bread for a sandwich or panini and even cut it into bite-sized |
consistently is simply necessary for correctly-synchronized code. That by itself is ample reason to be consistently const-correct, but there’s more: It lets you document interfaces and invariants far more effectively than any mere /* I promise not to change this */ comment can accomplish. It’s a powerful part of “design by contract.” It helps the compiler to stop you from accidentally writing bad code. It can even help the compiler generate tighter, faster, smaller code. That being the case, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use it as much as possible, and every reason why you should.
Remember that the correct use of mutable is a key part of const-correctness. If your class contains a member that could change even for const objects and operations, make that member mutable and protect it with a mutex or make it atomic. That way, you will be able to write your class’ const member functions easily and correctly, and users of your class will be able to correctly create and use const and non-const objects of your class’ type.
It’s true that not all commercial libraries’ interfaces are const-correct. That isn’t an excuse for you to write const-incorrect code, though. It is, however, one of the few good excuses to write const_cast, plus a detailed comment nearby grumbling about the library vendor’s laziness and how you’re looking for a replacement product.
Acknowledgments
Thanks in particular to the following for their feedback to improve this article: mttpd, jlehrer, Chris Vine.STOP THE PRESSES: U.S. Intelligence Says Russian Hackers Are to Blame For Qatar Crisis
You’ve got to be a complete imbecile to believe in these Russian fairytales. How pervasive and powerful are these Russian hackers after all? Are our cyber experts merely standing around with dildos in their mouths, as these powerful king makers plant FAKE NEWS across the world — causing rifts, election upsets, and wars?
CNN is now reporting that the siege of Qatar, implemented by Saudi Arabia, is the result of fake news stories planted by strong as shit Russian programmers, raping Qatar’s state run news agency, which caused Saudi Arabia to starve the people of Qatar to death.
Moreover, as per CNN fake news, the Russian hackers are believed to belong to Putin himself, as ‘nothing happens inside that country’ of 16,377,742km, without the expressed permission of the government.
During the CNN report, they mentioned how Russian hackers interfered in the recent French election, something that was rejected by French intelligence agencies and even Macron.
To date, intelligence agencies have yet to provide any proof of Russian hacking, even the fact that they exist, aside from their firm assurance that they’re out there causing chaos.
Just today, President Trump praised the actions of Saudi Arabia and affirmed that Qatar was funding terror.
During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar – look! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017
So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding… — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017
…extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017
Yet another victim of the malicious and insidious forces of Russian powered fake news.
Un-fucking-believable.
NOTE: Saudi Arabia has given Qatar 24 hours to comply with their demands, else face military confrontation.
Saudi Arabia gives #Qatar 24 hr ultimatum to fulfill 10 conditions that have been sent to #Kuwait https://t.co/OpWGvvDY7r #Iran #QatarCrisis — Reza H. Akbari (@rezahakbari) June 6, 2017
If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on TwitterFormer WWE trainer Bill DeMott, who left the company amid allegations of harsh and insensitive coaching methods, insists he is “a new man” after sensitivity training, and will return under the moniker Hugh Manitarian.
DeMott has been reinstated as head trainer at WWE’s Performance Centre, where he insists he will employ a “holistic, meditative, and inclusive” regimen that “empowers up-and-coming talent to embrace and nurture their inner superstars.”
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Gone are the days, DeMott insists, of verbally berating opponents while they perform dozens of flat-back bumps to the point of vomitous exhaustion.
Demott, who once portrayed the character of Hugh Morris, insists that his new persona of Hugh Manitarian will encourage wrestlers to seek peaceful conflict resolution through dialogue rather than bodyslams and verbal abuse.
“Violence is never the answer,” he told a class of NXT stars this morning. “The only way to truly get ‘over’ in this world is through kindness and understanding.”
While many WWE trainees say they prefer this gentler incarnation of DeMott, some wonder how long it will be before he transforms into Hugh Jasshole.The search for Craig Strickland ended today after the Backroad Anthem lead singer was found dead at age 29.
A spokesperson for Oklahoma Highway Patrol confirms to E! that Craig's body was recovered and the family has been notified.
Strickland was declared missing Monday afternoon after his friend, Chase Morland, was found dead in Kaw Lake, OK.
The two pals embarked on a duck hunting trip over the weekend and Morland even foreshadowed the tragedy on Twitter by writing, "In case we don't come back, @BackroadCRAIG and I are going right through Winter Storm Goliath to kill ducks in Oklahoma. # IntoTheStorm."
On Sunday, a search was launched when a boat the two men were reportedly using for the hunting trip north of Tulsa, in Kay County, was found capsized in the early hours of Monday, according to Oklahoma's News9.An ancient jar, photographed by an underwater robot, at the bottom of Lake Biwako in Shiga Prefecture (Provided by Ritsumeikan University)
An underwater robot has snapped photographs of a pottery urn probably dating from the seventh or eighth century that has been left almost intact at the bottom of Lake Biwako.
The jar, which was spotted 71.5 meters down on the bed of the lake, is 30-40 centimeters in height with a 20-cm opening, Ritsumeikan University announced Dec. 26.
It was found about 400 meters off Cape Tsuzuraozaki in the northern part of Japan's biggest freshwater lake in Shiga Prefecture on Dec. 14 by a team led by Kenichi Yano, professor of archaeology at the university.
It is believed to be a reddish brown Haji pottery urn made sometime between the Asuka Period (592-710) and Nara Period (710-784).
Several other pieces of pottery, including those believed to be grayish-black Sue pottery shallow bowls, were also found in six places near the urn.
They have probably not been covered by earth because the current is strong in that part of the lake bed. Because of the depth and the current, a robot was used instead of divers.
The urn was found in an underwater archaeological site called the Tsuzuraozaki Kotei Iseki.
Since 1924, many pottery pieces, mainly from between the Jomon Pottery Culture Period (c. 8000 B.C.-300 B.C.) and Heian Period (794-1185), have been found at the site at a depth between 10 and 70 meters, often caught in fishing nets.
It remains a mystery why so much pottery from such a wide time span have been found at this site.
Some speculate a settlement was submerged by a rise in the water level or the pots were sunk there in obscure rituals. Others sidestep romance and suggest it was just a dumping ground for used ceramics.God of the Battlefield: Part 1 Text by Ver Graphics by HawaiianPig & disciple Introduction
During 2006-2007, Ma Jae Yoon (aka Savior) was the best Brood War player in the world. Not only did he win multiple championships, but he dominated his opposition in a way that had never been seen for the Zerg race. His play captivated the hearts of countless fans, and even the staunchest critics were forced to admit that he was one of the greatest of all time.
His career began on a sharp decline in March 2007, after a loss to Kim Taek Yong (Bisu) in the MSL Final. Though he would retain the loyalty and support of many fans - and occasionally show them flashes of his past brilliance - he would never challenge for a title again.
In 2010, Savior was implicated in one of the most devastating events in e-Sports history, the pro-gamer match fixing scandal. Nearly a dozen progamers had received bribes to intentionally lose their matches, which were bet upon by a handful of shady parties on illegal e-Sports gambling websites. Korean courts found Savior guilty of being a broker, a middle-man between the gamblers and the bribed progamers, though it is suspected that he may have been more directly involved as well.
Savior was sentenced to one year in prison (this sentence has been suspended for 2 years; sentencing occurred in May 2010). Furthermore, all of the progamers implicated were given life-time competition bans by KeSPA (the governing body for BW e-Sports in Korea). GomTV employees have mentioned that the banned BW players would not be allowed to compete in the GSL as well.
Though Savior seriously undermined the institution of e-Sports through his despicable crimes, we must be able to separate his faults as a human being from his accomplishments as a player. Though he will rightfully never play another game of professional Brood War, he left a significant, lasting mark on the way the game is played today.
Over a year ago, Ver wrote an excellent analysis of Savior's ZvT play at its apex, but the advent of the match-fixing scandal made us wary of posting an article praising him. Now that a year has passed since the match fixing scandal, and wounds have begun to heal (though they never will, completely), we decided we were ready to publish the following article.
The God Of the Battlefield: Part One
Once among the most loved of all champions, Savior now is loathed as a true villain. The tainting of his formerly great legacy happened almost overnight. Gone is the once overwhelming desire to see his return, being replaced by scorn and mocking.
But the match fixing cannot override or disqualify the beauty and quality of Savior's play. Whatever actions he may have taken outside the game do not change what he did within it, for it. Savior is probably the most studied player in history, yet to this day almost everyone, even pros, do not realize the full extent of his discoveries. To demonstrate why his innovations made such a large impact, it is first necessary to understand the unmatched obstacles that Savior surpassed. Following that, the gritty details of his innovations will be analyzed to show exactly what and how Savior did was so unique.
TvZ is something of a unique matchup in Broodwar. On the whole it looks innocent enough, but there has been one pattern firmly etched into Broodwar's history: top Zergs lose to top Terrans. In Starleague finals Terrans have emerged victorious 16 times to 7 against Zergs. The difference is most striking in comparing the very best themselves.
First examine
Now take a look at their counterparts:
Savior is the lone exception to the fate of his brethren, the only one to ever flip ZvT upside down. It was his ZvP that was most talked about because it was statistically better, but his ZvT was by far his defining attribute. Not only was he the only Zerg to truly succeed against Terran, he flat out dominated in by far the hardest conditions any player has ever faced. His play was so astonishing and of bottomless depth that it is with complete confidence that I can make the following claim:
The peak level of ZvT was reached by Savior in February and March 2007. It is not to Jaedong, Effort, or Zero that we should be looking, but Ma Bonjwa himself. Savior's play was so beyond his time that for years everyone studied his games yet never understood half of what he did.
Who comes close in series dominance? Boxer? Jaedong? Bisu? Flash? Nope, none are remotely comparable except Flash in TvT against pathetic opposition (11-2). Only the two greatest players ever, iloveoov and Nada, can come near Savior with 11-0 series win periods in TvT (oov) and TvZ (Nada) against a succession of strong opponents. But Savior's series dominance is not just measured simply by the number of his victories, but by the quality of his opponents and difficulty of circumstances under which they were achieved. Savior was the most dominating series player in the history of SC and his ZvT showed that better than anything else.
The only players on that list above who didn't fit in tip-top S-class TvZ levels were Yooi and Justin. Everyone else, including the statistically out-of-place Iris, made the 6 dragons look like pushovers. If you had to gather the best lineup of players at one matchup of any period, nobody would come close to these 7.
Savior's performance is even more out of place next to the fact that only 4 out of the other top 10 Zergs held a >50% ZvT win rate from January 2006 to March 2007! And only one out of those 4 was actually winning games against Starleague-caliber opponents. Considering that a Terran player won every single league that Savior didn't participate in during the period, it's pretty safe to say that Savior was the only reason why that era was not the most dominating for Terran and worst for Zerg in history.
The King of ZvT
Because Savior reached six Starleague finals in a row, he played solely versus the absolute toughest competition possible. As the score sheet shows, he repeatedly beat down the hottest Terran players of the day as well as the other three bonjwas at their best matchup. How many Zergs besides Savior does Nada have a losing record against (with a minimum of 5 games)? Three. Boxer? Zero. iloveoov? Zero. Yet Savior decisively defeated them all by unheard of margins when they were still dominating every other Zerg.
To further magnify his achievements, Savior played seven of those series within two months! The worst moment was when he played two Bo5's against Hwasin and Iris on consecutive days. Suffice to say, no player has ever went through as intense of a struggle as Savior did from January to March 2007.
Once among the most loved of all champions, Savior now is loathed as a true villain. The tainting of his formerly great legacy happened almost overnight. Gone is the once overwhelming desire to see his return, being replaced by scorn and mocking.But the match fixing cannot override or disqualify the beauty and quality of Savior's play. Whatever actions he may have taken outside the game do not change what he did within it, for it. Savior is probably the most studied player in history, yet to this day almost everyone, even pros, do not realize the full extent of his discoveries. To demonstrate why his innovations made such a large impact, it is first necessary to understand the unmatched obstacles that Savior surpassed. Following that, the gritty details of his innovations will be analyzed to show exactly what and how Savior did was so unique.TvZ is something of a unique matchup in Broodwar. On the whole it looks innocent enough, but there has been one pattern firmly etched into Broodwar's history: top Zergs lose to top Terrans. In Starleague finals Terrans have emerged victorious 16 times to 7 against Zergs. The difference is most striking in comparing the very best themselves.First examine Boxer (54-16, 77.14% over 28 months), Nada (112-47, 70.44% over 34 months), iloveoov (37-0, 100% over 13 months), and Flash (50-12, 80.65% over 10 months) for TvZ. Sit down, gaze in awe, and bask in their greatness. Not only are their records incredible or even unbelievable, the quality of their opponents and the lengths of their domination are also peerless.Now take a look at their counterparts: Yellow (70-32, 68.63% over 23 months) July (40-29, 57.97% over 11 months), Gorush (27-11, 71.05% over 5 months), and Jaedong (42-19, 68.85% over 12 months). Barely even comparable. The best of the Zergs is not at the level of the worst of the Terrans with respect to TvZ. Only Gorush is remotely near the Terran four in his success against the highest quality of opposition, but his was also by far the shortest duration of dominance at 5 months. If you drop down to merely excellent players at the matchup, it would take a full paragraph to list the two dozen or so TvZ all-stars while you can count on at most two hands the number of Zerg players who have been truly good at ZvT. That is the reality of ZvT history.Savior is the lone exception to the fate of his brethren, the only one to ever flip ZvT upside down. It was his ZvP that was most talked about because it was statistically better, but his ZvT was by far his defining attribute. Not only was he the only Zerg to truly succeed against Terran, he flat out dominated in by far the hardest conditions any player has ever faced. His play was so astonishing and of bottomless depth that it is with complete confidence that I can make the following claim:The peak level of ZvT was reached by Savior in February and March 2007. It is not to Jaedong, Effort, or Zero that we should be looking, but Ma Bonjwa himself. Savior's play was so beyond his time that for years everyone studied his games yet never understood half of what he did.Who comes close in series dominance? Boxer? Jaedong? Bisu? Flash? Nope, none are remotely comparable except Flash in TvT against pathetic opposition (11-2). Only the two greatest players ever, iloveoov and Nada, can come near Savior with 11-0 series win periods in TvT (oov) and TvZ (Nada) against a succession of strong opponents. But Savior's series dominance is not just measured simply by the number of his victories, but by the quality of his opponents and difficulty of circumstances under which they were achieved. Savior was the most dominating series player in the history of SC and his ZvT showed that better than anything else.The only players on that list above who didn't fit in tip-top S-class TvZ levels were Yooi and Justin. Everyone else, including the statistically out-of-place Iris, made the 6 dragons look like pushovers. If you had to gather the best lineup of players at one matchup of any period, nobody would come close to these 7.Savior's performance is even more out of place next to the fact that only 4 out of the other top 10 Zergs held a >50% ZvT win rate from January 2006 to March 2007! And only one out of those 4 was actually winning games against Starleague-caliber opponents. Considering that a Terran player won every single league that Savior didn't participate in during the period, it's pretty safe to say that Savior was the only reason why that era was not the most dominating for Terran and worst for Zerg in history.Because Savior reachedStarleague finals in a row, he played solely versus the absolute toughest competition possible. As the score sheet shows, he repeatedly beat down the hottest Terran players of the day as well as the other three bonjwas at their best matchup. How many Zergs besides Savior does Nada have a losing record against (with a minimum of 5 games)? Three. Boxer? Zero. iloveoov? Zero. Yet Savior decisively defeated them all by unheard of margins when they were still dominating every other Zerg.To further magnify his achievements, Savior played seven of those series within two months! The worst moment was when he played two Bo5's against Hwasin and Iris on consecutive days. Suffice to say, no player has ever went through as intense of a struggle as Savior did from January to March 2007. This was the worst semifinals I've had go to through. The maps were tough, and my schedule was very tiring as well. I don't even have time to be happy that I reached 5 consecutive finals because I am so busy and can't think about other things. Today was the semifinals and tomorrow is the semifinals too. -Savior after defeating Hwasin
Because he was stuck in the same matchup on the same maps, his opponents had unparalleled mounds of data to develop counterstrategies with while Savior alone had to incessantly innovate to avoid being overtaken by every other player working to unseat him. S-class pros are terrifyingly good at dissecting builds and preparing appropriate counters, yet Savior never allowed them that chance. To avoid becoming predictable and to prevent getting gunned down by precise timing attacks, Savior literally did something new every single game and continuously stayed ahead of the competition, something no other player has ever managed to do even in much easier circumstances.
Even with his star-studded opponents and overwhelming scheduling still not enough to bring him down, Savior's enemies had one final trump card: the mapmakers.
Because he was stuck in the same matchup on the same maps, his opponents had unparalleled mounds of data to develop counterstrategies with while Savior alone had to incessantly innovate to avoid being overtaken by every other player working to unseat him. S-class pros are terrifyingly good at dissecting builds and preparing appropriate counters, yet Savior never allowed them that chance. To avoid becoming predictable and to prevent getting gunned down by precise timing attacks, Savior literally did something new every single game and continuously stayed ahead of the competition, something no other player has ever managed to do even in much easier circumstances.Even with his star-studded opponents and overwhelming scheduling still not enough to bring him down, Savior's enemies had one final trump card: the mapmakers. I think even I can beat a zerg user using terran on that map...it is difficult to beat even our team’s practice partners on that map… -Savior, on Longinus 2
It is bad for Zerg. Not only do I feel bad after training for that map, but during the training I lose smooth(ly) [inevitably] -Savior, on Reverse Temple
Hwasin predicted that if the game extended beyond mid-game, then NaDa would win. Reverse Temple was just that good of a map for Terran users.
Iris also came to the same conclusion. No matter what starting position the Terran was at, Terran would be favored and Savior would have a hard time on Reverse Temple.
Contrary to the rest of his colleagues, Savior showed his very best in the worst conditions of them all. Reverse Temple and Longinus are the icons of Savior's legacy, for they best represent the trials Savior had to overcome. It was here that Ma Jae Yoon did what was thought to be impossible over a dozen times. Not only did he win on these maps, but he won in decisive fashion and made them look advantageous for Zerg while doing so. Not to mention nearly all of his games were against some of the best Terrans ever.
Hwasin predicted that if the game extended beyond mid-game, then NaDa would win. Reverse Temple was just that good of a map for Terran users.Iris also came to the same conclusion. No matter what starting position the Terran was at, Terran would be favored and Savior would have a hard time on Reverse Temple.Contrary to the rest of his colleagues, Savior showed his very best in the worst conditions of them all. Reverse Temple and Longinus are the icons of Savior's legacy, for they best represent the trials Savior had to overcome. It was here that Ma Jae Yoon did what was thought to be impossible over a dozen times. Not only did he win on these maps, but he won in decisive fashion and made them look advantageous for Zerg while doing so. Not to mention nearly all of his games were against some of the best Terrans ever. You can't emphasize enough how much you need to be a paradigm shifter. -Savior
One can at first interpret Savior's ZvT success to his revolutionary new strategies, and this conclusion is partially valid. When Savior first emerged with his new strategy of 3 Hatch Muta, pumping drones, and transitioning to lurkers while double expanding into 4 gas defiler, he managed to outsupply Nada while having defilers out before even fighting a battle! That's how far ahead Savior was of everyone else in terms of strategy, and he owed much, if not all of his early success – particularly the mind blowing 5-0 against iloveoov – to the strategic advantages of his many ZvT revolutions.
Essentially every SC star has emerged sporting something new and shiny, whether it be revolutionary mechanics or a completely new concept/strategy. The more radical the idea or execution, the greater the subsequent dominance. Boxer, Nada, iloveoov, and Flash, in TvZ, Bisu in PvZ, Jaedong in ZvZ, and Savior in ZvP are just a few among many other examples. While all of these players initially won consistently because their opponents had no clue how to play against them, they experienced a slow, or sometimes rapid decline when their rivals figured out how to counter or equalize against the previously dominant strategy. This has been, and will always be the case. Innovations only have a limited amount of time to be made use of before they become another draw-even strategy or obsolete altogether. And once that period of time is over, that player always declines in performance. Only Savior is the exception to this rule.
Savior's ZvT dominance began because of his new strategy of 3 Hatch Muta into lurkers covering a double expansion and massing drones, all with a fast hive. While it sounds similar to the more familiar variation everyone should know, it is actually conceptually different in many ways as it was optimized against the slower expansion builds of 2 Rax Academy CC and 2 Rax CC. He unveiled a mostly finished product on April of 2005, but in January of 2006 he was already running into trouble. Thanks to iloveoov and Midas in June of 2006 his original strategy was completely outdated after only 21 games.
Everyone in the spotlight eventually gets gunned down. Well, almost everyone...
But Terrans are not the kind of race to stop at just keeping up with Savior's brand new concept with a faster expansion. No, iloveoov, Casy, Midas, Nada, Hwasin, and Iris tag teamed Zergs to oblivion by correcting their sense of timing, reactions to mutalisks, tech transitions, and totally transformed their anti-hive play. All of these changes were so far-reaching that despite originating in 2006, they are still mostly the standard today. It looked like Savior would fall victim to what had happened to every other upstart player once their strategies were figured out. And yet with his brilliant strategy in shambles and his play found out and outdated, Savior actually started winning more despite becoming increasingly handicapped by maps and scheduling!
How did he do it? Well quite simply, he improved faster in other, unseen ways. The collective mind of every Terran, by far the most innovative race in SC history, failed to surpass him despite having an unprecedented amount of opportunities to test Savior. With every other Zerg lagging so far behind, it was literally Savior against the World, and Savior won. Not only did he create the strategic equality against Terran in both economics and decision making that has survived to this day, but he advanced a much lagging area of ZvT: tactics. Much to their downfall, Zergs have rigorously copied Savior's strategic innovations but have mostly overlooked his tactical ones. Tactics separated Savior from every other Zerg, and they were the primary reason why he reached the highest level of ZvT three years ago.
What are Savior's tactics? To keep matters as simple as possible, "tactics" is simply a broad term I use to explain Savior's battlefield actions because they do not fit under any previous concept. Tactics are more of a concept dependent on creativity and psychology than a rigid set of actions. Different situations call for different tactics, and the examples picked out in these two articles are simply a small portion of the many that Savior used. Hopefully by examining various examples of Savior using certain tactics in certain circumstances, one can get a glimpse at his terrifying and comprehensive understanding of the matchup.
Still confused at what tactics are? Here's a helpful demonstration by the Maestro himself:
Bonjwa Training Step 1: Hidden Lurker Ambush
Not good enough?
*Note that a video link fast-forwarded to each tactical scene will be provided as seeing them in action is essential.
The central principle that all of the maneuvering tactics are based around is simply having more, properly placed units at the right place at the right time. Despite being almost always outnumbered, Savior generally had the upper hand when the two sides came to a clash. By keeping this principle in mind at all times, it will be much easier to understand just how his tactics work.
The point here is not to focus on the individual tactics themselves. No one tactic is as important as the overall mindset behind it, for different situations call for different tactics and the number of possibilities are only limited by creativity. Preparing for every conceivable plan and movement his opponents could throw at him was impractical. Rather, Savior could instantaneously choose the best suited tactic to any unforeseen situations.
The first, and perhaps most basic principle of ZvT maneuvering is to form a mobile, multi-purpose army that is free to roam around the map. The worst outcome in ZvT is to have the Zerg army trapped in its base as the Terran slowly batters down the castle. Savior would often use a line of sunkens and a few lurkers to defend his bases from any immediate blitz, while scattering his army far away from his bases. By doing so, Savior magnified his army's strength by several times. He ended up using more sunkens than other Zergs, but the benefits of his maneuvering always proved to be well worth the investment.
Savior vs Iris on Reverse Temple - VOD
Iris goes to attack Savior's base while Savior runs his army to a key location.
Savior's army here is doing 5 things:
1) Threatening a backstab on Iris's main (Savior's winning technique in this game)
2) Threatening an attack on Iris's army at any sign of weakness
3) Threatening to cut off reinforcements at a moment's notice
4) Defending Savior's natural and 3rd base
5) Hiding in the fog and staying completely out of reach of Iris's attack capabilities
All five of these points are serious threats that his opponent must devote time and concentration to defending. Iris cannot have constant information of Savior's army location and movements, and thus has no way to know his intentions. Ergo, simply by running his army around instead of keeping it trapped inside his base, Savior forced Iris to consider every possibility and therefore greatly improved his situation without killing a single unit.
Small details like the precise positioning of his army were absolutely key to Savior's success.
Savior vs iloveoov on Ride of Valkyries - VOD
Savior's game here is so remarkable because it so aptly illustrates how Savior used his tactics to allow him to cut many corners on timings, which was very important against the cheater terran (named for his ability to make a seemingly unfair amount of units) himself. After helping himself to a comfortable early lead through a new 8 rax -> CC strategy, oov begins a threatening attack with 5 tanks, 40 infantry, and 2 vessels against a paltry 12 mutas and 7 lurkers. Such a unit imbalance all but assured oov an easy victory, if only he could actually fight a battle. Swooping in and out with his mutalisks and reburrowing his lurkers, Savior forced oov to continually regroup and advance at a snail's pace. By the time a battle was actually fought, Savior's army had more than doubled in size, and despite oov's reinforcements the Terran menace was halted.
Savior's dismantling of oov showed the growth of Savior's tactics. oov, always the clumsy and mechanically handicapped gorilla, was incapable of multitasking and his attack was unnecessarily delayed by Savior's shenanigans. As for Savior, he succeeded in delaying oov's attack sufficiently but he did not stop oov from reinforcing his army. Thus he halted the monster, but could not crush him. This meeting between Savior and oov occured in January of 2006. Now let's fast forward and see how much more refined Savior was 13 months later.
Savior vs Iris on Longinus II - VOD
Along with having a mobile army and delaying the Terran timing attack, the other basic step for all levels of ZvT is to prevent the Terran from reinforcing their main army. In other words, once that Terran ball moves into the middle, it becomes isolated from civilization—a suicide squad, so to speak. These three steps are all that are needed in order to achieve relative superiority at the decisive battle, the entire goal of midgame ZvT.
This game is a fantastic example of how effective maneuvering can be. Iris began his attack at 10:39, and given how close the mains are on Longinus he could have arrived at Savior's natural entrance, the critical area, in 25 seconds. But Iris never made it to Savior's natural; his army was annihilated as soon as dark swarm was finished at 14:04! In other words, Savior with a much inferior army delayed a 25 second trip to over 3 minutes and 25 seconds! By making many different threats and forcing Iris to respond to them all, Iris ended up marching around in circles and never reached his destination.
How did Savior turn a simple expedition into the trip from hell? Let's go through step by step:
+ Show Spoiler [Explanation] +
Savior threatens a fake backstab as soon as Iris runs out, forcing Iris to turn southward to block it before resuming his northern march.
Savior deploys two high ground lurkers to delay Iris's initial advance and to punish any sloppiness.
Savior threatens a backstab as soon as Iris clears the way and starts advancing northward.
Savior moves his army to block Iris's southern advance and snipes two careless Vessels.
Iris gives up marching back and forth and just storms through and advances through the middle to the northwest ramp, preparing to assault Savior's natural. Savior continues to threaten another backstab and kills some stragglers.
Savior cuts off all reinforcement routes and keeps his army just out of reach in the shadows. At any point it can attack Iris's army out of the darkness from every angle.
These Lurkers prevent Iris from reinforcing, killing some units when Iris isn’t looking.
As soon as Iris's reinforcements clash with the retreat blocking lurkers Savior launches a pincer on Iris's now isolated army.
Iris, instantly recognizing Savior's movements, barely escapes the trap intact, retreating and reorganizing his army. Yet even though he saved his army, his position is no better than a minute earlier and the defiler clock is ticking down.
Iris is just outside of his destination but with no way to get reinforcements, moving quickly from the high ground is a grave risk when he doesn't know the location of the rest of Savior's army. Therefore he slowly pushes forward while keeping most tanks sieged and infantry in position.
Iris pulls back his units to chase back the imaginary threat of a group of lings on his rear. Another movement slowing down any advance possibility.
Savior plants his lurkers in order to prevent any retreats. They may seem useless at the moment but very shortly they will prove decisive.
The delaying is over, consume is researched! Savior begins the swarm assault on Iris's trapped army.
Note how his second swarm traps Iris in a tiny corner instead of pushing forward up the hill with 2 swarms and letting Iris potentially retreat.
The last stragglers of a once mighty army...
...get torn to pieces. The first key point to remember is how Savior won their previous game in the series on Reverse Temple, featured above. There, a seemingly inevitable Iris win thanks to impossible positions and no muta damage was thwarted by a perfectly-timed backstab. On the equally Terran-favored Longinus 2, Iris would be sure to not make the same mistake twice and Savior knew that. His backstabs were many times a game winner, but they were just as strong as a threat alone.
The main imbalance on Longinus, and the only map where this is possible, is that the Terran can actually make two timing attacks on favorable terrain before consume is out due to the extra income and rush distance. Preventing Iris from even reaching the sunkens given these conditions would be completely unthinkable if it were not Savior that was playing him.
The key to remember is that from Iris's point of view, Savior's units, particularly his lurkers, could be anywhere. At any moment they could burst from the darkness and ram into his natural, or if he moved from the high ground he could be flanked by a wave of units from that high ground. It is only natural that Iris became increasingly paranoid, moving all his infantry to chase a dozen lings or redirecting his whole army several times to run after some lurker/ling. After all, he never knew what lay just out of sight in the shadows or underground. Yet at the same time that paranoia was necessary in order to save his army from the potentially devastating ambush that Savior sprung. In order for Iris to even make use of his army he needed to deduce Savior's army movements from small shreds of information, so that he might guess whether Savior was truly threatening his troops or merely making a feint. Isn't that asking a little too much from poor Iris, or anyone for that matter?
A noteworthy contemporary performance was demonstrated by Hogil in this
But what about an elite level modern Terran? Surely some fancy running around can't touch |
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