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silent about because we may actually know some things the North Koreans don't even know."
Preparing for North Korea's growing threat, the Pentagon will attempt to shoot down an intercontinental-range missile for the first time in a test this week, with the goal of more closely simulating a North Korean ICBM aimed at the U.S.
The American interceptor has succeeded in nine of 17 attempts since 1999. The most recent test in June 2014 was a success, but that was only after three failures. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has vowed to possess a missile capable of reaching the U.S., and though he hasn't yet tested such a missile, Pentagon officials are on their toes.
In the 2018 budget the White House offered to Congress earlier this week, the Pentagon proposed spending $7.9 billion on missile defense.The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has adopted a harsh language against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, revealing the depth of angst over the brutal crackdown on protesters during President Erdogan’s visit last week.
In a unanimous vote, the Committee also separately condemned Turkey for the violent attack on peaceful protesters outside Turkish Ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C., during President Erdogan’s entrance to the building.
The congressmen at the subcommittee hearing even went on to say that President Erdogan should never be allowed to visit the United States again, and pressed for the expulsion of the Turkish ambassador, echoing the earlier call of Senator John McCain.
The sharpness of discourse and recriminations against the Turkish president was a testimony of the state of bewilderment among American politicians.
“To have the president of another country who watched his bully boys beat Americans into the ground and bloody them and for him to protest our people, that is the supreme insult,” Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats, said during his opening remarks. “We don’t need people like you visiting the United States any more.”
“When we want to talk to the Turks, we want to talk to Turks who want to have a democratic society, and not to their oppressor, a man who is trying to create Islamofascism in his own country with him as the head fascist … Erdogan should never again be invited to the United States.”
“He is an enemy of everything we stand for, and more importantly, he is the enemy of his own people,” he said, reflecting a widely-shared sentiment among the American public.
The incident prompted swift condemnations from infuriated members of the both chambers of the U.S. Congress.
On Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators called on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to waive any claims to immunity for security detail of foreign delegations. They also pressed for holding bodyguards accountable for their actions, making them available for interviews with the U.S. authorities.
If Turkey overturns the American demands, the senators argued, that Mr. Tillerson should revoke diplomatic credentials of Turkish Ambassador to the U.S. Serdar Kilic and reconsider visas for other government officials.
On the same day, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan assailed Turkey and portrayed the violent acts by bodyguards against protesters as “completely indefensible.”
“The violent crackdown on peaceful protesters by Turkish security forces was completely indefensible, and the [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan government’s response was wholly inadequate,” he said in a statement.
“Turkey is an important NATO ally, but its leaders must fully condemn and apologize for this brutal behavior against innocent civilians exercising their First Amendment rights. In the meantime, we stand fully committed to helping bring all those responsible to justice,” he added.
During the hearing, the chairman underlined that the incident fits a pattern of broader political violence and suppression in Turkey. Nor was it an isolated case, as the chairman recalled the altercation last year between journalists and Mr. Erdogan’s bodyguards during a speech at Brookings Institute.
“The repressive and authoritarian nature of the Erdogan government has been developing … right in front of our eyes,” he said.
Aram Hamparian of Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) testified at the subcommittee hearing. After praising Mr. Ryan and other Congress members for their robust posture, Mr. Hamparian called for swift action, “expulsion of the Turkish ambassador and the lifting the diplomatic immunity and action on each of the points in H.Res. 354”
The congressmen who were usually reserved and prefer adopting a diplomatic language when criticizing foreign leaders dropped any reservation, unleashing a scathing criticism of the Turkish president.
This was equally true for Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline. “One has to wonder why President Erdogan felt so emboldened that in the bright D.C. sunshine, in front of cameras and hundreds of people, he sent his attack dogs out.” The Donald Trump administration was among the targets of his castigating remarks for removing emphasis in human rights matters.
Moral issues in foreign policy have been cast adrift as President Trump has no qualms over moral concerns when he forges relations with authoritarian leaders.
His administration’s displayed indifference to human rights violations, crackdown on opponents in domestic politics of U.S. allies or other countries is regarded by the congressmen as an unsavory policy, giving leeway to leaders with authoritarian tendencies.
It was manifestly evident during President Erdogan’s visit. Both Mr. Trump and other officials conspicuously steered clear of any mention of mass arrests and the sweeping purge in Turkey.
In a gesture of comity to Mr. Erdogan, President Trump lavishly praised his guest and Turkey for being a stalwart ally against terrorism in the region. The warm embrace was the seal of approval the Turkish president desperately craved amid mounting international criticism over his crackdown on domestic opponents.
But it was all about style, not anything of substance, as the trip fell short of meeting its lofty goals for a reset in relations tested by a number of unresolved thorny issues.
As the hearing advanced, Representative Brad Sherman of California excoriated Turkey, portraying the incident “as an attack on American sovereignty.”
He was less reserved when depicting the bodyguards as thugs. “The actions of those thugs have been compounded by the lies of the Turkish ambassador … and he should be asked to leave our country immediately.”
The Chairman also went ballistic when he offered a portrait of the Turkish president unheard before from a U.S. congressman.
“Obviously you have a fascistic megalomaniac in charge of the government of Turkey who is so consumed with his own power that he thinks he can call people together and tell us we were wrong when we see our citizens being beaten into the dirt, American dirt,” Mr. Rohrabacher said.
If President Erdogan came to the U.S. to persuade the Trump administration over the extradition of U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, his arch-foe, he appeared to be less convincing for his argument. The violent episode presented a setback for his demand as the American Congress increasingly appears more skeptical and cautious over the matter.
The incident had a profound impact and a fallout over the extradition issue, a source of enduring friction between the two allies. President Erdogan holds Mr. Gulen as responsible for the attempted coup last summer and presses the U.S. to extradite him.
But despite the U.S. demand from Turks to provide convincing evidence that links Mr. Gulen to the abortive putsch, the Turkish side has so far failed to do that. The congressmen touched upon the matter, urging caution against Mr. Erdogan’s repeated calls to the Trump White House.
Befuddled by Turkey’s summoning of the U.S. ambassador to castigate the U.S. security personnel over the treatment of the Turkish bodyguards, the chairman said Turkey is no longer a friend.
“They are no longer our friends because the head of their country now can watch this [violence in Washington, D.C.] and then call our ambassador in to castigate us after seeing this firsthand,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. “He saw this firsthand. One wonder when he talks about Gulen, we have to take into consideration what he did here.”
U.S. Congressman Brad Sherman was blunter in his response to the Turkish government over its claims against Mr. Gulen.
“I think we have to declare very firmly: They’ve got no credibility,” he said in candid terms.
In a reflection of a growing consensus among the U.S. Congress members, Mr. Rohrabacher summarized the mood. After noting that President Erdogan “wants to close down” all Gulen-linked schools, the chairman said: “We should probably note that the Gulen movement is a very positive thing … this should cement what we think of them.”
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This article was possible thanks to your donations. Please keep supporting us here.MP Larry Miller has apologized after saying women who want to wear niqabs at Canadian citizenship ceremonies "should stay the hell where they came from."
MP Miller made the apology after a storm of controversy erupted following his comments made on a Bayshore Broadcasting radio program.
"Like, frankly, if you're not willing to show your face in a ceremony that you're joining the best country in the world... if you don't like that or don't want to do that, stay the hell where you came from," Miller said on March 16 during a segment on the Open Line show – hosted by Bill Murdoch – on CFOS. "I think most Canadians feel the same. That's maybe saying it a little harshly, but it's the way I feel."
Police were called to his Owen Sound office later that day when a man dressed in camouflage clothing and wrapped in a foreign flag protested outside the MP's office. No threats were made and charges were not laid. Miller was not in his office at the time.Health in the Year 2050
by Bill Sardi by Bill Sardi
DIGG THIS
It’s the year 2050. There are half as many doctors in the U.S. as there were in the year 2010. Mortality rates have been slashed by 90% and over 70% of the population now lives to the age of 120 years in good health.
Thanks to resveratrol-fortified soft drinks and dietary supplements, senility due to Alzheimer’s disease is a thing of the past.
By law, all foods must be fortified with Vitamin D in amounts that boost immunity so that winter-time cold and flu epidemics have been eliminated. Since vaccines are no longer needed, childhood autism no longer is reported.
Since it was found that vitamin D hardens dental enamel, drinking water is no longer fluoridated for that purpose, and childhood dental decay has been drastically reduced.
High-dose vitamin D pills have replaced penicillin to treat bacterial infections, and more stubborn bacterial, viral or fungal infections are now treated with allicin pills, derived from garlic. By using these natural antibiotics, germ-resistance is no longer reported.
Since the inclusion of rice bran into cereals, bread and other baked goods, diabetes now rarely occurs before the age of 100.
Cholesterol-lowering drugs are no longer employed since they never were shown to lower mortality rates and it was later revealed that government health authorities created this misdirection long ago in an effort to covertly reduce birth rates and population growth (cholesterol being a precursor for sex hormones — estrogen and testosterone).
Atherosclerosis is now treated as a disease of progressive calcification of arteries and heart valves that begins once childhood growth is completed. Natural molecules (vitamin D, vitamin K, magnesium, rice bran, resveratrol and lignans), which retain calcium in bones or prevent calcium from crystallizing, are widely employed to cleanse arteries, kidneys, eyes, brain and liver from excessive calcium.
Once diagnosed, cancer is treated at home with intravenous vitamin C, high-dose vitamin D, resveratrol and allicin pills. Twenty-year survival rates after initial diagnosis are now in the range of 90%.
The fortification of folic acid in foods has virtually eliminated birth defects, cervical cancer and other malignancies, and has measurably improved brain function in senior adults.
Adults now attend clinics where a non-invasive eye-scan measurement of lipofuscin, a marker of cellular aging, is obtained so that citizens now know their biological as well as chronological age.
Family members can no longer estimate your age by pictures in the family photo album. Grey hair and wrinkles are a thing of the past. By inclusion of a molecule called hyaluronan into mayonnaise, beverages, salad dressings and food supplements, most adults maintain youthful-looking skin, thick hair and flexible joints throughout life.
The striking disappointment is that all of this was known over 40 years ago but entrenched financial interests prevented these health practices from being implemented in a timely manner.
The Best of Bill SardiAerotronics Flight Simulator and Tactical Systems Company Profile:
Aerotronics LLC is a producer of high-end flight simulation hardware. Our core business revolves around production of the HOTAS for most of the United States fighter jet and Helicopter inventory. We have expanded to the UAV market, as well as Space Vehicle Controllers and Weapons System Controllers. Custom engineering: Almost everything we have made was the result of an industrial request. To many customers, we are the “go to” people for designing and building simulation items that are not readily available in the market. We pride ourselves on being inventive, resourceful and thinking “outside the box”. We have built many “never done before” projects for companies in Canada, Austria, Korea, Singapore, as well as here in the US. Some of these projects include tactical systems used in actual aircraft. New Items! Virtual Reality Rapidly Reconfigureable Jet Agressor Stations. With VR, the grips and controllers need to be in the right positions with the right feel. The seat needs to be at the right angle, and every pushable button needs to be mapped to the VR environment. We are teaming with other companies to develop F-16, F-35, F/A-18, T-6, F5E stations that can be rapidly reconfigureable. Fully functional high fidelity C-130 throttle quadrant with "lift up" gating mechanisms, C-130H yokes and Nav grips. UAV Control stations: Block 15 and the new upgraded Block 30 controllers for Reaper-like / Warrior stations: We have been building Block 15 stations. Now we are also building the Block 30 UAV control stations Marvel Movies! See if you can guess what parts we made in the upcoming Captain Marvel Movie (Hint: F-15) Lakota UH-72A Simulator Project: We were awarded a large contract for UH-72A (Lakota Helicopter) / Eurocopter EC-145 Cyclic and Collective controllers. The contract called for 204 units to be completed in less than 6 months. Prototypes were required within 2 months. Amazingly, we were able to deliver the prototypes and production units on time. We have had secondary orders for a high fidelity version. These require synchronized dual twist grips for the pilot and copilot collectives. Not an easy fix...but we did it!! Next Gen TX Project Jet Simulator HOTAS, Rudder Pedals, Displays. Radar Warning Receivers RWR for A-10 and F-16 F-35 Rudder Pedals! UAV rudder pedals, Space Vehicle Controllers for the CST-100 Starliner space capsule sims Our Customers: We have provided equipment to many of the US Airforce Bases, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L-3, AFRL, Environmental Tectonics. International customers include Israel, Singapore, Thailand, Canada, South Korea, The Netherlands and Austria. Our Mission: Aerotronics LLC was born out of an industry need for a high fidelity military simulation hardware with competitive pricing, and faithful reliability. We strive to support all points in the price value reliability triangle and deliver within a reasonable lead time. Aerotronics Engineering Innovations Aerotronics has developed unique solutions for the industry simulation needs. For example: If you want an authentic feel to the F-16 throttle action with the proper detents and stops, you would normally need to build a heavy, bulky side wall to house the throttle guide rail. Instead, Aerotronics has successfully provided all of the gates, detents and stops with the side wall built completely internally. Our rudder system is the most rugged in its price class, complete with hidden integrated toe brakes and accurate actuation forces. The force transducers accurately represent the force loading of the real F-16 FLCS base using strain gauge technology. In every piece of equipment we develop, Aerotronics finds a way to redefine the industry standard. F-22, F-16 and F-35 HOTAS Sets Production Capabilities HOTAS systems for the cockpit and desktop environment
Robust Rudder Pedals
Head Up Display (HUD) Avionics System
Reproduction of rare parts
Rapid prototyping: finding new ways to deliver parts quickly.
Design and implementation of new hardware technology.
On-Site Manufacturing and precision CNC machining
Uncompromising quality control standards Why Aerotronics? What distinguishes us from the rest? 4 words: Price, Quality, Timeliness, Innovation. Price: Our promise is to deliver the best value. We offer several grades of fidelity and material, including aluminum, steel, carbon fiber, fiberglass and resin. If price is the most important factor, we will supply the best equipment available for your budget. Upgrades in quality and delivery time frames are always available for a premium. Quality: Our flight hardware is designed by an aerospace engineer who takes pride in developing a robustness that exceeds design specifications. Since flight simulators get 100 times the abuse of the real jet, we develop stronger grips. Timeliness: Some of our competing hardware manufacturers have lead times of upwards of 12 to 24 months. As a smaller company, Aerotronics can often manipulate staffing for rush orders unlike larger, inflexible companies. Innovation: Aerotronics implements new, practical solutions for an expanding lineup of products. Be wary of vendors who promise the world and then cannot deliver. There may be projects that cannot be delivered at a given price. We would let you know that up front.40% of Polish live below subsistence levels, financially vegetating
The Polish institute of labour and social policy (Instytut Pracy i Polityki Społecznej) has released figures that place 40% of Polish households below it’s defined quality-of-life threshold.
They calculate that a couple with one small child require 2661.36 złoty (€630) per month to survive above subsistence, or, be able to do more than just vegetate. A family of four, 3437.68, a family of five, 4216. A childless couple, 1793.60 (€425) per month and a retired couple 1799.24.
Explains Dr. Piotr Kurowski, author of the “Rzeczpospolita” report, this amount is meant to indicate how much income is needed in the family to participate in a social life – examples given:
go for a cheap vacation
have a phone
the cheapest tv subscription
do something with kids from time to time
go out with friends
adults commuting to work
The amounts exclude mortgage payments, which would need even more income.
SEE ALSO: Polish wages should increase, record job vacancies
Prof. Janusz Czapiński, social psychologist and author of “Diagnoza Społeczna” said:
We estimate that revenues at the level of the subsistence minimum or below applies to about 40% of families in Poland.
Rafał Betlejewski’s 30 days
Following in the footsteps of “Mr 30 days“, American Morgan Spurlock, Polish performer and journalist Rafal Betlejewski last year conducted an experiment, and tried to survive the month for 1436 złoty net.
“On this, or lower amounts, live the majority of Polish pensioners” Betlejewski explains. He adds that his experiment failed, he came up 300 zł short.
“For subsistence you can survive, but it comes with an extraordinary effort and one must give up on any goods of civilization, gains of culture” – believes Betlejewski.
In his opinion such a low income means that contacts with the world is broken, with other people, a man with such income loses all ambitions and aspirations.
An example family of four
But people must cope. Elwira from Warsaw together with her husband raise two teenagers. She is a cook, her husband does not work.
We earn 2.5 thousand złoty gross per month. My husband earns 500zł per month working under the table.
– She acknowledges if they save anything, it’s mainly on food and matters related to culture.
I shop at discount stores, sometimes I can bring food home, when the boss lets me take something that is left over after an event.
We don’t go to the cinema, theatre or concerts. Newspapers and books, we do not buy. We try not to save when spending on the children.
We have provided pay-as-you-go sim cards for mobile phones and our computer for them. But for vacations the kids have to earn the money. I am trying to earn some extra money myself. In the summer I took care of a friend’s dog, in September, she was in a conference.
SEE ALSO: Polish pres tells Poles stay in Britain, don’t come home
Dr. Ewa Flaszyńska, the Director of social welfare at Bielany, says that for people on low incomes the hardest thing is to live in small towns and in the countryside:
In larger cities such as Warsaw, the possibilities are greater, in smaller ones everything depends on the wealth of the municipality.
Except that in large cities, people have greater opportunities to benefit from cultural events or are free to enter a Museum. Poor rural children do not benefit from that, because they cannot afford it, it would be on a ticket to get into the city.
Poverty and unemployment
If the parents are excluded socially, their children do the same. Often they inherit this poverty and unemployment.
She explains, also noting that children from poorer families it is true for minimal school supplies they get funding e.g. social grants, but they are digitally excluded, because their parents can’t afford a computer, and there is a fixed fee for the internet.
Poorer children do not go on trips. Do not go on vacation. They sit in their homes.
..says Dr Flaszyńska. She recognises that, in many cases, poverty has a close relationship to unemployment, the most enduring connection.
Children inherit joblessness, following their parents. Some habits are at home, so they can see their father has not worked all his life, and later reproduce this behaviour. That is why it is important to not only the work of social workers, but also families, to teach families and children other behaviour, habits and examples.
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∼ If you enjoyed, please Like or share! ∼This small country has a proud history of progressive reform. But some worry that the current government is turning back the clock.
New Zealand is a young island nation, known the world over for its clean, green reputation and breathtaking scenery. It’s a reputation that opens up markets for its exports and draws in millions of tourists looking for adventure. It is the lifeline of the economy and the employer to many thousands of people.
Indeed, it’s a reputation that has defined New Zealand as a nation and reflects the values that many of its people hold dear.
It’s also a reputation that is under threat from government policies that are undermining the country’s clean, green values.
Missed Opportunities
New Zealand is well-placed and well-equipped to achieve economic prosperity without compromising its environment. The government could stop the on-going battle that’s being waged on the country’s land, air and seas, and instead take action to become a global leader in cleaner, smarter development.
But, sadly, this is not the case.
The centre-right National party government has defined both its terms in office with two polarizing ambitions: to close the income gap with Australia by 2020, and to get New Zealand’s books back in surplus by the next election in 2014.
On the face of it, such aspirations would seem laudable. But they have become the basis for policies which are letting ‘economic growth at all costs’ ride roughshod over the people’s instinct and wisdom to protect their land.
Known in political circles as the ‘business growth agenda’, it has become the holy grail of economic reform. “Nothing creates jobs and boosts incomes better than business growth,” its architects claim. And who could disagree?
However, a more prosperous future for New Zealand depends on the type of business growth that it allows. And this is where the risk to its reputation lies.
At the heart of the government’s fiscal plan is the exploitation of the country’s natural resources — its oil, gas and coal reserves. The government has made it the centrepiece of its economic program. It is courting major oil companies to come and drill for oil in New Zealand’s deep seas and mine its land for coal.
Ministers are championing hydraulic fracturing for unconventional gas reserves, in spite of international and local community concerns over the effects of this polluting practice on human health.
New Zealand’s state-owned energy company, Solid Energy, has proposed to unlock some of the country’s six billion tonnes of lignite — the dirtiest coal and the most climate-polluting form of energy — to turn into diesel and coal briquettes. It is a carbon bomb that will shatter New Zealand’s efforts to tackle climate change.
Yet the government is eager to light the fuse. Nothing, it seems, is off the table.
In order to make it easier for big business to exploit the nation’s natural resources and bypass local consultation, the government has been rewriting the laws that were put in place to safeguard the environment.
Or, as the mantra has become, it’s ‘finding the right balance between economic growth and environmental loss’. In other words, a little bit of growth justifies a little bit of environmental damage, and so on. It pits the two against each other, rather than considering them as a whole.‘…Just like natural organisms, the financial system must have death to evolve into a better form…’
Now that he’s wearing some sort of do-good government hat, even Hank Paulson is not thinking straight.
Regulate in New York and finance goes to Toronto. Regulate in London, it goes to Frankfurt or Paris – and since Toronto, Frankfurt and Paris are run by the same nervous bureaucrat-types, we can reckon soon enough that the entire financial markets will be hosted out of Singapore and Shanghai.
There they will accept the risks as well as the rewards, to their very considerable long-term benefit.
You simply cannot enjoy being the financial center of the world but start bleating for government bailout whenever asset prices dip a few percent. As Paulson is demonstrating, the regulatory price for being bailed out is far too high. We must all grow up and take a full measure of punishment. The banks must take theirs.
Let the shareholders and depositors take theirs too. Just like natural organisms the financial system must have death to evolve into a better form.
Paulson’s plan is a dressed-up confiscation of the profits of the cautious, and a transfer of those profits straight back to unreconstructed gamblers in the worst offending banks. This is very unwise.
Caution must be rewarded
In these difficult times, profit (or more accurately the avoidance of loss) should be benefiting those who troubled to understand the risks in the system, and avoided them. But Paulson’s plan is currency creation, and a devaluation of the good quality assets owned by the cautious. He fails to understand that unless the system occasionally rewards caution there is no reason ever to be cautious again.
The market works better without these rescues. Only by appropriate economic reward to the cautious, when they are right and everyone else is wrong, will caution sit well beside risk-taking in the financial system. The real threat to New York’s and London’s continued dominance of the world’s future financial system is government regulation itself.
Mr. Paulson should read Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom, and he would understand the inevitable failure of his rescue plans. He would see how these top down rules remove society’s flexibility until one day we all wake up in a paralyzed ‘command’ economy, where nothing can be done without official sanction.
Instead, he has forgotten what a command economy means. He should study the history of communism’s economic successes. It won’t take him long.
By Paul Tustain for BullionVault.comWhere will Mike Williams eventually settle on a list of active NFL receivers from Clemson?
Perhaps on top of it.
NFL Network analyst Charley Casserly, formerly general manager of the Washington Redskins, believes the potential first-round draft choice will a better pro than the Houston Texans' DeAndre Hopkins.
"Watching the two of them coming out of college, off tape, to me, Williams has better separation, the ability to beat a defender one-on-one when he has to, inside and outside on cuts," Casserly said on NFL Network's Path to the Draft.
That's saying a lot.
Hopkins' resume includes a 111-catch, 1,521-yard season on it (2015) and he's averaging north of 1,100 yards per year after four NFL seasons. Hopkins is the most accomplished among a deep group of NFL receivers from Clemson that includes Sammy Watkins and Martavis Bryant. Williams was a big draw Thursday at Clemson's pro day, where he ran a pair of 40-yard dashes clocked in the 4.5's. It was a solid time for a player of Williams' size (6-foot-4, 220 pounds) and strength. NFL Network analyst Mike Mayock called Williams "a first-round pick all day long," at the pro day workout Thursday.
While Casserly prefers Williams over Hopkins, and projects him to be selected No. 10 overall by the Buffalo Bills, that doesn't mean he doesn't have some scouting concerns about him.
"A little disappointing to me was his 10 (yard split) time, only 1.65. Laquon Treadwell of the Minnesota Vikings had the same time, that's scary," Casserly said. "He hasn't done shuttle drills. Why not? Maybe he doesn't think he does them well, and his change of direction may not be quite what we think it is. (I) love him on tape, though."
If he proves to be a better receiver than Hopkins in the NFL, whichever team picks him up in the draft will be thrilled.
Follow Chase Goodbread on Twitter @ChaseGoodbread.The chief of police in an upscale northern California town has issued a letter in Spanish to illegal immigrants in his city assuring them that they’re safe from deportation because his agency “will not engage in federal immigration enforcement activities.” Police in Windsor, which is situated about 60 miles north of San Francisco, will not arrest or detain any person for immigration violations or conduct “sweeps” to locate those “illegally present in the United States,” the letter states.
Windsor’s police chief, Carlos G. Basurto, reveals in the letter that he is the grandson of illegal immigrants and knows that an overwhelmingly large percentage of illegal aliens are good, decent and hard-working.
“I am committed to provide them and all other segments of our community with a safe and healthy community for all to enjoy and prosper and to have a feeling of equality,” the chief writes to illegal aliens in his municipality of about 28,000 residents. Basurto concedes that in his 28 years in law enforcement he’s seen illegal immigrants who are violent gang members, drug dealers, murderers, rapists, human traffickers and child abusers. “To think that this does not exist and that all immigrants are good people, is to be either naïve, uninformed or in denial,” the chief writes, confirming that “there is a segment committed to violence, drugs and domestic terrorism.”
With that said, the top law enforcement official in this California town vows to protect illegal aliens from federal authorities, even those with minor offenses. “Our community involves and includes everyone,” Chief Basurto writes. “I don’t want anyone, and I emphasize anyone, to be afraid to call upon us for assistance, information, advice or to report any crime or issue in our town.” The reassurances continue; “If you are an undocumented immigrant in the Town of Windsor, you do not need to fear the officers of the Windsor Police Department nor assume that they have any reason to bother you, detain you or arrest you for simply being undocumented. Your immigration status is completely irrelevant to us.” He adds that his agency collaborates with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to apprehend “serious or violent criminals” under the condition that ICE refrain from arresting any person based immigration status or low-level offenses.
Deep in the three-page letter the chief acknowledges that illegal entry to the United States is against the law, but his personal convictions evidently allow him to look the other way. His grandparents came from Mexico and worked in the fields and ranches of California and when he was in junior high he and his brother worked in the prune fields to earn money for school clothes. This taught Basurto to appreciate immigrant workers. “We also knew that most, if not all of these people, emigrated here from other countries to do this work, for little pay, in hopes of making a better life for themselves and their families,” the chief writes. “In essence, I can relate to these people, because like many of us in this town, we are these people.”
Guaranteeing illegal aliens that they’ll be shielded from federal authorities technically constitutes a sanctuary city, but Windsor officials say this could bring consequences under the new administration so they’re keeping it quiet. A local Spanish newspaper article reports that town manager Linda Kelly, a seasoned government official, has recommended that Windsor keep its sanctuary practices under the radar because President Donald Trump has threatened to cut federal funds to sanctuary cities. Instead, Windsor will adopt a resolution that omits the word sanctuary, instead declaring the town to be a united community that values diversity and the contributions of all residents.According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is going to solve the issue of wasted space on bigger displays, but essentially, filling them up – with more tiles that is. The rumour is that there will be support for a third column of medium sized tiles. Windows Phone Daily made the mockup you see above, and I actually quite like it. At first, I thought maybe it was too cluttered, but now, I think it works, especially since we have heard that WP8 will have bigger and better displays.
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I recently had the discussion on twitter that MS may soon run out of UI/UX innovation, but hopefully this is the least exciting change they make. I’d love to have those 3/4 tiles – both landscape and portrait and the folder implementation. Oh, and of course, our very own Peter Lackman’s concept of “Hyperspace” notifications.
So my last addition is, is more better?
Source: All things Microsoft; Via: Windows Phone Daily
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Category: RumoursFP Haskell Center Open Publish Announcement
As you know, FP Complete’s mission is to drive the wide-scale adoption of Haskell functional programming. As our next step in this mission, I’m pleased to announce we are releasing our full FP Haskell Center (FPHC) free for developers of open projects. This model will be very familiar to Haskellers and GitHub users.
FPHC has been live online for a little less than a year and has been very successful. I’m proud of our hard-working team who have achieved so much so quickly, using many important open-source components as well as some very good commercial services. Because of this progress and the support and activity from our users, we have reached the point where we can give even more back to the Haskell community and do more to promote the overall advancement of Haskell.
As of October 1, users of our free Community or “Open Publish” edition will have access to features previously offered only to FPHC Commercial customers. This includes complete remote git support, complete git command line integration for Emacs clients, as well as git “mega repos,” and inter-project dependencies.
With these increased free features, the paid Personal edition is no longer needed. If you have a Personal license, we’ll stop charging you, and will renew you to a free Open Publish license. Similarly, Academic accounts will also convert to Open Publish accounts.
Unlike Commercial licenses, Open Publish accounts will automatically publish all projects on the FPHC site with each commit. Open Publish accounts aren’t available on private servers, and won’t include a shared or private FP Application Server. Of course we continue to offer the paid Commercial license for those who need it — but most people won’t.
We’re confident that access to more capable tools will inspire others to be more involved with pushing Haskell forward, and we believe this move will better suit open source projects and independent developers.
Now that our corporate clients are expanding their work orders with us, we can offer even more for open source developers. This has also afforded us the opportunity to focus on our own innovative Haskell projects which we will be rolling out over time. Our corporate clients are excited by what we’ve been able to deliver with our Haskell-built tools, and this is just the beginning. Of course we also continue to contribute to Yesod, Fay, GHC, Stackage, and other important Haskell community projects beyond FP Haskell Center itself.
Innovation is about motivation, and we hope our free tools for open source Haskell developers provide the resources and motivation to build more projects. What has already been amassed in our School of Haskell is proof that the Haskell community knows how to build great resources given the right tools and forums. Keep up the amazing work and let us know what else we can do to help.
Aaron Contorer, CEO, FP Complete
Planned Release Schedule:Blake Krikorian, who played on UCLA's water polo team between 1986 and 1989, died Wednesday, Aug. 3, while surfing in the San Francisco area. While the cause of his death is still unconfirmed, he apparently suffered a heart attack, according to media reports. He was 48 years old and is survived by his wife, Cathy, and two daughters.
He is the older brother of former UCLA water polo player and coach Adam Krikorian, who is currently serving as head coach of the U.S. Women's Water Polo Team competing at the Olympics in Rio.
Blake Krikorian, who was the former CEO of Slingbox Media Inc., and his brother Jason were on the team that created Slingbox in 2004, a device that allows you to watch your own television from a laptop anywhere in the world.
While at UCLA, Blake had three injury-laden seasons as a Bruin from 1986-88. But after shoulder surgery in 1988, he returned to the squad in 1989 for his senior year and had his best season as a Bruin, recording 19 goals (fifth on the team) while finishing fourth in steals (12) and second in assists (11).
A tough competitor, Blake was a member of the 1985 Junior National Team and graduated from Mountain View High School in Mountain View, California. He was his team's MVP and was an All-CCS and All-League performer in water polo and was an All-League swimmer as well.
He graduated from UCLA in |
parties are scrambling for answers. Only the bogey of communalism and constantly chanting that ‘idea of India’ is under danger is not good enough to win votes in today’s day and age. Not that there is a lack of issues to attack the Modi govt. The manufacturing sector is facing a crisis; job creation is far below that were promised, traders reeling from double blow of GST and demonetization, cow vigilantes are running amok. But the opposition, primarily due to lack of effective leadership, hasn’t managed to form any strong narrative against the government. The ‘Suit Boot ka Sarkar’ jibe managed to ruffle some feathers, but Modi did amends by backtracking on the Land Acquisition Bill. From then, it has been one-way traffic all the way.
But greatest takeaway for NDA’s political foes and the undecided parties is that scrutiny from investigative agencies will only increase in the coming days. Mamata Banerjee is already facing the heat, although she remains the undisputed ruler of Bengal. But other parties may not be immune to such intense probe. It may make more sense to jump the ship and join the tide rather than swim against it and face political oblivion. Like the Third Front was a non-starter for the last two decades rife with self-contradiction and power squabbles, a united opposition may remain a pipe dream in near future. With Nitish’s inclusion, NDA has virtually crushed the soul of Opposition, sapped it of all the hopes. Only some magic potion can rejuvenate them.Chinese Navy helicopters fly over a People's Liberation Army Navy warship on April 23, 2009 off Qingdao in Shandong Province. AFP Photo/Guang Niu As China boosts its military spending, rattling neighbours over territorial disputes at sea, an AFP investigation shows that European countries have approved billions in transfers of weapons and military-ready technology to the Asian giant.
China's air force relies on French-designed helicopters, while submarines and frigates involved in Beijing's physical assertion of its claim to vast swathes of the South China Sea are powered by German and French engines -- part of a separate trade in "dual use" technology to Beijing's armed forces.
Chinese President Xi Jinping announced stepped-up production of the Airbus EC175 helicopter in China during his visit to France this month -- a deal analysts said could result in technology transfers to the military.
"European exports are very important for the Chinese military," said Andrei Chang, editor of the Hong Kong-based Kanwa Asian Defense Review.
"Without European technology, the Chinese navy would not be able to move."
The European Union imposed an arms embargo on China after its army killed many demonstrators in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. But member states are free to interpret the embargo loosely, analysts say.
The exports have generated friction with the United States -- which does not export arms to Beijing -- along with criticism from activists pointing to human rights violations and analysts citing regional security concerns.
An EU spokesman said in a statement that "the final decision to authorize or deny the (arms) export is the responsibility of EU member states".
Vessels of war
AFP Photo/Guang Niu China -- the world's second largest military spender -- last month announced the latest of many double-digit rises in its official defence budget.
EU arms makers received licenses to export equipment worth three billion euros ($4.1 billion) to China in the decade to 2012, according to annual EU reports on the trade.
The most recent said arms exports worth 173 million euros were approved in 2012, with France issuing more than 80 percent of them by value. A French parliamentary report said the country delivered China arms worth 104 million euros.
Most of the sum was accounted for by the production of Airbus helicopters in China for use by China's military, according to analysts from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which monitors arms transfers.
Other EU licences included almost three million euros' worth of "smooth-bore weapons" and accessories, approved for export by Britain, and nearly 18 million euros' worth of "vessels of war" or their accessories and components, authorized by the Netherlands.
Most of Beijing's military imports last year came from Russia while France, Britain and Germany supplied 18 percent, SIPRI estimates.
'Very lax, very loose'
China is on track to become a major military power.
While it calls its expanding capabilities peaceful and aimed at self-defence, relations with its neighbours have soured in recent years, especially rival Japan, with experts warning of potentially dangerous escalations if either side miscalculates.
Tensions spiked last year when a Jiangwei-class Chinese frigate was among the vessels Tokyo accused of locking fire-control radar on a destroyer and a helicopter near disputed islands seen as a potential flashpoint, an allegation Beijing denied.
Military experts believe the ship relies on diesel engines produced by German firm MTU.
Another accused ship, a Jiangkai-class vessel, uses engines made by SEMT Pielstick, a French diesel engine manufacturer owned by German firm MAN Diesel and Turbo, according to analysts and specifications posted on Chinese military websites.
MAN told AFP that its Chinese licensees have supplied about 250 engines to China's navy.
MTU said it "acts strictly according to the German export laws", without elaborating.
The engines are exported as "dual use" -- having civilian and potential military applications -- so are exempt from the EU arms embargo.
Beijing's military has acquired an array of such items, including software used to design fighter jets, from Europe over the past decade.
German-designed engines chosen for their quietness power virtually all non-nuclear Chinese submarines and several classes of Chinese frigates deployed in the South China Sea, where Beijing has a host of territorial disputes, analysts say.
Citing the co-production deal signed in France, Chang said: "China uses the name of civil purchase to purchase French helicopter engines, and they shift those engines into military helicopters."
"If (China) knows how to design the middle-sized EC175, they will know how to design a middle-sized military transport helicopter."
China's recent military helicopters "appear to just be upgrades" of Airbus designs, said Roger Cliff, military analyst at the US-based Atlantic Council.
Airbus directed inquiries to its helicopter division, which did not respond.
Bernadette Andreosso, director of European studies at Ireland's University of Limerick, described Europe's dual-use export controls as "very lax, very loose".
European countries face a dilemma, analysts said.
"China represents much more of a threat today to stability in the Pacific and elsewhere," said Andreosso. "We might have to sacrifice some of our competitiveness to have greater security."
Trading values for arms?
Arms exports have created tension between the EU and US, analysts say, and according to SIPRI the US has not exported any arms to China in any of the recent years for which it has data.
China's defence ministry declined to comment.
Campaigners also worry about human rights in China, which jails dissidents and deploys troops in sensitive areas including Tibet.
"The EU is supposed to be based on the promotion of human rights and democracy, but all too often these values are overridden in the name of short-term profits for arms companies," said Andrew Smith, of the UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade.
Emil Kirchner, an EU policy expert at Britain's University of Essex, said East Asian tensions meant the exports could eventually damage EU interests.
"Already, cynics claim that if the People's Liberation Army went to war tomorrow, it would employ an arsenal filled with equipment from Germany, France and Britain," he said.Macross Delta's Walkūre Live 2017 "Walkūre ga Tomaranai" at Yokohama Arena sold 551 more copies for a new total of 3,946. It dropped from #11 to #29 in its second week on the overall DVD chart.
The Shin Godzilla film sold 498 more copies for a new total of 71,529. It rose to #48 to #32 in its 12th week.
Rank Last
Week Title Weekly
Copies Total
Copies Release Date Maker Artist/Category Highest
Rank Weeks
on Chart 1 5 Minions 1,423 90,773 16/6/3 NUE Animation 1 54 2 - Naruto Shippūden Naruto & Sasuke Arc 3 1,127 1,127 17/6/7 ANX Animation 2 1 3 7 Despicable Me 2 (14.09) 1,032 160,050 14/9/3 NUE Animation 1 145 4 6 A Silent Voice Movie DVD 899 11,691 17/5/17 KYA/A Silent Voice Movie Production Committee Animation 1 4 5 12 Despicable Me Mini Movie Collection 500-Yen DVD 842 108,908 14/12/19 NUE Animation 1 130 6 - One Piece 18th Season Zou Arc piece. 6 833 833 17/6/7 AVP Animation 6 1 7 10 Minions 9 Mini Movie Collection 649 21,906 16/11/18 NUE Animation 5 30 8 9 Despicable Me (12.04) 628 199,535 12/4/13 GUE Animation 1 224 9 8 Utano☆Princesama Legend Star 6 481 6,455 17/5/24 K Animation 4 3 10 3 Granblue Fantasy the Animation 2 (Limited Complete Pressing) 466 14,151 17/5/24 ANX Animation 2 3 11 13 My Neighbor Totoro 408 95,999 14/7/16 WDS Animation 3 152 12 2 Yuri!! on Ice 6 DVD 332 21,701 17/5/26 AVP Animation 1 3 13 4 Kubikiri Cycle: Aoiro Savant to Zaregoto Tsukai 6 (Limited Complete Pressing) 241 2,175 17/5/31 ANX Animation 4 2 14 - Curious George Best Selection 3 Outdoor Adventures! 240 1,232 16/11/18 NUE Animation 14 7 15 - Curious George Best Selection 1 Fun With Friends! 239 1,138 16/11/18 NUE Animation 15 6 16 - Curious George Best Selection 2 Garden Discoveries! 233 924 16/11/18 NUE Animation 16 5 17 14 Granblue Fantasy the Animation 1 (Limited Complete Pressing) 231 20,700 17/4/26 ANX Animation 1 7 18 1 The [email protected] Cinderella Girls Gekijō Vol. 1 212 15,641 17/5/24 FTW Animation 1 3 19 - Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju DVD Box (Limited-Time Edition) 174 174 17/6/7 K Animation 19 1 20 - Doraemon: Nobita no Himitsu Dōgu Museum (Doraemon Movie Super Price Edition) 139 7,085 16/3/2 SGK Animation 14 43 21 - Soreike! Anpanman Omocha no Hoshi no Nanda to Runda 133 11,142 16/11/23 VAP Animation 4 29 22 - Tom and Jerry Dodo-nto 32 Supersized Pack Vol. 1 120 72,115 13/8/21 WHV Animation 3 197 23 - Kiki's Delivery Service 119 42,689 14/7/16 WDS Animation 10 150 24 15 Yuri!! on Ice 5 DVD 117 17,136 17/4/28 AVP Animation 1 7 25 - Soreike! Anpanman Pika Pika Collection Anpanman Tanjō/Anpanman to Baikinman 116 37,486 05/11/23 VAP Animation 24 131 26 - Lego Batman: The Movie – DC Super Heroes Unite 108 5,002 17/3/17 WHV Animation 8 12 27 - Spirited Away 107 32,546 14/7/16 WDS Animation 9 116 28 - Doraemon: Nobita to Kiseki no Shima ~Animal Adventure~ (Doraemon Movie Super Price Edition) 107 4,855 16/3/2 SGK Animation 19 33 29 - The Lego Movie 102 4,686 17/3/17 WHV Animation 10 13 30 16 Anime Chiruran 1/2 I DVD 101 789 17/5/26 SL6 Animation 16 3
Source: OriconHow it Works
Paste and edit existing SQL Select statements
The tool allows you to quickly understand the structure and possible problems with a syntactically correct SQL which produces ex a cartesian join. The SQL will be parsed, tables with aliases, columns, joins, WHERE clauses, subselects, GROUP BY will be extracted and renderred into a diagram. The uniqueness of this site is that parsing requires no access to your physical database, or to it's create script. This also means that you have to qualify your columns with a table or alias prefix.
This approach was introduced by the open source Reverse Snowflake Joins project in August 2008, with an online demo on this website since 2008. The tables are layed out automatically using Graphviz.
Cartesians joins, loops and typos
The query bellow has a typo, S.Geography_Id = G.Id instead of S.Geography_Id = C.Id. How fast can you spot the error in the unformatted SQL?
SELECT B.Brand, G.Country, SUM (F.Units_Sold) FROM Fact_Sales F INNER JOIN Dim_Date D ON F.Date_Id = D.Id INNER JOIN Dim_Store S ON F.Store_Id = S.Id INNER JOIN Dim_Geography G ON S.Geography_Id = C.Id INNER JOIN Dim_Product P ON F.Product_Id = P.Id INNER JOIN Dim_Product_Category C ON P.Product_Category_Id = C.Id INNER JOIN Dim_Brand B ON P.Brand_Id = B.Id WHERE D.Year = 1997 AND C.Product_Category = 'tv' GROUP BY B.Brand, G.Country
Left and right joins
Left and right joins are easily spotted, the colored edge being wider towards the table containing also NULL values. For example the path from fact right join d2 left join d22 contains left and right joins, and most probably would return incorrect results
SELECT *
FROM fact LEFT JOIN d1 ON fact.k1=d1.k1 RIGHT JOIN d11 ON d11.k11=d1.k11
RIGHT JOIN d2 ON fact.k2=d2.k2 LEFT JOIN d22 ON d22.k22=d2.k22
LEFT JOIN d3 ON fact.k3=d3.k3 RIGHT JOIN d33 ON d33.k33=d3.k33
Chasm traps
Chasm traps occur when one table is connected to two or more tables by 1-to-N relationships. This causes multiplication of rows. For example one bad way is to directly try to compare actual sales against sales targets by products.
SELECT
p.product, SUM(o.sales), SUM(sp.sales)
FROM
products p INNER JOIN orders o ON p.pid = o.pid
INNER JOIN salesplans sp on p.pid = sp.pid
GROUP BY p.pid
Fan traps
Fan traps are caused when joining one table by 1-to-N relationship to a second table that is joined to a third table by another 1-to-N relationship. This again is causing multiplication of rows. For example taking the sum of amounts from the orders table and the count of shipped items from the lineitem table.
SELECT
c.customer, SUM(o.ordertotal), SUM(l.quantity)
FROM customer c INNER JOIN orders o ON c.cid = o.cid
INNER JOIN orderlines l ON o.oid = l.oid
GROUP BY c.customer;
Write a SELECT to quickly document or design database schemas
Following example is taken from the tables from Fossil SCM, plus the inexistent Payments table and a few comments. Easy to write SQL syntax, you can add whatever comments you like and you are ready to show it to your coleagues ex using an overhead projector. Makes technical meetings more productive.
SELECT
payment.login, payment.timestamp, payment.amount, payment.status,
user.uid, user.login, user.pw, user.cap, user.cookie, user.cexpire, user.info, user.mtime, user.photo,
ticketchng.tkt_id, ticketchng.rkt_rid, ticketchng.mtime, ticketchng.login, ticketchng.username, ticketchng.mimetype, ticketchng.icomment
FROM
user INER JOIN payment ON user.login = payment.login INNER JOIN ticketchng ON ticketchng.login = user.login
WHERE
user.photo='field not used' AND ticketchng.username='field not used'
Constraint optimizer might reoder the columns to minimize edge crossings
Sometimes the joining columns between tables have different alphabetical order in each table, leading to unnecessary edge crossigs. These can be minimised by re-ordering the columns in some tables.It has been confirmed that BIGBANG’s T.O.P and Japanese actress Juri Ueno will be starring alongside one another in a new drama. The drama is a Korean-Japanese co-production, organized by CJ E&M and AMUSE Inc.
According to a representative of CJ E&M on March 31, the upcoming drama will follow the story of two people who live completely different lives—a Korean man, Woo Hyun, and a Japanese woman, Haruka. The storyline will focus on the process of overcoming the pain of these two characters’ first loves and finding a new love.
T.O.P is set to play the lead male role of Woo Hyun, a man who holds the pain of his first love yet still wants to believe in love, while Juri Ueno will be taking on the female lead role of Haruka, a woman who still wants a lot of answers when it comes to love.
The director of this Korean-Japanese co-produced project, Lee Seung Hoon, shared, “This project has finally entered production after going through nearly a year of planning. I am very happy to be able to work with T.O.P and Juri Ueno, as we had them in mind for the leading male and female roles since the planning stages. We will make a fun production that many people will be able to enjoy.”
Are you excited for this upcoming drama?
Source (1) (2)TouchArcade Rating:
Teeny Titans ($3.99) is perhaps my biggest surprise of 2016. If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the game, it’s a Pokemon-like that has you running around the world of Teen Titans GO battling and collecting little figures based off of characters from the show. It has a super clever battle system and is dripping with polish and charm. As someone who never really watched Teen Titans GO, I wasn’t expecting Teeny Titans to be something that would float my boat, but holy moly was I wrong. We loved it in our review, and I became pretty obsessed with it once it came out, and even after beating the entire game I still come back to it just to battle and level up my crew because it’s so darn fun.
Anyway, I think Cartoon Network and developer Grumpyface Studios have been quite pleased with the game’s reception as well, and seeing how the game is a success it only makes sense that there would be content updates ahead for the game. Yesterday during the San Diego Comic-Con, it was announced that a new update will be coming to Teeny Titans soon and one of the first new characters revealed is America’s favorite sociopath sweetheart Harley Quinn.
Grumpyface promises that Harley Quinn is “just one of the goodies" planned for Teeny Titan’s first update, and that more information about what else we can expect will be coming soon. I will be anxiously awaiting hearing those details, but in the meantime I have lots of leveling up to do on my current roster of Teeny Titans. If you have yet to experience Teeny Titans, definitely check out the afore-linked review. Even if you’re like me and have never played a Pokemon game or aren’t really a fan of the Teen Titans GO cartoon, this is one of those games that’s just plain fun and should be experienced by all.Von Thomas Eppinger
Die Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) ermordete in den 28 Jahren von 1970 bis zu ihrer Auflösung 33 Menschen, 200 wurden bei den Anschlägen verletzt. Ihren Höhepunkt erreichte die Terrorwelle im ‚Deutschen Herbst‘ 1977 mit der Entführung und Ermordung Hanns Martin Schleyers, der Entführung des Lufthansa-Flugzeugs Landshut und den Selbstmorden von Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin und Jan-Carl Raspe in Stammheim. Die Ziele der Terroristen waren die Spitzen der deutschen Republik, Führungskräfte aus Politik, Wirtschaft und Verwaltung.
Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland antwortete auf die Ermordung ihrer Eliten mit aller Härte. Sie nutzte den Spielraum, den der Gesetzgeber in einem Rechtsstaat hat, bis an seine Grenzen. Manche sind der Ansicht, noch etwas darüber hinaus. Die Einführung der Rasterfahndung ermöglichte den Behörden erstmals, die Personen unabhängig von konkreten Verdachtsmomenten zu überprüfen. Autofahrer, die zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt in einer bestimmten Straße fuhren, Wohnungsmieter, die Strom und Miete bar bezahlten, jeder konnte ins Netz der Terrorfahnder geraten. Der Radikalenerlass verbot die Beschäftigung von ‚Verfassungsfeinden‘ im Öffentlichen Dienst, was für kommunistische Lehrer oder Lokführer praktisch einem Berufsverbot gleichkam. Die ‚Bildung krimineller Vereinigungen‘ und die Mitgliedschaft darin wurden unter Strafe gestellt. Damit konnten auch jene Personen verurteilt werden, denen man vor Gericht keinen konkreten Tatbeitrag zu einer Straftat nachweisen konnte. Schon die Mitgliedschaft in der RAF war strafbar.
Der Staat ging auf allen Ebenen gegen die RAF und deren Sympathisanten vor. Der deutsche Rechtswissenschaftler Prof. Dr. Christoph Gusy beschrieb die Strategie Deutschlands vor zehn Jahren in einem Interview mit der Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung und hob dabei vor allem die Maßnahmen außerhalb des legislativen und polizeilichen Rahmens hervor:
„Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Terrorismus ist keine Aufgabe allein des Rechts oder gar der Polizei. Im Gegenteil: Ein paar zu allem entschlossene Gegner können einen demokratischen Rechtsstaat mittelfristig nicht existenziell gefährden. Dies kann nur gelingen, wo und wenn es in der Bevölkerung ein Umfeld gibt, in welchem die Terroristen leben können ‚wie ein Fisch im Wasser‘. Wo größere Gruppen von Menschen an die Legitimität der Ziele von Terroristen glauben, entstehen wirkliche Gefahren. Diesen ihre scheinbaren Legitimitätsgrundlagen zu entziehen, ist die vordringliche Aufgabe der Politik.“
Zusammengefasst: Um seine Spitzen zu schützen, reagierte der Staat auf den Terror mit allen ihm zur Verfügung stehenden Mitteln. Deutschland schöpfte alle legislativen und polizeilichen Instrumente aus und ging auf allen Ebenen gegen die Terroristen und ihre Sympathisanten vor.
Islamischer Terror funktioniert
Im Vergleich zu den Terroranschlägen im Namen des Islams erscheint der Terror der RAF als regionales Phänomen. In den nicht einmal zweieinhalb Jahren seit dem Anschlag auf Charlie Hebdo im Jänner 2015 ermordeten islamische Terroristen allein in Europa 360 Menschen, über 3.600 wurden verletzt, viele davon schwer. Weltweit verübten islamische Terroristen im heurigen Jahr mindestens 933 Anschläge in 46 Ländern, bei denen 6.745 Menschen ermordet und 7.344 verletzt wurden (Stand 7. Juni 2017). Wie viele Anschläge von den Behörden verhindert werden konnten, ist nicht bekannt.
Doch diesmal stehen nicht die Eliten im Visier der Terroristen sondern wir alle. Männer, Frauen und Kinder sind zu Zielen geworden. Auf einer Busfahrt, in einem Konzert, auf der Straße. Niemand soll sich sicher fühlen, so das Kalkül der Terroristen. Und das Kalkül geht auf. Der islamische Terror hat längst unseren Alltag verändert. Wir haben uns an die endlosen Sicherheitsprozeduren vor Flugreisen ebenso gewöhnt wie daran, darauf zu achten, nur ja den Islam nicht zu beleidigen. Keine Zeitung in Europa würde heute mehr die Mohammed-Karikaturen veröffentlichen, zu groß ist das Risiko geworden.
Der Terror der RAF war erfolglos. Nicht zuletzt, weil der Staat entschieden gegen die Täter und deren Sympathisanten vorging. Der Terror der Islamisten ist erfolgreich. Nicht zuletzt, weil der Staat gegen die Täter und deren Sympathisanten in einer Art und Weise vorgeht, die potenzielle Täter schützt, während sie potenzielle Opfer in ihrer Lebensführung beeinträchtigt. Ausnahmslos alle Attentäter der letzten Monate waren den Behörden bekannt. Sie wussten von deren Gewalttätigkeit, wussten von ihrer Zugehörigkeit zur islamischen Community, die meisten wurden sogar als „Gefährder“ eingestuft, also als potenzielle Terroristen.
Wozu neue Gesetze zur Internet-Kontrolle, wenn die bisherige Überwachung ohne Folgen bleibt, fragt man sich da als Steuerzahler und potenzielles Anschlagsopfer. Wie kommen unsere Regierungen angesichts dieses Staatsversagens dazu, uns nach jedem neuen Anschlag aufs Neue die selben abgedroschenen Floskeln zuzumuten?
Der Staat schützt seine Bürger nicht
„Der Islam sei eine Religion des Friedens“ heißt es, „die Mehrheit der Muslime wolle nichts als Frieden“, und – ganz wichtig – keinesfalls dürfe man Muslime unter Generalverdacht stellen. Im Falle der RAF durfte man das hingegen durchaus: Deutschland hat im Deutschen Herbst alle Linken unter Generalverdacht gestellt und kommunistische Kindergärtnerinnen rausgeworfen. Hat ein eigenes Hochsicherheitsgefängnis für drei RAF-Mitglieder gebaut und Kontaktsperre über sie verhängt (dass sie in der Praxis hintergangen wurde, ist hier nicht das Thema). Als der ‚Göttinger Mescalero‘ in einem Text seine „klammheimliche Freude“ über die Ermordung des Generalbundesanwalts Siegfried Buback kundtat, wurde ein Strafverfahren gegen 140 Beschuldigte eingeleitet.
Wenn seine Eliten angegriffen werden, fährt der Staat alle Geschütze auf. Wenn seine Bürger angegriffen werden, heißt es, das gehöre eben zum normalen Lebensrisiko. Und überhaupt sei es wahrscheinlicher, bei einem Autounfall ums Leben zu kommen. Stimmt. Galt aber auch schon für Buback, Ponto und Schleyer. Nur dass die Empörung grenzenlos gewesen wäre, hätte man deren Ermordung mit denselben Phrasen verniedlicht, mit denen Regierungschefs nun die Ermordung ihrer Bürger kommentieren. Denn erschossen zu werden gehört eben nicht zum normalen Berufsrisiko eines Vorstandsvorsitzenden. Genauso wenig, wie es zum normalen Lebensrisikos eines Mädchens gehört, bei einem Konzert in die Luft gesprengt zu werden.
Friedlich waren die meisten Linken in den 1970er Jahren auch. Das hat den Staat nicht davon abgehalten, das ideologische Umfeld der Terroristen mit allen gerade noch rechtsstaatlichen Mitteln zu bekämpfen. Als es um seine Spitzen ging, wusste der Staat, dass er gefährdet ist, wenn es für Terroristen ein Umfeld gibt, in dem sie „leben können wie ein Fisch im Wasser“. Und die islamischen Terroristen leben in ihren Communities wie der Fisch im Wasser, nur dass sich ihr Habitat zu jenem der RAF verhält wie der Traunsee zum Atlantik.
Würde der Staat mit ähnlicher Entschlossenheit gegen die Terroristen vorgehen, die seine Bürger bedrohen, wie er gegen die Terroristen vorgegangen ist, die seine Eliten bedroht haben, hätte er Muslimbrüder und Salafisten längst als „kriminelle Vereinigung“ klassifiziert und die Mitgliedschaft unter Strafe gestellt. Dann würde er Betätigung für den Politischen Islam genauso ahnden wie nationalsozialistische Wiederbetätigung. Er würde die paar tausend ‚Gefährder‘ aus Europa ausweisen oder, wenn das nicht möglich ist, inhaftieren. Er würde amtsbekannte Extremisten und Agitatoren mit Fußfesseln ausstatten und ihnen bei Strafe verbieten sich zu versammeln – was man problemlos automatisiert überwachen könnte. Imame, die nicht auf dem Boden der Verfassung stehen, hätten längst Berufsverbot, islamistische Kindergärten wären längst geschlossen.
Ja, der eine oder andere wäre vielleicht von subjektiv inadäquaten Maßnahmen betroffen. Aber die Europäische Union beschäftigt die bestausgebildeten Beamten der Welt, die mit einiger Sicherheit effektive und rechtsstaatliche Richtlinien entwickeln könnten, hätte der Schutz der Bürger ähnlich hohe Priorität wie Toaster und Glühbirnen. Ein britischer Forscher über Internationale Beziehungen, der gebürtige Inder Sumantra Maitra, bringt in einem bemerkenswerten Aufsatz auf den Punkt, wie brisant es ist, wenn der Staat beim Schutz seiner Bürger versagt:Who can ever learn the will of God? Human reason is not adequate for the task, and our philosophies tend to mislead us, because our mortal bodies weigh our souls down. The body is a temporary structure made of earth, a burden to the active mind. All we can do is make guesses about things on earth; we must struggle to learn about things that are close to us. Who, then, can ever hope to understand heavenly things? Who has ever learned your will, unless you first gave him wisdom, and sent your holy spirit down to him? In this way people on earth have been set on the right path, have learned what pleases you, and have been kept safe by wisdom. (Wisdom 9,13-18)
As you can see these words are not mine, but come directly from the Book of Wisdom. If you recognize yourself in these questions, you are clearly in good company. The believer’s foundation is to recognize God’s will, and St. Francis was one of the living examples of this: “Lord what do You want me to do.” His life embodied both the urgent need to understand the will of the Lord and the fullness derived from finding and fulfilling it. Yet recognizing God’s will in our lives doesn’t seem to be easy, at least not for me. Over the years —especially thanks to help of who was ahead on the journey (Fr. Max, my spiritual guide)— I learned to recognize some peculiar features of His will, some specific ways the Lord uses in practice to reveal Himself in the lives of people, and especially in mine!
Listening is the primary ingredient to understand Him: listening to the Word of God and to its resonance in the deepest part of ourselves (our consciousness). The passage of Wisdom quoted above points the way: Who has ever learned your will, unless you first gave him wisdom, and sent your Holy Spirit down to him? Therefore listening is based on prayer and meditation over the Holy Spirit.
On my path, and thanks to Fr. Max, I discovered there are three aspects that are necessary in order to recognize God’s will (all three are required, but not necessarily in this order).
1. Concrete facts
This is often the first condition I recognize: concrete facts. Here we are talking about practical things. Let’s say you want to date a girl, Monica. Monica now lives in another country, you have rarely met her, you have different interests (which makes meeting her even more difficult), but above all… she is dating someone else! (… and maybe they even set the wedding date). Now, you can be very attracted to Monica, and for some reasons you may have understood she is the girl you want to court… however, facts clearly say that you’re making a blunder! Let’s imagine, instead, you are interested to work in a certain field. With not much effort you meet the right people —in fact it seems these people come towards you—, opportunities arise by themselves, it is confirmed in the Word of God and you have a sense of peace in all this… maybe this could be the right direction! For example, although there were more than 700 miles between Alessandra and me, we randomly met more than five times in Assisi during the year before we started dating… when you say God-incidences…
2. The Word of God
This example brings us to the second point: confirmation by the Word of God. In fact, once dating, a great discouragement immediately arose because of the many differences (and miles) between us. The Word of God came to our aid by simply going to church and listening to the Gospel of the day:
Because you say so, I will let down the nets (Luke 5,5)
These words clearly resonated in both of us: “This is My work, not yours, so go ahead! In your life you have always fished your own way, and you got nothing. Trust me this time!”. Without this help I think we would have given up right away from the beginning. From this I learnt a great lesson. I understood that every thought of my heart and every project I picture needs to be examined and inspected through the Word of God. Before leaving for France in 2007, I was very concerned and stressed, since I really didn’t want to leave my hometown, Rome. But a word ripped through the lies of my heart: those who want to save their lives will lose them (!). This was the very thing I had in my heart: the fear of leaving what was familiar to me for something I didn’t know (and which also turned out to be pretty hard).
3. The confirmation of the spiritual guide
All this must finally be inspected by the spiritual guide… you shouldn’t mess around with others’ lives, but neither with your own! In Rome we would say “four eyes are better than two”, but above all it is important to understand whose are these extra eyes. The spiritual guide has to be someone who has much experience with the Lord because he spent much time with Him. Once you have found this trusted person, open your heart to him, with no reservation: only then he will be able to help you. Otherwise it could even become counterproductive. You’ll see how his advices will help you to see situations under a different light, and to perceive a greater perspective on your path. In addition, the spiritual guide will push you to get involved in situations you would have gladly avoided! Here is the fundamental point of having a guide: obedience. When Fr. Max told me to go to visit Mimmo and Cynthia in order for me to understand what a Christian family is, I absolutely didn’t want to go… but there I then clearly realized I should court Alessandra. Having seen how it turned out, it’s clear that God rewards those who submit to obedience!
Once these three aspects are verified, what gives you the confirmation that you are on the right track? Peace. When you do the will of God you are in peace. This is the ultimate test that confirms and encourages. Any decision that brings worry, stress or anger is not of God. Where there is peace, there is God. This doesn’t mean situations are necessarily simple… for us living in Strasbourg was very hard, but we were in peace knowing that that was our moment of difficulty. Giving up everything and going back home would have brought us nothing but worries.
The understanding of God’s will requires prayer and discernment. It requires time and prudence. His will upon us is all-encompassing. This is why discernment is based on more points; if all the points confirm our intuition then we can go on and make choices in that direction (always with prudence and gradualness). It is clear that we must be always cautious in discernment, and I don’t mean to provide a handyman manual with this post, don’t even think about it! As it was for St. Francis too, we can understand God’s will only little by little: it is a mystery that is revealed slowly. When St. Francis heard “Go and repair my house, which as you see is brought to desolation”, this was referred to the whole Church, not the small church of St Damiano that he had in front of him.
Finally, I conclude with a blessing, wishing the path may become clearer:The brain tumor surgery in India with IndianMedguru Consultants is the first step to treat the most benign and malignant tumors. This has been performed by the most experienced surgeons at best hospitals in the country. IndianMed |
many of whom have strong and varied opinions on many subjects. Tor supports that diversity of viewpoints by publishing a widely varied group of authors and books through Tor/Forge and by posting a variety of material and reader comment on Tor.com.
Last month, Irene Gallo, a member of Tor’s staff, posted comments about two groups of science fiction writers, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, and about the quality of some of the 2015 Hugo Award nominees, on her personal Facebook page. Ms. Gallo is identified on her page as working for Tor. She did not make it clear that her comments were hers alone. They do not reflect Tor’s views or mine. She has since clarified that her personal views are just that and apologized to anyone her comments may have hurt or offended.
The Puppies groups were organized to support a slate of authors for the Hugo Awards, given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. Media coverage of the two groups initially suggested that they were organized simply to promote white men, which was not correct. Each Puppies’ slate of authors and editors included some women and writers of color, including Rajnar Vajra, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson and Amanda Green. Some of the authors on the Sad Puppy slate have been published by Tor and Tor.com, including Kevin J. Anderson, John C. Wright, Ed Lerner and Michael F. Flynn. Many, many Hugo Award nominees and winners are our authors too, including Kevin J. Anderson, John C. Wright and Katherine Addison this year and John Chu, John Scalzi, Cherie Priest and Jo Walton in past years, just to mention a few.
In short, we seek out and publish a diverse and wide ranging group of books. We are in the business of finding great stories and promoting literature and are not about promoting a political agenda
Tor employees, including Ms. Gallo, have been reminded that they are required to clarify when they are speaking for Tor and when they are speaking for themselves. We apologize for any confusion Ms. Gallo’s comments may have caused. Let me reiterate: the views expressed by Ms. Gallo are not those of Tor as an organization and are not my own views. Rest assured, Tor remains committed to bringing readers the finest in science fiction – on a broad range of topics, from a broad range of authors.Footage has been released which shows the "indescribable" damage caused by the Grenfell Tower blaze.
The images, released by the Metropolitan Police, reveal how entire flats were gutted in the fire on Wednesday morning - with rubble strewn across floors.
Burnt objects including baths, ovens, washing machines, and what looks to be an exercise bike, can be made out in the footage, filmed in one of the few rooms safe enough for specialist crews to access following the blaze.
Another photograph shows two elevators blackened by smoke - with Commander Stuart Cundy warning: "We must prepare people for the terrible reality that some people may not be identified due to the intensity of the fire."
Image: Dozens were killed in the Grenfell Tower blaze
Investigators now believe that the number of people missing and feared dead has risen beyond Saturday's estimate of 58.
Commander Cundy added: "Today, police teams continue their support to families, and make enquiries to cross check the number of those missing.
"I have always said I will be accurate about what I know, so the next figure of those presumed dead and missing will be released tomorrow, Monday, 19 June.
Image: A set of fire-ravaged lifts can be seen in this image released by police
"The figure will be higher but I do not wish to speculate on that number today.
"I must consider the fact that there may be others in the building who, for whatever reason have not been reported to us.
"There is also a real possibility that there may be people in the building that no one knows are missing.
"I want to hear from anyone who believes that they know someone who may have been living, staying or visiting but has not yet been reported missing to us.
Image: Police have released this image from just outside the fire-ravaged tower
"We are not interested in your reasons for not telling us sooner, we just want to understand as best as we can who may still be inside the building."
He pledged to continue with the Met Police's "wide ranging and exhaustive" investigation into whether anyone is criminally responsible for the fire and repeated his appeal for material which may help the inquiry.
The only victim to have been confirmed dead in the fire so far is 23-year-old Mohammad Alhajali, but Sky News has been told of several others.
Family liaison officers have been deployed with 52 families, including those with critically ill relatives as well as those whose family members have died.
'Victims sick of platitudes from politicians'
The 58 who were estimated on Saturday to have died included the 30 who have been confirmed dead.
Eighteen patients remain in hospital after the fire, including nine who are in critical care, NHS England has said.
Earlier, the Government announced that all households left homeless as a result of the fire will receive £5,500, £500 of which will be in cash, from a £5m fund set aside on Friday.
But the political row over the response of the Government, local authority and housing provider rumbled on.
Fire crews applauded as they leave Grenfell Tower
Residents who met Theresa May in Downing Street on Saturday said that while they welcomed the funds, they had not been consulted before the announcement was made.
In a statement, the group said: "At No 10 yesterday, the Prime Minister assured the group that from now on residents would be consulted on a coordinated relief effort. This has not happened with these funds."
Meanwhile, a group to help those affected by the fire, consisting of officials from several London councils, was set up to lead the "recovery and response".
Families or individuals who need assistance were urged to go to the Westway Centre to make contact with the Grenfell Fire Response Team.
On ITV's Peston on Sunday programme, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn renewed his controversial call for empty homes in the area to be taken over by the Government to house victims of the fire.Apparently, it requires an act of bicameral legislation to even consider allowing children the teeniest modicum of self-sufficiency: in Washington State, the House just passed a bill that would allow students to use sunscreen at school without a doctor's note.
It's like open carry, but for Coppertone.
In an article titled, "Lawmakers consider allowing sunscreen in schools" by the Associated Press, the Tri-City Herald reports:
...The Democratic-controlled [House] unanimously passed the measure Monday and it now heads to the Republican-controlled Senate for concurrence.
Right now, students must have a prescription or note from a licensed health care professional to use over-the-counter sunscreen products while at school. According to The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, sunscreen is considered to be a medication because it is regulated by the United States Food and Drug Administration and is categorized as a "sunscreen drug product."
Kudos for this push to restore sanity go to Jesse Michener, the Washington mom who in 2012 sent her daughters Violet, 11, and Zoe, 9, off to an all-day school event on a day that began as rainy (it's Washington, after all) but then turned so sunny it burnt her kids fiery red when school policy forbid them to apply sunscreen—even as teachers slathered in on themselves. The Huffington Post reports:
Michener told The Huffington Post that adults made comments about her kids burning, but because of the law, did nothing about it. She wrote on her blog, "one of my children remarked that their teacher used sunscreen in her presence and that it was 'just for her.' So, is this an issue of passive, inactive supervision? Where is the collective awareness for student safety?" At the very least, a hat might have protected the girls, but, "alas, hats are not allowed at school, even on field day."
Because, you know. Hats!
And all this is even though one of the daughters, Zoe, has a form of albinism that makes her especially sensitive to the sun.
Skin is just skin, but rules are rules. According to The Deseret News:
"Because so many additives in lotions and sunscreens cause allergic reaction in children, you have to really monitor that," said Dan Voelpel, Tacoma School District spokesman, in an ABC News article. "When Michener pressed school officials on the ban, they told her that there is a state-wide policy that does not allow staff to apply sunscreen to students, and students can only apply it themselves if they have a doctor's note," according to the Today article. "The law exists because the additives in lotions and sunscreens can cause an allergic reaction in children...
Yeah, yeah. The good news is that Oregon, Texas, and California recently passed similar bills allowing for common sense, and sunscreen, to prevail.
Now if only we could get state legislatures to guarantee that other freedom—the freedom of kids to play outside without their parents risking arrest—we would really be getting somewhere.8.05am GMT
The World Bank in Washington. Photograph: Lauren Burke/AP
Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of events across the financial markets, the global economy, the eurozone and the business world.
The World Bank has set the tone for the day, declaring that the global economy has reached a turning point, but warning that emerging markets could suffer as monetary policy returns to normality.
In its latest forecasts, released while much of Europe was sleeping, the Bank raised its forecasts for global economic growth for the first time in three years. Half a decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers plunged the world into the biggest financial crisis in generations, there are signs that the world economy is "bouncing back".
But while it sees faster growth in developed nations, the Bank is more nervous about the emerging markets -- especially as major central banks withdraw stimulus measures.
Europe remains a concern too, although the Bank sees growth picking up in richer nations as austerity measures are eased.
Kaushik Basu, its chief economist, declared:
Global economic indicators show improvement. But one does not have to be especially astute to see there are dangers that lurk beneath the surface. The Euro Area is out of recession but per capita incomes are still declining in several countries. We expect developing country growth to rise above 5 percent in 2014, with some countries doing considerably better, with Angola at 8 percent, China 7.7 percent, and India at 6.2 percent. But it is important to avoid policy stasis so that the green shoots don't turn into brown stubble.
European stock markets are expected to rally this morning, as the World Bank report reassures fears that growth was stumbling.
World Bank economic forecasts, January 15 Photograph: /World Bank
Here's the key points of today's forecasts:
The world economy will grow by 3.2% in 2014, up from the 3.0% the Bank predicted in June last year. That shows acceleration from 2.4% growth last year.
Global growth will rise to 3.4% in 2015 and 3.5% in 2016...
But developing nations will grow by 5.3% in 2014, down from a previous forecast 5.6%.
The World Bank said 'high-income countries' will grow by 2.2% this year, up from 1.5% in 2013, as "drag on growth from fiscal consolidation and policy uncertainty" continues to ease.
But the Bank also sounded an alarm about the impact on developing nations as the huge quantitative easing programmes that have supported the economies and financial markets of major nations are wound in.
Slowing and unwinding QE could cause disruption and slash the amount of capital flowing into emerging markets by up to 80%.
World Bank economic forecasts, January 15 Photograph: /World Bank
As economics editor Larry Elliott explains:
The Washington-based bank said a severely negative response to the return of monetary policy to normal might lead to capital flows to emerging markets falling by up to 80% for several months. The bank said growth prospects were brighter this year than they had been in 2013 but the first co-ordinated expansion in five years in the west's "big three" economies – the US, Japan and euro region – had the potential to cause problems elsewhere in the global economy.
The Federal Reserve took its first step towards slowing its stimulus programme last month, and could stop buying any new bonds by the end of this year.
The bank said this 'tapering process'would only cause a modest impact on developing countries, as long as it was handled in an orderly way, but....
"However, should the adjustment be disorderly, as it was in response to speculation about when a taper might begin during the spring and summer of 2013, interest rates could rise more quickly. "In such a scenario, countries that have large current account deficits, large proportions of external debt and those that have had big credit expansions, would be among the most vulnerable."
The full report is online here: Global Economic Prospects
I'll pull together more reaction to the World Bank's views, and all the other action through the day....Chris Fagan to be officially announced as Lions senior coach on Tuesday
THE BRISBANE Lions have settled on Chris Fagan as their next senior coach and are set to announce his appointment on Tuesday.
AFL.com.au understands the Hawthorn football manager, who has been the front-runner for a number of weeks, has been confirmed as the selection committee's preference.
Fellow candidates, including former Western Bulldogs assistant Brett Montgomery, are in the process of being informed of the club's decision.
Carlton assistant John Barker, who is overseas, also made an impressive case during a presentation last week but fell short.
Fagan was first interviewed by Brisbane Lions' CEO Greg Swann and list manager Peter Schwab two weeks ago in Melbourne and presented to the committee last week.
The 55-year-old has been a key member of the Hawks' off-field team for all four premiership wins in 2008 and 2013-2015.
He has extensive experience in coaching with the Hawks, Melbourne, Tassie Mariners, North Hobart and Sandy Bay.
The veteran administrator played 275 games in Tasmania.
Fagan was mooted as a strong candidate shortly after the Lions sacked Justin Leppitsch at the end of the season.
The coach search narrowed quickly after multiple strong candidates chose not to apply, believing it was a two-horse race between Fagan and Barker.
The five-person panel to select the new coach included new football manager David Noble, Swann and Schwab.
Rounding out the panel was club great Simon Black and consultant and psychologist Matti Clements, who was a member of the panel that selected St Kilda coach Alan Richardson.
The Lions are expected to appoint a senior assistant to work under Fagan, with a number of assistant coaching positions also to be filled.The White House said Friday that there is no transcript of President Trump's call with the widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, one of the four soldiers killed during an ambush in Niger earlier this month.
Trump's top spokeswoman was asked about a possible transcript after the issue was raised in an interview with the president's daughter-in-law Lara Trump.
“There’s not a transcript of the call,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters during the White House press briefing.
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"I believe she was responding to reports and things she read. I haven’t spoken directly to her. I refer you to the campaign that handles her press inquiries," Sanders added.
Lara Trump was asked during an interview aired Friday on "Fox and Friends" about a "transcript" of the disputed call.
"Your dad tweeted that he had proof. You read the transcript. What were your thoughts?" host Ainsley Earhardt asked the president's daughter-in-law.
"Well, from what I've seen, this is just a clear case of the media not doing their job. Whenever you read exactly what he said, he said your husband went into battle, you know, knowing that he could be injured, knowing that he could be killed, and he still did it because he loved his country and did it for the American people," Lara Trump responded.
"I can't think of a better way, quite frankly, to have expressed my gratitude to someone by saying something like that. And yet they conveniently leave off the last part of what was said," she added.
The White House spent several days this week responding to questions about the call to Johnson's widow after a Democratic lawmaker said Trump was insensitive during the conversation.
Rep. Frederica Wilson Frederica Patricia WilsonJuan Williams: Racial shifts spark fury in Trump and his base Dem behind impeachment push to boycott State of the Union Democrats seek to take on Trump at State of the Union MORE (D-Fla.), who was present with the widow for the call, said Trump told Johnson's widow that the fallen soldier “knew what he signed up for... but when it happens it hurts anyway.”
Trump shot back at Wilson, saying she had fabricated the account and he had "proof" he did not say that, though Wilson stood by her account of the call, along with members of Johnson's family.
White House chief of staff John Kelly John Francis KellyMORE did not dispute the comment attributed to Trump during his appearance at the White House press briefing on Thursday, though he defended Trump's handling of the call.Amy Adams and Tom Hanks weren’t nominated for Oscars Tuesday morning — but the awards show’s official website led people to believe otherwise when they mistakenly posted a nominees list that included the two actors in the Best Actor and Best Actress categories.
The live-stream announcement said Ruth Negga was nominated in the Best Actress category for her performance in Loving, but, according to screengrabs, the website replaced her name with Adams, who starred in Best Picture nominee Arrival. The website also added Hanks to the Best Actor category for his role in Sully. Both Adams and Hanks have since been removed from the official list.
ABC Digital soon released a statement apologizing and taking responsibility for the error: “This morning, in an attempt to release breaking news as announced, ABC Digital briefly posted inaccurate nomination information on the Oscar.com website. The nominees announced by the Academy on Twitter were accurate. ABC quickly identified and corrected the errors. We apologize to the Academy, press and fans for any confusion.”
Via oscars.org
Adams and Hanks have their fair share of experience at the Oscars, though, as both are five-time nominees: Adams has received nods for American Hustle, The Master, The Fighter, Doubt, and Junebug, while Hanks has been recognized for Cast Away, Saving Private Ryan, and Big. He has two statues to his name, for Forrest Gump and Philadelphia.
See the full list of Oscar nominees here. The Academy Awards take place Feb. 26.“John, are you a homosexual? A simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ will suffice?”
– Ralph, (a Christian blog reader)
I’m not so sure a yes or no answer will suffice.
I’m actually quite sure that it won’t.
This is such sad and unfortunate response, though I wish I could say that it was a rare one.
I will often get a (sometimes quite colorful) variation on this theme, from professed religious folk on my blog comments, especially when an impasse is reached and they find that I will not likely be moved from my position: “Dude, you must be a fag!” (You know—sweet, loving, Jesus kind of stuff, like that).
Apparently to some Christians, the only logical explanation for a person of faith speaking on behalf of the “homosexual” community, is that they themselves must also be so: a sort of, covert queer self-preservation.
It never occurs to those people that we don’t need totally commonality to align ourselves with other human beings; in order to champion their humanity and uphold their dignity.
I feel incredibly sorry for followers of Jesus like Ralph, who are so filled with hate and bigotry, that they would even feel the need to ask such a question of another human being. It shows that their hearts have become so hardened, their need to discriminate so great, that they cannot fathom any other option, than some alternative narrative to justify that person supporting LGBT people; as if total affinity is ever a prerequisite for loving someone unconditionally.
That’s now how this all works, friends.
That isn’t how Jesus ever did it.
He was a sinless Savior who took up for sinners. He was Divinity, lobbying with his life for Humanity.
True compassion, transcends barrier and label and classification and designation.
It’s bigger than any convenient compartment we like to place people within.
Those whose faith is outgrowing their religion get this well.
They are becoming The Church that they’ve been waiting all their lives to see.
They know that real love is border-less. It’s boundless.
Real love is God-sized.
This love, is what I hope guides my ministry and shapes my agenda:
I believe women should be treated equally with men. I am not secretly a woman.
I believe black people are as God-reflecting and worthy of respect and decency as white people. I am not a closeted person of color.
I believe Muslims are not any more evil or capable of violence than Christians. I am not concealing a hidden Islamic agenda.
I believe people outside of America matter to God as much as Americans do. I do not secretly hate America.
It’s a tragic thing, when rather than prayerfully examining their own mistreatment of any group of people, a Christian would more quickly seek to undermine the integrity and motivation of someone supporting that group— that we would waste more energy on a stranger’s character assassination, than our own self-examination.
I’m not sure what a “simple yes” to Ralph’s question would do for him; whether it would allow my voice less resonance, my position, less respectability. Perhaps it would let him off the hook in considering anything I had to say. It’s a moral escape clause, of sorts.
Apparently a “queer person” speaking on their behalf doesn’t carry any real weight, so it would be convenient for him if I were.
Thankfully, Jesus doesn’t concern himself with such caveats and conditions, and he doesn’t seek a way around our sacred and most pressing calling, which he himself clarifies so well:
“’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:36-40
This is how love works.
We don’t just love those who look like we do, vote the way we do, love the way we do, come from where we come from, pray the way we pray.
Love doesn’t just care for “its own kind”.
In fact, the heart of one who really loves with the extravagant love of God, recognizes that those who breathe and bleed, are its kind.
To all the Ralph’s out there looking for loopholes to avoid loving people, or to justify hatred toward another group, or to categorize and trivialize those whose opinions differ from their own: Do better.
Are you willing to really love those who are different than yourself? A simple yes or no will suffice.
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EmailThis article is about the painting by Ellis Wilson. For the painting by George Grosz, see The Funeral (Grosz)
Funeral Procession is the name of a painting by Ellis Wilson, which went from obscurity to notoriety in 1986, when it was featured heavily in the episode "The Auction" of TV series The Cosby Show. In the episode, Mrs. Huxtable wins the painting at an auction and pays $11,000 for it. She states that the painting was made by her "great-uncle Ellis". She said it hung in her grandmother's house and it was sold when her grandmother got sick and needed the extra money for medical bills. At the end of the episode, Dr. Huxtable hangs the painting over the family's living room mantle, where it would stay for the remainder of the eight-season series.
In real life, the painting is displayed as part of the Aaron Douglas Collection at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Ellis Wilson was born on April 20, 1899 in Mayfield, Kentucky, and died on either January 1 or 2, 1977. The most Wilson ever got for one of his paintings was about $300.[2][3]How I hacked App Store ratings for a consistently perfect 5 stars
Aaron Wojnowski Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 1, 2015
2 days after a new version was released to the store
1 month after releasing to the App Store
6 months after releasing to the App Store
My name is Aaron Wojnowski and I built Musi (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/musi/id591560124), an iOS application that lets you stream music from YouTube and SoundCloud, build playlists, edit music, and more.
For the most part, Musi’s users love the app and that fact was reflected in its reviews. However, review volume was non existent. It would take a few days for Musi to receive enough ratings after an update so that the ratings would show in the App Store, and that significantly affected ASO and downloads.
For the last two years, Musi simply implemented iRate (https://github.com/nicklockwood/iRate) on application launch. This solution was okay (I’m kidding, it was garbage). Instead of adding to Musi’s ratings, iRate simply annoyed its users. Since the prompt appeared on application launch, a time when a user opens the application and wants to interact with it, the prompt was cancelled over 99% of the time. That’s some good conversions… not.
Implementation
It was clearly time to make a change, and this was accelerated by an amazing article by the folks at Circa News: https://medium.com/circa/the-right-way-to-ask-users-to-review-your-app-9a32fd604fca
I opted to implement a similar system in Musi, and outlined some goals (many of which corresponded with Circa News’ implementation):
Only target happy users Only target veteran users Give a chance for unhappy users to give feedback Don’t break the user’s context by forcing interaction Ensure users would rate the application every version
In Circa News’ rating system, they integrated the ratings with the user’s news feed. This approach could potentially apply to Musi by integrating the rating prompt inside a user’s music library, but that might annoy users as well. Instead, I opted to include the rating prompt where users were most satisfied with the app: in the music player. People use Musi to play music, so what’s a better time to ask them to rate the app than when they’re listening to some great music?
In addition to only targeting users that were likely to be happy, I wanted to only target experienced users so they could give meaningful reviews. I decided to make it so the prompt would only show if a user had more than 8 songs in their library, to guarantee that they were familiar with the app. Why 8? I don’t know.
Ensuring that users would rate the application every version was a difficult problem. An identical prompt wouldn’t be optimal, but it would also take time to build a bunch of others. Instead, I just settled on slightly changing the wording. Instead of “Are you enjoying Musi?”, I changed it to “Are you still enjoying Musi?”. Simple, friendly, personable, and effective.
After a few hours, the following rating system was born:
The initial prompt that showed
If the user chose “Not really”
If the user chose “Ok, sure”
Results
As soon as the update was released, ratings poured in at a significantly better rate than before.
Historically, users wouldn’t think about rating it. However, with the new prompt, Musi would deliver by playing their song and in return, they’d have the option to deliver back with a rating. Since the prompt would only show the App Store link if you said you were enjoying Musi, <4 star reviews were a thing of the past.
For users that didn’t like Musi, support emails poured in and I was able to triage and fix the user’s problem. If they were satisfied and their problem fixed, I dropped a link to Musi in my email and they happily rated the app. Users that had previously said “I don’t enjoy Musi” and went out of their way to tell us why were converted into happy, long time users instead of going elsewhere. Woohoo!
Stats wise, here’s a raw breakdown of Musi’s rating responses:
11% of all users with >8 songs in their music library went on to rate it. That’s pretty good! Also, only 17% of people also said they didn’t like Musi (we both know that’s a misclick though since let’s be real nobody doesn’t like Musi).
Conclusion
Think about the way your app asks for ratings. Chances are you’ve put hundreds of hours into building it. Put a couple hours into increasing your ASO significantly by creating a good ratings system, and also put your satisfied customers on display.
Make sure to also respond to user emails in a courteous and friendly manner. In Musi, I opted to just use the MFMailComposeViewController since it appears more candid than a native contact form (and it’s also easier to implement!). If an irate user emailed me, I would make sure to explain my rationale behind the problem they were experiencing (if it was a UX decision, design decision, etc) and give them a bunch of options to fix it up. Then, I would ask them to follow up and attempt to build a relationship. Most times, their problem was solved and many users even said they’d tell their friends about Musi, which was a great bonus.
Finally, make sure to actually have a good app. Nothing goes further than creating something people use and enjoy.Crews from Halifax Water will be removing snow near fire hydrants this weekend, but a spokesman for the utility estimates it could be up to two weeks until they're fully cleared.
"It's going to take a while; it's a lot of snow," said James Campbell.
He said the utility is trying to move in closely behind the city's snow clearing efforts.
"The snow comes down, the plows push it around, they bury the hydrants. People who are digging out their driveways bury the hydrants," he said.
8,300 hydrants
Campbell said the utility is responsible for digging out the nearly 8,300 hydrants it owns.
Crews are focusing on priority areas near schools, hospitals and senior homes.
When possible, Campbell is encouraging people to pick up a shovel and help out.
"They're not obliged to but it would certainly be helpful if they can chip in," he said, directing people to the Halifax Water app to locate their nearest fire hydrant.
Snowy streets a tight squeeze for fire trucks
Deputy Chief Roy Hollett of the Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency said snow piles are making it difficult for fire trucks to manoeuvre city streets and is asking people to stagger their parked vehicles.
There's a hydrant in there somewhere. Halifax Water is responsible for digging out the nearly 8,300 hydrants it owns. (Halifax Water)
He said the streets are already narrowed by snow accumulation, and people parking on both sides of the street make it nearly impossible for trucks to pass.
Hollett said fire trucks need three metres in width. In one case, he said, firefighters stopped and individually pushed in people's car mirrors on a street before passing by.
"It's that tight," he said.
The fire department hasn't been called to any structure fires since the storm, said Hollett.
He said firefighters are trained to access hydrants further from an emergency if nearby hydrants are buried.
Since Monday's blizzard, the department is responding to a higher number of motor vehicle accidents, medical calls for chest pain and security alarms in buildings being falsely activated, he said.If you’re a Game of Thrones fan – you know that Ygritte is a bad-a** wilding who has the balls to mutter – “You Know Nothing Jon Snow.“ And, you were high-key heartbroken when she was killed off – a big F you to George R.R. Martin…how could you do us so dirty?
Little did you know (of course you knew) Rose Leslie (Ygritte) and Kit Harington (Jon) have been dating in real life for a while now. And, while their reps have not confirmed the news officially, it appears they just got engaged. My Game of Thrones heart cannot take this.
Can we just cue the Game of Thrones intro as she walks down the aisle?
#Goals.
According to Marie Claire, the proposal was very romantic and heartfelt. Kit cooked Rose a beautiful, intimate dinner with candles and the whole nine yards – and, he proposed to her at the end of the evening. How. Adorable.
Side note – good thing Jon Snow’s not a Crow anymore (hehe).
Life & Style broke the news and had the Internet in an uproar overnight as everyone was crying over Jon Snow no longer being eligible to marry any of us.
In June, Kit had told TV host James Corden that he and Rose had moved in together and he couldn’t have been any happier.
“I’ve moved in with my best friend, Rose. So, I’m very, very happy and it’s going well. She has all sorts of ideas for the house…. I said to her, because she moved into my house, ‘Look, darling, this is important that it’s our space, that it feels like our space, that you haven’t just moved into mine. Move anything you want around—change anything, chuck anything out. I went to the shops and I came back and said, ‘What did you decide?’ And she said, ‘We’re moving the kitchen downstairs.'”
Seems like Rose is just as bad-a** as her character on the show – get it girl. Hold on while I try and figure out why no one loves me that much. Also – can you imagine how much fun the wedding will be? All of the Game of Thrones cast members together, drinking, partying – celebrating without the threat of White Walker death upon them.
But, the real question we all have is –
Do Kit and Rose stay home on Sunday nights curled up on the couch anxiously awaiting Game of Thrones to come on like the rest of us?
KIT, ROSE – LET ME KNOW – ASAP.
UPDATE: After several sources had reported Kit and Rose’s engagement online – PizzaBottle has now learned that the couple has spoken out and denied the reports. They have, however, purchased a £1.75 million home together in the English countryside and are still very much in love.With Apple facing what may be one of its most challenging periods in a decade, it would certainly be understandable if Apple CEO Tim Cook put his head down and just focused on products.
Instead, Cook has continued to elevate his public profile by tackling political and social causes in a way that stands in stark contrast to his predecessor, Steve Jobs, who was legendarily apolitical. And beyond just embracing these issues, Cook has often been the first tech executive into the breach, with Apple’s Silicon Valley brethren following in his wake.
The hand-to-hand combat between Apple and the FBI is a perfect example of Cook’s willingness to take a strong public stand. The company is waging both a legal and public relations battle over an issue that doesn’t just affect Apple, but potentially almost every tech company and, indeed, the fundamental relationship between citizens and the government.
Of course, the U.S. government has accused Apple and Cook of being motivated by purely economic and business interests. But Cook has again managed to hit square on the nose the broader issue facing society: How far can the government invade our privacy in the name of fighting terrorism?
To be sure, it would have been quite simple for Apple to quietly give the government what it wanted from the San Bernadino shooter’s iPhone. Chances are high that the public would have been none the wiser. And if anything had been leaked, Apple could have spun the situation like any company with a mighty public relations army.
But it didn’t. It took a stand.
“Opposing this order is not something we take lightly,” Cook wrote in a letter to customers last month. “We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government.”
Heir to Packard and Hewlett legacy
Now, four-and-a-half years into Cook’s tenure as CEO, we can see his actions as part of a clear pattern. And this stance doesn’t just separate Cook from Jobs. It’s hard to think of any tech CEO, or even any executive, who has been willing to be this politically and socially active. For most companies, being “politically active” usually translates into political action committees and lobbying for favorable legislation.
In Silicon Valley, it’s also worth saluting Salesfore.com CEO Marc Benioff. He’s been quite outspoken about the impact of the tech industry on the residents San Francisco, was early to build charitable and social principles into his company’s core, and certainly stood up to a number of states over their proposed anti-gay rights stands.
But with all due respect to Benioff, his company and his stature aren’t at a level to match Cook’s, or Apple, the world’s most valuable company. To find someone with that kind of global standing in Silicon Valley, you might have to reach back to the founders of HP: David Packard and William Hewlett.
The pair was a civic-minded force back in an era when companies and corporate chiefs still had the crazy idea that the point of a thriving business was to benefit people and communities. They took leadership positions on local Silicon Valley issues, and Packard founded the Silicon Valley Leadership Group in 1978, bringing companies together to tackle issues like housing and traffic and education.
Cook seems the true heir to their public spirit, though without their specific focus on local issues.
He started walking this path almost right from the start. He was appointed CEO in August 2011, less than two months before Jobs would pass away. Six months into his tenure, Cooke took a remarkable public tour of Chinese factories amid growing criticism of Apple’s labor practices.
It was a shock to see an Apple CEO out in public like that talking about anything that didn’t directly promote some great new gadget or service. And just a few weeks later, Cook took it one step further by announcing that Apple was working with the Fair Labor Association to raise standards and prevent abuses in the factories.
“My lifelong heroes are Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy,” he once said. “I get a lot of spears when I talk about this stuff. I don’t give a crap. This is something we care deeply about. |
2018-11-07 26,180.30 +545.29 +2.13 [11] 12 & 2000-03-16 10,630.61 +499.19 +4.93 13 & 2009-03-23 7,775.86 +497.48 +6.84 14 & 2008-11-21 8,046.42 +494.14 +6.54 15 & 2011-11-30 12,045.68 +490.05 +4.24 16 & 2002-07-24 8,191.29 +488.95 +6.35 17 & 2008-09-30 10,850.66 +485.21 +4.68 18 & 2002-07-29 8,711.88 +447.48 +5.41 19 & 2019-02-15 25,883.25 +443.86 +1.74 20 2018-03-09 25,335.74 +440.53 +1.77 Largest daily point losses[5] Rank Date Close Change Net % 1 2018-02-05 24,345.75 −1,175.21 −4.60 [12] 2 2018-02-08 23,860.46 −1,032.89 −4.15 [13] 3 2018-10-10 25,598.74 −831.83 −3.15 [14] 4 2018-12-04 25,027.07 -799.36 -3.10 [15] 5 & 2008-09-29 10,365.45 −777.68 −6.98 [16] 6 & 2008-10-15 8,577.91 −733.08 −7.87 [17] 7 2018-03-22 23,957.89 −724.42 -2.93 [18] 8 & 2001-09-17 8,920.70 −684.81 −7.13 9 & 2008-12-01 8,149.09 −679.95 −7.70 10 & 2008-10-09 8,579.19 −678.92 −7.33 11 & 2018-02-02 25,520.96 −665.75 −2.54 [12] 12 2019-01-03 22,686.22 −660.02 −2.83 [19] 13 2018-12-24 21,792.20 −653.17 −2.91 [20] 14 & 2011-08-08 10,809.85 −634.76 −5.55 15 & 2000-04-14 10,305.78 −617.78 −5.66 16 & 2016-06-24 17,400.75 −610.32 −3.39 [21] 17 2018-10-24 24,583.42 −608.01 −2.41 [22] 18 2018-11-12 25,387.18 −602.12 −2.32 [23] 19 & 2015-08-24 15,871.35 −588.40 −3.57 20 & 2018-04-06 23,932.76 −572.46 −2.34 [24]
Largest percentage changes [ edit ]
Largest daily percentage gains[5] Rank Date Close Change Net % 1 1933-03-15 62.10 +8.26 +15.34 2 1931-10-06 99.34 +12.86 +14.87 3 1929-10-30 258.47 +28.40 +12.34 4 1932-09-21 75.16 +7.67 +11.36 5 2008-10-13 9,387.61 +936.42 +11.08 6 2008-10-28 9,065.12 +889.35 +10.88 7 1987-10-21 2,027.85 +186.84 +10.15 8 1932-08-03 58.22 +5.06 +9.52 9 1932-02-11 78.60 +6.80 +9.47 10 1929-11-14 217.28 +18.59 +9.36 11 1931-12-18 80.69 +6.90 +9.35 12 1932-02-13 85.82 +7.22 +9.19 13 1932-05-06 59.01 +4.91 +9.08 14 1933-04-19 68.31 +5.66 +9.03 15 1931-10-08 105.79 +8.47 +8.70 16 1932-06-10 48.94 +3.62 +7.99 17 1939-09-05 148.12 +10.03 +7.26 18 1931-06-03 130.37 +8.67 +7.12 19 1932-01-06 76.31 +5.07 +7.12 20 2009-03-23 7,775.86 +497.48 +6.84 Largest daily percentage losses[5] Rank Date Close Change Net % 1 1987-10-19 1,738.74 −508.00 −22.61 2 1929-10-28 260.64 −38.33 −12.82 3 1929-10-29 230.07 −30.57 −11.73 4 1929-11-06 232.13 −25.55 −9.92 5 1899-12-18 58.27 −5.57 −8.72 6 1932-08-12 63.11 −5.79 −8.40 7 1907-03-14 76.23 −6.89 −8.29 8 1987-10-26 1,793.93 −156.83 −8.04 9 2008-10-15 8,577.91 −733.08 −7.87 10 1933-07-21 88.71 −7.55 −7.84 11 1937-10-18 125.73 −10.57 −7.75 12 2008-12-01 8,149.09 −679.95 −7.70 13 2008-10-09 8,579.19 −678.92 −7.33 14 1917-02-01 88.52 −6.91 −7.24 15 1997-10-27 7,161.14 −554.26 −7.18 16 1932-10-05 66.07 −5.09 −7.15 17 2001-09-17 8,920.70 −684.81 −7.13 18 (tie) 1931-09-24 107.79 −8.20 −7.07 18 (tie) 1933-07-20 96.26 −7.32 −7.07 20 1914-07-30 71.42 −5.30 −6.91
Some sources (including the file Highlights/Lowlights of The Dow on the Dow Jones website) show a loss of −24.39% (from 71.42 to 54.00) on December 12, 1914, placing that day atop the list of largest percentage losses. The New York Stock Exchange reopened that day following a nearly four-and-a-half-month closure since July 30, 1914, and the Dow in fact rose several percent that day (from 71.42 to 74.56, or +4.4%). However, the apparent decline was due to a later 1916 revision of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which retroactively adjusted the values following the closure but not those before, and it represents the only discontinuity in the index’s history rather than an actual loss.[25][26]
Largest intraday point swings [ edit ]
A point swing is the difference between the intraday high and the intraday low. (The intraday high may not be the same as the opening price; for instance, in the 2010 Flash Crash, the market reached an intraday high, higher than the opening price.)[27]
This is distinguished from an intraday point drop or gain, which is the difference between the opening price and the intraday low or high.
This table shows the largest intraday point swings since 1987.[28] As the "Net Change" column shows, 12 of these 20 largest intraday swings occurred during days on which the Dow declined, while only 8 occurred during days on which it advanced. Four of the six largest intraday swings occurred during one week in February 2018, and none of the top 20 occurred before the year 2008. At the time, during the height of the 2008 crisis, nine of the ten largest intraday swings ever (and 15 of the top 20) occurred over a single span of trading days between September 29, 2008, and December 1, 2008.
Rank Date Close Day high Day low Point swing Net change 1 2018-02-05 24,345.75 25,520.53 23,923.88 1,596.65 −1,175.21 2 2018-02-06 24,912.77 24,946.23 23,778.74 1,167.49 +567.02 3 2018-12-26 22,878.45 22,878.92 21,712.53 1,166.39 +1,086.25 4 2015-08-24 15,871.35 16,459.75 15,370.33 1,089.42 −588.40 5 2018-02-08 23,860.46 24,903.68 23,849.23 1,054.45 -1,032.89 6 2018-02-09 24,190.90 24,382.14 23,360.29 1,021.85 +330.44 7 2008-10-10 8,451.19 8,901.28 7,882.51 1,018.77 −128.00 8 2010-05-06 10,520.32 10,879.76 9,869.62 1,010.14 −347.80 9 2008-10-13 9,387.61 9,427.99 8,462.18 965.81 +936.42 10 2018-10-29 24,442.92 25,040.58 24,122.23 918.35 −245.39 11 2008-11-13 8,835.25 8,876.59 7,965.42 911.17 +552.59 12 2008-10-28 9,065.12 9,082.08 8,174.73 907.35 +889.35 13 2018-12-19 23,693.33 24,057.34 23,162.64 894.70 −351.98 14 2018-12-27 23,138.89 22,267.42 23,138.82 871.47 +260.37 15 2008-10-09 8,579.19 9,448.14 8,579.19 868.95 −678.91 16 2018-12-21 22,445.37 23,254.59 22,396.34 858.25 -414.23 17 2018-10-10 25,598.74 26,441.73 25,593.65 848.08 −831.83 18 2008-10-16 8,979.26 9,013.27 8,197.67 815.60 +401.35 19 2018-12-04 25,027.07 25,773.12 25,008.11 799.36 −799.36[15] 20 2008-10-06 9,955.50 10,322.76 9,525.32 797.44 −369.88
Largest intraday point changes [ edit ]
Largest intraday point gains An intraday point gain is defined as the difference between the opening price (which may or may not be the intraday low) and the intraday high. This is distinguished from a point swing, which is defined as the difference between the intraday high and the intraday low. Such records that turned negative are also recorded in a separate list. The opening price is used to calculate the point gain. The previous day close is used to calculate the net change. Rank Date Open Day
high Point
gain Net
change 1 & 2018-12-26 21,857.73 22,878.92 1,021.19 +1,086.25 2 & 2008-10-13 8,462.42 9,427.99 965.57 +936.42 3 2008-10-28 8,178.72 9,082.08 903.36 +889.35 4 2015-08-26 15,676.26 16,303.75 627.49 +619.07 5 2018-02-06 24,345.75 24,946.23 600.48 +567.02 6 2008-11-13 8,281.14 8,876.59 595.45 +552.59 7 2011-08-11 10,729.85 11,278.90 558.96 +423.37 8 2008-11-24 8,048.09 8.599.02 550.93 +396.97 9 2008-11-21 7,552.37 8,071.75 519.38 +494.13 10 2002-07-24 7,698.46 8,202.02 503.56 +488.95 11 2009-03-23 7,279.25 7,780.72 501.47 +497.48 12 2008-09-30 10,371.58 10,868.90 497.32 +485.21 13 2000-03-16 10,139.58 10,632.46 492.88 +499.19 14 2011-11-30 11,559.27 12,045.68 486.41 +490.05 15 2008-09-18 10,609.01 11,076.44 467.43 +410.03 16 2001-04-18 10,226.88 10,687.14 460.26 +399.10 17 2008-09-19 11,027.51 11,483.05 455.54 +368.75 18 2010-05-10 10,386.18 10,835.17 448.99 +404.71 19 2002-07-29 8,267.99 8,711.88 443.89 +447.49 20 2008-10-16 8,577.04 9,013.27 436.23 +401.35 Largest intraday point drops An intraday point drop is defined as the difference between the opening price (which may or may not be the intraday high) and the intraday low. This is distinguished from a point swing, which is defined as the difference between the intraday high and the intraday low. Such records that turned positive are also recorded in a separate list. The opening price is used to calculate the point drop. The previous day close is used to calculate the net change. Rank Date Open Day
low Point
Drop Net
change 1 2018-02-05 25,520.96 23,923.88 1,597.08 −1,175.21 2 2015-08-24 16,459.75 15,370.33 1,089.42 −588.40 3 2018-02-08 24,902.30 23,849.23 1,044.12 -1,032.89 4 2010-05-06 10,868.12 9,869.62 998.50 −347.80 5 2018-10-10 26,441.73 25,593.65 848.08 −831.83 6 2008-10-06 10,322.52 9,525.32 800.06 −369.88 7 2008-10-15 9,301.91 8,530.12 780.87 −733.08 8 2008-09-29 11,139.62 10,365.45 777.68 −777.68 9 2018-04-06 24,373.60 23,738.20 767.02 −572.46 10 2018-04-02 24,076.60 23,344.52 758.59 −458.92 11 2018-03-22 24,526.61 23,938.74 743.57 −724.42 12 2001-09-17 9,580.32 8,883.40 722.11 −684.81 13 2000-04-14 10,922.85 10,201.53 722.01 −617.78 14 2008-10-22 9,027.85 8,335.30 698.36 −514.45 15 2008-10-10 8,568.67 7,882.51 696.68 −128.00 16 2008-12-01 8,826.89 8,141.36 687.68 -679.95 17 2011-08-08 11,433.93 10,809.85 624.08 −634.76 18 2018-10-11 25,518.39 24,899.77 618.62 −545.91 19 2018-02-02 26,061.79 25,490.66 571.13 −665.75 20 1997-10-27 7,714.40 7,159.92 554.48 −554.20
Largest intraday point changes with turnovers [ edit ]
Largest intraday point gains that turned negative These are the largest intraday point gains that closed in negative territory at the end of the trading session. In order to be considered an intraday point gain, the intraday high must be above the open price. The previous day close is not a factor. Rank Date Open Day
high Close Highest
points 1 2015-08-25 15,882.27 16,312.94 15,666.44 430.67 2 2008-10-14 9,388.97 9,794.37 9,310.99 405.40 3 2018-02-07 24,892.87 25,293.96 24,893.35 400.13 4 2008-10-10 8,568.67 8,901.28 8,451.19 332.61 5 2008-10-03 10,483.96 10,796.26 10,325.38 312.30 6 2008-10-17 8,975.35 9,281.12 8,852.22 305.77 7 2008-10-29 9,062.33 9,363.32 8,990.96 300.99 8 2018-06-27 24,283.11 24,569.02 24,117.59 285.91 9 2018-02-21 24,988.06 25,267.99 24,797.78 279.93 10 2015-01-13 17,645.02 17,923.01 17,613.68 277.99 11 1999-04-19 10,493.89 10,765.74 10,440.53 271.85 12 2014-12-16 17,173.07 17,427.44 17,068.87 254.37 13 2008-09-02 11,545.63 11,790.17 11,516.92 244.54 14 2008-10-27 8,375.92 8,599.10 8,175.77 223.18 15 2008-11-10 8,946.60 9,159.58 8,870.54 212.98 16 2008-01-30 12,480.14 12,681.41 12,442.83 201.27 17 2015-09-17 16,738.08 16,933.43 16,674.74 195.35 18 2000-04-04 11,225.34 11,418.24 11,164.84 192.90 19 2008-11-20 7,995.53 8,187.40 7,552.29 191.87 20 2008-10-08 9,437.23 9,628.07 9,258.10 190.84 Largest intraday point losses that turned positive These are the largest intraday point losses that closed in positive territory at the end of the trading session. In order to be considered an intraday point loss the intraday low must be below the open price. The previous day close is not a factor. Rank Date Open Day
low Close Lowest
points 1 2018-02-09 23,992.67 23,360.29 24,190.90 632.38 2 2018-12-10 24,360.95 23,881.37 24,423.26 479.58 3 2008-10-16 8,577.04 8,197.67 8,979.26 379.37 4 2008-01-23 11,969.08 11,644.81 12,270.17 324.27 5 2008-11-13 8,281.14 7,965.42 8,835.25 315.72 6 2018-02-06 24,085.17 23,778.74 24,912.77 306.43 7 2008-10-23 8,519.77 8,243.55 8,691.25 276.22 8 2018-11-15 25,061.48 24,787.79 25,354.56 273.69 9 2008-12-05 8,376.08 8,118.50 8,635.42 257.58 10 2011-10-04 10,651.44 10,404.49 10,808.71 246.95 11 2011-08-05 11,383.98 11,139.00 11,444.61 244.98 12 2018-02-15 25,047.82 24,809.42 25,200.37 238.40 13 2008-03-13 12,096.49 11,875.78 12,145.74 220.71 14 2011-08-26 11,149.82 10,929.20 11,284.54 220.62 15 2015-07-07 17,684.92 17,465.68 17,776.91 219.24 16 2008-12-12 8,563.10 8,347.81 8,629.68 215.29 17 1989-08-02 2,637.33 2,426.33 2,657.44 211.00 18 2011-08-09 10,810.91 10,604.07 11,239.77 206.84 19 2009-01-15 8,196.24 7,995.13 8,212.49 201.11 20 2008-03-17 11,946.45 11,756.60 11,972.25 189.85
See also [ edit ]Donald Trump's bid for the White House has always been a media circus. Now, it's being run by one of the ringleaders.
The Trump campaign announced today that it has hired Breitbart News Network executive chairman Steve Bannon as campaign CEO. Paul Manafort, who has been running the show since the ouster of former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, will stay on as campaign chairman and chief strategist, but it seems without question that his power will be seriously diluted.
Bannon's hire highlights a troubling trend: the blurring of the lines between media as campaign observer and campaign operative. With Bannon leading Trump's presidential bid, the lines are now erased.
That the head of Breitbart would eventually just up and join the Trump campaign may have seemed a foregone conclusion to anyone who's been watching the conservative media outlet this election cycle. Breitbart has been openly pro-Trump, even as other conservative outlets like The National Review and Red State have come out against him.
When Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields accused then-campaign manager Lewandowski of battery, a charge that was eventually dropped, Breitbart's staff sided with the Trump campaign, telling reporters to stop speaking out about the story.
Breitbart has always been on a covert quest to see Trump elected. Now, that quest is out in the open. Bannon's hire highlights a troubling trend: the blurring of the lines between media as campaign observer and campaign operative. With Bannon leading Trump's presidential bid, the lines are now erased. And Bannon isn't even the only media mogul helping: ousted Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes is reportedly advising Trump in the run up to the first debate, despite allegations against him of sexual misconduct at Fox.
All of this would be unthinkable in any other election year. But with Trump's unpredictable candidacy, anything goes.
We've said before that the Internet killed objectivity, but it's just as true to say that election 2016 did, as mainstream media outlets struggle to cover a candidate who says and does things no mainstream candidate would. Meanwhile, outlets like Breitbart see a candidate who's giving voice to the very conspiracy theories and fears that have long lingered in its social media networks and comment sections. And now, giving them a seat at the political table. This has exacerbated the echo chamber effect that already makes it nearly impossible for people of different ideologies and beliefs to hear each other.
In choosing Bannon to lead his campaign, Trump is leaning into the divisive message that's buoyed his candidacy since last year, rather than trying to bridge the gap with disaffected Republicans, who have urged him repeatedly to pivot toward a steadier strategy. (In fact, Breitbart is one of the biggest critics of the current GOP leadership, including Speaker Paul Ryan, who's had a rocky relationship with Trump so far.)
It's also a familiar move for Trump: when the going gets tough, whoever's leading the campaign gets the boot. It happened to Lewandowski just two months ago when Trump's dominance in the polls began to flag and early fundraising numbers turned out to be dismal.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort listens to Ivanka Trump speak at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 21, 2016. Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Now, as Clinton continues to trounce Trump in battleground polls, Trump seems to be sidelining Manafort as well. The move also comes amid debate over Russia's role in Trump's rise and Manafort's ties to Russia. According to documents obtained by The New York Times, while Manafort was working for pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor F. Yanukovych, he was supposed to be paid $12.7 million in unofficial payments.
Meanwhile, the fact that the Democratic National Committee was hacked by Russian operatives has led many to wonder whether the Russians did it explicitly to prop up Trump's campaign. Then there was Trump's off the cuff comment during the Democratic Convention, in which he said of Hillary Clinton's deleted emails, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you’ll be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Bannon isn't the only one who will be tasked with getting this chaotic campaign across the finish line. Trump has also promoted KellyAnne Conway, a Republican pollster, to the position of campaign manager. That, too, is a fitting jump, given Trump's obsession with the polls during primary season. And yet, with just just 82 days until Election Day, turning around Trump's favorability numbers this late in the season would be unprecedented even for the most sophisticated pollster.
In a statement, Trump described Bannon and Conway as "some of the best talents in politics." WIRED reached out to the Trump campaign for comment but hadn't heard back by publication time.
"I am committed to doing whatever it takes to win this election," he said. In other words, you ain't seen nothing yet.Mitch Albom Mitch Albom
Mitch Albom first made a name for himself in the Detroit area as a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press 30 years ago - since then he's become famous on a national scale as a best-selling author and a regular contributor on ESPN sports talk shows.
It was on one of those national talk shows that his opinion regarding a rape settlement and an athlete has him taking some heat in the court of public opinion.
Mitch Albom has made a living speaking his mind but one recent comment may cost him. While appearing on the ESPN's The Sports Reporters, a show seen around the country the topic revolved around a $950,000 settlement regarding Jameis Winston and the woman who he allegedly raped when he was a quarterback at Florida State University.
"I'd feel a lot happier about this, if the woman took that money and gave it to charity and said, 'That's not what this was about.' I am always suspect when people end up saying, 'Well, I'm going to take it.'"
The backlash came quickly. People commenting online against Albom's outspoken statements. The reaction locally is equally as strong.
"In his own way he's calling her a liar," said Rychael Walton, Angel House co-founder.
Walton co-founded Angel House, creating resources, help for abused and battered women. She says Albom is downplaying what happened to the victim in this case.
"When it comes to this situation there is no compensation that could ever replace what you went through." she said. "With me being a rape victim myself, no one can ever compensate me enough for what I went through."
Mitch Albom emailed a statement about his comments to FOX 2:
"In no way was my Sports Reporters comment about giving a settlement to charity meant to imply it would have made the accuser’s case more believable, or to tell her what to do with her money.
"Quite the contrary. I hoped that it would take money out of the discussion to allow the important conversation about sexual assault to stand alone, without talk of settlement amounts.
"The impact of sexual assaults are devastating, and it takes great courage to come forward and report them. No comments, including mine, should ever shift the spotlight away from that, or from this terribly serious problem in our society. I hope that is where the focus will now remain."
Walton argues that a prominent public figure such as Albom has a responsibility to speak his mind but says it should be done with care His words carry a lot of weight and in this instance may do a lot of damage to victims willing to speak out and seek justice.
"It angers me what the quarterback did and what Mitch said because it's not fair," she said. "You don't know exactly how we feel when we go through something like that."Editor’s note: Second of an eight-part series breaking down the Broncos’ roster as they “reboot” under new coach Vance Joseph. Today: the running backs.
It was a cut he made hundreds of times in his career. Broncos running back C.J. Anderson planted his right leg to juke a Houston defender in a late October game against the Houston Texans. His right knee buckled.
Anderson left the field, but returned soon after and kept playing. He achieved his first 100-yard game of the season. Soon after, however, he found out he had torn his right meniscus and would be out for the season. It was then that the Broncos offense began to go downhill.
The Broncos didn’t have a great running game when Anderson was healthy, but it ground nearly to a halt after he was gone. Related Articles January 17, 2017 Building Broncos: QBs, Searching for the special one to lead Denver to greatness
January 25, 2017 Demaryius Thomas, Emmanuel Sanders are great, but Broncos need more weapons
January 23, 2017 Cab driver says John Elway is greatest QB of all-time, later realizes Broncos GM is in his cab
In the Broncos’ first seven games, with Anderson, they averaged 111.6 rushing yards per game and 4.1 yards per carry. In the final nine games, without Anderson, the Broncos averaged 78.1 rushing yards and 3.1 yards per carry.
Now, as the Broncos continue their offseason, they must ask themselves if they have enough talent at running back to bring balance back into the offense for whomever ends up being the starting quarterback. Anderson, Devontae Booker, Kapri Bibbs and fullback Andy Janovich are expected to return, but the 2017 draft class is rich with running back talent if management believes another back is necessary.
Louisiana State’s Leonard Fournette and Florida State’s Dalvin Cook likely will be gone before the Broncos pick at No. 20, but former Stanford and Valor Christian running Christian McCaffrey might still be on the board. He would be an intriguing option because of his running and receiving ability and additional ability to return kicks.
Fans would love it if the Broncos take McCaffrey, son of former Broncos star receiver Ed McCaffrey, but it might not be the best selection for a team with glaring needs on the offensive line. The Broncos signed Anderson to a four-year contract extension before last season, then drafted Booker in the fourth round and Janovich in the sixth round.
The more likely draft options, if the Broncos select another back, are on day two or day three of the draft. Tennessee’s Alvin Kamara, Ohio State’s Curtis Samuel or Brigham Young’s Jamaal Williams are likely to go in rounds two or three. Michigan’s De’Veon Smith or San Diego State’s Donnel Pumphrey could be players to look at in the later rounds.
As for Booker, there are a lot of unknowns after an uneven rookie season. He could be a great complement to Anderson, but it’s unclear whether he could be a building block to be a No. 1 back.
Anderson is the team’s clear lead back. He was on pace for 1,291 total yards and 11 touchdowns if he had played all 16 games. The problem is that he didn’t play 16 games and has been injured throughout his career. Anderson is entering the latter stages of rehabilitation and expects to be back on the field for organized team activities. He’s eager to prove he can be the Broncos’ unquestioned lead back, but he has to stay healthy to prove that.
Veteran Justin Forsett, a late season pickup, is a free agent contemplating retirement.
Janovich, a fullback, might have a role under offensive coordinator Mike McCoy, who drafted and used fullback Derek Watt in his final season with the Chargers.
Offensive line upgrades are expected, but the backs have to improve too, for the running game to get back where the Broncos need it.
Up next: The receiversDid you know that Bill Nye the Science Guy is now Bill Nye the national parks guy? Well, sort of.
The famous science educator is a Centennial Find Your Park Ambassador. He signed up for the gig because he's concerned some of the United State's "astonishingly beautiful" parks are disappearing; and he wants you to care about it.
Nye issued a startling warning to AOL.com over one national park in particular, Glacier National Park. That's the national park from the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," and a little Tom Hanks film called "Forrest Gump."
According to Nye, Glacier National Park is, "rapidly becoming Muddy Hillside National Park."
Don't take the Science Guy's word for it, take a look at some of these photos:
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with 8% for the S&P 500. But its debts are a whopping 289% of sales (tax revenues) versus 77% for the S&P 500.
An investor considering Leviathan Inc would certainly look askance at its record. Performance over the past decade has been “a mixture of stagnation, progression towards, and retreat from, achievement of our constitutional objectives”, says the 10-K. And its prospects are dim. As Social Security and health-care costs rise, the deficit and debt levels will deteriorate, even threatening the government’s status as a going concern by around 2046.
Governance is poor. The country is not managed using a coherent taxonomy. So, for example, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House each split the job of running America into roughly 20 operating divisions. But their categories are different, meaning crossed wires and insufficient accountability. Investors detest firms with “related-party transactions”, in which executives receive money from customers, the firm or counterparties on top of their compensation package. Page 152 of Leviathan Inc’s 10-K reveals a troublingly high level of such related-party transactions in the form of political funding (much from cash-rich companies as well as from individual donors).
I love this country
The idea that charismatic businesspeople can save the government from itself is a recurring theme in American politics. In 1909 Franklin MacVeagh, the treasury secretary, promised to run the government on a business basis. Ross Perot, a businessman, ran for president twice using the same logic. Donald Trump is the latest adherent to this view. He has filled his cabinet with swaggering tycoons, such as Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, hoping they can knock heads together harder than career politicians can.
Economists and policy wonks tend to dismiss the idea that government can learn much from business. That seems odd. Certainly, boardroom bravado is not the answer to America’s problems. But Mr Ballmer draws on a business tradition different from that of Mr Trump—its habit of clever, rational analysis.
A curious fact about America is that, while its government has gradually slid into gridlock and ill-repute, its companies have become more globally dominant than at any point, probably, in history. Of the world’s 20 most-valuable firms, 14 are American (including, still, Microsoft). They are ruthlessly effective about meeting their objectives of greater market power and profits. If you want to find a reliance on facts, cold rationality and coherent, purposeful organisation in America, look to its firms rather than to its media or its politicians. The 10-K will appear every year. It should be read widely.Have you ever gone to a party with your favorite homebrew in tow in a flimsy, cardboard 6-pack holder only to have them break from getting wet or tear from multiple times of use?
Well, you’re out of excuses. I have designed and made dozens of these wooden six packs. All for free!
Completed Wooden Six Pack Holder with Mounted Bulldog Bottle Opener.
I have found that many companies are willing to give away their used pallets if you just ask. Most pallets have a couple of boards that are 5 1/2″ wide. All you need is one length. I have detailed below how to use one board to make a handy wooden 6-pack holder in just under an hour. You can finish them however you want. Paint them your favorite school or team colors, stain them, or just leave them unfinished. You can burn your brewery logo on the side, attach a bottle opener, add a
rope handle or anything else you can think of. There is no wrong way to finish them.
Any species of wood can be used as well with the more exotic woods making for some pretty nice holders. Whatever you do, please read the below instructions completely before attempting to make a DIY Six Pack Holder.
Materials
Circular saw
Hammer
Drill
3/4″ wood drill bit (Not paddle bit)
Belt sander (optional)
Speed square
1 1/2″ finishing nails
Nail set
Clear gorilla glue
Board clamps
Pencil
3/4″ x 10″ wooden dowel
5 1/2″ x 36″ board (pallet board)
1/4″ x 2″ hobby board
1/4″ plywood
Paint or stain
1. If you want a smoother board you can use your belt sander to knock that off on the flat surfaces. Boards reclaimed from the pallet will be rough.
2. Mark off your first cut at 10″ and make that cut. Then mark off two lines, both at 11″ (you can see that I sanded my board down to be smooth and the nail holes.
3. On the two 11″ pieces mark off your side shape. I just wanted it to be tapered so I measured 6″ up from the bottom on both sides and made a mark and then found center at the top of the board and measured out 1″ in each direction.
4. Then cut both boards to be identical.
5. Measure and cut 4 pieces of the hobby board at 10″ length each.
6. On the two side pieces, measure 1.5″ down from the middle and drill a ” hole approximately ” deep on the interior facing side.
7. Cut your wooden dowel to length.
8. Test fit the dowel into the side pieces and make any adjustments for a snug, not loose, fit.
9. All pieces are cut, tested and ready for final assembly.
10. Next you want to cut your ” plywood to make the internal divider so your bottles do not bang together.
1 piece cut at 8 5/8″ x 4″ for the middle slat.
2 pieces cut at 5 ” x 4″ for the cross slats.
Measure 2 7/8″ in from each end of the 8 5/8″ Piece and mark 2″ down and on the 5 ” at 2 ” x 2″ down. This is for the cuts to slide the holder together.
11.If you want to paint them, like I did here, my suggestion is to do that prior to assembly.
12. Now it’s time for assembly. I like to use Gorilla glue as it holds the best. I put a drop of glue in each of the dowel holes and then insert the dowel and use a single nail for each side.
13. Now would be a good time to attach the bottom piece. Again a couple dots of the Gorilla glue, some nails from the bottom piece, and some clamps will hold it in place (This picture was before I glued and nailed the bottom piece on so it does not look straight.).
14. Next attach the side slats positioning them at the bottom and the top of the side pieces (on the blue boards). I used a drop of Gorilla glue and two pre-drilled holes on each board.
15. Then assemble the internal dividers and slide it inside the slats. I did not attach the slats to anything as they just sits there and separate the bottles preventing them from hitting each other.State laws related to residency of elected officials
17.03: Vacancies, how caused. Except as otherwise provided, a public office is vacant when:
(1) The incumbent dies.
(2) The incumbent resigns.
(3) The incumbent is removed.
(4) The incumbent ceases to be a resident of:
(a) This state; or
(b) If the office is legislative, the district from which elected.
784.04 When action may be brought.
(1) An action may be brought by the attorney general in the name of the state, upon his or her own information or upon the complaint of any private party, against the parties offending in the following cases:
(a) When any person shall usurp, intrude into or unlawfully hold or exercise any public office, civil or military, or any franchise within this state, or any office in a corporation created by the authority of this state; or
(b) When any public officer, civil or military, shall have done or suffered an act which, by the provisions of law, shall work a forfeiture of office.The Tragically Hip’s final concert will be televised and so far, despite numerous petitions and social media efforts, there has been no movement to stream it at either City Hall or on Parliament Hill. (Justin Trudeau, it’s been reported, will be at the final show in Kingston on Saturday.) However, there are a few viewing parties planned, and we anticipate most bars will be switching to the CBC broadcast on this night so all can party amid the tears:
The Canadian Cancer Society is hosting such concerts across the country, in aid of the Gord Downie Fund, including one in Ontario’s BobCaygeon.
The Arboretum Festival hits its stride this week with some delicious food, beer garden, night bazaar and kids’ playzone at a new hub among the club venues, brunch and BBQ and some amazing workshops and panels on timely topics.
But let’s discuss how to navigate the fantastic musical lineups with our picks:
• Thursday we recommend the Babely Shades Block Party, to catch an arty-electro lineup including Toronto’s activist rap trio Above Top Secret and headliner, Colombian sound and song creator Lido Pimienta, who are utterly fascinating and have yet to play here: House of Common. Though this is tough, because there’s a post-punk show with early grunge sound from Dilly Dally, and fave Toronto duo, Twist, offering fuzzy, less naïf songs with their latest releases: Babylon.
• Friday it’s a no brainer: Sloan play the entirety of their album, One Chord to Another, on its 20th anniversary (what!) and awesome grunge punk band METZ, with its roots in the murk of our city, close out the night.
• Saturday: catch the brunch or BBQ, then nap (as instructed), to catch laid back goth rockers Frigs at 7:15 p.m., some of electric NYC rapper Junglepussy (7:45 p.m.), then be schooled by performance artist Mykki Blanco 8:45 p.m), to end with some dancing to new wave, 80s electro-informed, quirky tunes from Montreal’s Operators (10 p.m.): Concert Village.
• Sunday: cool down with some synth bliss at an all-ages show at Daïmon, from noon.
• Bar Robo each night for DJ after-parties; It’s where that cute band member will probably be.
Up against The Hip’s Ottawa show, Dany Laj and the Looks play power pop rock with accessible, unpretentious (but hipstery) charm, reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen, if he’d gone retro an added some surf touches. Aug. 18, with Altmeda, Ornaments, 10 p.m., House of Targ. $5 before 10 p.m. www.houseoftarg.com
On Saturday, utterly entrancing, so-French, art-pop creator Klô Pelgag — think musical Amélie at a piano, with sprinkling of early Kate Bush — is headlining a free show that will, sadly, be battling for attention against The Hip. But she and compatriot Francis Faubert, a similarly quirky, heart-wrenching, garage rock-folk songwriter who released a new album this spring, may be the perfect foil for those seeking anything but Bobcaygeon. (Though, that’s song it wouldn’t be weird to hear on this stage.) Show ends at 11 p.m. Aug. 20, 8 p.m., Zaphod’s. Free. RSVP at www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1281259/
Foot-stomping and charmingly wry Acadian songwriter Lisa Leblanc headlines tonight’s show at St. Albert Curd Festival where, as added bonus, they will be handing out the squeaky cheese and there will definitely be poutine. Leblanc is a crowd-favourite with her ‘headbaging banjo playing” and frank songs, including the new single off her upcoming album, which every friend should have in their “your boyfriend sucks” arsenal. Aug. 20, with The Casual Affairs, 8 p.m., 150 St. Paul St., St-Albert. $30. festivaldelacurd.ca
There’s an all-ages show with headliner Something You Whisper, playing alt rock-flavoured post-hardcore, though there is a mix of indie hardcore and metal on the stage before them. Aug. 20, with Vesuvius, WKFLD, Trentia, Eyes over Sea, 7 to 11:30 p.m., Cafe Dekcuf. $15 at the door.
Also Saturday, francophone rapper Manu Militari is on stage with his bold and sometimes intimate raps. In his ten years in the public eye, he’s not shied away from controversy or tackling difficult topics, and even his own childhood comes under the lens in his 2015 releae, Océan. But this time, our sacred cows are revealed and torn down with a calming musical backdrop. Aug. 20, 8 p.m., Minotaure. $16.73. http://bit.ly/2btazHW
(For some hip hop in the raw, as it were, catch east coast, mi’kma’q rapper Shift from Tha 902, or Todd Googoo, on Wednesday at The Rainbow. Aug. 24, 8:30 p.m. $7. therainbow.ca)
Sunday is becoming the night for visiting new-wave bands to play Ottawa; Toronto’s underground-romantics Century Palm, who pay unabashed homage to their 80s post-punk forbears with songs that are dark and fresh at the same time. They’re joined by Ottawa’s power-punk Average Times, who have got new songs sure to get the dance floor throbbing. Aug. 21, with Feel Alright, Fever Feel, 7 to 11 pm., Pressed. $8/PWYC.
Toronto based, folk-leaning songwriter Edward Sayers will be on stage solo testing out some new tunes for his upcoming album. He says this music will sit somewhere between the “energetic folk rock” he played with the band Asmodeus, and the very languid, Neil Young-esque timbre of his 2014 EP, Pax Romana — though we’d be perfectly happy if he just gave us more of the latter. Aug. 23, 8:30 p.m., The Rainbow. $5. therainbow.ca
Much louder, Brazil’s classic metal band Hibria, with hair-band vocalising but not the clothes and tech metal chops, is in town as part of their 20th anniversary tour. They’ve just released a new album, XX, on Aug. 9, with four live performances off their catalogue, plus three new tracks. Aug. 23, with Death Wish, Thruster, 8 p.m., House of Targ. $13. www.chordproductions.com
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GALLERY: Sloan, a retro version for their retro show at Arboretum Fest.
Above Top Secret play Arboretum Fest. Brianna-Roye /supplied
METZ olay after Sloan at Arboretum Fest. David Waldman
French rapper Manu Militari is at Minotaure.
Edward Sayers plays a solo show with new music. Devin Wilhelm /supplied
Lido Pimienta is at Arboretum Festival.
The Tragically Hip's Gord Downie and the band thrills fans at their concert in Rogers Arena in Vancouver on July 24 2016 The Hip's 15-date, cross-Canada tour promoting the bands latest album, Man Machine Poem, was the announced in May, after learning that frontman Gord Downie had developed incurable brain cancer.
The Tragically Hip back in the day: From left, Gord Sinclair, Paul Langlois, Gord Downey, Johnny Fay, Rob Baker. Jack Chaing. The Tragically Hip. T
Lisa Leblanc plays the St. Albert Curd Festival.
Story Untold play an all-ages show at Cafe Dekcuf on Friday.
Tara Holloway has a rare show this week.
Francis Faubert plays a free show at Zaphod Beeblebrox with art-pop creator Klô Pelgag.
Toronto surf-punk, nouvelle-vague pop duo Twist play Arboretum Fest, with some new music.
Classic tech metal band Hibria are in town on their anniversary tour. Kais Ismail /supplied
Frigs plays Arboretum Fest. Caitlin McLafferty /supplied
The Kents have a new and first EP out, and a second show at The Rainbow (they played here last week already).
Nova Scotia rapper Shift from Tha 902 is in town.
Evening Hymns play the opening night of Arboretum Fest.
See Dany Laj and his friends for some blue-collarish tunes at House of Targ.
Hooded Fang play Arboretum Fest.
Hillbilly Hepcats play this week.
Mykki Blanco plays Arboretum Festival.
Concession 23 ply the Spencerville Bluegrass festival. Lawrence_Cook
Odonis Odonis play Hosue of Targ. JG_01
Something You Whisper play an al-ages show at Cafe Dekcuf.
Tim Hecker plays Arboretum Fest.
Dilly Dally play Arboretum Fest with some grunge-tinged music.
The Holds play The Rainbow, offering respite on a night of punk.
Related
FULL LISTINGS
Thursday, Aug. 18
Ol’CD, The Tenenbaums (10 p.m., $7), Jeremy Brendan Day (7:30 p.m.), Linda Marie (3 p.m., free), punk, The Rainbow, 76 Murray St. therainbow.ca
All Star Blues showcase with Russell Levia, 9 p.m., Irene’s Pub, 885 Bank St. Tickets: No cover. irenespub.ca
Arboretum Festival — Bar Robo: Official after-party (11 p.m.), Telecomo (7 p.m.), OMIC (5 p.m.), 692 Somerset St. W. Tickets: $5 at the door; $60/pass. arboretumfestival.com
Arboretum Festival— Arlington Five: Steven Lambke (of The Constantines), book launch by Ian Roy, 5 p.m., 5 Arlington St. Tickets: Free. arboretumfestival.com
Arboretum Festival— House of Common: Lido Pimienta (11:15 p.m.), Above Top Secret (9:15 p.m.), Morris Ogbowu (8:15 p.m.), Scott Hardware (7:15 p.m.), Tenderness (6:15 p.m.). with DJ Audrey Lourde, Babely Shades block party, electro/art-pop, all-ages, 11b Fairmont Ave. Tickets: $10 at the door; $60/pass. arboretumfestival.com
Arboretum Festival — St. Alban’s Church: Jeremy Gara (7:30 p.m.), Trails (8:30 p.m.), Tim Hecker (9:30 p.m.), all-ages show, 454 King Edward Ave. Tickets: $15 in advance, $20 at the door; $60/pass. arboretumfestival.com
Arboretum Festival — Babylon: Dilly Dally (11:30 p.m.), Fake Palms (10:30 p.m.), Twist (9:30 p.m.), Bonnie Doon (8:30 p.m.), 317 Bank St. Tickets: $5 at the door; $60/pass. arboretumfestival.com
Dany Laj and The Looks, Altmeda, Ornaments, power pop/country, 10 p.m., House of Targ, 1077 Bank St. Tickets: $ before 10 p.m.; $8 afterwards. www.houseoftarg.com
The Tragically Hip, 8;30 p.m., The Canadian Tire Centre, 1000 Palladium Dr. Tickets: $56-136. canadiantirecentre.com
South Grenville Bluegrass Festival: band scramble (7:30 p.m.), Grenville Grass (6:45 p.m.), Blue River Band (6 p.m.), Spencerville Fair Grounds, 4 Ryan St., Spencerville. Tickets: $10 at the gate, $60/weekend. www.southgrenvillebluegrassfestival.ca
Friday Aug. 19
Arboretum Festival — Concert village: METZ (10 p.m., Sloan (8:30 p.m.), Hooded Fang (7:30 p.m.), main stage; Fet.Nat (9:30 p.m.), Teenanger (8 p.m.), Moss Lime (7 p.m.), BB Cream (6 p.m.), Debaser Stage, City Hall, Marion Dewar Plaza. Tickets: $25/advance pass, $40/weekend pass, $60/all pass. arboretumfestival.com
Arboretum Festival — Bar Robo: DJs Lamb Rabbit, Patric, official after-party, 692 Somerset St. W. Tickets: $5 at the door; $60/pass. arboretumfestival.com
Arboretum Festival — Babylon: 90s or bust, hip hop, R&B dance party, 11 p.m., 317 Bank St. Tickets: free before midnight with $60/pass. arboretumfestival.com
Brad Barr, Tavis Trance, Jason Kent, Bucky Wheaton: The Natural Way, 8:30 p.m., The Black Sheep Inn, 753 Riverside Dr., Wakefield. Tickets: $15. theblacksheepinn.com
The Celebration Army, The Kerouacs (9 p.m., $10), Frank James Experiment Band (3 p.m., free), The Rainbow, 76 Murray St. therainbow.ca
Destiny, funk, 9 p.m., Irene’s Pub, 885 Bank St. Tickets: $5. irenespub.ca
La Cantina: The Handsome Ransoms, The Hillbilly Hepcats, George Stryker and more, greasy rockabilly fiesta, 10 p.m., House of Targ, 1077 Bank St. Tickets: $8 cover. www.houseoftarg.com
Prism, rock, 8 p.m., The Brass Monkey, 250A Greenbank Rd. Tickets: $25. http://bit.ly/2b6DYJh
South Grenville Bluegrass Festival: Concession 23 (10 p.m.), Bill White and White Pine (9 p.m.,) The Pie Plates (8 p.m.), Monroe Sisters (7 p.m.), High Strung Drifters (6 p.m.), Spencerville Fair Grounds, 4 Ryan St., Spencerville. Tickets: $20 at the gate, $60/weekend. www.southgrenvillebluegrassfestival.ca
St Albert Curd Festival: DJ Champion (9:30 p.m), Les Malpris (8 p.m.), 150 St. Paul St., St-Albert. Admission: $8/daily, $25 for concerts; $55/pass. festivaldelacurd.ca
Story Untold, Bearings, By The Glory, T. Rex Marathon, Fractures and Outlines, pop-punk/hardcore, all-ages show, 7 p.m., Cafe Dekcuf, 221 Rideau St. Tickets: $12 in advance, $15 at the door. http://bit.ly/2aOnZAo
Tyler Kealey, 9 p.m., The Branch, 15 Clothier St. E., Kemptville. thebranchrestaurant.ca
Saturday, Aug. 20
90s Grunge Night (9 p.m., $8), the DayDreamers (3 p.m., free), The Rainbow, 76 Murray St. therainbow.ca
Arboretum Festival — Concert Village: Operators (10 p.m.), Mykki Blanco (9:45 p.m.), Junglepussy (7:45 p.m.), Doomsquad (6:45 p.m.), Kina Nimiwag, Ashinabe Drum Group (5 p.m.), Main stage; Jef. E. Barbarab’s Black space (8:15 p.m.), Frigs (7:15 p.m.), H.de Heutz (6 p.m.), Debaser Stage; Open Air Brunch Club — Brockville Lions Steel drum band (2 p.m.), DJs Sarita, Adam Saikaley (noon), City Hall, Marion Dewar Plaza. Tickets: $30/pass, of $60/all-access pass; brunch free for all pass holders. arboretumfestival.com
Arboretum Fest — Backlot BBQ: Fairlfied circuity demo (2 p.m.), Istanbul-Mehmet cymbal clinic (12:45 p.m.), Jesse Stewart (noon), BBQ (11 a.m.), Spaceman and Dave’s Drum Shop parking lot. Tickets: Free, all ages. arboretumfestival.com
Arboretum Fest – Babylon: Lissa Monet, Sammy Rawal, D-luxx Brown, DJ Dae, Oh My Jam pride edition, 11 p.m, 317 Bank St. Tickets: Free with pass before 11 p.m., $15 afterwards. arboretumfestival.com
Arboretum Festival — Bar Robo: DJ Memetic, 11 p.m., 692 Somerset St. W. Tickets: $5 at the door; $60/pass. arboretumfestival.com
Barnstorm: Jimmy Tri-Tone, Julie Corrigan, Harea Band, Amos The Transparent, James LeClaire, Muffler Crunch, noon, 15328 Concession 3-4, Finch. Tickets:$30 before Aug. 19, $40 at the gate. www.barnstorm.ca
Karen Oxorn, jazz, 7:30 p.m., GigSpace, 753 Gladstone Ave. Tickets: $20. gigspaceottawa.com
Klô Pelgag, Francis Faubert, 8 p.m., Zaphod Beeblebrox, 27 York St. Tickets: Free. RSVP at www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/1281259/
Manu Militari, Québécois rap/hip hop, 8 p.m., Minotaure, 3 Kent St. Gatineau. Tickets: $16.73. http://bit.ly/2btazHW
Oh My Jam: Lissa Monet, Sammy Rawal, D-luxx Brown, Dj Dae, Queer Mafia pride edition, 10 p.m., Babylon, 317 Bank St. Tickets: $12 before 11 p.m., $15 afterwards.
St Albert Curd Festival: Lisa Leblanc (9 p.m.), The Casual Affairs (8 p.m.), 150 St. Paul St., St-Albert. Admission: $8/daily, $30 for concerts; $55/pass. festivaldelacurd.ca
Something You Whisper, Vesuvius, WKFLD, Trentia, Eyes over Sea, hardcore indie rock/metal, all-ages show, 7 to 11:30 p.m., Cafe Dekcuf, 221 Rideau St. Tickets: $12 in advance, $15 at the door.
South Grenville Bluegrass Festival: The Lost and Found (10 p.m.), The Northern Sons (9 p.m.), County Road 44 (8 p.m.), Bill White and White Pine (7 p.m.), Bluegrass Choir (5 p.m.), The Pie Plates (4 p.m.), Grass Under Fire (3 p.m.), The Lost and Found (2 p.m.), Concession 23 (1 p.m.), The Backsliders (noon), Monroe Sisters (11 a.m.), High Strung Drifters (10 a.m.), Spencerville Fair Grounds, 4 Ryan St., Spencerville. Tickets: $30 at the gate, $60/weekend. www.southgrenvillebluegrassfestival.ca
Tara Holloway, Panda Bee Catastrophe, 9 p.m., Avant-garde Bar, 135.2 Besserer St. Tickets: $10.
Trinbago Day, a celebration of Trinidad and Tobago with steel bands, calypso and soca performers, noon to 8 p.m., Jean Pigott Hall, City Hall. Ticket: Free.
The Yohawks (rnb/soul, 9 p.m., $10), Open mic with Sean Tansey and Annie Martel (1 to 4 p.m., no cover), Irene’s Pub, 885 Bank St. Tickets: $5. irenespub.ca
Sunday, Aug. 21
Acoustic and Hill: Connie Neilson, Valavent, Your Childhood Bedroom, Nojah, Matt Spalford, Lost Paul, 6 to 11 pm., Flapjack’s Canadian Diner, 354A Preston St. Tickets: $12 at the door.
Arboretum Festival — Daïmon: Dixtorchons, Mathieu Pelgag, Noise by Émilie Mouchois and Simon Labelle, DJs Glory Hull, Mr. Caffrey, Daisy, noon, all-ages, 78 Hanson St., Gatineau. Tickets: Free. arboretumfestival.com
Century Palm, Average Times, Feel Alright, Fever Feel, new wave/twee pop/psych, 7 to 11 pm., Pressed, 750 Gladstone Ave. Tickets: $8/PWYC.
Fluid, Trigon, Great Panic (8 p.m., $5), Open blues jam with Steve Thomas (4 p.m., $3), The Rainbow, 76 Murray St. therainbow.ca
Hillbilly Hepcats, 5:30 p., east court of the Aberdeen Pavilion, Lansdowne Park. Tickets: Free.
St Albert Curd Festival: Brimbelle (chidren’s show, 11 a.m.), Marco et les Torvis (1:30 p.m.), 150 St. Paul St., St-Albert. Admission: $8/daily, free for children 7 and under; $55/pass. festivaldelacurd.ca
South Grenville Bluegrass Festival: County Road 44 (2 p..), Grass Under Fire (1 p.m.), Grenville Grass (noon), The Backsliders (11 a.m.), The Northern Sons (10 a.m.),, Spencerville Fair Grounds, 4 Ryan St., Spencerville. Tickets: $10 at the gate, $60/weekend. www.southgrenvillebluegrassfestival.ca
Monday, Aug. 22
Open Mic Monday with Kevin Bartman, and full band, 8 p.m., The Rainbow, 76 Murray St. therainbow.ca
Tuesday, Aug. 23
Edward Sayers, 8:30 p.m., The Rainbow, 76 Murray St. Tickets: $5. therainbow.ca
Hibria, Death Wish, Thruster, metal/glam, 8 p.m., House of Targ, 1077 Bank St. Tickets: $13. www.chordproductions.com
Wednesday, Aug. 24
End of Summer House of Targ Show: Everyone Leaves, Save Face, Double Experience, Ryan Fitz, Swim Team, Empty Nesters, indie, all-ages show, 8 p.m., House of Targ, 1077 Bank St. Tickets: $10 cover. www.houseoftarg.com
Shift from tha 902, mi’kma’q hip hop artist (8:30 p.m., $7), Dr. Dave’s jazz and blues revue (3 p.,m.), free, The Rainbow, 76 Murray St. therainbow.ca
Thursday, Aug. 25
All Star Blues showcase with River City Junction, 9 p.m., Irene’s Pub, 885 Bank St. Tickets: No cover. irenespub.ca
Hybridreams, BEING, Passed Away, Domination, prog/death metal, 8 p.m., Cafe Dekcuf, 221 Rideau St.:
Not Normal: Experimental Night Music with DJs Pierre Richardson, Jason Skilz, Intangerines, 8 p.m., Pressed, 750 Gladstone Ave.
Odonis Odonis, PIPPA, Ruth Grader, post-gaze electronic/analog techno, 9:30 p.m., House of Targ, 1077 Bank St. Tickets: $10 in advance. www.houseoftarg.com
Reggae Night with Roots Movement (9 p.m., $7), Frank James Band (3 p.m., free), The Rainbow, 76 Murray St. therainbow.ca
Scary Bear Soundtrack, Moonriser, Slow Man Tofu, synth-pop/folk, 8 p.m., BaR Robo, 692 Somerset St. W. Tickets: $8.
Are you a promoter, musician or venue? Send your event information to kendemann@postmedia.com, by 8 a.m. Monday, two weeks before the event. Photos and audio files are welcome.
@keendemann
kendemann@postmedia.comWhile voice control has been part of Android since the dawn of time, Siri came along and ruined the fun with its superior search and understanding capabilities. However, an industrious team of folks from Dexetra.com, led by Narayan Babu, built a Siri-alike in just 8 hours during a hackathon.
Iris allows you to search on various subjects including conversions, art, literature, history, and biology. You can ask it “What is a fish?” and it will reply with a paragraph from Wikipedia focusing on our finned friends.
The app will soon be available soon from the Android Marketplace but I tried it recently and found it a bit sparse but quite cool. It uses Android’s speech-to-text functions to understand basic questions and Narayan and his buddies are improving the app all the time.
The coolest thing? The finished the app in eight hours.
When we started seeing results, everyone got excited and started a high speed coding race. In no time, we added Voice input, Text-to-speech, also a lot of hueristic humor into Iris. Not until late evening we decided on the name “iris.”, which would be Siri in reverse. And we also reverse engineered a crazy expansion – Intelligent Rival Imitator of Siri. We were still in the fun mode, but when we started using it the results were actually good, really good.
You can grab the early, early beta APK here but I recommend waiting for the official version to arrive this week. It just goes to show you that amazing things can pop up everywhere.Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE says he has forgiven more than $50 million in loans he made to his Republican primary campaign for president.
"Mr. Trump has fully extinguished this loan per his commitment," the Trump campaign said Thursday in a statement to reporters.
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"Therefore, he has personally invested in excess of $50 million dollars in the future of our country."
Forgiving the loans is an important step for Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, who needs to win over skeptical donors.
Despite saying he had self-funded his primary campaign, the money Trump gave was in the form of loans, which meant he could ultimately repay himself using donations from regular contributors.
This fact was becoming a source of tension among Republican donors who were worried that the money they gave to the Trump campaign would end up going into the billionaire's own pockets.
These donor concerns were heightened when Trump revealed just $1.3 million on hand at the end of May. Democratic presidential rival 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 ended the month with $42.5 million in the bank.
Since the damaging news broke on Monday, the Trump campaign has done a series of media interviews to insist their fundraising is doing well.
To forgive his $50 million in loans, Trump needs to send a "loan forgiveness statement" to the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
The FEC hasn’t yet registered the loan forgiveness statement, despite Trump's national finance chair, Steve Mnuchin, telling CNBC on Thursday, "We just forgave the loan this week."
Asked on Thursday afternoon whether the presumptive nominee had in fact sent the loan forgiveness letter, Trump's communications director, Hope Hicks replied, "It will be completed today."Canadians are still buying new cars and vegetables even as they become more expensive, supporting the central bank's view the economy will recover from a commodity crash without further interest-rate cuts.
December inflation climbed at the fastest pace in a year at 1.6 per cent, led by double-digit gains for fruit and vegetables and a reduced drag from gasoline, Ottawa-based Statistics Canada said Friday. The agency also reported retail sales rose 1.7 per cent in November, almost triple the highest estimate in a Bloomberg economist survey.
Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz kept his key lending rate at 0.5 per cent Wednesday, bucking some investor calls for a cut, citing "roughly balanced" inflation risks. Friday's report meshes with his view a weaker dollar – which makes imported goods like some food more expensive – is countering slack in the economy from the plunge in oil prices.
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"From the bank's perspective it does validate some of their expectations that in some parts of the economy the up trend is under way," said Dawn Desjardins, assistant chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada in Toronto.
"Food that we have to import did see healthy increases over the course of last year," she said. "We have seen a stealth impact in terms of the currency from that perspective, but of course we have the offset of gasoline prices."
Rapid slide
Fresh fruit and vegetable prices rose 13 per cent in December from a year earlier, pushing up total food costs 3.7 per cent. Most fresh produce is imported from the U.S. or Latin America during winter. Canada's dollar fell 16 per cent last year versus the U.S. currency.
Cutting interest rates again may have extended the Canadian dollar's rapid slide and led to a burst of inflation down the road, Poloz told reporters Wednesday, citing that risk as part of his rationale for shifting away from an earlier bias to cut rates.
Canadians have been perhaps most vocal about the sticker shock for one imported good: cauliflower prices jumped to $7 ($4.90 U.S.) a head in some cities this |
keeping the Post-Its that I still use organized!
Here are 3 ways I use Post-Its…
1. Quick lists
I classify a “quick list” as anything I need to write down so I don’t forget but is usually short term so it doesn’t have a home in my bujo. My grocery and shopping lists almost always fall in this category. It also makes it easy to grab and put in my wallet for my shopping trip.
2. Forward items
Here’s a scenario… it’s March and you just found out about an event in April, it’s too early to make that monthly spread and it’s not “big” enough to put in your future planner… Post-It!
3. Holds
Last but not least, when I have an idea or want to create a new page or collection but not ready to dive into it, I put it on a Post-It! This also makes it easy to plan my next few pages and I don’t forget anything!
Does anyone else use Post-Its in their Bujo? How do you use Post-Its?Description
1963 Lambretta Li 150/125 Looking to fund another project. Have a running LI 150. Body is a Special however the motor is a 125 with a 150 cylinder and a Jetex carb. Wiring is a mess, could use a new harness however everything works except the horn. New carb, stater, bearings, gaskets, key off switch. Not an all original bike, but still a whole bunch of awesome Email for more pics... I'll post a video on the youtube soon $1600 OBO Clear Ohio title if your in the Cleveland area I have a truck and could deliver to reasonable distance. If you live in the area feel free to hit me up and take it for a spin. I'm planning on putting the bike on ebay but I'd like scoot.net to have its dibs first. Thanks AndyCLOSE Stephen Holder and Gregg Doyel of IndyStar discuss the Indianapolis Colts' loss to the Baltimore Ravens. Matt Kryger/IndyStar
Indianapolis Colts outside linebacker Jabaal Sheard (93) pressures Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco (5) in the second quarter at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore on Saturday, Dec. 23, 2017. (Photo: Matt Kryger/IndyStar) Story Highlights Texans at Colts, 1 p.m. Dec. 31, CBS
BALTIMORE — Here is the best and worst of the Indianapolis Colts’ 23-16 loss to the Baltimore Ravens on Saturday.
Thumbs up
>> OLB Jabaal Sheard: This was one of the finest performances we’ve seen from the first-year free-agent pickup. Sheard was never going to be a pass-rushing freak, and this season has shown that the Colts must invest in an edge rusher in the coming offseason. But there have been times this season when Sheard takes advantage of favorable matchups and manages to have a huge impact on the passing game.
Saturday was one of those times.
Sheard was a seemingly ever-present force in the Ravens’ offensive backfield, pestering quarterback Joe Flacco throughout the day. He did not notch a sack, but the pressure he applied was palpable. He altered some of Flacco’s throws, collapsed the pocket and batted down two passes.
If and when the Colts acquire a productive pass rusher, Sheard could be even more of a force as it will lead to consistent one-on-one matchups.
More on the Colts
► Adam Vinatieri on missing a $500,000 bonus
► Just one more of these left
► Obscure Colts aren't giving up the fight
>> CB Kenny Moore II: You’ll never guess who the Colts’ leading tackler was on Saturday. Yes, it was the 5-9 rookie cornerback from Valdosta State, Moore. His inclusion here is not to suggest his coverage was airtight. But Moore deserves credit for his physical play despite his lack of size. He’s shown a willingness to mix things up in run support and against bigger receivers and tight ends.
This is as big a part of playing cornerback in the NFL as any other aspect, and Moore does not appear to be lacking in this area.
>> Offensive line: Did you happen to notice how much time quarterback Jacoby Brissett enjoyed in the pocket? That was certainly not something we’ve come to expect, but Brissett could comfortably scan the field on Saturday and deliver the football without pressure because of the line's stout performance. Despite its lineup being in tatters, this group had one of its best games of the season against Baltimore’s physical defensive front.
With Mike Person starting for Ryan Kelly at center, and Le’Raven Clark playing right guard and Joe Haeg moving to right tackle (for the injured Denzelle Good), the Colts overcame the lineup changes. The run blocking was superb, too, with Frank Gore and Marlon Mack using wide running lanes to at least 4 yards per carry.
It was the running game and offensive balance that aided the pass protection, according to left tackle Anthony Castonzo.
“We were running the ball,” he said, “so they’re just not teeing off (against) the pass.”
CLOSE Indianapolis Colts coach Chuck Pagano discusses his team's loss to the Baltimore Ravens. Matt Kryger/IndyStar
Thumbs down
>> CB Nate Hairston: The Colts matched a season low with two penalties, and both came from the rookie cornerback. Hairston committed a defensive holding penalty and was flagged for interference on the same series in the fourth quarter.
The calls ended up being monumental.
Both came on third downs and prevented the defense from getting off the field. Those first downs ultimately set up a Ravens touchdown that proved to be the difference.
>> Wide receivers: Drops were a common theme, as they’ve been throughout the season. Kamar Aiken had another inexplicable drop, as did Chester Rogers. T.Y. Hilton had a borderline drop as well, though he at least acquitted himself with several clutch plays in a 6-catch, 100-yard performance.
It was Hilton’s finest performance in a Colts loss this season. His previous three 100-yard games came against the Browns, 49ers and Texans —– the Colts’ three wins.Using the drug darapladib, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and colleagues have inhibited a cholesterol-and immune system-associated protein, thereby reducing the development of heart-disease plaques that may cause death, heart attacks, and strokes in a pig model of atherosclerosis and diabetes.
The study recently appeared online in Nature Medicine.
“We’ve used a model that closely mimics clinical disease,” says first author Robert L. Wilensky, MD, Director of Experimental Interventional Cardiology and Professor of Medicine at the Penn Cardiovascular Institute. “The study shows that darapladib is useful in reducing atherosclerosis but more importantly those blockages that are thought to cause death and heart attacks.”
Atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, is the most common cause of heart attack, stroke, and death from cardiovascular disease, and has long been thought of as a type of chronic inflammation. An early first step in the build-up of the plaques associated with atherosclerosis is the accumulation of low-density lipoproteins (LDLs), the “bad” cholesterol, on artery walls. When LDLs are oxidized by the body, they attract immune cells and lipids to the site of the build-up.
Problems arise when the plaques grow to form a lesion characterized by a thin fibrous cap and a lipid-filled core of dying cells. These unstable plaques are prone to rupture, which can then lead to heart attack, stroke, and death.
A molecule called lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A 2 (Lp-PLA 2 ) is connected with LDLs circulating in the blood. Elevated levels of Lp-PLA 2 in the blood predict an increased risk of heart disease events and are related to the development of the necrotic core of plaques. Darapladib specifically inhibits Lp-PLA 2.
“The results are exciting,” says Wilensky. “First, darapladib reduced the overall amount and size of plaques that block the coronary arteries of animals in the study. More importantly, it reduced the number and size of the type of advanced plaques that cause heart attacks and strokes. “
These advanced plaques have a thin cap and large core filled with cellular debris from inflammatory-immune cells that engorge themselves on cholesterol. If unstable plaques come into contact with blood, blood clots that develop from this contact constrict flow, which can lead to stroke and heart attack. Darapladib stabilizes these dangerous plaques by decreasing the size of the core and reducing the number of inflammatory-immune cells present within the plaque. Darapladib also decreased the expression of genes involved in enlisting immune cells involved in the inflammatory response associated with atherosclerosis.
“The aha moment came when we saw the profound difference in plaque composition in animals given medication versus those not given darapladib, although the high cholesterol levels in the pig model remained the same in both groups,” says Wilensky. “This study took cholesterol out of the equation and let us evaluate the effects of inflammation on the development of atherosclerosis.”
Recently, darapladib has been tested in a human clinical trial in Europe, which showed similar findings. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Inc., who provided the darapladib for the study, is planning a Phase 1 safety and efficacy trial with darapladib in humans in the near future. Penn will be one site in this proposed multi-center clinical trial.
This study was supported, in part, by funding from GlaxoSmithKline, over the last two years totaling about $1.5 million, through an industry-academic alliance called the Alternative Drug Discovery Initiative at the Penn School of Medicine. Co-author Emile Mohler, III, has a position on a steering committee as a National Coordinator for the Phase III GSK trial for darapladib.
In addition to other Penn co-authors Damir Hamamdzic, Daniel J. Pelchovitz, and Jisheng Yang, colleagues from Thomas Jefferson University, GlaxSmithKline, Southhampton General Hospital (UK), and the University of Washington were also co-authors. Wilensky has a consulting agreement ($2000 over the past year) with GSK for another compound.Stadler won out against the competition to build 22 customized electrical multiple units (EMU) for Stockholm Transport (SL). The total contract volume amounts to approximately CHF 232 million. The EMU will be used on the Roslagsbanan route, connecting Stockholm with regions to the north and east of the Swedish capital. The 891 mm track gauge is unique in the world, and Stadler meets the need for a special model: the Swiss rail vehicle manufacturer is well established in the tailor-made sector and continues to generate between 12 and 15 per cent of its group-wide turnover in this area.
Stadler was awarded the contract for the 22 EMU, known as X15p, on 23 August 2016. The cancellation period expired on 21 April. This means Stadler can deliver trains to Sweden once again.
“We are delighted with this order from Stockholm. The customized vehicles will allow us to evidence our flexibility and customer focus once again,” explains Peter Spuhler, owner and Group CEO of Stadler.
The 22 EMU will be used on the 65-kilometre Roslagsbanan route. The trains are designed for a speed of 120 km/h, and can take 300 passengers, with seats for 150. Furthermore, they are designed to make access easy for passengers with restricted mobility, and also offer more space for prams and bikes. The trains will be delivered in 2020 and will be put into service a year later.
The contract with SL includes an option for a further 45 vehicles. The Roslagsbanan 891 mm track gauge is unique in the world, and this calls for a bespoke model. Tailor-made models of this kind are one of Stadler’s strengths. The company prides itself on its high level of flexibility and willingness to cater for specific customer requirements. This clearly sets it apart from the competition.
Built for tough winters
The trains for SL are also winter-proof. They are specially designed to withstand harsh climatic conditions. The winter-proofing of its vehicles is something Stadler has proven with its trains in Norway, Finland, Estonia, Russia and Belarus, where extreme conditions occur regularly in the winter. This exceptional winter weather resistance is a result of features such as closed engine rooms, double-wall intercar gangways and high-quality insulation. Floor heating and warm air curtains fitted on the entrance doors provide extra comfort inside the train when external temperatures are low. Thanks to the lightweight aluminum design of the carriage bodies, the trains can accelerate more quickly, which results in a significant decrease in the energy required as well as lower operating costs.
Railcolor: Stockholm Transport (SL) wants to operate the new X15p’s next to the existing X10p fleet. The order has a estimated value of 2 billion Swedish crown. SL will also invest in the infrastructure of the Roslagsbanan, to make it possible to offer train services with a 10-minute interval during peak hours.Democratic governor signs budget law
Michigan makes drastic cuts to education, social spending
By Tom Eley
2 November 2009
Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat and close political ally of President Barack Obama, on Friday signed into law a budget for 2009-2010 that drastically reduces state spending on education and social programs.
Michigan was the last US state to formally approve a budget, a result of a standoff between Granholm and Senate Republicans that delayed final passage one month into the state’s new fiscal year.
Granholm actually signed six separate budget bills on Friday, bringing the total to 15, which combine to allocate an overall $44 billion state budget. In this process, Granholm used her line-item veto 70 times to cut spending by a further $127 million. The largest of these vetoes was a $51.7 million cut for 39 school districts—mostly in southeastern Michigan—that spend at a higher rate than the state average.
The budget includes not a penny of new revenue from taxation, a victory for the Republicans who control the state senate. For their part, Granholm and the Democrats, who control the lower house, never contemplated an income tax increase on the state’s wealthy or taxes on the activities of major banks and financial institutions. Granholm had proposed a series of regressive sales taxes.
The signings appeared to finalize massive cuts to public education averaging $292 per student for most of the state, and nearly twice as much in the 39 “high-spending” school districts.
Kevin McLogan, a representative of the Michigan Parent Teacher Student Association (MPTSA), told the World Socialist Web Site the cuts would be “devastating.”
“A lot of terrible things are going to happen,” he said. “There are a lot of districts that are already in tough shape. They will be pushed to the edge of receivership.”
“For other schools, there will be lot of cutting around the edges,” he continued. “They will curtail busing, after-school programs, community education and alternative education. Some districts will increase the amount of kids in the classroom, institute shorter school years, and force teachers to buy more of their own supplies.”
The state will cut by 8 percent its Medicaid contribution to hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and doctors who treat 1.7 million poor and disabled residents. These cuts will translate into reduced access for Medicaid recipients. “Some nursing homes with a heavy Medicaid caseload may close,” the Detroit News reports. The cuts to Medicaid mean the loss of hundreds of millions in federal matching funds.
The state of Michigan is now the target of a lawsuit launched on behalf of 400,000 Medicaid recipients whose dental benefits were axed through a Granholm executive order in June. An elderly woman from northern Michigan, Blanche D. LaVire, 76, died as a direct result of Granholm’s order. LaVire was to be treated for a grave dental infection in July. She died from complications associated with the spread of the infection while waiting for emergency paperwork to be approved by the state.
The budget cuts include, among other items:
Aid to cities and towns down 11 percent, or $100 million in all. These cuts will result in a new wave of reductions carried out at the local level. Affected will be police and fire protection, libraries, streets, water service, and sewerage.
A scholarship program, Michigan Promise, providing grants of between $1,000 and $4,000 to assist about 100,000 state residents to pay for college. These students will see a substantial increase in their tuition as early as the spring. The elimination of these scholarships was part of an overall 61 percent cut to student financial aid. Also eliminated were state nursing scholarships, the Michigan Work-Study Program, and the Part-Time Independent Student Program.
A reduction of 0.4 percent for state colleges and universities, which were spared a deeper cut by federal stimulus money targeted to higher education. “Federal stimulus law prevented 2010 cuts to college operations,” noted columnist Peter Luke of Mlive.com. “[But] in 2011, Michigan’s 15 public universities will have a giant target on their backs.”
A $62 million cut to state mental health services.
Using her veto, Granholm cut deeper than the austerity budget produced by the legislature. The Democratic governor vetoed $7 million to fund the Michigan State Fair, an exposition held in Detroit that has been an annual tradition since the nineteenth century. In fact, $6.6 million of the outlay was funded by the fair itself, so Granholm’s veto saves the state a net of only $500,000.
Granholm also used her veto to cut $5 million in payments to hospitals that treat the indigent and uninsured patients, funding for a senior food aid outreach project in two counties, and a volunteer health clinic in Bay City.
In signing the bill, Granholm said that Senate Republicans bear responsibility for the savage cuts.
“This is the budget we have, but it is not the budget we need,” the governor said. “It is a budget I don’t agree with and don’t support. It makes cuts that are too deep and are too painful for kids going to college, families keeping their families healthy and keeping their streets safe.”
These protestations are fraudulent. The Democratic Party controls not only the governor’s mansion, but the state house of representatives. There has never been any fundamental disagreement among Granholm, House Democrats, and Senate Republicans over the need to drastically cut social spending. There were only tactical differences over how much this year’s budget should be funded through the federal stimulus package—depleting those resources for next year’s budget—and whether or not to increase forms of the state’s regressive sales tax.
Politicians in both parties are in agreement that this year’s cuts are only the beginning. Unlike cuts made in some earlier recessions, it is generally accepted that the reductions made this year will not only be permanent, but even be deepened in the future. It is estimated that the new budget for 2010, barely a day old, already faces a $100 million shortfall, not counting the education fund, which is largely funded by the state sales tax. Current estimates put the budget deficit for 2011 at $750 million.
As the Detroit Free Press noted, “Michigan’s budget problems will almost certainly worsen before they improve. Tax revenues are expected to remain flat or decline. Program needs—from welfare to the cost of public employee salaries and benefits—will continue to grow. (Most of the state’s unionized employees are scheduled to get a 3% pay increase next spring.) And about $1.4 billion in onetime federal stimulus money to balance the 2009-10 books will be gone.”Posted on: January 20, 2014
El Sendero Luminoso (V 5.12d), on El Toro's 2,000-foot Central Pillar in El Potrero Chico, Mexico, one of the largest chunks of exposed limestone in North America. Alex Honnold Soloed the route in three hours on January 16. [Photo] Renan Ozturk/Camp 4 Collective collection
Six years ago, Alex Honnold stood in the streets of El Potrero Chico, Mexico, staring up at a striking line on El Toro's Central Pillar called El Sendero Luminoso (V, 5.12d). In that moment, he knew he had found a route he could solo that was unlike any other in North America. A few years later, Honnold was back in El Potrero climbing and cleaning the route. It hadn't seen much traffic since it was first climbed, siege-style, in 1994 by Jeff Jackson, Pete Peacock and Kurt Smith. "Peacock supplied us with water, fresh batteries for drilling and the occasional 12-pack of Tecate," Jackson wrote in the 1995 American Alpine Journal. "All told, Smith and I spent 20 nights on the ledge, drilled 190 bolts, consumed 40 gallons of water and ate five dozen tortillas." As Honnold made his first attempt on the 15-pitch route, an old rope left from a previous party hung from the pillar's upper flanks, and the holds were covered in dirt. Too much work needed to be done, so Honnold left knowing he'd return more prepared.
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This year, Honnold wanted a committed partner to go to El Potrero with him and completely clean the route. Cedar Wright volunteered, and they made the trip south. On January 16, after a week of cleaning and getting comfortable on the line, Honnold soloed El Sendero Luminoso, climbing the route, more than 1,500 feet tall, in only three hours time.
I chatted with Honnold as he rode his bike to a farmers' market in Oakland, California, the day after he returned home.
Why did you choose El Sendero Luminoso?
Well basically because it represented the pinnacle of technical limestone big-wall climbing in North America. There isn't really anything else like it in North America. Even though routes like El Sendero are abundant in Europe, nothing like this really exists here.
Ever since I went to El Potrero five or six years ago and first saw that route, I was like "Oh my gosh. That's the route. That is the line."
Does the route get climbed often?
It's hard to say. Last year I went up there and it didn't look like it had been climbed in years. Someone had gotten their line stuck on rappel and I had to dig it out. It was really simple, the line had just looped itself around a block, and it was covered in dirt. I was like, "Dude when was the last time anybody came up here?" I couldn't believe there was a full lead line up there stuck to the mountain. It was crazy somebody didn't go back up and get their rope back. It guess it makes sense because it is so hard. I doubt many people go climb it. El Potrero is kind of a vacation destination, so I don't think too many hardcore folks go down there.
Did you need to clean the whole route?
Yeah. I climbed it twice last year with two different partners, but half of it with one of them. And then we spent hours cleaning it on the way down. I realized it was going to need some serious time, so we stopped. This year I went back just planning on cleaning the whole thing.
Alex Honnold on clean holds high above the valley below, sans harness. [Photo] Cedar Wright
What was the grade of the new terrain you climbed, and why did you choose to go to the true summit rather than finish at the route's topout?
I think, stylistically, it's cooler to climb from the bottom to the top and then walk off. As for the new terrain, we thought we were going to do a first ascent and when we got up there it turns out there were bolts. I actually think that terrain is a part of Huevos a la Mexicana (5.11b), a route some locals put up. We were psyched to see bolts up there. It turned out the terrain was easier than it looked and better than it looked. It was two pitches of 5.9, then 800 feet of chossy 5.4 climbing to the summit.
What's the rock like there? Is it hard? Soft? Friable?
It's pretty good. It is sort of like Sierra granite in a way. The rock seems pretty good, and it's pretty blocky and stuff, but you can still pull big blocks off.
Tell me about the process of learning the moves? How long did it take?
I guess it took about four days of cleaning and climbing to learn the route. I cleaned a lot of holds and memorized a lot of moves. I practiced a few sections over and over until I was OK with it. I actually pioneered some soloing beta on certain sections. After the crux on the second pitch, normally you would need to toss between these two side pulls but it's doesn't keep you balanced. So I figured out all these little moves where I'd move both my feet to the left, move up my right hand to a side pull, then I'd move both feet to the right and move my left hand up. I did that so I was always in balance and not tossing to the side pulls. It was pretty intricate and there were a lot of little moves. There were also a few spots where I would need to step really really high to a good foot.
I saw the photo of you getting into your harness on the wall. What was going on there?
[Laughs] Well that's how you film the soloing process. We did a lot of documenting up there. I had just soloed a whole pitch to that block, and it just marked a natural end and a good spot to put my harness on. [During] one of the other pitches I soloed, Renan Ozturk hung an aider on a bolt. I just hung on it and stepped in. That's the thing with filming soloing, it's just filled with shenanigans.
Did you have any "Oh, shit" moments?
No. Because I rehearsed it, I sort of romped it. I almost over-rehearsed it. I felt like it took away the adventure in some ways. It kind of makes sense because the rock is so suspect and the moves were pretty intricate. But I was happy with it. Pitch 2 was the crux so I kind of got shaky or amped up because it was the hard part and I needed to bare down. But then for the rest of the route I was relieved and relaxed.
What was going through your mind the days before you committed to the solo?
That, actually, was kind of the hard part. Particularly because we were filming and there were all these people on an email thread asking when we were shooting and when I was going to solo it. I was like, "Oh man. I've actually got to do it." It was kind of weird. Normally I keep that stuff super low-key and I don't feel like there is any pressure at all, and I can just take my own time. For this solo I wanted a committed partner to come down and help me work on the route, so it kind of made sense to make a thing out of it. It was a little weird for me. Even the morning I hiked up there I had Renan asking me how I felt and stuff. I was like, "Dude, I don't really want to talk about it. I really just want to go up and do my thing. Lets not talk about it."
Alex Honnold committed mid-route on El Sendero Luminoso. [Photo] SkySight Aerials/Camp 4 Collective collection
And you said you were felt pretty good on the route after the crux?
Well with any big-wall solo like that, it takes a few hundred feet to ease into it and feel perfect. It just so happened that the crux was within those few hundred feet. There was a cruxy pitch up high at Pitch 11, and by then I had been climbing so long I felt in-sync and everything felt really easy.
Does soloing scare you?
Not really. I mean, if I pulled off a huge rock or something, yeah, I would be scared. But no, not really. Especially with this route in particular because everything was perfect.
What does scares you?
I used to be scared of spiders but I kind of got over it. I mean, with a route like El Sendero, I definitely felt some anxiety or nervousness beforehand, but I think a lot of that comes with experiencing something new. I didn't know how it would go because I'd never done anything like it before. Stepping into the unknown is always a little unnerving. But I wouldn't necessarily call that scary, I'd call it more stimulating than anything.
Do you feel like this was one of your most committing solos to date?
I don't know about committing. In a lot of ways it's a slab so you can just step anywhere and feel good. In a few cases there would be a place with a hand jam somewhere and if you got above it and jammed your foot in it, you could just stay there for eternity if you needed to. So it's not like the clock is ticking and you're getting pumped and you have to do it or fall off. I would say it is the most technically demanding and involved big walls that I have climbed. It is quite big.
Were there any vertical sections or was it all slabby?
Yeah, definitely. There are a few short vertical sections and a few roofs where you have to step over an overlap. But it is basically an epic slab.
How does it compare to some of the stuff you've done in Yosemite?
I'd say it's pretty similar to Half Dome. The thing about Half Dome was that it was more of an adventure for me because I hadn't rehearsed it. I just went up there and was like, "Ok, I'll just figure it out." Had I been completely unprepared for El Sendero, I would have probably felt the same. They are really similar to me, too, because they are such striking features that dominate the area that they are in.
Have you done any other soloing in the area?
I have done quite a bit, actually. I have pretty much done all of the classics. Potrero is sort of known for its classic 5.10s. The last morning before we left, I did a 14-pitch 5.10c. It took me 45 minutes to climb and another hour to down climb.
How do the locals feel about you guys being down there?
I think they were psyched. Cedar and I were hiking through the canyon and a big local crew from Monterrey stopped for a photo shoot with us. Everyone had their cameras and they all took turns. I think the local folks are just psyched to see any kind of high-profile climbers coming to appreciate their area. And the people that run the campgrounds are just psyched to attract any kind of attention. It's a big thing for the town to have climbers through the whole winter.
What's next? What's going on with you soloing a building?
I don't know what's going on with the whole building solo. It keeps getting pushed back because of budgeting stuff and productions stuff so I don't know. I'm not really involved in the planning process. But, I am flying to Patagonia with Tommy Caldwell in 10 days. It will be my first time down there but the thing is, I don't know how to ice climb. I don't know how to use ice axes or crampons at all. I think Rolando Garibotti gave Tommy a bunch of things he thinks we're qualified to do. Though I hear the weather has been shit. I hope that's the case so we can just boulder the whole time and I can come back super fit. I don't really want to go suffer in the mountains. [laughs]
Sources: Alex Honnold, Cedar Wright, 1995 AAJ
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advertisementMore than 1,200 resident doctors of state-run King Edward Memorial (KEM) hospital in Mumbai have called a strike against the alleged assault on three of their colleagues by relatives of a minor boy who died of dengue in the early hours today.Protesting doctors have demanded that until a First Information Report or FIR is not filed under Doctors Prevention Act and the accused arrested, they will continue with mass bunking."Our colleagues Dr Suhas, Dr Kushal and Dr Puneet were assaulted by relatives and beaten by iron rods leaving bruises all over their bodies," said Dr Amit Lomte, Vice President of Central MARD, the body regulating resident doctors in Maharashtra.Neither the police nor the hospital administration have come forward to listen to our anguish, he claimed.The doctors were said to be beaten after they failed to admit the boy suffering from dengue into the Intensive Care Unit or ICU ward on account of alleged non-availability of beds.The boy was later admitted to the general ward around 9 pm last night.The boy, aged around 10, died around 1.30 am after which his infuriated relatives allegedly roughed up the three doctors with rods and abused them, said Lomte.All the three injured doctors have been hospitalised.I’m a bit of a balisong, a.k.a, butterfly knife, aficionado, or at least I used to be when I lived in a really shitty neighborhood in Boston. At the time, I thought I was a ninja, and I never left my apartment without some sort of weapon. Now my butterfly knives collect dust in a drawer, but I still hold a special place in my beer-nerd heart for the dangerous little bastards. (I also now know that I am not, in actuality, a ninja.)
So when I saw BBBarfly.com’s cool new butterfly-knife-style bottle openers, which you can customize with your own design, I was more than a little intrigued. I don’t know if I’ll actually, you know, buy one, because I already have a shitload of bottle openers. But they’re still really cool, especially if you’re a bartender looking for a new way to differentiate yourself from all the other bottle slangers.
You can get a single-color butterfly-knife bottle opener for $20, and you can pick a number of designs for another $10 or so. You can also customize your bottle opener with your own design, but I couldn’t find any pricing information for custom BBBarlys on the company’s website.
Now I can’t wait to go home and play with my butterfly knives. Banzai.
UBN
AdvertisementsAugust 2, 2012
KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: Today, from Istanbul, we experience some of the great spiritual tensions and possibilities of our world: the “art” of religious otherness; and the “dialogue of life.” We meet a bishop of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which still has its base in this Muslim nation. First, we speak with a Roman Catholic Dominican monk who lives in Istanbul. The Dominicans began as an order of preachers and fighters of heresy. As part of this tradition, Alberto Ambrosio is living a Christianity inspired by his study of Islam. He calls this a wonderful paradox — a life-giving contradiction.
DR. ALBERTO AMBROSIO: I love this contradiction. I’m closer to the idea of human communion, human meeting. I mean, I know that I’m a Catholic and I’m still very close to this philosophy and theology, but at the same time, I can be open mind to see what God creates.
MS. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being — from APM, American Public Media.
Istanbul, of course, is the former Constantinople, named after the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. The story of one of the city’s great monuments, the Hagia Sophia, offers a kind of microcosm of the story of Christianity here. This architecturally astonishing structure is the second-largest church in the world, and one of the most ancient. It was first the Byzantine center of Christianity and later a mosque of the Ottoman Empire. Today, it’s a museum of the Turkish Republic.
It was at the suggestion of several Muslims that I visited Alberto Fabio Ambrosio at his monastery. He has lived in this city since he was in his 20s. He is an emerging teacher about Islam within Roman Catholicism. And he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the whirling dervishes — whom the poet Rumi inspired in this land in the 13th century.
MS. TIPPETT: I want to actually start out by asking you to tell us where we are — tell us about this building and this location.
DR. AMBROSIO: Yeah, we are in a historical part of Istanbul. We are really in the Genoese part of the city. The Dominicans here spent something like four centuries in Istanbul, in this place. But the Dominicans brothers were here even before in another church that was changed into a mosque in 1475.
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
DR. AMBROSIO: : So they left there.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
DR. AMBROSIO: : And they came here.
MS. TIPPETT: We drove by a tower — you said, the Italian tower that was 600 years old?
DR. AMBROSIO: : Yeah, because of the Genoese — the Genoese …
MS. TIPPETT: OK. So that came then?
DR. AMBROSIO: … constructed this Galata Tower.
MS. TIPPETT: Very beautiful.
DR. AMBROSIO: Yeah, wonderful.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
DR. AMBROSIO: It’s a wonderful place. I mean it’s, uh …
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
DR. AMBROSIO: I mean, I love to live here. I love to travel also, but when I come back here I’m very happy, because we feel the history. We feel, uh, we feel this part of history — Byzantine history. We feel also in our own place — we feel also the Ottoman history. In fact, this place was made in the Ottoman time.
MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm.
DR. AMBROSIO: |
unabashed good times of “Pale Blue Eyes,” only bolstered by a production less outwardly dedicated to a vintage sound than on either of their prior LPs.
That’s not to say Kadavar‘s methods have shifted away from ’70s heavy loyalism — quite the opposite — just that they’ve hit a point where they clearly feel they can carry across the spirit without directly aping the sound. They’re right. Entirely possible Berlin was recorded analog, in fact I wouldn’t doubt it, but it’s a clearer production, and it serves the material well, allowing a song like “Lord of the Sky” to concentrate on nailing Berlin‘s initial momentum or the chills-up-the-spine hook of “See the World with Your Own Eyes” to be utterly propelled by a build in Tiger‘s drums, or “Last Living Dinosaur” to highlight Lindemann‘s growth as a vocalist, switching register between verse and chorus as fluidly as the track soon enough shifts instrumentally into its rolling finish.
As with their last two outings, Berlin is an easy album to be excited about, and no doubt many will be. Its upbeat movement and vividness are infectious. What distinguishes Kadavar‘s work up to this point, however, is that the quality of the songs stands up after the record’s freshness gives way. Multiple listens to Berlin only make it sound richer, only reveal it to be a more complex outing than its brainwashing choruses at first declare. Subtle moments like the Rolling Stones-style noodling at the start of “Thousand Miles away from Home,” the way “Stolen Dreams” seems to echo the push of “Lord of the Sky” while doing something of its own as well, or how Lindemann‘s voice echoes when he says “night” in the title-line of “Into the Night” and the light Sabbathian touch in that song’s finish make Berlin all the more special.
Not just because they show attention to detail on the part of the band, but because they — like the tones, pacing, melodies and rhythm of the album overall — sound natural, grown out from Kadavar and Abra Kadavar but seeing the world with their own eyes (I just made that up; no idea where I might have gotten it from), the band’s progression evident in both the style they present on the surface and the substance that acts as the foundation beneath. The native-language bonus track makes a suitable finale even as it undercuts a prevailing hopeful sentiment, however, because its somewhat otherworldly melancholy reminds both of Kadavar‘s psychedelic side — something touched on elsewhere but not widely represented — and that at the best of times very often a downturn awaits. Going back to the start to give Berlin another go, one hopes that turn never comes and that, as much as Kadavar have found a new peak and captured a defining moment with these songs, there’s another around the next corner.
Kadavar, “The Old Man” official video
Kadavar on Thee Facebooks
Kadavar on Twitter
Kadavar at Nuclear Blast"I would think that in order for new drilling projects to be capitalized and economical, the price of oil would need to be around $85 to $90," Moody's Analytics energy economist Chris Lafakis said.
The situation is broadly similar to that faced by an earlier proposal to build a natural-gas pipeline from Alaska to the Midwest, Lafakis said. After being approved by then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in 2007, the pipeline was never built, because newly discovered supplies of gas in the Lower 48 states pushed gas prices down by about two-thirds.
"If oil were to stay as cheap as it is right now, you might very well get that Palin pipeline scenario," Lafakis said.
Read MoreUnleasing the benefits of American energy
One major oil producer in Alberta said its reserves can be brought to market for between $35 and $65 per barrel, a level Millington confirmed that some existing wells can achieve. And futures markets for oil are still pointing to a longer-term price of $85 to $90 a barrel, said Reg Curren, a spokesman for Cenovus Energy (CVE).
"For the intermediate term, you would need that price to keep encouraging production," Curren said.
Shawn Howard, a spokesman for Keystone XL owner TransCanada, referred questions about future drilling plans to oil producers such as Cenovus. Transcanada's revenue from the pipeline will come from tolls charged to carry the oil, which have not been publicly disclosed, rather than from the oil itself, he said.- It's the end of an era for a long-time San Jose business. This Sunday, Ken's Glass and Mirrors is closing its doors after 45 years. The 77-year-old owner Ken Lewis is retiring after building the business with little education and money but a lot of hard work.
At the corner of Senter and Lewis in East San Jose, it's hard to miss the yellow building and it's even harder now with signs that read "buy it all" and "last day is Sunday."
"If you enjoy what you are doing you don't mind being here 24 hours a day," said Lewis.
Since the 1970's, Lewis has called this place home. He wakes up early to open the shop and he's the last to leave since he's the only worker there.
"I've been pretty much a one-man shop all these years," said Lewis. "It's nice when you don't have a boss. You don't have to blame something for what they did because you are the one who did it."
The Missouri native is one of 12 siblings. He headed to California with a seventh grade education and a whole lot of drive. After polishing shower doors, he started collecting glass leading to his first shop on Monterey road and now on Lewis Road. In its hay day in the 1990's, the store was thriving.
"I was buying a truckload of glass every week," said Lewis. "We aren't talking about glass trucks. We are talking semi trucks."
The store even survived the Loma Prieta earthquake.
"I don't have any idea how many tons of glass and mirror was lost, said Lewis. "But after that it took a month to clean it up."
However, with the internet and big-name retail stores, business has declined. After putting the store on the market for three years, a developer now plans to build a Vietnamese restaurant. It's bittersweet given the shop is a reminder of the good old days when doing business meant more than just making money.
"Just being here and knowing I've done one heck of a lot of good for a lot of people," said Lewis. "By being happy and doing what I want. I made money."
He's hoping to sell 300 mirrors in three days in some cases, he's giving mirrors away. He plans to travel and do things he didn't get to do when he was working including going to football and baseball games.Everett Your neighbor probably knows better than you do what you will like
To figure out whether you'll like the restaurant around the corner or that new guy in accounting or a vacation in Madrid, or just about anything else you've never personally experienced, try asking a stranger who has. That person is more likely to predict more accurately than you your future reaction, according to a new study published in the March 20 issue of Science.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, the best-selling author of Stumbling on Happiness, argues that people who try to imagine how much they will like or dislike a future event (a blind date, say) are usually wildly off the mark, and that the most reliable measure of their future response seems to be that of someone who has already experienced the event rather than any actual information about the event itself even if that person is a stranger.
Indeed, Gilbert and his co-authors cite previous research showing people's scant ability to predict their future feelings about most things: "people have been shown to overestimate how unhappy they will be after receiving bad test results, becoming disabled or being denied a promotion, and to overestimate how happy they will be after winning a prize, initiating a romantic relationship or taking revenge against those who have harmed them."
But such is the resistance to this proposition people like to think of themselves as unique, self-aware individuals who can predict their own responses that even after being shown how muddleheaded their own predictions tend to be, people still prefer to rely on them rather than seeking advice from others, Gilbert's study found.
The study, titled "The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice," included two experiments. In the first, 33 undergraduate women were asked to participate, individually, in a five-minute "speed date" session with a male student. Before her date, each woman was given either "simulation information" (a photograph of the man and a short personal profile that included his name, age, height, hometown and favorite movie, sport, book, song, food and college class) or "surrogation information" (another undergraduate woman's enjoyment rating, on a scale of 1 to 100, of a speed date with the same man). Based on either packet of info, each participant was asked to predict how much she would enjoy her own speed date (in scientific terms, her "affective reaction"); after the actual date, each woman filled out her own score on the 1-to-100 enjoyment scale. It turns out that when women used surrogation info from a fellow student to make their own predictions, they were significantly more in tune with their real-life enjoyment. Compared with browsing a man's photo and profile info, using other female students' opinions of that man "reduced the size of the affective forecasting error by 49%."
"Ironically," the authors write, "84% [of the women] believed that simulation information would allow them to make a more accurate forecast about a future date with a different man."
In the second experiment, students were asked to write a story, which would then be read by a peer and used to classify the writer's personality as Type A, B or C A being positive, B neutral and C being decidedly negative. Type Cs were, for example, said to "sacrifice their beliefs because they seek contentment rather than challenge." Students were also asked to predict how they would feel if their peer judged them to be Type C some participants were asked to predict based on written descriptions of all three personality types; others were not given those descriptions, but shown only a reaction report by a fellow student who previously received a Type C evaluation. Once again, the fellow student's report was a more accurate predictor of students' future feelings than the written personality definitions, reducing the "size of the affective forecasting error by 63%."
Gilbert and his co-authors from Harvard and the University of Virginia say the findings aren't altogether surprising. People all over the world share similar reactions to stimuli; common evolutionary "physiological mechanisms" would explain why people, regardless of culture or belief, generally prefer "warm to cold, satiety to hunger, friends to enemies, winning to losing and so on." The authors write, "An alien who knew all the likes and dislikes of a single human being would know a great deal about the entire species."
Reached on the phone at his office at Harvard, Gilbert said that this new study builds on previous research on psychological biases and fallacies a genre of studies "that show us how we are largely strangers to ourselves." But, he says, we can better understand how we will react to future situations by embracing our commonality with other people, and treating their response to experiences as less subjective than objective.
"What we've done is found a way for people to make highly reliable predictions via a method that they would find preposterous, which is simply to say, 'I'll have what she's having,'" he says.
Of course, it works best when "she" is more like you than not. People may have their own unique preferences, but they also "tend to marry, befriend, work with and live near those who share their preferences and personality traits." So the people we're likely to get "surrogation information" from our neighbors and friends are also more likely to share our likes and dislikes. "There is little disagreement among people about the sources of pleasure and pain," the authors write, "and even less disagreement among neighbors."
Gilbert suggests his research could have some revolutionary implications for the way people behave. For one thing, the next time you sit down at a new restaurant, you might be better off abandoning the menu and instead asking a fellow diner, "What's good here?" Or you might even consider asking friends, family or the village elders whether your partner is marriage material or not. "Most Westeners would reject the notion outright that someone else would pick your marital partner more accurately than you can. It's not clear to me that's true," Gilbert says, conceding that in the case of marriage, the only person who could really help you predict the suitability of a life partner is someone who's already been married to that person too.
Or, maybe not. "That doesn't leave room for changes in character. I'm quite different with my wife than [I was with] my first wife," Gilbert says. "My first wife wouldn't be able to predict very well what my current wife would experience."
After a pause, he corrects himself with a laugh: "You know what, by saying that I'm almost sure I'm falling prey to all these biases. That's the nature of these biases. They don't go away just because you know about them."
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See the Cartoons of the Week.A Wellington City councillor will be campaigning in Christchurch because he's standing for Parliament.
Southern ward councillor David Lee will be the Green Party candidate for Ilam, the seat currently held by National's Gerry Brownlee.
Lee is not standing on the party list, meaning he will only become an MP in the unlikely event he defeats Brownlee, the politician he calls his mentor.
ROBERT KITCHIN/FAIRFAX NZ The Ilam seat is held by National’s Gerry Brownlee.
He does not plan on rigorous campaigning but might make a few extra weekend trips to the area about six weeks before the election to ramp up support for the Greens.
READ MORE: Economy to take centre stage at September 23 election, PM Bill English says
It would not impact his civic duties because technology would keep him in contact with constituents, he said.
"The election campaign in Christchurch is a sideline activity."
Lee, who is the council's portfolio leader for Technology, Innovation, Enterprise (TIE) and climate change, said he would not miss any city council meetings in the run-up to the election.
"I made clear that I would only stand for two terms and in 2019 I will not be seeking re-election. Until then, the city council is still my fulltime job."
He said he could still do his councillor job from Christchurch via phone and email.
"I do very little face-to face interaction, so I can still do my job as long as I have technology."
Brownlee was a shoo-in to win the seat in September's general election, Lee said.
"This is my opportunity to give back to the Greens and push up the party vote up in an electorate that requires an alternative voice for voters and not just a soundpiece for National."
Despite being a Green Party member for four years, blue blood runs in his veins.
The former Young Nat and election campaigner for Murray McCully describes himself as a born-again green who was "very blue with a green halo".
"Gerry Brownlee is my mentor."
Lee wanted to get his name out there for the 2020 election, when he planned to go "hard out" to win the Ilam electorate.
Ilam was his old "stomping" ground, he said.
"I am born-and-bred Canterbury and grew up in the Ilam and Riccarton areas and went to school and university there and my parents still live there."
He was travelling to Christchurch about three times a month to be with his ageing parents and help with the family property business.
Although he was looking at buying a residential property in Ilam, he did not intend to move there.
If successful at winning the seat, he would still live in Wellington, he said.
"MPs are expected to live in Wellington."Former top Newsweek journalist and current MSNBC.com editor Richard Wolffe on Monday smeared Senator John McCain as a racist. According to Wolffe, there's no legitimate reason for the Republican to oppose Susan Rice's confirmation for Secretary of State. Appearing on Hardball, the journalist sneered that it was "outrageous" the way McCain was acting, raging against "this witch hunt going on the right about these people of color, let's face it, around this president. Eric Holder, Valerie Jarrett, now Susan Rice." [See video below.]
Such a charge seemed to shock even Chris Matthews. He sputtered, "McCain, who had his own daughter attacked, was accused of having an illegitimate child when, in fact, he adopted a young girl from South Asia. You're saying that McCain's being driven by racial prejudice here?" Wolffe confirmed, "There is no other way to look at this..." Of course, McCain opposes Rice's nomination because of her dissembling on the issue of the terrorist attack in Libya.
Yet, Wolffe hinted, "What is it about Susan Rice? And the answer is there aren't any good foreign policy explanations for [opposition]."
Earlier in the show, Matthews offered one of his standard movie asides. Randomly informing the audience that he had just seen the new Lincoln film, the host ranted, "Why is the Tenth Amendment, which reserves powers to the states from the federal government, so much an issue with Republicans?"
Talking to GOP strategist Chris Feehery, he wondered, "It sounds like the Civil War to me. Your thoughts."
A transcript of the two exchanges:Colbert: Pass Protect America Act with Osama robo-calls
David Edwards and John Byrne
Published: Friday March 7, 2008
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Parodies of Hillary Clinton's "red phone" have been blanketing the Internet. On Thursday, Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert added one of his own.
Demanding Congress renew The Protect America Act, which would allow President Bush's eavesdropping program to continue and grant immunity for telecommunications firms the participated in the plan, Colbert proposed one of his own.
Colbert intercut clips of When A Stranger Calls, Silence of the Lambs, Scream,, The Ring, Nightmare on Elm Street and concluded with Clinton's "3 am" ad: "I'm Hillary Clinton and I approved this message."
"If the phone companies really want immunity, here's how they need to scare us," Colbert added. "Make one of those robo calls where celebrity gives away personalized promotional phone message. in this case, the message is fear. and the celebrity is Osama bin laden."
Bin Laden is shown wearing a telemarketer's headset.
"Hello, Stephen. I hope you are enjoying your job in media and entertainment. If the Protect America Act is not renewed, i will blow up your suburban house, your Buick LeSabre and your Sea-Doo jet ski. Allah is better than Jesus. Death to America. Good-bye."
"Nation, call your congressman and tell them you want America to be protected," Colbert concluded. "In fact, call anyone. The right people will be listening."
This video is from Comedy Central's Colbert Report, broadcast March 6, 2008.Albert Peterson, his wife Kathleen and their two sons, Matthew and Chris were all found dead in their Herndon, Virginia home on Tuesday, sources report to The Global Dispatch.
UPDATE: The police have confirmed the murder suicide with initial medical examiner report, more here
Police were making a welfare call after neighbors and co-workers of the parents authorities they had not seen the children going to school or the parents going to work recently.
Based on the facts reported to the Dispatch, Albert Peterson shot his wife and children while they were still in bed and then committed suicide. Police have yet to confirm these details.
Neighbor Alvaro Lopes spoke highly of Peterson family to the local CBS affiliate, but noted that Albert had tried to commit suicide previously and that the man’s heart attack medication seemed to change his personality.
“He seemed dizzy… just different,” Lopes said. “Hearing about what happened today made me think that could have something to do with it.”
“They were good people,” said Lopes. “Very quiet [and] would hang out in their front yard and do some barbecues.”
Fairfax County police spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell would not discuss whether the case was a murder-suicide, but said that homicide detectives are investigating and that there is no public safety threat.
WTOP spoke to a nearby neighbor, Jeremy Wilcox, who “said the family had been at a community picnic Sunday and showed no signs of any problem. He said the father would frequently be on his front porch waving to cars as they passed by, and that he sometimes stuck a plow on the front of his truck to clear a path for neighborhood cars when there was a snowstorm.”
Matthew was a sophomore at Westfield high school student and the other boy, Chris was an eighth grader Rachel Carson Middle School.WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—With just one week to go until the midterm elections, a new poll indicates that billionaires are likely to retain control of the United States government.
The poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, shows that the proxy candidates of billionaires are likely to win ninety-eight per cent of next Tuesday’s races, with the remaining two per cent leaning billionaire.
Although the poll indicates that some races are still “too close to call,” the fact that billionaires funded candidates on both sides puts the races safely in their column.
Davis Logsdon, who supervised the poll for the University of Minnesota, said that next Tuesday should be “a big night for oligarchs” and that both houses of Congress can be expected to grovel at the feet of their money-gushing paymasters for at least the next two years.
Calling the billionaires’ upcoming electoral romp “historic,” Logsdon said, “We have not seen the super-rich maintain such a vise-like grip on the government since the days immediately preceding the French Revolution.”
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Brian Anderson: Over the last two decades, the idea of implicit bias has made its way from the academic world into the mainstream of public discourse. Implicit bias purports to answer the question, “Why do racial disparities persist when explicit racism has greatly diminished over the last half-century?” The answer, according to proponents, lies deep within the human brain. The academic creators of the implicit association test, first introduced in 1998, claimed that they could scientifically measure the level of an individual’s unconscious bias, especially against blacks. From university hiring committees to human resources departments, the idea took off. An entire consulting industry has spawned, advising organizations on how to combat this unconscious prejudice. Every year government agencies and private firms pay millions of dollars to send workers to implicit bias training. In recent years, however, social scientists have begun to dispute the scientific reliability and validity of the test. And the original authors themselves have even walked back some of their earlier claims. With the statistical basis behind the implicit bias theory beginning to crumble, can we expect its influence on popular culture to disappear? Probably not without a battle. In the latest issue of City Journal, longtime contributing editor Heather Mac Donald takes a deep dive into the literature surrounding the idea of implicit bias in an essay entitled “Are We All Unconscious Racists?” Coming up on the podcast, associate editor of City Journal, Seth Barron, talks with Heather about her article and more. Their conversation begins after this.
Hello, I am City Journal editor Brian Anderson. Thanks for joining us for the 10 Blocks Podcast, featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors, and special guests.
Seth Barron: So, Heather, what is the principle behind the theory of implicit bias or unconscious racism? How does that work?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, the principle is that even if we believe ourselves to be colorblind and firm opponents of any kind of racial discrimination, our minds are impregnated with so many messages of bigotry that we can’t control our thought processes and we can’t control our actions. So, even if we think we are unbiased, we are, in fact, going to be making biased decisions against blacks.
Seth Barron: So, what’s the science behind, this though? Because from what I understand, implicit bias theory is supposed to be grounded in science and have a lot of evidence supporting it. What are the metrics or tests to determine the presence of implicit bias?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, there is a test that has gotten a heck of a lot of public attention thanks to Malcom Gladwell’s book, Blink. The media routinely takes this test and penitently it cops to its own alleged racism. It is called the implicit association test. And it is modeled on something that is actually sort of common in social psychology and cognitive psychology to try and measure response times to concepts and it is a technique that traditionally has been used to test the closeness of concepts in memory. But the developers of this specific implicit association test took this methodology into vastly radical political realms. But I’ll describe it. You – on a computer screen the test-taker is shown a series of black and white faces. And you are supposed to categorize them into the white and black categories with two computer keys. And then you are shown a series of words that are positive and negative, like happy, or death, and you are supposed to categorize them into good words and negative words with the same two keys that you have used to categorize the faces. Then those sorting tasks are intermingled, and at one stage of the implicit association test you are supposed to sort a white face with the same key that you are going to sort a positive word and a black face with the same computer key that you sort a negative word, and then that’s reversed and you sort the black face with the key for a positive word, and a white face with a key for a negative word.
Seth Barron: Hmm.
Heather Mac Donald: It turns out that the majority of test-takers are faster by milliseconds in sorting white faces into the positive category than they are in sorting black faces into the positive category. The developers of this implicit association test announced to the world as soon as it came out that it showed the ubiquity of prejudice and that the prejudice that it allegedly under – that it revealed had an active effect in the world and would result in behavior that was discriminatory.
Seth Barron: I see. So, well, two things. What is the connection between this implicit bias, these unconscious reflections we have that operate below the level of awareness and actual discrimination? I mean, how does this manifest itself?
Heather Mac Donald: There is no connection. That is the problem. Since this test was announced, there has been a handful of courageous social psychologists that have pushed back against the methodology, and they have found that there’s not a single aspect of the test that is not vulnerable to rigorous methodological critique. A: Any individual test-taker’s scores on the implicit bias test can vary wildly from one taking to the next, so the test fails what is known in the social psychology literature as the measure of reliability. It is not reliable from one test. But it also fails what is known in the literature as validity in that it does not predict what it purports to predict. It turns out when they try to measure whether your score on the implicit association test relates to discriminatory behavior, A: What counts as discriminatory behavior is completely artificial and trivial. It is how, whether you make eye contact or the placement of your chair in a mock interview in a college psych lab, or whether you decide to donate in a hypothetical charity experiment whether you donate to children in Columbia slums, versus – Columbian slums – versus South African slums. That’s the extent of what they call discriminatory behavior. In other words, this is not about a black candidate walking into an accounting firm and getting turned down because he is black. It’s these artificial constructs. But even if we accept that those artificial lab constructs count as discriminatory behavior we should care about, it turns out there is no relationship between your score on the implicit association test and these artificial discriminatory behaviors. So, the IAT and its social and political significance is falling apart as we speak, and yet it continues to have enormous effect on the corporate world, on the policing world, on the foundation world, and on the educational world.
Seth Barron: What are some of those effects? I mean, how is this theory being applied in, you know, HR departments, search committees? I mean, what do they do with it?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, some corporations are starting to screen employees using the IAT to say well, we don’t want any biased employees here. Hiring committees inevitably, and promotion committees in business inevitably have to go through their IAT self-examination and, you know, go to classes in implicit bias. There is a huge consulting scam built around this thing. Recently up to 200 CEOs signed a pledge that was spearheaded by PricewaterhouseCoopers to send all of their employees to implicit bias training. They will all take the IAT. This is enormous cost, enormous waste of resources. The CEOs in this pledge have also pledged to encourage their employees to have more conversations about race on the job, which is the last thing anybody wants to talk about given how fraught it is and given the reality, which is contrary to discrimination, it is the reality of racial preferences. And, so, race is understandably a charged topic. But these businesses can’t afford to send their employees to these classes instead of doing work. Some of the, for instance, Procter & Gamble is on the steering committee of this CEO pledge. They’re currently facing a corporate takeover bid and have had lagging profits. The idea that their employees are best spent – their time best spent in implicit bias training is ludicrous.
Seth Barron: Do the proponents of implicit bias training and the theory, I mean, since this all takes place below the level of awareness, what can the individual do, according to the theory, to fix themselves?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, that’s a superb question. And even one of the developers of the test, Anthony Greenwald, was quoted earlier this year saying that implicit bias training is snake oil. That hasn’t stopped the consultants from pulling in millions of dollars a year from gullible corporations. What, at best, what they argue is that you should have procedures in place that will block the working of implicit bias. You know, then they’ll say well, if you are aware of it that helps but, ironically, what some of the implicit bias proponents call for is hiring procedures that mask the race of the applicant to the extent possible. I say bring it on.
Seth Barron: Uh-huh.
Heather Mac Donald: You know, they seem to be unaware that such a procedure would demolish any institution’s ability to engage in racial preferences, which is a practice that is ubiquitous in every elite institution, as well as university, in the country.
Seth Barron: Yeah. In your article there was an interesting part where you talk about interviewing HR professionals and faculty search people and asking them well, how many qualified minority applicants were not hired because of implicit bias. What kind of response did you get from them?
Heather Mac Donald: Complete evasion. One would hope that a corporation that is worried about the bottom line would actually generate an evidentiary basis for some massive employee training and would know that there is – they can point to instances of qualified minority or female candidates who are not getting hired or promoted because of implicit bias ditto universities. But I asked one of the HR managers at PricewaterhouseCoopers who is spearheading this ridiculous corporate CEO pledge for diversity, well, please give me some examples of, you know, are you aware of instances at PricewaterhouseCoopers or elsewhere where people have not gotten the job because of implicit bias. She completely ducked it. Now, she may be worried about a lawsuit, you know, if she says…
Seth Barron: Uh-huh.
Heather Mac Donald: …but the fact is, the reality is, it doesn’t happen. I asked Anthony Greenwald, one of the two cocreators of the implicit association test, can you give me any example anywhere, not just at University of Washington, where he teaches, but any college, give me one example of a female or black, competitively qualified faculty candidate who didn’t get a job or promoted because of implicit bias? He refused. He changed the topic.
Seth Barron: Really?
Heather Mac Donald: So, there is no – there’s not examples of this happening. In fact, the reality is just the opposite. Anybody who has observed any faculty search knows it is one desperate effort to find competitively qualified, black or female candidates who have not been snapped up already by better endowed institutions.
Seth Barron: I see. So, well, if it can’t be tackled at the level of the individual and, you know, from what you just said, it doesn’t sound as though it is actually impacting individual hiring decisions. Do they, do the implicit bias advocates, do they have a broader social agenda? What is the goal, if you will, of this theory? What are they looking for?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, there’s a big movement in the legal academy piggybacking on implicit bias to remove the idea of voluntary intent from the law. It already – that kind of already exists with disparate impact theory, so that you’ve got a body of caselaw and statutes that say to make a case of discrimination in hiring you don’t actually need to show that the employer intentionally discriminated. You just need to show that any given hiring practice such as requiring say, a high school degree, or a certain standard on a verbal test, that that has a disparate impact on blacks. But they want to go further than that and really remove completely any idea of intentionality on the theory that human beings are so vulnerable to this implicit bias that any conscious cognition is just irrelevant. And this would mean that every single personnel decision could be challenged on the grounds that it was motivated by implicit bias and the only way to guarantee fairness in the workplace would be through a set of even more explicit racial quotas than already exist.
Seth Barron: It sounds like – I mean, I am reminded of that recent case at Google where the engineer was fired for having written a, basically a little essay questioning whether or not women were really being discriminated against in hiring at Google, or maybe there aren’t just that many women qualified to be software engineers at that level. Where does this go if you are really, I mean, in your essay, in your article you said that only 1%, I believe, of Ph.D.s in one of the hard sciences in the last year were black, so how would you, I mean, if there’s really very few candidates, how would racial quotas even work?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, it’s very scary. I mean, in the STEM fields the game is more about female preferences than race preferences because, as you say, Seth, there are so few blacks and Hispanics in the pipeline. It’s – we are talking about 1% in computer science and computer engineering. Nevertheless, the pressure would mean, to the extent it applies in the race field as well as gender, accepting very mediocre hires. And, to a certain extent, this is simply about ideology for its own sake. The other developer of the implicit association test who is a social psychologist at Harvard was involved in an email exchange with a journalist from New York Magazine earlier this year and she just exploded at him and it was clear that she sees herself on a social justice crusade and views anybody who questions the scientific methodology of the IAT, she said that they should take this up with their priest or their psychiatrist. You know, there are some people who believe we should go back to a world where there’s coloreds only fountains.
Seth Barron: Uh-huh.
Heather Mac Donald: This is absurd.
Seth Barron: Right.
Heather Mac Donald: This is absurd, but she views any criticism as itself a symptom of bias.
Seth Barron: Ironically, the whole notion of implicit bias sort of sounds like, I mean, it sounds very theological, in a way. This idea that there is this devil in you making you do things that you can’t even, you know, become aware of. But let’s shift gears, because in the area of law enforcement, you know, I know that implicit bias has been discussed there, too, and surely it must play a role in the racial disparity in shootings of people by police, no? Does that – is this not a – is not bias a major factor there?
Heather Mac Donald: Well, federal law enforcement agents were all sent off to implicit bias training by President Obama at enormous cost. Local police departments are sending off their departments to implicit bias training at enormous cost. The New York Police Department next year is going to put every officer and every recruit through a full-day seminar on implicit bias, all, again, without any evidentiary basis. There is a psychologist at Cornell named Josh Correll who has been studying police shooting decisions for years. They call it Shoot, Don’t Shoot Decisions. And, he, clearly, if you read his writing, he’s not particularly pro-cop, but against his obvious will he has found that for police officers, they are not making errors. They take a little bit longer to observe a situation involving an unarmed black that is a counter-stereotypical threat, because most of the shootings of police officers are disproportionately done by blacks. In fact, a police officer is eighteen-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer. That’s because black males have made up 42% of all cop killers over the last decade even though they are only 6% of the population. So, police officers are taking a little longer to assess threats and has shown that their neurological fear symptom is a little higher, but that is not resulting in what is known as bad shoots, that is, shooting unarmed civilians, black or white.
Seth Barron: Uh-huh.
Heather Mac Donald: And they are not, not shooting armed whites because they can’t imagine a white person being armed. So, and Correll’s findings were reinforced and strengthened by another study that came out last year by a University of Washington researcher, Lois James, that found that officers were really, really hesitating when confronting black targets, even armed targets, because they are so second-guessing themselves due to the black lives matter narrative.
Seth Barron: So, in fact, according to you, bias is not really playing into shootings of people by police, that it is, more or less, what you would expect?
Heather Mac Donald: It is predicted by crime rates.
Seth Barron: So, where are we headed with |
former Secretary of State isn't trustworthy.
Nationwide, not only does Clinton have negative favorability numbers that even reached 55 percent according to one CNN poll, but Yahoo writes that "57 percent of Americans say she is not honest and trustworthy."
Nobody wins a general election when close to 60 percent of Americans don't trust the candidate.
While it's virtually impossible to convince many Clinton supporters that the FBI's investigation of her emails is different form the GOP's investigation of Benghazi, controversy is continually linked to the former Secretary of State. There are also issues with foreign donors and weapons deals tied to her tenure as Secretary of State, but again, any mention of poor decision-making is linked to the GOP's Benghazi hearings.
Finally, numerous polls show Bernie Sanders already defeats Donald Trump by a wider margin than Hillary Clinton in a general election. Sanders also has higher favorability ratings than Clinton or Trump and is a less polarizing figure.
What has taken Clinton and Trump decades and billions of dollars in name recognition to accomplish, Bernie Sanders has done with grass roots organizing and fundraising. Bernie Sanders surged from less than 1 percent last year to 29 percent support within the Democratic Party according to a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll. This surge will continue because of how polling trajectory is tied to both campaigns; Hillary is perpetually defending against scandal while Bernie is free to focus on issues. In fact, when Clinton isn't turning Benghazi into the political equivalent of the Alamo, or mentioning the NRA incessantly, she often times works very hard to copy Bernie's progressive stances. In a very real sense, Bernie Sanders is the only electable Democrat for president, and also the only person setting the Democratic agenda in terms of ideas and policies in 2016.
Also on HuffPost:“It’s a typical aftershock to have sovereign debt crises after banking crises. But Europe is extraordinary,” Rogoff said. “There’s all these political variables. I’d be shocked if they didn’t have sovereign debt crises.”
“It was nuts to let Greece and Portugal in (to the EU) as quickly as they did,” he added. “They just looked the other way and decided to let them in. Greece had high inflation, default risks. Portugal had an IMF program early as 1984."
- Watch Kenneth Rogoff interviewed on CNBC above.
"I think they should have let Portugal and Greece go" before doing the bailout -- not overnight -- but in an orderly fashion, Rogoff said.
The European Commission indicated that their expansionist plans will likely continue earlier this week.
Estonia, a country of 1.3 million people, is on course to adopt the euro in January 2011, subject to the approval of all 27 EU member states, 16 of which are in the euro zone.
Estonia's sovereign debt was at 7.2 percent of GDP in 2009, well below the euro-zone average of 60 percent.NEW ORLEANS – Carmelo Anthony says he still wants to retire a New York Knick under one circumstance: The struggling team must show him a strong plan in the offseason toward building itself into a title contender.
"At the end of the season it will be the time where everything will have to be laid out and be on the table from both parts," Anthony said during Eastern Conference All-Star media availability on Friday afternoon. "If it's something that we grow with, we can build on, we can compete with at the highest level, we're rolling. If that's not the plan that we have, then we have to talk about something else."
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Anthony said that he plans to opt out of his contract after this season to test the free-agent market. The seven-time All-Star, however, also said his "first priority is to stay" with New York. Anthony arrived to the Knicks via a trade from the Denver Nuggets in February 2011 after asking to be dealt.
"I don't want to be traded," Anthony, 29, said. "I've said it before that I wanted to retire as a Knick. That's something I wasn't just [expletive] with. I said it. I meant it. That's how I feel."
Anthony also said, "Let's figure that out together. Just because I said I want to be a free agent doesn't mean I'm going to leave. I've never been a guy coming into a situation where it's not going well to leave like that. That's not my style. That's not my personality."
By opting out of his contract with a year remaining, Anthony will turn down being paid $23.3 million during the 2014-15 season. However, he could sign a new five-year contract paying as much as $129 million with the Knicks, which is more than any other team can offer. Anthony said he can get paid no matter where he goes, and he is more worried about the talent around him.
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Anthony added that he "knows for a fact" he will not be traded prior to Thursday's trade deadline, nor is he seeking a trade. He said he didn't feel like it was his last All-Star game representing the Knicks. An NBA source said the Knicks will not trade Anthony during the All-Star break and that the team is hoping to add some talent prior to the trade deadline to help.
"I don't think there is any way possible I will be traded," Anthony said. "I don't think they're considering it. … If they felt that they wanted to get rid of me, I feel we would have already had that [discussion]."
Even more, Anthony said he is willing to take a pay cut to help the Knicks bring in better players. He also added that "there is no better place in the world" to play a basketball game than in New York's Madison Square Garden.
"If it takes me taking a pay cut, I'll be the first person to say, 'Take my money,' " Anthony said.
Anthony said he expected New York to take a "step forward" after winning 54 games last season, but instead it has been a "step back." The Knicks' disappointing 20-32 record at the All-Star break sits them 10th in the lackluster Eastern Conference. Anthony described the Knicks' season as a "roller coaster" and expressed embarrassment about Wednesday night's home loss to the struggling Kings (18-35).
[All-Star coverage: Chris Paul's return to New Orleans stirs emotions, memories]
So how is Anthony coping with the losing?
"Body armor. You got to have that body armor," said Anthony, who is averaging 27.3 points, 8.6 rebounds and 3.0 assists this season. "You got to build this wall around you and just take it. A lot of times people go through stuff they're not ready for. I wasn't ready for this season and the way that it is going.
"But just as far as just all the things that come along with it, I kind of embrace myself for that. Nobody can tell me from their own experiences how to deal with my experience. It's a learning curve for me. But I prepare myself for a lot of what is going on by not reading [about it] or listening to it, not feeding into it. I'm just focusing on what I need to do to make the team better."
The Knicks also have a coach who appears to be on the hot seat in Mike Woodson. But when Anthony thought a reporter was dancing around a question about whether Woodson would be fired, the small forward said with a laugh: "Do I think he is going to be fired? Just ask me that question. You don't have to beat around the bush. We have practice in Memphis on Monday. 'Woody' will be there, plain and simple."
More on NBA All-Star weekendKey Sublime from Barrel Theory Beer Company: This brand-spanking-new brewery, on East Seventh Street in Lowertown, is already putting out a stable of such solid beers that I had a hard time choosing one this week.
However, there is one beer I kept returning to, a beer that’s so interesting, so quaffable, so unlike a beer in many ways that it might be a little controversial. But controversy be damned, I love key lime pie, and this puckery, fruited Berliner Weisse tastes just like it, down to a hint of a graham cracker crust that comes from to a touch of bourbon vanilla and some Vietnamese cinnamon.
It’s a thoughtful, fantastic brew. In fact, the whole opening lineup is great. Barrel Theory won’t be distributing its beer outside of a few kegs to bars and restaurants here and there, and the only place to get its beers right now is in the taproom.
International Bittering Units (IBU): NA; Alcohol by Volume (ABV): 4 percent
Barrel Theory Beer Company: 248 E. 7th St., St. Paul; 651-600-3422; barreltheory.comLawyers for the Obama administration, arguing for their ability to kill an American citizen without trial in Yemen, contended that the protection of US citizenship was effectively removed by a key congressional act that blessed a global war against al-Qaida.
Known as the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), the broad and controversial 2001 law played a major role in the legal decision to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, the former al-Qaida propagandist and US citizen, in 2011, according to a redacted memorandum made public on Monday.
"We believe that the AUMF's authority to use lethal force abroad also may apply in appropriate circumstances to a United States citizen who is part of the forces of an enemy authorization within the scope of the force authorization," reads the Justice Department memorandum, written for attorney general Eric Holder on 16 July 2010 and ostensibly intended strictly for Awlaki's case.
Among those circumstances: "Where high-level government officials have determined that a capture operation is infeasible and that the targeted person is part of a dangerous enemy force and is engaged in activities that pose a continued and imminent threat to US persons or interests."
The 2nd US circuit court of appeals in Manhattan released the memo on Monday in response to a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times.
The AUMF is unbounded by geographic or time limitations, indicating the wide berth the Obama administration provides for understanding its powers for the potential targeting of US citizens. The administration's official policy is that the AUMF ought to be "ultimately repeal[ed]", as Obama said in May. The administration does not support immediate repeal, which already faces a difficult congressional road.
Barely over a year after the memo was issued, Awlaki was dead, following a US drone strike – the first such lethal strike known to have deliberately targeted an American citizen. Yet an earlier US assault on Awlaki, in December 2009, predated the memo.
While Obama administration officials have for years insisted that Awlaki was an operational leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which in 2009 and 2010 attempted unsuccessfully to detonate bombs inside the US, they have also fought lawsuits seeking to reveal their case against Awlaki.
But for the case against Awlaki, hinted at in a Justice Department "white paper" summarizing it that leaked last year, the administration leaned significantly on the broad leeway for counter-terrorism the AUMF established.
"Just as the AUMF authorizes the military detention of a US citizen captured abroad who is part of an armed force within the scope of the AUMF, it also authorizes the use of 'necessary and appropriate' lethal force against a US citizen who has joined such an armed force," reads the memo, written by former Justice Department lawyer David Barron, who also analyzed and rejected arguments that killing Awlaki would be tantamount to murder.
"It is true that here the target of the contemplated actions would be a US citizen," reads the memo.
"But we do not believe al-Aulaqi's citizenship provided a basis for concluding that section 1119 would fail to incorporate the established public authority justification for a killing in this case."
The release of the memo, as ordered Monday by a federal appeals court, ended a legal battle that has stretched for years, intended to prevent the administration from killing Awlaki or any other US citizen without trial. After losing an April appeal and confronting a challenge by Republican senator Rand Paul to deny Barron a federal judgeship, the Obama administration agreed not to fight the document's disclosure.
"The release of the legal memorandum follows the administration’s decision last month not to appeal the court’s decision. The material being released is consistent with the administration’s previous statements on this issue," said Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon.
But its suppression challenge took various forms and arguments over the years, despite repeated official confirmations about the drone strikes, including from the president; despite the confirmed killing of four Americans, three of whom are claimed to have been killed accidentally, including Awlaki's 16-year-old son; and despite the 2013 leak of a memo summarizing the Justice Department's arguments about so-called "targeted killing" for Congress.
The redacted version of the memo released Monday does not reveal much of the factual basis for the government's claims that Awlaki represented an imminent threat to the United States.
In the disclosed portions, Barron's memo does not explicitly vouch for the government's case against Awlaki, referring instead to "the facts represented to us". It refers instead to Awlaki as a "leader" who was "continuously planning attacks" against the US, without providing an evidentiary basis for claims central to the extraordinary circumvention of normal due process procedures. Nor do the public sections explain why capturing Awlaki was not feasible, nor why the Justice Department believes it need not have provided Awlaki with judicial process.
The CIA, which along with the military's special operations forces sought authority for the strike, declined to comment. Barron was confirmed by the Senate to the federal bench on 22 May.
The Justice Department memo "confirms that the government’s drone killing program is built on gross distortions of law", said Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who challenged the Awlaki killing, who added that the "forced transparency comes years late".
Rejecting a government argument that the release of the memorandum would chill attorney-client communications, the court wrote on Monday: "If this contention were upheld, waiver of privileges protecting legal advice would never occur. … We need not fear that OLC will lack for clients."
Several of the government's appeals for secrecy have been overtaken by the public record, the court found. Among them: the "identity of the country in which al-Awlaki was killed", which was reported as being Yemen on the day of the lethal strike; and the involvement of the CIA, which in addition to being an open secret for years was confirmed by former director Leon Panetta.
"We recognize that in some circumstances the very fact that legal analysis was given concerning a planned operation would risk disclosure of the likelihood of that operation, but that is not the situation here where drone strikes and targeted killings have been publicly acknowledged at the highest levels of the Government," the court explained.
The ACLU, which sought along with the New York Times to compel the release of the memo, vowed to fight the government's additional arguments for secrecy around other legal foundations of what it calls its "targeted killing" program.
“We will continue to press for the release of other documents relating to the targeted-killing program, including other legal memos and documents relating to civilian casualties," said deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer.
"The drone program has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, including countless innocent bystanders, but the American public knows scandalously little about who is being killed and why.”
In May 2013, Obama raised his standards for launching drone attacks or other so-called "targeted" lethal military action against terrorist suspects. American drones struck last week in both Yemen and Pakistan, though no Americans are suspected of being killed.
US senator Ron Wyden praised the memo's release and called for more transparency on Monday. "For example, how much evidence does the president need to determine that a particular American is a legitimate target for military action? Or, can the president strike an American anywhere in the world? What does it mean to say that capturing an American must be ‘infeasible’? And exactly what other limits and boundaries apply to this authority?" he said.
"I urge the executive branch to build on today’s disclosure and start answering these additional questions."Can pornography be an addiction?
Marty Klein says no. Take away an addict’s drugs, and witness their withdrawals — physical illness. Take away a frequent porn watcher’s porn, says Klein, and the person may at most act a bit “crabby.”
“It’s so disrespectful to genuine [drug] addiction to talk about porn addiction,” the sex therapist, author and public policy analyst said Friday in Salt Lake City.
Klein spoke to about 200 therapists and others who gathered for the Rocky Mountain Sex and Intimacy Summit, hitting on a number of pornography-related themes that have become frequent Utah topics of discussion — and legislative action — in recent years.
In 2016, the Utah Legislature declared pornography to be a public health crisis. Earlier this year, Gov. Gary Herbert signed a bill that allows lawsuits against pornographers for damage to minors.
And last week, a new privately-funded Utah campaign emerged to “protect our kids” from porn. It will include billboards, radio spots and a website to raise awareness about the perils of porn. At a news conference, Rep. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, compared the new pornography-fighting effort to the homeless problem on Salt Lake City streets, now being tackled with Operation Rio Grande.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could collaborate on trying to protect our children from some of the filth we know as pornography?” Weiler said at the announcement.
Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune Senator Todd Weiler speaks about 2HB 141 Unborn Child Protection Amendments during Senate Floor Time at the Utah State Capitol Thursday March 9, 2017.
Klein, who recently released the book “His Porn, Her Pain: Confronting America’s PornPanic with Honest Talk About Sex,” offered a more moderate stance Friday. He criticized the state’s approach to creating porn legislation as lacking a sufficient range of perspectives.
“There’s no other consumer product in America [other than pornography] that you can regulate without input from manufacturers, distributors or consumers,” he said.
Klein argued we live in such a “confused” atmosphere about sexuality that “porn is being blamed for problems that existed before porn.” He said clients he sees often blame porn as being the primary factor in their relationship or sex troubles, when deeper examination often finds another culprit.
“You don’t need someone jacking off to pornography to [find] people not having much sex,” Klein said. “People can manage not having much sex very well. And they’ve been doing that for thousands of years.”
He disputed other serious claims about porn. Data do not demonstrate that the proliferation of online pornography since 2000 has caused an uptick in sexual assault, divorce or child exploitation and abuse rates, he said. All three numbers nationally have trended down since the start of the century and sudden growth of the internet.
Porn, however, does create challenges, Klein said. It cannot serve as sex education for children — and parents bear the responsibility of teaching their kids about sex before they see porn, he argued. It also can create unrealistic expectations about sex for young adults, or body image problems for men and women comparing themselves to porn actors, he said.
Klein said it is important for young people to be educated about what porn leaves out about sex — the preparation, discussion, kissing, going slowly, birth control, hugging. He said it is also important for them to know the way porn looks is not how sex really feels.
But Klein argues that despite pornography’s downsides, it’s certainly not an addiction.
And it’s not often porn’s fault something bad occurred in a couple’s sex life, he told the crowd of therapists.EDMONTON – The University of Alberta’s HUB Mall was shut down shortly before 1 p.m. Monday. Officials later confirmed there was a death on campus.
Edmonton Fire Rescue Services confirmed it was responding to a fire alarm call around 12:45 at the university.
The university’s protective services team sent a message on Twitter saying that HUB was closed for an “ongoing incident” and that first responders were on site.
HUB MALL CLOSED 12:42 pm HUB closed. No entry. Responders on site. Ualberta.ca for information — Protective Services (@UofA_UAPS) October 27, 2014
HUB Mall remains closed for an ongoing incident. 12:53PM. First Responders on site. — Protective Services (@UofA_UAPS) October 27, 2014
@UAlberta#ualberta#yeg wish they would have told us it was a gas leak, considering HUB Mall’s history. People are terrified in class. — Juliana (@jul_trombone) October 27, 2014
An Emergency Notification email explained emergency responders were called to HUB Mall at 12:42 p.m. for a hazardous materials incident.
HUB Mall shut down for a “hazardous materials” incident. Emergency responders on site. Alarms going off. #ualbertapic.twitter.com/VrAk4IIHlJ — Alex Migdal (@alexem) October 27, 2014
Notice: There has been an incident at HUB Mall. Please avoid the area. #UAlberta — UniversityOfAlberta (@UAlberta) October 27, 2014
Most of the mall – which also serves as a student residence – was reopened shortly after 1:30 p.m.
NOTICE: 1:33 pm. HUB MALL REOPENED. HUB Mall has been reopened except for the north stairwell near the incident. #UAlberta — UniversityOfAlberta (@UAlberta) October 27, 2014
“At approximately 12:45 p.m. today there was an incident in HUB Mall at the University of Alberta,” said Bev Betkowski, a spokesperson for the university.
“Edmonton Police Services and Edmonton Fire have evaluated the scene and have determined there are no risks to public safety. HUB Mall has been reopened. The north stairwell of HUB Mall is still cordoned off.”
Later Monday afternoon, university officials said there had been a death on campus.
Notice: HUB Mall is safe and has been reopened. We can confirm that there was a death on campus. #UAlberta — UniversityOfAlberta (@UAlberta) October 27, 2014
The death was not criminal in nature, Edmonton police told Global News.
The Dean of Students Office has resources to help students through difficult times. Please see here. http://t.co/xPgkojnjuX #UAlberta — UniversityOfAlberta (@UAlberta) October 27, 2014
More to come…Dallas Stars defense prospect Esa Lindell will play for a gold medal at the 2016 World Championship in Russia. Lindell registered an assist Saturday as Finland defeated Russia, 3-1, in the semifinals to advance to Sunday’s championship game.
Finland will play Canada, which defeated the United States in the other semifinal game, for the gold medal.
Carolina prospect Sebastian Aho scored two power-play goals, and former Star Jussi Jokinen scored at even strength for Finland, which improved to 9-0 at the tournament. Goaltender Mikko Koskinen stopped 28 shots.
Lindell played 18:04, had one assist and a plus-one rating in the game. He had the secondary assist on Aho’s first power-play goal, which tied the game 1-1 early in the second period. Lindell helped set the stage for Aho’s second power-play goal, which extended Finland’s lead to 3-1 late in the second. He poked the puck away from Russia’s Alexander Ovechkin in Finland’s zone, joined the rush going the other way, and then drew an interference call on Ovechkin to put Finland on the power play. Aho scored 16 seconds later to give Finland the two-goal lead.
Lindell has registered four points (one goal, three assists) and a plus-seven rating in nine games at the tournament. He ranks second on Finland with 19:34 of ice time per game.
Ryan Ellis’ goal early in the third period snapped a 3-3 tied and held up as the game-winner as Canada rallied for a 4-3 win over the United States in Saturday’s other semifinal game. Canada jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the first period but the USA scored three straight goals in the second to take a 3-2 lead before Canada’s Derick Brassard tied the game on the power play with 4:30 left in the second.
Saturday Semifinal Games
Finland 3, Russia 1
Canada 4, USA 3
Sunday’s Medal Games
Bronze: USA vs. Russia, 8:15 a.m. CT
Gold: Canada vs. Finland, 12:45 p.m. CT
This story was not subject to the approval of the National Hockey League or Dallas Stars Hockey Club. Mark Stepneski is an independent writer whose posts on DallasStars.com reflect his own opinions and do not represent official statements from the Dallas Stars. You can follow Mark on Twitter @StarsInsideEdge.Ticking the elusive kvass
Kvass, an obscure style of Russian ale, is among the rarest varieties of beer to be had. This is important to note, as a popular activity among a certain wild breed of beer geeks is the illustrious activity known as ticking. Simply put, ticking is trying as many different kinds of beer as possible, and recording it for posterity. Popular variations of ticking includes sampling as many unique beers as possible, sampling beers from as many states or countries as possible, and in this case sampling as many unique styles of beer as possible.
Cue Woodshop 5.1, a beer tasting event held at Blue Palms Brewhouse in Hollywood, CA. Beer geeks from across the Southern California region swarmed to the event with dreams of sampling the tasty rare beers that the Woodshop name had become synonymous with. One enterprising you man known named Bobby, and known to the wider beer community as t0rin0, was about to make that dream come true. The highlight of his cooler full of brews that day included none other than an elusive kvass called Khlebny Kray (read the accompanying review here).
Bobby had over a liter of the mystifying ambrosia in a plastic bottle he had procured from the far away land of the internet. In the land of ticking each person only needs approximately two ounces of beer, so this one large bottle was split well over a dozen ways.
Kvass is a traditional Russian beverage that is made with a variety of grains, or most commonly is not really a beer at all but made with stale rye bread. More modern versions employ a combination of barley malt and cheaper grains such as rye or buckwheat. Fruit and spice additions like raisins, lemon, and mint are also added for flavorings to smooth out the beverage that is generally made with excess ingredients and fermented with simple bread yeast. Today, the beverage even takes on an almost soda-like status, and has some history in the post Soviet era as being championed as the true Russian drink, as opposed to foreign drinks like Coca-Cola.
On this sacred day at Blue Palms, over a dozen members of the website BeerAdvocate were able to sample the beer. Eventually, they would review it. With this rare opportunity to tick a kvass, few could pass up the allure. Personally, I truly did enjoy this. It was almost like a sweetened carbonated herbal tea. My friend Greg, also known as Wethorseblanket, concurred as we sipped and refreshed our palates.
It later became evident that not everyone actually enjoyed the beer/kvass as much as we did, though everyone was pleased to at least try this exotic treat. Not everyone would end up feeling the same way come the end of this story.
Read Part II of this article “The kvass that shook the BeerAdvocate Top 100” here
AdvertisementsTime To Pull Out Of Afghanistan
Nine years into a war that seems to be without end, it's time to declare victory and go home.
Doug Mataconis · · 27 comments
Today, The New York Times reports that the United States has begin to withdraw from an Afghan valley that, only six months ago, it was describing as crucial to victory:
KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of fighting for control of a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the United States military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The withdrawal from the Pech Valley, a remote region in Kunar Province, formally began on Feb. 15. The military projects that it will last about two months, part of a shift of Western forces to the province’s more populated areas. Afghan units will remain in the valley, a test of their military readiness. While American officials say the withdrawal matches the latest counterinsurgency doctrine’s emphasis on protecting Afghan civilians, Afghan officials worry that the shift of troops amounts to an abandonment of territory where multiple insurgent groups are well established, an area that Afghans fear they may not be ready to defend on their own. And it is an emotional issue for American troops, who fear that their service and sacrifices could be squandered. At least 103 American soldiers have died in or near the valley’s maze of steep gullies and soaring peaks, according to a count by The New York Times, and many times more have been wounded, often severely. Military officials say they are sensitive to those perceptions. “People say, ‘You are coming out of the Pech’; I prefer to look at it as realigning to provide better security for the Afghan people,” said Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell, the commander for eastern Afghanistan. “I don’t want the impression we’re abandoning the Pech.” The reorganization, which follows the complete Afghan and American withdrawals from isolated outposts in nearby Nuristan Province and the Korangal Valley, runs the risk of providing the Taliban with an opportunity to claim success and raises questions about the latest strategy guiding the war. American officials say their logic is simple and compelling: the valley consumed resources disproportionate with its importance; those forces could be deployed in other areas; and there are not enough troops to win decisively in the Pech Valley in any case. “If you continue to stay with the status quo, where will you be a year from now?” General Campbell said. “I would tell you that there are places where we’ll continue to build up security and it leads to development and better governance, but there are some areas that are not ready for that, and I’ve got to use the forces where they can do the most good.
Sounds like smart military strategy under the circumstances, the problem is that it’s an argument that could, and should be applied to the entirety of the entire Afghanistan situation at this point:
Vice President Biden said in Afghanistan last month that “we are not leaving if you don’t want us to leave.” At the NATO summit in Lisbon, the president said that we’re in Afghanistan for at least four more years. But for what? Why do we need to sacrifice more American lives? Why must we continue to align ourselves with a government that commits fraud in elections? Instead, why aren’t we using all our resources to go after the terrorists that murdered so many of our civilians on Sept. 11, 2001? What are we giving up to maintain the status quo? Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz told the House Veterans Affairs Committee in September that the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, including interest payments on the money borrowed for these wars and care for our wounded soldiers and veterans, is likely to total $4 trillion to $6 trillion. Simply put, we believe the human and financial costs of the war are unacceptable and unsustainable. It is bankrupting us. The United States should devise an exit plan to extricate ourselves from Afghanistan, not a plan to stay there four more years and “then we’ll see.” This doesn’t mean that we abandon the Afghan people – rather, we should abandon this war strategy. It is a failure that has not brought stability to Afghanistan and has not enhanced our own security. As the retired career Army officer Andrew J. Bacevich has written, to die for a mystique is the wrong policy. It is easier for politicians to “go along” rather than make waves. But we were elected to do the right thing, not what is politically expedient. The discussion of Afghanistan shouldn’t be about politics, which we acknowledge are difficult, but what is right for our country. And the right thing is to end this war.
The above quote comes from an Op-Ed by Democratic Congressman James McGovern and Republican Congressman Walter Jones, and they’re absolutely right. We entered Afghanistan with one mission; to crush al Qaeda and it’s sponsors the Taliban. For the most part, that mission was accomplished in relatively short order. The Taliban Government collapsed within weeks, and those members of al Qaeda who weren’t captured or killed in the initial months of fighting quickly scattered elsewhere, most to Pakistan where they are protected by Intelligence and Army officials of the nation that is supposed to be our ally in this “war on terror.” In fact, it’s fairly clear that the Bush Administration’s obsession in the years after 9/11 with attacking Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with the terror attacks that killed 3,000 of our citizens, diverted both attention and resources from the hunt for al Qaeda members. Perhaps if we hadn’t engaged in a hasty, foolish, and mistaken military adventure in Iraq, we would’ve been able to crush toe remaining elements of al Qaeda before the scattered to the four winds.
Our mission in Afghanistan today, though, has nothing to do with al Qaeda and everything to do with propping up a corrupt government led by a man who very clearly cheated his way through the last two national elections. We’ve said that U.S. troops would start to leave the country this year. Then that deadline was pushed back to 2014. Now, it seems like the commitment is entirely open ended. All of this despite the fact that public support for the war itself is at an all-time low. The American people want us to leave. The Afghan people aren’t even sure why we’re there. And, there is absolutely no sign that the Karzai government will be any more stable or popular with the Afghan people three years from now than it is today. It’s time to end this foolish crusade before we end up regretting as much as the Soviets came to regret their own misadventure in the Hindu Kush.newz
It appears that Eurocom representative has spilled the beans on Z390 chipset.
The mysterious Z390 chipset, which for now has only been seen on leaked roadmaps is not launching this year with Z370 (expected on October 5th). The Z390 is likely to arrive after the full stack of 300-series chipsets (such as B360/H370) will be revealed early next year. The Z370 is just a taste of what Intel is preparing for the mainstream market next year.
Eurocom rep might have just inadvertedly revealed the biggest secret of the new chipset. As it turns out, the Z390 is designed to support 8-core processors, a direct competition for Ryzen 7 series.
Not much is known at this point about the architecture itself, but the 8-core Intel processors might be the first 10nm Ice Lake silicons.
Earlier this month a roadmap was leaked presenting Z390 chipset succeeding Z370 just three quarters later.
Source: Notebookreview via ComputerBaseThe Washington Blade on Tuesday endorsed Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE for president.
The editor of the Blade, which focuses on coverage of the LGBT community, wrote that although Clinton's rival Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE deserves credit for the issues he brought to light during his campaign, he now has no credible path to victory.
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"While the Republicans have burned through 16 losing candidates and turned their party over to a racist, sexist bully with zero experience in elected office, the Democrats are still slugging it out — in May," the piece said.
"This should be a time for Hillary Clinton’s victory lap, not a time for enduring more misguided attacks on her fitness for office from fellow Democrats."
The piece said Sanders fight made Clinton an even better candidate, forcing her to "up her game and sharpen her economic message."
"We owe him a big 'thank you' for that,'" it said.
But now, it said, the "responsible" thing for the Vermont senator to do is to withdraw from the race and endorse Clinton.
With Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE now the presumptive GOP nominee, the endorsement says there's a great deal at stake and argues that Sanders can't risk further damaging Clinton.
It rebukes claims that Clinton is unqualified to be president and that she'd be soft on terrorism, adding that Clinton's judgment can be trusted in picking Supreme Court justices.
It goes on to commend Clinton for pledging her full support on different lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues and slams Trump, saying the presumptive nominee would "turn back the clock on our equality in myriad ways."
"The LGBT community cannot risk a Trump presidency," it says.
Clinton, on the other hand, will continue to advocate for LGBT issues and has outlined specific policy proposals to show her commitment, it said. She also has a record of standing up for LGBT rights around the world as secretary of State.
"The time has come to move past divisive fights of the past and rally around an ally who has pledged to put the full weight of her administration and bully pulpit into maintaining and advancing LGBT equality," the editorial said.
"Hillary Clinton is that ally and has earned LGBT support in November."4chan prank means Justin Bieber must tour North Korea
Justin Bieber's "My World Tour" Twitter voting contest asked fans to vote on which country he should tour next, without restriction on which countries could be included in the vote. 4chan smelled opportunity: Anonymous nominated North Korea, then the boards clickswarmed. At the time of this blog post, more than half a million votes now demand |
body. He can shoot off balance. He doesn't massage the puck at all. He doesn't put his head down. Instead, his head is up, almost as though he were stickhandling.
"There's such a disguise of when he's going to shoot. He doesn't drop his shoulder. He doesn't move his body in a certain position so you know he's going to shoot," MacInnis said. "It's just… bang! It's off his stick."
"He sees goalies in a different way than most guys do," said Blues goaltender Carter Hutton. "He does a lot of things to get open and battle for space - and he's such a strong guy that he can do that - but a lot of times he uses the movement of the goalie to his advantage."
Hockey is a game of gaps, Hutton explained. At all times, each body on the ice has momentum. The key is to control the gaps and capitalize on your opponent's motion.
"He catches guys moving. He shoots to places that are going to open up. He just understands. And his release is so - it's a sneaky release. If I turn the wrong way - as soon as you start to move a bit - he releases it. And at that point you don't have your total body control." He shrugged. "Other guys use their stick and use the full leverage. [Vladi's] is just a quick sling of the wrist and it's gone."
Like a one-inch punch?
Hutton considered a moment and then nodded. "Yeah, that's a good comparison."
****
Tarasenko smiled when I asked him if he were familiar with Bruce Lee.
"You mean the guy that does this?"
He was sitting on the couch, and he leaned forward as he spoke, positioning his left hand, fingers extended, less than an inch from his right hand, which was also extended. Then, in one swift, seamless motion - and without ever pulling his arm back for leverage - he thrust his fist into his palm.
"Yeah," he said with a wry smile. "I know him."
To provide context for the question, I told him Hutton and I had discussed the comparison.
He broke into an amused grin. "He told me that."
As the ready precision with which he mimicked the punch suggested, Tarasenko is a longtime fan of Lee. On road trips, when he finds himself with free time, he'll search for Bruce Lee videos, specifically the one-inch punch, and study his movements. When I told him his own punch was surprisingly practiced, he laughed.
"I 'practice' with my oldest son," he said. "He likes it. He likes to fall back on the couch to make it more fun."
But beyond the exhibition of the one-inch punch, Tarasenko said he admires what Bruce Lee represents: "how much success people can get if they work hard and they believe in themselves."
For his part, Lee believed the traditional martial arts were too unwieldy. "It's not the daily increase," he said, "but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." He developed a system of fighting without fixed positions, attracting celebrity students such as James Coburn, Steve McQueen and Kareem Abdul-Jabar. His philosophy also shed light on what makes Tarasenko's shot so successful, though Tarasenko didn't always shoot the way he does now, nor did his shot evolve organically. His dad, Andrei, taught him.
Andrei Tarasenko played for Yaroslavl in the Russian Superleague (the KHL wasn't around yet) in the 1990s. He led the League in scoring in 1996-97. He also played for Russia in the 1994 Olympic Games in Lillehammer. During those years, Tarasenko lived with his grandparents in Novosibirsk in Siberia. His grandfather, a hockey player himself, taught Tarasenko to skate and signed him up for his first hockey teams. He went with him to every game and on every road trip throughout his junior career. During this time, Tarasenko practiced his shot, but not more than he worked on any other part of his game.
"When I used to play in Russia a long time ago, when I grow up, you don't have much ice," he said of his practice habits when he was young. "The only chance to skate was outside, you know?"
He gave the example of summer camp, where he spent three weeks each year when he was a kid. He and his friends would hang up giant fishing nets and place plastic bottles where they guessed the four corners of a hockey net would be. Then they'd fire pucks at the bottles.
"It was like a shooting range for us," he said, shrugging. "It was like the shooting room in Scottrade for me now. But it wasn't like I stay there over the night - " he shook his head to emphasize the negative - "and no. Just normal. Because when you're younger, and you have enough to score a lot of goals, you score every game and get points every game. You don't think, 'Oh, I need to shoot 200 more pucks."
By enough, Tarasenko meant skill. Tarasenko was extremely successful as a youngster - he once scored a point in every game for over five years - but Andrei knew that what worked against Tarasenko's peers would not work against grown men. The game would only get faster, the defenseman keener, the goalies steelier. Tarasenko was in his mid-teens when Andrei told him it was time to change his shot. Andrei, like Lee, hacked away at the unessential.
"He told me to shoot like I shoot now for the first time, and it's uncomfortable. I'm like, 'I can't do this, because I usually like to shoot like - " he stood up and demonstrated, swinging his arms back. "All guys in junior like to pull it back nice and swing it hard to score top glove or top blocker. Everyone wants to do this when they're young, you know?"
He explained that young skaters prefer a splashy windup not simply because of vanity - though that plays a part - but because kids simply don't have the strength to fire a heavy shot without the leverage of a flexing hockey stick.
"So this nice swing -" he demonstrated again - "and the puck goes up, and you feel like you're a good hockey player when you're young." He laughed. "But it wasn't like I got it in one day. It was really uncomfortable to shoot like this, to not stickhandle before you shoot."
For Tarasenko, at least in junior level hockey, time to shoot was never an issue. Plus, he was already scoring goals and tallying points. He didn't see the need to change his shot.
Andrei was insistent. He told his son that if he had a three-second window to shoot the puck, he needed to shoot it in the first second.
"I would ask why I need to shoot here if I have two more seconds," Tarasenko continued.
Andrei's answer was twofold: Tarasenko would have more time to make decisions and, if he could get his shot off two seconds before anyone was expecting it, no one would be able to catch him.
"And then I start practicing and practicing - " he shook his head, exhaling. "It was hard because you never do this before. But then you just get used to it - and keep doing it now."
The key to Andrei's shooting style wasn't just quickness. It was also power. Lots of guys fired heavy shots. Lots of guys fired quick shots. But who could fire a shot that was just as heavy as it was quick? For Andrei, it was simple math: add velocity to the shot and subtract time for execution. And the former required muscle.
Tarasenko is astonishingly - almost unbelievably - strong. More than that, his strength seems to surge on his skates. For all of the laurels heaped upon his shot, Tarasenko is arguably one of the best skaters in the NHL.
"It's not speed," explained Liut. "People equate skating with how fast you are. That's an element of it, but it's the strength on his skates. He can make you turn as a defenseman. If you're protecting too much against that, and he goes wide and gets his shoulders past you, you're not going to stop him. It's a different element of skating. It's power."
"When you watch him skate, you'd think he weighs 150 pounds," said Paul Stastny, whose locker is adjacent to Tarasenko's in the Blues locker room. "His edges… he's basically floating on the ice. It's very impressive. If he just had the quickness he did, I think he'd still score goals. But the fact that he shoots it that hard makes it that much harder to stop.
"I don't think people realize how hard that is to fake a shot and change your angle and transfer the power all in one motion. He does that with ease."
****
Tarasenko is famously humble. ("Showing off is the fool's idea of glory," Lee once said). He deflects praise and, when it can't be deflected, is visibly uncomfortable until the conversation moves forward. When I mentioned Al MacInnis' accolades - that Tarasenko's shot is perhaps the best he's ever seen - he was, for a moment, disbelieving and then quieted by the weight of the honor. He looked down at his hands. Then he smiled, embarrassed, "That is a good [compliment]."
Tarasenko's modesty stems from deep gratitude and razor-edged competitiveness. Regarding the former, he is acutely aware of the sacrifices his grandfather and father made for him and the wisdom they imparted. Also, their patience. He was, admittedly, not a willing student.
"I wasn't easy to coach," he said with a culpable laugh. "Sometimes I get angry. It was pretty tough - tough kid to explain something."
Specifically, Tarasenko's grandfather and father had to teach him how to handle losing.
"I'm a heavy guy with it. Like, I'm really nervous about losing. I hate losing. Even a regular season game or something like that. There is night sometimes it's hard to fall asleep." He shook his head. "Not sometimes. A lot of times."
Tarasenko said that when he was a kid, he was devastated by defeat. He would cry when his team lost. When his team was trailing, he was tempted to quit.
"But my grandfather teach me how to - what to do to win. You need to do something to win, you know? Wins don't come themselves. It's not gonna bounce out from nowhere.
"Obviously, this year, things didn't go our way. So what are you gonna do now? Over the summer get better and stronger and come back and fight again? Or are you gonna just let it go and lose?"
As if on cue, Alexander teetered into the living room, followed by Yana. Tarasenko's face burst into a smile, radiant with delight. Alexander's explosion of white hair suggested he had napped successfully, as did his dimpled grin. I asked if Alexander is always this happy.
"Of course," Tarasenko said, giggling and lifting his younger son, "because daddy is home." Then he added, "He will be a hockey player, probably."
After a few more moments of giggling - both father and son, whose likeness extends even to their laughs - Tarasenko resumed the conversation.
"With Mark right now, I can see myself in his spot when I was 10 years old. And you have an OK game, but you don't like a game, and you feel a ton of the world. You're frustrated.
"There was periods of my life when it wasn't going my way, and there was two ways: they make you stronger or they get you and make you [worse]. There is no staying the same level after you go down, you know?
"So that's what I try to explain to him right now. To fight for it. To don't be upset. Don't show anyone you are upset because people see you upset or frustrated, and they will take care of you. And you don't have a chance to win at all."
Alexander, who had been toddling around the couches and banging the palms of his hands on the glass coffee table throughout the duration of his father's speech, picked up a small, blue ball and tossed it at Tarasenko's feet.
"Gooooal!" Tarasenko cried, raising his hands in celebration.
Alexander - who hadn't stopped smiling since he woke up from his nap - smiled wider and raised his arms, too. This pattern repeated itself several times until the whole family was involved: Alexander throwing the ball, and his dad, mom, and brother Mark - who had by now come downstairs - cheering, "Gooooal!"
At one point, a particularly boisterous throw sent the ball flying into the hallway. In his hurry to retrieve it, Alexander tangled his stout legs and tumbled.
"Oh!"
Tarasenko held out his hand to gently shush Alexander's audience. Then, unwittingly illustrating the last point he had made, he turned around and began walking nonchalantly around the room as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Alexander, on the verge of tears, looked at his father, who by now was looking in any direction but his.
Then, after a moment's reflection, he steadied his lip, smiled, and got back up to play.
****
In 2011, at the World Junior Championship in Buffalo, New York, Team Russia seemed destined for a silver medal. They were trailing the Canadians 3-0 heading into the third period of the championship game. But a herculean effort by a line of Tarasenko, Evgeny Kuznetsov and Artemi Panarin spearheaded a charge that would eventually see the Russians score five unanswered goals. The three tallied seven points between them, with Tarasenko logging both a goal and an assist.
"Vladi's line brought them back," Liut said. "That line won that game. Vladi was determined. He was the driver on that line."
The game marked the first time Liut saw Tarasenko play in person. I asked him if Tarasenko's wristshot had first lured the Blues to court the Russian. It wasn't. While Tarasenko's shot was heavy enough to turn heads, it was his all-around play - not just shooting skills, but skating and passing, size, and such intangibles as vision, intensity, toughness, and commitment - that convinced the team he would be a success in the NHL. He was a teenager who could drive past men. He was quick to his spot - quicker than he needed to be on the larger, European ice surface. He was strong down low in the offensive zone. He could escape coverage. And he was willing to go into the hard areas time and time again.
"What Vladi could do is overpower people," Liut said. "He was the real deal. His passing is extraordinary. It's like his shot. It's a bullet. It's as good as it gets. He's a great hockey player. He's an elite player. It's more than just shooting the puck." He paused and laughed. "But that definitely helps."
Liut noted that Tarasenko entered the NHL during what he called the "decline of the Russians." At the beginning of the 2000-01 season, there were over 70 Russian players in the NHL. By the time Tarasenko entered the league in the lockout-shortened season of 2012-12, there were fewer than 30, the lowest number in over two decades.
"There was a host of '82-born players that came over and just couldn't make it. Highly-touted players with exceptional skill that just didn't make it," Liut continued. "There were a lot of them. That was the concern at the time.
"But he told me in English when I met him the first time that he wanted to have success in the World Cup and the Olympics, but he really wanted to play in the NHL. He felt he could compete at that level. And he did. He did exactly what he said he was gonna do."
****
It has become a familiar sight at Scottrade: Yana, standing at ice level by the Olympia doors, holding Alexander on the ledge where the boards meet the plexiglass. Mark is by her side in a Tarasenko jersey. Alexander's palms bang against the glass, like they do against the coffee table at home. He bounces and smiles as he waits for his dad to skate over. Here the trio wave and cheer for the duration of warm-ups. Home games are a family affair.
"Yep. Every single game," Yana said. "I think Mark loves it."
So does Alexander, though it took him a few games to appreciate the limitations of an NHL arena.
"First time, when she bring him in, he was not even understanding what's going on," Tarasenko said. "I tried to like, 'Hey, it's me! It's me!'" he said, waving as he explained. "I even took off my helmet."
After a few more games, Alexander recognized his dad and smiled. But the improvement was short-lived.
"He decided, 'I can't get in!' So he started crying then," Tarasenko laughed.
For Tarasenko, his wife and sons temper the volatility of the NHL season and keep him grounded in his convictions, both on and off the ice.
"I want my kids to be good humans first," he said, stressing that skill means nothing if you are a "great hockey player, but you have a bad personality."
"I tell them you need to be humble with people. You can't judge people only when you see them, because maybe there's a story behind it." He also warns them about jealousy. This last item is especially important.
"There are two ways of being jealous, you know? In Russia, they call it white and black. If you say black, it's a bad one. That's when you really, really jealous. And if you say white, it's like you want to be in his spot, but you're happy for him. But it makes you work harder to get there."
He paused for a moment.
"And if there is another one, it is believe in your family, because I think family is a really, really strong power. It's hard to understand when you're 10 years old right now that it's actually like this, but it's what we try to do. We tell him family are the ones who always can help you, whatever happens. We're not gonna turn away, or turn our back for you."
****
In his treatise on martial arts, Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Bruce Lee wrote, "There is no mystery about my style. My movements are simple, direct and non-classical. The extraordinary part of it lies in its simplicity."
The same can be said for the brilliance of Tarasenko's wristshot, though one could argue the simplicity itself is the mystery.
"To be honest, I don't know how he shoots like that. I've never seen somebody who can get a shot off so quick and so accurate," said teammate Ryan Reaves.
In the locker room, Tarasenko is flanked by a concrete wall on one side and Reaves on the other, which is to say, he is flanked by concrete walls. Reaves is the only player on the team who rivals Tarasenko in raw strength.
"The thing that blows my mind with his shot is he can shoot through a guy's stick and still get it in the right spot," he continued. "A lot of times, you see those shots get deflected. I don't know how he does it."
David Perron, whose flash-and-dash style earned him the NHL's Goal of the Year in 2009 for a two-zone masterpiece against the New York Islanders, said he asks Tarasenko about his shot-details about his mechanics or how he reads defensemen or how he decides where to shoot - and, in the offseason, works on applying those principles to his own game.
Back at Tarsenko's home, in the Zen-like quiet before his sons woke up from their naps, I asked my own questions. What does he do differently than other players? Why does the puck explode off his stick, ostensibly shirking the laws of physics?
He considered the question.
"It's not close to the body," he said. "It's more like -" Here he broke off and started again. "Don't let the goalie a chance to read your shot - " Another pause. Finally, after a self-conscious attempt to put into words what he does with unselfconscious ease: "I don't want to explain it a lot because then they're gonna know how I shoot it."
In one of the rarer moments of our conversation, he didn't smile.
Tarasenko's grandfather has said he prefers to call his grandson a master rather than a superstar. And while Tarasenko, characteristically downplays the epithet ("It doesn't matter what they call you," he said), the distinction is in the nuance. A superstar is a performer, a patron of spectacle. A master, on the other hand, is a philosopher, a student of what's left when all the spectacle has been stripped away. Tarasenko, in that sense, is the latter.
And every master has his secrets.Press Secretary Sean Spicer tries to duck Donald Trump's erratic tweeting, but CBS' reporter Major Garrett nailed him at the latest briefing.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has repeatedly played fast and loose with the truth as he unsuccessfully tries to cover up for Donald Trump’s mistakes and provocations in the White House.
When that happens, what is needed is a White House press corps willing to hold Spicer and his boss to account for their words and actions — a function of the watchdog press that too often goes unfulfilled, especially in the daily briefing.
Fortunately, CBS Chief White House correspondent Major Garrett showed up for work in the most recent briefing.
After Trump tweeted that his former national security adviser Michael Flynn “should ask for immunity” as part of ongoing congressional probes into Russian election interference, which Trump falsely characterized as “a witch hunt,” Garrett pressed Spicer to be clear on what Trump was asking for.
Spicer attempted to stonewall him and continue the White House’s attempts to ignore the consequences of Trump’s tweets, but Garrett persisted, asking calmly for clarity instead of spin, noting that Trump’s comments have weight no matter where they happen.
Eventually Spicer relented, admitting that Trump was not instructing Congress or the FBI to offer Flynn immunity.
GARRETT: You frequently tell us to take the president’s tweets at face value, and they speak for themselves. So, when the president says that Mike Flynn should get immunity, is he suggesting to Congress that it grant immunity? SPICER: I think Mike Flynn and his legal counsel should do what’s appropriate for Mike Flynn. GARRETT: But that isn’t — they cannot obtain immunity. It must be granted. SPICER: Right. And again, to your question — GARRETT: Is the president recommending, either to the FBI or to Congress, that it grant immunity? Because that’s the only way it can happen. SPICER: I understand, but again, he didn’t say ‘Congress should grant.’ GARRETT: That’s why I’m asking. What does he mean by that? SPICER: What he means is he supports Mike Flynn’s attempts to go up to Congress and be very clear with everything that they ask and what they want. GARRETT: Right, but he could’ve just said testify; he said he should get immunity. And I’m asking you because it’s important. SPICER: It is. GARRET: Every lawyer who works on this tells you it’s extremely important to seek it and then obtain it. And there’s only one way you can seek it: By it being granted either by the FBI or by Congress. And for the President of the United States to even lightly indicate that he is in favor of that, it seems to me is a significant development. I’m trying to find out if that’s what the president was trying to accomplish. SPICER: And I’m trying to answer the question, which is that I think what the — not that I think, I’ve talked to the president about this — GARRETT: You have? SPICER: Yes. And the president is very clear that he wants Mike Flynn to go and be completely open and transparent with the committee, and whatever it takes to do that he is supportive of. GARRETT: Even if he doesn’t obtain immunity? SPICER: He wants him — again, I want to be clear: He wants him to do what is necessary to go up there and talk to the committees of jurisdiction to get this matter behind us. GARRETT: And since you’ve talked to the president about this, he was not trying to suggest to the FBI or the Justice Department that it grant immunity to Michael Flynn? SPICER: I think he was asking — I’m not entirely sure of the process, whether Congress does it or DOJ or both in this case. But the point is — right, I understand. The bottom line is — GARRETT: He’s not instructing the Justice Department — SPICER: What he is asking is that Mike Flynn do everything he can to cooperate with the committees that he’s asked to look into this.
Shareblue’s Tommy Christopher, a longtime White House press colleague of Garrett’s, observed, “Major has always had a knack for nailing the substance of an issue, and he nailed Spicer with it today.”
Trump had long signaled his intent to be hostile to the press and opaque to the public — a public which now pays his salary. The reporters in the room should keep this in mind, and take a lesson from Garrett not to let Trump’s team get away with disinformation and evasion.• A daily summary of global reports on security issues.
Syrian revolutionaries made their first official request for foreign intervention Thursday, saying that the death toll had grown enough to ask for outside help despite their initial reluctance. However, the chances of their request being granted are slim – the US and Europe, who led the international community into Libya, have given no indication they want to stage another intervention.
Members of the Syrian Revolution General Commission, a new umbrella organization of nearly four dozen groups seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime, said they hope to avoid being labeled traitors by asking first for human rights monitors rather than military intervention.
If the regime refuses to allow the monitors into the country, it will "open the door" for more direct intervention, such as no-fly zones, said spokesman Ahmad al-Khatib, according to Reuters.
However, the West has expressed little interest in implementing a no-fly zone, or any other military measures, for Syria. International action has so far been limited to diplomatic and economic moves, such as sanctions.
Syria is a much more strategically critical country for both the West and the Middle East than Muammar Qaddafi's Libya was. It has links to key players in the region and it has a larger population that is divided between various sectarian groups.
The Libya intervention both strained NATO members' military resources and raised the hackles of Russia, who did not block the operation in Libya but has since expressed regret that it didn't. It's unlikely Russia, which holds UN Security Council veto power, would once again permit a foreign intervention in an Arab uprising, let alone endorse it.
According to Chinese wire agency Xinhua, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Friday that Russia did not want a Libya repeat.
"The situation in Libya has changed," Medvedev told Euronews in an interview broadcast Friday. "Even so, we believe the mandate from Libya Resolution 1973 was exceeded." The president said Russia definitely did not "want the same thing to happen in Syria."
Russia has even resisted a UN resolution that would impose sanctions on Mr. Assad, saying any action needed to be directed at both sides in the conflict, not just the government, according to a second Reuters report.
While much of the international community, including former ally Turkey, have given up hoping that Assad will implement reforms and sit down with the opposition to end the uprising peacefully, Russia is still pushing for negotiations.
"We are ready to support different approaches, but they must not be based on one-sided condemnations of the actions... of the government and President Assad," [Russian President Dmitry] Medvedev said in the remarks, to Euronews television. "They must send a firm signal to all conflicting sides that they need to sit down at the negotiations table, they need to agree and stop the bloodshed," he said.
Another critical source of support for the intervention in Libya is likely to be absent in Syria's case: the Arab League, The Christian Science Monitor reported last week. The NATO intervention was only given the go-ahead after a nod from the 22-member Arab League.YJA Calls For A Common Front For Women
Leyla Agirî, a member of the coordinatıng body of Yekitiya Jinen Azad (YJA) – Union Of Free Women – has given an interview to Özgür Gündem in which she speaks about the YJA’s role as a common front for all women and the direction of the women’s revolution in the region more generally.
Agirî explained that the organization was founded on the perspective of the democratic nation and stressed that with the group’s formation they had “made a change toward a more independent and emancipatory system.” She also drew attention to the dangers facing women in the face of widespread war and chaos in the region, telling the paper that “we must strengthen the common front of women’s struggle…Women’s organizations in the Middle East and women around the world should unite around this organizational effort.”
The interview was conducted by Veysi Sarısözen and Sedat Yılmaz and took place in the Kandil Mountains of South Kurdistan. The interview has been translated from Turkish to English in its entirety below.
–
-The experiment of Kurdish women organizing has remade itself with the proclamation of a new big tent organization called the YJA. Can you talk a little about the stage your organization has reached and the institutional framework you have created?
The YJA has more than a 20 year history of freedom struggle. We first mobilized along the perspective of our leadership in 1993. Following our first organizing experiment with the YJK we moved to form ourselves as a party and Partiya Azadiya Jin A Kurdistan (PJAK) was founded in 2001. We reorganized ourselves in 2001 together with the paradigmatic change made by our leadership on İmralı. In 2003 we moved toward a confederal organization under Koma Jinen Bilind. This umbrella organization was made up of three separate spheres: PAJK in the ideological sphere, YJA in the community sphere and and YJA Star in the self-defensive sphere. Most recently we have created a sphere for the organization of young women and these four spheres continue to operate until today. We evaluated ourselves and organization in every aspect from the democratic nation perspective following the new process that our leadership began in 2013 on Newroz. In fact we had already set up a women’s KCK – that is the YJA – a long time before during a congress we organized. YJA is a confederal umbrella organization. As the Women’s KCK we made a change toward a more independent and emancipatory system.
-Lets talk about the women’s revolution that rests on the foundation of all of this organizing. How much has it registered or been internalized within the Kurdistan resistance movement?
Leader Apo’s foundational life principle is that “society cannot become free without the freedom of women.” In fact the development of the women’s freedom movement was made a concrete fact together with a thorough study of the 5 thousand-year patriarchal ideology and the subjection of this to analysis. Of course as women joined the PKK they encountered the national contradictions at its base. But there was a gender identity and status given to us within the society. One of the reasons that brought us to the mountains were the pursuits we lived as women. The first years of the war were very difficult from our perspective. It wasn’t easy for us as women to fight, to develop a strong organization presence during the war when this was the space most staked out by the power of male hegemony; it wasn’t easy for us to take this tool from them and to take male hegemony to task; it wasn’t easy to face and struggle and hold to account the Statist system.
-In these space where male hegemony was most dominant you created an entirely different life…
If we as women had not transformed ourselves into a strong, democratic subject and had not developed this will we could not have developed a strong alternative to men in any sphere of life. For this reason the masculine approaches which we experienced in the war created serious problems for the traditional position of women. As the leadership saw this and understood it and moved to solve the problem it said “women must develop their own organization structures.” At first this happened through the organization of separate military units and over time this transitioned into the formation of an organized women’s party and, dialectically, the important development of the Women’s KCK. Of course at first we needed to build consciousness. We became very strong and radical by growing in conscious, investigating the traditions among us, adopting positions in regards to them and to the reality of male hegemony.
-Did you encounter any resistance or problems from men?
We did not arrive at today easily. The gains we have won are the result of great struggles, sacrifices and difficulties. Alongside the reality of Kurdish masculinity is the subject of a 5 thousand-year old patriarchal mentality. We clashed seriously with these masculine attitudes with every step we took. We arrived at today by clashing, by struggle, by gaining in strength, consciousness, will and organization. We waged a serious struggle against the masculine, belittling and dismissive understanding that “women do not understand war or government.”
-What kind of change do you see concretely? How did it used to be and what is the situation now?
Men did not used to see us as a power. To say power was to say men. Today if we look at Kurds as a third power in the Middle East, whether criticized or appreciated by friends our enemies, there are commonalities when it comes to women. Leader Öcalan carried out a revolution in person of the Kurdish woman. In any place where women are organized they can question and struggle against male hegemony. This is now seen as a power and we are taking this into account. In the foundation we destroyed the status we had in our culture. There is no such thing as women’s or men’s work. Everyone does every job. From the kitchen to security, everything is done in common.
-In combat do women and men fight together or apart?
We have our own organizations in every sphere of life. We have a place in general mixed structures and we have places which belong to ourselves. Everything is equal. However traditionalism has persisted. We have created free women and free men but the freedom struggle demands persistence. And we continue our pursuits and efforts in this area.
-When talking about the foundation of the women’s ideology you always stress the efforts of Öcalan. This is criticized among certain feminist circles Turkey who say that “a man cannot lay the foundation for a women’s ideology.” How do you explain this?
In this past we constantly encountered such attitudes but today we see it less. We do not approach women and men as a fact of biology. Sexism in society creates such a reality. It is a question of the creation of two separate sexes, two separate consciousness, two separate souls. The leadership investigated this among itself and look seriously at the all of the masculine structures, soul, mentality and behavior. The leadership is not an individual for us, it is an identity. Now in the circles we are talking about they are coming to realize that as much as they know the leadership its ideological, philosophical understanding and its understanding of struggle is the most reasonable solution from the perspective of humanity. Everyone who sees our lives, our positions and our organizations is surprised. There are many commentaries on the Kurdish woman who until just yesterday counted for nothing, whose name was unknown, who was unseen and unrecognized and who has received education and is organized and comes to possess a new consciousness. There are those who have decided to struggle together with us.
-Do you have exchanges and debates with women in other countries in the world?
We have relations with Latin American countries even if they have been held up. Last year we hold a Middle East women’s conference. We are not only aiming at the liberation of Kurdish women. We are a movement that aims at and struggles for the freedom of all women. This is the subject of our efforts and pursuits.
-Men have their role in all wars. Now you are aiming at a confederal structure for the Middle East. Perhaps as women you are more advantaged regarding the unification of the Middle East…
We are both advantaged and the main force. Because the main vehicles of capitalist modernity are religious sectarianism, nationalism, sexism and scientism. These vehicles together with weapons estrange all identities from one another and divide them, break them apart and then rule over them. From the women’s perspective all of these vehicles are an insidious trap and plot for communities. When women develop a democratically conscious power and will they become one of the most transformative powers for change.
-You have spoken of something which attracts much interest perhaps we could speak about this more..
We have gone about ‘jinelogic’ work in the name of women from within the perspective of the democratic nation. As a feminine science, jinelogy works to go beyond the sexism in the realm of science and to remake the entire legacy of women on the foundation of the democratic nation as a space where a common mentality and values can meet. It is an opening in respect to the women’s movement. This is a project which has attracted the attention of women’s organizations around the world. In science where religious sectarianism, nationalism, and sexism is found is every sphere sexism has most severely affected women. European women are even more in search of this. We posses a universal character. When women see us they are very affected. They are those who want to take our model and apply it. Those who get to know us chose to struggle together with us.
-With Jineoloji you have challenged the world of science. Where do you want go?
No method of thought has legitimized sexism as much as science. We have started to work around this subject together with the efforts of Leader Apo even if a little late. Scientism is itself a product of male hegemony. Even if women have great contributions in the field of science. When one investigates this field a great conflict breaks out. Jineologic work challenges the sexism which has been made concrete in science. It is a revolt. It is a correction. We are is developing jineology in the mountains along our own, free mechanisms. |
in nature.
"decapitation or distension of the head or reproductive structures."
"I’m especially interested to see how this method will compare with those currently used for emerald ash borer [...], both in terms of detection and overall cost of the traps," said Dave Jennings, an entomologist at the University of Maryland who didn’t participate in the study, said in an email. Because of North America’s ongoing struggle with the Emerald Ash Borer — an Asian beetle species that was first detected in the US in 2002, and has spread to 24 states and two Canadian provinces since then — developing effective trapping methods has become a priority for entomologists and government officials everywhere.
The "emerald ash borer is a devastating invasive insect pest that has thus far been very successful at avoiding detection methods when present at low population densities," Jennings said. So "being able to find [it] in an area before it’s able to cause significant tree mortality will be very beneficial."
Unfortunately, it’s not yet clear how the males of species will react to the decoys. So far, the traps appear to attract a number of jewel beetle species — beetles of the Buprestidae family — but Domingue’s team isn’t sure if the decoys will be able to target serious pests in a specific way, while excluding less harmful species. The next step in the research will therefore attempt to figure out if varying the decoys’ colorations might increase the traps’ specificity.
The emerald ash borer has spread to 24 states and two Canadian provinces since 2002
Regardless, this study represents a significant advancement for the scientists and government officials who have been fighting to keep the beetle from spreading across North America. Synthetic decoys would require less maintenance than scent-based one, and might bring about new forms of trapping technologies, Domingue said — including "high-tech" systems that could alert researchers wirelessly when males land on decoys. "With that capability, entomologists could obtain information about the pests immediately rather than waiting weeks or months to check trap contents" — a boon when trying to curb the invasion of one of the most tenacious beetle species North America has ever encountered.The Manhattan Institute just released a new study by economists Ed Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor called “The End of the Segregated Century.” It cheerfully notes that segregation is at its lowest level since 1910 and that all-white neighborhoods “are virtually extinct.”
Their report seems accurate enough in describing the changes and is consistent, in many respects, with other research. Yet, in focusing exclusively on change, the report fails to convey that segregation is still quite high throughout much of America. Moreover, the summary and discussion are misleading in their insinuation that “the end of segregation” has failed as a “driving force” behind increasing socio-economic equality between races.
First, let me deal with the extent of segregation. It’s great that the percentage of blacks living in totally or nearly all-black neighborhoods has fallen dramatically since the height of Jim Crow, when racial covenants restricted blacks from living in certain neighborhoods, anti-black violence was common, and finance and real estate market discrimination were formalized.
Today, however, 51 percent of the entire U.S. metropolitan black population still lives in 50 metropolitan areas where segregation is high, according to the dissimilarity index data provided by John Logan of Brown University (a score above 60 is considered high--and means that 60 percent of blacks would have to switch neighborhoods with whites to achieve balance). This is down from 86 percent of blacks in 1980, living in 194 metropolitan areas, but it means that most blacks still live in highly-segregated metropolitan areas, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest. Moreover, the share of metro black residents living in at least moderately segregated metros (an index of 40 or above) is 95 percent.Ex-husband of Iqbal al-Hilli died of a heart attack in the US on the same day as deadly 2012 attack in French Alps, police say
The wife of British Iraqi-born engineer Saad al-Hilli, who was murdered with his family in the French Alps, had a "secret" American husband who died of a heart attack on the same day as the deadly attack, it emerged on Tuesday.
The revelation by French investigators adds a new twist to the murder mystery, which has thrown up a series of false leads since Hilli, his wife, Iqbal, and mother-in-law, Suhaila-al-Allaf, were shot dead along with a passing cyclist. Hilli's two daughters survived the attack at a layby on a wooded mountain road near Annecy on 5 September 2012.
"We have found out some surprising things about Iqbal, and we still don't have answers to some of the questions," said lead investigator Lieutenant-Colonel Benoit Vinnemann. Before marrying Hilli, Iqbal had never told her family about a US visit between February 1999 and December 2000 in which she married a dentist who was 13 years her senior. They divorced soon afterwards. Iqbal was herself a dentist. She met her second husband in Dubai a couple of years later.
The former husband, known only as James T, died on September 5 2012 in Natchez, Mississippi. The official cause of death was a heart attack.
"Is there a family secret that we haven't found? Does it concern Saad, or his wife Iqbal?" said Vinnemann.
In a further twist, the Annecy prosecutor, Eric Maillaud, said on Monday that a 35-year-old Iraqi had been placed under investigation last month on suspicion of carrying out a contract killing against Iraqis. However the man, who was not identified, had been released.
"He denied taking part in any contract whatsoever. He even denies the existence of this contract," Maillaud said. He added that investigators had been unable to establish any link with the Hilli family.
The Iraqi was the third person to be arrested in connection with the murders. Hilli's brother Zaid al-Hilli was arrested by British police who suspected a possible dispute with Saad over a family inheritance. However, he strongly denied any role in the murders and was subsequently released.
Then last February, French police appeared to have made a breakthrough by announcing the arrest of a 48-year-old Frenchman suspected of being the motorcyclist who had been spotted near the scene of the shootings. But he too was released although he continued to be questioned on unrelated arms possession offences.
The police have been puzzled by the weapon used in the shooting, which would appear to rule out a professional killing: a 7.65mm Lugar PO6 handgun, issued to the Swiss army and police in the 1920s and 1930s.
Hilli was staying in a caravan site in Annecy with his family when they decided to go on the fatal excursion to the village of Chevaline. One of his daughters was seriously hurt in the attack, while the other survived by hiding under the skirt of Iqbal al-Hilli, who was sitting in the back. The bodies were discovered by a British cyclist, Brett Martin.President-elect Donald Trump tapped Kathleen Troia “KT” McFarland to be Deputy National Security Advisor, the transition team announced Friday.
Mcfarland will be answering to retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, whom Trump recently appointed to be his National Security Advisor. The post of deputy national security adviser does not require the confirmation of the Senate.
A former Fox News national security analyst, McFarland held national security posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. McFarland served as an aide to Dr. Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council staff from 1970 to 1976.
At the start of the first term of the Reagan administration, she was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee Staff as well as a senior speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. She later became the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (PA) and Pentagon spokesman.
In 2006, in an effort to take on then Sen. Hillary Clinton, McFarland ran in the Republican Senate primary in New York only to be defeated by then-Republican Yonkers Mayor John Spencer.
McFarland received bachelor’s degrees from George Washington University and Oxford University, and her masters degree from Oxford. She later went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD program where she studied nuclear weapons, China and the Soviet Union.
McFarland received graduate fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (Hubert Humphrey Fellowship).
She is married to Alan Roberts McFarland and is the mother/stepmother of five.
Follow Kerry on TwitterThe Philippines is seeking US and Chinese help to guard a major sea lane as Islamic militants shift attacks to international shipping, officials said Wednesday.
Manila does not want the Sibutu Passage between Malaysia’s Sabah state and the southern Philippines to turn into a Somalia-style pirate haven, coast guard officials said.
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The deep-water channel, used by 13,000 vessels each year, offers the fastest route between Australia and the manufacturing powerhouses China, Japan and South Korea, they added.
In the past year Abu Sayyaf gunmen from the southern Philippines have boarded ships and kidnapped dozens of crewmen for ransom in waters between Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, raising regional alarm.
Indonesia has warned the region could become the “next Somalia” and the International Maritime Bureau says waters off the southern Philippines are becoming increasingly dangerous.
“If shipowners will skirt that area just to avoid kidnap at sea activities by these terrorists, for sure, it will have an additional cost,” Philippine Coast Guard chief Commodore Joel Garcia told AFP.
“It’s not just the concern of the Philippines or Indonesia and Malaysia, but of the international shipping community.”
Manila plans to ask its longstanding defence ally the United States to hold joint exercises in waters off the southern Philippines to address the problem, Defence Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told AFP on Tuesday.
And Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte last week urged China to launch patrols off the piracy-plagued waters, citing Beijing’s dispatch of a naval convoy to the Gulf of Aden in 2009 to protect Chinese ships from Somali pirates.
Duterte made the comments a day after meeting a special envoy from Indonesia who wanted to know what Manila, which has one of the weakest naval forces in the region, plans to do to address the threat.
Garcia said details of the possible sea patrol cooperation with China would likely be discussed at a meeting between the two countries’ coast guards in Manila next week.
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Lorenzana said Manila plans to “talk to the ministry of defence of China on how to operationalise this joint patrol” off the southern Philippines.
Garcia said rising incidents of piracy around the 29-kilometre-wide (18-mile) Sibutu Passage threaten to push up overall shipping costs, including insurance for vessels, cargo and crew.
Diverting ships to Indonesia’s Lombok Strait would be more expensive and voyages would take longer, said Filipino coast guard spokesman Commander Armando Balilo.
The Filipino coast guard recorded 12 piracy or kidnapping incidents in the passage in the last six months alone, on top of four unsuccessful attempts by gunmen to board vessels.
“It (a Somalia-like situation) has not happened, but if it escalates into a full-blown piracy area, that would be scary because they will avoid that route. They will use other routes and shipping costs will rise,” Balilo said.
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MOST READWASHINGTON, D.C. — How Brad Evans came to be in the US national team’s starting XI against Germany is irrelevant. The fact that he was a late call up is irrelevant.
All that matters is that when the call came, he played well at a relatively unfamiliar position — right back — and helped Jurgen Klinsmann’s American squad to a 4-3 win over Germany on Sunday.
“Jurgen called me a couple of weeks ago and asked, ‘Are you ready to come in?” Evans told MLSsoccer.com after the match. “I don’t know what happened with the late call up, but you don’t ask questions. You just say, ‘Yes, sir. Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘We’ll look at you at right back.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir. Yes sir.’”
READ: Evans gets high marks in MLSsoccer.com's US player ratings vs. Germany
Evans, who normally lines up in the midfield for the Seattle Sounders, has played a few US Open Cup and league matches at right back, but only a handful. He admits that he’s “still learning the position.”
It’s a steep learning curve, for sure. The competition at right back includes mainstay Steve Cherundolo, who has struggled with injuries recently, and Geoff Cameron, who plays right back for his club, Stoke City, but has mainly played center back for the US. Plus, there is Augsburg right back Michael Parkhurst and possibly Nurnberg’s Timothy Chandler.
Still, he looks to have a better opportunity to break through at right back than anywhere else on the field, according to the manager.
“Brad showed exactly what we wanted to see,” Klinsmann said after the match. “For Brad to break into our midfield line is very, very difficult, having Jermaine Jones and Michael Bradley set in there.
“But I always said he can play on the right or on the left [of the defense]. He has that vision, that technique. He’s strong and good in one against ones. He doesn’t shy away from overlapping up front as well.”
READ: Klinsmann gushes over Clint Dempsey
Sunday’s match took Evans’s cap total to 10. His last appearance came in a 0-0 draw with Canada in January, and he has been named to the 35-man preliminary roster for the upcoming Gold Cup. (He's listed as a midfielder, of course.)
But before that, there is the matter of Friday’s World Cup qualifier in Jamaica (9:30 pm ET, beIN Sport, live chat on MLSsoccer.com). Evans, who was partially at fault for not reacting to a possible rebound that led to Germany’s third goal, doesn’t know if he did enough on Sunday to book a seat on the USMNT’s flight to Kingston on Tuesday.
“There are still things I can do better to help the team,” he said. “I’ll look at tape and see where it stands next week.”
Klinsmann didn’t give anything away, either, but at least he acknowledged that Evans’s performance gives him something to consider.
“He took his chance,” Klinsmann said. “It’s as simple as that.”Tony Stark seems to be the type of guy that only gets involved in politics when he is made to, but Captain America: Civil War's Robert Downey Jr. did reveal what candidate he thinks the character would lean towards in this current election.
Speaking with Howard Stern, Downey Jr. said: "I believe Tony [Stark], being a budding feminist, he would say it's time to have some feminine energy in the White House."
When Howard double checked, asking if that indeed is the candidate that Tony Stark would back, Downey Jr. responded: "He does," The actor stays away from political conversations overall, but he did add "I'm going to vote. That's what's important."
Stern then asked if Captain America would back Ted Cruz. Downey Jr. said: "If you go along with his points of view in the movie, he would back up whoever was for accountability. It's a great year, I tell you."
Cruz is no longer an option, but Stark's nominee is still in the race. Having a guy like Stark in your corner is never really a bad thing either.A new study has found evidence that brain tumours use fat as their preferred source of energy, bringing into question the decades-long assumption that sugar is their main fuel source.
If confirmed, this could fundamentally change the we treat cancer in the future, because until very recently, scientists have been focussing their efforts on ways to starve cancer cells of their sugar supply.
"For 60 years, we have believed all tumours rely on sugars for their energy source, and the brain relies on sugars for its energy source, so you certainly would think brain tumours would," lead researcher Elizabeth Stoll, a neuroscientist from Newcastle University in the UK, told Ian Johnston at The Independent.
A glioma is a type of brain tumour that grows from glial cells - cells that support the neurons and help maintain the blood-brain barrier. Glial cells make up 90 percent of the brain’s total cells, and until recently have been shrouded in mystery.
There are three types of glial tumours - astrocytoma, oligodendroglioma, and glioblastoma - and they can be notoriously difficult to treat. Glioblastomas are the most common and most aggressive form, with just 30 percent of patients in the US living to more than two years after diagnosis.
A new target for treatments could make a huge difference, with Stoll and her team finding that when they inhibited the tumour cell’s ability to process fat as fuel, their growth rate slowed significantly, which equates to a better survival rate.
The team worked with human tumour tissue that had been donated by glioma patients undergoing surgery, and live mouse models of the disease, and treated them with a fatty acid oxidation inhibitor called etomoxir.
"We tested etomoxir in our animal model, and showed that systemic doses of this drug slow glioma growth, prolonging median survival time by 17 percent," Stoll said in a press statement. "These results provide a novel drug target which could aid in the clinical treatment of this disease for patients in the future."
The idea of cancer growth being fuelled by glucose - a simple sugar that healthy cells also break down to use as an energy source - has been around since at least the 1950s, when Nobel Prize-winning German scientist Otto Warburg observed that tumours primarily metabolised glucose in order to grow.
This process, known as the Warburg effect, and is now estimated to occur in up to 80 percent of cancers.
"It is so fundamental to most cancers that a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, which has emerged as an important tool in the staging and diagnosis of cancer, works simply by revealing the places in the body where cells are consuming extra glucose," Sam Apple reports for The New York Times.
With so many cancers appearing to reply on glucose first and foremost for their growth, and healthy brain cells themselves also relying on sugar to keep functioning, it was only natural for scientists to assume that cancer cells in the brain would follow suit.
This perception was also perpetuated by the way scientists treat tissue samples in the lab.
As Stoll explained to The Independent, it's common for researchers to extract brain tumour cells from patients and put them into blood to culture them in the lab. But the simple act of placing these cells into a medium where sugar is more abundant than fat appears to change them, prompting them to switch fuel sources and use sugar because they're starved of fat.
Stoll's team avoided this complication by culturing their mouse and human tumour cells in serum-free conditions.
"What we have always needed to do is put the cells in [blood] serum. It’s a trick to get the cells to grow in culture," she said. "If you take malignant brain tumours and expose them to blood serum, it changes them. Then they switch quite easily."
We should make it clear that Stoll's discovery has so far only been made in animal models and extracted human brain tumour cells, so until the team can demonstrate similar effects from the drug etomoxir in human trials, we can't jump to any conclusions.
The researchers also say they're not ready to make any assumptions about how our diets could be implicated in the fat versus sugar debate at this stage.
But any new target for cancer research is something to be cautiously optimistic about, because if anything is going to allow us to finally beat the enigma that is cancer, it's going to be a better understanding of what fuels its relentless growth.
The results have been published in Neuro-Oncology.Mortgage rates have dipped to modern record lows this fall. In the spring, economists had been warning that rates would be rising by now.
At the end of March, the Federal Reserve wrapped up an initiative intended to drive down mortgage rates by buying $1.25 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities. The consensus view throughout the mortgage industry was that rates would rise steadily through the end of this year.
Instead, mortgage rates fell steadily through the summer and into the fall. Now, economists speculate the Fed might start buying Treasury securities to drive long-term interest rates even lower. The speculation seems to have put a cap on mortgage rates.
“I see rates low and I see them continuing low for a pretty long period,” says Paul Anastos, president of Mortgage Master, a lender based in Walpole, Mass.
A.W. Pickel, CEO of LeaderOne Financial, a mortgage bank based in Overland Park, Kan., says he doesn’t see how rates could go much lower.
“The mortgage interest rate should be inflation plus cost of funds. That should put us in the 4s, which is where it is,” he says.N.F.L. games appear live on network television every Sunday and Monday in Denmark. Due to the time difference, early-afternoon games are viewed in the evening, while the eight-thirty games are broadcast at two-thirty in the morning. Nonetheless, as many as a hundred thousand Danes tune in to regular-season games. That number increases to roughly a half million for the Super Bowl, which is screened at some movie theatres, where fans can watch the game while drinking Budweiser.
American football has never excited Europe much. The sport is more popular in Mexico, India, and China—though its popularity in other countries pales, of course, in comparison with its popularity at home, where nearly two-thirds of the population describe themselves as “fans.” N.F.L. Europe was a well-chronicled failure. But in Denmark, a country of about five and a half million, nearly a quarter of the population follows the National Football League, according to the (possibly optimistic) Danish American Football Federation. Percentage-wise, that's on par with Brazil and greater than Spain, Australia, and England—where three N.F.L. regular-season games will take place this year—according to a recent survey of global N.F.L. fans from thirty-two countries. (The survey, which focused on larger countries, did not include Denmark.)
Ultimately, though, the team from Søllerød couldn't stop the running attack of the Razorbacks' Geoffrey Lewis, and the pride of Vejle won the trophy yet again. Champagne was sprayed. More American rock songs were played. The twenty-seven hundred and fifty-four spectators—filling only a quarter of the stadium, but still a record crowd for American football in Denmark—roared. Meanwhile, most Danish fans of American football were at home, waiting for the genuine article: Sunday night N.F.L. football.
On the first play of the game, the Gold Diggers, wearing black and gold, did something rarely seen in stateside Super Bowls: quarterback Morten Forsbøl—who threw for eleven hundred and eighty-four yards and eleven touchdowns in 2015—tossed a lateral to Thomas Johansen, who found an open receiver down the field. But the team failed to score. The Razorbacks got the ball back, only to do something else unusual by N.F.L. standards: snapping the ball over their punter, Torben Atkinson Jørgensen, who fumbled it while trying to run out of the end zone. As quickly as you can say "General-clothes-press-inspector-head-superintendent-Goat-legs"—a character in Andersen's “The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep”_—_it was seven to nothing, Gold Diggers.
Inside the stadium, Van Halen's "Jump" blared as the teams raced onto the field. Since 2008, the Razorbacks and the Gold Diggers have faced each other in the championship six times. (Parity is not currently a feature of the Danish version of American football.) The Razorbacks won in dramatic fashion in both 2011 and 2012, the last time the two teams squared off on this stage, and they entered Saturday's game undefeated.
Last Saturday, on a cool afternoon in northern Denmark, the Guns N' Roses power ballad "Sweet Child o' Mine" played on the streets outside Viborg Stadium as fans of American football began to tailgate, in a subdued, Scandinavian manner, before the championship game in the country's top American football league. The Triangle Razorbacks, from Vejle, faced the Søllerød Gold Diggers, from the suburbs of Copenhagen, in Mermaid Bowl XXVII. The Mermaid Bowl was named after the fairy tale written in the nineteenth century by Hans Christian Andersen. (You may be familiar with the Disney version.) Though there is a literary football team in America—Poe's Baltimore Ravens—it's hard to imagine the Patriots and the Seahawks squaring off in, say, the Moby-Dick Bowl. But Denmark is happy to mix high culture with low, not to mention Danish with American.
How did this happen? A pair of onetime exchange students had a lot to do with it. In the late summer of 1985, a sixteen-year-old named Claus Elming got off a plane from Denmark and set foot in Minnesota for the first time. He would be living with a family of strangers in the small town of Prior Lake, twenty miles southwest of Minneapolis. Like many Danish kids, he played soccer and had never seen an American football game. But the family he'd been placed with was, as he recently put it to me, "football-crazed."
Elming's host-brother took him to watch a football game on his third day in the States: a Prior Lake Lakers high-school varsity scrimmage. "I thought the gladiator-look of the football players was quite crazy,” Elming said, “but also really cool." At home in Prior Lake, every Sunday after church, they watched the Minnesota Vikings—a team name that resonated, conveniently, with Elming's Scandinavian roots—and they played football with neighborhood kids all through the winter. By the time he left the States a year later, Elming had been transformed. "I brought home what my host brother had taught me," he said. "I was a football kid who had never played a down of organized, full-contact football, but I was determined to introduce this sport to as many people as possible."
At the time, American football was all but nonexistent in Denmark. There was only one team, according to Elming—the now-defunct Copenhagen Vikings—and they had to play Swedish teams to play at all. Football games had never been shown on Danish television. "It may as well have been figure skating," Elming said. In late 1987, when he was eighteen, Elming founded the Herning Hawks—the third football club team in Denmark—with two other former American exchange students. "I had absolutely no plan at the time," Elming said. "I was a kid who loved football and just wanted to play it, bring it to Denmark."
There was only one television network in Denmark in 1987, Danmarks Radio. That year, for the first time, it broadcast highlights from the Super Bowl. The legendary Danish sports commentator Claus Borre—who normally covered swimming, Formula One, and boxing—was chosen to describe the game between the Denver Broncos and the New York Giants. "He read John Elway’s name as ‘Eiway’—with an ‘i’ instead of an ‘l’—and since nobody had ever heard of the guy in Denmark, we thought for many years that his name was John Eiway," Peter Sloth, a Danish sports journalist, recalled. A few years later, a Nintendo video game called John Elway’s Quarterback appeared, and, Sloth said, "everybody in Denmark thought that they’d spelled the name wrong!"
TV 2 was established in 1988, breaking Danmarks Radio's monopoly and, soon, becoming the first network in the country to broadcast a full N.F.L. game: Super Bowl XXIII, between Joe Montana's 49ers and Boomer Esiason's Bengals. That same year, Elming moved to Aarhus to study, where he also founded the Aarhus Tigers. Soon, club games were a novelty subject on the nightly news. Early video clips show players using American expressions, like "Let's Go!," to get into the spirit of the sport. Danish competitors spiked the ball and danced after scoring a touchdown, imitating their American counterparts. Super Bowl parties were also successfully replicated.
In the nineties, Elming played wide receiver for the Herning Hawks, the Aarhus Tigers, and the Fredericia Jets; he later coached all three, as well as the Avedøre Monarchs and the Danish under-nineteen national team. Owing to both his knowledge of American football and his good looks, Elming was eventually asked to anchor TV 2 Sport—essentially Denmark's ESPN—and soon became known as the "John Madden of Denmark." Known to wear purple underwear, an intimate homage to his Minnesota Vikings, Elming is also referred to as "N.F.L.ming."
The other exchange student who played a crucial role in all this was Morten Andersen, who, starting in 1982, had an extraordinary N.F.L. career. The now-retired kicker, born in Copenhagen and raised in Struer, played twenty-five seasons in the N.F.L. and holds the all-time league record for points scored: twenty-five hundred and forty-four. He is, far and away, the most celebrated American football player from Denmark, an admittedly small group. "Morten Andersen was very essential in the beginning," Elming said. "We had a Dane in the best league in the world, and we would report on his success or failures every week. He became the 'Great Dane' to us." In America, he was known as "Mr. Automatic," for the reliability of his left leg.
Andersen is now seven years into his wine-collecting retirement in the States, and Elming has moved on to hosting Denmark's "Dancing with the Stars." Both have been inducted into the Danish American Football Federation's hall of fame. A new flag bearer for American football is needed in Denmark. As it happens, the University of Connecticut has the six-foot-nine offensive tackle Andreas Knappe, nicknamed Thor, who is from Silkeborg and played for the Triangle Razorbacks a few years ago. CBS Sports recently called Knappe, a junior, "one of the most intriguing players in college football this season."
"As my first year went on," Knappe told a reporter, "I started to understand what was going on. I wasn't running around like a chicken with his head cut off. I knew the game. I understood the game. There are still some things I had to work on. The game was not as sophisticated when I played in Denmark."Image copyright AFP Image caption Child jazz piano prodigy Joey Alexander hails from Bali, Indonesia
He may be only 11, but he delivered a performance that brought the audience at the 2016 Grammy awards to their feet in a standing ovation.
Indonesian jazz pianist Joey Alexander is the youngest performer ever to be nominated for the prestigious music award.
He did not win a Grammy but while the young musician performed on stage, the cameras panned across to singer Bruno Mars, who was watching with glistening eyes.
Many from Joey's homeland also expressed their admiration and support for the young star.
You were definitely the star of the show," tweeted Indonesian music composer Sherina Sinna. Movie-maker Joko Anwar also described him as a "hope".
He was born in Bali, Indonesia
Josiah Alexander Sila was born in Bali's Denpasar city to Christian parents Denny Sila and Farah Leonora Urbach, who ran a tourism business.
His parents have described their son's talents as a "gift from God".
There were no formal jazz classes in Bali where he grew up, so the young musician took part in jazz sessions with more experienced performers.
It was then that his parents decided to make the move to the Indonesian capital Jakarta - home to one of the world's largest jazz festivals - to pursue Joey's musical dream.
He went on to win music competitions before his family moved to New York in 2014.
Image copyright AP
He taught himself to play the piano, at age six
The child prodigy taught himself to play piano at age six, after his father bought him an electronic keyboard.
Joey has said that learning music came naturally for him, thanks to listening to songs from his father's personal jazz collection.
"My dad played a little bit of piano and guitar, but not that professionally," Joey said in an early interview, about falling in love with the piano.
"I saw him play and I said, 'I want to play. I want to try this instrument.'"
The young musician considers Harry Connick, Jr. and Herbie Hancock among his main musical influences, and also admires Clifford Brown and Miles Davis.
There could be something in the blood because he is also the nephew of Indonesian rock singer Nafa Urbach.
He was discovered on YouTube
Renowned Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, discovered Joey after seeing him perform in a YouTube video in 2014.
Praising the young pianist on Facebook, he then invited him to play at the Jazz at Lincoln Center's gala, making him him an "overnight sensation".
Joey went on to make his US debut, performing at several Jazz festivals.
Then he released his first jazz album
Joey's debut album titled, "My Favourite Things" was released on 12 May, 2015. He was 11 years old at the time of its release.
He became the first Indonesian act to crack the US Billboard album charts, debuting at number 174.
The record re-entered the charts and peaked at number 59 in January 2016.Let's face it: in Marvel Comics, there aren't many times when you're more sure that you're about to get absolutely demolished than when you see Odin suit up in Destroyer armor.
The good folks at Diamond Select Toys have provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive first look at their latest action figure, which allows fans to recreate exactly that, in the form of a Destroyer 7" action figure that features an interchangeable head featuring the face of Thor's father, Odin.
The Destroyer, that massively-powerful automaton that's as often a menace to Asgard as any kind of real protection, is generally nigh-impossible to stop without totally destroying it -- but Odin has been known to project himself into the armor, taking control of it. The toy, which runs $24.99 retail, will be available in the fall or winter and, besides the interchangeable heads, comes with an Odinsword.
This will come out, of course, ahead of everybody talking about Thor when Thor: Ragnarok is in production next year. Rumors have already started to swirl, especially once it was revealed that the Incredible Hulk will play a role in the film. You can check it out above and below.Let’s just get the important lack of news out of the way, Returning Registration for San Diego Comic-Con 2018 does not have a date. Yet.
Comic-Con International posted a strange Toucan blog today — offering several details on the process of the impending Returning Registration, but no date. However, at this point, we expect an update very soon.
The first of Comic-Con’s badge sales technically kicks off tomorrow (Wednesday, October 11) with Creative Professional registration, but the first big event — Returning Registration, open to those who attended as a general attendee in 2017 — should be right around the corner. The process, which everyone who is eligible for should already be familiar with, appears to be identical to previous years.
Those who are eligible will receiving a link to the Expo Logic waiting room at least 48 hours prior to the sale, and you’ll also be able to eventually find your personal registration code in your Comic-Con Member ID. You can purchase badges for up to three people, including yourself, but each person must be eligible on their own (so sorry, you can’t buy your first-time attendee cousin a badge in this sale). If you need a quick refresher on more than that, you can find our Visual Guide from last year here.
what is actually different? Well, CCI has now created a tab in your Member ID called “Contact Info” which stores both your physical address and your badge shipping address — and you have until May 14, 2018 to confirm your shipping address is correct. Last year, the tab was called something else. Is that really all the new information? Yep, basically.
Also just like last year, international attendees have the option of either entering a U.S. domestic address for their badge shipping address, or they can pick up on-site.
You can find the full update on the Toucan Blog — but we’re still just in a holding pattern.Mainstream piracy on the current generation of gaming consoles is pretty much non-existent, with the PS4 and Xbox One standing firm in the face of determined hackers. Now, however, a flurry of PS4 games including GTA V and Far Cry 4 has hit the web. That being said, it's doubtful that many gamers will jump through the hoops required to play them.
During the reign of the first few generations of consoles, gamers became accustomed to their machines being compromised by hacking groups and enthusiasts, to enable the execution of third-party software.
Often carried out under the banner of running “homebrew” code, so-called jailbroken consoles also brought with them the prospect of running pirate copies of officially produced games. Once the floodgates were opened, not much could hold things back.
With the advent of mass online gaming, however, things became more complex. Regular firmware updates mean that security holes could be fixed remotely whenever a user went online, rendering the jailbreaking process a cat-and-mouse game with continually moving targets.
This, coupled with massively improved overall security, has meant that the current generation of consoles has remained largely piracy free, at least on a do-it-at-home basis. Now, however, that position is set to change after the first decrypted PS4 game dumps began to hit the web this week.
Thanks to release group KOTF (Knights of the Fallen), Grand Theft Auto V, Far Cry 4, and Assassins Creed IV are all available for download from the usual places. As expected they are pretty meaty downloads, with GTAV weighing in via 90 x 500MB files, Far Cry4 via 54 of the same size, and ACIV sporting 84 x 250MB.
Partial NFO file for PS4 GTA V
While undoubtedly large, it’s not the filesize that will prove most prohibitive when it comes to getting these beasts to run on a PlayStation 4. Indeed, a potential pirate will need to jump through a number of hoops to enjoy |
recently, with the phrase, "We report, you decide," and the marketing slogans were an endless source of both frustration and amusement to his left-leaning detractors, some of whom delighted in calling his creation "Faux News" or other derisive derivatives.
Ailes, who never gave an inch of satisfaction to his enemies or competitors, was fiercely protective of the Fox News brand, once even suing comedian (and future U.S. senator) Al Franken for copyright infringement over Franken’s 2003 book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, though a judge ruled the case was without merit.
Left-leaning AlterNet petitioned unsuccessfully to have the U.S. Patent Office rescind the network’s “fair and balanced” trademark, arguing it was inaccurate, and Ailes and Fox News were the No. 1 target of progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America. He and Fox News inspired documentary films and several books with a critical take on the man and his network, including 2014’s The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News — and Divided a Country.
Fox News TV hosts and PR executives feverishly maligned author Gabriel Sherman and his unauthorized biography on the air, in social media and behind the scenes, an effort allegedly orchestrated and micromanaged by Ailes himself.
Ailes consistently seemed to get the best of his enemies, and in March 2015, a scientific poll from Quinnipiac University determined that American consumers considered Fox News the most trusted news network on cable or broadcast. Ailes and others at Fox News also repeatedly pointed out that Fox News had about as many liberal guests as conservative guests on its channel, a goal not pursued by its competitors, they said.
Ailes never argued that Fox News wasn't different, but he took offense to accusations that it shut out opposing voices. "The first rule of media bias is selection," Ailes told Zev Chafets, author of Roger Ailes: Off Camera, a rare book in that it is a positive look at Ailes. "Most of the media bullshit you about who they are. We don't. We're not programming to conservatives, we're just not eliminating their point of view."
Ailes also told Chafets — who received unprecedented access to Ailes' office, home, family and friends — of a discussion at a cocktail party with a man who told him that Fox News isn't needed because CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC and PBS already satisfy his needs. "If they all have the same take and we have a different take, why does that bother you?" asks Ailes. "The last two guys who succeeded in lining up the media on one side were Hitler and Stalin."
So powerful was Fox News that it was credited (or blamed, depending on one’s political bent) with turning a rag-tag, grassroots movement called the Tea Party into an estimated 40 million-strong political force. Stories accusing Ailes and Fox News of manufacturing the right-wing Tea Party were legion, many times reported by the same journalists who championed the left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement.
In 2011, a 10,000-word article in Rolling Stone magazine compared Ailes to former Communist dictator Mao Tse-tung and accused him of “redbaiting,” of having been “on the take from Big Tobacco,” injecting “venom into the media bloodstream” and orchestrating “disinformation” campaigns; it also quoted myriad insiders who said he was anti-gay, anti-Muslim and anti-Jew. “It is Ailes who built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc,” reporter Tim Dickinson concluded in his piece.
“Attacking me and Fox News is nothing new — it’s a cottage industry,” Ailes told The Hollywood Reporter in January 2014. “But I won’t quit stirring things up. I saw [CBS Corp. chief] Les Moonves one night in a restaurant with my old friend [former Sirius XM Radio CEO] Mel Karmazin. They came over to my table and said: ‘We got a pool on you, Ailes. It’s up to a million dollars. Everybody wants to know when you’re going to die or retire because you’re killing us!’”
The beginning of the end for Ailes came on July 6, 2016, when former anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a lawsuit claiming that she was let go from Fox News as retaliation for rebuffing his sexual advances. Other women soon came forward with complaints, and even Kelly reportedly told investigators that he made "unwanted sexual advances toward her" about a decade ago.
Terms of his exit agreement were not released, but sources said Ailes walked away with $40 million, which is the remainder left on his contract that ran into 2018.
Ailes was born and raised in Warren, Ohio. He suffered from hemophilia so he didn’t participate in recess at school and was hospitalized because of the disease. He delivered newspapers as a boy and considered himself a movie buff back then, fond of John Wayne Westerns and patriotic films like Yankee Doodle Dandy with Jimmy Cagney.
His father, Bob Ailes, was a maintenance man for automaker Packard, and he was abusive by today's standards — but a hero to his son. "When he got mad, he beat me … he used an electric cord, a belt, whatever was handy," the Fox News exec told Chafets.
"One time I visited my father at work and saw him getting dressed down by some college boy executive," Ailes said in the book. "I asked him why he was taking that kind of shit. I remember exactly what he said. He said, 'I'm taking the guff so that someday you will be one of the guys giving the orders.'"
Ailes came close to death as a boy when he bit his tongue and, because of the hemophilia, no one in Warren could stop the bleeding, so his dad drove him 60 miles to Cleveland, where a doctor saved him. His father's co-workers from Packard donated blood. "Always remember … you've got blue collar in your veins," Bob Ailes told his son.
After graduating high school, Ailes was kicked out of the house. He presumed it was another life lesson from his dad, but he learned later that the harsh treatment was owed to the fact that his mother was in the process of leaving his father. Ailes enrolled at Ohio University, where he studied radio and television. He later admitted he “was hammered all the time” as a young man.
The Air Force ROTC rejected him because of his health, so he joined the college radio station and did some acting in collegiate stage plays. After graduating, he took a low-level job on The Mike Douglas Show, working his way up to executive producer by age 25.
The position afforded him the opportunity to meet powerful people, including Nixon, who told Ailes that he considered television a “gimmick” that had cost him his 1960 presidential bid. Ailes cautioned the candidate to have more respect for TV, and Nixon hired him as his media consultant during his successful run in 1968.
After he was elected, Nixon discarded Ailes, who by then had founded Ailes Communications, and he was soon consulting for numerous political candidates and other high-end clients. In the early 1970s, he turned his attention, once again, to theater, co-producing a flop called Mother Earth before scoring an off-Broadway hit with The Hot L Baltimore (later adapted by Norman Lear for an ABC sitcom). Ailes also produced and directed a 1984 TV special, Television and the Presidency.
In 1984, he helped re-elect Reagan in one of the most lopsided presidential victories in history, and in 1988 he helped orchestrate Bush’s come-from-behind win over Michael Dukakis, in large measure by scripting a “Revolving Door” TV commercial that focused on a “furlough” policy approved of by the then-Massachusetts governor. The ad showed an actor portraying Willie Horton leaving prison on a weekend pass, then explained to the audience that the convicted murderer committed rape and armed robbery while on his furlough.
In 1992, Ailes encouraged radio star Rush Limbaugh to try television, resulting in a syndicated half-hour show that Ailes produced for four years. “I had to learn how to take being hated as a measure of success,” Limbaugh said at an awards dinner for Ailes in 2009, “and the person that taught me to deal with this and to remain psychologically healthy was Roger Ailes. … The things I’ve learned from him about being a man, about the country, about how to be a professional, nobody else taught me.”
Ailes was named president of CNBC in 1993, and the next year he launched a sister channel, America’s Talking, on which he hosted a show called Straight Forward. While CNBC flourished under Ailes, the network decided to ditch America’s Talking after only two years, replacing it with a joint venture with Microsoft to be branded as MSNBC. He quit and went to work for Murdoch, who had dreamed of creating an all-news cable network that would some day eclipse CNN.
“We all know that whatever Roger touches works,” Limbaugh said in 2009, referencing Fox News. “Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera, and yet everybody who does is a reflection of him. He has the ability to inspire, to motivate, to enthuse.”
In his later years, hemophilia, Sherman wrote in his Ailes book, “caused blood to pool in his knees, hips and ankles. Though the swelling ravaged his joints, he was stoic about the problem — on occasion he’d sit through a meeting, his shoe filling up with blood from a cut. His pain became a kind of badge. ‘The difference between pros and amateurs is that pros play hurt,’ he once said."
Even President Barack Obama, scorned privately by Ailes and publicly on Fox News, has acknowledged the executive’s massive influence. Sherman wrote that when Ailes visited the White House in 2008, Obama greeted him with, “I see the most powerful man in the world is here.” Ailes replied with: “Don’t believe what you read, Mr. President. I started those rumors myself.”
In a THR cover story published in April 2015, Ailes said that he was writing a memoir, not for his own sake but for that of his son, Zac. "I don't want my son to have to collect a bunch of New York Times articles to see what I was like … you read The New York Times, you think, 'Gee, my dad was a monster,'" he said.
"I did what I did," he continued. "I went against the grain. And I understand that I would be criticized. Those were all choices. I really can't bitch about it. They are choices I'd make again."
#RIPRogerAiles He gave many the opportunity to work -feed their families. He was genius w a wickedly funny sense of humor. Rip — Jeanine Pirro (@JudgeJeanine) May 18, 2017
RIP, Roger. Praying for comfort to his family during this difficult time, especially for his young son. — Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) May 18, 2017
My life changed the day I met Roger Ailes. Flaws and all, he believed in me when others didn't. I am forever grateful. Rest in peace, Roger. pic.twitter.com/8c0czMZgSC — Jehmu (@Jehmu) May 18, 2017The White House’s reaction to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s embrace of Sen. Barack Obama’s 16-month withdrawal timetable is the like the five stages of grief.
When a guy you more or less install in power and keep there on a very short leash starts going off the reservation, you first claim there was some sort of translation error. Then you claim that what he says is not what he means. When he continues to reiterate the point, you assert that he knows not of what he speaks.
And when he becomes adamant on the point, you do what White House press secretary Dana Perino tried to do today, just pretend that nothing Maliki has said trumps the earlier joint statement issued by the U.S. and Iraqi governments last week: “It is no small thing for two leaders to issue a statement; it is one that was taken with care and with seriousness.”
Fun times in the White House briefing room:After two weeks in Lakewood Ranch, Florida and another back in Central Ohio at SuperKick in Lewis Center, Crew SC is preparing for phase three of preseason. The Black & Gold are escaping the cold Columbus weather and heading to Tucson, Arizona to participate in the fifth annual Desert Diamond Cup over the next two weeks.
Hosted by FC Tucson of the USL Premier Development League (PDL), Crew SC is set to be joined by five other MLS sides as well as two USL teams and the hosts in the tournament.
The Black & Gold will play Sporting Kansas City at 8 p.m. ET on Wednesday, February 17, followed by contests against Real Salt Lake on Saturday, February 20 (7 p.m. ET) and the Swope Park Rangers (USL) on Wednesday, February 24 (8 p.m. ET). The fourth and final match will be played on Saturday, February 27, against a yet to be determined opponent.
ColumbusCrewSC.com will provide full coverage of the preseason friendlies, including live audio streams of the matches against Kansas City and the Swope Park Rangers. Crew SC broadcast voice Neil Sika will have the call.
In addition, there will be live video streams of the Black & Gold’s matches on February 20 (RSL) and 27 (TBD). The kickoff time for the final match in the tournament has yet to be determined.
Additional information for the tournament can be found at http://bit.ly/DDCTickets.BOSTON — A couple of mornings a week, Eleanor McCullen stakes out a spot outside the Planned Parenthood clinic here and tries to persuade women on their way in to think twice before having an abortion.
But she has to watch her step. If she crosses a painted yellow semicircle outside the clinic’s entrance, she commits a crime under a 2007 Massachusetts law.
Early last Wednesday, bundled up against the 7-degree cold, Ms. McCullen said she found the line to be intimidating, frustrating and a violation of her First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday in her challenge to the law.
The state’s attorney general, Martha Coakley, who is the lead defendant in the suit, said the 35-foot buffer zone created by the 2007 law was a necessary response to an ugly history of harassment and violence at abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a shooting rampage at two facilities in 1994.It’s no use complaining to the International Olympic Committee, since it’s playing the role of Daddy in this family drama. He also disapproves of everything we do: He complained about construction delays, criticized the pollution in Rio’s waterways and said we were even worse than Greece, before the 2004 Summer Olympics. “Your older sister had better grades,” we heard him say.
It’s as if they were both expecting a classical pianist and all they got was a punk rocker who knows only three-chord songs. Well, if they wanted punctuality, maybe they should have chosen the Germans or the Swiss to host their events. We Brazilians are slightly different.
Last month, Mário Gobbi, the president of the Corinthians soccer team (which owns Itaquera Stadium, one of the World Cup venues), claimed that delays were part of the Brazilian way of life. “I don’t know of any renovation or construction project that went on schedule,” he said in an interview.
I’ll give one example: The subway system in Salvador, a city in Bahia state, on our northeast coast, has been under construction since 1997. The government has spent more than $450 million for four miles of tracks, which will be ready to operate on June 11, one day before the World Cup opening. (Two years ago, the Federal Court of Auditors found evidence that $180 million of the project’s money had been lost to overbilling and embezzlement, but the matter is still under investigation. Bahia’s Court of Justice has also indicted a number of businessmen for illicit association, formation of cartels and bid rigging.)
Another: 22 years ago I worked on a petition to clean up the Tietê River, in São Paulo. Today, $1.6 billion and more than one million signatures later, it still stinks.
In Brazil it takes 13 bureaucratic procedures — required signatures and forms and the like — and 107.5 working days to open a business, according to a recent report from the World Bank. Construction permits take 400 days to get issued, and you need to wait 58 days more just to get electricity flowing.
It once took a man in Bahia four years to schedule a common diagnostic test called a uroflowmetry at a public hospital.Galileo Overview
The Galileo is a revolutionary, iOS-controlled robotic iPhone platform with infinite spherical rotation capability. Just swipe your finger on the screen of your iPad or other iOS device and Galileo reacts, orienting your iPhone or iPod Touch accordingly. With applications in areas of photography, cinematography, social networking, and video conferencing, Galileo gives iOS devices endless possibilities of remote-controlled motion. Capable of infinite 360° pan-and-tilt at speeds up to 200° per second in any orientation, Galileo is an invaluable tool to everyone from an amateur photographer to the professional cinematographer, and vastly improves the experience of video chat for anyone needing to stay connected.
How Will You Use Galileo?
To bring distant experiences closer than ever before? To capture an exquisite sunset panorama? To film silky smooth gimbal shots with unparalleled power and ease? Galileo gives you the ability to do things you never thought possible.
Video calls and conferencing – stay connected as you follow the action
– stay connected as you follow the action Baby monitoring – see what you want to see, not just what the babysitter shows you
– see what you want to see, not just what the babysitter shows you Remote learning – follow professors around the classroom; see who is asking questions
– follow professors around the classroom; see who is asking questions Time-lapse photography – create dynamic time-lapse videos that encompass movement along with passage of time
– create dynamic time-lapse videos that encompass movement along with passage of time Cinematography – Shoot interesting transition shots, panning down, panning across and up, etc. Mount the Galileo on rails and create a mini-rig for your iPhone camera!
– Shoot interesting transition shots, panning down, panning across and up, etc. Mount the Galileo on rails and create a mini-rig for your iPhone camera! Real estate photography – build 360° spherical virtual home tours with ease
Below is a short time-lapse demo video to give you a sense of what's possible with Galileo. The clips within this video were shot on a prototype Galileo with an iPhone4.
Galileo Features
Infinite 360° panning and tilting rotation. 200° per second pan-and-tilt speeds.
200° per second pan-and-tilt speeds. Remotely controlled from your iPad, iPhone, or web browser. Swipe your finger across the screen or move your mouse to control the movement of the Galileo and your device.
Swipe your finger across the screen or move your mouse to control the movement of the Galileo and your device. SDK (software developers kit) for app development. Freedom to integrate Galileo functionality into existing apps or to create entirely new apps built around the movement capabilities of Galileo. Or build software to integrate the Galileo with other hardware (e.g. camera rails).
Freedom to integrate Galileo functionality into existing apps or to create entirely new apps built around the movement capabilities of Galileo. Or build software to integrate the Galileo with other hardware (e.g. camera rails). Outfitted with a standard tripod screw, the Galileo can be mounted on any tripod.
, the Galileo can be mounted on any tripod. Fabulous charging station for your iPhone or iPod. Charges your device while plugged in (USB cable included).
Charges your device while plugged in (USB cable included). Rechargeable Lithium polymer battery lets you use your Galileo anywhere.
The Galileo charges your device while plugged in
Specifications
Works with: iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPod Touch 4th Generation
iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPod Touch 4th Generation Controlled by: iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2, iPad 3, iPod Touch 4th Generation, and web browser
iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2, iPad 3, iPod Touch 4th Generation, and web browser Colors: Black, white, limited edition Kickstarter Green
Black, white, limited edition Kickstarter Green Weight: 7oz
7oz Size: 2 x 3.25” closed, 3.5 x 4.3” open
2 x 3.25” closed, 3.5 x 4.3” open Tripod Mount: Universal 1/4” thread; compatible with all standard tripods
Available in black, white, and limited edition Kickstarter Green
Join the Galileo Community!
What excites us the most about Galileo are the uses that we haven't thought of yet. With our Galileo SDK, app developers have the freedom to integrate Galileo functionality into their existing apps as well as create entirely new apps around the unbounded movement of Galileo, expanding the possibilities for automated tracking and photographic and cinematographic applications.
So what will you do with Galileo?
Freedom to develop apps or integrate into other hardware with our SDK
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!Friday the 13th is almost like Christmas for people who love tattoos. Many tattoo shops around Las Vegas will be offering special $13 tattoos (plus lucky $7 tip). If you have been itching for new ink, here is a list of 13 shops around town (in no particular order) to choose from.
1. VOODOO TATTOO 3 : Voodoo Tattoo 3 has many designs to choose from on Friday the 13th. The shop will also be collecting blankets, hoodies, sweaters, jackets and etc. for those in need on Friday. Donated items will be distributed on Thanksgiving weekend along with a meal. All donations are welcome.
2. CROWN ELECTRIC TATTOO : Crown Electric Tattoo on East Charleston Boulevard offers hundreds of designs to choose from, not just one or two sheets. They will start tattooing at 10 a.m. and not stop until 6 a.m. Nov. 14. In addition, all piercings (except genitals) will be half price on Friday the 13th.
3. KOOLSVILLE TATTOOS : Koolsville Tattoos in downtown Las Vegas will be giving away free $100 tattoos on Friday the 13th. They will give away one tattoo every hour from 6 p.m. to midnight. They will also be offering $13 tattoos (plus tip) and say they have all new sheets of tattoos.
4. SKIN FACTORY TATTOO : Both locations of Skin Factory Tattoo (Sunset Road and Horizon Ridge Parkway) will be offering Friday the 13th tattoos for a grand total of $20. Tattoos will be done on a first come, first serve basis. Cash only. No minors or drunks. No changes to the design, including changing the color. Limit of 2 per customer. Must have ID. No body piercings (although piercer will give discounts to customers who return the next day).
5. LAST CHANCE TATTOO : Last Chance Tattoo will once again be offering $13 tattoos (plus $7 tip) on Friday the 13th. In addition, they will also offer basic piercings for $20. They will be open from noon to midnight and they've added many more designs to choose from.
RELATED: 13 things you didn't know about Friday the 13th
6. REVOLUTION TATTOO PARLOR : Revolution Tattoo Parlor will offer more than 100 designs for just $13 (plus tip) on Friday the 13th. Their six tattoo artists will begin working at 10 a.m. and keep going until at least midnight. They will also have other designs for slightly more money, but definitely cheaper than the normal $300 to $600. Those designs will start at $60 and go up to $100.
7. IRONHORSE TATTOOS : Friday the 13th is a little different at Ironhorse Tattoos, which has been tatting Las Vegas locals and tourists for 15 years. In addition to having flash art to choose from, the tattoo shop will offer 13 percent off of any of its services that day. They will be open from noon to midnight and will have 8 artists and 3 body piercers on hand.
RELATED: Is the number 13 lucky or unlucky?
8. NAKED CITY INK : Naked City Ink on South Commerce Street will be offering custom-designed Friday the 13th tattoos. They will be offering old-school, vintage tattoos to choose from. Tattoos will cost $13 plus tip. They will open at 1 p.m.
9. PRECIOUS SLUT TATTOO : Precious Slut Tattoo 4 will be offering $13 tattoos on Friday the 13th and will also be offering two piercings for $70, which is a $10 discount. All of their artists will be working that day and they will begin tattooing at midnight on Nov. 13.
10. REVOLT TATTOOS: Revolt Tattoos won't be offering $13 tattoos, but they will have one heck of a deal. They will be doing tattoos that would normally cost $300 for $130.
11. ATOMIC CITY TATTOOS : Atomic City Tattoos is offering Friday the 13th tattoos and piercings for $13 plus $7 tip. Hours are noon to 10 p.m. Must choose from designs provided. No substitutions. First come, first served.
12. BLACK SPADE TATTOO : Black Spade Tattoo will be offering not only traditional Friday the 13th tattoos, but they will also offer small cute things like small flowers, Hello Kittys, grenades, chess pieces and more. There will be three artists working and the doors will open at noon. They will stop signing up customers between 9 and 10 p.m. depending on number of people in line. Get there early. $13 plus $7 tip.
13. TRIP INK TATTOO : Trip Ink Tattoo on Dean Martin Drive will be offering Friday the 13th tattoos drawn by one of its artists. Cost is $13, of course, plus the $7 tip. Although not located on the Strip, it's close enough for most tourists to get to without an expensive cab ride. Locals welcome too.
As mentioned earlier, there are definitely more than 13 tattoo shops in the valley offering Friday the 13th tattoos. Another one you might want to check out is the 702 Tattoo Shop. They will be open from 11 a.m. to midnight. And, Ship & Anchor Tattoo will start tattooing at 12:01 a.m. Nov. 13 and keep going until 11:59 p.m. Each artist will have their own designs. In addition, Red Handed Tattoo will open at 11 a.m. and offer a many designs for $13 plus tip.
Keep in mind, if you decide to get a Friday the 13th tattoo, there are a few basic rules. No one under 18 is allowed and everyone must have valid ID. Most shops only accept cash. Most shops will not tattoo hands, neck, faces or tummies. Most shops require you to choose a design from the selection they provide and there is absolutely no modification. Tattoos are usually done on a first come, first served basis.
Shops are not listed in any particular order and list does not imply an endorsement of the skills of any of the artists at the shops.Hideo Kojima wrote several long posts that he shared on Kojima Productions’ Twitter account. In them, he discussed Death Stranding’s influences, themes and development. It’s clear a lot of thought was put into the game’s title, with death and “connecting strands” being central themes.
This confirms that development has indeed begun, though knowing Kojima (five years passed between his two most recent games, Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain) it could still be a long time before Death Stranding releases.
Hideo on some of the support we've been getting this far. pic.twitter.com/jyI0fr9syE — Kojima Productions (@KojiPro2015_EN) June 16, 2016
Part 3 of 9. Two and a half months. pic.twitter.com/VqBPHIPPuV — Kojima Productions (@KojiPro2015_EN) June 16, 2016
Part 4 of 9. Some of the new concepts for the game. pic.twitter.com/YH9VoMZ2FZ — Kojima Productions (@KojiPro2015_EN) June 16, 2016
Kojima's comments hit on the meaninglessness of death in so many games. From Mario to Dark Souls, death is little more than a stopgap, a time penalty before you try the thing again. It'll be interesting to see how he tries to subvert that with Death Stranding.
Part 5 of 9. On what should and shouldn't be different. pic.twitter.com/MQ11oPNcz4 — Kojima Productions (@KojiPro2015_EN) June 16, 2016
Kojima went on to mention the influence of a book from his youth, Rope by Kobo Abe.
Part 6 of 9. On Kobo Abe, one of Hideo's favorite authors. pic.twitter.com/2AkJ0eHSLi — Kojima Productions (@KojiPro2015_EN) June 16, 2016
Part 7 of 9. On sticks and ropes. pic.twitter.com/RxgkNXOYRG — Kojima Productions (@KojiPro2015_EN) June 16, 2016
Part 8 of 9, how Kobo Abe's sticks and ropes are keywords. pic.twitter.com/BcLcWUnjRL — Kojima Productions (@KojiPro2015_EN) June 16, 2016
Part 9 of 9. When asked about what genre is the game. pic.twitter.com/QtZoGBsPta — Kojima Productions (@KojiPro2015_EN) June 16, 2016
Well, if one of his goals is to create a new genre, then he’s certainly set the bar high.
Kojima also gave an inside look at the process of creating the game’s trailer (which you can watch here). Performance capture was used to bring Norman Reedus into the trailer. This meant a massive camera set-up and the good ol’ motion capture suit.
We’re excited to see Kojima’s first venture outside the Metal Gear franchise in a long time.Eight men allegedly gang-raped a woman before her husband in a vehicle on Thursday night in Jalaun district. The couple was then robbed and dumped on Auraiya-Jalaun highway. Police said the Jalaun based couple was travelling home from Jaipur, where they work as artisans. They reached Auraiya by train around Thursday midnight and were looking for a public transport, when the driver of a loader van offered them a lift.
Representational Image
Shortly afterwards, the vehicle halted at a liquor shop from where some other men boarded it. It was then driven to a secluded spot, where eight men took turns to rape the woman after tying up her husband. The duo was also abused and threatened against raising an alarm, cops said.
Representational Image
The couple was then dumped on the highway after being robbed of their belongings. They somehow reached out to Jalaun cops around 3 am on Friday, and lodged an FIR, following which the woman was sent for medical examination.
Don't Miss 8.7 K SHARES 420 SHARES 96.2 K SHARES 50.8 K SHARES 65.5 K SHARES
Additional SP of Jalaun S C Shakya said, "An FIR has been lodged against eight unidentified men for gang rape and dacoity. We'll arrest the culprits soon." Some people have been rounded up and the probe is on, Shakya added.
Originally published in Times of IndiaCAIRO — A CNN report about the sale of African migrants as slaves in the North African nation of Libya has incited outrage in recent days, prompting a protest in central Paris, condemnation by the African Union and an official investigation.
Hundreds of protesters, mostly young black people, demonstrated in front of the Libyan Embassy in central Paris on Saturday — with some carrying a sign that said, “Put an end to the slavery and concentration camps in Libya,” and chanting, “Free our brothers!” — three days after CNN aired footage of migrants being auctioned off in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
“We have to mobilize — we can’t let this kind of thing happen,” one of the protesters told the television station France 24. “Did we really need to see such shocking pictures before taking a stand? I don’t think so.”
French police officers fired tear gas to disperse the rally, which had turned violent.
Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union Commission and the foreign minister of Chad, issued a statement after the rally, calling the auctions “despicable.” He urged the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to assist the Libyan authorities with the investigation that they opened in response to CNN’s report.Leafs 2017 Centennial Classic Jersey Leak?
The Toronto Maple Leafs appear to be adding a splash of silver to their look for the upcoming 2017 NHL Centennial Classic.
Courtesy an image Tweeted to us via a reliable, anonymous source the Leafs will be wearing blue sweaters with a white and silver horizontal stripe across the chest and arms (similar to — dare I say it? The Montreal Canadiens). On the chest is the Leafs logo new for the 2016-17 season re-coloured to add silver veins in the leaf and a silver and blue outline around it.
Take a look:
Note that this is an infant jersey (as indicated by the “INF” tag), it isn’t uncommon for infant and toddler jerseys to omit or simplify details for the purposes of their smaller size so it’s entirely possible this isn’t the 100% exact on-ice design — for example, the logo might be larger, there may be a shoulder patch, or perhaps laces at the collar which we don’t see here.
The Maple Leafs have never worn a jersey design like this throughout their history, but while playing as the Toronto St. Pats the team wore a green and white jersey with a horizontal stripe across the front for several years in the 1920s.
Unfortunately no images of what the Red Wings may be wearing yet — but if the Leafs jersey is any indicator, combined with the colour schemes used in the NHL centennial season logos, I’d expect silver trim to go along with their classic red and white look.
The 2017 Centennial Classic will be played at Toronto’s BMO Field on January 1, 2017.
UPDATE:
We’ve since been sent an additional photo of the jersey courtesy another Twitter user, this photo shows an adult size jersey which indeed includes laces at the collar.A Minnesota Republican is facing a backlash after sending out a message mocking transgender people.
“A guy who thinks he’s a girl is still a guy with a mental health condition,” Minnesota state Rep. Mary Franson tweeted Wednesday morning.
Franson sent the tweet after two transgender candidates were elected to the Minneapolis City Council.
One of those candidates was Andrea Jenkins, the first black openly transgender woman elected to political office in the United States.
“Thank you, Representative Franson, for showing all Minnesotans your true bigotry and unapologetic transphobia,” she told CityPages. “As a tax-paying citizen, I am extremely disappointed in seeing my public officials displaying such discrimination against and complete disregard for transgender residents of the great state of Minnesota.”
The Minnesota LGBTQ legislative caucus also released a statement criticizing Franson.
According to CBS Minnesota, Franson has deactivated her personal Twitter account along with one of her Facebook pages.
But she is still receiving backlash directed at her official Twitter account:
@RepMaryFranson I am embarrassed for your family, what a shame you've brought upon them. Your transphobic remarks should cost you your position. No hate monger should be in public office. You, sir, are what is wrong with this country. — *Hupahu💀Cikala* (@MrTrickster3) November 10, 2017
@RepMaryFranson Your disgusting bigotry has no place in Minnesota. Do better or resign. pic.twitter.com/YsoQTgrEAM — medium uzi vert (@lizmaebrooks) November 11, 2017
Does that include transgender soldiers? — Maggie Madsen (@MaggieMadsen3) November 11, 2017Place in Aragon, Spain
Citadel of Jaca.
Detail of the interior of Jaca Cathedral.
Jaca (in Aragonese: Chaca or Xaca[1]) is a city of northeastern Spain in the province of Huesca, located near the Pyrenees and the border with France. Jaca is an ancient fort on the Aragón River, situated at the crossing of two great early medieval routes, one from Pau to Zaragoza. Jaca was the city out of which the County and Kingdom of Aragon developed. It was the capital of Aragon until 1097 and also the capital of Jacetania.
Villages [ edit ]
Besides Jaca town, there are a number of outlying villages in Jaca's municipality, including the ski resort of Astún.
History [ edit ]
The origins of the city are obscure, but its name is apparently of Lacetani origin, mentioned by Strabo as one of the most celebrated of the numerous small tribes inhabiting the Ebro basin. Strabo adds that their territory lay on the site of the wars in the 1st century BC between Sertorius and Pompey. According to the atlas of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds Jaca was a town where minted coins were made[2] from the second half of the 2nd century BC, a small number of which are now in the British Museum.[3] The coins show an unidentified bearded head to the right with an inscription to the left and also have |
Luke Cage, and Daredevil season two)
,, and season two) Marc Jobst (a lengthy TV career, he directed solitary episodes of Luke Cage and Daredevil season two)
and season two) Kari Skogland (extensive TV experience, but this is her first venture into Marvel Netflix)
Stephen Surjik (has directed at least one episode of every Marvel Netflix show–a streak that will end with Jessica Jones season two)
season two) Jeremy Webb (the same sort of background as Skogland above)
Despite all the negative press there was still anticipation for ABC’s Inhumans (at least, judging by this chart via Rotten Tomatoes). How did that register in the ratings? Variety noted it beat its 8pm competition in the coveted 18-49 demographic, while just losing out in the 9pm slot. Bleeding Cool noted it’s numbers were superior to both Agents of SHIELD‘s normal numbers and its season four finale. Given the critical drubbing this is a solid opening–episode three will provide insight into how fans reacted to the TV pilot, albeit it’s future is up in the air and likely controlled by Disney. One of the funny results of all the negative buzz is that there is buzz (unlike The Gifted, see below), so that people are curious about it even if they perceive it as a train wreck.
Speaking of the show, I posted a review looking at the differences between the movie and TV versions.
I’ve been thinking about the release dates for the Marvel Netflix shows. Prior to 2017 there had never been more than two shows released in a year. The current overlapping filming schedules suggest we’ll be getting seasons much more rapidly, albeit we don’t know just how quickly since Netflix drags its heels with Marvel release announcements. The best way to illustrate this is to look at what’s happened in the past along with what we know about the future:
Completed
Daredevil (1): filming July-December (5 months), released in April, 2015 (4 months later)
Jessica Jones (1): filming February-August (6 months), released in November, 2015 (3 months)
Daredevil (2): filming July-December (5 months), released in March, 2016 (3 months)
Luke Cage (1): filming September-March (6 months), released in September, 2016 (6 months)
Iron Fist (1): filming April-October (6 months), released in March, 2017 (5 months)
The Defenders (1): filming October-March (5 months), released in August, 2017 (5 months)
Upcoming
The Punisher (1): filming October-April (6 months), released Oct/Nov, 2017 (6/7 months)
Jessica Jones (2): filming April-September (5 months)
Luke Cage (2): filming June-December (6 months)
Daredevil (3): filming October*-c.March
Iron Fist (2): filming January*-c.May
*unconfirmed
The gap between the end of filming and release seems to be growing longer (5-6 months of late), but I think that’s less a trend and more to do with specific circumstance. With this in mind we can speculate on release dates. So far the shortest gap between releases has been four months (between JJ and DD2), which will be beat by Punisher at 2 or 3 (I’ll look at 3 or 4 month rotations and see how they fit):
JJ2 – January/February – January seems most likely to me, with February having Black Panther as its focus
LC2 – April-June – April; seems prudent to avoid Infinity War (May), albeit the four-month schedule would put it in May if my JJ prediction is correct
DD3 – July-October – July (makes the most sense on the 3-month rotation); this becomes September on the 4-month schedule if my JJ prediction is correct
IF2 – October-February – October; in the 4-month version this is January, both of which are empty of comparable competition
To summarize: for a three-month rotation I see JJ in January, LC in April, DD in July, and IF in October; on a four-month rotation it’s January, May, September, and January.
Interesting news for Luke Cage season two has come out, as Entertainment Weekly has confirmed that Danny Rand will be appearing in the show. This makes a lot of sense, given that we know Misty Knight is joining Iron Fist season two, and further boosts the Heroes for Hire bond teased in The Defenders. I’d guess the appearance will be in the nature of a cameo (based on the fact that Finn Jones has been on the convention circuit while LC2 has been filming the last three plus months–and is just starting his Kung Fu training only recently (see below). It is possible, incidentally, that his scenes were shot at the beginning of the LC2 shoot before The Defenders dropped (which would also suggest just a cameo). I like the idea of the Netflix characters popping up in each other’s shows and I hope we get more of it.
Finn Jones has started training for the next season of Iron Fist. If we can take his previous comments literally (that he’s training for 4-5 months) than we can expect filming to begin in January or February (completing in July/August and production completed October/November).
Just an incidental about the show: I’ve been pointing out for awhile that it’s far more popular than given credit for, but it’s true that it is the only show that people actively hate. While other shows have disliked elements, they don’t get active hate. Iron Fist is pretty polarizing–people either liked it or they actively despise it (interestingly, the latter are often fans of the comics). Overcoming the latter sentiment is probably going to require critical praise, but whether that ship has sailed or not remains to be seen.
There has been very little buzz about the Runaways even though it’s just two months away (perhaps NYCC will change that). One interesting thing about it is that MCU guru Kevin Feige has a producer credit for the show, which is highly unusual for Marvel TV (the only other TV property he’s been involved with was Agent Carter)–I wonder what brought him to the Hulu project?
A thought going back to the news that The Defenders viewership numbers in the US were low: whatever feedback Netflix gets on why this is can’t be incorporated into plans for Jessica Jones season two (filming is complete), Luke Cage season two (filming is ongoing), or have much impact on Daredevil season three (filming will start soon so the scripts and storyline are already done). I think the lesson has already been learned however, as Netflix waived goodbye to the Hand–both JJ and LC would have more grounded stories anyway, and it’s clear DD3 will follow suit (I have no idea what Iron Fist season two will be like–scripts are likely still being written for it and the only known change is that Finn Jones will be better at Kung Fu–see above).
The Gifted, despite critical praise, is receiving a very muted response (eg Emergency Awesome‘s Charlie Schneider bailed on plans to make videos about it). I watched it and it looked exactly like what you’d expect a Bryan Singer-directed pilot would look like: everything is dark, gritty, and firmly rooted in 1980s X-Men themes. I thought the acting was largely histrionic (clearly a product of the directing), with the plot unimaginative and derivative. Polaris was the best thing about the show and while things could improve a lot needs to change for it to succeed. The metaphor of mutants as a prosecuted minority without set-up doesn’t really work anymore–superheroes have broad popular appeal so the conceit requires actual buy-in (they have to be presented as a threat first), which the show doesn’t attempt. Not much effort is put Polaris’ crew (Jamie Chung’s Blink is a big step down from Bingbing Fan’s in Days of Future Past), while the Strucker family comes across as bland and generic (with Lauren unsympathetic and annoying and her brother Andy simply annoying). Will the show be a success? It’s hard to say, but the lack of buzz and the heavy competition from other superhero shows means it has a tough hill to climb (and how do you continue to seem gritty when The Punisher drops?).
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
AdvertisementsWelcome to Week 20 (Monday 8/21 to Sunday 8/27). Wow, week 20. That means you only have a match, maybe two left to claim a playoff spot. If you are on the outside looking in this is no time to play it safe. You need a few spotters to come through big for you. If you are in ROTO, you know by now if you have a shot or not, but if so, you only have a few weeks to catch up if there is going to be a dogfight at the end. As I said in last week’s article, I tend to lean on the veterans over the more flashy rookies this time of year when there is no room for error. If on the other hand, you are a longshot and need to jump pretty far, then all bets are off and you should go for the HR. Keep innings limits top of mind while scanning the wire.
A couple of important injury notes:
Some bad news: Max Scherzer went on the 10-day with a neck issue, John Lester went on the 10-day with a lat muscle & shoulder issue, and Adam Wainwright went on the DL with an elbow issue. At this point, none are considered
season-ending and Lester is already being penciled in when he is eligible. Guys like A.J. Cole & Mike Montgomery should benefit from these injuries. Corey Kluber, back from the DL recently left his game the other day with a sprained ankle. No DL announcement yet so keep an eye on that one. Scott Feldman may have to miss some starts opening the door again for Asher Wojciechowski. There is still no timetable for Aaron Sanchez who still has blister issues or King Felix.
Some returning arms: A lot of big names coming back in or near Week 20. Scheduling is still tentative, but Steven Strasburg, (edit: Robbie)Johnny Ray, CC Sabathia (Sat 19th vs Red Sox), Masahiro Tanaka, Alex Cobb, Hector Santiago, Adalberto Mejia, Dietrich Enns, & Joe Biagini should see action soon. These returns should bump Jordan Montgomery (again), & Blake Snell (again). James Paxton is playing catch and hopes to be back soon. The White Sox need an arm for Monday’s doubleheader and have to choose between Mike Pelfrey & Lucas Giolito. Raise your hand if you hope it is Giolito.
WEEK TWENTY: 8/21 to 8/27: Trivia Question: What 36-year-old pitcher from the AL West has gotten his first six major league starts in 2017 after an MLB career that started in 2008?
If you play DFS, don’t forget to look at my picks at the bottom of the article. I especially love my Contrarian picks this week.
Spotters from the <50% owned crowd: ( has finally graduated, now owned by over 70% of Fantrax Leagues.)
AJ Griffin, RHSP, TEX (4.6 owned ESPN, 37% Owned in Fantrax) @ OAK, FRI 8/25: Am I the only one who knows the 29-year-old AJ Griffin is pitching pretty well for the past month or so? Well, no, I guess 37% of the rest of you do as well. Overall, in his 55 innings, he’s 6-3 and pitching to a 46/18 K/BB leading to a 1.280 WHIP, although his ERA is 5.07 during that stretch due to his opponents launching 15 HR off him during that time. He also owns a complete game shutout. In his last three starts, all QS, he is 2-1 over 16 IP with 6 R on 11 H and 3 HR and an 11/6 K/BB lowering his ERA by a full run over that stretch. However, in his last start out against the Tigers, he gave up no homers, two walks, and five hits in five innings, with four strikeouts and one run for a W. He made me look smart for the 2nd week in a row. He still has a game Sunday (today) home vs CHW so grab him if he is still there for today. The ChiSox are 20th in the MLB in wOBA away vs. RHP of.307. For week 20, the A’s have a wOBA of.327 vs righties at home which is good for 17th in the MLB. These offenses are not the worst of the worst, but Griffin is really on fire over the last few games.
Martin Perez, LHSP, TEX (20.5% owned in ESPN, 39% owned Fantrax) @ LAA, THU 8/24: The 26-year-old Perez has very quietly put together a decent season, going 8-10 overall. He has an ERA north of five and a WHIP north of 1.5, with a K/BB of only 87/48 with 167 hits in 137 IP. However, Perez has been pretty reliable with the right matchups lately, as evidenced by two QS (3 runs total), but three clunkers in his last five games. He is not overpowering or dominant and has to have his sinker working to be successful. In the three clunkers, he was torched for 21 runs. His GB/FB rate is pretty good at 1.69, however, it has averaged nearly 3.00 over the past three years. This week he gets the Angels, in Anaheim where they are hitting a woeful.288 wOBA at home vs LHSP, good for 27th in the MLB, although they have been hot of late.
***TWO START PITCHER*** Clayton Richard, LHSP, SDP (21% owned in ESPN, 31% owned Fantrax) @ STL TUE, 8/22 & @ MIA, SUN 8/27: Richard is a 33-year-old lefty barely known outside of San Diego. The Phillies know him also as he pitched a three hit complete game shutout against them, his 2nd complete game of the season, lowering his ERA from 5.40 to 4.84 in the process. Richard can be a scary pitcher to start as he will often sandwich a huge clunker in between a group of solid starts. These two matchups look prime for Richard. He gets the Cards in STL where they have a.302 wOBA vs LHSP at home and then the Marlins in Miami on Sunday 8/27 where they have a.294 wOBA vs lefties at home.
James Shields, RHSP, CHW (28% owned in Fantrax) vs MIN, WED, 8/23: Shields has been on a seesaw the past few starts alternating between 4 and 5 run outings with shutout ball several times. He is due for a good one this
week if that pattern continues. More importantly, he gets the Twins at home. In his past three starts, he’s logged 17.1 IP with 17 H, 8 ER and a 20/5 K/BB. Overall, in eight starts since his injury, Shields is 3-1 in 50.2 IP, 3.02 ERA and 1.184 WHIP giving up only four HR. He is an extreme groundball pitcher playing in a big park but is pitching to a career-worst 2.6 HR/9. 18 of his earned runs and seven of the homers have come in just three of his games started. In his past 42 IP, he has a 38/18 K/BB. So, if he keeps it down and avoids any long ones, he should be ok in this one. The Twins are 26th in wOBA away vs RHSP with a.298 wOBA. Again, when it is late in the year and there are slim pickins, I lean to the vets.
Not for the faint of heart. Pitchers from the abyss:
Jake Junis, RHSP, KC (7.7% owned ESPN & 28% owned Fantrax) vs COL, THU, 8/24: I thought Junis would now stay in the Royals rotation for the foreseeable future, at least until Trevor Cahill is healthy. In his last two starts, vs the A’s & Mariners he’s gone 2-0 giving up 3 R, 8 H, no BB or HR and logging 9 K’s. Overall he is 4-2, 4.70 ERA & 1.386 WHIP in his brief MLB career. Instead of starting vs the Indians this weekend he pitched in relief of Corey Kluber on Friday getting hit hard for four runs in two innings raising his ERA half a run against a blazing hot Indians lineup. But he does have a decent 42/17 K/BB in 52 IP. The bulk of the problem has been HR’s, however of his 10 HR, all but one have come in just three games, and that one was in the relief stint. He is a 24-year-old rookie learning on the job and has been improving every week. Colorado is 26th in the MLB in wOBA away with a.292 mark. If he keeps the ball in the park he should be ok, especially in KC. (NOTE: There may be some confusion in Junis’ place in the rotation as the Royals just skipped his start today. I’ll update as soon as I know if he keeps the Colorado start)
***TWO START PITCHER***Chris Smith, RHSP, OAK (6.5% owned in ESPN, 6% owned Fantrax) @ BAL, MON, 8/21 & vs TEX, SAT, 8/26: We are digging really deep here, but some of us will have to, and he is on over 90% of our waiver wires. What a story for Mr. Smith. He’s pitched a QS in four of his six starts and in his last start went 5.1 IP giving up three ER on Three H, one BB & no HR with three K’s. Smith has been on my radar for a while now, and lately, he seems ready to be used as a two-start starter with these two matchups. No, these are not slam dunks, but if you need a two start pitcher and it is a deep league with slim pickins this is where I would go. First, he is in BAL where the O’s have a.316 Woba vs RHSP and then at home vs the Rangers where they have a.322 wOBA vs RHSP on the road. He is also RP primary which makes him a painless add in leagues that have position roster limits. This week’s Trivia Question Answer: Smith’s career in the MLB started in 2008 with the Red Sox. Between a few years of being used in relief exclusively, years in the minors and years lost to injury, Smith is now 36 years old. In 2017 he has gotten his first chance to start at the MLB level and now has six MLB starts, four of which have been quality starts. Like I said earlier, this close to the end I start leaning heavily on the more experienced, longer track record pitchers for my spot starting needs down the stretch. If you have better options out there, use them, but if not this may be safer than a rookie making his first start.
***LATE ADDITION – Potential two start pitcher***Dillon Gee, RHSP, MIN (3% owned Fantrax & less than 1% ESPN) @ CHW, MON, 8/21: Gee, his ownership is the lowest ever in this series of articles. Gee, is he really 31 years old already? Gee, these are bad puns here. The truth is I like Gee tomorrow in one of the doubleheader games in Chicago vs the Sox. To me, the main risk is that he does not go enough innings to get you a W or QS but I doubt the Sox will blow him out and he is a good bet to have a good game. The Sox are 29th in the MLB in wOBA (.305) vs RHSP at home and tied for last in runs scored (165 vs 289 for league leader) in that match-up combo as well. Gee has a 3.16 ERA mostly in relief for the Twins with his one start being a not so stretched out 4 runs over 3.1 IP. I realize he had a 5.55 ERA in 14 2016 starts, but this feels like one of those moves that will leave your opponent scratching his head, one way or another. In 17.2 innings of long relief for the Twins this season, Gee has a 15/3 K/BB, zero HR allowed, and 5 Earned Runs helping that 3.16 ERA. We will have to ignore the 1.519 WHIP as the cost of doing business off the deepest portion of the waiver wire. Whichever pitcher on the Twins excels in tomorrow’s doubleheader will likely continue in the rotation going forward as the Twins are down to four SP. The Sox offense is barren enough after losing Melky, Frazier, et al, so a further diluted doubleheader squad could be just what the Doctor ordered. If he sticks he’ll be a two-start pitcher getting the Blue Jays in Toronto Saturday or Sunday where they are 18th in the MLB with a.315 wOBA vs righties at home. Gee, I hope their son gets his looks from Mom and not Dad.
DFS PLAYERS: You may want to re-think starting these guys:
Gio Gonzalez, LHSP, WAS vs NYM, SAT, 8/26: The Mets have a.371 wOBA away vs LHSP. That mark is best in the MLB. (NOTE: This mark was compiled prior to the purge of Bruce, Granderson, and Walker)
Steven Strasburg, RHSP, WAS vs NYM, FRI, 8/25: The Mets have the 3rd best wOBA vs RHSP in the MLB @.331. (NOTE: This mark was compiled prior to the purge of Bruce, Granderson, and Walker)
Madison Bumgarner, LHSP, SFG @ ARI, SAT, 8/26: The D’Backs hit LHSP at home at a.329 wOBA, good for 10th MLB.
DFS CONTRARIAN MOVE: Scary Contrary, Don’t let your kids try this at home:
Jimmy Nelson, RHSP, MIL @ SFG, TUE, 8/22: Are you a gambler? Then don’t push your luck unless you can handle the stress. The Giants are dead last in the MLB in wOBA vs righties at home with a.291 mark. Wow your league mates!
J.A. Happ, LHSP, TOR vs MIN, FRI, 8/25: The Twins wOBA vs LHSP on the road is.277 or 28th in the MLB. Wow your league mates twice this week!
DFS PLAYERS: Match-ups of the week:
Zack Greinke, RHSP, ARI vs SFG, FRI 8/25: The Giants are 26th in the MLB with a.298 wOBA vs righties on the road.
Carlos Rodon, LHSP, CHW vs MIN FRI, 8/25: The Twins are 28th in MLB wOBA vs lefties away at.277.
Cole Hamels, LHSP, TEX @ LAA, MON 8/21: The Angels are 27th in the MLB vs lefties at home at.288.
Thanks for reading and good luck in week twenty, especially with your pitching. If you have a question about these or any other SP match-ups next week don’t hesitate to leave a message in the comments, write me, or check out my “Pick Your Spots” thread every Sunday on the /r/fantasybaseball Sub-Reddit where I’ll talk starting pitching all day.
joseph.iannone021@gmail.com @JoeIannone2 Twitter
What to expect in 2017: (If you read this part in last week’s article, skip the next few paragraphs.
Criteria Used: Platoon splits, LH/RH, Day/Night, Month, Half, stadium splits, team batting against splits, metrics like GB/FB rate, K & BB rates, Babip, wOBA, FIP, Trends, etc. Sources are Fan Graphs, Baseball-Reference, Fantrax, ESPN and more.
Pitchers from the under 50% ownership group – I’ll list three or four pitchers, less than 50% owned who I believe are primed for a good start the following week, or better yet two good starts. I’ll list two or so pitchers that are less than 20% owned and look like a good choice based on the above criterion.
DFS Suggestions – I’ll pick out a few aces to avoid in DFS and a couple who should be in your lineup, especially if I see a great contrarian start.
My crusade for 2017/2018: Pitchers and other players seem to be getting injured so fast that most leagues don’t have enough DL spots to accommodate them all. Roster limits force tough decisions which are a good thing for competitive league balance and showcasing owner skills, but this season’s overcrowded Disabled-Lists have proven to test traditional capacity at times. I think it is a combination of pitchers being more injury prone, but also the abundant use of the new in 2016 7 day concussion DL, and the new in 2017 10 day DL rule that has MLB teams easing their own roster limitations at the expense of our fantasy limitations and resources. In light of the 7-day & 10-day DL rules, I recommend any owners who have 2 to 4 DL spots to petition the League Manager to increase the number of DL spots to whatever is appropriate for that format. Most good LM’s won’t change rules or settings once the season starts, and rightly so, but at least it will be in place for 2018. Don’t feel victimized by the new rule. Adjust to it.
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WhatsAppIt was announced in Australia that Jeff Horn will defend his WBO welterweight title against England's Gary Corcoran (17-1, 7 KOs) in Brisbane on December 13.
News Corp Australia reported that the world champion boxer had locked in a two-fight deal with the State Government and Brisbane City Council.
For Horn (17-0-1, 11 KOs), the Corcoran bout will be his first since a points decision win over eight division world champion Manny Pacquiao back in July before a crowd of 51,000 at the Suncorp Stadium.
The fight will be held at the Brisbane Convention Centre.
The Wednesday night fixture is thought to be most beneficial for pay television earnings.
“Corcoran is 26, so he’s three years younger than me — he’s very fit, strong and hungry,’’ Horn said.
“He’s a dangerous guy. I know what it’s like to be a determined underdog just like he is going into this fight. This is his golden opportunity to do what I did against Pacquiao but there are millions of dollars on offer for me with big fights in 2018 so I can’t let this guy come to my home town and wreck all my good work.’’
In a very odd bit of news, the reports in Australia suggest that Horn would like to face UFC superstar Conor McGregor in his next fight. McGregor made his pro boxing debut in August, when he was stopped in ten rounds by Floyd Mayweather Jr.
According to Top Rank, who have options on Horn, the next fight for him would come in March or April - either in a rematch with Pacquiao or a defense against Terence Crawford.
Pacquiao, who has the option of a rematch clause, was the original opponent for the fall, but he withdrew after citing conflicts with his political schedule.DNS is a venerable protocol, one which has serviced a core function for the internet since the early 1980s. There is plenty of great, battle tested open source authoritative DNS server software out there — from the original and still nearly ubiquitous BIND, to newer but widely used implementations like PowerDNS, Knot, and more. So why on earth, when we started NS1, did we build our own authoritative DNS server software from scratch — unlike nearly every other DNS service provider in the market?
A global architecture
Most authoritative DNS software that’s out there today was built to do one thing above all else: deliver statically configured DNS zones and records via the network, with deep coverage of the protocol specifications, reliably and fast, from individual servers. And the server software produced by the open source community is exceedingly good at meeting this use case.
When we were starting NS1, there was just one problem: that wasn’t our use case. And we’d seen the ceilings we would hit with this model before, when we used heavily modified open source DNS software to solve traffic management problems in a CDN we’d built. It got the job done, but not without a lot of hackery and many architectural backflips, because we were using the software as part of a highly distributed, highly dynamic global system driven by an intensive data pipeline and in need of frequent reconfiguration as zones and records changed dynamically, new service endpoints spun up and down, and infrastructure conditions in the application shifted. We had learned from our experience that for this use case, we’d need to build something new and different.
So from the beginning, we built our DNS server to be a small (but obviously important) part of a global architecture — ingesting a constant stream of configuration changes and data, generating a steady flow of telemetry and analytics, and automated and managed not with zone files and SIGHUPs but with high velocity globally replicated databases and message queueing.
A single-minded purpose
When we built our new DNS platform, we started with the centermost kernel that enables our game changing traffic management capabilities: the Filter Chain. To experienced engineers, that might sound surprising: why not start by experimenting with and selecting an optimized server framework, or building rock solid DNS protocol logic? Simple: because that’s not actually what NS1 is about. To us, DNS is the substrate we use to deliver intelligence. And unless we got that intelligence just right, none of the rest mattered.
So we focused from the very start on how we’d combine flexibility, power, and simplicity to invent a new way to manage traffic with DNS, and iterated and iterated and iterated until we’d built the Filter Chain: a super simple idea, entirely new in the industry, for combining high performance traffic routing algorithms in bespoke application-specific setups, driven in real-time by telemetry about the infrastructure of the application and the state of the internet.
The Filter Chain is still the core kernel of functionality of our DNS server software, and it still executes in real-time for every single DNS query that hits NS1’s servers, because we built all the other scaffolding of our software and architecture with that single-minded purpose.
Breaking the rules
We also knew from the start that we didn’t want to confine ourselves to the traditional RFCs that govern agreed upon rules for DNS systems. The DNS protocol itself obviously constrains the way NS1’s systems interact with the rest of the internet. But within those limitations, what more could we accomplish?
Rethinking the traditional DNS data model was where we started. By reimagining DNS records as collections of potential answers, to be manipulated by an algorithmic traffic management pipeline, we avoided many of the configuration management backflips needed to make use of other platforms and enabled an elegant approach to managing complex DNS setups with many-faceted traffic management rulesets. Our approach has enabled us to deliver not just the most powerful DNS platform on the planet, but also the simplest and most approachable.
And at the same time, by building our own DNS server, we’ve enabled ourselves to explore ideas for application performance optimization, ease of use, and visibility that push the envelopes of the protocol. For example, linked records and zones — essentially symlinks within NS1’s platform — are a super simple idea, not unlike CNAME and DNAME records, but reducing recursive DNS lookups, solving CNAME-at-the-apex issues (where we’ve also long supported ALIAS records as well), enabling deep performance improvements for our customers, and making complex name-aliasing issues easy to solve.
Milliseconds matter in more than delivery
Traditional Managed DNS players have differentiated mainly on network characteristics: DNS lookup uptime and response time. Our view as we were starting NS1 was that 100% uptime and super-fast global lookup performance had become table stakes, not differentiators. It is not that hard to build a reliable, low latency global anycasted DNS network these days. But while we’ve focused our efforts on delivering the most advanced traffic management capabilities and most usable, flexible tools for managing DNS in the industry, performance still matters, and we have stretched the expectations for Managed DNS performance in new dimensions.
For example, we knew change propagation was a huge issue for companies making dynamic updates to their DNS configurations. Traditional DNS servers weren’t built to ensure configuration changes pushed to a “central” API can propagate quickly across a global network of DNS delivery POPs, including potentially thousands of individual DNS servers. But that’s exactly what NS1’s systems do — propagate changes globally at close to the speed of light — and it’s only possible because of the configuration and telemetry pipelines we built directly into our DNS server software from the beginning. These pipelines plug into a global messaging topology to ensure the instant DNS records are added or updated through the NS1 API, those updates are pushed to our edge locations, into every DNS server instance, through every layer of internal caching, so on the next DNS query we respond with the newest configuration.
The same mentality drives our approach to telemetry. Observability is critical in any distributed system, and we have a system that’s about as distributed as you can get, spanning dozens of datacenters, hundreds of servers, thousands of instances, all in the critical path for our customers, meaning we need to notice potentially concerning issues instantly. Our DNS server generates internal telemetry across dozens of dimensions and pumps it at granularities as low as 1 second to our operations dashboards and analytics and alerting tools, so we can react quickly as conditions shift.
We treat DNS analytics no differently, and we present our customers with real-time query metrics for every single DNS record in our platform, using a lightweight but powerful query analytics aggregation engine built right into our DNS server itself. Four years later, NS1 is still the only industry player with such granular analytics delivered in real-time. That high velocity visibility matters to our customers.
Control = velocity
One of the most important motivations behind building our own DNS server was the desire to move fast. That might sound counterintuitive: isn’t building a DNS server that handles all the wacky exigencies of a decades-old protocol kind of a laborious process? Yep, it is — and there’s certainly a lot of up-front complexity and cost in going down this path. But it’s hard to overestimate the value of having complete control over the architecture of your most critical service delivery asset.
That control has enabled us to deliver at high velocity new features like linked records and zones, ALIAS records, new kinds of Filter Chain algorithms, support for new DNS record types, and more.
And just as importantly, it’s enabled us to react quickly to changing workloads and scaling challenges. For example, we’ve been able to rapidly iterate on our techniques for mitigating certain kinds of DDoS attacks, quickly start gathering new types of telemetry, introduce new caching and data architecture strategies, and re-work internal load balancing and load shedding approaches.
Building our own DNS server was a more intensive up front effort, but the control it’s afforded us has helped us be the most innovative company in our space ever since.
Where to from here?
Building and iterating on NS1’s own in-house DNS server has served us well. So well, in fact, that we’re doing it again. After years of scaling, data gathering, operational experience, and optimization, we’ve learned an incredible amount about the demands of operating global authoritative DNS systems at scale. This year, we’ve embarked on a from-scratch rewrite of our edge DNS server software based on those lessons, with an eye toward truly massive scale, future threats, and bleeding edge functionality for our customers.
So stay tuned — the fun is just getting started.As freshmen walked onto UB’s campus for their orientation, they were greeted with the cold-hearted smiles of Orientation Aids, maliciously pretending to be “happy UB students.” Lured into a false sense of camaraderie, school spirit, and excitement, freshmen flushed with pride as they walked around their future school.
Meanwhile, UB upperclassmen set up camp around campus during the freshmen orientation to point and laugh at the wide-eyed innocent kids.
“These little shits are so naive,” said John Smith, senior business management major.
Smith and his friends walked through the Student Union in the guise of helpful Orientation Aids, as they said – between smirks and giggles – things like, “No, the winter’s not that bad. I barely ever need a jacket,” and “Oh you’ll be getting a refund check? Don’t worry; you’ll definitely get it within the first month.”
Between scratching his balls within his three-year-old UB sweatpants, playing “Who can Belch the Loudest” with his frat buddies, and pointing out which girl he’s going to bang at his Frat house come the Fall, Smith took the time to impart his sage “advice” onto freshmen.
They all seemed pleased with Smith, gazing in wonder at the upperclassman that selectively chose which frosh he wanted to impart his wise advice on. Incoming freshmen Ronald Hill was particularly inspired.
“He told me that all girls at UB love gingers,” Hill said as he smoothed down his tangled and frizzy mop of fire-red hair. “I’m set for next year. John said I can even come to all of his fraternity parties, free of charge!”
When asked about the freshman’s statement, Smith laughed and replied, “Oh that ginger douche? Like I’d let him into my kickass parties.” Smith returned to the Student Union, not before sharing a first-bump with his frat brother, and went back to tricking more unsuspecting kids.
As freshmen found friends amongst each other and sat down to eat the delicious food UB ordered out for them, Smith walked around |
registered by Kerala police since January 1, 2015.
It claimed that the court could invoke parental authority even if Hadiya was an adult, as her case suggested that she was radicalised.
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The Supreme Court had said it could consider the contention of the NIA and Ashokan, that Hadiya had been indoctrinated and her consent was not free, only after it had talked to her.Tunisia is backing Turkey’s role as a mediator in the efforts to ease the Gulf-Qatar crisis, Foreign Minister Khamis Al-Jahnawi announced yesterday. The Turkish government is also seeking ways to resolve the crisis in Libya, he pointed out.
Al-Jahnawi told Behind the Event programme on Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) that Tunisia supports Turkey’s “influential role” in the region, especially in resolving the “unprecedented” crisis between the Gulf neighbours. “Given Turkey’s close relations with various parties in Libya,” he added, “it can also help to find a solution there.”
The minister stressed the importance of relations between Tunis and Ankara. The second session of the Tunisian-Turkish Supreme Council for Strategic Cooperation will be held in January next year in the Turkish capital.
Read: Turkey willing to mediate to resolve Gulf dispute
Since the cutting of diplomatic and economic ties with Qatar by many of the Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Turkey has been playing an important role in mediating in an attempt to resolve the dispute.
On Wednesday, Turkey’s Foreign Minister arrived in Qatar on an official visit as part of a drive to repair the GCC rift. During his visit, he announced that his next stop would be Kuwait, which has also been seeking to mediate in the conflict.Until you peer closer, and listen to what they have to say.
ABOARD THE CCGS LOUIS S. ST-LAURENT–Without a microscope, most plankton are easy to miss. And when the tiny marine creatures do come into focus, they aren't much to look at.
"So in one way, the plankton are a type of canary in a coal mine," says John Nelson, a Department of Fisheries and Oceans scientist examining plankton at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, B.C. "They will be affected by, and respond to, environmental change and we can detect this by studying them."
As tiny, and as hard to love, as plankton are, scientists studying them say that if global warming makes things go bad for these organisms, the pain will run all the way up the food chain to humans.
Way down near the bottom of the oceans' food chain, animals known as zooplankton drift on the currents, feeding on each other, eating still lower life forms such as bacteria and viruses, or in most cases, grazing on microscopic plant life, called phytoplankton.
Kelly Young, 28, is a seagoing technician collecting millions of plankton in sample jars for study later in Nelson's lab, as CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, pride of Canada's icebreaker fleet, steams through the Northwest Passage.
Other species of zooplankton look like microscopic shrimps, or jellyfish with sticky tentacles to trap food and cram it into their mouths. Some glow green – bright green – when bothered.
Copepods, usually less than 8 millimetres long, are parasites with long antenna and a pair of leg-like limbs that the animal uses to push its hard-shelled body through the water in quick, jerking bursts of speed. Fish larvae love to eat them.
The Arrow worm, known as the tiger of the zooplankton, is shaped like a torpedo. Its minuscule head has a halo of spines that the creature uses to swallow its prey whole.
At first glance, zooplankton seem more likely to model for horror movie special effects than a "Save the World" poster.
"They're actually very pretty to look at," she said, after filling more jars with mushy sludges of sea life that looked like frozen margaritas.
Young is on a team of six Canadian scientists and students aboard the ship they affectionately call The Louis, which set sail for the Arctic's Northwest Passage from St. John's, Nfld., on July 20.
Twice each day, in the morning and evening, The Louis's crew slows the 5,300-tonne ship to a stop in the ocean so the scientists can go to work on the rolling deck. Young runs a piece of equipment called bongo nets because they look like two pairs of drums lashed together.
Little propellers mounted at the top measure the flow of water through long, fine-meshed conical nets. They dance in the frigid wind like Japanese kites when the equipment is winched over the side of the ship to be lowered 100 metres into the ocean.
The nets are quickly hauled back in, at 1 metre per second, so that fish and most other sea animals bigger than plankton escape. Young then washes her catch into small buckets, called cod ends, on each end of the four nets.
She bottles some of the concentrated samples in ethanol to preserve the plankton for DNA analysis. Others end up in formalin, a kind of embalming fluid, so different species of zooplankton can be catalogued, and the number in each group counted.
She kept one of her captives alive long enough to explain the attraction of animals few people ever see, let alone care about.
The pteropod, or "winged snail," was shaped like a manatee, but was as small and delicate as a fly fishing lure, an opaque organism with an orange tail, beating its appendages like wings against the swirling currents in a gently tilted sample jar.
So far, scientists haven't seen any plankton species go extinct, Nelson said from Barrow, Alaska, after a separate, two-week research voyage. But they are closely watching Pacific Ocean plankton found in the Arctic to see if they begin reproducing as sea temperatures rise.
"If a Pacific species was established in the Arctic, this would really be news," he says. "But we have not detected this yet. What could happen in this scenario is that, if the invader out-competes the native species, this could lead to fundamental changes in ecosystem function."
For instance, a smaller, invading species of plankton might replace a larger one, denying fish that used to eat the bigger plankton a key source of food, Nelson says.
Another instrument scientists use aboard the icebreaker is known as a rosette, from the circle of 24 tubes that capture water samples. They are analyzed for their salt content, various chemicals and nutrients, including oxygen content, all to assess the effects of global warming on the northern oceans.
The Arctic is one of the most unforgiving places to learn about Earth and the state of her health. It is also a very expensive place for scientists to work, so it has long been neglected by field researchers.
As concern builds over rising temperatures, the once ice-bound Northwest Passage is opening up to scientists eager to get a better look at what is happening to a region thought to be most vulnerable to early damage from climate change.
Vast areas of the Arctic are still scientific black holes, where researchers have yet to gather hard data, says Jane Eert, science coordinator of the Three Oceans Project, a federal study of Canada's Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
For years, scientists trying to figure out what is happening to Arctic ice have relied on measurements recorded by pings from U.S. navy nuclear submarines cruising stealthily under the ice cap from Alaska to the North Pole, during the Cold War, says Eert, 49.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, and relations between Washington and Moscow warmed, the U.S. military was less worried about potential enemies knowing where its subs had been and declassified the ice data. It seemed to show the ice was thinning dramatically.
"Nobody really quite noticed the submarines were running across the outside edges of the Canadian archipelago," the islands scattered across Canada's Far North, "where for all we know, the ice was getting thicker," Eert says.
"The ice doesn't stay constantly thick over the whole area. It moves around. So if you take measurements only in one spot, and make global conclusions from that, you might be going wrong."
A physical oceanographer, Eert leads the scientific team aboard The Louis. It's her 10th voyage on the ship since 1999. Between 10 and 15 per cent of the Arctic Ocean is what Eert calls a data hole. It will take years' more research to fill it in with solid information, she adds.
After years of reports that vast areas of Arctic ice are melting as the seawater below, and air above, warm up, scientists have discovered that dramatic changes in the past three years are the result of shifting winds, perhaps caused by climate change.
Enormous amounts of ice have "been exported from the Arctic," driven by winds that are shifting as the climate changes, which pushed the ice into ocean currents that delivered it to the North Atlantic, Eert says.
"The multi-year ice in the polar pack didn't melt in the Arctic Ocean,'' she says. "It moved out and what's left in the Arctic is thinner than it was."
That doesn't mean some Arctic ice isn't disappearing altogether, just that the process is not as simple as some reports suggest, Eert says.
Old ice that has shifted south from Greenland may have a counter-effect on the climate, which is just one of the many pieces of a very complex jigsaw puzzle that scientists are trying to piece together as they attempt to predict the effects of global warming.
"The guys who are running the long-term climate models have a tough problem," Eert says. "They're looking at really long time scales, and as result they can't look at a lot of details for each year.
"In order to get the results before you die, you have to fudge some things. And what they fudge is the small-scale stuff. But it turns out that probably the small-scale stuff is important and fudging it gives you wrong answers."
Ordinary people may help answer some of the Arctic scientists' most vexing questions. Eert's team brought along 200 new beer bottles, donated by Sleeman and Molson, which they are tossing overboard in the Davis Strait, Baffin Bay and other parts of the Arctic.
Inside each sealed beer bottle is a printed message asking anyone who finds it to contact the research team. Most have extra messages written by schoolchildren, with their own appeals for help for a project that's a cheap way to map ocean currents.
Up on the ship's bridge, Andre Pelland uses binoculars and his long experience to read icebergs birthed in Greenland, pack ice that the ship breaks through in the Arctic, and other ice conditions.
Pelland works aboard The Louis for the Canadian Ice Service, a federal agency that uses observations from radar satellites that can see through clouds, along with reports from monitors in aircraft and on ships, to produce detailed reports.
The shipping industry relies on them to steer vessels clear of icebergs and other hazards.
Pelland, 49, is The Louis's Ice Man. He started out as a weather observer in Resolute Bay 25 years ago, when he filed reports by a clunky Teletype machine.
Now he uses a digital tablet to log the ice, and files updates to headquarters by satellite Internet link.
The latest maps show above-normal concentrations of ice across a huge region in western Hudson Bay and James Bay, while some areas farther north have less ice than usual. Deciding what that all means is above Pelland's pay grade.
But he knows this for sure: the frozen North that captivates him is far too precious to lose.
"It's the last frontier," he says wistfully, the ship's rumbling diesel engines propelling her steadily north.One day a giant went to play in the Namibian desert. He made a toytown village out of bits of things he found lying around; the husks of scorpion shells, desiccated bones, sand-sifted diamonds, and brightly colored plaster. He lined up his toytown houses in neat little rows, serviced them with a tinker rail-line, then sat back and sighed in contentment. The next day he walked away and left the toytown to the sands.
Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the deserts of Namibia, built by the DeBeers mining company in 1908, abandoned in 1956 after diamond prices crashed. The town is named after a transport driver named Jonny Coleman (Kolman) who took shelter from a sandstorm on a hill (Skop) in the vicinity.
Kolmanskop toytown, drifting into the dunes.
DeBeers is a Dutch company, and they built their miners` town in a traditional Dutch style, incorporating all the infrastructure of a `modern` town into their theme parkish oasis-mirage; a hospital, casino, ballroom, skittle-alley, the first x-ray station in the southern hemisphere, and so on.
When they left the place behind, the sands rolled in, pushing open the doors and promulgating, desertifying rooms and inching their way up the walls. Over 54 years of abandonment, many houses have been crumpled from the top down, their living rooms opened to the sky.
Now it is a popular tourist destination, with the Nam-Deb (Namibia-DeBeers) company running jeep tours.
Disneyland Dutch style.
House made of Lego bricks.
Encroached.
Bathtubs are the boats of the desert ocean.
Railway to the underworld.
Sand percolates.
Rooms once filled with miners’ families now abound with sand.
I first thought this photo was a surrealist painting. But it’s real.
A slatted roof stripped of shingles by sandstorms paints stripes over the sand.
HDR.
Gorgeous dawn-time capture.
On the inside looking out.
Skittle alley.
Coleman’s Hill.
In high school I learned about desertification, the process by which good arable lands become turned to dead wastes of sand. It fascinated me at the time, and I set my first novel `Jethro`s Fall` in a single remaining walled city beset on all sides by a spreading desert. In one climactic scene Jethro stands atop the wall and watches as the city`s immense fans push back the steady advance of the sands. Underneath the encroaching dunes he sees the remnants of streets and buildings, ground under the weight of the sand. He begins to understand in that moment, that soon their city too will be gone. They can`t push back the sands forever.
The book isn`t yet published, but I`m reworking it and hopeful for its future.
Image Sources– Linked by Image.
Text Sources- Namibia Travel, Wikipedia
See more world ruins in the ruins gallery.
See my collection of Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:
[album id=4 template=compact]Emergency Committee for Israel ad
This ad appeared with Josh Nathan-Kazis’s great reporting on the Emergency Committee for Israel’s Super PAC at The Forward. (I cannot find the image at the ECI site.)
Incitement? This follows the last ad from the ECI, which said that Obama was treating Israel like a punching bag and Bill Kristol said we’re going to punch back.
Here are excerpts from the Forward. Note that Jeremy Ben-Ami says that ECI is getting its money from a disgruntled group of hedgefund billionaires. He would seem to mean Daniel Loeb, a former California surfer, and Jonathon Jacobson, in the list that comes up at the Federal Elections Commission. But note that a CBS lawyer, Howard Jaeckel, is also funding this outfit.
As of the latest available filings, there are only about 200 Super PACs, officially known as independent expenditure-only committees. Only one besides ECI’s appears to deal with Israel policy. That group, called US Israel Friendship PAC, was created to run advertisements in support of California Democrat Barbara Boxer in her 2010 senatorial race. Sam Lauter, a California political affairs professional whose name appears on the group’s filings with the Federal Elections Commission, said that it had no plans to be active in the 2012 cycle. Between the formation of ECI PAC in October 2010 and the end of that year, the Super PAC raised $152,000. During the 2010 midterm elections, the group spent $40,000 on airtime for advertisements opposing Joe Sestak, the Democratic candidate for senator in Pennsylvania who eventually lost to Pat Toomey; $37,000 on airtime for advertisements opposing Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democratic congressman who won his re-election fight; and $37,000 on airtime for advertisements opposing John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democratic congressman who also won re-election…. Between May 2010 and April 2011, ECI’s separate but affiliated 501(c)(4) raised over $700,000, according to tax filings the group provided to the Forward. As a 501(c)(4), ECI is not required to report on its political expenditures to the same level of detail as ECI PAC, but the organization notes that it ran five advertisements in July and August 2010 “that called on members of the public to contact their elected representatives — who were standing for re-election in the November 2010 election — and tell them to support a strong U.S.-Israel alliance.” ECI’s 501(c)(4) also ran an advertisement during the September 2011 special election in New York to replace Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner. The group spent $25,000 on the distribution of an advertisement in support of Bob Turner, whose eventual victory was cast by some Republicans as a referendum on Obama’s Israel record…. Instead, ECI appears to draw support from a small number of wealthy donors. Only five individuals have given to ECI PAC. And in its 2010 fiscal year, five individuals provided all but a few thousand dollars of ECI’s 501(c)(4) revenue. The 501(c)(4) is not required to name its donors, so it is unclear whether there is overlap between the two groups of supporters. “They clearly have the ability to raise large sums of money from a very small number of disgruntled hedge fund billionaires,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s president. “But they don’t have the ability to demonstrate a broad base of activist support of thousands and tens of thousands of people all across the country who want to signal their support on this issue for their views.”
The five individuals are not named. However, here are the five largest contributors to the ECI PAC, as reported to the Federal Elections Commission:Image copyright Getty Images
Mortgages are now more affordable than they have ever been, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML).
In September, the average homeowner - excluding first-time buyers - spent 17.7% of his or her monthly income on mortgage repayments, the CML said.
Eight years ago, when interest rates were much higher, they spent 23.7% of their income on repayments.
The CML said the figures represented a historic low, and should help more people to buy their own home.
First-time buyers are spending 17.8% of their income servicing their mortgages, compared with 24.7% in November 2007, a recent high.
Low rates
The proportion of household income being spent on repayments would have been even higher in the 1970s and 80s, when interest rates were as high as 17% a year, the CML said.
The improvement in affordability follows the Bank of England's decision to cut base rates to 0.25% in August, which resulted in many lenders cutting mortgage rates further.
Two-year fixed rates are now available for as little as 0.99%.
"Mortgage affordability reached an historic low in September, for both first-time buyers and home movers, which partly reflects the re-pricing of mortgages following August's base rate cut," said Paul Smee, the director general of the CML.
"This should help turn strong appetite for home-ownership into a reality as we approach the closing months of the year."
Analysis: Simon Gompertz, Personal Finance Correspondent
Image copyright Thinkstock
The days of the ultra-cheap mortgage could be numbered.
Banks and building societies are keen for us to celebrate the fact that loans for homes have never been more affordable.
But Donald Trump's victory may mark a turning point for the lowest fixed rate offers.
The price of fixed rates depends on the deals which lenders can negotiate in the City, called swap rates.
And swap rates - which were already creeping up - have leapt since Trump's triumph.
It's part of a dramatic shift in expectations about interest rates, if the President-elect delivers on his promise to double the growth rate of the US economy.
People are predicting much higher US rates in the long run, with a knock-on effect across the world.
Mortgage experts here are talking about increases of around 0.25% in five- and 10-year fixed rates over the next few days, with more rises to follow.
However, rising house prices mean the total value of loans has risen dramatically over the last few years.
Separate figures from the Office for National Statistics, released on Tuesday, said the average UK house price rose by 7.7% in the year to September, unchanged from the previous month.
Where can I afford to live?Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Earl of Derby, Walter Long and the Duke of Devonshire attending the first meeting of the Privy Council of King George V
This past week has seen a bit of concern about Jeremy Corbyn's views on monarchy: was the avowed republican wrong to stay quiet during a rendition of "God Save the Queen"? There has also been a bit of a question about whether the new Labour leader should have accepted the normal invitation to leaders of the opposition to join the Privy Council, too.
He has agreed to join this body - officially, the sovereign's corps of advisers. Membership allows Mr Corbyn access to useful briefings to Privy Council members. But there's an interesting anecdote which appeared in an early draft of a memoir by David Laws, a former cabinet minister, which bears upon this question.
Would-be members, when inducted to the council, queue up for ennoblement in a particular order set by the palace - an order of precedence fixed in an arcane and seemingly incomprehensible pattern. Mr Laws reported, in the draft, that he was unsurprised to be near the back. Mr Laws was, back then, chief secretary to the treasury - not even the top minister in his own department.
So he was baffled at finding himself near to Liam Fox, then the defence secretary. Mr Fox, after all, held a post which is much grander and older. Out of curiosity, the two men inquired how the order was drawn up. An official told them they were at the rear because of their Roman Catholicism. There is a ranking of the religions - and it puts Catholics and Muslims near the back.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A box containing a Privy Council dress including a cocked hat with an Ostrich feather trim from 1905, displayed in a box in the archive room at Henry Poole & Co on Savile Row
Officials' secret acts
A very modest act of discrimination (even one against Catholics like me) is not a top-tier national issue: it is, after all, only a slight against people who have made it to the Privy Council. It is also unsurprising that England's state religion has a special place in an ancient state ceremony.
But I was a little surprised to learn that the order of precedence distinguishes so carefully between different sorts of non-Anglican. And this little episode is of interest. It is still an act of discrimination. And if you are a secularist or republican, this sort of thing might be the very reason why.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Former cabinet minister Sir Alan Duncan wore his Privy Council uniform at Lady Thatcher's funeral in 2013
For my part, I cannot see any public interest in my keeping this episode hidden from you. That is why I find it utterly bizarre that the Cabinet Office asked Mr Laws to remove it from his memoir. Sue Gray, who is the director general for the propriety and ethics team, instructed him to take it out (I've written about her before).
Before publication, he had to send a copy of the text to her: the ministerial code observes that "former Ministers intending to publish their memoirs are required to submit the draft manuscript in good time before publication to the Cabinet Secretary and to conform to the principles set out in the Radcliffe report of 1976".
Mr Laws could have resisted the request, but that would have been a breach of the ministerial code. The real question is why Ms Gray asked him to remove that particular section of the book. What, then, is this Radcliffe Report?
What they keep out of gaze
The Radcliffe report was written in the wake of the posthumous publication of Richard Crossman's diaries in January 1975, which included unredacted discussion of cabinet meetings. The report, published shortly afterwards, took the view that there were a few categories of information that should be restricted in ex-ministers' diaries and memoirs.
There are parts of this rulebook that are understandable: the books are checked to make sure ministers do not reveal anything that "contravenes the requirements of national security operative at the time of his proposed publication" nor anything that would be "injurious to this country's relations with other nations".
Parts are less defensible: "ministers should refrain from publishing information destructive of the confidential relationships of ministers with each other, and of ministers with officials".
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The publication of Richard Crossman's diaries in 1975, which included details of cabinet meetings, triggered the current system of vetting ministerial diaries
In effect, it says that if a retired minister must reveal they think another minister has been a fool, they should keep that a secret for 15 years. And if they must reveal that they think a permanent secretary is a fool, they should wait until the alleged fool has chosen to retire.
But nowhere in the Radcliffe guidance, as reproduced in the civil service handbook, is there anything that would let the Cabinet Office keep the Privy Council anecdote a secret. How can this redaction possibly be justified? I've asked the Cabinet Office to explain - and received a refusal to comment. The memoir process, they say, is confidential. Mr Laws has declined to comment. But a former official familiar with the chain of events told me that it happened because they are "paranoid about the palace".
You might think this minor, but there is a bigger, more important point. The Cabinet Office recently got responsibility for policy around the Freedom of Information Act. This week, it got record management policy, too.
Taken together, these policy areas make the Cabinet Office into the "Your Right to Know" department - and it has a culture of extreme secrecy. It does not hesitate to cover things up - even when it comes to the order in which people form a queue.SALT LAKE CITY — An elderly Salt Lake County resident who died in late June is the first confirmed Zika-related death in the continental U.S., health officials announced Friday.
The individual traveled to a Zika-infected area earlier this year and was awaiting Zika testing results when he or she died, according to Salt Lake County Health Department Director Gary Edwards.
He said officials found the cause of death to be "of suspicion" and later received test results confirming that the individual had Zika.
Due to privacy laws, public health officials said they would not release additional details about the individual or his or her travel history.
It may be impossible to determine exactly how or if the Zika virus contributed to the individual's death, said Dr. Dagmar Vitek, the health department's medical director, who added that the individual had "an underlying health condition."
Vitek clarified in a news conference Friday that officials believe Zika contributed to the death but do not know if it was the sole cause.
Experts assured Utahns that the chance of local transmission in the state remains low. The species of mosquito that carries Zika has been found in Utah just once, when mosquito abatement workers caught six specimens in Washington County three years ago.
Utah’s cold winters and high elevation usually prevent Zika-carrying mosquitoes from surviving in Utah, according to Salt Lake City Mosquito Abatement District manager Ary Faraji.
Six people in Salt Lake County have tested positive for the Zika virus, according to Salt Lake County epidemiology director Ilene Risk, including the deceased individual. All had recently traveled to Zika-affected areas.
No locally acquired Zika cases have been reported yet in the 50 states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Still, workers will be increasing the number of traps they put out in Salt Lake County, Faraji said, "just to make sure."
The mosquito-borne illness was declared a public health crisis after alarming reports from Brazil surfaced last year of babies being born with severe birth defects.
Since then, “the more we’ve learned, the bigger the problem seems,” said University of Utah pediatric infectious diseases chief Dr. Andrew Pavia.
Once considered a relatively mild illness, the Zika virus is now thought to cause a range of birth defects in children born to infected mothers, and it has been linked to a rare form of temporary paralysis called Guillain-Barre syndrome.
And although spread mostly through mosquitoes, sexual transmission is now thought to play a bigger role in Zika's spread than once thought, according to Pavia.
However, Zika-related deaths remain rare, he said.
A 70-year-old Puerto Rican man who died in February was the first U.S. death tied to the disease.
In that case, Pavia said, the man died as the result of an autoimmune reaction to an earlier Zika infection in which his antibodies started attacking his platelets.
Experts also believe that people who have weaker immune systems may be more susceptible to complications, although Pavia called the theory "speculative" at this point.
With containment proving difficult and Congress deadlocked over Zika funding, Pavia said the virus is likely to continue spreading throughout the Western hemisphere.
“It is really hard to mount an all-hands-on-deck response to a new infection when you have to steal money from one program and count pennies and recycle syringes,” Pavia said. “That's a slight exaggeration, but they’re really running out of spare change that they can find to do the work they need. We need funds to deal with this.”
The Utah Department of Health is awaiting about $826,000 in funding from the CDC expected to arrive next month.
But Democrats and Republicans in Congress are still fighting over President Barack Obama’s February request for $1.9 million in emergency Zika funding.
Last month, Democrats blocked a federal spending bill that would have provided $1.1 billion to fight Zika, arguing that Republicans had inserted "poison pills" into the legislation. Those included provisions that would have restricted Planned Parenthood and other clinics from providing contraceptive services related to Zika and threatened funding for the Affordable Care Act.
On Friday, Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, accused Senate Democrats of “playing politics with our health" in a statement about the Utahn's death.
The House passed a bill he sponsored that would have redirected leftover funds from the Ebola crisis to Zika. Democrats maintained that money was still needed to fight Ebola.
Without any indication that a vaccine or cure is on the way, Vitek reminded residents that prevention “is absolutely huge.”
People who are traveling to Zika-infected areas are advised to take precautions during the trip and after. For the most updated information about areas affected by Zika, visit CDC.gov/zika.
Because Zika can be sexually transmitted, women who are pregnant or trying to become pregnant should not have unprotected sex with a man who has recently traveled to an area of the world where Zika virus is circulating for six months, health officials said.
The Salt Lake County Travel Clinic is available to educate travelers about preventing Zika and other diseases common in their destination. The travel clinic can provide necessary immunizations and prescriptions for the prevention of other travel-related diseases. Appointments can be made by calling 385-468-4111.
People who have traveled recently and who are concerned about any illness they may be experiencing should contact their health care provider.
Contributing: Katie McKellar
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Related Stories© NASA/ESA handout via Reuters Hubble Space Telescope image shows the Galaxy GN-z11, shown in the inset, 13.4 billion years away and as it was just 400 million years after the Big Bang when the universe was only three percent of its current age, in this image released by NASA on March 3, 2016.
To look through the lens of a telescope is to peer back in time.
The light we view through it has spent hundreds, millions, even billions of years crossing the vastness of space to reach us, carrying with it images of things that happened long ago.
On Thursday, astronomers at the Hubble Space Telescope announced that they’d seen back farther than they ever have before, to a galaxy 13.4 billion light years away in a time when the universe was just past its infancy.
The finding shattered what’s known as the “cosmic distance record,” illuminating a point in time that scientists once thought could never be seen with current technology.
“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble,” Yale University astrophysicist Pascal Oesch, the lead author of the study, said in a statement.
The galaxy, unpoetically named GN-z11, appears as an unremarkable, fuzzy, dark red splotch when it’s magnified from an image taken by the Hubble Telescope. But by measuring a phenomenon known as redshift, Oesch and his colleagues were able to look back in time to when the galaxy was brilliantly blue and incredibly hot, bursting with brand new stars that formed at a frenetic rate.
“It really is star bursting,” study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, told the Associated Press.
Redshift explains GN-z11’s dull crimson coloring: Because the universe is expanding, every object we see through a telescope is actually moving away from us. And as they move, the waves of light they emit stretch out, shifting in color from blue, which has a relatively short wavelength, down to red, whose waves are long. The phenomenon isn’t so different from the way the sound of a train deepens as it chugs away from the listener.
By measuring the degree of redshift, scientists can figure out how long light has been traveling to us through space, and thereby how long ago the thing that they’re looking at existed. Previously, the highest redshift number assigned to a galaxy was 8.68 — meaning it existed some 13.2 billion years in the past.
GN-z11’s redshift number is 11.1.
This means that the galaxy was around just 400 million years after the Big Bang — no time at all, in cosmic terms — to a period that is 97 percent of the way to the universe’s very beginnings.
(A note on time and distance: Light years are a measure of distance — how far light can travel in a year. But cases like this, they are an indicator of age. Since the light from GN-z11 has traveled 13.4 billion years to reach us, that means it’s been traveling for 13.4 billion years, so its source must be 13.4 billion years old.)
© NASA, ESA, and A. Feild
The universe was still a toddler at that stage — hazy, cold and shrouded in a fog of hydrogen gas.
But the stars in GN-z11 and other galaxies like it were fast-growing giants that would have swiftly heated things up, “frying” the gas around them, the scientists told the BBC. And new ones were popping out all the time; GN-z11 formed stars at a rate 20 times faster than our own Milky Way.
For a brief time, they burned brilliantly. And then they burned out.
The researchers say that the existence of such a hot and active galaxy shows how little they know about the universe’s toddler years. Marijn Franx, a co-author from the University of Leiden, noted in the statement that previous research suggested that such a thing wasn’t possible.
How exactly the brilliant GN-z11 was created “remains somewhat of a mystery for now,” added his colleague Ivo Labbe.
There is some skepticism about GN-z11’s age from other scientists. Speaking to the AP, Richard Ellis, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory who found the previous record-holder for farthest galaxy ever seen, noted that the astronomers studied a spectrum of light that’s seen as less reliable.
Ellis wrote in an email that those light signatures are “noisier and harder to interpret,” and that for GN-z11 to be visible it would have to be three times brighter than typical galaxies.
Oesch responded that his team made sure “this was as clean as possible a measurement,” and noted that the technique he used is now becoming standard.
This will probably stand as one of Hubble’s last big accomplishments and almost certainly its most distant find. The decades-old behemoth hasn’t been repaired since 2009, and will likely be retired after NASA launches its new space telescope, the James Webb, in 2018.
Exactly how that happens is still up in the air, so to speak. The telescope could be booted into a higher “parking orbit,” where it will float for centuries as yet another piece of space junk. Or it might be summoned back to Earth via a robotic craft, which would guide it on a fiery descent into the Pacific Ocean.
But both options are still years away. If anything, Oesch said, the new find shows that after more than two decades aloft, Hubble has still got it.
“Hubble has proven once again, even after almost 26 years in space, just how special it is,” he told the BBC. “When the telescope was launched we were investigating galaxies a little over half-way back in cosmic history. Now, we’re going 97 percent of the way back. It really is a tremendous achievement.”On his Sirius-XM Mad Dog Sports Radio show Tuesday, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith defended Democratic presidential candidate and former Gov. Martin O’Malley (D-MD) for saying “all lives matter” after he was booed by a crowd for his comments.
Smith acknowledged that black lives do matter and he understands why that saying has been so prevalent with the publicity of recent deaths of African-Americans, but he also explained that all lives matter and he scolded “an abundance of African-Americans” for forcing a white O’Malley to apologize for his comments.
“I have to say this, I guess rhetorically. to my brothers and sisters, because I am a black man. Where’s the noise about black lives matter when black folks are killing black folks? That’s where you lose me. So a presidential candidate, who isn’t |
dog.
The Animal Welfare Board of India issues IDs for people who feed stray animals.
Early morning chill. A photo posted by Vasu Agarwal (@vasuagarwal) on Mar 22, 2016 at 12:42pm PDT
These IDs help in protecting women and senior citizens, especially, who care for animals from animal-haters. The Board also organises Animal Welfare Fortnights, held this year in January, which have hardly caught anyone's notice.
People choose to ignore these rules because implementation largely depends on NGOs.
Stray dogs are protected under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, and rules enacted under Section 38 of the act, particularly, the Animal Birth Control (Dogs) Rules, 2001; Indian Penal Code, sections 428 & 429 and Article 51A (g) of the Constitution. Despite such extensive laws, people go scot-free because bringing them to justice is a difficult task.
Filing an FIR against people who are cruel to animals or towards people who care for animals is important.
This is Razia. Razia attends classes more than me. Razia eats pedigree. Razia eats drools. Razia has a new crush in college. Razia is calm. Razia lives the moment #dogsofinstagram #doglove #lovestrays A photo posted by Shakti (@shaktism15) on Feb 5, 2016 at 6:29am PST
Filing an FIR in your local police station not only forces the officials to take action, but also helps in maintaining a record of repeat offenders for NGOs and other animal welfare groups.In October 2015, before its third season kicked off at OBERON, Old School Game Show’s creators told us the show was “what would happen if The Price is Right got drunk and danced on a table.” And it certainly hasn’t gotten any less zany over the last year—why would it? The one-of-a-kind, interactive variety production—part TV series, part musical, part comedy show, all absolutely bananas energy—brings together some of Greater Boston’s artists, comics and musicians for send-ups and celebrations of everything from pro wrestling to Pat Sajak.
Perhaps its no surprise, then, that Old School Game Show will introduce that mirth and mania to an audience at the Wilbur on February 4 for its biggest, most off-the-wall episode to date.
Executive producer and actress Ginny Nightshade says that she and the rest of the Old School Game Show crew have been actively looking beyond Somerville and Cambridge to bring the Old School Game Show experience to new spaces and new audiences. “We’ve got this really lovely base of people who come to our show all the time … but we can bring this to people who have never seen something like this before,” Nightshade says before a Wednesday night rehearsal at the Rockwell in Davis Square.
The 2015 Halloween production was held at Cinema Salem, where only a handful of people had seen the show before. Old School Game Show also made its Laugh Boston debut last year.
Nightshade says they’ve learned that this “crazy monster of a show” will hold up in just about any space, and The Wilbur, with its capacity of 1,200, will be the largest venue in which they’ve showcased their offbeat brand of comedy by a lot. (OBERON, for comparison, seats 130.) It’s letting Nightshade and co. do their biggest, boldest evening to date. “And our show is already pretty big,” she chuckles.
To take advantage of the room, they’ve added huge dance and musical numbers. The whole band will be onstage. They’re bringing tons of local talent along for the ride, including opening comic Ken Reid and musical guest Will Dailey. Starlab Studios worked with the crew to film scenes for a brand new game that will make its debut in February.
Coordinating their biggest production to date has meant the writers, actors, dancers and musicians have done more planning than ever before. Nightshade jokes that the script has been done for weeks—this time around, it won’t be finalized just days before the show. The full-cast rehearsal at the Rockwell is something of an anomaly, too, as the crew generally practices piecemeal before the big night.
But fear not: More rehearsing won’t mean a final product that’s any less wild. This is the same crazy crew of actors and writers who brought you games like “Baby Mama Trauma,” where contestants have to guess which violent movie is depicted in a child’s drawing. In fact, the wheels might come off even more at the Wilbur. Old School Game Show episodes are usually based around a theme, like heavy metal, or the ’80s. This time around, the theme is just “game show,” which means just about anything could happen.
“We’re getting to pay homage to what the show originated and was based on, which was these game shows we all came home and watched on TV after school,” Nightshade says.
And of course, it’s all led by host Mike D’Angelo, the manic, mustachioed “tour de force of campy energy,” who’s helmed this thing since the beginning. He and Nightshade, who have been creative collaborators for years, actually got engaged in December. “I thought the show was the love of my life, and it turns out that he is,” she says, grinning. “It’s been really neat to do this together as coworkers and as partners.”
“We just talk about it constantly,” she adds. “We never stop doing it.”
Old School Game Show heads to the Wilbur on Saturday, February 4 at 10 p.m. You can grab tickets here and find more information on Facebook or on the Old School Game Show website.Tonia Winchester, the former Seattle prosecutor who campaigned for the legalization of marijuana in Washington made an appearance in Vancouver this week.
Winchester was a guest speaker at the Union of BC Municipalities conference on Sept. 21. Despite federal drug laws, Winchester served in the coalition of citizens that allowed marijuana to be sold to adults (over 21), starting in July 2014.
BC has seen a number of cannabis dispensaries in the last little while, which is challenging the governments to regulate the issue.
Winchester mentioned that BC, (and Canada in general), is known for being more progressive and yet Washington and Alaska are beating BC in this movement. She mentions that BC can follow in their footsteps with a little creativity and courage from locals to say they are ready for something different and stand up for their communities.
Winchester recently told CBC in an interview, “I think it’s challenging as a politician to step out and be pro-marijuana. Because people think if you are pro-marijuana, you are pro the use of marijuana. But what we are really talking about is what is the best policy for our community.”
The regulation and taxing of marijuana is about taking money out of the hands of cartels, freeing up law enforcement to work on other issues and investing in drug treatment and education, she added.
What do you think about the possible legalization of marijuana in BC? Sound off in the comments below!
Written by: Meagan GillThe results of an eight-month investigation by InsideClimate News, published Wednesday, show that Exxon scientist warned company executives decades ago about human-caused global warming.
But despite its own 40-year-old research that showed that burning fossil fuels released carbon dioxide that was warming the planet to harmful levels, Exxon – the United States' largest oil company – has spent $30 million to discredit climate science to protect its carbon-based business.
In 1977, senior Exxon scientist James F. Black told company executives, "In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," according to InsideClimate.
"Present thinking," Dr. Black then estimated in 1978, "holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical."
Despite the warnings, the oil giant, which brought in $127 billion in gross profit in 2014, cut back its carbon dioxide research in the late 1980s when – like today – a glut of oil depressed its price, hurting the company's business. In the ensuing decades, Exxon instead focused on casting doubt on global warming warnings and lobbying against international action to control greenhouse gas emissions.
It spent $1 million on climate denial groups in 2014 alone, reports environmental advocacy group Greenpeace.
A few decades ago, things were different. Exxon was at the forefront of climate research. The company’s research and engineering division comprised a team of accomplished scientists and mathematicians who worked with university scientists and the US Department of Energy to develop sophisticated climate models. They spent three years and at least $1 million measuring the levels of CO 2 in the air and ocean aboard the company’s Esso Atlantic tanker, the InsideClimate report explains.
Exxon scientists published their research in peer-reviewed science journals.
By 1982, company scientists reported to management that despite the need for more research, controlling global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”
According to InsideClimate:
Unless that happened, "there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered," the primer said, citing independent experts. "Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible."
InsideClimate's review of corporate financial reports filed during the height of the company’s climate research era showed that the company did not relay the gloomy results to shareholders.
By the mid 1980s, in the days of a major recession triggered by an oil crisis, global warming became a topic of national discourse.
“With alarm bells suddenly ringing,” reports InsideClimate, “Exxon started financing efforts to amplify doubt about the state of climate science.
Today, Exxon acknowledges climate change is a "risk," though it doesn't believe that reducing the use of fossil fuels is the right way to mitigate it.
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“It is equally essential that society manages the risk of climate change by increasing energy efficiency and by investing in research into technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” a 2014 company announcement says.
But, the company says, “All energy sources, including carbon-based fuels, are necessary to meet future global energy demand growth as society manages the risks of climate change.”A suicide bomber struck the headquarters of the Anti-terrorism Squad of the Islamabad police force Thursday afternoon, just as lawmakers were preparing to convene 15 miles away to discuss growing militancy in the country.
The incident added to the rise in bomb attacks that Pakistan has seen over the past year, not only in its troubled northwestern region but also on high-profile targets in major cities like Islamabad, the capital.
"The message [from Thursday's attack] couldn't have been clearer," says Hassan Askari Rizvi, former professor of Pakistan Studies at Columbia University.
The militants, he continues, "want to show that they have the capacity to hit Pakistani institutions – even those ones trusted with the responsibility of protecting the rest."
Suicide bomb attacks have spiked in Pakistan, from two in 2002 to a record 56 in 2007, according to the Institute for Conflict Management, based in New Delhi. As of August of this year, the country had seen 25 suicide-bomb attacks, ICM reports.
In a grim indicator of the rise in attacks, according to Pakistan's intelligence agency, this year Pakistan has overtaken Iraq in suicide-bomb deaths.
It counted 28 suicide bombings in Pakistan that killed more than 471 people in the first eight months of this year. By comparison Iraq saw 42 such attacks and 463 deaths; Afghanistan, 36 incidents and 436 casualties.
Thursday's bombing in Islamabad left no casualties. But it capped off a week of deadly attacks throughout the country. In Dir, near the northwestern Swat Valley where the Army is currently battling militants, a roadside bomb targeted a bus carrying prisoners and killed 11 people, including four children in a school bus that was passing by.
On Wednesday, three bombings in Lahore targeting a spot where young men and women are known to mingle freely, injured several women and children. Earlier attacks in the past week targeted politicians.
The attack came the day after Pakistan's newly appointed intelligence chief delivered a rare briefing to lawmakers on the country's militant threat.
Lawmakers will reconvene Monday behind closed doors to discuss a unified strategy to combat the growing militancy in the country.
But more than political will, Pakistan will need to improve its counterterrorism abilities, says Khalid Rahman at the Institute of Policy Studies in Islamabad.
"Most of the time there is no claim of responsibility, and investigations don't uncover much," he says. "Unless we have concrete information on where this is coming from and why, it will be a hard fight to fight."The twentieth century saw the Space Race, a battle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to conquer the solar system. This century’s technological war is a little more terrestrial—it’s taking place along Earth’s roads and highways.
It’s a competition to see who can be first to take the driverless car and turn it from the futuristic stuff of science fiction into the planet’s dominant mode of transportation. And while the United States is leading the pack, China and the UK aren’t far behind.
Though the driverless car has been slowly becoming a reality for decades, as manufacturers have added features that give vehicles autonomy (like cruise control or park-assist), the first fully driverless car was invented in the U.S. It came out of the Carnegie Mellon robotics Navigation Laboratory in 1984, and American companies have been leading the way ever since. This is where Google and Tesla, who’ve invested millions in autonomous vehicles (AVs), are based. So the U.S. has a clear head start.
Google already has prototypes up-and-running on the streets of California. Tesla famously pushed an “autopilot” feature to its Model S cars earlier this year, and the tech community is buzzing with speculation and rumors that their next car, the Model 3, expected to be available sometime at the end of 2017, could be the first commercially available fully AV.
In the last year, private U.S. companies and academia have invested heavily in AV technology. Ride-sharing powerhouse Uber started testing its own automated Ford Fusions on the streets of Pittsburgh this May. Their closest rival, Lyft, announced earlier this year that they are partnering with General Motors to create a national network of self-driving vehicles. Meanwhile, Texas A&M just announced that they’ve purchased an old military base and will be repurposing it into a massive $150 million, 2,000-acre hub for driverless car innovation.
But while private industry and academia are barreling full-steam ahead, the U.S. government is taking a more cautious approach. There are no federal laws to incentive cities and states to invest in infrastructure to support driverless cars. In fact, it’s not completely clear that driverless cars are even legal in every state. Only eight states have enacted legislation (one by executive order) that expressly permits the use of autonomous vehicles. But the rest of the states’ laws, for the most part, don’t expressly say that a person must have their hands on the wheel to be legally driving a car, rather they must be “operating” it, which leaves a legal grey area.
“If the U.S. doesn’t get thoughtful about robotics policy, we will wind up losing out to these other nations,” Ryan Calo, an expert in cyber law and robotics at the University of Washington School of Law, tells Vocativ.
Specifically, in a white paper on the government’s difficulty with regulating new technologies, Calo said that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) lacks the understanding on the complicated technology behind the vehicles already on our roads. He cites an example of a past electronic problem with Toyota vehicles, in which NHTSA, unable to evaluate the issue on their own, had to ask NASA for assistance in determining the car’s malfunction.
Just this month, NHTSA head Mark Rosekind released a statement emphasizing the role of individual states, rather than the federal government, in making policy decisions about AV regulation. “What the states actually implement is their call,” he said. According to a National Law Review article on the statement, this move by the NHTSA could mean that the U.S. isn’t ready to compete with other countries, like China, on pushing forward legislation that will make AVs a reality. “This is undoubtedly a disappointment to the many companies in the industry that have pushed for federal regulations to promote uniformity and avoid the substantial efforts necessary to sift through the potentially conflicting state rules,” the National Law Review story said.
A disappointment for sure, or if you’re Google, a slap in face. The company’s director of self-driving cars, Chris Urmson, went before the Senate in March and essentially begged them take action. Leaving the law in a “patchwork” of different rules depending on the state, he said, would “significantly hinder safety innovation, interstate commerce, national competitiveness, and the eventual deployment of autonomous vehicles.”
According to Dan Malone, an attorney with extensive experience with automotive compliance laws at the Michigan law firm Butzel Long, “[Driverless car regulation] doesn’t come with instructions. People are trying to marshall developments that are occurring at breakneck speed. You don’t want to rush too quickly and … you don’t want to delay, delay, delay.” he says. “Where you strike the balance between those two extremes will largely define what lies ahead.”
So, while Silicon Valley’s early investment in AVs gives the U.S. a leg up on the competition, our resistance to regulation could be our undoing.
There’s no country that wants to win the driverless car race more than China. While some of their largest companies (like internet giant Baidu) are developing their own driverless vehicles, the country is mostly focused on partnerships with international companies like BMW and Volvo (which is actually a Chinese-owned company based in Sweden).
Overall, the Chinese auto-making industry is not robust; however, China is the world’s largest automotive market—and that gives them a lot of bargaining power with car companies. If China creates the infrastructure for AVs—and Chinese car consumers buy them—then car manufacturers hoping to remain relevant will have little choice but to invest in supplying them.
So that leaves a lot of room for international companies to get deeply involved with China. Last month Apple invested $1 billion in the country’s Uber-like ride-sharing company Didi.
And when it comes to regulating its driverless cars, China leads the pack.
The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is already at work on a roadmap that will have autonomous vehicles on the highway within three to five years and in urban centers by 2025, a lofty goal. The ministry is also responsible for regulating China’s internet, electronic, and software industries.
Under single-party rule, China has been able to enact large-scale social changes that would be far more difficult in countries with American-style bureaucracy. After all, a few years ago the nation announced plans to move 250 million people off farms and into newly constructed cities, in what would be the biggest relocation of humans in history, in just a dozen years—and they’re making progress. That makes having a nation of driverless vehicles in ten years not seem so crazy.
So now they have turned their power to change in the direction of autonomous vehicles. The roadmap they have set out includes convening a panel that will set standards and create an industry that is unified nationwide According to a Reuters story on the roadmap: “The draft will set out technical standards, including a common language for cars to communicate with each other and infrastructure, and regulatory guidelines—a unified framework that contrasts with a patchwork of state laws and standards in the United States.”
Many individual Chinese cities are also investing in infrastructure that would support AVs. Last month, the southeastern city of WuHu announced it wants to be the world’s first city to embrace the driverless car. The city is at the start of a three-year pilot program in which autonomous vehicles—including cars, buses, and vans—are tootling around the city in designated areas. If the three-year test run is a success, local residents will be allowed to drive their own self-driving vehicles and, according to the proposal, within five years driverless cars on the streets of WuHu will be the norm.
So while China may be relying on technology from other countries, their focus on infrastructure investment and regulation could help them win out.
Over the past year, England has burst onto the scene, becoming a legitimate contender in the driverless car race. It seems surprising for a country not particularly known for its car culture or technological innovation, but the English government has prioritized the regulation of the industry and incentivized its growth. In March, Google’s Eric Schmidt said that the company is considering testing its driverless vehicles in the UK, which may end up being a big coup for the country as the U.S. government has largely ignored Google’s requests to create federal regulations back home.
Last year, the UK launched a full-scale review of its highway codes and regulations, with the intention of revamping its regulatory system to accommodate AVs on the roads. The results of the review, which they expect to be completed by 2017, will include recommended rewrites to current transportation laws, which will state outright that driverless cars are legal on the country’s roads.
As part of the Queen’s Speech this year, the government has also announced a Modern Transport Bill that would create a Code of Practice that will standardize the rules for testing self-driving vehicles and have the cars on the road nationwide by 2020. The Code allows for widespread AV testing across the country. That testing includes government investment in eight AV-related pilot projects, which span a number of self-driving technologies, from car-to-car communication to AV fleets designed to transport disabled or vision-impaired riders.
One pilot project—in partnership with the UK’s top car manufacturer, Jaguar Land Rover—dedicated $15 million to install wireless sensors on roads around the UK. Jaguar calls the program, dubbed the UK Connected Intelligent Transport Environment (UK-CITE), a “41-mile living laboratory.” Once installed, the sensors will communicate with a fleet of 100 connected autonomous research vehicles. The resulting data will give the company and the government a better sense of how self-driving cars affect road safety and traffic efficiency.
In a separate program, this July, London will be unveiling seven small driverless van-like vehicles they’re calling “pods” (inspired by the track-based pods the city uses to move people around Heathrow Airport) that will operate throughout the borough of Greenwich that includes residential streets. After a three-month test period of “invited” users, they’ll be available for general use. Three other cities in the UK will be launching similar programs this year.
England’s insurance industry is taking on AV liability, which is a big indication that even private industry is taking the government’s desire to win this race seriously. The country’s first self-driving car insurance policy, created by insurer Adrian Flux, covers AV owners against damage caused by hackers, satellite and navigation failures, and damage caused to the vehicle when the owner fails to control it while avoiding an accident. The policy also does not allow the car’s owner to sleep behind the wheel or drink and drive.
But while England has shown interest in entering this next great race, their vote to leave the European Union—and the loss of workers from throughout the EU—is likely to hold them back.
Regardless of which country wins out, we’re not getting results any time soon. The UK isn’t planning to have driverless cars on the streets until 2020, and China is aiming for 2025. The U.S. doesn’t even have a central federal plan, opting instead to leave regulations and planning up to individual states.
AV technology is still emerging, and it will be years before today’s investments—in regulation, infrastructure and the technology itself—begin to bear out for the three great superpowers. But the U.S., while at the forefront of AV technology, could falter with a “innovate now, regulate later” approach—leaving the country an archaic loser with a country full of cars still controlled by human hands.
Where we’re going, we’ll still need roads, but will we need drivers? This week, Vocativ explores the state of autonomous vehicles—their regulation, technology, and security—and how close we really are to a driverless future. Read more here:
Getting Rid Of Traffic Lights Could End Gridlock
If A Self-Driving Car Gets Into An Accident, Who Is To Blame?
How Driverless Cars Make Life-And-Death DecisionsThe shifting natural wealth of nations
Rabah Arezki, Rick van der Ploeg, Frederik Toscani
Global natural wealth has shifted from North to South over the past decades, with discoveries of major oil and gas fields and mineral deposits first in Latin America and more recently in Sub-Saharan Africa. This column argues that a more outward market orientation on the part of developing countries has been the key driving force behind this shift – over and above other forces such as the increase in emerging markets’ demand and/or developed countries running out of natural resources.
Contrary to popular belief, developing countries appear relatively poor in resource wealth compared to developed countries. At least, that is what the data show. According to the World Bank, proven reserves of hydrocarbon and mineral deposits per square kilometre in the African continent ($25,000 per km2) are much lower than in the OECD ($130,000 per km2) (Collier 2011, McKinsey Global Institute 2013). Of course, that apparent disparity in the relative natural wealth of nations might just be an artefact of the data and simply reflect the fact that the developing world has largely been much less subject to exploration.
North-to-South shift
Interestingly, major discoveries in the developing world have relentlessly increased for decades narrowing the gap in (known) resource wealth between developed and developing countries. According to existing data from geologists, OECD countries accounted for 37% to 50% of all natural resource discoveries between 1950 and 1989, but they accounted for only 26% in the past decade, with sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America doubling their shares, to 17% and 27%, respectively. Latin America has had the most mineral and oil discoveries in the past two decades. For crude oil, Figure 1 shows that proven reserves have grown continuously over the past decades and have shifted from high-income countries to the emerging market and developing economies.
Figure 1. Proven oil reserves are rising much faster in non-OECD than in OECD countries
These major shifts in resource discoveries from North to South are associated with efforts in emerging market and developing economies to open up to foreign investment and/or improve their institutions – including more stable government and a stronger rule of law. This has enabled the supply of natural resources – from oil, gas, and coal to all kinds of minerals – to rise, so that concerns that the world will soon run out of oil, gas, and minerals may be misplaced.
The role of policies and institutions
Several authors have emphasised the role of institutions in the exploitation of natural resources (Bohn and Deacon 2000). Less work has been done, however, on the relation between the role of institutions and exploration of natural resources. Cust and Harding (2016) explore the role of institutions in determining the likelihood of discoveries by exploiting cross-sectional variation from strips of land of 500 metres that overlap a border and stretch out in two different countries for which arguably the geology is the same either side of the border. They find significant differences in the frequency of discoveries across borders and conclude that institutional quality is an important driver of oil discoveries.
The evolution of political institutions such as the rule of law over the last decades also shows a North-South convergence as various emerging market and developing economies adopt standards already prevalent in the North. And the rapid improvement in the institutional environment in many developing economies in the 1990s coincided with the increase in the share of oil and mineral discoveries in Latin America and Africa. The increase in discoveries after countries open up is stark (Figure 2). In Peru, for example, discoveries more than quadrupled, in Chile they tripled and in Mexico they doubled. These discoveries not only occurred when commodity prices were high, but also when commodity prices were at historical lows.
Figure 2. Discoveries increase after opening up of the economies (controlling for country, year and mineral fixed effects)
To provide a conceptual framework for these global shift in resource wealth, in new research we extend the depletion and discoveries model of Pindyck (1978) to an international context where globally operating resource companies shift exploration activities until no arbitrage opportunities are left (Arezki et al. 2016). This leads to three theoretical predictions: (1) as countries open up, discoveries shift from North to South; (2) resource discoveries increase as demand for resources rises; and (3) depleting reserves first leads to more discoveries (the probing effect) and then eventually to lower discoveries (the running-out effect).
To test these predictions, we estimate a three-way panel of major oil and gas discoveries (obtained from Mike Horn, a former president of the American Petroleum Geologist Association) and mineral discoveries (obtained from Minex, a consultancy) between 1950 and 2012 in 128 countries for 33 different natural resources – including oil, metal ores and minerals. The estimates control for country, year and resource fixed effects, so take account of, say, global common shocks, technological progress, geological information for particular resources on individual countries, and big countries perhaps having more discoveries. A generic measure of market orientation for institutional quality is used, since this is seen to be more credible. We find that a country’s market orientation is associated with a statistically and economically significant increase in the likelihood of resource discovery. Countries discover more natural resources after they adopt market-based institutions, especially when they improve the investment climate and government stability – for example, when contracts are strengthened or expropriation risk is reduced. A country’s proven resource endowment is thus in part determined by its institutions.
The bottom line
Improvements in institutions and policies related to the opening up to foreign investors have an economically large impact on the likelihood of major resource discoveries. Estimates suggest that if all of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa were to adopt the same quality of institutions as the US (as measured by the International Country Risk Guide), the number of discoveries worldwide would increase by 25%, all else equal. Demand and reserves matter too as predicted. The results also hold if exploration spending instead of discoveries is used as the dependent variable or if different measures of institutional quality are used. The results also suggest that the effects of opening up hold for mineral and hydro-carbon discoveries separately.
From a policy standpoint, the North-South shift in the frontier of resource exploitation is likely to have important, mainly beneficial consequences for individual economies with newly found natural resources. Indeed, these discoveries expand the list of resource-rich countries. They also portend positive economic developments. New mines mean more investment and jobs, especially in the resource sector, and increased government revenues, that if properly spent can increase the health and welfare of the people. The new production has fostered new trade routes from Latin America and Africa to emerging Asia – such as China–Ghana and China–Chile – multiplying commodity trade alone on those routes by more than 20 times since the 1990s.
However, it is important that the income from the new resource discoveries is not squandered but spent on high-quality growth enhancing investment to ensure that the whole country benefits. Improving on the knowledge of what lies beneath their soil is important but it is equally important for authorities to negotiations with multinational corporations to find the just middle ground between incentivising exploration and making sure that resource income can be used to further development.
Of course, exploration and development has not increased only in those countries with newly improved institutions. The re-emergence of US oil production through the use of fracking technology suggests that technology, depending on how and where it is adopted, could to some degree attenuate the North-South shift in the frontier of resource extraction. That said, as the South continues to develop an environment that encourages investment, the move of resource exploration and extraction to emerging market and developing economies will continue.
References
Arezki, R, F van der Ploeg and F Toscani (2016), “Shifting Frontiers in Global Resource Extraction: The Role of Institutions”, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 11553.
Bohn, H and R T Deacon (2000), “Ownership risk, investment, and the use of natural resources”, American Economic Review 90 (3), 526–49.
Collier, P (2011), The Plundered Planet: Why we Must — and How we Can — Manage Nature for Global Prosperity, Oxford University Press.
Cust, J and T Harding (2014), “Institutions and the Location of Oil Exploration”, revised OxCarre Research Paper 127, Department of Economics, Oxford Center for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford.
McKinsey Global Institute (2013), Reverse the Curse: Maximizing the Potential of Resource-Driven Economies.
Pindyck, R S (1978), “The Optimal Exploration and Production of Non-renewable Resources,” Journal of Political Economy 86, 841-861.Microsoft has long been one of the most ardent proponents of expanding U.S. copyright law. But that enthusiasm doesn't extend to the new Stop Online Piracy Act, which its lobbyists are quietly working to alter, CNET has learned.
It's little surprise that Web-based companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter oppose SOPA, which is designed to make allegedly piratical Web sites virtually disappear from the Internet. They, and many civil liberties and human rights groups, worry that SOPA could jeopardize legitimate Web sites too.
BSA
But Redmond's skepticism is notable because unlike the Web companies, Microsoft earns nearly all of its revenue by licensing software--which can, of course, be pirated--and loses money on Bing and its online services division. What's even more telling is that Microsoft had enthusiastically endorsed a narrower version of the copyright bill, called Protect IP, earlier this year.
That concern about SOPA, which is heading toward a committee vote in the House of Representatives next month, led to a rare and embarrassing about-face on the part of the Business Software Alliance, a trade association that represents Microsoft's interests in Washington, D.C. (BSA, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, is among the seven members of the International Intellectual Property Alliance. Among BSA's projects is a pro-copyright Web site for kids featuring Garrett, the copyright-crusading ferret that Wired dubbed one of the "lamest technology mascots ever.")
When Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, introduced SOPA last month, BSA distributed a statement saying it "commended" him for it and that the legislation was a "good step...to address the problem of online piracy."
Yesterday, BSA President Robert Holleyman changed his tune, saying in a blog post that SOPA "needs work" and that "valid and important questions have been raised about the bill."
While the wording of SOPA hasn't changed over the last four weeks, the politics have. A person familiar with the situation told CNET that BSA's volte-face came after Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, other members of the trade association had reviewed the bill and informed Holleyman of their displeasure.
Holleyman did not respond to a request for comment today. A spokesman for BSA would say only that "I'm directing you to the blog post."
It's possible that Microsoft is reluctant to oppose SOPA publicly because it would jeopardize its relationship with Smith, the influential chairman of the House Judiciary committee, which oversees copyright law. Microsoft declined to respond to a query from early yesterday, with a representative saying only that we are "unable to accommodate your request."
Microsoft isn't the only company to embrace Protect IP yet have reservations about SOPA. Tim McKone, AT&T's executive vice president of federal relations, told CNET last week that "we have been supportive of the general framework" of Protect IP. But when it comes to SOPA, all AT&T would say is that it is "working constructively with Chairman Smith and others toward a similar end in the House."
One major difference between the two proposals is that SOPA is broader. Protect IP, which is awaiting a Senate floor vote, would allow courts to order AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other ISPs to pretend that the domain names for targeted Web sites didn't exist. (The Domain Name System, or DNS, translates alphanumeric domain names like CNET.com into the numeric IP addresses actually used by computers, in this case 64.30.224.118.)
SOPA goes further by permitting the Justice Department and courts to order ISPs to block customers from visiting the numeric IP addresses of off-limits Web sites. It also appears to authorize deep packet inspection, which raises privacy concerns.
This week's public position-revision by BSA has inspired some mirth on the part of its customary opponents on copyright law.
Art Brodsky, communications director of Public Knowledge, which previously twitted BSA in a blog post titled "Copyright industry: Copyrights trump human rights?", says he welcomes a potential new ally.
"Generally BSA has been very hawkish on the intellectual property front," Brodsky says. "We're always glad to see them become enlightened on these issues."HOLLYWOOD, Fla. - A man was arrested Thursday in Hollywood after a woman caught him masturbating in public, authorities said.
According to an arrest report, the woman called police about 1:30 p.m. and said that she saw a man masturbating in a van parked outside the Cove Apartments at 4300 Sheridan St.
The woman told officers that she saw the incident from her second-floor balcony and went down to confront the suspect, who was identified by police as Alexey Zubkov, 27, but he drove away and returned a short time later.
The responding officer said he confronted Zubkov and asked him if he knew why he was there.
According to the report, Zubkov replied, "Yes. The lady says she saw me jerking off."
Police said Zubkov asked the officer if he could explain himself, and claimed that he has a "very bad itch on his penis and wanted to get a good scratch," so he pulled down his pants to relieve his itch.
Police said Zubkov claimed that he didn't have his penis all the way out, just enough to scratch himself.
Police said the woman had a clear view of Zubkov's van from her balcony.
Because of her statements and his testimony, Zubkov was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in public.
Copyright 2017 by WPLG Local10.com - All rights reserved.The development of approaches for simulating rare events in complex molecular systems is a central concern in chemical physics. In recent work, Roux and co-workers proposed a novel, swarms of trajectories (SoT) method for determining the transition paths of such events. It consists of the dynamical refinement on the system’s free energy surface of a putative transition path that is parametrized in terms of a set of collective variables (CVs) that are identified as being |
-hating Black men who date white women for contrived and pathetic reasons, and I hate them. They're so up front about their exclusive attraction to white women, and they'll give you a list of reasons why. It is deliberate for them. They smugly go out of their way to put down Black women based on stereotypical notions about their attitude, or hair, or something equally stupid, and it's corny and disgusting. That's one of the issues with interracial dating. Any time a Black man walks around with a white woman, he's giving off the impression that white women are his specific preference and that he has a problem with women of his own race, and because that applies to some Black men who date white women, it becomes a label that all of us are subjected to."
Black women suffer from stereotypes that paint them as too aggressive and unattractive, in contrast to white women, who are painted as the epitome of beauty in our society.
A year ago, when my relationship fizzled with a strong-willed Black woman — who is still one of the most beautiful, successful, smart, and compassionate women I’ve known — a white male friend of mine suggested I’d do better with “a nice white girl," since my ex was so bossy, in his opinion.
The idea that I deserved better than her — and that better was “a nice white girl” — still gets under my skin. I assured him I had no qualms with dating Black women and that I actually have a thing for bossy women. The idea that being bossy is unattractive in a woman also exposes sexist double standards.
Nicki:
3. Race doesn’t matter if you love him.
BigStock/Ocus Focus - bigstockphoto.com
Rudeness from strangers on public transportation or in restaurants. Conversations between lovers about race that expose conflicting worldviews and experiences. Condemnation from friends and family who disapprove of interracial relationships. These are all examples of how race issues create a lot of stress and anxiety in, and bring baggage to, interracial relationships. Love is strong, but it takes more than love to overcome the obstacles that can stand in an interracial couple’s way.
You have to be open to addressing the weirdness head on — together. Don't just sweep issues under the carpet and assume that love will conquer all.
4. He's packing.
Scientific evidence that Black men have bigger penises is lacking. This myth seems harmless and like a positive stereotype. But the idea that all Black dudes are packing has more sinister roots than a lot of people realize.
The myth is part of the sexual stereotypes about Black people used as justification for oppressing them. It's been suggested "that the sexual stereotype of Blacks" is a major factor that helps maintain racism, as Gary L. Davis and Herbert J. Cross wrote in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
"Black females are thought to have a near insatiable sexual appetite, and Black males are thought to have an oversized penis and to be more sexually potent than white males.... Along with this ascribed Black male potency is a fear of Black male aggressiveness. Whites are allegedly fearful that white women may be raped by Blacks because of the Blacks' ungoverned sexual appetites. This fear is an implicit reason for segregation. History is replete with instances where Black males were lynched for supposed sexual indiscretions with white females; and not only were they lynched, they were castrated. Castration-lynching in this society has been directed primarily at Blacks and has been interpreted as direct violence on the sexual potency of Black males by whites, because of the threat of Black sexuality."
And as Woman Musings pointed out, "fetishizing someone because of their race is not a compliment."
"It assumes a monolithic identity and evidences that what is truly desired is not an equal relationship, but a caricature of what is understood to be natural based in race. Each racial group has their own disgusting stereotypes to negotiate by gender: Latino men are said to be full of machismo, Asian men are overtly feminized, and Black men are constantly reduced to large roving penises willing to please. When embarking on an interracial relationship, one never knows for sure if the interest expressed is because the potential partner believes that you are attractive, intelligent, funny, and great to be around. Before a person of color enters any room, let alone a relationship, race enters and brings with it a load of assumptions. Dating outside of one’s race opens the possibility of not just having one’s heart broken, but dealing with the fact that in some cases, what the person really wants is not actually you, but the stereotype they assume you embody."
5. He wants you to be "down."
You don't have to get fresh cornrows, start listening to trap music, or attempt speaking African-American Vernacular English just because you're trying to date a Black dude. Personally, you'd get more points from me for if you can quote James Baldwin or if you're knowledgeable about or genuinely interested in learning about my culture beyond popular trends and stereotypes.
Don't try too hard. Be yourself. And remember, there's a difference between appreciation and appropriation, as Maisha Z. Johnson wrote for Everyday Feminism:
If you mean to appreciate part of Black culture, that has to include learning about the history of what you’re appreciating and about the struggles and achievements of the people you’re borrowing from. Then you’ll be the kind of ally who’s informed enough to honor our culture in a way that supports us — instead of just taking what you like and hurting our community.“Too risky,” they say. Who is they? Probably you. That’s right, you are a member of the ignominious “they” now. Doesn’t feel so good, does it? But I’m here to make one last ditch effort to try to get you to see the light. Here is the argument for Carlos Correa at #4 overall:
1) Correa’s competition isn’t as safe as they appear (Donaldson, Arenado, Rizzo, Machado, Stanton, Cabrera, McCutchen)
Let’s start with Josh Donaldson, Nolan Arenado, Anthony Rizzo, and Manny Machado. All of these guys have exactly one year of elite fantasy production, and only Donaldson managed to even crack the top 5 last season. Arenado finished 10th on Yahoo’s player rater, Machado finished 13th, and Rizzo 23rd. Their track records, which I guess is the reason they are considered safer than Correa, include multiple seasons of non-elite production for each player. It would not be the first time we attribute a “breakout” season to a player, when it ends up being closer to a career year in reality. Not to say I don’t think these guys had real breakouts, I do, but you can’t completely ignore the risk of regression, either.
Which brings us to Giancarlo Stanton, Miguel Cabrera, and Andrew McCutchen. The risk factor for Stanton is obvious, injury. He has played in under 125 games in 3 of his 5 full major league seasons. As for Cabrera and McCutchen, they present the best arguments for picking a safe player over Correa, but their track records are starting to get a little too long, as some age related red flags popped up for both of them last season. Cabrera’s came in the form of injuries. He played in only 119 games in 2015 after being a pillar of health his entire career. McCutchen’s came in the form of stolen bases. He stole a career low 11 bags, on a career low 16 attempts last season. This coming off establishing career lows in both categories in 2014. I actually have Cabrera and McCutchen ranked slightly higher than the general consensus, so I do value the safety of a long track record, but the longer the track record gets, the more wear and tear risks come into play.
2) 5-category production
Picking true 5-category producers in the early rounds, rather than pure power guys, will give you the flexibility to seek value in the later rounds, no matter what form it comes in. You won’t have to pass on your favorite sleepers, or that stud that keeps falling, because you ignored speed, or average, earlier in the draft. Arenado, Cabrera, and Donaldson are not going to give you much in the way of steals. Rizzo and Stanton fall more into the “sneaky” steals category, and don’t think you can count on them for true 5-category production like a 20+ steal Correa will provide. McCutchen’s declining stolen base totals and attempts were discussed above. Machado is the most interesting case. If I were more confident in his ability to steal bases, he very well might be deserving of the #4 spot (at least in a Yahoo league where he has SS eligibility), but his past history, poor stolen base percentage, and average speed grades suggest his 20 steal season in 2015 might be hard to repeat.
The 5-category production argument is also the major reason why I wouldn’t draft Clayton Kershaw ahead of Correa, either. Through no fault of his own, Kershaw is limited to being a 4-category producer. I also believe in an overarching draft strategy of favoring hitters over pitchers. I’m always going to take one of the elite hitters in the first round of a draft, no matter how dominant a pitcher is. I have been in many leagues where I have seen a pitching heavy strategy work, so I don’t think drafting Kershaw #4 overall is disastrous, but it is just not a strategy I will employ.
3) The much maligned positional scarcity
Positional scarcity should not be a major factor when you are drafting, and that’s the point, Correa can stand at #4 on his own merits, without the positional scarcity handicap. But it also doesn’t mean we should completely ignore it. The entire SS position is riddled with risk, starting with the moving away from Coors, oft injured Troy Tulowitzi, right on through to all of the highly touted youngsters (Xander Bogaerts, Corey Seager, Francisco Lindor). Ending up with Evan Longoria as your 3B, or Mark Teixeira/Brandon Belt as your 1B, is far safer than guys like Marcus Semien or Ketel Marte, as much as I like them as sleeper candidates myself. So while it may feel like you are going “safe” by passing on Correa in the first round, you are really just reallocating some of that risk to later in the draft.
4) Carlos Correa is a beast
As for Correa himself, he put up a fantasy line of 52/22/68/.279/14 in 432 MLB PA last season. He then played even better in the post season, putting up a.903 OPS with 2 homers in 25 PA. This coming off a MiLB hitting line of 44/10/44/.335/18 in 246 PA split between Double-A and Triple-A. And for the cherry on top, he is triple-slashing.419/.513/.774, with a 1.287 OPS and 3 homers in 39 PA so far this Spring. There is not a single scouting report that doesn’t absolutely love this kid. It is seriously looking like the riskier bet is actually betting against Correa to keep on hitting. And that 5-category production from the shortstop position is too risky to pass up after the big 3 are off the board.
By Michael Halpern
Email: michaelhalpern@imaginarybrickwall.com
Twitter: Imaginary Brick Wall (@ImaginaryBrickW)SPRINGFIELD — A U.S. mail carrier attacked by at least two youths Wednesday evening as he waited in his delivery vehicle for a red light in the Forest Park neighborhood was taken to Baystate Medical Center for a possible broken jaw and other injuries.
The 57-year-old man was attacked about 6 p.m.at the intersection of Belmont Avenue and Oakland Street, Springfield Police Sgt. John Delaney said.
A large group of males approached the vehicle and began to hit it and rock it, said Delaney, public information officer for the department.
A witness told police that when the mail carrier got out, two members of the group began to hit him in his back. When the victim attempted to cover himself, he was punched several more times, Delaney said.
The suspects then fled toward 279 Dickinson St., and the victim took refuge in the Forest Park neighborhood post office, nearby at 393 Belmont Ave.
Both suspects are described as Hispanic males, approximately 16 years old. One has black curly hair and wore a multi-colored jacket, and the other had shorter hair with a light blue hooded sweatshirt.
Delaney said detectives are investigating. No arrests have been made.
Those with information are asked to call the Detective Bureau at (413) 787-6355. Or, they can use the anonymous " Text-a- tip" program. Text "CRIMES" or "274637;" the body of the message should begin with the keyword "SOLVE," followed by the information to police.
Postal service officials could not immediately be reached for comment.Remember that line in the classic 1967 Dustin Hoffman film The Graduate where Mr. McGuire offered Benjamin one word of advice, "Plastics"? If that movie was filmed in 2012, he would have said "MongoDB."
Well, maybe he would have said "HTML5" but if he was offering two words of advice, the next word would have been "MongoDB" for sure.
The point is, he wouldn't have said "iOS" or "Android" or even "mobile."
That's because in a list of the Top 10 most sought after job skills by resume site Indeed.com, MongoDB is No. 2 -- beat only by HTML5. That makes MongoDB more sought after than iOS and Android and mobile. Indeed.com searches millions of job postings to come up with its list of the fastest growing keywords.
Mongo DB job skills Indeed.com With Tuesday's news that 10gen, makers of the MongoDB database, grabbed a boatload of new funding on a half billion valuation, we are looking at a company that will very likely do what no other open source company besides Red Hat has done yet -- become a billion dollar company.
And that's only the beginning because "the database market is bigger than the server/operating system market," says 10gen's CEO Dwight Merriman.
Merriman is also a cofounder, investor, and board member of Business Insider.
We got on the phone with him this week to find out his plans for the company.
In a word: huge.
"The goal is to have the most popular database period, used more than Oracle or [IBM's] DB2," he says. Merriman isn't just the CEO. He co-wrote MongoDB with 10gen co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz.
This doesn't mean 10gen will kill Oracle -- just maim it. Traditional databases will always be around. But MongoDB is a new type of database, known as "noSQL." It is better for Web apps and the cloud -- and that's the next big thing for software.
It's better for the cloud because noSQL can instantly grow really big by spreading itself over lots of ordinary, cheap Intel-based servers. This type of database can also handle data that's messy and unpredictable. A traditional database wants things tightly structured and all on one server. As it grows, it needs a bigger, more expensive server.
Because more companies are writing web apps, they are trying MongoDB or one of its competitors (Couchbase, Cassandra). Once they try noSQL and see how easy it is to use, they always come back from more, says Merriman.
"It's to the point now, where some organizations are using Mongo as the default choice when write a new app," he says.
By the way, Business Insider uses MongoDB and has since 2009. Here's a very technical article that explains how we're using it.
Don't miss: 12 Massive Changes That Will Transform The Software Industry Within 5 YearsDINOSAUR COMICS BOOK RELEASE & HOLIDAY PARTY!
Posted Wednesday, December 08, 2010 DINOSAUR COMICS BOOK RELEASE
and HOLIDAY PARTY!
It’s the new book, “Dudes Already Know About Chickens!”
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
7:30-10pm, doors at 7pm
@ Pauper's Pub, 539 Bloor St. W., 2nd Floor
FREE TO ATTEND
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171649502866605
Presented by The Beguiling and Topatoco.com
Oh my gosh you guys! Just in time for Christmas, it’s the release of the long-awaited new collection of DINOSAUR COMICS, the awesome webcomic by Toronto’s own Ryan North! It’s called “Dinosaur Comics: Dudes Already Know About Chickens”, and collects all of the strips originally appearing in 2006—NOW IN FULL COLOUR! Author Ryan North will be on hand signing books and meeting and greeting with fans! Copies of the new book will be on sale at the event, as will past books, shirts, and prints! It’s going to be awesome you guys!
We’re launching the book just a few days before a big holiday, so we thought “Why not make it a party that everyone can enjoy?”!!! It’s also THE OFFICIAL DINOSAUR COMICS HOLIDAY PARTY! Food, drinks, merriment! Wear your Santa hats! Bring a Secret Santa gift and you’ll receive one (details below)! And much more!
All of this is happening Tuesday, December 21st, at Pauper’s Pub (539 Bloor St W, near Bathurst TTC), on the second floor. We hope we’ll see you there…!
SECRET SANTA RULES:
If you would like to participate:
- Please bring a wrapped gift with a monetary value of no more than $5.
- Go to the book sales table and trade your gift for a numbered ticket.
- At 8:30pm, we’ll call out the numbers, and when your number is called you’ll have your choice of the available gifts!
- Please mark on the outside of the gift if your item contains food and especially if it contains common allergens including peanuts, gluten, etc., so that people with allergies will be able to make an informed Secret Santa Selection.
- Participation is by no means mandatory, but we thought it might be fun!
ABOUT
“Dinosaur Comics: Dudes Already Know About Chickens” is a new, 256 page, full colour collection of strips by Ryan North, and published by Topatoco. It will retail for $20 Canadian. You can find Dinosaur Comics online every day at http://qwantz.com.
The Beguiling is Canada’s premier retailer of comics, graphic novels, manga and more, and has been for more than 20 years!
- Archives - September 2006 October 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009 December 2009 January 2010 February 2010 March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010 August 2010 September 2010 October 2010 November 2010 December 2010 January 2011 February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 July 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 November 2011 December 2011 January 2012 February 2012 March 2012 April 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012 August 2012 September 2012 October 2012 November 2012 December 2012Date: Fri, 1 Dec 1995 15:26:35 CST
Reply-To: ww@wwpublish.com
Sender: Activists Mailing List <ACTIV-L@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
From: Workers World Service <ww@nyxfer.blythe.org>
Subject: Native People Bury Racist Rock
To: Multiple recipients of list ACTIV-L <ACTIV-L@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Native People bury racist rock
Worker's World, 1 December 1995
Plymouth, Mass. Plymouth Rock is a symbola monument to murder, slavery, theft, racism and oppression. The white man has killed the spirit in the rock. Things that are dead should stay buried.
Bury racism! Bury oppression! Bury `Pilgrim's Progress'! And bury the rock!
With these words, Moonanum James (Wampanoag), sachem of United American Indians of New England, led over 300 Native people and their supporters of all nationalities down to Plymouth Rock on Nov. 23.
There, about a dozen protesters scaled an iron fence, jumped into the pit where the rock is located, and buried it.
The crowd cheered as women, men and children representing all four directionsred, black, white and yellowworked together to cover Plymouth Rock with sand and then planted a Native warrior flag atop it. As the victorious dirty dozen climbed out of the pit, Native singers broke into the American Indian Movement song.
The burial of Plymouth Rock capped the 25th anniversary of the National Day of Mourning speak-out held here in Plymouth. The Day of Mourning is a protest against the U.S. celebration of the mythology of Thanksgiving, and against the racist Pilgrim's Progress Parade.
The parade is a re-enactment of the march of Pilgrims to church, with muskets and bibles in hand. Moonanum James said of it: They want to act as though we sat down and ate turkey and lived happily ever after. That is simply not trueand we keep coming back year after year in order to give answer to their lies.
Plymouth Rock had previously been buried in 1970, during the very first National Day of Mourning.
NO REASON TO CELEBRATE
Speakers included Mahtowin (Lakota), an organizer of the event. She spoke about the case of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement warrior framed by the FBI for the 1975 shooting of two FBI agents at Pine Ridge in South Dakota.
Noting that Peltier has been unjustly imprisoned for nearly 20 years, she called on everyone present to join in a concerted effort to picket FBI offices around the country on Feb. 6 in a nationally coordinated day of support for Peltier.
Mahtowin also mentioned the tremendous loss earlier this year of lawyer William Kunstler, who had always been a great champion of Native causes.
An Aztec-Mayan man named Josewho did not want to give his last name because of potential problems with the racist Immigration and Naturalization Servicespoke of a prophecy. He said the prophecy is that some day the eaglesymbol of North American Native peopleand the condorsymbol of Central and South American Native peoplewould come together, and that this would bring about a resurgence in the Native struggle.
Horacio Gutierrez of Arizona told the gathering of a 1996 spiritual run to reinforce unity among all Indigenous nations from North, Central and South America. Sam Sapiel, a Penobscot medicine elder and another organizer of the protest, opened and closed the Day of Mourning with prayers, and expressed his grave concerns about the ongoing destruction of the environment.
Two days earlier, on Nov. 21, the city of Provincetown, Mass., had held a celebration of the signing of the Mayflower Compact. A statement from UAINE was read to the assembled group there. It read in part:
We have no reason to celebrate the signing of the Compact or the arrival of the Pilgrims. The Mayflower Compact was a mere corporate agreement of white men agreeing to stick together. This would be for the benefit of a handful of wealthy white men and to the detriment of the vast majority of human beings.
There was no room in that Compact for women, lesbians and gay men, and the poor, let alone for Native people or our sisters and brothers of African descent. We call on all oppressed people to unite and join the fight against the racist and murderous ruling class, and not glorify the Mayflower Compact but to condemn it and the system it created.
While some of those attending the celebration in Provincetown were stunned and angered by this statement, a number of people burst into enthusiastic applause.One of the problems with assuming that government can regulate everything is that it can't. Not very well at least. Take Dodd-Frank, which was touted as a way of bringing the banksters under control.
The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Pub.L. 111–203, H.R. 4173) was signed into federal law by President Barack Obama on July 21, 2010 in the Ronald Reagan building. Passed as a response to the late-2000s recession, it brought the most significant changes to financial regulation in the United States since the regulatory reform that followed the Great Depression. It made changes in the American financial regulatory environment that affect all federal financial regulatory agencies and almost every part of the nation's financial services industry.
As Jack Henneman points out what it actually threatens to do is create a thicket of rules so dense that only the banksters -- and the biggest banksters at that -- can navigate through it. He quotes a report:
Rules implementing the Dodd-Frank financial reform law could fill 28 copies of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, according to a new analysis of the Wall Street overhaul. The law firm Davis Polk, which closely tracks the Dodd-Frank rule-making process, released a graphic Friday that highlights the gargantuan size of the financial reform bill's overhaul of regulations. All told, regulators have written 13,789 pages and more than 15 million words to put the law in place, which is equal to 42 words of regulations for every single word of the already hefty law, spanning 848 pages itself. And if that seems like a lot, keep in mind that by Davis Polk's estimate, the work implementing the law is just 39 percent complete. (bold emphasis added)
Another estimate puts it more conservatively. There only need to be ten pages of regulation for each page of Dodd-Frank. Here's the graphic showing that relationship:
Now explain the regulations
But it probably doesn't stop there. The number of textbooks and commentaries necessary to explain the regulations themselves will probably be longer still. From the POV of information the question that arises is how we can know that the resulting system is computationally correct. As Jack Henneman explains, there is no ready way to tell.
Not only does it require a great many bureaucrats to write, vet, review, revise, and sign off on so much regulation, but a vast army of lobbyists to argue for changes in same to benefit one sort of financial firm over another, and countless legions of lawyers to interpret, litigate, and detect loopholes in no doubt imperfect drafting after the regulations are implemented. Our banks will then spend billions restructuring to comply with the law, if they have not succeeded in limiting its effect by dint of the aforementioned lobbying. If the great and powerful Oz were able to confirm to a certainty that all this would prevent another financial crisis, it might be worth the dead-weight load on the economy, not to mention the further corruption of our republic. Unfortunately, no such assurances obtain.
The problem with regulation as an approach to managing risk it is creates risk in itself. The MIT Sloan School Management Review has an article which explains how more is not always safer.
Legal codes and agreements have also become increasingly complicated, often resulting in loopholes that others can exploit.... As companies increase the complexity of their systems — products, processes, technologies, organizational structures, contracts and so on — they often fail to pay sufficient attention to the introduction and proliferation of loopholes and flaws. As a result, many firms are continually making fixes, which then adds to the total cost of ownership and often creates new problems. One estimate is that 20%–50% of all fixes to software bugs introduce new, unknown problems.... Build new applications on top of legacy systems, and errors creep in between the lines of code. Merge two companies, and weaknesses sprout between the organizational boundaries. Build Byzantine corporate structures and processes, and obscure pockets are created where bad behavior can hide. Furthermore, the enormous complexity of large systems like communications networks means that even tiny glitches can cascade into catastrophic events. In fact, catastrophic events are almost guaranteed to occur in many complex systems, much like big earthquakes are bound to happen.
Most programmers know this. Thank God for managers who don't and order perpetual tweaks to the system thereby guaranteeing bugs and the continuous employment of said programmers. And after a while a strange thing happens. The bugs themselves acquire champions. The problems in the system become institutionalized and have to be maintained to protect jobs. The MIT paper continues:
Simplicity is not happening, and it’s not about to occur in any meaningful and sustainable way. Much of the reason for that is self-interest, not just the self-interest of software vendors looking to milk the newest release of a cash cow product but people’s own self-interest. Take, for example, the U.S. tax code. Although everyone agrees that it’s far too complex, the system represents so many interconnected vested interests that any significant simplification would create a public outcry, initiated by those affected negatively. Consequently, people can’t agree how best to simplify the tax code and the only direction is toward more complexity, not less, and that progression will continue unless war or revolution resets the entire system.
The net result is that Dodd Frank will simply expand to swallow up all the available space and computing power that can be assigned to it. And the more you fix it, the bigger the demands will be. It's almost like an episode from Star Trek. And what it suggests is that for a certain class of problems, not only is a detailed regulatory approach impractical, it may actually be impossible.
And Dodd Frank is not alone. Wait until we get to Obamacare. If Dodd Frank is 28 times the length of "War and Peace", the regs for Obamacare are two and a half times the length of the Bible -- and growing.
Obamacare Vs Dodd Frank Compete for World Domination
How problems actually get solved through history is an interesting subject in itself. They are often damped down by something completely unexpected. For example the tons of horse manure which threatened to bury cities at the end of the 19th century disappeared with the invention of the automobile. It's entirely possible that the current problems of the banking industry will be fixed by the disappearance or transformation of the current financial system itself, and not by armies of regulators. The endemic lack of telephones in the Third World was fixed by cellular communications.
The world works in strange ways. Mark Steyn observed that bureaucrats have a deep seated desire to make reality unconstitutional. But reality has a knack of winning out in the end, and of surprising us too.
Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.
The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
Tip Jar or Subscribe or UnsubscribeA file photo of the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
What to Know The Sigma Chi fraternity is suspended at Rutgers until 2020
The suspension follows a party in September in which members of sorority Sigma Delta Tau say they were given tainted drinks
Sigma Chi members still on campus are prohibited from any and all fraternity activity, Rutgers said in a statement
A Rutgers University chapter of the national Sigma Chi fraternity has been suspended after its members allegedly drugged members of a campus sorority during a party this fall, according to a report citing documents obtained through an Open Public Records Act request.
The years-long suspension is fallout from a mixer on the weekend of Sept. 16 in which members of Sigma Chi allegedly put Xanax in an athletic container filled with alcohol and juice. The fraternity was reportedly hosting members of the sorority Sigma Delta Tau at the time.
The Rutgers chapter of Sigma Chi was unexplainably shut down in November, prompting The Daily Targum, Rutgers’ official student newspaper, to put in a records request.
Documents, including written testimony, provided to The Daily Targum say women in the sorority mentioned the juice “tasting funny” and having a “chalky” texture on the night of the party.
Over the next few hours, the women began having negative reactions to the concoction, even those who drank a small amount, documents said. One member was “so out of it” she misplaced her phone and found it behind a tree the following day, according to the documents. The brew reportedly interfered with another member’s prescribed medication.
“It was stated that SDT members, about 10 of them, were left vomiting, incoherent, and some even blacked out,” written testimony says, according to The Daily Targum.
A member of the sorority told The Daily Targum that fraternity members were the only ones who had access to the container of alcohol that night.
The Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs was notified about the party and the university gathered evidence from witnesses, video footage and text messages, according to The Daily Targum.
In a statement to NBC 4, Rutgers spokesman John Cramer said the university had reached a mutual agreement with the national Sigma Chi fraternity for the suspension of the New Brunswick chapter.
“All operations and activities of the chapter are terminated until August 2020, after which the national organization may consider establishing a chapter with new members, without the involvement of suspended member,” Cramer said in the statement.
Cramer said the Sigma Chi national organization agreed to directly inform all members still on campus that they’re forbidden from any and all fraternity activity for the remainder of their undergraduate careers at Rutgers.
The Sigma Chi chapter didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Daily Targum. Before it was removed from campus, the fraternity reportedly posted a message to Facebook reading: “We’re not suspended... You’re suspended.”Enrollment: ObamaCare loyalists are trumpeting a new Kaiser Family Foundation survey finding that more than half of those who enrolled had been uninsured. But the survey's findings are nothing to cheer about.
First, nobody knows exactly how many ObamaCare enrollees were previously uninsured, because the administration didn't bother to ask for that information when people signed up. So it's been up to pollsters to figure out what happened, and previous surveys showed that only a small percentage of ObamaCare sign-ups came from the ranks of the uninsured.
The new Kaiser survey, in contrast, found that 57% of those getting coverage through an ObamaCare exchange had lacked insurance. But this number isn't nearly as glowing as it first appears.
First, it's bloated. The survey asked whether those signing up had been uninsured at the time they enrolled. Turns out almost 1-in-10 of those listed as "uninsured" had, in fact, lacked coverage for less than three months — presumably thanks to ObamaCare itself. And nearly a quarter had been uninsured for less than a year.
Also, 29% of those uninsured said they would have gotten insurance anyway, even without ObamaCare. The number also doesn't factor in those who dropped insurance once they got a look at ObamaCare rates.
Even if the Kaiser number is right, it's underwhelming. The Congressional Budget Office forecast 6 million would gain insurance through the exchanges this year. The Kaiser survey suggests it's more like 4 million.
And remember how Obama promised that everyone would love ObamaCare because the benefits were so wonderful? Turns out that's not true, either.
The Kaiser survey found those forced to switch plans have far more negative views of ObamaCare than the general public — with 53% expressing an unfavorable view vs. 46% of the public overall. And 57% of those who had their coverage canceled because of ObamaCare say they've been negatively affected by the law.
No wonder, since more than half ended up paying the same or more for ObamaCare plans than what they had, though they often came with higher deductibles, less coverage, fewer choices of doctors, and offered no better financial protection.
The Kaiser survey also found that nearly half of those getting government subsidies through the exchanges don't even know they're on the government dole. An official HHS report says 87% of those enrolled in the federal exchange are getting government subsidies to hold down the cost of ObamaCare coverage, but only 46% told Kaiser they were. Even so, 43% of those enrolled in ObamaCare-compliant plans say they find paying their premiums "difficult."
Also largely overlooked in all the glowing coverage is that far more people ended up moving from employer-based coverage to the exchanges than the government expected. The CBO figured that in the first year, ObamaCare would have a negligible impact, if any, on those who had been getting coverage through an employer.
But the Kaiser survey found 14% of those enrolled in an ObamaCare exchange had employer or COBRA coverage before. Using the White House's enrollment numbers, that works out to more than 1 million workers.
In the end, the Kaiser survey doesn't change any of the central complaints we have with ObamaCare.
The only reason it looks good is because supporters keep lowering the bar for what constitutes success.Your gran could pass on her iTunes password along with the family silver as a survey suggests that 11 per cent of Brits have either put internet passwords into their wills or plan to do so.
The main reason for passing on the keys to internet accounts was the valuable content amassed in the cloud – with 25 per cent of the 2,000 adults questioned saying that they had collected |
14 respectively preceded the introduction of Adam Zampa. His also-frugal beginning encouraged the incorrigible, Dilshan, following up an effective sweep with a nonsense chip to midwicket. After 10,920 runs, there would be no more with a 360-degree goodbye to the adoring fans.
5pm - Sri Lanka 5-143, 32 overs: Dinesh Chandimal 62, Kusal Perera 5
Zampa'd. That's what Angelo Matthews was. He was Zampa'd. Handy to have a trademark with fewer than nine months' international experience, but this is what it is to be trapped by the wrist spinner by a straight one colliding with leg stump via your pad. Usually after a DRS referral.
Scoring just one, the Sri Lankan skipper had failed. The advantage to his counterpart should have been augmented when the reintroduction of Hazlewood brought another high-on-the-bat edge. It wouldn't be: Warner grassing the straight-forward chance off Chandimal. It all went down when he was on 41. Might hear about that again? Feels that way; he's beyond 50 now for the sixth time in his last seven starts.
At least his seamers are doing the job. Nicely rotated to let Zampa at it from one end, short burts from Starc then Faulkner then Hastings are all effective, the locals now well behind the game. When Dhananjaya De Silva holed out, 30 had been added in 54 balls for the fourth wicket. They're languishing.
6:20pm: Sri Lanka all out 226, 49.2 overs
Starc back: his in-swinging yorker again hits stumps, this time Kusal Perera's. Rinse and repeat. The auxiliary quicks Hastings and Hazlewood continued to be tidy as a hotel bed, the former into the book when Thisara tried to slog his simple slower ball. Loved it too, the triumphant bowler.
For all this middle-overs graft happy hour is never fun for the captain between sums and field tweaks and general chaos. But when Zampa came back and immediately had Seekkuge Prasanna out slapping as well, maybe they could shift them before 200?
That would require shifting Chandimal first. The man Warner dropped continued his shrewd accumulation while Dilruwan Perera took on the attack. Warner had a chance to end the stand, missing a run out opportunity with three stumps to aim at, the target now beyond 200.
Finally, the last of the three Perera's gone when Hastings had him swatting to midwicket, the skipper again in the game with the catch, the quick finishing with orderly figures of 2 for 42.
A Chandimal single to deep cover brings up his ton. He had a chance, sure. But integral in getting the hosts to a credible total. He finally packed it in without adding to the century, Australia's death-over specialist Faulkner collecting the last, 2 for 44 his fine afternoon.
All told, just about the perfect bowling performance to dine on with the best of them Zampa, claiming another 3-for, conceding only 38. He has skills.
8pm - Australia 3-83, 17 overs (Bailey 19, Head 21)
Amila Aponso hadn't been hit for boundary of any variety in his only two ODIs to date, pocketing a man of the match in Colombo as well. Aaron Finch's response? Hitting him over the cover rope first ball he bowled. That's intent to match a solid start.
But then... oh how Warner may rue that cut that wasn't quite, caught at point, dismissed by his opposing number Mathews for 10. Dilshan with the snaffle - would it be right him for him end up a winner tonight, the retiring champion?
That romantic narrative is helped by Finch, who won the first Aponso battle but comprehensively lost the war within a quarter hour, the second to fall when trapped LBW on 30. And Shaun Marsh. He may not always get out early, but when he does it sure looks awful with the catch he gifted to mid off defying a man of his talent through that region.
So Bailey to do the tidy up work from three-for-not-enough again, then. This time with Travis Head, elevated to the top five and off his training wheels; he has expectations on him tonight. And he looks up for it with a cut shot reminiscent his coach Darren Lehmann.
9pm - Australia 4-165, 33 overs (Bailey 54, Wade 27)
Bailey and Head, Head and Bailey. A 50 stand, then the youngun's highest international score when smashing Thisara Perera through midwicket. But when bowled on the back foot cutting at spin in the way the Test side learned the hard way that you can't in these conditions, he was gone for 36 when 56 or 76 was needed to guarantee a win. Even so, another innings of some presence. More, please.
Bailey and Wade, Wade and Bailey. The two from the stoic stand on Wednesday. Boundaries to each; Bailey's reversing Aponso, Wade dancing Perera of the off-spinning variety. A review denied to save Wade, another reverse sweep from Bailey, then a cut to bring up his own 50. That should do it, from the guy who used to stand in as captain. Easy from here. Right?
10:04pm - Australia win by two wickets with 24 balls to spare
Nothing is ever easy, you fool. Wade had been a stumping candidate throughout, and missing a sweep he was finished for 42. Very handy runs, and another step in the right direction.
But platitudes are forgotten when Bailey from nowhere let's one skip through off his pad onto his off stump on 70. A vital 70. The defining innings of the match, assuming they don't mess it up. Four balls later, though? A filthy holing out from the guy who is meant to eat up these chases for dinner, James Faulkner. Uh oh.
Balls left no longer the issue, 21 to get with three wickets in hand is the only equation. But all bowlers. Thankfully one is Starc, who long-handles over the long on boundary. Then the next over picks out the same spot, albeit on the bounce this time. Home now, yeah? Not that quick. Next ball, he is caught at that identical long on position. Here we go…
Blimey, Adam. Zampa is deep in the crease and cutting off his stumps, but gets enough wood on a ball that otherwise would certainly have bowled him. The result was secured, even if the same player was dropped when the scores were level, appropriately enough. Phew.
"To be brutally honest, we should have won that five wickets down," said Warner when it was all over, reflecting on the 2-1 lead his side take into the final pair of rubbers. He may be new, but he's spot on. With this bloke in charge, it will always be worth watching.
Topics: cricket, sport, sri-lanka, australia
First postedCustom Nike Romaleos 2 - How To Paint Custom Lifters by Blake Barash
Lots of people have been asking how I paint my shoes. I decided to write a blog post to show how I made these. The picture below shows the shoes when they're completely finished. The design shows a base coats of purple gradients with a sliver webbing around the shoes as the top layer of paint.
All this was done with an Iwata Compressor and Iwata Eclipse HP CS Airbush. I got mine here >>>> Airbrush Delux Kit
In the picture below, you can see everywhere I taped off. Those are the places that I don't want to get paint. This 3M 2020-2 General Purpose Masking Tape works good. It's a good idea to tape off the bottom of the shoe too because overspray somehow finds it's way everywhere.
There are a few steps not shown here. What's missing is 1. Prepping the shoe with Acetone using Cotton balls wearing rubber gloves. 2. Spraying with Adhesion Promoter 3. painting the shoe purple, 4. cutting the masking tape dots. After loading up the airbrush with purples and painting a few coats, on goes the masking tape. This is a long process but is fun because it's creative. In the shoes below I wanted to give the vibe of a school of fish swimming around the shoes.
Now you can see I applied a few coats of Jacquard Metallic Silver.
This picture shows the left shoe after the tape has been removed, and the right shoe is still drying.
Done!
Let me make you a pair! Order yours here >>> https://bstreetshoes.com/collections/custom-nike-sneakers/products/custom-painted-nike-romaleos-2-phoenix-weightlifting-shoeThe commander of the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen, has done a complete 180 on the alliance’s official stance on Wednesday’s pre-dawn air strike against the Logar Province, which killed 18 civilians including nine children.
NATO initially claimed that everyone killed, including apparently the young children, were known militants, though it did promise an eventual “follow-on assessment” to confirm that claim.
Now Gen. Allen is apologizing for the air strike, though not “claiming responsibility” for the deaths, saying that while the investigation will continue “our weapons killed these people.” Apparently the alliance still hopes to find some way to blame the Taliban.
Anger over the civilian deaths forced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to cut short his state visit to China, rushing back to Afghanistan to condemn the killings and press NATO once again to stop launching attacks against populated areas.
Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz"Icee" redirects here. For frozen water, see Ice. For other uses, see ICEE (disambiguation)
The Icee Company is an American beverage company located in Ontario, California, United States. Its flagship product is the Icee (stylized as ICEE), which is a frozen carbonated beverage available in fruit and soda flavors. Icee also produces other frozen beverages and Italian ice pops under both the Icee and Slush Puppie brands. The company's mascot is an animated polar bear.
The Icee Company was founded by Omar Knedlik who is the inventor of the original Icee drink. It became the foundation for the Slurpee and other frozen machine drinks after several machines made by the company were purchased by 7-Eleven in 1965. It has been a division of J & J Snack Foods Corporation since 1988 and distributes product in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, China, and the Middle East.[1]
History [ edit ]
The Icee was invented in 1958 by Omar Knedlik, a Dairy Queen owner in Coffeyville, Kansas.[2] The beverage was the result of faulty equipment in the Dairy Queen owned by Knedlik.[3] His soda machine broke and he began placing bottles of soda in the freezer to keep them cold. Knedlik began selling bottles of the soda which would instantly turn to slush once opened.[1] The frozen soda became popular with the customers of the establishment.[3]
The name Icee as well as the original company logo were developed by Ruth E. Taylor, a local artist and friend of Knedlik.[3] She developed the name "Icee", as well as the idea of the logo's icicles hanging from the block letters, which has remained unchanged. She thought of the Polar Bear, but the actual bear mascot had already been created by the Norsworthy-Mercer ad agency. The "Icee" word with the snow on it was designed by a Mitchell Company staff artist, Lonnie Williams, as part of a cup he designed.
Knedlik partnered with the John E Mitchell Company in Dallas to develop the machine, for which Knedlik received a patent in 1960.[1] The first machine was made from a car air conditioning unit. It worked by combining and freezing water, carbon dioxide, and a flavor mix.[4] After 5 years Knedlik's idea had become the iconic Icee Machine after drawing the attention of 7-Eleven. The convenience store chain purchased several machines and later changed the name to Slurpee based on the slurping sound people make when drinking the beverage.[1]
The Mitchell Company instituted a two-tiered franchise plan involving "Developers" and "Subdevelopers". Essentially, the Developers and Subdevelopers both paid fees and rentals for the right to use specified numbers of Icee dispensers and for rights within exclusive territories to distribute the machines and to promote the sale of the Icee drink. By the mid-1960s, 300 Icee machines had been manufactured.[5]
Products and licensing [ edit ]
The Icee Company has over 75,000 Icee machines across America serving over 300 million Icee per year. McDonald's and Subway restaurants inside Wal-Mart stores sell Icees. Burger King in the US and Canada sell Icees and Icee Floats. Target and Wawa also sell Icees inside their stores. In Mexico, Icee is widely available at department stores such as Sears and Wal-Mart, and inside movie theaters and convenience stores. Icee is also the primary frozen beverage sold in Wawa and Quick Chek, two convenience store chains in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. Icee is available at Valero gas stations co-branded with their CornerStore marts (except for independently owned stores) as well as at most Rainforest Café locations.
See also [ edit ]Ray Kurzweil, the head of Google’s engineering lab and a renowned futurist, believes Bitcoin is too unstable to become the global digital currency.
Comparing Bitcoin to the US dollar and other reserve currencies, Kurzweil stated:
“Currencies like the dollar have provided reasonable stability. Bitcoin has not. And it’s not clear to me that the whole mining paradigm can provide that type of stability… We’ve seen tremendous instability with Bitcoin, so I wouldn’t put my money into it. I certainly do think there could be alternatives to national currencies emerging in the future. Algorithmic ones are a possibility, I just don’t think we’ve arrived at the right algorithm yet.”
What’s unstable: volatility rate or mining ecosystem?
However, Kurzweil’s reasoning behind the characterization of Bitcoin as an unstable financial protocol and digital currency is weak because he did not state how the mining paradigm of Bitcoin has provided instability to its network.
When Kurzweil compared Bitcoin to the US dollar in terms of stability, it is unclear whether Kurzweil intended to discuss the volatility rate of Bitcoin or its mining ecosystem because if it is the latter, Bitcoin has been tremendously stable and secure since its launch in 2009.
Any digital currency at its early stage will experience extreme volatility and fluctuation. Until Bitcoin reaches its later stages in development and its fixed supply of 21 mln, Bitcoin will continue to experience exponential growth in terms of user base, market cap and value. An increase in price is also considered volatile and in that sense, Bitcoin will continue to be volatile as long as it continues to grow.
Regarding instability in the mining paradigm of Bitcoin, Kurzweil could have intended to talk about Bitcoin scaling issues because, in terms of security, Bitcoin’s mining paradigm has been stable and successful so far.
Bitcoin’s hashrate resulting from its mining paradigm has allowed the network to become immutable and decentralized, making it virtually impossible for any centralized entity to manipulate the network. If investors and users consider the decentralized nature of Bitcoin as its greatest advantage, then its mining paradigm has proven its worth and stability.
Scaling issues
If Kurzweil characterized Bitcoin as an unstable digital currency due to Blockchain congestion and its underlying scaling issues, it is important for anyone to consider why it is so difficult and complex to come to a consensus and agreement within the Bitcoin community. The difficulty in making changes or alterations to the Bitcoin network demonstrates that the Bitcoin network is that much more secure and decentralized.
Bitcoin is still at its early stage in development. After all, it is only an eight-year-old technology. As a technology, Bitcoin will continue to evolve. Bitcoin is a settlement network and digital gold at the moment for the vast majority of investors. However, as Bitcoin continues to scale, it will transform into an ideal and efficient digital currency.Diego Costa caused controversy in Chelsea's 2-0 win over Arsenal
Chelsea striker Diego Costa has been charged with violent conduct by the Football Association after his side's 2-0 win over Arsenal on Saturday.
Costa, 26, put his hands in the face of Arsenal centre-back Laurent Koscielny prior to clashing with Gunners defender Gabriel, who was sent off.
The FA has also charged Gabriel, 24, with improper conduct and both clubs with failing to control their players.
Arsenal are to appeal against Gabriel's dismissal and three-match ban.
Media playback is not supported on this device Chelsea boss Mourinho clashes with press over Costa
Costa has until 18:00 BST on Tuesday, 22 September to respond to the charge, which is for the clash with Koscielny.
Having confirmed the match officials did not see the incident, the FA supplied video footage to a panel of three former elite referees.
They each had to independently rule Costa's actions to be an instant red card for the FA to proceed with the charge.
If Costa accepts the charge he will serve an automatic three-match suspension with immediate effect but, if he contests it, an independent regulatory commission will rule.
Chelsea face Walsall, Newcastle and Southampton in their next three domestic fixtures.
Referee Mike Dean booked both Costa and Gabriel for their spat, before the latter was dismissed for kicking out at the Blues forward.
Gabriel and both clubs have until 18:00 BST on Thursday, 24 September to reply to their charges.
Arsenal midfielder Santi Cazorla, who was sent off for two bookable offences, has been warned about his behaviour.NEET 2017 Entrance Examination: Students who were checking updates for NEET 2017 Result is extracting here. There were in total from India 897898 lakhs of Candidates appeared for this Entrance Examination conducted in May 2017.
The Result for the same was declared on June 2017 as announced by the board of Central Education of India. Basically, medical candidates and engineering candidates appeared in past year examination and for this timing strategy of phase 1 and phase 2 combined with a single examination has got transformed for only medical candidates from India. The government of India for the conduct of counseling for 15% All India Quota Seats and for supplying the result to state/other Counselling Authorities.
Candidates can enroll their Scores along with NEET 2017 Result online at the time of result declaration as per the above-mentioned date announced by CBSE. The CBSE will display the images of OMR Answer Sheets and Responses graded by the Machine of all the candidates on the official website.Defense contractor Leonard Francis, right, shown in this courtroom sketch with his attorney Patrick Swan, Judge David Bartick and prosecutor Robert Huie, left, during his appearance in federal court in San Diego on Nov. 21. (Krentz Johnson/Reuters)
After a month at sea, the 5,000 sailors aboard the USS George Washington couldn’t wait to hit the bars, legalized brothels and other attractions in Brisbane, Australia. But when the aircraft carrier arrived for a port visit in July, crew members remained stuck on board for six frustrating hours because a Navy contractor couldn’t find a gangway.
It was the second major embarrassment in less than a year for the contractor, Glenn Defense Marine Asia. In February, the Philippine Senate publicly excoriated the Singapore-based company after finding that it had collected untreated sewage from U.S. Navy ships and illegally dumped it into protected waters near Subic Bay.
Despite the dumping violations and poor performance, Navy contracting officials kept giving the contractor more lucrative business to resupply ships and submarines in the region. Two days after the blunder in Brisbane, records show, Navy officials awarded the firm a no-bid $1 million contract extension to provide port services in Malaysia.
Today, Glenn Defense Marine and its president, Leonard Glenn Francis, are principal characters in one of the biggest contracting fraud investigations in the Navy’s 238-year history. The Justice Department has accused Francis, a Malaysian widely known in maritime circles as “Fat Leonard,” of bribing Navy officers with prostitutes and cash for inside information that enabled him to fleece the government. Seven senior Navy officials have been charged, suspended or placed on leave, and the Navy has said it expects more will get in trouble.
In a recent court filing, federal prosecutors in San Diego gave a clearer picture of the scope of the investigation, saying it has involved more than 100 law enforcement agents working in eight states and eight Asian countries. U.S. federal agents are teaming with authorities from other countries, including the Royal Thai Police and Singapore’s Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau.
The court filing also reveals that prosecutors have expanded their estimate of the financial damage that Francis and his firm inflicted on the Navy, saying their tally of alleged fraud exceeds $20 million and is likely to keep rising. The executive has been in federal custody in San Diego since September, when he was arrested in a sting operation after agents lured him to the United States. He has pleaded not guilty.
In addition to salacious evidence of sailors selling secrets for sex, cash and other favors, the investigation has pinpointed systematic weaknesses in the Navy’s worldwide contracting bureaucracy.
According to affidavits filed by agents from the Pentagon’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service, Francis and other executives from Glenn Defense Marine cheated the system with ease by forging hundreds of invoices, price quotes and other documents to overcharge for fuel, food and port services.
The firm made little effort to conceal the fraudulent nature of the paperwork, repeatedly submitting the same false forms for reimbursement, the affidavits show. Navy contracting officials in Singapore and Japan rubber-stamped many of the claims, even though a cursory check could have exposed the scam, according to the agents’ statements.
In September, the Navy terminated contracts with Glenn Defense Marine worth up to $200 million. But it took the step only after federal authorities arrested Francis, as well as a deputy executive at the company, a Navy commander and a senior Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent allegedly involved in the bribery scheme.
Court papers show that criminal investigators had been scrutinizing the Singapore firm at least since 2009. Rather than declare the firm off limits, however, Navy contracting officials steadily delivered more business to Francis.
Navy contracting officials based in Asia would not answer questions about their dealings with Francis and his firm, referring questions to Navy headquarters.
Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Navy’s chief spokesman, said federal regulations prohibit public disclosure of Glenn Defense Marine’s past performance on Navy contracts, including whether the firm has received negative reviews. He said that a Navy contracting officer tried to penalize the company after the sewage dumping incident in the Philippines and asked for a partial refund of expenses from the port visit but that the matter was under appeal.
A corporate spokeswoman for Glenn Defense Marine in Singapore and a Washington attorney for Francis and the company also declined to comment.
To win a bigger share of the Navy’s business, Glenn Defense Marine submitted bids that were sometimes so low that competitors formally complained there was no way it could cover its costs, let alone turn a profit, a review of contracting records shows.
In an attempt to minimize expenses, the Navy negotiated fixed prices for many port services in advance. While Glenn Defense Marine was stuck with its low bid for those fixed services, the contracts contained major loopholes that the company was able to exploit, according to prosecutors.
Under certain conditions, Glenn Defense Marine could charge higher prices for fuel, “incidental services” and port tariffs, or fees charged by local port officials. To do so, the company was required to submit paperwork justifying the added expenses, such as quotes from multiple subcontractors or invoices from port officials.
In case after case, however, federal investigators found that Glenn Defense Marine simply made up those bills and bids.
During one nine-month period in 2011 and 2012, the company submitted 282 false quotes from subcontractors for incidental services at three ports in Thailand alone, resulting in losses to the Navy of $2.3 million, according to federal criminal charging documents.
Similarly, during the same period, Glenn Defense Marine billed the Navy for $4 million in fictitious tariffs at two of the Thai ports, submitting more than 100 fraudulent invoices from purported Thai government agencies that in reality were shell companies, the charging documents show.
Glenn Defense Marine also artificially inflated the price of fuel, overbilling the Navy by more than $3 million for just five fuel purchases in Thailand in the fall of 2011, the documents show.
Rival firms to Glenn Defense Marine said they complained for years to Navy contracting officials in Japan and Singapore that Francis was using unfair business practices, to no avail.
“There is no way that anybody who’s been there for five minutes can’t have smelled something,” said a senior executive with another maritime company in Asia who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing his business relationships with the Navy. “But the Navy routinely decided to look the other way. It was just constantly outrageous.”
Glenn Defense Marine was able to overcharge more easily at certain locales in Southeast Asia where Navy officials were naive about local business practices and the bureaucracy, according to federal investigators. Francis called these places “Pearl Ports” and bribed Navy officers to send ships there more often, court records show.
Navy statistics show that the number of ship visits to the Pearl Ports soared sharply three years ago.
In 2009, for example, Navy vessels stopped at four Pearl Ports — Phuket and Laem Chabang in Thailand and Port Klang and Sepangar in Malaysia — a total of seven times. The next year, the number of visits jumped to 48, a nearly sevenfold increase.
Traffic at the Pearl Ports remained at similarly high levels in 2011 and 2012, but it has plunged this year, with just six visits to the four ports.
Navy officials said the drop had nothing to do with Francis’s arrest, attributing this year’s reduction to budgetary cutbacks. Conversely, they said the increase in 2010 was prompted by the Obama administration’s strategic pivot to Asia, which emphasized an increased military presence in the region.
But court records show that between 2010 and 2012, Francis bribed at least two Navy officers into giving him sensitive information about ship schedules and steering vessels to the Pearl Ports.
For Francis, a particularly prized destination was Port Klang, a short drive from the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. Another company he owns bought the cruise terminal there in 2010, effectively giving it complete control over port services and freedom to raise prices.
In August 2011, after prodding from Francis and another Glenn Defense Marine executive, Navy Cmdr. Michael Vannak Khem Misiewicz, who has pleaded not guilty to bribery, informed the two men in an e-mail that the Navy would extend a planned stay by the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier, at Port Klang the next month.
“See, you ask — I deliver! LoL!” Misiewicz wrote in the e-mail, according to court papers.
Glenn Defense Marine subsequently charged the Navy $1.3 million for a five-day visit to Port Klang.Samsung is fixing its major Galaxy Note 7 issue, but until its recall is completed it means that an estimated 1.5 million Galaxy Note 7 units that may pack faulty batteries could be in use right now, out of the 2.5 million new phablets Samsung built. That means the FAA might not let you take the phone with your on your next flight.
DON’T MISS: How to tell if your Galaxy Note 7 might explode
An official response to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 recall isn’t ready, but the FAA is looking into the matter, according to Gizmodo.
“The FAA and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration are working on guidance related to this issue,” an FAA spokesperson told the site. “If the device is recalled by the manufacturer, airline crew and passengers will not be able to bring recalled batteries or electronics that contain recalled batteries in the cabin of an aircraft, or in carry-on and checked baggage.”
You might think that the FAA doesn’t know the product was already recalled. But it’s not that simple. Samsung did recall the device, but it didn’t follow proper US procedure. Samsung bypassed the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which is why the FAA doesn’t refer to it as an official recall.
The problem with Samsung’s cheating its way through this recall process, at least in the US, is that the phones may still be available for purchase from some retailers right now, even after the phones have been recalled. A recall through the CPSC would have made the device illegal to sell, and the FAA would have a better answer.
The FAA banned hoverboards from flights before, as various self-balancing scooters experienced battery-related explosions just like the Note 7. For now, taking the Galaxy Note 7 on flights isn’t a problem, but that could change soon.
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See the original version of this article on BGR.comSnefer or Snofru (Soris in Greek), was the founder of the Fourth Dynasty, reigning in 2613 BC. Until 2589 BC. His name means “Make beautiful” in Egyptian. He was married to Hetepheres who apparently was the daughter of Huni’s predecessor. According to some theories, his father-in-law might have been his father (Huni would have had Hetepheres after marrying Great Royal Wife, and Sneferu with one of his concubines.) Thus marriage allowed Sneferu access to the throne.
Sneferu and Hetepheres were the parents of the most famous pyramid constructor, Khufu.
Snefer was actually more prolific than his heir, owing to the end of Huni’s pyramid at Meidum, transforming it from the pyramid into steps into a real pyramid, the first of its kind.
He then continued building his own pyramid in the stairs.
These were followed by the famous Dahshur stunning pyramid and eventually the Red Pyramid.
About a small pyramid at Seila near Medium is believed to have been built at his command.
Although taken individually, the pyramids built under Sneferu’s reign are smaller than Khufu’s Great Pyramid, the total volume of stone used in Snefer’s monuments Is the largest of all ancient Egypt.
Despite the construction of these monuments, relatively little is known about Snefer’s reign.
From an inscription on the Stone of Palermo, it is evident that the Egyptians had already begun to import high-quality wood (the inscription stating that Sneferu commanded 40 Lebanese cedar vases.
Some Sneferu-style information about the lifestyle is known from the Westcar Papyrus, written during the Middle Kingdom.
Traditionally Sneferu is described as a righteous and wise leader.
Snefer – the first pyramid builder
Snefer, the first of the three great builders of the Fourth Dynasty, was, unlike Kheops, his son, a mediocre architect, but he was also the owner of an extraordinary ambition: to build the highest pyramid.
This ambition, however, led the architect to a series of mistakes that began at Medium, where Sneferu ordered the start of his first pyramid.
Finally, this pyramid was abandoned. The second pyramid at Dashur is twice as big as the first and is known in history as the Bent Pyramid.
This name was given to it by Egyptologists because it was initially conceived at an angle of 58 degrees but was completed at a 43-degree angle.
The construction of such a pyramid requires that soil strength is large enough to withstand a concentrated weight.
The snowman did not take this into account, and as a result, the soil gave in and the pyramid base had to be widened.
As a result, a pyramid was produced much wider than the ones before it, and in addition, the walls of the funeral chambers swelled under the external pressure of the ground and the construction had to be abandoned.
Snefer had to build another pyramid, the third one was built less than 1 km from the Bent Pyramid, and is the first successful pyramid in history.
The last pyramid is called the Red Pyramid because it was built of red granite, with a slope limited to 45 degrees this time.
Pyramids in Egypt have remained a mystery even after 4,500 years since their rise. “How were they raised?”, “What’s inside?” Are just some of the questions that have been left unanswered to date.
But here a team of Egyptian and foreign experts has managed to discover one of the mysteries. Thus, the internal structure of a pyramid was revealed using “cosmic particles”, writes Live Science.
An archaeologist team has released the first results of this new technique at the Bent Pyramid, located about 40 km from Cairo.
3D images show two interior chambers of the 4,600-year-old structure.
Located within the Dahshur royal necropolis, the Bent pyramid was one of the oldest pyramids built during the ancient kingdom of Sarafer Pharaoh.
Images could be obtained after radiographic particles known as muons were used. These cosmic particles fall on Earth and can pass through any hard surfaces.
Scientists can assert with certainty that the Bent pyramid has large corridors leading to the two funeral chambers, one above the other.
More so far, the legends spoke of the fact that the Snefer pharaoh himself is buried in the pyramid, but this very possibility has been ruled out by this new interior scanning technique.
By viewing these particles according to their angular distribution, we are able to reconstruct an interior image of the pyramid for the first time in history. The images clearly show two cameras located approximately 60 feet above each other, said Mehdi Tayoubi, co-chair of the ScanPyramids project.Imagine if the police knew exactly what you do online: All the porn sites you scan secretly, the vitriolic comments you leave on blogs, the number of hours you spend playing Farmville.
In Denmark, police have recommended to Parliament that it create laws that make it impossible for citizens to surf anonymously. According to Danish-language blog Computerworld Denmark, the proposal is intended to help investigate terrorism.
In the proposal, locations providing open Internet, like cafes and libraries, would have to confirm a user's identity, with some form of official ID, before letting them get online. Companies may also have to register and verify users' identities before providing access, as well as retain records of user logs.
Danish law already requires that ISPs store user data for at least a year, as an anti-terrorism measure. The proposal suggests that with such information, police would be able to see who exactly is on the network, where they go, and who they talk to.
Such a move would have serious privacy implications. But another problematic facet of the proposal is in the nature of online identity itself. 4Chan founder Christopher Poole recently defended web anonymity against those, including Facebook, who believe real-world identity and web identity should be one.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has heaped praise on his German counterpart less than two weeks before Angela Merkel is set to face voters.
During a question and answer session at the Women in the World conference in Toronto Monday, event founder Tina Brown asked the prime minister what it is like to work with Merkel.
Trudeau conceded he had to be "careful" because the German chancellor is in an election campaign right now.
She's thoughtful and serious and intellectual. And I've got a nice head of hair. Apparently.
"And I don't want to comment on it because I will, of course, work with whomever gets elected. That's a line I've used a few times," he quipped, referencing his go-to statement whenever he was asked to weigh in on the U.S. presidential race last year.
"But I do have to say that Angela is absolutely extraordinary as a leader."
Trudeau added that people used to joke about the thought of him sitting down with the German chancellor.
"And I always said, well, that's sort of a mean thing to say to me. Because, you know, she's thoughtful and serious and intellectual. And I've got a nice head of hair. Apparently."
Trudeau lauded Merkel as "so interesting" and able to focus on what matters instead of being distracted by the little things that can trip up politicians.
"She's been a good friend and someone who, if the German people decide, I certainly look forward to working with for many years to come."
Germans head to the polls on Sept. 24. Merkel, who was first elected in 2005, is seeking a fourth term.
In June, Trudeau denied a report in German magazine Der Spiegel that he asked Merkel to consider removing references to the Paris climate change agreement from a draft G20 statement. The report suggested Trudeau wanted to appease President Donald Trump, who pulled the U.S. from the pact that month.
Michael Kappeler/Reuters U.S. President Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are shown at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on July 8, 2017.
Trudeau said he did "no such thing" when NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair pressed him about the matter in question period, adding that the German government confirmed as much.
"I clearly expressed to Angela Merkel that we need to continue to work together on fighting climate change, on remaining committed to Paris," he said.
Merkel hosted the G20 summit in Hamburg in July, where she met privately with Trudeau. The final communique from the event noted the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement.
The German chancellor also said in her closing remarks that she deplored that the U.S. was exiting the climate agreement.
With a file from The Canadian PressPin 3 2K Shares
Derrick Broze
September 8, 2015
(ANTIMEDIA) Of the Earth’s 7.2 billion human beings, an estimated 1.49 billion people actively use Facebook on a monthly basis. The social media site has become both an invaluable tool for online activism and an endless stream of cats, food, and selfies. However, no matter how you use Facebook, the company more than likely has your face on file via its facial-recognition software. This software has lead Facebook Inc. to be sued four times this year for possible violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act.
Currently, Facebook’s software analyzes faces in photos to suggest tags of friends. However, the faces are stored in a database that has privacy advocates concerned. The latest complaint was filed by Frederick William Gullen of Illinois. Gullen does not have a Facebook account but claims Facebook made a template of his face after a friend uploaded a picture of him. Gullen’s complaint states:
“Facebook is actively collecting, storing, and using — without providing notice, obtaining informed written consent or publishing data retention policies — the biometrics of its users and unwitting non-users … Specifically, Facebook has |
Jewish student union asked Twitter to reveal information that could be used to identify what they insisted on calling “anti-semitic” tweeters. Twitter refused; the social-media company prides itself on its protection of free speech, and argued that taking down the individual tweets was enough. The student group took the case to court. Twitter lost and a civil court in Paris ruled that the company must hand over the names, or other identifying information, of the users who had tweeted anti-semitic content, so that they can be prosecuted.
And of course TOO readers will only too readily remember the case of the 21-year-old Merseyside man Garron Helm who made fun of a Jewish female MP who was crowing about Labour’s mass immigration policy. Twitter not only revealed Garron Helm’s identity but he was jailed for a month. For his tweets.
Forget a bloody massacre by unhinged desperadoes. Forcing Twitter to hand over user information, that is real power.By By Lynn Herrmann Mar 27, 2011 in Politics Biloxi - The Obama administration has issued a gag order on data over the recent spike of dead dolphins, including many stillborn infants, washing up on Mississippi and Alabama shorelines, and scientists say the restriction undermines the scientific process. The dolphin die-off, labeled an “unusual mortality event (UME),” resulted in wildlife biologists being contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service to record the recent spike in dolphin deaths by collecting tissue samples and specimens for the agency, but late last month were privately ordered to keep their results under wraps. One biologist involved with tracking dolphin mortalities for over 20 years and speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters that: “It throws accountability right out the window. We are confused and... we are angry because they claim they want teamwork, but at the same time they are leaving the marine experts out of the loop completely.” Some scientists said they have received a personal rebuke from government officials about “speaking out of turn” to the media over attempts at determining the dolphins’ deaths. Additionally, these scientists say the collected specimens and samples are being turned over to the government for evaluation under a deal that omits independent scientists from the final results of lab tests. Almost 200 dead bottlenose dolphin bodies have been found since mid-January through this week along shorelines of Gulf coast states, including Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Reuters notes. About half of the carcasses are newborns or stillborn infants. That number is around 14 times the average numbers recorded during the same time frame between 2002 and 2007 and has coincidentally occurred during the first calving season since the BP Deepwater Horizon debacle last year in the Gulf. Although many of the dolphin specimens recently collected show no outward signs of oil contamination, lab analysis is crucial in helping to determine their deaths. Some experts believe the recent surge of deaths is the result of dolphins inhaling or ingesting oil during the oil spill, the results of which are just now beginning to show their toll, including a possible upsurge in dolphin miscarriages. The recent spike in Some are questioning the Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and its delay in providing dolphin samples to laboratories. “It is surprising that it has been almost a full year since the spill, and they still haven't selected labs for this kind of work,” said Ruth Carmichael, of the independent Officials with the NOAA state the confidentiality measures are an integral part of the current investigation over the BP oil spill. “We are treating the evidence, which are the dolphin samples, like a murder case,” said Dr. Erin Fougeres, a Fisheries Service marine biologist, Reuters notes. “The chain of custody is being closely watched. Every dolphin sample is considered evidence in the BP case now,” she added. An abnormal dolphin mortality this year along the Gulf coast has become part of a federal criminal investigation over last year’s BP oil spill disaster and as a result, has led the US government to clamp down on biologists’ findings, with orders to keep the results confidential.The dolphin die-off, labeled an “unusual mortality event (UME),” resulted in wildlife biologists being contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service to record the recent spike in dolphin deaths by collecting tissue samples and specimens for the agency, but late last month were privately ordered to keep their results under wraps. Reuters has obtained a copy of the agency letter that states, in part: “Because of the seriousness of the legal case, no data or findings may be released, presented or discussed outside the UME investigative team without prior approval.”One biologist involved with tracking dolphin mortalities for over 20 years and speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters that: “It throws accountability right out the window. We are confused and... we are angry because they claim they want teamwork, but at the same time they are leaving the marine experts out of the loop completely.”Some scientists said they have received a personal rebuke from government officials about “speaking out of turn” to the media over attempts at determining the dolphins’ deaths.Additionally, these scientists say the collected specimens and samples are being turned over to the government for evaluation under a deal that omits independent scientists from the final results of lab tests.Almost 200 dead bottlenose dolphin bodies have been found since mid-January through this week along shorelines of Gulf coast states, including Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Reuters notes. About half of the carcasses are newborns or stillborn infants.That number is around 14 times the average numbers recorded during the same time frame between 2002 and 2007 and has coincidentally occurred during the first calving season since the BP Deepwater Horizon debacle last year in the Gulf.Although many of the dolphin specimens recently collected show no outward signs of oil contamination, lab analysis is crucial in helping to determine their deaths.Some experts believe the recent surge of deaths is the result of dolphins inhaling or ingesting oil during the oil spill, the results of which are just now beginning to show their toll, including a possible upsurge in dolphin miscarriages.The recent spike in dolphin deaths has compounded the dolphin mortality problem, as scientists were already busy attempting to determine the deaths of nearly 90 dead dolphins, mostly adults, that washed up along the US Gulf coast during the weeks and months after the BP disaster.Some are questioning the Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and its delay in providing dolphin samples to laboratories.“It is surprising that it has been almost a full year since the spill, and they still haven't selected labs for this kind of work,” said Ruth Carmichael, of the independent Dauphin Island Sea Lab, located in Alabama, according to Reuters. “I can only hope that this process is a good thing. I just don’t know. This is an unfortunate situation,” she added.Officials with the NOAA state the confidentiality measures are an integral part of the current investigation over the BP oil spill.“We are treating the evidence, which are the dolphin samples, like a murder case,” said Dr. Erin Fougeres, a Fisheries Service marine biologist, Reuters notes. “The chain of custody is being closely watched. Every dolphin sample is considered evidence in the BP case now,” she added. More about dead dolphins, dead baby dolphins, Gulf oil spill, bp oil spill, Gulf coast More news from dead dolphins dead baby dolphins Gulf oil spill bp oil spill Gulf coast gulf coast states dolphin deaths Obama administration Bottlenose dolphins national marine fish... dolphins found dead NOAA Criminal investigati... stillborn dolp0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
Two men from opposing sides of the political spectrum, with different experiences of America, utilizing two divergent forums, arrive at the same conclusion: disenfranchising voters is harmful to our struggling democracy.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul appeared on last Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press for an interview with moderator David Gregory. Paul gave several statements that would appear to be at odds with Republican Party talking points, including a stubborn refusal to fault President Obama for the administration’s current cautious approach to reengaging Iraq. But we already knew that Paul is a true libertarian on this issue. He values a nation’s right to live and determine its own system of government above his party’s interest in warfare and faux domination. I am not alone in wondering if this approach renders him unelectable in a national Republican primary.
But in the same interview, Paul drew attention to another fundamental plank in his platform – ending the war on drugs. This is another issue on which the Senator takes a truly libertarian perspective. Even so, I bolted upright on my couch when he said the following:
“[The war on drugs is] the biggest voting rights issue of our day. We’ve gotten distracted by a lot of other things. We think there may be a million people who are being prevented from voting from having a previous felony conviction…It prevents you from employment, so if we’re the party of family values and keeping families together, and the party that believes in redemption and second chances, we should be for letting people have the right to vote back, and I think the face of the Republican party needs to be not about suppressing the vote, but about enhancing the vote.”
I am not in the habit of rewarding politicians for uttering statements of obvious common sense, but given the toxic state of reason and discourse in the Republican party, it’s difficult not to view this as a little brave. After all, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor just got tossed for being viewed by his constituents as too liberal.
On the same day, The New York Times ran columnist Charles M. Blow’s piece, “The Frustration Doctrine.” Blow, a dyed in the wool liberal who writes from the perspective of an African-American man come of age in the deep South, has been critical of the broken prison system as well as voter disenfranchisement. This past weekend, while evaluating the nation’s general distrust in government institutions, he observed:
“As many Americans, particularly those in the middle, throw up their hands in disgust and walk away in dismay, hyperpartisans — particularly conservatives — exert more influence…moderates are the least likely to be politically active. The ambivalent middle appears to be the cradle of apathy. And while the consistently liberal are more likely to do things like volunteer for a candidate or a campaign, consistent conservatives are much more likely than liberals to vote.”
While Paul and Blow approached the issue of the vote from two different angles (Paul indicting a penal system that disproportionately disenfranchises minority men – who incidentally tend to vote Democrat, Blow trying to incite civic spirit in the malaised middle), the message is the same. Renewed access to and enthusiasm for the ballot is the only way to repair our fractured democracy.
It’s hard to remember a time when getting out the vote was not a polarizing issue, but so it was. Merely eight years ago, then-President George W. Bush celebrated the extension of the Voting Rights Act. The compassionate conservative and former Governor of Texas would likely find himself primaried over such an inclusive approach to the polls in 2014.
I’ll go back to impugning his other dangerous policies in short order, but for now, I thank Senator Rand Paul for challenging his party to live up to its long stated core values. Freedom for all – not just the moneyed white man. At the same time, it’s equally critical that those of us on the left and in the middle chant the same mantra: Don’t like where the country is headed? Get off the couch and vote – even if they make you wait in line. No hyperbole here. It’s the only way.U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic agencies are quietly making plans to secure elements of Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s expansive arsenal of weapons as his regime nears collapse and is under fire from rebels seeking to expand control over the Libyan capital.
The government is concerned that conventional weapons, such as SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles, which can be used to shoot down aircraft, could get in the wrong hands.
The government also is monitoring Col. Gadhafi’s stocks of chemical weapons, estimated to include between 10 tons and 14 tons of mustard gas and also uranium ore, U.S. government spokesmen said Wednesday.
Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday that the Soviet-made 1970s-era surface-to-air missile launcher known as the SA-7 would “remain a concern because of [its] portability.”
News reports Wednesday from Libya said the rebel coalition had placed a price on the head of Col. Gadhafi. The Libyan opposition confederation, known as the Transitional National Council, also urged the international community to release Libya’s frozen assets held by foreign banks.
The State Department this year hired the MAGAmerica, or the Mines Advisory Group, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization that specializes in the disposal of ordnance, to monitor and dispose of some conventional arms stockpiles in Libya. A team from the group arrived in the country in April and began training fighters provided by rebel groups for on-the-ground assessments.
Jennifer Lachman, executive director of MAGAmerica, said her organization had seven non-Libyan specialists on the ground in the country.
She said her group disposed mainly of airdropped bombs that had not exploded. When the inspection teams came upon abandoned ammunition points, however, the teams had to negotiate with the Transitional National Council over what weapons would be destroyed, Ms. Lachman said.
“We have teams of technical experts, international experts who deployed and trained local members of the TNC to work with us,” she said. “We always work with the ultimate or primary priority being the security of our staff. It’s a negotiation or a joint process that determines what items are destroyed.”
The U.S. government estimates that Col. Gadhafi imported 20,000 shoulder-fired SA-7 rockets during his reign. The weapon is especially attractive to terrorists seeking a projectile capable of downing an airplane.
Ms. Lachman said her teams have not found many SA-7 rockets. “It’s a security concern, given the threat,” she said. “We haven’t seen close to 20,000 of them on the ground.”
“We’ve seen since February the looting of arms depots and specifically those missiles,” said Matthew Schroeder, director of the arms-sales monitoring project at the Federation of American Scientists. “Missiles similar to these have been used in the past to shoot down civilian aircraft.”
Mr. Schroeder added that the rebels have acquired the SA-7b missiles. “We know the rebels have had a hard time controlling them at the depots,” he said.
Libya’s chemical weapons also have been a worry for the U.S. government.
Jamie F. Mannina, a spokesman for the State Department’s arms-control division, said Libya’s known chemical-weapons storage facilities have been monitored since the start of the rebellion in March.
“We have been monitoring known missile and chemical-agent storage facilities since the start of this conflict and will continue to do so,” he said. “We also continue to monitor storage sites of the Libyan stockpile of uranium yellowcake. I am not going to go beyond how we do these things other than to say we are using national technical means.”
“National technical means” refers to the overhead satellite and aircraft surveillance the U.S. government has used for decades to monitor known missile and nuclear facilities all over the world.
Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, said “known missile and chemical agent storage facilities remain secure, and we’ve not seen any activity, based on our national technical means, to give us concern that they have been compromised.”
Regarding nuclear-related goods, the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that Libya holds 2,000 tons of yellowcake uranium stored mainly at a facility in the southern town of Sebha.
“At this point, it’s a big amount. If you want to just remove [it], it’s a major effort. It’s packed in drums and would require a major operation,” said Olli Heinonen, deputy director general for safeguards at the International Atomic Energy Agency from 2005 to 2010.
Mr. Heinonen, now at Harvard University, said the Gadhafi regime wanted to sell the yellowcake uranium a few years ago, but he thinks the regime decided against that.
Mr. Heinonen said the material would be of interest mainly as a precursor to making nuclear fuel, but in and of itself it would not be useful as a weapon. “If you put it in a public place, it’s a problem,” he said. “But it’s less of a problem compared to other radioactive material.”
One U.S. official said the State Department has sent technical specialists to meet with the Transitional National Council and to help alert Libya’s neighbors about the possible transshipment of weapons across the country’s borders.
Another U.S. intelligence officer, who asked not to be named, said the United States also was relying on contractors to monitor known weapons sites.
“We don’t have much in the way of ground forces,” this official said. “Someone was supposed to be doing this. The Qataris and Emiratis were supposed to do it; they had their special forces on the ground, and there are contractors too. They were supposed to do site security and make sure nothing has been touched.”
The U.S. Special Operations Command has special units of commandos that are prepared to go to foreign countries, including North Korea, to destroy or secure foreign weapons sites. It could not be learned whether commando units are set for operations in Libya.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.NEW DELHI (Reuters) - As an election campaigner, Narendra Modi promised sweeping market reforms to revive India’s economy and put the country to work. As prime minister, he has dismayed admirers, apparently reverting to the script of the hapless government he defeated.
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi reacts during a meeting with Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff (not pictured) on the sidelines of the 6th BRICS summit at the Alvorada Palace in Brasilia July 16, 2014. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino/Files
To some of the economists and business leaders who as his campaign cheerleaders dared to dream of a Thatcherite revolution, he seems not to be listening. Three months after his win, it is dawning on them that their views count for little.
“As of now, the momentum is lost. They might still recover it, but we have lost the moment,” said Bibek Debroy, a prominent economist who co-wrote a book laying out a reform agenda that the new prime minister himself launched in June.
Debroy told Reuters that so far there had been no signs of the promised change at institutions sapped by graft and over-regulation that many Indians have grown to revile.
Back in the heady days of the election campaign, Modi and his supporters seemed much more in tune, all lambasting the last centre-left government for years of waste and policy paralysis and building expectations of a regime of “minimum government and maximum governance” that would unshackle key sectors of the economy from the state.
But now there is a sense that the 63-year-old Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) strongman, who made his reputation putting his home state Gujarat on a high growth path, has somehow stumbled in New Delhi.
To be fair, the government has a five-year term to achieve Modi’s goal of transforming India into an economic and military power able to withstand the rise of China on its doorstep.
On Friday, Modi will make his first Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Old Delhi, and the expectation within his party is that he may use the occasion to announce bold changes that have so far been absent.
According to economists at HSBC, the government has already moved with “unaccustomed alacrity” on a number of fronts, such as opening up the state railways to foreign investment and providing new guidelines for a more streamlined bureaucracy.
“But the stuff that will lift economic growth over time... requires deft and delicate handling,” they said this week, noting resistance to reform from the country’s states and the challenges of pushing legislation through the upper house of parliament, where the BJP does not have a majority.
MORE OF THE SAME
Modi won India’s biggest election mandate in three decades in May after promising to revive growth that has fallen below 5 percent, choking off job opportunities for the one million people who enter the workforce every month.
He dangled the prospect of new roads, factories, power lines, high-speed trains and even 100 new cities. So far, there has been little movement on any of these gigantic tasks, which will require an overhaul of India’s land acquisition laws, faster environmental clearances and an end to red tape.
He has refrained from cutting food aid that is estimated to cost 1 percent of gross domestic product, or tackling costly welfare programmes.
Last month, his government blocked a global trade reform pact, saying there must be movement on a parallel agreement on stockpiling that is necessary to run a programme to distribute cheap food, the world’s largest.
A leader with such a strong mandate “should be making policy with conviction, not emulating tactics of a defunct government,” Surjit Bhalla, an economist and bitter critic of the previous government, wrote in the Indian Express newspaper.
BJP leaders and strategists with ties to the Modi administration said the government had considered reforms to a $6 billion workfare scheme that guarantees 100 days of employment a year to the rural poor.
One idea was to take modest steps that would cut waste, stop unproductive work and tackle embezzlement, said a source with knowledge of the discussions within the government. But the government shrank back even from that, and actually increased funding for the scheme in its budget for fiscal 2014-15.
It was not clear who vetoed the changes, but the source said some were pointing the finger at India’s powerful bureaucracy.
TWEETING BUT NOT TALKING
Modi himself has not been speaking much, and that has compounded the problem, said a member of his campaign team.
Modi the campaigner was everywhere, even appearing as an animated hologram in places he couldn’t visit. Modi the premier has been low-profile, preferring to communicate through Twitter.
His reluctance to engage the media has drawn parallels with his reserved predecessor, Manmohan Singh, although the two men could hardly be more dissimilar.
“Manmohan Singh’s silence was out of compulsion, Modi’s by choice,” said the election strategist.
Some of Modi’s top-ranking supporters including top Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, who hailed his rise as a turning point for India, have yet to find a role in his team.
Bhagwati, who told Reuters in April that he expected a spot on an external council advising the prime minister, declined to comment on the government’s performance so far, saying he was recovering from surgery.
He noted in an email, however, that there had been mixed reactions to Modi’s first three months.
Arvind Panagariya, Bhagwati’s protege at Columbia, had nothing to add to an article he wrote last month criticising Modi for continuing wasteful subsidies and sticking to a fiscal deficit target that he believes will throttle growth.
Panagariya has taken on a role advising the government of Rajasthan, a BJP-led state that has since the election rolled out the sort of ambitious reforms Modi fans had hoped he would embrace for the nation as a whole.
MODI THE CEO
While Modi is yet to unveil major policy initiatives, he has been unrelenting in his focus on making government accountable and holding his ministers to high standards of public probity.
Cabinet colleagues routinely field calls at the crack of dawn or late at night from the prime minister’s office, often to check on work in progress.
Modi himself works 15-hour days and at weekends, and expects similar commitment from members of his government.
One minister was refused permission to go on a private trip abroad to attend his daughter’s graduation. He was told that, if he really had to go, he should give up his post. Another, on his way to the airport for an official tour, was told to dress appropriately since he was representing his country.
“To be fair, Modi has been taking quite a few incremental measures, which will make it easier to do business in India,” a banker said, on condition of anonymity.
“People pay little attention to nuts and bolts reforms as they don’t make headlines, but they count a lot.”
At least one prominent Western investor is voting with his feet.
U.S. real estate mogul Donald Trump said on Tuesday he planned “substantial investments” in Indian property and hotels, betting on the new government to revive economic growth.
“I do see India as a great place to invest, and I think the election made that even better,” said Trump, in India to launch Trump Tower in Mumbai, his first project in the country’s financial capital, in collaboration with India’s Lodha Group.A view of Choccolocco Creek, Talledega County, Alabama, where a surviving population of the wicker ancylid limpet Rhodacmea filosa (insert, not to scale), was recently rediscovered. Credit: Paul Johnson, Alabama Aquatic Biodiversity Center ANN ARBOR—Think “mass extinction” and you probably envision dinosaurs dropping dead in the long-ago past or exotic tropical creatures being wiped out when their rainforest habitats are decimated. But a major mass extinction took place right here in North America in the first half of the 20th century, when 47 species of mollusk disappeared after the watershed in which they lived was dammed.
Now, a population of one of those species—a freshwater limpet last seen more than 60 years ago and presumed extinct—has been found in a tributary of the heavily dammed Coosa River in Alabama’s Mobile River Basin. Researchers from the University of Michigan, the Alabama Aquatic Biodiversity Center and the Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission reported the rediscovery May 31 in the online, open-access journal PLoS One.
The story of Rhodacmea filosa’s disappearance and reappearance is both a conservation success story and a cautionary tale for other parts of the world where rivers are being dammed, said Diarmaid O’Foighil, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a curator at the U-M Museum of Zoology. It’s also an example of how museum specimens collected generations ago can inform scientists of today.
Limpets are snails with shells shaped like caps rather than coils. They make their homes in the riffles and shoals of fast-flowing rivers and streams, where they graze on microscopic algae. When rivers are dammed, shoals and riffles are replaced with reservoirs, and the swiftly-moving water the limpets require is stilled.
The Mobile River Basin, a “global hotspot of temperate freshwater biodiversity,” was extensively industrialized throughout the 20th century, and 36 major dams and locks were built. At the time, few thought much about preserving biodiversity. The prevailing attitude was, “What’s not to like about getting electricity from a natural source—especially in impoverished, rural areas—and using that to drive industrialization?” O’Foighil said. “The dams were seen as signs of progress.”
But progress came at the expense of mollusks that were found only in that area and nowhere else in the world.
“Their habitat was destroyed in huge chunks,” O’Foighil said. The result: 47 of 139 endemic mollusk species were lost, representing a full one-third of all known freshwater mollusk extinctions worldwide.
Then, about 20 years ago, thanks to increased interest in and funding for conservation projects, biologists began searching patches of the drainage that weren’t affected by damming, trying to find remnants of the original, rich fauna and save whatever still could be saved. At the Alabama Aquatic Biodiversity Center (AABC), a former catfish experimental research station has been converted into a captive breeding facility, with the aim of breeding survivors of the mass extinction and reintroducing them into unaffected parts of the watershed.
It was through those efforts that AABC director Paul Johnson discovered the surviving population of what he thought might be Rhodacmea filosa. But how does one definitively identify a species that hasn’t been seen in decades? There are no other living members of the group with which to compare specimens.
That’s where the U-M Museum of Zoology collection comes in. It just so happens that 100 years ago, biologists collected multitudes of mollusks from the Mobile River Basin—never envisioning the habitat destruction and resulting extinctions that were to come—and those specimens ended up in the U-M collection. Coincidentally, the mollusk portion of that collection was largely established by Bryant Walker, an early authority on—you guessed it—the limpet genus Rhodacmea. Furthermore, the last person to study Rhodacmea was a U-M graduate student, some 50 years ago.
Using century-old reference specimens, O’Foighil, professor emeritus John Burch, graduate student Jingchun Li and collection coordinator Taehwan Lee were able to confirm the identity in addition to performing detailed morphometric and DNA analyses.
“This is very good news,” O’Foighil said. “With conservation biology, usually it’s all gloom and doom, but this is one of those rare events where we have something positive to say.”
But just because survivors have been found, does that mean the species can continue to survive?
“I think they can, because of two things,” O’Foighil said. “We have a persistent population in this little tributary, but we also now have in place the infrastructure for their captive breeding and reintroduction to other tributaries.”
This snail tale might well serve as an object lesson, O’Foighil said. “The industrialization of freshwater watersheds that happened across the U.S. in the last century is now happening all over the world. For instance, right now one of the most egregious examples is the ongoing damming of the Mekong, and there are likely thousands of endemic species there. Even though we’re now more aware of this—of the negative downsides—when it comes to issues of economic development, freshwater biodiversity almost always loses.”
In addition to O’Foighil, Li, Lee, Johnson and Burch, the paper’s authors include Ryan Evans of the Kentucky State Nature Preserves Commission. Funding was provided by the State Wildlife Grant Program, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Science Foundation.
Related Links:Dear Mr. Bezos,
As the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, the world's largest online retailer, you hold incredible power. I'm writing today to urge you to use this power for good: to protect animals from cruelty by immediately banning the sale of foie gras on Amazon.com.
Amazon has proven time and again to be a true leader. You've shown a spirit of ingenuity, forward thinking and creativity that has moved our society forward in so many ways.
It's disappointing to see such an otherwise progressive company continue to support a practice that's like something out of the dark ages -- the brutal, cruel force-feeding of ducks to create foie gras.
Foie gras, French for "fatty liver," is quite literally the diseased liver of a duck. It is made by violently shoving a pipe down a duck's throat and cramming food into his stomach in order to induce the diseased liver that is then sold as a delicacy.
The practice is so cruel it is banned in California and in more than a dozen countries, including Austria, Argentina, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxemburg, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.
A 2013 investigation by Mercy For Animals at Hudson Valley Foie Gras, an Amazon foie gras supplier, documented a system of intentional torture of animals, including:
Workers violently grabbing ducks by their wings and necks and then shoving a metal pipe down their throats to force-feed them
Countless ducks hyperventilating as their unnaturally large livers pressed against their lungs, making it difficult to breathe
Birds with open, bleeding wounds left to suffer in tiny wire cages without proper veterinary care
Fully conscious ducks being shackled upside down and having their throats cut open
In the past, your company has stood up against animal cruelty by ending the sale of other products due to their inhumane production practices. Amazon has banned the sale of a long list of animal products, including shark fins, whale meat, bear bile, ivory, snake and crocodile skin, seal fur and any product or body part from a dog or a cat. It is admirable that your company recognizes its power to prevent needless animal suffering.
Amazon UK recently banned the sale of foie gras on its site. So we ask you, Mr. Bezos, what is the difference between a duck in the UK and a duck in the U.S.? Are they not equal in their capacity to feel pain? Should geography dictate whether or not a duck is tortured? We don't think so.
Amazon has the power to lead important social change. And with power comes responsibility. These animals cannot speak for themselves, so it is up to people like you to speak for them. Won't you do that?
Other retailers have already taken a stand for these intelligent and friendly animals. Recognizing the cruelty inherent in foie gras production, major restaurants and grocers, including Costco, Safeway, Target, Giant Eagle, Whole Foods Market, and Wolfgang Puck, refuse to sell it.
Won't you please join them?
Help stop one of the cruelest factory farming practices in existence by immediately ending the sale of foie gras on your site. Add this to the list of great things Amazon already does.
Continue to be an industry leader, Mr. Bezos, by leading the way to the end of this barbaric practice.
Sincerely,
Nathan Runkle
Executive Director
Mercy For AnimalsTurns out, Teresa and Joe Giudice aren’t the only Bravolebs facing financial issues.
Albert Manzo, owner of The Brownstone catering hall and husband to Caroline Manzo, owes $208,012.77 in New Jersey state taxes from 2015. That’s a lot of meat-a-balls! And if that weren’t bad enough, Radar is reporting the catering hall, where so much Real Housewives of New Jersey drama has gone done, is falling apart.
This isn’t the first time Manzo has had money troubles in regards to The Brownstone banquet hall. In 2004, it took a full year to pay off the $105,983 tax bill from the state of New Jersey, but June 2016 was the worst month ever for the Manzo’d with Children star. The Brownstone was hit with a civil judgment owed to and accounting firm for $13,075, and within days, an elevator company filed a complaint for over $6,000.
Financial woes aren’t their only problems! In 2013, a waitress filed a discrimination lawsuit against Albert and his bother Tommy for unfair pay and bigotry and said there were referred to as “spic bitches.” Manzo has denied these claims. “I’ve never spoken to any employee in that manner. This is the most insane thing I’ve ever dealt with.” Manzo said to the Daily News in 2013.
“Like” us on Facebook “Follow” us on Twitter and on InstagramImage copyright Reuters Image caption The UK is due to leave the EU on March 29 2019
The "cabinet is united" over the need for a transitional period after Britain officially leaves the European Union, Cabinet minister Michael Gove has said.
He said an "implementation period" ensuring access to migrant labour and economic stability would happen.
He said it must be driven by "pragmatism" but also recognise the UK's vote to leave the EU last year.
It follows newspaper reports that free movement for EU citizens could continue for years after March 2019.
The Times reports that the prime minister is ready to offer EU citizens free movement for up to two years after the UK officially leaves the EU - while the Guardian suggests it could be four years.
A senior Downing Street source dismissed the reports as coming from "someone on a flyer" and said it was "not the government's position".
But BBC political correspondent Chris Mason said there appeared to have been a hardening of opinion in cabinet around the concept of a transitional period between full EU membership and a new relationship after the official Brexit date of March 2019 - in which the UK would be outside the EU but in which some elements of its membership would continue for a fixed period.
The new buzz word?
Image copyright PA
Political correspondent Iain Watson
What form will any transition take?
Could there be temporary membership of the European Economic Area? Some leavers might be suspicious that temporary would become permanent.
Should we stay in the customs union a bit longer until we hammer out a bespoke deal post Brexit? The EU is unlikely to get the clarity it seeks until there is clarity around the cabinet table.
There has been talk of soft, hard and clean Brexits. Increasingly another word has entered the lexicon.
David Davis uses it. Michael Gove used it today. Expect to hear more of it. Pragmatic. That's now the goal - a pragmatic Brexit. And that necessarily means compromise at cabinet level as well as with the EU.
Read more from Iain
International Trade Secretary Liam Fox - who campaigned for Brexit - said on Thursday he "did not have a problem" with the idea of an "implementation phase", which he suggested could be around two years.
On Friday, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs International Richard Gnodde said a "significant" transitional period needed to be agreed as soon as possible.
'Pragmatic judgement'
Asked about the newspaper reports on Friday, Mr Gove said: "The prime minister has made clear, as we leave the European Union we will have an implementation period which will ensure that we can continue to have, not just access to labour, but the economic stability and certainty which business requests. And again that is something around which the government and the cabinet is united."
He recognised the importance of "access to high quality labour" for businesses and said any such transitional period should "be driven by a shared pragmatic judgement" involving the best interests of the UK economy and a "smooth" Brexit but which was also "in line with the result that the British people voted for just over a year ago".
Immigration to the UK, particularly from poorer EU countries, was seen as a major issue in the referendum campaign.
'Time to adapt'
Newly elected Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable said: "It is encouraging that some of the more sensible and pragmatic members of the government are beginning to exert themselves and look for a compromise, but it is still the case that within a few years, British people are going to lose their right to move freely around the continent."
Speaking earlier, the former Labour chancellor Lord Darling said that a transition period after March 2019 was "essential" to stop businesses suddenly being deprived of European workers and told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "If it's true that they are talking about up to four years, then I think that would be very welcome."
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said the question of a transitional deal was "a matter for |
servitude but FOR their chains, and to force others to accept the same base estate.
One of their leaders, Christine O’Donnel, New England’s version of our own beloved Sellouts Tancredo, Buck and Malkin, quipped at a Pearl Harbor Party that “tragedies come in threes” and said Pearl Harbor, the death of Elizabeth Edwards, and the unemployment benefit being extended.
Ms Edwards, for decades the Right Wing including the Demon Spawn O’Donnel, have been fervently wishing that ALL liberals, especially the most effective activists and politicians, would simply catch cancer and die. This is the level of their “revolutionary” zeal. If they’re lucky enough not to get put down like the pack of rabid chihuahuas they truly are, by the Other Half of the poor, the ones who the Modern Jay Goulds can’t possibly pay off, while they’re on their way to storm the castles of American Royalty.
One way they could help that slim survival chance along is if they develop enough smarts or lose enough stupids that they don’t try to block the way.
By the way, The BBC schlock-umentary “The Queen” is airing this week on BBC AmericaDODGERS Checkup looks good for Dodgers
With top players back and performing as expected, surging Dodgers look like favorites to capture the weak NL West.
Yasiel Puig, who didn't start either of the last two games before the break because of soreness in his left hip, should be back in the lineup. Carl Crawford, who was nursing a stiff lower back, could be too. Matt Kemp, who is recovering from an irritated shoulder, is expected to be reinstated from the disabled list for the series finale Sunday.
As the Dodgers return from the All-Star break Friday here against the Nationals, they are only 2 1/2 games behind the first-place Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League West. And they are as close to full strength as they have been this season.
The team's blueprint for reaching the playoffs is equally simple. "One of the biggest keys is having our guys out there," first baseman Adrian Gonzalez said.
WASHINGTON — The Dodgers have a simple explanation for how they turned around their season: They became healthy.
The Dodgers look to lock up the National League West after the All-Star break… (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles…)
That list of ailments is nothing compared with what the Dodgers had to face earlier this season.
The offense stalled out of the gate with Hanley Ramirez unavailable because of a broken left thumb, Crawford not all the way back from elbow surgery and Kemp looking nothing like the hitter he used to be after off-season shoulder surgery.
The pitching had even more trouble. Chad Billingsley and then Josh Beckett were lost for the season because of injuries, Zack Greinke sustained a fractured collarbone during a bench-clearing brawl in his second start, and Chris Capuano, Ted Lilly and Stephen Fife also spent time on the disabled list.
The Dodgers were 9 1/2 games out of first place as recently as last month, but they have won 17 of their last 22 games.
"We've kind of got our confidence," Manager Don Mattingly said. "We have some momentum."
Keys to the offense
Ramirez and Puig are why the offense dramatically improved over the last few weeks. Ramirez is batting.386 and Puig.391. Each has eight home runs in fewer than 40 games. The Dodgers are 18-9 with both in the lineup.
Gonzalez is batting a steady.297 and leads the team in hits, runs, doubles, home runs and runs batted in.
Keys to the defense
The rotation looks capable of leading the Dodgers to a division title and deep into the playoffs. Clayton Kershaw has a major league-best 1.98 earned-run average. Greinke has an 8-2 record and appears to be rounding into top form. Hyun-Jin Ryu is 7-3, though there are concerns about how he'll hold up over an entire season. Recently acquired Ricky Nolasco is one of baseball's best No. 4 starters.
Catcher A.J. Ellis has thrown out 50% of potential base stealers, by far the best among MLB's regular catchers. Backup Tim Federowicz has thrown out seven of 13 potential base stealers.
Must improve
The Dodgers rank 26th in baseball with a.981 fielding percentage, but there are some positive signs. Ramirez looks increasingly comfortable at shortstop, Crawford appears to be throwing without worrying about his surgically repaired elbow and Andre Ethier has been solid in center field replacing Kemp.
Who could help
Although closer Kenley Jansen has helped restore order in the bullpen, the unit remains an area of concern. Jansen has never pitched in a playoff game. Setup man Ronald Belisario is notoriously streaky; left-handers Paco Rodriguez and J.P. Howell have been used with alarming frequency; Brandon League is lost. Look for the Dodgers to add a late-inning option before the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline.
On the farm
Top prospects Joc Pederson and Zack Lee are still probably a year away from the major leagues. The Dodgers are built to win now, so anyone they call up from the minor leagues probably would be a bit player — a reliever or a reserve position player.There has been much recent comment in relation to Ireland’s controversial neutrality during the second World War that suggests a diminishing rather than a deepening of historical understanding.
The apology and pardon granted to Irish soldiers who deserted the Irish Army during the war, some to fight with the British army, has been broadly welcomed and rightly seen as a noble gesture. But unfortunately, it has been accompanied by distorted and simplistic accounts of a complex period of Irish history.
It has become fashionable in recent times to denigrate Irish neutrality during this period, either because it is not accepted that Ireland was neutral at all, or because it is believed that the decision to declare and maintain neutrality involved a self-serving opting out of the defining moral and political issue of the 1930s and 1940s- the defeat of Nazism.
Last year, when he addressed the deserter issue, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter referred to Irish neutrality as “a principle of moral bankruptcy” in the context of the Holocaust, and this week, contrasted that with those deserters from the Irish army who fought for “freedom against tyranny”.
British journalist Ben Macintyre has also entered the fray, referring yesterday to an “indifference to the evils of Nazism” which still “shames” Ireland.
Would that history was so simple, but it is not, and what gets lost in too much of contemporary comment and judgement of neutrality is the nuance, context and shades of grey that form the basis of the documented history of Irish neutrality and the evolution of national and international policy at that stage of the State’s existence. Of course neutrality was not absolute; Ireland’s geographic position, small size and strategic interests would dictate that it could not be absolutist about its foreign policy. But the important point is that the desire that existed in the 1930s and 1940s was that a State that had experienced a war of independence – against an imperial Britain with an often shameful record of misrule and oppression of the Irish – and a civil war less than 20 years prior to the second World War, was determined to insist on the right to implement as independent a foreign policy as possible, because the ability to do this was seen by contemporaries as the ultimate test of true independence.
This was the logical conclusion to the various Anglo-Irish relations developments in the 1930s, including the crucial return of the Treaty Ports in 1938. What also seems to be forgotten is that the decision to declare neutrality was backed overwhelmingly by all political parties at a time when the civil war divide in Irish politics was still strong.
In practice, pragmatism, stubbornness and self-preservation were also relevant and the restraint of those who could have invaded Ireland was vital. There was a difficult balancing act to be performed in order to navigate relationships with Britain, Germany and the US, and a deliberate holding at arms length of certain moral dilemmas, a rigorous censorship and a pious belief in the right to choose an Irish solution to an international crisis.
As historian Dermot Keogh has pointed out “ the world of diplomacy in Dublin during the Emergency was not a time of philosophical discussion between de Valera and the different foreign ambassadors. It was a world of shadow language and shape-shifting”. These shapes and shadows are now being contorted to serve narrow contemporary agendas born of hindsight and current values.
The attempts to pronounce Irish neutrality dishonourable and amoral also conveniently overlook the wider cost of neutrality; it further entrenched partition, damaged relations with Britain and the US, and as much of Europe rebuilt and prospered in the 1950s under the aegis of reconstruction, the Irish economy floundered and emigration soared. Such was partly the price of what novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who observed the country closely during the war, described as the State’s “first free self-assertion”.
Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD"Progressives": In Bed With Bibi
By Gilad Atzmon
May 08, 2013 " Information Clearing House " - Once again we see a familiar pattern: our united ‘progressives’ — a veritable synagogue, a collective of great humanists — lend their support to the oppressed. This time it is the ‘Syrian people’ whom they wish to liberate and their enemy is obviously Bashar Al-Assad.
It is a pattern we know only too well by now. Ahead of the ‘War Against Terror’ we witnessed years of intensive progressive Feminist and Gay rights groups campaigning for women’s rights in Afghanistan. The Progressive type also disapproves of the current state of the Iranian revolution. Too often he or she would insist that we must liberate the Iranians. This week, once again, we see a united front made by Tariq Ali, Ilan Pappe, Fredric Jameson, Norman Finkelstein and other very good people. They clearly want us to ‘liberate the Syrians’.
They campaign openly to topple Bashar al-Asad’s regime. They call the ‘people of the world’ to pressure the Syrian regime to end its oppression of and war on the ‘Syrian people.’ “We demand,” they say, that Bashar al-Asad leave immediately without excuses so that Syria can begin a speedy recovery towards a democratic future.”
So here we are. Ali, Jameson, Pappe, Finelstein & Co, in light of recent Israeli attacks on Syria, will you be kind enough, gentlemen, to tell us whom you support? Is it Assad or Netanyahu you side with?
One may wonder how it can happen that our progressives, in spite of their good will and humanist credentials, have managed once again to end up in bed with Bibi?
The answer is actually embarrassingly simple. The progressive philosophy is the latest and most advanced form of ideological choseness. Calling yourself a progressive obviously entails that someone else must be a ‘reactionary’. It is a self-appointed elitist standpoint that is inherently intolerant and supremacist.
Progressiveness is a precept devoted to the Tikun Olam (fixing the universe) ideology. It is premised on the idea that those who uphold progressive ideas ‘know better.’ They know what is right and who is wrong. The Progressive knows how to differentiate between the Kosher and the Taref. The progressive voices in this case somehow turn a blind eye to the embarrassing fact that it is actually the Syrian army, largely Sunnis, that is fighting the so-called ‘Syrian rebels’ who are a motley gathering of foreign mercenaries.
Perhaps our progressive interventionists could do with reading Robert Fisk more often — after all, Fisk may as well be the only reliable English-speaking reporter in the region. “The word ‘democracy’ and the name of Assad do not blend very well in much of Syria.” Fisk reports, but he continues, “I rather think that the soldiers of what is officially called the Syrian Arab Army are fighting for Syria rather than Assad. But fighting they are and maybe, for now, they are winning an unwinnable war.”
Bearing that in mind, I would expect progressive intellectuals, amongst them respected historians and political scientists, to be slightly more sophisticated and ponder a bit more before providing Israel with a moral green light to launch a new global conflict.
I would tend to believe that it is about time our progressive humanists engaged in a preliminary ethical investigation. They should find out, once and for all, what it is that constitutes moral grounds for any form of intervention. I believe that before you preach ‘Tikun Olam’ and claim to ‘fix the world’ in the name of the usually cited ‘civil society’ and ‘international law,’ you may want to consider fixing yourselves first.
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Undiluted techno from an under-appreciated name.
Ashley Burchett is a London producer whose work has featured in the bags of full-throttled techno DJs since 2000. Those who checked our recent Label of the Month feature on Belgian label Token will know that Burchett came on board with the imprint in 2007 and has made it his exclusive home ever since. Burchett has largely pushed a fast-paced, rolling sound, one that often evokes the more shadowy corners of Jeff Mills' Purpose Maker series. Token marked its fifth birthday at the start of 2012 with Burchett's relentless Binary Opposition, a release that would be remixed later in the year by an eye-catching selection of modern techno's finest—Ben Klock, Peter Van Hoesen, Planetary Assault Systems, Sigha. Burchett arguably outdid himself with Behind the Sun late last month, running from delicate intensity through to full-bore attack mode.
You get all of the aforementioned Ø [Phase] tracks on RA.337 along with unreleased material and new guard names like Shifted, DVS1 and Truncate.
What have you been up to recently?
Production-wise I've been busy with various remixes (due out in the coming months). I've been gigging in between. Also working on an album for next year.
How and where was the mix recorded?
It was recorded in my studio directly into Logic from vinyl and CD. I don't have Traktor or Ableton or such like.
Can you tell us about the idea behind the mix?
There's no big concept. It's just a condensed version of what I might do live. An illustration of my tastes right now.
Kr!z said in a recent feature with us that you "should have been way bigger by now." Is this a view you share?
It's a fair enough sentiment, though I'm not particularly looking for reasons why. We all have our own curve.
Do you feel like the techno scene has been increasingly moving in line with your approach to the sound recently?
It would seem things are toughening up again lately. Perhaps they're just finding a natural level. Things went too hard and too fast in the past, certain producers slowed things down (which was definitely a good thing). It feels a bit like those two approaches have been re-aligning slightly over the past couple of years. I've always been somewhere in the middle so I suppose you could look at it like that.
What are you up to next?
The album will be my main focus musically in the coming months, while gigging in between.The federal consumer agency is sounding warning bells about the growing debt Canadians are taking on through auto loans.
[np_storybar title=”How Canada’s auto loan bubble has become a ticking time bomb” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/personal-finance/debt/how-canadas-auto-loan-bubble-has-become-a-ticking-time-bomb”%5D
Spurred by tantalizingly low interest rates, sweeteners like stretched out loan timelines, and increasingly confident consumers who worship their wheels, car debt has been growing at a phenomenal pace.
Continue reading.
[/np_storybar]
Consumers have been taking advantage of stretched amortization periods in recent years to take on more debt without increasing their monthly payments, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada revealed Tuesday in a research report tracking market trends.
But they are often buying more car than they can afford, paying much more interest, and, in some cases, going on to buy new cars before the original loans are fully repaid.
“In these circumstances, consumers put themselves in the position of having to roll the debt owing on the long-term loan into the loan for the purchase of the new vehicle, thereby potentially stepping onto an ‘auto-debt treadmill’,” the agency warned.
The FCAC conducted research in the summer and fall of last year in a targeted review that tapped the country’s biggest banks for information, as well as smaller lenders focused on the auto sector.
Particular attention was paid to the information consumers receive about the terms of their auto loans, and to issues with potential impact on consumers, such as “negative equity” and non-prime lending, the report said.
“Recent trends in extended-term car loans have raised several concerns,” said Lucie Tedesco, commissioner of the FCAC. “Consumers must carefully examine their needs and their financial situation to ensure they can repay their car loans without undue strain, and with a full appreciation of the total interest charges and value of the car throughout the loan period.”
The FCAC called the growth in long-term car loans “worrisome,” noting that the average new car loan last year had a term longer than 72 months, up from about 65 months in 2010.
In the same five years, the share of consumers trading vehicles with “negative equity” has risen by 50 per cent – up to 30 per cent of consumers in 2015 from 20 per cent in 2010.
“Although significantly more consumers are carrying negative equity when they break their existing auto loans, the average amount of negative equity carried by consumers who are underwater … has hovered around $6,700,” the report says.
Vehicles depreciate quickly, which means the negative equity peaks in the early years of a loan when the portion of each payment dedicated to interest tends to be larger. Holding the loan longer eventually moves the borrower into a “positive equity” position. That typically happens by the fourth year in a standard 60-month auto loan, but the longer loans leave many borrowers in negative equity positions into the fifth year and even well beyond it, the report says.
The FCAC is not the first to zero in on auto lending as an area of concern. Debt-ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service raised similar red flags in 2014.
In a report that fall, Moody’s noted that auto lending by banks had grown at a compounded annual rate of 20 per cent since 2007, “significantly outpacing” the growth of even red-hot mortgages, credit cards, and lines of credit. In seven years, vehicle loans had jumped to $64 billion from $16.2 billion.
The authors of the Moody’s report warned that with household debt already at record levels, the concerted push into auto lending – buoyed by low interest rates and longer amortization periods that reduced a buyer’s monthly payments — had exposed Canadian banks to the risks of soured loans and lower recovery rates in the event of a downturn.
“Since our report, both consumer debt levels and auto loans at Canadian banks have increased,” Jason Mercer, one of the authors of the Moody’s report, said Tuesday. “Today, Canadian consumers face increased uncertainty due to persistent low oil prices and potential housing overvaluations, so these risk remain as relevant as ever.”
The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada says consumer groups have also expressed concern, and it is responding by focusing oversight and education efforts on the auto loan market.
One step will be to ensure the indirect lending activities of federally regulated financial institutions, including auto loans, comply with federal legislative and regulatory requirements.
According to the FCAC report, long-term car loans – those of six years or more — constitute about 60 per cent of the car loan portfolios of Canada’s largest financial institutions.
The Agency is also collaborating with provincial and territorial governments to ensure that consumers receive the information they need when entering into a car loan.
Financial Post
bshecter@nationalpost.com
Twitter.com/BatPostDALLAS (FWAA) – The 15th annual Football Writers Association of America Freshman All-America Team has a southern feel to it and includes four players who will help decide the College Football Playoff National Championship tonight in Glendale, Ariz. Alabama wide receiver Calvin Ridley and cornerback Marlon Humphrey face off against Clemson defensive tackle Christian Wilkins and offensive tackle Mitch Hyatt when their teams meet at University of Phoenix Stadium. Ridley and Humphrey are among eight players from the Southeastern Conference on the Freshman All-America team, the most of any conference. Alabama and Clemson led the list with two players each, along with fellow SEC member Missouri and Texas. The Big 12 had five players on the team, with the Pac-12, Big Ten and ACC earning three slots. Each of the Division I conferences is represented on the team along with Notre Dame. There are 24 different schools represented on the 29-man team. The First Year Coach of the Year went to Houston’s Tom Herman, who guided the Cougars to a 13-1 record and a 38-24 win over Florida State in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. Herman was the offensive coordinator at Ohio State during its 2014 national championship season, and drew praise from the FWAA panel with his high-scoring attack that took Houston to the American Athletic Conference title in his first season. Incoming FWAA president Mark Anderson led the 10-person panel of nationally-prominent writers that represent each of the FBS conferences in the selecting the team. Both true freshmen (19 players) and redshirt freshmen (10 players) were considered for the team and are so noted on the list below. 2015 FWAA FRESHMAN ALL-AMERICA TEAM OFFENSE (12) Pos. Player, School Ht. Wt. Hometown QB • Josh Rosen, UCLA 6-4 210 Manhattan Beach, Calif. RB • Saquon Barkley, Penn State 5-11 222 Coplay, Pa. RB • Myles Gaskin, Washington 5-9 192 Lynnwood, Wash. RB Mike Warren, Iowa State 6-0 200 Lawton, Okla. WR • Penny Hart, Georgia State 5-9 170 Buford, Ga. WR Richie James, Middle Tennessee 5-9 171 Sarasota, Fla. WR • Calvin Ridley, Alabama 6-1 188 Coconut Creek, Fla. OL William Clapp, LSU 6-5 303 New Orleans, La. OL • Will Noble, Houston 6-4 290 Leander, Texas OL • Mitch Hyatt, Clemson 6-5 295 Suwanee, Ga. OL Max Scharping, Northern Illinois 6-6 311 Green Bay, Wis. OL • Connor Williams, Texas 6-5 283 Coppell, Texas DEFENSE (12) Pos. Player, School Ht. Wt. Hometown DE Walter Brady, Missouri 6-3 255 Florence, Ala. DE Jaylon Ferguson, Louisiana Tech 6-5 256 St. Francisville, La. DT • Terry Beckner Jr., Missouri 6-4 300 East St. Louis, Ill. DT • Christian Wilkins, Clemson 6-4 315 Springfield, Mass. LB T.J. Edwards, Wisconsin 6-1 238 Lake Villa, Ill. LB • Dre Greenlaw, Arkansas 6-0 222 Fayetteville, Ark. LB • Malik Jefferson, Texas 6-3 232 Mesquite, Texas DB Marlon Humphrey, Alabama 6-1 192 Hoover, Ala. DB Kareem Orr, Arizona State 5-11 195 Chattanooga, Tenn. DB Jabrill Peppers, Michigan 6-1 205 East Orange, N.J. DB • Andrew Wingard, Wyoming 6-0 194 Arvada, Colo. DB • Jordan Whitehead, Pittsburgh 5-11 185 Aliquippa, Pa. SPECIALISTS (5) Pos. Player, School Ht. Wt. Hometown K • Justin Yoon, Notre Dame 5-10 185 Nashville, Tenn. P • Austin Seibert, Oklahoma 5-10 210 Belleville, Ill. AP • Christian Kirk, Texas A&M 5-11 200 Scottsdale, Ariz. KR • Kavontae Turpin, TCU 5-9 152 Monroe, La. PR • Antonio Callaway, Florida 5-11 198 Miami, Fla. HEAD COACH Tom Herman, Houston (Finalists: Jim Harbaugh, Michigan and Pat Narduzzi, Pittsburgh). • Denotes true freshman Celebrating its 75th season, the Football Writers Association of America, a non-profit organization, consists of more than 1,400 men and women who cover college football. The membership includes journalists, broadcasters and publicists, as well as key executives in all the areas that involve the game. The FWAA works to govern areas that include game-day operations, major awards and its annual All-America team. For more information about the FWAA and its award programs, contact Steve Richardson at tiger@fwaa.com or 214-870-6516. All-Time FWAA Freshman All-America Teams
• 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 2015 FWAA FRESHMAN ALL-AMERICA COMMITTEE Mark Anderson, Las Vegas Review Journal (MWC) Ron Higgins, NOLA.com (SEC) Mark Blaudschun, AJerseyGuy.com (ACC) Blair Kerkhoff, Kansas City Star (Big 12) Andrew Greif, OregonLive.com (Pac-12) Doug Smock, Charleston Gazette (American Athletic) Mike Griffith, MLive Media Group (Big Ten/Independents) Phil Stukenborg, Memphis Commercial Appeal (C-USA) Tommy Hicks, Call News (Sun Belt) John Wagner, Toledo Blade (MAC)Funko Marvel Spider-Man: Homecoming Pop! Spider-Man (Unmasked) Vinyl Bobble-Head Hot Topic Exclusive is rated 4.9 out of 5 by 15.
Rated 5 out of 5 by MarsGirl from Awesome! Bought this in stores but the box was a little damaged, overall great figure for someone who wants both a Peter Parker and regular Spider-Man funko! 2 in 1!
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Rated 5 out of 5 by Churro from One of my favorites! This pop is definitely one of my favorites ever! It's so well detailed and well made, and on the plus it's a bobble head as opposed to the regular funkos. They did a great job capturing Tom Holland's face as Spider-Man and it's what makes this pop all the more memorable.
Rated 5 out of 5 by Gh111111122 from Love it Love it.....More than 200 million people on this planet worry about the same invisible villain: their blood glucose. High, low, just right? For many of these diabetics, it’s a medical version of Goldilocks that entails four or more blood-test finger pricks a day and a jab in the thigh with a needle full of insulin at mealtimes. It’s a drag and I should know—I was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic 30 years ago. At the time my father thought to himself, “She’ll be cured by the time she’s in college.” I’m now well beyond college age, and not only do I still have diabetes but I still use (basically) the same hardware and medications.
The options for managing my disease are limited: multiple devices embedded under my skin and stuffed into my pockets—insulin pump, continuous glucose monitor, and my phone; or a black nylon pouch (made in Taiwan) filled with needles, insulin vials, and a flimsy plastic glucose monitor. It’s like carrying a tiny hospital in your purse—not something you want to spill onto a table on a first date.
If my car can drive itself and my phone can open my front door, turn on the heater, and take my dog for a walk, isn’t it time we had a major breakthrough in the gear that helps us manage this disease? Well, we’re about to.
Inhaled Insulin (Afrezza)
Huffing insulin is way better than shooting insulin: Use a device that looks like a pipe to inhale a microfine human-insulin powder. It peaks in the bloodstream 15 minutes later and exits just as rapidly, which is more how natural levels of this blood-sugar-regulating hormone work.
How long it will take to reach patients: As long as it takes you to make an appointment with your doc. (I started using it in April.)
OneDrop Glucose Meter (OneDrop)
Razorfish cofounder Jeff Dachis has redesigned the glucose meter, “one of the most unloved products on the planet.” With this compact gadget you’ll feel like Jony Ive when you check your blood sugar.
How long it will take to reach patients: The app is available from iTunes now, so you can log and share readouts from the traditional ugly meters you already have. The slinky new model should ship in early 2016.
FreeStyle Libre Flash Glucose Monitoring System (Abbott)
Much like a continuous glucose monitor, but tiny and with no cords, this glucose monitor is the size of a quarter and sticks to the arm with a tiny semi-invasive sensor juuussst underneath your skin. Wave a small digital reader over it to know if you’re trending high or low. Sensors last for 14 days. One thing that’s important to note: When researchers focus on alternate body fluids like eye fluid or the stuff just under the skin, they have to create algorithms to convert, say, the eye fluid data into traditional blood data.
How long it will take to reach patients: Coming soon! It’s already in Europe and US trials are complete.
Temporary Tattoo (Center for Wearable Sensors at UC San Diego)
A mild electrical current forces subdermal glucose to the skin’s surface. Sensors in this temporary tattoo measure the resulting electrical charge, and algorithms will translate that into a blood sugar reading.
How long it will take to reach patients: It’s noninvasive, so this project has less to worry about from the FDA than others might. Say 2017?
Smart Contacts (Google and Alcon)
These smart contacts are a collaboration between Google and Alcon. (The technology was developed by GoogleX.) A glucose sensor rings the periphery of a contact lens, reading the tear fluid and sending a signal to a tiny circuit that translates the reading into a glucose level. Then it’s onward, wirelessly, to a smartphone. In addition to the electric components, the lenses can hold a prescription. (Bonus!) Finally, eyewear from Google that people actually want.
How long it will take to reach patients: Up to a decade.Todd Starnes: Kaepernick Should Be Named 'Coward of the Year'
NFL Fans Burning Tickets, Merchandise Over National Anthem Protests
GQ Magazine named its "men of the year" this morning, with former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick receiving the honor of Citizen of the Year.
The magazine released the cover featuring the four "new American heroes," including Kaepernick, late night host Stephen Colbert, NBA star Kevin Durant and actress Gal Gadot.
Donut Store Chain Makes Waves With Anti-Kneeling Billboards
Lisa Boothe: Goodell Cares About Anthem Kneeling Because It's Hurting Bottom Line
The accompanying piece from GQ is titled, "Colin Kaepernick Will Not Be Silenced." Describing Kaepernick, the editors wrote:
He's been vilified by millions and locked out of the NFL—all because he took a knee to protest police brutality. But Colin Kaepernick's determined stand puts him in rare company in sports history: Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson—athletes who risked everything to make a difference.
Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL last month, accusing the owners of colluding to keep him out of the league following his controversial decision to kneel during the national anthem last season.
The former 49ers QB became a free agent after last season and remains unsigned. The issue of national anthem protests has remained an issue for the league after some players continued to kneel this season.
In September, President Trump called for NFL teams to "fire" any players who protest the "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Kaepernick first knelt for the anthem in the summer of 2016 before a preseason game, saying he was protesting racial injustice and violence by police officers against minorities.
Watch the reaction from the "Fox & Friends" hosts above.
Bar Boycotts Sunday NFL Games, Raises Money For Veterans Instead
Report: Roger Goodell Wants Nearly $50 Million Yearly & Lifetime Use of a Private Jet
Facebook Group Calls for NFL Boycott on Veterans Day WeekendTHE AIR was clean, the fruit was fresh and not even the threat of a woolly mammoth attack could ruin a pleasant day of hunting and gathering.
Cavemen may have been on to something with their way of life, which could explain why their diet is making an unexpected comeback millions of years later.
But the Paleo Diet, which goes hand in hand with the CrossFit phenomenon sweeping the world, isn't for everyone, the Huffington Post reports.
The diet advocates eating the food that was around before the advent of modern farming. That means no grains, legumes, dairy, alcohol or sugar, but plenty of hand-reared meat, fresh produce and nuts.
It's praised by some for being the optimum human diet that lowers the risk of heart disease and helps with weight loss.
But critics question the logic of following the eating pattern. After all, cavemen only lived to the age of 25.
Cut through the hype and follow six principles that guide the Paleo Diet.
1. AVOID PROCESSED FOODS
This is Paleo orthodoxy but also common sense, which explains why it's recommended by just about every health practitioner and Harvard's School of Public Health.
Consuming whole foods, as close to nature as possible, is healthful.
2. PAIR DIET WITH EXERCISE
Paleo is the eating plan followed religiously by CrossFit acolytes. But even if the hardcore training method isn't for you, the idea that diet and exercise should be part of a healthy lifestyle is a good one.
Research shows that combining the two elements is the best way to lose weight.
3. ACHIEVE A GOOD SALT BALANCE
Processed foods are a major source of the sodium in the modern diet, so Paleo followers eat a low-salt diet without really thinking about their sodium intake.
Also, the Paleo plan provides nearly two times the amount of potassium that a typical diet includes.
That combination is a recipe for good vascular health and low blood pressure.
4. CHOOSE GOOD FATS
Poor old fat. It gets such a bad rap for having the same name as... well... being fat.
But there are good ones, which the Paleo Diet embraces.
Opt for single-source fats like avocados, olive oil, flaxseed oil and coconut oil.
Throw out hydrogenated vegetable oils.
5. COOK FOR YOURSELF
With strict eating guidelines, you're less likely to hit the vending machine for a quick snack or go to a restaurant for a weekend blowout.
That means most of the food you eat comes from your own kitchen. And that means you know exactly what's in it and how it will affect your body.
6. DON'T COUNT CALORIES
After all, cavemen certainly didn't.
Calories certainly count, and if you eat a lot of them, you'll gain weight. But they're not the metric of a healthy diet.
Calories are the starting point towards looking at the health value of food. The better measure of a food is how many nutrients it contains.
But perhaps the most important rule of the Paleo Diet isn't written in any of the literature.
7. PLEASE DON'T TALK ABOUT PALEO TO PEOPLE WHO DON'T CARE
Unless someone asks how you've shed so much weight or why you have steamed chicken and broccoli for lunch every day, keep it to yourself.
Thanks.
Continue the conversation on Twitter @newcomauHQBritish drunks have just given us another reason to oppose socialized medicine.
As the BBC reports, the head of England's public health service, Simon Stevens, has announced that so-called "drunk tanks" might become permanent fixtures of British towns and cities. Drunk tanks are mobile medical facilities that provide for intoxicated morons who render themselves incapable on a night out.
The government's concern is that this winter season will put huge burdens on emergency departments that are already overcrowded. They hope that drunk tanks will reduce pressure by reducing the 70 percent of alcohol-related Friday and Saturday evening hospital visits!
Yet the real philosophical issue here isn't whether drunk tanks are a good idea or not (I think they are positive in reducing costs), but rather why so many Britons put such pressure on the health service.
It's socialism, stupid.
Ultimately, because Britons know that they will face no out-of-pocket costs for using a hospital bed or drunk tank, many have very few qualms about getting annihilated on alcohol. And while Stevens laments this "selfish" attitude, words won't change anything.
On the contrary, the only way the drunks would stop wasting health resources is if they were fined for each alcohol-induced medical visit. That would raise hundreds of millions of dollars a year to put back into the health service, but it would also balance personal responsibility considerations against reflexive idiocy.
There's a broader relevance here for the United States.
As the left continues to push for socialized medicine, we must pay heed to examples like this one in the warnings they offer. After all, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and co. claim that we can have a medical utopia at lower costs and immediate service delivery, but examples like this one prove otherwise. Do you really think Americans would be more responsible in a socialized medical system?
Forget it. As Doctors Finkelstein, Taubman |
the words themselves? Giving yourself a wide enough berth to be able to examine both the source and nature of your feelings is particularly important for those of us who grew up looking through the wrong end of the binoculars.
5. Adopt a New Perspective
Specific strategies can help when you reflect on negative situations and the emotions they evoke. One study by Ethan Kross, Ozlem Ayduk, and Walter Mischel focused specifically on the ways people processed negative events and the emotions they aroused. I cite this study often because it makes so much sense, and I have found the strategy personally useful. Think for a moment: When you recall an emotional incident, do you immerse yourself in it—and re-experience the same flood of emotions you did in the moment—or do you view it as if you were seeing it from a distanced point of view, as if it had happened to someone else? What questions do you ask yourself as you recall the moment: Do you ask yourself what happened or do you ask yourself why it happened? Kross and his colleagues found that the distanced point of view combined with the “why” perspective worked to help participants process their negative emotions, and permitted them to steer clear of a ruminative loop.
The “why” perspective will also allow you to focus on other people’s motivations, as well as your own. Part of becoming the author of your own story entails seeing why and how you act and react, and taking responsibility for all that you do, while holding others responsible for their actions and reactions.
6. Managing in the War Zone
Perhaps the hardest task of all is for an unloved daughter to set healthy boundaries with her mother. Children don’t have the power or authority to set boundaries but adult daughters must do so if they stay in contact with their unloving mothers, as many decide to do. How difficult it is to set boundaries may also depend on the reasons a daughter has continued contact—among them, wanting to stay connected with brothers, sisters, or fathers; deciding that giving your children a grandmother outweighs your own discomfort; feeling that going "no contact" is too drastic a step; or concerns about cultural disapproval or neglect of filial duty.
For one daughter, now in her forties and a mother of two, the issue of boundaries continues:
“First of all, my mother denies everything she does so getting her is impossible. But, second, I end up violating my own rules when my own neediness gets in the way. I fall back into old patterns, wanting to please her, doing things I know she ultimately won’t appreciate and then I end up hurt all over again.”
Another woman says simply:
“It’s my own hopefulness that gets in the way. I get all hopeful that my mother will suddenly change and treat me well and, even though I know that’s nothing more than wishful thinking, I get sucked in anyway. I end up feeling as devastated at 35 as I did at the age of 15.”
You have to be as articulate as you can be about the boundaries you need. Writing them down may be useful, as would making a list of the behaviors you consider unacceptable. Be as clear as you can be.
7. Giving Up on Wishful Thinking
Acknowledging how difficult it will be to establish new boundaries is a necessary first step, especially if your mother doesn’t see the need for new rules or is unlikely to cooperate. You need to take a thorough inventory of your reasons for the boundaries as well as your expectations. Be realistic, and accept the possibility that you might be hurt. Ask yourself if this effort is important enough to you to allow yourself to be hurt.
Finally, as therapist F. Diane Barth suggests, you have to commit to a reversal of the roles you and your mother played earlier in your life: “The trick is to try to be firm and gentle at the same time, to try to be ‘the grown-up' in the relationship, and try to make it clear what you expect from your mother and yourself.” It’s worth noting that she adds parenthetically: “Much easier said than done.”
As I’ve written before, it’s the daughter who’s always on trial in the court of public opinion because of taboos against criticizing our mothers and the in the automatic and instinctual nature of mother love. Try to keep in mind that only you can decide whether and how you can continue to relate to your mother, and believe in your own judgment. Sometimes, accepting failure is a part of the journey.
Many of the stories I’ve heard (and told) testify to the fact that daughters can come out the other side. They may not be “whole” in the conventional sense, but whole enough to live their lives on their own terms, surrounded by people who love them—which is what they deserved in the first place.
In the hope that these strategies are of use, let’s toast to all of us as works in progress!
VISIT ME ON Facebook
READ Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt and my new book, Mastering the Art of Quitting: Why It Matters in Life, Love, and Work
CHECK OUT F. Diane Barth's blog
Schore, Judith R. and Allan R. Schore, “Modern Attachment Theory: The Central Role of Affect Regulation in Development and Treatment, Clinical Social Work Journal (2008). Vol.36: 9-20.
Shuren, Jeffrey MD and Jordan Grafman PhD, “ The Neurology of Reasoning,” Archives of Neurology, vol. 59 (June 2002): 916-919.
Lewis, Thomas MD, Fari Amini MD, and Richard Lannon, MD. A General Theory of Love. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.
Pennebaker, James W. and Janel D. Segal, “Forming a Story: The Benefits of Narrative,” Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol. 55 (10), 1243-1254 (1999)
Kross, Ethan, Ozlem Ayduk, and Walter Mischel, “When Asking ‘Why’ Does Not Hurt: Distinguishing Rumination from Reflective Processing of Negative Emotions,” Psychological Science, vol. 16, 9 (2005): 709-715.
Copyright ©2014 Peg StreepA Clockwork Orange is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It employs disturbing, violent images to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain.
Alex (Malcolm McDowell), the central character, is a charismatic, antisocial delinquent whose interests include classical music (including Beethoven), committing rape, and what is termed "ultra-violence". He leads a small gang of thugs, Pete (Michael Tarn), Georgie (James Marcus), and Dim (Warren Clarke), whom he calls his droogs (from the Russian word друг, "friend", "buddy"). The film chronicles the horrific crime spree of his gang, his capture, and attempted rehabilitation via an experimental psychological conditioning technique (the "Ludovico Technique") promoted by the Minister of the Interior (Anthony Sharp). Alex narrates most of the film in Nadsat, a fractured adolescent slang composed of Slavic (especially Russian), English, and Cockney rhyming slang.
The soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange features mostly classical music selections and Moog synthesizer compositions by Wendy Carlos. The artwork for the poster of A Clockwork Orange was created by Philip Castle with the layout by designer Bill Gold.
Plot [ edit ]
In a futuristic Britain, Alex DeLarge is the leader of a gang of "droogs", Georgie, Dim and Pete. One night, after getting intoxicated on drug-laden "milk-plus", they engage in an evening of "ultra-violence", which includes a fight with a rival gang led by Billyboy. They drive to the country home of writer F. Alexander and beat him to the point of crippling him for life. Alex then rapes his wife while singing "Singin' in the Rain". The next day, while truant from school, Alex is approached by his probation officer Mr P.R. Deltoid, who is aware of Alex's activities and cautions him.
Alex's droogs express discontent with petty crime and want more equality and high yield thefts, but Alex asserts his authority by attacking them. Later, Alex invades the home of a wealthy "cat-lady" and bludgeons her with a phallic sculpture while his droogs remain outside. On hearing sirens, Alex tries to flee but Dim smashes a bottle on his face, stunning him and leaving him to be arrested by the police. With Alex in custody, Mr Deltoid gloats that the woman he attacked died, making Alex a murderer. He is sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
Two years into the sentence, Alex eagerly takes up an offer to be a test subject for the Minister of the Interior's new Ludovico technique, an experimental aversion therapy for rehabilitating criminals within two weeks. Alex is strapped to a chair, his eyes are clamped open and he is injected with drugs. He is then forced to watch films of sex and violence, some of which are accompanied by the music of his favourite composer, Ludwig van Beethoven. Alex becomes nauseated by the films and, fearing the technique will make him sick upon hearing Beethoven, begs for an end to the treatment.
Two weeks later, the Minister demonstrates Alex's rehabilitation to a gathering of officials. Alex is unable to fight back against an actor who taunts and attacks him and becomes ill at the sight of a topless woman. The prison chaplain complains that Alex has been robbed of his free will; the Minister asserts that the Ludovico technique will cut crime and alleviate crowding in prisons.
Alex is let out as a free man, only to find his parents have sold his possessions as restitution to his victims, and have let out his room. Alex encounters an elderly vagrant whom he had attacked years earlier, and the vagrant and his friends attack him. Alex is saved by two policemen but is shocked to find they are his former droogs Dim and Georgie. They drive him to the countryside, beat him up, and nearly drown him before abandoning him. Alex barely makes it to the doorstep of a nearby home before collapsing.
Alex wakes up to find himself in the home of Mr Alexander, where he is being cared for by Alexander's manservant, Julian. Mr Alexander does not recognise Alex from the previous attack but knows of Alex and the Ludovico technique from the newspapers. He sees Alex as a political weapon and prepares to present him to his colleagues. While bathing, Alex breaks into "Singin' in the Rain", causing Mr Alexander to realise that Alex was the person who assaulted him and his wife. With help from his colleagues, Mr Alexander drugs Alex and locks him in an upstairs bedroom. He then plays Beethoven's Ninth Symphony loudly from the floor below. Alex is unable to withstand the sickening pain and attempts suicide by throwing himself out the window, falling unconscious on the ground.
Alex wakes up in a hospital with broken bones. While being given a series of psychological tests, Alex finds that he no longer has aversions to violence and sex. The Minister arrives and apologises to Alex. He offers to take care of Alex and get him a job in return for his cooperation with his election campaign and public relations counter-offensive. As a sign of goodwill, the Minister brings in a stereo system playing Beethoven's Ninth. Alex then contemplates violence and has vivid thoughts of having sex with a woman in front of an approving crowd, and thinks to himself, "I was cured, all right!"
Cast [ edit ]
Malcolm McDowell as Alex DeLarge.
Themes [ edit ]
Morality [ edit ]
The film's central moral question (as in many of Burgess's novels) is the definition of "goodness" and whether it makes sense to use aversion therapy to stop immoral behaviour.[4] Stanley Kubrick, writing in Saturday Review, described the film as:
“ A social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioural psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots."[5] ”
Similarly, on the film production's call sheet (cited at greater length above), Kubrick wrote:
“ "It is a story of the dubious redemption of a teenage delinquent by condition-reflex therapy. It is, at the same time, a running lecture on free-will. ”
After aversion therapy, Alex behaves like a good member of society, though not through choice. His goodness is involuntary; he has become the titular clockwork orange — organic on the outside, mechanical on the inside. In the prison, after witnessing the Technique in action on Alex, the chaplain criticises it as false, arguing that true goodness must come from within. This leads to the theme of abusing liberties — personal, governmental, civil — by Alex, with two conflicting political forces, the Government and the Dissidents, both manipulating Alex purely for their own political ends.[6] The story portrays the "conservative" and "liberal" parties as equally worthy of criticism: the writer Frank Alexander, a victim of Alex and his gang, wants revenge against Alex and sees him as a means of definitively turning the populace against the incumbent government and its new regime. Mr Alexander fears the new government; in a telephone conversation, he says:
“ Recruiting brutal young roughs into the police; proposing debilitating and will-sapping techniques of conditioning. Oh, we've seen it all before in other countries; the thin end of the wedge! Before we know where we are, we shall have the full apparatus of totalitarianism. ”
On the other side, the Minister of the Interior (the Government) jails Mr Alexander (the Dissident Intellectual) on the excuse of his endangering Alex (the People), rather than the government's totalitarian regime (described by Mr Alexander). It is unclear whether or not he has been harmed; however, the Minister tells Alex that the writer has been denied the ability to write and produce "subversive" material that is critical of the incumbent government and meant to provoke political unrest.
Psychology [ edit ]
Ludovico technique apparatus
Another target of criticism is the behaviourism or "behavioural psychology" propounded by psychologists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Burgess disapproved of behaviourism, calling Skinner's book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) "one of the most dangerous books ever written". Although behaviourism's limitations were conceded by its principal founder, Watson, Skinner argued that behaviour modification — specifically, operant conditioning (learned behaviours via systematic reward-and-punishment techniques) rather than the "classical" Watsonian conditioning — is the key to an ideal society. The film's Ludovico technique is widely perceived as a parody of aversion therapy, which is a form of classical conditioning.[7]
Author Paul Duncan said of Alex: "Alex is the narrator so we see everything from his point of view, including his mental images. The implication is that all of the images, both real and imagined, are part of Alex's fantasies". Psychiatrist Aaron Stern, the former head of the MPAA rating board, believed that Alex represents man in his natural state, the unconscious mind. Alex becomes "civilised" after receiving his Ludovico "cure" and the sickness in the aftermath Stern considered to be the "neurosis imposed by society". Kubrick told film critics Philip Strick and Penelope Houston that he believed Alex "makes no attempt to deceive himself or the audience as to his total corruption or wickedness. He is the very personification of evil. On the other hand, he has winning qualities: his total candour, his wit, his intelligence and his energy; these are attractive qualities and ones, which I might add, which he shares with Richard III".
Production [ edit ]
McDowell was chosen for the role of Alex after Kubrick saw him in the film if.... (1968). He also helped Kubrick on the uniform of Alex's gang, when he showed Kubrick the cricket whites he had. Kubrick asked him to put the box (jockstrap) not under but on top of the costume.[11][12]
During the filming of the Ludovico technique scene, McDowell scratched a cornea,[13] and was temporarily blinded. The doctor standing next to him in the scene, dropping saline solution into Alex's forced-open eyes, was a real physician present to prevent the actor's eyes from drying. McDowell also cracked some ribs filming the humiliation stage show.[14] A unique special effect technique was used when Alex jumps out of the window in an attempt to commit suicide and the viewer sees the ground approaching the camera until collision, i.e., as if from Alex's point of view. This effect was achieved by dropping a Newman Sinclair clockwork camera in a box, lens-first, from the third storey of the Corus Hotel. To Kubrick's surprise, the camera survived six takes.[15]
Adaptation [ edit ]
The cinematic adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1962) was not initially planned. Screenplay writer Terry Southern gave Kubrick a copy of the novel, but, as he was developing a Napoleon Bonaparte–related project, Kubrick put it aside. Kubrick's wife, in an interview, stated she then gave him the novel after having read it. It had an immediate impact. Of his enthusiasm for it, Kubrick said, "I was excited by everything about it: the plot, the ideas, the characters, and, of course, the language. The story functions, of course, on several levels: political, sociological, philosophical, and, what's most important, on a dreamlike psychological-symbolic level." Kubrick wrote a screenplay faithful to the novel, saying, "I think whatever Burgess had to say about the story was said in the book, but I did invent a few useful narrative ideas and reshape some of the scenes."[16] Kubrick based the script on the shortened US edition of the book, which omitted the final chapter.
Novelist's response [ edit ]
Burgess had mixed feelings about the film adaptation of his novel, publicly saying he loved Malcolm McDowell and Michael Bates, and the use of music; he praised it as "brilliant", even so brilliant that it might be dangerous. Despite this enthusiasm, he was concerned that it lacked the novel's redemptive final chapter, an absence he blamed upon his American publisher and not Kubrick. All US editions of the novel prior to 1986 omitted the final chapter.
Burgess reports in his autobiography You've Had Your Time (1990) that he and Kubrick at first enjoyed a good relationship, each holding similar philosophical and political views and each very interested in literature, cinema, music, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Burgess's novel Napoleon Symphony (1974) was dedicated to Kubrick. Their relationship soured when Kubrick left Burgess to defend the film from accusations of glorifying violence. A lapsed Catholic, Burgess tried many times to explain the Christian moral points of the story to outraged Christian organisations and to defend it against newspaper accusations that it supported fascist dogma. He also went to receive awards given to Kubrick on his behalf. Despite the benefits Burgess made from the film, he was in no way involved in the production of the book's adaptation. The only profit he made directly from the film was the initial $500 that was given to him for the rights to the adaptation.
Direction [ edit ]
Kubrick was a perfectionist who researched meticulously, with thousands of photographs taken of potential locations, as well as many scene takes; however, per Malcolm McDowell, he usually "got it right" early on, so there were few takes. So meticulous was Kubrick that McDowell stated "If Kubrick hadn't been a film director he'd have been a General Chief of Staff of the US Forces. No matter what it is—even if it's a question of buying a shampoo it goes through him. He just likes total control." Filming took place between September 1970 and April 1971, making A Clockwork Orange the quickest film shoot in his career. Technically, to achieve and convey the fantastic, dream-like quality of the story, he filmed with extreme wide-angle lenses[18] such as the Kinoptik Tegea 9.8mm for 35mm Arriflex cameras,[19] and used fast- and slow motion to convey the mechanical nature of its bedroom sex scene or stylise the violence in a manner similar to Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (1969).[20]
Nature of the society [ edit ]
The society depicted in the film was perceived by some as Communist (as Michel Ciment pointed out in an interview with Kubrick) due to its slight ties to Russian culture. The teenage slang has a heavily Russian influence, as in the novel; Burgess explains the slang as being, in part, intended to draw a reader into the world of the book's characters and to prevent the book from becoming outdated. There is some evidence to suggest that the society is a socialist one, or perhaps a society evolving from a failed socialism into a fully fascist society. In the novel, streets have paintings of working men in the style of Russian socialist art, and in the film, there is a mural of socialist artwork with obscenities drawn on it. As Malcolm McDowell points out on the DVD commentary, Alex's residence was shot on failed municipal architecture, and the name "Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North" alludes to socialist-style housing.[21]
Later in the film, when the new right-wing government takes power, the atmosphere is certainly more authoritarian than the anarchist air of the beginning. Kubrick's response to Ciment's question remained ambiguous as to exactly what kind of society it is. Kubrick asserted that the film held comparisons between both the left and right end of the political spectrum and that there is little difference between the two. Kubrick stated, "The Minister, played by Anthony Sharp, is clearly a figure of the Right. The writer, Patrick Magee, is a lunatic of the Left... They differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly distinguishable."[21]
Locations [ edit ]
Thamesmead South Housing Estate where Alex knocks his rebellious droogs into the lake in a sudden surprise attack
A Clockwork Orange was photographed mostly on location in metropolitan London and within quick access of Kubrick's then home in Barnet Lane, Elstree.
Shooting began on 7 September 1970 with call sheet no. 1 at the Duke Of New York pub: an unused scene and the first of many unused locations. A few days later, shooting commenced in Alex's Ludovico treatment bedroom and the Serum 114 injection by Dr Branom.
New Year's Eve started with rehearsals at the Korova Milk Bar and shooting finished after four continuous days on 8 January.
The last scenes were shot in February 1971, ending with call sheet no. 113. The last main scene to be filmed was Alex's fight with Billy Boy's gang, which took six days to cover. Shooting encompassed a total of around 113 days over six months of fairly continuous shooting. As is normal practice, there was no attempt to shoot the script in chronological order.
The few scenes not shot on location were the Korova Milk Bar, the prison check-in area, Alex having a bath at F. Alexander's house, and two corresponding scenes in the hallway. These sets were built at an old factory on Bullhead Road, Borehamwood, which also served as the production office. Seven call sheets are missing from the Stanley Kubrick Archive, so some locations, such as the hallway, cannot be confirmed.
Otherwise, locations used in the film include:
Music [ edit ]
Despite Alex's obsession with Beethoven, the soundtrack contains more music by Rossini than by Beethoven. The fast-motion sex scene with the two girls, the slow-motion fight between Alex and his Droogs, the fight with Billy Boy's gang, the drive to the writer's home ("playing 'hogs of the road'"), the invasion of the Cat Lady's home, and the scene where Alex looks into the river and contemplates suicide before being approached by the beggar are all accompanied by Rossini's music.[23][24]
Reception [ edit ]
A Clockwork Orange. Original trailer for
Critical reception [ edit ]
A Clockwork Orange was a box-office success in the United States. It grossed more than $26 million on a conservative budget of $2.2 million, was critically acclaimed, and was nominated for several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture (losing to The French Connection).[25] As of 22 March 2018, A Clockwork Orange holds an 89% "Certified Fresh" rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 55 reviews with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's critical consensus states: "Disturbing and thought-provoking, A Clockwork Orange is a cold, dystopian nightmare with a very dark sense of humor".[26]
The movie was the most popular film of 1972 in France with 7,611,745 admissions.[27]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised the film saying:
“ McDowell is splendid as tomorrow's child, but it is always Mr. Kubrick's picture, which is even technically more interesting than 2001. Among other devices, Mr. Kubrick constantly uses what I assume to be a wide-angle lens to distort space relationships within scenes, so that the disconnection between lives, and between people and environment, becomes an actual, literal fact.[25] ”
The following year, after the film won the New York Film Critics Award, he called it "a brilliant and dangerous work, but it is dangerous in a way that brilliant things sometimes are".[28]
Despite praise from many critics, the film had detractors. Film critic Stanley Kauffmann commented, "Inexplicably, the script leaves out Burgess' reference to the title".[29] Roger Ebert gave A Clockwork Orange two stars out of four, calling it an "ideological mess".[30] In her New Yorker review titled "Stanley Strangelove", Pauline Kael called it pornographic because of how it dehumanised Alex's victims while highlighting the sufferings of the protagonist. Kael derided Kubrick as a "bad pornographer", noting the Billyboy's gang extended stripping of the very buxom woman they intended to rape, claiming it was offered for titillation.[31]
John Simon noted that the novel's most ambitious effects were based on language and the alienating effect of the narrator's Nadsat slang, making it a poor choice for a film. Concurring with some of Kael's criticisms about the depiction of Alex's victims, Simon noted that the writer character (young and likeable in the novel) was played by Patrick Magee, "a very quirky and middle-aged actor who specialises in being repellent". Simon comments further that "Kubrick over-directs the basically excessive Magee until his eyes erupt like missiles from their silos and his face turns every shade of a Technicolor sunset".[citation needed]
The film was re-released in North America in 1973 and earned $1.5 million in rentals.[32]
Responses and controversy [ edit ]
American version [ edit ]
In the United States, A Clockwork Orange was rated X in its original release in 1972. Later, Kubrick voluntarily replaced approximately 30 seconds of sexually explicit footage from two scenes with less explicit action for an R rating re-release in 1973. Current DVDs present the original version (reclassified with an "R" rating), and only some of the early 1980s VHS editions are the edited version.[33][34]
Because of the explicit sex and violence, The National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures rated it C ("Condemned"), a rating which forbade Roman Catholics seeing the film. In 1982, the Office abolished the "Condemned" rating. Subsequently, films deemed to have unacceptable levels of sex and violence by the Conference of Bishops are rated O, "Morally Offensive".[35]
British withdrawal [ edit ]
Although it was passed uncut for UK cinemas in December 1971, British authorities considered the sexual violence in the film to be extreme. In March 1972, during the trial of a 14-year-old male accused of the manslaughter of a classmate, the prosecutor referred to A Clockwork Orange, suggesting that the film had a macabre relevance to the case.[36] The film was also linked to the murder of an elderly vagrant by a 16-year-old boy in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, who pleaded guilty after telling police that friends had told him of the film "and the beating up of an old boy like this one". Roger Gray QC, for the defence, told the court that "the link between this crime and sensational literature, particularly A Clockwork Orange, is established beyond reasonable doubt".[37] The press also blamed the film for a rape in which the attackers sang "Singin' in the Rain" as "Singin' in the Rape".[38] Christiane Kubrick, the director's wife, has said that the family received threats and had protesters outside their home.[39]
The film was withdrawn from British release in 1973 by Warner Brothers at the request of Kubrick.[40] In response to allegations that the film was responsible for copycat violence Kubrick stated:
To try and fasten any responsibility on art as the cause of life seems to me to put the case the wrong way around. Art consists of reshaping life, but it does not create life, nor cause life. Furthermore, to attribute powerful suggestive qualities to a film is at odds with the scientifically accepted view that, even after deep hypnosis in a posthypnotic state, people cannot be made to do things which are at odds with their natures.[41]
The Scala Cinema Club went into receivership in 1993 after losing a legal battle following an unauthorised screening of the film.[42] In the same year, Channel 4 broadcast Forbidden Fruit, a 27-minute documentary about the withdrawal of the film in Britain.[43] It contains footage from A Clockwork Orange. It was difficult to see A Clockwork Orange in the United Kingdom for 27 years. It was only after Kubrick died in 1999 that the film was theatrically re-released and made available on VHS and DVD. On 4 July 2001, the uncut version premiered on Sky TV's Sky Box Office, where it ran until mid-September.
Accolades [ edit ]
Differences between the film and the novel [ edit ]
Kubrick's film is relatively faithful to the Burgess novel, omitting only the final, positive chapter, in which Alex matures and outgrows sociopathy. While the film ends with Alex being offered an open-ended government job, implying he remains a sociopath at heart, the novel ends with Alex's positive change in character. This plot discrepancy occurred because Kubrick based his screenplay on the novel's American edition, in which the final chapter had been deleted on the insistence of its American publisher.[45] He claimed not to have read the complete, original version of the novel until he had almost finished writing the screenplay, and that he never considered using it. The introduction to the 1996 edition of A Clockwork Orange says that Kubrick found the end of the original edition too blandly optimistic and unrealistic.
In the novel, Alex's last name was never revealed, while in the film, his surname is 'DeLarge', due to Alex's calling himself "Alexander the Large" in the novel.
At the beginning of the novel, Alex is a 15-year-old juvenile delinquent. In the film, to lessen the controversy, Alex is portrayed as somewhat older, around 17 or 18.
Critic Randy Rasmussen has argued that the government in the film is in a shambolic state of desperation, whereas the government in the novel is quite strong and self-confident. The former reflects Kubrick's preoccupation with the theme of acts of self-interest masked as simply following procedure. [46]
One example of this would be differences in the portrayal of P. R. Deltoid, Alex's "post-corrective advisor". In the novel, P. R. Deltoid appears to have some moral authority (although not enough to prevent Alex from lying to him or engaging in crime, despite his protests). In the film, Deltoid is slightly sadistic and seems to have a sexual interest in Alex, interviewing him in his parents' bedroom and smacking him in the crotch.
One example of this would be differences in the portrayal of P. R. Deltoid, Alex's "post-corrective advisor". In the novel, P. R. Deltoid appears to have some moral authority (although not enough to prevent Alex from lying to him or engaging in crime, despite his protests). In the film, Deltoid is slightly sadistic and seems to have a sexual interest in Alex, interviewing him in his parents' bedroom and smacking him in the crotch. In the film, Alex has a pet snake. There is no mention of this in the novel. [47]
In the novel, F. Alexander recognises Alex through a number of careless references to the previous attack (e.g., his wife then claiming they did not have a telephone). In the film, Alex is recognised when singing the song 'Singing in the Rain' in the bath, which he had hauntingly done while attacking F. Alexander's wife. The song does not appear at all in the book, as it was an improvisation by actor Malcolm McDowell when Kubrick complained that the rape scene was too "stiff". [48]
In the novel, Alex is offered up for treatment after killing a fellow inmate who was sexually harassing him. In the film, this scene was cut out and, instead of Alex practically volunteering for the procedure, he was simply selected by the Interior Minister for speaking up during a ministerial inspection of the prison.
Alex's prison number in the novel is 6655321. His prison number in the film is 655321.
In the novel, Alex drugs and rapes two 10-year-old girls. In the film, the girls are young adults who seem to have consensual, playful sex with him, with no suggestion of using any drugs and without any violence.
In the novel, the writer was working on a manuscript called A Clockwork Orange when Alex and his gang are breaking into his house. In the movie, the title of the manuscript is not visible, leaving no literal reference to the title of the movie. Some explanations of the title are offered in the Analysis section of the novel.
when Alex and his gang are breaking into his house. In the movie, the title of the manuscript is not visible, leaving no literal reference to the title of the movie. Some explanations of the title are offered in the Analysis section of the novel. Early in the film, Alex and his droogs brutally attack a drunk, homeless man. Later, when Alex is returned to society, he is recognised by the same man. The homeless man gathers several other homeless men to beat Alex, who is unable to defend himself. These scenes do not appear in the book, but there is a similar scene in which an elderly man heading home from the library is beaten and his books destroyed by the droogs. After Alex is returned to society, he decides he wants to kill himself and goes to a library to find a book on how to do it. There, he is recognised by the man he had beaten and is attacked by him and a gang of other old library patrons.
Alex is beaten nearly to death by the police after his rehabilitation. In the film, the policemen are two of his former droogs, Dim and Georgie. In the book, instead of Georgie, who was said to have been killed, the second officer is Billyboy, the leader of the opposing gang whom Alex and his droogs fought earlier, both in the film and the book.
The film concludes with Alex recovering from his suicide attempt in hospital. In the novel, Alex leaves the hospital and forms a new band of droogs, but is unsatisfied by the violent activities which once entertained him. He encounters Peter (one of his former droogs) in a café, and is fascinated by the seemingly nonviolent life he now leads. The story closes with Alex suggesting that he might try to pursue a similar, peaceful lifestyle.
In the novel, Alex is accidentally conditioned against all music, but in the film he is only conditioned against Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
Home media [ edit ]
In 2000, the film was released on VHS and DVD, both individually and as part of The Stanley Kubrick Collection DVD set. Due to negative comments from fans, Warner Bros re-released the film, its image digitally restored and its soundtrack remastered. A limited-edition collector's set with a soundtrack disc, film poster, booklet and film strip followed, but later was discontinued. In 2005, a British re-release, packaged as an "Iconic Film" in a limited-edition slipcase was published, identical to the remastered DVD set, except for different package cover art. In 2006, Warner Bros announced the September publication of a two-disc special edition featuring a Malcolm McDowell commentary, and the releases of other two-disc sets of Stanley Kubrick films. Several British retailers had set the release date as 6 November 2006; the release was delayed and re-announced for 2007 Holiday Season.
An HD DVD, Blu-ray, and DVD re-release version of the film was released on 23 October 2007. The release accompanies four other Kubrick classics. 1080p video transfers and remixed Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (for HD DVD) and uncompressed 5.1 PCM (for Blu-ray) audio tracks are on both the Blu-ray and HD DVD editions. Unlike the previous version, the DVD re-release edition is anamorphically enhanced. The Blu-ray was reissued for the 40th anniversary of the film's release, identical to the previously released Blu-ray, apart from adding a Digibook and the Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures documentary as a bonus feature.
Legacy [ edit ]
Along with Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969), Soldier Blue (1970), Dirty Harry (1971), and Straw Dogs (1971), the film is considered a landmark in the relaxation of control on violence in the cinema.[49]
A Clockwork Orange remains an influential work in cinema and other media. The film is frequently referenced in popular culture, which Adam Chandler of The Atlantic attributes to Kubrick's "genre-less" directing techniques that brought novel innovation in filming, music, and production that had not been seen at the time of the film's original release.[50]
A Clockwork Orange appears several times on the American Film Institute's (AFI) top movie lists. The film was listed at #46 in the 1998 AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies |
ico Quattrocento Quattrocento Sans Questrial Quicksand Qwigley Radley Raleway Rammetto One Rancho Rationale Redressed Reenie Beanie Ribeye Ribeye Marrow Righteous Rochester Rock Salt Rokkitt Ropa Sans Rosario Rouge Script Ruda Ruge Boogie Ruluko Ruslan Display Ruthie Sail Salsa Sancreek Sansita One Sarina Satisfy Schoolbell Shadows Into Light Shanti Share Shojumaru Short Stack Sigmar One Signika Signika Negative Sirin Stencil Six Caps Slackey Smokum Smythe Sniglet Snippet Sofia Sonsie One Sorts Mill Goudy Special Elite Spicy Rice Spinnaker Spirax Squada One Stardos Stencil Stint Ultra Condensed Stint Ultra Expanded Stoke Sue Ellen Francisco Sunshiney Supermercado One Swanky and Moo Moo Syncopate Tangerine Telex Tenor Sans Terminal Dosis The Girl Next Door Tienne Tinos Titan One Trade Winds Trochut Trykker Tulpen One Ubuntu Ubuntu Condensed Ubuntu Mono Ultra Uncial Antiqua UnifrakturCook UnifrakturMaguntia Unkempt Unlock Unna VT323 Varela Varela Round Vast Shadow Vibur Vidaloka Viga Volkhov Vollkorn Voltaire Waiting for the Sunrise Wallpoet Walter Turncoat Wellfleet Wire One Yanone Kaffeesatz Yellowtail Yeseva One Yesteryear ZeyadaCANBERRA, Australia (AP) – Australians have overwhelmingly welcomed the final chapter of a mystery that has captivated the nation for 32 years: Did a dingo really take a baby that vanished from an Outback campsite in 1980?
A nation that was once bitterly divided on whether baby Azaria Chamberlain had been dragged away by a wild dog or murdered by her mother now largely agrees that the parents deserve the vindication a coroner's court provided Tuesday.
A day after Azaria Chamberlain would have turned 32, a coroner found that a dingo had taken her as a 9-week-old baby from a tent near Ayers Rock, the red monolith in the Australian desert now known by its Aboriginal name Uluru. That is what her parents had maintained from the beginning.
The eyes of Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton and her ex-husband, Michael Chamberlain, welled with tears as the findings of the fourth inquest into their daughter's disappearance were broadcast from a courtroom in the northern city of Darwin to televisions around Australia.
The first inquest in 1981 had also blamed a dingo. But a second inquest a year later charged Chamberlain-Creighton with murder and her husband with being an accessory after the fact. She was convicted and served more than three years in prison before that decision was overturned.
A third inquest in 1995 left the cause of death open.
The case became famous internationally through the 1988 Meryl Streep movie "A Cry in the Dark."
Many Australians initially did not believe that a dingo was strong enough to take away the baby. Public opinion swayed harshly against the couple; some even spat on Chamberlain-Creighton and howled like dingoes outside her house.
No similar dingo attack had been documented at the time, but in recent years the wild dogs have been blamed for three fatal attacks on children. Few doubt the couple's story today, but the latest inquest — which the family had fought to get — made it official that Azaria was killed in a dingo attack.
The news was welcomed by many around the country.
Yvonne Cain, one of the 12 jurors in the 1982 trial that convicted a then-pregnant Lindy Chamberlain of murder, was thrilled that a dingo is now on the record as the culprit.
"The dingo has done it. I'm absolutely thrilled to bits," Cain said. "I'd always had my doubts and have become certain she's innocent."
Cain said while she still encounters people who doubt the Chamberlains' innocence, but they inevitably misunderstand what evidence there was against them.
"When people say she's guilty, I say: 'You have no idea what they're talking about — I was there,'" she said.
An expert on dingo behavior, Brad Purcell said he was not surprised that a dingo would enter a tent and take a baby while older siblings slept.
Purcell suspects that many people blamed Chamberlain-Creighton for leaving the baby in a tent where a dingo could have been attracted by her crying.
"She was almost being condemned because she wasn't acting as a responsible parent," Purcell told Australian Broadcasting Corp.
But not all Australians accept the latest ruling.
A policeman who was at Uluru the night Azaria disappeared said he still believes the first coroner's finding that there was some human intervention.
Frank Morris, who has since retired from the police force, said while he was not trying to blame the parents, he thought someone played a part in moving clothing Azaria wore that night.
"We don't know who. That is the $64,000 question," Morris said.
"If you go to court enough times, you are bound to get a win sooner or later," Morris added of the parents' victory Tuesday.
Azaria's parents and her three siblings, including 29-year-old sister Kahlia who was born in prison, on Tuesday collected her new death certificate.
"We're relieved and delighted to come to the end of this saga," a tearful but smiling Chamberlain-Creighton told reporters outside the court.
Coroner Elizabeth Morris said she was "satisfied that the evidence is sufficiently adequate, clear, cogent and exact and that the evidence excludes all other reasonable possibilities."
The findings mirror those of the first coroner's inquest in 1981. But that inquest found that somebody had later interfered with Azaria's clothing, which was later found relatively unscathed in the desert.
A second coroner's inquest triggered a Northern Territory Supreme Court trial that resulted in Chamberlain-Creighton being found guilty of slashing her daughter's throat and making it look like a dingo attack.
She was convicted in 1982 and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor.
She was released in 1986 after evidence was found that backed up her version of events: the baby's jacket, found near a dingo den, which helped explain the condition of the rest of the baby's clothing. A Royal Commission, the highest form of investigation in Australia, debunked much of the forensic evidence used at her trial and her conviction was overturned.
A third inquest could not determine the cause of death.
The fourth inquest heard new evidence of dingo attacks, including three fatal attacks on children since the third inquest.
Morris noted that dingo experts disagree on whether a dingo could have removed the clothing so neatly and without causing more damage.
"It would have been very difficult for a dingo to have removed Azaria from her clothing without causing more damage than what was observed on it, however it would have been possible for it to have done so," she said.
Michael Chamberlain had threatened to go the Northern Territory Supreme Court to force another inquest if Morris had not agreed to reopen the case. Another coroner had rejected his application in 2004 for a fourth inquest to challenge the 1995 finding.
"This has been a terrifying battle, bitter at times, but now some healing and a chance to put our daughter's spirit to rest," Chamberlain told reporters.
He said his quest for a death certificate that acknowledged his daughter had been killed by a dingo had seemed to be a "mission impossible."
"This battle to get to the legal truth about what caused Azaria's death has taken too long," Chamberlain said.
"However, I am here to tell you that you can get justice even when you think that all is lost. But truth must be on your side."The doctor will see you now.
Med Student Joey Kiho Kim Has The Cure For Your Insatiable Thirst
A trip to the doctor’s office is never fun, but we’d be begging for monthly physicals if Joey Kiho Kim was our MD.
missing the scrub life 🏥 A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Sep 21, 2017 at 9:01am PDT
The 6’2″ stunner is currently in medical school, and luckily for us, he’s using modeling gigs to help pay the bills. Although being a model isn’t his main goal in life, he’s hoping to use his opportunities for good.
“As much as this is a hobby and fun for me, I hope that I can have some positive impact on the way that Asian-American males are portrayed in the media and viewed by the world,” Kim wrote in a social media post.
bye bye summer ✌️photos by @bradensummers A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Sep 19, 2017 at 8:39am PDT
His Instagram feed is a combination of professional photos and sexy selfies, and is guaranteed to make you feel better with just a few double taps.
boo 👻 ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Photo by @bradensummers A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Sep 15, 2017 at 9:54am PDT
Check out some highlights from his feed below, including some of our favorites from photographer Hard Cider NY. Then head here to see his full modeling portfolio.
Somewhere in Connecticut with @hardciderny A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Aug 31, 2017 at 8:15am PDT
denim everywhere 👖 photos by @hardciderny A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Aug 30, 2017 at 9:24am PDT
📷 by @hardciderny A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Aug 23, 2017 at 1:38pm PDT
cabin fever 🏚 photos by @hardciderny A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Aug 22, 2017 at 10:40am PDT
friday vibes 🤘photos by @hardciderny A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Aug 18, 2017 at 10:08am PDT
'Murica 🇺🇸 photos by @hardciderny A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Aug 15, 2017 at 9:06am PDT
happy 🐫 day from @hardciderny A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Aug 9, 2017 at 7:53am PDT
#tbt to chillin lakeside for @hardciderny and pretending this paddle was a lax stick 😎 A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Aug 5, 2017 at 4:48pm PDT
😾 A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Jun 1, 2017 at 4:00pm PDT
alright so real talk, whens the next vacation? 🏝🤙😎 A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on May 11, 2017 at 12:03pm PDT
b&w sessions with @gxlopes A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on May 9, 2017 at 9:53am PDT
gotta show off the super powers when you on vacation 🤙 #PuntaCana @red_models A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on May 7, 2017 at 9:09am PDT
rain drop, drop top? more like sweat drop, no top 😎🔥 #bars #notevenarapper A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Apr 18, 2017 at 1:44pm PDT
🐶 A post shared by Joey Kiho Kim (@joeykihokim) on Apr 7, 2017 at 10:21am PDTA government-commissioned sample study to ascertain the efficiency of Aadhaar-based social programmes - in this case subsidised grains - has thrown up some disappointing news: technical hiccups are depriving the poor of their access to food.
In Andhra Pradesh, half of the beneficiaries in the surveyed areas couldn’t access their ration quota due to glitches, lack of training and mismatches linked to Aadhaar. The study was ordered by the state after complaints that disbursal of grains had suddenly dropped for a month this year.
The findings could mask larger problems with the ambitious switch to Aadhaar, the 12-digit biometric identity project every citizen must have for delivery of social benefits, especially in poorly governed states.
In the survey, a majority of beneficiaries reported fingerprint mismatches and fair-price shop owners’ inability to operate point-of-sale (POS) devices correctly as major hurdles. Aadhaar numbers did not match with ration card numbers in many cases.
The NDA government plans to robustly defend the UPA-conceived Aadhaar, which has been challenged in the Supreme Court, mainly on the grounds of privacy. Activists argue that a technology-driven platform like Aadhaar could lead many to fall through the social safety net, especially migrants.
On the other hand, the NDA government’s dossier on Aadhaar, which HT has viewed, says limiting the programme would have a “deleterious” effect on social schemes because it is vital to plugging leakages eating into the government’s finances.
On August 12, the government won a reprieve when the SC, which had earlier ruled against making Aadhaar mandatory, allowed its use for the public distribution system (PDS) and cooking gas.
In the study that focused on about 125 fair price shops, of the 85,589 ration card holders, 50,151 could not procure grains due a reason linked to Aadhaar integration. The scale of the problems is astounding, given that the study covered five PDS outlets in three districts: Prakasam, Nellore and Anantapur.
“It is not clear if the manual distribution of ration was done because the dealer genuinely did not have knowledge of using the POS machine or if the dealer was attempting to discourage people from using POS machines. However, the beneficiaries stated that the dealer did not have good knowledge of using the POS machine,” the study states.
First Published: Oct 07, 2015 14:58 ISTA FRIEND told me once that he walked into a bar in North Philadelphia many years ago and noticed a crowd of people gathered in the back of the room. The crowd was standing around a young man of modest stature with red hair and it was listening with rapt attention to him speak. He was telling stories of his childhood.
That man was my future husband and I have listened to those stories too.
When I married 27 years ago, I didn’t just marry a man. I married a whole community. A community that no longer existed.
I married Jonesy, the retired welder who served on a ship with the Five Fighting Sullivans and was a boarder in my husband’s childhood home. I married Mrs. Wier, known as “Wiery,” who lost her legs on the train tracks while playing as a child and survived as an adult on disability. I married Pete B., the alpha male whom my husband overheard saying to a girl, “I’ve just been leading you on, baby. You mean nothing to me.” I married Bobby Kerrigan, my husband’s first and favorite cousin. He was raised by my mother-in-law and sent her a piano and a cuckoo clock when he was stationed in Germany. He committed suicide not long after the mother who had abandoned him reappeared. I married Bessie Haughey, who was not always kind to her invalid husband but would be moved to tears of admiration for domestic life when she walked by my husband’s house and saw nine people gathered around the dinner table.
I also married a dog. Part-dachsund, part-beagle, Buttons would walk to the butcher shop himself for a bone. He spent his days in this urban paradise fighting dogs, hunting cats and engaging in unapologetic acts of free love.
I married them all because they all came with my husband. They were part of my husband. I have never personally met any of the above, even my mother-in-law and certainly not Buttons, who died of a heart attack after killing a cat, but I have known and loved them, as well as others from the streets and living rooms of Chester, for years.
My husband, A. Wood, grew up in the city of Chester, Pennsylvania, on the Delaware River, nine miles south of Philadelphia. Chester was once home to one of the world’s great shipyards and tightly-packed neighborhoods of row homes, twins and stores. Two world wars helped make Chester a boomtown. It did not fare well in peace. The servicemen came home, but they didn’t stay long.
The G.I. Bill, passed in 1944, made cheap mortgages available to veterans, which they used to buy the brand new mass-produced homes in the suburbs. Borrowing techniques from the automobile industry, builders rapidly turned meadows and woods in Cape Cod and split-level subdivisions. Compared to these sparkling clean houses and tamed lawns, the humble homes of industrial towns such as Chester looked like so many worn-out shoes.
Meanwhile, the government was busily building evacuation routes to get people out to new communities. From 1945 to 1960, the U.S. government spent $200 billion on highways and virtually nothing on public transportation.
Wealthy foundations at the same time had discovered a way to break up the growing political power of urban Catholic neighborhoods. They encouraged poor blacks to transgress the respected divisions between neighborhoods and move into white neighborhoods. They demonized whites who fought to preserve their culture as “racists.”
During the 50s and 60s, Chester gradually devolved before the eyes of an attentive young boy.
By the time Joe Hoffman, the father of eleven children, was shot to death in 1978 while walking from St. Michael’s church hall to the rectory with the bingo proceeds, most of the homes in my husband’s neighborhood had been abandoned, crime was rampant and it was far, far too late to turn back.
The larger social forces that helped bring about the decline of Chester never absorbed my husband as much as the people who lived there.
Perhaps you will grow to love them too.
Renner
Renner was a ghostly figure. When he ventured outside, which wasn’t often, he was an apparition in white. White shirt, white pants, white cap. He had white hair and bore an uncanny likeness to Boris Karloff. Renner lived in a dark house with stained-glass windows. Long shades blocked off the front windows. Just last week, Della, who lived behind us, had seen a ghost slip through his wall. Our dog, Judy, the dog who ate caramels and who preceded Buttons, had wandered into his yard on a summer afternoon and mysteriously dropped dead. Other kids in the neighborhood had seen his ghostly form materialize out of nowhere on Eighth Street.
One night I rang his doorbell, which jutted loosely from sooty bricks. I heard no response. I pressed again upon the doorbell button, compressing taped-over wires into the bricking. Finally, footsteps thudded along a creaky hallway. A lock on the vestibule door was unlatched and then a second one and the steps approached the front door. I still had time to leave. I heard the slow manipulation of the lock atop the door knob, then an upper lock. A solid minute passed before the clacking of a lock chain. At last the front door opened. It was Renner himself. He let me in wordlessly.
He was expecting me. I visited him almost every night. I believed we were best friends.
I could think of no place on Earth I’d rather be.
Renner’s house had wandered in from another era, had refused to leave it, or vice versa. It was the utter opposite of the raucous, ramshackle place next door, where we lived, where the doors were never locked because there was no way to lock them.
Renner had locks. Locks in front, locks in back and on the side. He lived a lonely, barricaded life. I was his only visitor. He was a widower who had married well. He had his own garage where he kept a virtually unused, rounded-back white Oldsmobile. His house was dark and drafty, even in summer, but I found it as irresistible as his company.
Unlike my house, where all the lights were on all the time, his was as dark as a church during the 6:30 Mass on an autumn morning. The only light in his living room, where we used to sit for hours talking about baseball and world events listening to his tabernacle-shaped radio with the glowing tubes, was a sickly yellow glow that came from a heavily fringed lampshade in a corner. The room always smelled vaguely of fire. At the time, Renner was the only human being I knew who smoked a pipe. He had an extraordinary collection of pipes that he kept in a china closet in the parlor, although he smoked only a corncob. The house had other things I had never seen. Those stained-glass windows. A secret passageway from the second floor to the kitchen. A collection of diamonds he once showed me after soliciting an oath of secrecy I was surprised they weren’t shinier. My mother, who took Jesus Christ quite literally when he said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, told me that those diamonds had made Renner a widower. During a fire at my house, his wife had rushed up a flight of stairs to rescue the diamonds. On the way back down, she died of a heart attack.
Renner had a piano that played by itself. One time he had it play “Bicycle Built for Two” for me. He gave me my first taste of grapefruit juice. He once took me for a daylong drive in his Oldsmobile, for which he made apple dumplings with white icing. The interior of the Oldsmobile had the smell of unworn car upholstery and a faint hint of cigar smoke. We rode through hilly countryside. Renner beeped at every intersection to warn nonexistent cars that we were coming. The roads felt like roller-coasters.
It was one of the happiest days of my life.
In any year, the Chester winter was a dreary one. The town took on the color of the sky, as drab as the Scott Paper smokestacks. Occasionally, the Chester winter was interrupted by a period of enchantment wrought by a generous snow cover, something we could count on at least once a winter. It didn’t happen that winter. It was neither especially cold nor mild, just relentlessly dreary.
What I remember most about that winter was Renner. Renner had sold his magical Oldsmobile. His garage was torn down, and the land sold to a Lincoln-Mercury dealership, which erected a huge billboard next to his south wall. His house was colder than ever. He sat in his living room wearing a heavy coat with a fur collar. He appeared to be smoking as much to keep warm as out of habit.
Renner had stacked luggage next to the large, Victorian-scale windows in his living room, eight bags of well-worn leather, each of a different size. On all eight, the finishes were worn off of the handles and in the vicinities of the fasteners.
Are you moving, I asked him.
No, he said. He wasn’t going anywhere. The upstairs had become so cold that he was going to live downstairs from now on.
********
If Renner appeared on Eighth Street, he would be heading toward Ted’s, the candy and tobacco shop owned by his brother-in-law Ted was the only adult with whom Renner had consistent conact, and as far as I know, the store his only destination. No one had seen him anywhere else outside the house. He was either at Ted’s, or on his way to Ted’s.
So I was surprised one afternoon when Renner’s name surfaced at Jake’s.
Jake’s was a precursor of the convenience store. Actually it was called Jacobs’ Bros. Market, owned by Bennie and Morris Jacobs. We knew it only as Jake’s, and for years I tried to figure out which one was “Jake.” The store carried small items, such as 6-ounce cans of evaporated milk or boxes of baking powder, that weren’t worth a trip to the supermarket. Bennie and Morris also had a superb butcher, and their meats were of the highest quality.
A trip to Jake’s was our least-favorite errand. It wasn’t the distance, so much, fewer than three blocks. To a kid there is nothing longer than a wait, and Bennie and Morris kept you waiting forever. The pleasure of watching them fetch items on high shelves with their grip poles was insufficient compensation for the ordeal. On a typical afternoon, by the time you showed up they would be “serving” three or four other customers who had been waiting and waiting.
If you didn’t hand them a note, they would ask you what you wanted and write each item down, whether it was two or 20. They would fetch each item individually and slowly, interspersing random conversation between each fetching. “He-He-He-Hello, Wo-Wo-Wo-Woody ” That was Bennie, who had a terrible stutter that delayed the filling of the order even more. “You know that Z-Z-Z-elesinik? He sh-sh-shot a man.” Poor Helen Mason, who had been in the store at least 20 minutes by now would roll her eyes and shake her head. She lived next door to the Zelesniks, and had heard Bennie say this every time she walked into the store for at least the last 365 days. For it had been a year since young Zelesnik accidentally fired a rifle and wounded a friend. Helen, who went to Jake’s every other day, would have to hear the same excruciating question and answer with each new customer who came in.
On one of those afternoons on which my mother sent me to Jake’s, I found Helen there waiting. I knew what was coming.
“He-He-He-Hello, Wo-Wo-Wo-Woody ” I mentally completed the rest of the sentence and hoped against all experience that he would get on with my order.
“You know that Re-Re-Re-Renner? He tried to se-se-sell me some diamonds.”
***********
At 1 a.m. on March 10, we were roused from our beds – by whom, I didn’t know – and ordered to get out of the house. Fast. Fat, sickly flakes of wet snow were lighted by a rotating red-and-white light atop a fire truck.
Renner’s house was on fire.
I was disappointed that I couldn’t see flames. It was nonetheless exhilarating, standing outside wrapped in a blanket, a central figure to a high drama, next-door neighbor and best friend to the man with the burning house.
The fire chief, Harry Bomberger, was standing on Renner’s front porch, near the door buzzer that I had rung so often. Nothing had prepared me for what I heard him say to no one in particular: “That’s the most obvious case of arson I’ve ever seen.”biography
Hailing from the abysmal forests of the mystic North, Belzebubs have possessed a stealthy cult status throughout their existence. Originally summoned together in 2002, the band has succeeded in creating a thrilling blend of melodic black metal, guttural growls and vivid solos, forged with progressive twists and cinematic soundscapes. Accompanied by a new drummer and a three-record-deal with Century Media, Belzebubs finally feels fit to take on the (under)world.
”We are extremely proud to sign with Century Media on their 30th anniversary year, joining the likes of Watain, Tribulation, Moonsorrow, Insomnium, and Rotting Christ, just to name a few. We have been busy composing new material, and can’t wait to get in the studio (and tour!?) with our new drummer Samaël, who’s brought a tight, progressive twist to our gritty yet melodic sound."Is it going to rain today? Should I bring a jacket with me? Is it safe to plan a trip to the beach this weekend? Just a couple of years ago, answering any of those questions required watching your local news or tuning in to The Weather Channel to get a vague forecast that will probably change before you get where you’re going. But with smartphones, we can have insanely accurate weather reporting and predictions at our fingertips everywhere we go. Weather apps are a huge part of my daily routine — I consult them every day to determine where I’ll go and what I’ll wear.
Google Now on Android phones puts the current weather conditions and forecast a simple voice command away. But if you're looking for more than just basic temperature and the upcoming forecast, there are plenty of great weather apps out there for Android. The best apps can accurately tell you the forecast in your notification bar or in a desktop widget, are easy to use, fun to look at, and don’t have ugly ads ruining the experience. And they offer everything from short and long term forecasts to radar maps and severe weather alerts.
You can spend days — and a lot of money — looking for the best weather app for your Android smartphone. We’ve done the hard work, testing out dozens of weather apps, and have narrowed it down to a paid option for a premium experience and a free option if you don't feel like spending any money. I love weather apps — here are the ones you should love too.
Using an iPhone? Check out our picks for the best weather apps for iPhone!
The Winner
The best paid weather app on Android is AccuWeather Platinum. AccuWeather has pretty much everything you could ask for in a weather app: detailed current conditions, accurate hourly predictions, forecasts that stretch out for up to three weeks, animated radar maps, and TV-style video forecasts.</p> <p>It recently gained minute-by-minute forecasts and exact locations, down to a street address. If you’re curious if it will rain in the next 120 minutes or not, AccuWeather can tell if so, when, and for how long it will last.
AccuWeather also has a clean design that fits right in with Android’s design guidelines and offers informative and attractive homescreen widgets. It presents forecasts in charts, making it easy to see weather trends, as you scan the predicted temperatures for the day or week. You can also have the current temperature and weather conditions right in your notification bar and get alerts for severe weather events, if you want. There is a free version of AccuWeather that offers the same features, but with annoying ads that mar the otherwise nice design. And it’s worth paying a few dollars for an app you’ll open several times a day, every day.
The Runner-Up
If you don’t want to spend any money, Yahoo Weather is the best free option for Android. It uses beautiful, full-bleed images culled from Flickr along with clean typography to convey the current weather conditions. A simple swipe brings up your hourly and five or ten-day forecasts, along with plenty of details about current conditions and precipitation forecasts.
Yahoo Weather also offers multiple homescreen widgets and ongoing notifications in the status bar to keep you abreast of changing weather throughout the day. The only things that it’s really missing are animated radar maps and minute-by-minute forecasts. Even though it’s a free app, Yahoo Weather doesn’t have any annoying ads, banner or otherwise, and is more polished than most paid apps on Android.
The Others
7 Verge Score The Weather Channel for Android The Weather Channel is the first source many people think of when looking for reliable weather information, and its app is unsurprisingly popular. It recently received a design overhaul and is packed with features such as live radar maps and the ability to report the weather conditions in your area. But its interface isn’t the easiest to navigate and it doesn’t have as many useful features as AccuWeather. It also has annoying ads that can’t be removed with an in-app purchase. Buy for $0.00 from Google Play
7 Verge Score 1Weather 1Weather provides an abundance of information at your fingertips, including short- and long-term forecasts, precipitation predictions, and animated radar maps. It can show your current weather and forecast in the notification tray or in a widget on your home screen. And if you’re an early adopter of Google’s new smartwatch platform, you’ll be pleased to know that 1Weather is the first third-party weather app with support for Android Wear. But it’s not as feature rich or nice to look at as AccuWeather. Buy for $0.00 from Google Play
6.8 Verge Score Weather Underground for Android WeatherUnderground’s claim to fame is its 40,000 professional and amateur stations; no matter where you are, it should be able to give you an accurate forecast for your exact location. It also has radar maps, crowd-sourced reports, and even air quality conditions. This wealth of information can be a bit more difficult to parse, however, and WeatherUnderground isn’t as easy of an app to navigate as AccuWeather or Yahoo Weather. There are banner ads on almost every screen, but you can remove those with a yearly in-app purchase. Buy for $0.00 from Google Play
6.5 Verge Score Earth Networks WeatherBug for Android WeatherBug has been around forever — it was one of the first desktop helper apps that put the current temperature in the system tray of your PC. Its smartphone app is fully-featured, but it doesn’t have as nice of a design as AccuWeather or Yahoo Weather. You can tune in to weather cams stationed around the country to get a real-world look at current weather conditions in a specific area, and it offers a unique alert system for lightning strikes. The Android app is free, but has banner ads that cannot be removed with an in-app purchase. Buy for $0.00 from Google Play
6.5 Verge Score Arcus Weather Arcus Weather is unique in that it taps into the same database that powers our favorite iPhone weather app, Dark Sky. It has minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour forecasts, as well as weather in your notification tray and homescreen widgets. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the killer alerts found in the real Dark Sky app, and its barebones interface leaves a lot to be desired. Buy for $0.00 from Google Play
6 Verge Score Solar for Android Solar burst on to the weather app scene with a super simple, super clean and colorful design that shows you the current temperature and conditions. You can swipe up and hold your thumb on the screen to see what the temperature will be like later in the day. It’s a fun app to use, but it lacks a lot of advanced features, such as radar, long-term forecasts, or severe weather alerts. Buy for $0.00 from Google Play
6 Verge Score RadarScope for Android If you were to ask a meteorologist which weather app they preferred on their smartphone, chances are they’ll point you to RadarScope. RadarScope provides a wealth of radar and in-depth prediction information, but it can be overwhelming and hard to parse when you just want to know the current temperature outside. It’s also considerably more expensive than most of the other weather apps in the field. This one is definitely pros only. Buy for $9.99 from Google PlayElectrek has learned that Mateo Jaramillo, Vice-President at Tesla Energy and one of the early members of the company’s stationary storage effort, is leaving Tesla after 7 years. The company’s energy storage division has undergone a restructuring over the last few months ahead of the merger with SolarCity, but a source familiar with the situation told us that Jaramillo’s departure from the company is unrelated to the recent shake-up at Tesla Energy.
CEO Elon Musk once compared working at Tesla to being in the Special Forces:
“…the general understanding is that if you’re at Tesla, you’re choosing to be at the equivalent of the Special Forces. There’s the regular Army, and that’s fine, but if you are working at Tesla, you’re choosing to step up your game. And that has pluses and minuses. It’s cool to be Special Forces, but it also means you’re working your ass off.”
Seven years of Special Forces is a long time and our understanding is that Jaramillo is taking a break.
He joined Tesla back in 2009 as Director of Powertrain Business Development. At that time, Tesla was starting to work with other OEM to develop electric powertrains, namely for Toyota second generation Rav4 EV, Mercedes’ Smart EV and later Mercedes’ Electric B-Class.
Two years prior to Jaramillo coming on board, Tesla co-founder and former CEO, Martin Eberhard, launched the predecessor of ‘Tesla Energy’, ‘Tesla Energy Group’. The new division aimed to produce battery packs for other automakers and potentially for stationary energy storage.
In a since-deleted blog post, Eberhard explains the goal of the new Tesla division:
Tesla Energy Group is a group within Tesla Motors, Inc. created to allow us to design and sell Energy Storage Systems (ESS) to other companies.
Eberhard put Bernard Tse, a member of Tesla board of directors at the time, in charge of the new division.
Unfortunately, things were difficult at Tesla in 2007-2008 and Eberhard was replaced as CEO, leaving Tesla not long after. The company refocused its limited resources on the Roadster that had yet to start production and Tse also left the company. He started Atieva, now known as Lucid Motors, to enter the same business as ‘Tesla Energy Group’ – making energy storage systems for OEM.
Elon Musk took over as CEO of Tesla, and not long after Jaramillo, a Harvard and Yale-educated businessman, joined to lead the powertrain business and to star the stationary energy storage effort. He also participated in the early deployment of the Supercharger network.
In 2014, he became Director of Tesla Energy to focus his effort on the stationary energy storage business, which was only officially launched in April 2015 – 8 years after the original ‘Tesla Energy Group’. Drew Baglino, a longtime engineer at Tesla, led the engineering effort behind the project under CTO JB Straubel. Like Jaramillo, he was promoted to Vice-President earlier this year after the successful launch of Tesla Energy.
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we may have forgotten how high they felt in, say, 2008, when Sarah Palin had a shot at being a heartbeat away from the presidency. It is also partly because Trump is a genuinely dangerous person — a racist demagogue who knows less than nothing about governing, legislating, diplomacy, foreign policy, economics. The list goes on. He is a narcissist with no empathy for anyone not named Donald Trump, and he’s got skin so thin he’s liable to order an invasion of China if Panda Express forgets to include a fortune cookie with his takeout order.
We should all be genuinely horrified that this xenophobic Creamsicle has any shot at all at winning the White House. But he is still much more likely to lose than win, no matter what the polls and the media tell us over the next couple of weeks.Expand Portraits of Khmer Rouge victims are seen on display at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, which served as an interrogation and torture center in Phnom Penh during the regime. 2008 Reuters
(New York) - Thirty years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's culture of impunity remains as strong as ever, Human Rights Watch said today. Under Prime Minister Hun Sen, the Cambodian government continues to obstruct the United Nations-supported court created to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders and others most responsible for the deaths of up to 2 million people during the Khmer Rouge-era.
Despite more than three years of operations and the expenditure of approximately US$50 million, the UN-backed Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia established to hold the Khmer Rouge accountable have held no trials.
"After 30 years, no one has been tried, convicted or sentenced for the crimes of one of the bloodiest regimes of the 20th century," said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "This is no accident. For more than a decade, China and the United States blocked efforts at accountability, and for the past decade Hun Sen has done his best to thwart justice."
The Extraordinary Chambers have been deeply flawed in both design and practice. UN reports have concluded that the Cambodian judiciary lacks independence, competence and professionalism. Yet at the insistence of Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, the Extraordinary Chambers were established with a majority of Cambodian judges and a Cambodian "co-prosecutor" and "co-investigating judge." The United Nations opposed that structure.
Prosecutors and investigating judges have conducted only limited field investigations. The Extraordinary Chambers have also been mired in allegations of corruption among its Cambodian personnel, with charges of job-selling and bribery.
Five Khmer Rouge leaders whom Hun Sen has allowed to be arrested are in detention, but no other cases have been filed against the many persons implicated in horrific crimes during Khmer Rouge rule. Human Rights Watch has called for broadening the scope of investigations beyond the five already charged.
Today, the Extraordinary Chambers published a statement in which the Cambodian co-prosecutor opposed filing additional cases. The international co-prosecutor rightly asserted in his filing with the Extraordinary Chambers that the charges fall within the court's jurisdiction and "would lead to a more comprehensive accounting of the crimes that were committed." Yet for political and policy reasons, the Cambodian co-prosecutor has opposed bringing more cases, citing "Cambodia's past instability and the continued need for national reconciliation."
"No serious observer believes there is any threat to Cambodia's stability if additional cases are filed against alleged Khmer Rouge killers," said Adams. "On the 30th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge's fall from power, the Cambodian government is playing games. This is a transparently political attempt to stop the court from doing its work."
The Khmer Rouge came to power at the end of the United States' war in Indochina. Led by Pol Pot and Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge was in power from April 17, 1975 to January 7, 1979. Estimates suggest that as many as 2 million of Cambodia's 8 million people were killed or died from disease, starvation, or forced labor during this period.
After the Khmer Rouge carried out numerous cross-border attacks on Vietnam in which hundreds of villagers were massacred, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia. It pushed the Khmer Rouge out of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. The Khmer Rouge retreated to the Thai border, where it received support from Thailand, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore and others for the next decade.
To force the Vietnamese army out of Cambodia, the US then led a broad international embargo on Cambodia, depriving a population that had survived inconceivable violence, deprivation, and hardship of the assistance necessary to rebuild their health and their country.
Throughout the 1980s the Khmer Rouge conducted a violent insurgency in which tens of thousands died. For geopolitical reasons, discussions of holding the Khmer Rouge leadership accountable for their crimes while in power were blocked, principally by the US and China.
At China's insistence, the Khmer Rouge was included as a party to the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, which led to creation of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), the UN's largest peacekeeping effort up to that time, and national elections to form a new government. The Khmer Rouge withdrew from the peacekeeping force, but the elections went ahead without it. China pledged to withdraw support from the Khmer Rouge thereafter, which it apparently did. But elements in the Thai army continued to support the Khmer Rouge and deaths and injuries, many from landmines, mounted.
The Khmer Rouge movement fractured publicly in 1996 with the amnesty granted to Ieng Sary, the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister, by the Cambodian government. The movement effectively collapsed after the death of Pol Pot in 1998 and the defection to the Cambodian government of other top leaders, including Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, and thousands of Khmer Rouge soldiers.
In 1997, Hun Sen and his co-prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, sent a letter to the UN secretary-general at the time, Kofi Annan, asking for an international tribunal to hold the Khmer Rouge accountable. This effort was blocked by China, which made it clear that it would veto any UN Security Council resolution to create such a court, and by Hun Sen, who with the collapse of the Khmer Rouge, lost interest in holding its leaders accountable. Instead, Hun Sen invited Khmer Rouge leaders who defected to his government to his home, toasted them with champagne, and called for Cambodians to "bury the past."
"Hun Sen has spent most of the past 10 years trying to undermine UN efforts to establish a credible tribunal, miring it in delay and fights over jurisdiction," said Adams. "Now he is trying to stop a few more cases from being filed."
Human Rights Watch said that the impunity enjoyed by the Khmer Rouge has been matched in the post-Khmer Rouge era. The Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea, in power from 1979 until 1993, routinely violated the fundamental rights of Cambodians. During the UNTAC period in the early 1990s, the United Nations recorded hundreds of killings and attacks by forces under the control of Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party.
On March 30, 1997, a grenade attack on an opposition political rally killed at least 16 people and wounded approximately 150. Hun Sen's bodyguard unit has been implicated in the attack. In July 1997, Hun Sen staged a coup against his royalist coalition partners in which more than 100 opposition figures were extrajudically killed. In the 1998 elections, dozens more were killed. In the past decade, many opposition politicians, journalists, labor leaders and human rights activists have been killed or attacked. No perpetrator has been held accountable, in spite of the availability of evidence in many of these cases.
"Whether it is for Khmer Rouge crimes or those of more recent times, brutal, well-known perpetrators remain free men," said Adams. "Sadly, impunity remains almost complete in Cambodia."It was her first time as a paid camp counselor. It was the longest she had been away from home or lived in a tent. It made her laugh, learn and, at times, cry.
Those six-and-a-half weeks at summer camp were the best of Lydia Grande’s life.
Lydia, 18, spent her summer as a counselor at Camp T. Brady Saunders of the Heart of Virginia Council. You might remember she brought us her “5 Things Scouting Has Taught Me” earlier this year. (Read more of her writing here.)
Now she’s back with an equally fascinating look at her first time serving on camp staff. Don’t miss her “Lessons From Scout Camp,” below.
Lessons From Scout Camp
By Lydia Grande
Six-and-a-half weeks of lessons learned, skills developed and patience tested. Late nights, long days, lots of laughter, sweat and, at times, frustrated tears.
“Boy Scout camp counselor”: That was the title I held the bulk of my summer. I was one of five female staffers in a sea of about 50 on staff.
It was a summer of firsts:
First time being a paid camp counselor.
First time living in a tent for more than two days at a time.
First time being away from home, by myself, for more than a week.
First time being in a rowboat … at 6 a.m., no less!
First time staying up until 3 a.m. talking about life with my fellow staffers.
Yes, I had lots of firsts. Lots of learning experiences, too. I learned how …
… people communicate in different ways, and there’s a best way to communicate with each person.
… to deal with people who didn’t think I should be at camp — much less be teaching.
… the way I say something is just as important as what I say.
… to live among a family of almost all guys.
… to teach skills that I barely know myself.
… to ask for help.
… to love different people where they were.
… to laugh at myself.
The list could go on and on!
Five takeaways:
Going the extra mile makes a difference, especially when done in the spirit of the Scout Oath and Scout Law. Doing your best in a cheerful and organized manner — even when you feel tired, sweaty and have very little idea what you are doing — goes a long way toward setting an example for the Scouts and staff around you. If the boys see you having fun, they will be more willing to jump into tasks and learn new skills. A song or a word of encouragement lightens the mood. Actually learn the names of the boys you are around and something about them. There is something special about being at a camp of 300 boys and knowing that someone took the time to try to learn your name. If the boys see you make mistakes and try again, they are more likely to keep trying until they get it right. Everyone makes mistakes, but the failing does not come in the falling down, but in the staying down. So you had a rough day? It’s OK. Tomorrow is a new day, and the sun will rise.
How did your summer camp compare?
If you served on staff or attended summer camp this summer, did your experience match Lydia’s? Leave a comment below.Amazon's Domes In addition to three high rise office buildings, Amazon's new corporate headquarters will also include dome-shaped structures, right in the middle of one of Seattle's busiest neighborhoods. NBBJ
In the Denny Triangle section of downtown Seattle, one of the city’s fastest growing neighborhoods, Amazon’s new corporate headquarters is starting to take shape. Amazon Tower I, a 37-story office building also known as Doppler, opened in December of 2015. A nearly identical building, Amazon Tower II, is projected to be finished in September, and Amazon Tower III (see a pattern emerging?) will be completed by decade’s end. Though these towers will forever change the look of Seattle’s distinctive skyline, another one of Amazon’s construction projects seems to be getting all the attention: the spheres.
They’re alien but organic, futuristic but right there in front of you.
Nobody’s really even sure of what to call them, and Amazon hasn’t yet committed to a name. Around the web, I’ve seen them referred to as biospheres, biodomes, bubbles, globes, spherical buildings, giant spheres, epic-looking glass spheres...you get the picture. When they’re done being built, the three intersecting spheres will give the company’s employees 65,000 square feet of green space in which to walk, talk, lounge, eat lunch, conduct meetings, brainstorm, and do whatever else it is Amazon employees do.
The Seattle-based architecture firm, NBBJ, intends for the spheres to be the “new visual focus and ‘heart’” of Amazon’s headquarters. Amazon unveiled the design in 2013, thereby scrapping a prior plan to put a six-story rectilinear office building in that location. And though the spheres are still far from complete—when I visited, crews were working on the steel exoskeleton—the structure is already fulfilling its promise to be the area’s visual focus.
Building Amazon's Domes The domes, still under construction, are starting to take shape. Patrick Klacza
What remains to be seen is whether the spheres will become the “heart” of Amazon’s headquarters, as NBBJ intends them to be.
From blocks away, the spheres draw the eye. Their bold curves contrast sharply with the straight lines of the surrounding architecture. I wasn’t the only person to take pictures of the work in progress or simply gaze at it from the sidewalk. Even Amazon employees seemed to admire the spheres, though one might expect them to have gotten used to the sight by now. What remains to be seen is whether the spheres will become the “heart” of Amazon’s headquarters, as NBBJ intends them to be. By gathering, assessing, and implementing data much like its notoriously data-minded clients, the multinational company has positioned itself as the firm de rigueur of the tech industry. NBBJ architects have used data for every step of their design process. Amazon’s spheres, though unusual, rely on the idea that natural light, plant life, and the sheer act of walking reduce employee stress and improve job satisfaction more so than a standard office building. (I reached out to both the architecture group as well as Amazon for comment. Unfortunately, NBBJ declined to comment and Amazon didn't provide any further comment other than what has already been made public.)
The architects behind the domes' design have relied on the idea that more sunlight and plants could lead to better productivity. NBBJ
Researchers have looked into this connection. One study showed that workers performed better when plants were added to their office space, and another one found that people who worked in an office with windows performed better on certain tests and had better overall sleep than those who worked in a windowless office, or didn’t have access to a window. By creating an environment that optimizes sunlight, allows for trees to grow to full height, and simulates “montane ecologies found around the globe,” Amazon wants to give its employees a better chance at coming up with the next Prime, Kindle, or Echo. But a question remains: Will they visit and use the space voluntarily? I’m not convinced. For Samsung’s headquarters in San Jose, the same architecture group, NBBJ, came up with a very different design from what you see in Seattle, and one that’s also supposed to foster collaboration. The ten-story, square, donut–shaped building will encourage employees to move between floors—something people don’t typically do on their own— because they’ll be within eyeshot of peers both above and below them. Apple is also betting on the donut. Campus 2, set to open in late 2016 or early 2017, will occupy a staggering 176 acres of Cupertino real estate. The four-story ring will add 2.8 million square feet to Apple’s holdings and accommodate 12,000 employees. Of course, it’s much easier for a company to spread out in suburban California. What sets Amazon apart is its decision to build in an urban setting, so close to downtown, with all the inherent constraints. There really is nowhere to go but up. And though I doubt employees will often leave their towers to stroll inside the spheres, I applaud the radical mark the company has decided to make on Seattle’s architecture.
A mockup of what the domes are set to look like when they are finished. NBBJFoto: Imago; Illustration: Sarah Schmitt
Beim Sondieren der Sportnachrichten aus aller Welt fiel unsere Aufmerksamkeit heute früh auf einen ganz besonderen Leckerbissen aus Norwegen.
Der „Stavanger Golfklubb" sitzt nämlich tief in der Scheiße. Und das sogar wörtlich. Denn seit fast zehn Jahren kackt hier ein Unbekannter in die Löcher der Golfbahn. Und nein, das Ganze soll kein schlechter Witz sein, für ungläubige Thomasse geht's hier zu unserer (wenn auch schwedischsprachigen) Quelle. Und keine Angst, es gibt keine Fotos vom Ab- bzw. Tatort.
Angefangen hat alles bei der Norwegischen Meisterschaft im Jahr 2005, als man bei den letzten Vorbereitungen feststellen musste, dass sich jemand in zwei Löchern der Bahn erleichtert hatte. Seitdem findet man—genauer gesagt der arme Golfwart Kenneth Tennfjord—immer wieder Kot auf der Golfbahn, weswegen Tennfjords erster Gang am Morgen immer den Löchern der Anlage gilt.
Am häufigsten trifft es übrigens Loch 3, wie er der Tageszeitung Rogalands Avis in einem Interview verraten hat. Doch damit nicht genug. Tennfjord glaubt zudem, dass leistungssteigernde Mittel im Spiel sein könnten. „Die ersten Jahre war es relativ harter Stuhl, doch die Konsistenz hat sich im Laufe der Zeit verändert." Er glaubt: Der Serienscheißer greift auf Abführmittel zurück. Aufgrund der beschriebenen Konsistenz überrascht es auch nicht, dass der Unbekannte neben seinem Geschäft immer auch Klopapier zurücklässt. So scheint er zumindest mit dem eigenen Körper reinlich umzugehen.
Dass man den Übeltäter übrigens noch immer nicht identifizieren konnte, liegt auch daran, dass der Golfklub keine Erlaubnis bekommen hat, eine Überwachungskamera aufzustellen. Dennoch ist sich Tennfjord sicher, dass ein Mann dahinterstecken muss: „Was wir hier vorfinden, ist so viel, dass es kaum von einer Frau stammen könnte."
Um den Täter dennoch abzuschrecken, wurden Lampen in einem Baum montiert. Nicht aber mit dem Serienscheißer! Denn um sich an seinem stillen Örtchen nicht von grellem Licht blenden zu lassen, ist der Unbekannte kurzerhand auf den Baum geklettert und hat die Leuchtkörper einfach wieder abmontiert.
Bekenntnisse eines Amateur-Tennistrainers
Was für Außenstehende lustig klingt, bringt die Mitarbeiter des Golfklubs schon lange nicht mehr zum Lachen. „Das ist kein Thema mehr, über das wir im Büro schmunzeln können", betont Steinar Fløisvik, Geschäftsführer des Golfklubs. „Wir wollen, dass diese Person—so wie jeder normale Mensch auch—endlich auf die Toilette geht".
Um dem Ganzen noch die Krone aufzusetzen, sei gesagt, dass der Serienscheißer nur an Werktagen die Anlage aufsucht.
Bleibt eigentlich nur noch eine Frage offen: Wer zum Teufel schleicht sich nachts auf einen Golfplatz und kackt in Löcher? Darum haben wir mal unsere schlauen Köpfe zusammengesteckt und eine Art Täterprofil erstellt.
Möglichkeit 1: der pensionierte Gewerkschaftler
Ganz klar, wir haben es mit einem Gewerkschaftler a.D. zu tun. Weil er sich jahrelang für die Rechte von Arbeitern eingesetzt hat, kommt es für ihn auch nicht in Frage, am Wochenende auf den Golfplatz zu schleichen und die Hose runter zu lassen. Das Wochenende ist ein heiliges Gut, das es zu verteidigen gilt!
Möglichkeit 2: der Kirchengegner
Es wird doch kein Zufall sein, dass am häufigsten das Loch 3 beschmutzt wird. Stichwort: heilige Dreifaltigkeit. Die Drei ist die wichtigste Zahl der Kirche, und um gegen die ein Zeichen zu setzen, sucht sich der überzeugte Antikleriker natürlich das dritte Loch der Golfbahn aus, wo er buchstäblich auf Gott und die Kirche scheißt.
Möglichkeit 3: der schlechte Verlierer
Mit sehr hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit handelt es sich um ein ehemaliges Klubmitglied, das über viele Jahre vergeblich versucht hat, hier ein Turnier zu gewinnen, aber immer an Loch 3 gescheitert ist. Und wenn schon nie der Golfball reinwollte, dann zeigt er jetzt zumindest beim Kekelabwurf echte Putter-Qualitäten. Dazu passt außerdem, dass sich der Serienscheißer auf dem Gelände blendend auszukennen scheint.
Möglichkeit 4: der politische Aktivist
Um gegen die scheiß hochnäsigen Bonzen vom Golfplatz ein Zeichen zu setzen, hat sich der politische Aktivist dazu entschlossen, auf eines der Symbole des Kapitalismus ordentlich zu scheißen. Das geht aber nur unter der Woche, weil er am Wochenende auf irgendwelchen Demos abhängt.
Möglichkeit 5: der naturliebende Künstler
Unser Unbekannter war irgendwann mal im New Yorker Museum of Modern Art, wo ihn ein Exponat namens Merda d'artista schwer beeindruckt hat. Doch anstatt in eine Cola-Dose zu scheißen, war für den Naturliebhaber klar, dass sein Kunstwerk unter freiem Himmel geschehen muss.
Möglichkeit 6: Kenneth Tennfjord
Wen will Kenneth Tennfjord eigentlich an der Nase herumführen? Uns auf alle Fälle nicht! Nicht nur, dass er als Greenkeeper wunderbar in das Der-Mörder-ist-immer-der-Gärtner-Schema reinpasst. Der Kerl hat doch eindeutig Täterwissen offenbart. Wie will er sonst wissen, dass da Abführmittel im Spiel waren? Außerdem kann es kein Zufall sein, dass er immer zuerst am Tatort eingetroffen ist.Coming into this weeks game vs 9th ranked Wisconsin, no one gave Georgia State a shot at winning, myself included. The Panthers have under performed in their first two games of the season leaving their fan base with little hope.
Then it happened.
The Panthers team that we were all waiting to see finally showed up. Georgia State’s offense, lead by Conner Manning, was able to move the ball effectively. Manning performed well going 20/29 for 269 yards and one touchdown. The Panthers didn’t necessarily run the ball well, however the effort was visibly better upfront.
The biggest change in Georgia State this week came on defense. Jesse Minter had his group ready to go today. The Panthers held Wisconsin to 187 yards on the ground. That is a significant improvement considering they came into the game giving up 394 ypg on the ground.
I am happy with the way Georgia State fought today but it cannot be a one time thing. The Panthers must play with that level of focus and intensity each and every week here-on-out. I think Conner Manning solidified his job this week. I look forward to seeing how he improves throughout the season.
Coming into the bye week, Georgia State will get some much needed rest before their Sun Belt opener vs App State.
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!FILE - In this July 9, 2002 file photo, Yutaka Katayama, a former president of Nissan Motor Co.’s U.S. unit, speaks during an interview at his office in Tokyo. Katayama, known as the “father of the Z,” who built the Z sportscar into a powerful global brand in the 1970s, died Thursday, Feb. 19, 2015, his son said. He was 105. (AP Photo/Tsugufumi Matsumoto, File) The Associated Press
By YURI KAGEYAMA, AP Business Writer
TOKYO (AP) — Yutaka Katayama, a former president of Nissan Motor Co.'s U.S. unit who built the Z sports car into a powerful global brand in the 1970s, has died, his son said Saturday. He was 105.
Known as the "father of the Z," Katayama won international respect for the Datsun Z as an affordable sports car at a time when Japan-made products were synonymous with slipshod quality.
Katayama, who retired from Nissan in 1977, died Thursday of heart failure at a Tokyo hospital, his son Mitsuo said.
Carlos Ghosn, who has led a turnaround at the Japanese automaker under an alliance with Renault SA of France, resurrected Katayama's legendary status at Nissan by bringing back the Z, which had been discontinued in 1996.
Inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in both the U.S. and Japan, Katayama is revered by Z fan clubs around the world, which nicknamed him "Mr. K."
"A car is a horse. I want to drive a thoroughbred that's in tune with my heartbeat, but not something that's too dressed up for someone like me," Katayama told The Associated Press in a 2002 interview about the Z's comeback.
In selling the Datsun brand in the U.S., Katayama stressed maintenance services, and courted dealers and employees alike. His vivacious personality, unusual for a Japanese person of his generation, helped.
He made one of the first color films of a Datsun, innovating visual storytelling for marketing, something taken for granted in the auto industry today.
"With a love of cars and a flare for promotion, he built the Datsun brand, Nissan's initial brand name in the U.S., from scratch," Yokohama-based Nissan said on its website last year.
Mitsuo Katayama mused that his father was happily zooming around in the Z in heaven, no longer worried about "gas, police or traffic tickets."
"His greatest achievement, I think, was the fact that he was able to give many American Datsun dealers their own success story," he said.
Katayama is survived by his wife, Masako, two sons and two daughters, 11 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren. A family service is planned for Tuesday. A larger memorial will be announced later.
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Follow Yuri Kageyama: https://twitter.com/yurikageyamaOooooh bananas! Since realising that I can now eat them, life has been transformed! I’ve had banana cakes, I’ve made ice creams that are tremendously tasty, although I have in fact stopped short of actually just eating a plain banana, I’ll need to give it a go and see how I get on.
For those who haven’t seen my earlier banana related posts, I have previously never been able to eat a banana without a horrible reaction, chest pains, nausea, migraine, not very pleasant, and it’s only recently with some research that I’ve come across others who do not get the same reaction when the banana is cooked, hence my tentative trial with the banana brownies. All went well, so I moved onto ice cream, could be something to with freezing it or it could be the small amount of heat generated from the food processor, but again, I’m absolutely fine.
So in appreciation for my new found love of banana and my eternal passion for amaretto, I put together this heavenly dessert that just melts in the mouth and is gawjuss!! There is of course an option if you want to keep it family friendly by subbing the amaretto for some almond extract.
Amaretto Caramelised Banana Cake with Almond Chocolate Drizzle (Vegan & Gluten Free)
MyInspiration Feel The Difference Range
Serves 4 – ready in 45 minutes
For the Caramelised Banana
1 large banana sliced
1 tbsp maple syrup
1/2 tbsp almond milk (or any other non dairy milk)
Pinch cinnamon
1 tbsp amaretto (or 1 tsp almond extract)
For the main cake
1 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup non dairy milk (I used almond) mixed with 1/4 tsp apple cider vinegar
3 tbsp amaretto (or for kid friendly/alcohol free, just use 3 tsp almond extract)
3 tbsp maple syrup
Pinch cinnamon
2 tbsp raisins or sultanas
1/2 tbsp sesame seeds
For the drizzle
25g vegan dark chocolate
1/2 tbsp almond milk (or any other non dairy milk)
1/2 tsp almond extract
Method
1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius (356 degrees Fahrenheit) and prepare a non stick 9″ round cake tin.
2. Start off with the caramelised banana by heating the 1/2 tbsp almond milk in a saute pan over a medium heat, add the banana, maple syrup, cinnamon and amaretto and turn the heat up to high and keep stirring the mixture until the banana start to get nice a mushy. Turn off the heat and set aside.
3. In a large mixing bowl combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder and cinnamon then add in the almond milk, maple syrup, amaretto (or almond extract) and mix together before adding in the caramelised banana, raisins and sesame seeds and folding through. I would taste the batter at this point to make sure that it is sweet enough for your own preference, it’s at this point you could stir through a little more maple syrup and or amaretto or almond extract. Pour into your cake tin and bake for 20 – 25 minutes then cool.
4. While you are waiting on the cake to cool slightly, make the drizzle by melting the chocolate in a bain marie (I use a bowl sat over a small pan of boiling water), once the chocolate has melted add 1/2 tbsp almond milk and the almond extract and stir until smooth, remove from heat and using a teaspoon, load it with chocolate and flick it over your cake in whatever pattern you like best, I just went for swirly movements, just make sure there’s a nice drizzle on each slice of the cake!As he attempts to rebrand himself as a spiritual leader, Glenn Beck has surrounded himself with religious and secular figures who share a fervent opposition to the "homosexual agenda."
David Barton
James Dobson
Randy Forbes
Maggie Gallagher
Jim Garlow
John Hagee
Terence Henry
Alveda King
Richard Land
Daniel Lapin
Patrick Lee
Richard Lee
Miles McPherson
Chuck Norris
Sarah Palin
James Robison
Charles Stanley
David Barton
David Barton, founder and president of WallBuilders, spoke at Beck's August 27 event, "Divine Destiny." He also led the August 16 Glenn Beck Morning Prayer, one of a series of recorded prayers posted online in the days leading up to Beck's rally.
Opposing military service by gay men and lesbians, Barton argued that homosexuality "was long considered too morally abhorrent and reprehensible to openly discuss." In a 2001 article posted to the WallBuilders website, Barton argued that "there is substantial merit for maintaining the ban on homosexuals in the military." Barton wrote that "General Washington held a clear understanding of the rules for order and discipline, and as the original Commander-in-Chief, he was the first not only to forbid, but even to punish, homosexuals in the military." He further stated that "Based on the statutes, legal commentaries, and the writings of prominent military leaders, it is clear that any idea of homosexuals serving in the military was considered with repugnance; this is incontrovertible, with no room for differing interpretations. The thought of lifting this proscription is a modern phenomenon, and would have brought disbelief, disdain, and condemnation from those who established our Armed Forces." After explaining why "the military [should] be concerned with a person's morality," Barton discussed why "homosexuality [should] concern a society:"
Why Should Homosexuality Concern a Society? Public discussions concerning homosexuality are a purely recent phenomenon; it was long considered too morally abhorrent and reprehensible to openly discuss. Consider, for example, the legal works of James Wilson, a signer both of the Declaration and the Constitution and appointed by President Washington as an original Justice on the U. S. Supreme Court. Wilson was responsible for laying much of the foundation of American Jurisprudence and was co-author of America's first legal commentaries on the Constitution. Even though state law books of the day addressed sodomy, when Wilson came to it in his legal writings, he was too disgusted with it even to mention it. [...] In view of the arguments listed by historical and legal sources, there is substantial merit for maintaining the ban on homosexuals in the military. The Founders instituted this ban with a clear understanding of the damaging effects of this behavior on the military. This ban has remained official policy for over 200 years and one would be hard-pressed to perceive the need for altering a policy which has contributed to making America the world's foremost military power.
Barton reportedly spoke at event to promote gay-marriage amendment. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on November 11, 2005, (accessed via Nexis) that Barton was among the speakers at an event designed to promote a state constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage:
At the end of a day of presentations from leading state and national social conservatives, participants were asked to sign a five-point pledge to pray for the proposed constitutional amendment, preach "on God's plan for marriage," collect petitions, register voters and distribute information on the amendment effort. [...] The pastors' summit was organized by the Minnesota Family Council in the belief that "the only thing that stands in the way of legalization of same-sex marriage in Minnesota is the church," said Chuck Darrell, of the council's Minnesota for Marriage project. Attendees heard speakers who described how pastors have spearheaded marriage amendment drives in states from Oregon to Maine, offered tips for churches to get active without forfeiting tax-exempt status and recounted the history of religious leaders engaging in the American political culture. David Barton of the Texas-based group Wallbuilders said the Bible condemns not only homosexuality but also capital-gains taxes, progressive income taxes, estate taxes and minimum-wage laws. State Sen. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater, the Legislature's chief proponent of the proposed amendment, led one session on its uncertain status in Minnesota, while her husband, Christian therapist Marcus Bachmann, led another on "the truth of the homosexual lifestyle."
Barton's group published election guide claiming Obama "supports curriculum that promotes homosexuality. WallBuilders published a voting guide in 2008 claiming that Obama supports "Homosexual Education," i.e. "curriculum that promotes homosexuality," and did not "refuse to support gay pride celebrations."
James Dobson
Beck identified James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, as one of the figures who played a key role in helping him gather other religious figures to start his Black Robe Regiment.
Dobson endorsed a sermon blaming "lesbian sex" for the "wrath of abandonment" by God, which could result in destruction of a U.S. city. On the June 4, 2007, edition of his radio show, Dobson broadcast and endorsed a sermon by John McArthur, which announced that "You know a society has been abandoned by God when it celebrates lesbian sex," and that as a result of America's abandonment, "God would be just" in destroying a U.S. city. During his introduction to the sermon, Dobson stated: "I happen to agree with what John MacArthur was saying on this day, and I want to thank him and his team and Woodman Valley Chapel for allowing us to share this message."
Dobson predicted that same-sex marriage would lead to "group marriage," incest, bestiality. On the October 7, 2005, edition of his radio show, Dobson predicted that allowing same-sex marriage in the United States would lead to "group marriage," "marriage between daddies and little girls," or "marriage between a man and his donkey." Dobson called this vision of the future "more or less a prophecy," though, he stressed, not a "divine prophecy, but a prediction." He said that his specific examples, as well as "anything allegedly linked to civil rights," will be "doable, and the legal underpinnings for marriage will have been destroyed" if same-sex marriage is legalized.
Dobson claimed homosexuality results when a child doesn't "reattach to his father" emotionally. On the November 22, 2006, edition of CNN's Larry King Live, Dobson offered the following explanation for what causes homosexuality: "[I]t has to do with an identity crisis that occurs too early to remember it, where a boy is born with an attachment to his mother and she is everything to him for about 18 months, and between 18 months and five years, he needs to detach from her and to reattach to his father. It's a very important developmental task and if his dad is gone or abusive or disinterested or maybe there's just not a good fit there. What's he going to do? He remains bonded to his mother."
Dobson joined Medved in warning about the homosexual "subtext" in children's film Happy Feet. During the December 11, 2006, edition of Dobson's radio show, guest Michael Medved claimed that the children's film Happy Feet, an animated film about penguins living in Antarctica, contains a "subtext, as there so often is, about homosexuality." Dobson then questioned whether the filmmakers are "getting at the idea that homosexuality is genetic."
Calling |
the bookends.”
I think for her and for the rest of us, that “bookends” term was really key. What she meant was that scheduling tasks, they had no idea how to schedule a task. They didn’t have a way of serving them automatically. We needed a way, if we were really going to seduce people into this engineering approach.
I think seduction is probably a good way to do it. Because often, people come into these things and it’s like, my god. I’ve got all these headaches with actually trying to write the code, and build the model, and get the stuff out.
Why do I have to acquire all these new, unpleasant, difficult skills? Actually, I think they’re pretty wonderful skills. But if they’re new, they might seem unpleasant.
I guess this is a little repetitive. The point is, in terms of the diagram, we were weak on the engineering skills.
We gave a pair of talks in which I talked about software engineering and analytics, and then she followed up with one where her comment was that she’d taken this back to her team and they had said, “We’re not programmers. I’ve never scheduled a job before. I don’t even know where to start.” That was her image for how the team felt about this whole process.
In order to calm things down, we had to do something really, really clever. In my case, very lucky. What we did was we built a very simple system. Simple. And part of it was the seduction.
We said, you can solve your problem with scheduling. Get your code checked into a source code repository, which was itself a victory since most of the code for our various teams resided on those laptops where they’d been doing all their work. And built a new technology called R Server.
You check in your files with some scheduling information into the R Server and the R Server runs it automatically. And then, outputs the results. So that for the first time in the entire company—and you could, of course, do this with Jupyter Notebooks, too. But our team was heavily into R and actually needed a variety of outputs, not just a notebook.
People were able to schedule things. It also had the result that they had to have them in source code control. That’s why it was a little seductive. It’s transformed several of our teams.
When I say “we did the following,” I had one part in this, which was that I knew I wanted somebody to do this. I was very lucky; I hired a genius.
I found the 0.07 unicorn that Kimberley spoke about. I found Ben Weber, who now works at Twitch. And he’s a computer scientist who’s worked as a director of analytics and loves games. And he came in.
He did an amazing job of just working with our team, finding out where their problems were. And he really built this system. And I’ve forgotten the URL, but he has it as an open source system. It really transformed things.
Sometimes, you can find a unicorn. They’re great, even if you only have them for a little while. And we had Ben for about a year, but he really made this happen. I asked him to do something like this, and he made a realization that was far better than anything I could have conceived of, so I’m very grateful for that.
Where it landed us, we’ve gotten a lot better. We’d automated things. We got Colleen’s bookends covered. It was adopted by multiple analytics teams throughout Electronic Arts. As a result, the teams really started using the technology to improve their work. Teams became more efficient.
The analysts who had made the “walking dashboard” comment came back and said, I’m not a walking dashboard anymore. I love this.
Because the system was so general, she was able to serve up her reports as automatically updated R Markdown files. How many of you know R markdown? Ah. So if you went to the R User Conference at Stanford last year, you would have seen Don Knuth, who Paco talked about, talk about R Markdown as an example of literate programming.
My own team, I’ve been talking to them about literate programming for a while. About how great R Markdown was as an example of this. When they went to the conference, they came back and they said to me, R Markdown is an example of literate programming. This is really exciting.
I said, yes, I know. One of the really powerful things of this whole system was that people actually had a motivation for remembering to check their code into the source code control system.
I could have mandated that. I pushed them gently in that direction for a long time, and then I started mandating it. It just wasn’t natural for them. But when it became part of their workflow, it was the most natural thing in the world.
It didn’t solve everything, however. We produced more tools, but we really have only taken the first step towards being a real software-producing organization. I honestly believe that whether you’re partnering with data engineering teams whose job is to take what you’ve done and productionalize it.
All you’re doing is the sort of old-fashioned model where you’ve got some code on your laptop, and you run it, and then you write a report. An analytics or a data science team is still a software-producing organization. So much of our value is in that software reproduce, even if it’s a small script.
One of my goals for the team is for the whole team to really understand this in terms of what it means to make things repeatable. What it means to make their lives easier because things have unit tests.
We’ve only taken the first step there. And effectively, we’ve really expanded the laptop model. The system of R Server—I wouldn’t promote this as an enterprise-level data science or data engineering solution.
It’s a good intermediate step for training people to get where they need to. It’s been very effective there. But it also introduced some issues that is worth thinking about with a system like this. Because the server system we set up is so popular with multiple teams, not just mine, there’s been this incredible proliferation of models and things that are running in the R Server.
We didn’t stop to think, “Oh, we’d better curate these.” We’d better figure out when we need to retire them. That’s one of the things we’re grasping with now. It’s actually really helping the conversations with the data engineers.
Suddenly, my team understands that if they get the data engineers to productionalize something, one of the things they need to say is, these are the criteria under which this can be turned off and thrown away.
One of our engineering team’s big worries is you want us to have these automated processes going, but you can’t tell us when they go away. And we don’t want this big proliferation.
My team is now dealing with that because they’re maintaining the R Server. They have all of these other analytics teams that are running these things on this and they really want to know when they can get rid of them.
As part of this, we have people leave. But the server processes they started keep on going. This is just one step in what we’ve done.
I think I’ve probably already said this. We needed to make a cultural change. We’ve done a whole bunch of things. We’ve started teaching R classes in the company that teach good coding style.
We actually introduced a style guide for our R code, which is basically a very, very basic style guide, but it was fun for me because I got to tell some horror stories about how bad code can be, which I enjoy doing.
We started to do code and project reviews. I think we could do that much, much better. We’ve also started training the team in programming engineering in new languages.
Actually, our colleagues—not in our team, but our central engineering team also has a small data science team that started thinking in terms of how to use SPARC as a platform to make models and predictive code be first-class citizens of the enterprise system.
They’re doing it in SPARC. So they’re teaching some SPARC classes, which I’m very happy about. In order to avoid the unicorn problem, I’ve also taken some of my headcount and said, these are reserved for people whose primary background is in software engineering.
I’m not necessarily looking for somebody who really knows analytics or data science. They just have to be comfortable with the idea of working with analysts and data scientists. Fortunately, a lot of them are.
What’s next? I really want us to set up a dev test and prod environment, where we can really move things across.
We’ve gotten some of the cultural change going. People are thinking about the difference between developing code and testing code, and then productionalizing it. If you think about that old laptop script—run script, get the images, get the results, write them up in a report model—there’s no real distinction between dev, test, and prod there other than what’s implicitly there.
We’re working with our central data engineering team to be able to say, OK, what does this look like if we really set this up for the data scientists?
We’re also upgrading our tool set and beginning to do pair programming with people. We’ve found in the past that really helps.
Questions
Q: What is the solution again?
Neely: Let me go back. Maybe I can talk through the diagram.
So what we had before was the laptop. Imagining I’m holding a laptop. My data scientists would write all of their code there on the local directory of the laptop. They’d get some results. They would either translate those into something that could be turned into the enterprise system into a SQL script.
That means that all the power of what R or Python could do in terms of fitting the model, choosing the model was lost. The code also lived in the laptop. Weeks and weeks of time could go into creating this code. And where did it live? It lived in some random directory on their laptop.
So perforce, which is our enterprise source code control system. We started saying you can use Perforce. I guess I should be honest. I started saying I want you to use Perforce. It was a big shift for them, so I wasn’t making it like an annual goal for them.
Thou shalt use Perforce or you won’t get your bonus. It was more, I want you to do this. But what we then did is we developed our own technology.
Or rather, Ben developed for us as part of the group this R Server technology. So it was a Java app that he wrote. And basically, what that Java app does is it will go to Perforce, grab a directory, grab a project, basically, from Perforce. Say, oh, here’s the script there that I know how to run.
Runs it automatically. Pipes the results out. And then, produces a web report, something in a repository, just the general output of whatever it can do.
This had two effects. It meant the Java app that was our server—I’m sorry if I blasted through that too quickly—it could handle all the scheduling people needed.
It’s hard to schedule something on your laptop. You might have closed it, for example. And it also did something that was intentionally a little manipulative. I hope that’s not a bad word.
It got people to have a reason to use Perforce because, do you want to schedule this? You want it to run on the server? That’s lovely. You’d better check the code into Perforce.
There was some gentle heavy-handedness. Did that answer your question? Yeah.
It wasn’t just the Perforce. It was the combination of the Perforce with our locally-developed R Server app.
Q: I think the organization I’m with is in a very similar place. We’re very much R focused. You mentioned sort of extending what you guys are doing with Python. I’m just curious. Not being super-experienced with it, I still view it in my mind just being an alternative to R rather than something where you would extend like that. I understand we’re working in that direction. Can you just share, just for my benefit, maybe some examples of things that you see Python as being able to do that R isn’t able to do? Because you’re sort of setting it up as the next step rather than an alternative path, which is I think how we still view it.
Neely: That’s a great question. And I have the perfect answer, which is it’s not about the relative strengths of the languages.
I actually don’t think that’s the important variable. The place where we’ve used Python is—part of this is particular to Electronic Arts’ model.
We have a central analytics and a central data science team with lots of embedded groups. The thing that Python allows us to do that R simply can’t do and will never be able to do is it allows us to talk to our client groups who are used to using Python.
That sounds silly, but I actually think it’s really one of the important distinctions in terms of which computer language you choose. We did a matchmaking algorithm for one of our studios. And the data scientist on my team who developed the matchmaking algorithm, did it in R because he’s very familiar with R.
The studio we were working with, their engineering team that needed to implement this really loved Jupyter and IPython Notebooks for good reason. They’re eminently lovable. And that was the language they knew. And so we had two choices:
He could take the model and the algorithms that he developed in R and turn them into sort of a pure mathematical algorithmic description that he could have then handed off to the engineers.
Or, he could say, I re-rendered it as a Python Notebook, an IPython Notebook. And he did that and it was very easy for them to implement. So I agree with you.
I mean, my background is a statistician. I’ve been using R since the—I think 1996 was when I first encountered R. It has incredible breadth and depth of models that Python hasn’t yet gotten.
But I honestly think that for a lot of our work, that’s not the most important variable. It’s what our client teams and partners can use.
I encourage my team—when we’re working with central engineering, we use Scala. They like Scala. And they like SPARC. So we use that.
When we’re dealing with one of EA’s studios where the engineers and the embedded analysts are fond of Python, we’ll use Python.
Q: Does the system track dependencies between outputs?
Neely: It can in a very primitive sense. But not I think in the wiser, more sophisticated sense that you’re asking. So it’s possible to do that. Because this just generally takes scripts from a Perforce directory and says run them. If that Perforce directory, if the work there was set up to do that tracking, it can.
But the scale of this is really at this point very much an extension of that laptop model. It’s not taking the results, putting it in a repository, running it in such a way that you can cache the results and then get them, except in the sense that R and good practices within that directory would natively support.
But that’s a great idea. I’m going to take it back to the team.
Q: I’m curious. How long and how many engineers does it take to improve this pipeline? And then on an ongoing basis, how much effort is required to maintain this as they come along?
Neely: Oh, good question. So how many engineers it took was one. But remember that I did find a unicorn.
I found a unicorn who made it happen in fairly short order once he spent the time—and this is a beautiful example of the importance of collaboration and engineering. He spent the time working with the team to figure out their workflows and realized that a fairly lightweight system could support this for the next step in our maturation as a software-producing organization.
It took Ben relatively little time to make this, but he’s a genius and a unicorn. I haven’t found another one since he moved off to Twitch. I forgive him for that. I’m happy for him. He’s very happy there.
In terms of maintaining it, this also, I think, is a reflection of Ben. He trained one of our data scientists who’s primarily a data scientist. He’s got a master’s degree in statistics, but loves programming and has been doing it for a few years, to maintain it and understand it. And it’s been relatively problem-free.
So we haven’t had much maintenance we’ve had to do, except small things like updates when some R package is changed. It’s been pretty easy. It is very lightweight. It is really a small thing.
I think Colleen in her description of this as dealing with the bookends for the system was really quite perceptive in terms of where the teams needed help.
RelatedStorm clouds are too small for climate models to render directly, and so modelers must tune for them. PHOTO: ZOONAR GMBH/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
It began with an unplanned leave of absence. But it has blossomed into a full-fledged transparency movement for climate science.
In 2010, Erich Roeckner, a longtime guru behind the global climate model at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPIM) in Hamburg, Germany, was unable to work. The timing was inopportune: Deadlines loomed for an international project that would compare the major climate models with one another, and MPIM's had a bug.
Roeckner's skill was handling details like the effects of rough terrain or the formation of clouds—processes too fine-grained for models to render within the imaginary boxes, tens of kilometers on a side, into which they divide the atmosphere and ocean. Instead, modelers “parameterize” such details, coming up with equations meant to approximate their effects. When the equations miss the mark and the model strays from the known climate, scientists like Roeckner bring it back into harmony by adjusting them. Other disciplines might call this calibration. In climate science, it's called tuning.
With Roeckner out of commission, a team of six people spent several months tuning the MPIM model to match the climate and eliminate the glitch. Their work, though laborious, was fairly routine. What was unusual was their decision, in 2012, to publish a detailed accounting of it. Roeckner's absence was random. But in hindsight, it was the butterfly flapping that has now led climate modelers to openly discuss and document tuning in ways that they had long avoided, fearing criticism by climate skeptics.
Next week, many of the world's 30 major modeling groups will convene for their main annual workshop at Princeton University; by early next year, these teams plan to freeze their code for a sixth round of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), in which these models are run through a variety of scenarios. The output will ultimately help the next United Nations climate change panel make its predictions. By writing up their tuning strategies and making them publicly available for the first time, groups hope to learn how to make their predictions more reliable, says Bjorn Stevens, an MPIM director who has pushed for more transparency. And in a study that will be submitted by year's end, six U.S. modeling centers will disclose their tuning strategies—showing that many are quite different. “Most groups take pride in calibrating their models in different ways,” says Gavin Schmidt, who's coordinating the study and directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, another prominent modeling center.
At their core, climate models are about energy balance. They divide Earth up into boxes, and then, applying fundamental laws of physics, follow the sun's energy as it drives phenomena like winds and ocean currents. Their resolution has grown over the years, allowing current models to render Earth in boxes down to 25 kilometers a side. They take weeks of supercomputer time for a full run, simulating how the climate evolves over centuries.
When the models can't physically resolve certain processes, the parameters take over—though they are still informed by observations. For example, modelers tune for cloud formation based on temperature, atmospheric stability, humidity, and the presence of mountains. Parameters are also used to describe the spread of heat into the deep ocean, the reflectivity of Arctic sea ice, and the way that aerosols, small particles in the atmosphere, reflect or trap sunlight.
It's impossible to get parameters right on the first try. And so scientists adjust these equations to make sure certain constraints are met, like the total energy entering and leaving the planet, the path of the jet stream, or the formation of low marine clouds off the California coast. Modelers try to restrict their tuning to as few knobs as possible, but it's never as few as they'd like. It's an art and a science. “It's like reshaping an instrument to compensate for bad sound,” Stevens says.
Indeed, whether climate scientists like to admit it or not, nearly every model has been calibrated precisely to the 20th century climate records—otherwise it would have ended up in the trash. “It's fair to say all models have tuned it,” says Isaac Held, a scientist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, another prominent modeling center, in Princeton, New Jersey.
For years, climate scientists had been mum in public about their “secret sauce”: What happened in the models stayed in the models. The taboo reflected fears that climate contrarians would use the practice of tuning to seed doubt about models—and, by extension, the reality of human-driven warming. “The community became defensive,” Stevens says. “It was afraid of talking about things that they thought could be unfairly used against them.” Proprietary concerns also get in the way. For example, the United Kingdom's Met Office sells weather forecasts driven by its climate model. Disclosing too much about its code could encourage copycats and jeopardize its business.
But modelers have come to realize that disclosure could reveal that some tunings are more deft or realistic than others. It's also vital for scientists who use the models in specific ways. They want to know whether the model output they value—say, its predictions of Arctic sea ice decline—arises organically or is a consequence of tuning. Schmidt points out that these models guide regulations like the U.S. Clean Power Plan, and inform U.N. temperature projections and calculations of the social cost of carbon. “This isn't a technical detail that doesn't have consequence,” he says. “It has consequence.”
Recently, while preparing for the new model comparisons, MPIM modelers got another chance to demonstrate their commitment to transparency. They knew that the latest version of their model had bugs that meant too much energy was leaking into space. After a year spent plugging holes and fixing it, the modelers ran a test and discovered something disturbing: The model was now overheating. Its climate sensitivity—the amount the world will warm under an immediate doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations from preindustrial levels—had shot up from 3.5°C in the old version to 7°C, an implausibly high jump.
MPIM hadn't tuned for sensitivity before—it was a point of pride—but they had to get that number down. Thorsten Mauritsen, who helps lead their tuning work, says he tried tinkering with the parameter that controlled how fast fresh air mixes into clouds. Increasing it began to ratchet the sensitivity back down. “The model we produced with 7° was a damn good model,” Mauritsen says. But it was not the team's best representation of the climate as they knew it.
Aside from being more open about episodes like this, many modelers say that they should stop judging themselves based on how well they tune their models to a single temperature record, past or predicted. The ability to faithfully generate other climate phenomena, like storm tracks or El Niño, is just as important. Daniel Williamson, a statistician at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, says that centers should submit multiple versions of their models for comparison, each representing a different tuning strategy. The current method obscures uncertainty and inhibits improvement, he says. “Once people start being open, we can do it better.”F1 2016 Official Review Blu-ray - Description
This Blu-ray is suitable for playback in America as well as Europe and Australia.
Featuring previously unseen footage and exclusive team radio audio
The 2016 FIA Formula One World ChampionshipTM has been dominated by the battle between Mercedes team mates Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton. As we’ve written in these pages before, some of the very best F1 seasons are those where two drivers on the same team, in identical cars, are so far ahead of the pack the battle boils down to a tense, nervy grudge match of mind games and mind blowing driving as they push each other to the limits. Not that we’d describe the Hamilton – Rosberg situation as a grudge match, of course…
At the time of writing (with three rounds still to go) Rosberg has 26 points in hand over Hamilton, meaning the result of the Drivers’ Championship is anything but decided and setting up a fantastic end to a season that has delivered a lot of drama already.
What you get with the Official Review of the season is a masterful recapping of an eventful and, at times, controversial year of F1 from the pre-season testing right through to the last race at Abu Dhabi. Packed with race footage from every round, interviews, statistics, analysis and insightful commentary, the F1 review is quite simply the World’s best motorsport programme, year in year out.NEW YORK — Every story has a beginning, a moment when pen meets paper. For some, the words just ease out onto the page. For others, however, that first sentence is the most challenging. FC Barcelona appears to be falling into the latter category this season as they get set to play their first of three matches in the International Champions Cup against the Italian champions Juventus.
Juventus, as you may know, was responsible for showing Barça an early exit in last season's Champions League, adding further drama to a marquee matchup that will keep Barça busy for all 90 minutes.
A game of firsts
Barça may be opening their seventh U.S. tour, but for all intents and purposes, this one is loaded with firsts. Saturday's Barça–Juve clash will be:
New manager Ernesto Valverde's first game as head coach
Barça's first game wearing the new shirt sponsored by Rakuten
Barça's first game in the New York area since the Club opened its Park Avenue office last September
Barça's first match at MetLife Stadium (their previous New York visits were to Giants Stadium)
Trident on board
One of the big questions raised when Barça first announced this summer's tour was whether the team's big three—Leo Messi, Luis Suárez, and Neymar Jr—would take part. Not only is the trident turning heads stateside this week, but all the team's big guns are here as well, including defender Gerard Piqué and midfielder Andrés Iniesta. The only regular missing is the goalkeeper Marc-Andre ter Stegen, who was granted extended vacation after leading Germany to the Confederations Cup championship earlier this month.
Triple-challenge
Saturday's Juve match may be one of the tougher matchups out there. But that doesn't mean things will get any easier. Barça's next two games here are against Manchester United in Washington D.C. on July 26th and against Real Madrid in Miami on July 29th.
But, as they say, you've got to start somewhere.Unprecedented Interruption of Supreme Court Proceedings
Early on Wednesday morning, inside the stuffy chambers of the United States Supreme Court, a man stood up in a crowd of 330 citizens to address the nation’s nine top judges. He wasn’t scheduled to give testimony, and wasn’t a certified legal expert with credentials to present an oral argument in the Supreme Court. His interruption of Supreme Court proceedings would be the first in eight years, and only the second in two decades. And for the first time ever, a citizen speaking freely inside the Supreme Court chamber was caught on video.
“I rise on behalf of the majority of the American people, who believe that money is not speech, corporations are not people, and our democracy should not be for sale to the highest bidder. Overturn Citizens United. Keep the cap in McCutcheon. The people demand democracy,” said Kai Newkirk of the organization 99Rise, before being hauled out of the courtroom and handcuffed. As of this writing, Newkirk is still in jail on charges of “haranguing” and uttering “loud threatening or abusive language" in the Supreme Court building.
Newkirk’s outburst preceded oral arguments for the McCutcheon vs. FEC case, which has been called “Citizens United, Part 2.” Shaun McCutcheon, C.E.O. of the mining industry-focused engineering company Coalmont Electrical Development, is the plaintiff in the case. McCutcheon, of Birmingham, Ala., donated $16,250 to the Alabama Republican Party in 2012. His company has donated to the campaigns of the most obstructionist Republicans in the US Senate, including top Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, who is credited with initiating the federal government shutdown of 2013. The latest oral arguments for McCutcheon vs. FEC were presented in October. It’s also worth noting that the Republican National Committee has joined McCutcheon in his lawsuit, along with Mitch McConnell himself, whose team of lawyers will be making arguments to the Supreme Court on McConnell’s behalf.
In January of 2010, Citizens United vs. FEC ruled that political contributions are an expression of free speech, allowing corporations to make unlimited political donations. Corporations were given the same rights as people after the Union Pacific Railroad vs. Santa Clara County ruling in 1886. Citizens United also paved the way for the creation of Super PACs – political entities that place no limits to how much one person can give at one time. McCutcheon argues because corporations are people and money is speech, aggregate limits for political contributions from individual citizens are unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
"The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision was a betrayal of the American people and of our democracy. It took the systemic corruption of our government by big money interests to an obscene new level,” 99Rise wrote in a press release. “If the Court eliminates the cap on aggregate donations by an individual in an election cycle - the question at hand in the McCutcheon case - it would put another round of shots into the dying body of our democracy."
Individuals can currently donate a maximum of $2,600 per candidate, per election cycle. These rules were put in place in 1974 with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which created the Federal Election Commission. The current aggregate limit is $46,200 for all federal candidates in a 2-year period, and $70,800 to political action committees and political party committees. This means that Shaun McCutcheon can donate the maximum amount to a maximum of 18 different federal candidates in an election cycle. If the Supreme Court rules in McCutcheon’s favor, McCutcheon and other big donors like the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson would be able to donate larger amounts to an even greater pool of candidates.
The most ironic thing about this entire episode is that while the Supreme Court portrays themselves to be defenders of constitutional rights like free speech, they have arcane rules in place that don’t allow cameras inside their chambers, that require observers to be seated and silent at all times, and that allow for the arrest of anyone who protests on the front steps of the Supreme Court or speaks during hearings.
Kai Newkirk’s arrest illustrated exactly how much the original concept of democracy has been perverted in today’s United States. A corporation can donate an unlimited amount of money to a Super PAC and flood public airwaves with deliberately dishonest attack ads under the guise of “free speech,” but citizens nonviolently exercising those same rights are immediately handcuffed and thrown in jail.
"Generations of Americans have shed blood, sweat, and tears to win the right to vote and extend the promise of democracy in America,” Newkirk said in the 99Rise press release. “It's time for our generation to step up and do whatever it takes to defend that right and end the corruption of big money in politics. If that means risking arrest in order to speak truth to power, so be it."After exacting his revenge on Uriah Hall in November, Gegard Mousasi has one fight left on his UFC contract and it sounds like he’s tired of waiting around. Currently riding a four-fight win streak, Mousasi is the fifth-ranked middleweight and looks to be on the cusp of a title shot in muddled up 185-pound division if he can just get one more top tier win. There’s one problem though: he can’t seem to find anyone to fight.
While speaking with Fox Sports recently, Mousasi said he’s been asking the UFC for a top opponent for weeks but no one is willing to take it, or else the UFC is keeping them from him.
“I wanted to fight Anderson [Silva] and the UFC said ‘well you don’t have a big enough name’ but now he’s fighting Derek Brunson,” Mousasi said. “Luke Rockhold is injured but I see him training all the time. Chris Weidman doesn’t pick up his phone. The UFC offered him that fight a couple of times. [Robert] Whittaker wants to go on holiday for seven months. I don’t know what he’s up to. I’m looking for a fight.”
“[Weidman] says he was offered a couple of fights? Who? Everyone is booked or injured. Whittaker doesn’t want to fight until May or June, that’s what the UFC told me. Who else is there to fight? UFC offered me to him to fight.
“[Rockhold], he says he’s torn his ACL a little bit, and I’m actually afraid to take that fight because he’s still injured. I’m afraid to accept that fight and then suddenly he pulls out and I’m training for nothing. If he accepts the fight and he’s healthy, that’s a good fight for me.”
It’s an interesting circumstance for Mousasi. When Rockhold pulled out of his fight with Ronaldo Souza, many thought the UFC might book a rubber match between Mousasi and “Jacare” as a de facto title eliminator to face the winner of the Michael Bisping-Yoel Romero title fight that will happen sometime this year. But instead, Jacare accepted a fight with 14th-ranked Tim Boetsch, which left Mousasi without a ready to go dance partner other than the former middleweight champion Anderson Silva. But despite Silva’s legend status, he currently hasn’t won a fight at middleweight since 2012 and Mousasi believes he wants to pick up an easy win instead of risk losing his third fight in a row.
“They can say whatever they want. I fought [Lyoto] Machida after injury. I went to Sweden to fight [Alexander] Gustafsson but he got injured. I was willing to fight [Daniel Cormier] when Jon Jones got pulled off the card. I was willing to fight Anthony Johnson [at UFC 206]. Of course I wanted to fight Anderson but I think he favors the guys he can beat easier or he believes he can beat easier.”
“Derek Brunson’s stand up is horrible, I’m sorry. The guy is a good fighter but his stand up is just terrible. He’s an amateur fighter stand up wise. It was just a bar fight in his last fight.”
With no other options in sight, Mousasi is staying ready for any opportunity and says he’s hoping Weidman will accept a fight. If not, he’s willing to fight anybody in the division because he’s coming for that top spot.
“I’m ready to take any fight. From No. 1 to No. 15, I’m open. I’m ready to take risks if the reward is there. I’d rather fight somebody in the top five rather than somebody in the top 15, but I’ll fight anybody.
“If I fight the right fight, I’m a bad matchup for everyone. I feel I have the best stand up. Luke Rockhold’s not going to take me down. Chris Weidman’s not going to take me down. Their wrestling is great, but they have to set it up with strikes. Heavyweights cannot take me down at this moment so no middleweight is going to take me down. All I can say is I’m very confident. I’m looking to fight those guys.”
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West Linn. Chael Sonnen said “guys sucked” back when Tito Ortiz was champion.
Company guy. Stipe Miocic says the UFC “took my kindness for weakness” with his UFC 203 contract.
Drama. Rashad Evans says the Blackzilians are basically done due to “high school drama.”
Retirement. Yair Rodriguez won’t say whether he thinks B.J. Penn should retire for good.
MEDIA STEW
The champ with an MLK tribute.
Oh no. McGregor can’t ever win now.
Gracie breakdown of the Ezekial from bottom mount w/ Vince Vaughn.
Cooking with the Menace w/ special guest Chris Algieri.
Frankie wants BJ to hang ‘em up.
Floyd offering to work with Ronda. So much Money May in MMA.
Cody only named one bantamweight here. Did mention Jeremy Stephens though.
TMZ is now apparently all about MMA.
LISTEN UP
Anik and Flo.
Severe MMA.
Brit Pack.
TWEETS
So BJ needs to go up in weight...
BJ Penn's record by weight class.
145: 0-2
155: 11-3-1
170: 3-5-1
185: 2-0
Open: 0-1 — RJ Clifford (@RJcliffordMMA) January 16, 2017
Big time signing.
Hooft out.
After 6 years working with a great team the blackzilians I am going my own way I had a great time met some cool people and learned a lot. Now it's time for #hkickboxing and new challenges that come my way................. NOTHING IS FOREVER BUT DREAMS AND GOALS A photo posted by Henri Hooft (@henrihooft) on Jan 16, 2017 at 11:54am PST
Mighty shady in here.
I want advance drug testing from @usantidoping for my title defense against @TJDillashaw @ufc — Cody Garbrandt (@Cody_Nolove) January 16, 2017
Governor of a state claiming the UFC is rigged.
Hats off to class act @JoeLauzon for calling out the rigged @ufc score cards in Phoenix tonight...Two clearly wrong results in a row... — Matt Bevin (@MattBevin) January 16, 2017
Nick Diaz.
There are steps to take. Its not just visualize. Its not just hard work. There is |
, she started to get ready for bed. She put her pajamas on and went to sit on her bed combing her hair. Now, I don’t know if she looked in the mirror while doing this. If she did, then that might explain what happened next; for there is the belief that looking at a mirror at night invites a demon into the room (or so I was brought up to believe and thus I still avoid mirrors at night). According to the family there was just a five minute lag between when she left the living room to go to her room and when all hell broke loose. As the mother and father went about getting themselves ready for bed, they heard their daughter chanting, saying some strange words over and over again that they didn’t understand. They went to look in on her and then she started screaming about how hot the room was and how they had to get out of there. She screamed loudly about how scared she was and couldn’t be calmed down. She then started to run about the house still screaming about how “it was here”. Of course, now I think of the movie Poltergeist and wonder if they had seen that movie. The father tried to hold her down but she had an incredible amount of energy and strength. This is what scared the family the most: her inordinate amount of strength. She escaped their grips and went running into the building’s hallway. We all, including myself, stepped out as well when we heard the bone-chilling screams. It took three big men to hold her down. I was very confused by this situation and asked my own family what was going on and whether we should call the cops. Sadly, I already knew how to do that very well by then and was prepared to do so. No one called the cops. No ambulance came. Eventually everyone went back into their apartments. I was told a week later that the girl had suffered some form of possession. She was being sent to Sunday school thereafter so that she could get confirmed. Her form of possession was whispered about the neighborhood and I was told it was “delirium tremens”. I believed that explanation at the time. What did I know?
Apparently, suffering from delirium tremens (the DTs) was a common occurrence in that old neighborhood of mine. The DT instances were ascribed, by the community, to the devil taking a hold of the person. Now, as I went to school and majored in psychology and watched popular cultural depictions of delirium tremens, I came to realize that it wasn’t so much the devil but alcohol that was heavily impacting my old neighborhood. In one of my favorite (yet very depressing) movies, Leaving Las Vegas, the main character, Ben Sanderson (played by Nicolas Cage), suffers from delirium tremens after a drinking binge, and rushes to his liquor supply to prevent them from continuing. That scene was such a stark reminder of what we saw as part of everyday life in the old neighborhood. Delirium tremens is mainly caused after a long period of drinking, being stopped abruptly and experiencing withdrawal. It may also be triggered by head injury, infection, or illness in people with a history of heavy use of alcohol. Delirium tremens also commonly affects those with a history of alcoholism that has existed for more than 10 years. Interestingly, the main symptoms of delirium tremens are confusion, nightmares, disorientation and agitation and other physical indicators that the body is fighting something off, such as fever or tachycardia. These symptoms may appear suddenly but usually appear a few days after alcohol cessation. Also, this can start abruptly at night. Other common symptoms include intense hallucinations such as visions of insects, snakes, or rats. I note this all to say, wow-sounds symptom-wise that the girl did suffer from the DTs. That poor girl had supposedly experienced intense heat (I suppose fever) and extreme agitation and hallucinations. My question is could she really be experiencing the DTs at that age?
But can I just tell you this is all typical of living in the South Bronx? People are always seeing rats because rats truly do exist in quite plentiful form in those streets. But since the DTs had become synonymous with being possessed and in need of an exorcism, I am not too sure she got the actual care that she needed (perhaps the intervention of a social worker). But considering that most triaged exorcism-cases end up being referred for psychological counseling, this somewhat makes sense. Let me add one other spooky anecdote about that young girl. The family soon moved from that apartment and months later said apartment was engulfed in flames. Coincidence? Had a supernatural being warned her about the pending fire? Or perhaps it was just the typical result of a slumlord not heating the building and everyone having to use candles to keep warm. Of course, most, including my mom believed there was some otherwordly force at play.
The threat of making someone go through an exorcism was often invoked to keep teenagers in check in the neighborhood. The Catholic Church admits as much as well. Let me give you another example from my old neighborhood. A long time ago, when a young woman was getting ready to get married (she was maybe 19 years old), rumors were started by the vicious mean girls of the block that this young woman was a not a virgin. The horror! (of course the girls that spread this rumor were not virgins themselves). This rumor set off a frenzy of activity on the part of the family. They had the young women go get counseling from the local priest. The family tried to pressure her into telling the truth by threatening an exorcism to rid her of the evil spirits that were keeping her from being a good girl. As she continued to swear that she was a virgin, the family still did not take her at her word and sent her off to be examined by the family doctor who confirmed that her hymen was indeed intact. A letter announcing that her hymen was still intact was written and circulated throughout the block. Had she turned out to have had a broken hymen, I am 100% sure that the family would have called for an exorcism believing that the young lady had to be possessed. The young woman got married and never returned to the block. We were all convinced that she must have gone to the local botanica of wherever she had moved to and set the evil eye upon the neighborhood. After her neighborhood departure and within a short period of time thereafter, a young girl was hit by a car while she played, a young boy got killed in a motorcycle accident and the girlfriend of one of the local alcoholics was decapitated and stuffed into a garbage can. I am not joking about any of this. Now, one could say these are all phenomena that can be easily explained by the ecological environment (poverty, drugs, crowded streets where kids play in the street instead of a park). But a majority of the people believed there was something otherworldly that was taking vengeance upon the neighborhood. So, exorcisms –the threat of – have always been part of the community consciousness of certain neighborhoods.
I’m reminded of Grosse Point Blank where the main character explains to his future father-in-law that he has been a hitman for the last decade and the in-law impressively notes that as a growing job field. Seems the same can now be said of Exorcists. The City of Milan has established an exorcism switchboard that will be available from Monday to Friday from 2.30pm to 5pm. Furthermore, the church has doubled to 12 the number of priests dealing with demonic possession cases. I wouldn’t be psychologistmimi if I didn’t note that the Fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V) is about to be fully released May 2013. Perhaps a joint task force and hotline can be set up between the Catholic Church and the American Psychiatric Association. Wait a second is that what Torchwood is supposed to be about anyway -that does truly exists in an underground bunker somewhere, right? One final question does come to mind: What happens when the Devil comes knocking outside of the hours of Monday to Friday between 2.30 and 5 pm?The Washington Post recently ranked the Bayou City alongside such well-known food Meccas as New York and Chicago. Here’s why.
What do Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Houston all have in common? They’ve all been named among the ten best food cities in America by the Washington Post. Todd Romero is a history professor and co-director of the University of Houston’s Gulf Coast Food Project. He joins Andrew Schneider on this week’s “Bauer Business Focus” to discuss Houston’s food culture and restaurant industry.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
What defines Houston’s food culture?
“I think Houstonians often lament that we live on a swamp that’s hot and humid, but we forget that we’re also on the edge of a number of great regional cuisines [e.g., Creole, Cajun, Mexican, other Latin American cuisines]…Economically…the two main sectors of the economy, one energy and the other the Medical Center…draw a diverse range of people… that not only bring their foods and food ways, but create a market for a variety of different restaurants.”
How do you translate a distinct food scene into a thriving restaurant industry?
“Money…Restaurants run on thin margins. There’s an often quoted but, I gather, inaccurate statistic that says that 90 percent of restaurants that start fail. It’s probably closer…to 50 to 60 percent. And so, cities that have robust economies like ours are better able to support robust restaurant scenes.”
What happens when there’s a downturn in the local economy, as we’re seeing now, tied to the price of oil?
“At least so far, it appears the restaurant industry is continuing to move and grow at a rapid pace…One of the things I do worry about is that…until recently, the fact that rents were relatively low in Houston benefited a lot of restaurateurs, and as both the real estate market residentially, but also in terms businesses become more expensive, I worry about the ability of lots of different kinds of restaurants, from mom-and-pop immigrant restaurants to fine dining, being able to maintain their ability to open new places.”U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke after holding a meeting on Syria. Watch it in the player above.
MOSCOW — Fiercely feuding over Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin met the top American diplomat in Moscow on Wednesday to see if they could rescue relations between the world’s mightiest military powers. Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. presidential election also hovered over the first face-to-face encounter between Putin and a Trump administration Cabinet member.
Leaving traveling U.S. reporters across town, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met Putin in the Kremlin for almost two hours following fraught discussions with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The chief dispute concerned the Syrian government or opposition’s culpability for a chemical weapons attack that killed more than 80 people in Syria last week, though broader disagreements over everything from Ukraine to Russia’s support for once-fringe candidates in European elections are among other sore points between the former Cold War foes.
Steeped in geopolitical intrigue, the meeting between Putin and Tillerson wasn’t formally confirmed until the last minute, following days of speculation about whether the Russian would refuse to grant the former oil executive an audience. Putin’s decision to host Tillerson signaled Moscow’s intent to maintain communication with the U.S. even as they bash each other publicly in louder and louder tones.
The men know each other well from Tillerson’s days as Exxon Mobil CEO. Putin had even granted Tillerson with a friendship honor.
Unlike he has done with previous secretaries of state, Putin didn’t keep Tillerson waiting for hours on Wednesday. The Russians held to a tentative schedule that was worked out in advance, U.S. officials said. They weren’t authorized to discuss diplomatic conversations publicly and requested anonymity.
The meeting agenda wasn’t announced. The U.S. and Russia have sharply disagreed over whether Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces or rebels were responsible for the chemical weapons attack last week that led to U.S. retaliatory cruise missiles. Washington says it has no doubt about Assad’s responsibility. Putin has spoken of having proof that it was a “false flag” operation intended to rally international opposition to Assad.
Before meeting Putin, Tillerson received a chilly reception from Lavrov, who told Tillerson that Russia was trying to understand the “real intentions” of the Trump administration.
“We have seen very alarming actions recently with an unlawful attack against Syria,” Lavrov said, referring to the 59 Tomahawk missiles Trump launched at a Syrian air base to punish Assad for using chemical weapons. “We consider it of utmost importance to prevent the risks of replay of similar action in the future.”
Tillerson conceded the two world powers had “sharp differences” that have obstructed cooperation but voiced optimism they could make progress.
In the U.S., Trump sought to tamp down speculation he’ll intervene militarily against Assad, who is being backed by Russian forces. Trump told Fox Business Network that his strikes were solely because Assad used chemical weapons. Turkey has said tests showed sarin gas was used. U.S. intelligence agencies have said similar.
“Are we going to get involved with Syria? No,” Trump said. But, he added, “I see them using gas…we have to do something.”
Russia, Assad’s staunchest ally, has insisted the Syrian leader is blameless and that rebels disbursed chemical weapons.
The palpable tension hanging over Tillerson’s trip spoke to a widening chasm between the two world powers.
Only weeks ago, it appeared that Trump, who lavishly praised Putin throughout the campaign, was poised for a potentially historic rapprochement with Russia. But any expectations of an easy rapport have crashed into reality as the two countries trade escalating accusations over what happened last week in rebel-held territory in northern Syria.
“Frankly, Putin is backing a person that’s truly an evil person,” Trump said, referring to Assad. “I think it’s very bad for Russia. I think it’s very bad for mankind.”
Of Assad, Trump added: “This is an animal.”
And Putin, who U.S. intelligence agencies say tried to help Trump get elected, insisted that relations with the U.S. had only gone downhill since Trump took office in January.
“The level of trust at the working level, especially at the military level, has not become better but most likely has degraded,” Putin said in an interview broadcast Wednesday by state television channel Mir.
Josh Lederman of the Associated Press wrote this report. AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee in Washington and Associated Press writers Vladimir Isachenkov, Nataliya Vasilyeva and Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report.
PBS NewsHour will update this story as it develops.There was a smile in her kind eyes, but they were too sparkly to be conveying simple happiness. The fleeting tears that had so quickly and thinly veiled themselves in each eye were subtle hints as to how she was really internalizing our exchange.
“Isn’t this home?” she asked, curiously incredulous but understanding in the same breath. I’d just told mom, after a night’s visit, that I was heading out – bags packed – ready to go home.
It was a terrible thing to do, I realize now, but I’d had no cruel intentions. It was just a simple fact; I’d gone about the semester calling my dorm home because that’s what it came to be. Each day, after class, I would go home – for lunch. After parting ways with my friends, I would go home – to sleep. After loading up my trunk with groceries, I would alert my roommate that I was “heading home” – just to be there. Whether there was an act associated with it or not, that itty-bitty-cruel-excuse-for-a-living-space WAS home for me and for K. It was where we slept, where we studied, where we pondered thoughts of the universe, where we discussed boys – all normal life activities.
I’m not sure there’s an easy way to break something like this to your mom.
Home has changed a lot lately. The old-but-lovable apartment S and I shared last year was our home. The apartment in Ohio I lived in with five other girls over the summer was too. And now, back at MSU, I share a home with my roommate C.
When I moved out, home changed fast, but I guess I knew that would be the case. Before my high school graduation, I remember being on AIM with my friend, A, who had recently started his freshman year at college. He’d only been gone a few months, but he mentioned experiencing the strange realization that his dorm was his home. Annoying roommate and all. He lived there, and that was his place.
I’d had my warning, and so had mom. However, for me it was a step to the future, and for her it was a stab in her poor motherly heart.
To make matters worse, I’m fairly certain my stupid freshman self tried to be cool and play it off.
“Yeah, Mom. Home.” Just that with no emotion or explanation. Who’s got two thumbs and wins the crappy daughter of the year award? This guy!
I swear I’m not really that mean. My aforementioned stupid “I’m a freshman and I moved away from home so I’m cool” ego kinda got the best of me in that instance… And a few others. Maybe you can relate? Maybe you just hate me now? In either case, we all make mistakes. Sometimes I’m an awesome daughter who makes dinner and/or brings home the most delicious chips and salsa from the shadiest Mexican place I know, and sometimes (which is too frequently, I realize) I suck and make my mom sad.
But I’m here to apologize to the dear woman, and maybe make some stuff right. You see, it occurred to me rather recently that the term isn’t quite so resolute. Since evolving into a more understanding 20-year-old junior from an 18-year-old idiot freshman, I truly believe that I’ve thwarted that evil ego and become a more compassionate human being. Which is why I feel compelled to share this:
I’ve realized that I have been telling my friends for quite a few days that I am excited to be heading home, back to where I grew up, for the holidays.
And it’s home because – as cheesy as it sounds – home will always be where your family is…. Even if you happen to have what you consider to be your own home somewhere else in the world.
Apple Caramel Cupcakes
Apple Cake adapted from Bravetart
I love this recipe because it’s so unique. In one week, I made it once as a layer cake when my Grandparents came to visit, and again as cupcakes the next day because it’s really just THAT good. This recipe will make about a dozen little lovelies, and they’d be perfect for any kind of fall celebration… *hint hint*
Printable Recipe
12 oz (340 g) apples
3/4 cup + 2 Tbsp (113 g) flour, sifted
3/4 tsp soda
3/8 tsp baking powder
3/8 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
3/8 tsp ginger
1 egg
1/2 c (99 g) sugar
1/3 c (50 g) brown sugar
3/4 tsp vanilla extract
4 Tbsp safflower oil
2 Tbsp butter, melted
Prepare a cupcake tin with liners and set aside. Preheat oven to 350F.
Grate the apples onto cheesecloth, a clean, thin dishtowel or three layers of paper towel. Gather up edges and squeeze firmly over a bowl, collecting juices. Squeeze until you’ve got about 1/3 of a cup and set the juice aside to use in the caramel. Reserve the pressed apple.
In a small bowl, sift together the flour, soda, powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. Set aside.
In a medium bowl, beat together the egg and sugars until lightened and fluffy, about five minutes. With the mixer running, slowly drizzle in the vanilla, melted butter and oil, then beat to combine. Dump in the dry ingredients all at once and beat just to incorporate.
Fold in the reserved pressed apple gratings.
Portion the batter into the prepared cupcake tin and bake until cakes spring back when pressed lightly, 15-20 minutes. Cool briefly in tins on cooling racks, then remove the cupcakes from the tins and allow to cool completely on the rack.
Apple Caramel via Bravetart
7 Tbsp cream
1/2 vanilla bean, split and scraped (alternately, 1 1/2 tsp vanilla)
1/2 cup (99 g) sugar
1/3 cup (85 ml) freshly-squeezed apple juice
1/8 tsp salt
2 Tbsp butter
In a small pan, bring the cream and the scraped vanilla bean (reserve pulp) to a simmer. Turn off the heat and let steep for one hour (alternately, add the vanilla extract where directed).
Pour the sugar in an even layer over the bottom of a tall and thick-bottomed pan. Set over medium heat and allow to caramelize, swirling the pan occasionally to even out any hot spots that may develop. Stella describes the process in more detail here. When the sugar becomes a nice amber color, drizzle in a little of the cream and stir to incorporate, being careful of the bubbling that will occur. After it’s combined, add in more cream and continue mixing, repeating until all cream has been added. Pour in the apple juice and stir to combine. Remove the pan from heat and add the salt, butter, vanilla bean scrapings and vanilla extract, if using. Pour into a small heatproof container to cool completely.
Apple Caramel Swiss Meringue Buttercream
Please click here for a step-by-step guide to making Swiss Meringue Buttercream and troubleshooting tips!
5 egg whites
1 c (200 g) sugar
1 c (226 g) butter, room temp
Apple Caramel, cooled to room temp (above)
Cook the egg whites and sugar in a small saucepan over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the sugar is completely dissolved (test by rubbing some between your fingers. If it’s completely smooth, it’s done). Pour into another bowl (a stand mixer is preferable) and whip on high speed until room temp. Then, on a medium-slow speed, add the butter, waiting until each piece is completely incorporated before adding the next. After all the butter has been added, turn the mixer back to high speed and whip until it has come together, about five minutes. Add the apple caramel, beat to incorporate and use.
If the buttercream seems soupy after all of the butter is added and does not come together after whipping, refrigerate for 5 to 7 minutes and continue whipping until it becomes fluffy and workable.OTTAWA—All levels of government in Canada are increasingly being targeted by investors for alleged breaches of Chapter 11, NAFTA’s investment chapter, says an analysis released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
According to the analysis, by CCPA Senior Trade Researcher Scott Sinclair, as of October 2010, 43% of the known 66 claims under Chapter 11 were made by foreign investors against Canada.
“The trend over the last five years is alarming. More than half the claims (54%) against Canada since NAFTA came into force over 15 years ago, were initiated during this time period,” Sinclair says. “This trend reflects a growing awareness among foreign investors and corporate trade lawyers of NAFTA investment rights, and an increasing willingness to invoke them to contest public policy measures.”
The analysis notes that even though NAFTA was signed by the federal government, many of the Chapter 11 challenges involve provincial government resource management and environmental protection measures.
“Ottawa’s decision this summer to pay Abitibi Bowater’s $130 million to settle its NAFTA chapter 11 claim is a particular concern,” says Sinclair. “The federal government compensated the investor for the loss of its water and timber rights in Newfoundland and Labrador, but such rights have never been considered compensable under Canadian law.”
The known investor-state claims as of October 1, 2010 include 28 against Canada, 19 against the U.S., and 19 against Mexico.
Canada has already paid out NAFTA damages totaling $CAD157 million and incurred tens of millions more in legal costs.
–30–
NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-State Disputes is available in the hyperlink below.
For more information contact Kerri-Anne Finn, CCPA Senior Communications Officer, at 613-563-1341 x306.NEWARK - When fires break out in central Ohio, firefighters and EMS personnel spring into action to make sure residents are safe and cared for. Saving human lives is always paramount, but there are often other members of the family that need saving, too: pets.
NEWARK � When fires break out in central Ohio, firefighters and EMS personnel spring into action to make sure residents are safe and cared for.
Saving human lives is always paramount, but there are often other members of the family that need saving, too: pets.
That�s why the Newark Fire Department carries oxygen masks specifically for pets on all of its major vehicles. The masks were donated a couple of years ago by a local business, said Capt. Brandon Metzger. After seeing the value of the equipment, the department began budgeting its own funds for the devices, which run about $90 each.
The Newark department put the pet oxygen masks to use this month when a fire broke out in a house on Curtis Avenue. Bradetta Morton, her boyfriend, Jarrod Jones, and other family members who live in the home were all OK, but their beloved pit bull and cocker spaniel, Star and Speckles, were in bad shape after inhaling smoke.
Unfortunately, the masks can't always do the trick. Star and Speckles appeared to be doing much better after receiving the oxygen, but within a few days, both dogs died.
Still, Morton was grateful that first responders had the equipment to help her dogs, even for a little while.
�They gave us the time to say goodbye,� she said through tears. �The last thing they remembered was their loved ones loved them and were with them, not in a state of panic.�
Officials with local fire departments that have such equipment say the devices aren�t used very often, but they�re good to have on hand.
>> Read and watch more stories about central Ohio dogs at Dispatch.com/dogs
The Newark Fire Department has used them eight times during the past two years, Metzger said. The Delaware Fire Department, which received the devices as a donation about five years ago, has used them only once, estimated Chief John Donahue. The Marysville and Violet Township fire departments also have them but haven�t used them.
But when the masks are used to save a pet, it can make all the difference for the owners, Metzger said.
�It�s almost like some of their animals are direct family members, just as if they were kids,� he said. �They are extremely appreciative. Most of them get very emotional."
Until recently, the use of pet oxygen masks has been a gray area for some departments, such as the Columbus Fire Division, because state law said care to animals had to be administered by a licensed veterinarian, said Battalion Chief Steve Martin.
But Gov. John Kasich signed House Bill 187 into law in May, which officially allows first responders to provide treatment to pets, except administering medication.
�Now that it�s legal for us to do so, it�s more appropriate for us to seek getting that equipment,� Martin said. He said, though, that budget issues would make it difficult.
The Lancaster Fire Department also is in the process of getting the masks, said Chief Dave Ward.
The law officially goes into effect Aug. 31, but even before the law was passed, departments such as Newark used the masks to save pets.
The department said it did its due diligence with respect to the law, but when it came down to it, the choice of whether to save an animal was a clear one, Metzger said.
�Society expects us to be able to handle every single situation,� he said. �When we�re able to see the positives outweigh the negatives in terms of treating animals with simple oxygen, it was a no-brainer for us.�
Dispatch Reporter Mary Beth Lane contributed to this story.
jsmola@dispatch.com
@jennsmolaSo this encounter too turned out to be a fake. There has been a total dearth of genuine encounters since Mr Nehru and Mrs Mountbatten. You can't blame China for all that's fake. Our country has had a long history of fakery. Fake passports, degrees, fake Viagra, jutta fake leather, fake smiles, orgasms and cricket. Sindhis of Ulhasnagar know they have been demonised for something Gujaratis have not been far behind in.However, the Gujarati Mr Modi is not called Feku for faking anything. He is called Feku for he indulges in fenkna (spinning yarns). Which is quite different from kite-flying, the sport Gujaratis excel at. Gandhiji spun, for his nation. Modiji spins for his carnation, which is a valid enough pursuit.Now the CBI says Ishrat Jahan became a victim of a spin. That Hindu Heart Samrat Modi wanted to be seen as the chief target of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. And Gujarat Police officers conspired to unravel an LeT plot to kill Modi. So when Kashmiri cops tipped them off about an LeT terrorist really planning to kill Modi, they heaved a sigh of relief that they did not need to fake it. But when they picked up that terrorist, the cops were spotted by another man. When they picked up the other man, they were spotted by Ishrat. So they also picked up Ishrat and her friend. Then they were all killed on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Three Intelligence Bureau officers supervised this operation and also procured the arms that were planted on the four dead bodies. This was the whole nine yards that CBI has spun and handed over to the court.The Intelligence Bureau, another Central government apparatus, continues to believe that Ishrat and three others were killed in an encounter, after it came to know that they were on their way to Gandhinagar to eliminate Mr Modi. Bureau tipped off the Gujarat Police and they managed to spot the blue Indica and killed the would-be killers.The matter has been in courts for nine years. India does not know which caged parrot to believe: its own IB or its own CBI? If the encounter was indeed fake then why aren't parents of the three boys killed coming forward? Is it okay to kill boys in fake encounters? If the boys had terrorist links why was Ishrat with such characters? Was she fooled into being a shield or was she brainwashed to yield? There are questions that have no easy answers. Some have no answers at all.For example, CBI says all this based on the statement of A who says he heard B talking about C and D having a conversation about bumping off Ishrat. Statements are not evidence but they do point towards evidence. Pawan Bansal's nephew Vijay Singla is an accused, so are the people who paid Singla to buy Bansal's favours. They have been giving statements. But the CBI gives Mr Bansal a clean chit.The CBI slams the Noida Police for insinuating that Rajesh Talwar killed his daughter Aarushi and their help Hemraj. Then goes on to arrest four servants in the area. The CBI says it has enough evidence to nail the Nepalis. Later the servants are released and CBI tells a court that the parents did it but it would like the case closed for lack of evidence. The court rejects the plea. The CBI now says it has enough evidence to nail the parents, because the parents did it.In many other cases, the CBI has seen success and credibility. But can you trust the CBI? The Supreme Court doesn't. No court should, for that matter. The courts should trust evidence. Only evidence. So what's the evidence in this case? We will see more evidence or lack of it in the days to come. What we might not see is establishment of a motive. If the encounter was created to make Modi look like a hero, it's clear who planned to profit from it. If that was the motive, then why is Mr Modi not even mentioned in the chargesheet? In fact, the chargesheet does away with the critical part of any criminal investigation. It answers what and how, but skips the WHY?This is why Isharat Jahan may never get justice. The CBI investigation is as fake as the encounter. It fails to nail Modi but succeeds in making it all communal. On the eve of elections, Congress would love to frustrate Modi's attempts to woo minorities. Modi, on the other hand, would not be too disappointed. He would love polarisation. It's a win-win situation for them. For truth, it's lose-lose.Profit share on SLOT: dutch-buyback
SlotNSlot Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 29, 2017
U.S. SEC recently reported that DAO tokens would be deemed as securities, thus requiring legitimate registrations to SEC. The community has been debating on this, and lots of FUDs were witnessed as well. But this doesn’t seem to stop the outstanding DAO march, as some of leading figures of the community chills down the fears.
TheDAO broke our regs like crazy, but we aren’t going to do anything about it except write words to scare other people. -Nick Szabo
Untraceable, international, no central authority, funds can’t be frozen. The SEC ICO warning is the best ad for ICOs. -Elaine Ou
Actual very good advice from SEC for ICO participants: ask for clear plans, open code and security audits. -Alex Van De Sande
Anyways, SLOT, the SlotNSlot governance token is gonna have a well-established profit distributing mechanism to rightfully benefit its investors. Many of top-funded ERC20 tokens only work as utility values on specific uses(GOLEM, STATUS, etc.), and some give out platform profits to token holders(AUGUR), and there are DAOs repurchasing the tokens back(GNOSIS). Among those providing gambling services, Funfair and Dao.casino tokens look to be utility tokens, and Edgeless, iDice, vDice directly shares the house profit.
SlotNSlot team find it really difficult to make true “utility” for a token that is used in gambling scene, where the tokens have no point of contact to any currencies that have actual value in real life. There, the team initially considered the profit sharing model to be direct distribution of platform profit.
Direct Profit Distribution
Distributing the platform profit to token holders would work like this. In the platform smart contract, profits will be accumulated for a specified N blocks. For every N blocks mined on Ethereum, the accumulated profits are distributed to token holders in proportion to the amount of SLOT they hold.
As the team struggled to come up with better models, a serious disadvantage was found in this model. If there were M token holders(or wallets), then every distribution would incur M*21000 gas. More “unique” investors would mean poor efficiency.
Dutch Token Buyback
An alternative way to share profits to investors is to repurchase the tokens with platform profits, a naive idea of which was suggested by an anonymous potential investor from our Hipchat room. Our initial idea was to receive bids from token holders with price ETH/SLOT, and number of tokens to sell at that price, over N block period. After N blocks are mined, accumulated profits buy back as many tokens as possible, from the lowest bidding.
But this model still had an efficiency that could potentially be improved. Token holders submitting the bids suffer gas prices for each bid. After N blocks, some kind of transaction must be submitted with sufficient gas to process all the bids. The single lowest bidder paying all the gas for every accepted bidders isn’t fare. But at the same time we don’t want there exist a need for external transaction to activate the buy back.
There we came up with a dutch-auction style buyback model, which would work like followings.
1. For every N block period, ETH/SLOT price will be coded inside the contract to increase from an extremely low value.
2. It will increase in a discrete manner, e.g. for the first 100 blocks it’s 0.01ETH/SLOT and then 0.05 ETH/SLOT for the next 100 blocks, and so forth.
3. Any token holder can send SLOT to the contract to sell at the price at that specific moment.
* The amount of accumulated ETH, N-block period, interval, and ETH/SLOT price will be visible real-time in several channels including the SlotNSlot webpage(which will be also possible to calculate with all the codes open on our Github).
Using this model, every transaction from a token holder is assured to trigger an actual exchange between that token holder’s SLOT and ETH on the profit contract, unless the transaction was broadcast with invalid inputs. Thus there would be no gas fee used inefficiently. At the same time, the one who wants to make the purchase is the one who pays the gas fee. There’s no need for external third party transaction to trigger the contract.
Tokens bought back by the platform profit contract would then be used for either a) reserve for later additional issuance, b) reward for bounty programs on the platform, or c) burn.
Though the dutch auction token buyback would make it much more efficient and reasonable way to distribute platform profits, there’s still potential issues to deal with, including…
i) detailed settings such as the N-block period, starting&ending prices of dutch auction, etc.
ii) there might potentially remain a small number of HODLers who refuses to sell, and the profit remains unclaimed on the platform.
iii) New investors might experience high entry barriers.
While SlotNSlot team is researching on possible profit share models, any suggestions for better methods would be appreciated. We look forward to get feedbacks and contributions from all Ethereum & blockchain societies.
The dev team is currently finishing the improvement on game processing logics, and the super-fast playing demo video will be uploaded anytime soon.
Check out our
WebPage // Whitepaper // Github // Twitter // HipChat // Reddit
*you can join our hipchat without sign up
**we’ve newly created our subreddit. please share your thoughts!A cisgender man connected with a Florida Christian convention accosted a cisgender woman with a Bible as she exited an “All Genders” restroom at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando. The man, shouting about Biblical interpretations of gender while waving his bible around wildly, apparently assumed the cisgender woman was a transgender woman who was participating in a nearby LGBT media convention.
The incident came to light when the hotel publicly apologized to the LGBT media convention, on behalf of the hotel owner, Harris Rosen, for the incident and stationed a security guard next to the unisex restroom to prevent further disturbances.
A representative for |
The mayor proposed allocating $16 million to the Birmingham Public Library. The council wants to fund the library at $17.6 million. In his initial budget proposal, the mayor had suggested $15.6 million.
Birmingham City Schools would receive $3.6 million in city money in the mayor's new budget. The council wants to fund schools at $3.9 million. The mayor's new proposal is about $1.3 million more than what the mayor initially allocated.
The City Council's proposed budgetallocates $6.5 million for neighborhoods, which includes weed abatement and home demolition, $4.6 million for Birmingham City Schools, $2.1 million for public libraries and $5.1 million for employee raises and $500,000 for the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.
The council's changes include giving an additional $1.5 million to Birmingham City Schools, $500,000 in additional funds for police vehicles and an additional $500,000 for weed abatement and $1 million for home demolition.Movie theaters and studios haven’t had a lot to be thankful for this fall.
Painful flops have outnumbered the hits, as “By the Sea,” “Our Brand Is Crisis,” “Burnt” and others have fallen victim to audience indifference. Even “Spectre,” “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2” and other blockbusters have trailed previous entries in the franchises they represent, disappointing analysts who were expecting to receive a bigger bump from James Bond and Katniss.
The hope is that a box office that’s been huffing and wheezing will catch its breath and regroup heading into Thanksgiving. There’s certainly some promising offerings at the multiplexes, among them Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur,” which should attract family crowds and “Creed,” the “Rocky” spinoff that has sparked talk of an Oscar for Sylvester Stallone.
Thanksgiving tends to be one of the busiest times for movie-going, but last year’s holiday was lackluster, with “Penguins of Madagascar” and “Horrible Bosses 2” dying quick deaths at the ticket booths. The 2015 edition of “turkey day” seems healthier.
“The Good Dinosaur” seems best positioned to thrive in this climate, despite receiving reviews that are more lukewarm than the rapturous critical response that routinely greets the animation house’s films. The picture opens on Tuesday night, just in time to cash in on school holidays, and should bring in $60 million over its first five days. It will screen in more than 3,700 theaters, roughly 75% of which will offer 3D shows.
Related All Eight Rocky Movies Ranked Including 'Creed II' Celebrities Don't Have to Pay You for Movie Ideas You Tweet at Them, Judge Rules
Disney, Pixar’s parent company, didn’t provide a budget, but their films usually cost between $175 million to $200 million. It marks the first time ever that Pixar has released two films in the same year. It scored a major hit last summer with “Inside Out.”
“The Good Dinosaur” may be able to secure a first place finish, but a lot depends on how “Mockingjay — Part 2” holds up in its sophomore weekend. The “Hunger Games” finale opened to $101 million, but that was a big drop over its predecessor, which kicked off to more than $121 million in 2014. “Mockingjay — Part 1” went on to make $82.7 million for the five-day Thanksgiving holiday, but part deux could have difficulty matching that figure given its weaker start.
Then there’s “Creed,” which was barely registering on tracking before reviews started leaking out and critics began losing their collective mind over a series that had swapped Ivan Drago for emotional pathos and reinvigorated itself in the process. The film reunites the “Fruitvale Station” team of Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler for the story of Apollo Creed’s son and his quest to prove himself in the ring. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and New Line produced the $37 million production, with Warner Bros. is distributing the film in more than 3,000 locations. Look for “Creed” to do $33 million over its first five days.
That leaves Fox’s “Victor Frankenstein” struggling to get noticed among the new wide releases. The $40 million horror film is looking at a five-day bow of $12 million when it debuts in 2,700 locations. Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy star in the monster movie revival, which has been moved around several times on the release schedule.
In the arthouse realm, the holiday period will host the four theater debut of “The Danish Girl,” Tom Hooper’s acclaimed look at a transgender artist (Eddie Redmayne) undergoing one of the first sex change operations. Focus Features is backing the film, which should factor into the Oscar race.III-V said: Thank you CD I have been waiting to jump back into this game!.. Click to expand...
So of course it's fixed now, so where are the persons who said it would not and could not be fixed..CD who? Maybe you mean Compact Disc, certainly not Crystal Dynamics.........It's because of Crystal Dynamics we have inputlag-framepacing issues in this game in the first place....I'm thinking it's a no-brainer that Square Enix's next update for FFXV later this month, will bring some graphical/performance enhancements to FFXV as well as a fix for the framepacing issues in that game.So yes, framepacing is something that can be fixed, it's even better if you cater to eliminate it or prevent it from ever happening during the development process. RAD has much to teach other devs in that regard.As we gear up for the 2017 fantasy football season, members of the QB List staff are revealing their 10 bold predictions for the upcoming season. These are predictions that could happen, but aren’t likely to. Here are Ben Palmer’s 10 bold predictions for the 2017 season:
1. Evan Engram finishes the year as a top-10 tight end
Rookie tight ends rarely ever do anything, no matter how talented they are. Even Jason Witten, Antonio Gates, and Tony Gonzalez caught fewer than 40 passes in their rookie years and they’re considered to be three of the greatest tight ends in history. Aside from Rob Gronkowski (whose rookie season was very good but not insane), no matter the tight end, they rarely produce much in their rookie year. Some are thinking Tampa Bay Buccaneers rookie O.J. Howard might break that trend, but I think Evan Engram could be that guy. The guy has loads of talent and is in all honesty, built more like a receiver than a tight end. Eli Manning has had productive tight ends in the past, and he’s got a really talented one in Engram. Working his way into the top-10 might not be all that difficult either. Whether it’s injury questions (Gronk and Jordan Reed), questions of age (Jason Witten and Delanie Walker) or whatever else, there’s some uncertainty in the top-10 right now. Could Engram slide his way into there? I think so.
2. Jeremy Maclin finishes the year as a top-15 wide receiver
The Baltimore Ravens grabbed Maclin in the offseason to fill the role that Steve Smith had for them last year, and I think he’ll do just that if not more. The Ravens threw the ball a ton last year (to their detriment if we’re being honest). Joe Flacco had the second-most passing attempts in the NFL, just one behind Drew Brees, and with Marty Mornhinweg back as offensive coordinator and a less-than-impressive Terrance West in at running back, I wouldn’t be shocked if the Ravens throw a ton yet again. If they do, expect a lot of targets to go the way of both Danny Woodhead (as Flacco loves dumping off to his running back) and Maclin. Before last year, Maclin had two straight years of over 1,000 receiving yards and being that he was on the Kansas City Chiefs (who hate to throw the ball more than ten yards) for one of those years, that’s pretty impressive. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that Flacco is a better quarterback than Alex Smith, and I think that Flacco’s going to be throwing a ton of target’s Maclin’s way. Sure, some will go to Mike Wallace and Breshad Perriman, but both of them have one thing they’re really good at, and that’s running long. Maclin’s good at everything else.
3. Carson Wentz finishes the year as a top-10 quarterback
Boy, aren’t I original picking Carson Wentz as a sleeper pick? Well, there’s a good reason people like him this year. He’s finally got a legitimate NFL-caliber receiving corps in front of him with Alshon Jeffrey and Torrey Smith coming to town, not to mention all the positive buzz around Nelson Agholor. Plus, he’s got LeGarrette Blount for a running back, who should be relatively productive behind what is arguably the best offensive line in football (assuming Lane Johnson is healthy), and adding in ageless wonder Darren Sproles as a receiving back weapon doesn’t hurt either. NFL players typically make their biggest leaps in productiveness between years one and two, and I think Wentz could make a huge leap coming into this season.
4. Terrelle Pryor finishes the year with at least 1,200 yards and at least 10 touchdowns
I think that, if the Washington Redskins use Terrelle Pryor correctly, he could be awesome. The Cleveland Browns didn’t really use Pryor correctly all the time last year. They had him run a lot of go routes, and while Pryor is fast and can win some jump balls, he’s not blindingly fast enough to consistently beat corners one-on-one. Pryor’s strength lies in slant routes and stuff that gets him inside cornerbacks. Once he’s in on a cornerback, if the quarterback leads him well enough (and certainly Kirk Cousins is a skilled enough QB to do that), the corner has no chance of stopping Pryor from catching the ball; he’s just too tall and too long. I think the Redskins know this and saw this in Cleveland, which is why they signed him. They lacked a solid red zone target outside of Jordan Reed last year (and Reed can’t stay healthy), and I think Pryor is going to be that guy. With all the targets available in Washington with the departures of Pierre Garcon and DeSean Jackson, plus the touchdown potential and the fact that Washington will likely be a pass-first offense, I think Pryor could have a huge year.
5. LeSean McCoy leads the NFL in rushing yards and leads the Buffalo Bills in receptions
LeSean McCoy was pretty awesome last year, especially considering he missed two games, as he averaged 5.4 yards per carry and caught 50 balls. The Bills are a run-first team and I think that they’re going to absolutely run McCoy into the ground this year. With Sammy Watkins gone, and Jordan Matthews somewhat of an injury concern, the Bills will more than likely rely on McCoy to carry their offense. Being that Tyrod Taylor is a serious running threat, opposing defenses won’t be able to stack the box on McCoy, opening things up for him, and being that the Bills passing game is what it is, McCoy will likely be seeing a bunch of passing targets too.
6. Michael Thomas will be the top receiver in fantasy football
We saw just how good Michael Thomas is last year with his 1,137 yards and nine touchdowns, and now with Brandin Cooks gone, Thomas is the number one receiver in the New Orleans Saints offense, which is always a good thing. Drew Brees is one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL (HOT TAKE ALERT) and Thomas is exceptionally talented. Like I said earlier about Evan Engram, NFL players make their biggest strides from year one to year two, and if Thomas is able to significantly improve on what he did last year, he could easily be the top receiver in fantasy football this year, especially since there are questions about at least two of big three: with Odell Beckham Jr., there’s injury questions, plus he’s got a increasingly-bad quarterback in Eli Manning, and Julio Jones is losing Kyle Shanahan who helped make Matt Ryan awesome last year. Sure, it’ll still be hard for Thomas to top OBJ, Jones, and especially Antonio Brown, but he’s in the right situation and has enough talent to do it.
7. Brian Hoyer will force his way into being a top-12 quarterback
Kyle Shanahan showed that he could turn Matt Ryan from “Eh, I guess he’s better than Joe Flacco?” to an MVP. Now yes, plenty of that was Ryan himself, but Shanahan played a huge part, and now he’s moved to the San Francisco 49ers and Brian Hoyer, who despite being on miserable teams most of his starting career, has been a good NFL quarterback. He’s not been a great quarterback, but he’s certainly been serviceable, and with Shanahan at the helm, he could quite easily have the best year of his career, especially with Pierre Garcon as his top receiver. Plus, Marquise Goodwin, and Aldrick Robinson aren’t exactly slouches at the receiver position either. Not only that, but he’s got Carlos Hyde at running back, who’s had excellent reports coming out of the preseason. This could be a solid offense that could potentially overcome their poor defense and offensive line, and if they do, watch out because Brian Hoyer might just be slinging the ball (especially if there’s a bunch of junk time, and I bet there will be).
8. Keenan Allen will lead the NFL in receptions
Keenan Allen has had some serious bad luck. If you think of him as injury prone, that’s honestly fair, but in reality, he isn’t. He broke his collarbone in 2014, had a kidney injury in 2015, and tore his ACL in 2016. These have just been really bad luck injuries, not necessarily injuries that you’d expect to continue to nag him, and when he’s been playing, he’s been awesome. Before he got hurt in 2015, he was on pace to end the season with around 140 or so receptions. Now the Chargers passing attack is more developed with the emergence of Hunter Henry and Tyrell Williams, not to mention whenever Mike Williams gets healthy, which means that secondaries won’t be focusing solely on Allen, and given the volume he’s gotten so far, I think there’s a decent chance that he stays healthy all year and catches a ton of balls.
9. Zay Jones finishes the year as a top-20 wide receiver
I liked Zay Jones a lot as a draft pick out of East Carolina, and I liked him as the number-two guy behind Sammy Watkins. Now, Watkins is gone, and while Jordan Matthews is in Buffalo now, he hasn’t exactly set the world on fire throughout his short career (he’s also not super healthy right now). That being said, Matthews is still just 25 and if you wanted to say he’s finally going to break out as the number one guy in Buffalo, I think that’s fair. But I think the Bills like Jones, and I think they trust him. Will he be the “number one” guy while Matthews is healthy? Perhaps not. But I think Tyrod Taylor will be looking Jones’ way a lot, and if Matthews is out at all, look for the NCAA D-I record holder for single-season receptions to have a big year.
10. Matt Ryan finishes the year outside the top-15 in quarterbacks,
Like I mentioned earlier, Kyle Shanahan helped turn Matt Ryan into the MVP of the NFL, and what benefits he’s bringing to the 49ers by joining them, he’s taking away from the Atlanta Falcons by leaving them. Last year was far and away Ryan’s best season, the dude was a statistical monster, and a lot of it had to do with Shanahan’s offense. I don’t think that Ryan is going to necessarily be a total bust, but could we see Matt Ryan back down to some version of the Matt Ryan of old? I think that’s entirely possible. Sure, he’s got great weapons in Julio Jones and Devonta Freeman, but he’s had great weapons before (Tony Gonzalez and Roddy White for example) and he didn’t do close to what he did last season. I think regardless, a regression is in store for Ryan, and it could be a significant one.Fire ecology is a scientific discipline concerned with natural processes involving fire in an ecosystem and the ecological effects, the interactions between fire and the abiotic and biotic components of an ecosystem, and the role as an ecosystem process. Many ecosystems, particularly prairie, savanna, chaparral and coniferous forests, have evolved with fire as an essential contributor to habitat vitality and renewal.[1] Many plant species in fire-affected environments require fire to germinate, establish, or to reproduce. Wildfire suppression not only eliminates these species, but also the animals that depend upon them.[2]
Campaigns in the United States have historically molded public opinion to believe that wildfires are always harmful to nature. This view is based on the outdated belief that ecosystems progress toward an equilibrium and that any disturbance, such as fire, disrupts the harmony of nature. More recent ecological research has shown, however, that fire is an integral component in the function and biodiversity of many natural habitats, and that the organisms within these communities have adapted to withstand, and even to exploit, natural wildfire. More generally, fire is now regarded as a 'natural disturbance', similar to flooding, wind-storms, and landslides, that has driven the evolution of species and controls the characteristics of ecosystems.[3]
Fire suppression, in combination with other human-caused environmental changes, may have resulted in unforeseen consequences for natural ecosystems. Some large wildfires in the United States have been blamed on years of fire suppression and the continuing expansion of people into fire-adapted ecosystems, but climate change is more likely responsible.[4] Land managers are faced with tough questions regarding how to restore a natural fire regime, but allowing wildfires to burn is the least expensive and likely most effective method.[5]
A combination of photos taken at a photo point at Florida Panther NWR. The photos are panoramic and cover a 360 degree view from a monitoring point. These photos range from pre-burn to 2 year post burn.
Fire components [ edit ]
A fire regime describes the characteristics of fire and how it interacts with a particular ecosystem.[6] Its "severity" is a term that ecologists use to refer to the impact that a fire has on an ecosystem. Ecologists can define this in many ways, but one way is through an estimate of plant mortality. Fire can burn at three levels. Ground fires will burn through soil that is rich in organic matter. Surface fires will burn through dead plant material that is lying on the ground. Crown fires will burn in the tops of shrubs and trees. Ecosystems generally experience a mix of all three.[7]
Fires will often break out during a dry season, but in some areas wildfires may also commonly occur during a time of year when lightning is prevalent. The frequency over a span of years at which fire will occur at a particular location is a measure of how common wildfires are in a given ecosystem. It is either defined as the average interval between fires at a given site, or the average interval between fires in an equivalent specified area.[7]
Defined as the energy released per unit length of fireline (kW m−1), wildfire intensity can be estimated either as
the product of the linear spread rate (m s −1 ), the low heat of combustion (kJ kg −1 ), and the combusted fuel mass per unit area,
or it can be estimated from the flame length.[8]
Abiotic responses [ edit ]
Fires can affect soils through heating and combustion processes. Depending on the temperatures of the soils caused by the combustion processes, different effects will happen- from evaporation of water at the lower temperature ranges, to the combustion of soil organic matter and formation of pyrogenic organic matter, otherwise known as charcoal.[9]
Fires can cause changes in soil nutrients through a variety of mechanisms, which include oxidation, volatilization, erosion, and leaching by water, but the event must usually be of high temperatures in order of significant loss of nutrients to occur. However, quantity of nutrients available in soils are usually increased due to the ash that is generated, and this is made quickly available, as opposed to the slow release of nutrients by decomposition.[10] Rock spalling (or thermal exfoliation) accelerates weathering of rock and potentially the release of some nutrients.
Increase in the pH of the soil following a fire is commonly observed, most likely due to the formation of calcium carbonate, and the subsequent decomposition of this calcium carbonate to calcium oxide when temperatures get even higher.[9] It could also be due to the increased cation content in the soil due to the ash, which temporarily increases soil pH. Microbial activity in the soil might also increase due to the heating of soil and increased nutrient content in the soil, though studies have also found complete loss of microbes on the top layer of soil after a fire.[10][11] Overall, soils become more basic (higher pH) following fires because of acid combustion. By driving novel chemical reactions at high temperatures, fire can even alter the texture and structure of soils by affecting the clay content and the soil's porosity.
Removal of vegetation following a fire can cause several effects on the soil, such as increasing the temperatures of the soil during the day due to increased solar radiation on the soil surface, and greater cooling due to loss of radiative heat at night. Fewer leaves to intercept rain will also cause more rain to reach the soil surface, and with fewer plants to absorb the water, the amount of water content in the soils might increase. However, it might be seen that ash can be water repellent when dry, and therefore water content and availability might not actually increase.[12]
Biotic responses and adaptations [ edit ]
Plants [ edit ]
Lodgepole pine cones
Plants have evolved many adaptations to cope with fire. Of these adaptations, one of the best-known is likely pyriscence, where maturation and release of seeds is triggered, in whole or in part, by fire or smoke; this behaviour is often erroneously called serotiny, although this term truly denotes the much broader category of seed release activated by any stimulus. All pyriscent plants are serotinous, but not all serotinous plants are pyriscent (some are necriscent, hygriscent, xeriscent, soliscent, or some combination thereof). On the other hand, germination of seed activated by trigger is not to be confused with pyriscence; it is known as physiological dormancy.
In chaparral communities in Southern California, for example, some plants have leaves coated in flammable oils that encourage an intense fire.[13] This heat causes their fire-activated seeds to germinate (an example of dormancy) and the young plants can then capitalize on the lack of competition in a burnt landscape. Other plants have smoke-activated seeds, or fire-activated buds. The cones of the Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) are, conversely, pyriscent: they are sealed with a resin that a fire melts away, releasing the seeds.[14] Many plant species, including the shade-intolerant giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum), require fire to make gaps in the vegetation canopy that will let in light, allowing their seedlings to compete with the more shade-tolerant seedlings of other species, and so establish themselves.[15] Because their stationary nature precludes any fire avoidance, plant species may only be fire-intolerant, fire-tolerant or fire-resistant.[16]
Fire intolerance [ edit ]
Fire-intolerant plant species tend to be highly flammable and are destroyed completely by fire. Some of these plants and their seeds may simply fade from the community after a fire and not return; others have adapted to ensure that their offspring survives into the next generation. "Obligate seeders" are plants with large, fire-activated seed banks that germinate, grow, and mature rapidly following a fire, in order to reproduce and renew the seed bank before the next fire.[16][17] Seeds may contain the receptor protein KAI2, that is activated by the growth hormones karrikin released by the fire.[18]
Fire tolerance. Typical regrowth after an Australian bushfire
Fire tolerance [ edit ]
Fire-tolerant species are able to withstand a degree of burning and continue growing despite damage from fire. These plants are sometimes referred to as "resprouters." Ecologists have shown that some species of resprouters store extra energy in their roots to aid recovery and re-growth following a fire.[16][17] For example, after an Australian bushfire, the Mountain Grey Gum tree (Eucalyptus cypellocarpa) starts producing a mass of shoots of leaves from the base of the tree all the way up the trunk towards the top, making it look like a black stick completely covered with young, green leaves.
Fire resistance [ edit ]
Fire-resistant plants suffer little damage during a characteristic fire regime. These include large trees whose flammable parts are high above surface fires. Mature ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) is an example of a tree species that suffers virtually no crown damage under a naturally mild fire regime, because it sheds its lower, vulnerable branches as it matures.[16][19]
Animals, birds and microbes [ edit ]
A mixed flock of hawks hunting in and around a bushfire
Like plants, animals display a range of abilities to cope with fire, but they differ from most plants in that they must avoid the actual fire to survive. Although birds are vulnerable when nesting, they are generally able to escape a fire; indeed they often profit from being able to take prey fleeing from a fire and to recolonize burned areas quickly afterwards. Some anthropological and ethno-ornithological evidence suggests that certain species of fire-foraging raptors may engage in intentional fire propagation to flush out prey.[20][21] Mammals are often capable of fleeing a fire, or seeking cover if they can burrow. Amphibians and reptiles may avoid flames by burrowing into the ground or using the burrows of other animals. Amphibians in particular are able to take refuge in water or very wet mud.[16]
Some arthropods also take shelter during a fire, although the heat and smoke may actually attract some of them, to their peril.[22] Microbial organisms in the soil vary in their heat tolerance but are more likely to be able to survive a fire the deeper they are in the soil. A low fire intensity, a quick passing of the flames and a dry soil will also help. An increase in available nutrients after the fire has passed may result in larger microbial communities than before the fire.[23] The generally greater heat tolerance of bacteria relative to fungi makes it possible for soil microbial population diversity to change following a fire, depending on the severity of the fire, the depth of the microbes in the soil, and the presence of plant cover.[24] Certain species of fungi, such as Cylindrocarpon destructans appear to be unaffected by combustion contaminants, which can inhibit re-population of burnt soil by other microorganisms, and therefore have a higher chance of surviving fire disturbance and then recolonizing and out-competing other fungal species afterwards.[25]
Fire and ecological succession [ edit ]
Fire behavior is different in every ecosystem and the organisms in those ecosystems have adapted accordingly. One sweeping generality is that in all ecosystems, fire creates a mosaic of different habitat patches, with areas ranging from those having just been burned to those that have been untouched by fire for many years. This is a form of ecological succession in which a freshly burned site will progress through continuous and directional phases of colonization following the destruction caused by the fire.[26] Ecologists usually characterize succession through the changes in vegetation that successively arise. After a fire, the first species to re-colonize will be those with seeds are already present in the soil, or those with seeds are able to travel into the burned area quickly. These are generally fast-growing herbaceous plants that require light and are intolerant of shading. As time passes, more slowly growing, shade-tolerant woody species will suppress some of the herbaceous plants.[27] Conifers are often early successional species, while broad leaf trees frequently replace them in the absence of fire. Hence, many conifer forests are themselves dependent upon recurring fire.[28]
Different species of plants, animals, and microbes specialize in exploiting different stages in this process of succession, and by creating these different types of patches, fire allows a greater number of species to exist within a landscape. Soil characteristics will be a factor in determining the specific nature of a fire-adapted ecosystem, as will climate and topography.
Some examples of fire in different ecosystems [ edit ]
Forests [ edit ]
Mild to moderate fires burn in the forest understory, removing small trees and herbaceous groundcover. High-severity fires will burn into the crowns of the trees and kill most of the dominant vegetation. Crown fires may require support from ground fuels to maintain the fire in the forest canopy (passive crown fires), or the fire may burn in the canopy independently of any ground fuel support (an active crown fire). High-severity fire creates complex early seral forest habitat, or snag forest with high levels of biodiversity. When a forest burns frequently and thus has less plant litter build-up, below-ground soil temperatures rise only slightly and will not be lethal to roots that lie deep in the soil.[22] Although other characteristics of a forest will influence the impact of fire upon it, factors such as climate and topography play an important role in determining fire severity and fire extent.[29] Fires spread most widely during drought years, are most severe on upper slopes and are influenced by the type of vegetation that is growing.
Forests in British Columbia [ edit ]
In Canada, forests cover about 10% of the land area and yet harbor 70% of the country’s bird and terrestrial mammal species. Natural fire regimes are important in maintaining a diverse assemblage of vertebrate species in up to twelve different forest types in British Columbia.[30] Different species have adapted to exploit the different stages of succession, regrowth and habitat change that occurs following an episode of burning, such as downed trees and debris. The characteristics of the initial fire, such as its size and intensity, cause the habitat to evolve differentially afterwards and influence how vertebrate species are able to use the burned areas.[30]
Shrublands [ edit ]
Lightning-sparked wildfires are frequent occurrences on shrublands and grasslands in Nevada
Shrub fires typically concentrate in the canopy and spread continuously if the shrubs are close enough together. Shrublands are typically dry and are prone to accumulations of highly volatile fuels, especially on hillsides. Fires will follow the path of least moisture and the greatest amount of dead fuel material. Surface and below-ground soil temperatures during a burn are generally higher than those of forest fires because the centers of combustion lie closer to the ground, although this can vary greatly.[22] Common plants in shrubland or chaparral include manzanita, chamise and Coyote Brush.
California shrublands [ edit ]
California shrubland, commonly known as chaparral, is a widespread plant community of low growing species, typically on arid sloping areas of the California Coast Ranges or western foothills of the Sierra Nevada. There are a number of common shrubs and tree shrub forms in this association, including salal, toyon, coffeeberry and Western poison oak.[31] Regeneration following a fire is usually a major factor in the association of these species.
South African Fynbos shrublands [ edit ]
Fynbos shrublands occur in a small belt across South Africa. The plant species in this ecosystem are highly diverse, yet the majority of these species are obligate seeders, that is, a fire will cause germination of the seeds and the plants will begin a new life-cycle because of it. These plants may have coevolved into obligate seeders as a response to fire and nutrient-poor soils.[32] Because fire is common in this ecosystem and the soil has limited nutrients, it is most efficient for plants to produce many seeds and then die in the next fire. Investing a lot of energy in roots to survive the next fire when those roots will be able to extract little extra benefit from the nutrient-poor soil would be less efficient. It is possible that the rapid generation time that these obligate seeders display has led to more rapid evolution and speciation in this ecosystem, resulting in its highly diverse plant community.[32]
Grasslands [ edit ]
Grasslands burn more readily than forest and shrub ecosystems, with the fire moving through the stems and leaves of herbaceous plants and only lightly heating the underlying soil, even in cases of high intensity. In most grassland ecosystems, fire is the primary mode of decomposition, making it crucial in the recycling of nutrients.[22] In some grassland systems, fire only became the primary mode of decomposition after the disappearance of large migratory herds of browsing or grazing megafauna driven by predator pressure. In the absence of functional communities of large migratory herds of herbivorous megafauna and attendant predators, overuse of fire to maintain grassland ecosystems may lead to excessive oxidation, loss of carbon, and desertification in susceptible climates.[33] Some grassland ecosystems respond poorly to fire. [34]
North American grasslands [ edit ]
In North America fire-adapted invasive grasses such as Bromus tectorum contribute to increased fire frequency which exerts selective pressure against native species. This is a concern for grasslands in the Western United States.[34]
In less arid grassland presettlement fires worked in concert [35] with grazing to create a healthy grassland ecosystem [36] as indicated by the accumulation of soil organic matter significantly altered by fire. [37] [38] [39] The tallgrass prairie ecosystem in the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas and Oklahoma is responding positively to the current use of fire in combination with grazing.[40]
South African savanna [ edit ]
In the savanna of South Africa, recently burned areas have new growth that provides palatable and nutritious forage compared to older, tougher grasses. This new forage attracts large herbivores from areas of unburned and grazed grassland that has been kept short by constant grazing. On these unburned "lawns", only those plant species adapted to heavy grazing are able to persist; but the distraction provided by the newly burned areas allows grazing-intolerant grasses to grow back into the lawns that have been temporarily abandoned, so allowing these species to persist within that ecosystem.[41]
Longleaf pine savannas [ edit ]
Yellow pitcher plant is dependent upon recurring fire in coastal plain savannas and flatwoods.
Much of the southeastern United States was once open longleaf pine forest with a rich understory of grasses, sedges, carnivorous plants and orchids. The above maps shows that these ecosystems (coded as pale blue) had the highest fire frequency of any habitat, once per decade or less. Without fire, deciduous forest trees invade, and their shade eliminates both the pines and the understory. Some of the typical plants associated with fire include Yellow Pitcher Plant and Rose pogonia. The abundance and diversity of such plants is closely related to fire frequency. Rare animals such as gopher tortoises and indigo snakes also depend upon these open grasslands and flatwoods.[42] Hence, the restoration of fire is a priority to maintain species composition and biological diversity.[43]
Fire in wetlands [ edit ]
Although it may seem strange, many kinds of wetlands are also influenced by fire. This usually occurs during periods of drought. In landscapes with peat soils, such as bogs, the peat substrate itself may burn, leaving holes that refill with water as new ponds. Fires that are less intense will remove accumulated litter and allow other wetland plants to regenerate from buried seeds, or from rhizomes. Wetlands that are influenced by fire include coastal marshes, wet prairies, peat bogs, floodplains, prairie marshes and flatwoods. [44] Since wetlands can store large amounts of carbon in peat, the fire frequency of vast northern peatlands is linked to processes controlling the carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere, and to the phenomenon of global warming. [45] Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) is abundant in wetlands and plays a critical role in their ecology. In the Florida Everglades, a significant portion of the DOC is "dissolved charcoal" indicating that fire can play a critical role in wetland ecosystems.[46]
Fire suppression [ edit ]
Fire serves many important functions within fire-adapted ecosystems. Fire plays an important role in nutrient cycling, diversity maintenance and habitat structure. The suppression of fire can lead to unforeseen changes in ecosystems that often adversely affect the plants, animals and humans that depend upon that habitat. Wildfires that deviate from a historical fire regime because of fire suppression are called "uncharacteristic fires".
Chaparral communities [ edit ]
In 2003, southern California witnessed powerful chaparral wildfires. Hundreds of homes and hundreds of thousands of acres of land went up in flames. Extreme fire weather (low humidity, low fuel moisture and high winds) and the accumulation of dead plant material from 8 years of drought, contributed to a catastrophic outcome. Although some have maintained that fire suppression contributed to an unnatural buildup of fuel loads,[47] a detailed analysis of historical fire data has showed that this may not have been the case.[48] Fire suppression activities had failed to exclude fire from the southern California chaparral. Research showing differences in fire size and frequency between southern California and Baja has been used to imply that the larger fires north of the border are the result of fire suppression, but this opinion has been challenged by numerous investigators and is no longer supported by the majority of fire ecologists.[citation needed]
One consequence of the fires in 2003 has been the increased density of invasive and non-native plant species that have quickly colonized burned areas, especially those that had already been burned in the previous 15 years. Because shrubs in these communities are adapted to a particular historical fire regime, altered fire regimes may change the selective pressures on plants and favor invasive and non-native species that are better able to exploit the novel post-fire conditions.[49]
Fish impacts [ edit ]
The Boise National Forest is a US national forest located north and east of the city of Boise, Idaho. Following several uncharacteristically large wildfires, an immediately negative impact on fish populations was observed, posing particular danger to small and isolated fish populations.[50] In the long term, however, fire appears to rejuvenate fish habitats by causing hydraulic changes that increase flooding and lead to silt removal and the deposition of a favorable habitat substrate. This leads to larger post-fire populations of the fish that are able to recolonize these improved areas.[50] |
wrote of government power, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." He may still be right, but there's now a decent chance someone will be there with a cell-phone camera to post it on YouTube. And exposing abuse of power is half the battle.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
TV star Martin Shaw is back in Durham shooting what is believed to be the last-ever series of Inspector George Gently.
Cast and crew will be there on Saturday - Shaw’s 72nd birthday - to film the latest scenes for the hit BBC police drama.
To fans’ dismay, the series - which stars Shaw as the eponymous crime-cracking inspector - is said to be coming to an end with two final feature-length stories.
They make up the eighth series of the sixties-set drama which is based on novels by Alan Hunter which have been adapted for TV by Gateshead-born writer Peter Flannery who created Our Friends In The North.
Despite being set in the region, the initial series were filmed in Ireland until a grant from Northern Film & Media encouraged producers to make a move to its “proper” home.
In 2010, Martin Shaw and Lee Ingleby - who plays Gently’s sidekick Detective Sergeant John Bacchus - filmed in Durham for the first time, making use of such stand-out locations as Palace Green, giving Durham Cathedral and Castle background roles.
Its star called the local scenery “breathtaking” and “spectacular”.
The period drama, which sees him play Gently as an old-school detective, began in 2017 and its storylines have moved on in time over the years.
Its North East debut, which featured the murder of a woman in Northumberland, was based in World Cup year, 1966.
The new stories - Gently Liberated and Gently and the New Age - are said to be set in the 1970s and to feature a possible miscarriage of justice and a case involving corrupt police officers.
A miners’ strike is also rumoured to feature. In 1972 a real-life miners’ strike involved a dispute between the NUM and Edward Heath’s Conservative government.
Fans will hugely miss the series which has brought further acclaim to Shaw, former star of The Professionals and Judge John Deed.
He picked up the Best Drama accolade for Inspector George Gently at the Royal Television Society awards on Tyneside in 2015, where it beat competition from other North East-set successes including ITV’s Vera and the CBBC mini-series Harriet’s Army.CLOSE Syrian TV identifies this as the Syrian airfield hit by U.S. missiles. The Syrian military is calling the U.S. strike a "blatant act of aggression." USA TODAY
Satellite images of the Shayrat Airfield in Shayrat Airfield is pictured in Homs region of Syria. President Trump ordered a cruise missile strike against Syria in retaliation for the chemical weapons attack that killed 86 people. The Sharyrat Airfield is the suspected target of the cruise missiles. (Photo11: Pentagon)
WASHINGTON — Russia could have stopped its Syrian ally from conducting Tuesday's deadly poison gas attack that killed dozens of civilians, but did not, U.S. officials said Friday.
That assessment, from a senior military officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, went even further than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's assessment that Russia was "complicit" or "simply incompetent" in enforcing a 2013 agreement that forced Syria to give up their chemical weapons.
And it raises the stakes for the U.S. involvement in the region, as the Trump administration tries to stanch the deepening humanitarian crisis in Syria and prevent President Bashar Assad from using chemical weapons. But those actions come at the risk of increased friction with Moscow, which has supported the Assad regime and condemned the U.S. airstrikes.
The U.S. airstrikes were carefully designed to avoid hitting Russian personnel at the Syrian air base, U.S. officials said Friday. But they said mere presence of as many as 100 Russian personnel at an air base used to launch a chemical attack raises questions about whether Russia knew about the attacks and failed to stop them. The defense officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the operation.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer deflected questions about whether the U.S. was seeking to send a signal to Russia. "The actions that were taken were against the Assad regime, and I’m not going to say anything more than that," he said.
President Trump is "prepared to do more" to stop the civil war in Syria if Russia cannot convince President Bashar Assad to abide by ceasefire agreements, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told the U.N. Security Council on Friday.
"We are prepared to do more, but we hope that will not be necessary. It is time for all civilized nations to stop the horrors that are taking place in Syria and demand a political solution," Haley said.
The U.S. missile attack, which was launched at 7:40 p.m. ET Thursday, was Trump's first major military action against another country and involved Syria, a nation that Trump had previously considered an ally of convenience in the fight against the Islamic State. But Trump's reluctance to involve U.S. forces in Syria began to melt Tuesday morning, when Trump was first presented with details of the chemical attack during his morning intelligence briefing. White House press secretary Sean Spicer gave a detailed timeline of Trump's deliberations Friday.
Trump asked for more information, and by 8 p.m. that night a deputies committee of the National Security Council deputies committee considered possible options for a strike.
During a full NSC meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Trump reviewed the options in detail and he gave the final approval for the attack at 4 p.m. Thursday after meeting in Florida with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Tillerson.
The U.S. strike, which Pentagon officials and Spicer called successful, led to a Syrian condemnation Friday morning. Assad's government called it a "blatant act of aggression."
Nine civilians were killed, including four children, when the projectiles hit the base and nearby villages, the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported. Several others were injured.
Assad's office called the strikes "shortsighted," “reckless” and “irresponsible.”
CLOSE Russian aerial video shows the damage done to a Syrian airfield after a U.S. missile strike. USA TODAY
Timeline of Syria chemical attack
Two Pentagon officers sketched out the timeline leading up to Syria's April 4 attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province that killed 86 people, including 27 children.
The Syrian regime, feeling pressure from opposition forces and fearing the imminent loss of another key airfield, launched a series of chemical weapon attacks of increasing severity.
On March 25, Syrian aircraft dropped bombs carrying chlorine gas, a potentially lethal industrial agent. A subsequent attack, on March 30, appears to have used a nerve agent, the officers said.
The attack on April 4, almost certainly a chemical nerve agent, was the largest since 2013. That determination was made based on reports from Syria, although there has been no U.S. government validation. However, the Shayrat air base, where the planes carried out the attack and chemical weapons are believed to be stored, had been linked in the past to chemical weapons storage and military personnel trained to use them.
The attack occurred at about 6:50 a.m. local time. Within minutes, patients with symptoms of chemical exposure began streaming into local hospitals, the officers said.
Aerial imagery showed a small crater in a roadway consistent with a chemical weapon, the first of the two officers said. Destruction was minimal and there was staining around the crater's rim, indicating the presence of chemicals..
A drone circled the hospital, spying on the stream of ambulances and people entering. The drone left and returned. Soon after, a warplane attacked the hospital.
By April 5, Pentagon planners began developing military options for discussion by the National Security Council, top Pentagon officials and the president.
Four hours after Trump made the call to attack Thursday, 59 Tomahawk land-attack missiles launched from destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Each one hit its mark, the officers said.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said six Syrian jets were destroyed but the air base's runway was intact. He said “the combat efficiency of the U.S. strike was very low" and 23 of the 59 missiles fired by the United States reached the base. "The place of the fall of the other missiles is unknown," Konashenkov said, according to Russia's TASS news agency.
The senior military officers flatly rejected that assessment, saying all 59 cruise missiles struck their targets, destroying an estimated 20 aircraft, hangars and other facilities at the airfield.
READ MORE:
U.S. launches strike on Syrian military airfield: Here's what we know
Analysis: Trump just ordered the kind of attack against Syria that he warned Obama against
Putin: U.S. 'act of aggression' damages relations with Moscow
How Trump came to make snap decision to strike Syria
What is sarin gas, the suspected nerve agent in the Syria attack?
Syria: U.S. now a partner of ISIS
The Syrian army said the missile strikes made the United States a “partner” of the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and other terrorist organizations.
Assad allies Russia and Iran also condemned the U.S. strikes, saying they violated international law.
"It is an act of aggression under a completely far-fetched pretext," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday, according to TASS. "This is reminiscent of the situation in 2003, when the U.S. and the U.K., along with some of their allies, invaded Iraq without the consent of the U.N. Security Council and in violation of international law."
It's unclear how much the Kremlin knew about the U.S. strikes before they happened. The Kremlin said it received advance warning from the United States about the strikes.
“No contacts were made with Moscow, with President Putin," Tillerson said late Thursday. “There were no discussions or prior contacts, nor have there been any since the attack, with Moscow.”
But there were certainly military-to-military communications with Russian forces in the region, under a process known as "de-confliction." That hotline was set up during the Obama administration to ensure that U.S. and Russian forces don't accidentally clash when taking action against Islamic State targets.
Despite Thursday's action, Russia agreed to maintain that hotline, the two Defense officials said.
CLOSE The U.S. fired missiles at a Syrian air base Thursday in response to what is believed to be a chemical attack on Syrian civilians earlier this week. Video provided by Newsy Newslook
Konashenkov said Russia will help Syria strengthen its air defenses to help “protect the most sensitive Syrian infrastructure facilities," the Associated Press reported.
Iran said the U.S. action was "dangerous, destructive and violates the principles of international law.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Bahram Ghasemi, said Iran condemned the strikes, “regardless of the perpetrators and the victims” of the chemical weapons attack and warned that the attack would “strengthen terrorists” and add to “the complexity of the situation in Syria and the region,” according to the semiofficial ISNA news agency.
Russia claimed the deaths Tuesday were caused by a Syrian strike on a terrorist chemical weapons facility, but the United States, other nations and human rights groups rejected that argument as baseless.
The 59 missiles, fired from the destroyers USS Porter and Ross in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, targeted the Shayrat Airfield in Homs province where Syria based warplanes used in the chemical attack, according to Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman. The missiles destroyed aircraft, hardened hangars, ammunition supply bunkers, air defense systems and radar at the base.
"As always, the U.S. took extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties and to comply with the Law of Armed Conflict. Every precaution was taken to execute this strike with minimal risk to personnel at the airfield," Davis said in a statement.
The Syrian army said the United States struck the air base without determining what happened or who was responsible for the chemical attack, which “sends wrong messages to the terrorist organizations that would embolden them further to use chemical weapons in the future every time they suffer heavy losses in the battlefield," SANA reported.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Vladimir Putin believed that Washington’s “total disregard for the use of chemical weapons by terrorists only exacerbates the situation significantly.”
"Putin also sees the strikes on Syria by the U.S. as an attempt to divert the attention of the international community from numerous civilians casualties in Iraq. Washington’s move impairs the Russian-U.S. relations, which are in a deplorable state, substantially," Peskov said, according to TASS.
Gregory Korte reported from Palm Beach, Fla. and Jane Onyanga-Omara reported from London.
CLOSE President Trump made a statement regarding the U.S. cruise missile strike on Syria after chemical weapons attack. USA TODAY
CLOSE Foreign affairs reporter Oren Dorell explains who is fighting whom in the Syrian Civil War in two minutes. USA TODAY
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2o9df4HBy the end of the night, following almost 11 hours of negotiations aimed at finding a way to save the crisis-plagued carmaker Opel from the clutches of bankruptcy, Germany's political elite looked exhausted. It was 4:15 a.m. on Thursday morning by the time the team emerged from the Chancellery, and most eyes had dark rings under them. Finance Minster Peer Steinbrück even mumbled something about how desperately he needed sleep.
REUTERS Chancellor Angela Merkel (third from left) with members of her cabinet during late night negotiations on the future of Opel in the Chancellery on Wednesday night.
But exhaustion wasn't the only problem. The talks, as quickly became clear, had failed. And as deep and dark as the rings under most eyes were, the flash of anger was likewise unmistakable -- anger at Germany's negotiating partners from the US.
Roland Koch, governor of the state of Hesse, which plays host to Opel headquarters, complained that the American role in the negotiations "was not exactly helpful." Economics Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said "once again General Motors confronted us with surprises."
'Absurd' Negotiations
With the US automobile giant General Motors facing imminent bankruptcy in the US, Berlin is doing what it can to prevent its German subsidiary Opel from going down with the ship. In addition to courting possible investors interested in buying a majority stake in Opel, Berlin -- in conjunction with the governors of the three German states which Opel factories call home -- is likewise trying to lubricate the sale with bridge financing to the tune of 1.5 billion ($2.07 billion).
DER SPIEGEL GM's European operations.
But on Wednesday night, General Motors made a surprise demand for an additional 300 million ($415 million), catching German negotiators off guard. To make matters worse, the US had only bothered to send a low level representative who frequently had to confer with his superiors in Washington.
Complaining that the night had been "absurd in parts," Guttenberg also said that he expected "more seriousness and a greater willingness to compromise on the part of the US."
GM has in principle agreed to shed itself of Opel, but will make the final decision regarding a new investor. It is up to the German government, however, to decide on whether the new investor should receive temporary government support. Both the Italian carmaker Fiat and the Canadian auto parts supplier Magna are still in the running while US financial investor Ripplewood Holdings LLC has reportedly withdrawn its offer. Guttenberg says more information from GM and from the US is needed before any decision can be reached and spoke of Friday as being "the absolute deadline."
Slow-Motion Collapse
The issue has attracted massive attention in Germany, first and foremost because of the risk that thousands of jobs could be lost. Opel employs 25,000 people in Germany with many thousands more dependent on the company for their livelihoods. All of the potential investors currently courting Opel and Berlin have said that some job cuts would be unavoidable.
And they wouldn't just be in Germany. GM's Europe division employs a further 25,000 people elsewhere in Europe and many countries have become angry that Germany has reserved a dominant role for itself when it comes to the future of GM's European subsidiaries. It came out on Wednesday that Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy wrote to the European Commission urging the EU to make sure that a decision regarding the future of GM's holdings in Europe, which include Britain's Vauxhall, be fair to all involved. Belgium also plays host to an Opel factory, employing some 2,500 workers. According to a report in the Financial Times, EU rules may require that Opel cut capacity by up to 30 percent in order to balance out the distortion of competion any government aid would bring with it -- a cut that would likely result in massive job losses.
According to a report in the business daily Handelsblatt, the German government has requested that any new Opel investor guarantee jobs in Germany. Such a guarantee, should it only apply to Germany, could violate EU rules, the report says.
Ongoing GM efforts to find a buyer for its Swedish subsidiary Saab are unconnected to the Opel negotiations.
Making things more complicated in Germany, however, is the ongoing general election campaign in Germany -- and the ongoing recession. With the vote set for September, neither Chancellor Merkel's Christian Democrats, nor Peer Steinbrück's Social Democrats want to be seen as standing by as Opel sinks. But, if Berlin does too much, it could set an uncomfortable precedent given the numerous other large firms in Germany which are facing significant financial difficulties.
The sports car icon Porsche, for example, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and may need public help. The ball-bearing giant Schaeffler and the retail conglomerate Arcandor, both large employers in Germany, are likewise far from healthy. And with the economic crisis still in full swing, there may be more to come.
Short Half-Life
Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) have been doing what they can to present their efforts on behalf of Opel as mere coordination between GM, Opel and the potential investors. Guttenberg, from the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, has shied away from direct government investment in Opel and has even held out bankruptcy proceedings as a possible outcome.
The Social Democrats, for their part, have steered a more populist course. Finance Minister Steinbrück has largely avoided such electioneering, but Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is also the SPD's candidate for the Chancellery, was quick to throw his support behind direct government investment in Opel. He has also recently blasted Guttenberg for moving too slowly and in February, Steinmeier paid a visit to Opel headquarters to express his solidarity with the workers.
Yet even as Steinmeier opens himself up to charges of shallow electioneering, it still seems that Merkel's CDU has the most to lose. Were the Opel negotiations to fail and the carmaker to go out of business, she and her economics minister would likely bear the brunt of the blame. Furthermore, the three German states where Opel factories are located are all governed by senior Christian Democrats.
For now, though, the US has managed to succeed where Berlin's political elite has failed for months: getting the CDU and SPD to agree. Both parties are unified in their excoriation of America's role in Opel negotiations thus far. "It seems to me," said Steinbrück on Thursday morning, "that transparency is in short supply on the US side. The half-life of the information received by Germany is very short."A Hollywood powerhouse came forward this week to speak well of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. In an interview with Fox News, Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight called the candidate “an extraordinary fellow who has accomplished much in his life,” adding that Mr. Trump remains “clear and strong” even at the end of a 12-hour day — and is exceptionally considerate to event staff and other personnel he encounters on the campaign trail.
Mr. Voight grew blunt regarding Democratic rival Hillary Clinton during his interview with Fox anchor Neil Cavuto.
“Donald Trump has no blood on his hands, as does Hillary. Remember Benghazi, remember Benghazi. And I can tell you this: One thing you can be sure of is that Donald Trump is no liar,” Mr. Voight said.
“I know Donald Trump. I know the things that he says, and I find them to be true,” the actor continued. “I find that sometimes, in an unusual, sometimes even in an awkward way, he says exactly what needs to be said. And he tells the truth.”
FOR THE LEXICON
“Team Yuuuge,” “Team MAGA,” “Team Irredeemables,” “Team Deplorables.”
— Official names for four of Donald Trump’s national fundraising teams. “MAGA”, incidentally, is actually a Twitter hashtag that stands for “Make America Great Again.”
NO ELECTION ANGST: VOTERS EAGER TO SHOP
Well, at least one American tradition has not been affected by the drama and trauma of the 2016 election.
“A survey of American voters found the vast majority will not let the outcome of Election 2016 affect their planned spending this coming holiday season,” reports RetailNext Inc., a marketing and consumer analysis group based in California.
The survey of 2,000 voters found that 90 percent are itching to get at that holiday shopping, and the outcome of the election will not affect their plans. Another 70 percent say that if Donald Trump is elected, it will not affect their spending; 68 percent say the same about a Hillary Clinton victory.
“Any residual angst from election 2016 will likely be well over by Thanksgiving. As this holiday season has two additional shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, an overlapping of the beginning of Hanukkah with Christmas Eve, and a bevy of generally positive economic indicators, the retail industry should close the year relatively strong,” predicts Shelley E. Kohan, the company’s vice president of retail consulting.
THE MEDIA SHIELD
Wondering where significant broadcast coverage of the Clinton Foundation has gone? The answer: There’s very little, despite repeat discussions about potential conflict-of-interest issues presented by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her family foundation.
A new study finds that 95 percent of the stories centered on the Clinton Foundation that aired on NBC, ABC and CBS never even brought up the conflict-of-interest dimension, according to Alatheia Nielson, an analyst for Newsbusters.org, a conservative press watchdog.
She reviewed 62 network reports from a one-month period that ended Sept. 9. Only three of them mentioned the prospects of “ethical problems” the Clinton family might face should Mrs. Clinton win the White House.
“The broadcast networks ignored the conflict of interest afflicting the Democratic nominee in 95 percent of their stories,” Ms. Nielson noted. “Instead, the networks pushed the Clinton campaign’s version; that the foundation was being ‘targeted unfairly,’ that conflict of interest allegations were ‘absurd,’ and that reports questioning Clinton’s actions as Secretary of State were ‘misleading.’”
WATERGATE, 2016
The iconic and luxurious Watergate Hotel reopened three months ago after a $200 million renovation, fully embracing its role as the site of the 1972 Watergate break-in and cover-up that prompted President Richard Nixon to resign two years later. Time marches on, however. The hotel has also just opened its new, $3.5 million “Argentta” wellness spa.
“The 10,500-square-foot spa includes the hotel’s original indoor pool, which has been meticulously restored for guests to use year-round. The spa also boasts a whirlpool, sauna rooms, a state-of-the-art Technogym, six personal treatment suites and one duet suite, steam rooms, a unisex sauna and a nail salon,” the hotel advises.
“Signature treatments include the Argentta Seven Elements Ritual, a 90-minute, seven-part ritual where fresh organic ingredients are used to create a toxin free solution that restores aging skin to optimal health and The Strengthening Facial, a 120-minute, highly moisturizing and firming strengthening facial that uses the healing qualities of liquid silver to dramatically improve the skin’s elasticity. Spa services range from $160 for a 60-minute service to $400 for a 120-minute service.”
CLINTON CORRUPTION PANEL
Judicial Watch — which has consistently submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act requests regarding Hillary Clinton’s private email server, her family foundation and other matters — offers a comprehensive overview of their work on Thursday.
The watchdog group presents “Clinton Scandal Update: Emails and the Clinton Foundation,” with a panel that includes the organization’s president, Tom Fitton; Peter Schweizer, author of “Clinton Cash” and other investigative books; former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova; Chris Farrell, director of investigations and research at Judicial Watch; plus author and World Net Daily columnist Jerome Corsi.
Mr. Fitton deems the 90-minute event a “historic educational panel discussion” and the content both “revealing and discomfiting.”
See it broadcast live at 11 a.m. EDT at JudicialWatch.org/live The forum will also be carried live by One America News, a cable news channel.
POLL DU JOUR
• 36 percent of Americans say it’s best for the country if a president is from the same party that controls Congress; 42 percent of Republicans, 28 percent of independents and 40 percent of Democrats agree.
• 36 percent overall say it makes no difference how political power is allocated; 29 percent of Republicans, 38 percent of independents and 37 percent of Democrats agree.
• 20 percent say it’s best the president and Congress come from different parties; 19 percent of Republicans, 27 percent of independents and 14 percent of Democrats agree.
Source: A Gallup Poll of 1,020 U.S. adults conducted Sept. 7 to 11 and released Wednesday.
• Polite applause, cranky commentary to [email protected]
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.MUMBAI: Last year, the Maharashtra government made a decision to give a 75% discount on land for a food park in Nagpur, which eventually was awarded to Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Ayurveda Ltd. Documents accessed through RTI show that the decision was not uncontested. A senior bureaucrat, then principal secretary of financial reforms, Bijay Kumar, had raised concerns in writing about the basis of the price waiver.Three weeks after Kumar questioned the financial calculations behind the price reduction, he was transferred on April 29, 2016. The transfer came less than a year and a half into his posting while the usual tenure is at least three years. Kumar, who is currently principal secretary (agriculture), was unavailable for comment.Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis who heads the Maharashtra Airport Development Corporation (MADC) board which cleared the allotment, told TOI that the entire process was transparent and the allotment followed open bids. He also said Kumar’s transfer was routine and he had been given a posting of his choice.The board relied on a four-member sub-committee to suggest the land price for a food park in the Mihan (Multi-Modal International Hub Airport) area in Nagpur. Kumar was a member of this sub-committee, which included then MIDC CEO Bhushan Gagrani and then VC and MD of MADC Vishwas Patil. The panel was headed by urban development secretary Nitin Kareer.Although MADC’s rate in the area was Rs 1 crore per acre (4,046 square metres), the committee recommended a base price of Rs 25 lakh per acre for a food park. In August 2016, the sole bidder Patanjali Ayurveda Ltd was awarded 230 acres of the land, paying Rs 58.63 crore for a 66-year lease.The minutes of the sub-committee’s final meeting held on April 7, 2016--acquired by TOI through RTI--reveal how the rates came to be brought down.The rate offered by MADC for land outside the SEZ area with developed infrastructure was Rs 2,500 per square metre, the minutes show. However, MADC MD Vishwas Patil said the rate was too high for a food park. He pointed out that other states were offering concessional rates and this could potentially draw away projects from Nagpur. Also, MADC had earlier given plots at concessional rates to Boeing and Satyam, Patil said.To bring down the price, the panel first subtracted the cost of providing infrastructure as the plot was in an undeveloped area. This meant a reduction of Rs 1,000 per square metre in the base price. The base price would then work out to Rs 1,500 per square metre.MADC officials then suggested a further markdown by lowering base price to Rs 625 per square metre (around Rs 25 lakh per acre) “considering the rates of adjoining states and viability of such projects”.The sub-committee ended up endorsing this suggestion. It said if the plot was bid or auctioned for an offset price of Rs 625 per square metre, then price of the remaining unsold land in the area should be “proportionately increased” to compensate for the discount given to Patanjali.The land earmarked for the food park was 300 acres and the remaining unsold MIHAN land around it was around 1,050 acres. MADC officials worked out that the base price for the entire remaining land would have to go up by 15%. “This type of cross-subsidy would benefit such a project which can lead to major gains to the farmers in the rural areas of Nagpur,” said MADC officials.The sub-committee finally recommended both the new base price and the 15% hike on the remaining land given for commercial or industrial purposes, on condition of a transparent bidding process.But while three members of the sub-committee signed on the recommendation, the fourth, Kumar, dissented. In the minutes, he noted that neither the lowered base price nor the cross subsidy were supported by detailed calculations.“These have been taken as proposals of the MD of MADC without detailed back-up calculations. These detailed calculations have been asked for. The board may get the same vetted before having to decide the merits of these proposals,” he said in a hand-written note on the minutes.Sub-committee chairman Nitin Kareer told TOI that initially other members were also not satisfied with the price calculations. “Later, more details were presented to calculate the base price. We also looked at the process followed by MIDC. And the cross-subsidy ensured that there would no financial loss to MADC,” he said.Subsequently, the MADC board headed by Fadnavis agreed to the recommendations of the sub-committee on lowering the base price and offering a cross-subsidy. Patanjali Ayurveda Ltd emerged as the sole qualifying bidder and was awarded the land at Rs 630 per square metre.Piano sheet music for the piece (Germany)
The waltz "Sobre las Olas" (or "Over the Waves") is the best-known work of Mexican composer Juventino Rosas (1868–1894). It "remains one of the most famous Latin American pieces worldwide", according to the "Latin America" article in The Oxford Companion to Music.[1]
It was first published by Rosas in 1888.[2] It remains popular as a classic waltz, and has also found its way into New Orleans Jazz and Tejano music.
The song remains popular with country and old-time fiddlers in the United States.
Recordings [ edit ]
Chet Atkins, on Alone
Willie Nelson, on Red Headed Stranger
Roy Clark, on The Lightning Fingers of Roy Clark
Mark O'Connor on American Classics
Film [ edit ]
A Mexican film titled Sobre las olas was released in 1933.[3]
The Mexican film biography of Juventino Rosas, released in 1950 and starring Pedro Infante, is entitled Sobre las Olas (Over the Waves).[4]
In popular culture [ edit ]+ Mars Home
+ Rovers Home Spotlight On Mars - Image Second Extrication Drive Yields Slight Progress
Image and Caption
Spirit successfully completed the first step of its planned two-step motion on Sol 2090 (Nov. 19).
After spinning the wheels for the equivalent of 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) in the forward direction, the center of the rover moved approximately 12 millimeters (0.5 inch) forward, 7 millimeters (0.3 inch) to the left and about 4 millimeters (0.2 inch) down. The rover tilt changed by about 0.1 degree. Small forward motion was observed with the non-operable right front wheel, and the left front wheel showed indications of climbing, despite the center of the rover moving downward. These motions are too small to establish any trends at this time.
The drive plan had imposed a limit of 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) motion in any direction. The second step of the drive was not performed, because Spirit calculated it had exceeded that limit.
The data downlink volume from the rover was much better than expected, with all drive-related imagery being received. The team is continuing to analyze results from the drive.
#2009-171
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech//USGSPin +1 Share 2K Shares
After getting pummeled in the presidential election Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are planning their own ‘Thank You Events’ tour. It will be the worlds first participation trophy tour.
With how tiny their crowds were during the election I can’t imagine how small they’ll be now, but this does look like a move from Clinton to stay relevant for another run.
From the Washington Examiner:
Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, said Thursday that he and Clinton would soon appear for a series of “thank you events” in the “next couple of weeks” to show their appreciation for supporters. “Hillary is a very resilient person. I mean, she has dealt with an awful lot in her life,” Kaine said during an appearance on Fox 5, a local Washington-area channel. “And she’s got a philosophical perspective that, OK, if you’ve been given a lot of opportunities… you also have to accept the tough things,” he said. His “thank you” tour could coincide with a similar string of events President-elect Trump will host this month in states that delivered him the presidency. On Thursday, he will kick off the tour with a rally in Cincinnati, Ohio… “I really was holding my expectations down,” he said. “I always felt like Hillary was the underdog, frankly, because she’s trying to be a woman president and we’ve never had one.”
CommentsNew Delhi, April 28: Breaking his silence after the Aam Aadmi Party’s debacle in MCD polls, senior party leader Kumar Vishwas in an interview with India Today said that AAP has turned into another congress. He was referring to the denial of the ruling party in implementing the recommendations of the Shunglu Committee. The committee had raised questions over the irregularities in the functioning of the government.
Adding that Aam Aadmi Party failed in communicating with people on its performance in last two years, he criticised the party for giving tickets to wrong people in MCD polls. He added that we need to boost the morale of the party workers and decisions should not be taken behind the closed doors.
He added that attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the surgical strike on terrorist launch pads did not go well with the people.
In an earlier development, Delhi Chief Minster Arvind Kejriwal had called an emergency to supervise the swearing in ceremony of newly elected councillors. He appealed to the party councillors to keep Party pure and not betray
Aam Aadmi Party leader and Delhi Transport Minister Gopal Rai had reiterated that the Bharatiya Janta Party had won the elections by tampering the electronic voting machines. He said, there is no Modi wave, it’s the EVM wave responsible for the victory of BJP. In a similar tone, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia had said that Bharatiya Janta Party used its experience of tampering EVMs in securing victory in civic polls.
Aam Aadmi Party has called a meeting to introspect the humiliating defeat in civic polls on Friday. Aam Aadmi Party could not save its bastions like Burari, Patparganj and Babarpur. The party had won the Delhi assembly elections in civic polls with a brute majority. The Bharatiya Janta Party succeeded in snatching the stronghold of unauthorised colonies which comprises an estimated population of 40 Lakh people. As per the Data made available by Delhi State Election Commission, Bharatiya Janta Party won 181 out of 270 wards in three municipal bodies with 36.02 percent votes. Despite garnering 26.23 percent votes, Aam Aadmi Party had to console itself with the win on 48 seats.Israel will lend its counter-terrorism expertise to Kenya by helping the African country build a security wall along its border with Somalia, the UK’s The Times reported on Thursday.
Nairobi is seeking assistance from the Jewish state to construct a 440-mile barricade to prevent Somali terrorists from infiltrating the country. Israel itself is in the process of building a security fence along its southern border with Jordan — expanding the fence located alongside the Sinai peninsula — and has plans to build a massive concrete wall that extends underground, to prevent terrorists from the Gaza Strip from infiltrating the country through tunnels.
The news comes amid Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s diplomatic flurry in Africa this week, which included a stop in Kenya on Tuesday.
Following a meeting with Netanyahu, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta stated, “Kenya and Israel, just like other nations in the world, are facing the challenges of terrorism and today was a great opportunity to discuss ways of dealing with the issues.”
Both leaders agreed to strengthen their intelligence cooperation, with Israel offering to share tactics it has developed to detect terror attacks in the early stages of their planning.
“If you know in advance that an attack is going to happen and can preempt it, it saves lives,” Netanyahu said. “Israel is doing this and we will share intelligence with Kenya and Africa.”
The Israeli prime minister warned that terror groups across Africa — such as ISIS and its Nigerian affiliate, Boko Haram — are gaining strength and pose a major threat not only to Africa, but to the entire world. “There is a raging crisis of terrorism,” he said. “Where Israel can help, we will.”
Over the past several years, Kenya has been victim to a spate of attacks by Somali terrorists, particularly jihadists from the Islamist Al-Shabaab group.
In 2013, Al-Shabaab killed sixty-seven people at a Westgate shopping center in |
were empty, the boat would have had to wait 5 to 10 minutes while the lock was filled. For a boat travelling upstream, the process is reversed; the boat enters the empty lock, and then the chamber is filled by opening a valve that allows water to enter the chamber from the upper level. The whole operation will usually take between 10 and 20 minutes, depending on the size of the lock and whether the water in the lock was originally set at the boat's level.
Boaters approaching a lock are usually pleased to meet another boat coming towards them, because this boat will have just exited the lock on their level and therefore set the lock in their favour – saving about 5 to 10 minutes. However, this is not true for staircase locks, where it is quicker for boats to go through in convoy.
Operation of a canal lock
1–3. Boat enters 'empty' lock
4. Bottom gates are closed, bottom paddles closed, top paddles opened, lock starts to fill
5. Lock is filling with water, lifting boat to the higher level 1–3. Boat enters 'empty' lock4. Bottom gates are closed, bottom paddles closed, top paddles opened, lock starts to fill5. Lock is filling with water, lifting boat to the higher level
Details and terminology [ edit ]
An empty lock chamber
For simplicity, this section describes a basic type of lock, with a pair of gates at each end of the chamber and simple rack and pinion paddles raised manually by means of a detachable windlass operated by lock-keepers or the boat's shore crew. This type can be found all over the world, but the terminology here is that used on the British canals. A subsequent section explains common variations.
Rise [ edit ]
The rise is the change in water-level in the lock. The two deepest locks on the English canal system are Bath deep lock[6][7] on the Kennet and Avon Canal and Tuel Lane Lock on the Rochdale Canal, which both have a rise of nearly 20 feet (6.1 m). Both locks are amalgamations of two separate locks, which were combined when the canals were restored to accommodate changes in road crossings. The deepest "as-built" locks in England are considered to be Etruria Top Lock on the Trent and Mersey Canal and Somerton Deep Lock on the Oxford Canal: both have a rise of about 14 ft (4.3 m). Again, sources vary as to which is the deepest, and in any case Etruria has been deepened over the years to accommodate subsidence. A more typical rise (in England) would be 7–12 feet (2.1–3.7 metres) (though even shallower ones can be encountered). By comparison, the Carrapatelo and Valeira locks on the Douro river in Portugal, which are 279 feet (85 m) long and 39 feet (12 m) wide, have maximum lifts of 115 feet (35 m) and 108 feet (33 m) respectively.[8] The two Ardnacrusha locks near Limerick on the Shannon navigation in Ireland have a rise of 100 feet (30 m). The upper chamber rises 60 feet (18 m) and is connected to the lower chamber by a tunnel, which when descending does not become visible until the chamber is nearly empty.[9]
Pound [ edit ]
A pound is the level stretch of water between two locks (also known as a reach).[10] On American canals, a pound is called a level.
Chamber [ edit ]
The chamber is the main feature of a lock. It is a watertight (masonry, brick, steel or concrete) enclosure which can be sealed off from the pounds at both ends by means of gates. The chamber may be the same size (plus a little manoeuvring room) as the largest vessel for which the waterway was designed; sometimes larger, to allow more than one such vessel at a time to use the lock. The chamber is said to be "full" when the water level is the same as in the upper pound; and "empty" when the level is the same as in the lower pound. (If the lock has no water in it at all, perhaps for maintenance work, it might also be said to be empty, but it is more usually described as "drained" or "de-watered".)
Cill [ edit ]
The cill, also spelled sill, is a narrow horizontal ledge protruding a short way into the chamber from below the upper gates. Allowing the rear of the boat to "hang" on the cill is the main danger one is warned to guard against when descending a lock, and the position of the forward edge of the cill is usually marked on the lock side by a white line. The edge of the cill is usually curved, protruding less in the center than at the edges. In some locks, there is a piece of oak about 9 in (23 cm) thick which protects the solid part of the lock cill. On the Oxford Canal it is called a Babbie; on the Grand Union Canal it is referred to as the cill Bumper. Some canal operation authorities, primarily in the United States and Canada, call the ledge a miter sill (mitre sill in Canada).[11]
Photo gallery [ edit ]
Gates [ edit ]
Gates are the watertight doors which seal off the chamber from the upper and lower pounds. Each end of the chamber is equipped with a gate, or pair of half-gates, made of oak or elm (or now sometimes steel). The most common arrangement, usually called miter gates, was invented by Leonardo da Vinci, sometime around the late 15th century.[12] When closed, a pair meet at an angle like a chevron pointing upstream and only a very small difference in water-level is necessary to squeeze the closed gates securely together. This reduces any leaks from between them and prevents their being opened until water levels have equalised. If the chamber is not full, the top gate is secure; and if the chamber is not completely empty, the bottom gate is secure (in normal operation, therefore, the chamber cannot be open at both ends). A lower gate is taller than an upper gate, because the upper gate only has to be tall enough to close off the upper pound, while the lower gate has to be able to seal off a full chamber. The upper gate is as tall as the canal is deep, plus a little more for the balance beam, winding mechanism, etc.; the lower gate's height equals the upper gate plus the lock's rise.
Balance beam [ edit ]
A balance beam is the long arm projecting from the landward side of the gate over the towpath. As well as providing leverage to open and close the heavy gate, the beam also balances the (non-floating) weight of the gate in its socket, and so allows the gate to swing more freely.
Paddle [ edit ]
A paddle – sometimes known as a slacker, clough, or (in American English) wicket – is the simple valve by which the lock chamber is filled or emptied. The paddle itself is a sliding wooden (or nowadays plastic) panel which when "lifted" (slid up) out of the way allows water to either enter the chamber from the upper pound or flow out to the lower pound. A gate paddle simply covers a hole in the lower part of a gate; a more sophisticated ground paddle blocks an underground culvert. There can be up to 8 paddles (two gate paddles and two ground paddles at both upper and lower ends of the chamber) but there will often be fewer. For a long period since the 1970s it was British Waterways policy not to provide gate paddles in replacement top gates if two ground paddles existed. The reason for this was given as safety, since it is possible for an ascending boat to be swamped by the water from a carelessly lifted gate paddle. However, without the gate paddles the locks are slower to operate and this has been blamed in some places for causing congestion. Since the late 1990s the preferred method has been to retain or re-install the gate paddles and fit 'baffles' across them to minimise the risk of inundation.
On the old Erie Canal, there was a danger of injury when operating the paddles: water, on reaching a certain position, would push the paddles with a force which could tear the windlass (or handle) out of one's hands, or if one was standing in the wrong place, could knock one into the canal, leading to injuries and drownings.[13]
Winding gear or paddle gear [ edit ]
Winding gear is the mechanism which allows paddles to be lifted (opened) or lowered (closed). Typically, a square-section stub emerges from the housing of the winding gear. This is the axle of a sprocket ("pinion") which engages with a toothed bar ("rack") attached by rodding to the top of the paddle. A lock-keeper or member of the boat's shore crew engages the square socket of their windlass (see below) onto the end of the axle and turns the windlass perhaps a dozen times. This rotates the pinion and lifts the paddle. A pawl engages with the rack to prevent the paddle from dropping inadvertently while being raised, and to keep it raised when the windlass is removed, so that the operator can attend to other paddles. Nowadays it is considered discourteous and wasteful of water to leave a paddle open after a boat has left the lock, but in commercial days it was normal practice. To lower a paddle the pawl must be disengaged and the paddle wound down with the windlass. Dropping paddles by knocking the pawl off can cause damage to the mechanism; the paddle gear is typically made of cast iron and can shatter or crack when dropped from a height. In areas where water-wastage due to vandalism is a problem, (for example the Birmingham Canal Navigations), paddle mechanisms are commonly fitted with vandal-proof locks (nowadays rebranded "water conservation devices") which require the boater to employ a key before the paddle can be lifted. The keys are officially known as "water conservation keys", but boaters usually refer to them as T-keys, from their shape; handcuff keys because the original locks, fitted on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, resembled handcuffs; Leeds and Liverpool Keys after that canal; or simply Anti-Vandal Keys.
Hydraulic paddle gear [ edit ]
During the 1980s, British Waterways began to introduce a hydraulic system for operating paddles, especially those on bottom gates, which are the heaviest to operate. A metal cylinder about a foot in diameter was mounted on the balance beam and contained a small oil-operated hydraulic pump. A spindle protruded from the front face and was operated by a windlass in the usual way, the energy being transferred to the actual paddle by small bore pipes. The system was widely installed and on some canals it became very common. There turned out to be two serious drawbacks. It was much more expensive to install and maintain than traditional gear and went wrong more frequently, especially once vandals learned to cut the pipes. Even worse, it had a safety defect, in that the paddle once in the raised position could not be dropped in an emergency, but had to be wound down, taking a good deal longer. These factors led to the abandonment of the policy in the late 1990s, but examples of it survive all over the system, as it is usually not removed until the gates need replacing, which happens about every twenty years.
Windlass ("lock key") [ edit ]
Collection of lock windlasses. Note: rakes are for clearing trash out of the lock.
A windlass (also variously 'lock handle', 'iron' or simply 'key') is a detachable crank used for opening lock paddles (the word does not refer to the winding mechanism itself).
The simplest windlass is made from an iron rod of circular section, about half an inch in diameter and two feet long, bent to make an L-shape with legs of slightly different length. The shorter leg is called the handle, and the longer leg is called the arm. Welded to the end of the arm is a square, sometimes tapered, socket of the correct size to fit onto the spindle protruding from lock winding gear.
Socket: Traditionally, windlasses had a single socket, designed for a particular canal. When undertaking a journey through several canals with different lock-gear spindle sizes it was necessary to carry several different windlasses. A modern windlass usually has two sockets for use on different canals: the smaller is for the British Waterways standard spindle, fitted in the early 1990s almost everywhere, the larger for the gear on the Grand Union Canal north of Napton Junction, which they were unable/unwilling to convert.
Handle: The handle is long enough for a two-handed grip and is far enough from the socket to give enough leverage to wind the paddle up or down. There may be a freely rotating sleeve around the handle to protect the hands from the friction of rough iron against skin.
Arm: A "long throw" windlass has a longer arm so that the handle is further from the socket to give a greater leverage on stiffer paddles. If the throw is too long then the user, winding a gate paddle, risks barking their knuckles against the balance beam when the handle is at the lowest point of its arc. A sophisticated modern windlass may have an adjustable-length arm.
then the user, winding a gate paddle, risks barking their knuckles against the balance beam when the handle is at the lowest point of its arc. A sophisticated modern windlass may have an adjustable-length arm. Materials : Early windlasses were individually hand forged from a single piece of wrought iron by a blacksmith. More modern techniques include casting of iron or bronze, drop forging and (the most common technique) welding. Some boatmen had their windlasses'silvered' (or chrome plated) for increased comfort and to prevent rusting. Windlasses are now only rarely plated, but a popular modern choice of metal is aluminium, whose smooth and rustproof surface has the same advantages of longevity and blister-reduction, and is also very light. One type of these, the Dunton Double, has only a single eye, but by clever tapering it will operate either size of spindle.
On the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the lockkeepers were required to remove the windlasses from all lock paddles at night, to prevent unauthorized use.[14]
"Turning" a lock [ edit ]
"Turning" a lock can simply mean emptying a full lock, or filling an empty one ("We entered the lock, and it only took us five minutes to turn it"). It is used more often to refer to a lock being filled or emptied for the benefit of someone else ("The lock was turned for us by a boat coming the other way") and sometimes the opposite ("The lock was set for us, but the crew of the boat coming the other way turned it before we got there").
Swell or Swelling [ edit ]
A swell was caused by opening suddenly the paddle valves in the lock gates, or when emptying a lock.[15] To help boats leave (downstream) a lock, the locksman would sometimes open the paddles to create a swell, which would help "flush" the boat out of the lock. In one case, a boatsman asked for a back swell, that is, open and shut the paddles a few times to create some waves, to help him get off the bank where he was stuck.[16] If boats ran aground (from being overloaded) they sometimes asked passing crews to tell the upstream lock to give them an extra heavy swell, which consisted of opening all the paddles on the lock gate, creating a surge that affected the whole pound below.[17]
On the Erie Canal, some loaded boats needed a swell to get out of the lock, particularly lumber boats, being top heavy, would list to one side and get stuck in the lock, and needed a swell to get them out. Some lockkeepers would give a swell to anyone to help them on the way, but some would ask for money for the swell.[15]
The Erie Canal management did not like swelling for two reasons. First, it used too much water lowering the water on the pound above sometimes causing boats to run aground. In addition, it raised the water level on the pound below causing some boats to strike bridges or get stuck.[15]
"Lock mooring" was a commonly used method of navigating into a lock by a barge travelling upstream. The barge would be directed to the slack water to one side of the lock gates and as the volume of water decreased as the lock emptied the barge or boat is effectively sucked out of the slack water into the path of the lock gates. The effort required to navigate the barge or boat into the mouth of the lock was therefore substantially reduced.
Snubbing posts [ edit ]
Snubbing a boat to keep it from hitting the downstream gates. Note the rope wrapped around the snubbing post.
On horse-drawn and mule-drawn canals, snubbing posts were used to slow or stop a boat in the lock. A 200-ton boat moving at a few miles an hour could destroy the lock gate. To prevent this, a rope was wound around the snubbing post as the boat entered the lock. Pulling on the rope slowed the boat, due to the friction of the rope against the post.[18] A rope 2½ inches (6.3 cm) in diameter and about 60 feet (18 meters) long was typically used on the Erie Canal to snub a boat in a lock.[19]
One incident, which took place in June 1873 on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, involved the boat the Henry C. Flagg and its drunk captain. That boat was already leaking; the crew, having partially pumped the water out, entered Lock 74, moving in front of another boat. Because they failed to snub the boat, it crashed into and knocked out the downstream gates. The outrush of water from the lock caused the upstream gates to slam shut, breaking them also, and sending a cascade of water over the boat, sinking it. This suspended navigation on the canal for 48 hours until the lock gates could be replaced and the boat removed from the lock.[20]
Variations [ edit ]
A series of photos of the Canadian Locks in Sault Ste. Marie to illustrate a drop of about 22 ft (6.7 m) in a lock.
Variations exist for types of locks and the terminology used for them.
Some locks are operated (or at least supervised) by professional or volunteer lock keepers. This is particularly true on commercial waterways, or where locks are large or have complicated features that the average leisure boater may not be able to operate successfully. For instance, although the Thames above Teddington (England) is almost entirely a leisure waterway, the locks are usually staffed. Only recently have boaters been allowed limited access to the hydraulic gear to operate the locks when the keeper is not present.
Powered operation. On large modern canals, especially very large ones such as ship canals, the gates and paddles are too large to be hand operated, and are operated by hydraulic or electrical equipment. On the Caledonian Canal the lock gates were operated by man-powered capstans, one connected by chains to open the gate and another to draw it closed. By 1968 these had been replaced by hydraulic power acting through steel rams. [23] Even on smaller canals, some gates and paddles are electrically operated, particularly if the lock is regularly staffed by professional lock keepers. On the River Thames below Oxford all the locks are staffed and powered. Powered locks are usually still filled by gravity, though some very large locks use pumps to speed things up.
Even on smaller canals, some gates and paddles are electrically operated, particularly if the lock is regularly staffed by professional lock keepers. On the River Thames below Oxford all the locks are staffed and powered. Powered locks are usually still filled by gravity, though some very large locks use pumps to speed things up. Fish Ladders. The construction of locks (or weirs and dams) on rivers obstructs the passage of fish. Some fish such as lampreys, trout and salmon go upstream to spawn. Measures such as a fish ladder are often taken to counteract this. Navigation locks have also potential to be operated as fishways to provide increased access for a range of biota. [24]
Weigh lock.
A weigh lock on the Lehigh canal
A weigh lock is a specialized canal lock designed to determine the weight of barges to assess toll payments based upon the weight and value of the cargo carried. The Erie Canal had a weigh locks in Rochester, Syracuse, and West Troy New York. The Lehigh Canal also had weigh locks (see photo on right).
Special cases [ edit ]
Lock flights [ edit ]
Loosely, a flight of locks is simply a series of locks in close-enough proximity to be identified as a single group. For many reasons, a flight of locks is preferable to the same number of locks spread more widely: crews are put ashore and picked up once, rather than multiple times; transition involves a concentrated burst of effort, rather than a continually interrupted journey; a lock keeper may be stationed to help crews through the flight quickly; and where water is in short supply, a single pump can recycle water to the top of the whole flight. The need for a flight may be determined purely by the lie of the land, but it is possible to group locks purposely into flights by using cuttings or embankments to "postpone" the height change. Examples: Caen Hill locks, Devizes.
"Flight" is not synonymous with "Staircase" (see below). A set of locks is only a staircase if successive lock chambers share a gate (i.e. do not have separate top and bottom gates with a pound between them). Most flights are not staircases, because each chamber is a separate lock (with its own upper and lower gates), there is a navigable pound (however short) between each pair of locks, and the locks are operated in the conventional way.
However, some flights include (or consist entirely of) staircases. On the Grand Union (Leicester) Canal, the Watford flight consists of a four-chamber staircase and three separate locks; and the Foxton flight consists entirely of two adjacent 5-chamber staircases.
Staircase locks [ edit ]
Staircase of five locks, dating from 1774, at Bingley, England
Where a very steep gradient has to be climbed, a lock staircase is used. There are two types of staircase, "real" and "apparent".
A "real" staircase can be thought of as a "compressed" flight, where the intermediate pounds have disappeared, and the upper gate of one lock is also the lower gate of the one above it. However, it is incorrect to use the terms staircase and flight interchangeably: because of the absence of intermediate pounds, operating a staircase is very different from operating a flight. It can be more useful to think of a staircase as a single lock with intermediate levels (the top gate is a normal top gate, and the intermediate gates are all as tall as the bottom gate). As there is no intermediate pound, a chamber can only be filled by emptying the one above, or emptied by filling the one below: thus the whole staircase has to be full of water (except for the bottom chamber) before a boat starts to ascend, or empty (except for the top chamber) before a boat starts to descend. By building a pair of such lock sets (one used to climb and the other to descend) these difficulties are avoided, as well as enabling a greater traffic volume and reduced wait times.
In an "apparent" staircase the chambers still have common gates, but the water does not pass directly from one chamber to the next, going instead via side ponds. This means it is not necessary to ensure that the flight is full or empty before starting.
Examples of famous "real" staircases in England are Bingley and Grindley Brook. Two-rise staircases are more common: Snakeholme Lock and Struncheon Hill Lock on the Driffield Navigation were converted to staircase locks after low water levels hindered navigation over the bottom cill at all but the higher tides – the new bottom chamber rises just far enough to get the boat over the original lock cill. In China, the recently completed Three Gorges Dam includes a double five-step staircase for large ships, and a ship lift for vessels of less than 3000 metric tons. Examples of "apparent" staircases are Foxton Locks and Watford Locks on the Leicester Branch of the Grand Union.
Operation of a staircase is more involved than a flight. Inexperienced boaters may find operating staircase locks difficult. The key worries (apart from simply being paralysed with indecision) are either sending down more water than the lower chambers can cope with (flooding the towpath, or sending a wave along the canal) or completely emptying an intermediate chamber (although this shows that a staircase lock can be used as an emergency dry dock). To avoid these mishaps, it is usual to have the whole staircase empty before starting to descend, or full before starting to ascend, apart from the initial chamber.
One striking difference in using a staircase of either type (compared with a single lock, or a flight) is the best sequence for letting boats through. In a single lock (or a flight with room for boats to pass) boats should ideally alternate in direction. In a staircase, however, it is quicker for a boat to follow a previous one going in the same direction. Partly for this reason staircase locks such as Grindley Brook, Foxton, Watford and Bratch are supervised by lockkeepers, at least during the main cruising season, they normally try to alternate as many boats up, followed by down as there are chambers in the flight.
As with a flight, it is possible on a broad canal for more than one boat to be in a staircase at the same time, but managing this without waste of water requires expertise. On English canals, a staircase of more than two chambers is usually staffed: the lockkeepers at Bingley (looking after both the "5-rise" and the "3-rise") ensure that there are no untoward events and that boats are moved through as speedily and efficiently as possible. Such expertise permits miracles of boat balletics: boats travelling in opposite directions can pass each other halfway up the staircase by moving sideways around each other; or at peak times, one can have all the chambers full simultaneously with boats travelling in the same direction.
Doubled, paired or twinned locks [ edit ]
Doubled locks. Left lock has boat in it, right lock (center of drawing) is empty. This is on the Erie Canal at Lockport
Locks can be built side by side on the same waterway. This is variously called doubling, pairing, or twinning. The Panama Canal has three sets of double locks. Doubling gives advantages in speed, avoiding hold-ups at busy times and increasing the chance of a boat finding a lock set in its favour. The Belgian Company SBE Engineering worked on this project. There can also be water savings: the locks may be of different sizes, so that a small boat does not need to empty a large lock; or each lock may be able to act as a side pond (water-saving basin) for the other. In this latter case, the word used is usually "twinned": here indicating the possibility of saving water by synchronising the operation of the chambers so that some water from the emptying chamber helps to fill the other. This facility has long been withdrawn on the English canals, although the disused paddle gear can sometimes be seen, as at Hillmorton on the Oxford Canal. Elsewhere they are still in use; a pair of twinned locks has been opened in 2014 on the Dortmund-Ems Canal near Münster, Germany.[25]
The once-famous staircase at Lockport, New York was also a doubled set of locks. Five twinned locks allowed east- and west-bound boats to climb or descend the 60 feet (18 m) Niagara Escarpment, a considerable engineering feat in the nineteenth century. While Lockport today has two large steel locks, half of the old twin stair acts as an emergency spillway and can still be seen, with the original lock gates having been restored in early 2016.[26]
These terms can also (in different places or to different people) mean either a two-chamber staircase (e.g. Turner Wood Double Locks on the Chesterfield Canal: the same canal has a three-rise staircase called Thorpe Low Treble locks), or just a flight of two locks (as at Thornhill Double Locks on the Calder and Hebble Navigation). Also, "double lock" (less often, "twin lock") is often used by novices on the English canals to mean a wide (14 ft) lock, presumably because it is "double" the width of a narrow lock, and allows two narrow boats going in the same direction to "double up". These are properly known as broad locks.
Stop locks [ edit ]
A "stop" lock is a (very) low-rise lock built at the junction of two (rival) canals to prevent water from passing between them.
During the competitive years of the English waterways system, an established canal company would often refuse to allow a connection from a newer, adjacent one. This situation created the Worcester Bar in Birmingham, where goods had to be transshipped between boats on rival canals only feet apart.
Where a junction was built, either because the older canal company saw an advantage in a connection, or where the new company managed to insert a mandatory connection into its Act of Parliament, then the old company would seek to protect (and even enhance) its water supply. Normally, they would specify that, at the junction, the newer canal must be at a higher level than their existing canal. Even though the drop from the newer to the older canal might only be a few inches, the difference in levels still required a lock – called a stop lock, because it was to stop water flowing continuously between the newer canal and the older, lower one. The lock would be under the control of the new company, and the gates would, of course, "point" uphill - towards the newer canal. This would protect the water supply of the newer canal, but would nevertheless "donate" a lockful of water to the older company every time a boat went through. In times of excess water, of course, the lock "bywash" would continuously supply water to the lower canal.
When variable conditions meant that a higher water level in the new canal could not be guaranteed, then the older company would also build a stop lock (under its own control, with gates pointing towards its own canal) which could be closed when the new canal was low. This resulted in a sequential pair of locks, with gates pointing in opposite directions: one example was at Hall Green near Kidsgrove, where the southern terminus of the Macclesfield Canal joined the Hall Green Branch of the earlier Trent and Mersey Canal. The four gate stop lock near Kings Norton Junction, between the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal and the Worcester and Birmingham Canal was replaced in 1914 by a pair of guillotine lock gates which stopped the water flow regardless of which canal was higher. These gates have been permanently open since nationalisation.[27]
Many stop locks were removed or converted to a single gate after nationalisation in 1948. Hall Green stop lock remains, but as a single lock: the extra lock was removed because the lowering of the T&M's summit pound (to improve Harecastle Tunnel's "air draught" – its free height above the water level) meant that the T&M would always be lower than the Macclesfield. The Hall Green Branch is now considered to be an extension of the Macclesfield Canal, which now meets the T&M at Hardings Wood Junction (just short of the Harecastle Tunnel north portal).
It should be noted that the newer canal was not always at a higher level than the one it joined. For instance, there is a very shallow lock at Autherley Junction, where the 1835 Birmingham and Liverpool canal (now part of the Shropshire Union Canal) met the older Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, build in 1772. The Nicholson guide shows that a boater travelling south along the newer canal locks "up" before turning north or south onto the older Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal – so the Shropshire Union Canal gains a small lockful of water each time a boat passes. However, the gain is tiny since the level difference is so small that it is sometimes possible to open both gates at once.
Round locks [ edit ]
Agde Round Lock
There are several examples where locks have been built to a round plan, with more than two exits from the lock chamber, each serving a different water level. Thus the lock serves both as a way of changing levels and as a junction. The circular plan of the lock allows boats within it to rotate to line up with the appropriate exit gate.
The best known example of such a round lock is the Agde Round Lock on the Canal du Midi in France. This serves as a lock on the main line of the canal and allows access to the Hérault River.[28]
A second French round lock can be found in the form of the, now disused, Écluse des Lorraines, connecting the Canal latéral à la Loire with the River Allier.[29]
Drop locks [ edit ]
A drop lock allows a short length of canal to be lowered temporarily while a boat passes under an obstruction such as a low bridge. During canal restoration, a drop lock may be used where it is impractical or prohibitively expensive to remove or raise a structure that was built after the canal was closed (and where re-routing the canal is not possible).
A drop lock can consist of two conventional lock chambers leading to a sump pound, or a single long chamber incorporating the sump - although the term properly applies only to the second case. As the pounds at either end of the structure are at the same height, the lock can only be emptied either by allowing water to run to waste from the sump to a lower stream or drain, or (less wastefully) by pumping water back up to the canal. Particularly in the two-chamber type, there would be a need for a bypass culvert, to allow water to move along the interrupted pound and so supply locks further down the canal. In the case of the single-chamber type, this can be achieved by keeping the lock full and leaving the gates open while not in use.[30]
While the concept has been suggested in a number of cases, the only example in the world of a drop lock that has actually been constructed is at Dalmuir on the Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland.[31] This lock, of the single chamber type, was incorporated during the restoration of the canal, to allow the replacement of a swing bridge (on a busy A road) by a fixed bridge, and so answer criticisms that the restoration of the canal would cause frequent interruptions of the heavy road traffic. It can be emptied by pumping – but as this uses a lot of electricity the method used when water supplies are adequate is to drain the lock to a nearby burn.[32]
Flood locks [ edit ]
A flood lock is to prevent a river from flooding a connected waterway. It is typically installed where a canal leaves a river. At normal river levels, the lock gates are left open, and the height of the canal is allowed to rise and fall with the height of the river.
However, if the river floods beyond a safe limit for the canal, then the gates are closed (and an extra lock created) until the river drops again. Since this is a true lock it is possible for boats to leave the canal for the flooded river despite the difference in water levels (though this is not likely to be wise) or (more sensibly) to allow boats caught out on the flood to gain refuge in the canal.
Note that if the canal is simply a navigation cut connecting two stretches of the same river, the flood lock will be at the upstream end of the cut (the downstream end will have a conventional lock).
Flood locks which have been used only as flood gates (see below) are often incapable of reverting to their former purpose without refurbishment. That is, where only outer gates are ever closed (probably because a waterway is not a true commercial one, and therefore there is no financial imperative for a boat to venture out onto a flooded river) inner gates soon suffer from lack of maintenance. A good example is on the Calder and Hebble Navigation, where structures referred to in the boating guides as "Flood Locks" are clearly only capable of being used for flood-prevention, not for "penning" boats to or from the river in flood.
Flood gates [ edit ]
Bi-directional flood gates on the canal Schoten-Dessel, Belgium
Flood gate or Stop gate (American usage) on Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. When a flood threatened, boards were put in the lock to divert waters from the canal to the Potomac river. Note winch house on top for the boards.
A flood gate or "stop gate" is the cheaper equivalent of a flood lock. Only one set of gates exist, and so when the river is higher than the canal, the gates are closed and navigation ceases. These are quite common in the French inland waterways system. Flood gates may also be used to sub-divide long canal pounds or protect, in case of bank collapse, the surrounding area if this is lower than the water level of the canal. They are commonly found at the ends of long embankments and at aqueducts. These gates are often overlooked because they lack balance beams and are only a little higher than normal canal level.
Bi-directional gates and locks [ edit ]
Bi-directional gates at one chamber end of a tidal lock (located in Veurne on the canal Nieuwpoort - Duinkerke)
Where a lock is tidal (i.e. one side of the lock has water whose level varies with the tide) or where a canal meets a river whose level may vary, the water on the tidal or river side (the "downstream" side) may rise above the water on the normal "upper" side. The "upstream" pointing doors will then fail to do their job, and will simply drift open. To prevent water flowing the wrong way through the lock, there will need to be at least one set of gates pointing in the "wrong" direction. If it is desirable that boats can use the lock in these circumstances, then there needs to be a full set of gates pointing towards the tidal or river side. The usual method is to have gates pointing in opposite directions at both ends of the chamber (alternatively, the "paired stop lock" arrangement of two separate sequential locks pointing in opposite directions would work here – but would require an extra chamber). If navigation is not required (or impossible) at |
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“My operating assumption has long been that Trump would run about as poorly as John McCain and Mitt Romney among African-Americans, and also would run significantly worse among Hispanics. This would require Trump to secure about 64% of the white vote in order to win – a tough haul,” says Real clear Politics’ Sean Trende.
“But Trump’s numbers among nonwhites have actually been relatively decent. If we assume that undecided voters are ultimately representative of decided voters (within groups), Fox News has him winning 7% of African-Americans and 27% of Hispanics – roughly Romney’s showing in 2012. The common rejoinder is that these polls represent the state of the race with Trump having wrapped up the Republican nomination, while Clinton is stuck in a nasty race with Bernie Sanders. Once she nails down the nomination, the race should shift back to her….But… the ABC News poll finds that Trump is, in fact, pulling in 11% of Democrats to Clinton’s 8 % of Republicans, but that only 3% of Democrats are undecided, while 7% of Republicans haven’t made up their minds.
The Fox News poll has similar findings, with Clinton and Trump both taking an equal number of voters from the other party, and showing a similar number of undecided partisans.” [RCP]
But It’s Still Early
Clinton’s decline in the polls is a warning sign that this could be a close race. However, more than five months remain until the election in November. A lot can, and will, happen in that time, including Clinton officially securing the Democratic nomination.
The national trends are good indicators of the national mood right now, but closer to the election, the focus will shift to the handful of battleground states that will determine the outcome of the election.Ukraine's prime minister Mykola Azarov has described a $15bn aid package from Russia as a historic deal to allow the ex-Soviet republic return to economic growth, as protesters in Kiev voiced anger over a "sell-out" to Moscow.
Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovych and Russia's Vladimir Putin announced the bailout for Kiev on Tuesday after talks in Moscow. The deal also includes lowering the price for Russian gas deliveries to Ukraine pays by about a third.
"The head of state managed to agree lower gas prices as of January 1st and until the contract ends," Azarov told his government, referring to a ten-year gas contract that expires in January 2019. "This allows a revival of economic growth."
"Yesterday, a historic development occurred.
"The president reached agreement on exceptionally beneficial conditions for crediting Ukraine's economy, which allows us to carry out wide-ranging plans for economic modernisation," Azarov said.
Putin's intervention raised the stakes in the battle over Ukraine's future.
The announcements came after he held talks in Moscow with his Ukrainian counterpart, who is facing massive protests at home for his decision to shelve a pact with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia.
Economic experts say Ukraine desperately needs at least $10bn in the coming months to avoid bankruptcy.
Putin sought to calm the protesters in Kiev by saying on Tuesday that he and Yanukovych did not discuss the prospect of Ukraine joining the Russian-dominated Customs Union. But the sweeping agreements are likely to fuel the anger of demonstrators who want Ukraine to break from Russia's orbit and integrate with the 28-nation EU.
The Russian finance minister, Anton Siluanov, said after the Kremlin talks that Russia would purchase $15bn in Ukraine's Eurobonds, starting this month.
Putin said the Russian state-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom, will cut the price that Ukraine must pay for Russian gas deliveries to $268 per 1,000 cubic metres from the current level of about $400 per 1,000 cubic metres.
In brief remarks to the media before they began the talks, Putin said Ukraine "is without doubt, in the full sense of the word, our strategic partner and ally". He said that over the past two years, trade levels between the countries had dropped, but that the range of new agreements would rectify that.
"The time has come to take energetic steps not only to return to the levels of recent years but to go further," he said.
Membership of the Customs Union, a Moscow-led trade grouping into which the Kremlin has been keen to entice Ukraine, is unlikely to be on the agenda in the near future, but it is believed that in return for a package of loans and trade concessions, Yanukovych has agreed not to sign the EU deal.
Putin looked relaxed before the meeting, slouching in his chair, while Yanukovych sat bolt upright and spoke with long pauses between sentences. Ukrainian media reported that Yanukovych's delegation had asked the Russians not to arrange a joint press conference after the meetings finished.
Nevertheless, Yanukovych said the documents on the table represented a "strategic decision" and that the two sides should work harder to develop closer relations in future. He told Putin he hoped the "traditional" issue of gas prices could be solved.
Demonstrators have sealed off the centre of Kiev for several weeks and repulsed police efforts to remove them. On Tuesday morning, several hundred protesters stood on Yanukovych's route to the airport, holding signs that read: "Turn the plane round to Europe!"(That’s from “Archer” but it rings true here as well. Thank God for Russians. And tomato juice.)
Ahh yess… I am quite the lucky one. I’ve been given the glorious task of contributing pictures of my ex boyfriend for his birthday party/girlfriend’s baby shower. And because of my blessed Catholic guilt, I agreed to do it. So as I sit here, cropping myself out of memories and chugging bloody mary’s, I have to wonder…
Is there such a thing as “too much” vodka?
I’ve concluded there is not, although I know this in my heart to be false. However, I’m unsure if I currently have a heart because there is nothing inside me but alcohol and numbness. (Also tomato juice, which is giving me a bit of heartburn.)
I’ve created a fun new drinking game out of this pain and loneliness: take a drink whenever I start to cry.
(At present, I am plastered.)
Do you guys remember that game (and/or “horror-fest”) that you played as children when you’d go into the bathroom at midnight and say “Bloody Mary” 3 times in the mirror? Well even though she doesn’t appear and slaughter you (spoiler alert), you will see a crazed redheaded woman screaming with makeup running down her face.
At least that’s what I see.
Despite the fact that I was always more of a Queen Elizabeth fan, I’m starting to understand Mary Tudor’s methods. (Not killing Protestants. I just mean the whole “burning people” thing.) She was just pissed, that’s all. Her lovely mother was replaced by a trashy ho named Anne Boleyn and she wasn’t about to let her shitty hypocrite father stomp all over her beliefs. “Defender of the Faith”, my ass! Thinks he’s a goddamn prophet…
Anyways, people should quit giving her a raft of shit because I’d probably do the same thing if my father tossed my mom out and tried to disown me…
…oh, wait! He totally did! (The latter part at least.)
Also, thank you very much to my ex and his family for giving me the task of providing you with pictures that I TOOK.
So fuck them and fuck everybody and have a nice day. Also check out this post from Thought Catalog that reminded me of my post from a couple weeks ago. God bless and peace out and whatever else people say. I’m getting too drunk to see the keyboard.
UPDATE NOVEMBER 13th, 2014:
I totally emailed her the pictures and said something like, “Here’s the pictures, congratulations on everything! Wishing you all the best! *smiley face* ” and guess what the fuck she said in her response email…
“Thank you for the pictures. Your being really nice about this whole baby thing I know it’s hard because you still have feelings for zach but we are about to start a family and you gotta understand where I’m coming from when I ask you to stop contacting him.”
Ignoring all the grammar and spelling mistakes, I’m sitting here like WHAT IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK?!?! I don’t even contact him, HE contacts ME and I don’t want to be a part of their shitty little family!!!
(As though I’d leave my current fantastic boyfriend and get together with my ex so he can be a giant anchor shackled to my foot forever pulling me deeper and deeper into the water until I’m drowning in regret and clutching onto his child who calls me “Aunt Alanna”.)
Absolutely not! Ridiculous…
So I responded with this:
“Of course, I totally respect that and I wish you both the best. I won’t contact Zach anymore and I’m truly sorry if I’ve offended you in any way. That was never my intention. I really do wish you both happiness and I’m glad that I could help with the pictures. I promise you won’t be hearing from me anymore lol :)”
BECAUSE THAT IS WHO THE FUCK I AM, PEOPLE. THAT IS WHO. I. AM.!!!!!!!!!
*drops mic*
AdvertisementsDifferentiating High-Quality Furniture Construction from Substandard Workmanship
Features and Tips to Help Assure That You Are Buying Quality Furniture
Many consumers can likely recount an experience when they purchased an item for a rather large sum of money and were ultimately disappointed to learn that its quality simply did not live up to their expectations. Based on such factors as marketing, outward appearance of the item, and even assurances or statistics offered by a salesperson, there was undoubtedly the anticipation of long-lasting performance and high return on investment; when this did not materialize, it left them dissatisfied, angry, disillusioned, or any combination thereof.
While the above scenario could apply to most major purchases, it can be most disconcerting when it occurs with items that people rely on every day, such as their vehicles, appliances, electronics – and the furniture throughout the rooms of their home. High quality furniture affords homeowners a number of benefits, including:
Comfort
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Wood Frame and Construction Look for a hard wood (oak, cherry, mahogany) not any hardwood (a class of tree) If plywood, it should be at least nine layers thick, with a minimum number of knots Veneer (thin layer of premium wood) is okay if base piece is solid wood or plywood Pieces of good quality furniture will not wobble under pressure on any of the corners Similarly, these pieces will not twist or creak upon lifting any of their sides or corners
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Red Flags – What to Avoid Pressboard, particleboard, or fibreboard construction Soft woods that are easily scratched, marred, or dented Perfectly symmetrical pieces of wood; likely machine-made Joints that are held together with staples, nails, or visible glue Wood-on-wood sliding drawers; can lead to sticking or warping Very glossy or cloudy finishes that hide/mask the grain of the wood
Buying furniture, just like buying a home or a vehicle, should be considered an investment, one that is intended to deliver long-term returns in terms of comfort and performance. In this light, while top quality furniture will likely have a higher upfront cost, it will in fact prove more cost effective over time than inferior pieces that are purchased solely on the basis of a lower price tag.
Taking the time to examine the construction and composition of any new pieces or suites to ensure that they meet the standards of quality outlined above will be a very important step in making a wise furniture purchase – and investment.
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Black Glass Nightstand on Copper Legs
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I've just finished New GROW!
Please note that, it is rather a little bit small size with 5 panels than normal GROW even it took a long time.
I intended to make a mini GROW at first,but it had been complicated as a mini one.
Please enjoy it!
PS> Only one way to get ALL MAX levels.
[How to play GROW] You click the panel and makes things in field grow.
You would complete the game when all panels' level would become Lv.MAX.
You have to think about the order since there are deep relations with each panel when they are growing.
Sponsored Links
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*contribution rule
*contribution rule I would like you to understand that I will delete the posts that outright spoiler of the game or the link to the other walk-through site. I made these games after suffering many hardships, so I hope everyone can enjoy them as long as possible.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Back to topDriving east out of Aden, we were just a few hundred metres past the last army checkpoint when we saw the black al-Qaida flag. It flew from the top of a concrete building that had been part-demolished by shelling.
From here into the interior, all signs of control by the government of Yemen disappeared. This is the region of newly proclaimed jihadi emirates in south Yemen that are run by affiliates of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the Yemeni franchise of the movement founded by Osama bin Laden.
AQAP has existed in this ragged, mountainous terrain for years, but in the last 12 months the jihadis have moved down from the high ground to take control of cities in the lowlands. They are in the process of setting up an al-Qaida utopia here, where security is provided by jihadis, justice follows sharia law and even the administration of electricity and water supplies is governed by the emir.
Azzan, a market town in Shabwa province a year ago, is one of the three proclaimed Islamic emirates in south Yemen. When the Guardian approached it, the town entrance was defended by more than a dozen fighters equipped with armoured vehicles that had been commandeered from the government. We were met by three young jihadis and taken to the spot where the 17-year-old son of AQAP's spiritual leader, Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed, presumably by an American drone. Awlaki himself was killed in a separate strike last year.
At a small store on the side of the road, young men sat at computers copying the sermons of Awlaki, the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and other household names of the global jihad. A poster on the wall advertised a film called The Survivors, featuring accounts of leaders who had survived drone strikes.
The city's old police station has been converted into a sharia court. Inside, in a room whose walls were hung with the symbols of the jihadi court – a black flag, a kalashnikov and a long stick used for delivering corporal punishment – sat the judge. He opened a small notebook as a demonstration of how the al-Qaida justice system had resolved 42 cases in a fortnight.
"People come to us from parts we don't control and ask us to solve their problems," he said. "The sharia justice system is swift and incorruptible. Most of the cases we solve within the day."
Had they had cut off any hands in dispensing justice?
"Cutting the hand of the thief is not to punish the thief, it is to deter the rest of society," he said.
Driving out of Azzan to the west for 100 miles we came to the centre of another Islamic emirate, at Jaar. Jihadi fighters met us with their newly commandeered armoured vehicle, freshly painted with their insignia and furnished with the black flag.
We threaded a way through the crowded market, past stalls of vegetables and live chickens, as gunmen on motorbikes patrolled the dusty potholed streets. Many of the town's buildings appeared to have been reduced to concrete rubble by air strikes.
In this wretched place, AQAP and their affiliates are attempting to build a new society. Unlike in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, in Yemen they are trying to implement sharia by winning over the hearts and minds of the people.
In Jaar, the jihadi administration has abolished taxes, provided free water and electricity and installed sewage pipes. Their trucks distribute water to villages and Bedouin settlements.
People living in the desert on the outskirts of the town told us the jihadis had connected their village to the electricity grid for the first time in their lives. The Islamist administration has even allowed the people to continue chewing the stimulant qat. The only thing they have insisted on is moving the market for it to the outskirts of town.
A young, shy jihadi named Fouad took us into an abandoned building, where a meal was spread out on the floor. "Eat, eat, these are good times," he said, cheerfully shredding chunks of mutton with his thick stubby fingers and throwing them over.
"Times have changed, things are much better," said Fouad. "The days of suffering and hiding in the mountains have gone."
Another fighter dressed in Afghan style sat with us, but his big belly and over-stuffed magazine pouches prevented him from kneeling and scooping the rice, so he picked up a bone and reclined, sucking at it like a happy child making whistling sounds.
"Thanks be to Allah," said the fighter.
Fouad had once studied English at the college of literature at Sana'a University, but now he had adopted the dress and outlook of a jihadi.
His head was covered with a big white headscarf pulled down on his forehead and throwing dark shadows over his broad bony features. He spoke softly in classical Arabic, but his message was contemporary and had little to do with the caves of Afghanistan.
"The media tries to portray the mujahideen as ignorant people who failed in their lives, rejected by their societies and this is why they take this path," he said. "The reality is that many of the mujahideen are educated and have higher degrees, but they left their studies to care about the nation. They saw their nation insulted and living under oppression and believe it is their duty to take this path."
Fouad said that "democracy" – a word that for him covered the autocratic Arab leaders who ran fake elections in their countries – had been shown not to work.
"Democracy has failed in the Arab world," he said. "It failed in Tunis and in Egypt and Libya. It failed in Yemen. The people agree.
"Democracy only brought injustice and ignorance and backwardness and a desire to follow the west. The first people to revolt against these treacherous regimes were of course the mujahideen. But the people did not respond to them at the beginning because of the strength of the police state. The people feared them. At last, however, they started to revolt. They saw that it was either injustice and slavery or freedom. So they revolted. And we support all the revolutions. Sheikh Osama supported it.
"We also benefited from these revolutions. They gave us freedom. We were able to come out."
The revolutions had weakened the police states, Fouad said, and the jihadis had been able to exploit that. "We were able to control towns and areas. We were able to tell people about our mission. All of this was during the last revolution.
"We were aiming for this control from the start. Control under sharia is our basic goal. Nothing else. We just want to serve the people, give them what they have been missing for a long time."
The jihadis had tried to take Jaar many times before, sometimes holding the town for a few weeks before being driven out. But last year, the revolution that toppled the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, split the army and turned units against each other, weakening security forces. The jihadis took advantage, and this time they appear to have succeeded.
A muezzin called for prayer and the whole town began to converge on the mosque.
Fouad walked us through the market, pointing out the perfection and piety of a town where merchants leave their shops unattended while they go to pray.
"Look, the merchandise is left alone and no one steals," he said.
What if someone doesn't want to pray?
"We just take them aside and advise them on the importance of prayer," he said.
And if they still don't want to pray?
"Then we will lock them somewhere quiet and give them reading material until they realise how wrong they were."
Fouad asked with meek and apologetic smile if he could have our phones. We were then blindfolded and driven in a car to meet the prisoners.
When Fouad removed the white piece of cloth, we were outside a small compound surrounded by heavily armed men, some in local sarongs, others in shalwar kameez. A couple of them had their faces wrapped in checkered scarves.
They stood guard outside padlocked metal doors. We were led into the first room, where a dozen captured soldiers sat on the floor, their bare feet in new, shiny metal chains with a small copper padlock. They were tired. Some had long beards.
A man stood in the middle of the room to military attention and talked, his voice monotone: "We are soldiers who fought defending our country … we fought greatly until we ran out of ammunition … we ask the brother president to look into our situation and agree to the demands of the brothers in Ansar al-Sharia and exchange us with their prisoners …"
We were taken into another cell, and another soldier stood and narrated very similar lines while someone filmed him.
In the fourth room, we asked one of the men squatting on the floor how were they being treated.
"Like a prisoner. Like a prisoner," he repeated, his eyes staring at me wide open.
After we had been shown the prisoners, a heavily armed squat man said: "They are poor soldiers, they give each soldier one magazine, that's what, 30 bullets? We each carry 10 magazines how many bullets is that? You calculate and we have more supplies in the middle of the battle, we use Google maps and send scouts days before the attack. They are poor."
In the car on the way back a man – identifiable from his voice as the commander – said: "We ask the government to respond to us, and exchange those men."
And what if they don't?
"Sharia gives us three ways to deal with them, either we release them, which we won't, or exchange them or kill them," he said.
Later we walked around Jaar unaccompanied. A farmer with a thin fuzz of white stubble on his face was making his way back from the fields on the outskirts of town. What did he make of jihadi rule?
"They got three men from three different areas and they cut their hands," he said. Had they stolen? "Yes, but what? An air conditioner, a few items … but now no one dares to raise his voice in Jaar, let alone steal. This town has gone quiet. Even in the market, no one shouts. Al-Qaida have imposed security, but if they suspect that someone is spy he will disappear."
The fertile land around Jaar appeared deserted. The irrigation canals, neglected for almost a year, had dried up and the yellow earth was cracked and powdery. Where mangos and papayas had once grown were withered trees and swirling clouds of dust.
Many of the people have left, fleeing the shelling by the government and aerial attacks. Tens of thousands of refugees are packed in schools in Aden, where they live among uncollected garbage, raw sewage and poverty.
"The people have left, each family leaving one son in the house and the rest fled to Aden," said the old farmer.
One of those who has fled is Faisal. He woke up one morning last year and saw that the jihadis had taken control of the town. "Not one bullet was fired," he said.
The people tried to march in the streets of Jaar in protest against the town's takeover, Faisal said, but they were shot at and the crowd dispersed. So he joined a caravan of refugees streaming towards Aden, where he now lives in a camp.
A few months after taking Jaar, the jihadis pushed into the nearby town of Zinjibar. They surrounded the police and security services. The government's feared central security units abandoned their camp and the next day the army did the same. The jihadis took over the banks and raided the heavy weapons stores and ammunition dumps. Heavy shelling and fighting in Zinjibar in the months that followed sent tens of thousands more refugees to Aden, which now has the air of a city under siege.
In March, the emboldened jihadis scored another tactical victory, attacking a military camp on the outskirts of Aden itself. Instead of attacking the heavily guarded trenches and tank positions, the jihadis followed a mountain trail and attacked the rear of the army. In a few hours they had killed 182 soldiers and captured 72. They took the weapons and left.
Many in Sana'a and Aden couldn't believe that the Yemeni army could be so easily defeated by a band of tribespeople. Where were all the American-backed anti-terror units?
In Aden, the Guardian met a young lieutenant, his hair cropped short and his moustache pencil thin. He was still being paid by the army, but hadn't worn a uniform in more than a month. He was part of the reconnaissance unit of the 25th armoured brigade, which had been doing most of the fighting in Abyan province in the last year.
"There are many conspiracy theories about how we lost Zinjibar," he said. "Many thought that there was a deal between Saleh and the jihadis. The truth is much simpler: the army leadership is rotten and corrupt. Why would a soldier fight if the army is split in Sana'a?
"Do you know how many of them attacked the camp? Between 55 and 65."
The lieutenant's assessment of the jihadis' strength chimed with something Fouad had told us. For two decades, Abyan province and other parts of south Yemen were closely connected to global jihad. Thousands went to fight in Afghanistan. Later, new waves of jihadi Yemenis left for Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, and Abyan became one of the preferred routes for Saudi young men to seek training and then travel to Iraq.
"We have military commanders who lead and have new tactics and new ways to wage war," Fouad said. "The Yemeni army is much weaker than people think. They don't have a reason to fight. [The army] fights only for money, which serves a foreign agenda whether they know it or not. They follow their leaders' orders."
"We have learned," Fouad said."They didn't announce it officially, but the rumour is that they were going to raise the excise tax on it 500 per cent. It's 11 (per cent) now and that puts it out in the market for $400 a box. It would go up to $2000 if the excise goes up to 500 per cent," he says. Eric Payne, 22, who is in the military, is buying up boxes of 45mm and 9mm ammunition for target practice. "Everybody's buying it right now, probably because of politics, because they think gun laws are going to change," he says. Some put the shortages down to America's two wars, which are causing manufacturers to focus on military need, coupled with increased training exercises by other law enforcement officials. But Mr Gilronan says there is also evidence of stockpiling by private gun owners, who fear the new political climate. "Every time you tell people there's a chance they can't have it, they are going to buy it as fast as they can get it," he says. Rick from Virginia, a tall, athletic-looking man in his mid-30s he declines to give his last name has loaded up a trolley with about a dozen boxes of ammunition of various calibres.
"The numbers I have seen suggest that 17 per cent of gun owners in America will defend their right to own guns with their lives," he says. "In order to able to do that, they have to be able to shoot them and so they are buying enough ammunition now so that should there be a shortage or legislation or anything else to restrict the supply of ammunition, they will have everything they need." Asked how many guns he owns, he laughs. "There was a group at one stall back there wearing the same T-shirt. It said: 'If you know how many guns you have you do not have enough'. Let's put it this way: I would run out of fingers and toes." By now, I have attracted a small crowd and another, older man in a cap that identifies him as a Vietnam veteran, hearing that I am a reporter from Australia, looms into my personal space. "Do you know anything about firearms?" he asks. "I have a lot of experience dealing with the press on this and I have yet to see the press do a decent job because I know what your agenda is. "Will you give me your home address so that I can send my friends to get you and your editor if you do your usual 60 Minutes strangle-job?" he says angrily.
I hazard another seemingly innocuous question: "I've heard people are worried about President Obama tightening up on gun ownership, is that right?" "Oh yeah, we are paranoid ex-military, right-wing excrements, can't you tell?" says the veteran, getting more worked up. "Have you read President Obama's lips? Are you familiar with his record as a senator from Illinois?" In the election campaign, candidate Obama declared that he did not believe assault weapons should be available to private citizens and he would look at reinstating the ban that ended in 2004 due to a sunset clause. Legislators have not seriously attempted to reinstate the ban, despite several mass shootings in the US involving semi-automatic weapons. But two weeks ago, when the flow of military-style guns from the US over the border to the Mexican drug gangs threatened to become a diplomatic issue with Mexico, Mr Obama was asked whether he still believed that assault weapons should be banned.
He does, but he added that "none of us are under any illusions" that reinstating the ban will be easy. In other words, it is in the too-hard basket. But that didn't placate the shoppers at the Virginia gun show. A huge number of automatic and semi-automatic weapons are on sale and trade seems to be brisk. I stop to admire what appears to be an M16. "That one," explains the vendor, who declines to give his name, "will fire 600 rounds a minute." It is not allowed to be sold on the spot because it requires a special licence and background checks with the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms administration and the FBI. But a few stalls further down, I could pick up, for instance, a very nice semi-automatic such as an M1 carbine, used by the US military, for between $US1000 and $US2000 depending on the model, provided I am a resident of Virginia and I don't have a criminal record. I do not require a gun licence and computers are set up around the hall for instant background checks. Loading
At the next stall down, Dale Blenkenship of Dales Guns tells me the SIG Sauer semi-automatic pistol I am admiring will cost $US350, but he's disappointed when he hears I am from over the border in Maryland, because he can't sell to me. Russell, who also doesn't want to give his last name, says sales are booming because "we don't want it to happen here like your government screwed up your country, taking your guns and freedom away from you".A soldier facing court-martial on child pornography and other charges went missing the day before his scheduled courtroom appearance at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and remains on the loose.
A warrant has been issued for the arrest of Staff Sgt. Ulises Moore-Ramirez, who had been cooperating with investigators, a base spokeswoman said, as they sought to convict him on 13 specifications of sexual abuse of a child (non-touching), five specifications of attempting to commit such abuse, seven specifications of extortion, one specification each of manufacturing and possessing child pornography, and one count of obstruction of justice.
The hearing was set for Thursday, spokeswoman Tiffany Wood said in an email. Moore-Ramirez hasn't been seen since Wednesday.
St. Louis' Fox TV affiliate reported that Moore-Ramirez, with 1st Engineer Brigade, allegedly used graphic language online in an attempt to convince underage girls to send him nude photos.
Staff Sgt. Ulises Moore-Ramirez
Photo Credit: Army
The soldier faces a maximum punishment of 316 years behind bars if convicted on all counts, Wood said, as well as loss of pay and allowances, reduction in rank to E-1 and a dishonorable discharge.
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Moore-Ramirez's disappearance has earned him a spot on the Army's online most-wanted list. The site lists him as 39 years old and 6-foot-1, with family ties to the Missouri area and to Mexico, his place of birth.Note: This release requires provider extensions to make Interop Tools fully work, learn more at http://insidewindows.net/category/interop-tools/ Interop Tools is an app that allows you to access multiple technical parts of your device. Through additional provider extensions (not included with the app by default), Interop Tools allows you to view and edit things such as Device Registry, Certificates, Applications, Device Info details and much more. Interop Tools will also allow other apps to access this app feature via App Services, it will include a built in permission system to allow the user to take control of which app has access to specific features. Interop Tools without any provider can also serve as a remote tool for another Interop Tools instance on another device, via Project Rome (in a future release) or the Remote Access functionality. Different providers and more extensions can be found at: http://insidewindows.net/category/interop-tools/FOXBORO � In one play you saw the culmination of a budding friendship built upon sweat, hard work and Ping-Pong.
FOXBORO � In one play you saw the culmination of a budding friendship built upon sweat, hard work and Ping-Pong.
It was a special moment last weekend when Julian Edelman and Danny Amendola fooled the entire Baltimore Ravens defense to tie the game late in the third quarter. Edelman took a lateral pass from Tom Brady, heaved the ball toward the dark Foxboro sky, and the Gillette Stadium crowd went crazy as it descended into the arms of Amendola for a 51-yard touchdown.
Most know about Edelman�s background � he�s a former quarterback at Kent State who defied the odds while transitioning into a dangerous NFL wide receiver. Not everyone knows that the connection we all saw between Edelman and Amendola |
Eastern elite, rural America (the "real" America according to Palin)) versus urban America. Ironically, the idea of Populism in Bryan's time included strong support for the income tax, whereas today the term implies being against virtually all forms of taxation. But consistency is rarely a constraint when rational thought is considered a form of elitism. Proof that consistency is not an admired trait is in the fact that Palin calls for Rahm Emanuel's resignation for using the word "retard" but simultaneously supports Rush Limbaugh's use of the same word the next day. That blatant hypocrisy and transparent double standard could only survive in an atmosphere of blind faith, anti-intellectualism, and demagoguery. The popularity of hate-mongers like Hannity, Beck, O'Reilly and Limbaugh bear further witness to this truth.
Voters profess attraction to Palin because of her anti-Washington language and image as a down-to-earth working mom. These are the same voters who without irony deeply hate Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, politicians like Palin doing double duty as working moms. But Palin unlike Clinton or Pelosi is "down-to-earth" because she speaks English badly and doesn't know the name of Russia's leader. Therefore she is one of the people. No matter that she is a wealthy politician flying around in private $10 million jets with a husband who supports Alaskan succession while claiming the mantle of patriotism. No, she is a woman of the people because of her fractured syntax and willful embrace of populist ideals that she herself has never actually lived.
I have been ignoring Palin, hoping that like a small scratch she would eventually heal and go away. Instead, she has turned out to be a drug-resistant staph infection intent on destroying our body politic. I now accept that reality. So be it. So I have changed my mind and welcome her to the political scene. We must lance the wound. Palin makes my skin crawl, but I fervently hope that she is the Republican candidate for president in 2012. We need to find out once and for all if the infection is going to kill us or if we can fight and reclaim our health. As with the first Civil War, we must now decide between two radically different futures, between an enlightened democracy and an oppressive theocracy. We either embrace our secular origins or willfully become a Christian nation. We either embrace science and rationalism or rely on faith for our guidance in both public and private life. We either take actions to protect the environment or consider climate change a liberal hoax. We either institute serious health care reform or allow medical costs to destroy our economy. These issues are not amendable to a middle-ground, parse-the-difference, mediate-the-dispute approach. The voters must decide between two completely incompatible visions of our future. And those radically divergent views are perfectly represented in Palin and Obama.
I once deeply feared another Palin candidacy, hoping that our country would never again be put in peril with a candidate so clearly unqualified for the presidency. But I now welcome and embrace the idea. The fact that anybody even believes she could serve as president means we have to test the hypothesis. This Civil War must be prosecuted, for we must choose one path or the other. Just as in 1861 we can no longer solve our differences by meeting half way. One side must prevail, and the only way to precipitate that victory or defeat is to engage in the battle. So let's rumble. Bring it on, and let's give the American people a clear, stark, unambiguous choice for what this country will become.Most of the Android phones comes with a built in Free Music player,Even though it meets my basic requirements,I choose to explore some other Apps available for Android.If you are a Music freak like me,I suggest you to try some of the below apps that I found worth using than default ones.Some of the listed apps are Paid ones and others are free but it all depends on your need,the one which has many features and controls is certainly not free,Indeed you can try these paid players and settle with the one you like.
The Best Music Player
After lot of research,I found that “PlayerPro Music Player‘” is the best music player available for for Android,It has some close competitors but at the end,Playerpro took the stage.
PlayerPro Music Player (Paid – $5 )
PlayerPro is a advanced music player with a stunning Interface and functionality,which will satisfy all your basic expectations.The features which enhances this player are
18 Free Player skins with wonderful artistic design.
Excellent search capabilities with integrated Voice Search
Integrated Video browser and Player.
Social Sharing option which will allow you o share album artist and details to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
10 band graphic EQUALIZER with 15 default/customizable presets, PRE-AMP control, BASS BOOST control, volume control, optional VIRTUALIZER control (stereo widening).
I recommend you to try the trial version of this app before purchasing the full version.
Download PlayerPro Music Player Trial ( Google Play )
Poweramp Music Player
This players is a relatively more popular Music player than the PlayerPro among the Android users,It comes with many inbuilt features like
Supports wide range of music formats (plays mp3, mp4/m4a (including alac), ogg, wma*, flac, wav, ape, wv, tta, mpc, aiff )
10 band optimized graphical equalizer for all supported formats, presets, custom presets
It has ability to queue the songs like in itunes
supports various playlist formats (m3u, m3u8, pls, wpl playlists)
it can scan music in library in few seconds and and has various visual themes, including support for external/3rd party skins
You need download the Poweramp Full Version Unlocker ($5) to extend the trial version to full version.
Download Poweramp Music Player (Trial) ( Google Play )
Winamp Music Player
Winamp Music player is a popular desktop music streaming app,the Android version of this app is also very much promising,It includes many features that above paid apps have and the Good news is it is FREE,so if you consider spending money on Apps go this one,It is a best alternative for the above paid apps.
Download Winamp Music player ( FREE- Google Play )
Here is a video which describes its feature in action
Other Music Players (Free)
If you are a diehard Apple Products fan you will surely love this player(but I wonder why you chose Android!!!).MUI Player has a design which resmbles with i0S style.It has some unique features like ability to edit meta tags of the song and also searching songs will become fast and easy.
Google Play Music – Download
Official App by Google,Shop music on Google Play and listen instantly using the Google Play Music app.The Google Play Music app lets you listen to your music collection anywhere.
Neutron Music Player – Download
Simple and powerful player by which you can play the Lossless music formats like FLAC.Also it supports wide range of Music formats like MP1, MP2, MP3, OGG (Vorbis), FLAC, WMA, WMA Lossless (16-bit only), AC3, AAC, M4A, M4B, M4R, MP4, 3GP, 3G2, MOV, ALAC, APE (Monkey’s Audio), WV (WavPack), MPC (MusePack), WAV, AU, AIFF, MPG/MPEG (audio only), AVI (audio only)
TTPod – Download
You can also use this player for playing FLAC audio formats.It includes features like
Built in graphic and customize EQ
High accurate lyrics and album acts downloads;
Plenty of skins to chose from;
Minilyrics style floating lyrics.
Cubed3 Player – Download
Most downloaded Music player with great interface and basic features.Give it a try if you are not satisfied with any of the above players.
Finally :
Well,Everything depends on your needs and taste,you can spend some bucks to purchase the paid ones if your really impressed by the Trail versions or else you can go with free players like Winamp,Google Play Music etc.
Did I miss your favorite Music player??? why don’t you share with me.Both Rob Hawkes from Nelson and his mother in law had to battle for their money back after seeking a quote from Youi.
Youi's sales tactics are being condemned by former customers and an ex-staffer of the insurance company which is under investigation by the Commerce Commission.
A former staff member believes the company's culture encourages salespeople to push the boundaries.
The South African-owned insurer has been asked for an explanation by the Insurance Council over claims about its sales techniques which allegedly include debiting customers for policies without their permission.
SCOTT WORSLEY Scott Worsley of Fielding says Youi charged him after he sought a quote for a customer.
The company launched in New Zealand in 2014, selling house, car and contents insurance through the internet and telephone.
READ MORE:
* Commerce Commission completes Youi investigation
* Youi gets 'please explain' from Insurance Council after allegations
Complaints have since emerged that Youi required people to give their credit card or bank account details before giving a quote, and then had their accounts debited without their agreement.
The commission began investigating Youi's sales techniques in March last year. It has completed its investigation but is not yet ready to reveal its findings.
A number of Stuff commentors say they have had similar experiences and had heavy pressure put on them when they tried to cancel their policies.
Judy Whitaker of Alexandra, said her husband Alan was asked for his bank account details before being given a quote, and then declined to go ahead with a policy.
They were surprised to find a strange direct debit on their account.
"I went straight to the bank and they said, oh, that's Youi," Whitaker said.
"He never signed anything... and then next minute they were saying, you never paid this account and we said, hang on a minute, we've got emails to say that we didn't want it.
"It took us quite some time to get our money back. It just went on and on and on."
* Do you have a Youi story to tell? Contact us at businessday@fairfaxmedia.co.nz and put "youi" in the subject line.
Andrew Campbell said he had been billed straight away and it was a "mission to try and get my payment back".
"They insisted they required all my credit card details and said they couldn't move further without them for a proper 'quote'. While I challenged this process with the phone sales rep, they still insisted."
It took a few weeks to get a refund and Campbell said he cancelled his credit card so it could not be debited.
He now used a pressy card when giving out credit card details.
"Not the practice"
Youi spokesman Trevor Devitt said the company would not comment on the allegations covered in the commission's investigation until the watchdog made its findings.
But he said asking for credit card details for a quote was "certainly not the practice" at Youi.
He said he would need the particulars of any new complaints so he could determine the facts.
A former staff member said he had serious concerns about the company's ethics while working there.
The person, who asked not to be identified, believed the company's culture, which encouraged the initial salespeople to "soft sell" customers, and then heavily penalised the staff who handled the cancellations when they lost policies, was the problem.
It was more the culture that salespeople were thrown into, rather than their training, the worker said.
One tactic was to put the customer under a heavy sense of obligation about the agreement and make them second guess themselves.
But Youi also had a strange culture which reinforced positivity.
"I don't know if it came from the States or something but it made me very uncomfortable."
"Numerous emails"
Rob Hawkes said more than $2500 was taken from his account after making inquiries about house and contents insurance.
"It took numerous emails and phone calls to get my money back and none of the apparently senior managers at Youi I spoke to seemed to think it was any big deal."
Hawkes said his mother-in-law had a similar experience.
One of Hawkes' staff had worked for Youi in Australia and believed it was tacitly encouraged by the company.
"A look at their 'wall' on their website shows just how often it's happening," he said.
Jackie Bennion was told that giving her card details was the only way to view the policy details and that she could back out within a certain timeframe.
"When I tried to do this I was bombarded with sales people telling me how foolish I was and that Youi was the best thing since sliced bread and they knew how much better it was than my current insurer."
"I would never go back to them no matter how much money they reckon I could save. And as it turned out they were no better than the company I was with anyway!"
Luke Pivac was shopping for insurance last month and Youi was insistent on credit card details before giving out a quote.
"Being experienced in this kind of thing I told them I was not feeling comfortable with it and didn't want to. However, they kept asking me more questions about the quote; then brought it up again... three more times.
"This made me feel even more pressured and was making me feel more uncomfortable, I resorted to having to hang up."
Scott Worsley's motorcycle business was charged when he sought a quote on behalf of a customer seeking finance.
He thinks Youi got his bank details from a policy he arranged for a previous customer.
Writing the experience off to a misunderstanding, he rang for another customer late last year but ended up challenging the need to give bank account details on a quote for someone else.
Worsley says the salesperson rang bank several times, saying account numbers were no longer needed. Eventually he slammed down the phone.
"They were very persistent and just didn't grasp [the concept of a quote]," Worsley says. "I found them to be very pushy and not professional at all, so we don't use them anymore."
Christine Lowdon plans to complain to the Commerce Commission and the Insurance and Financial Services Ombudsman after her experience with Youi.
After realising the company had been deducting money from her account since May last year, she said she was battling to get her money back and had proof she had declined their quote. "They are still mucking me around."
She believed she would eventually get a refund, but she worried for others.
"Their arrogant and intimidating manner on the phone makes me worry that less confident people will doubt themselves and perhaps be left out of pocket by backing down."They say that breaking up with your bank is hard to do.
They're wrong about that. One of the biggest reasons to remain a customer of a big bank was pretty well eliminated in a low-key news announcement earlier this month. No longer do you have to sacrifice the convenience of a huge ATM network if you deal with a credit union or smaller bank.
For years, there's been an ATM network called the Exchange available to smaller players in the banking business. Customers of participating banks and credit unions could use Exchange-linked ATMs without paying surcharges that can range from $2 to $3 for a simple withdrawal.
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The Exchange is now on its way to growing in size from medium to extra large. Manulife Bank, a member of the network, is in the process of adding 830 ATMs to convenience stores in nine provinces by the end of September. This gives the Exchange a total of 3,300 or so bank machines, second to the 4,000 operated by Royal Bank of Canada.
"There has generally been a perception that if you deal with a small bank or credit union, you had to give up a level of convenience or access to facilities," said Andrew Obee, president and CEO of Ficanex Services, which manages the Exchange in Canada (there is a U.S. arm of the network as well). "The reality is that this isn't true."
Manulife Bank's expansion doesn't just give the 184 members of the Exchange network more ATM muscle than five of the Big Six banks. It also suggests we could be entering a golden age of competition for your banking business.
Manulife Bank's plan to fight harder for market share is in part based on building its public profile through the ATMs being added to Couche-Tard, Mac's and Circle K convenience stores. The bank previously had 12 bank machines – Manulife Bank CEO Rick Lunny jokes that "at least half of them were probably located in Manulife office buildings."
Mr. Lunny said the bank is also developing products, services and technologies to build its competitive position. For example, it recently introduced a combined chequing and savings product called the Advantage Account that provides unlimited, no-fee withdrawals and 1.25-per-cent interest for customers who keep a balance of $5,000 or more. "What we're putting our money into on the technology front is mobile banking," he said. "I'm kind of convinced that the future of banking is in mobile."
The big banks are all over mobile banking, but their biggest competitive asset is their branch network. These days, banks are shifting the emphasis in branches from basic teller transactions to selling mortgages, credit lines, mutual funds and other profitable products. Banks like to say they're providing advice, but they're primarily selling stuff.
The level of competitiveness in online banking seems to be on the rise as well. Long-time incumbents Tangerine and President's Choice Financial are being challenged by a new player called Zag, which is backed by Quebec's Desjardins Group.
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And then there are the credit unions that dominate the Exchange's membership list. More of them are getting into no-fee chequing as a way of capitalizing on their images of more customer-focused banking. Some credit unions also compete hard on mortgage rates, and on rates paid to savers.
The increased size of the Exchange makes using an alternative financial institution as convenient as a big bank from an ATM point of view. Many years ago, my wife and I had an account with Citizens Bank of Canada, a no-fee online bank and Exchange member that was eventually closed by its parent, Vancouver City Savings Credit Union. At my office in Ottawa, I had the choice of using ATMs operated by National Bank of Canada or HSBC Bank Canada, both less than a block away. While travelling in Prince Edward Island one summer, we used a local credit union's ATM. In each case, there was no surcharge because the institutions providing the ATM were Exchange members.
It's great to see alternatives like this becoming available because banks have a proven strategy for maintaining profitability in the kind of economic uncertainty we're seeing these days. They charge customers more and become more dictatorial about rules and terms. If your bank tries anything, break up. It's a great time to start a new relationship.
======
The Exchange in profile
What it is: A network of ATMs that clients of 184 smaller banks and credit unions can use without incurring the usual surcharges that apply when you use a bank machine that isn't part of your bank's own network.
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Who's in: Bank members include Canadian Western Bank, HSBC Bank Canada, Manulife Bank and National Bank of Canada; credit union members range from big players like Vancity in British Columbia to Malpeque Bay Credit Union in Prince Edward Island (check the full list here).
What you can do at Exchange ATMs: Withdraw money and, in some cases, deposit money and change your PIN.
U.S. access: Clients of banks and credit unions that are Exchange members can withdraw money from U.S. ATMs with the Accel logo – surcharges may or may not apply; it's also possible to use point-of-sale terminals with the Accel name.
History: The Exchange began as a U.S. network of ATMs and expanded into Canada in 1983.Stock on sale as we are moving into B2B wholesale. The Basho Zen Meditation Chair helps you experience meditation at its best. Why? Because this chair allows you sit in a perfect posture, relaxed and open, that naturally takes you deeper into your inner world. For beginners and for people who are already practicing Vipassana meditation, Mindfulness, Zazen, or guided meditations focusing on the breath, the spine, the Chakras or Kundalini energy, this is the chair for you.
Buy now and get 40% off using code: basho40
A Meditation Chair with Many Purposes
We are delighted to see our chairs being used in many ways around the world: in yoga studios, in meditation retreats, ashrams, communes, hotels and also in ordinary homes, where parents take advantage of its conveniently portable design to stay close to their playing children.
In addition, our combo set of chair and table makes an ideal work station, or for resting, reading a book or enjoying a cup of tea.
Meditation Chairs that Care about the Environment
Our meditation chair is the result of many years’ experience in carpentry and design, requiring close cooperation among our design team, whose members have a passionate interest in meditation and personal well-being.
We also care for the environment and are acutely aware of the need for global consciousness - both are part of our mission. All wood for the production of our meditation chairs is CFC Certified. Every piece of leather is selected among the best in Europe and the fabric is Oeko-Tex 100 accredited.
The Basho Zen Meditation Chair is made and designed in Denmark.The whole reason of FOURCC codes is to prevent this mess
I really hate it when people overload four-character (FOURCC) codes for video formats they weren't intended to handle. Why?
Because it creates a mess that the user has to clean up manually.
The whole point of FOURCC codes and format structures is to unambiguously identify the format and color space of image data. When you overload an existing FOURCC with a new meaning, it creates ambiguity that causes conversion errors throughout a video processing pipeline that can be hard to track down. One common transgression is writing full range YCbCr data into the YUY2 FOURCC instead of 16-235 luma range. This creates all sorts of situations where video ends up either 14% higher or lower in contrast because two modules disagree on what range is being used, and they can't autonegotiate because the same code has been overloaded. Ditto for Rec. 601 vs. Rec. 709 coefficients, or interlaced vs. noninterlaced.
One solution that is often suggested is to make it a user choice. Well, that's one way to "solve" the problem, but it propagates the mess, and it also assumes that the user knows the answer to the question. Do your users whether the video codec you are using uses full-range luma or not? Does the vendor who makes the video codec document that? Probably not. It gets worse, though, when you consider that there may be hidden conversions in the pipeline. You can argue that hidden conversions are bad, and in general it's better to avoid them for performance and quality reasons. However, they're sometimes unavoidable, particularly for display. What would you do if you saw this dialog:
...followed by more for the video compressor and for the video driver. Heck, at this point, why bother having FOURCCs at all? Just make the user enter in the color space and chroma subsampling information too.
I've also heard the suggestion to make the determination based on whether the frame size is SD or HD. That's not really any better. So now you can't resize video temporarily across the SD/HD boundary without incurring a color conversion... yuck.
An additional reason I've heard to put in options is to recover blacker than black (BTB) and whiter than white (WTW) areas. Well, yes, you can do that via changing the color space, but that's not really what you're trying to do -- you need some sort of conversion to map those values in range, but the full range YCbCr color space is unlikely to be the one you want, and by changing the color space you're also whacking chroma as well as luma. What you really need is a custom color conversion matrix or at least to remap the luma range. Otherwise, you're likely reducing contrast more than necessary or introducing slight color shifts into your video.
At this point, I've resigned myself to having to eventually add some of these options to VirtualDub, because I see far too many cases where people have broken color conversions in their pipeline and they need to be able to compensate for codecs and players that use the wrong conversion formula. However, I fully intend to put a big "THIS IS NON-STANDARD" flag on the options, because I do not want to further the idea that this is the way that FOURCCs are supposed to work. Doing this is a big change to the blitter and display libraries, too, so I have no idea when this would be implemented.Riddles from Doctor Who
By: Justin Zablocki (author, Zablocki Bros. LLC) on September 9th, 2013 12:00 AM.
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Doctor Who originally aired on BBC in 1963 and was meant to be a show for the whole family because it dealt with science and history. Since the 26 seasons, 7 series, and one large break of Doctor Who it has gotten countless awards including several BAFTA TV Awards and millions of viewers. The mystery of Doctor Who makes this show a perfect setting for riddles. Here are some of the riddles of Doctor Who.
I'm something borrowed, I'm something blue; You stole me, and I stole you; I'm quite old and not quite new; End of the world, what to do?
This riddle comes from the episode "The Big Bang" (series 5, episode 13). In this episode the Doctor has been locked in Pandorica, a prison built for him by his enemies. After an elaborate plan he manages to'reboot' the universe and escape the prison. This riddle is referring to the TARDIS, Amy finally figures this out when the Doctor shows up with the TARDIS on her wedding day.
The next riddle comes from the episode "The Celestial Toymaker", the sixth series of the third season. At the end of the episode there are three riddles Steven and Dodo must solve.
Four legs, no feet; Of arms no lack; It carries no burden on its back; Six deadly sisters, seven for choice; Call the servants without voice.
Hunt the key, to fit the door; That leads out on the dancing floor. Then escape the rhythmic beat; Or you'll forever tap your feet.
Lady luck will show the way; Win the game, or here you'll stay.
The first two are riddles given by the Toymaker and the last one was given by the Doctor. The first riddle is referring to seven chairs in two rooms, by sitting in six of them you will be killed. The servants are life-sized dolls found in TARDIS shaped cupboards. The second riddle refers to a literal key that is hidden in a pie and then they go to a dance floor where the creepy dolls dance with Steven keeping him and Dodo from the Tardis, but they make it out alive. The final riddle isn't really much of a riddle, it just means they have to win the game to escape.
The next riddle comes from series 6, episode 4 ("The Doctor's Wife") and are the last words of Idris.
The only water in the forest is the river.
Originally these words had only speculative meaning but they were explained in "A Good Man Goes To War". In this episode you find out that the riddle meant that River is Amy Pond's daughter. The people of the Gamma Forest don't have a word for "Pond" so it was translated to River. For more information about this visit the Wikepedia page.
Then there is the biggest riddle of all. What is The Doctor's name? This riddle may never be solved but it has been the topic of a lot of recent discussion with the recent episode "The Name of the Doctor". But really this was just a ploy and didn't reveal anything relating to his name.
I hope you enjoyed these riddles! For more riddles go to funny riddles.Product Overview NOW YOU'RE GAMING WITH MSI
A graphics card is the single most important element for more FPS. As gamers, we understand that not just any graphics card "will do". That's why we bring you the best of the best. We don't want to bug you with noise and heat, but we DO want to give you more performance. With MSI GAMING series graphics cards you get just that.
PRE OVERCLOCKED PERFORMANCE
Most MSI Gaming graphics cards come pre-overclocked out of the factory. This simply means you get more performance out of your card, without spending any time on checking for maximum clocks and stability. Pre-overclocked graphics cards simply give more performance and you don't have to worry about damaging your card, it is completely covered by our warranty!
Features ADVANCED TWIN FROZR IV
MSI's Twin Frozr has been the industry defining graphics card cooler. The first Twin Frozr kicked off the dual-fan trend and today MSI stays true to its dual-fan dual-slot design where others have to resort to less effective means.
MILITARY CLASS COMPONENT
One of the deciding factors in performance is the quality of the components used. That is why MSI only uses MIL-STD-810G certified components for its Gaming cards because only these components have proven to be able to withstand the torturous circumstances of extreme gaming and overclocking.
AFTERBURNER
MSI Afterburner has quickly become the favorite overclocking software for media, overclockers and end-users. Because of its simple interface, it's easy to learn, but it packs a lot of powerful features like an integrated benchmark utility called Kombustor that can check your system performance in benchmarking mode, or run as a stability test.
Warranty Please note your statutory rights are not affected. For further information regarding Scan's warranty procedure please see our terms and conditions Details Duration: 36 months Type: Direct DOA Period: 14 days Manufacturer Contact Details Manufacturer: MSI Telephone: 0870 820 0009
TekSpek Guides AMD Radeon R9 285 Graphics Card
Date Issued: 2nd Sep 2014
Date Issued: You may know that the high-end Radeon R9 290X and R9 290 GPUs use the latest Hawaii GCN 1.2 architecture, imbued with better geometry throughput, tidier design and a general clean-up of the memory controller and back-end when compared to other mainstream Radeon models powered by the first-generation Tahiti architecture. Read More
ReviewsBoth the Fed and the ECB have managed to remain credible since the financial crisis, but their credibility levels have evolved differently. Since inflation in the US and the euro area has been similar in the past 8 years, the difference in the way that credibility has evolved is the result of the different macroeconomic policy mix applied.
This post is available in German on Makronom.
As policymakers prepare to go to unexplored lengths in using unconventional monetary measures (Gürkaynak and Davig 2015; Roubini 2016; Demertzis and Viegi 2010), the key to the effectiveness of monetary policy remains, as always, ‘expectations’: what people believe the future holds and the confidence they have in a central banks’ ability to achieve their objectives. In other words, credibility. When markets have trust in central banks’ ability to deliver price stability, the central bank needs to do less to deliver it. And conversely, without credibility more aggressive action is needed to achieve the same objective.
Credibility becomes more important in times of high uncertainty (Demertzis and Viegi 2010). This is because it becomes less about specific policies, and more about confidence in policymakers’ ability to manage uncertainty (Drazen and Masson 1994; Posen 2010).
When markets have trust in central banks’ ability to deliver price stability, the central bank needs to do less to deliver it.
Years of successful inflation performance prior to the financial crisis allowed central banks in the US and the euro area to become highly credible. This was manifested in the extent to which long term expectations were anchored to inflation targets.
But since the start of the financial crisis, inflation has become much more volatile in both the US and the euro area, reflecting persistently high uncertainty (Yellen March 29, 2016). And for the past couple of years it has been on a persistent declining path. Policymakers have reacted, and interest rates are now at the zero lower bound, which has raised doubts about the central banks’ ability to control inflation. Are central banks still credible?
A measure for credibility
How can credibility be measured? The way to capture it is by looking at how closely inflation expectations match the central bank’s inflation target (Demertzis et al 2012). The closer the two are for sustained periods of time, the more credible a central bank. However, inflation itself is also crucial to credibility. If inflation deviates from the target for long periods, then expectations lose their capacity to convey views on credibility.
It takes repeated successes for an institution to build up this stock that will allow it to establish credibility.
Two features are crucial when measuring credibility: first, identifying the stock of credibility that is deemed sufficient. In our measure, which ranges from 0 to 1, we identify this at 0.9. Second, it is crucial to recognise that it is through sustained failures that agents lose faith in an institution’s ability to deliver results. And the other way around: it takes repeated successes for an institution to build up this stock that will allow it to establish credibility.
What kind of expectations are relevant?
We apply here survey expectations to proxy policy makers’ credibility. If these expectations are de-anchored, then trust in their ability to manage the system is lost. However, it is important to acknowledge that recently a pronounced wedge has emerged between survey and market expectations measures (Christensen and Lopez 2016), in both the US as well as the euro area.
Figure 1a: US – Inflation Expectations, Survey vs Markets
Source for figures 1a and 1b: FRB, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, FRED Federal Reserve Bank of St.Louis, ECB and Thomson Reuters
Figure 1b: Euro area – Inflation Expectations, Survey vs Markets
As the two series diverge, this signals that confidence is starting to wane. But also, the wedge may very well be a reflection of increased uncertainty. Market expectations are quicker to follow actual inflation (even at longer horizons) as they attempt to also capture perceptions about risk and therefore hedge against them.
Survey expectations on the other hand, reflect an opinion about inflation reaching its target in the relevant horizon and are arguably more a measure of policy makers’ ability to deliver. Nevertheless, we need to understand better the difference in information these measures convey, as well as why they are diverging.
The US: credibility gained, credibility maintained
Based on a commonly agreed narrative about US monetary policy history (Goodfriend and King, 2005; Goodfriend 1993, 2005, 2007), we identify four distinct periods in its inflation history since the early 1970s (figure 2):
Period A: period of Great Inflation ending with Paul Volker’s appointment as chairman of the Fed (1980). This comprised of the two oil crises and both high and volatile inflation rates.
Period B: Volker’s disinflation period, ending in 1987. During this period inflation fell dramatically, at substantial cost to employment and growth, but there were also important gains in credibility.
Period C: Chairman Alan Greenspan is appointed and the period is identified with a Great Moderation. This is the period where the Fed effectively established its credibility.
Period D: coinciding with the start of the financial crisis (2007) and made up of what the IMF calls the Great Recession (2007-2009), the years of quantitative easing (QE1-3) and the recent years of very low inflation. Chairman Ben Bernanke was appointed just over a year before this period at the start of 2006.
Figure 2: Credibility in the US
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (CPI 10-year ahead inflation expectations) and authors’ calculations. Credibility threshold at 0.9.
A: Great Inflation — B: Volcker’s Dininflation — C: Great Moderation — D: Great Recession — Red line: Start of QE
During most of the 1990s and until 2007, the Fed enjoyed full credibility, as shown by the measure for credibility stocks in figure 2 (blue line). With the start of the crisis, this measure started to decline, but started improving again between QE2 and QE3. We interpret this to mean that:
the initial level of high credibility implies that despite its fall expectations had not been in any danger of being de-anchored (since it remained above 0.9 throughout the crisis), and
three applications of quantitative easing have succeeded in reversing the declining trend in the stock of credibility.
The euro area: can high credibility be sustained?
The history of the euro area is much shorter than that of the US. Since 1999, inflation in the euro area has been much lower in member states compared to historical levels, and also significantly lower than that inflation levels achieved by the Bundesbank. An average inflation rate of between 2 and 2.5 per cent throughout the first eight years allowed the ECB to establish high credibility.
Since mid-2007, the euro area has been subjected to two crises, the financial crisis originating in the US, and the European sovereign debt crisis (end of 2009). From mid-2007 onwards, inflation became much more volatile, even if on average it was still at similar levels.
Figure 3: Credibility in the euro area
Source: ECB, (CPI inflation and SPF 5- year ahead inflation expectations), and authors’ calculations. Credibility threshold at 0.9.
Events: 1. “Whatever it takes”: speech by Mario Draghi — 2. Start of QE
Credibility levels, as shown in figure 3 (blue line), did not suffer until mid-2010, right after the start of the sovereign debt crisis. Credibility started to fall in mid-2010, but inflation expectations and credibility stabilised around mid-2013, after the “whatever it takes” speech by President Draghi and in anticipation of quantitative easing.
Credibility in Europe has stabilised but, unlike the US, it has not returned to previous levels.
Since then credibility has stabilised but, unlike the US, it has not returned to previous levels. Importantly, |
want to announce that we accept SPDY.
proxy_pass https://nodejsservers;
A key line, basically instructing NGINX that we want to proxy requests to our cluster above. Node we called it nodejsservers in our upstream definition above. This is what allows us to refer to it here and have NGINX understand it.
# Set headers proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
We want to set some headers before forwarding it on so our terminal applications have the real ip of the requests. Without it, all requests will look as though they are coming from our load balancer.
Step 2: Configuring our Node.js servers
So now we have NGINX operating as a proxy to spread load among our Node.js servers, we now need to update them to be able to handle SPDY requests.
Get your SSL certs on your Node.js servers
Same as above, we want the.crt and.pem files. In our case we used the exact same 2 files on the load balancer as on our Node servers.
Now that we have the certs, let’s use ‘em!
Below is a simplified version of an app running Express. But the same technique would work for Koa, or anything else which builds upon Node’s baked in HTTP request as Express and Koa both do.
var express = require("express"); var spdy = require("spdy"); var app = module.exports = express(); // routes, middleware, etc. omitted spdy.createServer({ key: yourdomain.com.private.pem, cert: yourdomain.com.crt }, app).listen(9081);
We used port 9081 as specified in our NGINX config above. Again, any port works, as long as NGINX is routing the SPDY traffic to a port open on your Node.js servers.
Epilogue: Load balancing the load balancer
Doing things exactly as described above is awesome for allowing multiple Node.js servers to handle SPDY requests, however it introduces a single point of failure, namely the load balancer.
Of course this is not ideal! The AWS Elastic Load Balancer comes with some fault tolerance baked in. How can we get around this?
Well, in our case, we deployed multiple load balancers like this in multiple availability zones.
Using Route53, we can set up DNS with routing policies such as Latency, Geolocation, Failover, and more. Depending on your application, use the one fit for the job.
For example, if you just have multiple load balancers all in us-east-1, you may want to use simple failover. But if you have multiple data centers, say one in us-east-1 and one in eu-west-1, you can have requests route to the correct load balancer closest to the appropriate data center with Latency or Geolocation routing policies. Not only will this speed up performance (so a request from say, Russia doesn’t have to travel around the entire world to Virginia to then be load balanced back to the server in Europe) but also provide failover, so if one of the load balancers goes down, the other can continue servicing requests until a new one is brought online.
You should follow me on twitter here.
[1]: Why not terminate SPDY at the load balancer and just communicate via HTTP to the Node.js servers? Because then we are not eliminating the TCP handshake, just pushing it further into our system. We could take this approach, but then our load balancer will be doing the TCP handshake with our Node.js servers so we’re just pushing the problem down the line. Only ensuring the SPDY pipe is ending with a server will truly eliminate that.
[2]: YMMV, honestly I don’t feel comfortable enough with SSL certs to explain the difference, I did some trial and error to get it working. Searching the web for “which freaking SSL files do I need for this” or “I have a.crt,.pem and.key, which file is which and which goes where” didn’t yield much in the way of useful results.
[3]: I have read that ip_hash can be is suboptimal in many circumstances because it doesn’t evenly spread load, but we need some kind of affinity so a single client connecting to our API keeps connecting to the same server or a lot of the benefit of SPDY (avoiding the TCP handshake and the pipelining) goes out the window. Most of the other selections for affinity (such as sticky ) use some sort of cookie based mechanism for ensuring a client hits the same server on a subsequent request, but since basically all of our requests are API calls made from mobile devices to our backend, cookie based affinity didn’t make much sense. For browser based traffic, this makes more sense, but our clients don’t use cookies for anything.
212 KudosIf you’re like us and you love to go to a show and have your face melted by some insane singing, here are 10 ladies you have to hear live.
Patti LuPone, War Paint
The Queen has never sounded better…ever. It’s absolutely remarkable what she is doing onstage at the Nederlander. There's only one Patti LuPone.
Donna Murphy, Hello, Dolly!
Well #HelloDolly A post shared by @beechatter (@beechatter) on Jun 21, 2017 at 3:52am PDT
Tuesday nights are lit AF 🔥 🔥 over at the Shubert Theatre because Donna is Dolly, and she is opting up every single opportunity she has. The vocals are unreal and absolutely effortless.
Eva Noblezada, Miss Saigon
You will wonder how someone so tiny can produce such incredible sound. In a Broadway debut for the ages, Eva sings like it’s the last night of the world and the chopper is leaving Saigon….which I guess for her character Kim, it kind of is.
Mamie Parris, Cats
You might never hear “Memory” performed the way Mamie Parris sings it over at the Neil Simon Theatre. This Griz only needs one big breath to blow audiences away and make them forget every other version of this ALW standard.
Betsy Wolfe, Waitress
I can assure you, you have never heard the Waitress score like this. This Broadway belter makes you hear Sara Bareilles’ music completely anew. Her “What Baking Can Do” and “She Used to Be Mine” should be recorded for posterity.
Jenn Colella, Come From Away
This 2017 Tony nominee has a breakout moment in the ensemble piece when she steps forward to sing her solo “Me and the Sky”. Colella is always singing at 100, but here she absolutely soars. When she growls and gets gritty, it’s EVERYTHING.
Laura Osnes, Bandstand
Broadway fans fell in love with Osnes’ ingénue soprano, but in Bandstand this Tony nominee serves you something completely fresh and fierce. There’s a moment she’s belting upside down and you think, “What can’t she do?!” Also that “Welcome Home (Finale)”….Girl bye.
Mandy Gonzalez, Hamilton
The Beast is back and the vocals are ferocious! You will be much more than “Satisfied” with what she’s doing at the Richard Rodgers.
Ali Ewoldt, The Phantom of the Opera
It’s no wonder this Christine inspires the Phantom the way she does. Ali’s clear, strong voice is other worldly on this iconic score. Her “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” will have you slayed.
Grace McLean, Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812
There’s a moment in which this incredible performer is wailing as she runs down a flight of steps and you think, “I might die right now! This is what Broadway is about.” Listen for her in every number—you won’t be disappointed.French Flanders in summertime, especially around the small village of Fromelles, always seems so improbably beautiful when you consider the vast horror that unfolded there a century ago.
The peal of church bells converges with endless lark song, lending this unsettling place a discordant languor. The milky light, those corn-coloured fields, the poppies, so vivid and so perfectly poppy-shaped they seem a cliche, are the backdrop on the European western front for all those picture-postcard villages flattened during the global cataclysm we’ve come to refer to incongruously as the “great war”.
The Lost Legions Of Fromelles by Peter Barton – book review Read more
The graveyards, with their blond stone tablets and crosses, and their modest, moving messages – My only darling son; Another life lost hearts broken for what – give too much away, of course.
Regardless, visitors to this place, where millions – including some 46,000 Australians – died during world war one, invariably remark how peaceful it all is now that the landscape has enveloped the trenches and the guns remain silent.
Many Australians will be in Fromelles, a stone’s throw from Ypres, this week to commemorate the centenary of what remains the darkest day in Australian military history – the attack on a German stronghold outside the village that claimed 5,553 Australian casualties including 1,917 dead and 470 prisoners.
Like most such Australian military moments, the barnacles and moss of myth, perpetuated by official history and politics, had for so long obscured the truth about what happened.
Some scholarly work, not least by Peter Barton in his The Lost Legions of Fromelles, has further exposed the true folly and the horror of this Australian infantry charge.
Men of the 53rd Battalion waiting to don their equipment for the attack at Fromelles. Only three of the men shown here came out of the action alive, and those three were wounded. Photograph: Australian War Memorial
There are few certainties in war. But one is that governments will coerce or force young men to fight it. Another is that many of them will die. It is for the politicians to justify the cost; this, they predictably tried to do after the abysmal slaughter at Fromelles, just as they continue to do in conflicts where Australian involvement, and death, seems no less pointless.
And this week, hopefully, the Australians who’ve crossed the world for the fields of Flanders to commemorate the dead, will think about the utter pointlessness of what happened there and what, if anything, Australia has learned from it a century later.
Australian war memorials across the country, from swimming pools in suburban Brisbane to obelisks and stone diggers that mark junctions in countless country towns, are inscribed with the names of Australians who died at Fromelles on 19 and 20 July 1916. Invariably, they’re called the “fallen”, but they are now just the dead. And there is no escaping the horror of the way they “fell” as part of this abysmal, needless British operation.
The memorials around Fromelles signal broadly what happened. The Commonwealth cemetery at VC Corner – standing today in what was then the “no man’s land” between the British and German lines – has no individual gravestones. It has two big stone crosses under which about 400 Australians are buried en masse.
The novelty of being a soldier wore off in about five seconds … it was like a bloody butcher’s shop Private Jim Cleworth
None of them could be identified or named at death.
On a nearby wall is inscribed 1,299 names of Australian men who went missing at Fromelles or who could not be identified at death.
In recent decades, hundreds of Australian and other bodies have been located and exhumed around Fromelles. On Tuesday at Pheasant Wood cemetery in Fromelles there will be a dedication ceremony for the headstones for some of those whose bodies have been discovered and identified.
The attack on Fromelles was essentially a diversionary tactic to stop the Germans from sending reinforcements south in order to help counter the great British offensive on the Somme that had begun on 1 July. The Australian 5th Division was attached to Britain’s XI Corps, under the command of General Sir Richard Haking. Intent on minimising casualties while creating the intended diversion, Haking proposed an assault on a distant German position, Aubers Ridge. But British high command wanted a major artillery bombardment followed by a direct attack on the German front’s concrete stronghold, “Sugarloaf”, and on the secondary German defences north of Fromelles.
Remembrance Day: war monuments speak a truth that still resonates Read more
The attack had been planned for 16 July. Heavy rain postponed it for three days, giving the Germans plenty of opportunity to prepare for what was clearly going to be a frontal assault on their position. When the Allied troop movements coincided with a massive barrage of British artillery throughout the relatively clear day of 19 July, the Germans knew the attack was imminent.
The Australians had no hope.
British troops had been slaughtered in similar circumstances in May 1915. It has since been pointed out by Barton and others just how closely the events of July 1916 replicated the failed British attack.
To imagine the indescribable horror of the Australian experience at Fromelles, picture this: the Australians made heavy going through the swampy ground between their trenches and the German position, trudging through the fetid bodies of the British who’d died a year earlier, and falling among them when wounded.
They were cut down in droves.
Private Jim Cleworth of the 29th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, said of his first action: “The novelty of being a soldier wore off in about five seconds; from that point on it was a question of survival. Fromelles was confusion at best. It was like a bloody butcher’s shop, it was terrible.”
For his part the Australian commander, Harold “Pompey” Elliott failed to successfully challenge the nonsensical order for Australian advance. He wept as he watched, through his field glasses, his men cut down in the slosh.
Elliott got it right when he described the Fromelles action a “tactical abortion”. It, and much else about that war, scarred Elliott, who, suffering what would today have been recognised at post-traumatic stress, suicided in 1931.
This first substantive action by the Australians on the western front at Fromelles was prescient for all the death yet to come.
By war’s end more than 46,000 Australians would die on the western front. That includes 18,000 who would never be identified or found; naming the dead, if not finding them, and remembering them, is a valuable and (for descendants) cathartic part of restoring identity stolen in battlefield death.
The Australian western front dead include 6,800 who died fighting in and around Pozières in August and September 1916.
You’ll hear a lot about Australian “sacrifice” in the next few days as politicians, military leaders and the families of the dead converge on Fromelles for the commemorations.
First world war: 15 legacies still with us today Read more
But it’s worth remembering that few of those who went over the top at Fromelles to trudge across the sodden no man’s land filled with decaying British bodies, would have viewed their actions as such.
They didn’t sacrifice themselves.
The Australian politicians and the British sacrificed them.
And what did Australia learn? Not enough.
Australia continues to volunteer for more and more distant imperial wars. Meanwhile, our politicians still justify the “sacrifice” of those (mostly) young men who they send to die in them.Looking for news you can trust?
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What explains the horrific shootings in a Kansas suburb that claimed the lives of three people? Searching for an answer, I called a jail in Stanton, North Dakota, the temporary residence of Craig Cobb, a white nationalist whom Frazier Glenn Miller, the suspect in these attacks, called a friend during a 2010 radio interview. Cobb, 62, has been locked up for months after being arrested for terrorizing residents of a small town that he was trying to turn into an all-white enclave; he and a buddy had been patrolling the streets brandishing weapons. (Last year, he earned a few minutes of fame when a DNA test indicated that Cobb, who believes Jews have orchestrated the “genocidal collapse” of the white race, was 14 percent black.)
I couldn’t reach Cobb directly, but he soon called me back—collect—and was eager to discuss Miller, who was a former grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and a founder of the White Patriot Party. Cobb says that he had only met Miller once in person, but that the two had for years been associates via online bulletin boards and forums, that they spoke on the phone once or twice a week, and that he thinks of Miller, 73, as an older brother or father figure. During their most recent call, which happened at the end of last week, Miller seemed upbeat to Cobb—more upbeat than usual. Miller had mentioned that he had weekend plans to get together with friends for barbecue and beer. Cobb says Miller mentioned nothing indicating he might go on a shooting rampage.
But, Cobb notes, a few weeks ago, Miller told him that he was suffering from an emphysema-like disease and had one foot in the grave. Did he want to go out with a grand statement? Cobb says he saw no sign of that. In fact, he points out that Miller in recent months had repeatedly expressed an overall positive outlook, telling Cobb that he believed that now the “whole world was on to them.” By “them,” Miller meant Jews. Cobb recalls that Miller had noted that the internet had allowed the spread of information about the global Jewish conspiracy: “Recently, he’s said the whole world has figured out what the Jews have done to whites.” Miller, Cobb recounts, “was quite excited there seemed to be a worldwide consciousness” about Jewish schemes against white people and “Zionist wars.”
Miller had military training, Cobb says, noting that Miller told him he had been a Green Beret and had served in Vietnam, earning a military pension. Miller had a son, according to Cobb, who died in a shootout with law enforcement officials several years ago.
Cobb says that he never discussed any plans for violence with Miller—especially not on a prison phone line that is routinely recorded. He notes he has no idea where or how Miller obtained his weapons. As a convicted felon, “he’s not supposed to have weapons,” Cobb points out. (In 1986, Miller was convicted of violating a federal order. A year later, after being indicted for conspiring to obtain stolen military weapons and for other charges, he received a five-year sentence in exchange for testifying against other white supremacists.) Cobb insists that Miller never discussed weapons with him at any time: “We consider ourselves propagandists.”
Cobb thinks highly of Miller: “He has real high social skills. He’s a real people person. That’s why it’s so shocking. Everyone likes him. He’s a natural leader.” He continues: “Like a lot of white nationalists, he’s an alpha personality…He has always said that David Duke is the greatest white nationalist in the world.” Miller, according to Cobb, has passed out 1 million pieces of “white literature.”
He recalls that Miller once told him a story that Cobb found amusing. Miller was driving along and suddenly spotted several police cars—lights flashing, sirens wailing—heading in his direction. Believing they were after him, he pulled his car into a parking lot. He jumped out, grabbing a gun or two, and positioned himself behind the car, as the police cars neared. Miller aimed his gun at the oncoming cars, ready to fire. And…the police cars raced past him, toward another destination. There was no shootout.
Cobb says he doesn’t believe Miller committed the shootings. “I hope he didn’t,” he says. But if Miller did, what might be the explanation? “People are fed up,” Cobb says.On a Sunday afternoon nearly four years ago, Elvin Daniel was in his garden when he got a call from police: His sister, Zina Haughton, had been shot at work.
Zina’s abusive husband, Radcliffe Haughton, used a semiautomatic handgun that he bought from a man in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in Germantown the day before the shooting. He killed Zina Haughton, Maelyn Lind and Cary Robuck and wounded four others at the Azana Salon & Spa in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield. He then used the weapon to kill himself.
Zina Daniel Haughton, 42, left behind two daughters, ages 20 and 13.
Daniel, who owns a gun, said he was shocked that his late brother-in-law was able to buy a firearm despite a judge’s order prohibiting Radcliffe Haughton from possessing a gun.
“We started to find out that people actually can get guns without a background check,” said Daniel, who lives in Illinois, where all gun purchasers must pass a background check. “As naive as I was back then, I thought because I go through a background check, everybody did. So we start to find out about all these loopholes that we have in our laws.”
Since his sister’s death, Daniel has pushed lawmakers to expand criminal background checks beyond licensed dealers to private sellers, such as those who advertise on Armslist. That is where Haughton found the seller of the gun he used in the mass shooting.
“I mean, the day before that (shooting), I was one of those that says, ‘You know what, leave me and my guns alone,’ ” Daniel said. “I still feel that, but I believe that everybody should go through a background check when they buy a gun to keep guns out of (the hands of) people that shouldn’t have them.”
Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Zina Haughton’s daughter, Yasmeen Daniel, was at the salon and saw her mother shot to death. Her stepfather also tried to shoot at her, but Daniel was saved when Lind stepped in front of her.
She is now suing Armslist, charging the website facilitated the illegal gun purchase that led to her mother’s death. Armslist has asked a Milwaukee County Circuit judge to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that under Wisconsin law, the company cannot be held liable for the actions of people who advertise on its site.
Eighteen states plus the District of Columbia have expanded background checks beyond federal law to include at least some private sales. Two more states — Nevada and Maine — have expanded background checks on the ballot this fall.
Background checks proven, popular
A Marquette Law School Poll this year found 85 percent of registered voters in Wisconsin, including 84 percent who have guns in their homes, say they support closing the private-sale loophole. A CNN poll in June showed 92 percent of respondents nationwide favored expanded background checks.
Officials in Milwaukee are working with community leaders and nonprofit groups on a plan to reduce gun violence. A top recommendation: Expand criminal background checks to private gun sales. (That initiative is partially funded by The Joyce Foundation, which also provides funding for the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s coverage of gun violence prevention issues.)
Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn said expanding background checks to private sellers would not cure all of Milwaukee’s violence, but it would be a step.
“Background checks for private party gun sales would add another layer of oversight that may help keep guns out of the hands of those prohibited from possessing guns,” Flynn said in an email.
But Republicans who run Wisconsin state government have blocked attempts to require background checks on purchases from private sellers. That position is shared by the National Rifle Association, the nation’s most powerful gun lobby, which spent $3.6 million to support Republicans and conservative candidates in Wisconsin between 2008 and 2014, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
A 1997 study estimated that 40 percent of U.S. guns are obtained outside of federally licensed gun stores. Updated research from Harvard University and Northeastern University includes soon-to-be published findings that roughly one-third of gun acquisitions today occur outside of such licensed dealers.
Everytown for Gun Safety
Expanding background checks to private sales is the “most promising” strategy to prevent gun violence, said Ted Alcorn, research director for Everytown for Gun Safety, the nation’s largest gun violence prevention advocacy organization. The group, which began as Mayors Against Illegal Guns, is bankrolled by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and gun-control advocate. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett helped co-found the organization.
Firearm violence includes two elements, Alcorn said: a gun and a person who poses a high risk of causing harm with it. Background checks act as a gatekeeper, he said, preventing individuals at risk of harming others from accessing guns.
University of California Regents
“Criminologists and law enforcement officers say this is … the biggest weakness with the gun laws that we currently have in place because it leaves an open door for prohibited people like convicted felons and domestic abusers to buy firearms without a background check, no questions asked,” Alcorn said.
Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis, has studied various policies for more than 30 years and agrees universal background checks are among the most effective at preventing gun violence.
Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, also has studied background checks. Webster and his fellow researchers found that Connecticut saw a 40 percent drop in the firearm homicide rate over a decade after universal background checks were enacted. In contrast, when Missouri repealed such a law in 2007, firearm homicide rates rose 23 percent, Webster has found.
Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research
The permit-to-purchase laws implemented in Connecticut and repealed in Missouri require buyers to pass background checks and get a license from a state or local police agency to buy a firearm. Some states require a permit for all firearms and some only for handguns. In some states, permit holders must first go through safety training or an exam.
Another Webster study found levels of illegal gun trafficking were about half in cities where the state required background checks for private handgun sales.
But a University of Pittsburgh study this year discovered that most criminals found ways around laws aimed at keeping guns out of their hands. Researchers traced the origins of 893 firearms recovered by Pittsburgh police in 2008. The study found 79 percent of perpetrators were not the legal owner of the firearm used in the crime — bolstering the gun-rights argument that laws do not stop criminals who want guns. Pennsylvania requires background checks for all handgun purchases.
NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen said these types of laws are tantamount to “criminalization of the private transfer of firearms.”
“These gun control laws criminalize the commonplace practices of law-abiding gun owners,” Mortensen said in a written statement. “By imposing government mandates and fees they cost law-abiding gun owners time, money and freedom.”
Mortensen cited work by economist John Lott, Jr. In his 2016 book, “The War on Guns, Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies,” Lott writes that data from all 50 states from 1977 to 2005 shows murders were 49 percent higher and robberies were 75 percent higher in states with expanded background checks.
Lott is founder and president of Crime Prevention Research Center, a Colorado nonprofit that studies the relationship between gun policy and public safety. The center says it receives no funding from the NRA.
Lott’s influential studies have been disputed by some academics for faulty statistical analysis and allegedly fabricated research. And he has acknowledged posing as “Mary Rosh,” a former student, in posts praising his own teaching and research. Lott has likewise criticized Webster’s research, accusing him of cherry-picking in the study of Missouri’s repealed law.
Republicans mum on checks
In emotional testimony before a U.S. Senate committee in 2014, Elvin Daniel described himself as “a Republican, an avid hunter (and) a gun owner” who is “a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, and an NRA member.” Nevertheless, he urged the senators to pass universal background checks and make some “good come out of (Zina’s) death.”
“It is heartbreaking to know that our weak gun laws continue to allow dangerous abusers to buy guns without a background check,” he said.
The argument failed to sway any Republican senators. Two years later, on June 20 after a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at an Orlando, Florida nightclub, a Senate filibuster and vote resulted in a 56-44 largely party-line vote against expanded background checks. Wisconsin’s Republican Sen. Ron Johnson voted no; Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin voted yes.
On June 23, House Democrats staged a sit-in to try to force a vote on a measure to expand background checks and another that would have prohibited people on no-fly lists, including the Orlando shooter, from buying guns. Republican Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin blocked that effort, calling it a “publicity stunt.”
In Wisconsin — where an epidemic of gun violence fueled by illegally obtained firearms is raging in Milwaukee — lawmakers have avoided voting on background checks. Bills introduced by Democrats to expand background checks in recent sessions have died without a hearing.
Republican Gov. Scott Walker has said he opposes expanding background checks. In a written response to questions from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, Walker spokesman Tom Evenson said Wisconsin already requires background checks; he did not address the issue of private sales, which require no such scrutiny.
Other top Republicans are mum on why the Legislature has declined to consider expanding background checks.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Email and phone messages sent to Rep. Joel Kleefisch, R-Oconomowoc, chairman of the Assembly Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety, also were not returned. He told Wisconsin Public Radio in 2015 that he opposed the Democrats’ bill but gave no explanation.
‘Don’t ask, don’t, tell’ for guns
Wintemute said there are “two systems of gun commerce in the United States”: Sales by licensed retailers that require background checks, paperwork and a permanent record; and transactions between two private individuals requiring no screening or record keeping.
Wintemute has seen the systems in action during his visits to gun shows in Wisconsin and elsewhere. He calls it “Don’t ask, don’t tell” for guns.
“I’ve watched people go up and negotiate the purchase of the gun from a vendor at a gun show, not realizing that they’re talking to a licensed dealer,” Wintemute said. “And just as the negotiation is concluding, out comes the paperwork. And the buyer says, ‘Wait, you’re a dealer?’ And the seller says ‘Yes,’ and the buyer just laughs and walks away and goes and finds a private party to buy from.”
Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
At the Badger Military Collectible Show at the Waukesha Expo Center Aug. 5, some licensed dealers told a reporter that they have witnessed the same thing. At this show, old military uniforms, medals and vintage firearms were sold next to tables with newer handguns and rifles. Licensed dealers were vocal in their thoughts on expanding background checks to private sales, but several unlicensed sellers declined interview requests.
Marty Brunner, who goes by the nickname “Machine Gun” Marty, is a licensed gun manufacturer and dealer. “NRA4 EVER” is tattooed across the knuckles of both his hands. Brunner believes purchasers go to private dealers because “they have something to hide.” He also believes private vendors are more likely to sell “hot guns” previously used in crimes.
Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Tom Hardell, owner of Tom’s Military Arms & Guns, said he “definitely” supports universal background checks. Hardell, who mostly sells handguns, said he has turned down a lot of buyers after running a background check. Many of them, he said, are “gang bangers.”
“It hurts me as a business, and it hurts Milwaukee because that’s where the guns are coming (from),” Hardell said.
Ron Martin, a licensed dealer who travels across Wisconsin selling hunting rifles, said implementing background checks for everyone could “level the playing field” between licensed and unlicensed firearm sellers.
Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Martin is not sure expanding background checks would help to reduce firearm violence, however.
“You could put all the laws you want, but the last I checked criminals don’t abide by laws,” Martin said. “They don’t buy guns — they steal them.”
Former gang member: Guns easy to get
But Rico, a former gang member and admitted criminal from Madison, told a reporter that he bought his guns, finding it easy to amass numerous high-powered weapons after he failed a background check by a licensed dealer. While Rico has bought some of his guns “on the street,” he also purchased weapons at gun shows. He asked that his full formal name not to be used because he described committing crimes that could subject him to prosecution.
The 27-year-old estimated that he owns more than 20 guns — all of them bought without passing a background check.
“To be honest, I lost count. I got many. I got assault rifles, I mean, just regular hand pistols, they could be 9-millimeter Berettas, mini-AKs, ARs,” Rico said, listing a variety of semi-automatic weapons. He photographed many of them at the request of a reporter.
He bought several firearms without a background check at a Black River Falls gun show. He used the same terminology as Wintemute to describe private transactions: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
It is possible that Rico could qualify to buy a gun after undergoing a background check. He was charged with a felony in 2009 — possession with intent to deliver marijuana — but the case was dropped for lack of evidence. Rico believes he could have fought the background check denial. He chose not to.
“I might as well buy it from a third party where they don’t do background checks, like gun shows, private sales,” Rico said, saying such transactions are similar to “people who’re just selling them … on the street.”
He said universal background checks would not keep criminals from getting guns.
During his years in the gang, Rico said he used guns for intimidation and robbery — even a shootout. Rico acknowledged using firearms to rob people at ATM machines.
“I mean, the more crime you did … the more elite, the more alpha you were,” he explained.
He described one incident in Milwaukee about 10 years ago in which two cars approached his group on the street. Somebody said something in Spanish that provoked his group. At least 15 shots were traded in a matter of moments, he said.
Rico said he has quit the gang life. He went back to school, and now works in an office as a tech specialist. He has turned in his gangster attire for gym gear; he hopes to become a certified trainer.
One remnant of his old lifestyle stayed.
“I kept the firearms,” Rico said.
Lawsuit targets Armslist
For several years before her death, Zina Haughton had been physically abused by her husband. When the violence escalated in October 2012, she got a restraining order and moved out of the couple’s Brown Deer home, testifying that his threats “terrorize my every waking moment.”
The court granted her protection, prohibiting him from approaching Zina Haughton for four years and from possessing firearms, a ban that would have lasted until October 2016.
If Radcliffe Haughton had attempted to buy from a licensed dealer, he would have been blocked by a background check, and police would have been alerted to his attempt to illegally acquire a gun, according to the lawsuit filed by Yasmeen Daniel with help from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Instead, he visited Armslist.com.
The lawsuit argued that Haughton’s “extreme urgency, lack of discernment, and preference for a high-capacity magazine” should have alerted Armslist proprietors.
Without any screening or background check, Radcliffe Haughton purchased a FNP-40 semi-automatic handgun for $500 from a private seller in a McDonald’s parking lot.
The complaint argues Armslist proprietors designed the site to exploit the loophole to allow private sellers to cater to prohibited purchasers. It notes that the website has been traced to several incidents in which prohibited purchasers used firearms in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Websites including eBay, Amazon and Craigslist have banned private gun sales. The complaint argues that Armslist strategically fills the online void left for private gun sales “to enable the sale of firearms to prohibited and otherwise dangerous people.”
The lawsuit also alleges such transactions circumvent other safeguards, including federal restrictions on interstate transfers of guns, state waiting periods and state-specific assault weapon bans.
Armslist attorney Eric Van Schyndle did not respond to several messages seeking comment. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Glenn Yamahiro has scheduled a Nov. 1 hearing to decide whether to dismiss the case. In 2014, Armslist defeated a similar lawsuit in Illinois.
Background checks stall in Wisconsin
State Sen. Nikiya Harris Dodd, D-Milwaukee, and state Rep. Terese Berceau, D-Madison, co-sponsored a bill again in the most recent legislative session to implement universal background checks. Berceau called it a “common sense” step to reduce gun violence.
Alexandra Arriaga / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
“It seems really obvious to me that if you are a person who knows that you can’t pass a background check, you’re going to buy from one of these private sellers, and that is indeed what’s going on,” Berceau said.
Under the bill, all firearm transactions would have to go through a licensed dealer, and buyers would have to pass a background check, with certain exceptions. Gifts between family members, for example, would be exempt.
As a representative from Milwaukee, where gun violence spiked in 2015, Harris Dodd called the legislation a “no-brainer.” Milwaukee had 119 gun-related homicides and 633 nonfatal shootings in 2015, according to the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission — the highest in at least 10 years. The Center has reported that such crimes cost individuals and the state of Wisconsin billions a year in medical bills, police and prosecutorial costs, lost lives and stunted futures.
Of the known suspects in the 2015 gun homicides in Milwaukee, 69 percent — or 66 suspects — were legally prohibited from possessing a firearm at the time of the crime, according to the commission.
Milwaukee’s lobbyist, Jennifer Gonda, said universal background checks are a key part of the city’s legislative agenda. But she is not optimistic any of the city’s priorities to reduce gun violence will pass the current Legislature.
“We didn’t make much headway with the Democrats and … we’re making less with the Republicans,” Gonda said. “In some ways, it feels like we’re spinning our wheels a little bit.”
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a member of the NRA, has opposed universal background checks and other gun regulations. Clarke, a Democrat who spoke at the Republican National Convention, has advised residents to arm themselves to stay safe.
“Universal background checks and limiting magazine capacity are offered as reasonable approaches to reducing violence” but are “technical fixes” that mostly |
(part of OpenJDK) are some prominent ones.Wonders shall never end in Cryptoland! On Sunday Cointelegraph predicted that it is going to be hot at the top 10 on CoinMarketCap this week. Truly less than 24 hours, on the early mornings on Monday, Ethereum Classic flew so much to make an upward adjustment of 31.46 percent.
ETC conquers Dash
In the process, ETC knocked down Dash to take over as the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency in the world. Nothing surprises anyone anymore in this ecosystem when it comes to the growth of altcoin. Just when everyone thought the battle between Dash and Ethereum Classic is over and that Dash has conquered, the latter has called it a bluff.
This brings ETC's market capitalization to almost $900 mln and a market price of $9.72. The gap between it and the pacesetter of decentralized community governance is over $170 mln and even two steps behind.
A couple of weeks ago Cointelegraph spoke to Carlo Vicari of Ethereum Classic about its current impressive growth and he was really optimist of the future. He revealed how the Ethereum Classic community is bulging with newcomers.
Looks like ETC is gunning for the top to get off his senior brother, Ethereum out of the way, even though it looks unfeasible at the interim. But then again, altcoin growth is like we are in wonderland.
Ethereum takes back number two
Moreso in a classic move Ethereum has regained the number two position from Ripple deepening the gap between them to more than $3 bln. It was with such great improvement of over 36 percentage point of growth. Its market price is now an admirable $174.81.
As Cointelegraph predicted, the battle between the two is not yet over, and this was informed by how the two are all well-patronised utility. Whether Ripple can make another come back to the number two spot is just another interesting trend to be on the look out for in this space.
Bytecoin is biting
Yet still, the most intriguing development is Bytecoin that was firmly rooted on the tenth rank rising all of a sudden to the seventh position overnight. It made a casualty of Dash and Stellar Lumens and is now behind Ethereum Classic.
On Sunday Cointelegraph asked whether Bytecoin has come to the elite echelons to stay or just one of those flash in a pan you see with altcoin. It appears they are proving it is not a fluke at all. The adjustment is unbelievably impressive! A 61.76 percent gain to knock out two strong cryptos tells you they mean business.
Anyway, it doesn't look well for Monero at this stage. It's now sitting at number 10 with Dogecoin barking to push it away. For a few months now Cointelegraph has been referring to it as ‘gradually declining' Monero.Image copyright Stuart Kettell Image caption Stuart Kettell completed his challenge at about 13:30 BST on Saturday
A man has completed his challenge to push a Brussels sprout up Snowdon using his nose.
Stuart Kettell, from Balsall Common in the West Midlands, started out on Wednesday and reached the 1,085m (3,560ft) summit in three days.
The 49-year-old trained for his charity mission by pushing a sprout around his garden with his nose.
Mr Kettell said he selected a large sprout so it would not fall down a crevice in the rock.
His aim was to collect at least £5,000 in sponsorship for Macmillan Cancer Support, but does not yet know how much he has raised.
"People definitely think I'm mad, and I'm beginning to think it myself," he said.
Mr Kettell, who has previously raised money by staying inside a box for a week, said this latest challenge was the most uncomfortable yet.
"It hurt my arms, my legs, my feet, my knees and my neck," he said.Buy Photo Well-wishers gather for dinner in support of Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy and his sons, who are facing federal trials stemming from a pair of armed rebellion incidents the Bundys allegedly helped orchestrate against the government, during a fundraiser for Bundy family members held at the Veyo Park on Saturday. (Photo: Kevin Jenkins / The Spectrum & Daily News)Buy Photo
Dozens of well-wishers gathered at the Veyo Park Saturday to raise money for the families of Southern Nevada ranchers facing trials on criminal charges stemming from their battles with federal government land management policies.
The dinner-dance fundraiser for the families of Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy and his sons Ryan, Mel, Ammon and Dave was the brainchild of EllaMay Walther, a Bunkerville-area resident who lives by Cliven and babysat his sons when they were younger.
“They are like family to me, and I am trying in a way to help the family,” Walther said. “The wives of the guys who are in prison and jail, they do not have any income coming in and they need help at this time. (Their husbands) have been in there for over eight months. … They have babies that they have at home (and are) taking care of.”
The Bundys are in federal custody as jurors in Oregon hear evidence related to a January armed rebellion at the state’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which arose in January after Oregon ranchers were criminally charged with illegal burning on the federal land. Bundy family members and Arizona Strip rancher LaVoy Finicum appeared prominently in media coverage of the standoff, and were active on social media as well.
Buy Photo Well-wishers gather around a donation bucket during a fundraiser for Bunkerville's Bundy family members at the Veyo Park on Saturday. (Photo: Kevin Jenkins / The Spectrum & Daily News)
Finicum was shot to death in a tense confrontation with law enforcement officers who moved to arrest people allegedly involved in organizing or sustaining the armed occupation of the refuge in defiance of federal authorities.
The trial for Ammon and Ryan Bundy and Kanab resident Shawna Cox is scheduled to enter its 12th day Monday and is expected to continue until November, at least.
The Bundys were also arrested in connection with an armed standoff in 2014 against federal officials who had moved to impound Bundy cattle grazing in the nearby area of Gold Butte — a swath of public land that conservationists hope will become protected as a national monument.
Buy Photo Jeanette Finicum, right, talks with well-wishers during a fundraiser for Bunkerville's Bundy family members held at the Veyo Park on Saturday. While Cliven Bundy and his sons face federal trials stemming from a pair of armed rebellion incidents the Bundys allegedly helped orchestrate against the government, the visitors expressed condolences to Finicum, whose Arizona Strip rancher husband was killed in a showdown with law enforcement during one of the incidents. (Photo: Kevin Jenkins / The Spectrum & Daily News)
Cox wrote a book that offers her perspective of that confrontation, and she has gained notoriety for capturing the events surrounding Finicum’s death on cell phone video as she rode in the vehicle he was driving.
The Bundys are expected to receive a trial on the Nevada charges beginning in February.
Walther said money raised at Saturday’s event will be divided equally among the five Bundy families to use however they wish, whether for legal bills, food supplies or other necessities.
Buy Photo A well-wisher delivers signs in support of Bunkerville's Bundy family members during a fundraiser held at the Veyo Park on Saturday. (Photo: Kevin Jenkins / The Spectrum & Daily News)
Jeanette Finicum, LaVoy’s widow, was also present at the event and raised some funds by selling a novel her husband LaVoy wrote about a family’s “struggle to come together and survive in the midst of national crisis,” as well as copies of Cox’s book on her behalf.
Diamond Valley resident Kirk Bastian picked up copies of both books while expressing his sympathies to Jeanette.
“I’m aware of all this stuff that’s going on (but) I can’t claim to be real knowledgeable about it and I’d like to know more,” Bastian said. “I just wanted to come and support these people. I think they really got railroaded. … I think these folks were trying to look out for themselves and the government took advantage.”
Buy Photo Eileen Heath, left, and her young helpers Kayla and Bentlie, recruit participants for a "Split the Pot" event during a fundraiser for Bunkerville's Bundy family members held at the Veyo Park on Saturday. (Photo: Kevin Jenkins / The Spectrum & Daily News)
Jeanette said she has been paying attention to the trial and has chatted with Cox while continuing to pursue her own interests, which include a planned lawsuit against law enforcement officers involved in what she regards as the “murder” of her husband and participation in a ranchers’ association scheduled to meet Friday night in the Hurricane Community Center to discuss property allotment rights.
Visitors to her table Saturday picked up stickers with LaVoy’s LV-Bar brand and signed a petition asking Congress to launch its own investigation of LaVoy’s death.
“I sure hope (the trial) turns out well for all of (the accused). I’m praying that it does,” Jeanette said.
“They’re in there … for our freedom and to keep the Constitution,” Walther said. “They are here fighting for us. … I think (the dinner-dance) has done great. There’s been a lot of people willing to help and donate.”
Follow reporter Kevin Jenkins on Twitter, @SpectrumJenkins. Call him at 435-674-6253.
Read or Share this story: http://www.thespectrum.com/story/news/2016/09/24/dozens-attend-dinner-fundraiser-bundys-amid-trial/91063188/iSHOKZ Profile Joined July 2011 Germany 136 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-17 13:32:33 #1
Video Version
Table of Content
1.0.......Introduction
2.0.......Build Order
3.0.......Execution
3.1.......Thought process in general
3.2.......How to engage
3.3.......How to react to cheeses
4.0.......Replays
5.0.......Feedback
Introduction top Because of recent incidents: I am not the "shokz-guide" guy. My name is iSHOKZ (like iphone)
Hello Teamliquid community, my name is iSHOKZ and I am currently a master player on the EU Server with the race random. One of my best match-ups so far is the TvZ, with this mech build-order. Right now i am 11 wins and 0 loses with it (+ cup wins)
I do also want to mention: No I am not the "shokz" you know from the shokz guides, my name is iSHOKZ, i'm a completely other person and i did not steal that name.
My stats with this build can be seen here. I do also use it quite successfully in TvT, but it has its weaknesses there. For those who call the amount of games not representative, i did also use it in weekly cups with good success.
Note: This is no Build proofed for grandmasters, its just a solid macro-build for all those masters and below players who want to play mech.
+ Show Spoiler +
Build Order top In general we don't have to have a complicated build order here, we can just follow this sequence by building what we need whenever we can afford it.
reaper opening -> expand -> reactor factory, techlab on barracks afterwards -> expand -> 2nd gas -> 2 more factorys, and armory and 3rd gas.
Buildorder in supply:
10 - Supplydepot (send out the worker before the 9th finishes, everything here needs to be tight)
11 - Barracks
11 - Gas
14 - Reaper
15 - OC
15 - Supplydepot
16 - 2nd and last Reaper
19 - Build CC in your main
20 - Factory + Reactor on the Baracks
23 - Build CC in your main (you cc's will give you the supply when you need it, next depot starts when 3rd cc finishes)
24 - Swap factory and barracks, techlab on barracks, build 2 widowmines, morph oc, build 2nd gas, start 2nd factory
From now on you just add the 3rd gas on the natural as soon as you feel safe, depending on the scouting done by your reapers. When you can afford it go for the 3rd factory and an armory. You should be able to produce +1 weapon when the armory finishes and 2 thors in case you need them against incoming mutas.
Execution top A good build is useless with bad execution. So be sure to produce workers nonstop, don't get supply-blocked, add more factorys in the course of the game and also add more OC's in the lategame.
Since we play mech and don't need that many minerals in the lategame, we constantly add OCs and scan the zerg army, the reinforcements he builds and his tech, so we don't get surprised by a muta switch or something.
In the following we are going to take a look at the thought process behind the build, engagements, unit compositions and some adaptiations we need to make in certain situations
Random Notes: Never push with less then 3 thors in case of a muta switch. (+widows). I like to skip the hellion transformation upgrade and produce battle hellions right away. Use burrowed widow-mines to scout key map-paths. This build also works in TvT if you react accordingly.
Thought process in general top With HotS terran received a lot of buffs. Tanks don't require siege mode and the widow mine and battle-hellions are two new factory units. These buffes are great defensively, so you should be able to use them as a terran and go very eco heavy without being punished. The new reaper gives us the ability to scout the opening of a zerg. Since we go 3OC we have no other mapcontrol than the early reapers which are crucial to see what the oponent is doing.
Now let us have a look at the other side, at the zerg points of view. Terran has new mech potential. The zerg has got vipers now, swarmhosts and a hydra buff. The hydras should not bother a mech player to much and the other two units will be in the game as soon as a 3 OC build kicks in. We will take a look at how to play vs. them in the next section. How to engage top The most important part with a mech army is the engagement. We are not very mobile and can't micro our units to the korean potential, but with a mech army you are able to get huge advantages through positioning. Once you know how to control and position your army correctly you feel unbeatable.
In general: When you push out (at around 150-160 supply) you want to use the architecture of the map as best as you can. Always move and siege next to "dead-space", so the zerg has less surface area with his army to attack you. Think about where the zerg wants to fight, and slowly push towards it, don't push to fast, there is almost no timer on your army composition like in WoL, you now have a much easier time dealing with broodlords because of the new thor. If you know where the zerg wants to engage your army, set your first tanks up separately in the back. You want to make a huge siege-tank line! Most likely the zerg will have a maxed roach army. If your tanks are spread, the zerg engages the tanks in the front first while those in the back deal alot of damage. If the frontal tank is down the zerg needs to run to the next tank to take it down. Once the tanks in the front are dead, the zerg needs to close the distance to the next tanks to be able to attack them.Furthermore you have more potential to reposition a part of your army if you have a spread tank-line. Lets say you see the zerg wants to basetrade, you can just unsiege your tanks in the front and siege them back slowly, while the tanks in the back cover them.
To get the perfect split, i like to have a hellion in "hellion-mode" to scout ahead of the army. When I am in the position to siege the first tanks i just seperatley click them and tell them to siege, while i move command the rest of my army closer to the zerg. (Watch the video guide for better understanding)
Pictures are worth a thousand words:
+ Show Spoiler +
Scan ahead and siege the first tanks in case the zerg wants to engage
We are spread out perfectly and the obstacles help us because the zerg needs to run around them. We win the fight with few losses and the zerg will try to remax quickly, so don't get over eager.
So our reinforcements arrive, we brought some scvs for buffer and repair. The zerg also remaxed and we scan that he might consider to base-trade.
Our reaction is to unsiege the right part of our tank-line and move it to the left, in this way we are safe if he wants to base-trade, but also if he wants to force the engagement.
He decides to engage, because we had defensive tanks and were about to sandwich him.
Like a Boss, look at the supply.
Scan ahead and siege the first tanks in case the zerg wants to engageWe are spread out perfectly and the obstacles help us because the zerg needs to run around them. We win the fight with few losses and the zerg will try to remax quickly, so don't get over eager.So our reinforcements arrive, we brought some scvs for buffer and repair. The zerg also remaxed and we scan that he might consider to base-trade.Our reaction is to unsiege the right part of our tank-line and move it to the left, in this way we are safe if he wants to base-trade, but also if he wants to force the engagement.He decides to engage, because we had defensive tanks and were about to sandwich him.Like a Boss, look at the supply.
Versus Ultralisks: This is similar to TvP versus mass chargeleg. Create choke areas by using your lategame factorys as part of a wall in front of your crucial mining base (for example in front of the 4th at daybreak). Then wait until you are maxed and slowley edge forward. Your army composition can include many thors vs. ultralisks.
Versus Broodlords: Thor Viking demolishes broodlord compositions.
Versus Broodlord Swarmhost Corruptor: I may consider this as the hard counter. You should try to kill the zerg before he gets this. If he has this composition i think the only counter is making enough vikings to kill of the corruptors, then kill the broodlords without support and try to overwhelm the swarmhosts afterwards. Even a mass Air switch might be viable here.
Versus Mutas: Just go for thor battle-hellion and mix in some widow-mines if you want. If its no surprising muta switch you should not lose to that.
Versus Vipers: Low Viper numbers benefit your army strength in theory if they use blinding cloud. Vipers cost 3 supply and if your spread they take away one of your tanks fire, so 3 supply aswell, BUT if the zerg engages, the tank will still act as a buffer and the zerg needs to kill it at first. When you have no vikings you can't do anything about abducts, rather than be ok with it or retreat. If you have vikings the vipers will die very fast and you are also prepared for some air switches.
How to react to... top React to cheese: We do not only go for the fast reaper opening to kill some drones, we mainly use it for the scouting information. You will see the gastiming of the zerg and can even sacrifice one reaper to scout if he did mine more than 100 gas. If this is the case and you scouted and all in like 1 base roach, or he did make a huge amount of zerglings which indicates a baneling bust, just build a bunker in your main, send your reaper(s) in, produce the first 2 widow mines, followed by 2 hellions and pump marauders out of your techlab baracks.
React to fast mutas: Since we saw the gas timing we now know if a zerg has the potential to go for fast mutas. We can pump out 2 thors when the armory is done, this will line up perfectly. We do also go for an ebay and protect the mineral line, the production and crucial sieged tanks with a turret or two. It is better to overreact to mutas, since mutas are a heavy investment for the zerg and an overall pretty bad unit vs. our playstyle.
React to heavy droning/expanding: The easier it is for the zerg to expand, the easier it should be for you. Just expand with him and go into a macro game, you have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame
React to heavy pressure: On some maps it might be harder to secure a third base due to the layout. But remember, the harder it is for you to get a third, the harder it is for the zerg to defend hellion run-byes and harassment.
Replays top Replaypack
consisting out of 8 TvZ using this build: Download here
Versus
1 Base Roach All-In - http://drop.sc/316311
2 Base Baneling Bust - http://drop.sc/316313
Roachdrop on Whirlwind - http://drop.sc/316315
Ultra Lategame featuring Ultralisks,Vipers, Broodlords - http://drop.sc/316312
Feedback top I really hope you liked the guide, whether the video or the text version. I would appreciate any form of feedback and criticism. Have you tested the build yet and did it work out for you? You have some adaptions to make it better? You think this build is bad, tell me why?
Furthermore I would love to see you as a part of the inFluenceTV community
B.net Community Channel (EU) "inFluenceTV" - Ask questions and chat with us!
- We provide high level sc2 casting
And also our B.net Community Channel (EU) "inFluenceTV" - Ask questions and chat with us! Our twitch.tv Caster Channel, twitch.tv/influencetv - We provide high level sc2 castingAnd also our Facebook-Site for more updates
Good luck with the build,
iSHOKZ
Thanks to iFsmN for helping at this guide
More iSHotS ; HotS with iSHOKZ Guides
+ Show Spoiler + [G] ZvT Roach Hydra Style
papaz Profile Joined December 2009 Sweden 4128 Posts #2 Finally a good mech TvZ guide. Just saying thanks. Will read and learn
haaz Profile Joined May 2010 157 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-02 10:59:18 #3
Very clean to read I like it.
But
Why should I use your build instead of old wol hellion banshee style with defensive widow mines (if needed)?
I mean, with hellion banshee you got opportunity to actually kill some drones, and in your build you just wait for timing attack with ~6 tanks, 4 thors + hellbats around 150 supply.
So you let zerg make just anything they want to 14 min mark?
First of all your guide looks pretty damn good.Very clean to read I like it.ButWhy should I use your build instead of old wol hellion banshee style with defensive widow mines (if needed)?I mean, with hellion banshee you got opportunity to actually kill some drones, and in your build you just wait for timing attack with ~6 tanks, 4 thors + hellbats around 150 supply.So you let zerg make just anything they want to 14 min mark? React to heavy droning/expanding: The easier it is for the zerg to expand, the easier it should be for you. Just expand with him and go into a macro game, you have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame
You have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame? wtf man? broodlords would pwn u so hard, you dont even have starport. You have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame? wtf man? broodlords would pwn u so hard, you dont even have starport. temp banned: 2 warnings: 8, my little achievments 8), last update: 23-05-2013
LardMaster Profile Joined May 2012 United Kingdom 123 Posts #4 On April 02 2013 19:57 haaz wrote:
First of all your guide looks pretty damn good.
Very clean to read I like it.
But
Why should I use your build instead of old wol hellion banshee style with defensive widow mines (if needed)?
I mean, with hellion banshee you got opportunity to actually kill some drones, and in your build you just wait for timing attack with ~6 tanks, 4 thors + hellbats around 150 supply.
So you let zerg make just anything they want to 14 min mark?
Show nested quote +
React to heavy droning/expanding: The easier it is for the zerg to expand, the easier it should be for you. Just expand with him and go into a macro game, you have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame
You have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame? wtf man? broodlords would pwn u so hard, you dont even have starport. First of all your guide looks pretty damn good.Very clean to read I like it.ButWhy should I use your build instead of old wol hellion banshee style with defensive widow mines (if needed)?I mean, with hellion banshee you got opportunity to actually kill some drones, and in your build you just wait for timing attack with ~6 tanks, 4 thors + hellbats around 150 supply.So you let zerg make just anything they want to 14 min mark?You have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame? wtf man? broodlords would pwn u so hard, you dont even have starport.
You obviously just build a starport as the game goes on. See greater spire --> build vikings/ravens You obviously just build a starport as the game goes on. See greater spire --> build vikings/ravens
haaz Profile Joined May 2010 157 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-02 11:27:25 #5 You obviously just build a starport as the game goes on. See greater spire --> build vikings/ravens
Yeah, but what stops zerg for just droning 10 minutes in game? 2 reapers?
There is no harras included in this build just timing attack after 14 min mark.
You saying that when you see greater spire you just start building vikings/ravens? Its far too late.
You say, you build starports as the game goes on. So you build them when? After 14min push or before?
Both answers are fail.
Making starports before push means you weaken push itself = you did nothing with. Late banshees will not help either because zerg got spire and 3rd base already with spores.
Making starports after push means its already gg for you because zerg have greater spire already and you have got no time to counter zerg air
Damn zerg can just make mass swarm hosts and a-move you. He will make infestation pit anyway.
And with afk 10 minutes droning he will get maxed with 4-5 bases at 12 minutes. Yeah, but what stops zerg for just droning 10 minutes in game? 2 reapers?There is no harras included in this build just timing attack after 14 min mark.You saying that when you see greater spire you just start building vikings/ravens? Its far too late.You say, you build starports as the game goes on. So you build them when? After 14min push or before?Both answers are fail.Making starports before push means you weaken push itself = you did nothing with. Late banshees will not help either because zerg got spire and 3rd base already with spores.Making starports after push means its already gg for you because zerg have greater spire already and you have got no time to counter zerg airDamn zerg can just make mass swarm hosts and a-move you. He will make infestation pit anyway.And with afk 10 minutes droning he will get maxed with 4-5 bases at 12 minutes. temp banned: 2 warnings: 8, my little achievments 8), last update: 23-05-2013
iSHOKZ Profile Joined July 2011 Germany 136 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-02 11:30:15 #6 On April 02 2013 19:57 haaz wrote:
....
Why should I use your build instead of old wol hellion banshee style with defensive widow mines (if needed)?
I mean, with hellion banshee you got opportunity to actually kill some drones, and in your build you just wait for timing attack with ~6 tanks, 4 thors + hellbats around 150 supply.
So you let zerg make just anything they want to 14 min mark?
Show nested quote +
React to heavy droning/expanding: The easier it is for the zerg to expand, the easier it should be for you. Just expand with him and go into a macro game, you have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame
You have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame? wtf man? broodlords would pwn u so hard, you dont even have starport.....Why should I use your build instead of old wol hellion banshee style with defensive widow mines (if needed)?I mean, with hellion banshee you got opportunity to actually kill some drones, and in your build you just wait for timing attack with ~6 tanks, 4 thors + hellbats around 150 supply.So you let zerg make just anything they want to 14 min mark?You have nothing to be afraid of in the lategame? wtf man? broodlords would pwn u so hard, you dont even have starport.
Thanks for feedback,
as mentioned above this is only a buildorder until you have the 3 factorys, after that you have to adapt your playstyle depending on what you scouted. If I know there will be broodlords I will prepare with starports, as easy as it is. There are 2 games in the replaypack where i play vs. broodlords and they just die.
The lack of early harassment options is really a thing that i don't like either. I don't want to say that helion banshee allows you to harass the zerg heavily, but it definitely has more options to.
In regards to the helion banshee 3CC opening: With that opening you really have a hard time against well timed roach all-ins, which become more and more popular in HotS. Furthermore you delay a strong mechpush by delaying tankproduction.
In masters-league the strong macro into timing push was almost enough to finish every zerg, without early harassment (i don't know if its viable in grandmasters, but it worked fine vs. better zerg aswell). But why dont you just add a starport after the "buildorder" is finished and go for widow-mine or battle-helion drops with helion harass on the same time, if you want?
Or if you see the zerg drones to heavily just force units by faking a push.
So just adapt the "buildorder" and don't play every game down like before. Even if the zerg just goes up to 80 drones asap, you will be fine in a macrogame with those 3 OC's
A buildorder is adaptable!
edit:
Thanks for feedback,as mentioned above this is only a buildorder until you have the 3 factorys, after that you have to adapt your playstyle depending on what you scouted. If I know there will be broodlords I will prepare with starports, as easy as it is. There are 2 games in the replaypack where i play vs. broodlords and they just die.The lack of early harassment options is really a thing that i don't like either. I don't want to say that helion banshee allows you to harass the zerg heavily, but it definitely has more options to.In regards to the helion banshee 3CC opening: With that opening you really have a hard time against well timed roach all-ins, which become more and more popular in HotS. Furthermore you delay a strong mechpush by delaying tankproduction.In masters-league the strong macro into timing push was almost enough to finish every zerg, without early harassment (i don't know if its viable in grandmasters, but it worked fine vs. better zerg aswell). But why dont you just add a starport after the "buildorder" is finished and go for widow-mine or battle-helion drops with helion harass on the same time, if you want?Or if you see the zerg drones to heavily just force units by faking a push.So just adapt the "buildorder" and don't play every game down like before. Even if the zerg just goes up to 80 drones asap, you will be fine in a macrogame with those 3 OC'sA buildorder is adaptable!edit: On April 02 2013 20:26 haaz wrote:
...
You say, you build starports as the game goes on. So you build them when? After 14min push or before?
Both answers are fail.
...
We have enough scans available to scout properly. I recommend you to watch those replays.
We have enough scans available to scout properly. I recommend you to watch those replays.
haaz Profile Joined May 2010 157 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-02 11:36:01 #7
So if your push fails, then its gg.
I would say its allin.
As I said above, with no harras included you relying too much on your push to do damage to zerg.So if your push fails, then its gg.I would say its allin. Even if the zerg just goes up to 80 drones asap, you will be fine in a macrogame with those 3 OC's
There was a guy (grandmaster terran I think he name was Avilo?) who played 4 OC mech and still get outmacroed hard.
He played simillar passive style and raged a lot when zerg just a-moved his armies.
Maybe 14 cc rax gas opener would be better to fasten the push but it wouldnt help that much with no harras me thinks.
There was a guy (grandmaster terran I think he name was Avilo?) who played 4 OC mech and still get outmacroed hard.He played simillar passive style and raged a lot when zerg just a-moved his armies.Maybe 14 cc rax gas opener would be better to fasten the push but it wouldnt help that much with no harras me thinks. In regards to the helion banshee 3CC opening: With that opening you really have a hard time against well timed roach all-ins
Thats why we can make widow mines now and collect wins Thats why we can make widow mines now and collect wins temp banned: 2 warnings: 8, my little achievments 8), last update: 23-05-2013
iSHOKZ Profile Joined July 2011 Germany 136 Posts #8 On April 02 2013 20:32 haaz wrote:
As I said above, with no harras included you relying too much on your push to do damage to zerg.
So if your push fails, then its gg.
...
I don't agree with that, and once again recommend you to watch those replays and I won't answer you furthermore because you don't seem to listen.
We have a running reactor factory that can start 2 Hellions at a time, after we have the first 2 Widow Mines. Use them to harass and be happy (as seen in those replays) I don't agree with that, and once again recommend you to watch those replays and I won't answer you furthermore because you don't seem to listen.We have a running reactor factory that can start 2 Hellions at a time, after we have the first 2 Widow Mines. Use them to harass and be happy (as seen in those replays)
MateShade Profile Joined July 2011 Australia 736 Posts #9 nice guide, would be nice if you played more games though and gave more detailed and specific answers as you improves your play style.
this definitely isn't a build you could win gsl with but its a solid macro style that many people masters and below can try, and you preface that so I think people need to take that into account when adding criticism
Markwerf Profile Joined March 2010 Netherlands 3723 Posts #10 hmm it's a fairly lengthy guide but very short in the interesting part: how to transition/play in the lategame. Vipers are quite a pain for this pain, some even think vipers instead of broodlords make the window of oppurtunity for mech even shorter than in WoL.
Just saying a blinding cloud takes out 1 tank thus 3 supply cancels eachother is very simplistic..
First of all it's quite hard to spread tanks enough to prevent blinding cloud owning you while at the same time they can't just pick off tanks with abduct. Besides that even if he does get 1 for 1 with his vipers (which can easily cast 2 clouds by the way) he is still getting a good deal because without tank support roach/hydra does really well agains the other factory units plus zerg tends to have a bigger economy.
The problem with mech at the moment seems to be that you need tanks to beat roaches/ultras but making too much makes |
256 picks of the NFL draft are in the books, and every key free agent has long since signed. All 32 NFL teams have largely finished building their rosters for the 2014 season. Now it's time to see how they stack up against each other—at least, as much as is possible without playing football.
A quick reminder: These are power rankings, a snapshot of where these teams stand in relation to one another. They aren't reflective of last year's records (SPOILER ALERT: The Seahawks are not No. 1), nor are they offseason grades.
They're an attempt to rank the overall state of the league's rosters—considering their talent, depth, experience, youth and balance.
Whenever power rankings are done, fans upset with their team's too-low ranking will say things like, "But we added [however many] new starters in the draft!" Yes, and so did every other team.
In order to gain ground in the NFL, you have to get better faster than the other teams around you. Teams that stand pat or get worse (sorry, Carolina Panthers fans) will drop a long way in these rankings from their 2013 finish.
The other thing to remember in these rankings: Rookies rarely make a huge impact on the bottom line. If your favorite team really struggled at cornerback in 2013, a fifth-round rookie is not going to step in and fix the problem for 2014.
My colleague Matt Miller usually handles the power rankings; he last did them at the end of the 2013 regular season. Let's find out how the teams stack up now.The popular collectible company Funko has helped immortalize many characters from across pop culture, including a significant part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While several lines of the company's highly-stylized Pop! Vinyl figures based on the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise are already on shelves, Marvel fans are hoping for many more to be made. And now it appears that a very special Guardians-related Pop! is on the way - of the film's director, James Gunn.
Earlier tonight, Gunn responded to a fan's request on Twitter for Funko to design figures for popular creators, such as Gunn, George Lucas, and Stan Lee. Gunn revealed - to many fans' surprise - that a Pop! of him is on the horizon.
I believe @TheRealStanLee’s already been done, and I’m coming up! More news soon! Cc @OriginalFunko https://t.co/vpqFJjHLTG — James Gunn (@JamesGunn) May 27, 2017
In case you were wondering, there are in fact a series of Funko products already dedicated to Stan Lee. But this news of Gunn's Funko Pop! is certainly a pleasant surprise, considering the following the director has accumulated in recent years. This isn't the first Funko Pop! to be made of a popular director. Bridesmaids and Ghostbusters helmer Paul Feig received the Funko treatment last year, with his figure being exclusive to Funko's online store. Feig's figure was only made in a lot of 200, so here's hoping that Gunn's Pop! will be a little bit easier for his fans to get.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is in theaters now. Spider-Man: Homecoming lands on July 7, 2017, followed by Thor: Ragnarok on November 3, 2017. After that Black Panther debuts on February 16, 2018, while Avengers: Infinity War hits theaters on May 4, 2018. Ant-Man and the Wasp is slated for July 6, 2018, followed by Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019.
(via CinemaBlend)For those of you who haven’t noticed, Polaris, the parent company of Victory and Indian motorcycles, has been on fire. Having pushed past tough competitors such as Honda and Yamaha, it dominates the North American market for off-road four-wheelers (from ATVs to UTVs and side-by-sides), contends for the top of the snowmobile market with Bombardier, and has seen its earnings and stock rise in reward. However, its road in the motorcycle market has been a bit more arduous. After introducing its first motorcycle—the oil-cooled V92C—back in 1998, Polaris saw its Victory motorcycle business launch, stagger, and walk in circles for much of the next decade, as the company addressed both built-in technical issues (the V92’s oil-cooled engine didn’t really cool well at the power levels desired, so it had to be redesigned to shed heat better) and learned how to play in its new sandbox. As the 20-oughts gave way to the 20-teens, Polaris’ board of directors gave the motorcycle division an ultimatum: Get profitable or get out. The result was a renewed focus on Victory, the acquisition of the Indian brand, increasing investment in new engines and new products, and rapidly rising sales.
One of those new products you see pictured here is the Victory Octane, a motorcycle that Brandon Kraemer, Victory product manager, likens to a classic American muscle car: light, fast, and affordable. It’s also a machine whose coming has been telegraphed for most of a year in a series of customs by famous builders: Roland Sands’ Project 156 (as ridden by our own Don Canet at Pikes Peak); Urs Erbacher’s Ignition; and Zach Ness’ Combustion. All were built around the Octane’s new V-twin, and the later ones used much of its chassis. The Octane is very much what a lot of Victory customers and potential customers were asking for: a middleweight Victory cruiser. Its low, 26.9-inch seat height and forward pegs place it firmly in the mainstream of the cruiser class, but its 104 hp, relatively short gearing, and six-speed transmission give it performance that positions it closer to an original 1,130cc Harley V-Rod than a 1200 Sportster. At its heart, the Octane has a new, 1,179cc V-twin that’s very closely related on the inside to the 1,133cc powerplant of the Indian Scout. It has a 2mm-larger bore, its own camshafts and tuning, and new cosmetics on its cylinder, cylinder-head, and engine-cover castings. Redline is up at 8,300 rpm, and peak torque is claimed to be 76 pound-feet, 4 more than the Scout. Wrapped around the engine is a chassis that stretches out to a 61.6-inch wheelbase. The front tire is a beefy 130/70-18, while the rear is a relatively sporty 160/70-17. A single disc brake is used at the front. The steering head rakes out at 29 degrees and works with 5.1 inches of trail, standard figures for a cruiser where good handling is more important than an extreme raked-out appearance. The fork allows 5.1 inches of wheel travel, while the twin rear shocks permit only 3.0 inches of rear-wheel movement—again, not an unusual number for a cruiser where seat height concerns and “low” style can trump rider comfort on a bad road.
Kraemer freely admits that the Octane is a platform play and utilizes many of the designs and some of the components of the Scout. “They only share about 35 percent of their parts, however,” he offers, “either on a part-number or a part-cost basis. We wanted to leverage the parts that weren’t super customer facing, like the axle shafts. But anything that gives the bike its character is unique.” The frame structure design is similar to that of the Scout, with large front and rear aluminum castings bolting directly to the engine and two smaller aluminum frame rails tying these together under the fuel tank. The front casting provides a cage where the radiator resides. The fuel tank carries 3.4 gallons of gas and hides an airbox underneath that displaces only 0.9 gallon less—essential volume to make good power while meeting sound regulations.
Our opportunity for the first ride of a production-validation-build Octane came in early December. The ride left from a secret Polaris garage in an industrial park in Lake Havasu, California, at the Arizona border and, seeking to stay away from phone cameras and curious people, ventured into Arizona while following the old Route 66 two-lane, a place where the Octane felt much at home. As with the Indian Scout, the Octane’s engine makes the first impression: sweet! It demonstrates what engineers can do when allowed to design and tune an engine not for maximum performance per cubic centimeter (after all, Ducati puts out a similar-displacement V-twin that almost doubles this power rating) but are allowed to just design for torque spread and rideability. The bike charges through first gear, reaching the rev limiter at about 45 mph, and pulls hard through second and third. One hundred mph comes quickly. But even more impressive is how smoothly the bike pulls in the midrange and from low speeds; leaving it in sixth, you could lug it down to 1,250 rpm, open the throttle, and (assisted by ECU-controlled throttle-by-wire) pull smoothly back up to highway speed. Similarly, this might be an 1,179cc twin with big pistons, but only the ghost of engine vibration ever reaches the rider. At 65 mph on the freeway, it’s almost glassy smooth. At 75 to 80 mph, that ghost of a buzz touches you lightly, mostly through the pegs and slightly through the grips, but only enough to let you know you’re being propelled by an engine and not enough to annoy.
The transmission, too, shifts sweetly, with the klunk-thunk sound of the bigger Victory engines—thankfully—banished. While the belt-drive gearing is 8 percent shorter than on a Scout, highway rpm is still below 4,000 rpm and feels relaxed. The clutch requires a moderate 14 pounds of effort (Polaris claims) and engages smoothly. A lighter clutch effort might be the only improvement we could suggest to the driveline, and mostly that’s for the anticipated female Octane riders. The Octane places you in a classic cruiser riding position, with feet stretched out ahead and forward controls. The pegs are slightly farther aft than on a Scout, so, if you’re 6-foot, you’ll have some bend in your knees. The bars come back a little bit, so straight-armed riding puts a tall rider upright to slightly aft-leaning. The small windscreen breaks the blast a bit, but at 75 mph the inclination is to bend the elbows slightly and lean forward. Overall, the Octane feels narrow and low and light—Kraemer says the machine weighs 538 pounds in "shipping weight," with little fuel in the tank. It will be interesting to see how it comes out when we get one back to our own scales. Instrumentation is simple and useful. A single classically shaped round speedometer also includes inset LCD displays that can alternatively show either a numerical rpm reading or multiple trip mileages.
Through the switchbacks up and down the hills of western Arizona, the Octane demonstrated competent handling. The handlebar position gives substantial leverage, allowing you to roll the Octane rapidly into a corner—something that narrower, lower bars wouldn’t give you with this steering geometry. The Octane has enough power that—with the front wheel raked well out from the rest of the bike—the front end can get light accelerating out of a second-gear corner. The Octane can certainly lean farther than many cruisers, requiring roughly a 32-degree bank before the lower exhaust touches down on the right. That’s probably more lean than most cruiser riders will reach. A few of the heaves and pits on the battered old pavement of Route 66 hammered spinal discs a little too much like shock-absorber bump rubbers, even while smoother pavement presented a comfortable ride. Could we maybe have at least 3.5 inches or even 4.0 inches of suspension travel? Of course, according to Kraemer, Victory will help you tailor the Octane to your desires. There will be optional peg kits that bring the pegs backward somewhat and the bars a little lower or a little farther back or higher. There will be a rear passenger pad and pegs, soft bags, and performance parts. Victory certainly sees the Octane as the start of a new platform that will allow a range of machines to emerge—some through customization and others down the road from Victory itself. But what Kraemer seemed most proud of is this: The Octane will sell in the US for $10,500. “The thing about American muscle and pony cars was that they were affordable—that’s what we wanted with the Octane.”
SPECIFICATIONS |2016 Victory Octane PRICE|$10,499 ENGINE|liquid-cooled, 4-stroke V-twin DISPLACEMENT|1179cc BORE x STROKE|101.0 x 73.6mm INDUCTION|60mm throttle body TRANSMISSION|6-speed FRONT SUSPENSION|41mm telescopic fork REAR SUSPENSION|dual shocks BRAKES|single disc front/rear FRONT TIRE|Kenda Cruiser 130/70-18 REAR TIRE|Kenda Cruiser 160/70-17 SEAT HEIGHT|26.9 in. WHEELBASE|61.6 in. RAKE / TRAIL|29° / 5.1 in. FUEL CAPACITY|3.4 gal. CLAIMED WET WEIGHT (NO FUEL)|548 lb.
Photo #1 2016 Victory Octane action. Jeff Allen
Photo #2 2016 Victory Octane action. Jeff Allen
Photo #3 2016 Victory Octane static rear 3/4 view. Jeff Allen
Photo #4 2016 Victory Octane front section. Courtesy of Victory
Photo #5 2016 Victory Octane instrumentation. Jeff Allen
Photo #6 2016 Victory Octane overhead view of engine. Courtesy of Victory
Photo #7 2016 Victory Octane seat. Courtesy of Victory
Photo #8 2016 Victory Octane studio side view. Nick Ferrari
Photo #9 2016 Victory Octane studio front view. Nick FerrariOfficials Will Enforce Preexisting Festival Ordinance for Music at Gatherings of Over 500 People
Thousands of partygoers are expected to descend on the streets of Isla Vista for Deltopia this Saturday, and now local law enforcement officials are saying that Santa Barbara County Outdoor Festival Ordinance Section Six — which limits music that can be played during large gatherings — will be more strictly enforced.
SB Co. Ordinance 6-70, a county ordinance which defines an outdoor music festival as a gathering of 500 people or more, states partygoers or DJs who host music that can be heard from the street — at an event of 500 or more people — can be held responsible and charged with a misdemeanor. The penalty for holding such an event without a permit is up to a $500 fine and/or six months in jail. While penalties and fines are oftentimes increased during Halloween weekend, local officials have said that no such increases will be implemented for Deltopia 2014. There is also no official start and end time for the ordinance, which is expected to be enforced all weekend, and no additional ordinance is being implemented. During Halloween festivities in recent years, local law enforcement usually enforce the Halloween Noise Ordinance, or SBCO 6-70.01, which completely bans music heard from the street — at events of all sizes — between the hours of 6 p.m. and 7 a.m. for a specified period of days.
According to a post on the Deltopia Facebook event page by UCPD Sgt. Mark Signa, police will respond to anyone in violation of the ordinance, citing the death of a Cal Poly student at last years’ Deltopia.
“Anyone playing and/or hosting an event in violation of the ordinance will face a citation or arrest and potentially have their equipment seized,” Signa said in the statement. “Due to the death of Giselle Ayala and the numerous other people hurt last year, we are going to be very strict on any violations we see.”
Associated Students President Jonathan Abboud said he and many students were frustrated that the announcement came a few days before the event.
“This is completely unacceptable and, in my opinion, demeans our status as taxpayers of this county,” Abboud said. “Trust me, they would’ve done a lot more than a Facebook post at 2 a.m. for any other community in SB County.”
However, IVFP Station Lieutenant Rob Plastino said although section 6-70.01 — the Halloween Noise Ordinance — does not apply to Deltopia weekend explicitly, section code 6-72 — which requires licensing for outdoor music festivals — will apply. Also, SBCO 6-107 — which defines the misdemeanor penalty for violation of the code — will be in effect and enforced. According to an IVFP FAQ sheet on Deltopia, 6-70.01 covers Halloween festivities only, but all other parts of the code will remain enforced.
“The bottom line is Deltopia is an event that occurs in I.V. that is similar to Halloween,” Plastino said. “But what’s happened recently is that there are people that try to promote it as their own [event]. You can’t just set up a band or a DJ and start playing it, so a party spills out onto the street.”
According to Plastino, it is completely acceptable within the ordinance to play music during Deltopia, as long as it is not played for an audience of 500 people or more, otherwise it would be considered an outdoor festival and would require a permit to hold. Plastino said continued violations of the ordinance will result in heavier penalties — including possible confiscation of property, a ticket — or in the most extreme case — jail time. However, he said IVFP and other law enforcement agencies will not be looking for people who are inadvertently violating the ordinance.
“[It does not apply to] private celebrations with … friends, but targets those whose parties have people spilling out into the streets music festival-style,” Plastino said. “No one is following the law, you have to get business permits for this stuff.”
Plastino said there is no official host to Deltopia, making the need for facilities such as portable restrooms and security unfulfilled. He said the community-wide beach party could be more easily permitted by law enforcement if some party stepped up and took responsibility for the festivities.
“If someone came forward and said, ‘We want to be responsible,’ it’d be a much better event and we’d be okay with it,” Plastino said. “But the problem is everybody wants that, but nobody steps forward to take the responsibility.”
While the blaring house music that permeates Isla Vista during Deltopia could be considered part of Isla Vista’s culture, IVFP tends to not enforce the festival ordinance on regular weekends but plans to this weekend because “Deltopia is different.”
“We are hesitant to enforce this ordinance, but last year’s Deltopia was just insane,” Plastino said. “There was the death of Giselle Ayala, out-of-control crowds and the balcony that collapsed. Law enforcement were ill-equipped to deal with it.”
Plastino said although the problems were not directly caused by music, the playing of loud music tends to form large groups of people. He also said that by isolating the music to smaller groups and venues, law enforcement could better handle the weekend’s festivities.
Alexander Moore, External Vice President for Local Affairs at Associated Students, said he spoke to Sgt. Signa about better communicating this weekend’s restrictions to the student body.
“In the future, this needs to be better communicated with the student body, because otherwise, there is no one representing students and asking the hard questions,” Moore said. “However, I believe this incident was just a hiccup, and generally we have good communication with IVPF and Lt. Plastino.”
According to Moore, the measure is designed to “target public parties” rather than people who are there with friends and that IVPF will be working with the Santa Barbara County Fire Department to enforce occupancy limits.
“I’d like to stress that in no way does this increase enforcement that mitigates student’s ability to exercise your rights,” Moore said. “Should you happen to receive a citation you wish to challenge, the Associated Students Legal Resource Center is available to all UCSB students.”
Typical crimes that occur in Isla Vista will be received by the normal fine for a given offense and, according to Plastino, there will be no fine increases. Typical crimes include public drunkeness, possession of marijuana without a medical marijuana card, certain types of assault and minors in possession of alcohol, all of which are misdemeanor offenses subject to a maximum fine of $2,000, while open container violations are subject to $100 fines.
According to Plastino, in the case of more serious offenses such as sexual assault, assault causing great bodily injury and possession of illegal drugs — with the exception of medically authorized marijuana or prescription drugs — the person is in violation of a felony and could be subject to a multi-thousand dollar fine.
– Peter Mounteer contributed to this story.
Photo by Kenneth Song / Daily Nexus.
A version of this story appeared on page 1 of Wednesday, March 2nd, 2014’s print edition of the Daily Nexus.
[Correction: A previous version of this article reported that serious offenses such as sexual assault, possession of illegal drugs and illegal possession of prescription drugs, and assault causing great bodily injuries were subject to a maximum fine of $1,000 and up to two years in prison time. That is incorrect. Such crimes may be subject to multi-thousand dollar fines and possible prison time.]
PrintFor thousands of years, gold has been used as a currency, investment, and commodity
—
cementing its importance as an asset
4600 B.C.
Earliest evidence of gold used as jewelry
1091 B.C.
China legalizes the use of gold as money
560 B.C. to 400 A.D.
Gold coins are minted by King Croesus (present day Turkey); Julius Caesar introduces a gold coin as common currency
1284 to 1300
Venice and Great Britain issue the gold ducat and florin, respectively
1511 to 1700
Spain launches its hunt for gold and finds massive reserves in Brazil in 1700. By 1720 the
country is producing more than 60% of the world‘s supply
1799
Gold production begins in the U.S.
1848
Gold rush gets underway in the U.S., with more than 300,000 people moving to California
1900
The U.S. passes the Gold Standard Act
1933 to 1937
The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 ends the minting of gold coins and raises the price of gold to $35 per ounce to trade in to the treasury (formerly set at $20.67)
1971
President Nixon ends the ability to trade U.S. dollars in for gold
1980
Gold sets a then-record high of $870 per ounce
2001 to 2007
China becomes the world‘s largest producer of gold after deregulating its market
2004
The first gold ETF begins trading
2008 to 2010
The ―Great Recession‖ in the U.S., and a larger global slowdown, push gold prices over
$1,000 for the first time everThis tactic is now being used by Romney against Gingrich. The Washington Post's Greg Sargent posts this flyer, at left, mailed to voters in Florida by the Romney campaign that points to Gingrich's "well of sleaze." Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Romney backer, told Politico's Alex Isenstadt and Jake Sherman Friday that the idea of Gingrich winning the Republican nomination "scares me to death... Newt Gingrich is an unreliable leader. He’s prone to becoming unhinged. He’s been mired in scandal in his personal and professional life. And he is a consummate D.C. insider." New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called Gingrich an embarrassment. During Thursday night's debate, Romney called Gingrich's claim that he was anti-immigrant "repulsive."
Gingrich has a tougher time making this case against Romney, who has been married only once. But that doesn't stop him from trying. In Thursday's debate, Gingrich portrayed Romney as greedy and depraved, saying Romney had invested in firms that profited from foreclosing on Floridians. "So maybe Governor Romney in the spirit of openness should tell us how much money he's made off of how many households that have been foreclosed by his investments?" he asked.
2. Corruption
Gingrich took down Democratic incumbents by accusing them of violating ethics rules. He brought ethics charges against Speaker Jim Wright in 1988 (Wright resigned). He was involved in the House postage scandal that brought down Dan Rostenkowski. He pushed for an investigation into the House banking scandal, in which members of Congress -- including Gingrich himself -- bounced checks from their House bank accounts. And, of course, he led the impeachment of President Clinton. Now Romney is portraying Gingrich as a corrupt creature of Washington. On Gingrich's consulting work for Freddie Mac, Romney said at the debate, "You can call it whatever you like -- I call it influence peddling. It is not right. It is not right." The reverse side of the mailer Sargent posted, at right, calls him unethical.
Gingrich has tried to present his eat-the-rich attacks on Romney's business career as a question of ethics. Romney was "looting companies," Gingrich said. "It’s not fine if the person who is rich manipulates the system, gets away with all the cash and leaves behind the human beings," he said earlier this month. This time, "the system" is finance, instead of Washington. "Romney owes all of us a press conference where he explains what happened to the companies that went bankrupt and why Bain made so much money out of companies that were going bankrupt."
3. Elitism
Since the Nixon era, Republicans have argued that uppity liberals want to impose their rules on hardworking, upstanding "traditional" families. It worked against John Kerry in 2004. Barack Obama played into this one in 2008, when he said the working class bitterly clung to guns and God, which offered quite the opening for Sarah Palin. Gingrich said of Romney this week, "I think you have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatic -- you know, $20 million a year of no work -- to have a fantasy this far from reality." Worse, Gingrich said in a campaign speech, Romney thinks you're a moron. Referring to Romney's questioning of his Reaganite credentials, Gingrich said, "This is the kind of gall they have to think we're so stupid and we're so timid... The message we should give Romney is, 'We aren't that stupid and you aren't that clever.'"Mitt Romney (Steve Pope/Getty Images)
As news junkies already know, Mitt Ronney has ended his brief 2016 presidential “exploration.” Romney never became a formal candidate, so, technically speaking, he isn’t withdrawing from the race, but when your announcement that you are not running makes headlines after weeks of signaling that you kinda sorta are running, this is a distinction without a difference. Romney wasn’t quietly mulling a bid. He was test-marketing one. Like many presidential aspirants, Romney tested the waters and found they were not warm. This sort of thing happens every four years during the “invisible primary” phase of the presidential nomination campaign.
Many will speculate about what Romney’s decision means for the GOP’s chances in 2016 or its impact on particular Republican presidential contenders. These are valid questions. Yet this episode is also interesting for what it illustrates about the dynamics of parties and presidential nominations.
Three factors that scholars and other political observers look at in trying to predict campaign outcomes are poll numbers, fundraising and endorsements or other signs of party elite support. In our book, “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations before and after Reform,” my co-authors and I argue for a continued important role for party elites in the modern post-reform presidential nomination process. Voters ultimately elect the delegates that formally select nominees, but party elites have influence over outcomes, not least in helping to shape the field by encouraging some candidates and discouraging others. (This is also true for nominations for other offices, but the book is focused on presidential races.)
Party elites want a candidate who can win and who will reflect their wishes when making policy. What party elites from interest group leaders and elected officials to activists want is often different from what the broader public does, so if they have significant influence over nomination outcomes, that has important implications for representation and policy-making.
Since Romney did not declare his candidacy, we don’t have fundraising totals to pore over, but one thing we can say is that money has never been a problem for Romney. Reports indicated that some fundraisers were supportive this time, and the enormously wealthy Romney could self-fund for a while if it came to that.
Polling was also encouraging. The period in which a Romney candidacy was widely discussed was brief, but not so brief that there was no polling. And it’s notable that whether the polls were national or focused on Iowans, Romney was well in the lead, zooming past Jeb Bush, who had previously been in first place.
On the other hand, the third factor, party elite support, was much less promising for the former Massachusetts governor. Two weeks ago The New York Times reported that “interviews with more than two dozen Republican activists, elected officials and contributors around the country reveal little appetite for another Romney candidacy.” GOP members of Congress, including some who had supported the former governor’s previous nomination campaigns, also evinced little enthusiasm about the prospect of Romney Redux.
If we look at prominent Republican voices in the media Mitt-mania was not evident. The Wall Street Journal — a prominent voice in GOP circles — published a harsh editorial about the idea of a third Romney bid, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, a dogged Mitt-booster in 2012, poured cold water on the idea of another candidacy by the former governor.
We cannot know all the factors that went into Romney’s decision, and maybe we never will. Politics, as Bismarck said, is not an exact science, and neither is political science. But as far as it goes, the abortive Romney 2016 bid is consistent with a view of campaigns in which party elites play an important role. Romney had the poll numbers. He has the money. What he didn’t have was a warm welcome from party elites. Romney by now has a lot of experience in presidential campaigns. It seems he drew conclusions from the signals he got. Campaign analysts should, too.GETTY Roger Federer's match with Nick Kyrgios in Miami has been named the best of the year
The 36-year-old won two Grand Slams to take his tally to 19 this year - and now he has been given the accolade for winning the best match of the year by the official ATP website.
Federer met Kyrgios in the Miami Open semi-finals in March where they played out a three-set thriller.
Federer took the first set on a tie-break, winning it 11-9, before the bad-boy Aussie hit back in the second.
He saved match points to win the breaker 11-9 too to take it into a final set.
Kyrgios had to dig deep and save more match points in the decider before Federer clinched a 7-6 6-7 7-6 win in more than three hours.
GETTY Roger Federer and Nick Kyrgios after their semi-final in Miami
Federer said after the match: “It did feel very good, because you don't very often play three breakers in a match.
“It's nice to win those and winning breakers is always such a thrill. It's great winning this way, especially because I remember the loss against him a few years ago. It was rough.”
Kyrgios, meanwhile, said: “I feel like my level of tennis has always been high, but mentally I'm competing for every point now.
“That's making the difference. I showed a lot of fight. Obviously, I'm an emotional guy. I had some ups and downs, a bit of a roller coaster, but ultimately I think I put in a good performance. I think I've made an effort to try and put in [the work] every day.
GETTY Roger Federer celebrates his win over Nick KyrgiosDonald Trump is "morphing into" all the things he railed against when it comes to immigration, and his decision to shift his views on immigration in order to attract voters and political power is "abhorrent," former GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush said Thursday.
"Well, I can only say that whatever his views are this morning, they might change this afternoon, and they were different than they were last night, and they'll be different tomorrow," the former Florida governor told WABC Radio host Rita Cosby in an exclusive interview Thursday.
"So I can't comment on his views, because his views are, they seem to be ever, ever changing, depending on what crowd he's in front of."
"And that makes Trump sound like something he's railed against being, said Bush, "a typical politician."
"[He] sounds like a typical politician, by the way, where you get in front of one crowd and say one thing, and then say something else to another crowd that may want to hear a different view," Bush said. "All the things that Donald Trump railed against, he seems to be morphing into – it’s kind of disturbing.”
The Bush interview came just a few hours after MSNBC's "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough said he believed that Trump had adopted Bush's policies on immigration.
Trump on Wednesday told Fox News' Sean Hannity in a town hall meeting that he would be willing to "work with" undocumented immigrants living in the United States to allow them to stay, rather than ordering them to be deported. Trump also commented that he would not agree to a policy involving amnesty for people living illegally in the country.
Bush told Cosby he's not sure what to believe about the possibility that Trump is softening his hardline position on immigration.
"I don’t know what to believe about a guy who doesn't believe in things," Bush said. "I mean he doesn't. This is all a game. His views will change based on the feedback he gets from a crowd, or, you know, what he thinks he has to do."
Life is "too complex" to behave like that, said Bush.
"For me I couldn't do that," said the former governor, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race in February after a series of disappointing losses and setbacks.
"I have to believe what I believe, and if it’s popular, great, if it’s not, I try to get better at presenting my views. But shifting my views because, because it’s political to do it? That's what politicians do in this country, that's what Trump is trying to do right now. I find it abhorrent."
However, Bush said that it may be a good thing if Trump really is pulling back on his earlier campaign call to deport all of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, and that he's now reaching out to minority voters.
Story continues below.
"I'm happy he is making efforts to reach out to constituencies that Republicans have ignored," said Bush of Trump's latest speeches aimed at African American and Latino voters. "I think that's a very healthy thing for our party. It's a smart thing for him to do, if it's sincere."
Still, Bush told Cosby, he's not quite sure Trump's change of position will stick.
"His views on immigration, I can't comment on because we're talking in the morning of...this is Thursday morning right?" Bush said. "Tomorrow, it might be different."It's no secret that Siberia's permafrost is on thin ice. Conditions are varying so much that huge holes are appearing out of nowhere, and, in some places, tundra is quite literally bubbling underneath people's feet.
But one of the biggest craters in the region, known by the local Yakutian people as the 'doorway to the underworld', is growing so rapidly that it's uncovering long-buried forests, carcasses, and up to 200,000 years of historical climate records.
Known as the Batagaika crater, it's what's officially called a'megaslump' or 'thermokarst'.
Many of these megaslumps have been appearing across Siberia in recent years, but researchers think Batagaika could be something of an anomaly in the region, located around 660 km (410 miles) north-east of the region's capital city of Yakutsk.
Not only is the crater already the largest of its kind, almost 1 km (0.6 miles) long and 86 metres (282 feet) deep, but it's getting bigger all the time.
Alexander Gabyshev, Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North
Research presented in 2016 by Frank Günther from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany revealed that the head wall of the crater has grown by an average of 10 metres (33 feet) per year over the past decade of observations.
And in warmer years, the growth has been up to 30 metres (98 feet) per year.
The team also suspects that the side wall of the crater will reach a neighbouring valley in the coming months as temperatures heat up in the Northern Hemisphere, which could lead to even more land collapse.
"On average over many years, we have seen that there's not so much acceleration or deceleration of these rates, it's continuously growing," Günther told Melissa Hogenboom from the BBC.
"And continuous growth means that the crater gets deeper and deeper every year."
That's not great news for climate change. The crater formation first started after a large chunk of forest was cleared nearby in the 1960s.
Because the ground was no longer shaded in the warm, summer months, it heated up more rapidly than it had in the past, eventually causing the permafrost to melt and the ground to collapse.
Major flooding in 2008 made the melting even worse, and contributed to the size of the crater.
Alexander Gabyshev, Research Institute of Applied Ecology of the North
The instability of the region isn't just dangerous for locals, there are also concerns that as the hole gets deeper and larger, it will expose carbon stores that have been locked away for thousands of years.
"Global estimations of carbon stored in permafrost is [the] same amount as what's in the atmosphere," Günther told the BBC.
As the crater continues to melt, these greenhouse gases could be released into the atmosphere, triggering more warming.
"This is what we call positive feedback," added Günther. "Warming accelerates warming, and these features |
last president we had was Ronald Reagan that said we’re going to dramatically cut tax rates. And guess what? More revenue came in…” – Sen. Rand Paul
June 2015: “If you look at the revenue that came in after the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax rate cuts, yes, there was more money coming into the treasury.” – GOP strategist Ron Christie
April 2017: “The tax plan will pay for itself with economic growth.” – Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
September 2017: “I am one who is convinced that if we reduce tax rates, eventually we will bring in more money into the Treasury.” Rep. Ted Poe
December 2017:
House Speaker Paul Ryan is acknowledging "nobody knows" if the sweeping tax cuts Congress is enacting will produce enough economic growth to fend off soaring federal deficits — AP Politics (@AP_Politics) December 20, 2017
Ed. note: Tax cuts do not pay for themselves.Social media may be putting the right to a fair trial at risk, according to a public consultation launched by the government’s chief legal adviser.
On Friday the attorney general, Jeremy Wright QC, published a call for evidence to assess the impact of social media on criminal cases and establish whether extra reporting restrictions are needed.
The initiative follows recommendations by the senior appeal court judge, Sir Brian Leveson, following legal challenges over what could be published about the trial of two schoolgirls who were eventually convicted of murdering Angela Wrightson in Hartlepool in 2014.
The first trial of the teenagers, who were 13 and 14 at the time of the killing, was abandoned by the crown court judge amid a torrent of social media comments and abuse that threatened to prejudice the hearing.
Before the second trial began there was a legal challenge over restrictions imposed on the mainstream media. They were eventually partially relaxed but nonetheless prevented reports of the trial being released on Facebook and compelled editors to disable comments on website message boards.
The case highlighted the increasing problems faced by courts and law enforcement officers in upholding traditional, strict contempt laws designed to ensure that defendants receive a fair trial.
The Contempt of Court Act 1981 sets out what can be published before and during a trial. It is contempt of court to publish anything that creates a “substantial risk that the course of justice in the proceedings in question will be seriously impeded or prejudiced, even if there is no intent to cause such prejudice”.
While journalists are well aware of the traditional restrictions, most of the public posting comments on social media sites are unaware of such limits. For example, juveniles are not normally named in criminal cases.
Launching the consultation, Wright said: “Every defendant in this country is entitled to a fair trial where a verdict is delivered based on the evidence heard in court.
“Our contempt of court laws are designed to prevent trial by media. However, are they able to protect against trials by social media? I am looking for expert evidence on whether the increasing influence and ubiquity of social media is having an impact on criminal trials and, if so, whether the criminal justice system has the tools it needs to manage that risk.”
Wright told the Guardian that he was not approaching the issue with any preconceptions about whether there was a need to change the law. Judges, lawyers, police, victims’ organisations, journalists and human rights groups are being approached for comments.
“We have to keep a balance between the principle of freedom of speech and the integrity of the trial process,” he explained. “What I want to see is how broad the concerns are, then we can start to think about the issues. I want to see whether judges have the tools required or whether they are crying out for some new powers or changes in the law.”
The scope of the inquiry could also extend to any problems caused by archived media content – old stories that remain easily accessible via the internet – as well as the dangers jurors face if they research trials they are hearing online.
Wright said that the Wrightson case demonstrated that social media “is having some impact on the administration of justice in criminal trials, but it does not show to what extent … Was this an isolated incident or are there more examples of trials being affected by social media commentary?”
The consultation asks respondents whether they have been involved in a case in which reporting restrictions have been breached by social media and whether the “risks posed by social media to the administration of justice are greater than five years ago”.
The call for evidence is open until 8 December. The attorney general’s office will produce a report and/or recommendations afterwards.Monetize your Gmail inbox with Earn.com
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Bounce unsolicited emails back to the original sender, and let them pay to reach you.
We just announced our new token yesterday, and you can sign up for it here. Over the days to come, we’ll be shipping a number of features that power up our existing product at Earn.com in anticipation of the token launch.
One of the first such features is the new Earn.com Gmail integration. With one click, you can now bounce emails from users outside your contact list, and allow them to pay to reach you.
How to set up the Earn.com Gmail integration
This feature is live for all Earn.com users right now. Just log into your dashboard and look for the new “Bounces” tab, as shown below:
If you have a Gmail account, click that button to enable the integration and you’ll get a bounce dashboard that looks like this:
As you can see, you can bounce messages from salespeople while easily accepting messages from friends. You can also configure your whitelist by contact or domain, like this:
And you can set up a polite autoresponse to go out with every bounce:
How bounces work
Now that you’ve set it up, below is a quick gif of how the bounce process works. In this example, Jeff is sending an email to Sarah. He’s not on her contact list, so he gets a bounce. He then chooses to send her a paid message, which he can easily do through her Earn.com profile. If she replies within a week, she gets paid and Jeff gets his reply.
It’s that simple: set up the Earn.com Gmail integration and then forget it. You will bounce messages from folks outside your network, and they can pay you to get in touch if it’s an urgent matter.
A note on permissions and security
We recognize that email can be sensitive, so we ask for the absolute minimum number of permissions to enable the bounce feature, as shown below:
Importantly, you retain full control over your Gmail account. We make it easy for you to review all the activity that occurs in your inbox, and we never delete any emails from your account. We lean on Gmail’s API to store the minimum data necessary, and any data that we do store is securely encrypted on our servers.
With that said, the Earn Gmail integration is an optional feature, and you can enable it at your discretion. The purpose of doing so is to save you time and make you more money through your Earn.com account.
Summary
Your time is valuable, and sorting through emails from people you don’t know — like marketers, recruiters and salespeople — can feel like work. With the Earn.com Gmail integration, those senders now have an easy way to compensate you for the time spent reading and replying to their messages.
We hope you find this feature useful. If you have any questions, reach out to support@Earn.com or join our community.Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE is viewed unfavorably by over 4 in 10 Hispanics, according to a new poll, though she holds a huge lead over GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE with the voting bloc.
Forty-one percent of Hispanics in Friday’s Fox News Latino survey said they view Clinton negatively, compared with 56 percent who view her positively. Forty-two percent said she desires the presidency for herself and not for the good of the country.
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The former secretary of State trails far behind President Obama when it comes to favorability among Hispanic voters. Seventy-two percent in the poll said they view Obama favorably, while only 26 percent expressed an unfavorable opinion.
The favorability numbers for Trump are far worse than Clinton's. Seventy-four percent said they view the businessman unfavorably, while 23 percent had a favorable opinion of him.
Seventy-two percent said they believe that Trump is seeking the presidency for personal gain.
Overall, 60 percent of Hispanic voters said they would vote for Clinton in November, while 23 percent would pick Trump.
While that's a huge margin, many campaign analysts predict Clinton will need to run up the score with minorities to win, as the businessman has an early advantage with white voters.
Fox News Latino conducted its latest sampling of 886 registered Latino voters via interviews from May 14-17. It has a 3.5 percent margin of error.
Trump says Hispanic voters will come around to his candidacy despite his hardline stances on border security and illegal immigration and his controversial comments about criminals coming into the country from Mexico.
He has sworn that he will deport the nation’s illegal immigrant population and build a wall along America’s southern border with Mexico.It has been reported that Hollywood actor, Tom Cruise, hasn’t seen his nine-year-old daughter, Suri, for more than two years.
It is believed that the star’s involvement with the controversial Scientology religion has prevented him from seeing his child with ex-wife Katie Holmes for “800 days”.
Tom was last seen with Suri in 2012. Copyright: Getty
Speaking to The National Enquirer, a source explained: “He doesn’t seem interested in being part of Suri’s day-to-day life. Katie does her best to be a hands-on mum but there’s no replacing her father.
“He hasn’t been seen in public with his daughter in over two long years – that’s a fifth of her lifetime.”
A former member of Scientology, Marc Headley, also confirmed that this is not unusual behaviour for a member of the church, as Tom might have concerns that his former in-laws have been bad-mouthing his religion.
Copyright: Wenn
He told the publication: “It’s possible Tom won’t see Suri because he thinks Katie and her family are speaking negatively about him and Scientology.”
It is also thought that the actor is too busy with his work commitments to make the time for Suri, with Tom working on several movies back-to-back in recent years.
Meanwhile, the Church of Scientology has come under scrutiny over the last few weeks thanks to a sensational book released by former member, Leah Remini.
Copyright: Splash
In the piece, Leah claims to expose secrets about Tom and the religious group, alleging that Tom and Katie had left Suri to cry on the bathroom floor when she was just a baby, and also maintaining that it’d be tough for Tom to keep in contact with his daughter.
She said during a TV appearance: “The policy with the church is you can’t be connected to someone who has committed a suppressive act - which I have, Katie has.”When I first heard of the RadioShack bankruptcy, I was not surprised at all. Nor was I bothered by it. RadioShack used to be the go-to place for electronics parts and state of the art electronics. But those times have been long gone. The electronic giant made the fatal business decision to shift more into the cell phone parket. Many of their employees lack knowledge in teh electronics area but will try to sell you a cell phone with every purchase. At least that was my perception. Towards the end RadioShack management realized their mistake and tried to re-align the stores with the maker industry. But just putting Arduinos on the shelf by itself doesn’t do much. The employees aren’t well trained for these kind of products and therefore RadioShack never really lost its image as a cell phone store.
With the closure of many stores and the chapter 11 bankruptcy an era comes to an end. I’m not sure if it the stores in their current state will really be missed.What about you, how do you feel about the RadioShack closure? Please leave your RadioShack related stories and opinions in the comment section below.
Here are some pictures of my final blowout shopping trips:
Links and Sources:
[1] QST: http://www.arrl.org/qstThis month, Costa Rica’s state-run electricity company announced that the country had gone 75 days using only renewable resources for electricity. Costa Ricans are the first in the world to power their country for so long without the use of fossil fuels, and the record-breaking achievement was quickly picked up by news agencies all over the world.
Costa Rican residents have certainly benefited from the clean energy, with electricity prices set to tumble between 7% and 15% in April. But despite the world’s congratulatory backslaps for the renowned green country, its clean energy production is not likely to last at this scale, nor is it a model that would work in many other parts of the world.
Conservationist murders threaten Costa Rica's eco-friendly reputation Read more
Costa Rica gets most of its electricity from hydroelectric plants and a recent period of unusually heavy rain allowed the country to reach the milestone. This clean power is bolstered by geothermic energy from the country’s volcanoes and a small amount of wind and solar power. Most years, these sources allow Costa Rica to generate approximately 90% of its electricity without burning fossil fuels.
The abundance of natural resources, combined with Costa Rica’s strong commitment to environmentalism, spurred policymakers to set a goal for carbon neutrality by 2021. If Costa Rica meets the target, it will likely become the first carbon-neutral country in the world, but there are obstacles.
The downside to hydropower is that it requires consistent rainfall. Though the dams in Costa Rica are now full, just months ago the country was suffering one of the worst droughts in its history. This forced Costa Rican utility companies to burn fuel to generate power, releasing greenhouse gases and causing rate rises.
‘While there is plenty of clean power today, it could just as easily be gone tomorrow.’ Photograph: Corbis
This unpredictability in rain patterns isn’t unique to Costa Rica and is considered to be one of the primary effects of climate change. Ironically, this means that the bulging reservoirs that gave Costa Rica its green energy surge are likely to be attributable, at least partially, to climate change. And while there is plenty of clean power today, it could just as easily be gone tomorrow.
Even if Costa Rica were able to sustain 100% clean electricity production, the country still relies on petroleum for transportation, and emissions from this sector are the largest hurdle the country faces in reaching its carbon neutrality goal. The environment ministry reports that fuel burned by cars, buses and trains accounted for almost 70% of the country’s carbon emissions in 2014. According to customs there are only 200 or so hybrid cars in Costa Rica to take advantage of the energy produced by renewables on the grid.
The fact that even a country like Costa Rica, which has made major investments to produce clean energy, still struggles with these obstacles, shows just how difficult it would be for larger, more industrialised nations to follow in its footsteps.
With a population under 5 million and no major industry, Costa Rica uses much less power than most developed countries, and its geography of tightly packed volcanoes, rivers and mountains is more suited to producing clean power than most. Though small, Costa Rica is able to produce enough energy to power itself while leaving much of its wilderness intact.
To tap into all of the natural resources in the rest of the world would require environmental loss of a different kind, by altering rivers, displacing people and animals, and destroying vegetation. Solar and nuclear power offer other alternatives for clean energy but need more research and investment to make them cost-effective and safe. Even if it were possible to power the world’s largest countries with renewable energy, the destruction required would be unfathomable with only the current technologies.
These limitations, along with a lack of political will, are what has meant the world relied on fossil fuels for almost 90% of its energy since 1999. As admirable as Costa Rica’s feats in energy production may be, its model is not realistic for the world’s largest energy consumers.
But what most of the industrialised world lacks in natural resources, it more than makes up for with other assets. To seriously make a difference in global energy consumption would require significant investment in the research and design of new sources of non-polluting energy, a task most easily funded by richer nations.
While the world may not be able to tailor its energy programmes to Costa Rica’s geography-specific model, the lesson here is not about science and infrastructure, but about volition and ideals.SACRAMENTO — As California’s elk herds rebound, the state has proposed a new management plan for the animals — creatures of great magnificence and caution that were once nearly pushed out of existence.
State officials say that the steadily increasing elk population — from 3,500 to 13,000 over four decades — demands a broader approach to expand, link and improve their scattered habitats so that they will continue to flourish.
Each of California’s 22 isolated herds, including some in Santa Clara and Alameda counties, are now monitored individually, using plans drafted in the 1980s.
The draft Statewide Elk Conservation and Management Plan, released for public review last week, seeks to coordinate these efforts — improving the elks’ genetic diversity and grazing lands, among other goals, with an eye toward boosting populations by at least another 10 percent. Related Articles Wait, that’s no service animal: Llama aboard light rail helps Portland keep it weird
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“We had no comprehensive statewide plan for elk herds,” said Joe Hobbs, a senior environmental scientist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “This sets the foundation for future work and data collection.”
Some herds may need to be reduced to bring them in better balance with their ecosystems and prevent damage to ranch fencing, according to the plan.
Other herds may need to expand through the introduction of new elk that boost genetic diversity and resiliency.
And some herds could be better connected so that there’s easier transit and new access to untraveled landscapes.
Elk once roamed across much of California, from Mendocino County to the Tehachapi Mountains near Bakersfield, but extensive hunting and habitat loss throughout the 1800s nearly wiped out the species.
According to the new state report, however, California now has growing numbers of three species of elk: 5,700 Tule elk, 5,000 to 6,000 Roosevelt elk and about 1,500 Rocky Mountain elk.
They’re expanding into landscapes where they vanished more than a century ago, Hobbs said. Some are moving into the Sierra Nevada region of Sierra and Plumas counties. Others are moving down the coast, from Humboldt County to Mendocino County.
“There’s elk in Elk, California” — a tiny Mendocino County community located about 20 miles south of Fort Bragg — for the first time in recent history, Hobbs said.
The Bay Area’s Tule elk are all descended from 65 creatures from the Owens Valley that were released from 1978 to 1981 onto the 28,000-acre San Felipe Ranch, jointly owned by tech pioneers Bill Hewlett and David Packard, near Mt. Hamilton in southern Santa Clara County.
“We moved animals not knowing if they would do well, or not do well. You never know,” said retired California Department of Fish and Wildlife warden Henry Coletto, who led the effort. “It is amazing to me that we have these populations. At one time, there were just a few left.”
Descendents of the animals have since dispersed from the release sites into portions of Santa Clara, Alameda, Merced, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties, forming distinct populations.
In southern Santa Clara County, between Hellyer Park and Anderson Reservoir, a single herd of 30 elk has more than tripled in size during the past decade, said Craige Edgerton, recently retired executive director of the Silicon Valley Land Conservancy.
Now there are four herds in the Coyote Ridge area, including a “bachelor herd” of several bulls and a newly created herd, grazing just north of San Jose’s Metcalf Road, with one bull and 17 to 20 cows and calves, according to Edgerton and local naturalist Michael Hundt.
“They’ve gotten as close as 100 yards from Highway 101,” especially in winter, when they drop to the lower elevations, Edgerton said. In summer, they’re harder to see because they head up to the Mount Hamilton area on the back side of Henry Coe State Park.
A year ago, for the first time, Coletto spotted three elk at the 6,000-acre Cañada de los Osos Ecological Reserve, east of Gilroy.
Other animals from the Hewlett-Packard ranch have wandered north to Alameda and San Joaquin counties. About 100 elk have been sighted at San Antonio Reservoir, Apperson Ridge, Sunol and Connolly-Corral Hollow ranches.
“It appears to some of us that there is likely inbreeding happening, especially in San Antonio Valley near Mt. Hamilton,” said Bill Leikam of the Urban Wildlife Research Project, which seeks to open new territory for the herds by building a wildlife crossing at San Jose’s Metcalf Road overpass to expanding their range into the Santa Cruz Mountains. “Some of those elk have malformed antlers and several other indicators that inbreeding is taking place.”
Near San Luis Reservoir, several hundred animals hang around the dam. They are unable to safely cross four lanes of traffic at Highway 152, so their expansion is limited to the north and south.
Elk-human conflicts are increasing, as they knock down fences and compete with cattle for grass and water. At Point Reyes National Seashore, the U.S. Park Service has tried ineffective techniques such as contraception and hazing to keep the animals away from pastures.
The new state plan seeks to identify and map the areas of private property where there’s the greatest conflict, then issue more hunting permits.
There are other challenges: Recent research has shown that herds in once-depleted areas lost significant amounts of genetic diversity when only a few individuals were introduced to a new area, or herds were not managed appropriately. This simulates a genetic bottleneck effect, making it difficult for populations to adapt to changing conditions.
“With so much of our state fragmented, with 40 million people, these populations are isolated,” Coletto said.
Improved herd management will improve diversity by bringing in animals from a variety of different herds around the state.
In 2014, wildlife workers from the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service captured 15 bulls, 16 cows and five calves in the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge in Los Banos and trucked them to three areas: the San Antonio Valley Ecological Reserve in Santa Clara County north of Mount Hamilton, the Carrizo Plains Ecological Reserve in San Luis Obispo County and the Wind Wolves Preserve in Kern County.
The state also wants to improve the quality of elk habitats, better monitor elk for disease and offer workshops and new viewing opportunities for the public.
“Having a statewide plan gives us a bigger vision of the total populations,” Coletto said, “so we can better manage them.”
How to comment on elk plan
All public comments should be submitted no later than 5 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 29. Comments may be submitted online at ElkManagementPlan@wildlife.ca.gov. A copy of the report is available at https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Mammals/Elk.
Comments can also be mailed to:
California Department of Fish and Wildlife
Wildlife Branch, Attn: Joe Hobbs
1812 Ninth St.
Sacramento, CA 95811
View a video of San Jose’s Coyote Ridge Tule Elk herd by local naturalist Michael Hundt: https://vimeo.com/224792725
View a video of San Jose’s Coyote Ridge Tule Elk herd by Anderson Lake by local naturalist Michael Hundt: https://vimeo.com/138105442"He had lost about 30 or 35 pounds," Jerry Miller said. "He didn't look the same. He couldn't eat. He said, 'It's just so hard out there, Dad. It smells like death.' "
On June 18, Ben Miller went to a baseball game with friends. Later that night, "he just snapped," said his girlfriend, Megan Henk.
Miller got a taxi and headed to Nalipinski's home in Roseville, where he was staying. He had a gun hidden in the house. Miller's younger brother called Nalipinski to warn her something was wrong.
When Miller arrived, he was hysterical, Nalipinski said. He wouldn't look at her or speak to her.
He grabbed a bullet from his room and ran out of the house.
Nalipinski called the police, but officers arrived too late....Nalipinski said her brother might have been too proud to ask for help or tell anyone what he was going through.There are many arguments for and against the regulation of Bitcoin. For Bitcoin to succeed in the medium to long term I think there must be some sort of fair regulatory framework in place for certain Bitcoin businesses and startups to adhere too. Bitcoin as it stands is a legal grey area that nobody is 100% certain on how to navigate.
Banks still see Bitcoin as an inconvenience to deal with and as such are not eager to support businesses and individuals that are Bitcoin related in nature. Because of this they are often shutting down bank accounts due to regulations that are in place that relate to money laundering and other criminal activities. If a bank suspects there to be suspicious activity with one of their customer’s accounts, it is often easier to shut the account down than to get in trouble with regulators.
Bitcoin is still seen as a currency for terrorists and people of a questionable nature. Is it any surprise that banks want little to do with Bitcoin activities going through their customers banks accounts? It is a bank’s responsibility to report on suspicious activities and to close accounts that are suspected to be used for criminal activities. If this is not done and a bank is found to have let its customer use an account for criminal purposes, they will be fined considerable charges by regulatory bodies. The closure of a customer’s account is simply business. It is easier for a bank to shut an account down than to face potentially colossal fines from regulatory agencies.
To overcome this, there must be definitive legislation handed down from the government to banks for them to be able to engage with digital currency related customers. The government is currently addressing this issue and with time there will no doubt be clear guidelines on how to treat Bitcoin companies.
Currently there are many Bitcoin businesses that have to bank elsewhere to operate. This includes Bitcoin exchanges that are operating in other EU countries. This has led to higher charges and more inconvenience for customers who are having to accept higher transfer fees for the purchase and sale of Bitcoin. Bitcoin needs banking services for legitimacy, integration and lastly widespread adoption. It is questionable as to how Bitcoin can flourish if the public are unable to purchase Bitcoin in an easy and frictionless fashion.
Circle is a great example of being able to purchase Bitcoin in an easy fashion. By simply entering your credit card details you are able to purchase Bitcoin in an instant manner with your credit card. Ease of use is key if we are to reach widespread adoption with digital currencies.
The government seems to be open to talks about digital currencies and they recognise the fact that increasing banking competition is in the interest of all customers. The government has also taken small steps forward by looking to apply anti-money laundering laws on exchanges and will discuss the proposal early in the next parliament.
How regulation should be applied to digital currencies is to be seen but those of us in the Bitcoin community must engage and communicate with the government to make sure a fair proposal is placed forward. The government is to decide on the identity of the regulatory body to carry this process out and also on the scope of the regulatory oversight that shall be placed on the shoulders of the digital currencies industry. By communicating with the government we can make sure this process is as fair as possible.
If we look at the Bitlicense at New York we can see the pros and cons of regulatory oversight. Bitcoin in its current state is a small entity but with more oversight comes more clarity for the end consumer. There were and still are many bad actors in the Bitcoin industry and this fact can be pointed to the lack of general checks that more traditional financial industries have to go through.
The cost of such a licence can be prohibitive and could potentially hold back or prevent the creation of new startups in this space. Many companies in the Bitcoin space have already broadcasted their distaste for such a licence with Local Bitcoins and Satoshi Citadel Industries pulling out of the market altogether.
It could be argued that the lack of regulation has allowed amateurs to tarnish the image of Bitcoin. The most notable example being Mark Karpeles, the former CEO of the collapsed Bitcoin exchange MtGox. Mark Karpeles carried out ignorant actions such as using his personal bank account for receiving customers payments with there being no separation between company and personal funds. He also made code changes to live servers that ran the exchange and was the only one who had access to the cold storage wallets that stored the Bitcoin for the exchange. This I feel is proof we need oversight in place that will stop amateurs from dealing with people’s hard earned money.
Overall I feel that regulation will in the medium to long term, be a positive process for Bitcoin and will allow us to move to the next stage of adoption. With regulation Bitcoin services can be seen to have the same standard of professionalism as other financial institutions which will lead to a better public perception of Bitcoin. With a better image we may see the public migrate with open arms into the Bitcoin ecosystem and in turn see Bitcoin finally move into its mainstream stage. Of course, the above is simply my opinion but please leave comments below as to whether you agree or disagree.
(Image by Isaac Bowen)Michigan and Washington have agreed to a home-and-home series in 2020 and 2021, the schools announced Wednesday.
The Wolverines and Huskies will meet Sept. 5, 2020, in Seattle, and Sept. 18, 2021, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Michigan will host Washington in the second installment of a home-and-home series beginning in 2020. Leon Halip/Getty Images
Michigan leads the all-time series with Washington 7-5, and the Wolverines won the teams' last contest in 2002.
Washington on Wednesday also announced a home-and-home series with BYU to be played in 2018 (home) and 2019 (road).
Michigan and Washington have met four times in the Rose Bowl, with each team winning twice. Michigan is 3-1 at Michigan Stadium and 2-2 at Husky Stadium.
"There have been some exciting, down-to-the-wire football games between Michigan and Washington, and we anticipate the same type of contests when this series is played at the outset of the next decade," Michigan coach Brady Hoke said in a prepared statement.
Michigan is diversifying its upcoming schedule with opponents like Oregon State, Florida, Colorado and Arkansas. The Wolverines will play Notre Dame for the final time in the foreseeable future Sept. 6 at Notre Dame Stadium.Those who started their weekends early last Friday missed a vainglorious display of partisan quarrelling that can really only be observed by watching through the cracks in your fingers. The debate was supposed to be about whether Canada should change the lyrics to its national anthem to make it gender inclusive — or, more specifically, about whether parliamentarians should vote to send a bill about changing the lyrics to Canada’s national anthem to committee review. But it devolved, as these things do, into Liberals and Conservatives trying to make the case that each had been unduly persecuted by the other.
Bill C-210, put forward by Ottawa-area Liberal MP Mauril Bélanger, would amend the National Anthem Act such that the words “thy sons” in the English version of O Canada are changed to “of us.” The government under former prime minister Stephen Harper floated a similar idea to a resounding chorus of “boos” back in 2010, and Bélanger himself put forward an identical version of the bill a couple of years ago, though it was defeated at second reading by a vote of 144-127. This time, however, with the Liberals’ majority in the House, the bill is almost certain to pass.
The normal procedure still has to be observed, however, with the complicating factor here being that Bélanger is dying. He was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, last year, and his condition has rapidly deteriorated. Many of his colleagues in the House hoped to fast track the bill, in hopes he’d live long enough to see it become law. For that to happen, the Conservatives would have had to bench some of their speakers during the hour of time allocated for debate during the second reading of the bill to allow for a vote. Instead, they used up all of the time, effectively punting the bill until the fall. The Liberals attempted to get unanimous consent to continue the debate, but without support from the Conservatives, the motion failed.
This set the stage perfectly for each party’s particular brand of wounded histrionics: the Liberals were aghast that the Conservatives would not expedite procedure for the sake of a dying MP — as if the government has some obligation to yield to the wishes of terminally ill parliamentarians. The Conservatives were aghast that they were accused of delaying the bill in spite of a dying MP — as if they truly believed it was of critical importance that each speaker stand up and say nearly the same thing as the previous speaker, knowing that there would be further opportunities for debate before the bill is passed.
The Conservatives didn’t delay anything, really: they just used up allocated debate time, which is perfectly acceptable. At the same time, it was rather rich of the Conservatives — having discovered their newfound commitment to parliamentary procedure oh, six months ago — to suddenly profess an unyielding fidelity to the rules, and insist that the topic was so important that they needed to use the entirely of their allotted hour, but not important enough to extend the debate on a Friday afternoon.
Everyone looks bad here, with the exception, perhaps, of the MP who actually put forth the bill, and allowed his colleagues to jostle each other around him while he spoke (with the assistance of a text-to-speech iPad program) to the actual merits of his proposition. Bélanger was honoured for his commitment to public service back in March, when he was given a standing ovation as the first-ever honourary speaker of the house for a day. It was a fitting tribute to a veteran MP, and an appropriate way for the government to honour one of its long-time servants. Less appropriate is insisting on the expediting of a bill that will amend a government act, even if its outcome is fairly foreseeable.
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On that outcome, what will most likely happen is that the anthem will indeed be changed, which will neither improve the experiences of Canadian women nor will it catalyze a slippery slope of the erosion of Canadian heritage. The change will be akin to the way Canadian’s reacted to the elimination of the penny, or (eventually) the phase-out of door-to-door mail delivery: we’ll talk about it ad nauseam, then totally forget about it afterwards. That is, until someone in government tables a bill to remove the references to “God” in the national anthem, which will start the process all over again. The good news is there’s hardly a chance it will be as excruciating to watch as it was this time.
National Post
Robyn Urback • rurback@nationalpost.com | robynurbackLast October, Microsoft announced Windows 8 at a huge launch event in New York City. Microsoft, along with its partners, had high hopes that this new version of Windows would capture the attention of the market and start growing its PC's fortunes again. Well, that has not happened.
In fact, last quarter's PC sales were off by at least five percent and Windows 8 has failed to become the hit Microsoft and its vendors hoped it would be. Acer posted a 28 percent drop in fourth-quarter shipments from a year earlier and its president, Jim Wong, said at the launch, "Windows 8 itself is still not successful." He added, "The whole market didn't come back to growth after the Windows 8 launch, that's a simple way to judge if it is successful or not."
Microsoft refutes this and says that more than 60 million Windows 8 licenses have been sold to date. This is a shipped number, however, and not necessarily representative of actual purchased licenses by users. It also says it is on par with the record-setting pace of Windows 7. Yet, when I talk to OEM vendors, they insist that Windows 8 has been slow to take off and is not causing new demand for their products at this time.
So, why has Windows 8 been slow to gain favor with consumers and businesses alike? There are a lot of reasons for this but I want to focus on a couple that have become rather obvious to me.
The first has to do with Microsoft's own marketing of Windows 8. Put simply, I don't believe it has clearly stated the value of this new OS, and has actually caused confusion in some users' minds about Windows 8 and its touch features. A rather good example of this comes from a dealer who told me that a customer with a two-year old laptop came in having downloaded Windows 8 and wanted to know why the touch screen on Windows 8 did not work. For many others, the exclusion of the Start bar has been puzzling. Still for others, the tiling metaphor of Windows 8's touch panel has a steep learning curve. Microsoft's Windows 8 marketing campaign just has not resonated with many users.
But aside from some marketing issues, Microsoft transitioned from Windows 7 to Windows 8 using what I believe was flawed thinking. The company believed that its partners would start shipping touch-based laptops in huge volumes at consumer-friendly prices. Consequently, Microsoft put an emphasis on laptops with touch screens for the launch of Windows 8 but vendors have only been able to deliver touch-based laptops in price ranges that consumers feel are too expensive. In fact, at Creative Strategies, our research shows that consumers think anything higher than $599 is too expensive, no matter the features of the laptop. That |
girls, the release stated. The DA’s office previously said the victims were between 9 and 11 years old.
“He befriended at least four different families and then under the guise of playdates with his daughter he then would sexually assault the girls when he got them alone,” Deputy DA Heather Brown said at the time he was charged in the case.
The defendant “committed lewd acts” on the girls, including kissing the children and touching their genitals, according to the release.
One of the girls reported the crime to a family member, who then alerted the Santa Ana Police Department.
Aguilera was arrested on Sept. 4, 2015.Image copyright AFP Image caption The provincial city of Deir al-Zour has been devastated by years of fierce fighting
Dozens of civilians have been killed since Sunday in suspected Russian air strikes along the River Euphrates in eastern Syria, activists say.
Jets are reported to have hit camps for displaced people on the western bank of the river and passenger ferries outside the city of Deir al-Zour.
It was not possible to verify the reports, and Russia has not commented.
But it is providing air cover to Syrian government forces battling so-called Islamic State in the Euphrates valley.
Last week, troops and militiamen broke a long-running siege by the jihadist group of a government-held enclave in Deir al-Zour and a nearby military airport.
They are now seeking to advance southwards along the western side of the Euphrates to the town of Albu Kamal, which is on the border with Iraq.
A US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, the Syrian Democratic Forces, has launched a separate offensive in the same direction on the eastern bank.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group that monitors Syria's civil war through a network of sources, said on Tuesday that at least 69 people had been killed in suspected Russian air strikes over the past 72 hours.
On Sunday it reported that 34 civilians, including nine children, had died in a raid that destroyed more than 40 ferries waiting to transport passengers across the Euphrates between the IS-held town of al-Baloul and al-Sakhba, 25km (15 miles) south-east of Deir al-Zour.
The activist-run website DeirEzzor24 put Monday's death toll at 17 and also blamed Russian warplanes.
Local clinics were struggling to cope with the injured because of a shortage of staff and medicines, it said, adding that civilians were forced to use the ferries to flee the fighting in the area because all the bridges had been destroyed by IS.
On Monday, the Syrian Observatory said another 19 civilians had been killed in suspected Russian air strikes on tents where displaced people were sheltering in the village of al-Khurayta, 16km (10 miles) north-west of Deir al-Zour, and on boats at a nearby river crossing to Hawayij Dhiyab Shamiya in Iraq.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Syrian troops broke an IS siege of a government enclave in Deir al-Zour last week
DeirEzzor24 later listed the names of 27 people it said were killed in these raids.
The Syrian Observatory said another 16 civilians, including five children, had been killed on Tuesday in a Russian air strike on a cluster of tents in Zaghir Shamiya, north-west of Deir al-Zour.
It also reported that US-led coalition aircraft had bombed al-Shahabat, killing 12 members of a single family, during fierce fighting around the village between IS and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
DeirEzzor24 put the death toll in Zaghir Shamiya at eight and said a number of civilians had been killed in al-Shahabat, but it did not say who was responsible.It’s been said many times over that the Yankees have a roster crunch coming in the offseason. With a minor league system bursting with prospects, it makes sense that there won’t be room for all of them once they come of age. In anticipation for this coming issue, the Yankees have made some moves that effectively alleviated the roster from any concerns this offseason.
At this year’s trade deadline, Brian Cashman acquired Todd Frazier, Tommy Kahnle, David Robertson, Jaime Garcia, and Sonny Gray. In order to do all that, the Yankees needed to part with some good talent in return. Guys like Blake Rutherford, James Kaprielian, and Jorge Mateo were effectively sacrificed on the altar to give the major league team a better chance in 2017. These three trades, however, have also helped the organization manage it’s 40-man roster beyond this year.
Every winter, MLB has the Rule 5 Draft, which allows teams to take eligible players from other organizations and place them on their roster. When top prospects become eligible, it means they must be aded to the 40-man roster to avoid other teams taking them. While the best players are going to be protected, some middling prospects can lose out. When a team like the Yankees has so much youth, some hard decisions are inevitably going to be made.
Rutherford and Kaprielian were still some ways away from needing to be protected on the 40-man roster, but the other players the Yankees gave up likely didn’t have a place in the organization long term.
Who was traded
The deal that brought over Todd Frazier, David Robertson, and Tommy Kahnle also included Ian Clarkin and Tito Polo heading back to the White Sox. Clarkin was a first round draft pick out of high school in 2013. Such a pedigree would have made him desirable to other teams. He’s dealt with multiple arm issues, and though he’s avoided surgery, his strikeout numbers have plummeted. The Yankees clearly saw a chance to unload someone they felt didn’t have a future in the organization.
Polo was an international signing who has been in pro ball since 2012. His ability to hit for average and get on base are admirable, and when the Yankees picked him up last season, he was hitting a career-high in home runs. Unfortunately, his power disappeared again in 2017, making him more expendable. You know what they say, teams prefer their guys over someone else’s anyway.
The Yankees made the deal for Jaime Garcia by trading Zack Littell and Dietrich Enns to the Twins. Moving Enns opened up a roster spot for Garcia now and again in the offseason once the veteran leaves as a free agent. I freely admit that maybe Littell was a bit much for Garcia, but we can’t know what negotiations were like. While Littell’s stats were good, we also don’t know how the Yankees evaluated him internally. Regardless, it allowed them to clear more space.
In the Sonny Gray deal, the Yankees surrendered Jorge Mateo and Dustin Fowler from the 40 in order to get their new acquisition onto the roster. Mateo was more of a depth chart move, since he was kind of trapped with Did Gregorius and Starlin Castro above him and Gleyber Torres passing him.
Dealing Fowler was possible because the Yankees have plenty of outfield depth. He had just hurt his knee and it could become a recurring issue. Now that Aaron Judge and Clint Frazier had arrived, and Jacoby Ellsbury will remain, Fowler had no place to go. Both players were expendable.
The Yankees also made smaller, more forgettable deals that have helped make room this offseason. Yefry Ramirez, who was on the 40, was sold to the Orioles for additional international bonus money. Matt Wotherspoon and Dillon McNamara were also sold off before they were to become eligible for the rule 5 Draft.
That’s six rule 5 guys moved and four 40-man roster opened up in a matter of weeks. Gray, Robertson, and Kahnle might be here for next year too, but CC Sabathia, Matt Holliday, Todd Frazier, Michael Pineda, Jaime Garcia, and maybe Masahiro Tanaka are going to be free agents. That gives the Yankees a handful of roster spots for free agents and the large collection of players still coming up through the system.
Who could be protected
The arrival of Gleyber Torres allowed the Yankees to trade Mateo. Even with the elbow injury, he’s an elite talent who is considered one of the best in the league right now. The Yankees will clearly protect him this winter. Thairo Estrada emerging as a legitimate prospect has also made things interesting. His ability to hit for average and improving power as a middle infield could make him someone to watch very soon. Having both on the roster would add incredible depth.
The season that Billy McKinney has put together likely made it easier for the Yankees to part with Fowler. McKinney was a former top prospect with the Athletics and Cubs before things began to fall off for him. A broken knee also didn’t help matters, but he’s turned things around in 2017 and should get a spot on the 40.
The Yankees have a few relief pitchers to choose from in Stephen Tarpley, J.P. Feyereisen, and Nestor Cortes. The first two have shown to be strikeout artists with major control issues, while Cortes is a former 36th rounder who has stuck around as a soft-tossing lefty. As much as I have been personally rooting for him, it’s clear the Yankees saw the limits of his abilities when they moved him to the bullpen. Erik Swanson, who came over in the Carlos Beltran trade, could also be in consideration.
Other players who will be eligible but probably won’t be protected include Abiatal Avelino, Dan Camarena, Cale Coshow, Rashad Crawford, Mike Ford, Brady Lail, and Mark Payton. It’s also important to note that Chance Adams will not need to be protected this offseason.
Overall, that’s a huge difference in the amount of players in consideration. The Yankees moved six Rule 5 guys and four players on the 40-man roster in order to make things easier on the the team later. It also allowed Cashman to get what the team needed now in exchange for pieces that wouldn’t be around later. That’s mission accomplished, I’d say.Juan Carlos Osorio stares at his feet, his fingers twitching in his pockets. “I’m very sad,” he declares, “both me and the players are hurting a lot today.” He kicks a piece of turf and lifts his chin from his chest to look blankly into the distance. As manager of the 14-times Colombian champions Atlético Nacional, he has lifted the last three league titles and won two domestic cup competitions. He is the most successful manager in the history of Colombia’s most successful team and was inspired into football management after a spell living across from Liverpool’s training ground where he watched Gérard Houllier’s team night and day. And yet, there’s still something missing.
For Osorio, that something has become an obsession; a continental trophy that will catapult his name to global attention and allow him a stab at his dream job: to manage in England.
Last Wednesday, his opportunity finally arrived. After a tense penalty shootout victory in the Copa Sudamericana semi-final against São Paulo the week before, the stage was set as Atlético Nacional hosted the Argentinian giants River Plate in the home leg of the final.
With almost 60,000 fans piled in to the Atanasio Girardot – capacity 44,000 – Nacional put in a memorable first-half performance. “They couldn’t handle us,” Osorio says “we played with such intensity.” But at half-time and for all their dominance, Nacional only had Orlando Berrio’s strike to show for it. After the break, the tables were turned.
A former Arsenal trialist, Sebastián Pérez, hit the bar for the home side early in the second half, but a few minutes later River equalised and in the end the Argentinians could have gone on to win it. “It was a historic chance to beat a historic rival and we blew it,” Osorio moans. “I’m distraught.”
Several minutes later at a petrol station on the outskirts of Colombia’s second city Medellín, Osorio is locked in debate with the guy filling up his car. “Profe, forget about it, there’s no use crying over spilt milk, onwards to the second leg.” Osorio spins off his driver’s seat and looks the pimply teen in the eye. “You can mess up in the small games that don’t matter, but not ones like this. This does matter.”
During lunch, over coffee in a local bakery, and then on the football ground at his kids’ school, the 52-year-old engages with anyone who approaches him on where it all went wrong. While his 10-year-old son trains, for more than half an hour on the sidelines Osorio berates the child’s PE teacher for daring to use player tiredness as an excuse for the collapse. “That would be the easiest excuse, but it just isn’t true, we got scared and we bottled it.”
Back in his car, the phone calls pour in as Osorio liaises with players, agents and the club chairman. “This is my life, I talk football and I spend time with my kids.”
Talking football is an understatement; he lives and breathes the game. Born in 1962, Osorio was an average player at his local side Deportivo Pereira before packing it all in to go and study in New York. For 13 years he attended Southern Connecticut State University while saving money for a trip to England. In 1997 he crossed the Atlantic heading for Liverpool to study a Science and Football degree at John Moores University.
“I learnt so much from England,” Osorio says. “When I arrived there I tried several times to watch Liverpool training sessions, but they wouldn’t let me in.”
Undeterred, Osorio began banging on the doors of the local houses that overlooked the ground. “11 Crown Road,” he beams. “I saw there was a crack in the brick wall so I walked up to the house opposite and demanded to live there. I explained what I wanted to do and the owners organised a meeting in which they allowed me to stop there. I spent almost two years in that house, and was very happy.”
It was during Houllier’s time in charge at Anfield and the then 35-year-old Colombian would wake up early every morning and peep out of his bedroom window, scribbling away in endless reams of notebooks on what he saw.
“If it was raining I had to watch from the window, but if it was a nice day I would drag a table out and watch from outside and over the brick wall. At night I would do the same or go and watch the academy.”
In 1997 Osorio returned to the United States as assistant at the Metrostars – now known as New York Red Bulls – before a call from Kevin Keegan, the then manager of Manchester City, who convinced him to return to England as a conditioning coach.
Indelible marks from his time in England still remain, in particular Osorio’s manic squad rotation policy that was surely inspired by watching Houllier’s Liverpool. In over 200 games in charge at Nacional, Osorio has never once fielded the same back-to-back team, with even the goalkeeper chopped and changed from one game to the next.
“That’s something I learnt from England where everybody rotated. In Colombia that was something very new and at first everybody was against it,” Osorio says.
Keeping players fresh has been essential this year as Nacional have racked up a staggering tally of 85 games – and counting – that is surely a world record for 2014. But there’s no doubt that Wednesday’s second leg against River is the most important. So much so that Osorio has said he will do something special to mark the occasion. “There are few clubs as big as River Plate, so I have said that if we win I will get an Atlético Nacional tattoo.”
Lifting the Copa Sudamericana trophy would also edge Osorio a little closer to one day fulfilling his dream. “I deeply admire the English game,” he says. “I would die for the opportunity to one day manage there.”Home | History | 1900-1999 A.D. Assyrian History 1918: The Assyrians of Shamizdin, Turkey The land of Shamizdin lies in southeast Turkey in the Assyrian Hakkiari, and canvasses the southern side of the Sat Dagh mountain range which separates Shamizdin from Gawar. Some sixteen villages were scattered in the fertile plain of Gawar, and among them were; Diza, Karmil, Kirdiwar, Gagawran, Kirzallan, Shwawoota, Mannunan, Bashirga, Ein d’Kandil, and Darawa. To the east of Shamizdin are the lands of Targawar and Margawar which lie just across the Persian border. To the northwest are the ancestral tribal lands of Jeelu and Baz. The Assyrian inhabitants of Shamizdin are more commonly called the Nochea. Nochea is a Kurdish word meaning "between the mountains". In the old days this country used to be called Rustaka, meaning "black mountains", which picturequely describes the dark forests of Sat Dagh. Nochea contained both Assyrian and Kurdish villages and according to Qasha Yousip D’Kalaita, the Assyrian villages were Neri, Mar Ishu, Bet Diwe, Shabatan, Tis, Halana, Dariyan, De Rayi and Deri Bend. The spiritual leader of the Shamizdin Assyrians was Metropolitan Mar Yousip Khnanisho of the Assyrian Church of the East, who, in the old days was styled as the Metropolitan of Rustaka. His Diocese in 1914 included Shamizdin, Targawar, Margawar. Under him were bishop Mar Dinkha in the village of Tis, an ancestor of the present Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, Mar Dinkha IV; bishop Mar Youkhana of the village of Tulaki in Targawar, and after 1914 his own nephew bishop Mar Yousip who was ordained on the eve of WW1 in Qudchanis by Patriarch Mar Benyamin Shimun, bless his soul. The people of Nochea were simple farmers, they owned cattle and grew food, but were particularly known for their fine tobacco. They were greatly oppressed by their Kurdish neighbors. In June 1896, Mar Goriel, Assyrian Church bishop in Urmia, along with an Archdeacon, two priests, three decons, and others, fourteen persons in all, were murdered brutally on orders of a certain Kurdish Sheikh Sadik. The group was returning from a visit to Mar Yousip Khanaisho. This Kurd would confiscate Assyrian property at will, and would prevent the Metropolitan from visiting the Patriarch in Qudchanis. An Englishman visiting the land a hundred years ago noted that "there is perhaps no Assyrian district where simple piety and loyal devotion to the church of their fathers is more beautifully seen than Nochea". Prayers and fasting were strictly observed in the villages. Metropolitan Mar Iskhaq lived in the monastery of Mar Ishu which contained a church, a house, and the school of deacons. He taught in the school and was helped by his father and uncle. The main subjects were old Syriac (Aramaic) and church liturgy. During the First World War the people of Shamizdin fled to Urmia. In 1918 Metropolitan Mar Khnanisho consecrated Mar Polus Shimun, bless his soul, as Patriarch of the Assyrian Church after the murder of Mar Benyamin Shimun, bless his soul, at the hands of the Kurdish leader Simco in Koni Shahar. Mar Iskhaq died during the trip from Hamadan to Baquba in 1918 and was buried in Kermanshah. Following the Baquba Refugee Camps, most of the Nochea Assyrians settled in the village of Simil near Dohuk in northern Iraq while a small group stayed in Gailani Camp in Baghdad. In 1928 they moved to Dashti Harir in Arbil province and established the following five villages: Harir, Batas, Darbandoki, Qalata and Hinari. These villages were under following Mukhtars (village head) respectively: Zaro, Breemo, Lazar, and Khidero. The first four villages named had the following churches and priests respectively: Mar Youkhana served by qasha Youil Mar Younan served by qasha Akhiqar Mar Quryaqus served by qasha Benyamin Mar Youkhana served by qasha Youil. A further three Assyrian households lived in the village of Cubau, and half of the population of the Kurdish village of Al-mandan was Assyrian. In nearby Rowanduz, the people of Shamizdin established a further three villages, namely, Dayana, Hawdiyan and Seerishmi. This group was the Diocese of bishop Mar Philipos Youkhana, who was ordained in Baghdad on April 19, 1953 by Metropolitan Mar Yousip Khnanisho. The latter lived in the village of Harir. Bishop Mar Youkhana served in the church of Mar Giwargis in Dayana and the church of Mar Awrahim in Hawdiyan. Tooma was the Mukhtar of the first village and Rehana of the second one. The present Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East, Mar Dinkha IV, was born in Darbandoki and baptized in the church of Mar Quryaqus. Later on he was ordained a deacon by Metropolitan Mar Yousip in the church of Mar Youkhana in Harir. Changes did not come to Nochea until the Kurds started their rebellion in northern Iraq in the 1960’s. Many Assyrians then moved to the big cities and later on they became part of the great migration to the west. One last footnote to this story is that when part of the Assyrian nation migrated to Syria following the tragic events of 1933, a group from Nochea established the village of Tal Faitha on the banks of the Khabur river. They built the church of Mar Quryaqus which was served by qasha Oraham. At one time Chitto Bado was the Mukhtar of the village. Related Information History Forum 1900-1999 A.D. Assyrian HistoryWhat is this new theory?” the long-retired New York University cognitive psychologist, Lloyd Kaufman, asked me. We were sitting behind the wooden desk of his cozy home office. He had a stack of all his papers on the moon illusion, freshly printed, waiting for me on the adjacent futon. But I couldn’t think of a better way to start our discussion than to have him respond to the latest thesis claiming to explain what has gone, for thousands of years, unexplained: Why does the moon look bigger when it’s near the horizon?
He scooted closer to his iMac, tilted his head and began to read the MIT Technology Review article I had pulled up.1 I thought I’d have a few moments to appreciate, as he read, the view of New York City outside the 28th floor window of his Floral Park apartment, but within a half-minute he told me, “Well, it’s clearly wrong.”
It wasn’t even my theory, yet I felt astonished. It described two researchers—Joseph Antonides (an undergraduate) and Toshiro Kubota (a computer scientist), of Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania—who had constructed a perceptual model in which the sky was contiguous with the horizon, so that the moon was placed, as it were, in front of the sky, occluding it.2 Since our depth perception also places the moon farther away from us than the horizon, we are faced with a perceptual dilemma. The scientists reasoned that the horizon moon’s enlargement is a product of the brain trying to solve this dilemma.
It’s wrong, he told me, because “you can get the illusion if you have only one eye. Simple!”
Also in Psychology Ingenious: Nicholas Epley By Kevin Berger As a behavioral scientist, Nicholas Epley is a bold explorer. For years he has plumbed the murky river of misunderstanding that runs between people. “There’s more blackness in the mind of another person than we think there is,” Epley says....READ MORE
The moon illusion is a sort of Rip Van Winkle figure in the history of science. Unlike other astronomical puzzles, the moon illusion, wrote Rutgers University philosopher Frances Egan, “has persisted through massive changes both in our overall physical theory, and in our very conception of the scientific enterprise.”3
The earliest mention of the moon illusion we know of was impressed almost 3,000 years ago, in cuneiform script upon a clay tablet, when it was housed in the royal library of Nineveh.4 Later on, in the second century A.D., Ptolemy argued that it was the result of the magnifying properties of the atmosphere’s moisture and haze. “It is just like the apparent enlargement of objects in water, which increases with the depth of immersion,” he wrote.5 On account of something like divine authority, this physical or “refraction” account of the problem went unchallenged for more or less 1,000 years, a real shame since he also had an alternative physiological account that went largely ignored until Newton’s time.6
Today, this physiological account is known as the “angle-of-regard” hypothesis, for the angle that our eyes (or head) make relative to the horizon. The more your eyes are angled upward, the thinking goes, the smaller something looks, due to the physiology of our visual system. Angle-of-regard sat dormant for hundreds of years after Ptolemy, until the Irish philosopher George Berkeley revived it, in 1709, as part of a debate with the then-new geometrical optics of philosophers like René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche.
They took the moon illusion to support their contention that vision is inherently three-dimensional, and that we can compute size and distance using vision alone. In his “Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision,” Berkeley opposed this view, pointing out that the moon illusion could be explained away using the angle-of-regard hypothesis; and claiming that there is nothing inherently three-dimensional about what we see—that instead we learn about how far and how big things are by moving around in the world, hands-on, as it were. Descartes, though, didn’t accept the angle-of-regard dismissal of the moon illusion. Instead he held to the “apparent distance” hypothesis, according to which the horizon moon seemed larger because we judged it to be farther away.
“It’s the challenge of solving a problem the likes of Galileo and Newton couldn’t handle.”
Neither hypothesis was generally accepted until the 1940s, when angle-of-regard was made briefly triumphant by the work of Harvard psychologist Edwin G. Boring. That was before Kaufman arrived on the scene in 1956, in search of a thesis topic for his masters in psychology. When I asked Kaufman why, out of all the unsolved mysteries in science, he chose to dedicate his attentions to this one, he offered his reason as if it ought to have been obvious. “It’s the challenge of solving a problem the likes of Galileo and Newton couldn’t handle.”
In their 1962 paper, Kaufman and his colleague Irvin Rock attacked angle-of-regard. They pointed out, in a section ominously titled “Grounds for Caution,” that if you looked at the horizon moon with your chin tucked in and your eyes elevated, the moon illusion persisted—regardless. They also criticized Boring’s experimental methodology and his evaluation of Descartes’ apparent distance hypothesis.
In pursuit of a new explanation, Kaufman and Rock performed a set of experiments using a device that could place a disk of light in the sky so that it was “exactly like looking through a window at the moon.”7 They considered eye-elevation both outdoors and indoors, the moon’s color and brightness, and the presence of terrain. The first two had no effect, but the third was crucial: They concluded that if an observer’s view of the terrain is obstructed, the illusion vanishes.
This observation supported the apparent distance hypothesis: The presence of terrain increased the subjective sense of distance to the moon, so that while it was actually the same size, the perceptual system would “conclude” that it was a more distant object and thus inflate its size. Boring had rejected the apparent distance hypothesis because people reported that the horizon moon looks closer, not farther away. As the behavioral physiologist J.T. Enright points out, this size-distance paradox seemed to require some kind of disconnect between our conscious and subconscious perception of distance: We expand the moon to be larger given that it seems farther away, but then report that it seems closer. “The subconscious impression of distance, once it has determined apparent size, must remain irretrievably locked in the subconscious,” he wrote. “These seem to be unresolvable paradoxes.”
But Kaufman’s data clearly pointed to the importance of terrain, as did other experiments.8 Kaufman even called the astronaut Ed Lu when he was overhead in the International Space Station to ask him if he saw the moon illusion up in space: He said no. “There’s nothing there but the curvature of the Earth,” Kaufman told me. “You got no distance.” Plus, he told me, he’s asked test pilots (“these guys have eyes like eagles”) if they see the moon illusion. They told him “sure, but only when we get down low.”
In a 2007 paper, Kaufman confronted the “size-distance paradox” head-on.9 The traditional description of the paradox involves three consecutive acts of perception: First, we perceive the moon to be farther away because of terrain, then we perceive it to be larger because it is farther away, and then we perceive it to be closer because it is larger. But, Kaufman says, “perceptions do not cause perceptions.” One or more of the steps in this causal chain might involve a conscious judgment rather than a subconscious perception, or might result from a complex simultaneous network of connections and inferences of which we are unaware. We need to remember, says Kaufman, that “perceptions are outcomes of computational processes far more numerous and complicated than the perceptions themselves.” Judgment and perception might be correlated with each other, but they do not cause one another.
Clearly spelling out the error is hard, he told me, because “it’s not intuitive.” He said, “When I try to make it explicit, I run into a lot of difficulty, and that’s why I’m hung up on this last paper I’m doing.” Precisely explaining the mechanics of our vision is a problem Kaufman shares with some august company: It was Kepler who wrote four centuries earlier that, “perception does not belong to optics but to the study of the wonderful.”10
Brian Gallagher is an editorial intern at Nautilus. He has written for Mic and the Santa Barbara Independent. @brianscottg
References
1. Moon illusion: New theory reignites debate over why moon appears larger near the horizon. MIT Technology Review http://www.technologyreview.com (2013).
2. Antonides, J. & Kubota, T. Binocular disparity as an explanation for the moon illusion. Preprint arXiv 1301.2715 (2013).
3. Egan, F. The moon illusion. Philosophy of Science 65, 604-623 (1998).
4. Plug, C. & Ross, H.E. Historical review. In Hershenson, M. (ed.) The Moon Illusion Psychology Press, New York, NY (1989).
5. Ross, H.E. & Ross, G.M. Did Ptolemy understand the moon illusion? Perception 5, 377-385 (1976).
6. Enright, J.T. The moon illusion examined from a new point of view. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 119, 87-107 (1975).
7. Osmundsen, J.A. Modern psychology upholds Ptolemy on moon illusion; Ptolemy upheld on explantion of why horizon moon is ‘larger.’ The New York Times (1960).
8. Hamilton, J.E. Effect of observer elevation on the moon illusion. American Journal of Optometry and Archives of American Academy of Optometry 42, 417-431 (1965).
9. Kaufman, L. et al. Perceptual distance and the moon illusion. Spatial Vision 20, 155-175 (2007).
10. Fishman, R.S. Kepler’s discovery of the retinal image. Archives of Ophthalmology 89, 59-61 (1973).
*As originally published, this caption stated that the moon was rising. It is, in fact, setting.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A WHISTLEBLOWER has lifted the lid on the “shambolic and unsafe” state of Scotland’s flagship hospital.
Shocking pictures passed to the Record show filthy equipment and cupboards containing deadly drugs lying wide open on wards at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.
An exhausted nurse is seen sleeping on a mattress on the floor and the door to a secure area has been wedged open with a medical waste bin.
Our source – a nurse who didn’t want to be named – claimed the £842million complex is at breaking point.
She said: “Things have gone from bad to worse, mainly due to the fact that there simply aren’t enough staff to keep the place clean and functioning efficiently.
“Auxiliary nurses are having to do the bulk of ward cleaning which means they aren’t looking after patients.
“Trolleys used to transport medical supplies are filthy because nobody has time to clean them properly.
“These things go from ward to ward so infections and bugs can be spread right around the hospital.
“There is also a common problem of drug stores being left open and the doors being wedged open. It’s basically done to make fetching supplies quicker because there are so few staff.
“These cupboards contain highly addictive and dangerous drugs such as morphine, tramadol and diazepam.
“They are supposed to be kept under lock and key by senior members of staff because you have patients with addiction issues and it is not uncommon for stock to disappear – but that isn’t happening.
“Another issue is night shift workers who are having to grab some sleep during 12-hour shifts on mattresses plonked on the floor. These rooms are basically store rooms converted into tea rooms.
“Night shift is probably the most dangerous time at the QEUH with staff alone, frustrated and thinly stretched.
“I’ve worked in a few hospitals and believe it to be the worst in the country.
“There have been instances of patients being neglected. I found one with urine burns and another caked in dry faeces.
“Managers push sick staff to return and employ bank or agency nurses, who find themselves walking into wards with little experience in the field the ward covers.
“The end result is a shambolic and unsafe environment for patients and staff. The main problem is managers with no understanding of what is happening on the wards, and a general lack of resources. There’s no point having this fantastic new building if you aren’t going to use it properly.”
A spokeswoman for Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board said last night: “There are clear rules regarding the safe storage of medicines and these have been reinforced to all staff.
“The QEUH, like all of our hospitals, has strict policies around cleaning regimes and we take infection control extremely seriously.
“While these photos appear to show some issues, we need to check them for authenticity. If there are any areas to address this will be done as a priority.”
Labour health spokesman Anas Sarwar said: “This is further evidence that our NHS staff are undervalued, under-resourced and overworked.
“Unless people wake up to the reality that we are under-resourcing our NHS, these stories are only going to get more common.”Adapted from Why Irrational Politics Appeals: Understanding the Allure of Trump, edited by Mari Fitzduff, with permission from ABC-CLIO/Praeger, Copyright © 2017.
Editor’s note: All but the last section of this article was written before Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, making its insights all the more remarkable. It was updated for Scientific American Mind.
It is easy and common to dismiss those whose political positions we disagree with as fools or knaves—or, more precisely, as fools led by knaves. Indeed, the inability of even the most experienced pundits to grasp the reality of Donald Trump's political ascendency in the 2016 presidential race parallels an unprecedented assault on the candidate and his supporters, which went so far as to question their very grip on reality. So it was that when a Suffolk University/USA Today poll asked 1,000 people in September 2015 to describe Trump in their own terms, the most popular response was “idiot/jerk/stupid/dumb,” followed by “arrogant” and “crazy/nuts,” and then “buffoon/clown/comical/joke.” Similarly, Trump's followers were dismissed in some media accounts as idiots and bigots. Consider this March 2016 headline from a commentary in Salon: “Hideous, Disgusting Racists: Let's Call Donald Trump and His Supporters Exactly What They Are.”
Such charges remind us of Theodore Abel's fascinating 1938 text Why Hitler Came into Power, but first let us be absolutely explicit: We are not comparing Trump, his supporters or their arguments to the Nazis. Instead our goal is to expose some problems in the ways that commentators analyze and explain behaviors of which we disapprove. In 1934 Abel traveled to Germany and ran an essay competition, offering a prize for autobiographies of Nazi Party members. He received around 600 responses, from which he was able to glean why so many Germans supported Adolf Hitler. Certainly many essays expressed a fair degree of anti-Semitism and some a virulent hatred of Jews. In this sense, party members were indeed racists or, at the very least, did not object to the party's well-known anti-Semitic position. But this is very different from saying that they joined and remained in the party primarily or even partially because they were racists. Abel discovered that many other motives were involved, among them a sense of the decline of Germany, a desire to rediscover past greatness, a fear of social disorder and the longing for a strong leader.
We would argue that the same is true of those who supported Trump. Some, undoubtedly, were white supremacists. All were prepared to live with his racist statements about Muslims, Mexicans and others. But are racism, bigotry and bias the main reasons people supported Trump? Certainly not. We argue instead that we need to analyze and understand the way he appealed to people and why |
to assist local law enforcement agencies in the recovery effort. Others also called on the Trump administration to step up its efforts — including Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the presidential election.
“President Trump, Sec. Mattis, and DOD should send the Navy, including the USNS Comfort, to Puerto Rico now. These are American citizens,” Clinton tweeted on Sunday. The USNS Comfort is a Naval medical ship.
Democrats also called for more help for Puerto Rico, with some lawmakers criticizing Trump’s tweeting in recent days. “Mr. President, instead of dividing the country over this you could give support to the 3.4 million Americans without power in Puerto Rico,” Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., wrote on Twitter Monday.
Brian Fallon, who served as the Clinton campaign’s spokesman, also took Trump to task on Twitter in unusually harsh terms. “Trump’s racist neglect of Puerto Rico is threatening lives. It is time to start caring about the crisis there,” Fallon tweeted.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency issued an update Sunday on the federal recovery efforts in Puerto Rico, noting that more than 2,300 National Guard members were on the ground in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which were also hit by the hurricane.
FEMA also said the Defense Department has deployed helicopters, amphibious ships and other resources to help evacuate people stranded by the storm.
In Monday’s White House news conference, Sara Huckabee Sanders said that the FEMA and DHS heads were now on the ground in Puerto Rico to access damage, and that the federal government has “done unprecedented movement in terms of federal funding to provide for the people of Puerto Rico and others that have been impacted by these storms.”
The crisis has raised pressure on Trump to visit Puerto Rico to see the damage firsthand. The president visited Texas and Florida earlier this month after the states were battered by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.
Last week, the White House told CNN that Trump was “committed” to visiting Puerto Rico, but the official said the visit had not yet been scheduled due to “infrastructure concerns.”
If Trump travels to Puerto Rico, he would be only the second sitting U.S. president to visit the island in four decades. Former President Barack Obama made a short trip to Puerto Rico in 2011 for a political event.
Before Obama, the last sitting president to visit Puerto Rico was Gerald Ford, who made a two-day trip to the island in 1976.This week, United States District Judge Reggie Walton denied a motion filed by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS) for a preliminary injunction that would have blocked the U.S. Department of Education from proceeding with the de-recognition of the organization. ACICS needs department recognition in order for the colleges it accredits to be eligible for federal student grants and loans.
Judge Walton said in open court that ACICS had not demonstrated a substantial likelihood of prevailing on the merits of the case, particularly because then-Secretary of Education John King determined in December that ACICS was in substantial noncompliance with the rules governing accreditor performance. Walton noted that King had the discretion to give ACICS more time to comply, but that King, “in his wisdom,” decided instead to terminate.
Walton also rejected ACICS’s argument that it would suffer irreparable harm if its motion was rejected, relying on the courtroom testimony of ACICS head Roger Williams, who indicated that the group’s demise was not imminent and that it had other sources of revenue besides from the schools receiving federal aid. Walton also noted that Williams’s testimony revealed that the organization has “substantial reserves” to tide it over while it pursues the lawsuit. Just how much cash ACICS had was unclear, because ACICS’s lawyer, Allyson Baker, demanded that such information be hidden from the public, leading Judge Walton to temporarily clear the courtroom of spectators, including lawyers from the offices of several state attorneys general who have been seeking to intervene in the case.
Finally, Judge Walton weighed the public interest factors involved and seemed to find that they favored the government. In particular, he noted testimony presented at the hearing by a Department official that taxpayers were on the hook to cover about $100 million in loans forgiven on the basis of “closed school discharges’ provided to former students of for-profit ITT Tech, an ACICS-accredited school, after that troubled institution collapsed last year under the weight of multiple law enforcement investigations for fraud.
In the hearing, Baker tried to press the department official, Ron Bennett, to admit that schools that lose their accreditor and can’t find another accreditor promptly, would commonly be required to post a burdensome letter of credit with the department.
Bennett replied, “The situation we’re talking about” ― meaning a failed accreditor ― “is not a common situation.”
Baker decided that she had no further questions of the witness.
There were rumblings before the hearing that the new Trump-Betsy Devos Department of Education might back down and somehow try to reverse Secretary King’s decision, as lobbyists for predatory for-profit colleges have been openly and aggressively urging. It’s not at all clear how the department could simply dump King’s decision; from the regulations it appears that ACICS would have to start all over again and reapply.
For today, at least, the Department of Justice, which represented the Secretary of Education in case, diligently and skillfully opposed ACICS’s motion.
In declining to recognize ACICS on December 16, King wrote that the accreditor had “exhibited a profound lack of compliance” with its responsibilities.
King’s action affirmed prior decisions by the department staff, by the department’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), and finally by King’s own chief of staff, Emma Vadehra, from whose September decision ACICS had appealed.
The Department of Education has been engaged in outreach to students, colleges, and other accreditors to protect educational opportunities for students affected by King’s decision.
ACICS has been the accreditor for some 240 institutions exclusively or primarily, and most of those are for-profit colleges. $4.76 billion in taxpayer dollars went from the Department of Education to ACICS schools in 2015.
But ACICS has been the asleep-at-the-switch accreditor of some of the most notorious bad actors in the for-profit college sector, including Corinthian Colleges, ITT Tech, Kaplan, EDMC (the Art Institutes), Career Education Corporation (Sanford-Brown), Alta Colleges (Westwood), Globe, FastTrain, and Daymar. All these companies have been under investigation by law enforcement for deceptive practices. Some of those companies have, like Corinthian and ITT, shut down under the weight of abusive and reckless business practices. FastTrain’s CEO has been convicted of federal crimes and sentenced to eight years in prison. Others, like Kaplan, EDMC, and CEC, continue to receive billions in taxpayer dollars.“He expected the temple to be more beautiful on the inside than it was…”
Just a few days prior to me and my wife taking our five daughters to the new Gilbert, Arizona temple, I sat for lunch with an LDS Stake President who had taken one of his friends to the temple who was also Roman Catholic. At the end of the visit, this Stake President was taken aback when his friend explained that he expected the temple to be more beautiful on the inside than it was. Statements like this can be a bit disorienting for Mormons since they have been taught from childhood that the temple is the most beautiful place on earth. Here’s my attempt to make sense of this perplexity.
You can learn a lot about a religion by how they create their most sacred of spaces. Sacred space provides meaning within a world of chaos, and sacred space is where the essence of the religion comes into sharpest focus. The Hajj pilgrimage for example teaches participating Muslims that their own individual story (regardless of race, gender, wealth, social status, etc) is directly intertwined with the prophets and messengers of old, and as such, this sacred space allows Muslims to attach their narratives to those of the larger Islamic community. Experiencing the sacred doesn’t just enable spiritual transformation, but it tells you what that transformation is to look like. We could observe this with any religion we wanted to look at: Krishna devotees and the Braj pilgrimage, Sufis and their shrines, Buddhists and pagodas, and Catholics and their Cathedrals. For Catholics, Cathedrals are places of deep reverence for the sacred, but also a place for congregants to participate in and experience this sacred power. Sacred relics with their own powers can be stored at these sites and the altars themselves are sometimes built atop the bones of ancient martyrs, becoming an appropriate setting for the miracle of Eucharist, where the sacred and the divine collide. The architecture of the buildings represent humanity’s best attempt to articulate the sacred and provide it visibility. Cathedrals are to be the most beautiful places on earth, and since the context was Europe, this beauty has been associated with kingdom and Jesus as King. It is awe-inspiring and beautiful.
Mormons hold their temples as the center place of what they deem sacred, yet there is no sense of kingdom or king when you walk in the doors, but rather that of corporation and family. The entrance room felt like I had entered a very well-to-do law office or the headquarters of a major and powerful corporation. As one would expect in such a setting, there are chairs for temple workers who check to see if you have the credentials to enter. During this open period however, all are welcome. Later on, you will need a “recommend” to enter, meaning you have proven your dedication and commitment to the institution itself, in which two ecclesiastical leaders will approve and sign after private interviews.
Once I entered the building, we were guided to various rooms, the lowest being the baptism font, where Mormons perform vicarious work for those who died without becoming Mormon. After climbing many stairs, we enter the top part of the sacred edifice and entered perhaps its pinnacle of sacred space – the “sealing room” where couples are married and families are bound “for time and eternity.” While in this room, those guiding us through had me and my children stand in front of a larger mirror and look in. Because there was another mirror just behind us, our family symbolically embraced infinity. This is the essence of Mormonism. The rest of this Mormon sacred space made more sense with this in mind. Another important room, the Mormon “Holy of Holies,” or “Celestial Room” represents a place where Mormons directly commune with God. By the time Mormons enter this room, they have been prepared and symbolically transformed into the divine. They make up part of its “living room.” This is consistent with most the rest of the temple interior which looks like the home of a person of extreme wealth – one that welcomes you as part of it. Lining the walls are religious paintings that add to the aesthetic of a comfortable place to dwell, and nothing there serves to make distinctions between what is worshipped and those who worship. It is not the pictures in the halls or the huge chandelier in this special celestial room, but rather the presence of the people who visit the “house of the Lord.” Their presence is what makes it sacred. They are transformed into the sacred, but in a uniquely Mormon way.
This “Celestial room” is of particular notice in our attempt to grasp the essence of Mormonism by way of looking at its architectural articulation of the sacred. On its surface, the room looks similar to what one might expect to see in the home of the most rich and famous of the world. Here, wealth glorifies God. This is not to say Mormons embrace the prosperity gospel that equates righteousness with worldly wealth, but it certainly makes the connection that heaven resembles that wealth. This is not the wealth to be gained by earthly economic fortune, but rather the belonging to the right heavenly community here on earth. Like Muslims on the Hajj, those who enter the temple once it’s dedicated put on new and simple clothes that make it hard to distinguish high class from low, rich from poor, powerful from weak. As you look at this Celestial room, you notice that there are no pictures of Christ and no images of the Cross. There are no relics. There is nothing that would give it away as obviously religious or sacred. Instead, it is adorned by plants, expensive carpet, sofas, tables and chairs. It looks like a place to hang out if you were so fortunate. Mormons call their temples “God’s house.” Indeed, it is a home where the sacred is understood to dwell, and where some Mormons speculate upon the possibility of “bumping” into Jesus himself, opening windows of Mormon temple folklore. This is Mormon cosmology and theodicy. It is the definition of what Mormons are to be transformed into. There may be messiness, poverty and chaos in the world, but once you enter into God’s house, those concerns are to disappear, and the eternal lends new perspective. This is to Mormons the ideal and beauty of their religion.
This family-centric ideal however is not easy for all Mormons, and I stumbled onto this in my visit as well. As I thought about the sacred within Mormonism and how family-centric it was, I recalled what was said by an older long-time-single lady that stood behind us in line. She had come already to this open house of the temple and was excited for it to be built so she could go more often without the long lines. She stated while in line that she struggled remaining part of the LDS church because she felt like a failure due to being single in a religion that prizes marriage and family above all else. She wondered how Mormonism applied to her. She still seemed bothered by it and had her struggles, but the temple and its sacred space seemed to provide comfort for the very anxiety it helped create. Scholars of religion have found that the sacred often dwells within contradictions and perplexities, and here Mormonism offered no exception. As I stood in between the mirrors with my family gazing into the Mormon sense of the sacred, it was hard not to think about how this woman felt as she stood by herself in the same spot.Get a full-cast adaptation of your favourite Doctor Who novel today
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For some Doctor Who fans there were the dark times. Between 1989 and 1999 – before Big Finish started releasing Doctor Who audios – there were very limited new Doctor Who stories available. One of the outlets keeping the blue box going were the novels by Virgin Publishing. From 1991 until 1999, these stories carried on from where the TV series ended taking the Seventh Doctor further than before with companions Ace and Bernice Summerfield, and also back in time for some Missing Adventures.
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Make sure you pick up these specially priced releases before midday (UK time) Monday 18th December, and don’t forget to check out the bundles options for further savings.MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – A man died Friday afternoon when the motorcycle he was riding on collided with a squad SUV on its way to an officer-involved shooting on the city’s south side.
According to authorities, the collision occurred near 26th Street and Blaisdell Avenue. Minneapolis tweeted: “We do not know who collided with who yet … We do not know who had green, yellow or red at time of collision. We don’t know who ran a light or a stop sign … or if that happened.”
However, sources told WCCO that the motorcycle hit the back passenger side of the SUV, which was going through the intersection on a red light with lights and sirens at 50 mph.
The male driver was killed, and his female passenger was taken to HCMC with injuries. The source said she is in critical condition, although police said she was in stable condition.
Police said the squad car was on its way to a shooting near 27th Street and Bryant Avenue, where two officers suffered gunshot wounds.
“This is a tragic situation for all involved,” said Chief Janeé Harteau of Minneapolis Police. “I want to extend my sympathies to the family of the deceased male on the motorcycle.”
Police are investigating the crash.Barcelona’s forward Sandro looks set to leave on a free transfer (Picture: Getty Images)
When Barcelona sporting director Robert Fernandez announced that Sandro would be leaving, there was a sense of surprise in and around the club.
After it became clear that he’d be going for nothing, that surprise turned to anger.
Along with Munir El Haddadi, the stocky centre-forward was fast-tracked to Barca’s first-team after impressing at the lower levels.
Although it’s true he did find the initial step up difficult, there are certain mitigating circumstances that the club don’t appear to have taken into account or have conveniently overlooked.
For example, despite there being ample opportunity to rest any one of Messi, Neymar or Suarez over the last 18 months or so, Luis Enrique felt it only necessary to do so in Copa Del Rey games against minnows that would roll over, with respect to those opponents.
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Ramirez was never really given the chance to shine and like Gerard Deulofeu, Adama Traore and others before him, another rough Blaugrana diamond will have to move on to pastures new to continue his footballing education.
There’s likely to be a queue of admirers, but the player would do worse than follow Deulofeu and Traore to England.
He certainly has the skill set to make a decent fist of a career in the Premier League.
Not easily knocked off of the ball, Sandro is direct when in possession of the ball and has a keen eye for goal.
West Ham United’s Slaven Bilic is keen to add some attacking talent to his squad (Picture: Getty Images)
His shooting accuracy could be improved but given a reasonable run of games under the tutelage of a forward-thinking manager, there’s every reason to think that whomever wants to acquire his services will get much more than a ‘reserve.’
Slaven Bilic not only talks a good game, as can be seen via his Euro 2016 punditry, but he knows how to get the best from players.
Look at the way that the Croatian has got West Ham playing – with several of the players that were languishing in the bottom half of the table under Sam Allardyce still heavily involved.
Allowing his staff to express themselves in an attacking set up but within the team dynamic is winning Bilic plaudits from all corners.
With rumours of imminent departures for Diafra Sakho and Enner Valencia and continued question marks over Andy Carroll’s fitness, West Ham could do with some reinforcements up front before they begin their 2016/17 campaign.
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Bilic only needs to view the footage of the NextGen tournament from the last time Sandro was in London, when he completely destroyed Tottenham Hotspur to know what the striker brings to the party.
A player that’s still in the fledgling stage of his professional career but who’s hungry, willing to learn and free of charge.
It’s not even a gamble really is it.Monday, June 22, 2015
30-60-90 Triangles are one type of special triangles. They are important for many students because the SAT and Act ask several questions involving this special right triangle. Here are 7 helpful resources you can use to master the 30-60-90 triangle.
Free Math Help This page has several examples that demonstrate the relationship between the side lengths, and the angle measure of 30-60-90 triangles.
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Grade A Math This page does a great job of explaining how to find the missing sides of a 30 60 90 along with several example problems.
30-60-90 Right Triangle by radical prep. This video has 55,000 views on YouTube. It works several SAT type problems that involve a 30-60-90 triangle, and why it is important to memorize the ratio of the sides.
45-4-90 and 30-60-90 Triangles In this video by Patrick of JMT, he explains the difference between a 45-45-90 triangle, and a 30-60-90 triangle. This video is very helpful, very clear, and he has a very relaxed style.
30-60-90 Triangle MooMooMath This page has a helpful review of the characteristics of a 30-60-90 triangle, along with several shortcuts to use when finding side length.
Special right triangle song. I love this video. The song is not great, but the lyrics stick in your head, and it can really you help memorize the properties of special right triangles. The lyrics are included in the video description.
Finally, here are two helpful calculators that will calculate the side length of a 30-60-90 triangle. Calculators are handy in order to check your homework. I looked at several calculators and felt these are the easiest to use.
30-60-90 Calculator Webmath
Tweet This Tweet ThisIt's Cults Week at Curbed LA! Join us.
Jack Parsons (legally, John Whiteside Parsons) helped found Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and made major contributions to rocketry, but he is also remembered for his occult beliefs and generally bohemian behavior. So much of what happened in his life happened in and around Pasadena: he worked at Caltech, tried and eventually succeeded at launching rockets in the Arroyo Seco, conducted now-legendary rituals and rites in a house on Pasadena's Millionaire's Row, and also met his end in the quiet, largely monied town. We've taken a look at a few of these sites and their role in Parson's brief, busy, and storied life.
(There's plenty of fantastic writing about Parsons, his life, and his beliefs regarding magic and the occult—one example is the biography Sex and Rockets, which largely informed this post.)
↑ Caltech: Through a chance meeting with the director of Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, California Institute of Technology after a lecture about rockets, Parsons, with his childhood friend Ed Forman, found himself with permission to use a lab at Caltech for his work; he was, by this time, solidly versed in powder explosives, largely due to a lot of... well, blowing things up. Despite not having a degree in anything related to rockets (or anything at all; he'd dropped out of USC), documents from the time seen in Sex and Rockets show that he was listed as head guy in charge of solid rocket fuel for the GALCIT program. Unfortunately, the experiments were not well-liked on the campus. Due to their literally explosive, dangerous undertakings, Caltech students nicknamed Parsons and the group he worked with the Suicide Squad. Parsons and friends were sent back to their original test site, the Arroyo Seco, shortly thereafter.
↑ The Arroyo Seco: This part of the Arroyo in northern Pasadena was once the site of many, many rocket launches conducted by Parsons, his friend Forman, and other rocketry enthusiasts Parsons met while using the Caltech lab. The most famous were the ones on October 31, 1936, which JPL refers to as "the first rocket experiments in the history of JPL." The first buildings in their complex were built across the Arroyo from the original site where Parsons and friends held their 1936 tests. (The above image is based on that general description.)
↑ 1003 S. Orange Grove Avenue: In 1942, Parsons and his wife moved into a house that had been built by philanthropist and major Caltech donor Arthur Flemming. According to Sex and Rockets, the Swiss-chalet-inspired property was huge, with 10 rooms in the main house, plus a three-bedroom "coach house" in the back. This home functioned as both a boarding house for "less-than-desirable" tenants and as an Agape Lodge of the fraternal/religious order Ordo Templi Orientis, famous for its connections to Aleister Crowley. (Parsons's close friend, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, was a boarder there; he left, and later took Parsons's girlfriend with him.) The property at this time also went by the nickname The Parsonage.
As times and social mores have changed, it seems now like the things that happened in the house weren't so terrible after all. No one was sacrificed on an altar, there was just a lot of unconventional (but apparently consensual) "sex magick," a good bit of drugs, and the occasional candle-adorned coffin. But disapproving neighbors called the cops more than a handful of times—this was still a fairly posh part of town and this stretch of Orange Grove was once dubbed Millionaire's Row. The police ultimately concluded that the people who frequented the house were not members of a "cult," but just a group (including a Pasadena bank manager!) interested in the bohemian and the esoteric. The original house was leveled in the late 1940s to make way for multi-family housing.
↑ 1071 1/2 S. Orange Grove Avenue: After World War II, Parsons lived here in a rented garage behind the Cruikshank estate, about a block away from where his Parsonage had once been (and still on Millionaire's Row). His security clearance was revoked following an FBI investigation for espionage; aside from the OTO-related activities that occurred at his one-time home, he was a suspected communist, and he'd also taken some classified documents at some point.
In 1952, Parsons was looking to go abroad wherever he might be able to find a job (Spain and Israel were mentioned) while also planning a trip to, reportedly, test a super-powerful explosive. While his wife Marjorie Cameron (who he believed was an incarnated goddess...) was out buying groceries for the trip one night, an explosion rocked the couple's rented home and Parsons was killed. The cause was found to be the illegal explosives he was mixing; some, including Cameron, believe that he was murdered. Authorities thought that it was either suicide or a druggy accident.
· Life as Satanist Propelled Rocketeer [LAT]
· The strangely true connection between Scientology, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and Occult Sorcery [i09]
· JPL History: Early History [JPL]
· Cults Week [Curbed LA]Since 2000 humans have put out 30% of their total CO2 but there is nothing to show for it.
The global “pause” has been running for nearly 19 years. But a whopping 30% of all the human emissions of fossil fuels, ever, has come out since the year 2000. Nearly 40% of all our emissions since 1990.
All that CO2, and nothing to show for it. Half of all human emissions of “carbon pollution” have occurred since 1987.
…
Here’s your handy reckoning table for human emissions from 1751 – 2014. (I know you’ve been waiting for it). Next time you need to know what percentage of the total human emissions of CO2 has been emitted since, say, Ash Wednesday, Cyclone Tracy, or Napoleon, or whatever, this is the table you need. When we hear that it’s the warmest summer since 1939, this table tells us what the CO2 levels were in 1939.
Year Law Dome* Cumulative % of Emissions^ Year Law Dome* Cumulative % of Emissions^ Year Law Dome* Cumulative % of Emissions^ Year Law Dome* Cumulative % of Emissions^ ppm % ppm % ppm % ppm % 1751 277 0.0 1818 284 0.1 1884 291 1.5 1950 311 15.4 1752 277 0.0 1819 284 0.1 1885 291 1.6 1951 312 15.9 1753 277 0.0 1820 283 0.1 1886 291 1.7 1952 312 16.3 1754 277 0.0 1821 283 0.1 1887 292 1.7 1953 312 16.8 1755 277 0.0 1822 283 0.1 1888 292 1.8 1954 313 17.2 1756 277 0.0 1823 283 0.1 1889 293 1.9 1955 314 17.7 1757 277 0.0 1824 283 0.1 1890 293 2.0 1956 314 18.3 1758 277 0.0 1825 283 0.1 1891 294 2.1 1957 315 18.8 1759 277 0.0 1826 283 0.1 1892 294 2.2 1958 315 19.4 1760 277 0.0 1827 283 0.1 1893 295 2.3 1959 316 20.0 1761 277 0.0 1828 284 0.1 1894 295 2.4 1960 316 20.6 1762 277 0.0 1829 284 0.1 1895 296 2.5 1961 317 21.3 1763 277 0.0 1830 284 0.1 1896 296 2.6 1962 317 21.9 1764 277 0.0 1831 284 0.2 1897 296 2.7 1963 318 22.6 1765 277 0.0 1832 284 0.2 1898 296 2.8 1964 318 23.4 1766 277 0.0 1833 284 0.2 1899 296 2.9 1965 319 24.2 1767 277 0.0 1834 284 0.2 1900 296 3.0 1966 320 25.0 1768 277 0.0 1835 284 0.2 1901 296 3.2 1967 321 25.8 1769 277 0.0 1836 284 0.2 1902 296 3.3 1968 322 26.7 1770 277 0.0 1837 284 0.2 1903 297 3.5 1969 323 27.6 1771 277 0.0 1838 284 0.2 1904 297 3.6 1970 324 28.6 1772 278 0.0 1839 284 0.2 1905 297 3.8 1971 325 29.7 1773 278 0.0 1840 284 0.2 1906 298 4.0 1972 326 30.8 1774 278 0.0 1841 284 0.2 1907 298 4.2 1973 327 31.9 1775 278 0.0 1842 285 0.2 1908 299 4.3 1974 329 33.0 1776 278 0.0 1843 285 0.2 1909 299 4.5 1975 330 34.2 1777 278 0.0 1844 286 0.3 1910 299 4.7 1976 331 35.4 1778 278 0.0 1845 286 0.3 1911 300 4.9 1977 332 36.6 1779 278 0.0 1846 286 0.3 1912 300 5.2 1978 333 37.9 1780 278 0.0 1847 287 0.3 1913 300 5.4 1979 335 39.2 1781 278 0.0 1848 287 0.3 1914 301 5.6 1980 336 40.5 1782 278 0.0 1849 287 0.3 1915 301 5.8 1981 337 41.8 1783 278 0.0 1850 287 0.3 1916 302 6.0 1982 339 43.1 1784 278 0.0 1851 287 0.3 1917 302 6.3 1983 340 44.3 1785 279 0.0 1852 287 0.4 1918 303 6.5 1984 342 45.6 1786 279 0.0 1853 287 0.4 1919 303 6.7 1985 343 47.0 1787 279 0.0 1854 287 0.4 1920 303 6.9 1986 345 48.4 1788 279 0.0 1855 286 0.4 1921 304 7.1 1987 346 49.8 1789 280 0.0 1856 286 0.4 1922 304 7.3 1988 348 51.3 1790 280 0.0 1857 286 0.4 1923 304 7.6 1989 349 52.8 1791 280 0.0 1858 286 0.5 1924 304 7.8 1990 351 54.3 1792 281 0.0 1859 286 0.5 1925 305 8.1 1991 352 55.8 1793 281 0.0 1860 286 0.5 1926 305 8.3 1992 354 57.4 1794 281 0.0 1861 286 0.5 1927 305 8.6 1993 355 58.9 1795 281 0.0 1862 286 0.5 1928 306 8.8 1994 356 60.4 1796 282 0.0 1863 286 0.6 1929 306 9.1 1995 358 62.0 1797 282 0.0 1864 286 0.6 1930 307 9.4 1996 360 63.7 1798 282 0.0 1865 286 0.6 1931 307 9.6 1997 361 65.3 1799 282 0.1 1866 287 0.7 1932 307 9.8 1998 363 66.9 1800 283 0.1 1867 287 0.7 1933 308 10.0 1999 365 68.6 1801 283 0.1 1868 287 0.7 1934 308 10.3 2000 367 70.2 1802 283 0.1 1869 288 0.8 1935 308 10.5 2001 369 72.0 1803 283 0.1 1870 288 0.8 1936 309 10.8 2002 371 73.7 1804 283 0.1 1871 288 0.8 1937 309 11.1 2003 373 75.5 1805 284 0.1 1872 289 0.9 1938 310 11.4 2004 375 77.4 1806 284 0.1 1873 289 0.9 1939 310 11.7 2005 377 79.4 1807 284 0.1 1874 289 1.0 1940 311 12.0 2006 379 81.5 1808 284 0.1 1875 290 1.0 1941 311 12.3 2007 381 83.6 1809 284 0.1 1876 290 1.1 1942 311 12.7 2008 383 85.8 1810 284 0.1 1877 290 1.1 1943 311 13.0 2009 384 88.0 1811 284 0.1 1878 290 1.2 1944 311 13.4 2010 387 90.3 1812 284 0.1 1879 290 1.2 1945 311 13.6 2011 389 92.6 1813 284 0 |
Australia's welfare agency Centrelink is embroiling the government in a hugely damaging controversy, raising incorrect debts and auto-issuing threatening letters to citizens.
The “pay up” letters are genuinely terrifying when the sums involved are often thousands of dollars, especially when even government officials admit that the “error rate” is as high as 20 per cent.
It's pitched as an IT story, and there is an IT story there – but it's not the mainstream “Centrelink IT failure” it's presented as. Rather, it demonstrates that the government's blind faith in big data analysis is completely misplaced.
The agency was given a political instruction after the 2016 budget: claw back money from welfare recipients in what governments typically pitch as a “crackdown on cheats”.
(That language ensured that the Australian Labor Party, the country's national opposition, would not have the backbone to oppose the so-called “omnibus savings bill” that implemented the crackdown.)
Part of the crackdown – a part repeatedly trumpeted by the government as a success – was to use “data matching” to identify “cheats”. If someone received a Centrelink payment, the income they reported would be cross-checked automatically with the Australian Tax Office; if there was a discrepancy, a debt would be created representing the alleged “overpayment”, and a letter sent to the recipient.
And so, with much preening by government ministers like Christian Porter, the crackdown commenced, 160,000 Australians received their “debt letters” from Centrelink, and all hell broke loose.
When all of this first emerged, it looked like an IT story, and for good reason: the government is famous for chronic incompetence in managing IT systems; the hapless IBM is in charge of Centrelink's core systems; those systems are positively ancient and need replacing; IBM was the village idiot that ruined the 2016 Census; and people assumed that if Centrelink is creating incorrect debts it's because the IT system's a dog.
In a desperate search for IT people with credibility on the topic, The Guardian got Paul Shetler, former boss of the Office of Eternal Beta (not Google, the Digital Transformation Office) to give it an interview.
It's not an IT story, because the computer systems, as geriatric as they are, are calculating exactly what they're asked to calculate.
The “errors” are very simple to understand:
If you earn over a set threshold in a fortnight, your benefit is reduced. Earn enough, and the benefit should be zero;
The time unit is, however, a fortnight, but the Australian Tax Office doesn't care about fortnights, only years;
Centrelink's developers divided the ATO earnings data by 26 because they were told to write the software that way ;
; When “yearly / 26” yielded an amount over the benefit threshold, a debt was created and recipients could only change this by challenging the calculation, with records to back them up, as much as six years back.
This isn't a bug in an IT system: it's an executive giving developers instructions to implement a malicious system.
Before this blew into a social media sensation, Centrelink already knew that averaging annual earnings isn't a good guide to point-in-time entitlements.
With thanks to Twitter user @drzax – the ABC's Simon Elvery – we find this in the Department of Human Services' online manual explaining debt calculation:
Assessing verified employment income where fortnightly details cannot be obtained
“Employment income for workforce age customers should be assessed for the fortnight the income is earned. Sometimes it is not possible to determine a fortnightly breakdown and the only means to assess the income is as an annual amount …”
“If employment is for a part of a year only, averaging over 12 months will not result in a correct result if the customer should have received a full rate at other times of the year”
(Emphasis added.)
The government admits that 20 per cent of the “debts” are incorrect, it persists in treating its estimated savings as already realised. Christian Porter – social services minister, handling the government's attack-dog role while human services minister Alan Tudge enjoys his holiday – says the system has “saved” the government AU$300 million.
The whole thing is incompetence at the top. The devs did what they were ordered to do – and probably hated doing it.
The IT angle
That said, there is a government IT angle – it's just not a Centrelink IT fail.
Since before he was prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull has consistently promised that cross-agency data-sharing will improve government services, deliver efficiencies, and all the usual shiny stuff Big Data believers promise.
Part of the rationale for the Office of Eternal Beta – including its frankly-astonishing $90 million-plus annual budget – is to create a single digital identity for Australians. This is central to cross-agency data matching.
The reason the Australian Bureau of Statistics wants to keep names and addresses? To become the repository for national-scale data matching.
The reason the Australian government looks to New Zealand for its welfare models? Because it believes “big data” will help it slash the welfare spend.
However, the complete mismatch between just two agencies – the Australian Tax Office and Centrelink – shows that blind faith and political blather don't translate into results.
In the case of the ATO/Centrelink data matching, it's a simple matter of timescales: the ATO's heart beats once a year, Centrelink's once a fortnight, and in spite of what Turnbull (apparently), Tudge and Porter believe, they are completely incompatible.
And that's just two agencies: citizens' data touches dozens of agencies and probably hundreds of systems.
Each of those systems will have a view of the citizen that's relevant to the interaction between agency and individual.
It's no wonder the political dreams have borne so little fruit: they're borne of a simplistic view of the world. It's time the government listened to people with an understanding of operational detail, rather than visionaries. ®MVTaylor Profile Blog Joined October 2011 United Kingdom 2827 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-21 08:45:41 #1
2) Allowing in
3) Taking 5 hours to disqualify Quantic HyuN as he is ineligible due to his participation in WCS KR Code S this season but only doing so after he has knocked out 4 people.
4) Banning people from channels who asked why the Chinese players were not entered in to the bracket.
http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1crcp0/chinese_players_left_out_of_wcs_america_qualifier/c9j9xqg
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=408680¤tpage=34#673
5) Not updating the bracket on their site, leaving it to liquipedia to pick up the slack.
http://gamebattles.majorleaguegaming.com/pc/starcraft-ii-wings-of-liberty/tournament/wcs-america-season-1-qualifyin/bracket
Worth noting that while the ESL bracket was also a PITA compared to say, Challonge or Binary Beast it didn't force people to name themselves twice (Rootcaliber = Tubbythefat etc), was updated and had collapsible sections as opposed to having later stages off screen.
It's also worth noting
6) The decision to cap the bracket size at 512. 1) Refusing to allow any community broadcasters to show any of the other games meaning matches such as NrGquasAr knocking JD down to the losers bracke t will be reserved for their cast by replays broadcasts. Along with all the games for qualfiication from the Winners Bracket.2) Allowing in hackers and low tier NA players instead of top players from China, including people such as the WCS China champion despite confirming to the players they will be in. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=408776 3) Taking 5 hours to disqualify Quantic HyuN as he is ineligible due to his participation in WCS KR Code S this season but only doing so after he has knocked out 4 people.4) Banning people from channels who asked why the Chinese players were not entered in to the bracket.5) Not updating the bracket on their site, leaving it to liquipedia to pick up the slack.Worth noting that while the ESL bracket was also a PITA compared to say, Challonge or Binary Beast it didn't force people to name themselves twice (Rootcaliber = Tubbythefat etc), was updated and had collapsible sections as opposed to having later stages off screen.It's also worth noting http://gamebattles.majorleaguegaming.com/pc/starcraft-ii-heart-of-the-swarm/ doesn't even exist6) The decision to cap the bracket size at 512. @followMVT
Grovbolle Profile Blog Joined July 2011 Denmark 3770 Posts #2 Pretty much. That is the problem when Blizzard effectively kills all competition, it removes any pressure from organizers to actually do a decent job.
I find it hilarious how everyone were pitchforking ESL. So far they have done a better job than MLG that's for sure #ForGGeddon #DerByuNtergang - Lies, damned lies and statistics: http://aligulac.com - @Sc2Aligulac - Catch me @MortenBoJ
Silvanel Profile Blog Joined March 2003 Poland 3374 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-21 09:49:37 #3 This doesnt sound good, especially points 2, 3, and 4. Have they realesed a statement regarding those accusation? Or You are just gathering the mob?
PS. I felt like i am more informed on EU qualifications to WCS, like everything was more clear. But that might be just a biased feeling.
Integra Profile Blog Joined January 2008 Sweden 5590 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-21 08:53:35 #4 On April 21 2013 17:47 Grovbolle wrote:
Pretty much. That is the problem when Blizzard effectively kills all competition, it removes any pressure from organizers to actually do a decent job.
I find it hilarious how everyone were pitchforking ESL. So far they have done a better job than MLG that's for sure
I don't understand this. Howcome EU was allowed to have multiple streams but not NA? Aren't they both in WCS so shouldn't the rules be applied equally?
EDIT: and yes, MLG dropped the ball on the qualifiers, so much shit that wen't wrong. I don't understand this. Howcome EU was allowed to have multiple streams but not NA? Aren't they both in WCS so shouldn't the rules be applied equally?EDIT: and yes, MLG dropped the ball on the qualifiers, so much shit that wen't wrong. "Dark Pleasure" | | I survived the Locust war of May 3, 2014
TT1 Profile Blog Joined December 2008 Canada 8896 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-21 08:56:15 #5 On April 21 2013 17:50 Silvanel wrote:
This doesnt sound good, especially points 2, 3, and 4. Have they realesed a statemnt regarding those accusation? Or You are just gathering the mob?
but in all seriousness they shouldnt have capped the tourney, hopefully theyll put a league restriction or something next time but in all seriousness they shouldnt have capped the tourney, hopefully theyll put a league restriction or something next time ab = tl(i) + tl(pc), the grand answer to every tl.net debate
Roman666 Profile Joined April 2012 Poland 1440 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-21 08:54:33 #6 On April 21 2013 17:52 Integra wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 21 2013 17:47 Grovbolle wrote:
Pretty much. That is the problem when Blizzard effectively kills all competition, it removes any pressure from organizers to actually do a decent job.
I find it hilarious how everyone were pitchforking ESL. So far they have done a better job than MLG that's for sure
I don't understand this. Howcome EU was allowed to have multiple streams but not NA? Aren't they both in WCS so shouldn't the rules be applied equally? I don't understand this. Howcome EU was allowed to have multiple streams but not NA? Aren't they both in WCS so shouldn't the rules be applied equally?
It is the MLG policy against any community streams. It has always been like that. Though as it is not entirely their event, they could make an exception here. It is the MLG policy against any community streams. It has always been like that. Though as it is not entirely their event, they could make an exception here.
Integra Profile Blog Joined January 2008 Sweden 5590 Posts #7 On April 21 2013 17:53 Roman666 wrote:
Show nested quote +
On April 21 2013 17:52 Integra wrote:
On April 21 2013 17:47 Grovbolle wrote:
Pretty much. That is the problem when Blizzard effectively kills all competition, it removes any pressure from organizers to actually do a decent job.
I find it hilarious how everyone were pitchforking ESL. So far they have done a better job than MLG that's for sure
I don't understand this. Howcome EU was allowed to have multiple streams but not NA? Aren't they both in WCS so shouldn't the rules be applied equally? I don't understand this. Howcome EU was allowed to have multiple streams but not NA? Aren't they both in WCS so shouldn't the rules be applied equally?
It is the MLG policy against any community streams. It has always been like that. Though as it is not entirely their event, they could make an exception here. It is the MLG policy against any community streams. It has always been like that. Though as it is not entirely their event, they could make an exception here.
SO even that was MLG's fault? Great... SO even that was MLG's fault? Great... "Dark Pleasure" | | I survived the Locust war of May 3, 2014
Jknighty Profile Joined July 2011 159 Posts #8 7) Only having one bracket so that 2 of the LB sections are completely stacked, with JD, Center, Zenio, Revival and in one and Sage, JYP and Alive in another. Meanwhile the other 2 sections have Heart and Apocalypse in one and Motok, Hwangsin and Miya in another.
I've ignored all the notable foreigners but it doesn't take a genius to work out that QXC, Demuslim and friends are going to have a much tougher time in JD and co's section than incontrol in Apocalypse's or nony in Miya's.
Waxangel Profile Blog Joined September 2002 United States 27026 Posts #9 rofl, they let HyuN play and actualyl eliminate people? Administrator Hey HP can you redo everything youve ever done because i have a small complaint?
Champi Profile Joined March 2010 Australia 1418 Posts #10 i heard the aussies got dicked aswell. i went to bed as soon as they said they wernt in the brackets but in the chat pig was saying that he, iaguz, fenner, rossi, megafonzie and petraeus wernt in the brackets and it seemed like they were missing from the brackets after checking in and doing everything correctly aswell.
like i said i could be wrong and it might been resolved for them but it looks pretty fucked Australian former Protoss player for team carnage.Razer
Roman666 Profile Joined April 2012 Poland 1440 Posts #11 On April 21 2013 17:56 Waxangel wrote:
rofl, they let HyuN play and actualyl eliminate people?
Yeap they did.... Yeap they did....
bittman Profile Joined February 2011 Australia 8308 Posts #12 Wow, it's just a mess.
2, 3 4 and 5 are all pretty bad.
1 and 6 are a shame, but they might not fix them =S Mvp - Leenock - Dongraegu - MC - Gumiho - Keen - Polt - Squirtle - Jjakji - Genius - Seed - Life - sC - Dream || LG-IM - MVP - FXO
MasterOfPuppets Profile Blog Joined March 2011 Romania 6941 Posts #13 What a colossal failure... "my shaft scares me too" - strenx 2014
KanoCoke Profile Joined June 2011 Japan 863 Posts #14 MLG and Blizzard really need to fix this trainwreck of a qualifier or they'll be losing a lot. Especially since they ticked off people already for shooing off NASL for actually HELPING THEM OUT.
This is absolutely stupid. Will always cheer for: MMA Bomber Taeja Curious Life herO Zest
MasterOfPuppets Profile Blog Joined March 2011 Romania 6941 Posts #15 On April 21 2013 18:07 KanoCoke wrote:
MLG and Blizzard really need to fix this trainwreck of a qualifier or they'll be losing a lot. Especially since they ticked off people already for shooing off NASL for actually HELPING THEM OUT.
This is absolutely stupid.
Imagine if they had let NASL run the online qualifiers, I bet you none of these issues would have happened. We might've had some audio problems here and there ( ) but that's about it. ~_~
Imagine if they had let NASL run the online qualifiers, I bet you none of these issues would have happened. We might've had some audio problems here and there () but that's about it. ~_~ "my shaft scares me too" - strenx 2014
Technique Profile Joined March 2010 Netherlands 1542 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-21 09:10:48 #16 MLG should not be used anymore for WCS, they obviously can't handle it and screwed a lot of people over.
Perhaps let ESL do it, so the rules of EU and NA are at least the same. If you think you're good, you suck. If you think you suck, you're getting better.
mikkmagro Profile Joined April 2011 Malta 1509 Posts #17 Blizzard should've just commissioned NASL to do it, they even failed hard with the invitees. mousesports, Team Acer, Fnatic!
JustPassingBy Profile Blog Joined January 2011 10465 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-21 09:16:05 #18 Honestly, I don't think that MLG screwed up more than ESL did. The jist though is that they only have one stream and one qualifier, which makes their screwup a lot more gravere compared to what happened with the ESL.
Players being screwed during check-in?
ESL: Ya, we're really sorry, please try again in the other three Code S qualifiers!
MLG: Ya, we're really sorry, please try again in the Code A qualifier!
Stream boring (boring game, too much downtime)?
ESL: Ya, sorry, please change to one of the other streams in the meantime.
MLG: Ya, sorry, but you are stuck with us.
Daswollvieh Profile Blog Joined October 2009 5551 Posts #19 Why are people surprised? I mean, it´s what Hyun does, really, eliminating people online. It´s like his natural habitat.
Hellboy.100 Profile Joined June 2011 Slovenia 134 Posts #20 I don't even understand how are people organizing this tournament even doing such silly and illogical mistakes? PhysicsLee had topics on reddit aswell as TL, aswell as his team manager defending him and asking people for more evidence first. I'm pretty sure he isn't even the only hacker on the bracket since there's so many on NA lately...it must suck for people to get eliminated in such a way instead of going out with glory by losing to a top notch korean.
1 2 3 4 5 40 41 42 Next AllIntroduction to Alchemical Philosophy
Alchemy is the quintessential hermetic science. It is a clear embodiment of the well known maxim from the Equinox: “The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion.” Furthermore it is the foundation for a great deal of the symbolic representation found throughout hermetic writings. A deep understanding of alchemical logic and philosophy is an invaluable tool to any student of the Hermetic Arts. The traditional alchemist is a spiritual scientist, one who investigates the laws of the material world to further understand and develop the soul. Please join Frater Marius for an introduction to alchemical thought, philosophy, and symbolic systems. There is a suggested donation of $5 to cover space rental costs.
Cost: Free - $5 donations are suggested to fund the rental for this event.
Categories: Education | Health & Wellness | Religion & SpiritualityRoger Stone, a veteran political strategist and longtime friend of President-elect Trump, says the billionaire businessman only pretended to seriously consider former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for secretary of state so he could "toy with him" for opposing Trump during the general election.
"Donald Trump was interviewing Mitt Romney for secretary of state in order to torture him," Stone told InfoWars on Sunday. "To toy with him. And given the history, that's completely understandable. Mitt Romney crossed a line. He didn't just oppose Trump, which is his democratic right, he called him a phony and a fraud. And a con man. And that's not the kind of man you want as secretary of state."
Some of Trump's top advisers — like adviser Kellyanne Conway and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — have publicly criticized Romney for refusing to support the GOP nominee before the election and his about-face after Trump won the White House. Conway said a "number of people" would feel "betrayed" if Trump selected Romney for a coveted Cabinet position because he attacked Trump throughout the election.
"Well you know, Trump correctly said he was a choker," Stone said, "and at the key moment in the campaign against Barack Obama he choked. Donald Trump is not a choker, in fact, he's a scratch golfer. So in this particular case, Trump did what Romney couldn't."
Stone would not say if he will take a formal role with Trump. On Sunday, Trump's transition team said the president-elect is leaning toward nominating ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to lead the State Department.As Triggs pointed out in a recent speech after the G20 meeting, German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke of the importance of the international rule of law, of democracy and human rights. The Chancellor anchored her speech on those principles. Senator Ian Macdonald, who spoke from the chair in public hearings of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, made it quite clear that, in his view, the government in its legislation was giving the Australian people what they wanted. He claimed the people of Australia had said, "We don't care about treaties". If Macdonald believed what he was saying, he was following some of the worst instincts of those who have led Australia on this issue. He and his colleagues should have made it clear treaties do matter; that Australia's reputation does matter. What he said was a total abdication of his responsibilities as a senator. The idea that the executive government of a state is precluded from detaining a person without judicial process is not a recent invention of the United Nations or the post-World War II world - it is a guarantee of ancient times, which almost every democratic regime in the world recognises as essential to a civilised nation. Yet, in Australia, people are detained and the High Court has ruled that such detention is legal if it is regarded as for administrative purposes and not for punishment. Many Australians believe basic human rights are enshrined in our constitution. That is not so. The constitution defines a division of power, between Australia and the Australian states, as approved by the British Parliament. The common law is no longer a protection of human rights. The High Court has ruled that the Federal Parliament can override any such right.
While the breach in human rights applies to asylum seekers, and especially to the administration of the security services, the greatest breach of those common law rights under the current situation applies to people in immigration detention. There are more than 2500 asylum seekers on the mainland, all in detention. This includes more than 400 children. We are the only nation in the world that demands the arbitrary detention of children and their families on their arrival. We do so indefinitely for periods exceeding a year and sometimes for several years. Compare that with Britain, where asylum seekers must be released after 72 hours. As a result of recent amendments to the Migration and Maritime Powers Act, some children were to be released from detention facilities into the community and work rights were to be available to their parents on bridging visas. I am advised some of those children are still in detention in Darwin and the minister's promise has not yet been kept. The new legislation exempts government officials from the need to abide by Australia's obligations under international law. It ensures due process or natural justice cannot be given as reasons for invalidity of particular actions. Breach of international law on the high seas is sanctioned. The government has also regarded as "irrelevant" its international obligation not to return refugees to a country in which there is a high chance they will be tortured. Such an attitude makes Australia party to any subsequent torture, complicit in it, and guilty of it. The international definition of refugee no longer applies under Australian law; it is much narrower and relieves the government of obligations that earlier would have been willingly accepted. Children born in Australia are to be treated like their parents, regarded as illegal maritime arrivals. So, many years of development of administrative law and international law are wiped out by this government and the Australian Parliament.
The government has also further extended the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation's powers curtailing basic rights and freedoms Australians have too easily taken for granted. It is consistent with the government's clear wish to place its actions outside the rule of law. These actions make the Australian Human Rights Commission even more important to safeguard remaining freedoms and to prevent a full introduction of a police state. Even so, the powers available to the government and to security authorities in Australia would rest more comfortably with old-fashioned tyrannies from Europe than with any democracy in the 21st century. Triggs has been following the law designed to govern the actions of the commission with care and with integrity. The commission has not transgressed into areas of government discretion, but, as required under the law, has made recommendations, which the government can accept, or reject. So many countries in the world have bills or charters of rights. New Zealand, Britain, Europe, Canada and the United States all have provisions in their constitutions or in separate legislation. It is because Australia is a standalone without such protections that we need to be so concerned about the future. Malcolm Fraser was prime minister from 1975 to 1983.So, after writing a positive review of the film and thinking it was another Ghibli home-run, my mind just seemed to linger more than it should have. The more I thought about it the more I found my self seeing the cracks and flaws, that are hidden underneath the gorgeous visuals.
At first I think I was distracted by the fantastic animation and amazing sound design and the fact that I wanted to love it. Then I pinpointed the reason for my lingering troubles with the movie, and unfortunately it was Jiro, the main character. My disdain stems not only from his character but from what the film-makers decided to do with him.Therefore my dislike for the character slowly decayed everything that had him in it (which is most of the film).
My main quarrel with the character, beside the fact that I think he’s quite bland and uninteresting, is that for such an ostensible “Good” character, the way that he and the film treats the morale dilemma is so disingenuous. The fact that the character and film just simply ignores this ethical issue creates this strong dissonance between the character and his attitude. The characters in-curiousness about his actions and the world around is mirrored in the films in-curiousness about delving in to such subject matter. This just leads to some very frustrating moments in the film
Then there is the romance which is made dull and uninteresting by his involvement. It often feels forced and contrived because the two lack any resemblance of a spark or chemistry together.
Ultimately the film falters due to a lack of conflict and urgency in the story and the characters. The film felt like it often had a lot to say, but just decided to say nothing at all.A classy first half performance from Arsenal saw Derby County’s Under 23s fall to a 3-1 defeat at St George’s Park.
Chris Willock opened the scoring as the Rams went behind early doors for the third consecutive game, before Chuba Akpom, who was on loan at Hull City last season, made it two with a similar finish.
The same man added a second before the hour mark, as Charles Vernam’s penalty conversion proved to be a consolation despite Darren Wassall’s side rally late on.
With the wind heavily against them in the first half, Derby faced a fierce uphill battle against a young Arsenal side brimming with talent and quality.
With Ainsley Maitland-Niles anchoring midfield and mopping up most of the hosts’ bursts forward, the Gunners’ front four were a constant menace as they penned the Rams towards their own goal for large periods of a tough first 45 minutes.
Early goals had been a feature of Derby’s previous two Premier League 2 encounters – against Everton and Tottenham Hotspur – and it was a familiar scenario this time around too as they found themselves behind early doors.
A provider first before scoring, Akpom showed his pace to collect a loose ball midway inside the home side’s half and slipped a finely weighted pass into the path of Willock to his left, who took a touch before beating Henrich Ravas with a low shot.
The pressure didn’t let up. The Rams’ Slovakian goalkeeper pulled off a sublime double save moments after to deny the impressive Stephy Mavididi and Akpom as Arsenal threatened a quick second.
The confidence was oozing from the visitors and that was displayed by the audacity of Maitland-Niles after he attempted to beat Ravas with a lobbed effort from the halfway line.
Arsenal, however, did double their advantage on 27 minutes after and to a nearly exact carbon copy of the opening goal as Akpom, this time, latched on to Mavididi’s through ball to finish with a low right footed shot beyond Ravas.
Gedion Zelalem had the opportunity to try and add a third shortly before the interval after he crafted some space on the edge of area, but the midfielder could not get enough power on his lofted effort as Ravas rushed out to easily claim.
The same pattern continued into the early stages of the second half as Derby’s backline continued to be kept busy.
Mavididi saw a firm drive turned behind by Ravas, whilst the goalkeeper also blocked Ben Sheaf’s effort after swift counter attack move, but the third goal of the evening did follow shortly after as Akpom smashed in his second from a tight angle after escaping Stabana’s presence.
It nearly got worse on the hour mark too as Stabana, superbly, cleared another Mavididi effort off the line after the forward had rounded Ravas and from there, and Marc Bola, the full back, was denied by the woodwork after being picked out inside the area.
Seventy minutes on the clock and that is when the contest evened out and Derby began to seriously craft their own openings.
Stabana, with a deep cross, cracked the top of the crossbar earlier on, but Wassall’s men were gifted a glorious opportunity to score after the referee awarded a spot kick.
Alex Babos, the substitute, had gone down under a loose leg and up stepped Vernam to convert his fourth goal in four league games, sending the goalkeeper the wrong way.
He nearly made it five in four, as he smacked a low drive from range no more than a minute later, but Hugo Keto got down low to make an easy save in the centre of his goal.
Despite the hosts' huffing and puffing, Akpom could have sealed his hat trick, but he screwed his effort wide when well placed as the Rams’ wait for a first win of the 2016/17 season goes on.
Derby County U23s: Ravas, Stabana, Rawson, Wassall, Cover (Gordon, 46), Macdonald; Hanson, Guy, Elsnik (Babos, 57), Santos (Jakobsen, 67); Vernam
Substitutes not used: Barnes, Walker
Arsenal U23s: Keto, Johnson, Da Graca, Bielik, Bola (Da Silva, 70), Zelalem, Sheaf, Maitland-Niles, Mavididi, Willock, Akpom
Substitutes not used: Bannacer, Virginia, Dragomir, Mourgos
Tweets by @ dcfcofficialNike Inc. said its revenue rose 7.7% and profit climbed in the latest quarter, helped by what the company said was robust growth across its business lines.
Still, shares fell 2.7% to $63.15 in recent after-hours trading as revenue was still shy of expectations.
The Beaverton, Ore., company said revenue increased to $8.03 billion for the three-month period ended Feb. 29, from $7.46 billion a year earlier. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected revenue of $8.2 billion. Excluding currency fluctuations, revenue grew 14%.
The world's largest sportswear maker by revenue reported continued strength in North America and China. Revenue in North America grew 13%, while sales in its Greater China segment improved by 23%.
Nike's quarterly earnings report comes as most of the retail sportswear industry is facing a crunch, with the bankruptcy filing of Sports Authority Inc. shaking up the near-term forecast at Dick's Sporting Goods.
The athletic gear company said futures orders, which reflect products scheduled for delivery from March through July, rose 12% on a global basis, compared with an increase of 2% a year earlier and the 15% growth from the last quarter. Futures orders are closely watched by investors as a benchmark for demand for Nike products.
Excluding currency impacts, futures orders increased 17%, compared with a rise of 11% a year earlier and the 20% growth in the previous quarter.
Over all, Nike reported a profit of $950 million, or 55 cents a share, up from $791 million, or 45 cents a share, a year earlier. Analysts expected a per-share profit of 48 cents.
Gross margin was flat at 45.9% as higher average selling prices and growth in the higher-margin direct-to-consumer business were offset by negative currency impacts, higher warehousing costs and efforts to clear inventories in North America.
Nike has used expensive sponsorships to increase its market share in sports such as soccer and basketball. In the latest period, Nike increased such spending--called demand creation--by 10% to $804 million.
At quarter's end, inventories were $4.6 billion, up 8% from a year earlier.
Nike last week unveiled coming products, including its HyperAdapt Trainer 1.0 sneakers with self-lacing technology that the sportswear company plans to plans to sell later this year. Investors likely will be listening on the conference call for any details on the pricing of the shoe, which will be available for the 2016 holiday season, as well as any indication when the new products will affect Nike's bottom line.
Last fall Nike, the world's largest sportswear maker by sales, outlined plans to achieve $50 billion in revenue by 2020, more than one-third of which it hopes to generate from direct sales to consumers, up from about a fifth in 2015. Investors also likely will be listening for any comments on Nike's wholesale or direct-sales strategy.
Write to Tess Stynes at tess.stynes@wsj.comI realize that it might not hold much weight coming from someone that’s been watching vintage episodes of Thundercats with their 5-year-old son all morning, but an overwhelming amount of the time, these days, it feels as if all of this throwback 1980s pop-culture nostalgia may have burned itself out a looooong time ago. Not everything deserves a tribute — let alone, a full-on television or film franchise reboot — but everything definitely seems to be getting one. Maybe it’s time to focus a little more on the present folks, creating things now and moving forward so that we actually have something to look back on when the future does arrive. Or, better yet, maybe it’s just time that we start becoming a little more selective and careful about what we choose to resurrect and how we choose to resurrect it.
Since 2004, Gallery 1988 has been at the forefront of the pop-culture game hosting themed art exhibits in Los Angeles, even expanding to two separate locations. Last Friday (St Patricks Day), they opened a new group exhibit at their WEST location that either proves that there is definitely still some territory worth continuing to chart in that 80s nostalgia world, or that it’s simply a matter of personal taste — if it’s something that I like, then it’s incredible and amazing, but if it’s something that I don’t care for, it’s fucking garbage. That being said, “Don’t Cry, Mac” A Tribute to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, tackles what became a legitimate cultural phenomenon. When the game was first released 30 years ago (yep, it’s been 30 years), it felt as if the Nintentdo Entertainment System had reached a new pinnacle and that home gaming, itself, had turned a corner into something that was unquestionably here to stay. There was plenty brilliant about Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!!, but aside from being credited as bringing arcade style gameplay to the home console, it has also been praised as being a puzzle game disguised as a sports game. Because of that, elements of the game have embedded themselves within us in very specific ways, as players trained themselves to mastered particular patterns, so as to progress through each level. In fact, I remember that, around 1999 or 2000, an old friend of mine got so spun out on MDMA that he couldn’t remember anything, including his own name; but the one thing that he could definitely recall was the code to reach Mike Tyson. You can wipe a human hard drive, but some things are so ingrained that they aren’t coming clean.
G1988 may have been one of |
’s grassroots—from local shops upwards—crucially giving players something to aspire to in the long term and rewarding the very best with a platform to shine on. There was a huge desire on the part of all involved to legitimise and remunerate the skill and creativity of the best Magic players, so they might earn a similar status to the high-school quarterbacks or valedictorians out there: “It was important for us to reward people for their efforts and to give people a sense of self-esteem,” says Elias.
Vitally, it would also smooth the transition required to level the tournament playing field between the haves and have-nots. “The second purpose,” admits Elias, “was to ‘bribe’ the players. I hate using that word, but we wanted to show them that we would reward them for playing the game with only cards printed in the last two years—a new tournament format that we would call Type II.” The game’s old-school players could certainly continue playing with cards from the game’s entire history at Type I tournaments (the format now known as Vintage)—but the brunt of Wizards’ official prize support and promotional focus would go to a format that provided equal opportunity to all players, no matter how long they had been playing the game. The Type II format (today called Standard) would feature cards currently in print over a two-year period and would rotate as and when new cards were published, with outgoing sets replaced by the new printings. This would keep the format fresh and constantly challenging, much like Garfield had originally imagined. Magic: The Gathering, remember, was originally to be available for a year before being replaced by a completely different Magic: Ice Age product—only the necessity to rush expansions out to the game’s early adopters had changed that plan.
The creation of the new format was a huge and controversial schism that would go on to have major consequences for Type I. But in conjunction with the creation of the Pro Tour, it finally provided Wizards with a model for sustainable sales. “They had a vision for what Rick referred to as the ‘metagame,’” says Matlins. “His analogue was a pinball machine with all the names of the high scorers on it.” As long as the rewards of triumphing in this vision of the tournament metagame were high enough, players would now have every reason to continue to buy new Magic cards. It was a brilliantly holistic vision and precisely the business model Wizards had been looking for. The Pro Tour itself would be laid over an infrastructure similar to tennis, namely a ranking system based on the Association of Tennis Professionals’ rankings, where players ascend by beating players ranked higher than them. It even harked back to the “ladders” for card games like hearts that Garfield had run for his Maths Department colleagues back in his University of Pennsylvania days. And, as one of his columns in The Duelist magazine in the spring of 1995 revealed, he was fully on board with the idea. “Recently, I claimed that I could make any game popular if I could build a good ladder around it,” he wrote. “Each player [on a ladder] has many different chances for success. When a player moves up even one rung from the bottom of a ladder, he has achieved a kind of victory.” That same aspiration would be the bedrock of Magic’s future as an enduring, perennial game.
*
It might not have been much, but its consequences would be seismic: a tiny news story, tucked away in the bottom left-hand corner of page 10 of The Duelist issue number eight, from December 1995.
PROFESSIONAL POSSIBILITIES FOR Magic TOURNAMENTS
The first in a series of professional Magic tournaments is in the early planning stage at Wizards of the Coast. Members of the Magic team have been scoping out sites in the New York City area and hope to put together an initial event by early next year. For more information, contact Wizards of the Coast Customer Service at (206) 624-0933.
While the self-effacing manner of the Pro Tour’s announcement almost certainly hints at the internal scepticism at Wizards of the Coast, the master plan was now public knowledge. John Jordan, the company’s biggest shareholder, was onside and preparation began in earnest for the first big-money event—one that would have to prove the viability of Skaff Elias’ radical idea.
As the news story in The Duelist says, the venue for the first-ever Magic Pro Tour would be New York, in a converted loft near Greenwich Village. With no qualifying system in place, the best-known players around the world were canvassed by Wizards and invited to intend. Bertrand Lestrée, for example, the runner-up to Zak Dolan at the 1994 World Championships, remembers receiving a Fed Ex package while on work placement in the UK. He had actually stopped playing Magic six months previously, but as he opened the courier’s parcel to discover a letter from Wizards telling him they would fly him to New York to play in the game’s first ever-professional event, all expenses paid, his interest in the game was suddenly rekindled. His case proved in microcosm the allure of playing at the top level, for high stakes and getting a holiday thrown in, to boot. Fittingly, the slogan for the Pro Tour would for many years become “Play the game, see the world!”
Other players simply heard about the impending event—to be held on the weekend of 16-18 February 1996—by word of mouth. While Wizards had a rough idea of the big names they wanted to play at the tournament, the other slots available needed filling—and were awarded on a first-come, first-served basis to anyone who called up and asked for one. A total of 347 players would make it to the Pro Tour and would be split into a Junior and Masters competition according to age (a distinction which would later be done away with). Despite a snowstorm delaying the start of the tournament, there was a palpable sense in that New York loft of a new era beginning. Richard Garfield himself kicked off proceedings with words that neatly summed up what a watershed moment it was: “The reason I take games seriously is because I consider them the intellectual counterpart to sports,” he told a rapt audience of fans. “I would love to see games raised to the stature of intellectual sports.” The concept was a fine one, but Elias, Matlins and the other Wizards and ProServ staff in attendance could only cross their fingers and hope that the event would prove their big-money gamble correct. Certainly, as far as the players were concerned, this was a thrilling new arena to compete in. One 17-year-old player in the Junior portion of the competition, a Neutral Ground regular called Jon Finkel, could barely contain his emotions. Today, he says that first Pro Tour was like, “…being in a school football team that gets to play a game at Wembley. It was clearly a bigger stage.”
As the rounds progressed, that feeling began to spread to the organisers, too. By the semi-finals, with thousands of dollars on the line, the play had ratcheted up to a new level of intensity—and everyone in attendance had been swept up in it. There were no bleachers or close-circuit television as there would be at later events for the crowds of eliminated players to watch on. So they scrambled as best they could on to nearby tables and chairs to lean in and get a view of the play as it was unfolding. The tournament rules had not been fully ironed out yet, so the players were allowed to play out their matches without a time limit. As the semi-finals stretched out, the atmosphere became electric—and it was then that the organisers were convinced they were on to something. Matlins recalls being bowled over by the intensity in the room. “What you saw was passion, engagement, interest—and if I remember correctly, you could even hear ‘Oohs’ and ‘Ahs’ from the crowd at various plays,” he says. “That was the moment I went from knowing the Pro Tour made sense, to believing it made sense. I wasn’t a Magic player and I’m not today but in that moment you could palpably feel the connection of an audience to the play of others and for a sport, that’s fundamental.” For Elias, seeing Matlins’ reaction was the proof of concept he needed—sure, Magic was exciting to gamers. But when a non-gamer was as awestruck by the unfolding excitement as all the Magic players in the room, the entire rationale for the Pro Tour was vindicated. This was sport; it would produce drama, birth heroes and legitimise not only its big-money heroes—but also all the wannabes striving to be like them. “It was astounding,” says Elias.
By the time American player Michael Locanto triumphed against Bertrand Lestrée in a gruelling final to become the first ever Pro Tour champion—winning a cheque for $12,000 in the process—Magic had changed forever. Not only did its players have a reason to be proud, but Wizards too could reflect with self-confidence on an excellent business decision. It was, says Peter Adkison, essentially their first. “Up to that point, Magic had been big and amazing because Richard was smart and creative,” he says. “This was the first time we made a really smart business decision rather than simply getting lucky, and it took us to the next level as a company.” The core believers at Wizards had been fully vindicated. And, as the shadow organised play unit absorbed the existing one, fears about the game’s future abated. “Unequivocally,” says Elias, “this saved Magic.”After threatening to do it for months, on Tuesday, the Philippines’ ultra-hardline President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law on the conflicted southern island of Mindanao.
The declaration takes immediate effect and will last for 60 days—officially. But in his comments upon the declaration, Duterte said it could last up to “a year”—and (not for the first time) favorably invoked the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, under whose harsh rule the Philippines saw a decade of martial law.
“To those who have experienced martial law, it would not be any different from what president Marcos did,” Duterte said. “I’ll be harsh.”
Duterte’s murderous war on low-level drug dealers and users has already jacked up a body count of perhaps 7,000 since he took office last year.
And while the martial law declaration is ostensibly in response to an ISIS-linked terrorist group, it will give his security forces an even freer hand. Duterte has before declared an ill-defined “state of lawlessness” in Mindanao, but the new emergency measures officially delineate sweeping powers. Martial law allows use of the military to enforce the law and to detain people without charge for long periods.
The declaration was sparked by an outburst of violence in the Mindanao city of Marawi, which cut short Duterte’s trip to Russia to meet with Vladimir Putin. Two soldiers and one police officer were killed in the fire-fight that erupted after troops raided an apartment where militant leader Isnilon Hapilon was thought to be hiding.
Militants from Abu Sayyaf and possibly the even more extreme Maute Group—which have both pledged allegiance to ISIS—occupied the town’s main streets, threw up barricades and burned a Catholic church and two schools. Photos posted on social media by Marawi residents showed gunmen patrolling the city with the black flags of ISIS.
And there is plenty of potential for a convergence of Duterte’s drug war and anti-terror campaign: the Islamist militants have been repeatedly accused of profiting off the Mindanao cannabis trade to fund their insurgency.
Finally, Duterte’s declaration comes just as the transcript was leaked of President Trump‘s April 29 phone call with the Philippine strongman, in which he invited him to visit the White House later this year.
The Washington Post reports that Trump complimented Duterte during the call, according to the “confidential” transcript obtained from a Philippine source.
“You are a good man,” Trump told Duterte, adding that he was doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem… Many countries have the problem, we have the problem, but what a great job you are doing, and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”
With both Putin and Trump behind him, the last legal restraints on Duterte’s official brutality are now being lifted. Ominously, an initiative to impeach him over his human rights violations on May 15 died in the Philippine House of Representatives—shot down by the Justice Committee, controlled by Duterte’s allies.
It looks like the Philippines are facing their greatest test since the long rule of Marcos ended with a popular revolution in 1986.[Epistemic status: idea for one’s toolbox of ideas; not to be followed off a cliff]
I.
Commenters on this blog have sometimes tried to shame or attack other commenters for perceived misdeeds like sexual promiscuity. They tell people to their faces that they’re bad people and try to humiliate them.
When this happens, I ban the commenters involved.
And I get protests – what about free speech? What about the marketplace of ideas? Isn’t shaming sometimes a useful social mechanism? There are some norms we can’t or shouldn’t codify into law; shouldn’t violation of those norms be punished by shaming? Shaming can be very effective – for example, last week we learned the Puritans had a premarital pregnancy rate near zero because they publicly shamed anyone who departed from their moral standards. Might it not be useful to have something like that nowadays, either for premarital sex, or for other evils like homophobia and racism that we want to discourage? And even if I think we shouldn’t, is it really okay to ban the people trying, seeing as they were probably well-intentioned?
I think my answer is: be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness.
II.
A friend (I can’t remember who) once argued that “be nice” provides a nigh-infallible ethical decision procedure. For example, enslaving people isn’t very nice, so we know slavery is wrong. Kicking down people’s doors and throwing them in prison for having a joint of marijuana isn’t very nice, so we know the drug war is wrong. Not letting gays marry isn’t very nice, so we know homophobia is wrong.
I counterargue that even if we ignore the ways our notion of “nice” itself packs up pre-existing moral beliefs, this heuristic fails in several important cases:
1. Refusing the guy who is begging you to give his drivers’ license back, saying that without a car he won’t be able to visit his friends and family or have any fun, and who is promising that he won’t drive drunk an eleventh time.
2. Forcibly restraining a screaming baby while you jam a needle into them to vaccinate them against a deadly disease.
3. Sending the police to arrest a libertarian rancher in Montana who refuses to pay taxes for reasons of conscience
4. Revoking the credential (and thus destroying the future job prospects of) a teacher who has sex with one of her underage students
Sure, you could say that each of these “leads toward a greater niceness”, like that you’re only refusing the alcoholic his license in order to be nice to potential drunk driving victims. But then you’ve lost all meaningful distinction between the word “nice” and the word “good” and reinvented utilitarianism. And reinventing utilitarianism is pretty cool, but after you do that you no longer have such an easy time arguing against the drug war – somebody’s going to argue that it leads to the greater good of there being fewer drugs.
We usually want to avoid meanness. In some rare cases, meanness is necessary. I think one check for whether a certain type of meanness might be excusable is – it’s less likely to be excusable if it’s not coordinated.
Consider: society demands taxes to pay for communal goods and services. This does sometimes involve not-niceness, as in the example of the rancher in (3). But what makes it tolerable is that it’s done consistently and through a coordinated process. If the rule was “anybody who has a social program they want can take money from somebody else to pay for it,” this would be anarchy. Some libertarians say “taxation is theft”, but where arbitrary theft is unfair, unpredictable, and encourage perverse incentives like living in fear or investing in attack dogs, taxation has none of these disadvantages.
By the rule “be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness”, we should not permit individuals to rob each other at gunpoint in order to pay for social programs they want, but we might permit them to advocate for a coordinated national taxation policy.
Or: society punishes people for crimes, including the crime of libel. Punishment is naturally not-nice, but this seems fair; we can’t just have people libeling each other all the time with no consequences. But what makes this tolerable is that it’s coordinated – done through the court system according to carefully codified libel law that explains to everybody what is and isn’t okay. Remove the coordination aspect, and you’ve got the old system where if you say something that offends my honor then I get some friends and try to beat you up in a dark alley. The impulse is the same: deploy not-niceness in the worthy goal of preventing libel. But one method is coordinated and the other isn’t.
This is very, very far from saying that coordinated meanness is a sure test that means something’s okay – that would be the insane position that anything legal must be ethical, something most countries spent the past few centuries disproving spectacularly. This is the much weaker claim that legality sets a minimum bar for people attempting mean policies.
As far as I can tell there are two things we want in a legal system. First, it should have good laws that produce a just society. But second, it should at least have clear and predictable laws that produce a safe and stable society.
For example, the first goal of libel law is to balance people’s desire to protect their reputation with other people’s desire for free speech. But the second goal of libel law should be that everybody understands what is and isn’t libel. If a system achieves the second goal, nobody will end up jailed or dead because they said something they thought was totally innocent but somebody else thought was libel. And nobody will spent years and thousands of dollars entangled in an endless court case hiring a bunch of lawyers to debate whether some form of speech was acceptable or not.
So coordinated meanness is better than uncoordinated meanness not because it necessarily achieves the first goal of justice, but because it achieves the second goal of safety and stability. Everyone knows exactly when to expect it and what they can do to avoid it. I may not know what speech will or won’t offend a violent person with enough friends to organize a goon squad, but I can always read the libel law and try to stay on the right side of it.
Likewise, in the Puritan community, I know exactly what things I have to do to avoid being shamed. Better still, I can only be shamed for violating one set of moral standards – the shared moral standards of the whole community. This isn’t true of random people shaming promiscuous people, or people with the wrong opinion on race/gender issues, or whatever, on a private blog. Not only do most people reasonably expect to be able to do those things (and/or talk about those things here) without being shamed, but there are too many conflicting standards to meet – plausibly somebody could be shamed by traditionalists for being promiscuous, and by free-love people for not being promiscuous enough. Since shaming is unpleasant and supposed to act as a punishment, this is the equivalent of letting anybody beat up anybody else if they think they’ve broken an unwritten rule. It probably results in a lot of people being beaten up for not very much social change.
III.
The second reason that coordinated meanness is better than uncoordinated meanness is that it is less common. Uncoordinated meanness happens whenever one person wants to be mean; coordinated meanness happens when everyone (or 51% of the population, or an entire church worth of Puritans, or whatever) wants to be mean. If we accept theories like the wisdom of crowds or the marketplace of ideas – and we better, if we’re small-d democrats, small-r republicans, small-l liberals, or basically any word beginning with a lowercase letter at all – then a big group of people all debating with each other will be harder to rile up than a single lunatic.
As a Jew, if I heard that skinheads were beating up Jews in dark alleys, I would be pretty freaked out; for all I know I could be the next victim. But if I heard that skinheads were circulating a petition to get Congress to expel all the Jews, I wouldn’t be freaked out at all. I would expect almost nobody to sign the petition
(and in the sort of world where most people were signing the petition, I hope I would have moved to Israel long before anyone got any chance to expel me anyway)
Trying to coordinate meanness is not in itself a mean act – or at least, not as mean as actual meanness. If Westboro Baptist Church just published lots of pamphlets saying we should pass laws against homosexuality, maybe it would have made some gay people feel less wanted, but it would have been a lot less intense than picketing funerals. If people who are against promiscuity want to write books about why we should all worry about promiscuity, it might get promiscuous people a little creeped out, but a lot less so than going up to promiscuous people and throwing water on them and shouting “YOU STRUMPET!”
This is my answer to people who say that certain forms of speech make them feel unsafe, versus certain other people who demand the freedom to express their ideas. We should all feel unsafe around anybody who relishes uncoordinated meanness – beating people in dark alleys, picketing their funerals, shaming them, harassing them, doxxing them, getting them fired from their jobs. I have no tolerance for these people – I am sometimes forced to accept their existence because of the First Amendment, but I won’t do anything more.
On the other hand, we should feel mostly safe around people who agree that meanness, in the unfortunate cases where it’s necessary, must be coordinated. There is no threat at all from pro-coordination skinheads except in the vanishingly unlikely possibility they legally win control of the government and take over.
I admit that this safety is still only relative. It hinges on the skinheads’ inability to convert 51% of the population. But until the Messiah comes to enforce the moral law directly, safety has to hinge on something. The question is whether it should hinge on the ability of the truth to triumph in the marketplace of ideas in the long-term across an entire society, or whether it should hinge on the fact that you can beat me up with a baseball bat right now.
(if you want pre-Messianic absolute safety, there are some super-democratic mechanisms that might help. America’s Bill of Rights seems pretty close to this; anyone wanting to coordinate meanness against a certain religion has to clear not only the 50% bar, but the much higher level required of Constitutional amendments. Visions of more complete protection remain utopian but alluring. For example, in an Archipelago you might well have absolute safety. The skinheads can’t say “Let’s beat up Jews right now”, they can’t even say “Let’s start an anti-Jew political party and gradually win power”. They can, at best, say, “Let’s go found our own society somewhere else without any Jews”, in which case you need say nothing but “don’t let the door hit you on your way out”. In this case their coordination of meanness cannot possibly hurt anyone.)
IV.
I’ve said many times I find the idea of “safe spaces” very attractive. I think they can be understood not just as spaces that are guaranteed safe for one group, but as spaces that have coordinated meanness against anything that threatens that group – ie they’ve agreed to shame, shun, and expel people who violate group norms. Everybody knows the local norms, and if somebody gets kicked out they can’t say they weren’t warned.
This is the principle with which I deal with the blog comments I started off by talking about. Right now people come to this blog with a default expectation that people aren’t going to be mean to them or try to shame them for things, other than the things universally agreed to be shameful in these general circles (like trolling, spamming, and misusing one-tailed t-tests). I want to explicitly reinforce that expectation here.
If you support being meaner in certain ways for the greater good, either as a subculture or as a society, you’re welcome to try to use this blog to advocate for that policy (within reason), but you’re not welcome to enact that policy unilaterally.
So here are two previously implicit SSC rules, made explicit for your edification:
First, you’re allowed to make (polite) arguments for why we should try shaming certain groups, but you are not allowed to directly shame any commenters here.
Second, you’re allowed to (politely) express your philosophical disagreements with the idea of transgender, but you are not allowed to actually misgender transgender commenters here.URGENT: YES Votes Needed For SB 810
Demand a YES Vote
for Single-Payer SB 810 In Tuesday’s
Senate Appropriations Committee Hearing
PLEASE CALL, FAX AND WRITE YOUR SENATOR — BEFORE NEXT TUESDAY!
California’s landmark single payer bill, SB 810, authored by Senator Mark Leno, is now scheduled to be heard in the Senate Appropriations committee on January 17th in Sacramento. The bill must pass this committee and pass a Senate floor vote before the end of January in order to then be considered in the Assembly. Your help is urgently needed to write and call your State Senator and urge him/her to vote for SB 810.
If SB 810 fails to pass Appropriations committee and the Senate floor, it can’t be heard again until it is re-introduced in 2013!
PLEASE TAKE THE FOLLOWING ACTION:
Call AND send a fax AND a written letter (emails don’t usually get through) to your State Senator’s Sacramento office, urging his/her support of SB 810. If you do not know who your Senator is, find your district here.
It is especially important to call and write your Senator if he or she is a member of the Senate Appropriations committee:
District 6 Darrell Steinberg (916) 651-4006 Fax: (916) 323-2263
District 13 Elaine Alquist (916) 651-4013 Fax: (916) 324-0283
District 17 Sharon Runner (916) 651-4017 Fax: (916) 445-4662
District 23 Fran Pavley (916) 651-4023 Fax: (916) 324-4823
District 26 Curren Price (916) 651-4026 Fax: (916) 445-8899
District 28 Ted Lieu (916) 651-4028 Fax: (916) 323-6056
District 33 Mimi Walters (916) 651-4033 Fax: (916) 445-9754
District 37 Bill Emmerson (916) 651-4037 Fax: (916) 327-2187
District 39 Christine Kehoe (916) 651-4039 Fax: (916) 327-2188For Immediate Release
Zero Motorcycles Announces Powerful New 2017 Lineup with World’s First Production Electric Motorcycle to Exceed 200-Mile Range
– Upgraded powertrain delivers more torque than any fuel burning production 1,000cc sport bike with zero routine powertrain maintenance and a 5-year / unlimited mileage battery warranty –
SANTA CRUZ, Calif., (Nov 8, 2016) – Zero Motorcycles, the global leader in electric motorcycle sales and technology, today announced its 2017 model line featuring as much as 19% more torque, up to 11% more power and the world’s first production electric motorcycle to exceed 200 miles on a single charge. Advancements in Zero’s proprietary Z-Force® powertrain include interior permanent magnet (IPM) motors with increased temperature thresholds and higher amperage motor controllers. Combined, they produce greater acceleration throughout the rev range and up to 116 ft-lb of instant torque on Zero SR and Zero DSR models—more than any gasoline-burning production 1,000cc sport bike.
“Zero’s 2017 lineup offers riders more power, versatility and options than ever before,” said Zero Motorcycles CTO Abe Askenazi. “For those interested in the most fun way of efficiently traversing their urban environment, we’ve released the new, lighter, Zero S and Zero DS ZF6.5 models. On the other end of the spectrum, our top of the line Zero SR and Zero DSR now deliver even more thrills with higher levels of asphalt-shredding torque, while still offering penny-per-mile fuel efficiency and no routine powertrain maintenance.”
The new Zero S ZF6.5 street bike and Zero DS ZF6.5 dual sport are ideal for navigating dense urban areas. These economical models feature a compact battery that sheds 95 pounds, offering more nimble handling and additional space for convenient, locking storage. For those seeking longer range, the Zero S and Zero SR ZF13.0 models equipped with the optional Power Tank accessory now exceed 100 miles on the highway and 200 miles in the city (based on standardized SAE J2982 riding range testing), the longest range of any production electric motorcycle.
Zero’s Z-Force® power packs are the most energy and power dense in the EV industry. For 2017, they feature more powerful processors and new engineering innovations in battery architecture that simplify cell interconnectivity, making the batteries even more robust and reliable. The advanced lithium-ion power packs are maintenance free, designed to exceed the life of the motorcycle, and are now backed by a five-year, unlimited mileage warranty.
“Zero is pushing electric motorcycle technology forward with longer range, higher performance and greater value,” said Todd Andersen, Zero’s VP of Marketing, Sales and Aftersales. “At a time when overall motorcycle industry sales are essentially flat, Zero’s growing network of incredible dealers are seeing significant volume growth and are bringing a wide range of new riders to the sport.”
Beyond their latest functional advantages, the Zero S, Zero SR, Zero DS, and Zero DSR models look better than ever. A new high-quality paint application process replaces the previous molded-in color body panels. The paint underwent extensive scratch and fade resistance testing to ensure exceptional durability. Complementing the painted “tank” area is a new locking, weather-resistant storage compartment. The result is added convenience and a premium look and feel.
Zero also announced an exciting new feature to its app for 2017 models. The free mobile app will enable owners to remotely update their motorcycle’s firmware, saving them a trip to the dealer. It can also be used to customize the motorcycle’s performance characteristics, allowing them to set preferences for maximum torque, top speed and regenerative braking.
From the streetfighter style of the Zero S to the dual sport Zero DSR and the hooligan-friendly Zero FX and Zero FXS, Zero offers an electric motorcycle for every two-wheeled lifestyle. All 2017 Zeros come with a one-year membership in the American Motorcyclist Association, the world’s largest organization that advocates the rights of motorcyclists. Membership includes free roadside assistance.
2017 models arrive at authorized US Zero Motorcycles dealers in November 2016. Suggested retail prices range from $8,495 to $15,995. However, US buyers can take advantage of a 10% federal tax credit making the effective price range from $7,645 to $14,395. Additional states offer incentives, such as California’s $900 rebate, that drop the effective prices even lower. The Charge Tank accessory has a suggested retail price of $1,995. The new, higher capacity ZF3.3 Power Tank lists for $2,695. Both options can now be factory installed when the customer places their order.
Detailed specifications and prices are available at: www.zeromotorcycles.com
About Zero Motorcycles
Zero Motorcycles is committed to transforming the motorcycling experience by bringing innovative electric motorcycles to market with exceptional value and performance. Zero is powered by innovation, driven by passion, guided by integrity and measured by results. Through extensive research, insight and experience, Zero combines the art and science of motorcycle development in the design and execution of products that excite consumers and inspire brand loyalty. Zero is determined to remain the preeminent global electric motorcycle company.
Every Zero motorcycle is designed and built in California.
Become a fan of Zero Motorcycles on Facebook, follow Zero Motorcycles on Twitter @ZeroMC and Instagram @ZeroMotorcycles, and find us on YouTube at www.youtube.com/zeromotorcycles.
FOR MEDIA: For more information, contact (831) 325-0273 or media@zeromotorcycles.com. For press information, videos and photos go to www.zeromotorcycles.com/media-center/
For more information on Zero Motorcycles or to learn more about its complete motorcycle line, including the Zero S, Zero SR, Zero DS, Zero DSR, Zero FX, and Zero FXS motorcycles, visit www.zeromotorcycles.com.
View the range of police/authority and military models at www.zeromotorcycles.com/fleet/.Lawmakers are learning to shrug off President Donald Trump’s penchant for embracing and repeating incorrect information — and not apologizing for it — even as his comments rattle the rest of the world.
In Washington, where politicians and their spokespeople often stonewall and mislead, Trump's unconventional information flow once unnerved Capitol Hill leadership, rank-and-file legislators, and even some of the most jaundiced watchers of his campaign. He has repeatedly talked about millions of fraudulent votes and shared questionable tales of voter fraud. He and his aides have made false statements about his inauguration crowd size. He has incorrectly stated the size of his Electoral College victory, and the nation's murder rate, among others, with the presidential seal backing him up.
Story Continued Below
Now, when Trump makes public declarations that aren't true or clash with what his Cabinet secretaries say, Republicans barely look up, aides and members say. Even some Democrats are now trying to assess if pointing out a misstatement will get any traction.
"The president is in danger of people on Capitol Hill simply tuning him out because of the flood of misinformation that comes out of the White House," said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat.
Trent Lott, the Republican former majority leader of the Senate who keeps in close contact with members, said people are "learning to disregard more of the things he says and tweets."
His comments still send shockwaves across the globe. For example, Swedish officials rushed to correct the record when Trump suggested during a Florida rally last weekend that an immigrant-related terrorist attack had happened in Sweden the night before. Days later, officials including Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven were still fixated on the comment, with Lofven mocking Trump’s loose grasp on statistics.
Trump also appeared to muck up a trip his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and his homeland security secretary, John Kelly, took to Mexico to try to repair relations by calling the U.S. deportation plans a “military operation.” Kelly, standing by Mexican officials later in the day, emphatically stated “No — repeat — no use of military force in immigration operations. None.”
But in Washington, most everyone shrugged. GOP aides on Capitol Hill shook their heads at the "military operation" and Sweden comments, with their bosses privately ranging from laughing it off to nonchalant bemusement to frustration over another statement of questionable origin, according to several of them. "What are you supposed to say? Nothing happened in Sweden," one senior GOP aide said.
Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, said past administrations have been quite careful to present a consistent message because they know the president's words greatly matter. "This is not that presidency,” Rozell said. “Now, we wonder: ‘Who do we take seriously? Who speaks for the administration?’ We just have to ask those questions every time now."
But GOP lawmakers are starting to get desensitized, even if they don't like his misstatements. Last week, after saying he was not a fan of the "daily tweets" and the president's off-message fights, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he didn't expect Trump to listen. At an overseas conference last week, Sen. John McCain helpfully encouraged foreign officials to simply follow the president's actions because he said Trump often contradicts himself.
Republicans now prepare for questions with non-answers to deflect and move on. They back-channel with top Trump aides who they trust. For example, they were assuaged soon after his conflicting comments on the timing of repealing the Affordable Care Act that the administration's plan of getting it done this year hasn't changed. After some of his Twitter posts, they have been reassured that it would die down -- or that it didn't matter. White House aides have even shrugged off some of his comments to them, several GOP Capitol Hill sources say.
"He says some crazy shit sometimes," one senior GOP aide said. "We are getting used to handling it."
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
His fact-challenged remarks come from a wide spread of sources - New York friends he talks to late at night on the phone, people he meets at parties and events, television segments he consumes every night, blogs that are printed out and given to him, videos he is shown on his computer, and aides and advisers, who compete for his ear. He is not interested in lengthy briefings or long meetings where issue experts pass along information about the world's problems. He likes to ask questions and soaks it in. "If you're talking to him the most, you can control the information," one longtime adviser said.
"He is a sponge," another longtime friend said. This person said Trump will take information of dubious value and believe it is true "if it conforms with what he already believes." This person said Trump is less likely to believe information if it contrasts with what he thinks, and that some aides feed into his worst impulses by giving him questionable information that meshes with his worldview. He has repeated cable news chyrons word-for-word on Twitter, and repeated dubious broadcast reports, as he did with the claims of the terrorist attack in Sweden.
"That the president regularly sits in the White House and watches television and sees a story that intrigues him and decides to make that executive branch policy is a frightening prospect," Jeffries said.
Still, bashing Trump isn't a useful exercise for Republicans. As one senior GOP aide said, attacking him would hurt their chances to get him to |
This was because when Dortmund’s full-backs received the ball in build-up, they were unable to play back to the centre-backs (with Raffael and Stindl ‘locking them up’), or play inside into a central midfielder because of the aforementioned man-marking. Therefore, the only option was often to hit straight forward passes down the line, which Gladbach’s full-backs did an excellent job of anticipating.
Finding Gundogan
Theoretically, the key for Dortmund was to find Gundogan, the one player without a clear man-marker. Although, as mentioned earlier, Elvedi moved forward from centre-back to close him down, this was often only to a distance of 8-10 metres off Gundogan in anticipation of him receiving the ball, not, crucially, to actively prevent him from receiving the ball.
Sometimes, if Elvedi was occupied by Aubayemang, then left-winger Fabian Johnson would tuck in narrower to be in a position where he could close down Gundogan should he receive the ball.
This still meant, though, that Gundogan was ‘free’, especially relative to how closely his teammates were being marked. This is evident in the scene below.
Therefore, although Gladbach defended well for the most part, It was inevitably that it was through Gundogan that Dortmund took the lead. Burki’s chipped pass allowed the midfielder to get free, and he turned, faced forward and quickly played Reus in behind for a smart finish. It was the exact route to goal Dortmund needed to bypass Gladbach’s first and second pressing lines.Will Mars and the moon will appear the same size on August 27, 2018? Will Mars ever appear as big as the moon, seen from Earth? No to both. This hoax has its roots in a real 15-year cycle of Mars, that’s peaking – giving us an excellent year to observe Mars – in 2018. Although it’s not true, you’re likely to see the claim as an email – or on social media – that Mars will appear as large as a full moon in Earth’s sky on a particular date, often August 27 of any given year. Sometimes there’s a suggestion that Mars and Earth’s moon will appear as a double moon. I’ve also seen the photo above, circulating on Facebook. And that is just not true. It’s not true in 2018. It’s never been true. It never will be true.
Here’s a sample of what the hoax typically says:
SEE MARS AS LARGE AS THE FULL MOON. Should be spectacular! Truly a once in a lifetime experience!
It sounds amazing! Can it possibly be true?
No. It can’t.
Mars can never appear as large as a full moon as seen from Earth. As seen from Earth, in months when Mars does appear side by side with a full moon, Mars’ diameter appears, on average, about 1/140th the diameter of the full moon.
In other words, you’d have to line up 140 planet Mars – side by side – to equal the moon’s diameter.
Earth and Mars had a particularly close opposition on on July 27, 2018. Beginning around July 7, Mars bumped Jupiter out of the second-brightest planet slot; Mars has been the second-brightest planet (after Venus) and will remain so until about September 7, 2018. Mars’ opposition happens whenever we pass between it and the sun in our smaller, faster orbit. Mars was closest to us on July 31, closer than it’s been since 2003! It’s been bright and very reddish! Like a dot of flame.
Thus the Mars-as-big-as-the-moon and double moon rumors are flying!
Ah, Mars. World of dreams and visions. Mars is the world orbiting one step outward from Earth’s orbit. This world is slightly smaller than Earth – but slightly larger than Earth’s moon. Mars is also much much farther away than Earth’s moon. It’s hard to comprehend what little specks the planets and moons are in contrast to the vastness of space, but let me put it this way. Earth’s moon is about a light-second away. Traveling at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/sec), light bouncing from the moon’s surface takes about a second to reach us here on Earth. Meanwhile, light from Mars takes much much longer to reach Earth – from several minutes to about 20 minutes – with the difference being the result of Earth’s and Mars’ motions around the sun. In other words, when Mars is on the same side of the sun as Earth, its distance from us is less than when it’s on the far side of the sun from us.
The moon is much closer than Mars, and that’s why we see the moon as a bright disk in our sky. Meanwhile – to the eye – Mars never appears as anything but a reddish starlike point.
So how did this rumor of Mars-as-big-and-bright-as-the-moon get started? It started with an actual (though much more subtle) event in 2003. On August 27 of that year, Earth and Mars came very slightly closer than they’d been in nearly 60,000 years. Center-to-center, Earth and Mars were less than 35 million miles apart (about 56 million km) – just over three light-minutes apart. The last people to come so close to Mars were Neanderthals. Astronomy writers like me had a field day that year, talking about Mars at its closest. Was it a spectacular sight? Yes!
Was Mars as big and bright as the moon, even at its closest in 2003? Never. But the legend continues …
The 2003 event was part of that 15-year cycle for Mars, mentioned above.
Think of Earth and Mars in orbit around the sun again. Neither Earth nor Mars has a circular orbit. Both worlds have elliptical orbits … like squashed circles.
So both Earth and Mars have a closest point to the sun. Maybe you can see that – when Earth passes between the sun and Mars (opposition) around the time Mars is closest to the sun (perihelion) – Earth and Mars come closest.
The diagram below, used with the kind permission of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, helps show why.
Bottom line: Mars can never appear as large as a full moon in Earth’s sky. The email – or social media – claims to the contrary are a hoax. However, 2018 is an excellent year for Mars. Until early September, this world will appear as the second-brightest starlike object – after Venus – in Earth’s sky.
Read more: Mars brighter in 2018 than since 2003In a testament to the cachet of a BuzzFeed byline, DCist Editor-in-Chief Ben Freed has been dismissed from his position after he placed a freelance piece with the popular news site. Speaking about the matter last night, Freed sounded a bit dazed by the ouster: “I did not think that writing something for BuzzFeed could get me fired,” he said.
Following the news that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would be purchasing The Post for $250 million, BuzzFeed asked Freed if he’d do a piece assessing the impact of the deal on local D.C. news — long a forte of The Post and the sole mission of DCist, a news-and-culture site among the family of “ist” properties owned by Gothamist LLC. “As somebody who ran a local news Web site, I thought I had a pretty good angle on that,” says Freed.
So he got to work. Although his supervisor suggested that the piece sounded like something that would fit nicely at DCist, Freed thought it would have more of a “personal” feel than most posts on the site. Plus, he figured that the exposure on a high-traffic site like BuzzFeed would bring needed publicity to DCist. Whatever the case, Freed didn’t interpret management’s push back as a “firm no.”
After Freed filed his copy, however, he learned what it meant. Yesterday morning, before the story was posted, Freed received an e-mail from Jake Dobkin, publisher and co-founder of Gothamist, instructing him to have BuzzFeed kill the story. BuzzFeed, though willing to spike it, argued that the story provided an interesting angle and that it’d shower attention on DCist, according to Freed.
It ran. Titled “What The Washington Post’s Sale Means For D.C. Journalism,” Freed’s essay lamented that key outlets covering the District and surrounding areas answered to ownership groups spread across the country:
I’m also a transplant to D.C. But it didn’t take long after moving here to realize that in this city that seeks to define itself apart from the grand marble temples it hosts, we care a great deal about who provides our local news. We need our reporters to be invested in our lively streets, evolving neighborhoods, and ridiculous local politics. Everybody wants to hang out at the newest restaurants on 14th Street NW, but it’s a small group that wants to sift through the development contracts, zoning variances, and voluntary agreements that made that $12 cocktail possible. When the Post’s sale to Bezos goes through, very few of those people will be employed by local entities.
The story was published around noon yesterday; by the end of the day, Freed had been fired. “The piece was well received, it wasn’t fabricated, it wasn’t plagiarized,” he says. “It sucks that it ended this way and if it played out again, I’m sure I could have approached the subject differently, or delicately.”
Though many of the folks who supply content to DCist aren’t full-time employees, Freed, as editor-in-chief, is. He earns — actually, earned — a salary in the $40,000 range plus health benefits, vacation and sick leave. (He started as associate editor for DCist in late 2011, moving to the top job in spring 2013). For such commitments, employers in the media world generally expect first option on their reporters’ work. When the Erik Wemple Blog served as editor of the Washington City Paper and now-defunct TBD.com, freelance work received liberal approval, provided that the story in question fulfilled one of two conditions: 1) That it was a terrible idea certain to embarrass whatever paper had commissioned it; 2) That it was on a topic foreign to our editorial mission.
Freed’s piece fails both tests. Any local news operation — including DCist — would have benefited from publishing it.
Freed, 29, says he has a work contract but that as far as he can recall, it makes no mention of freelance rules. Not that it was much of an issue in any case. Though he’d done some freelance work, Freed says that editing DCist “is a full-time job that requires 60 to 70 hours per week on it.”
Though he’d had “disagreements” of one sort or another with management in the past — “maybe needling me over traffic or whatever,” he said — Freed says it was “nothing like this.” One DCist contributor, who declined to put his name to his comments, says that Freed had a knack for rankling the site’s corps of contributors. To which complaint Freed responds: “Yes, I occasionally butted heads with contributors. To the best of my recollection, most of those arguments tended to be related to my editing style, which I’ll admit can probably be a little aggressive at times, and perhaps not what some of DCist’s contributors were used to. It was never personal for me. I was just trying to make the site as good as possible.”
When asked about the developments, Dobkin writes via e-mail, “We thank Ben for his service to DCist over the years. We wish him well!”
Freed: “I loved this job.”Zoltán Kocsis, who has died aged 64 following a long illness, was a member of a distinguished troika of Hungarian pianists – with Dezsö Ránki and András Schiff – who emanated from the late 1960s class of Pál Kadosa at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Schiff, although the youngest of the trio, was the first to embark on an international career, while Kocsis, like Ránki, remained closer to Hungary, engaging fruitfully with his compatriots, provocatively and often courageously towards officialdom. Kocsis’s contribution to the culture of his native country was all the more valuable in that he was not only a pianist and conductor, but also a teacher, arranger, musicologist, composer, record producer and critic.
Underpinning that versatility was a sense of mission: a burning desire to pass on the insights and experience of previous generations. To that end he would proselytise on behalf of, for example, Rachmaninov’s or Bartók’s performances of their own works, even when this approach ran counter to orthodoxy. Thus his interpretations of Bartók (he recorded the complete piano works, both solo and with orchestra, to high acclaim) exemplified his conviction that the “barbarism” traditionally projected in the ubiquitous motor rhythms was too extreme, too mechanical. Kocsis preferred a more flexible and sensitive approach, as had been demonstrated, he maintained, by Bartók himself.
Zoltán Kocsis, pianist and 'giant of music', dies aged 64 Read more
Rubato was indeed a prominent feature of all Kocsis’s playing, whether in his ravishing account of Grieg’s Erotik, in the subtle inflections of Debussy’s Clair de Lune, evoking the preternatural stillness of a moonlit night, or in the transcendental figuration of Liszt’s Les Jeux d’Eaux à la Villa d’Este. The other predominant characteristic of his performances was the pellucid tone, consistently sensuous even in passages of heightened emotion and enhanced by the singing quality he unfailingly brought to melodic lines.
As a conductor, Kocsis achieved prominence as co-founder with Iván Fischer of the Budapest Festival Orchestra in 1983. Remaining as an artistic director until 1997, he helped establish the orchestra as one of the leading world ensembles, with appearances at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Vienna Musikverein, BBC Proms and Salzburg and Lucerne festivals. In 1997 he became music director of the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, nailing his colours to the mast with a performance of Schoenberg’s massive Gurrelieder in his first season. Inventive programming and contemporary repertoire remained features of his orchestral and solo piano programmes: among the composers who wrote works for him was György Kurtág, another of his teachers at the Liszt academy.
Born in Budapest, son of Mária (nee Mátyás) and Ottó Kocsis, Zoltán began his piano studies at the age of five and continued them at the Béla Bartók Conservatory, where he also learned composition. Moving on to the Liszt Academy in 1968, he was still a student when he won the Hungarian Radio Beethoven Competition in 1970. The following year he toured the US, and in 1972 appeared in London and at the Salzburg and Holland festivals. Rapidly establishing a career as an international pianist, he also achieved celebrity status in Hungary, as conductor and teacher as well as pianist. His academic pursuits continued to inform his activities on all fronts: meticulous in his study of texts and sources, he brought a scholarly, inquiring mind to the art of performance. He was appointed to teach at the Liszt academy in 1976.
Dividing his time between playing and conducting, he appeared with leading orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and Royal Concertgebouw, as well as the Hungarian National Philharmonic. He also toured extensively in Europe, America and the Far East.
With his cherubic features, shock of wavy hair and penetrating, often idiosyncratic, readings, he had a charismatic stage presence, and was especially renowned for his exceptional pianistic talents, on account of a series of prizewinning recordings. In addition to the complete Bartók series, he made some acclaimed recordings of Debussy, Rachmaninov, Liszt and Dohnányi. Drawing on his talents as composer and arranger, he made his own version of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, concluding with imaginatively virtuosic figuration.
His transcription of the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which at the climax spills on to multiple staves, deployed virtuosity to project the heights of passion. It is possible to feel that his account of the Liebestod from the same work (this time using Liszt’s version) emphasised passion at the cost of Isolde’s transfiguration; a similar criticism may be levelled at his forceful rather than enraptured Prelude to Lohengrin. Elsewhere, however, his undoubted virtuosity was harnessed to a sensitivity and poetic imagination that made his artistry compelling.
In 1986 he married the pianist Adrienne Hauser. After their divorce, in 1997 he married the pianist Erika Tóth. She survives him, as do their son, Krisztian, also a pianist, and daughter, Viktoria, and his son, Mark, and daughter, Rita, from his first marriage.
• Zoltán Kocsis, pianist and conductor, born 30 May 1952; died 6 November 2016AUGUSTA, Maine — It’s about three weeks from Election Day, but you may just now be hearing about the November ballot question to reform Maine’s program for taxpayer-funded political campaigns.
Question 1 on the ballot aims to fortify the Maine Clean Election Act, a citizen-initiated effort passed by voters in 1996 to stem the influence of private money in state politics.
It allows candidates to run for state office by collecting small-dollar campaign donations to the Maine Clean Election Fund — known as “qualifying contributions” — that make them eligible to receive public money to run campaigns. Once they get it, they can’t raise private money.
The law has been weakened in recent years, but Maine’s system is still one of the most progressive in the nation. Only 13 states provide public campaign financing; of those, just five open it to legislative hopefuls, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
But Maine could take it further this Election Day.
Here’s how:
Question 1, if approved, would increase public spending on elections by eliminating yet-to-be determined corporate tax breaks and regulate campaigns more tightly.
It would raise allocations to the Clean Election system from $4 million to $6 million in each two-year budget period. How to fund that increase would be left to the Maine Legislature.
The proposal also directs legislators to pass a bill that would eliminate “low-performing, unaccountable” corporate tax breaks “with little or no demonstrated economic development benefit” as defined by the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability, the legislative watchdog office that has put forward a proposal to evaluate business tax breaks.
It also would increase penalties for campaign law violations and add new disclosure provisions. Notably, outside groups spending money to advertise for or against candidates would need to disclose their top three donors in any advertisement they place.
This would expand the program and open it back up to gubernatorial candidates.
When the Clean Election law first came into being, it allowed legislative candidates receive “matching funds” that were released when a privately funded opponent would outspend them and offered significant financing for gubernatorial candidates.
Neither is true now. The U.S. Supreme Court deemed matching funds unconstitutional in 2011, and funds for the 2014 gubernatorial race were cut in a budget deal. Funding for gubernatorial candidates is slated to be partially restored by 2018 but not to levels seen in the past.
With these changes, participation in the clean elections program has plummeted: In 2008, 81 percent of Maine legislative candidates were publicly funded but only 53 percent were in 2014.
In addition to this, the U.S. Supreme Court also has opened the floodgates on campaign spending from outside groups in political races across the nation with its landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling in 2010.
As a result, outside spending on legislative races in Maine rose from $600,000 in 2008 to $3.6 million in 2012, according to Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, an advocacy group.
Question 1, if it passes, would replace matching funds by allowing publicly funded candidates to unlock additional money by continuing to gather small seed contributions after they initially qualify for the program. To qualify, House candidates must collect 60 seed contributions, Senate candidates must collect 175 and gubernatorial candidates 3,200.
Here’s how a candidate would unlock added funds: A Senate candidate gets an initial $20,000 for a general election after qualifying for the program. If they collected an additional 45 contributions, they would get $5,000 more. They could only do that eight times, however.
Counting public and seed money, the proposal would limit gubernatorial candidates to a $3.2 million campaign, lifting Senate candidates from about $25,100 to a $65,000 cap and House candidates to $16,500 from about $5,700.
Question 1 proponents have campaigned for months and raised more than $1 million, but opposition is coalescing.
Mainers for Accountable Elections, the main group supporting Question 1, started campaigning in July and raised $1.3 million through September, with three-quarters of that coming from groups and individuals outside of Maine. The Proteus Action League, a liberal group with ties to billionaire George Soros, donated $350,000.
Conservative opponents loosely organized in September under a political action committee called Mainers Against Welfare for Politicians — a term Republican Gov. Paul LePage has used to describe the Clean Election system, which he has tried to defund.
Rep. Joel Stetkis, R-Canaan, a group founder, said it’ll raise just “thousands” to fight Question 1. He said supporters are running a hypocritical big-money campaign that will only give politicians more taxpayer money to send “more junk mail and make more annoying robocalls.”
“I have great faith in the Maine people to see through this and take it upon themselves to share the truth with their neighbors and turn out and vote,” he said.
Lizzy Reinholt, a spokeswoman for Question 1 supporters, called it an opportunity “to elevate the voice of everyday people in our election process.” She said reform is “a consensus issue” and that someone, whether it’s large donors or Maine people, will control elections.
“Question 1 is a way to ensure it’s the people of Maine,” she said.by
VATICAN CITY — It seems in this day and age, Las Vegas will take bets on just about anything; including how many altar boys the new Pope has molested in the past.
Just hours after the white smoke cleared from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel and the new Pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio (pronounced Ber-GOAL-io) was announced, Catholics were already up in arms as Vegas oddsmakers officially set the over/under number of molested altar boys at five. An over/under bet is a wager in which a sportsbook will predict a number for a statistic and bettors wager that the actual number will either be higher or lower than that number. The statistic being wagered on in this case is the number of altar boys oddsmakers believe will be reported by the media in the next 365 days as having previously been molested by the new Pope. Vegas oddsmakers say all wagers have to be placed within two weeks from today to lock in your bet. They say there will be no more bets taken after that.
Vegas oddsmaker Paul Horner explained why the number was set at five. “Five is a good roundabout number. It’s not too many molestations, but not too few,” Horner said. “Comparing the history of other priests and past popes this number sounds just about right.” Horner continued, “I’m predicting the Catholic religion will be dead anyway within 100 years. The only people that care about it now are old people and brainwashed children. It’s only a matter of time before the old people die, and the brainwashed kids actually read the bible. But until that happens, Vegas can reap the benefits of all this nonsense.”
Fappy The Anti-Masturbation Dolphin who was in Las Vegas visiting various schools in the area educating children about the dangers and consequences of masturbation was asked by reporters what he thought about the over/under wager. “I’m not so much concerned about the number of children the new Pope has molested in the past, but rather if he himself has ever masturbated before or not.” Fappy® continued, “It’s one thing to molest an altar boy and ask for forgiveness. But by raping yourself, there is no available forgiveness and you are guaranteed an eternity of hell in the afterlife.”
Michael Ian Black told reporters his whole family had gotten together at his home today and was celebrating the selection of the new Pope. “With all this excitement about electing the new Pope, I almost totally forgot there is no god.”
You can place your molested altar boy over/under wagers with any online sportsbook or at a casino accepting bets of this kind.
###Sold before we could post it! This immaculate 998R is going to a new home after someone committed to the $26k BIN. -MI
In the game of "there's no substitute for cubic inches" the Ducati 998 was a step above that which came before. The last of the 916 lineage, the 998R model was everything that a 916 enthusiast could hope for. More engine, with more torque and power. More suspension and more adjustment. More championships, and unfortunately, more price. Visually, the 998 (as well as the 996 that preceded it) resemble the fabled 916. But the 998 was everything that the 916 strove to be in the initial version. And the 998R? It was even more.
As is Ducati custom, the "R" bikes are something just a bit more special. Ignoring the limited edition numbered plaque on the headstock for a moment, the R bikes have always been equipped with the best of the best - from suspension to brakes. But even more so, the power plant of the R model has been one step ahead of current year Ducatis. The 996R model foreshadowed the 998 in displacement. And the 998R, with a revised bore/stroke combo, a model-specific oil pan, cams, and more, really displaced 999cc. That's right folks - this is really a 999R in Tamburini clothing (for those that prefer it to the Terblance design that followed). From an engine perspective, it is mechanically closer to the 999 than the 996 (and not just numerically). Easily the most recognizable form in the motorcycling world, the 998 utilized the general bodywork, single sided swing arm and high exhaust of the 916 to create a beautiful - and terrifically potent - road missile.
From the seller:
For Sale is my 2002 Ducati 998R, #461 of 700. I have owned the bike since August, 2006. It currently has less than 6600 miles and is in excellent shape. It has always been titled and licensed in California, since new and the current registration (in my name) is good through Jan 2020. It has been stored in a climate controlled garage since I bought it 12 years ago. There is no evidence that it was ever abused or raced. I have many receipts from the previous owners dating back to early 2003. This bike is in very original condition as a street legal model. The paint is beautiful with one noticeable scratch on the lower portion of the fairing. Everything works properly (gauges, lights, controls, horn, etc). It has Marchesini Magnesium wheels with older Pirelli tires. Ohlins suspension front and rear with an Ohlins steering damper. I have added the wiring mod to allow the bike to idle in neutral while on the side stand. Also, a new Yuasa battery (May 2018). It comes with all the additional goodies. I will include the front and rear stands, a factory 998R shop manual, a complete factory tool kit, the 998R owner’s manual, and the factory Plaque of Authenticity.
More from the seller:
The most current service to the bike (June/July, 2018) was performed by Scott Watters, owner of Motoservizio in Signal Hill, Ca. Prior to starting his business in 2002, Scott worked at Ducati dealerships as a factory trained mechanic. He also was a Fast by Ferracci mechanic for Doug Polen (AMA 1994), Vance and Hines mechanic for Thomas Stevens and Anthony Gobert (AMA 1997-98), Doug Polen (FUSA 2000), Dean Mizdal AMA 2001. All were racing Ducati MCs. The recent servicing included:
4 valve service
New cam belts
All fluids fully changed (oil/filter, coolant, fork oil/seals/bushings, and brake fluid)
New air filters
R&R fuel pump, new filter, new hoses, and cleaned tank interior
Clean the headlight shells inside and out Again, the bike is in excellent condition and is ready to be ridden hard or put on display.
The final model in the original 916-based line, the 998R stands out as the pinnacle example of that model. It shares all of its good looks and characteristics with the legend, yet boasts more power and better *erverything* across the line. If you are in it for the collection, this is a must-have bike. If you are in it to ride like Troy Bayliss (but undercover, without the polarizing graphics of the Bayliss Edition), this is still a must-have bike. This is a bike you can ride today and it will still be appreciated by the people you pass. Not bad for a design that reaches so far back; it is really that timeless. Check it out here, and don't wait long. It is not cheap, but we do not see 998Rs of this caliber often. Two more than a 996, 82 more than a 916, and one less than a 999 - you do the math. Good Luck!!
MIGreen Party of New York
http://www.gpny.org/
Contact:
Peter LaVenia chair2@gpny. org, 518-463-8653
Eric Jones, chair@gpny.org, 716-908-5226
The reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws proposed during the NY State budget negotiations is a welcome sign in the abolition of these exceedingly unjust laws, but does not go far enough, according to the New York State Green Party, whose 1998 gubernatorial candidate “Grandpa” Al Lewis was instrumental in helping publicize the Drop the Rock coalition in its early days. The party notes that although the proposed bill restores much judicial discretion in sentencing of drug-related offenses and displays a preference for treatment, it still ignores a good portion of the 12000 nonviolent drug offenders in New York prisons. It also does nothing to recognize that the so-called “War on Drugs” is a failed prohibitionist policy, and that the sensible option is to legalize, tax, and regulate drugs just like alcohol.
“The New York State legislature has a chance to chart a radically new course in U.S. drug policy, which would mean ending the war on drugs and legalizing them, and releasing all non-violent drug offenders in custody. This is recognized by the Green Party and groups as diverse as NORML and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Instead it has decided to propose changes in sentencing procedures, which will do nothing to end the phony ‘war.’ This is an example of the Legislature and Governor Paterson patting themselves on the back for policies that are still badly misguided,” said Gloria Mattera, secretary of the New York State Green Party.
“The proposals for which our legislators are lauding themselves would still oblige judges to impose jail terms on broad categories of non-violent offenders without any option of diverting them to treatment instead. Although estimates by the Correctional Association of NY show that up to 55% of current non-violent drug offenders might have been spared jail time with the reforms, that leaves at least 45% who would still be sent to prison. The Legislature and the Governor can do better than this,” said Alice Green, executive director of the Center for Law and Justice in Albany, NY. “The ‘war on drugs’ disproportionately affects people of color. It’s a fair assessment to say that the Rockefeller Drug Laws – all drug laws – are laws that contribute to the racism still endemic in our society. Black men are incarcerated at rates 6 times higher than whites, and Latino men 2 times higher than whites. Drug laws and enforcement targeting minority neighborhoods have led to this situation, and it’s far past time to end it.”
“Additionally, in this time of fiscal crisis, New York could use the tax revenue that legalized and state-regulated drugs would bring. Why aren’t the Democrats in the Legislature bringing up a bill like California Legislator Tony Ammiano’s, which would legalize and tax marijuana sales? Not only would legalization help alleviate New York’s fiscal crisis, but ending arrests of nonviolent offenders and releasing those already imprisoned would be a blow at the phony moralism of the ‘War on Drugs.’ In a year where the governor proposed a tax on non-diet sodas and the Bottle Bill is set to pass, why not help New Yorkers shoulder the fiscal crisis by measures which simultaneously unburden them of unjust laws?” said David Doonan, the mayor of Greenwich, NY.In what will surely be the hottest promotion in the history of the franchise, the Albuquerque Isotopes will embrace one of the most special things about being a New Mexican. With respect to one of the iconic culinary customs of New Mexico, on June 16, for one night only, the Albuquerque Isotopes will become the Albuquerque Green Chile Cheeseburgers.
Isotopes Park will be decked out in a Green Chile Cheeseburger theme that night, with green chile cheeseburger sliders being served throughout the ballpark's concession stands. Green chiles will be roasted on the concourse, as "The Lab" will also be transformed into "The Grill."
Food-related promotions have been popular throughout Minor League Baseball over the past few seasons, many celebrating a unique item in their community. The visiting Fresno Grizzlies will be in town for the matchup and will don their Fresno Tacos jerseys. The result will be the biggest food fight Minor League Baseball has ever seen as the Tacos will battle the Green Chile Cheeseburgers.
"We wanted to embark on a journey that would be all about what New Mexico is all about," said Isotopes General Manager John Traub. "This is something our fans can really sink their teeth into. After all, we are what we eat."
Special Green Chile Cheeseburgers merchandise is now on sale at the Isotopes Park Pro Shop. Fans can purchase replica jerseys, on-field hats, t-shirts and much more.
An interactive website, www.BringingTheHeatABQ.com will launch within the next few days and feature unique social media polls relating to all things Green Chile Cheeseburgers. The website will also feature links to purchase team merchandise and much more.On November 4, the Metropolitan Police Department's organized-crime unit 5th division arrested 27-year-old actress Ai Takabe for cocaine use in Tokyo. As reported, she was already arrested for possession of the drug on October 15, and her urine test after the arrest showed a positive reaction to it.
Takabe voiced in four TV anime series: as Fumi Manjoume in Aoi Hana (2009), Maiko in Hourou Musuko (2011), SP in Sacred Seven (2011), and Agiri Goshiki in Kill Me Baby (2012). After her arrest, at least three Japanese streaming sites: Amazon Video, Nico Nico Douga and Bandai Channel stopped selling three of them: Aoi Hana, Hourou Musuko and Kill Me Baby.
In addition, Fuji TV has decided to postpone the broadcast of its upcoming TV drama special Ouoku she appeared in till the adjudication of the case in court. The jidaigeki drama is starring Ryoko Yonekura
and was originally produced as the station's New Year special program. She has also joined TV Asahi's
ongoing TV drama Samurai Sensei based on Esusuke Kuroe's comedy manga series, starring Kanjani
Eight member Ryo Nishikido. All of her appearance scenes were deleted from the drama. Her agency
Oscar Promotion has already cancelled a management contract with her.
Source: Yomiuri, Weekly Jyosei Prime, Sports Nippon,
Related:
"Aoi Hana," "Kill Me Baby" Voice Actress Ai Takabe Arrested for Possession of Cocaine
Japanese Streaming Sites Stop Selling "Aoi Hana," "Hourou Musuko," "Kill Me Baby"
Ai TakabeBundled against the chill of a dewy morning, we settled on the lower slopes of Mauna Loa volcano, a landscape interrupted on Hawaii’s Big Island. Around us was a forest that had grown up over a centuries-old flow, but for half a mile in either direction were cindery stretches of bare lava from more recent events. In the greens and grays of the woods, little molten explosions brightened the ohi’a trees, whose brilliant red blossoms feed several species of endemic Hawaiian honeycreepers, small nectar-feeding forest birds.
Even before we’d spotted a single bird, we knew that we were in the right place, thanks to the ear of Jack Jeffrey, a former biologist with the State of Hawaii who now guides birding and photography tours. Just a few minutes from the parking lot of the Puu O’o Trail, he began identifying call after call. There were twittery trills, raspy kazoo blasts and what could have been R2-D2 chirps and beeps straight off the “Star Wars” soundtrack.
Hawaii: How to get there, where to stay, where to eat, what to do
(Gene Thorp/The Washington Post)
Jeffrey explained that recent research has traced the ancestry of nearly 60 species of nectar-loving Hawaiian honeycreepers back to a flock of finches from Asia that arrived nearly 6 million years ago (even before all the islands had formed). Of those 60 species, only 18 remain today. The honeycreepers, along with many other native animals and plants, have suffered pressures from development and from introduced predators and diseases. With so many unique species facing extinction, Hawaii is often described as the endangered species capital of the world.
Photographer Kim Hubbard and I spent eight days in Hawaii in December, mixing birding on Oahu and the Big Island with other sight |
I'd add? Many digital tools are helping to mitigate that harm.
About half of Americans are introverts, Cain says. These are people who have a superb ability to focus but work best alone and become drained by too much enforced socializing. Yet the US workplace has evolved in complete opposition to their needs. Private office space has shrunk dramatically: 30 years ago, companies averaged more than 500 square feet per employee; today it's less than 200. Meanwhile, corporations have pushed employees to work in face-to-face teams, marching them endlessly into conference rooms for brainstorms.
"There's such a stigma against introversion," Cain says. "To reveal that you're an introvert puts you in a bad light."
Yet this incessant teamwork isn't useful. A mountain of studies has shown that face-to-face brainstorming and teamwork often lead to inferior decisionmaking. That's because social dynamics lead groups astray; they coalesce around the loudest extrovert's most confidently asserted idea, no matter how daft it might be.
What works better? "Virtual" collaboration—with team members cogitating on solutions alone, in private, before getting together to talk them over. As Cain discovered, researchers have found that groups working in this fashion generate better ideas and solve problems more adroitly. To really get the best out of people, have them work alone first, then network later.
Sounds like the way people collaborate on the Internet, doesn't it?
Indeed it is—and as I've noticed, my introvert friends love it. Sure, the digital era has uncorked a fire hose of interaction, but it's mostly asynchronous. With texting, chat, status updates, comment threads, and email, you hash over ideas and thoughts with a pause between each utterance, giving crucial time for reflection. Plus, you can do so in private.
"This is precisely what brings out the best in introverts," Cain agrees. It's why someone like Kawasaki thrives online. And it's how the epic collaborations of the digital age—like Linux and Wikipedia—function: with a constellation of folks, many of whom probably peg the needle on the Introvert-O-Meter, working intimately but remotely.
Granted, not all online tools are good for introverts. As Cain says, research shows that Facebook's endless friend-collecting is more appealing to extroverts than introverts.
But overall the irony here is pretty gorgeous. It suggests we've been thinking about the social web the wrong way. We generally assume that it has unleashed an unruly explosion of disclosure, a constant high school of blather. But what it has really done is made our culture more introverted—and productively so.
Now if we could just get some doors on those cubicles.
Email: (clive@clivethompson.net).GETTY The EU faces an uphill struggle to restore its popularity
An excoriating set of polling data lifts the lid on massive public dissatisfaction with Brussels across the continent and demonstrates the monumental task the bloc faces to save itself from oblivion. The divide between how the haves and the have-nots view the Union is utterly cavernous, with just a third of ordinary working people saying it is a good thing compared to nearly three quarters of the political and economic elite. Eurocrats have been growing more and more confident that they have weathered the populist storm in recent months following election routs of Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.
But a damning survey by the respected Chatham House think tank, carried out across 10 EU countries, paints a starkly different picture of how ordinary Europeans see the project. It shows that, whilst other EU countries may not yet be ready to follow the UK out of the exit door, many of their citizens feel exactly the same anger and frustration towards Brussels as their British counterparts. Just 34 per cent of ordinary people asked by researchers said they had “benefitted” from the EU - a shockingly low number which should be cause for serious concern for eurocrats.
In contrast 71 per cent of what pollsters called the “elite” - establishment figures such as politicians, economists and journalists - thought the European project had been good for them. But perhaps most damningly of all for eurocrats an astonishing 54 per cent of respondents across 10 countries feel that their homeland was a better place to live 20 years ago than now. That figure includes more than half of Hungarians - whose country wasn’t even in the project two decades ago - and an astonishing 74 per cent of Italians who have suffered years of punishing austerity. Only in Spain, Britain and Poland do more than half of people believe life is better now than it was in 1997 - and even in those three countries the majority is slim.
Only 34% of the public feel they have benefited from the EU Chatham House survey
The extensive survey also shows how eurocrats’ attempts to foster a “European identity” through EU citizenship programmes has utterly failed, with most people still identifying by their country of birth. In all but one of the countries people said they were significantly more proud of their national identity than their “European” one despite decades of effort on the part of some euro elites to break down the former. The only silver lining for Brussels is that there is a “reservoir of support” amongst the European public for a project boosting cooperation and friendly relations between the continent’s countries. But it is clear from the data that the disconnect between the form eurocrats think this should take, through ever-closer political union, and what ordinary people want is cavernous. The Chatham House report notes: “The data reveal a continent split along three lines. First, there is a divide between elites and the public. “There is alignment between the two groups in their attitudes to, among other things, EU solidarity, EU democracy and a sense of European identity.”
RISE of Europe's far right Tue, March 14, 2017 Who's who of far-right politics in Europe as parties ride a wave of success on anti-immigration, nationalist and eurosceptic policies Play slideshow REUTERS 1 of 8 Geert Wilders wants to 'de-Islamicise' the Netherlands, hopes clashes between Turkish-Dutch protesters and the police, along with Ankara's accusations of Dutch 'fascism', will help bolster his chances of finishing firstThe Reno City Council has approved a 10-year agreement with a group of investors in the hopes of bringing a minor league hockey team to the Biggest Little City by Oct. 2018.
City council members voted 6-1 on a term sheet that would have city staff negotiate with the Reno Puck Club, which wants to bring an ECHL hockey team to the Reno Events Center.
The group is pushing to take over operations of the Reno Events Center for 10 years and invest $5.7 million to install an ice skating rink and make other upgrades to the venue.
They would also try to bring other ice skating events to the venue, including hockey tournaments and themed ice performances to the venue.
, which currently operates the venue.
is a non-binding draft, and it would not allow staff to use general fund dollars on the project. Instead, it proposes Reno and the RSCVA each spend $2.5 million over separate 5-year periods to reimburse the ice rink improvements. The city would take its portion from the $2 Capital Projects Surcharge Fund.
Under the term sheet, Reno Puck Club would have to have plans for an ice rink and the license for an ECHL franchise by May 30, 2017. The agreement would last through 2027, and the Puck Club would be responsible for all operating expenses.
Would you like to see a minor league hockey team in Reno?"What's at stake?" someone once asked me when I explained my social anxiety about inadvertently saying the wrong thing to a stranger at a party.
"This person, who I will likely never see again, will go on in life thinking that I'm an asshole," I responded. "That shouldn't bother me, but it does."
Fear, as it turns out, isn't always a logical response.
This is especially the case with Kojima Productions' "interactive teaser" P.T. We all know by now that P.T. is a viral marketing project to announce Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro's upcoming Silent Hill game, but its real surprise is how it manages to be possibly the scariest game I've played without relying on the usual tropes of horror game design.
Daringly, the entire game is set in one tiny L-shaped hallway with a minuscule bathroom hanging off to the side. Exit the corridor and you're booted back to its entrance. That's it. Worst case scenario, there's not much ground to retread.
Furthermore, I'm not sure if P.T. even has a fail state. I think I suffered a game over or two, but these might have been scripted parts of the story. Even after completing it I'm not sure if those so-called deaths actually happened to my character in their final timeline, or if they were untimely ends that were merely rewritten, the way game overs usually operate in our medium.
But that's the point, I reckon. It's never clear what, if anything, in P.T. is real. Welcome to Silent Hill(s).
That's part of what makes P.T. so fascinating. It doesn't matter what's real. Typically video games scare us by putting our progress at risk. Pluck away at Demon's Souls' Tower of Latria nightmare prison and your palms will sweat as you risk forfeiting your last 45 minutes of progress. That's a real consequence. That's danger. P.T.'s minuscule scale and generous autosave system ensures that you're putting nothing at risk. Shockingly, this doesn't ease the tension nearly as much as you might expect.
Instead of holding your progress hostage, P.T. relies on a much more old-fashioned method of horror: its sound effects, visual design, choreography, and difficult to decipher enemy placements. The peculiar lighting, the seemingly random placement of monsters that appear and disappear based on where you're looking, the deeply unnatural sounds of howling winds, baby cries, and radio static instil a profound feeling of dread, even though you know you're just sitting on a couch flicking a couple of analogue sticks with nothing to lose (besides your bowel control, as is Kojima's aim).
Kojima and company are almost supernaturally skilled in how it places players in a mindset where such low-risk terrors suddenly become the most important thing in the world..
That's because its claustrophobic, repetitive environment practically hypnotises you into a state of vulnerability. Escape the Room games tend to catch you off guard like that. Their cramped quarters suggest they should be easy to suss out with their solutions laying within spitting distance. Then, when you get stuck, you start going mildly insane as you're sure you've done everything. The beauty of P.T. is that sometimes you have. Sometimes the solution is as simple as walking forward, but you're so trained to believe that every cigarette butt or paper scrap could hold the key to getting out of this maddening space. Then, when you look at an object you've seen countless times before but this time something happens, it throws you off guard.
It's a f****** wall, it's a f****** wall, it's a f****** wall!
It's worth noting that P.T.'s puzzles, on their own, wouldn't be particularly memorable. Some are clever, some are overly obscure, and others are banal pixel hunts. But in a sense, it doesn't actually matter if they're that good. What matters is that they're deeply uncomfortable to deal with given the circumstances. They occupy your time, your attention, and give you reason to trot around maddeningly scrutinising every detail in the scenery. Stripped of the foreboding atmosphere, there'd be little of P.T. to recommend, but the puzzles don't exist in a vacuum and their frustrating nature blends effortlessly with the game's overall theme of cyclical mental anguish.
I'm reminded of a scene in P.T. (!) Anderson's The Master where a cult leader coaxes an impressionable, mentally challenged man into closing his eyes and walking back and forth for hours as he compares the feel of a glass window on his palms to the wooden wall across the way. After a while this sensory deprivation and repetition gets to the man until the window, the wall, and the ground beneath his feet become his entire world.
Viral campaigns are nothing new to marketing. We saw this sort of thing 13 years ago in the campaign for Steven Spielberg's sci-fi film A.I. But typically they're compiled of so much obscure information that they're not much fun on one's own and only take on a life of their own when tackled as a collaborative process. P.T. isn't like that (which probably explains why its great secret was cracked so quickly). It's feasible to solve on one's lonesome, but challenging enough that you'll probably resort to some sort of hints (confession: I did). Whether you solved P.T.'s mysteries on your own or with help isn't terribly important, however. As long as you at least put in a solid effort to unravel P.T. you're more than likely going to have a great, awful, terrifying, aggravating, and darkly comic experience.
P.T.'s biggest surprise isn't that Hideo Kojima is making a Silent Hill game. It's that it's one of the medium's most unique horror experiences in its own right.A photograph of the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory superintendent, in Marietta, Georgia, was sold for $3,125 at an auction.
The warm-toned photograph on postcard stock includes a pencilled caption on the back by an unidentified hand with the words: “Hanging of Leo Frank.” It sold at Sotheby’s on Wednesday.
The seller of the postcard, a private New York collector, said he bought the postcard years ago. After realizing that he was never going to display the photo in his house (“too gruesome,” he said) and that there probably wasn’t much of a venue for showcasing it, he decided to put it on the block
He approached all the major auction houses, but they declined the offer. “The subject matter was too controversial,” he said.
Read more at The Forward
Leo Frank Forverts
The governor of Georgia commuted Frank's death sentence the day before he was to be hanged. APSchool absence rates are getting worse, Ministry of Education figures reveal.
Photo: Supplied / 123rf
The ministry says the number of students regularly attending school fell from nearly 70 percent in Term 2, 2015 to 67 percentin the same period last year. Only 55 percent of Maori students were regularly showing up and 57 percent of Pacific students.
The ministry defined regular attendance as being at school 90 percent of the time, so the figures include all reason for absence, including truancy and illness.
Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin said she would be asking officials about it and said the government needed to figure out what was going wrong.
"We have to try and ask the question, not only is the Attendance Service working, but are these children not coming to school because they don't have the transport money?
"Are these children not coming to school because for whatever reason they don't have lunch that day so their parents are keeping them at home? What are the reasons that they're not coming to school?"
Photo: 123RF
While Mrs Martin said the figures were atrocious she was not surprised by them. She said changes National made to the Attendance Service meant that in her community the excellent local truancy officer was removed.
"So if we had a student not show up at school we would have that lady, we would let her know, and she would instantly go around to the house.
"She would also be driving through our towns and so she would see a student and she would stop and say - 'do you have a permission slip from school?'
"When the Attendance Services were changed under the National government, our contract was actually given to an organisation over in West Auckland and it took three to five pieces of paper and it took days for people to show up - so they gave up."
National Party education spokesperson Nikki Kaye said Mrs Martin would soon realise there was no easy fix.
"Once the minister has had the opportunity to look more into the portfolio what she will see is under successive governments the bigger issue is a group of young people who have come from certain communities and are not turning up at school.
"And the primary reason for that is not the provider, it is the fact that they are in social deprivation," Ms Kaye said.
ACT Party leader David Seymour said the attendance figures were a disgrace.
"There's a group of students who not only are not passing, 40 percent of the time they're not even attending.
"And I think we've given the new government a real challenge because if it is not charter schools what is their alternative to these frankly disgraceful statistics for what is supposed to be a modern egalitarian democracy?"
Mr Seymour wants tougher financial penalties for the parents of truant students and has called for the fines to be increased from $15 to $50 a day.House and Senate negotiators dropped an effort to force women to sign up for the traditionally all-male draft Tuesday evening.
Republicans stepped in and killed the provision from the final version of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), though men from the ages of 18-26 are still required to sign up for Selective Service.
A Senate version of the NDAA would have mandated that women sign up for the draft within 30 days of turning 18. This order would have kicked in on January 2018.
The push to make the draft requirement apply to women came after Secretary of Defense Ash Carter opened all combat roles to women in December 2015. Prior to that point, the rationale behind giving women an exemption from the draft was they weren’t able to serve in combat roles.
That’s all changed now. And since that time, various military leaders have come forward in support of the proposal to expand the draft sign-up to include women, even though in general they oppose the idea of activating the draft, preferring a voluntarily manned military instead. The U.S. has not called for a draft since 1973 during the Vietnam War.
Although the final NDAA no longer includes this provision, what it does feature is a call for a full review of the Selective Service System, in order to see whether the idea of a draft even makes sense anymore. This proposal is similar to the one proposed by GOP Sen. Ben Sasse in June.
Sasse, who argued against the entanglement of culture war issues with national security, applauded the decision to remove the draft language.
“Defense bills are common in Washington but, this year, the big story is that both sides will put national security ahead of unnecessary culture-warring,” Sasse said in a statement. “This is a victory for common sense. It’s encouraging to see Congress do its work instead of jumping into a fight about drafting our mothers, sisters, and daughters when the military isn’t demanding an end to our all-volunteer fighting-force. Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree that keeping our defenses strong is more important than needlessly scoring points on divisive issues.”
The Selective Service System costs around $23 million a year.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.Today Kraken is launching support for trading Monero (XMR). Monero is one of the leading cryptocurrencies that has seen huge 40x market cap growth in 2016 and trades with high volume and liquidity. Monero is built on the core principles of privacy, decentralization, open development, scaleability, and fungibility.
You can learn more on the official Monero site and check out the introductory video below.
Which XMR trading pairs are available at launch?
XMR/XBT, XMR/EUR, XMR/USD
Margin: Coming soon – stay tuned for details!
How do I fund my account with XMR?
To deposit your XMR go to Funding > Deposit > XMR and generate a deposit address. Then send your XMR deposit to this deposit address. 15 confirmations are required before the funds are available in your account balance for trading. Kraken utilizes integrated addresses which have the payment ID embedded in the address, so you don’t need to specify a separate payment ID for your deposit.
What about the hard fork at block 1220516?
There is a hard fork planned for block 1220516, estimated for January 9th or 10th (an upgrade to enable RingCT transactions). Note that you should upgrade to Monero v0.10.1 before the hard fork. The hard fork is expected to go smoothly, but there may be significant price volatility around the event presenting opportunity for traders. Kraken XMR deposits will go offline shortly before the fork and remain offline for several hours after the fork.
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FacebookCenter snapped the ball on 988 of 996 offensive plays last season
Buffs center Alex Kelley is on the preseason Rimington Award watch list for the award given for the nation's top center. ( Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer )
When Colorado center Alex Kelley was in the fifth grade, he wrote a paper in school about some of the goals he hoped to achieve in his life.
Two goals right at the top of the list were playing center for the Colorado Buffaloes, his father's alma mater, and playing center for the Denver Broncos.
Attention John Elway: You might want to keep an eye on this guy.
"I can honestly still say my goals back in the fifth grade, I can still achieve them," Kelley said.
Kelley is a fourth-year junior heading into his second season as the starter in the middle of the Buffs' offensive line. A year ago, he was the young guy being mentored by senior guards Daniel Munyer and Kaiwi Crabb. He tied for the team lead in playing time, snapping the ball on 988 of the 996 plays the CU offense ran.
CU averaged more than four yards per rush (4.11) for the first time since 2006 in Alex Kelley's first full season at center last season. (Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer)
He gave up only one sack and seven quarterback pressures all season and graded out in a positive fashion 87 percent of the time. His performance earned him a spot on the preseason Rimington Award watch list for 2015. The award is given annually to the nation's top center.
"He's doing a good job," offensive line coach Gary Bernardi said. "He's a pretty smart football player. He's pretty perceptive. He's done a good job.
"He's always got a good comment. He's a pretty delightful kid really."
Kelley credits Munyer and Crabb for teaching him the tricks of the trade and helping him raise his level of play as his first year as a starter went along. Now he's in their shoes trying to help their replacements. Sophomore Gerrad Kough appears well on his way to earning the starting job at left guard and junior Shane Callahan and sophomore Jonathan Huckins are battling for the starting job at right guard.
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"I always say I love playing center because I love telling people what to do," Kelley said. "It just comes natural to me. I love it."
Kelley is one of the better follows on Twitter among all the Buffs. Here is one example from Aug. 9:
"I'd really like to know Gods thought process when he was making wasps. Like what the (heck) God... #IJustGotStung"
Kelley said his father might be the only one more happy about how far he has come and the position he worked himself into at CU. He said there were times during games last season when he was able to look up into the stands and pick out his dad because Karry Kelley was jumping up and down. His father lettered three times at CU playing tackle (1976-79).
"My dad is living the dream himself," Kelley said. "Every time he gets a chance to brag to his friends or a stranger on the sidewalk, he does. He just loves everything about it."
Kelley will undoubtedly be a key component to whatever improvement the Buffs are able to achieve this season. CU players are hoping for a bowl game and the first winning season since 2005. Coaches believe the CU offense will have to improve in the running game once again this fall to help make that happen.
CU averaged more than four yards per rush (4.11) for the first time since 2006 in Kelley's first full season at center. He says he comes to practice each day during fall camp with a goal. If he achieves it, he moves on to another one but makes a point to maintain whatever success he has achieved in other areas.
It's rare that Kelley is caught without a smile.
"I feel like I'm one of the most blessed people in the world and I want to share that blessing upon others," he said. "I grew up wanting to be a Buff and play center for the Buffs and here I am. I'm starting and I'm just living the life."
Kyle Ringo: ringok@dailycamera.com, on Twitter: @kyleringoThis is a study of contrast between two of the more "successful" states of India.
Gujarat is highly industrialised; Kerala hardly so. Gujarat has attracted high levels Foreign Direct Investments (FDI); Kerala has been far less successful in this front. Gujarat has been politically "right wing"; Kerala just the opposite -- with powerful labour unions and grass roots political activism influencing public policy.
Given these differences in political and social ethos, how have the two states fared since Independence?
Economic Indicators Kerala Gujarat All India Per capita net state domestic product (SDP) in Rs (2004-05) 27,048 28,355 23,222 Percentage share in total FDI approved (1991-03) 0.53 6.47 NA Average annual growth of state domestic product in per cent (1993-94 to 2003-04) 5 5.7 5.6* Per capita SDP in per cent (1993-94 to 2003-04) 4.1 3.6 3.8* Percentage of population below poverty line (1999-00) 12.72 14.07 26.1 Range of min wages for unskilled workers in Rs (2005) 72-189 50-99 61-115 Job-seekers registered with employment exchanges in thousands (2003) 3635.1 998.1 41388.7 Percentage employment share (public/private, 2001-02) 52.8/47.2 53.6/46.4 69.0/31.0 Percentage of urban population (2001) 25.96 37.3 27.81 How Women-Friendly? Kerala Gujarat All India No. of females per 1,000 males (’01 census) 1058 920 933 Juvenile (0-6) sex ratio (2001) 963 878 927 Mean age for marriage (2004) 22.9 20.5 20.4 Female literacy rate (2001) 87.7 57.8 53.7 Currently married women who usually participate in household decisions in per cent 62.5 56.7 52.5 Women who have experienced spousal violence in per cent 16.4 27.6 37.2 Percentage of women with more than 10 years of education 49 24 22 Percentage of women’s employment to total employment (2003) 39.3 12.7 18.1* Media, Roads, Slum and Voting Kerala Gujarat All India Percentage with regular exposure to media (TV, radio, newspaper at least once a week) 97 84 80 Percentage of slum population to total urban population (2001) 0.8 9.9 15 Teledensity per 100 persons (May 2007) 35.1 25.5 19.3 Total road length (km) per 100 sq km (2002) 386.8 70.2 74.7 Voting percentage (2004 elections) 71.45 45.2 58.1 Health Kerala Gujarat All India Life expectancy at birth (1999-2003, M/F) 70.9/76 62.5/64.6 61.8/63.5 Number of infant deaths per 1,000 live births in the last five years 15 50 57 Institutional deliveries in the last three years in per cent 100 55 41 Mothers who had at least three antenatal care visits for their last birth in per cent 93.9 64.9 50.7 Vaccination coverage in per cent 75 45 44 Children age 6-35 months who are anaemic in per cent 55.7 80.1 79.2 Population served per government hospital bed 1,172 1,544 2,257 Children under 3 who are underweight in per cent 29 47 46 Per capita expenditure on health in Rs (2001-02) 1,858 816 997 Well-Being/Prosperity Kerala Gujarat All India Percentage of households that: Have a television 67.7 53.8 44.2 Have a motorised vehicle 24.7 30.2 18.6 Live in a pucca house 84.1 56.4 41.4 Have access to a toilet facility 96 54.6 44.5 Use piped drinking water 24.6 72.7 42 Have electricity 91 89.3 67.9 Education Kerala Gujarat Literacy rate (2001 census) 90.9 69.1 Percentage of schools with one teacher 0.1 5.7 No. of students for each teacher 26 36 Transition rate from primary to upper primary in per cent 86.6 82.7 Average classrooms in each school 10.5 4.8 Average number of instructional days 181 210 Percentage who go on to Grade V 108.5 78.9 Net primary enrolment ratio 64.1 75.9 Dropouts (Grade I-V) in per cent 5.8 2.2
Source: Outlook India dated 16 July 2007
[http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20070716&fname=HThe+Stats&sid=1]It is ''pretty bloody hot'' on Harry and Nicola Bussell's property - 50.8 degrees, in fact. It is a new high for the stunning sheep farm nestled at the foot of the Victorian alps in Carboor.
Despite the record - and Victoria's second significant heatwave in five years - the Bussells are sceptical humans are changing the temperature or climate.
Emergency call-out: After the temperature hit 50.8 degrees, Harry Bussell resorted to a novel method to cool down his wife Nicola and children Emily, 2, Jack, 8, and Sophie, 6. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer
''I am definitely not convinced,'' Mr Bussell said this week. ''The climate is changing all the time. It's been changing for millions of years.''
Ms Bussell said for her debate over whether the planet is warming was not helpful. She said qualified people sat on both sides, and it was arguable Australia could do anything about it at any rate. She said helping farmers manage the variable climate they have always faced would be more useful.A new study suggests that the high number of early deaths in is mainly due to people drinking too much alcohol, especially vodka.
The study says that 25 percent of Russian men die before they are 55, and most of the deaths are down to alcohol. The comparable figure is 7 percent.
Causes of death include liver disease and alcohol poisoning. Many also die in accidents or after getting into fights.
The study is thought to be the largest of its kind in the country.
Researchers from the Russian Centre in Moscow, Oxford University in the and the Health Organization International Agency for Research on Cancer, in France, tracked the drinking patterns of 151,000 adults in three Russian cities over up to 10 years.
During that time, 8,000 of them died. The researchers also drew on previous studies in which families of 49,000 people who had died were asked about their loved ones' drinking habits.
Study co-author Prof Sir Richard Peto, from the University of Oxford, said that Russian death rates have fluctuated wildly over the last 30 years as alcohol restrictions and social stability varied under Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin, and the main thing driving these wild fluctuations in death was vodka.
Most drinkers were smokers as well which researchers say "aggravated" the death rates.
The study is published in The Lancet.MARK HALPERIN (CO-HOST): Everyone has their own opinion -- conservatives have been trying to discredit Machado by digging up stories from her past in Venezuela involving a boyfriend, a shooting, and claims that she threatened a judge. Rush Limbaugh today called her a porn-star alluding to a report that she may have appeared in an adult film. The drive-by media, as Limbaugh calls our ilk, have for the most part been giving this story plenty of airtime for the last forty-eight hours. Fox News however, is a different story. They don't report on this one so you can't really decide. Yes, the fair and balanced network this story last night, but today, they couldn't seem to find the time even as other TV outlets led with it. Fox did somehow find time to cover these important stories.
[...]
HALPERIN: Alright there were a few rare instances in which Machado did come up on Fox today, but it was quickly smothered. Watch for instance what happened on Fox & Friends when a focus group with five mothers talking about Monday's debate. The host, Ainsley Earhardt, did not bring up Machado, but when a woman in the focus group did she was immediately cut off.
[...]
JOHN HEILEMANN: One of the things that is true about a lot of Republican politicians, in particular Republican presidential nominees, is that eventually, they start, as the campaign gets longer and longer, for a variety of reasons they get sucked into the conservative media cocoon and they stop talking to anybody outside that cocoon. It is understandable. You want the praise, you do not the criticism. You want the easy questions, not the hard questions. But it is not to your political benefit to do that. And in this case, I think if Donald Trump is just looking at Fox News and reading Breitbart, and looking at conservative blogs he does not understand what kind of resonance this story is having out in the real world and it may be lulling him into thinking, "Hey, this is no big deal,” when it's a big deal.From 13 April 2017, all Australian telecommunication providers are required to collect your metadata and provide it to your Government. Many interactions we have in the digital world are being collected and stored by our communications providers, all without adequate safeguards. This program requires no warrants, has very little oversight and has received condemnation from human rights experts worldwide.
That’s why we’re declared this Thursday as a national day of action – we’re calling upon Australian citizens to educate themselves about the scale of this surveillance and take precautions accordingly. If the government wants to surveil its citizens, then we’ll do everything in our power to equip people to circumvent that surveillance.
We declare Thursday 13 April to be National Get A VPN Day.
It’s time to protect yourself. It’s time to get a VPN.
Step 1: know what a VPN is and why you need one
A Virtual Private Network (VPN), is a service that encrypts the traffic going to and from your computer. Under normal circumstances, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can witness, collect and store all of this traffic as it passes through their servers. By using a VPN, your ISP only sees one source of traffic – the VPN. Since the mandatory data retention scheme relies on your ISP handing over this data to the government, you can stop this happening even before it begins.
Put simply, a VPN is a paid service for funnelling your digital life through a handy opaque pipe, free from the prying eyes of your government.
For more information, have a read of this overview from LifeHacker or this from Wired.
Step 2: find yourself a good VPN
As with any service provider, it’s hard to figure out which is the best one for you. And we’re not in the business of necessarily endorsing any one brand. But what we can do is point you in the right direction.
When choosing a VPN provider, it’s important to take into account the key issue relevant to government surveillance: do you trust the company providing the service? Do they make it part of their privacy policy to not keep access logs of your interactions with their service? Do they operate within the jurisdiction of one of the Five Eyes countries? Do they have a history of handing over user data to governments when compelled to do so? Do they accept Bitcoin or other anonymous payment types?
Here’s a list of lists that could also be useful in your selection of a VPN provider:
Step 3: help us spread the word about National #GetaVPN Day
A major concern that we have about the mandatory data retention scheme is that the majority of Australians are unaware of the scale of these operations. Huge amounts of their personal data is being hoovered up in the name of national security, and it’s time they understood how to protect themselves. You can help us get the word out.
Step 4: tell your elected MPs what you think of mandatory data retention
Would you like to know which MPs voted in favour of mass warrantless surveillance of Australian citizens? They Vote For You have put that together for you.
Or perhaps it’s more interesting to note which MPs voted against government agencies needing a warrant to access citizens’ metadata?
Elected democracies are a wonderful thing, because you can drop these MPs an email or ring their office to let them know how you feel about their voting histories on this matter.About
This project is the sequel to the 1988 smash hit Battle Chess. We intend to bring this game into the modern era but we need your help.
You can find more gameplay videos on our YouTube Channel.
Why Kickstarter?
We set out to create a new Battle Chess that would please the old school fans as well as modern gamers. We are proud of what we have done so far, but we need funding in order to complete our vision.
We |
has slipped significantly among the publics of other major nations. Opinion about Russia is mixed, but confidence in its president, Vladimir Putin, has declined sharply. In fact, the Russian leader’s negatives have soared to the point that they mirror the nearly worldwide lack of confidence in George W. Bush.
Global distrust of American leadership is reflected in increasing disapproval of the cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy. Not only is there worldwide support for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, but there also is considerable opposition to U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan. Western European publics are at best divided about keeping troops there. In nearly every predominantly Muslim country, overwhelming majorities want U.S. and NATO troops withdrawn from Afghanistan as soon as possible. In addition, global support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism ebbs ever lower. And the United States is the nation blamed most often for hurting the world’s environment, at a time of rising global concern about environmental issues.
At the same time, China’s expanding economic and military power is triggering considerable anxiety. Large majorities in many countries think that China’s growing military might is a bad thing, and the publics of many advanced nations are increasingly concerned about the impact of China’s economic power on their own countries.
Russia and its president also are unpopular in many countries of the world. But criticisms of that nation and its leader are sharpest in Western Europe where many citizens worry about overdependence on the Russian energy supply. For instance, despite sharp declines in favorable views of the U.S. in France and Germany since 2002, Russia’s image in those countries is no better.
There is little evidence that discontent with the major nations of the world and their leaders is resulting in greater confidence in those who have challenged the global status quo. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez inspires little public confidence, even in Latin America, and huge majorities in most countries also say they have little or no confidence in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to do the right thing regarding world affairs. There also is broad opposition to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Citizens all around the world voice substantial concern about the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. This includes the Muslim publics of neighboring nations such as Kuwait and Turkey.
The Pew survey finds a general increase in the percentage of people citing pollution and environmental problems as a top global threat. Worries have risen sharply in Latin America and Europe, as well as in Japan and India. Many people blame the United States — and to a lesser extent China — for these problems and look to Washington to do something about them.
As was the case in Pew’s first major global survey in 2002, global concerns vary significantly by region of the world. The spread of nuclear weapons is a growing worry in the Middle East — it is named as a top global danger in that region, along with religious and ethnic hatreds.
AIDS and other infectious diseases continue to be viewed as the dominant threat in Africa and a major concern in Latin America. Yet the polling also finds that African publics are increasingly concerned about the growing gap between rich and poor. In addition, the belief that economic inequality represents a major global danger has become much more prevalent in South Korea and Russia.
In the face of strong criticisms of its foreign policy, the U.S. is cited in many countries about as often as the U.N. as the entity that should be responsible for dealing with the problems that confront the world. This is particularly the case among people who are most concerned about the spread of nuclear weapons. But when it comes to AIDS and the gap between rich and poor, many who see these as important threats look to their own countries to provide solutions.
Most people in the survey, conducted in 46 countries and the Palestinian territories, have a favorable view of the United Nations. Negative views of the U.N. are most prevalent in the Middle East. Large majorities in both the Palestinian territories (69%) and Israel (58%) express unfavorable opinions of the world body. U.S. opinion of the U.N. remains mixed — 48% have a favorable view, 39% unfavorable. For the most part, global opinion of the European Union parallels opinion of the U.N.; in the U.S. roughly twice as many have a positive view of the EU than a negative one (47% vs. 22%), although many Americans offer no opinion (30%).
Anti-Americanism: Deeper But Not Wider
In the current poll, majorities in 25 of the 47 countries surveyed express positive views of the U.S. Since 2002, however, the image of the United States has declined in most parts of the world. Favorable ratings of America are lower in 26 of 33 countries for which trends are available.
The U.S. image remains abysmal in most Muslim countries in the Middle East and Asia, and continues to decline among the publics of many of America’s oldest allies. Favorable views of the U.S. are in single digits in Turkey (9%) and have declined to 15% in Pakistan. Currently, just 30% of Germans have a positive view of the U.S. — down from 42% as recently as two years ago — and favorable ratings inch ever lower in Great Britain and Canada.
For all of the bad news, however, the global survey of 47 nations, conducted throughout the world, reveals a more complex picture of opinions of the United States.
First, the U.S. image remains positive in Africa. In several African countries, such as Ethiopia and Kenya, it is overwhelmingly positive. In addition, majorities in two of America’s most important Asian trading partners — India and Japan — continue to express favorable opinions of the United States. And the U.S. image has improved dramatically in South Korea since 2003 (from 46% to 58% favorable).
While opinion of the U.S. has slipped in Latin America over the past five years, majorities in such countries as Mexico, Peru and even Venezuela still say they have a positive opinion of their large neighbor to the north. Similarly, “new Europe” likes America better than “old Europe,” although the U.S. image is not nearly as strong in Eastern Europe as it was five years ago.
And while negative views of the U.S. continue to prevail in much of the Muslim world, anger is not as universal today as it was in the spring of 2003 after the start of the war in Iraq. At that time, just 1% of Jordanians — and less than 1% in the Palestinian territories — gave a favorable rating to the United States, compared with 20% and 13%, respectively, today. And while still far from positive, America’s image has recovered substantially in Lebanon as well.
However, opinions of the American people have declined over the past five years in 23 of 33 countries where trends are available. In Indonesia and Turkey, where favorable views of the U.S. have declined markedly over the past five years, opinions of Americans have fallen sharply as well. In Indonesia, positive opinions of Americans have fallen from 65% in 2002 to 42%; in Turkey, favorable opinions have declined 19 points.
While opinions of Americans have fallen in most Western European countries, they remain generally positive. In every Western European country surveyed, far more people express positive opinions of Americans than they do of the U.S.; in Germany, for instance, 63% say they have a positive opinion of Americans compared with just 30% who rate the U.S. positively.
In fact, in many countries, the American people get better ratings than does the U.S. generally. Latin America is a consistent exception to this rule. In this region, Americans get about the same ratings as their country; either both are mostly favorable, as in Venezuela and Peru, or both are quite low, as in Argentina.
Opinions that Influence America’s Image
This is by far the largest global survey Pew has conducted since 2002. As such, it provides a broad perspective on anti-Americanism, documenting the nature and breadth of negative perceptions of the U.S.
Among key U.S. allies in Western Europe, the view that the U.S. acts unilaterally is an opinion that has tracked closely with America’s overall image over the past five years. Ironically, the belief that the United States does not take into account the interests of other countries in formulating its foreign policy is extensive among the publics of several close U.S. allies. No fewer than 89% of the French, 83% of Canadians and 74% of the British express this opinion.
U.S. policies also are widely viewed as increasing the gap between rich nations and poor nations. This is even the case in several countries where the U.S. is generally well regarded. In addition, this is one of the few criticisms of the U.S. that is widely shared around the world and with which a plurality of Americans (38%) agree.
Critiques of the U.S. are not confined to its policies, however. In much of the world there is broad and deepening dislike of American values and a global backlash against the spread of American ideas and customs. Majorities or pluralities in most countries surveyed say they dislike American ideas about democracy — and this sentiment has increased in most regions since 2002. However, sizable majorities in most African nations — as well as in Israel, South Korea and Japan — continue to express positive views of the U.S. approach to democracy. In addition, a small plurality in China says they like rather than dislike American ideas about democracy (48% to 36%).
Public rejection of American democracy in most countries may in part reflect opinions about the way in which the United States has implemented its pro-democracy agenda, as well as America’s democratic values. Majorities in 43 of 47 countries surveyed — including 63% in the United States — say that the U.S. promotes democracy mostly where it serves its interests, rather than promoting it wherever it can.
The poll also finds negative attitudes toward American ways of doing business. Dislike of the U.S. approach has deepened. However, Muslim countries in the Middle East are a notable exception, despite their generally poor opinion of the U.S. As many as 71% of Kuwaitis, 63% of Lebanese, and even 40% of Palestinians say they like the American way of doing business. But the greatest admirers of the American approach to business continue to be in Africa, where huge majorities in countries such as Kenya and Nigeria endorse it.
While many around the world fault American ideals, there is still considerable admiration for U.S. technology and a strong appetite for its cultural exports. In 42 of 46 foreign countries surveyed, majorities say they admire U.S. technological and scientific advances. In Russia, however, a majority (53%) says nyet to American scientific achievements. Similarly, in most parts of the world, majorities report liking American music, movies and television. However, there is greater dissent with regard to these pop culture exports; majorities in several predominantly Muslim countries, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan and Egypt, say they dislike American music, movies and television. Indians and Russians also express negative views of U.S. cultural exports.
Despite near universal admiration for U.S. technology and a strong appetite for its cultural exports in most parts of the world, large proportions in most countries think it is bad that American ideas and customs are spreading to their countries. The percentage expressing disapproval has increased in many countries since 2002 — including Great Britain (by 17 percentage points), Germany (14 points) and Canada (13 points). Israel, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast and Nigeria are the only countries (aside from the U.S.) in which majorities say they like the spread of American customs.
As noted, however, the U.S. is not alone in drawing the increasing ire of people in other countries. The poll also finds flagging views of China, an emerging superpower. Favorable views of China have fallen in Western Europe — particularly in Spain, Germany and France. And while China’s image is generally positive in Asia, it has grown somewhat more negative in India and much more negative in Japan, where unfavorable opinions of China now outnumber positive ones by more than two-to-one (67%-29%).
Opinion of China’s growing economic power is decidedly negative in Western Europe, where nearly two- thirds of Italians and the French believe this trend is bad for their country. Only in Sweden is there a positive view of this development. The polling also finds concern about China’s economic clout in Mexico, Czech Republic, South Korea and India. In sharp contrast, the publics of the African nations surveyed give thumbs up to China’s economic power.
Majorities or pluralities in the 10 African countries surveyed believe that China has at least a fair amount of influence on their countries. Most people in the African countries surveyed also say that the U.S. has considerable influence; however, U.S. influence is rivaled or exceeded by China’s in a number of African countries, including Mali and Ivory Coast.
Similarly, many people in Latin America believe that China is having an important influence on their countries. While China’s perceived impact in this region is not as great as that of the U.S., majorities in Venezuela and Chile, and half of Mexicans, say China’s influence is growing. In general, Africans are more positive than Latin Americans about the growing influence of both China and the U.S. on their countries. But in both regions, somewhat greater percentages say China’s influence is a good thing than say that about U.S. influence.
Additional FindingsUPDATE 4:19 PM EDT: MSNBC.com has just released the following statement from Courtney Hazlett:
"Today on 'Morning Joe' I chose my words poorly in describing the relationship between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee. I take my responsibilities as a journalist seriously and know that words can have a strong impact. I sincerely apologize to Spike Lee and to the viewers for my comments."
Original Post: On Friday's "Morning Joe," MSNBC gossip "reporter" Courtney Hazlett used a insulting — and perceived by many to be racist — word in describing the Spike Lee-Clint Eastwood feud that began last month in Cannes. Introducing today's developments, in which Eastwood smacked Lee down with a "shut your face," Hazlett described how the feud began:
"During the Cannes Film Festival...Spike Lee got really uppity about Clint Eastwood and about how there were no African Americans involved in the filming of 'Flags of our Fathers' or 'Letters from Iwo Jima.'"
Watch or scroll to keep reading:
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While the literal definition of "uppity" is "taking liberties or assuming airs beyond one's station," it is largely seen to have a racist connotation when applied to African Americans (witness the 2007 outcry after Salon labeled Obama "uppity" and then quickly swapped the word out for "smug").
Courtney Hazlett pens a column called "The Scoop" for msnbc.com, generally a mishmash of other people's day-old reporting couched as her own. For example, today she "reports" on an OK! Magazine story, an In Touch story and a Us Weekly story (which hit newsstands Wednesday) before rehashing this weekend's new releases. She frequently appears at the end of "Morning Joe" reporting others' entertainment stories.
Gawker labeled Hazlett's use of the word uppity a "VideoUhOh"Forget the terrible Hollywood version: There is only one true Godzilla and she is Japan's greatest retro icon for a good reason. Here is cinema's original bad beast, in all her glory courtesy of popular figure maker Kaiyodo. As featured in the 1989 cult classic Godzilla vs. Biollante, this large 1/80 scale model can be built to give you a life-like monster figure for your home, workplace... or wherever you fancy having a Godzilla companion!
The seventeenth film in the Godzilla kaiju series, Godzilla vs. Biollante depicts the monumental clash between the eponymous monsters. This model set will be much sought after by fans of Japanese kaiju films and is a limited edition for serious collectors of nostalgic pop culture wares. Featuring 66 parts the model is highly detailed, right down to realistic teeth and tongue in Godzilla's fearsome mouth.
The Godzilla vs. Biollante Kaiju Model features:There have been over 4,000 security breaches at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in the past four years, according to information revealed in a parliamentary question.
Secure information has been leaked through mistakes by senior military officials, it was claimed. Some of these leaks have reportedly resulted in threats to national security.
The answer to a parliamentary question revealed there were five “security information incidents” every day in 2013 - a total of 1,194.
There were 3,892 breaches in total between 2010 and the end of 2013.
One defense source said access to mobile phones in areas with “secret” information was to blame for a number of the security leaks.
“There are areas of the Ministry of Defence where everything is ‘secret’. Yet security within these departments is poor. Staff are allowed to enter with mobiles. These take pictures and represent a significant risk,” the source said.
Staff from both the government and the military had accidentally made statements, which had allowed ‘enemies’ to become party to highly sensitive and classified information, posing a risk to national security.
There were breaches of security through social media, laptops, memory sticks and third party involvement by hackers.
“The figures relate to incidents in which information has not been fully protected,” The MoD said in a statement. “The MoD treats all breaches of security very seriously.”
Revelations of the scale of security breaches come months after it was revealed 56 firearms had been lost or stolen over the last four years.
Following a Freedom of Information request in August, the government admitted 18 guns and nearly 2,000 bullets had made their way into civilian hands in the past year alone.
The documents also revealed that ammunition identified as belonging to the British military was responsible for a total of 46 percent of bullets discharged in the Merseyside area in 6 months in 2012.
The MoD was also criticized recently for wasteful expenditure, after revelations they had spent £5.7 billion ($8.9 billion) on obsolete equipment, unnecessary software and faulty earplugs for troops.
According to the MoD’s annual report, it spent £860 million ($1.4 billion) on obsolete equipment alone.
The MoD spent some £6 million ($9.4 million) on 10,000 new high-tech earplugs, each individually molded to fit soldiers’ ears at £500 a pair. They were intended to allow soldiers to communicate with each other on the battlefield while protecting their hearing from the noise of explosions and gunfire.Steve Kerr might be coaching the Warriors again before their playoff run ends, but he's certainly not going to rush it.
According to NBCSportsBayArea.com's Monte Poole, Kerr said he's feeling somewhat better and plans to visit specialists from Stanford University as the next step in alleviating symptoms stemming from back surgery following the 2014-15 season.
From Poole:
[Kerr] revealed to NBCSportsBayArea.com that in recent days he has spoken to several people who have experienced the debilitating effects of a cerebrospinal fluid leak and been able to overcome it. He says that because his symptoms have intensified over the past week, in an odd twist, that may make it easier for specialists to trace the precise source. "That's what the next few days are all about," Kerr said, standing down the hallway from the visitor's locker room. "They're trying to find it. If they can find it, they can fix it." He'll begin in the coming days by consulting with specialists at Stanford Medical Center, which has some of the more respected surgeons in the world. Though Kerr requested that we not reveal certain elements of what's ahead, he said he felt somewhat better than had a few days ago. Maybe part of that was hearing the comeback stories of others.
Kerr missed the final two games of the Warriors' first-round sweep over the Portland Trail Blazers, with assistant coach Mike Brown filling in during his absence.
Kerr has reportedly gained confidence from the story of a former NFL executive who dealt with similar problems and has now fully recovered.
"He's 100 percent," Kerr said. "So I'm hopeful. And he's not the only one."
The Warriors will face the winner of the Clippers-Jazz series in the second round, but it sounds like Kerr is more concerned with regaining the ability to live a normal life than returning to coaching in the near future.New trademarks for No One Lives Forever, the beloved spy shooter series from the early 2000s, were filed last week by Night Dive Studios, a publisher of classic PC games.
The Operative: No One Lives Forever kicked off the franchise on Windows PC in November 2000; it was followed by No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way in September 2002 and a prequel, Contract J.A.C.K., in November 2003. All three games were developed by Monolith Productions, which is now owned by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.
The rights to the series were believed to have resided with publishers Fox Interactive and Sierra Entertainment, both of which ended up as subsidiaries of Activision. But last April, Dan Amrich, then Activision's social media manager, reported that the company did not believe it owned the No One Lives Forever rights. It is currently impossible to purchase a new copy of any of the games in the franchise.
On April 26, Night Dive Studios filed trademarks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for "The Operative," "No One Lives Forever," "A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way" and "Contract J.A.C.K.," all for video game-related uses.
Portland, Oregon-based Night Dive Studios is a publisher that resurrects classic games and readies them for modern digital distribution. The company has brought games such as System Shock 2 and The 7th Guest to Steam.
In an email to Polygon, Night Dive CEO Stephen Kick said, "At this time we are unable to comment on future plans. I would like to add that our team has a great fondness for these games and our hope is that they will one day be re-released."NEW YORK (AP) Regulators are investigating whether several major U.S. banks failed to monitor transactions properly, allowing criminals to launder money, according to a New York Times story. The newspaper cited officials who it said spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency that oversees the biggest banks, is leading the money-laundering investigation, according to the Times. The report said the OCC could soon take action against JPMorgan Chase & Co., and that it is also investigating Bank of America Corp. Money laundering allows people to make money often obtained illegally appear like it came from another source.
The OCC, JPMorgan and Bank of America declined to comment.
The financial industry is struggling to mend its public image. Four years after the financial crisis, banks are getting closer scrutiny. And regulators are under pressure to show that they're not missing any questionable activity.
This summer, British bank Barclays PLC settled charges that it had manipulated a key global interest rate. Standard Chartered PLC, also based in the U.K., agreed to settle charges that it had improperly processed money for Iran, brought by the New York Department of Financial Services after the bank voluntarily informed regulators that it was reviewing relevant practices. In the spring, JPMorgan surprised shareholders with an unexpected trading loss.
If the OCC takes action, it could be similar to a cease-and-desist order that it filed against Citigroup in April. At the time, the OCC said that Citi had deficient internal controls and anti-money laundering procedures. In bank regulation, a cease-and-desist order doesn't mean that a bank has to shut down, but it is a serious sanction that requires a bank to change its practices. Citi had already told the regulator that from 2006 to 2010, it had "failed to adequately monitor" some of its transactions connected to "foreign correspondent banking."
The order in April didn't make any new, specific accusations. But it did instruct Citigroup to tighten its rules so it could improve compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act and related regulations. The act requires financial institutions to report suspicious activity and to put rules in place to try to make money laundering impossible for customers.
Last year, JPMorgan paid $88 million to settle charges from the Treasury that it had unlawfully processed money for Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Liberia.
At the time, JPMorgan said it had had no intent to violate regulations. It pointed out that it oversaw "hundreds of millions of transactions and customer records per day, and annual error rates are a tiny fraction of a percent."
It's not expected that banks would be accused of trying to show support for countries like Cuba and Iran. It's more likely that they would be accused of faulty oversight that made any unlawful transactions possible. The industry has maintained that such violations are almost always unintentional.
According to the Times, the Justice Department and the Manhattan district attorney's office are also involved. The Manhattan U.S. attorney's office and the Manhattan district attorney's office declined to commRebel Or Compromiser: Which Boehner Will Be Speaker?
Newly elected members of Congress arrive Monday in Washington to begin freshman orientation, while the current lawmakers, still with a few weeks left in their terms, open a lame-duck session.
Behind closed doors, both parties will meet to elect leadership for the new Congress, which begins in January. It will look very different in the House -- with a Republican majority and a new speaker, likely to be John Boehner of Ohio. Boehner has a complicated history in Congress, one that hints at what kind of speaker he may be.
Looking back on Boehner's 20 years in Congress, a duality emerges: Boehner the Rebel and Boehner the Compromiser.
After he was elected in 1990, Boehner arrived in Washington ready to rouse the rabble. He and a few other freshmen denounced what had become business as usual in Congress -- from subsidized haircuts to special banking privileges. The Gang of Seven, as they were dubbed, targeted any lawmaker regardless of party.
Later, Boehner was one of a few Republicans who wrote a simple, succinct document that outlined an agenda of vast reforms in Congress -- the Contract with America. And with that document, the party swept the House and Senate elections in the Republican revolution of 1994.
"It really boils down to one word: credibility," said Boehner. "As a political party, we've kept our word. We've done exactly what we said we would do, and we're going to continue to keep our word and earn the trust of the America people for this institution and for our political party."
This Boehner is tough, conservative, ideological, uncompromising. He entered the Republican leadership ready to fight for reforms and a smaller government -- regardless of the political price. When his party shut down the government in a stalemate over the budget, Boehner and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich held firm, even as President Bill Clinton applied enormous pressure to end the shutdown.
"It is not a natural disaster. It is an unnatural disaster, born of a cynical political strategy," Boehner said.
Nineteen days into the standoff, Boehner acknowledged that the political tide was turning, but he stuck to his guns.
"This is tough. This is difficult on the members. It's difficult on the American people and certainly difficult on government workers. But the fact is, is that we need to have this conversation with the American people, and we need to make some decisions," he said. "We're here trying to keep our commitment to them -- that we would balance the budget in a responsible, reasonable way."
Perhaps the strongest example of Boehner the Rebel was his involvement in a leadership coup that tried to oust Newt Gingrich as speaker. Boehner and a few other top Republicans felt that Gingrich's loud public persona had become a liability for the party. But the coup fell apart. Gingrich remained speaker, and later Boehner was bounced out of the leadership altogether.
This is where the era of Boehner the Compromiser began. In 2001, he took over as chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee. George W. Bush had just been elected president, and education reform was among his top priorities. Boehner began to work with Democrats on a massive overhaul that would be dubbed No Child Left Behind.
President Bush traveled to Hamilton, Ohio, to sign the bill. "I'm signing this bill here because it's the home of the chairman, John Boehner," he said.
Boehner worked with his Senate counterpart and with Democrats to write and pass the bill -- not just any Democrats, but California's Sen. George Miller and Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, two of the most liberal members of Congress.
Boehner the Compromiser called No Child Left Behind his proudest achievement in his decades of public service.
Fast forward to the present. Which Boehner, the rebel or the compromiser, will take the speakership?
It's a tough dilemma, says anaylst Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. Boehner has dropped a few hints that he's willing to work with the president on several issues. But if he wants to compromise, Ornstein says, he'll get into trouble with the more than 80 new Republicans who have just been elected by harshly criticizing President Barack Obama.
"If they didn't do it directly, they were standing by benignly while others were accusing Barack Obama of being a socialist, a communist, a fascist, an illegitimate president, a Muslim, and they have a large group of people in the country, and a lot of new members coming in, who believe this," Ornstein said.
Then again, if Boehner leads with his tough, conservative side, he's likely to spend two years fighting political battles -- with a Senate and a White House still controlled by Democrats.
And fighting, Ornstein says, is exactly what the American people are sick of.North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, already known for his unique hairdo, has updated his look.
Kim's new hairstyle remains cropped on the sides and heavy on top, but he appears to have grown his hair out and had it sculpted into a trapezoidal shape. And, for good measure, it seems as if he's had his eyebrows trimmed:
Enlarged Meeting of Political Bureau of C.C., WPK Held under Guidance of Kim Jong Un http://t.co/sCLIBL57WG pic.twitter.com/dte6KS012G — KCNA Watch (@KCNAWatch) February 19, 2015
Here's a side-by-side comparison of Kim's new look with an image taken a year ago:
High brow: A year apart - Kim Jong Un in early 2014 and now #NorthKorea pic.twitter.com/AOTKrrNiih — Frank Feinśtein (@frankfeinstein) February 19, 2015
Some on Twitter have pointed out that Kim's new hairstyle looks a lot like Pauly D's from "Jersey Shore," which led the DJ to retweet this comparison:
CNN called it a "power haircut." The New York Daily News described it as "barbarous." New York magazine said it was "ambitious." And Vox had a list of 29 questions about the hair.
While much ado is being made over the 'do, it's really just a more sculpted version of a look Kim sported for a period of time last spring, right down to the eyebrows:The four points of Forbidden Magna
Maid-In, CLT System, Animation, and ETR System.
Marvelous AQL released new details and screenshots this morning of its upcoming 3DS game Forbidden Magna, which is in development by the team behind the Rune Factory series.
The new details come in the form of a four-point outline, detailed below:
Point #1: Maid-In System During “Inn Parts,” you can enjoy conversations and events with the spirits you’ve befriended that work at the inn as live-in maids. Point #2: CLT System “Battle Parts” use the ‘Connect Lead Time System,” which is a speedy action game-like turn-based battle system. The spirits are experts of battle. Each character’s attack range and movement distance varies. As such, it’s up to you to come up with the best positions so they can sweep up lots of enemies in one fell swoop! Point #3: In-Game Animation The story’s more important scenes are depicted via animated cutscenes, with colorful voice actors on hand to help bring the game’s charm to life. Point #4: ETR System Players will find a lot of options at their disposal when it comes to forging stronger bonds with spirits, including the ETR system in battles and various special events. One example of where these dynamics come into play involves Charlotte, who might be dealing with some issues. Why not talk it out, just the two of you?
Forbidden Magna is due out for 3DS in Japan on October 2. View the screenshots at the gallery.As development camp came to a close earlier this month, Washington Capitals’ fans saw a glimpse of potential NHL stars. Highlighted by forwards Tom Wilson and Riley Barber, along with other talented players including defenseman Nate Schmidt, development camp gave these prospects a chance to impress head coach Adam Oates and Capitals’ management. The Hockey Writers takes a look at a few of Washington’s prospects that play college hockey, which could give these young players a better shot at adjusting to the pro level.
Washington’s NCAA prospects are highlighted by forwards Riley Barber and Caleb Herbert along with defenseman Patrick Wey. Other than the standouts listed above, the Capitals’ remaining NCAA prospects project to be role players, likely playing in the AHL for a few years following their time in college, before potentially landing a spot on the third or fourth line in the nation’s capital.
Riley Barber
Barber, only 19, recently completed his freshman season at Miami University of Ohio following his time with the United States National Development team before college. Washington’s sixth round pick from the 2012 NHL entry draft posted 39 points in 40 games, earning him high respect from around the NCAA and his teammates.
“I just always knew that there is a long life after hockey and understood the importance of getting a good education,” Barber told THW in an interview earlier this year. “When I first visited Miami I guess you could say I knew right away. From the coaches to the school to the atmosphere I knew it was the right fit for me.”
He also played for the United States in the World Junior Championships this winter, helping the U.S. capture gold in Russia.
“It was an unbelievable experience and something I’ll never forget, it was something really special and it doesn’t hit you until you start thinking about how rare it is to win,” Barber said about the WJC.
“I’m spending 6 weeks here at Miami training with the team and then I go back to my trainer,” said the Capitals prospect regarding his plans this summer. “One thing I’d like to improve on is my quickness, I think you can always improve on all aspects and I’m going to continue to work on my shot because I think that’s a huge aspect of my game.”
Barber projects as a skilled third line forward with power play ability, and could become a top six forward if he continues to progress at Miami of Ohio. He told THW he’s playing it year by year and is focusing in on college right now.
Forwards
After winning Bulldog Rookie of the year and ranking eighth on the freshman scoring charts with 33 points in his freshman year, Washington forward prospect Caleb Herbert continued to shine in his second season at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Although his scoring wasn’t as proficient like his freshman year, the 21 year old forward registered 25 points in 35 games along with 53 penalty minutes. He’s an intriguing prospect to watch as his time in college goes along, and could become a key Capitals prospect to watch when he reaches pro hockey.
The remaining Washington Capitals’ forward prospects including Travis Boyd (University of Minnesota), Thomas DiPauli (Notre Dame) and Austin Wuthrich (Notre Dame) are all still young and have room to grow.
Name Class PPG Goals Assists Projected Role Riley Barber Freshman 0.975 15 24 Top Six Forward Travis Boyd Sophomore 0.35 3 11 Role Player Greg Burke Senior 0.385 3 2 AHL Role Player Thomas DiPauli Freshman 0.293 5 7 Future Unknown Caleb Herbert Sophomore 0.714 6 19 Bottom Six Center Austin Wuthrich Sophomore 0.273 5 4 Future Unknown
Boyd played in all 40 games this season for the Minnesota Gophers and set career highs in goals and assists with 14 points during his sophomore season. He earned his second career multi-point contest during the 2012-2013 college hockey season, totaling two points against Michigan Tech on October 19th. Boyd was also an all-WCHA academic honoree this past school year.
Defensemen
On the defensive side of things, the Capitals hold two talented defensemen in Patrick Wey (Boston College) and Garrett Haar, who will join the WHL after his time at Western Michigan University for the past two seasons.
Name Class PPG Goals Assists PIM Role Patrick Wey Senior 0.35 1 12 54 Shutdown Defenseman Garrett Haar Sophomore 0.41 3 6 12 Fringe Prospect, Shutdown Defenseman
Wey, 22, finished his senior season at BC this spring, and will compete for a starting spot on the Hershey Bears’ defense this fall, AHL affiliate of the Washington Capitals. He’s a sound shutdown defenseman with discipline and could be a strong compliment to the Capitals offensively skilled blue liners at the NHL level in a few seasons. Wey could earn penalty kill minutes in Hershey, and will be around a former NCAA defenseman in former Miami University of Ohio product Cameron Schilling.
Haar, 19, is a California native who struggled to stay on the ice and decided to leave the Western Michigan program to join the Western Hockey League. He posted nine points in 22 regular season games this past year, along with 12 penalty minutes. Haar decided to leave the program at the end of development camp, because he was ruled academically ineligible for the first half of his junior season at WMU this fall.
Haar is “not as far along as we had hoped but I think this is going to be really good for him, to play a lot of games at the junior level,” Washington Capitals General Manager George McPhee told the Washington Post during development camp. “If you’re not a great student and things aren’t going to go well in college it’s ok to go play junior. If that’s your dream to develop as best you can to try and be a national leaguer. I don’t really think you can go wrong in either place. They both have their pluses and minuses and you have to decide on a case-by-case basis what’s best for a player.”
You can view THW’s AHL prospects review here. Stay tuned for the Washington Capitals junior prospects |
has refused to allow Republicans to offer amendments on a fix in the past. “It all depends on whether there are amendments, what happens to those amendments, where there’s a fair process,” she said.
Kirk, meanwhile, said Monday that he had not been in talks with Democrats over the week-and-a-half recess, but said that as a moderate, he wasn’t surprised that the party was reaching out to him.
Kirk noted that he is seeking “a real no-gimmicks pay-for” to offset the cost of extending the program. Kirk opposed a bill last month that would have paid for the benefits extension through a process called “pension smoothing,” which has been widely panned by Republicans as a budgetary gimmick that will save money in the short-term and cost even more in the long-run.
Coats said he wasn’t involved in the talks over the break either, but that his staff continued to discuss the issue with Democrats. Asked whether he sees a path forward, Coats demurred: “Well there’s always a way forward, but as you know getting from start to finish here is not the easiest thing to do. So anyway, it all continues.”
Should the senators come to a deal whereby they can expect 60 votes, however, passage is expected as early as Monday.
Reed sounded hopeful, but guarded, on Monday. “There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion on both sides. And I think it’s — I’ll leave it at that. That’s usually the prelude to any kind of forward motion,” he said.
But if the extension does fail again, Reid has committed to keep up the fight and Democrats will continue to use the issue as midterm election messaging.China Military Online reports that the People’s Liberation Army will carry out live-fire drills in the East China Sea from July 29 to August 2. In preparation for the drills, the Chinese government issued a navigation notice banning maritime vessels from entering an area of the East China Sea bordering southeastern Zhejiang province, roughly 200 kilometers north of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. A Xinhua report reposted by China’s Ministry of Defense described the exercises as “routine training.”
Meanwhile, China is also holding military drills in the south. Bloomberg reports that China is “holding live-fire drills” in the Gulf of Tonkin. Though the drills are reportedly part of an annual exercise, the scope of this year’s exercises is larger than previous versions. Ni Lexiong, a defense researcher at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, told South China Morning Post that such large drills in China’s eastern coastal region were uncommon, and likely intended as a warning to Japan.
The reports from the Ministry of Defense come after media outlets in China speculated that military drills were causing widespread flight cancellations and delays in southern airports. South China Morning Post reports that 12 airports, from Qingdao in the northeast to Ningbo in the southeast, were experiencing major delays and cancellations due to “high-frequency drills of another user.” The widespread and long-lasting nature of the flight disruptions suggested a major military exercise, SCMP said.
However, China’s Ministry of Defense said that military exercises “are not the major factor behind recent delays,” blaming stormy weather instead. When announcing the upcoming exercises to be held off the southeast coast, the ministry promised that it would work “to minimize the exercise’s impact on civil flights.”
Xi Jinping has called on China’s military to increase its battle-readiness as part of a military modernization program. These drills appear to be part of this effort; the Ministry of Defense described them as “important for testing combat capability and improving real-combat training levels and military preparation.” A report in China Daily cites a military captain as saying that military exercises have become “more practical” in response to a March edict from the Central Military Commission. As such, the larger scope of this year’s drills might not be intended as a warning, but rather be an attempt to increase the complexity of the drills (including the need for coordination among different branches of the service) to better simulate war conditions."What Am Politics?" Episode 30
New Episode! The boys sit down with comedian, author, actress, and all round wonderful human being, Tara Flynn, to discuss Ireland’s Eighth Amendment and the efforts being made to repeal it.
Tara talks about the history of abortion on the island, some of the misinformation surrounding the subject, and ways to have constructive conversations with those of differing opinions.
Tara Flynn on Twitter
www.taraflynn.ie
Want to be on the show? Leave us a voicemail asking us a question or sharing your thoughts.
Recommended reading
Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights by Katha Pollitt
The Moral Case for Abortion by Ann Furedi
Going Undercover in Rogue Crisis Pregnancy Clinics
Tara's Safe Cross Code for Talking About Repealing the 8th
Tara's Headstuff Articles
Who To Follow
The Abortion Rights Campaign
The Abortion Support Network
Lawyers for Choice
Doctors for Choice
Mara Clarke
Repeal the EighthIllinois Sen. William Haine, D-Alton, argues medical marijuana legislation while on the Senate floor during session at the Illinois State Capitol Friday, May 17, 2013, in Springfield Ill. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Illinois lawmakers agreed to legalize the use of medical marijuana on Friday under a plan that's being billed as the strictest in the nation among states that have authorized the drug's medicinal use, though it was unclear whether the Democratic governor plans to sign it.
The plan authorizes a pilot program for physicians to prescribe marijuana only to patients with whom they have an existing relationship. Background checks are required, and patients must have at least one of more than three dozen terminal illnesses or other debilitating medical conditions specifically listed in the bill.
Gov. Pat Quinn has declined to say whether he supports the legislation, saying only that he was "open-minded" on the issue. Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon, a former prosecutor, has said she is in favor of the plan after meeting with patients, including military veterans.
The proposed legislation creates a framework for a four-year pilot program that includes requiring patients and caregivers to undergo background checks. It sets a 2.5 ounce limit per patient per purchase and calls for 60 dispensaries regulated by the state where patients could buy the drug.
"We are embarking here on a way to achieve relief, compassionate relief, consistent with the law (with) a system which avoids abuse," said the bill's sponsor, Democratic Sen. Bill Haine of Alton. "It's the tightest, most controlled legislative initiative in the United State related to medical cannabis."
Supporters say it is a compassionate measure that could save patients from the agony caused by illnesses such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and HIV. They argue that marijuana can relieve continual pain without triggering the harmful effects of other prescription drugs, including painkillers such as Oxycontin and Vicodin.
But opponents contend the program could encourage the recreational use of marijuana, especially among teenagers.
A report issued last month by the Pew Research Center poll showed that 77 percent of Americans say marijuana has legitimate medical uses. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes.
But critics in the Illinois Senate, which approved the plan Friday in a 35-21 vote, worried about whether the regulations would be enough to prevent abuse of the drug.
"For every touching story that we have heard about the benefits of those in pain, I remind you today that there are a thousand times more parents who will never be relieved from the pain of losing a child due to addiction, which in many cases has started with the very illegal, FDA-unapproved, addiction-forming drug you are asking us to make a normal part of our communities," Sen. Kyle McCarter, a Republican from Lebanon, said ahead of the chamber's vote.
Under the bill, patients who are prescribed the drug would automatically consent to submit to a sobriety field test should a police officer suspect they were driving under the influence of the drug. But leading Illinois law enforcement organizations have opposed the legislation, saying the test cannot determine if a motorist is under the influence of marijuana. The groups say the test works only for alcohol.
Haine, however, said his measure is the strictest the General Assembly has considered on medical marijuana.
Haine and other supporters have advocated for the issue for several years. A measure that cleared the Senate failed in the House in 2011. The current version of the bill received the House's approval in April.
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The bill is HB1.
Online: http://www.ilga.gov
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Contact Regina Garcia Cano at https://www.twitter.com/reginagarciakNO“The east wind takes us all in the end.”
So, there we have it. A week and a half, and it’s all over; Season 3 of “Sherlock” has come to a close. And what a close it is. “His Last Vow” may just be the most shocking “Sherlock” episode yet, and it definitely leaves us scratching our heads as to what the writers have in store next season. Far from the light, airiness of the first two episodes, this season ends with a dark, grueling descent into the grimy world of blackmail… and journalism.
“His Last Vow” picks up about a month after the Watson wedding. We find Sherlock in a drug den, possibly high, possibly undercover. But it’s all part of a bigger scheme, as Charles Augustus Magnussen is formally introduced. He is the “Napoleon of blackmail”, and he now has his sights set on Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. We find out some secrets about the life and times of the new Mrs. Watson, and a familiar face turns up for a rather intriguing cliffhanger (stay tuned for a stinger after the credits). Over all, we get to see the many sides of Sherlock Holmes, and the lengths he will go to protect those precious few he calls friends.
“The game is never over, John, but there may be some new players now.”
On the negative side, “His Last Vow” is very oddly placed. I actually found myself getting bored in the first half hour because it just seemed to be plodding along without any real direction or focus. Of course, this comes together in the latter half, which more than makes up for it. It was a hassle though to stay interested long enough for my interest to be re-piqued. That aside, every scene with Magnussen (Lars Mikkelsen) is brilliantly written, and terrifically tense and unsettling. His cold gaze, and utter disregard for anything resembling respect is just so instantly hateable. He makes for a perfect foil to Sherlock and stands as a great villain. It’s just unfortunate that we had to wait until the finale to have him fully introduced. While all the episodes are clearly connected with the endgame in mind, his presence was not felt nearly as well as Moriarty’s was in the previous seasons.
As usual, the chemistry between Cumberbatch and Freeman is the big draw here. Holmes and Watson have never been better together than they are here. Watson gets one of his most badass moments of the series early on in “His Last Vow”. We also get to see Sherlock in one of his most dastardly schemes in pursuit of his case. And like the two episodes before it, we’re also treated to some great conversations between Sherlock and Mycroft.
While many shows will try way too hard to shock their audience, this seems to come much more naturally to “Sherlock”. “His Last Vow” has no less than three shocking moments that are sure to leave your jaw on the floor. Thankfully, rather than feel like cheap gimmicks or on-the-fly ideas, these twists have evolved organically, over the whole season, and allow for some really great moments in this finale.
“Didyoumissme? Didyoumissme? Didyoumissme? Didyoumissme?”
So, after to brief a ride, we leave Baker Street for another indeterminate period, until Sherlock returns. “His Last Vow” does end the season with a hell of a wallop, but as the detective himself says, “the game is never over.” Yes, the final moments will leave you wanting more right away, but as with all great BBC dramas, patience is a virtue, no matter how much we all miss him… and him.A new study that sought to uncover what factors predict women’s likelihood of committing infidelity has been making a lot of headlines [1]. Although this study identified several variables linked to women’s cheating behaviors, most media reports have focused exclusively on one: women were statistically more likely to cheat on men with longer penises. Most of the headlines said something along the lines of “The Larger Your Penis, The More Likely Your Wife Will Cheat.” Others went as far as claiming that penis size is “a leading cause of marital infidelity.” The message is clear: large penises are destroying the institution of marriage! But why? According to media reports, it’s because bigger penises cause painful and uncomfortable sex, which leads women to look for partners who are packing less heat. So are these claims warranted by the data? A closer look at the research suggests that the headlines have been wildly exaggerated.
For starters, it is important to note that this study focused on a sample of 545 fishermen and their wives from Kenya. Although I think it’s great that these scientists conducted research in Kenya, we must keep in mind that these data come from a very specific cultural and ethnic context. Why? Because the meaning and structure of marriage differs dramatically across cultures. For instance, consider that polygamy is actually quite common in Kenya and other parts of Africa. As a result, it is not wise to assume that the factors that predict infidelity in one culture would necessarily be the same in other cultures.
In addition, some research suggests that there are racial differences in penis size, with men of African descent tending to have larger penises than men of European descent. This is especially noteworthy in light of the fact that female genital cutting (FGC) remains common in Kenya. Given that some versions of FGC actually restrict the size of the vaginal opening, it is quite possible that sex might feel different for women in Kenya compared to women in other parts of the world. As you can see, there are many reasons to be cautious about taking findings from one culture and assuming that they apply more broadly.
It’s also worth mentioning that of the 545 women surveyed, just 6.2% reported having sex outside of their marriage—that translates to a total of 34 women who actually committed infidelity. That seems like a pretty small number to use as the basis for making sweeping claims about why women in Kenya (or anywhere else for that matter) cheat, don’t you think?
As for the link researchers identified between penis size and female infidelity, the journalists who reported on this study made the erroneous assumption that larger penis size therefore causes women to cheat. Given that these are correlational data, we cannot assume that penis size has any type of cause-and-effect relationship with infidelity. One alternative possibility is that penis size is statistically linked to some other factor that actually causes cheating. For instance, some research has found that men with larger penises are more narcissistic [2]. In light of this, it might be the case that larger penises do not directly cause cheating; rather, it might be that men with larger penises have personalities that lead them to treat their partners in ways that increase the odds of infidelity.
Most media reports also went too far in claiming that larger penises promote cheating because they contribute to painful sex. In all fairness, the journalists were simply quoting the study authors, who stated the following in their article: “Women associated large penises with pain and discomfort during sex which precludes the enjoyment and sexual satisfaction that women are supposed to feel.” How did the authors come to this conclusion? They cited what one (just one) woman that they interviewed said:
“Some penis may be large yet my vagina is small, when he tries to insert it inside, it hurts so much that I will have to look for another man who has a smaller one [penis] and can do it in a way I can enjoy.”
I’m not in any way discounting or invalidating this woman’s experience because she is certainly not alone, especially not in Africa, a continent where FGC is common. However, for the researchers to essentially claim that all of the women in their sample found larger penises painful based upon one quote from one woman, well, that’s just not good science. If you’re going to make a broad claim about the nature of your sample, you need to have more than one quote from one participant to back it up.
In short, while this study may have found a statistical link between penis size and female infidelity, we have to consider it within the cultural context in which the study was conducted and the limitations of the methods and data. And even if painful sex as a result of large penises truly is a “leading cause” of infidelity in Kenya, I would be hesitant to just assume that the same is true in other parts of the world, especially in light of the fact that a significant number of Western women report that longer than average penises make them more likely to orgasm [3].
Want to learn more about The Psychology of Human Sexuality? Click here for previous articles or follow the blog on Facebook (facebook.com/psychologyofsex), Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit (reddit.com/r/psychologyofsex) to receive updates.
[1] Kwena, Z., Mwanzo, I., Shisanya, C., Camlin, C., Turan, J., Achiro, L., & Bukusi, E. (2014). Predictors of Extra-Marital Partnerships among Women Married to Fishermen along Lake Victoria in Kisumu County, Kenya. PLoS ONE, 9(4), e95298.
[2] Moskowitz, D.A., Rieger, G., & Seal, D.W. (2009). Narcissism, self-evaulations, and partner preferences among men who have sex with men. Personality and Individual Differences, 46, 725-728.
[3] Costa, R. M., Miller, G. F., & Brody, S. (2012). Women who prefer longer penises are more likely to have vaginal orgasms (but not clitoral orgasms): Implications for an evolutionary theory of vaginal orgasm. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 9, 3079-3088.
Image Source: iStockphoto.com
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As part of DARPA’s Robotics Challenge, which seeks more lifelike humanoid robots, the engineers at Boston Dynamics have impressed once again. Boston Dynamics first caught the public’s attention by showcasing just how fast robotics was advancing when they released videos of robots so lifelike that they were given names like LittleDog, SandFlea, BigDog, and the world’s fastest legged robot — Cheetah.
Now Boston Dynamics has entered the human realm with PETMAN. As you will see in the video below, this robot far outdoes its predecessors with its extraordinary range of motion and abilities.
PETMAN is an anthropomorphic robot designed for testing chemical protection clothing. Its range of motion allows it to balance, walk, crawl, and even climb stairs, while also having the ability to simulate human physiology such as sweating. (Source)
It is the first robot to display such human movements, heralding the next … step in robotics development destined to assist waging war on battlefield earth.
Read other articles by Activist Post here.(CBS) — Sophia Andrade won $200 on a scratch ticket, and instead of treating herself, she decided to use the money to buy a homeless man a hotel room for three nights.
Andrade had spotted Glenn Williams panhandling on the side of the road in Wareham, Mass., when she pulled up to a stop sign. With temperatures dipping below zero across the state over the weekend, she didn’t want him to be left out in the cold.
“I knew that God had put him in my path for a reason,” she said. “I knew instantly that the money wasn’t mine, it was given to me to help someone else.”
She’s hoping her act of generosity will inspire others.
“I want my children to know about compassion. Whether someone has a million dollars or one dollar, you should treat everybody the same,” she said. “Everybody deserves respect.”With one Grand Tour victory under his belt, Movistar’s Nairo Quintana is hungry for more and some believe that the lithe climber may just be able to bag his second at this year’s Tour. It’ll take some doing to topple the heavily favored Chris Froome, and to that end his sponsors – Campagnolo in particular – are pulling out all the stops.
Nairo Quintana’s Canyon Ultimate CF SLX
Quintana and Valverde will have access to the only five pairs of Boras in the world with a prototype brake track treatment meant to improve wet weather braking
On his size-XS Canyon Ultimate CF SLX, a pair of prototype Campagnolo Bora 50 wheels should give Quintana added braking confidence, especially in the rain. As we reported earlier, the new wheels feature a textured brake track to enhance brake pad grip.
According to a Movistar mechanic there are only five sets of Campagnolo Bora wheels with the new brake track in the world, two pairs of 50mm wheels and three with 35mm deep rims. All are in the care of Team Movistar, and only Quintana and Alejandro Valverde will be riding them at this year’s Tour.
German power meter manufacturer Power 2 Max is a Movistar sponsor. Quintana had standard 53/39 chainrings mounted for the start of the Tour:
The rest of Quintana’s bike is what we’ve come to expect for a Movistar team machine. Quintana uses a German Power2Max power meter, Canyon bar, stem and seatpost, a Super Record EPS groupset, Look pedals and Continental tires. (See photo captions for more details).
Quintana prefers a used saddle for the start of important races. His seat height is 69 centimeters:
Another interesting component on his bike is the Fizik Antares saddle. Quintana prefers to start a race as important as the Tour on a used saddle. So mechanics carefully measured his position and moved his saddle and seat post assembly over to the new bike they built for the Grand Depart. The underside of the saddles has several lead weights glued to it to bring his bike weight up to the required 6.8kg.
To meet the UCI minimum bike weight of 6.8 kilograms, mechanics glued lead weights to the underside of his saddle:
It’s a strange place to add weight, with most preferring to do so as low as possible. Gluing it the underside of the shell may also stiffen the saddle, but as Quintana had previously ridden the seat he must be accustomed to it. In any case, when the Tour reaches the inclines of the Pyrenees, Mont Ventoux and the Alps, we’re sure to see the Movistar team leader attacking con gusto.AUGUSTA — The board of Good Will-Hinckley School withdrew its job offer to House Speaker Mark Eves just days before he was to become the school’s new president, making the decision after Gov. Paul LePage apparently threatened to withhold state funding for the school.
The school said Wednesday that the board of directors had “voted to seek a new direction for the institution’s leadership” in order to avoid “political controversy.” But Eves’ attorney said the state legislator had been “terminated … without cause” and hinted at legal action against the governor.
Eves, meanwhile, released a statement accusing LePage of “blackmailing” the school for at-risk youths by threatening to cut $500,000 in state funding. He said that could potentially cause the loss of another $2 million in private funding for the school, which has an annual budget of $4.5 million.
“The governor knows that these financial losses would put the school out of business, but he has refused to back down,” said Eves, D-North Berwick. “This is an abuse of power that jeopardizes Maine children. The governor’s actions represent the worst kind of vendetta politics Maine has ever seen. If it goes unchecked, no legislator will feel safe in voting his conscience for fear that the governor will go after the legislator’s family and livelihood.”
Good Will-Hinckley, in Fairfield, announced June 9 that it had hired Eves as the school’s new president despite a last-minute intercession by LePage. On Wednesday, board Chairman Jack Moore announced the decision to withdraw the offer to Eves, who was scheduled to begin work next Wednesday.
“The basis for this decision is grounded in the institution’s desire not to be involved in political controversy that will divert attention away from our core mission of serving children and has the potential to jeopardize the future of our school,” Moore said in a prepared statement. “Good Will-Hinckley has a very dedicated staff. The board’s first priority is to act in the best interest of students and educators alike and the board’s actions reflect its unwavering commitment to them.”
LePage’s office didn’t respond to several requests for comment Wednesday night.
Moore said the school was immediately launching a new search for a president, and that the board would not comment further on the Eves decision.
Good Will-Hinckley operates the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences in Fairfield, the first of five charter schools approved in Maine since 2011, along with other educational and social services programs.
Details were emerging Wednesday night about the funding issue. But a letter sent to Moore on June 18 from the Harold Alfond Foundation – a major donor to Good Will-Hinckley – and obtained by the Portland Press Herald refers to “the likely loss of $1,060,000 in state funding over the next two years” for residential programs at the school.
“First, we want to express the serious concern of the Harold Alfond Foundation regarding the future financial viability of (Good Will-Hinckley), given the likely state funding loss,” reads the letter from the foundation’s Gregory Powell. He goes on to say that the foundation was reviewing the school’s “budget and financial forecasts,” noting that half of the $5.5 million in potential grants from the foundation were contingent on the school achieving enrollment and other performance goals.
LePage had written a scathing letter to the school’s two board chairmen, attacking Eves’ qualifications and urging the school not to hire him, largely because he had been a critic of charter schools.
“It is unfortunate for both Maine taxpayers and Maine students that the education system has become a soft-landing place for unqualified former Democratic politicians who seek exorbitant salaries but bring no real skills or true leadership to the important public positions entrusted to them,” LePage wrote in early June. He went on to level personal criticisms at Eves, questioning his skills and saying he had not dealt honestly with LePage while working on the state budget.
“Although he is employed as a family therapist, I have seen firsthand that his skills in conflict resolution, leadership, negotiation and reconciliation are sadly deficient,” LePage wrote.
In response to LePage’s letter, Eves acknowledged that he was not a strong supporter of charter schools and continued to have reservations about them. But he said his commitment to aiding children with troubled backgrounds outweighed those concerns.
Eves also declined at the time to criticize LePage for intervening in his hiring.
“He’s been a great supporter of the school,” Eves said June 9. “It wouldn’t be here without him.” Asked whether he expected that support to continue, Eves said: “I have no indication that’s not the case.”
ATTORNEY SAYS EVES MAY SUE LEPAGE
Eves’ attorney, David Webbert, said in a phone interview Wednesday night that litigation against the governor is a possibility, adding that “there seems to be strong evidence of a civil rights claim.”
“Under the First Amendment, the governor is clearly prohibited from using the money of our state government to exact revenge on public officials because they do not vote the way the governor wants,” Webbert said in an additional statement. “This is not how Maine’s system of government is supposed to work. The governor’s tyrannical behavior threatens our democratic institutions.”
The governor’s actions, if true, are the latest example of how LePage has grown increasingly bold as he pursues his policy agenda and targets his opponents. The governor has berated and insulted lawmakers from both parties – including members of the Republican leadership – in recent months and has threatened to veto all legislation sent to his desk.
Earlier this year, a different education leader was forced out when the governor threatened to withhold funding. In January, John Fitzsimmons, president of the Maine Community College System, resigned after LePage demanded his ouster and flat-funded the system in his budget.
The tactics have infuriated Democrats and caused considerable angst within Republican ranks at the State House. Among those critics is Sen. Roger Katz, a moderate Republican from Augusta who has clashed with LePage several times.
Katz said Wednesday night that LePage’s apparent intervention “goes beyond the political.”
“There is no question Mark is qualified to lead the school,” Katz wrote in an email. “This is personal, angry and vindictive. I sometimes don’t agree with (Eves), but he is a fine and honest man. More importantly, he is a husband and the father of three beautiful young kids who is trying to support his family. Political battles are one thing. Trying to ruin someone is quite another. This is unprecedented. Where does it all end?”
Despite LePage’s criticism, Eves, a licensed family counselor who has operated a private practice in York County for years and has worked with both at-risk youths as well as families, received a strong endorsement from the Good Will-Hinckley board when it announced his hiring at an annual salary of $120,000 plus benefits.
“The Good Will-Hinckley Board of Directors and senior staff believe strongly that Mark Eves’ professional credentials and career in psychology and family therapy, as well as his statewide policy and leadership experience as speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, make him the best candidate to lead our school’s work creating opportunity for at-risk and non-traditional students from across Maine,” Moore said at the time.
PROTECTING HIS LIVELIHOOD
Webbert, the employment law specialist who is representing Eves, said the speaker wasn’t looking for a battle with the governor, but had to protect his livelihood.
“He is now out of a job that he was counting on to support his three children and his family, and at some point you have to take care of your own personal welfare,” Webbert told The Associated Press.
The attorney is no stranger to conflict with LePage.
In 2013, Webbert filed a complaint against the governor with the U.S. Department of Labor, after LePage summoned a group of unemployment claims hearing officers to a Blaine House luncheon and berated them for allegedly deciding too many appeals cases in favor of workers.
In a review released in February 2014, the Labor Department effectively upheld the complaint, saying LePage’s action endangered the fair hearing process. The agency said it would be monitoring Maine’s performance in unemployment appeals to ensure that all parties were treated fairly.
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filed under:Hillary Clinton wins Pennsylvania Democratic primary
Hillary Clinton has won the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, according to the Associated Press.
The former secretary of state led comfortably over Bernie Sanders in a series of recent state polls. In a Fox News survey published Monday, Clinton held an 11-point advantage over Sanders, 52 percent to 41 percent.
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Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, campaigned hard in the state, holding roughly 10 events throughout the past week.
On Saturday in Dunmore, Clinton appeared to turn her eye beyond Sanders, whom she only referred to as “my opponent.” She largely focused on raising incomes, touting the effectiveness of her husband’s administration while calling out Donald Trump by name for suggesting that wages are too high.
Pennsylvania awards 127 of its 189 pledged delegates proportionally based on each of the state’s congressional districts. The remaining delegates — 42 at-large and 20 pledged party leaders and elected officials — are allocated based on the statewide vote.
View full results: http://politi.co/1oGcEFv
2016 delegate tracker: http://politi.co/2176fPmBy Tauqeer Jalal In April 19, 2014 On Photography, Photoshop, wallpapers 5310 Views
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Photo manipulation is an awesome creative art which is mainly develop by Photoshop by this software you can make good and attractive pictures for your own and personal use, in this article we have collected 16 Creative Photo Manipulation Art Work for your inspiration these professional designers has manipulate all pictures according to their thinking and all are nice and conceptual as well latest photo manipulation pictures has been published on GDI hope you will like them.
Eternal Pearl
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Reborn
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Wooden HouseSpace Engineers has the potential to be a really interesting PVP ship combat game. It has all the things that make it interesting such as the ability to design your own combat ships and weapons, the ability to code your own guidance scripts and run them in multiplayer and it has a resource system that allows for supply/demand economics.
The problem is the devs though only seem to care for the people that want to play PVE or single player. In 3+ years of development there is still only two basic forms of weapons rockets and Gatling guns. As well as this the speed limit of 100m/s (equivalent to 360km/h) is incredibly slow for even a regular modern day transport plane let alone a futuristic space ship. They need to address these issues.
Click to expand...Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting with the heads of National Paralympic Committees in Sochi, Russia, on March 13, 2014. (Michael Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images)
Russian President Vladimir Putin “declared on Tuesday his intention to make Crimea a part of the Russian Federation,” but also said “that Russia has no designs on any other parts of Ukraine beyond Crimea,” raising the question of what comes next?
An answer to this question requires some insight into Putin’s goals and motivations. Of course, no one really knows what Putin is thinking besides Putin. What follows, therefore, is my attempt not to conclusively answer the question of Putin’s motivation, but rather to lay out a framework for thinking about the different explanations that are out there. I believe this is an important exercise because the different explanations also imply different implications for what is likely to happen in the future, as well as how various international responses are likely to affect subsequent developments. These four explanations are, of course, not exclusive of all the arguments out there — and there are points of overlap between them — but I believe they encompass many of them, and I hope they will be helpful for people trying to organize their thoughts about Russia, Ukraine and Crimea.
1. The importance of Crimea for Russian security: Numerous commentators have stressed the potential short-term and long-term economic and political costs to Russia of annexing Crimea and/or an extended military conflict with Ukraine (see in particular this commentary by Sergei Guriev and this one by Samuel Greene). So perhaps the simplest answer to this question is that whatever the economic costs, the Russian leadership has become convinced that doing nothing after ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine represented a security threat that could not be ignored. This could have been due to a very specific calculation, such as the belief that there was a credible threat to the future of the Russian Black Sea Fleet based in Crimea, or it could have been due to a more general concern that allowing Russia’s ally — Yanukovych — to fall without a response would signify weakness moving forward. Either way, the key distinction of this explanation is that Russia’s moves were essentially reactive in nature to a perceived security threat.
Implications: If Russia’s security concerns can be addressed, there is the possibility that Putin would be willing to “de-escalate” the crisis in ways that might look more like the pre-crisis status quo, with the exception that Crimea ends up being part of Russia as opposed to Ukraine. Such a deal would probably involve guarantees of energy, water and other resources for Crimea, permanent neutrality for Ukraine, OSCE monitors for coming elections, etc. But that being said, what it actually means to “address Russia’s security concern” is, of course, an open question, as is what this means long-term for southern and eastern Ukraine.
2. The “greater Russia” plan: A second set of explanations focused on Russian security concerns takes a much bigger view of Russian security by keying in on a 2005 speech in which Putin stated (according to the Kremlin Web site — others use different translations) that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster.” While debates remain about what Putin actually was implying during the speech, references to this quote during the current crisis are usually taken to imply that we should see Russia’s actions in Crimea from the prism of a Kremlin with a long-term goal of trying, if not to reestablish the old Soviet Union, then at least to create a “greater Russia” that would encompass many of the millions of Russians who found themselves living in successor states of the former Soviet Union outside Russia after the U.S.S.R collapsed.
This would suggest that the long-term plan is to grow the size of Russia, and that Crimea (and perhaps southern and eastern Ukraine) were opportunities that presented themselves following the Euromaidan uprising. From this vantage point, we might not think that Russia was planning years ahead of time to get involved in Ukraine as soon as the 2014 Olympics ended, but that the general plan of expanding when opportunities present themselves would have been on the table for a while. In particular, the Kremlin’s efforts to get Russians to repatriate assets to Russia is given as a sign that growing conflict with the West had been anticipated in advance. Unlike the previous security related explanation, this one pos |
17. Key to the case for Russian responsibility across the Ukraine crisis is Moscow’s relations with the rebels and its ability to direct them.
Washington pretends to know all about this. The rebels are “pro-Moscow,” they are “Russian-backed,” Putin can bring them to heel if he wants to, and now he must. This is the line, successfully implanted, and with little shading, in the American conversation, if not the conversations of many others.
In truth we have little idea what we are talking about in these regards, at least not by the evidence to date presented. In this Putin must do more: Get out there with another video and put the klieg lights on these cross-border ties, whatever their nature.
My own take is this. It is almost certain that there are Russians active in Ukraine, driven by fraternal sentiments we Westerners cannot fathom or maybe sheer adventure. Many appear to be veterans with knowledge of weaponry. It is equally near to certain they operate autonomously, not officially. Their presence on Ukrainian soil seems to prove nothing.
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The weaponry. Now that MH-17 ups the ante, this requires clarity, too, and Putin would do well to provide it. Again, there is almost certainly Russian-made ordnance deployed in Ukraine. And again, it is not clear what this proves.
On this point, none other than Ron Paul weighed in usefully in a television interview broadcast late last week. Addressing the question of the fatal rocket’s probable origin, he remarked:
“That may well be true, but guess what, ISIS has a lot of American weapons…. It doesn’t mean that our American government and Obama deliberately wanted ISIS to get American weapons. So who gets the weapons is a big difference between how they got them and what happened and what the motivations were. So even if it was a Russian weapon — doesn’t mean a lot.”
Friends everywhere, it sometimes seems.
Here is my saver in the case of Moscow’s role and responsibility. Were the rebels to turn out to be straight-ahead Russian proxies and Putin to have been having us on all along, I wonder who among us could credibly blame him.
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Do not, once more, forget your history. Any American administration during the Cold War — witness Kennedy in 1962 — would have brought the world to the brink of war were the Soviets to activate as close to America’s borders as the Americans are now to Russia’s. Do not forget the American pilots flying over Indochina with no uniforms or dogtags, or all the other covert ops that feature in our repertoire abroad.
As to Putin, the ad hominem bit has gone very infra-dig these past days. It serves a purpose, and it is important to understand this. This is what those who buy in are buying: Personalizing the Ukraine crisis in one man relieves us of the obligation to recognize an alternative perspective. It is all the fault of an irrational, hyper-nationalist strongman — who need not be otherwise understood and who must be stopped by the forces of reason and good.
The anti-Putin rhetoric springs right from the top. But a couple of examples in the media, post-MH-17, are irresistible.
One is the work of Timothy Garton Ash, a celebrated Oxford don who made a name on our end of the ocean commenting on Eastern Europe after the Soviet collapse. In a piece called “Putin’s Deadly Doctrine,” published in last Sunday’s Times, Garton Ash has Putin down as “a threat to the whole post-1945 international order” (which, if true, would not be too bad, in my view). The Putin Doctrine, since you asked, seems to be some kind of blood-and-soil notion of the Russian “volk,” a loaded word to invoke.
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Garton Ash gets it all dressed up with a reference to Henri Bergson and dexterous hair-splits over translations from German and Russian. Take it apart. It is crapulous, intellectual vaudeville intended primarily to show off, lend intellectual weight, and then to cancel all thought of politics, authentic history and Western provocation.
And do not miss the truly juvenile references to Putin’s physiology and manner, for these betray the weakness of the argument: “a short, thickset man with a rather ratlike face… this irritating little man… uncrowned czar of all Russians.” Goodness, Timbo. From you? Why leave out the ill-fitting suit common in Cold War typecasting?
More in the same vein emits from the aforementioned Neil MacFarquhar, of the Times’ Moscow bureau (as linked above). This guy did have a tough assignment Monday for Tuesday’s paper, fair enough: Explain Putin’s video overnight while maintaining the irrational-aggressor theme and report on the widely held view among Russians that the West has opened a kangaroo court on the MH-17 question without lending the Russian perspective credibility.
The video seems to have been a real headache for MacFarquhar. Putin urged a credible, complete investigation of the aircraft tragedy, argued against opportunism in its wake (as quoted above), and committed to getting the rebels, best he could (and we do not know what best is), to cooperate on the plane tragedy and go to the bargaining table. All good, one would think.
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“But at the same time, Moscow did not admit that it was at fault,” MacFarquhar counters with faux-objectivity. The sentence has no logic to it whatsoever, so far as I can make out.
As Putin spoke, the rebels had already begun cooperating in releasing the bodies of MH-17’s victims and allowing investigators onto the site. But never mind. Even if he appears to do what he says, the theme cannot change: It is mere words, without action. Following the administration as it will, the Times is going to nail Putin in this way whether he is coming or going. This has been the pattern for months.
As to Putin’s perfectly decent, ordinary appreciation of MH-17 as human tragedy, an editorial accompanying MacFarquhar’s report takes care of this. “Sanctimonious,” it said in dismissing it. Do you get what that term means here? I do not. It comes over as no more than a cheap shot.
Worse from those Russians, MacFarquhar readers. Putin may have “appeared” conciliatory, but elsewhere in the video this was belied when “two senior military officers demanded that the United States show publicly any proof that the rebels fired the fatal missile.” An out-and-out affront. How dare they ask for evidence at a moment like this? Nobody gets to see our evidence of anything.
There is more in this unusually compromised piece of work, but I leave it to interested readers to follow the link. To entice, these predictable bits on Putin’s person: He “seethes with distrust and anger at the United States.” (Understandably, in my view.) Instead of “his usual swagger,” he was “pasty and unsure.” He did not look at the camera and “leaned on his desk.” (He looked altogether game to me.)
I would have thought a correspondent promoted to the Times’ Moscow bureau could do better than this. But maybe not in our day and age.
As to the views of Russians, the report gave us the thinking of Anastasia Lukina. Full credit for this, and for attempting no discrediting comment. What is there to say in response to a truth such as hers, even as the piece reporting on her is evidence of her point?“Tickets! Tickets!” the solitary figure called out from the steps of the arena. I passed by him on my way to the entrance, and that’s when I saw the gleam of a blade in the darkness. “You’d better take these goddam Knicks tickets off me, mister, or I swear...”
“Oh, thank you, but I’ve already got one!” I replied with a smile, handing my ticket to the attendant. It was the year 2018, and all was well at Madison Square Garden.
As I headed inside, and then through several Anti-Oakley Security Checkpoints, I marvelled at the changes the Owner had made to the Garden. The aisles had once swarmed with people, mutant under-dwellers who emerged from the depths of Penn Station. Now those same aisles stood empty and serene, like a temple, which was only fitting for this hardwood mecca, this site of some of the most storied feats in all of sport. Like the championship in the year—
I couldn’t quite recall. But who had time for the past when the present was so bright? I made it to my seat just in time for tipoff. The whistle blew, the referee moved to toss the ball into the air, then, suddenly, Phil Jackson strode onto the floor.
“Before we get under way, I wanted to say that someone on this team is a toxic pile of pure, radioactive trash.” He paused, looked over at Carmelo Anthony, pointed at Carmelo Anthony, and went on, “That’s an ancient Zen koan I’ve always admired and thought I’d share.”
His pep talk certainly seemed to inspire the players, who raced out ahead of their opponents, the Long Island Cablevision Is Goods. The Cablevision Is Goods were the divisional rivals of the Knicks in the new league the Owner had founded. It only made sense: having accomplished roughly all they set out to accomplish in the N.B.A., the Knicks would face new challenges against competition more worthy of their talents. Also, no mean chants about the Owner were allowed.
On paper, the Knicks matched up well against the Cablevision Is Goods, whose lineup consisted of someone who had once participated in a halftime free-throw contest, two guys from the Garden’s custodial staff, and the mascot of the New York Liberty, in costume. Their fifth player was out sick.
The game was well in hand for the Knicks by halftime. Carmelo was putting on the kind of show fans had come to expect: twenty-two points on four hundred shots. Derrick Rose, fresh off a stint in the I.C.U. following the explosion of both his knees, was doing what he did best: unnerving opponents with his vacant, disinterested presence. The long-term deal the Knicks had signed him to was looking better and better. Kristaps Porzingis was being kept off-site in a secure location.
It wasn’t until the fourth quarter that anything started to go wrong.
First, that free-throw-contest participant suddenly got hot from three. Apparently, now that he had access to the Garden around the clock, he was putting in a lot of time. It was frustrating that the Knicks had given him the tools to develop like that, but how were they supposed to know, since none of their own players had ever voluntarily practiced before, even once?
Moments later, Phil Jackson started to throw batteries onto the court. I think it was a kind of Zen metaphor thing about keeping energy levels up? But the players may have misinterpreted it, and Carmelo went so far as to sub himself out and crawl into the protective shelter he had built on the sideline out of folding chairs and old foam fingers.
And just like that, the Knicks’ ten-point lead, which had once seemed insurmountable, vanished. When time ran out, the Knicks had lost.
An ominous silence fell over the Garden. Looking back, I wish to Dolan I had shouted, “Fellow-Knickerbocker fans! Think of all we have! A Lithuanian! And headquarters in a city that good basketball players visit for fun, so let’s figure out ways to trap them and make them play for us! If we worked together, it would be so easy to trap them!”
But I stayed silent, looking on as the people around me rose up, and, with a collective shriek, rushed toward the Owner’s fortifications. That’s when I saw that they had seized the cannons—somehow, they had gotten ahold of the T-shirt cannons.
What came next, well—you don’t forget a thing like that.Building A React/Redux/Elm Bridge
Elm’s ngReact
A. Sharif Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 30, 2016
Sometimes it’s the small and incremental changes that matter.
A lot has been said about Elm. An impressive number of articles, talks and posts have been praising Elm as the future of Front End development (alongside with PureScript and ClojureScript).
The really nice thing about Elm, is the fact that you don’t have to go “full Elm” to leverage the benefits. The benefits include a great language, tooling, community as well as great ideas and concepts. Especially the community aspect and the interaction within the community is nice. It appears that everyone is either pair programming or otherwise collaborating, at least from an outsider perspective.
Elm also has an amazing on-boarding strategy. Evan Czaplicki wrote about it in How to Use Elm at Work, where he describes detailed strategies on how to introduce Elm into the workplace. The previously mentioned fact that you don’t have to go full Elm, but start out small by embedding Elm into an existing project, lowers the barrier to entry significantly. Which means that introducing Elm into your React based project is simpler than you might think.
We will take a look the different migration strategies, which include integrating into a barebones JavaScript project, migrating from React to Elm and finally how to even gradually migrate from Redux to Elm.
Embedding Elm in some big JavaScript project is not very hard. It’s like three lines of JS, but it feels like no one knows about them!
While it sounds like a complex undertaking, the interop part is really just a couple lines of code, as stated in the above comment. By adding an output option to the elm-make command, we get the compiled JavaScript file sans the HTML part.
elm-make Counter.elm --output=Counter.js
The following snippet is taken from the Elm language guide — JavaScript Interop section.
<div id="main"></div>
<script src="main.js"></script>
<script>
var node = document.getElementById('main');
var app = Elm.Main.embed(node);.
</script>
Communicating between JavaScript and Elm can be achieved in two ways: via ports and via flags. Getting the two to communicate requires a couple of adaptions on both, the Elm as well as the JavaScript side. Including having to define a port module
port module Counter exposing (..)
and adding ports for listening and sending from and to JS.
port check : Int -> Cmd msg
port counter : (Int -> msg) -> Sub msg
Every communication between Elm and JavaScript runs through port, where we can interact via commands and subscriptions. In the above example we send data to the JS side through the check port. We now have the option to send an integer by calling
check 1
The subscription part is covered by the counter port. We’re subscribing to any changes to the counter value coming from the JS side.
To reiterate on our previous HTML snippet, we can now initialize the counter f.e. In this very specific case we define an initial counter value of 3 and then subscribe to any changes on that counter.
<script>
var node = document.getElementById('counter');
var app = Elm.Counter.embed(node);
app.ports.counter.send(3)
app.ports.check.subscribe(function(count) {
console.log('receiving data...', count);
})
</script>
We could also listen to changes and multiply the current count by 3 f.e.
<script>
//...
app.ports.check.subscribe(function(count) {
app.ports.counter.send((count*3))
})
</script>
As seen with the previous examples, we can easily interact with JavaScript from an Elm perspective and vice versa. Elm also makes sure that invalid data is rejected upfront, preventing bad data from entering an Elm application in the first place.
The possibilities to interact don’t stop there, though. react-elm-components is a specific library aimed at introducing components written in Elm into a React codebase.
In reality, it simply wraps the previously seen code into a React component, ensuring that the Elm component is connected with the correct DOM node and handles the sending as well as the subscribing to that component. All in all, it’s just a couple lines of code, that enable us to smoothly bridge Elm to React. The same example can be written like this now.
import React from'react'
import { render } from'react-dom'
import Elm from'react-elm-components'
import { Counter } from './Counter'
const setupPorts = ports => {
ports.check.subscribe(count => ports.counter.send((count*3)));
}
const CounterComponent = () =>
<Elm src={Counter} ports={setupPorts} />
render(<div>
<CounterComponent />
</div>, document.getElementById('app'))
For a full implementation check the react-elm-components example.
All these examples highlight the fact that we’re able to introduce the smallest component into an existing JavaScript project without having to go through a complex setup. Add this to the fact that we can always revert back, makes incorporating Elm an interesting undertaking. These features are the bridge to introducing incremental changes. Opening up the way for slowly migrating a project to a different framework, or in this case a different language.
But as you can imagine, things don’t stop there. Someone in the Elm community thought about how to connect Redux with Elm. This makes sense actually, considering how far Redux is widespread in the JavaScript and especially React world. Christoph Hermann wrote a module simply entitled redux-elm-middleware which enables us to slowly migrate an existing redux codebase to Elm.
Let’s build a Counter reducer, just to get a feel for the idea.
port module Reducer exposing (..)
import Redux
import Task exposing (..)
import Process
import Json.Encode as Json exposing ( object, int )
port increment : ({} -> msg) -> Sub msg
port decrement : ({} -> msg) -> Sub msg
subscriptions : Model -> Sub Msg
subscriptions _ =
Sub.batch
[ decrement <| always Decrement
, increment <| always Increment
]
As seen in the interop example, we define a port module as well as the required ports, which we need for being notified when an increment or decrement action has been dispatched.
-- MODEL
type alias Model =
{ count : Int }
init : Int -> ( Model, Cmd Msg)
init count =
( { count = count }, Cmd.none )
encodeModel : Model -> Json.Value
encodeModel { count } =
object
[ ( "count", int count ) ]
The only really interesting part in the next section is encodeModel, where we tell Elm what the shape of our model should look like. If the passed in data doesn’t fit the defined model, it will be rejected straight away and fail on the JavaScript side.
-- VIEW
view : Model -> Html Msg
view model =
div []
[ button [ onClick Decrement ] [ text "-" ]
, div [] [ text (toString model) ]
, button [ onClick Increment ] [ text "+" ]
]
-- ACTIONS
type Msg
= NoOp
| Increment
| Decrement
-- UPDATE
update : Msg -> Model -> ( Model, Cmd Msg )
update action model =
case action of
Increment ->
( { model | count = model.count + 1 }, Cmd.none )
Decrement ->
( { model | count = model.count - 1 }, Cmd.none )
NoOp ->
( model, Cmd.none )
main =
Redux.program
{ init = init 0
, update = update
, encode = encodeModel
, subscriptions = subscriptions
}
All that is left to do, is to define the actions and the update function. This implementation is very similar to the original Counter example, no extra knowledge required. The only other interesting aspect is that we use Redux.program here.
The JavaScript part will consist of a connected Counter Component.
import React from'react'
import { render } from'react-dom'
import { applyMiddleware, createStore, combineReducers }
from'redux'
import { connect, Provider } from'react-redux'
import { compose } from 'ramda'
import createElmMiddleware, { reducer as elmReducer }
from'redux-elm-middleware'
const reducers = combineReducers({
elm: elmReducer,
})
const elmStore = window.Elm.Reducer.worker()
const {run, elmMiddleware} = createElmMiddleware(elmStore)
const store = createStore(reducers, {}, compose(
applyMiddleware(elmMiddleware),
))
run(store)
There is a lot going on in here. We’re accessing Elm.Reducer via window and passing it on to createElmMiddleware, which returns us the run and elmMiddleware functions. We then create the store and apply elmMiddleware to the Redux applyMiddleware function and finally call run with the created store.
The rest of the code is React specific.
const Counter = ({ count = 0, Inc, Dec }) => (
<div>
<button onClick={Inc}>+</button>
<p>Current count: {count}</p>
<button onClick={Dec}>-</button>
</div>
)
const EnhancedCounter = connect(
({elm}) => ({ count: elm.count }),
dispatch => ({
Inc: () => dispatch({ type: 'INCREMENT' }),
Dec: () => dispatch({ type: 'DECREMENT' }),
}),
)(Counter)
render(
<Provider store={store}>
<EnhancedCounter />
</Provider>, document.getElementById('app')
)
If you’ve been wondering how to migrate your Redux or React application to Elm, all of this has already been thought through by the community. The easiest way to get started is to actually try it out. Take a look at the redux-elm-middleware example for a more detailed implementation.
You might still be wondering what we gain from all this. In short, besides the fact that we’re able to introduce a functional language into the project, we also get pure state and effect handling out of the box while still being able to benefit from the Redux eco-system.
Elm’s strength is being able to interop with JavaScript while at the same time isolating any bad data away from Elm itself. This approach comes with a price obviously, which includes having to type complex JSON objects for example. You might want to keep this in mind.
Finally, do you remember ngReact? In hindsight it’s sounds trivial, but ngReact solved one problem, migrating an existing Angular application to React. react-elm-components and redux-elm-middleware open up a smooth way for introducing Elm into an existing project similar to ngReact.
Build something small. Get it into production. And then you can see wether you like it or not.
Richard Feldman, ReactiveConference 2016
Very special thanks to Christoph Hermann and Oskar Maria Grande for providing feedback.
Any questions or Feedback? Connect via Twitter
Links
redux-elm-middleware
redux-elm-middleware example
How to Use Elm at work
Elm Guide on JavaScript Interop
react-elm-components
react-elm-components example
Elm Guide on JSON InteropMindfulness-based cognitive therapy was associated with a reduced risk of depressive relapse over a 60-week follow-up period compared with usual care and outcomes were comparable to those who received other active treatments, according to an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry.
Recurrent depression causes significant disability. Interventions that prevent depressive relapse could help reduce the burden of this disease. A growing body of research suggests mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is efficacious.
Willem Kuyken, Ph.D., of the University of Oxford, England, and coauthors report the results of analyses of individual patient data from nine published randomized trials of MBCT. The analyses included 1,258 patients with available data on relapse and examined the efficacy of MBCT compared with usual care and other active treatments, including antidepressants.
The authors report MBCT was associated with reduced risk of depressive relapse/recurrence over 60 weeks compared with those who did not receive MBCT. There also appears to be no differing effects for patients based on their sex, age, education or relationship status.
The treatment effect of MBCT on the risk of depressive relapse/recurrence also may be larger in patients with higher levels of depression symptoms at baseline compared with non-MBCT treatments, according to the results. The authors suggest this means that MBCT may be especially helpful to those patients who still have significant depressive symptoms.
The authors acknowledge study limitations related to the availability of the data within the studies.
"We recommend that future trials consider an active control group, use comparable primary and secondary outcomes, use longer follow-ups, report treatment fidelity, collect key background variables (e.g., race/ethnicity and employment), take care to ensure generalizability, conduct cost-effectiveness analyses, put in place ethical and data management procedures that enable data sharing, consider mechanisms of action, and systematically record and report adverse events," the authors conclude.
Efficacy of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy in Prevention of Depressive Relapse, Willem Kuyken PhD, Fiona C. Warren PhD, Rod S. Taylor PhD, Ben Whalley PhD, Catherine Crane PhD, Guido Bondolfi MD, PhD, Rachel Hayes PhD, Marloes Huijbers MSc, Helen Ma PhD, Susanne Schweizer PhD, Zindel Segal PhD, Anne Speckens MD, John D. Teasdale PhD, Kees Van Heeringen PhD, Mark Williams PhD, Sarah Byford PhD, Richard Byng PhD, Tim Dalgleish PhD, JAMA Psychiatry, doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.0076, published online 27 April 2016.
Editorial: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Prevention of Depressive Relapse
"Mindfulness practices were not originally developed as therapeutic treatments. They emerged originally in contemplative traditions for the purposes of cultivating well-being and virtue. The questions of whether and how they might be helpful in alleviating symptoms of depression and other related psychopathologies are quite new, and the evidence base is in its embryonic stage. To my knowledge, the article by Kuyken et al is the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date to provide evidence for the effectiveness of MBCT in the prevention of depressive relapse. However, the article also raises many questions, and the limited nature of the extant evidence underscores the critical need for additional research," writes Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in a related editorial.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and the Prevention of Depressive Relapse, Richard J. Davidson PhD, JAMA Psychiatry, doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.0135, published online 27 April 2016.ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan 24) - Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Friday said Kurdistan Region's next month referendum on independence from Iraq could not constitute a casus belli for his country.
Yildirim's remarks carried by the state-funded Anadolu Agency followed a Thursday call for war by the leader of far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) Devlet Bahceli who described the referendum by the Kurds in Iraq as a prelude to creating a state for those in Turkey.
Bahceli went so far as to suggest the beheading of those "thinking of activating dynamics that divide Turkey."
"If a state starts challenging our sovereignty rights then we will have a reason for war. But what the regional administration which is a part of Iraq [does] cannot become casus belli," Yildirim told reporters during a flight back from Vietnam where he was on an official trip.
But Yildirim went on reiterating his country's rejection of the referendum, calling it "a wrong step," and inviting the Kurdish authorities to cancel it in no time.
Kurdistan Region's President Masoud Barzani has repeatedly announced that there will be no turning back from Kurds' path to self-determination.
“Iraq’s central government, Iran, Turkey oppose it. The US says we don't want it. European countries call it untimely. Taking all these into account, there is no reason for the Northern Iraqi administration to keep insisting on this subject,” Yıldırım said, avoiding using the region's constitutionally recognized name 'Kurdistan.'
Turks fear any attempt at statehood by the Kurds in Iraq would embolden others in Turkey, Syria, and Iran in seeking self-rule, if not outright independence.
Editing by Ava HomaHoly Macaroni: Welcome To The First Ever Official Pastafarian Wedding
Enlarge this image toggle caption Nick Perry/AP Nick Perry/AP
The scene: a wedding on a pirate-style ship in New Zealand's Akaroa Harbour.
The rings: known here as rigatoni, and made of pasta.
The happy couple: Pastafarians Toby Ricketts and Marianna Fenn, in full pirate regalia.
The officiant: Karyn Martyn, New Zealand's first "ministeroni."
The wedding feast: pasta. Only pasta. (OK, there was some cake, too.)
Welcome to the first official wedding of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, according to The Associated Press. The group was inspired by a 2005 satirical letter calling for greater separation of church and state.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Nick Perry/AP Nick Perry/AP
"When it came time for the kiss, the bride and groom slurped up either end of a noodle until their lips met," the AP reported.
As for the vows? "The groom, Toby Ricketts, vowed to always add salt before boiling his pasta, while bride Marianna Fenn donned a colander on her head."
During the service, Martyn, the ministeroni, explained some of the core beliefs of Pastafarians. "The Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world. We know that," she said, according to the AP. "We weren't around then and we didn't see it, but no other religion was around to see it either, and our deity is as plausible as any other."
Fenn, the bride, told the wire service: "I would never have agreed to a conventional marriage, but the idea of this was too good to pass up." We note that her last name was reported as Young, not Fenn, by one local publication that interviewed her.
You might remember that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster started as a demonstration against teaching intelligent design in Kansas schools in 2005. Bobby Henderson wrote to the Kansas State Board of Education, saying that according to his religion, a "Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe" — and this alternative theory should be taught in schools, he added:
"It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don't."
The letter quickly went viral, drawing supporters around the world who want to see greater separation between church and state. (As we reported, those include one Austrian who was eventually allowed to have his driver's license photo with a pasta strainer on his head.)
The church's New Zealand branch says it is "formed by people tired of being disenfranchised for thinking rationally."
Last December, New Zealand's Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was recognized by officials as "suitable to officiate weddings," and Martyn was the first celebrant to receive approval, The New Zealand Herald reported.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Nick Perry/AP Nick Perry/AP
"I've had people from Russia, from Germany, from Denmark, from all over contacting me and wanting me to marry them in the church because of our nondiscriminatory philosophy," Martyn told the BBC. "We will marry any consenting legal adults who meet the legal requirement."
Jeff Montgomery, New Zealand's registrar-general of births, deaths and marriages, explains why he gave the group approval.
"While some claim this is a 'parody organisation', members have rebutted this on a number of occasions," he wrote, according to the Herald. "Most approved organisations are faith-based and cluster around well-known religious views, however, a number have what might be considered an 'alternative philosophy.' "Please enable Javascript to watch this video
RICHMOND, Va. -- The man fighting for nude sunbathing in one fairly remote stretch of the James River Park will turn 80 in November.
The infamous "Naked Man" - aka "The Yeti of the River" - has Parkinson's Disease and lives in a vast retirement community, where he's known for jokes and magic tricks.
Thomas Roane, a retired agricultural engineering professor who worked at Richmond Professional Institute (now VCU), had been busted five times for sunbathing in the buff, the first time 30 years ago.
He was arrested for indecent exposure again in the Texas Beach area on June 7.
The river was up and Thomas was sunning himself on a big rock when he heard the voice of authority.
"He said something and I turned around and looked and there was an officer looking at me," Thomas said with a chuckle. "I knew immediately he was going to write me a ticket and take me back to court."
I interviewed the Naked Man down by the river in 2013.
Why does he do it?
"Because I enjoy it. It's fun and it's free," he told me then. "It's the mental freedom that you have. We're all brainwashed to keep our clothes on."
Is he proud of his body?
"Proud of it? Not particularly. I like my tan. The girls tell me they like my tan."
He is known not just for nudity (and he's not always nude), but for helping park users negotiate slippery rocks, picking up trash and broken glass.
Now he's been banned from all city parks, again.
Which is devastating - and wrong, he believes. He wants the local laws changed.
For all of his years of nudity, "I don't remember anyone coming up to me and saying, 'Thomas, you really shouldn't be doing that.' Nobody - church people, working people, other people...
"Two different state Supreme Court judges ruled in two different cases that nudity itself is not obscene. To be indecent you have to do something that is weird, crude, rude and all those kind of words."
Thomas said he has more than 300 signatures on a petition to allow nudity in one portion of the park.
He has hired a lawyer, but to take it up through the court system to fight the law itself would take more money than he has.
And he wishes he could still use his beloved river park.
"It gets me away from my head that's been uncomfortable for years and years," he said. "There's some kind of pain to it. It's not really painful, but aspirin doesn't help or nothing helps it."
He said he's been treated with psychiatric medications, but they haven't helped either.
A nice, free walk in the James River Park does, he said.
"It's restful, it's peaceful," Thomas said. "It gives me something to do to stay busy all day instead of sitting in the chair and rocking, getting old and dying."
Do you agree with the city’s decision to ban the 79-year-old "naked man" of the James River from all parks? Weigh in on the WTVR CBS 6 Facebook page.This article is about the New7Wonders Foundation list. For other uses, see Wonders of the World
New7Wonders of the World (2000–2007) was a campaign started in 2000 to choose Wonders of the World from a selection of 200 existing monuments.[1] The popularity poll was led by Canadian-Swiss Bernard Weber and organized by the New7Wonders Foundation based in Zurich, Switzerland, with winners announced on 7 July 2007 in Lisbon.[2][3]
The New7Wonders Foundation said that more than 100 million votes were cast through the Internet or by telephone. Voting via the Internet was limited to one vote for seven monuments per person/identity, but multiple voting was possible through telephone.[4] Hence the poll was considered unscientific.[5] According to John Zogby, founder and current President/CEO of the Utica, New York-based polling organization Zogby International, New7Wonders Foundation drove "the largest poll on record".[3]
The program drew a wide range of official reactions. Some countries touted their finalist and tried to get more votes cast for it, while others downplayed or criticized the contest.[3][5] After supporting the New7Wonders Foundation at the beginning of the campaign by providing advice on nominee selection, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), by its bylaws having to record all and give equal status to world heritage sites, distanced itself from the undertaking in 2001 and again in 2007.[6][7]
The New7Wonders Foundation, established in 2001, relied on private donations and the sale of broadcast rights and received no public funding or taxpayers' money.[8] After the final announcement, New7Wonders said it didn't earn anything from the exercise and barely recovered its investment.[9]
Although N7W describes itself as a not-for-profit organization, the company behind it—the New Open World Corporation (NOWC)—is a commercial business. All licensing and sponsorship money is paid to NOWC.
The foundation ran two subsequent programs: New7Wonders of Nature, the subject of voting until 2011, and New7Wonders Cities, which ended in 2014.
Winners [ edit ]
Location of the New7Wonders winners
The Great Pyramid of Giza, largest and oldest of the three pyramids at the Giza Necropolis in Egypt and the only surviving of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was granted honorary status.
Reactions [ edit ]
United Nations [ edit ]
In 2007, the New7Wonders Foundation contracted a partnership with the United Nations in recognition of the efforts to promote the UN's Millennium Development Goals". The UN posted on its website:[10]
The New7Wonders campaigns aim to contribute to the process of uplifting the well being and mutual respect of citizens around the world, through encouraging interaction, expression opinion and direct participation by voting and polling on popular global issues which are understandable to everyone. — United Nations Office of Partnerships
However, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in a press release on June 20, 2007, reaffirmed that it has no link with the "private initiative". The press release concluded:[7]
There is no comparison between Mr. Weber's mediatised campaign and the scientific and educational work resulting from the inscription of sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List. The list of the 8 New Wonders of the World will be the result of a private undertaking, reflecting only the opinions of those with access to the Internet and not the entire world. This initiative cannot, in any significant and sustainable manner, contribute to the preservation of sites elected by this public. — UNESCO
Brazil [ edit ]
In Brazil there was a campaign Vote no Cristo (Vote for the Christ) which had the support of private companies, namely telecommunications operators that stopped charging voters to make telephone calls and SMS messages to vote.[11] Additionally, leading corporate sponsors including Banco Bradesco and Rede Globo spent millions of reals in the effort to have the statue voted into the top seven.[3] News |
I support, and individuals working on projects I care about.
And finally, there is really nothing quite as wonderfully ego stroking as having your own name on the letterhead, company logo, website, and business cards. Every junior associate and new lawyer will spend their career creating a name for themselves. I am spending the same time developing my own brand.
Of course, the first and most terrifying aspect of starting a law firm is the fact that IT IS MY NAME ON THE LETTERHEAD! There is no “go to” partner who can fix my youthful mistakes or to temper my ignorance. My reputation as a lawyer is on the line with
everything that goes out of the door with my letterhead on it. Mistakes on a brief, or a filing are all mine: there is no one reviewing my work. Competency is my ethical requirement, so I spend hours which I can’t bill out to my clients if I have any hope of keeping my fees “reasonable,” researching legal issues and obsessing over documents to squeeze out as many errors as possible.
As a lawyer in a small firm there are limited opportunities to bounce ideas off of other attorneys. Thankfully I live and work in a legal community which makes itself available to answer questions and give guidance to young lawyers. Finding a mentor, or a group of experienced lawyers willing to help you over the shoals of the transition from law student to lawyer is vital for anyone thinking of starting a law firm right out of law school.
Any new law firm is a business, and the first time you lose track of that fact is the first time you will feel the financial repercussions. The first month I paid my nanny more than what I was able to bill my clients was the second terrifying aspect of my new firm. The benefits of no minimum billable hours requirement, and the ability to take time off are only illusions. As any small business owner can tell you, there is NO such thing as time off. If I am not working, there is no money coming in the door. If I don’t spend part of my time in any given month, focusing on the basic business issues—marketing, accounting, office management, networking—then I am going to spend the next month with nothing to do but spend my time marketing. I’ve heard it only takes 90 days for cash flow to dry up at an established law firm. Try ignoring marketing in a first year law firm and the time it takes cash flow to dry up is closer to two weeks. Start a small business and it will be the most selfish and jealous mistress you will ever know.
As a small business owner I get all of the credit and all of the stress. Truthfully, you will need to have the entrepreneurial spirit to succeed in starting a law firm just out of school. Few people know how to run a successful small business, and no one coming out of law school has all of the refined skills gained through years of trial and error in the practice of law. You need overweening confidence and a healthy ability to ignore stress brought on by early struggles.
Terror, the pure terror of starting a law firm, is the perfect motivation for success. Those of you who have gone to law school and studied for a bar exam, know the motivational power that terror of failing something so instrumental to your life that it is all consuming can have. To-do lists, daily goals, and pictures of my beloved family never motivate me as much as the student loan bill that comes in the mail.
The grim truth of the matter is that most small business fail within the first few years. If you don’t like feeling the cool breeze on your ass you had better find a position with a firm that will cover your tukkis. If you like the breeze… drop trou and hang your shingle.
(Photo:
Todd Williams practices energy and regulatory law at the firm Williams & Moser in Toledo, Ohio.Donald Trump speaks to a crowd at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on Sept. 14, 2015. Photo by Jamelle Bouie
DALLAS—Donald Trump’s political rallies are, if nothing else, an event. While you wait for the Donald to appear—and even during his off-kilter and meandering talk—you can buy snacks. On Monday evening, American Airlines Center wasn’t just a venue for Trump’s next speech: It was open for business, and attendees could grab popcorn, peanuts, nachos, and plenty of beer. This was a spectacle, and the assembled embraced it. People dressed in Trump memorabilia—including one woman in a Trump-branded dress—took selfies in front of Trump signs, and cheered in anticipation of the billionaire’s arrival.
“This is actually my first rally I’ve ever been to, period,” said George Lanier, a well-built personal trainer from nearby Carrollton, Texas. “I was like—what better way to start it off than by seeing Donald Trump, you know? He’s very exciting, it’ll be very entertaining.” Lanier liked Trump’s ideas, but he was much more drawn to the candidate’s affect and style. “I love that he’s talking in everybody else’s language. He’s not trying to be politically correct—he’s just speaking to us like how we’re talking here, or how you talk to your friends.”
We associate Trump with the Republican right wing, but this wasn’t a Tea Party rally. The crowd was diverse, or at least more diverse than you might assume. Chris Nieves was a transplant from New York City who studied at Texas Christian University and came as an undecided voter, interested in Trump as a businessman who could bring jobs and opportunity to minority communities. “He’s not a politician, and I think that’s huge for us minorities, because a lot of politicians like to exploit us,” said Nieves. “I think that he’s an independent voice, and I think that would be especially good for minorities who are in need of that, because of the establishment that has failed us.”
Joseph Le, 17, poses with his sign before the Trump rally in Dallas on Sept. 14, 2015. Photo by Jamelle Bouie
“I wanted to see what this was all about,” explained Lawrence Badih, a real estate agent who lives in Fort Worth but was born in Sierra Leone and immigrated to the United States. “I’ve been registered Republican for a long time, and we need a change. I see Trump is rising in the polls—he’s No. 1. He’s saying things that no one else wants to say—they’re being politically correct.”
For all the Trump-curious voters, however, there were just as many Trump supporters, who were clear-eyed and enthusiastic about their candidate. “We absolutely love Donald Trump, and we are supporting him 1,000 percent,” said Marilu Rumfolo, a retired investment banker who came all the way from Spring, near Houston. Rumfolo thinks Trump will be a strong conservative on immigration. “He hit a home run with immigration,” she said. “People who just walk in and take our country by force, they really don’t have the same values. We want immigrants, but we have to make sure the law is followed.”
She also thinks Trump will be a less divisive leader than President Obama. “I don’t feel like he’s going to create that kind of animosity that we see with Black Lives Matter,” she explained. “Because honest to God, all lives matter, and it’s really an insult to see a person working 40 to 60 hours a week and be told, even if they’ve struggled their whole life, that if they’re white, ‘Your struggle doesn’t count because your skin color isn’t a certain way.’ ”
At 30 minutes after its scheduled time, the event began. An estimated 16,000 people were packed in the center waving American flags and signs for Trump. First onstage: A megachurch pastor who thanked God for Trump’s “selfless public service.” Then, a local Tea Party activist who railed against Republican leaders—citing the Mississippi Senate primary where incumbent Thad Cochran worked with Democrats to beat his challenger, Chris McDaniel—and declared her belief that, with Trump on the ballot, “2016 may be more historic than the election of Barack Obama.” (At that, the crowd went wild.) Finally, Trump sauntered on stage to whoops, hollers, and cheers.
A woman poses for a news camera with her Donald Trump–themed dress in Dallas on Sept. 14, 2015. Photo by Jamelle Bouie
Trump gave the usual. He gestured toward policies and issues (the Iran Deal, China, Mexico); attacked his opponents (“Jeb Bush,” he said to boos, before mentioning Hillary Clinton to even louder ones); praised himself (he was leading the polls, unlike everyone else, he didn’t need the “blood money” of rich people, and if elected president, he was going to win so much “your head will spin”); and leaned in to his anti-immigrant rhetoric. “Many of these gang members are illegal immigrants,” he said to huge cheers. “They’re rough dudes.” He complained about trade with Japan—“They send us millions of cars. Millions. We send them beef. They don’t even want it.”—and promised to make a deal that will force Mexico to “build that wall.” After more than an hour of speaking, he concluded with his slogan: “You’re going to say to your children, and you’re going to say to anybody else, that we were part of a movement to take back our country. … And we will make America great again.”
At this point, the speakers blared with “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” and the crowd filed outside in the glow of Trump’s unabashed nationalism. There, in the plaza outside the center, they were met by demonstrators from the League of United Latin American Citizens. Carrying Mexican and American flags, they protested Trump’s presence and his message. “No more Trump,” chanted a group of activists wearing shirts that said “Latinos Stand Up” on the front and “Fuck Donald Trump” on the back. “We want them to know we’re united,” said Maira Medina, a manager at a local restaurant who was holding an anti-Trump sign. “If this state is going to be united, we have to unite with everybody and put the hatred and derogatory terms aside.”
A group of demonstrators protest the Donald Trump event in Dallas on Sept. 14, 2015. Photo by Jamelle Bouie
Most of the Trump rally’s attendees walked by without incident. But some couldn’t resist a confrontation. “Deport illegals! No more illegals!” yelled one older woman who got into a shouting match with a group of protesters. A bald, bearded young man—wearing a T-shirt with the words “Commies aren’t cool”—almost got into a fight with one of the demonstrators before police officers separated the two. And another young man—this one wearing a navy blazer, a pink patterned bow tie, and a pair of gray dress pants—was surrounded by media and bystanders as he argued with a young Mexican American man about “illegals.”
Trump is a sideshow, and in the presence of his personality, it’s easy to overlook the ugliness behind his campaign. But it’s there, a debased successor to the nationalist white resentment of Pat Buchanan and George Wallace. And although spectators may miss it, it’s more than clear for the targets of his xenophobia, and the people who hate them.
Read more of Slate’s coverage of the 2016 campaign.Gambians voted on Thursday in the first parliamentary elections since long-time leader Yahya Jammeh left power, electing politicians who could make or break a raft of reforms promised by the new president.
More than 880,000 Gambians were eligible to vote in the small West African country home to 1.8 million, with many relishing the chance to express their opinion after 22 years under Jammeh.
Voter turnout was low, however, according to the Independent Electoral Commission.
Al Jazeera's Nicolas Haque, reporting from the capital Banjul, said the poor showing may be because this election is one many Gambians are unfamiliar with.
"Over the last few decades under Yahya Jammeh, the parliament was effectively a one-party rule where Jammeh's APRC party was always voted into power, so a lot of Gambians weren't sure who and why they were voting," Haque said shortly after polls closed at 16:00 GMT.
Baboucarr Kebbeh, who was a local observer in Kanifing municipality, said he was surprised at the voter turnout.
"I was expecting a high turnout because of the understanding of the need for a National Assembly," Kebbeh, 31, told Al Jazeera by phone.
Kebbeh added he thought the weak turnout could be caused by a lack of voter education, especially in a country where he said Gambians always knew the result before the election took place.
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Change is coming fast in The Gambia - and it's intoxicating
The landscape of Gambian politics has shifted dramatically since the last legislative elections in 2012, when Jammeh's Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) took 43 seats, with a large number of them uncontested because of an opposition boycott.
Only 29 of the 239 registered candidates running for parliament seats representing 53 constituencies were from APRC this year.
President Adama Barrow will appoint five additional seats to bring the total number of parliamentary members to 58.
Key test
Thursday's election is a key test for the seven former opposition parties that make up Barrow's current cabinet.
Those parties had united to form a coalition to oust Jammeh from power, but internal tensions meant they did not run together in the legislative elections, and Barrow's promised overhaul of every aspect of the Gambian state will depend on their willingness to cooperate in parliament and in the cabinet.
Halifa Sallah, who has served as the coalition spokesman and special adviser to Barrow, said The Gambia has come a long way.
"We need a National Assembly that can accompany transformation, a National Assembly capable of carrying legal and constitutional reforms," Sallah said.
"What I am seeing is openness of the democratic process. I do not believe parties will control the process anymore."
READ MORE: The Gambia's journalists find new freedom of expression
Sallah himself was running as a candidate in Serrekunda Central for the People's Democratic Organization for Independence and Socialism.
Some Gambians had expressed anger that the coalition parties had not been able to present a united front, but President Barrow, after casting his vote, defended the coalition, saying: "There is not [a cabinet] split. This is about democracy and this is the new Gambia."
'Smooth start to democracy'
Al Jazeera's Haque said despite the low turnout and concerns, Thursday's election is still an important day for the country.
"That fact that they have been able to organise free and fair elections since Yahya Jammeh left is still a success," Haque said.
Kebbeh, too, believes the election is a positive step for democracy.
"These kinds of elections have never happened. It shows the National Assembly will be truly balanced," he said. "It shows a smooth start to democracy."
Final election results are expected on Friday.Can a gallery close its doors but still maintain the identity and presence of a gallery? The art world and its market trends are always in flux, one way or another, and I’d guess that now is a good time as any to find out.
Last week, during what is thankfully not a news cycle about a spate of gallery closings, the Houston gallery Art Palace announced it would close the doors of its physical space and yet continue to do business — that it would explore new avenues for working with its roster of artists and getting the work in front of audiences. I know the gallerists in question, Arturo Palacios and Hilary Hunt, and have every reason to believe that they are invested in continuing to show and sell work. We don’t know what their version of this looks like yet, and it may be some time before it takes shape, but the announcement itself implies something beyond the more common transition of a gallerist closing a permanent space while remaking him or herself into a straightforward private dealer or consultant. There are countless (and successful) examples of that across Texas. Palacios and Hunt seem to want to try something different.
I feel like it should go without saying that the overhead required to run a full-time brick-and-mortar commercial gallery is, even if it’s modest, a tremendous budget consideration relative to an art dealer’s profit. Rent, utility bills (which are higher for business accounts than residential ones), insurance, maintenance, code compliance, staff to be on hand for open hours, the cost of openings, shipping, private viewings, photography, storage…. The list of costs goes on. My guess is that plenty of gallerists, who are either having trouble keeping afloat or who just flat-out resent their space’s money and man-energy costs, have fantasized about jettisoning their permanent physical space and finding liberation in some new model of doing business. I believe that if there were plenty of success stories out there about the creative re-imagining of what it means to be a “gallery,” more would do just that. But there are solid reasons for galleries to stay put and keep paying rent. Some are practical, and some are purely psychological, and they have real weight.
Which isn’t to say that having a permanent physical space should continue to be the standard, though I think it will be for some time to come. But I know gallerists in London and New York, if not Texas, who say that people coming through their spaces — both during regular daytime hours as well as for evening artist receptions — has dropped notably in the past seven years or so, since social media became so many people’s way of life. The hyper-connectedness of social media gives people a sense that they’ve experienced something without having to show up. The gallerists sometimes wonder why they bother paying for a space, especially when they know their collector base buys work from them whether or not they attend any particular show. The collector comes in when it’s convenient (between trips to Martha’s Vinyard and Venice, perhaps) and goes into a back room to view a work from storage, or the work is sold via JPEG. Generally, art openings are well-attended if there’s a sense of hype surrounding a show, but that can be as much about how well a gallery cultivates a “scene” and whether the opening is capable of attracting a cool crowd. In that case, the art can seem beside the point.
Though we should admit that often a gallery’s crowd of young, groovy artist types gives the gallery a street cred that reassures older collectors who pay attention to such things. A popular gallery sometimes feels like a hybrid of a non-profit institution, a private club, and a sales enterprise, but the gallerist is hyper-aware of who’s buying, or at least who’s adding to the quality of the conversation, which can lead to more credibility which can lead to more sales. Once upon a time the only people who ventured into serious galleries (ever) were people who really loved art, or wanted to buy art. So, on the flip side of people not showing up anymore, you have “gallery nights” in nearly any large city — gigantic movable feasts of disconnected people just looking for something to do. Most gallerists would far prefer to host 20 serious art patrons at a private reception than 200 fashion-chasing randos who saw the event mentioned on Twitter an hour earlier. But there’s tremendous pressure on a gallery to participate in such events, just in case any exposure is — on the off-chance — profitable exposure.
Just as these new realities are sinking in, it still seems true that keeping a full-time space implies stability, solvency, and long-term investment on the part of the gallerist. It says: I believe in my artists, so much that I built a permanent home for them. Walking into an established gallery is like walking into the house of a nuclear family where the parents are still together and the kids make decent grades. If you’re a collector, it feels like a sane and safe place to spend time and money. Most collectors who are spending real money on art are a little older, too — Get X-ers and Boomers. Generationally they expect a gallery to have roots, because that’s the model they grew up with. And the presence of a good gallery in a neighborhood is, outside the more recent examples of unwanted re-gentrification, a kind of show of investment in a community, which also feels comfortingly predictable and solid to art patrons, so that visiting the space is like visiting an old friend.
How much of that ineffable stuff translates into sales is something a gallerist has to weigh every time they negotiate a new lease or pay rising rent. And I suspect that the newer generation of gallerists have some more flexible ideas about how to engage an audience, even if they’re not sure how to translate that into profit.
And I know that younger artists, as a demographic, aren’t nearly as fixated on gallery representation as they were even ten years ago. I think the 2008 crash and the tech revolution pretty much wiped out the Millennials’ sense of permanency, in terms of money or geography. Trying to explain to a 23-year old how a grand old London gallery took care of its artists as recently as the year 2000 is like explaining what life was like before smart phones. Not only does it not register, but they don’t even really care. Our youngest artists do not expect any gallerist or dealer to pay for their production (and shipping and travel) costs, and to do all their tax accounting, and to find them a studio. And a studio assistant. Etc. Those days of full service galleries may be over forever, outside the handful of international mega-galleries. While some gallerists may sigh in relief to be out from under such myriad obligations, the fact that it may have eroded a sense of formality and propriety in the art world can cost them traditional collectors who, again, want to sense that the art dealer is fully invested in the well-being of their artists. Nowadays it seems like the best a gallerist can do is give each of its artists a solo show every two years and promise to take the work to art fairs, which have eaten up ghastly amounts of any gallery’s operating budget.
I don’t know what a new business model looks like for Art Palace, or any gallery hoping to hang on to its hard-won image while breaking free of a lease. Palacios and Hunt’s vision may be as curatorial as it is dealer-oriented, and this shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s noticed that some of our most innovative “curators” (and certainly some of the sharpest eyes for emerging art) are gallerists, who have to know how to put on a good show in order to survive. The art world and all its disparate local scenes certainly would be a far poorer landscape without younger and mid-tier galleries — I don’t think anyone would deny that — but the squeezing of galleries at that level mimics the disappearance of the middle class in this country. It calls for a resourcefulness and inventiveness on the part of the galleries that we haven’t fully grasped yet.Today, we are going to be wrapping up our initial phase of interviews. It’s been an interesting sidestep, and I love the idea of Otherworld. I hope that we get to continue down this path, interviewing other purveyors of fantasy. While Tellest strives to grow, there are plenty of other incredible universes out there that deserve just as much attention.
We end this trifecta with the wonderfully able storyteller Ken Lim. His work takes a cue or two from the lectures of Brandon Sanderson, where he pushes the boundaries of the setting. The Starfall Knight was a fantastic read, and I hope many of our readers get the chance to experience it!
Tellest: The Starfall Knight takes place in a very interesting setting. These floating islands are more than just aimlessly floating land masses. They offer interesting new occupations, elements and more. What made you think to utilize the aerocks as a locale for your story?
Ken Lim: I’ve been a reader all my life, with my favourite genre being fantasy, but it struck me that almost every fantasy story was set on an Earth-analog — a spherical world, Earth-like conditions, and so on. On the other hand, sci-fi, horror and weird fantasy were more likely to push the boundaries of a setting. After watching an early writing lecture by Brandon Sanderson where he mentioned the same sort of notions, I knew it wasn’t just me being contrarian.
Until The Starfall Knight, I’d written my own fair share of generic fantasy, so I decided to create a handful of settings where the world was different and the supporting ecological system was reasonably plausible. The idea of floating landmasses caught my imagination and it led to the creation of world of the Starfall Knight.
T: The story you’ve crafted can afford to be fairly cinematic because of that change in locale. Would you recommend that other fantasy writers consider placing their stories in a peculiar setting as well?
KL: The big advantage of writing is that we’re only limited by our imagination and our ability to convey our ideas to readers. Having an unusual setting or culture is one of the features of sci-fi & fantasy so I’d highly recommend pushing the envelope in that aspect.
T: Sanderson has become a huge part of fantasy writing in recent years. Do you find that his lectures and support are a good place for novice fantasy storytellers to begin studying that realm of imagination?
KL: At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, novice writers have incredible resources nowadays. Brandon’s lectures bring together a large portion of the writing and craft advice that only 10 or 15 years ago would’ve required an inordinate amount of time to find. The internet of the late 90s/early 2000s was a much different place!
T: You have a second full-length novel out now as well, called The Steelbound Sun. Does it connect in any way to The Starfall Knight, or is it just good, standalone fantasy?
KL: The Steelbound Sun’s setting was the next most interesting setting from the batch that I’d brainstormed, so it was the next one that I wrote. While The Steelbound Sun can be enjoyed as a standalone book, there’s a little surprise for readers of The Starfall Knight.
T: There is some mystery there at the end of The Starfall Knight regarding a couple of the characters. Without giving too much away, would you say that The Steelbound Sun offers up some answers as to their whereabouts?
KL: I’ll just say that the answer can be inferred from The Steelbound Sun. The next installment will be out later this year.
T: Beyond your two novels, you’ve also worked on a series of shorter stories in a series called The Fae Liaison Initiative. Since you have experience working with both, which length do you prefer to find yourself involved with?
KL: I prefer writing the longer form; it’s what I prefer to read as well. But that said, while longer stories have more room for the exploration of ideas and characters, the short and succinct story has its own place and its own challenges in writing.
T: You alluded to the idea that there may be a minute amount of overlap between your feature length novels. While they can be read as a standalone, do you think they are moving you forward into a more complete saga?
KL: The groundwork for the complete saga has been in place since The Starfall Knight, so hopefully that won’t change as I continue writing. One advantage of self-publishing is that I can choose what to release.
T: There are plenty of people out there who really want to be a writer, but perhaps don’t understand how viable of an option self-publishing is. What can you tell us about your experiences that might make a difference in the way someone new to the scene perceives that process?
KL: While self-publishing bypasses a lot of the ‘gatekeeping’ in the traditional publishing model, it does mean that the author is responsible for a lot of things that would traditionally be handled by the publisher. It might appeal to some, but not others. Personally, while I find it interesting, it does take a lot of time away from actual writing.
T: You’re very involved with various forms of fantasy media, whether that’s casually reviewing movies to expressing interest in television. You’ve even written a screenplay about the game Team Fortress. Do you notice a lot of blending from one medium to another?
KL: There’s definitely a blending of storytelling from one medium to another. While movie adaptations have been around forever, I’m a big fan of the recent trend (if the last 10 years can be called ‘recent’) of adapting novels to long-form television.
For writers, there’s a lot that can be learned from each medium. Adapting the best parts of each format has certainly helped in my own craft.
T: So for instance, something like Game of Thrones or Legend of the Seeker? What would you say they capture well, and where could they improve?
KL: Game of Thrones has been the flagship of the long-form adaptation with good reason. With a lot of adaptations, respecting the source material is paramount — although that does mean that the show depends more on the quality of the source.
I found that season 1 of GoT worked brilliantly, partly because A Game of Thrones (book 1) was written in a structure that lended itself to TV. Season 3 was choppy in the beginning as the cast of characters expanded. This led to too little time spent on each thread, and as a result, the capacity for plot movement was reduced.
T: They did spend a decent chunk of time in certain places while ignoring several characters every other week. Still, considering there are other novels that are out there that only get the one film treatment, the time that a series like that affords its seasons is actually pretty generous. Since we’re on the topic, what would you have done differently?
KL: It’s impossible to meaningfully progress plot where there are too many threads. With only 1 hour of screen-time, I think the lesser evil would’ve been to cut characters from episodes. The current season of The Walking Dead is a prime example — although taken to the other extreme — where each group has plenty of screen-time in a single episode.
T: Would you say that you envision your stories as eventual television shows? Your novel had that sort of cadence that allowed it to fit the medium fairly well.
KL: A big budget adaptation is always the dream! I wouldn’t mind a movie. As far as a TV show goes, I think the main plot of Starfall would serve as the background/main arc, with extra stories expanding on the existing characters.
T: You’ve been involved in several mediums, the screenplays included. Have you ever thought about shifting any of your tales to that format and submitting them anywhere?
KL: The thought has crossed my mind but I’m happy to stick with the written word. That said, I wouldn’t say no to the right offer!
T: Any favorites you can tell us about? Favorite authors, movies, games?
KL: Needless to say, I read mainly fantasy and try to keep up with all the regular names. At the moment, I’m catching up with the Dresden Files and the last 15 or so Pratchett books — however, I’ve taken a short break from those two series to read Words of Radiance.
In terms of movies, I’ll watch anything but, of course, sci-fi & fantasy are my favourite genre, even when they don’t necessarily self-identify as a genre movie. Although I’m only casual comic-book reader, I’m a sucker for any comic-book adaptation, even unnecessary reboots!
In gaming, Team Fortress 2 is always on standby. RPGs are a favourite, although it has been a while since I’ve been truly engrossed in a modern-day RPG. Nowadways, they’re mostly either masquerading as action games or adventure games with only 1 set path. I love a good sim or strategy game even if I don’t have as much time to play as I used to (I don’t know how many hours I’d sunk into the Civilization series).
T: I’ve always felt that RPGs most closely embody the feel of the fantasy novel. If you were going to make an RPG out of The Starfall Knight and any potential sequels, what would you do to make it the best game it could be?
KL: My ideal RPG of The Starfall Knight would include things like isometric 3D, full terrain deformation and heights (very important for a setting in the aerocks), mechanics for resources like food/energy/survival, and of course, a robust combat system (the game Temple of Elemental Evil had a brilliant combat system).
T: You cite one of the more popular titles from the Dungeons & Dragons line of games, and the developer, Troika Games made that one really memorable. It would be great to see The Starfall Knight expand into something of that caliber. Here’s to hoping that we might see something like that some day!
Thank you so much for checking out our interview with Ken Lim. It was a great deal of fun speaking to him and learning what he values as a storyteller. You can find his featured work, The Starfall Knight, on Amazon.
If you’re the creator of fantasy worlds and you would like to be interviewed for your work, contact us via the link in the menu bar.
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PinterestIt really is a great idea.
A pair of glasses that can project information or perform actions on a virtual screen in front of you about pretty much anything and all you have to do is ask. Driving directions. LinkedIn connections. Order history. A photo. A video. A phone call. An email. The options seem limitless. And they are. Google Glass really is a great idea. The technology can and probably will change the world. So how did Google screw it up?
Yes, screw it up. Since first announcing the product in 2012, Google Glass has been subject to ridicule and even violence. It’s become a symbol of the anti-tech, anti-Silicon Valley crowd. Surveys like this one demonstrate the American public’s general dislike and distrust of Google Glass. The product has not yet spawned an industry. It has not generated revenues for Google. It’s become a frequent joke on late night TV and a target for bloggers and comedians around the country. The world “glasshole” has now risen to the same prominence as “selfie” and “twerk.” Yes, it’s getting attention. But only as a creepy gimmick which, I’m sure, is not the kind of attention that Google intended when they initially introduced it. As cool as it is, let’s admit that Google Glass will go down in the annals of bad product launches. And it will do so because of these reasons.
No one is sure if it was even launched. The product was first announced in 2012 and “prototypes” became available in early 2013. So is it out or not? Is it a product or not? Can we buy it or not? People have been spotted wearing them, particularly in the Bay area or New York City. Who are these people? Customers? Media? Developers? Insiders? Just this past week, Google Glass went “on sale” for just “one day only.” Who does this when launching a product? Was this PR stunt designed to actually create a positive buzz about the product? Not working. Launch. Or don’t launch. Please don’t play games with the buying public.
It’s designed poorly. I bet if Steve Jobs were around now he’d chuckle every time someone wearing Google Glass walks by. Don’t worry Steve – the rest of us have got your back. Google Glass looks ridiculous. And too obvious. The whole point of wearing Google Glass is that you can secretly search for the information you need without making a (excuse the pun) spectacle of yourself. Unfortunately anyone who’s ever worn, or known someone who wears ordinary glasses can pick out a Google Glass wearer a mile away. Product design is so important in our fashion-conscious world, especially when you’re introducing something new. It really, really has to look cool. And nerdy is just not cool. Google recently partnered with a few well known frame designers to fix this problem. But they let it go on too long.
The timing could not have been worse. Great idea Google: introduce a product that gives us the ability to surreptitiously find out all sorts of personal details about the guy we’re having lunch with at a time when hackers are stealing our credit cards, our government is listening to our phone calls and satellites are tracking our every movement. Google has already been accused of capturing way too much of our online and buying habits already – now they’re adding to that reputation by introducing a product that can further accumulate and then use that information through an ordinary pair of glasses? Sometimes even great products have to be delayed when the market conditions aren’t right. Given how scared the public is today about our private information, the market conditions aren’t right.
The price is way too high. Google’s “one day” PR stunt - I’m sorry, sale - during the past week priced Google Glass at $1,500 per pair. I get it – it’s like having a mini-computer on your face. And maybe the cost to build these things is such that even Google can’t absorb, even given their billion dollar cash hoard. But this is being marketed as a consumer product and today’s consumer wouldn’t buy a pair of glasses for more than $300 unless it literally had X-Ray vision or had previously been worn by Beyonce. Google screwed this up. Getting the price right from the get-go is particularly important to set an expectation in the customer’s mind. Now that Google has placed this item in the “luxury” class it’ll never appeal to the mass market.
The wrong market was chosen. Google Glass could be a very important tool for professional use, and not just some kind of consumer tech toy on the face of a Stanford educated hipster from Mission Bay. Anyone operating a truck, a train, a taxi, a boat or an airplane could be demanding better data to help them navigate quicker and safer. Machine operators could be fed up to the minute information about a manufacturing process. Police and security personnel could receive data about threats around them to better protect the public. The list goes on. Google should have taken this device to a specific market and worked with the developers in that industry to create business-use applications that would be used to help companies provide better services. In turn, the public would be intrigued about this important and serious tool. It would not be ridiculed if it were shown to have a useful business application. And it would’ve gone a long way to justifying the $1,500 per unit price too.
Finally, no one really “gets” it. If you’re going to introduce a product, feel free to leave some of its uses to the imagination. But not all. Make sure your intended market can connect it |
lots to maximize non-fare parking revenue.”
Seven years ago, the TTC discontinued free parking for Metropass users and the subsequent price hike, between $4 and $5 for everyone, caused a sharp drop in commuter parking. But in subsequent years, the report notes parking has gradually rebounded and average utilization across all lots is now 91 per cent.
In light of that fact, the TTC notes the recommended rate changes are not expected to “drive ridership away.”
A proposal to introduce paid weekend parking at selected lots was also considered, However, the report says while that would increase overall parking revenue, “free weekend parking has been a boon for weekend ridership levels and even a slight price increase may cause these levels to drop significantly.”Japan is gearing up for its turn hosting the Olympics in 2020. The country's hosting of the world's largest international sporting event has been under scrutiny from its announcement. From criticism over excessive spending, to debate over the design of the main stadium, to allegations that the original logo was plagiarized, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics have been plagued with controversy. Former prime minister of Japan and current president of the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Yoshirō Mori recently appeared at an event to discuss the status of planning and explain his vision for the upcoming event.
In discussing plans for the opening and closing ceremonies, Mori said that people around the world do not necessarily know much about kabuki and sumo. He believes that the aspect of Japanese culture that people everywhere know best is anime and manga. Characters such as Doraemon, Hello Kitty, and Astro Boy are internationally popular and well-known. Therefore, Mori likes the idea of including a big manga parade in the ceremonies.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government also held a special projection mapping event on Monday to mark three years until the Olympics come to the metropolis. The official show included famous footage from Akira, including the Kaneda bike sequence. Katsuhiro Otomo famously held part of his Akira story in a fictional stadium built for the 2020 Olympics in Neo-Tokyo.
The Olympics' organizing committee unveiled Astro Boy, Sailor Moon, Shin-chan, Luffy ( One Piece ), Naruto, Jibanyan ( Yōkai Watch ), Goku ( Dragon Ball Super ), Cure Miracle and Cure Magical ( Maho Girls Precure! ) as characters that appear on official Olympic merchandise. The Olympic handover ceremony at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics saw Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wearing a costume of iconic Nintendo character Mario. Although Pokémon was left out, the handover also showed a video featuring many iconic characters from Japanese pop culture. The video featured Captain Tsubasa, Pac-Man, Doraemon, and Hello Kitty while showcasing many traditional Summer Olympic sports.
Shoko Nakagawa is an official member of the Mascot Selection Review Conference for the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2020. The committee is expected to make its final selection for the Olympics' mascot character next year.
Source: Jiji Press via Yaraon!, KotakuThis a new series Cryptoblog is launching, where every day I am going to present a short article on a random relatively popular Altcoin. Today’s spotlight is on a coin called NEM, where as of June 2nd, it is the fourth most popular coin at almost a $2B market cap. I am going to explain some of the reasons why it launched to the fourth most popular coin so recently.
What is NEM?
NEM is a coin that was launched in 2016, that has the goal of becoming a public and private blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin that uses a proof-of-work algorithm that rewards miners for how much hashing power they put towards a block, NEM uses a newly created proof-of-importance algorithm that rewards users based on their contributions to the community. The process of creating blocks is called “harvesting” where the block creator is rewarded all of the transaction fees. The chances of being picked as a harvester are based on how “important” your account is.
Importance
Importance is based on three different things, net transfers, vested amount of NEM, and cluster nodes. Net transfers are any transactions made in the most recent month, vested NEM is just how much a person has saved, and cluster nodes are accounts that are part of a large amount of activity with others.
Vested NEM
Each account has vested and unvested NEM. Importance on the network is based largely on your vested amount. When you receive NEM in a transaction it is considered unvested. Picture it like a checking account, where you receive NEM that is unvested and a savings account for NEM that is vested. Every 24 hours, 10% of your unvested NEM, moves to vested status. When you send NEM to others, it removes some from your vested and unvested balances, in order to discourage super rapid trading. Also, if someone receives NEM and decides to keep it all to get a higher vested score, the algorithm will make hoarding a lower score.
How nodes work
NEM has what is called a node reputation system. Each node is given a trust value which is how often they synchronize with other nodes and how accurate its feedback is. This is to protect against malicious attacks where nodes are colluding.
NEM was a mystery for me until I started doing more research. It is a very interesting concept, and unlike Bitcoin you dont need to invest heavily in mining equipment in order to reap rewards from a block. I love how it rewards certain people just for using the network, and its mobile friendly wallet makes it very user friendly for beginners. I hope you enjoyed my quick article on the basics of NEM and if you want to see more frequent posts you can donate to my Bitcoin/NEM wallet. You can also click on the affiliate links to get free Dogecoin and free Bitcoin and benefit both of us in the process!
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Sources
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AdvertisementsNobby the polar bear has become the latest special addition to the animal kingdom at Yorkshire Wildlife Park.
The two-year-old took his first steps around his new home today (Thursday) at the award-winning park where he joins a trio of polar pals.
Nobby the polar bear in his new home.
Nobby is the fourth polar bear at YWP and the unique group will be a major force in supporting research and helping to raise funds and awareness aimed at protecting the vulnerable species, whose habitat is threatened by climate change.
He will share his new home with Victor, Pixel and Nissan at the 10-acre Project Polar complex, complete with pools, caves and rolling terrain that replicates the bears’ Arctic summer tundra habitat.
“We are delighted to welcome Nobby to Project Polar,” said Simon Marsh, animal collection manager of the park at Branton, near Doncaster. “He will take a while to settle in and get used to his new surroundings and polar neighbours and then visitors will soon be able to see him out and about.
“The Polar Reserve is spacious and designed to stimulate the bears and ensure they have enough room to roam,forage, play and swim. I’m sure Nobby will quickly become a favourite just like Victor, Pixel and Nissan.”
The all-male grouping has been brought together in co-ordination with the European Endangered Species Programme for polar bears. YWP is at the forefront of animal conservation and is part of a global project to save polar bears which are threatened by disappearing habitat and hunting. Project Polar is the one of the largest reserves in the world and a dynamic initiative for conservation, welfare and research.
The two-day operation to transport Nobby from Munich Zoo, where he was born, to Doncaster has been six months in planning and the 1,000-mile trip went without incident.
Keepers at Munich worked with Nobby and his twin Nella were gradually introducing and acclimatizing them to their separate travelling crates in preparation for the journey.. Nella will take up residence with a female group in a Dutch zoo while Nobby is making a new home in Yorkshire.
The timing of the move reflects the call of the wild where young polar bears split from their mother after two years and strike out on their own.
“It is exactly what happens in the wild and Nobby is ready for the move,” added Mr Marsh. “We put a lot of planning into any journey we do with our animals and this was no different. We want to ensure they are comfortable and relaxed as possible and I can confirm that Nobby arrived in good spirits and was excited to explore his new home.”
YWP has become a leading force in polar bear conservation since launching Project Polar in 2014 and bringing the world’s largest land carnivore to Yorkshire. The four male bears are the only Polar bears in the country.
The purpose built polar bear centre is one of the biggest in the world spanning 10 acres (about 8.5 football pitches!) and divided into four sections, featuring landscaped hills, valleys, lakes with water up to 8m deep, pools and waterfalls.
It was designed in consultation with world experts to be a centre for Polar Bear conservation and research as well as for bears with welfare needs, offering a stimulating complex environment.
Meanwhile, the Yorkshire Wildlife Park Foundation has been raising funds for polar bear conservation projects working with Polar Bears International and has recently started working with the IUCN Specialist Group on Climate Change.
YWP, which puts conservation and animal welfare at the heart of all it does, has just announced a £3.6m expansion and improvement plan for 2016 involving bringing endangered black rhinos to the park.
The current African Plains will be completely redeveloped and expanded in a £1.6m project to create a new walk through Safari experience.
The park, one of the UK’s fastest growing and most innovative attractions, brings visitors almost face to face with some of the world’s most rare and beautiful animals. It has a unique collection of animals including Amur Leopards and Tigers, Lions Anteaters, Giraffes, and many more.
It is the perfect place to come this Half Term for a fun packed family day - with a weather proof Monkey Play Barn offering adults the chance to relax in the warm 120 seater café while children enjoy three levels of play equipment - in full view of the baboon reserve through a glass wall.
For more information and to check how Nobby is doing visit Click hereSenate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) was traveling on an official trip to China last week when his scandal-scarred Nevada GOP colleague, John Ensign, announced his resignation so he hasn’t had a chance to comment until now.
Reid told reporters on a conference call Wednesday that he thinks the Senate Ethics Committee will issue a final report on the charges surrounding Ensign’s affair with a top staffer’s wife and the creative steps he took to keep it quiet.
In fact, he said, the panel doesn’t have a choice.
“They are obligated to come up with a report,” he said, noting that he had previously served as chairman of the ethics panel for many years.More than that, he said, if they find evidence of criminal misconduct, they have to turn it over to the Justice Department.
“If they come up with a [criminal] violation, they are obligated to refer it to the Justice Department,” he added.
Ensign had already announced he would not seek re-election, but a month and a half after the Senate Ethics Committee named a special prosecutor to his case, Ensign decided it was time to go — and quickly. His resignation is effective May 4.
Watchdogs immediately worried that the ethics panel would let Ensign off the hook completely, but the panel quickly quashed that concern by issuing a rare statement signaling it would continue its investigation.It’s not often that game devs raise money for celebrities, but Ethan and Hila Klein aren’t ordinary YouTube stars. Right now, the comedy YouTubers say they are fighting an extraordinary—and expensive—legal battle over their right to make “reaction” videos for their 4 million YouTube subscribers.
On April Fools, Overkill Software introduced Ethan Klein into first-person shooter Payday 2. Yesterday, Overkill, who are fans of the Kleins, announced they’ll be making the joke a permanent, and charitable, reality. This Fall, the faces behind H3H3Productions will be playable characters in Payday 2, and Overkill studios will donate all of the DLC’s revenue to the Kleins as they continue to fight their legal battle that, they say, could financially ruin them even if they win.
Ethan and Hila, who run the YouTube channel H3H3Productions, make sketch comedy and “reaction” videos in which they comment on internet and YouTube culture. Last year, the husband-wife team filmed a video mocking YouTuber Matt Hosseinzadeh, or “Bold Guy,” for his video about picking up girls using parkour. In response, Hosseinzadeh filed a complaint with the Southern District of New York District Court alleging copyright infringement. In the complaint, Hosseinzadeh accuses the Kleins of “purporting to discuss the Work in what they believe to be a humorous manner but in fact reproduces virtually all of the Work as nothing more than a prop.”
The Kleins took down their video. In subsequent videos, the Kleins wrote the lawsuit off as a sham: “I think the heart and soul of this is that he doesn’t like that we made fun of him and so he’s suing us,” Ethan said last May.
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The legal fees, though, were no joke. That’s what Overkill’s Ethan and Hila Character Pack will support. While the Kleins were initially represented pro bono, a year later, after switching firms, the price of fighting the lawsuit has reportedly snowballed, with the first month allegedly costing over $50,000. And they will continue to fight it, the Kleins say, to protect fair use and prevent a bad precedent. (YouTube personality Philip DeFranco helped raise $170,000 for them in a GoFundMe, arguing that the lawsuit is “an attempt to step on freedom of speech via a broken copyright system and most people’s confusion over Fair Use.”)
Payday 2’s new H3H3Productions-themed DLC sells for $4.99, for which Overkill will receive 0% of the cut. It’s a matter of protecting IP: “We understand, respect and appreciate the privileged situation our community has helped us create as independent game developers,” Overkill writes on their website. “We want to help Ethan and Hila to do the same, just like we want to help other independent game developers get their games out the door while having them retain their own IP.”New information about another body camera video from the Baltimore Police Department is under investigation for possibly showing police tampering with evidence.
According to charging documents, the incident happened last November in Southeast Baltimore. Police said they were conducting a covert drug investigation when they searched a car.
State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby first revealed its existence last week.
“An additional video raised concerns for one of our prosecutors,” Mosby said in a press conference.
Officers said the search was all captured on body-worn cameras.
The Office of the Public Defender reviewed what it described as a series of videos that show a thorough search of a car where officers found nothing until turning their cameras back off and on again after 30 minutes of being off.
The public defender’s office won’t release the video, but describes the investigation as the following:
“When the cameras come back on one officer is seen squatting by the driver’s seat area. The group of officers then wait approximately 30 seconds. Shortly thereafter, another officer asks if the area by that compartment has been searched. Nobody responds, and the officer reaches in and locates a bag that appears to contain drugs right by where the prior officer was. And where the car had been thoroughly searched about a half an hour prior with absolutely no results.
“A good defense attorney is going to argue why was there that gap in time, and why did the cameras go back on just before they found the biggest piece of evidence. You can imagine the doubt that might engender in a jury,” said legal analyst Adam Ruther.
Prosecutors dropped charges against one of two people arrested in the case. The woman whose charges were said she hired a lawyer for a possible civil lawsuit.
Seven officers are named in court records involving her case, but only two have been referred to Internal Affairs and that’s raising concern.
“What’s most concerning in this particular video, is it appears officers are working in concert with each other,” said Debbie Katz Levi for the Office of the Public Defender.
Mosby dismissed charges in 34 cases relying on the testimony of three other officers after the Office of the Public Defender released a different video they said shows an officer planting drugs. That officer is suspended and two others are on administrative duty.
Separately, seven other Baltimore officers on a gun crimes task force are accused of faking reports and false detentions.
Follow @CBSBaltimore on Twitter and like WJZ-TV | CBS Baltimore on FacebookAlberta’s Progressive Conservative government is about to face its first real test under Premier Jim Prentice: it’s by-election day in the province.
Four ridings are up for grabs: Calgary Elbow, Calgary Foothills, Calgary West and Edmonton Whitemud.
Two high-profile cabinet ministers and Prentice himself will try to earn a seat in the legislature.
Experts at Mount Royal University believe some of these races are still too close to call.
Among them is Political Scientist Lori Williams, who tells City News Calgary Elbow is shaping up to be a four-way race.
“I think those who support the policies will probably still vote for the Conservatives and the question is for those who don’t support the government and they want to send a message, who are they going to vote for? And some of those ridings, the anti-Conservative vote might get split,” Williams said.
Her colleague, Keith Brownsey, says voters often see by-elections as a chance to punish governments and the Wildrose needs to win at least one seat.
“Now if the Wildrose can’t do that, they can’t win at least one, they’ll have to question their leader, question their tactics and go as far to ask whether or not they should be there as a political party,” he said.
Polls will close at 8 p.m. Monday, and 660News will have complete coverage of the results.
For more information on the candidates running, click here.City authorities in Ohio will not be allowed to raise their local minimum wage higher than the statewide minimum, according to a bill passed Wednesday by the state’s legislature.
The Columbus Dispatch reports that the minimum wage restriction on local authorities was passed as part of a larger bill filled with different amendments, as the state’s General Assembly rushed to conclude its business.
The city of Cleveland was set to decide in a special election next May whether to gradually increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, reports Cleveland.com. How Wednesday’s decision would impact the scheduled vote is still unclear. Currently, Ohio has a statewide hourly minimum wage of $8.10, while the U.S. federal minimum wage is an hourly pay of $7.25.
“This is really about keeping Ohio business-friendly,” state representative Ryan Smith told the Dispatch.
According to the Dispatch, the so-called “Petland bill” ostensibly sought to override local restrictions on breeding sources of pets sold in pet stores. In addition to the minimum wage restriction, other legislations appended to this bill included outlawing bestiality, as well as making cockfighting a felony offense in the state.
For more on wages, watch Fortune’s video:
Raise Up Cleveland, the group whose petition led to the city’s decision to put minimum wage on ballots in May 2017, was not pleased with the state legislature’s decision.
“Out-of-touch politicians have once again shown their true colors,” the group’s spokesperson Jocelyn Smallwood said in a statement, calling the assembly’s move “a direct opposition to the will of the people and will hurt the very individuals who make our communities run.”
“It is shameful that lawmakers in Columbus would interfere with a local democratic process,” she added.
It is as yet unclear whether the state’s governor John Kasich will either support the measure, which had passed both houses with significant majorities, or sign the bill into state law. “A hallmark of lame duck [sessions] is a flood of bills, including bills inside of bills,” a spokesperson for Kasich told the Wall Street Journal, “and we will closely examine everything we receive.”The road you ride on
Road cycling. We think about cycling all the time but when was the last time you ever considered the road? It is just there. Perhaps you know where the rough sections appear on your riding routes, but what makes one road smooth and another rough? What makes a road?
History
The earliest roads were forest trails. Visit woodland today anywhere in the world and you’ll find trails worn by animals, whether a fox in Europe or an elephant in Africa. Their weight firmed the ground underneath preventing new plants from growing, and their passage pushed foliage aside, thus clearing a route. In time humans started using these paths and began to clear the way, breaking branches and pushing away stones. The wheel was invented and greater loads needed better trails; roll through history and various civilisations began to use paving, marking the move from simple paths created by common passage to routes that were planned and engineered: the road was born.
From 4,000 BC some civilisations were beginning to pave routes and others were using logs for Corduroy. These were the first roads. 2,000 years later a road in Crete was formed with different layers of material and finished with flagstones and drainage ditches. Another 2,000 years and the Romans were building a layer of crushed stone for drainage over which they put cobbles, a technique still used today.
The road to today
We cannot credit a single person for inventing roads but Pierre-Marie-Jérôme Trésaguet deserves a mention. A French engineer, he sat down to write guidelines for the construction of roads. In 1775 he became Inspecteur Générale for roads and bridges in France and the country began updating paths and tracks. Trésaguet insisted on excavating the ground, installing a layer of large rocks and then adding finer layers of gravel on top, all with drainage channels by the side. Like that, horse-drawn carriages could ride smoothly across mud-free roads as water would now drain away.
The next prominent name in early road construction is John Loudon McAdam, a Scot whose name lives on today thanks to macadam and tarmac. Macadam is the use of soil and stone that is then rollered into place to form a compacted layer that resists the passage of traffic, horseshoes included. This technique is still in use the world over and today cycling races use such roads in the strade bianche of Tuscany or the Colle delle Finestre, a regular in the Giro d’Italia which was built for the Italian army.
Tarmac then involved spraying hot tar – a thick extract from petroleum – on top of the macadam to bind the gravel as the liquid cooled and hardened – a technique used on unrollered paths in Babylonian times. Tarmac, when combined with Macadam, became the modern way of building roads.
Today
Contemporary roads use asphalt concrete. Asphalt is also known as tar or bitumen. A new road will see the route excavated and a layer of hard rocks compressed in place, a technique used in ancient times and refined by Trésaguet. Then comes Macadam’s contribution with the layer of aggregates (ie gravel) mixed with melted bitumen pour in place. This is then compressed by a heavy roller and left to cool, leaving the blacktop road surface that our sport relies on.
Variety
Roads vary. French TV commentator Jean-Paul Olivier once described a road as being “as rough as a cat’s tongue.” Some stretches of road are paper-smooth whilst others are rough. Construction techniques, uses and budgets all play a part here. More rural roads in Europe are often “chip seal”, also known as “tar and chip”. Here some liquefied tar is poured on the road and then gravel is spread on top.
The aim is that the gravel sinks into the tar, either under the weight of a heavy roller or often in France, the weight of passing traffic. The loose layer of gravel is to be avoided if you are on a road bike because even if you’re happy on the loose stuff, the liquid tar underneath is just waiting to ruin your tyres and splatter your bike. Once settled the gravel is effectively glued into the tar but you have to ride over the stones, creating the rough feeling. This is much cheaper than asphalt concrete.
Other parts of Europe see winter damage and subsidence. Some Alpine roads get smashed by coachloads of tourists and subzero temperatures, they are relaid every year. But away from the resorts the frost is left to crack and shatter the road. And in Belgium especially you will find the betonweg or concrete road with its infamous gaps.
Modern roads also feature additives, for example rubber is added to the asphalt to soften it a touch, offering improved grip and above all, better acoustics. Residents near busy road junctions get quieter routes.
Engineering
I’ve explained the methods behind their construction but surely the greatest engineering comes in the form of bridges and, for me, mountain passes. The two meet occasionally when the Tour de France crosses a bridge like the Pont de St Nazaire that is so long that it counts for the mountains competition.
Mountain passes existed long before roads, but the act of surfacing a route across a mountain has given races like the Tour de France the theatre that makes them so great. Hairpin bends are works of engineering but at times things of beauty and of course, thrilling too. The sporting battles and scenery granted by mountain roads are supreme. Cyclists from around the world visit these roads because of their legendary status; the strip of tarmac is a field of dreams.
Roads impose. Paths are carved into the rock, nature is disfigured. There is something impressive about a straight road; the Romans knew this, and Napoleon’s armies marched along linear avenues. But even if it is a false pretense, I prefer roads that work with the environment, whether following the shape of a river valley or twisting like an ancient trail through woodland.
Conclusion
Roads are the venue for our sport. They might just be there, a drab grey surface, but without them there’s no road cycling.
We enjoy moments when races leave the tarmac to use cobbles or gravel, but note even these sections are heavily-engineered with their drainage channels, camber, and design. And if we celebrate some mountain passes, give thanks for the humble strip of tarmac in front of your home.
Photo: the main photo above is from Mavic’s website where it accompanies their footwear. I think it is the Trafoi hairpins of the Stelvio pass in Italy. It makes an impressive desktop background and the full image is here. Thanks also to Zachary Olson for collaborating on this piece.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.
An IDF communications network enabling a wide variety of military operations faces no geographical barriers, and can be set up anywhere to support missions, a senior officer told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
The source, from the C4i Corps Hoshen Unit, was responding to a question about the IDF’s long-range communications capabilities needed for combat.
Any long-range missions, far from the nation’s borders, would require remote command and control and intelligence transmission capabilities, and collaboration among a number of units.“We can provide a solution to every operational requirement,” the source said. “We do not see geography or time as a constraint. We are not here to do the possible, but to do the impossible, and this is not just a slogan.”The Hoshen Unit is in charge of developing and maintaining the military- wide communications network that has given all units access to unprecedented levels of data, as well as an enhanced ability to work together.It has grown rapidly in recent years, achieving many breakthroughs, and allowed the IDF to fight its first network- centric conflict during Operation Protective Edge last summer.The network makes it possible for unit headquarters to speak to field officers through multiple channels, and for cross-branch communications between any platform or unit.It maintains tactical and strategic radio channels, an encrypted military cellphone network, satellite communications, and landlines, among others.“Every morning we face a new threat. We have to decide whether we respond with [the networks] we have, or go to development and create new solutions,” the officer said. “My people need to create new technological realities, in line with operational needs,” he added.“The reality is that there are totally new elements with weapons and the intentions to use them. We have to provide responses that can change in a matter of days. A mission that looked central on Sunday could be replaced with a new one in under a week,” said the source.Hoshen personnel maintain flexibility by working on a highly generic technological basis, made up of civilian off-the-shelf products. They mold these into military networks that support all manner of activities.Hoshen’s infrastructure supports collaboration among the air force, ground forces, and navy, the transmission of real-time intelligence data, and direct communications between platforms, such as tank to aircraft.Air defense systems, such as Iron Dome and the Home Front Command’s missile alert system, are also reliant on the network.“We are at a place in which all of our military ‘clients’ want more. "Whether it’s more storage, transmission or communications,” he added.Despite considerable budget constraints, Hoshen has created networks that enable data transfers to occur at rates that only a year ago did not seem feasible, the officer said.Such breakthroughs were possible due to “the very creative people” of Hoshen, who “identify opportunities and act,” the officer said.“During Operation Protective Edge [in Gaza last summer]... a navy ship could hold a dialogue with a fighter jet, which could talk to a brigade or a battalion commander.Direct user-to-user communications occurred. Hoshen is the backbone of that collaborative network.”These same channels were used by IDF lookout officers in control rooms, to order missile strikes on Hamas infiltrators seconds after identifying them in last year’s conflict.Because of Hoshen’s work, a company commander can access information directly from the head of Military Intelligence, challenging the traditional military hierarchy.The officer said he is seeking to balance the new capabilities with the need to protect the chain of command.“We will find solutions for our ‘consumers,’ who are hungry for increasing amounts of information,” he said. “We have a natural tension created by a lack of resources that is permanent and systematic.”Additionally, enemies with growing cyber capabilities will inevitably seek to attack the military’s communications. “It’s a question of when, not if,” said the officer. “We are working to defend against this.”
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Hollywood star Zoe Saldana has walked many red carpets but she has probably never worked harder to look glamorous at such events than in Singapore. Yet, despite sweltering humid conditions, she did just that at Shaw Lido theatres on Saturday night.She was in town to promote her upcoming Hollywood superhero blockbuster Guardians Of The Galaxy, along with wrestler-turned-actor Dave Bautista and director James Gunn.While the men were sweating buckets, Saldana, 36, seemed to be immune to the hot weather, and looked stunning sashaying down the red carpet. Getting such a close look at Saldana, who came to fame in Avatar, was worth a long wait for student Brandon Jany, one of more than 1,000 fans who showed up. The secondary three student said: "I was here since 7am. I'm a Marvel fan. I'm so ecstatic."Saldana, Bautista, 45, and Gunn, 43, obliged selfies with fans as well as autographed items such as movie posters and even a skateboard. When the trio took to the stage, Gunn said in jest: "This is the crowd I have outside my house. I'm very used to this." The gorgeous Saldana revealed that she has been undergoing martial arts training since her Avatar days. She said: "I was trained in ballet. I was able to kick a lot of things, dancing ballet. It wasn't until I started doing a movie called Avatar that I went through a very ardous training, that made me an absolute fan of martial arts and I've been training ever since."In the new movie, she takes on the role of Gamora, a deadly green-skinned assassin, while Bautista plays Drax the Destroyer, a brute bent on vengeance. The two unlikely heroes are part of a quartet of cosmic misfits roped in to help interstellar adventurer Peter Quill (Parks And Recreation's Chris Pratt) save the galaxy from evil forces.The reserved Bautista said he is slowly growing into his new role as an actor."It was a little overwhelming walking onto the set with some of the best actors and director. It was a step outside my comfort zone."Still, many of fans in the crowd clearly appeared to have followed him since his WWE wrestling days. One of them is Mr Bernard Ang, 33, an owner of a comic store G&B Comics. He was one of the three lucky Singaporean fans picked to go onstage to present the stars souvenirs. He said: "I'm a fan of wrestling and Marvel comics. Seeing Dave Bautista in a Marvel movie is the best of both worlds." Guardians Of The Galaxy opens here in cinemas on July 31.From the air, Kiribati's capital island resembles the cross-section of a polished geode. You’ll see a painfully thin crust of land and a glassy lagoon that shifts with rising tides. For years, media outlets have called this equatorial nation “a canary in the coal mine for climate migration.” But what you perceive at a distance may be misleading.
New Zealand could become the first country in the world to recognize climate change as a valid reason to be granted residency, according to an interview with a government minister on Tuesday.
The nation's newly elected government is considering creating a new visa category for Pacific Islanders displaced by climate change. If implemented, New Zealand’s proposal would offer up to 100 humanitarian visas per year as an experimental — and unprecedented — trial.
Related: Former Kiribati president eyes massive infrastructure projects to save his island nation
For countries across the Pacific, like the low-lying nation of Kiribati, New Zealand’s announcement comes as a welcome gesture of regional solidarity. Coastal erosion and freshwater contamination are already altering the lives of Kiribati’s 110,000 citizens. 32 of the nation’s islands, after all, sit on average just six feet above sea level.
Famously, the 1951 UN Refugee Convention does not cover people displaced across borders due to climate change. Though Fiji had previously committed to providing future climate refuge to Pacific neighbors, the New Zealand proposal marks the first time a developed country has considered addressing the international legal protection gap with a regional visa agreement. In an interview with Radio New Zealand, Climate Change Minister James Shaw noted the proposal is a “piece of work that we intend to do in partnership with the Pacific Islands.”
The proposal has triggered a flurry of questions. Though only a handful of climate migration cases have been brought to New Zealand courts in the last decade, will 100 visas per year satisfy future demand? Will this proposed regional experiment become a model for other nations?
A woman swims at high tide near her house in South Tarawa, Kiribati, in 2017. Credit: Mattea Mrkusic
And how has it been received in Pacific nations like Kiribati?
Walking around South Tarawa, the capital island of Kiribati, you’ll hear a strong reaction to the concept of climate migration. Many outright reject the label “climate refugee” in Kiribati. Some argue that it casts I-Kiribati citizens as victims of a foregone climate conclusion. Others believe the label doesn’t assign responsibility to high-emitting countries — and eclipses the nation’s fight to protect their homes.
Just ask Pelenise Alofa, national coordinator for the Kiribati Climate Action Network. For her, migration is a measure of last resort: “It’s the last option. And if it’s the last option, let’s do everything we can now to remain in Kiribati.”
Related: Series on living with rising seas
Kiribati’s government is currently implementing various adaptation measures, including sea walls, artificial land reclamation and rainwater tanks. These efforts, along with staunch civil society campaigns, aim to avoid a scenario in which I-Kiribati citizens must be forced to use New Zealand’s proposed visa option.
“We need to build Kiribati up,” says Alofa, who has traveled the world to speak about what the world’s carbon footprint feels like from her frontline home. “We need to strengthen it. So we can stay here.”
Though many Pacific Islanders migrate to New Zealand each year to pursue educational or job opportunities, here too, you'll notice a common refrain. The international community must curb CO2 emissions so that they — and future generations — can have a stable homeland to which they can return.Japan’s Textbook Screening and History Textbook Controversies
Some common assumptions about history textbooks used in Japan turn out to be ill-founded. Far from inculcating patriotism, as many overseas observers assume, Japanese high school textbooks tend to dryly present a chronology of historical facts, with little interpretive narrative added. This is the finding of the Divided Memories and Reconciliation project by the author and his colleague Professor Gi-Wook Shin, involving an in-depth comparison of history textbooks used in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States.
Japanese history textbooks and their treatment of the wartime era has become an almost constant subject of international dispute in the last three decades. For critics, both inside and outside Japan, the content of those textbooks is evidence of a failure to take responsibility for the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific War or to acknowledge the suffering the Japanese military imposed on conquered Asian nations and the crimes committed in combat with the Allies. The decision of the Japanese education authorities to approve certain textbooks for use, or to reshape |
main bundle and panel bundles is <100 lines.
Change the JavaScript bundler to Rollup
Core.js is still pure JavaScript and requires bundling. In my journey to get a smaller bundle, I went from Webpack to Webpack 2 to Rollup. At each step the bundle got smaller. Rollup is the big winner here because it doesn’t wrap all your modules in function calls but instead concatenates all files with minimal changes to make it work. This not only reduces the file size but also the loading speed. This is because the JavaScript engine will no longer have to invoke a function to resolve each import, it’s doing less work. This might not mean much for a computer but on a phone, everything counts.
Scrutinize dependencies
If the goal is to ship less, it’s time to take a good look at dependencies. It’s so often that we decide to fall back to yet another NPM package that makes our life a little easier but comes at the cost of size – size usually taken up by functionality that you might never need.
Remove Lodash
I realized that I only used a few methods of lodash. Lodash (and previously underscore) used to be one of the dependencies that would always be one of the first things that I would add to any project I start. But I could no longer justify it in the case of Home Assistant. Even with dead tree shaking it was not worth including it. Yes, they support a lot of edge cases but those were not relevant to my use case. And standalone lodash packages are still huge. The only thing that I couldn’t replace with a few lines of my own code was debounce. However I found a 40 line replacement.
Replace moment.js with Fecha
Moment.js is one of those power libraries. It is able to handle any date problem that you can throw at it. But this obviously comes at the cost of size. Fecha is a date formatting library at ~8% the size of moment.js (only 4.7kb pre-gzip). The only thing that it does not contain is date manipulation, which was something that was not being used.
Use Service worker to instantly load the app
Using a service worker we’re able to store all app components and core javascript in the browser. This means that after their first visit, the browser will only have to go to the network to fetch the latest data from the server.
Creating a service worker is easy using sw-precache, a service worker generation tool.
When a browser does not support service workers, Home Assistant will serve fingerprinted assets that are aggressively cached. Only when the content changes will the client redownload the asset.
Using fingerprinting with sw-precache required jumping through a few hoops. The final build script can be found here.
Make it feel fast
This one is more psychological: no one likes staring at a white screen because white screens are ambiguous: are we loading something, is there a crappy connection or maybe even a script error? That’s why it is very important to render something on the screen to show that the rest is being loaded, and as quickly as possible.
The Home Assistant landing page contains just enough CSS and HTML to render the loading screen minus the animations.
Now that the app is fast enough, I might swap out moving from a lite loading screen to drawing an empty toolbar. This makes it look like the UI is almost there.
Using a framework build on web standards
I left this to the end of the list, mainly because I had no influence on this. Polymer just happened to ship an update while I was optimizing the application which gave a big boost to the loading time.
By using Polymer we have the ability to use tomorrow’s web standards today. This is powered by polyfills. A polyfill will use JavaScript to simulate the behavior that the web standard would have taken care of. As browsers progress, more work can move from the polyfills back to the browsers. This is great because browsers will be able to optimize the work better and thus be faster.
Polymer 1.6 was introduced at the end of June and allowed the app to take advantage of native CSS variables in Chrome and Firefox. It also introduced lazy registration. Both greatly sped up our loading times.
Future optimizations
A lot of optimizations have been applied but this journey will never be over. There are still a lot of opportunities to make things even faster. Some ideas that are on my list to explore:SALT LAKE CITY — A massage parlor owner will stand trial for his role in an alleged sex trafficking ring in which young girls were forced into prostitution.
During a preliminary hearing in 3rd District Court this week, prosecutors presented evidence that Luis Daniel Arano-Hernandez coerced a 17-year-old girl and her mother to be prostituted at two Reiki massage parlors.
Arano-Hernandez, 29, threatened the girl with physical harm and deportation, according to prosecutors. She testified that he arranged for and required her to obtain false ID cards to show she was 18. She also testified that he told her to not contact police after a customer raped her at his business.
Arano-Hernandez is charged with three counts of aggravated human trafficking, a first-degree felony; pattern of unlawful activity and exploitation of prostitution, first-degree felonies; two counts of aggravated exploitation of prostitution, a second-degree felony; two counts of exploitation of prostitution, a second-degree felony; two counts of identity fraud, a second-degree felony; and one third-degree felony count of identity fraud.
Agents for the Utah Attorney General’s Office SECURE Strike Force arrested Arano-Hernandez and four other men last November after an eight-month investigation into sex trafficking at massage parlors in Salt Lake City, South Salt Lake and Millcreek. Authorities say the men are in the U.S. illegally.
The four others entered into cooperation agreements against Arano-Hernandez and were sentenced according to those agreements, the attorney general's office said.A startling archaeological discovery this summer changes our understanding of human history. While, up until now, scholars have largely held that man's first rituals were carried out over 40, 000 years ago in Europe, it now appears that they were wrong about both the time and place.
Associate Professor Sheila Coulson, from the University of Oslo, can now show that modern humans, Homo sapiens, have performed advanced rituals in Africa for 70,000 years. She has, in other words, discovered mankind's oldest known ritual.
The archaeologist made the surprising discovery while she was studying the origin of the Sanpeople. A group of the San live in the sparsely inhabited area of north-western Botswana known as Ngamiland.
Coulson made the discovery while searching for artifacts from the Middle Stone Age in the only hills present for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. This group of small peaks within the Kalahari Desert is known as the Tsodilo Hills and is famous for having the largest concentration of rock paintings in the world.
The Tsodilo Hills are still a sacred place for the San, who call them the "Mountains of the Gods" and the "Rock that Whispers".
The python is one of the San's most important animals. According to their creation myth, mankind descended from the python and the ancient, arid streambeds around the hills are said to have been created by the python as it circled the hills in its ceaseless search for water.
Sheila Coulson's find shows that people from the area had a specific ritual location associated with the python. The ritual was held in a little cave on the northern side of the Tsodilo Hills. The cave itself is so secluded and access to it is so difficult that it was not even discovered by archaeologists until the 1990s.
When Coulson entered the cave this summer with her three master's students, it struck them that the mysterious rock resembled the head of a huge python. On the six meter long by two meter tall rock, they found three-to-four hundred indentations that could only have been man-made.
"You could see the mouth and eyes of the snake. It looked like a real python. The play of sunlight over the indentations gave them the appearance of snake skin. At night, the firelight gave one the feeling that the snake was actually moving".
They found no evidence that work had recently been done on the rock. In fact, much of the rock's surface was extensively eroded.
When they saw the many indentations in the rock, the archaeologists wondered about more than when the work had been done. They also began thinking about what the cave had been used for and how long people had been going there. With these questions in mind, they decided to dig a test pit directly in front of the python stone.
At the bottom of the pit, they found many stones that had been used to make the indentations. Together with these tools, some of which were more than 70,000 years old, they found a piece of the wall that had fallen off during the work.
In the course of their excavation, they found more than 13,000 artifacts. All of the objects were spearheads and articles that could be connected with ritual use, as well as tools used in carving the stone. They found nothing else.
As if that were not enough, the stones that the spearheads were made from are not from the Tsodilo region but must have been brought from hundreds of kilometers away.
The spearheads are better crafted and more colourful than other spearheads from the same time and area. Surprisingly enough, it was only the red spearheads that had been burned.
"Stone age people took these colourful spearheads, brought them to the cave, and finished carving them there. Only the red spearheads were burned. It was a ritual destruction of artifacts. There was no sign of normal habitation. No ordinary tools were found at the site. Our find means that humans were more organised and had the capacity for abstract thinking at a much earlier point in history than we have previously assumed. All of the indications suggest that Tsodilo has been known to mankind for almost 100,000 years as a very special place in the pre-historic landscape." says Sheila Coulson.
Sheila Coulson also noticed a secret chamber behind the python stone. Some areas of the entrance to this small chamber were worn smooth, indicating that many people had passed through it over the years.
"The shaman, who is still a very important person in San culture, could have kept himself hidden in that secret chamber. He would have had a good view of the inside of the cave while remaining hidden himself. When he spoke from his hiding place, it could have seemed as if the voice came from the snake itself. The shaman would have been able to control everything. It was perfect." The shaman could also have "disappeared" from the chamber by crawling out onto the hillside through a small shaft.
While large cave and wall paintings are numerous throughout the Tsodilo Hills, there are only two small paintings in this cave: an elephant and a giraffe. These images were rendered, surprisingly, exactly where water runs down the wall.
Sheila Coulson thinks that an explanation for this might come from San mythology.
In one San story, the python falls into a body of water and cannot get out by itself. The python is pulled from the water by a giraffe. The elephant, with its long trunk, is often used as a metaphor for the python.
"In the cave, we find only the San people's three most important animals: the python, the elephant, and the giraffe. That is unusual. This would appear to be a very special place. They did not burn the spearheads by chance. They brought them from hundreds of kilometers away and intentionally burned them. So many pieces of the puzzle fit together here. It has to represent a ritual." concludes Sheila Coulson.
It was a major archaeological find five years ago that made it possible for Sheila Coulson to date the finds in this little cave in Botswana. Up until the turn of the century, archaeologists believed that human civilisation developed in Europe after our ancestors migrated from Africa. This theory was crushed by Archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood when he published his find of traces from a Middle Stone Age dwelling in the Blombos Cave in Southern Cape, South Africa.
###The ‘What about black on black violence’ crew just gained a new member – Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman.
The All-Pro began his media availability Wednesday denying rumors he criticized Black Lives Matter in a blog post this week. Sherman insisted he didn’t write the comment, which was posted in response to an image of Sherman and teammate Marshawn Lynch that calls for the killing of “KKKrakas.”
It’s all fake.
But Sherman did speak candidly on his own feelings on the Black Lives Matter movement. And while he said he believes black lives do matter, he also thinks the movement is a bit misguided.
“As a black man I do understand that black lives matter,” he reiterated. “I stand for that, I believe in that wholeheartedly. But I believe that there is a way to go about things and there’s a way to do things. I dealt with a best friend getting killed, and it was by two 35-year-old black men. Wasn’t no police officer involved, wasn’t anybody else involved, and I didn’t hear anybody shouting, ‘Black lives matter.’”
Oh.
Sherman than dropped a line conservatives have long repeated:
“If black lives matter,” he began “then they should matter all of the time.”
Read the full text of Sherman’s remarks below, as transcribed by SB Nation:Anonymity on the Internet can be both a blessing and a curse. While the ability to hide behind anonymous proxies and fast-changing Internet protocol (IP) addresses has enabled freer speech in nations with repressive regimes, the same technologies allow cybercriminals to hide their tracks and pass off malicious code and spam for legitimate communications.
In a paper to be presented next week at SIGCOMM 2009 in Barcelona, Spain, three researchers from Microsoft’s research center in Mountain View, CA, demonstrate a way to remove the shield of anonymity from such shadowy attackers. Using a new software tool, the three computer scientists were able to identify the machines responsible for malicious activity, even when the host’s IP address changed frequently.
“What we are really trying to get at is the host responsible for an attack,” said Yinglian Xie, a member of the Microsoft team. “We are not trying to track those identifiers but associate them with a particular host.”
The prototype system, dubbed HostTracker, could result in better defenses against online attacks and spam campaigns. Security firms could, for example, build a better picture of which Internet hosts should be blocked from sending traffic to their clients, and cybercriminals would have a harder time camouflaging their activities as legitimate traffic.
Xie and her colleagues, Fang Yu and Martin Abadi, analyzed a month’s worth of data–330 gigabytes–collected from a large e-mail service provider, in an attempt to determine which users were responsible for sending out spam. To trace the origins of multiple spam outbreaks, the scientists studied records including more than 550 million user IDs, 220 million IP addresses, and a time stamp for events such as sending a message or logging into an account.
Tracing the origins of messages–a key task for tracking spam and other kinds of Internet attack–involved reconstructing relationships between account IDs and the hosts from which users connected to the e-mail service. To do this, the researchers clumped together all the IDs accessed from different hosts over a certain time period. The HostTracker software then combed through this data to resolve any conflicts. For example, sometimes more than one user appeared to originate from the same IP address or a single user had multiple ID addresses during overlapping periods of time.
HostTracker resolves the conflicts by cross referencing the data to identify proxy servers, which allow several hosts to appear as a single IP address, and to determine when a guest was using a legitimate host. “The fact that we are able to trace malicious traffic to the proxy itself is an improvement because we are able to pinpoint the exact origin,” Xie says.
The researchers also created a way to automatically blacklist traffic from a particular IP address, once the HostTracker system has determined that the host at that address is compromised. Using this method in simulation, the researchers were able to block malicious traffic with an error rate of five percent–in other words, 5 out of 100 IP addresses classified as malicious were actually legitimate. Using additional information to identify good user behavior reduced that false-positive rate to less than one percent.
The results suggest that HostTracker would be a good way to refine the current way of defending against distributed denial-of-service attacks and spam campaigns, says Gunter Ollmann, vice president of research and development at Damballa, a firm that helps companies find and eliminate compromised hosts in a computer network.
“Using this technique will help find botnets that have a high frequency of traffic, such as spam campaigns, DDoS attacks, and maybe click-through attacks,” Ollmann says. “Other attacks, such as password-stealing and banking trojans, where the attack is more host-centric–this sort of technique would not be as effective.”
Xie acknowledges that while the technique is useful for creating lists of hosts to track, it may be less useful for law enforcement agencies attempting to identify the attackers behind online crime. “The accountability we are talking about is not court accountability,” she says. “We want to separate the two notions. The accountability that we are talking about is the ability to identify the hosts.”Now, I am hardly one to sympathize with the Church of Scientology. As far as I'm concerned, it's a wacky cult.
But what bothered me about this situation is that you have this group of hackers, et. al. rattling a serious sabre in the cult's direction, and the Department of Hopeless Insecurity isn't the least bit concerned.
So I started connecting the dots. First thing that came to mind is why ONLY go after Scientology? I mean, the Unification Church is another crazy religious cult that certainly engages in questionable activities - but they get away with it because Moon pretty much owns certain businesses and selected Congresscritters lock, stock and barrel. The religious right LOVES Moon. Corporate right-wing Christian wack jobs of his calibre are hard to find these days - they need all the help they can get. He's contributed close to a billion dollars in both lobbying and campaign contribution funds for certain Congresscritters.
So why isn't Anonymous going after the Moonies, too? And how can it be that DHS isn't taking their attacks on Scientology seriously enough to do anything about it? Could it be that they're a government front?
The remaining question: "Why go after Scientology at all?"
The answer: VALKYRIE.
Valkyrie is a movie that was shot last fall by famous Scientologist Tom Cruise, with assistance from fellow Scientologist John Travolta. It's in the can as of last October, and scheduled for release this summer. It concerns the real-life story of Nazi insiders who led a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler and his entire high level staff.
Watch the trailer and then ask yourselves who might possibly have a problem with the Scientologists making this movie. Who might want to bring down the Church of Scientology and annex it's money and resources at all costs - before this movie is released?
Moral: don't get caught up in the glamor attached to mindless hatred and fearmongering. When hatred and fear are "cool", lies and manipulation will not be not far behind. Don't let yourself be used. There are two sides to every story. GET THE OTHER ONE BEFORE YOU ACT. Do your fucking homework when someone tries to get you to hurt somebody else you don't even know.
"First they came for the Scientologists, and I didn't complain because I wasn't a Scientologist..."Daredevil has been streaming on Netflix for just about two weeks, and evidently is doing well enough to warrant continuation. Netflix just gave the green light to Daredevil season 2, with plans to air in 2016. But there’s a big change. Steven DeKnight is out as showrunner due to “previous commitments,” and Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez will jointly take on the showrunner role in his stead.
Marvel issued a press release:
Marvel and Netflix are proud to announce that “Marvel’s Daredevil” will receive a second season, available only on the streaming service in 2016! With the first season of “Marvel’s Daredevil” proving a smash success with both audiences and critics, Netflix and Marvel will continue to create further adventures of the Man Without Fear! Doug Petrie (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “American Horror Story”) and Marco Ramirez (“Sons of Anarchy”), who worked closely with Executive Producers Steven S. DeKnight and Drew Goddard during the first season, will serve as showrunners for Season 2. Petrie, Ramirez, Goddard (“Cabin in the Woods”), and Jeph Loeb (“Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”) will serve as Executive Producers of Season 2.
DeKnight offers his comments on leaving, too:
While previous commitments unfortunately prevent me from continuing on with Daredevil into its second season. I could not be happier that Doug Petrie and Marco Ramirez are carrying the torch. They were invaluable collaborators during our first season, and I for one can’t wait to see what they do with the show moving forward.
Personally, I’m curious to see how the showrunner change works out; Petrie and Ramirez are clearly not new to the show, but perhaps they can juice it up slightly. I like a lot of the first season of Daredevil — Charlie Cox is great, Vincent D’Onofrio makes a really interesting version of Wilson Fisk, and the action is often terrific. But the season also feels very sluggish, with very slow-developing drama and dull secondary villains. There’s a lot to work with, but also a lot of room to grow.
The press release also notes:“At least since World War II, presidents have been unwilling to discuss deficiencies in capability because they’re expected to do everything, and they like that sense of omnipotence,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former Obama State Department official now at the Brookings Institution. “Obama has been trying to change that in the last year because he senses that the requirements of omnipotence have gotten so far out of whack with what he can actually accomplish that he needs to change the expectations.”
The risk, naturally, is that the president looks as if he is simply trying to excuse his own actions, or inactions, as the case may be.
“It’s become a refrain to the point where I think people are becoming quite critical that that’s his response to everything,” said Daniel L. Byman, a former member of the Sept. 11 commission staff now teaching at Georgetown University. “He’s not differentiating between things he can influence and those that he can’t.”
The bill of particulars against Mr. Obama is long. In the view of his critics, he failed to stanch the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria when he rejected proposals to arm more moderate elements of the Syrian resistance. He left a vacuum in Iraq by not doing more to leave a residual force behind when American troops exited in 2011. And he signaled weakness to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, encouraging the Kremlin to think it could intervene in Ukraine without fear of significant consequence.
“I certainly do not think President Obama is responsible for all of the world crises that have taken place during his time in office,” said William C. Inboden, a former national security aide to President George W. Bush and executive director of the William P. Clements Jr. Center on History, Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Texas. “But he is responsible for actions and attitudes he took that have contributed to some of those crises — and he is also responsible for how he responds, or fails to respond.”When in Honolulu…
There’s nothing like a spot of record shopping when you’re on holiday and, let’s face it, there’s probably no holiday quite like Hawaii. Over the last few years Honolulu native Roger Bong has made it his business to become the authority on Hawaiian records, chronicling his various digging adventures on his fantastic Aloha Got Soul blog and feeding the more voracious US and UK collectors with utterly neglected gems from the paradise isle on a selection of superb mixes.
The music, ignored and inaccessible for so long, is, thanks to Roger finally filtering over the ocean and is feted by the likes of Psychemagik, Floating Points and the hardcore collectors at BBE records for its sun-soaked and gloriously carefree breed of island-tinted soul, funk and rare groove. Heavily influenced by the US and recorded primarily in the 70’s and 80’s, it’s basically impossible not to fall in love with this stuff.
Now, for the first time, Roger has flung open the doors and given us an unprecedented look into the heart of the record digging scene in Hawaii on this lovely film, sharing five of his favourite records and providing an insight into the best record shops and markets on the Pacific archipelago.
If however you can’t go digging in Hawaii this weekend, then we recommend you check out Aloha Got Soul’s collaborative party with London-based fashion company Weekends West, who are hosting concurrent Soul Time In Hawaii parties in London and Honolulu on 22nd March to celebrate the launch of a new limited edition t-shirt (sported by Roger in the film).
Click here for more info and to listen to one of Roger’s stunning mixes.Intermittent fasting has become immensely popular in recent years. This is an eating pattern that cycles between periods of fasting and eating. However, there are still all sorts of myths surrounding this topic. This article debunks the 11 most common myths about fasting, snacking and meal frequency.
1. Skipping Breakfast Will Make You Fat "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." There is an ongoing myth that there is something "special" about breakfast. People believe that breakfast skipping leads to excessive hunger, cravings and weight gain. Although many observational studies have found statistical links between breakfast skipping and overweight/obesity, this may be explained by the fact that the stereotypical breakfast skipper is less health-conscious overall. Interestingly, this matter was recently settled in a randomized controlled trial, which is the gold standard of science. This study was published in 2014 and compared eating breakfast vs skipping breakfast in 283 overweight and obese adults (1). After a 16-week study period, there was no difference in weight between groups. This study shows that it doesn't make any difference for weight loss whether you eat or don't eat breakfast, although there may be some individual variability. However, there are some studies showing that children and teenagers who eat breakfast tend to perform better at school (2). There are also studies on people who have succeeded with losing weight in the long term, showing that they tend to eat breakfast (3). This is one of those things that varies between individuals. Breakfast is beneficial for some people, but not others. It is not essential and there is nothing "magical" about it. Bottom Line: Eating breakfast can have benefits for many people, but it is not essential. Controlled trials do not show any difference between eating and skipping breakfast for the purpose of weight loss.
2. Eating Frequently Boosts Your Metabolism "Eat many, small meals to stoke the metabolic flame." Many people believe that eating more meals leads to increased metabolic rate, so that your body burns more calories overall. It is true that the body expends a certain amount of energy digesting and assimilating the nutrients in a meal. This is termed the thermic effect of food (TEF), and amounts to about 20-30% of calories for protein, 5-10% for carbs and 0-3% for fat calories ( ). On average, the thermic effect of food is somewhere around 10% of the total calorie intake. However, what matters here is the total amount of calories consumed, not how many meals you eat. Eating six 500-calorie meals has the exact same effect as eating three 1000-calorie meals. Given an average thermic effect of 10%, it is 300 calories in both cases. This is supported by numerous feeding studies in humans, showing that increasing or decreasing meal frequency has no effect on total calories burned (5). Bottom Line: There is no difference in calories burned if you eat more frequently. Total calorie intake and macronutrient breakdown is what counts.
3. Eating Frequently Helps Reduce Hunger Some people believe that snacking helps prevent cravings and excessive hunger. Interestingly, several studies have looked at this, and the evidence is mixed. Although some studies suggest that more frequent meals lead to reduced hunger, other studies find no effects, and yet others show increased hunger levels (6, 7,, ). One study that compared 3 high-protein meals to 6 high-protein meals found that 3 meals were actually better for reducing hunger (10). That being said, this may depend on the individual. If snacking helps you experience fewer cravings and makes you less likely to binge, then it is probably a good idea. However, there is no evidence that snacking or eating more often reduces hunger for everyone. Different strokes for different folks. Bottom Line: There is no consistent evidence that eating more often reduces overall hunger or calorie intake. Some studies even show that smaller, more frequent meals increase hunger.
4. Many, Smaller Meals Can Help You Lose Weight Frequent meals do not boost metabolism (increase calories out). They also do not seem to reduce hunger (reduce calories in). If eating more frequently has no effect on the energy balance equation, then it shouldn't have any effect on weight loss. In fact, this is supported by science. Most studies on this do show that meal frequency has no effect on weight loss (11, 12). For example, a study in 16 obese men and women did not find any difference in weight, fat loss or appetite when comparing 3 and 6 meals per day (13). However, if you find that eating more often makes it easier for you to eat fewer calories and less junk food, then perhaps this is effective for you. Personally I find it to be ridiculously inconvenient to eat so often, making it even harder to stick to a healthy diet. But it may work for some people. Bottom Line: There is no evidence that changing your meal frequency helps you lose more weight. Most studies show that there is no difference.
5. The Brain Needs a Constant Supply of Glucose Some people believe that if we don't eat carbs every few hours, that our brains will stop functioning. This is based on the belief that the brain can only use glucose (blood sugar) for fuel. However, what is often left out of the discussion is that the body can easily produce the glucose it needs via a process called gluconeogenesis (14). This may not even be needed in most cases, because your body has stored glycogen (glucose) in the liver that it can use to supply the brain with energy for many hours. Even during long-term fasting, starvation or a very low-carbohydrate diet, the body can produce ketone bodies from dietary fats (15). Ketone bodies can provide energy for part of the brain, reducing its glucose requirement significantly. So, during a long fast, the brain can easily sustain itself using ketone bodies and glucose produced from proteins and fats. It also makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective that we shouldn't be able to survive without a constant source of carbohydrate. If that were true, then humans would have become extinct a long time ago. However, some people do report that they feel hypoglycemic when they don't eat for a while. If this applies to you, then perhaps you should stick to a higher meal frequency, or at least ask your doctor before changing things. Bottom Line: The body can produce glucose to supply the brain with energy, even during long-term fasts or starvation. Part of the brain can also use ketone bodies for energy.
6. Eating Often and Snacking is Good For Health It is simply not "natural" for the body to be constantly in the fed state. When humans were evolving, we had to endure periods of scarcity from time to time. When humans were evolving, we had to endure periods of scarcity from time to time. There is evidence that short-term fasting induces a cellular repair process called autophagy, where the cells use old and dysfunctional proteins for energy ( ). Autophagy may help protect against aging and diseases like Alzheimer's disease, and may even reduce the risk of cancer (17, 18). The truth is that fasting from time to time has all sorts of benefits for metabolic health (19,, 21). There are also some studies suggesting that snacking, and eating very often, can have negative effects on health and raise your risk of disease. For example, one study found that, coupled with a high calorie intake, a diet with more frequent meals caused a greater increase in liver fat, indicating that snacking may raise the risk of fatty liver disease ( ). There are also some observational studies showing that people who eat more often have a much higher risk of colorectal cancer (23, 24). Bottom Line: It is a myth that snacking is inherently good for health. Some studies show that snacking is harmful and others show that fasting from time to time has major health benefits.
7. Fasting Puts Your Body in "Starvation Mode" One common argument against intermittent fasting is that it can put your body in "starvation mode." According to the claims, not eating makes your body think it is starving, so it shuts down its metabolism and prevents you from burning fat. It is actually true that long-term weight loss can reduce the amount of calories you burn. This is the true "starvation mode" (the technical term is adaptive thermogenesis) ( ). This is a real effect, and can amount to hundreds of fewer calories burned per day. However, this happens with weight loss no matter what method you use. There is no evidence that this happens more with intermittent fasting than other weight loss strategies. In fact, the evidence actually shows that short-term fasts increase metabolic rate. This is due to a drastic increase in blood levels of norepinephrine (noradrenaline), which tells the fat cells to break down body fat and stimulates metabolism (26, 27). Studies show that fasting for up to 48 hours can actually boost metabolism by 3.6-14% (27, 28). However, if you fast much longer than that, the effect can reverse and metabolism can go down compared to baseline (29). One study showed that fasting every other day for 22 days did not lead to a decrease in metabolic rate, but the participants lost 4% of their fat mass, which is impressive for a period as short as 3 weeks (30). Bottom Line: It is false that short-term fasting puts the body in "starvation mode." The truth is that metabolism actually increases during fasts of up to 48 hours.
8. The Body Can Only Use a Certain Amount of Protein Per Meal There are some who claim that we can only digest 30 grams of protein per meal, and that we should eat every 2-3 hours to maximize muscle gain. However, this is not supported by science. Studies do not show a difference in muscle mass if you eat your protein in more frequent doses (31, 32, 33). The most important factor for most people is the total amount of protein consumed, not how many meals it is spread over. Bottom Line: The body can easily make use of more than 30 grams of protein per meal, and it is not necessary to get protein in your body every 2-3 hours.
9. Intermittent Fasting Makes You Lose Muscle Some believe that if we fast, that our bodies will start burning muscle and using it for fuel. It is true that this happens with dieting in general, but there is no evidence that this happens more with intermittent fasting than other methods. In fact, some studies even suggest that intermittent fasting is better for maintaining muscle mass. In one review study, intermittent calorie restriction caused a similar amount of weight loss as continuous calorie restriction, but much less reduction in muscle mass (34). There was also a study that had participants eat the same amount of calories as they were used to, except in one huge meal in the evening (31). These people lost body fat and actually had a modest increase (almost statistically significant) in their muscle mass, along with a bunch of other beneficial effects on health markers. Intermittent fasting is also popular among many bodybuilders, who find it to be an effective way to maintain high amounts of muscle with a low body fat percentage. Bottom Line: There is no evidence that fasting causes more muscle loss than conventional calorie restriction. In fact, some studies show that intermittent fasting may be beneficial for holding on to muscle mass while dieting.Credit: WWE.com
The story of The Bella Twins' infighting is a train on its side, its wheels spinning, the track somewhere far behind it.
WWE has flubbed the Nikki Bella vs. Brie Bella feud by relying on a hackneyed plot and confusing the line between hero and villain. Beyond the decision to highlight the wrong women in the Divas division, the company has continually misfired with the latest WWE sibling rivalry.
Nikki was a central figure on Monday's Raw, one of the worst episodes in recent memory.
In a number of "Growing Up Bella" segments, she reflected on her past relationship with her twin sister. Nikki talked about how Brie had stolen her prom date, crashed her car and asked her to take a test for her.
The segments were trite and ineffective.
As much as pro wrestling sometimes deserves its "male soap opera" reputation, this was beyond that. This was General Hospital-type stuff.
Richard Gray of Wrestling News World chuckled at the segments, via Twitter:
He was by no means the only one to do so. Fans made Nikki's "but I never told anyone" line into a running joke. At MemeGene.net, fans have already created a treasure trove of memes making fun of Nikki's confessions.
This is not the reaction WWE was hoping for.
It's not surprising that this was how the audience responded, though. Nikki's motivation, along with her acting, wasn't the least bit convincing.
The segments felt too far removed from the basic motivations that usually power a wrestling feud. Bret Hart didn't need to bring up tales of old girlfriends in his battles with Owen Hart. Terry Funk would never bring standardized testing into his promos before a match against Dory Jr.
There are times when a narrative risk makes the crowd glad WWE went outside the box. Then, there are times that remind us of why there is a box in the first place.
Just because they are women doesn't mean these rivals have to fight over petty things one would see featured in a high school drama.
Besides, WWE is unwisely working hard to make the villain garner sympathy. As Lance Storm pointed out on Twitter, there is little logic to Nikki making Brie look so untrustworthy:
Storm is absolutely right. The story has not made Brie look like a hero at all. On the other hand, WWE is asking Nikki to play a victim role of sorts.
The strange narrative choice leads one to question what direction this is all going. As Jason Powell of ProWrestling.net wrote, "At what point does Nikki start acting like a heel rather |
and the only activity in the windswept fields seems to be the harvesting of potatoes by head-scarfed babushkas as we make for Akhalkalaki, the regional administrative centre.
Route of the Baku to Kars railway [Al Jazeera]
I have come to this remote part of Georgia because two massive projects must pass through this region – projects that could potentially worsen relations with Russia still further. First there's a new South Caucasus gas pipeline which when fully operational will carry gas from Azerbaijan through Georgia directly to energy hungry western Europe, by passing Russia and potentially undermining Moscow's current leverage over European states.
Secondly, there is the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, which will follow a similar path to the gas pipeline. Dubbed the 'Iron Silk road' this is the first ever trans-Caucasian railway not under Russian control. Set to open in 2015, it will give China direct access to Europe with an estimated $75bn trade flow, again completely sidestepping Russia which has previously had a monopoly on rail freight from Asia to the West.
Both initiatives are welcomed back in Tbilisi, because they will further cement Georgia to the west, but there’s a snag; Javakheti’s predominantly ethnic Armenian population is very pro-Russian and far from happy about either of these new developments.
Off the record, I was told by local leaders that the thought of gas coming from Azerbaijan and passing through Javakheti is an anathema – currently relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia could hardly be worse as a result of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. And as for the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway: as the name suggests, the new rail link will connect Tbilisi not only with Baku but also with Kars in Turkey.
Next year will be the anniversary of the (1915) Armenian genocide which Turkey still denies. There is a widespread fear here that a rail network giving Turkey access to the heart of a large Armenian community is a strategic blunder.
According to Davit Rstakyan, an ethnic Armenian politician I met, "The Turks have not changed. They still don't recognise the fact of the genocide. Everyone knows that this happened, but they still don’t admit it and this means that they have not changed; and in future Armenians and Georgians could be destroyed again. Because of this, we have much to fear."
This may seem a somewhat alarmist view, but it’s a common one. It also plays into wider fears that local culture is being gradually being eroded and the community marginalised. People here point to the fact that all official business is conducted in the Georgian language, though few ethnic Armenians understand it.
Indeed Russian is more widely spoken and consequently many look back fondly on the Soviet Union. Along with the geopolitical undercurrents of the new railway and gas pipeline it is understandable why some feel that Javakheti could be a potential flashpoint in the years ahead.
While amongst the Armenians I spoke to there was no appetite for confrontation with the authorities in Tbilisi, in these febrile times the Georgian government would do well to listen to those concerns - and remember the country's place on the map.
Source: Al JazeeraImage copyright Geograph / Robin Drayton Image caption Homes in Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, are among the cheapest in the country
Blaenau Gwent homes are on average the cheapest per square metre in England and Wales, new figures have shown.
Homes in the south Wales county were worth £777 per sq m in 2016, versus £19,439 in the most expensive council area, Kensington and Chelsea.
The Office for National Statistics figures showed the average home in Wales was worth £1,408 per sq m, compared to £2,463 in England.
The most expensive place to buy in Wales was in Cardiff.
Steve McPherson, the owner of Louvain Properties, an estate agents which covers Blaenau Gwent, said the reason prices were so low in the region was because of general poverty.
"There's a lack of jobs in the area and a big benefits culture," he said.
"Those who do work are generally on zero-hours contracts, so don't have the stability or wages to get a mortgage.
"Others prefer not to work, so they rent as well, with the help of housing benefit.
"There is some movement in the market with landlords buying property to rent out, but many people lack the inspiration or means to buy their own place."
But Stephen Evans, from Tredegar, who works at the Ebbw Vale Institute, said there were plenty of reasons to live in Blaenau Gwent.
"It is a safe place to live compared to other places," he said.
"There should be more tourism here but you only have to walk 300 yards (274m) to be in beautiful countryside and it is quite a startling effect to see. It is a completely different world up in the Brecon Beacons."
The figures also revealed the average price per sq m in Wales had risen by 28% in the last 12 years, while in England it had gone up by 44%.
Image copyright Geograph / John Sutton Image caption Cardiff is the most expensive place for homes in Wales
Merthyr Tydfil (£917 per sq m) and Neath Port Talbot (£984 per sq m) were also among the cheapest areas in England and Wales.
The most expensive homes in Wales were found in Cardiff, at £2,161 per sq m. Monmouthshire was the second most expensive at £1,956.
The ONS data also found new flats in England and Wales got 18% bigger in the last three years, while new houses remained around the same size.
It comes after a new Principality index showed the average house price in Wales was now higher than in 2007, before the slump caused by the financial crisis.
Tom Denman, chief financial officer at the Principality, said at the time that, while Wales' house prices have "steadily increased" over the last four years, there had not been "that real accelerated growth or spikes in growth" seen elsewhere.The alarm clock on my phone rings and I make the usual unconscious grab with a violent swing of my arm in an effort to silence the noise that had done its job for the day. I’m awake, it’s 4am and the message on my phone is the first thing I take in during these first moments: GET AFTER IT, Discipline Equals Freedom. The short powerful message sends chills through me as I stand up and exit the room.
As I make the short walk to the espresso machine I am aware of only darkness. I have to walk outside in order to get to the main kitchen compound and it is clear that I am up before the world is, and it is clear that I’ve already won the first battle of the day. After getting a double espresso, strong and black, I head over to the gym a quarter mile away in another building. The darkness and mystique of the morning is still thick and foggy as I turn on the gym lights and set my coffee down next to my earbud case and hard back roller. What’s about to begin is my morning routine and the first of two or three training sessions for the day.
The session itself is mild, with only some light stretching, pvc rolling on the muscles and joints and some minor handstand work. I wake up with sips of strong coffee that hopefully tastes like a cup of liquid cigar ash. This isn’t a time for me to break a sweat or get my heart rate up, it’s a time for me to be alone. Before the day can approach with all of its operations and possible complications, I’m alone for the time being and I can’t explain the contentment I get from these dark early morning hours. There’s something about this time that proves to my well-being again and again: The morning routine will save your life.
An hour goes by fast and I put the equipment back on the shelf before walking the quarter mile back to the main compound where roll call will be. I have the walk timed perfectly and quickly take a cold shower—another life giving technique to any successful program and the second battle of the day. It’s funny to watch the mind as it worries about the possible onslaught of cold water hitting the skin. Thoughts of doubt pop in as I reach for the handle but all the while the slogan I live by demands respect and attention: Discipline Equals Freedom. The water hits my head and a rush of energy flows through me. The straight cold stream blasts me like a punch in the face and I’m fully awake and alive. I’ve won another decision over the mind and I get ready for the third battle of the day, roll call.
Roll call starts at 5:30am sharp. It’s the time that I show up for the day’s work and I’ve assigned it a name of military significance. Roll call isn’t something you miss, it’s not a time to be found aloof and stuck in traffic. Set a time for your schedule and use it. Make it up if you have too, just make it a priority in your life.
So now you can see what a disciplined morning looks like. Focused and to the point, we need a habit pattern of solitude for reflection and habit that provides regularity to your life. We aren’t becoming effective leaders of our own life by waking up late, grabbing something on the way out and rushing off to our day. We want a proper plan in place so we have time to breathe. There’s no coffee spilled shirts or crumbs on the carseat. All of our prep has been accomplished and we arrive cool, calm and collected. We are striving to be that guy and that takes some work on our part. It takes some planning. It takes a morning routine that will most likely save our life.
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AdvertisementsResearch by affordable housing advocacy groups finds more than 55% of listings in city on Airbnb are illegal, and 30% are listed by commercial hosts
Short-term rental companies like Airbnb are flooding New York City’s housing market, reducing available housing stock citywide by 10%, a new study has revealed.
More than 55% of rooms or apartments listed on Airbnb in New York are illegal, according to the report, which is the result of research commissioned by two affordable housing advocacy groups: Housing Conservation Coordinators and MFY Legal Services.
The report focused on what it called “impact listings”, defined as entire home or apartment listings rented out illegally by commercial hosts, either multiple units for at least three months a year or single listings rented for at least six months a year.
The authors found 8,000 units fitting that description, the report says, noting that the landlords or hosts made more than $300m from renting them out short-term. If such units were returned to the rental market, according to the report, the number of vacant units available to rent citywide would rise 10%.
It has become increasingly difficult for New Yorkers to find affordable housing. A 2014 study by the office of the city comptroller found that median rent in the city rose by 75%, almost double the national average, between 2000 and 2012. Real income declined in the same period.
Marti Weithman, supervising attorney of MFY Legal Services and one of the authors of the report, said the figures were conservative, representing the minimum impact on affordable housing of Airbnb, based on the company’s own data.
For her, a significant finding was that 30% of Airbnb’s listings in New York City were listed by commercial hosts.
“They are the biggest, baddest actors on Airbnb and other platforms,” she said. “And that is the trend that we are seeing – multiple units being taken off the rental market in a single building.”
Some of those were listed by landlords, Weithman said, and some by third-party operators who rent the apartment in order to then list it on Airbnb or similar sites.
The company disagreed with the findings of the report. Airbnb spokesman Peter Schottenfels said in a statement on Monday: “We need to work together to find solutions that actually benefit middle class New Yorkers, including how to protect responsible home sharers, rather than protecting the interests of the well-connected hotel industry.”
For Liz Krueger, a Democratic state senator representing New York’s 28th district, the data reinforced what she has been seeing and hearing in complaints from residents in her district for “an extended period of time”.
In her district, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, according to the report, Airbnb and other peer-to-peer short-term rental sites were taking up 17% of what would otherwise be available rental stock. Average rent in the area had increased by 12% between 2011 and 2015.
Krueger said: “It’s taking apartments off the market, it’s increasing rental costs for those people trying to rent apartments, it is shrinking supply, it’s creating situations where tenants are being harassed by landlords who conclude it’s cheaper or more profitable to rent out by the night as illegal hotel operations than to continue their legal responsibilities to keep the apartments for residents.”You laughed at Deadpool, X-Men Destiny, Spider-Man: Edge of Time and Activision's other sloppy Marvel games. Bet you feel bad now that they've all been pulled from Steam, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. Or not. Either way, they're gone.
Deadpool: The Kotaku Review My initial foray into the world of High Moon Studios' Deadpool video game culminated in an… Read more Read
Nothing lasts forever, especially Activision contracts for Marvel games, as evidenced by 2010's disappearance of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 and its corresponding downloadable content.
It's the same deal here. After an end-of-year fire sale (via Dan Amrich's Twitter), Activision has removed the following games from Steam, Xbox Live, PSN and anywhere else you might obtain a copy digitally.
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Deadpool
Spider-Man: Edge of Time
Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions
Spider-Man: Friend or Foe
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
X-Men Destiny
X-Men: The Official Game
Note that 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man is still available for purchase.
A big loss? Probably not. I wouldn't have even noticed if not for a NeoGAF post on the subject. There are no more physical copies of the games being printed, but they're all still available used and new on the cheap.
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Update: To clarify, the games are only down for folks who have not purchased them. Those who already had purchased them will still be able to download fresh installs.Residents of a South Carolina town are on edge after being warned that people dressed as clowns were spotted trying to lure children into the woods.
"There [have] been several [conversations] and a lot of complaints to the office regarding a clown or a person dressed in clown clothing talking to children or trying to lure children into the woods," read a letter sent by the property management company which owns the Fleetwood Manor apartments in Greenville.
"At no times should a child be alone at night, or walking in the roads or wooded area at night," the property manager warned.
The company that manages the apartments did not immediately return a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.
However, Greenville County Sheriff's Office spokesman Master Deputy Drew Pinciaro told BuzzFeed News that deputies received a call complaining about clowns being spotted in the woods behind the apartments on Aug. 20. The caller did not want to leave their name, he said.
But one woman did file a report with the sheriff's office on Aug. 21, explaining that two days earlier her son told her he had "seen clowns in the woods whispering and making strange noises," read an incident report sent to BuzzFeed News with the woman's name redacted.
The woman then went to investigate herself and "observed several clowns in the woods flashing green laser lights [who] then ran away into the woods."
The woman's oldest son also told a sheriff's deputy he heard "chains and banging" at the door of the home.
Donna and James Arnold, who live in the Fleetwood Manor complex with their two sons, aged 10 and 13, told BuzzFeed News she filed the report.
"[Our children] mentioned, 'Mama, there's clowns out there in the woods and they're trying to get us to come out there,'" James Arnold said. "Some had chains, some had knives, and some were holding out money, saying, 'Come here, we've got candy for you,' but they wouldn't go."Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved
PEMBROKE, N.C. (WNCN) -- Hundreds of protesters in Pembroke, Fayetteville and Nashville marched Saturday in opposition to a proposed pipeline.
The nearly 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline is planned to carry natural gas from West Virginia to North Carolina. Construction could begin as early as Fall 2017 if permits are issued following a review by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
On Saturday, Mac Legerton led a three-mile march in Robeson County, which began at a park across the street from the University of North Carolina-Pembroke and finished at the planned end point of the pipeline in the Prospect community.
"We feel very strongly that this is being done because this is the poorest part of the state. We always seem to get the waste that other people want to get rid of and the dirtiest economic plans," Legerton said.
"We in the local community feel very strongly that further development of any fossil fuel will make us dependent on it for decades to come, and economic development now is moving rapidly toward energy conservation, renewable clean energy sources, and expanding technology," Legerton added.
Legerton said the Center for Community Action, which he directs in Robeson County, and members of Eco-Robeson want to start their protests far in advance of the FERC review, in an effort to educate communities about the pipeline.
Groups in Nash and Cumberland counties performed similar marches Saturday morning and all three events were considered prayer walks.
The Robeson County group gave their march a title: "Walk for the Protection of People and Places Where We Live: Stop the Pipeline."
Participants came from Cary and Durham and as far away as Asheville, plus a group of students from Appalachian State University.
Some of the afternoon protesters in Pembroke also took part in the morning marches. Many expressed concern about the drilling process used to extract natural gas and the potential for water contamination from fracking or leaks.
"Water is life, and we need to make sure that the water is protected," said Emily Wilkins of Durham. "We're coming because everybody's land is everybody's land and we need to protect it for future generations."
Some of the land in Pembroke and the Prospect community is traditionally tribal and representatives from the Native American community walked in the front of about 100 marchers in Robeson County.
Riders of the RedRum Motorcycle Club, which consists of Native American members, helped a pair of law enforcement vehicles block intersections and escort walkers.
"This is our land. We're just trying to protect and help raise awareness of what's going on," RedRum rider Marcus Locklear said.
"You've got some people that are for it, but there's other means of transporting oil and natural gas. It's been done for years and it's always worked. Why change it?" Locklear added.
Legerton said there will be a two-week walk in early March along the entire proposed route of the pipeline.Why is ``Brontosaurus'' now called Apatosaurus?
28th June 2004
Question
Answer
In 1903, Elmer Riggs' re-examination of Marsh's specimens led him to conclude that they represented the same genus (although see below), meaning that the names were synonyms. In such cases, the ICZN (International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, see www.iczn.org) mandates that the oldest name has priority - which means that the rather dull Apatosaurus (``deceptive lizard'') wins out over the much more resonant ``Brontosaurus'' (``thunder lizard'').
So why does the world still talk about ``Brontosaurus'' all the time? The paper in which Riggs established the synonymy was published in the Geological Series of the Field Columbian Museum - a relatively obscure journal, so the findings were not as widely known as they should have been. Also, the sexier invalid name received a lot of public exposure from non-scientific sources: for example, the Sinclair oil company used a ``Brontosaurus'' as its logo for many years. (Rather inappropriately, as it turns out, since oil is formed from plant matter, not animals. Never mind.)
So the world continued and continues to use ``Brontosaurus''; but Apatosaurus should be used in all serious writing.
I said that Riggs established that Apatosaurus and ``Brontosaurus'' were from the same genus. But the two Marsh specimens are still considered to represent separate species: the older specimen is Apatosaurus ajax and the newer Apatosaurus (nee ``Brontosaurus'') excelsus. However, since it's always a judgement call whether any species belong in the same genus (see ``When is a new dinosaur erected as a new species or genus?'' ), there are palaeontologists - notably Robert Bakker - who feel that the two species are sufficiently distinct that excelsus merits a separate genus. Under this scheme, the old genus name is still perfectly good, so Bakker still uses the formal name Brontosaurus excelsus (but never Brontosaurus ajax.)
Finally: for many years, Apatosaurus was believed to have a head similar to that of Camarasaurus - a mistake that was rectified in the 1970s with the discovery of a specimen with associated cranial remains closely resembling the head of Diplodocus. This has led to a misapprehension in some quarters that the name ``Brontosaurus'' refers to the combination of an Apatosaurus body with a Camarasaurus head. No so: the naming confusion is quite separate from this issue.Welcome to Viking Bags.com. Viking Bags manufactures all of the items that are listed on this website. Viking Bags are unlike any other motorcycle luggage company on the internet, Viking Bags makes their own products at their own factories and sell them at their own cost. Viking Bags are not limited to minimum advertised prices and other things that limit other websites. Viking Bags are located in the greater Los Angeles area but have warehouses nationwide. All Viking Bags' products are made from premium quality leather. For example, the motorcycle saddlebags, Viking Bags is known for, are designed and manufactured in-house. All designs are done by bikers and for bikers in order to last longer, look better, and provide all the comfort that a modern biker needs.
Viking Bags is one of the world's largest motorcycle luggage online retailers in the world. Viking Bags sells saddlebags, both leather and hard saddlebags, for most popular bike. In addition to saddlebags, Viking Bags offers; motorcycle sissy bar bags, chopper bags, motorcycle tank bags, motorcycle windshield bags, motorcycle trunks, motorcycle tail bags, motorcycle back packs, swing arm bags, fork bags, roll bags, handlebar bags and motorcycle tool bags.
Looking for a bag for your bike? Don't worry as Viking Bags carries saddlebags for most models which includes the Saddlebags for Harley-Davidson®, Honda saddlebags, Suzuki saddlebags, Kawasaki saddlebags, Yamaha saddlebags, Victory saddlebags, Triumph saddlebags, Indian saddlebags, and Hyosung saddlebags line-up. If your bike is not listed as one of the bikes we have saddlebags for, we're probably already in development for them as you read this and there's a chance they will be available soon. We take pride in our R&D department as we're always looking for ways to improve our already existing designs and come out with new ones as new models of bikes come out every year.
Viking Bags Customer Photos & Videos
Motorcycle Luggage Experts - Viking Bags
Viking Bags also offers multiple mounting options for most of these bags along with the shock cut out option for the motorcycles that have exposed shocks and need this in order to install the saddlebags properly. There's the standard throw-over mounting option, the hard mount which will require the bolting of the saddlebags to your fender rail, and the quick disconnect mounting option. The latter option is still a hard mount, but only the QDS mounting posts are hard mounted to the fender rail and not the saddlebag itself. The QDS itself is easily removable as it will remain attached to the saddlebags making the removal of the saddlebags themselves a matter of seconds. Look no further, Viking Bags offers the lowest price on motorcycle luggage, guaranteed!Fengshui Theme
Dark custom UI theme for Sublime Text 2 and Sublime Text 3. Heavily based on Soda Theme by Ian Hill.
feng shui
/ˌfɛŋ ˈʃuːi,ˌfʌŋ ˈʃweɪ/
noun
A system of laws considered to govern spatial arrangement and orientation in relation to the flow of energy (chi), and whose favourable or unfavourable effects are taken into account when designing.
Work on a canvas as free and clean as possible. Let the water and the air flow.
Project site: https://github.com/jobedom/fengshui-theme/
Design
Scheme and font
The Fengshui screenshots use an included custom version of Baara Dark scheme, also named Fengshui and adapted for Fengshui Theme. It's recommended to use it with the theme, including the following in your user settings.
{ "color_scheme": "Packages/Theme - Fengshui/Fengshui.tmTheme" }
The code font shown in the screenshots is Fira Mono.
Installation
Fengshui theme is designed to work with the latest development builds of Sublime Text, including Sublime Text 2 and Sublime Text 3.
Using Sublime Package Control
If you are using Will Bond's excellent Sublime Package Control, you can easily install Fengshui Theme via the Package Control: Install Package menu item. The Fengshui Theme package is listed as Theme - Fengshui in the packages list.
Using Git
Alternatively, if you are a git user, you can install the theme and keep up to date by cloning the repo directly into your Packages directory in the Sublime Text application settings area.
You can locate your Sublime Text Packages directory by using the menu item Preferences -> Browse Packages....
While inside the Packages directory, clone the theme repository using the command below:
git clone https://github.com/jobedom/fengshui-theme/ "Theme - Fengshui"
Download Manually
Download the files using the GitHub.zip download option
Unzip the files and rename the folder to Theme - Fengshui
Find your Packages directory using the menu item Preferences -> Browse Packages...
directory using the menu item Copy the folder into your Sublime Text Packages directory
Activating the theme
To configure Sublime Text to use the theme, follow the instructions below for your specific version.
Sublime Text 2
Open your User Settings Preferences file Sublime Text 2 -> Preferences -> Settings - User
Add (or update) your theme entry to be "theme": "Fengshui.sublime-theme"
Example Sublime Text 2 User Settings
{ "theme": "Fengshui.sublime-theme" }
Sublime Text 3
Open your User Settings Preferences file Sublime Text -> Preferences -> Settings - User
Add (or update) your theme entry to be "theme": "Fengshui.sublime-theme"
Example Sublime Text 3 User Settings
{ "theme": "Fengshui.sublime-theme" }
Additional Features
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Fengshui Theme ships with two alternate UI tab styles.
By default, a square tab style is used. If you'd prefer to use the original curved tab style, add the following custom setting to your Settings - User file:
"fengshui_classic_tabs": true
Retina Resolution UI
Fengshui Theme has been designed to take advantage of retina resolution (high-dpi) displays.
License
Fengshui Theme is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. You are free to share and remix the theme, however please abide by the license terms when doing so.
The following details apply to the Creative Commons license “author specified” components:Breaking law, Bush Administration fails to declassify 30-year-old files Nick Juliano
Published: Tuesday July 15, 2008
Print This Email This Failure continues pattern of Bush secrecy Thirty years. That's how long it's taken the State Department to publish an accounting of US foreign relations. And they're not even done -- the Department is again going to miss a mandatory three-decade legal deadline to publish an accounting of its foreign relations activities. "The 'Foreign Relations of the United States' (FRUS) series, which is the official documentary history of U.S. foreign policy, remains unlikely to meet the legal requirement that it be published no later than 30 years after the events that it describes, an official advisory committee has told the Secretary of State," The Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood reported Tuesday. Despite many and repeated assurances that this problem would be addressed by 2010, the committee is now very skeptical that the Office of the Historian will succeed in meeting the 30-year requirement for the Foreign Relations series at any time within the next decade, the State Department Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation writes in its latest report. "Compliance with the 30 year deadline is not optional; it is a binding legal requirement," Aftergood notes. He cites a 1991 statute: The Secretary of State shall ensure that the FRUS series shall be published not more than 30 years after the events recorded." Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was admonished for the department's failure to keep up with declassification rules by the advisory committee created in concert with that 1991 law. "The committee, however, is disappointed to have to report on the continuing failure to meet the 30-year requirement for the Foreign Relations series. Although there are many factors that may have contributed to this failure the always present concern with balancing secrecy and the publics right-to-know, possible shortages of personnel and/or resources, and recent presidential directives they don't even think they'll be able to meet their deadline by 2010. Foot dragging the department apparently has affected morale and may lead to retirement of some career employees, Aftergood wrote. "The committee must really be concerned for the report to be so explicit and emphatic, one former State Department official told Secrecy News. Adds Aftergood: "In a delicate allusion to reports of morale problems in the Office of the Historian and the ensuing resignations of professional staff, the Advisory Committee strongly recommended that State Department Human Resources personnel "conduct mandatory exit interviews to determine the principal reasons behind the departure of skilled researchers.'" Of note: the State Department also plans to offer reduced coverage of US policy during the Reagan Administration -- if and when they eventually complete the report. The committee is concerned that despite a collection of 8.5 million classified pages in the Reagan Library, compared with the Nixon years 2.5 million pages, the Office plans substantially fewer volumes of the FRUS series, they wrote.Planet and Rocket Lab have signed a Launch Services Agreement for at least three dedicated launches on Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle.
The agreement will see Electron used to expand and replenish Planet’s existing on-orbit fleet of Dove satellites. Planet will utilize the full capacity of Electron for each of the launches, which are scheduled to begin in 2017.
“Rocket Lab’s priority for Electron has always been to enable our customers by providing the affordable and frequent service they need to meet their objectives,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab CEO. “We look forward to working with Planet, who share our vision of seeing space infrastructure enhance how we use and understand our planet.”
With over 100 satellites already launched, the data generated by Planet’s constellation of Dove satellites can be used for a wide range of commercial and humanitarian applications including generating up-to-date maps, measuring global crop yields, tracking carbon stocks, and providing intelligence for disaster response.
Planet joins NASA, Spire and Moon Express as customers announced to fly on the Electron launch vehicle.
About Planet
Planet designs, builds and operates the world’s most capable constellation of Earth-imaging satellites. Planet’s mission is to image the entire Earth, every day and make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. With the complementary Rapid Eye constellation, Planet is revolutionizing the way geospatial imagery is processed, distributed and accessed. Planet is making its satellite data available quickly via web-based APIs and an online catalog, capable of delivering terabytes of new data every day to customers around the world.A Parable
There's a story about a wise fox and some pebbles. There's no story about a wise fox and some apples.
More or less, the story goes that the a thirsty fox came across a jar just barely filled with water. The wise fox threw some pebbles down the jar, and the water level raised higher and higher until the fox could drink. And that's because the fox was wise. There's another story about a crow who thought he'd look cooler by throwing apples into the jar. Ever heard that story? No? There's a reason why.
The reason is, sometimes it's smarter to use the easier and less expensive solution. The fox got some pebbles for less, and they worked just as well or better than those expensive apples! The fox was happy! The crow was not!
There's a lesson in that, you know.
Back to topThe text of the climate pact establishes a commitment by 195 countries to take concrete measures to reel in planet-warming carbon emissions. Related Article
Page 22 Temperature Increase “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”
Page 23 Preservation of Forests “Parties are encouraged to take action to implement and support, including through results-based payments, the existing framework as set out in related guidance and decisions already agreed under the Convention for: policy approaches and positive incentives for activities relating to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries; and alternative policy approaches, such as joint mitigation and adaptation approaches for the integral and sustainable management of forests, while reaffirming the importance of incentivizing, as appropriate, non-carbon benefits associated with such approaches.”
Page 26 Bearing the Cost “As part of a global effort, developed country Parties should continue to take the lead in mobilizing climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds, through a variety of actions, including supporting country-driven strategies, and taking into account the needs and priorities of developing country Parties. Such mobilization of climate finance should represent a progression beyond previous efforts.”
Page 28 Transparency “In order to build mutual trust and confidence and to promote effective implementation, an enhanced transparency framework for action and support, with built-in flexibility which takes into account Parties’ different capacities and builds upon collective experience is hereby established.”
Page 22 Absence of “Greenhouse Gas Emissions Neutrality” “In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2, Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.”
Page 26 Loss and Damage “Parties recognize the importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events, and the role of sustainable development in reducing the risk of loss and damage.”This post has been updated.
First, CEOs abandoned President Donald Trump by quitting White House advisory councils. Now, charities have begun to ditch Trump’s business by canceling fundraisers planned at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
In the wake of Trump’s failure to fully denounce white nationalists following the violence in Charlottesville, sixteen charities have cancelled events planned for Mar-a-Lago next year.
The Cleveland Clinic, a hospital network, pulled its 2018 fundraising gala from Trump’s Palm Beach club early Thursday afternoon. The clinic did not share its reasoning behind canceling plans to hold the event at Mar-a-Lago.
Then the American Cancer Society announced Thursday afternoon that it would no longer hold its annual fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago in February. The charity did not mention Trump by name, but noted its commitment to diversity.
“Our values and commitment to diversity are critical as we work to address the impact of cancer in every community,” American Cancer Society spokeswoman Miriam Falco said in statement. “It has become increasingly clear that the challenge to those values is outweighing other business considerations.”
Later Thursday, American Friends of Magen David Adom, a group that supports medical first responders in Israel, announced that it would no longer hold its annual fundraiser at Mar-A-Lago in 2018. The group, which held its fundraiser at Trump’s club last year, did not offer specific reasoning for pulling the event from the Trump family venue.
“After considerable deliberation, AFMDA — an apolitical and humanitarian aid organization — will not hold its 2018 Palm Beach Celebration of Life Gala at Mar-a-Lago,” the group said in a statement.
Four charities announced plans to move their venues from Mar-A-Lago on Friday, including several major national foundations.
The American Red Cross, which was scheduled to hold an event in February of next year, announced that it pulled the event from Mar-A-Lago “as it has increasingly become a source of controversy and pain for many of our volunteers, employees and supporters.”
“We believe this action will allow us to continue to put the focus on our lifesaving mission and the people we serve. The Red Cross provides assistance without discrimination to all people in need, regardless of nationality, race, religious beliefs, or political opinions, and we must be clear and unequivocal in our defense of that principle,” the organization said in a statement.
The Salvation Army, which was set to hold a fundraiser at Trump’s Palm Beach club in December, said Friday that the venue had become a distraction.
“The Salvation Army relies heavily on fundraising events like The Holiday Snow Ball in Palm Beach to further our mission of helping those in need through a range of social services including food for the hungry, relief for disaster victims, clothing and shelter for the homeless, and opportunities for the underprivileged,” the group said in a statement. “Because the conversation has |
in Serbia.
They successfully defended it 12 months later in Slovenia, before Stuivenberg stepped up to become U21 coach, a role he relinquished in favour of Adrie Koster to join Van Gaal at Old Trafford. At 43, Stuivenberg has already aided the Netherlands coach as a scout and analyst in FIFA World Cup preparations.
UEFA.com examines Stuivenberg's philosophy through our interviews with him over the years – and picks out an XI of talent that came through his U17 squads.
2007 "I was at Feyenoord for 13 years as head of youth development. This is a different aspect of developing players. You are not on the pitch every day with the players [as a national coach] but I am also assistant coach of the U16 team so I am quite busy."
2008 "You can see what happens in two years of development with players. Sometimes you have to be a little bit lucky. [In the semi-final loss to Spain] we were unlucky. We actually deserved to win and that's the biggest achievement we have attained this year."
2009 "I know we have a philosophy in developing players. The players make up a team, but the coach makes them into a team, gives them a way of playing. That is not easy, though it works both ways."
2011 "They have improved this season in understanding what it takes to win games, and when you are in front what it takes to keep the ball in possession and not let the opponents come back into the game again."
2012 Explaining why his final tournament training sessions concentrated on match situations, dealing with one-goal deficits or leads, or playing with or against ten men: "This is something the clubs don't always work on. The truly important thing is playing development. In the last five or six years I've seen that most the U17 players have progressed into first-team environments. That is a really satisfying aspect of the job."
Stuivenberg's record in UEFA competitions:
Under-17 P65 W41 D13 L11 F121 A47
Seasons 7 Titles 2 Finals 3 Qualifications 5
Under-21 P6 W5 D1 L0 F22 A4
©Getty Images
An XI from Stuivenberg's U17 squads:
Jereon Zoet (2007 & 2008); Joël Veltman* (2009), Stefan de Vrij* (2009), Terence Kongolo* (2011), Daley Blind* (2007); Leroy Fer* (2007), Jordy Clasie* (2008); Georginio Wijnaldum* (2007), Tonny Vilhena (2011 & 2012), Memphis Depay* (2011); Luc Castaignos (2009).
*In 2014 FIFA World Cup squadFinal Fantasy Type-0 HD for PC launches August 18
PC version boasts a number of improvements.
Final Fantasy Type-0 HD will launch for PC via Steam with graphical upgrades and new gameplay features on August 18, Square Enix announced.
Additions to the PC version include:
Improved in-game battle camera
Scalable motion blur settings
Customizable dynamic screen shot mode
Upgraded graphics resolution options for high-end PCs
Increased blood levels
New character speed boosts
Full controller support
Full Steam achievements and trading cards
Users who pre-order the game on Steam will receive the Master Chocobo as your courier and Moogle (Class Zero) as your ward in DOTA 2, plus an exclusive Final Fantasy Type-0 HD loading screen.
“Developing Final Fantasy Type-0 HD for Steam gave us the opportunity to fully realize our original vision of the game in an enhanced and refined experience exclusively for PC players,” said director Hajime Tabata.
The full list of PC minimum and recommended system requirements is listed below:
Minimum System Requirements:
Operating System: Windows 7, 8, 8.1 64bit
Processor: CPU Core i3 2.5GHz
Memory: RAM 4GB
Disk Space: HDD/SSD 30GB
Video: GTX560Ti or AMD Radeon 7790 mp4 [H.264]
Sound: DirectX XAudio2API
DirectX®: 11 and over Recommended System Requirements:
Operating System: Windows 7, 8, 8.1 64bit
Processor: CPU Core i5 2.7GHz
Memory: RAM 6GB
Disk Space: HDD/SSD 30GB
Video: GTX750 mp4 [H.264]
Sound: DirectX XAudio2API
DirectX®: 11 and over
View a new set of PC screenshots at the gallery.President Obama mandated Thursday that nearly all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians and respect patients' choices about who may make critical health-care decisions for them, perhaps the most significant step so far in his efforts to expand the rights of gay Americans.
The president directed the Department of Health and Human Services to prohibit discrimination in hospital visitation in a memo that was e-mailed to reporters Thursday night while he was at a fundraiser in Miami.
Administration officials and gay activists, who have been quietly working together on the issue, said the new rule will affect any hospital that receives Medicare or Medicaid funding, a move that covers the vast majority of the nation's health-care institutions. Obama's order will start a rule-making process at HHS that could take several months, officials said.
Hospitals often bar visitors who are not related to an incapacitated patient by blood or marriage, and gay rights activists say many do not respect same-sex couples' efforts to designate a partner to make medical decisions for them if they are seriously ill or injured.
"Discrimination touches every facet of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, including at times of crisis and illness, when we need our loved ones with us more than ever," Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement praising the president's decision.
Obama's mandate is the latest attempt by his administration to advance the agenda of a constituency that strongly supported his presidential campaign.
In his first 15 months in office, he has hailed the passage of hate crime legislation and held the first Gay Pride Day celebration at the White House. Last month, Obama's top military and defense officials testified before Congress in favor of repealing of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays in the armed forces.
But the moves have been too slow for some gay rights activists, who have urged the president to be more vocal and active in championing their causes. John Aravosis, a prominent gay blogger, wrote last October that Obama's "track record on keeping his gay promises has been fairly abominable."
Other gay rights activists have defended the administration, while at the same time pushing Congress to act on broader issues such as passage of an employment non-discrimination act and an end to the ban on gays serving openly in the military.
"We see this as part of our ongoing effort to encourage the administration to take action where it has the authority to act," said David Smith, a Human Rights Campaign spokesman. "We've been working and pressing the administration on our legislative agenda. That work continues."
Gay activists have argued for years that recognizing same-sex marriage would ease the stress associated with not being able to visit hospitalized partners.
But opponents of same-sex marriage have called the visitation issue a red herring, arguing that advocates want to provide special rights for gays that other Americans do not have. A spokesman for one group said the president's move was part of a broader effort to appease gays and to undermine the institution of marriage.All sides must do their utmost to protect and spare the civilians of Fallujah.
Baghdad (ICRC) - Fierce fighting is underway around the Iraqi city of Fallujah, raising serious concerns about the well-being and safety of civilians still trapped in and around the city. The situation is particularly worrisome for the tens of thousands of men, women, children and elderly who remain stuck inside the town – the largest in Anbar province – who have already had very limited access to food, water and basic healthcare for the past two years.
"Fallujah must not be allowed to become another Ramadi," said the ICRC's head of delegation in Iraq Katharina Ritz, referring to a nearby town that was severely damaged and left scattered with explosive remnants of war after intensive fighting there earlier this year. Clearing Ramadi of explosive weapons and rebuilding its homes and disrupted water and electric systems could take months, if not years to complete.
"Civilians must be spared and allowed to leave Fallujah safely, while houses and other civilian infrastructure must not be targeted", Ritz continued. "People of Fallujah have already suffered enormously as a result of relentless fighting in the area. Humanitarian agencies must be given access to reach them and provide relief."
The ICRC has been seeking access to Fallujah for months, but has so far not been able to get the safety guarantees and commitment it needs by all parties. It stands ready to provide humanitarian assistance to communities affected by the violence.
For more information, please contact:
Ralph El Hage, ICRC Baghdad +964 7901 916 927
Krista Armstrong, ICRC Geneva +41 79 447 37 26
See also :Piece of mineral crystal used to make jewelry
"Precious Stone" redirects here. For the James Bond character, see Hurricane Gold
clockwise from top left) Group of precious and semiprecious stones—both uncut and faceted—including ( diamond, uncut synthetic sapphire ruby, uncut emerald, and amethyst crystal cluster.
A gemstone (also called a gem, fine gem, jewel, precious stone, or semi-precious stone) is a piece of mineral crystal which, in cut and polished form, is used to make jewelry or other adornments.[1][2] However, certain rocks (such as lapis lazuli and opal) and occasionally organic materials that are not minerals (such as amber, jet, and pearl) are also used for jewelry and are therefore often considered to be gemstones as well. Most gemstones are hard, but some soft minerals are used in jewelry because of their luster or other physical properties that have aesthetic value. Rarity is another characteristic that lends value to a gemstone.
Apart from jewelry, from earliest antiquity engraved gems and hardstone carvings, such as cups, were major luxury art forms. A gem maker is called a lapidary or gemcutter; a diamond cutter is called a diamantaire.
Characteristics and classification [ edit ]
A selection of gemstone pebbles made by tumbling rough rock with abrasive grit, in a rotating drum. The biggest pebble here is 40 mm (1.6 in) long.
The traditional classification in the West, which goes back to the ancient Greeks, begins with a distinction between precious and semi-precious; similar distinctions are made in other cultures. In modern use the precious stones are diamond, ruby, sapphire and emerald, with all other gemstones being semi-precious.[3] This distinction reflects the rarity of the respective stones in ancient times, as well as their quality: all are translucent with fine color in their purest forms, except for the colorless diamond, and very hard, with hardnesses of 8 to 10 on the Mohs scale. Other stones are classified by their color, translucency and hardness. The traditional distinction does not necessarily reflect modern values, for example, while garnets are relatively inexpensive, a green garnet called tsavorite can be far more valuable than a mid-quality emerald.[4] Another unscientific term for semi-precious gemstones used in art history and archaeology is hardstone. Use of the terms 'precious' and'semi-precious' in a commercial context is, arguably, misleading in that it deceptively implies certain stones are intrinsically more valuable than others, which is not necessarily the case.
In modern times gemstones are identified by gemologists, who describe gems and their characteristics using technical terminology specific to the field of gemology. The first characteristic a gemologist uses to identify a gemstone is its chemical composition. For example, diamonds are made of carbon (C) and rubies of aluminium oxide (Al
2 O
3 ). Next, many gems are crystals which are classified by their crystal system such as cubic or trigonal or monoclinic. Another term used is habit, the form the gem is usually found in. For example, diamonds, which have a cubic crystal system, are often found as octahedrons.
Gemstones are classified into different groups, species, and varieties.[5] For example, ruby is the red variety of the species corundum, while any other color of corundum is considered sapphire. Other examples are the emerald (green), aquamarine (blue), red beryl (red), goshenite (colorless), heliodor (yellow) and morganite (pink), which are all varieties of the mineral species beryl.
Gems are characterized in terms of refractive index, dispersion, specific gravity, hardness, cleavage, fracture and luster. They may exhibit pleochroism or double refraction. They may have luminescence and a distinctive absorption spectrum.
Material or flaws within a stone may be present as inclusions.
Gemstones may also be classified in terms of their "water". This is a recognized grading of the gem's luster, transparency, or "brilliance".[6] Very transparent gems are considered "first water", while "second" or "third water" gems are those of a lesser transparency.[7]
Value [ edit ]
Enamelled gold, amethyst and pearl pendant, about 1880, Pasquale Novissimo (1844–1914), V&A Museum number M.36-1928
There is no universally accepted grading system for gemstones. Diamonds are graded using a system developed by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) in the early 1950s. Historically, all gemstones were graded using the naked eye. The GIA system included a major innovation: the introduction of 10x magnification as the standard for grading clarity. Other gemstones are still graded using the naked eye (assuming 20/20 vision).[8]
A mnemonic device, the "four Cs" (color, cut, clarity, and carats), has been introduced to help the consumer understand the factors used to grade a diamond.[9] With modification, these categories can be useful in understanding the grading of all gemstones. The four criteria carry different weight depending upon whether they are applied to colored gemstones or to colorless diamonds. In diamonds, cut is the primary determinant of value, followed by clarity and color. Diamonds are meant to sparkle, to break down light into its constituent rainbow colors (dispersion), chop it up into bright little pieces (scintillation), and deliver it to the eye (brilliance). In its rough crystalline form, a diamond will do none of these things; it requires proper fashioning and this is called "cut". In gemstones that have color, including colored diamonds, it is the purity and beauty of that color that is the primary determinant of quality.
Physical characteristics that make a colored stone valuable are color, clarity to a lesser extent (emeralds will always have a number of inclusions), cut, unusual optical phenomena within the stone such as color zoning (the uneven distribution of coloring within a gem) and asteria (star effects). The Greeks, for example, greatly valued asteria gemstones, which were regarded as powerful love charms, and Helen of Troy was known to have worn star-corundum.[10]
Aside from the diamond, the ruby, sapphire, emerald, pearl (not, strictly speaking, a gemstone), and opal[11] have also been considered to be precious. Up to the discoveries of bulk amethyst in Brazil in the 19th century, amethyst was considered a precious stone as well, going back to ancient Greece. Even in the last century certain stones such as aquamarine, peridot and cat's eye (cymophane) have been popular and hence been regarded as precious.
Today such a distinction is no longer made by the gemstone trade.[12] Many gemstones are used in even the most expensive jewelry, depending on the brand name of the designer, fashion trends, market supply, treatments, etc. Nevertheless, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds still have a reputation that exceeds those of other gemstones.[13]
Rare or unusual gemstones, generally meant to include those gemstones which occur so infrequently in gem quality that they are scarcely known except to connoisseurs, include andalusite, axinite, cassiterite, clinohumite and red beryl.[14]
Gemstone pricing and value are governed by factors and characteristics on the quality of the stone. These characteristics include clarity, rarity, freedom of defects, beauty of the stone, as well as the demand for them. There are different pricing influencers for both colored gemstones, and for diamonds. The pricing on colored stones is determined by market supply-and-demand, but diamonds are more intricate. Diamond value can change based on location, time, and on the evaluations of diamond vendors.[15]
Grading [ edit ]
There are a number of laboratories which grade and provide reports on gemstones.[12]
Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the main provider of education services and diamond grading reports
International Gemological Institute (IGI), independent laboratory for grading and evaluation of diamonds, jewelry and colored stones
Hoge Raad voor Diamant (HRD Antwerp), The Diamond High Council, Belgium is one of Europe's oldest laboratories; its main stakeholder is the Antwerp World Diamond Centre
American Gemological Society (AGS) is not as widely recognized nor as old as the GIA
American Gem Trade Laboratory which is part of the American Gem Trade Association (AGTA), a trade organization of jewelers and dealers of colored stones
American Gemological Laboratories (AGL), owned by Christopher P. Smith
European Gemological Laboratory (EGL), founded in 1974 by Guy Margel in Belgium
Gemmological Association of All Japan (GAAJ-ZENHOKYO), Zenhokyo, Japan, active in gemological research
The Gem and Jewelry Institute of Thailand (Public Organization) or GIT, the Thailand's national institute for gemological research and gem testing, Bangkok [16]
Gemmology Institute of Southern Africa, Africa's premium gem laboratory
Asian Institute of Gemological Sciences (AIGS), the oldest gemological institute in South East Asia, involved in gemological education and gem testing
Swiss Gemmological Institute (SSEF), founded by Henry Hänni, focusing on colored gemstones and the identification of natural pearls
Gübelin Gem Lab, the traditional Swiss lab founded by Eduard Gübelin
Institute for Gems and Gold Research of VINAGEMS (Vietnam), founded by Dr. Van Long Pham[ citation needed ]
Each laboratory has its own methodology to evaluate gemstones. A stone can be called "pink" by one lab while another lab calls it "padparadscha". One lab can conclude a stone is untreated, while another lab might conclude that it is heat-treated.[12] To minimise such differences, seven of the most respected labs, AGTA-GTL (New York), CISGEM (Milano), GAAJ-ZENHOKYO (Tokyo), GIA (Carlsbad), GIT (Bangkok), Gübelin (Lucerne) and SSEF (Basel), have established the Laboratory Manual Harmonisation Committee (LMHC), for the standardization of wording reports, promotion of certain analytical methods and interpretation of results. Country of origin has sometimes been difficult to determine, due to the constant discovery of new source locations. Determining a "country of origin" is thus much more difficult than determining other aspects of a gem (such as cut, clarity, etc.).[17]
Gem dealers are aware of the differences between gem laboratories and will make use of the discrepancies to obtain the best possible certificate.[12]
Cutting and polishing [ edit ]
Raw gemstones
A diamond cutter in Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 2012
A few gemstones are used as gems in the crystal or other form in which they are found. Most however, are cut and polished for usage as jewelry. The picture to the left is of a rural, commercial cutting operation in Thailand. This small factory cuts thousands of carats of sapphire annually. The two main classifications are stones cut as smooth, dome shaped stones called cabochons, and stones which are cut with a faceting machine by polishing small flat windows called facets at regular intervals at exact angles.
Stones which are opaque or semi-opaque such as opal, turquoise, variscite, etc. are commonly cut as cabochons. These gems are designed to show the stone's color or surface properties as in opal and star sapphires. Grinding wheels and polishing agents are used to grind, shape and polish the smooth dome shape of the stones.[18]
Gems which are transparent are normally faceted, a method which shows the optical properties of the stone's interior to its best advantage by maximizing reflected light which is perceived by the viewer as sparkle. There are many commonly used shapes for faceted stones. The facets must be cut at the proper angles, which varies depending on the optical properties of the gem. If the angles are too steep or too shallow, the light will pass through and not be reflected back toward the viewer. The faceting machine is used to hold the stone onto a flat lap for cutting and polishing the flat facets.[19] Rarely, some cutters use special curved laps to cut and polish curved facets.
Colors [ edit ]
Nearly 300 variations of diamond color exhibited at the Aurora display at the Natural History Museum in London.
The color of any material is due to the nature of light itself. Daylight, often called white light, is actually all of the colors of the spectrum combined. When light strikes a material, most of the light is absorbed while a smaller amount of a particular frequency or wavelength is reflected. The part that is reflected reaches the eye as the perceived color. A ruby appears red because it absorbs all the other colors of white light, while reflecting the red.
A material which is mostly the same can exhibit different colors. For example, ruby and sapphire have the same primary chemical composition (both are corundum) but exhibit different colors because of impurities. Even the same named gemstone can occur in many different colors: sapphires show different shades of blue and pink and "fancy sapphires" exhibit a whole range of other colors from yellow to orange-pink, the latter called "padparadscha sapphire".[20]
This difference in color is based on the atomic structure of the stone. Although the different stones formally have the same chemical composition and structure, they are not exactly the same. Every now and then an atom is replaced by a completely different atom, sometimes as few as one in a million atoms. These so-called impurities are sufficient to absorb certain colors and leave the other colors unaffected.
For example, beryl, which is colorless in its pure mineral form, becomes emerald with chromium impurities. If manganese is added instead of chromium, beryl becomes pink morganite. With iron, it becomes aquamarine.
Some gemstone treatments make use of the fact that these impurities can be "manipulated", thus changing the color of the gem.[5]
Treatment [ edit ]
Gemstones are often treated to enhance the color or clarity of the stone. Depending on the type and extent of treatment, they can affect the value of the stone. Some treatments are used widely because the resulting gem is stable, while others are not accepted most commonly because the gem color is unstable and may revert to the original tone.[21]
Heat [ edit ]
Heat can improve gemstone color or clarity. The heating process has been well known to gem miners and cutters for centuries, and in many stone types heating is a common practice. Most citrine is made by heating amethyst, and partial heating with a strong gradient results in “ametrine” – a stone partly amethyst and partly citrine. Aquamarine is often heated to remove yellow tones, or to change green colors into the more desirable blue, or enhance its existing blue color to a purer blue.[22]
Nearly all tanzanite is heated at low temperatures to remove brown undertones and give a more desirable blue / purple color.[23] A considerable portion of all sapphire and ruby is treated with a variety of heat treatments to improve both color and clarity.
When jewelry containing diamonds is heated (for repairs) the diamond should be protected with boric acid; otherwise the diamond (which is pure carbon) could be burned on the surface or even burned completely up. When jewelry containing sapphires or rubies is heated, those stones should not be coated with boracic acid (which can etch the surface) or any other substance. They do not have to be protected from burning, like a diamond (although the stones do need to be protected from heat stress fracture by immersing the part of the jewelry with stones in water when metal parts are heated).
Radiation [ edit ]
Virtually all blue topaz, both the lighter and the darker blue shades such as "London" blue, has been irradiated to change the color from white to blue. Most greened quartz (Oro Verde) is also irradiated to achieve the yellow-green color. Diamonds are irradiated to produce fancy-color diamonds (which occur naturally, though rarely in gem quality).
Emeralds containing natural fissures are sometimes filled with wax or oil to disguise them. This wax or oil is also colored to make the emerald appear of better color as well as clarity. Turquoise is also commonly treated in a similar manner.
Fracture filling [ edit ]
Fracture filling has been in use with different gemstones such as diamonds, emeralds and sapphires. In 2006 "glass filled rubies" received publicity. Rubies over 10 carats (2 g) with large fractures were filled with lead glass, thus dramatically improving the appearance (of larger rubies in particular). Such treatments are fairly easy to detect.
Synthetic and artificial gemstones [ edit ]
It is important to distinguish between synthetic gemstones, and imitation or simulated gems.
Synthetic gems are physically, optically and chemically identical to the natural stone, but are created in controlled conditions in a laboratory.[24] Imitation or simulated stones are chemically different from the natural stone but may be optically similar to it; they can be glass, plastic, resins or other compounds.
Examples of simulated or imitation stones include cubic zirconia, composed of zirconium oxide and simulated moissanite, which are both diamond simulants. The imitations copy the look and color of the real stone but possess neither their chemical nor physical characteristics. Moissanite actually has a higher refractive index than diamond and when presented beside an equivalently sized and cut diamond will have more "fire" than the diamond.
Synthetic, cultured or lab-created gemstones are not imitations. For example, diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds have been manufactured in labs to possess identical chemical and physical characteristics to the naturally occurring variety. Synthetic (lab created) corundum, including ruby and sapphire, is very common and costs much less than the natural stones. Smaller synthetic diamonds have been manufactured in large quantities as industrial abrasives, although larger gem-quality synthetic diamonds are becoming available in multiple carats.[25]
Whether a gemstone is a natural stone or lab-created (synthetic), the physical characteristics are the same. Lab-created stones tend to have a more vivid color to them, as impurities are not present in a lab and do not modify the clarity or color of the stone, unless added intentionally for a specific purpose.[citation needed]
List of rare gemstones [ edit ]
Painite was discovered in 1956 in Ohngaing in Myanmar. The mineral was named in honor of the British gemologist Arthur Charles Davy Pain. In 2005, painite was described by the Guinness Book of World Records as the rarest gem mineral on earth. [26] [ page needed ]
Hibonite was discovered in 1956 in Madagascar. It was named after the discoverer the French geologist Paul Hibon. Gem quality hibonite has been found only in Myanmar. [27]
Red beryl or bixbite was discovered in an area near Beaver, Utah in 1904 and named after the American mineralogist Maynard Bixby.
Jeremejevite was discovered in 1883 in Russia and named after its discoverer, Pawel Wladimirowich Jeremejew (1830–1899).
Chambersite was discovered in 1957 in Chambers County, Texas, US, and named after the deposit's location.
Taaffeite was discovered in 1945. It was named after the discoverer, the Irish gemologist Count Edward Charles Richard Taaffe.
Musgravite was discovered in 1967 in the Musgrave Mountains in South Australia and named for the location.
Grandidierite was discovered by Antoine François Alfred Lacroix (1863–1948) in 1902 in Tuléar province, Madagascar. It was named in honor of the French naturalist and explorer Alfred Grandidier (1836–1912).
Poudretteite was discovered in 1965 at the Poudrette Quarry in Canada and named after the quarry's owners and operators, the Poudrette family.
Serendibite was discovered in Sri Lanka by Dunil Palitha Gunasekera in 1902 and named after Serendib, the old Arabic name for Sri Lanka.
Zektzerite was discovered by Bart Cannon in 1968 on Kangaroo Ridge near Washington Pass in Okanogan County, Washington, USA. The mineral was named in honor of mathematician and geologist Jack Zektzer, who presented the material for study in 1976.
See also [ edit ]The people of Fuzhou (Chinese: 福州人; Foochow Romanized: Hók-ciŭ-nè̤ng), also known as Fuzhounese, Foochowese, Hokchew, Hokchia, Hokchiu, Fuzhou Shiyi people (福州十邑人), Eastern Min or Mindong usually refers to people who originate from Fuzhou region and the Mindong region, adjacent Gutian County, Pingnan County, in Fujian province and in the adjacent Matsu Islands. Fuzhounese are Han Chinese people and are a part of Min-speaking group, who speaks Eastern Min or specifically Fuzhou dialect. There is also a significant overseas Foochowese population, particularly distributed in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, United States (Fuzhou Americans), Japan, United Kingdom, etc.[2]
Despite their small population size, Fuzhounese people have produced a large number of achievements in both academic and science fields, there has been 17 Fuzhounese Zhuangyuans (scholar who is ranked first in the imperial examinations), and famous mathematicians and scientists such as Zhang Yuzhe (the father of modern Chinese astronomy), Guo Kexin (the main pioneer of electron microscopy of China), Chih-Tang Sah, Hsien Wu, Guo Kexin and Min Zhuo are Fuzhounese.
Language [ edit ]
Fuzhou dialect is a tonal language that has extensive sandhi rules in the initials, rimes, and tones. These complicated rules make Fuzhou dialect one of the most difficult Chinese varieties.[3]
During the Second World War, some Japanese scholars became passionate about studying Fuzhou dialect, believing that it could be beneficial to the rule of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. One of their most famous works was the Japanese-Chinese Translation: Fuzhou Dialect (日華對譯: 福州語) published in 1940 in Taipei, in which katakana was used to represent Fuzhou pronunciation.
Fuzhounese dialects [ edit ]
List of dialects of the Fuzhounese language (福州语的方言):
Fuzhou City History [ edit ]
Fuzhou throughout the 1800's had many missionaries from the West coming in and out of the city.[4] The lack of communication between government officials and local town people led to uproar among local residence regarding missionaries.[4] Although around 1850 five major port were allowing foreigners to reside temporarily for missionary work, Fuzhounese people believed only their city was allowing this.[4]
Emigration and diaspora [ edit ]
History [ edit ]
Fuzhou's history of emigration began since the Ming dynasty with Zheng He's voyages overseas. As the result of immigration of Fuzhouese to southeast Asia, Fuzhou dialect is found in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. The city of Sibu of Malaysia is called "new Fuzhou" due to a large wave of Fuzhounese immigration in the early 1900s. They are referred to as "Hockchiu" or "Hokchew" in Singapore and Malaysia.[5]
Southeast Asia [ edit ]
The Hockchius and Hockchias migrated to Nanyang (South-East Asia) in smaller numbers compared to the Hokkien, Cantonese, hakkas and Hainanese but achieved remarkable success. Amongst others, Robert Kuok (Hockchiu) rose to become the "Sugar King" of Malaysia and is currently ranked the richest man in south-east Asia[6] whereas Liem Sioe Liong (Sudono Salim) who was of Hockchia origin, was once the richest man in Indonesia, controlling a vast empire in the industry of flour, cement and food manufacturing.[7] The famous leader of the Malayan Communist Party, Chin Peng was also Hockchia.[8]
United States [ edit ]
Fuzhounese people first started immigrating to America during the late Qing dynasty. Some of these immigrants were students who, after completing their studies returned to back to their fatherland (Fuzhou).
After the lifting of emigration restriction from the People's Republic of China in the 1980s, a small wave of Fuzhounese settled in America. These new Fuzhounese immigrants set up their own separated communities such as "Little Fuzhou" in Manhattan, away from other non-linguistically related Chinese people.
Notable Fuzhounese people [ edit ]
Scientists, mathematicians and inventors [ edit ]
Politicians and revolutionaries [ edit ]
Writers and poets [ edit ]
Businessmen [ edit ]
Others [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
Fuzhou, the homeland of Fuzhou people.
Fuzhou dialect, the native mother tongue of Fuzhou people.
Fuzhou Americans, a portion of the Fuzhounese diasopa.More details about Back to Karkand and color-bind mode in Battlefield 3 have been revealed. Also, DICE shares it’s response to recent development rumors.
Besides the graphics, some of the biggest differences between the PC and console versions of Battlefield 3 are the map sizes, especially in the Conquest game type. Where you might find maps that include five flags on the PC, those same maps might include only three flags on console eg. Operation Firestorm. However, with the release of Back to Karkand this December, DICE is looking to change that. According to Global Community Manager, Daniel Matros, consoles will also be receiving five flag maps. However, recent GameSpot PS3 footage of Back to Karkand showed the maps Strike at Karkand and Gulf of Oman to be only three flag maps. We’ve yet to have seen console footage of Sharqi Peninsula or Wake Island, but if only one map were to include five flags on console, it would most likely be wake island with its lengthy U-shape design.
As a follow up to one of our recent articles detailing how they will be handling cheaters in Battlefield 3, DICE has recently announced that they have “banned hundreds of offending accounts and have stats-wiped additional accounts for exploiting (such as boosting).” Lookout for more!
Many fans are still on DICE’s tail regarding support for the color-blind. It’s something that is a must for Battlefield 3 considering the recent Modern Warfare 3 had color-blind support at launch. Thankfully, Tomas Danko, VO Producer at DICE, has some new info. He confirms color-blind mode “has not been forgotten, only postponed. This is an important issue to lots of people at DICE.” Expect updates as more details of the upcoming patch become available. Follow MP1st on Twitter and Facebook to stay informed!
Despite recent rumors of Battlefield 3 switching to consoles as the lead platform mid-development, Danko assures us this was not the case. “We spent years making the game on PC only, then ten months to fit it onto consoles AFTER the design was done,” he said in response to one distraught fan. Take from this what you will, but it’s important to recognize how much work DICE has put into the PC version of Battlefield 3.
Leave your thoughts below!1 Look at what people need, not necessarily at what you want when deciding on a business. There will always be things people need and they need them to be done well. Things like garbage disposal, energy creation, providing products to the health and dying industries, etc. In addition, the certainty of customers should not be overlooked lightly. Choose a business that provides what people really need and be prepared to put in the effort to make your products and services either the best, the most price efficient or unique.[9] There will always be things people need and they need them to be done well. Things like garbage disposal, energy creation, providing products to the health and dying industries, etc. In addition, the certainty of customers should not be overlooked lightly. Choose a business that provides what people really need and be prepared to put in the effort to make your products and services either the best, the most price efficient or unique.
2 Have a frugal start up. There is much talk about "looking the part". There isn't much point looking the part if it cost an arm and a leg to get it and you lack clients to pay for it. Get yourself a fabulous suit that is worn every day and makes you feel confident and ready to meet people but be very careful with your office fit-out and other business elements.[10] Here are some ideas to help you initially: Consider renting offices that someone else furnishes, cleans and that get shared around. Spend only the time needed in them, to cut costs.
If you do have your own offices, rent furniture or buy it cheap at auction.
Lease anything that needs to be constantly updated, computers being number one in this group.
Keep staff expenses under strict control from the beginning.
Fly economy. Or use Skype and other online forms of virtual confer |
important lands into a newly reorganized federal environmental protection system. Ordinary recreational lands would be managed at the state and local level, perhaps by transferring them to local counties. What better steward of a local recreation area than the people who live in the area?
The commercially most valuable lands, meanwhile, would be transferred to new ownership or put under long-term federal leases. Lands that have real commercial value could produce a double benefit: revenue from leases and land sales, and additional revenue from the jobs, minerals, oil, gas, lumber and other commodities the freed-up lands would produce.
It is time to end outdated federal land policies that are draining our country’s wealth, tying up valuable resources in red tape and bureaucracy, and harming the environment.
Robert H. Nelson is a senior fellow with the Independent Institute in Oakland. A longer version of this article appears in the current issue of Policy Review.California Native Plants that Attract Birds & Butterflie s
Designing wildlife friendly gardens or landscape is not only fun, but can be educational. The plants listed here attract birds for berries, protection and habitat. In addition, hummingbirds and butterflies are attracted to many of these plants for nectar. Adding water to the garden or landscape will also help to bring birds to the area. Understanding the nature of the plants listed here will help to bring wildlife to the landscape throughout the year. For example, Ceanothus and Ribes bloom in the late winter/early spring, Achilleas and Salvias bloom in the late spring/early summer, Sambucus bloom in the spring and fruit in the summer, Zauschneria bloom late summer/fall. Choosing a plant palette such as this will bring wildlife to the landscape almost all year.
*Without a contractual agreement, material may be unavailable or only in limited quantities during certain times of the year.
Return to CA Native Main Page
Return to Suitability Lists Main PageThe last time a waiver was used was in 1950, when Gen. George C. Marshall, then five years out of service, received one to be defense secretary for President Harry S. Truman.
There is little doubt that General Mattis, who is well liked by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, will be able to obtain that waiver. Mr. McCain himself appeared to try to hasten the process, issuing a statement on Monday in which he said he was “pleased that the president-elect found General Jim Mattis as impressive as I have.”
Some experts said that installing a general at the top of the Pentagon could muddy the principle of civilian control of the military.
“The president and the secretary of defense are the two leading figures in the chain of command,” said Peter D. Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University who served in the George W. Bush administration. “When they are civilians, that embodies that principle.”
Gen. Carter F. Ham, the retired head of the United States military’s Africa command, said the question of whether General Mattis was qualified to lead the Pentagon was a “slam dunk — he absolutely is.” But the reason the waiver “was put into law is that we are not a militaristic society, nor do we want to be,” he said. “The idea of senior military officers assuming senior positions in the civilian government — that is worthy of debate.”
Beyond the constitutional issues, there are bureaucratic hurdles that could stymie a military officer. The defense secretary must navigate the politics of the White House and Congress while balancing — and in some cases, resisting — the views of his former colleagues.
In a famous example, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates overruled his many senior generals, forcing through the development and purchase of more maneuverable and heavily armored mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, to stem a rising tide of casualties from roadside bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq.
People close to Mr. Trump said they were sensitive to the dangers of having too many military officers. They noted that there were other candidates for defense secretary, including Jim Talent, a former Republican senator from Missouri. The goal, they said, is to end up with a mix of people.When Police Are Given Body Cameras, Do They Use Them?
Enlarge this image toggle caption BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
Back in December, following the fatal shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., President Obama called for $75 million in funding for 50,000 body cameras to be used by police around the United States. The cameras record police activity, and their use is intended to boost accountability.
Denver's police department has been trying out the small video cameras, which can be attached to a wearer's shirt or glasses. The devices are powered by a small box, also wearable, with an on-and-off switch.
Law Body Cameras For Police Officers Aren't A Panacea Body Cameras For Police Officers Aren't A Panacea Listen · 3:38 3:38
After a six-month pilot program, 800 Denver cops — more than half the force — are expected to start wearing body cameras later this year. Officers are supposed to start recording as soon as they respond to a call or enter a scene.
But Noelle Phillips, who covers the police for the Denver Post, tells NPR's Arun Rath that an independent monitor's evaluation of Denver's pilot program found that in many cases involving use of force, the cameras weren't rolling. Approximately one in four of these incidents was recorded.
Sometimes this was because "the people involved weren't assigned cameras," says Phillips, including sergeants and off-duty officers.
In other cases, she says, "officers forgot to turn them on, or said, 'The situation deteriorated too quickly and we didn't have time,' or there was a technical malfunction and the thing just wasn't working."
The police have objected to the findings, Phillips says, partly because the results included people in the pilot program who weren't assigned cameras. The police department has "offered a much higher percentage of incidents that were recorded," she says.
But similar findings have been reported about body-mounted cameras used by police in other U.S. cities, including New Orleans.
"Police departments all over the country are saying, 'We're going to use body cameras,' " Phillips says. That will lead to more third-party evaluations, she says: "Lots of groups are saying, 'Hey, let's consider all these recommendations, how does the technology work — and make it the best it can be.' "
For more information on the Denver Police pilot program, click on the audio link above to hear the entire interview with Noelle Phillips.“‘I know you want it’ is exactly what my rapist said to me’
A Leeds graduate claims she was thrown out of a gay club and verbally abused after complaining to the DJ when he played Blurred Lines.
Georgia Greenfield, who left Leeds in 2013, was ejected on Tuesday morning from Queen’s Court – Leeds’ main gay club.
Georgia, 23, complained to the DJ saying it made her recall being raped.
Georgia wrote a note on a phone to the DJ saying: “‘I know you want it’ are the exact words my rapist said to me before he raped me. I don’t want to hear this shit.”
Shockingly, the grad says the DJ called over the microphone: “Fuck off you silly bitch.”
Georgia says: “I didn’t expect the song to be turned off but I wanted to give the person playing it an impression of its effect.
“I didn’t even expect them to turn it off or to say anything back to me at all. Why would you?”
But Georgia and friend Noah were left shocked when the DJ told Georgia over the microphone to “Fuck off you silly bitch” as they walked off.
Friend Noah Martin, a French third year who was with Georgia at the club, said: “My initial reaction was disgust, fear and anger. I couldn’t believe it happened in a space that was supposed to be safe – a gay club.”
Following the incident Georgia went to stand outside the club, reeling from what had been said.
When they tried to re-enter the club, 23-year old Georgia claims they were told by bouncers the DJ had advised neither her nor her friend were allowed back in the club.
Georgia said: “I was in disbelief that I was being thrown out of a club for telling the DJ I was raped.
“As I was explaining the actual reasons to the bouncers (not to get back in, but because it was ridiculous) the DJ said over the microphone: ‘If you don’t like what I have to say you can fuck off somewhere else’.
“Then as we were walking away he added: ‘There needs to be an electric fence around the DJ booth’.”
Noah lodged a complaint to the management of Queen’s Court and received an email confirming they were aware of the incident.
The email also said: “The incident is currently being fully investigated and a full response will be forwarded to [Georgia] once finalised”.
But Noah and Georgia are still unhappy. Noah said: “The manager didn’t even use the right pronouns for Georgia”.
Georgia identifies as “gender non-conforming” and prefers to use both “she and “they” pronouns, adding: “Noah as far as I know identifies as non-binary”.
When contacted by The Tab, a spokesperson for Queen’s Court said: “An investigation is underway. Due to it being pride weekend, it is taking a bit longer, but I am speaking to the lady in question.”
Georgia now wants disciplinary action to be taken against the DJ, and for Blurred Lines to be banned from the club “because it triggers so many women and people assigned female who go there”.
Georgia added: “Or at least it should be announced before it’s played from now on, so at least people can leave.”
The events happened just days ahead of Leeds Pride festival, which took place this weekend.Greetings Citizens
Greetings Citizens,
Thanks for everyone who came to see our panel at TwitchCon or hung out with us at one of the Bar Citizens over the past weekend. We received a lot of great questions both on stage and afterwards. We’re looking forward to next year, but first, we are finalizing all of our prepartions for CitizenCon this Friday. Be sure to check out our schedule of the entire event here
With that, lets see what’s going on this week:
Earlier today we released the newest episode of Citizens of the Stars! Twitch streamer Grakees talks about breaking the game for fun and hugs. Then Paul Vaden gets his chance to unseat Mike Jones as the Quantum Question champion. Catch the latest episode here.
On Tuesday, the writers will release their weekly Lore Post. These in-fiction stories help to give life to the living, breathing universe we aim to create.
Later this week, Loremakers Guide to the Galaxy returns. Which system will they take us to this Wednesday? Keep an eye on our playlist for the newest episode here
Then on Thursday, a new episode of Around the Verse and the most up-to-date bug count on Burndown!
Last, but certainly not least is Citizen Con 2947! We have an entire day of panels, demos, Q&A sessions and more. We’re also streaming it all on our Twitch Channel for those who can’t make it out to Frankfurt to join us in person. Be sure to check out everything we have in store by visiting our Citizen Con Details page.
Tyler Nolin
Community ManagerEveryone is discussing the "Mormon moment" thanks to Romney and national politics, and Max Mueller's piece for Religion Dispatches discusses why non-expert pontificators feel free to pontificate on Mormonism's "weirdness" where they would do no such thing about other religious traditions. Don't miss his article.
But it may actually be more the Mormon moment in the scholarly world than anywhere else. Our own John Turner's biography of Brigham Young will be out in a little over a year or so (and scroll down for John's recent post on Joseph Smith's), with Harvard University Press, and the big biography of Parley Pratt by Terryl Givens and Matthew Grow will be reviewed here at the blog in just a little while. And don't forget Patrick Mason's reviewed here at the blog a while back. The world awaits J. Spencer Fluhman's forthcoming study of nineteenth-century anti-Mormon rhetoric, coming out next fall with the University of North Carolina Press; the parts I've seen represent scholarship at its best.Illinois gets tough on sales tax for online purchases
While the Illinois state legislature waits to see if Gov. Pat Quinn signs a bill into law requiring out-of-state Internet retailers to collect a 6.25 percent sales tax on purchases made by Illinois residents, the Illinois Department of Revenue is moving ahead with its own plan to put the taxpayers on the hook for the tax, requiring it be paid alongside the state’s income tax.
Critics say that the move puts ordinary residents at risk of being tax evaders if they don’t keep track of all the items they purchase online, or pay an estimated tax suggested by tax officials.
Other states are likely to adopt the Illinois plan, if legislators in other financially-troubled states see it as an easy way to collect more revenues from taxpayers.
Currently, federal law protects online retailers from having to collect sales tax on goods they ship to states in which they do not have a physical presence. A 1992 court decision, Quill v. North Dakota, established the law, which at the time applied to catalogue sales, although has been interpreted to also include Internet sales.
Existing laws in Illinois and many other states require that companies or individuals report online purchases for which no sales tax was paid, and pay a “use tax.”
In Illinois, a use tax return, Form ST-44, is used by those wishing to report the tax. According to the Illinois Department of Revenue, about 5,000 to 6,000 taxpayers file the form annually and pay about $6 million in use taxes.
Starting this year, state tax officials plan on putting a separate line on its income tax form, highlighted in bright red, requiring individuals to report their online purchases or pay an estimated tax based on a schedule provided by the state.
In order to avoid penalties, taxpayers will have to sift through credit card records and report all online purchases, or cough up an estimated tax, which at $100,000 of gross income, amounts to $52.
Accountant James Funkhouser, head of TTS Tax Services, called it a “stealth tax.” He said that it’s another incidence of the cash-starved state “raking through their old records looking for anything that pops up and sending out a bill.”
Others say that the state is merely collecting tax that it is rightfully owed. State Rep. Don Moffit, said “It’s voluntary. There’s no new penalty, fine, or fee, no new enforcement. It’s a way in get new money without raising taxes.”
However, the instruction guide for this year’s individual Illinois income tax return describes it a bit differently, how they intend to enforce the tax: “If we find that you owe additional tax, we may assess the additional tax plus applicable penalties and interest. We conduct routine audits based on information received from third parties, including the U.S. Customs Service and other states.”
The state is also offering amnesty for taxpayers for sales or use tax that they did not report in previous years. Those wishing to take advantage of the amnesty program can fill out form ST-44, including all the Internet purchases made between July 1, 2004 and December 31, 2010, write “Amnesty” on the top of the form, and pay the tax due by Oct. 15.
A spokesperson at the Illinois Department of Revenue, Sue Hofer, said authorities won’t be chasing after taxpayers for minor purchases such as a pair of shoes. However, “if you go online and buy a boat…in Florida, we have a number of ways to learn about that transaction.”Giant XTC 26'' FR Aluminum Mountain Bike Frame when speed, efficiency and control matter the most, This Classic Race-Bred hardtail is hard to beat!! The Giant 26'' XTC FR Aluminum Mountain Bike Frame is designed with Giant Bikes Allux SL aluminum technology. Extreme lightweight frame featuring high-performance strength to weight ratios. Predominantly features 6061 grade alloy for a high performance strength to weight ratio. Forming methods include double butting resulting in lighter weight without sacrificing strength, and longevity. Features PressForming, WarmForming (advanced manipulation of tubeset shaping via injection of high pressure air) and fluid forming. Welding Techniques features both Standard, and Smooth welding for outstanding strength to and weight.
The Allux Advantage: From the manipulation of atomic grain structures to our advanced forming and welding techniques, Giant has been at the forefront of aluminum engineering for more than 30 years. Today, ALUXX Aluminum Technology represents the pinnacle of alloy performance.
A heritage of craftsmanship combined with unmatched manufacturing capabilities gives Giant the unique ability to monitor every step of the aluminum frame-building process. Through our cutting-edge materials science, proprietary forming techniques, and attention to detail, we are constantly advancing aluminum performance to create bikes that are lighter, stronger and stiffer. The difference can be felt in the ride. Every aluminum bike bearing the ALUXX Aluminum Technology label must live up to the highest standards and meet the tightest tolerances of any aluminum frame in the world.
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Height Recommendation: 6'0"-6'4"/ 6'4"-6'8"Cruising the Bosphorus River | Istanbul, Turkey ~ A Photo Essay.
November 9th, 2011 Posted in - Photos Turkey on
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Motoring up the Bosphorus revealed a side of Istanbul that I didn’t notice on land: it’s pretty dang hilly. In fact, according to our tour guide, there are seven major hills in Istanbul, each one playing its own role in the cityscape. On board, we bounced freely from the upper open-air deck to the much warmer lower enclosed deck taking photos and gawking at the scenery. Turkish flags, tiny to huge, were hung throughout the city to commemorate the holiday, adding splashes of red and white to an already colorful backdrop. The cruise starts just south of the Bosphorus Bridge (First Bosphorus Bridge) and takes a u-turn under the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge (Second Bosphorus Bridge). Motoring under the magnificent suspension bridges is a treat within itself, but the city really out did itself by hanging gigantic Turkish flags from each bridge. Just like the bus tour, the river cruise is also narrated by your tour guide. The first part of the tour takes place along Istanbul Europe, while the second part (after the aforementioned u-turn) travels along the Asian side.
Know Before You Go
* Wind got you down? Wait until after the u-turn at the second bridge to avoid windy conditions in the open areas of the boat, because the boat starts heading downwind on its way back to port. * Sticker shock? You can buy drinks and snacks on board, but you will pay a higher price. Coffee was about $2.50 and a beer was $5. * Sea Sick? We didn’t have any issues with getting sea sick, and the river was pretty rough, but if you are prone to motion sickness you may want to take precautions. A Note From Beth: I loved this cruise. It was really relaxing and easy going and a nice way to learn about the city and see it from a different perspective. There’s just something nice about being on a boat that makes you slow down and enjoy life. Then there’s the photos – shooting on the boat was awesome. There were so many flags and other boats going by – it was definitely a romantic tour in that sense. It wasn’t just me feeling the vibe either – several couples cuddled and kissed on deck. If you like the look of these photos I want to point out I shot them with my new Lensbaby lens! I really fell in love with this lens in Turkey and the pictures always remind me of far off memories. I was actually given an entire kit from the good folks at Lensbaby and I’ll be giving a full review of it in an upcoming post and then I will also post a photo essay of Lensbaby shots around Europe so be sure to stay tuned. We want to also be sure to thank GetYourGuide.com for providing us with this awesome tour. If you’re headed to a new place be sure to check out what they have on offer for tours. We’ll be taking a few more with them in the upcoming days and will give a full report. Hope you like the photos! *Get the first glimpse of our new travel photos & posts! Subscribe by email and get new travel articles delivered straight to your inbox:
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*Please remember all photos on this website, unless otherwise noted, are copyrighted and property of Beers and Beans Travel Website, Nariko’ s Nest Weddings & Bethany Salvon. Please do not use them without my permission. If you do want to use one of them please contact me first because I do love to share and I would be flattered. Thanks!CANNES (May 15, 2016) Starbreeze AB and Acer Inc. today signed a letter of intent to form a joint venture for the StarVR Virtual Reality (VR) Head-Mounted Display (HMD). The two companies aim to cooperate on the design, manufacturing, promotion, marketing and sales of the StarVR HMD to the professional- and location-based entertainment market.
“Since our launch in June 2015, we have had an amazing start with StarVR. By partnering with Acer we shift gears yet again to firmly position us as the leader in top-end VR experiences. Acer is an excellent, experienced and prominent hardware partner that will accelerate us in realizing and producing a high-definition, high-fidelity VR headset,” said Bo Andersson Klint, Starbreeze CEO. “We’ve been working with a clear roadmap for our VR strategy from day one, and are now about to realize one of the first major collaborations we set out to achieve. The future for StarVR is now set and extremely exciting.”
“Acer is thrilled to join forces with Starbreeze in bringing the StarVR head-mounted display to the market,” said Jason Chen, Acer Corporate President and CEO. “We are devoting R&D resources across multiple aspects of the VR ecosystem for a coherent and high-quality experience, while just last month Acer announced powerful desktops and notebooks fully-ready for StarVR. Starbreeze and Acer share the same goal of delivering best-in-class VR applications, and we look forward to unlocking new VR possibilities together with this partnership. ”
Starbreeze launched StarVR with a VR-experience at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June 2015 by the acquisition of French company Infinite Eye, that brought the StarVR HMD technology and an outstanding and agile engineering team into Starbreeze. After the launch, the VR-experience was brought on the road entertaining thousands of consumers. In January 2016, Starbreeze unveiled its location based StarCade initiative, introducing VR centers looking to allowing customers to immerse themselves into premium VR experiences.
Starbreeze additionally premiered its first cinematic VR experience “Cockatoo Spritz” directed by Stephane Barbato in Cannes during the first week of the festival. Visitors in Cannes can preview the experience by invitation to the exclusive cocktail party taking place Sunday May 15 or by appointment up until May 20th 2016.
For over 40 years, Acer has continued to bring cutting-edge technology to the market through its innovative computing devices. With the recent launch of its VR-ready Predator line-up of performance driven devices, the company is again leading new trends for computing and entertainment. This agreement further underlines Acer’s relentless pursuit for innovation and ambition to deliver technology in blazing time-to-market.
The letter of intent announced today form the basis for ongoing discussions regarding a definitive agreement to form the joint venture, subject to the parties’ board approval.
###
For more information, please contact:
Maeva Sponbergs, EVP of Communication and Head of Investor Relations, Starbreeze AB
Tel: +46(0)8-209 208, email: ir@starbreeze.com
Stella Chou, Public Relations, Acer Inc.
Tel: +886 (2) 8691 3204, email: stella.th.chou@acer.com
About Starbreeze:
Starbreeze is an independent creator, publisher and distributor of high quality entertainment products. With studios in Stockholm, Paris and Los Angeles, the company creates games and other virtual reality entertainment products, based on proprietary design and licensed content. Starbreeze’s most recent games include PAYDAY 2, the adrenaline fueled bank robbing co-op game and the upcoming John Wick VR shooter and survival co-op FPS OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead based on the hit series.
Starbreeze has set out to develop truly immersive virtual reality experiences, by integrating software and hardware in its StarVR head mounted display displaying a unique field of vision and a mission to bring top-end VR to large audiences. Starbreeze launched StarVR with a VR-experience at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in June 2015, gained by teaming up with French Infinite Eye. In January 2016, Starbreeze unveiled StarCade initiative; centers that invites people to immerse themselves into premium VR experiences. The first cinematic VR experience “Cockatoo Spritz” directed by Stephane Barbato, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2016.
Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Starbreeze’s shares are listed on Nasdaq Stockholm First North Premier under the tickers STAR A and STAR B with the ISIN-codes SE0007158928 (A-share) and SE0005992831 (B-share). Remium Nordic is the company’s Certified Adviser. For more information, please visit https://www.starbreeze.com, http://www.starvr.com, http://www.overkillsoftware.com
About Acer:
Established in 1976, Acer is a hardware + software + services company dedicated to the research, design, marketing, sale, and support of innovative products that enhance people’s lives. Acer’s product offerings include PCs, displays, projectors, servers, tablets, smartphones and wearables. It is also developing cloud solutions to bring together the Internet of Things. As one of the world’s top 5 PC companies, Acer employs 7,000 people worldwide and has a presence in over 160 countries. Its shares are listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE: 2353), and Global Depository Receipts (GDR) are listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE: ACID). Please visit www.acer.com for more information.VX-4, Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Four, (AIRTEVRON FOUR), commonly referred to by its nickname, The Evaluators) was a United States Navy air test and evaluation squadron based at Naval Air Station Point Mugu, California. Their tail code was XF, and they flew the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom, Grumman F-14 Tomcat and the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet until their disestablishment in 1994.
History [ edit ]
There were two squadrons which used the designation VX-4. The first was established in 1946 as Experimental and Development squadron Four at NAS Quonset Point equipped with PB-1Ws to evaluate and develop Airborne Early Warning equipment and procedures.[1] In 1950 it relocated to NAS Atlantic City as Air Development Squadron four. The squadron moved to NAS Patuxent River in 1951 where it was disestablished later the year due to the lapse of assigned projects.
The second squadron to carry the VX-4 designation was established in 1952 at NAS Point Mugu to conduct evaluations of air-launched guided missiles as assigned by the Commander, Operational Test and Evaluation Force. That squadron is the subject of this article.
In 1960 the squadron began to include additional projects that were not associated with guided missiles. Projects such as the operational test and terrain clearance radar, Doppler navigation systems, and air-to-air distance measuring equipment were included in the squadron's tasks.
The YF-4J Phantom II prototype from VX-4, painted with a USA bicentennial theme
VX-4 flew aircraft that were currently in operational service with the US Navy, and began their life with the Chance Vought F7U Cutlass. Later they transitioned to the McDonnell Douglas F3D Skyknight, redesignated F-10. With the AIM-7 Sparrow missile being used, the North American FJ Fury, Douglas A-4 Skyhawk and the McDonnell F3H Demon replaced the Cutlass and the Skynight. When the AIM-9 Sidewinder came about, the F-8 Crusader was introduced to VX-4, and in the early 1960s the F-4 Phantom II made its debut with VX-4. In the early 1970s the F-14A Tomcat arrived and when the F/A-18 Hornet came to the fleet, it appeared with VX-4 as well, plus newer variants of the F-14 Tomcat.
Operational tests and evaluation of airborne fighter weapons systems included the AIM-7 Sparrow, AIM-9 Sidewinder and the AIM-54 Phoenix missiles as well as radar warning devices and self-protection jammers.
VX-4 F-14 tail markings
January 1990 marked the end of the F-4 Phantom after nearly three decades of service with VX-4 and a few months later the F-14D Super Tomcat arrived. Also the same year they supervised the first operational test of the F-14D and the T-45 Goshawk. Throughout the year VX-4 developed tactics for the ALR-67 radar warning receiver and contributed the system’s incorporation in the F-14. VX-4 also began developing tactics for the employment of the AIM-120 AMRAAM missile.
After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 and the Gulf War in 1991, VX-4 was instrumental in the identification of deficiencies, testing and fielding of fixes to fighter weapons systems during Desert Shield, Desert Storm and subsequent operations in Southwest Asia. After Desert Storm commenced in January 1991, VX-4 continued to funnel the latest information to the fleet via messages and briefings presented by VX-4 aircrews deployed aboard carriers in the Red Sea and northern Arabian Sea.
A VX-4 F/A-18 Hornet loaded with ten AMRAAM and two sidewinders
After Desert Storm, the tempo at VX-4 returned to a more normal pace. AMRAAM testing aboard F/A-18, which began in 1991 and continued throughout the year. Evaluation of the F-14D, that had begun in 1990, likewise continued. Other 1991 projects included testing the Swedish BOL chaff dispenser on the F-14, various Sidewinder, Sparrow and Phoenix missile evaluations and Infra-red search and track set tests on the F-14D. ALR-67 (ECP-510) testing in the F/A-18 was one of the squadron's more significant projects in late 1991 and 1992. AMRAAM testing was finally completed in early 1994.
By late 1993, Hornet testing was winding down at VX-4 and preparations were underway for the transfer of all F/A-18 projects and F/A-18C/D aircraft to VX-5 at China Lake as an initial step in the consolidation of the two squadrons. The first Hornet departed for China Lake before the end of 1993, with the remainder of the squadron's aircraft following in early 1994. On 30 September 1994, VX-4 was disestablished and its assets were reassigned to VX-9 (Detachment Point Mugu) Vampires.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]As you may recall, on the eve of the 2012 election Sandy wrought devastation along virtually the entire eastern seaboard. As in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that crippled New Orleans and the Gulf Coast 12 years ago, Congress prepared a $51 billion recovery package for the impacted states. But in 2013, 58 House members who voted for Katrina funding for Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in 2005 said no to help for states from Florida to Maine. As a spokesperson for Rep. Steven Palazzo, whose Mississippi 4th District was heavily damaged by Katrina explained, “Congressman Palazzo fully supports a Sandy relief package that includes spending offsets.” The office of Missouri Republican Sam Graves concurred:
“The days of buy now and pay later are over.”
What changed between 2005 and 2013? Control of the White House, for one. When George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office, Republicans like Sam Graves had no problem voting to “buy now and pay later.” Graves, like Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, voted for President Bush’s unfunded $400 billion Medicare Part D prescription drug program. (In 2009, Hatch explained the GOP’s refusal to demand either spending offsets or new tax revenue to fund the program by declaring, “It was standard practice not to pay for things.”
But if the president of the United States was a Democrat during the Superstorm Sandy catastrophe, so too were most of the residents of the states in which it wrought havoc. As retired Long Island Democratic Rep. Steve Israel remembered this week, “There is deep and lingering resentment by members of Congress who needed help in their districts when Sandy just ravaged their constituents.” And at the front of what this week is now being called the “Comeuppance Congress” is Ted Cruz. As Cruz put it at the time:
“Hurricane Sandy inflicted devastating damage on the East Coast, and Congress appropriately responded with hurricane relief. Unfortunately, cynical politicians in Washington could not resist loading up this relief bill with billions in new spending utterly unrelated to Sandy,” Cruz said in a January 2013 statement. “Emergency relief for the families who are suffering from this natural disaster should not be used as a Christmas tree for billions in unrelated spending, including projects such as Smithsonian repairs, upgrades to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration airplanes, and more funding for Head Start.”
But then as now, Cruz was lying.
GOP opposition to Superstorm Sandy relief in 2013 had nothing to do with “pork” or “offsets.”
On Monday, Cruz defended both his “no” vote and the mythology behind it. “The problem with that particular bill is it became a $50 billion bill that was filled with unrelated pork,” Cruz said of his refusal, “Two-thirds of that bill had nothing to do with Sandy.” As the Washington Post explained this week in branding Cruz’s whopper a Three Pinocchio Lie, “The Congressional Research Service issued a comprehensive report on the provisions, and it’s clear that virtually all of it was related to the damage caused by Sandy.” (Nevertheless, President Obama moved quickly to call for federal funding when Houston was hit by flash floods in 2015 and expedited FEMA dollars for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott when Harris, Grimes, Parker, and Fayette counties were hit again the next year.) It’s no wonder New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie summed up Cruz’s treachery even as he rightly urged New Jersey’s Congressional delegation to come to the aid of the Lone Star State:
“I see Sen. Cruz, and it's disgusting to me that he stands in a recovery center with victims standing behind him as a backdrop and he's still repeating the same reprehensible lies about what happened with Sandy.”
But when it comes to disgusting stands and reprehensible lies, the disaster duplicity of the Sandy Republicans will be exceeded by Donald Trump’s new “tax reform” offensive. With its three tax brackets, lower marginal income tax rates, abolition of both the Alternative Minimum Tax and the estate tax, as well as a 15 (down from 35) percent corporate tax rate even for businesses like his own, the “plan” would redirect billions of dollars from the United States Treasury to Donald Trump and his family. Nevertheless, Trump, who on the campaign trail promised his tax program “is going to cost me a fortune,” comically told his Missouri audience on Wednesday:
“I’m speaking against myself when I do this, I have to tell you.”
But what neither Trump nor GOP leaders like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan want to tell you is what this still-to-be defined package will cost or how they are going to pay for it. Over the past year, analysts have forecast that proposals from Trump and Ryan will drain between $3 and $12 trillion over the next decade. As for how this hemorrhage of red ink from the Treasury will be prevented, Republicans like Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin claim:
“This will pay for itself with growth and with the reduction of different deductions and closing loopholes.”
It’s not just that it won’t even be close. But thus far, the Trump administration and House Republicans have only identified one deduction they would end out of all the tax expenditures that now cost Uncle Sam more than $1.5 trillion a year. The tax break in question? The deduction for state and local taxes (SALT).
So far, Trump and his GOP allies have only targeted one of these loopholes for closure.
Why are Republicans now—and as they have since Ronald Reagan called it “the most sacred of cows”—seeking to kill the state and local tax deduction? Well, doing so will save an estimated $1.3 trillion over 10 years. And then there’s this:
What is clear is that residents in states that impose the highest combination of property taxes and individual and corporate income taxes would pay the most. Taxpayers in 10 states — California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia — claim more than half of the total amount deducted, according to the Tax Policy Center. (Even in states without income taxes, including Nevada and Washington, some residents benefit because they can deduct sales taxes instead, the center said.) [Emphasis mine.]
Yes, these are all Democratic states. (All but Pennsylvania voted for Hillary Clinton for president, and the Keystone State has a Democratic governor.) But the GOP’s |
Frank Forde queried Blamey's recommendation, and asked who was the senior officer. Blamey explained that Savige was senior to Vasey—although not as senior as Arthur "Tubby" Allen, James Cannan or Eric Plant. Blamey pointed out that seniority was not the paramount concern for promotion at such a level, and that he was not prepared to recommend these officers at this time, whereupon Forde dropped his objection.[81] General Douglas MacArthur considered Vasey's supersession "outrageous".[82]
On 12 April 1944, Savige's I Corps headquarters moved up from Queensland to relieve that of Berryman’s II Corps at Finschhafen. The two staffs had hoped to exchange office equipment, thus saving on shipping, but Advanced LHQ ordered that each should move with all its stores. Instead, the designations of the two corps were exchanged, so that I Corps was still the corps in Australia and II Corps the one in New Guinea. On 20 April, II Corps was ordered to assume the designation and function of New Guinea Force and the existing headquarters of New Guinea Force in Port Moresby was broken up. Savige therefore assumed command of New Guinea Force, his new headquarters opening at Lae on 6 May. At this time, no major combat operations were taking place and activities were winding down in Australian New Guinea. New Guinea Force's main role was rolling up the base installations and shipping units back to Australia. On 9 September 1944, MacArthur discarded the task force organisation. Henceforth the US Sixth Army and Eighth Army and Lieutenant General Vernon Sturdee’s First Army reported directly to him. First Army headquarters arrived at Lae on 1 October and assumed control of Australian troops in New Guinea. At midnight, New Guinea Force was discontinued, and Savige's headquarters became II Corps once more.[83]
Bougainville [ edit ]
Savige (seated centre, head of table) presides as Lieutenant General Masatane Kanda (seated left) surrenders Japanese forces on Bougainville on 8 September 1945.
Although geographically the largest of the Solomon Islands, Bougainville was politically part of Australian New Guinea and Prime Minister John Curtin desired that Australia should contribute to the garrison.[84] Savige’s II Corps was ordered to "reduce enemy resistance on Bougainville Island as opportunity offers without committing major forces".[85] "To a commander like General Savige, who was not only deeply imbued with the doctrine of aggressiveness which was an AIF article of faith in both world wars but also burning to end his military career in a swirl of action,"" wrote correspondent John Hetherington, Savige's orders "were invitingly flexible."[86][86] GHQ reckoned that there were no more than 12,000 Japanese left on Bougainville, while LHQ estimated 25,000. Actually, more than 40,000 Japanese were still alive on Bougainville in November 1944.[87]
Savige's sixth and last campaign of the war was free of controversy about his command.[88] Once again, he had a talented regular officer as chief of staff, Brigadier Ragnar Garrett, with whom he had worked in Greece during 1941 and more recently in New Guinea.[89] Moreover, as a corps commander, tactical details could be left to subordinates, although Savige still had to keep a close eye on them to ensure that they did not take unnecessary risks or incur needless casualties.[90] Savige continued to tour the front lines wearing his scarlet cap band and flying his car flag. He also maintained his concern for, and rapport with, the ordinary soldiers under his command.[91] The final campaign on Bougainville cost 516 Australian lives. Some 8,500 Japanese were killed while 9,800 died of other causes, leaving 23,571 still alive when the war ended.[92] On 8 September 1945, Savige accepted their surrender at Torokina.[93]
After the war [ edit ]
From October 1945 to May 1946, Savige served as co-ordinator of demobilisation and dispersal. He transferred to the Reserve of Officers on 6 June.[1] Resuming his business interests, he was a director of Olympic Tyre & Rubber Ltd from 1946 to 1951 and chairman of Moran & Cato Ltd from 1950 to 1951. He was also chairman of the Central War Gratuity Board from 1946 to 1951 and from 1951 a commissioner of the State Savings Bank of Victoria. He was a leader in Melbourne's Anzac Day marches, a patron of a number of his former units' associations, and honorary colonel of the 5th Battalion (Victorian Scottish Regiment).[1]
Blamey recommended Savige for a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for the Salamaua campaign in October 1944. A year later, he recommended Savige for a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath for the campaign on Bougainville. Both recommendations were turned down by the Labor government.[94] Following the election of the coalition government in the 1949 election, Blamey wrote to the newly elected Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, requesting honours for his generals. This time he was successful,[95] and Savige was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (Military Division) in the King's Birthday Honours on 8 June 1950.[96] In 1953, he travelled to London to represent Legacy at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.[97]
Death [ edit ]
Savige died of coronary artery disease at his home in Kew, Victoria on 15 May 1954.[1] He was accorded a funeral with full military honours at St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne. The service was conducted by the Chaplain of Southern Command and Bishop of Geelong, the Right Reverend Dr J. D. McKie, who told the congregation that "Sir Stanley's greatest virtue was humanity. He had great consideration for his troops. He thought that they were not there just to be used, but to be helped." A crowd of 3,000 mourners watched him laid to rest at Kew Cemetery.[97] Savige left an estate valued at £66,000. He was survived by his daughter Gwendolyn and his nephew Stanley, his wife having died two months earlier. In his will, he directed that his papers be donated to the Australian War Memorial,[98] where they remain.[99] The War Memorial also holds his portrait by Alfred Cook.[1] In August 2006, Australian-Assyrian community leaders from Sydney and Melbourne gathered to commemorate Savige's role in saving Assyrian refugees in 1918, and the mayor of Morwell, Lisa Price, unveiled a bronze bust of the general.[100]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Share
A new Android trojan has been discovered that can work through your wireless router and control the Wi-Fi network of its victims. Security researchers are calling it the Switcher Trojan, and it’s capable of redirecting all traffic from Wi-Fi-connected devices straight into the hands of those who built it. The result? Well, cybercriminals could get their hands on your data, leading to data theft and even identity theft.
The researchers come from Kaspersky Labs, and they say that this is the first time they’ve seen an Android trojan being used to attack wireless routers like this. The way it works is that the software uses a long, predefined list of login combinations, and if it’s able to gain access, it changes the DNS settings of the router, effectively rerouting traffic onto a network controlled by hackers.
The news certainly is troubling, as it means that it’s not only the Android device that’s affected — it’s all traffic on a network. So, if your Android phone is used, your computer and all other devices on the network could be monitored, too. Hackers could also use the method to load web pages that look the same as the original, but contain some extra content, like extra ads. And, of course, hackers could also use it to redirect users to pages that contain malware.
“The Trojan.AndroidOS.Switcher does not attack users directly. Instead, it targets the entire network, exposing all its users to a wide range of attacks – from phishing to secondary infection. The main danger of such tampering with routers’ settings is that the new settings will survive even a reboot of the router, and it is very difficult to find out that the DNS has been hijacked,” said Kaspersky Labs in its blog post.Facebook's Connectivity Lab announced today that the company has for the first time test-flown a full-scale version of Aquila, the solar-powered high-altitude drone that Facebook hopes to use to deliver Internet connectivity to the remotest populated corners of the Earth. The test flight took place June 28 but was only announced today by Facebook.
The low-altitude test flight was originally intended only as a 30-minute “functional check” flight. "It was so successful that we ended up flying Aquila for more than 90 minutes—three times longer than originally planned," wrote Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure engineering, in a post to Facebook's Newsroom blog published today.
The initial test goals were simply to ensure that the huge Aquila drone—with a wingspan comparable to a Boeing 737 and mass more like an automobile—could even get airborne. To minimize its weight, Aquila doesn't have "traditional landing gear," according to Martin Gomez and Andy Cox of the Aquila team. "We attached the airplane to a dolly structure using four straps, then accelerated the dolly to takeoff speed. Once the autopilot sensed that the plane had reached the right speed, the straps were cut simultaneously by pyrotechnic cable cutters known as'squibs.'"
The entire takeoff sequence is driven by the drone's autopilot. But despite testing with a scaled-down (1/5-size) drone previously, this was the first time the computer modeling for the take-off attitude and speed had been tested. "The specifications based on our simulations resulted in a successful takeoff," Cox and Gomez reported on Facebook's Engineering Blog today.
The test also collected data on Aquila's aerodynamic performance at low altitude, its battery and power usage, and the effectiveness of the autopilot system. Like other autonomous drones, Aquila can be remotely commanded to fly by GPS waypoints, but all of the actual flying is done by the autopilot without direct human control. And this flight was the first opportunity to test the performance of the autopilot on a full-sized drone under real-world atmospheric conditions.
Parikh said the flight was a test of the Aquila drone's performance characteristics and components, including its batteries and control system, as well as a verification of the Aquila's crew training. "In our next tests," he said, "we will fly Aquila faster, higher, and longer, eventually taking it above 60,000 feet."
The goal of Aquila is to provide what has been described as an "atmospheric satellite" capability—the drones will fly for up to three months at a time, orbiting over remote areas and providing connectivity for a circle as much as 60 miles in diameter, using a laser-based network "backbone" and radio signals for local bandwidth. Because of its lift-to-weight ratio, Aquila can fly as slowly as 25 miles per hour in level flight.
But to achieve that goal, the Aquila team is going to have to significantly push forward solar-powered aircraft technology. "We will need to break the world record for solar-powered [uncrewed] flight, which currently stands at two weeks," Parikh noted. "This will require significant advancements in science and engineering to achieve."
Among the biggest challenges facing the Aquila team is getting enough sunlight to continually recharge the drone's batteries so it can stay aloft at night. That will be a challenge during winter months—while the drone's motors will only require about 5,000 watts of power to stay aloft at high altitude, it will have to fully recharge batteries with as little as 10 hours a day of sunlight in the expected range for Aquila's operation. And those batteries will have to be as light as possible to allow Aquila to perform its mission. "Given current and projected battery performance," Cox and Gomez noted, "that means batteries will account for roughly half the mass of the airplane. We’re pushing the edge of high energy-density batteries while exploring the best designs to ensure we have enough resilience in the system."
There are additional challenges that have less to do with getting into the air and more to do with Aquila being allowed to get there in the first place. In addition to making Aquila financially sustainable—by reducing how much it costs to operate and maintain—Facebook will have to convince network operators and other partners to help them get the broadband links they need. They will also need to convince governments to allow them to fly over their territory. Given the friction Facebook has faced with its free broadband efforts so far—such as India's ban on Facebook's Free Basics on network neutrality grounds—the company and its Internet.org effort will have to navigate carefully.The Australian Ballet turns 50
Updated
Sorry, this video has expired Video: The Australian Ballet turns 50 (7pm TV News VIC)
The Australian Ballet is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a spectacular international gala in Melbourne.
Guest dancers from companies including the Paris Opera Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and the Bolshoi Ballet will be a part of the performance, which will be broadcast live to 14 places around the country on Friday.
The Australian Ballet's artistic director David McAllister says there is a buzz at the company's studios in Southbank.
"It's been a huge year and I think with the international guests and just that whole sense of occasion about the actual 50th anniversary, I think everyone's pulling out all the stops to make sure they're perfect," he said.
"We've invited some amazing dancers from all around the world that are really coming in and doing their party pieces.
"So it's a wonderful repertoire from the classics, some beautiful contemporary pas de deux and really a great celebration of ballet."
The American Ballet Theatre's principal artist Julie Kent says she was thrilled to be invited to perform.
"It has really been a lifelong dream of mine to appear as a guest with the Australian Ballet and I was beginning to think it might not happen and so when I received the invitation to participate in not just any performance, but the 50th anniversary of this great institution, I was just absolutely delighted."
Ms Kent says her mother used to dance in Sydney.
"She has such fond memories of the exciting times and the beginning of the classical ballet scene in Australia and so she's here with me as well to join in the celebrations."
The Australian Ballet's principal artist Adam Bull says Julie Kent will be a joy to dance with.
"Julie Kent is a superstar on the world stage so I am so excited to be dancing with her," he said.
"She's such a lady, she's so giving and generous, so it's going to be a real milestone for me as well to be dancing with her," he said.
The Australian Ballet has grown in size and reputation and is now one of the world's most respected companies.
David McAllister says Australia's relative isolation has served the company well.
"We've been really lucky that from the beginning of the company, we've been pushed out into the world and I think that was great because it made us benchmark ourselves, not just with being the biggest ballet company in Australia but being on the world stage," he said.
"So we had to actually stand up next to those big companies like the Bolshoi and the Royal Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet."
There are five gala performances at Melbourne's Arts Centre.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, southbank-3006
First postedPatel argued that Welch had “forever changed” the lives of the victims, several of whom spoke in court and submitted letters to the judge.
“I’m almost sorry you were duped,” one unnamed 32-year-old Comet Ping Pong employee told Welch. He noted that many so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorists now believed Welch was a hired actor. “That’s how the game is played,” he said, adding that the online Pizzagate conspiracy theorists “almost got blood on [their] hands.”
Another employee told the court he wanted to “sink into the ground” after the shooting and needed traumatic counseling.
“I feel more empathy for you than anger,” he said, and told Welch he’d been a “pawn” of people who were happy to take advantage of him. “I still wish you the best of luck in your life going forward.”
James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, told reporters after the sentencing that it still wasn’t clear from Welch’s written and verbal apologies whether he believed the conspiracy theory.
“This gunman will spend years in jail, and I will try to rebuild my life and my name and my business,” he said. “I think that there are many other people who have pushed this conspiracy theory, who have created enormous amounts of harm to all of our community who have so far not been held accountable, and have not apologized for the damage and the harm that they’ve done.”LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Louisville says wide receiver DeVante Parker injured his left foot during practice and will be evaluated by an orthopedic surgeon in Charlotte, North Carolina, soon.
The school announced the injury in a news release and said there is no timetable for Parker's return.
Parker was injured during practice at Papa John's Stadium on Friday and evaluated by team physicians. He will visit Dr. Bob Anderson in Charlotte "in the next couple days for further evaluation and management," the release said.
The 6-foot-3 senior passed up a chance to jump to the NFL after his junior season, when he had 55 receptions for 885 yards and a school-record 12 touchdown catches.
He is the third-ranked senior receiver in ESPN Insider Mel Kiper Jr.'s latest 2015 draft prospects.
The Cardinals begin their first season in the Atlantic Coast Conference on Labor Day night when they host Miami.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.Sigur Rós – Valtari Film Experiment on December 8th
“World Premiere Event! Public screenings on all seven continents. Join Sigur Rós fans from around the world for a unique program of short films.”
This year Icelandic band Sigur Rós released their sixth album Valtari.
The band did something creative called “Valtari Film Experiment”.
Sigur Rós gave a dozen film makers the same budget and asked them to create whatever comes in to their head when they listen to songs from the band’s forthcoming album.
The idea is to abandon the usual approval process from Sigur Rós, and allow film makers utmost creative freedom.
On December 8th, the Canadian Film Institute with conjunction with the Embassy of Iceland.
They are proud to present the Ottawa premiere of Sigur Rós’ Valtari Film Experiment at the Library and Archives of Canada Theatre on 395 Wellington St.
You have to be 18 and over to attend this because some of the video are pretty risque. (IE naked body parts on “Fjögur píanó” which was filmed by Alma Har’el starring Shia LaBeouf in the buff :P)
The events starts at 8pm and runs for about two hours.
Thanks to the nice people at Canadian Film Institute, they are giving away passes to this.
If you want to win and attend this event.
Simply comment on the bottom with your name and email.
Since there are no tickets, the lucky winner can skip the line on Saturday night but there are no assigned seatings.
It’s a first come, first serve seating. So better get there early!
Contest ends on December 7th at 12pm.
Winner went to Alexis Bosse. Hope you will enjoy the premiere on the big screen
At the screening, you will also be given a unique URL where you can enter to win a deluxe Sigur Rós Valtari special gift package.
One winner will be selected per continent. PASSWORD IS LEYNDARMAL.
Here are the videos that I like the most.
Varúð
Fjögur píanó (NSFW)
RembihnúturCollecting cars is a passion in both the U.S. and Europe, but—as with a lot of other things, food for instance—we’re a bit more casual about it over here. Maybe it’s because we don’t have many centuries of history weighing us down. For whatever reason, we don’t get as excited about cars with racing history as the Brits do. I once pointed out to a vendor of an old Volvo that it had stickers from race tracks all over New England and New York. “Does it?” he said.
The Jabbeke Jaguar, after its restoration. (JD Classics photo)
“The odds are high that this car will go to a European collector,” said Jeff Lotman, the CEO of Global Icons and a big car collector/reseller. He was talking about a certain 1952 Jaguar XK120 that broke the world land speed record, hitting 172 mph circa 1953 on the Jabbeke Highway in Belgium with the notable driver Norman Dewis at the controls.
Dewis’ heroic feat is in the “every schoolboy knows of it” category, but only if you’re a British schoolboy. We tend to get more excited about the later jet-powered record setters that flamed into history at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Those don’t come up for sale often. Old race cars used to be worth very little, particularly in the U.S., but their value has been climbing. A Grand Prix Mercedes W196 associated with the great driver Juan Manuel Fangio recently set a record auction price for any car—more than $29 million.
The same Jaguar, competing at Brands Hatch in 1957 with Albert Powell driving. (courtesy JD Classics)
The Jag actually held the land speed record twice. Dewis took the honors in April of 1953 at 140 mph, but then a V-8-powered Pegaso went faster a few months later. MDU was further refined and hit 170.412 in October of that same year. The feat was immortalized in a plaque that went onto every XK120. Dewis, still very much alive at 93, was a consultant on the restoration of MDU.
“I like to find rare cars and restore them,” said Lotman. “Cars with racing history sell better. We returned the Jaguar to exactly what it was in 1953.” Lotman owns MDU with the English Jaguar restorers JD Classics, which restored it. He thinks the car will eventually go to a European collector, though probably via one of the premiere American auctions such as that held at Pebble Beach August 17 and 18 by Gooding and Company. “The biggest sales are still in the U.S.,” Lotman said.
Lotman had previously made headlines by finding and, with JD Classics, restoring an early XK120 that had been owned by Jag enthusiast Clark Gable (who’d said he wanted one “like a child wants candy.”)
Derek Hood, the owner of JD Classics, told me that restoring MDU took 18 months. To make it more streamlined, the car had the canopy from a British jet fighter installed, and recreating that was one of the big hurdles of the restoration. “We studied period photographs, took measurements, made a buck to the same size, then had a local company make the canopy in resin,” he said. “We spent 120 hours on that alone.”
Hood actually thinks the car could end up in an American collection, but a Swiss enthusiast has expressed interest in it. But who knows? “There are a lot of car collectors in Qatar now,” Hood said.
MDU had a racing history both before (it won its class at the Alpine Rally in 1952) and after the land speed record (races at Goodwood, Crystal Palace, Brands Hatch and Mallory Park.) It “retired” after a Jaguar Drivers Club sprint at Brands Hatch in 1957.
Jeff Lotman with his BMW 507, which is currently being restored by BMW in Germany. (courtesy of Jeff Lotman)
The land speed record equipment was designed to be easily unbolted, and MDU eventually became a road car again. Brian Redman, who bought it in the early 1960s, used it for his honeymoon. By the time Hood got his hands on it, the car had covered more than 100,000 miles, much of it as a family transporter. “So you mean that sometime in the ‘60s you’d have seen it parked at the supermarket, with no clues as to its racing history?” I asked Hood. “Exactly,” he said.
Lotman’s personal collection is the stuff of those same schoolboys’ dreams. He has a Ferrari 275 GTB/4, an SS Jaguar he races, an historic Mustang, a ’54 Lincoln Capri he also races, and a rare BMW 507 sports car currently being restored by BMW. Lotman’s work includes brand licensing for Ford and BMW. Maybe he could ask BMW why it doesn’t license the 507 as a clone car, since it’s as least as handsome as the much-copied Shelby Cobra.
To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Jabbeke record, Jaguar held this historic procession of cars past and present:MANILA, Philippines—More seatwork, shorter lectures, and best of all, no homework.
But instead of churning out flunkers and dropouts, this new teaching technique has actually produced high-scoring students.
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Say hello to the Dynamic Learning Program (DLP), which proponents say is not only the answer to perennial problems like the lack of public school teachers and textbooks, but also a 21st-century method that need not rely on high technology.
At least 157 public high schools in Basilan, Negros Oriental and Negros Occidental provinces are deviating from tradition by adopting DLP, a teaching technique developed by Christopher and Ma. Victoria Bernido, the physicist couple who earned the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2010.
Local education officials have partnered with the Bernidos and telecoms giant Smart Communications to “spread the gospel” of DLP, which was piloted in Cagayan de Oro last year and earlier tested in the Bernido’s Central Visayan Institute Foundation (CVIF) in Jagna, Bohol province.
During these initial runs, the program improved the students’ performance mainly by giving them more time for self-learning and drastically changing the role of teachers.
“It’s not a curriculum, it’s a way of teaching. The traditional way is that the teacher will lecture for most of the time and then students participate in recitation, quiz and homework,” said Stephanie Orlino, a community partnerships officer at Smart.
“This time around, students learn on their own 80 percent of the time, (and) the teacher only needs to be in class 20 percent of the time,” Orlino added.
Under the DLP, students get to spend much of their time answering questions on worksheets based on the lesson that their teachers have discussed for only 15 to 20 minutes.
Just pen and paper
No textbooks, notebooks or high-tech learning devices required—just pen and paper. Students may even write on the back of old calendars if they run out of activity sheets, which they can later file in different portfolios.
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“It’s plain hard work. When we visited one of the schools (during the pilot run), I saw that the students even put rubber band or tape around their pens to have a better grip because they used their pens quite often,” said Smart public affairs chief Mon Isberto.
“And these self-driven students are the kind of students we need in the 21st century, students who can acquire new skills on their own,” Isberto said. DLP is “a no-tech but 21st-century method” that can work even “without textbooks or classrooms,” he added.
Parallel learning
At the core of DLP is a technique developed by the Bernidos called parallel learning, where teachers spend only 20 percent of class time introducing the lesson to students and giving them the remaining 80 percent to answer questions.
By the end of a school year, DLP students would have answered up to 6,000 questions in science, math, economics and history subjects, among others.
And because so much work is already done in class, there is no more need to do assignments at home. The program also allows students a “strategic break” from academics every Wednesday, when they focus on physical education, music and arts classes.
Teachers can plan and prepare the activity sheets for the whole school year before classes start in June using DLP modules designed by the Bernidos. Even those who teach multiple classes may find it easy to follow the program.
In a DLP orientation video, Christopher Bernido further explained: “For example, (if) I have three biology classes, I (can) hold these classes simultaneously (even if I) cannot be in three places at the same time. (Since) teacher intervention will be limited… the teacher would give a lecture for 15 to 20 minutes in one section, transfer to another section and lecture again for 15 to 20 minutes there, and so on.”
CDO experience
Orlino said the 9,000 Cagayan de Oro high school students who had tried the DLP showed a “highly significant” improvement in their English, math and science tests in March 2012 compared to their test scores in June 2011.
The Cagayan de Oro experience mirrored that of students at CVIF, where the Bernidos first introduced the method in 2002. Since adopting the program, the school has consistently produced successful examinees in the University of the Philippines College Admission Test (Upcat), considered one of the toughest college entrance exams in the country.
“It’s very encouraging. Despite the fact that we had birth pains in the first year and (Cagayan de Oro) experienced Tropical Storm ‘Sendong,’ and despite the fact that the students had only four academic days, with no homework and less contact time with teachers, they improved in all subject areas,” Orlino recalled.
Judee Dizon, Smart’s program officer in CDO, said DLP also enabled seven high schools devastated by Sendong in December last year to bounce back immediately and resume classes the following month.
Smart is currently supporting the Bernidos by reproducing DLP materials and assisting the couple in training more schools heads and teachers via teleconferencing and other tech-savvy methods.
Isberto said spreading DLP is Smart’s first step in developing a generation of students best suited for e-learning. “Once you have these self-learning students gradually introduced to e-learning tools on top of the [DLP] system, these students will fly,” he said.
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MOST READ× Cleveland Officer Arrested for Negligent Tasering
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A Cleveland police officer has been arrested for allegedly using a taser in a negligent way, Fox 8 News reports.
Cleveland police said that as a result of an Internal Affairs Unit investigation, Officer Leonard Moore, 55, was arrested Friday for misdemeanor assault. The incident, however, happened back on January 1 at a Marathon gas station on East 55th Street, near Woodland Avenue.
According to a police report, a 27-year-old woman and her 28-year-old female friend went to the gas station to grab something to eat. As they stood in line for their food, Officer Moore reportedly approached the 28-year-old and began apologizing for tasering her earlier that night. Police did not reveal details about that event.
The 27-year-old woman then allegedly told Moore that she “didn’t want to hear anything from him.” She turned around, heard a “pop,” then her whole body stiffened, and she fell to the ground in pain, the report stated.
The 27-year-old woman told police that Moore started apologizing again, this time to her, while dialing 9-1-1 for an ambulance. According to the report, she removed one of the taser prongs from her breast, but had to wait for EMS to get another one taken out. She was then transported to St. Vincent Charity Hospital for treatment.
Cleveland police say Officer Moore will be assigned to restricted duty pending the results of his criminal case. He will have limited contact with the public and will not respond to emergency calls.
Stick with Fox 8 News and FOX8.com for updates on this story as they become available.Martin invited USA TODAY Sports to come along for his flight to Michigan, a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the life of one of the sport's top drivers.
Mark Martin still is popular with fans after 31 seasons on the Sprint Cup circuit, where some drivers consider him a sage of sorts. (Photo11: Jerome Miron, USA TODAY Sports) Story Highlights A well-respected veteran whose career has spanned parts of 31 seasons in the Cup series, Martin is viewed as somewhat of a racing sage by his peers
Martin has a passion for rap music and a presence on Twitter and is an early devotee of Vine
He shares views on drivers today, NASCAR's evolution
Mark Martin parks his jet about 20 feet from the kitchen counter.
Martin, the ageless NASCAR driver, scoops microwaved brown rice into his mouth as he prepares for his latest journey: flying himself to a race in Michigan.
His comfort zone is a large airplane hangar at the Concord (N.C.) Regional Airport, adjacent to the runway and equipped like a luxury home, mahogany wood floors included. There's an upstairs bedroom, a living room with comfortable couches and a TV.
There are no walls between the kitchen, where Martin sits, and his shiny 2-year-old Citation CJ4.
"It's stupid," Martin says. "It's absolutely stupid. Don't let anyone ever try to justify the costs of owning a plane.... But it sure is convenient."
Martin invited USA TODAY Sports to come along for his flight to Michigan, a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the life of one of the sport's greats. A well-respected veteran whose career has spanned parts of 31 seasons in the Cup series, Martin is viewed as somewhat of a racing sage by his peers. He has 40 Cup wins and 49 Nationwide Series wins to go with five championships in the now-defunct IROC series. Though he has never won a Cup title or a Daytona 500, he has a record five runner-up finishes in the season standings.
A man known for being able to keep up with the times, Martin has a passion for rap music and a presence on Twitter and is an early devotee of Vine. Yet the real secret to his long-term success likely lies in keeping himself physically competitive — the 54-year-old routinely shares his regimen with his Twitter followers.
"If you look at the way he has treated his body, it tells you that this guy likes a challenge," says Jeff Gordon, Martin's former teammate at Hendrick Motorsports. "He likes to push himself, and he is disciplined. I think that's what gives you longevity in a sport when you have the talent."
STATISTICS: Mark Martin by the numbers
VIDEO: Watch 'The King' explain two tales of Daytona
His life as a pilot is just one of the changes Martin has seen.
"We used to take a van to Michigan," he says. "Heck, we drove to Riverside (Calif.)! But one year, after we drove to Riverside and I finished fifth, I caught a flight home."
He laughs at the memory, eager to recall his early days in NASCAR. This season, NASCAR introduced its sixth generation Cup series car. Martin has driven and won races in four of them.
"We raced hard but fair," he says of the days going door-to-door with David Pearson, Richard Petty and Darrell Waltrip. "The definition of 'fair' has changed. It was, 'May the best man win' back then. You couldn't fight the inevitable of a faster car.
"Now, everyone is so close that you can't pass. And the slow cars now are not nearly as slow."
Yet Martin's experience gives him a connection to today's drivers. Teammates Clint Bowyer and Martin Truex Jr. have been "very kind" about listening to him, Martin says.
During Truex's six-year winless streak — recently broken at Sonoma (Calif.) Raceway — Martin helped Truex stay positive.
"He's like, 'You're going to get one,' " Truex said. "Just keep doing what you're doing. You guys are awesome. You're fast. You're doing all the right things. Don't get discouraged when things don't go your way, because you're going to get a win.
"He was right. It's nice to see somebody like that understand what we're going through and give good advice."
NASCAR driver Mark Martin backs his Citation CJ4 out of the hanger at Concord (N.C.) Regional Airport. "Don't let anyone ever try to justify the costs of owning a plane.... But it sure is convenient," Martin says. (Photo11: Jeff Gluck, USA TODAY Sports)
'Get with it or get obsolete'
Martin finishes his rice cup and, with a wave of his hand, motions to follow him outside the hangar. A walkie-talkie in hand, he says into the radio, "Concord pick up IFR to ADG."
The radio crackles with sounds foreign to a non-pilot. Martin scribbles notes on a yellow Post-it pad and heads back inside.
Private aviation is expensive, but Martin says he tries to reduce costs. Not only does he prep the plane himself, he often also is the sole pilot (he enlists help to fly after races).
As he prepares for departure, his mind still is on how different racing is these days.
"At Darlington in '83, I finished third and there were only three cars on the lead lap. Fans today would lose their minds if that happened!"
Martin says TV deals "accelerated everything. That sent the sport through the roof, but we had to sell ourselves so strong that it created unrealistic expectations. We couldn't deliver that strong all the time, and it was a vicious cycle: We had to outperform everything we'd done before."
Martin picks up a remote control and silences the country music playing in the background. He hits another button, and the massive hangar door folds upward.
"We used to be able to shake hands with the fans and be nice — but that was when there were 15 or 20 people standing there," Martin says. "When there are 5,000, you physically can't do that anymore. We still give as much time as we did before, but now it's so diluted."
The sponsors require more time too, Martin says, which is why private planes are necessary. Drivers cannot take the time to drive to a track — that would mean the cancellation of appearances, team meetings and other business, he says.
He considers it all |
ed their own money to start their business—would be shocked to hear that the government’s Small Business Administration has written off $17.5 billion dollars of taxpayer-financed loans and loan guarantees to 160,000 failed businesses since 2000.
Starting a small business is costly. There are mountains of rules and regulations that take time and money to comply with, as well as significant physical costs for a building, equipment, and employees. Often those costs can’t be recouped if a business fails.
That’s why many small business entrepreneurs seek loans. Without them, many small businesses would never get a chance to open their doors.
Banks don’t give loans to just any entrepreneur that walks in the door, however. They require a credible business plan, demonstrating how the business will be able to prosper and pay back its loan, and often times, lenders require borrowers have significant financial assets outside the loan.
Some would-be small businesses don’t have credible plans or financial assets and they can’t get loans from the private sector, at least not at interest rates that they can afford. But they may qualify for an affordable loan or loan guarantee from the Small Business Administration.
The Small Business Administration is tasked with helping small businesses that can’t, for whatever reason, get financing from the private sector. But if the private sector won’t lend to a business, there’s usually a good reason. The lender must think the risk of failure outweighs the potential profit from the loan.
With the government’s Small Business Administration loans, there effectively is no risk to the agency because the cost of a failed loan doesn’t come out of its operating budget, but is instead passed on to taxpayers.
If a private bank had to write off $17.5 billion worth of bad loans, it would almost certainly go out of business, but not the Small Business Administration. It can just ask Congress for more money when it incurs big loan losses.
That’s why many of the loans the Small Business Administration has made seem completely irrational. According to Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of Open the Books:
“SBA bankers didn’t even have the foresight to see the coming digital electronic revolution” and lent $412 million to paper and printing businesses.
“The SBA put $25 million into travel agencies and reservation firms while the whole world moved online to Orbitz and Priceline.”
From 2002 to 2008, the SBA lent $60 million to video cassette tape businesses and $3.8 million to three Blockbuster Video stores.
Moreover, many of the Small Business Administration’s loans don’t represent the small-scale, mom-and-pop loans the administration claims to support. According to the Open the Books report:
Significant loans went to upscale operations, including: Beverly Hills diamond suppliers, Lamborghini dealerships, private country clubs, luxury limousine companies, and ritzy destination resorts.
Many large corporations also got in on taxpayer dollars through their franchises. Some of the SBA’s significant loan defaults include: Choice Hotels, Holiday Inn, Comfort Inn, Days Inn, Quiznos, and Cold Stone Creamery.
While there’s nothing wrong with upscale businesses or well-known franchises, it’s hard to believe these businesses couldn’t obtain loans from the private sector, without taxpayer subsidies.
The government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers, using taxpayer dollars to finance businesses deemed least likely to succeed by the private sector.
The government should instead encourage small business formation and growth by reducing regulations and costs across the board, creating an equal—and easier—playing field for all businesses.
Rachel Greszler is a senior policy analyst in economics and entitlements at The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis.Law Enforcement Memorial
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Code Section: Section 32-6-680
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Secondary Tag Type(s): 02 MC (Motorcycle Pre-numbered) M2 (Motorcycle Personalized)
Series Began: January 2014
All residents of Alabama who are vehicle owners and supporters of the State Law Enforcement Memorial may purchase license plates in this category.
No documentation required to be presented by the registrant prior to purchasing this plate.
The plates may be personalized.
Personalized license plates in this category are transferable, at the option of the transferor, to the transferor’s spouse or child upon payment of the transfer fees.
This plate may be displayed upon the following types of vehicles:
private passenger automobiles
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The license plate design changes every five (5) years.
Individual plates are ordered On Demand through the Plate Reservation and Ordering System (PROS).
FeesQuestion: If Lil B's Based God's Curse—the one that he's put on Kevin Durant a few times now—is so effective, then why hasn't he been putting it on Warriors opponents throughout the NBA Playoffs? He's a big Golden State fan, so it kind of seems like a no-brainer to us. From Anthony Davis to Zach Randolph to Dwight Howard, Lil B should be handing out curses left and right!
We don't know why he's not doing it. But it does sound like he's close to putting a curse on Rockets star James Harden. Reason being, he's seen the celebration that Harden has used time and time again this season:
And Lil B thinks it's way too close to the cooking dance that he helped popularize, even though it's more likely that Harden was inspired to start doing it after seeing the music video for Chedda Da Connect's "Flicka Da Wrist":
Go warriors @warriors and let James harden no he doing the Lil B cooking dance if he doing that flickin wrist or whipping he mark - Lil B — Lil B From The Pack (@LILBTHEBASEDGOD) May 21, 2015
Uh oh. Sorry, Houston fans. But you might be in trouble! Scroll down to see a few of them begging Lil B not to curse their leader...I can’t recall how many times I’ve written or talked about the Healthcare legislation not being about healthcare. It is interesting that a recent Wall Street Journal article validates this notion. The author of the article covered a piece on the New Yorker’s website from the week before by John Cassidy.
The WSJ article states:
Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment,” he writes. “Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration... is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.” Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of “making the United States a more equitable country” and furthering the Democrats’ “political calculus.” In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.
This reminds me of another recent article by Judge Andrew Napolitano, were the he closes with the following:
America, this is not an academic issue. If this health care bill becomes law, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, privacy as you have enjoyed it, will cease to be. When Congress takes away our freedoms, they will be gone forever. What will you do to prevent this from happening?
So how about you my fellow lovers of liberty – what will you do?
I promise you that I will not be inactive. I will not stay silent.
I will stand up! I will speak up!
Because for me and my posterity…there WILL be LIBERTY!!
Joshua is the co-host of The Forgotten Men radio show Saturdays at 12noon ET, on AM930 WFMD and online at ForgottenMen.com.My friend Libertarian Girl asked me what I thought libertarians should be doing more of when it comes to communicating with the public. This is a quick list of things that I’ve noticed to be either effective or counterproductive. It isn’t exhaustive or perfectly phrased, and shouldn’t be taken to be an indictment of all libertarians–in reality, it’s mostly a list of mistakes I’ve made, and effective strategies I’ve seen others employ–but it may be helpful for some.
Don’t make references to libertarian philosophy when you’re talking policy to the general public, unless it is absolutely necessary. Make appeals based on the common values you share with the audience you’re trying to convince. Argue in good faith: assume the other side believes what they’re saying and genuinely wants what’s best for society. Give people the benefit of the doubt: attacking someone’s motives is good for riling up your base, but not for convincing other people. Don’t expect to convert someone to a different ideology or worldview in the course of a conversation. This never happens. Speak about specific issues and why more freedom, rather than less, is the answer. Know who your audience is. Are you trying to convince the person you’re debating, or are you trying to convince third parties listening to you? Know what you want to accomplish, and think realistically about how you can achieve it. Talk about things the audience cares about, in terms they can relate to. If you’re trying to convince people to care about something they just don’t, justify it by its relationship to the things they do care about. (See point #2.) Don’t be condescending and don’t pander. Tailor your message to the audience you’re speaking to, but treat them like rational, responsible adults. Be honest and be passionate. People who may be inclined to disagree with you will at least respect your sincerity. When speaking to particular groups, be aware of the issues that may be most important to them (see point #7), but make arguments for why X position is good for everyone, not just why “as a [blank],” it is in their narrow self-interest. The Self-Interested Voter Hypothesis is false. Make it personal: help people identify with your position or your complaint on a human level. Institute for Justice is great at this. Don’t be self-pitying or portray libertarians as persecuted. It’s unattractive, unconvincing, and simply not true. Don’t blame some nefarious external force if we lose the debate–the Council on Foreign Relations, “liberal media,” etc. Sometimes we lose because we just weren’t convincing enough. Reality matters. Don’t use axioms to machete your way through complex issues to a predetermined conclusion. Empirical evidence (data as well as micro-level stories) matters. Use it to guide the application of libertarian principles on specific issues. As Trevor Burrus put it, set down the machete and pick up a scalpel. Have a sense of humor. Try not to take differences of opinion personally. If the person you’re arguing with can make you mad, you will lose the chance to connect either with them or with the audience.
Update: Some have commented that most of this is common sense. I agree. Common sense is the name we give to the obvious but difficult.Pam's House Blend:
Hypocrisy much? The Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter-day Saints is unhappy about the fact that the media spotlight is trained on its participation in making Prop 8 happen.
In an official statement on the church's web site, bearing false witness and hypocrisy is the order of the day.
It is disturbing that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is being singled out for speaking up as part of its democratic right in a free election. Members of the Church in California and millions of others from every faith, ethnicity and political affiliation who voted for Proposition 8 exercised the most sacrosanct and individual rights in the United States - that of free expression and voting. While those who disagree with our position on Proposition 8 have the right to make their feelings known, it is wrong to target the Church and its sacred places of worship for being part of the democratic process. Once again, we call on those involved in the debate over same-sex marriage to act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility towards each other. No one on either side of the question should be vilified, harassed or subject to erroneous information.
Bzzt. Wrong answer. The people protesting the church's significant role in an another state's democratic process -- members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave millions of dollars to remove the civil rights of human beings -- are merely exercising their right to free speech to highlight that role.
And what is this "erroneous information"? Who knows, the church doesn't say. [..]
And the Catholic church is also lying baldly:
Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church was also a target for supporting Proposition 8. "Proposition 8 is not against any group in our society. Its sole focus is on preserving God's plan for people living upon this earth throughout time," Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles, said in a statement Thursday.
WTF? Wait a minute. Prop 8 just removed an existing right from one specific group of people. There's no way to whitewash this. There's no spin that takes away the fact that religious institutions that backed Proposition 8 did so because of their faith -- interfering with the laws of California.Torrey and Chanel Smith made a lot of people and animals happy Saturday. (Photo courtesy Leo Howard Lubow)
Torrey Smith and his wife, Chanel, took time over the weekend to help animals who need a second chance find their forever homes.
Smith, who will play for the Philadelphia Eagles this season, and his wife picked up the adoption fees for 46 cats and dogs at an adoption event Saturday in Baltimore. With roots at the University of Maryland and the Baltimore Ravens, Smith added a little “extra” in the donation department, too, according to BARCS (Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter).
“Last night at the conclusion of the runway show, Torrey took to the mic to address the crowd. Each year he reminds us all what this glamorous and grand event is all about — raising money and awareness for Baltimore’s homeless, neglected and abused animals. It’s safe to say that Torrey’s spirited and full-of-heart conclusion to the show is always a crowd-favorite moment,” the shelter wrote on Facebook.
“This year, Torrey surprised us all with a special announcement. He explained that before the show, he and his wife Chanel were discussing what more they could do for all the homeless animals they spent time with backstage. They wanted to make sure that every single one of them had an adoption application by the end of the night. Torrey and Chanel decided that they would cover the adoption fees for every single cat and dog at Pawject Runway — 46 animals, wow!”
H/T Lubow PhotographyA federal judge ruled Wednesday that a Michigan woman has no basis to sue the Detroit Police Department (DPD) for shooting her three dogs because they were not properly licensed.
U.S. District Court Judge George Caram Steeh dismissed a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by Detroit resident Nikita Smith last last year after a marijuana raid by Detroit police left her three dogs shot to death.
The ruling is the first time a federal court has considered the question of whether an unlicensed pet—in violation of city or state code—is protected property under the Fourth Amendment. Federal courts have established that pets are protected from unreasonable seizures (read: killing) by police, but the city of Detroit argued in a motion in March that Smith's dogs, because they were unlicensed, were "contraband" for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, meaning she had no legitimate property interest in them and therefore no basis to sue the officers or department.
In his Wednesday opinion Steeh agreed.
"The Court is aware that this conclusion may not sit well with dog owners and animal lovers in general," the judge wrote. "The reason for any unease stems from the fact that while pet owners consider their pets to be family members, the law considers pets to be property."
"The requirements of the Michigan Dog Law and the Detroit City Code, including that all dogs be current with their rabies vaccines, exist to safeguard the public from dangerous animals," he continued. "When a person owns a dog that is unlicensed, in the eyes of the law it is no different than owning any other type of illegal property or contraband. Without any legitimate possessory interest in the dogs, there can be no violation of the Fourth Amendment."
And without any Fourth Amendment violation, Steeh continued, there is no basis for a civil rights claim against the city. Steeh also ruled that Smith's suit would have been dismissed even if she had a cognizable property interest in the dogs, finding that the animals presented an imminent threat to the officers.
Smith's lawsuit characterized the Detroit police officers who raided her house as a "dog death squad." She claimed officers shot one of her pets through a closed bathroom door. Graphic photos from the raid on Smith's house showed the dog lying dead in a blood-soaked bathroom.
Smith's case is only one of several lawsuits that have been filed against the DPD for dog shootings over the past two years. The city of Detroit settled one of those suits for $100,000 after dash cam video showed an officer shooting a man's dog while it was chained to a fence. It was also one of three lawsuits against DPD for shooting dogs during marijuana raids. The most recent was filed in June after DPD officers allegedly shot a couple's dogs while the animals were behind a backyard fence.
A Reason investigation last year found the DPD's Major Violators Unit, which conducts drug raids in the city, has a track record of leaving dead dogs in its wake. One officer had shot 39 dogs over the course of his career before the raid on Smith's house, according to public records.
That officer is now up to 73 kills, according to the most recent records obtained by Reason.
Two other officers involved in the Smith raid testified during the trial that they had shot "fewer than 20" and "at least 19" dogs over the course of their careers.
The court's opinion notes that the "police officers conducting the search had not received any specific training on how to handle animal encounters during raids."
The ruling also noted that Detroit police supervisors found that the shooting of Smith's dogs by officers were all justified. "However, as in many other cases, the ratifying officers did so without speaking to the officers about what had transpired," the court wrote.
Reason's review of "destruction of animal" reports filed by Detroit police officers did not find a single instance where a supervisor found that a dog shooting was unjustified.
Detroit police obtained a search warrant for Smith's residence after receiving a tip that marijuana was being sold out of it. Police confiscated 25 grams of marijuana as a result of the raid, and Smith was charged with a misdemeanor.
However, the case against her was later dismissed when officers failed to appear at her court hearing.
Neither an attorney for Smith nor the Detroit Police Department were immediately available for comment.A deeply faithful Christian man is stuck on roof at home with massive flooding up to the 2nd floor.
Rowboat comes. He says, “No, I’m waiting for God. I prayed and I know he’s coming.”
2nd Rowboat. “No, I’m waiting for God.”
3rd Rowboat. “No, I’m waiting for God.”
Water rises. The man drowns.
Now he’s meeting God in heaven. The religious man says, “Where were you God? I prayed. I was faithful. I asked you to save me. Why would you abandon me?”
God says, “Hey, I sent you 3 rowboats.”
Did you ever consider Trump is our rowboat?
Maybe God is trying to tell us something important—that now is not the time for a “nice Christian guy” or a “gentleman” or a typical Republican powder puff. Maybe now is the time for a natural born killer, a ruthless fighter, a warrior. Because right about now we need a miracle, or America is finished. Maybe the rules for a gentlemen don’t apply here. Maybe a gentleman and “all-around nice Christian” would lead us to slaughter.
Or do you want another Mitt Romney, Bob Dole, John McCain, Gerald Ford or Paul Ryan?
Did any of them win?
Did they lead the GOP to “the promised land?”
Did they change the direction of America? No, because if you don’t win, you have no say. Paul Ryan couldn’t even deliver his own state, Wisconsin!
And as leader of the House, Paul Ryan rolls over to Obama like my dog rolls over for a scrap of food, or a steak bone, nice, but obedient. I mean Paul Ryan … not my dog. My dog is actually a pretty good defender and loyal.
Maybe God is knocking on your door loudly, but you’re not listening.
Maybe God understands we need a “war leader” at this moment in time.
Maybe God understands if we don’t win this election, America is dead. It’s over. The greatest nation in world history will be gone. Finished. Kaput. Adios.
And with one last breath, maybe what we need to save us at the last second, is someone different. Someone you haven’t ever experienced before, because you weren’t raised in rough and tumble New York where nothing good gets accomplished unless you’re combative, aggressive, outrageous, on offense at all times, and maybe just a tad arrogant too.
Someone with a personality you’ve never seen on stage at your church.
Maybe, just maybe, being a nice gentlemanly Christian would not beat Hillary and her billion dollars, and her best friends in the media who will unleash the dogs of hell upon the GOP nominee.
I guess you think God is only nice and gentlemanly. Really?
Then you’ve missed the whole point of the Bible. When necessary, God is pretty tough. When necessary, God strikes with pain, death and destruction. When necessary, God inflicts vengeance. Maybe you think God couldn’t possibly be associated with someone like Trump.
Trump is too vicious, rude and crude.
When we won WWII, was God “nice”?
Were we gentlemanly when defeating Hitler?
Were we gentlemanly when firebombing Germany?
Were we gentlemanly when dropping atomic bombs on Japan?
Is God ever “nice” on the battlefield? Or does he send us vicious SOB’s like General George S. Patton so the good guys can defeat evil?
That’s a different role than a pastor or church leader. God understands that. And maybe it's time to re-define “nice.”
Maybe Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan aren’t nice at all, because they led us to defeat. And losing again would mean the end of America. And God can’t allow that. Maybe Romney and Ryan mean well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Or maybe they’re just jealous they had their chance and blew it.
Maybe they’d rather help elect Hillary than allow a Trump victory that would make them look weak, feckless and incompetent.
“Even the youths shall faint and be weary, And the young men shall utterly fall, But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.” (Isiah 40:30-31)
God is about miracles. We don’t need a “nice guy” or a “gentleman” right now. It’s the 4th quarter and we’re losing 14-0. We need a miracle.
So let me repeat my message to Christians: “YOU’RE MISSING THE BOAT.”
I believe Trump is our miracle. I believe Trump is our rowboat. Except he’s more like a battleship!
No one is saying Trump is perfect.
No one is saying Trump is a perfect conservative.
But he is a patriot.
He is a warrior.
He is a capitalist.
He is the right man, at the right time.
Yes, he’s a bit rude and crude and offensive. But that may make him the perfect warrior to save America, American exceptionalism, capitalism and Judeo-Christian values. The choice should be easy.
It’s Trump … or it’s the end of the American dream.
If anything in this article strikes a positive chord with you, please pass it on.Submitted by Jake Anderson via TheAntiMedia.org,
Some of the weirdest and most disturbing advertisements ever created are done so for military campaigns. They come in the form of propaganda leaflets, which are dropped by air or otherwise disseminated into a country or territory that is being invaded. Virtually every war since the beginning of the 20th century has produced these leaflets, which are also known as psyops or psychological operations and can be divided up into three categories: white, grey, and black. The intention is to use psychology and symbolism to influence members of the general population, inciting fear and, ultimately, compliance.
Governments use psyops in a variety of contexts but the most common is during war, when entire populations must be convinced that killing in the name of God and State is not murder. Citizens also need an emotional impetus to grant their government the impunity to kill civilians and children in the most brutal of ways, including via unmanned drones. All but a few countries in the world are currently engaged in war, so there are a lot of psyops in progress as you read this.
The following leaflets come to you thanks to the incredible archives of PsyWar.org. They are, in this author’s humble opinion, the most sinister psyop leaflets ever dropped:
British leaflet produced by General Headquarters in France for German troops on the Western front 1915-1918
British balloon distributed propaganda leaflets for German troops on the Western front, 1918
World War 2 Germany to Allies – “While you were away”
“Waiting in Vain”
“Life is short – Death is quicker!”
Christmas message from Soviet Union to Germany 1941-1945
Japan to Allied Troops 1941-1945 – “CAPITALISTS DEMAND RED ENDLESSLY!”
First Iraq War – 1991 – “Adhere to the following procedures to cease resistance”
“CEASE RESISTANCE BE SAFE”
“Escape to Your Home!”
IFOR/SFOR BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA 1996-2004
Operation Enduring Freedom – 2001-2002
Operation Iraqi Freedom – Coalition Psyop 2003-2004
Israel to Lebanon 2006 – “Your defenders are your destroyers”
These days, the internet has turned into a powerful new breeding ground for wartime psyops, but the psychological methods and imagery still follow the same tactics; you just have the added tools of chat rooms, social media, and forums as ways to manufacture consent.Fedora Linux 24 was released yesterday. To my knowledge, this is the first fixed release Linux distribution which has all of the Surface Pro 3 basic functionality supported out-of-the-box, most likely thanks to the Linux 4.5 kernel. Things I have tested to work:
Type Cover, mouse and keyboard features.
Touch, with Onboard touch screen keyboard enabled when Type Cover is removed. Note: For some reason the browsers (Firefox, Chrome) do not work properly with on-screen keyboard. This is really a shame and limits keyboardless usage.
Wifi works as expected.
Device goes to sleep when idling, or by tapping the power button. Wakes up from the power button, or the Windows-logo button in the front panel.
Battery state and charge level is correctly reported.
Both cameras work, front and back.
High DPI support works well.
I’ve only done some quick live boot smoke testing on the Surface Pro 3, but the initial expression is very good. Personally I am not a huge fan of Fedora, due to it’s bleeding edge nature and sometime sub-par quality standards, but the level support on SP3 makes it currently the strongest contended on this piece of hardware.
Download 64bit version from GetFedora.org Dump the.ISO to a USB stick. Turn off your Surface Pro 3 and plug in the USB stick Press and hold Volume Up -button and then tap the Power button Modify the boot order so that the USB media is tried first. Save settings and reboot.
Thats it - enjoy your Surface Pro, freed from the annoyance of Windows 10. Please share your SP3 Linux experiences below!Beginning tomorrow, PlayStation Plus members with a PlayStation Vita will have a brand new game available to play for free if they so choose in Soul Sacrifice. Keiji Inafune, creator of the Mega Man series, brings us this latest Instant Game Collection action RPG title.
There are no other new free games, but Dynasty Warriors 6 and 7 are both discounted to $11.99 and $19.99 for PS Plus members respectively. PS Plus members will also be able to download a free Draw Slasher – Hanzo Avatar beginning tomorrow.
The official PlayStation blog also alerts us that Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen for PlayStation 3 will be leaving the Instant Game Collection on December 3, so make sure to download it as soon as possible if you would like to get it for free. Worms 2: Armageddon will also no longer be discounted beginning on that day.The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is proud to partner with Young America’s Foundation (YAF) to produce “Clichés of Progressivism,” a series of insightful commentaries covering topics of free enterprise, income inequality, and limited government.
Our society is inundated with half-truths and misconceptions about the economy in general and free enterprise in particular. The “Clichés of Progressivism” series is meant to equip students with the arguments necessary to inform debate and correct the record where bias and errors abound.
The antecedents to this collection are two classic FEE publications that YAF helped distribute in the past: Clichés of Politics, published in 1994, and the more influential Clichés of Socialism, which made its first appearance in 1962. Indeed, this new collection will contain a number of essays from those two earlier works, updated for the present day where necessary. Other entries first appeared in some version in FEE’s journal, The Freeman. Still others are brand new, never having appeared in print anywhere. They will be published weekly on the websites of both YAF and FEE: www.yaf.org and www.FEE.org until the series runs its course. A book will then be released in 2015 featuring the best of the essays, and will be widely distributed in schools and on college campuses.
See the index of the published chapters here.
#17 – “All We Need Is the Right People to Run the Government”
Editor’s note: This essay by Ohio businessman and writer Melvin D. Barger appeared in the 1994 edition of FEE’s book, Clichés of Politics, edited by former FEE trustee Mark Spangler. His citations of Ludwig von Mises all come from Mises’s 1945 book, Bureaucracy.
It’s been a time-honored practice in America to “throw the rascals out” when things go wrong in government. This supposedly is merely the political version of what happens when the manager of a losing baseball team is replaced, or the chief executive officer of a failing corporation gets the axe.
Nobody should dispute the fact that government operations require capable, experienced people who know how to do their jobs. We’ve all probably had unpleasant bouts with incompetent public officials and clerks, and we wish they could be replaced.
But when government expands beyond its rightful limits, problems arise that have little to do with the competence and abilities of its officials and employees. The delusion that these problems can be solved by replacing officials only delays the day when people face the hard questions about what government should do and should not do.
Thanks to the relentless expansion of government, however, these questions are being asked the world over, with surprising solutions in some cases. There is growing criticism of government operations and regulations. There is also a rush to “privatize” many services. Though privatization moves are being made for economic reasons rather than to restore liberty, they still appear as hopeful signs.
The most important reason for limiting government to its rightful peacekeeping functions is to preserve and promote liberty. If this is done, people working singly or in groups will eventually find wonderful ways of dealing with the many human problems that government promises to solve, and meeting the human needs that government promises to meet. But as we now know, problems and needs continue to grow while the government colossus has created dangers, such as mountainous public debt and group conflicts that threaten us all and seem beyond solution. These problems worsen no matter who seems to be running things in government. Even people who used to have almost religious faith in the powers of government are becoming disillusioned as its clay feet become more exposed.
A second dilemma with excessive government is that it must always be run bureaucratically. Bureaucracy can be a maddening thing for people who have been accustomed to the speed and efficiency of market-driven services. When confronted with bureaucratic actions that displease us we tend to blame the officials in charge and call for their replacement.
But unless the officials we want replaced are completely incompetent, rooting them out is usually a waste of time and effort. As Ludwig von Mises explained many years ago, bureaucracy is neither good nor bad. Bureaucratic management is the method applied in the conduct of administrative affairs, the result of which has no cash value on the market, though it may have other values to society. It is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by an authoritative body. “The task of the bureaucrat is to perform what these rules and regulations order him to do,” Mises explained. “His discretion to act according to his own best conviction is seriously restricted by them.”
Thus bureaucracy is good (and inevitable, but easily excessive, and even ridiculous and unresponsive much of the time) when it is applied in public operations such as police departments, military forces, and records bureaus. But it becomes oppressive and deadly when it is imposed on business enterprises and other human activities. As Mises shrewdly saw, the evil in bureaucracy was not in the method itself. “What many people nowadays consider an evil is not bureaucracy as such,” he pointed out, “but the expansion of the sphere in which bureaucratic management is applied.”
Mises then contrasted this bureaucratic system with business management or profit management, which is management directed by the profit motive. Managers, driven by the need to stay profitable (which is to say, to keep costs below income), can be given wide discretion with a minimum amount of rules and regulations. And customers will quickly let them know whether the business is providing proper goods and services and prices which customers consider favorable.
This profit-driven system has its opponents, of course, and this creates problems and frictions for entrepreneurs who want to compete for our business. Some opponents fear the new competition, while others deplore the entrepreneurs’ use of resources. And one of the most effective ways of hampering entrepreneurs is to put them under either limited or total government regulation and control—that is, replacing profit-driven management with at least some degree of bureaucratic management.
So what we have in today’s world is a great deal of government with additional regulation and control of private business. There is lots of grumbling about the fact that “the system doesn’t seem to be working,” but nobody is likely to fix it. At election time, glib office-seekers promise to reform the system and “get the country moving again.” This doesn’t happen, and general dissatisfaction is growing.
And there still seems to be a persistent delusion that “putting the right person in charge” will fix the problem. One favorite government response, when conditions worsen in an area, is to appoint a “czar” with special powers to bring everything together with businesslike efficiency. We have had numerous “czars” to control energy and prices, and one was recently named to deal with health reform. However highly touted, these czars soon turn out to be no more effective than the Russian rulers who gave rise to the term.
Another common fallacy, a favorite idea with pro-business political administrations, is that government operations will work better if capable business executives are found to head them. But as Mises perceptively noted, “A former entrepreneur who is given charge of a government bureau is in this capacity no longer a businessman but a bureaucrat. His objective can no longer be profit (generating more value than cost), but compliance with the rules and regulations. As head of a bureau he may have the power to alter some minor rules and some matters of internal procedure. But the setting of the bureau’s activities is determined by rules and regulations which are beyond his reach.”
Some people thrive in this sort of work and turn out to be excellent bureaucrats. They are the right people to run government operations when government is limited to its rightful peacekeeping functions. But if our purpose is to preserve and promote liberty while seeking the benefits of a market-driven economy, we’ll look in vain for reasonable answers and solutions from government—no matter who runs it. We are slowly learning this lesson, though at great cost. We should, of course, continue to follow the time-honored American practice of “throwing the rascals out” when elected officials are performing badly. But in today’s world, the officials we’re criticizing might not be rascals at all, but just conscientious people trying to do jobs that shouldn’t have been created in the first place.
Melvin D. Barger
Summary
As government grows, it creates more and more systemic and intractable problems.
Profit management and bureaucratic management are two very different things. The former seeks to generate more value than cost while the top priority of the latter is the promulgation and implementation of rules and regulations.
The bigger government becomes, the more calls you hear for “reform,” which may suggest there’s something inherently defective about the political system that prevents its practitioners from ever getting things right from the start.
Running government “like a business” is a popular rhetorical point but essentially an illusion that fails to recognize the deep differences between profit-driven business and rule-driven government.
For further information, see:
“No More Czars, Please” by Lawrence W. Reed:
http://tinyurl.com/jwaqzmb
“What’s So Bad About Big Government Anyway?” by George C. Leef:
http://tinyurl.com/lfddmj3
“Hayek Was Right: The Worst Do Get to the Top” by Lawrence W. Reed:
http://tinyurl.com/nxv4tmt
“The Economy Needs More Planning—Central Planning, That Is” by Lawrence W. Reed:
http://tinyurl.com/mudp5lu
“Can Government Manage the Economy?” by James L. Payne:
http://tinyurl.com/pq44dld66.9k SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
Fact checkers have blown apart Donald Trump’s first general election campaign ad, by finding that the television spot contains one lie every four seconds.
Here is the ad:
Trump’s ad begins with a favorite lie of the GOP nominee that the system is rigged against Americans |
, boring — especially compared with the fun I have doing deals in my office. I can never understand people who say that if they had a lot of money they would spend their time traveling. It’s just not my thing.” (Trump: Surviving at the Top, 1990)
“There’s no excuse for staying home; the world’s too fantastic to miss out on it. I wish I could travel more.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)
“Well, I read a lot … and over my life, I’ve read so much.” (The Hugh Hewitt Show, February 25, 2015)
“I don’t read much. Mostly I read contracts, but usually my lawyers do most of the work. There are too many pages.” (Veja, February 2014)
“I don’t have a lot of time for listening to television.” (New York Times, July 28, 2015)
“I actually love watching television.” (The Hugh Hewitt Show, February 25, 2015)
“I’m a thinker, and I have been a thinker … I’m a very deep thinker.” (Palm Beach, Florida, March 11, 2016)
“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)
“I don’t mind being criticized. I’ll never, ever complain.”
“I like it when people talk about me. As long as it is positive.” (Dubai-based Life Beyond Sport, undated)
“I really value my reputation and I don’t hesitate to sue.” (The Village Voice, January 15, 1979)
“I don’t mind being criticized. I’ll never, ever complain.” (CNN, September 24, 2015)
“When someone crosses you, my advice is ‘Get even!’ That is not typical advice, but it is real-life advice. If you do not get even, you are just a schmuck! When people wrong you, go after those people, because it is a good feeling and because other people will see you doing it. I love getting even. I get screwed all the time. I go after people, and you know what? People do not play around with me as much as they do with others. They know that if they do, they are in for a big fight. Always get even. Go after people that go after you. Don’t let people push you around. Always fight back and always get even. It’s a jungle out there, filled with bullies of all kinds who will try to push you around. If you’re afraid to fight back people will think of you as a loser, a ‘schmuck!’ They will know they can get away with insulting you, disrespecting you, and taking advantage of you. Don’t let it happen! Always fight back and get even.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“If you can avoid an altercation, do so.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)
“If someone attacks you, do not hesitate. Go for the jugular.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I don’t want to be provocative, and in many cases I try not to be provocative.” (Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, 2011)
“I do love provoking people. There is truth to that.” (BuzzFeed, February 13, 2014)
“Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.” (Trump: The Art of the Deal, 1987)
“If striving for wholeness means diminishing your competition, then your competition wasn’t much to begin with.” (Trump: Think Like a Champion, 2009)
“Be tough, be smart, be personable, but don’t take things personally.” (Twitter, June 22, 2015)
“It makes me feel so good to hit ‘sleazebags’ back.” (Twitter, November 19, 2012)
“You’ve gotta be nice.” (The New Yorker, May 19, 1997)
“I do believe in hate when it’s appropriate.” (Trump: Surviving at the Top, 1990)
“I think I am a nice person.” (New York, June 16, 2015)
“Being on the other side of a relationship with someone like me must be difficult.”
“I’m no angel.” (Rolling Stone, September 9, 2015)
“People who know me like me.” (New York, June 16, 2015)
“Being on the other side of a relationship with someone like me must be difficult.” (People, May 19, 1997)
“But there is nothing better than having a great marriage, in my opinion. There is nothing more beautiful, and there is nothing more important.” (CNN, March 21, 2004)
“You marry for love, but your signature on the marriage certificate is all about rights, duties, and property. It’s a legally binding contract that knows nothing of love.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I’ve never been the kind of guy who takes his son out to Central Park to play catch, but I think I’m a good father.” (Playboy, October 2004)
“I like kids. I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of ‘em. I’ll supply funds, and she’ll take care of the kids.” (The Howard Stern Show, April 2005)
“I think I’ve been a very good husband.” (CNN, February 9, 2011)
“What the hell do I know, I’ve been divorced twice?” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“Believe it or not, I’m a romantic guy.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)
“Geraldo Rivera is a friend of mine, but he did something which I thought was absolutely terrible and he admits it was a mistake. He wrote a book naming many of the famous women that he slept with. I would never do that — I have too much respect for women in general, but if I did, the world would take serious notice. Beautiful, famous, successful, married — I’ve had them all, secretly, the world’s biggest names, but unlike Geraldo I don’t talk about it.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I don’t have to brag. I don’t have to. Believe it or not.” (New York, June 16, 2015)
"Hey, look, I went to the hardest school to get into, the best school in the world, I guess you could say, the Wharton School of Finance. It’s like super genius stuff."
“I avoid people with especially high opinions of their own abilities or worth.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“Hey, look, I went to the hardest school to get into, the best school in the world, I guess you could say, the Wharton School of Finance. It’s like super genius stuff. I came out. I built a tremendous company. I had tremendous success. The Art of the Deal. The Apprentice. Everything.” (CNN, August 11, 2015)
“Do not look for approval from others. That is a sure sign of weakness.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“Look at my hands … My hands are normal hands. During a debate, he was losing, and he said, ‘Oh, he has small hands and therefore, you know what that means.’ This was not me. This was Rubio that said, ‘He has small hands and you know what that means.’ OK? So, he started it. So, what I said a couple of days later … and what happened is, I was on line shaking hands with supporters, and one of the supporters got up and he said, ‘Mr. Trump, you have strong hands. You have good-sized hands.’ And then another one would say, ‘You have great hands, Mr. Trump, I had no idea.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I thought you were, like, deformed, and I thought you had small hands.’ I had 50 people … I mean, people were writing, ‘How are Mr. Trump’s hands?’ My hands are fine. You know, my hands are normal. Slightly large, actually. In fact, I buy a slightly smaller than large glove, OK?” (Washington Post, March 21, 2016)
“Don’t worry about actively promoting yourself.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)
“Let people know what you’ve done. What good is it if no one knows about it? You’ve gotta be a promoter.” (New York magazine, December 24, 1984)
“Everyone says, ‘Oh, Trump is a great promoter.’ I don’t think I’m even a good promoter.” (Fortune, April 3, 2000)
“Subtlety and modesty are appropriate for nuns and therapists.” (Trump: How to Get Rich, 2004)
“So don’t be afraid to toot your own horn when you’ve done something worth tooting about.” (Trump: How to Get Rich, 2004)
“Everyone says, ‘Oh, Trump is a great promoter.’ I don’t think I’m even a good promoter.”
“If I get my name in the paper, if people pay attention, that’s what matters. To me, that means it’s a success.” (Gwenda Blair’s Donald Trump: Master Apprentice, 2005)
“Publicity gradually dehumanizes you.” (Trump: Surviving at the Top, 1990)
“I have learned that entertainment is a very simple business. You can be a horrible human being, you can be a truly terrible person, but if you get ratings, you are a king.” (Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, 2011)
“It’s fame itself that bends people out of shape. In fact, the more celebrities I meet, the more I realize that fame is a kind of drug, one that is way too powerful for most people to handle.” (Trump: Surviving at the Top, 1990)
“Everybody kisses your ass when you’re hot. If you’re not hot, they don’t even call. So it’s always good to stay hot.” (CNBC, June 24, 2012)
“I hate people that think they’re hot stuff, and they’re nothing.” (Warren, Michigan, March 4, 2016)
“I’m really concerned with the whole earthquake situation in L.A. I am a tremendous believer that someday Las Vegas may be the West Coast … People in general are having lingering doubts about the value of real estate in L.A. It’s happening too much and too often, the tremors. It’s a very scary thing.” (Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1988)
“L.A. is going to be very hot, and it is very hot. The fact that Trump goes there makes it even hotter.” (New York Times, February 5, 1990)
“Anyone who thinks he’s going to win them all is going to wind up a big loser.” (Trump: Surviving at the Top, 1990)
“I win, I win, I always win. In the end I always win, whether it’s in golf, whether it’s in tennis, whether it’s in life, I just always win. And I tell people I always win, because I do.” (Tim O’Brien’s TrumpNation, 2005)
“I do whine, because I want to win, and I’m not happy about not winning, and I am a whiner, and I keep whining and whining until I win.” (CNN, August 11, 2015)
“Toughness is knowing how to be a gracious winner — and rebounding quickly when you lose.” (Trump: Surviving at the Top, 1990)
“We finished second, and I want to tell you something: I’m just honored. I’m really honored.”
“I don’t like to lose.” (New York Times, August 7, 1983)
“I want to make America great again, and you can’t do that if you come in a close second.” (Washington Post, October 7, 2015)
“We finished second, and I want to tell you something: I’m just honored. I’m really honored.” (West Des Moines, Iowa, February 1, 2016)
“Remember that in the best negotiations, everyone wins.” (Trump: Never Give Up, 2008)
“You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win. That is a bunch of crap.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I learned from my father that work can make you happy.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I’ve noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs. They’re obsessive, they’re driven, they’re single-minded and sometimes they’re almost maniacal, but it’s all channeled into their work … I don’t say this trait leads to a happier life, or a better life, but it’s great when it comes to getting what you want.” (Trump: The Art of the Deal, 1987)
“When you shake somebody’s hand, go with it. It is very important. Shaking hands with someone means you are making a deal.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“Some business executives believe in a firm handshake. I believe in no handshake. It is a terrible practice. So often, I see someone who is obviously sick, with a bad cold or the flu, who approaches me and says, ‘Mr. Trump, I would like to shake your hand.’ It’s a medical fact that this is how germs are spread.” (Trump: How to Get Rich, 2004)
“All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements — they’re a disaster.”
“You’ve got to take care of your body and stay healthy.” (Men’s Health, March 3, 2013)
“All my friends who work out all the time, they’re going for knee replacements, hip replacements — they’re a disaster.” (New York Times Magazine, September 29, 2015)
“Dress the part and act the part. Do not cause any doubt in anybody’s mind that you don’t know your stuff. When I moved to Manhattan to do my first deal, I did not have money or employees. When I went into an office, I acted as if I had an organization, The Trump Organization, behind me. I was on my own and no longer working for my father. Few people knew that The Trump Organization had no employees except myself and operated out of my studio apartment in Manhattan.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“Sometimes people will come into my office and they will be great. They will look great, they’ll sound great, they dress beautifully; everything is great. Then after you hire them they turn out to be morons. Sometimes a real slob will come in looking for a job. He does not dress well. He does not look good. He does not seem to be very smart. It turns out when you hire him or her, you find out you have hired a genius.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I do something wrong — I do things wrong — and when I do, I don’t mind.” (CNN, September 24, 2015)
“You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on. I think of Jimmy Carter. After he lost the election to Ronald Reagan, Carter came to see me in my office. He told me he was seeking contributions to the Jimmy Carter Library. I asked how much he had in mind. And he said, ‘Donald, I would be very appreciative if you contributed five million dollars.’ I was dumbfounded. I didn’t even answer him. But that experience also taught me something. Until then, I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president.” (Trump: The Art of the Deal, 1987)
“ Jimmy Carter... He is a very nice man, but he wasn’t my kind of president. I was more into the Ronald Reagans of the world. Nevertheless, after President Carter’s term as President was up, he asked to meet me and of course I agreed. I didn’t know what he wanted in that I had never supported him and was actually very vocal on how poorly he handled our captives in Iran … Nevertheless, we had a wonderful conversation prior to getting to his point, which was, would I consider making a $50 million contribution to the Jimmy Carter Library? Here was a man that I had not supported, had not voted for, and yet he was in my office asking for a $50 million contribution! I said to myself, and I told the story many times, that Jimmy Carter, despite his image to the contrary, had an ability to think big. That’s why he ran for President and others did not.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“Ronald Reagan … is so smooth and so effective a performer that he completely won over the American people. Only now, nearly seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.” (Trump: The Art of the Deal, 1987)
“… Ronald Reagan, to me, was a great president. And whether you are liberal or you’re conservative, people really view him as a great president. He’ll go down as a great president and not so much for the things he did, it’s just, there was a demeanor to him and a spirit that the country had under Ronald Reagan that was really phenomenal. And, you know, there was just a style and a class … I mean, that’s a really big part of being president. Ronald Reagan had it.” (CNN, October 8, 1999)
George H.W. Bush is “a great man. He’s a man I support.” (Washington Post, April 21, 1988)
“But I disagree with him when he talks of a kinder, gentler America. I think if this country gets any kinder or gentler, it’s literally going to cease to exist.” (Playboy, March 1990)
George W. Bush? “I like him.” (CNN, October 8, 1999)
“Don’t talk to me about Bush, I was never a defender or a fan!” (Twitter, April 12, 2013)
“I like John McCain.” (Twitter, May 28, 2013)
“I’m not a fan of John McCain.” (Facebook, July 18, 2015)
“Ron Paul has some serious ideas which deserve serious consideration. Wrong for media to ignore him.” (Twitter, August 23, 2011)
“He should be ignored.” (Twitter, January 4, 2012)
Mitt Romney “is the steady conservative who can restore America’s future.” (Twitter, February 22, 2012)
“He’s a jealous fool and not a bright person. He's good looking. Other than that, he's got nothing.” (New York Times, March 18, 2016)
George Pataki is “the most underrated guy in American politics.” (Trump: The America We Deserve, 2000)
“Jeb Bush is a good man. I’ve held fundraisers for him. He’s exactly the kind of political leader this country needs now and will very much need in the future."
Pataki “couldn’t be elected dog catcher.” (Twitter, July 1, 2015)
“Jeb Bush is a good man. I’ve held fundraisers for him. He’s exactly the kind of political leader this country needs now and will very much need in the future. He, too, knows how to hang in there. His first shot at Florida’s governorship didn’t work out, but he didn’t give up. He was campaigning the day after his loss. He won the next race in a landslide. He’s bright, tough, and principled.” (Trump: The America We Deserve, 2000)
“He’s ’s like a lost soul, Jeb Bush … this poor, pathetic, low-energy guy.” (Las Vegas, January 21, 2016)
Barack Obama is “a strong guy who really knows what he wants.” (Fox News, February 9, 2009)
“He’s been a horrible president.” (Fox News, April 14, 2011)
“Here’s a man that not only got elected, I think he’s doing a really good job.” (CNN, April 15, 2009)
“Barack Obama has been the worst president ever.” (Fox News, April 14, 2011)
“Barack Obama is not who you think he is.” (Twitter, October 15, 2012)
“Oh, yes, he’s a champion. I mean, he won against all odds. If you would have looked — when he first announced, people were giving him initially no chance. And he’s just done something that’s amazing. He’s totally a champion.” (CNN, April 15, 2009)
“Hillary Clinton is definitely smart and resilient.” (Trump: The America We Deserve, 2000)
“Incompetent Hillary doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t have a clue. She’s made such bad decisions.” (Fox News, March 22, 2016)
“I think that a lot of people will be looking at Hillary’s record as secretary of state, and she will be defending that, and I’m sure she’ll do a good job of defending it.” (NBC News, August 10, 2013)
“I know Hillary and I think she’d make a great president..."
“She was the worst secretary of state in the history of our nation. There’s never been a secretary of state so bad as Hillary.” (NBC News, July 8, 2015)
“I know Hillary and I think she’d make a great president …” (Trump University “Trump Blog,” March 13, 2008)
“Hillary will be a disaster as a president.” (NBC News, July 9, 2015)
“She has a husband that I also like very much.” (CNN, September 24, 2007)
“She’s married to an abuser.” (NBC News, January 10, 2016)
President Trump? “He would believe very strongly in extreme military strength. He wouldn’t trust anyone. He wouldn’t trust the Russians.” (Playboy, March 1990)
“I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other.” (Reuters, December 18, 2015)
“I see NATO as a good thing.” (Washington Post, March 21, 2016)
“I think NATO is obsolete.” (ABC News, March 27, 2016)
In favor of invading Iraq? “Yeah, I guess so.” (The Howard Stern Show, September 11, 2002)
“It looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint.” (Fox Business, March 21, 2003)
“The war’s a mess.” (Washington Post, March 25, 2003)
“Qadhafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around, we have soldiers, all over the Middle East, and we’re not bringing ‘em in to stop this horrible carnage. … We should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick.” (Trump video blog, February 2011)
“I never discussed that subject. I was in favor of Libya? We would be so much better off if Qadhafi were in charge right now.” (Houston, February 25, 2016)
“Angela Merkel is doing a fantastic job … Youth unemployment is at a record low & she has a budget surplus.” (Twitter, October 3, 2013)
She’s “ruining Germany.” (Twitter, December 9, 2015)
John Kerry is “a very solid and stand-up guy.” (Twitter, January 25, 2013)
“Obviously Kerry did not read The Art of the Deal.” (Virginia Beach, Virginia, February 24, 2016)
“Compromise is not a dirty word.” (Manchester, New Hampshire, October 12, 2015)
“I’m not big on compromise. I understand compromise. Sometimes compromise is the right answer, but oftentimes compromise is the equivalent of defeat, and I don’t like being defeated.” (Life, January 1989)
“I’m walking, talking proof of the American Dream. For me, the American Dream is not just a dream; it’s a reality.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)
“Maybe we Americans pump ourselves up too much.”
“The American Dream is dead.” (New York, June 16, 2015)
“Maybe we Americans pump ourselves up too much.” (Trump: The America We Deserve, 2000)
“We are the greatest country the world has ever known.” (Time to Get Tough: Make America #1 Again, 2011)
“I’m never self-satisfied.” (Playboy, March 1990)
“In truth I am dazzled as much by my own creations as are the tourists and glamour hounds that flock to Trump Tower.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“If I were satisfied, I would not be Donald Trump.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I think there are two Donald Trumps.” (Palm Beach, Florida, March 11, 2016)
“I don’t think there are two Donald Trumps. I think there’s one Donald Trump.” (Palm Beach, Florida, March 11, 2016)
“Stop the indecisive internal dialogue before it starts. That is your biggest enemy.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I think we’ve had enough debates.” (Fox News, March 16, 2016)
“More debate is always better.” (Twitter, December 7, 2011)
“I mean, my whole life is a debate, but I don’t debate.” (South Bend, Indiana, May 2, 2016)
“Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — less is more.” (Trump: The Art of the Deal, 1987)
“I always say, ‘More is more.’” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)
“New York is a great place. It’s got great people. It’s got loving people, wonderful people.” (North Charleston, South Carolina, January 14, 2016)
“I know this city. There are some terrible people in this city.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“Nobody owns me.” (New York Post, April 18, 1999)
“I’m owned by the people!” (Rolling Stone, September 9, 2015)
“There’s not a team.” (MSNBC, March 8, 2016)
“Yes, there is a team. I’m going to be forming a team.” (MSNBC, March 8, 2016)
“Eminent domain is wonderful.” (Fox News, October 6, 2015)
“I don’t like eminent domain.” (Breitbart News, November 5, 2015)
“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ‘em, would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay the legal fees, I promise, I promise.” (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, February 1, 2016)
“I do not condone violence in any shape.” (NBC News, March 13, 2016)
“I believe in positive thinking, but I also believe in the power of negative thinking.”
“Oh, I believe in polls.” (ABC News, November 17, 2010)
“I honestly believe those polls are wrong.” (Miami, October 24, 2015)
“I believe in positive thinking, but I also believe in the power of negative thinking.” (Playboy, March 1990)
“I never think of the negative.” (New York Times, August 7, 1983)
“I always go into the deal anticipating the worst.” (Trump: The Art of the Deal, 1987)
“I believe in the power of positive thinking, but I never like to talk about it.” (Washington Post, October 7, 2015)
“I don’t think positively, I don’t think negatively.” (Gwenda Blair’s Donald Trump: Master Apprentice, 2005)
“I don’t worry about anything.” (New York Times Magazine, September 29, 2015)
“But I often think of nuclear war. I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process. It’s the ultimate, the ultimate catastrophe, the biggest problem this world has, and nobody’s focusing on the nuts and bolts of it. It’s a little like sickness. People don’t believe they’re going to get sick until they do. Nobody wants to talk about it. I believe the greatest of all stupidities is people’s believing it will never happen, because everybody knows how destructive it will be, so nobody uses weapons. What bullshit. On a much lower level, I would never hire anybody who thinks that way, because he has absolutely no common sense. He’s living in a world of make-believe. It’s like thinking the Titanic can’t sink. Too many countries have nuclear weapons; nobody knows where they’re all pointed, what button it takes to launch them. The bomb Harry Truman dropped on Hiroshima was a toy next to today’s. We have thousands of weapons pointed at us and nobody even knows if they’re going to go in the right direction. They’ve never really been tested. These jerks in charge don’t know how to paint a wall, and we’re relying on them to shoot nuclear missiles to Moscow. What happens if they don’t go there? What happens if our computer systems aren’t working? Nobody knows if this equipment works, and I’ve seen numerous reports lately stating that the probability is they don’t work. It’s a total mess.” (Playboy, March 1990)
“I’m an environmentalist.” (CNN, April 28, 2010)
“Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” (Twitter, December 6, 2013)
“I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.” (Trump: The America We Deserve, 2000)
“I am the strongest person running in favor of the Second Amendment.” (Hanahan, South Carolina, February 15, 2016)
“We finished second, and I want to tell you something: I’m just honored. I’m really honored.”
“My sons love to hunt. They are members of the NRA, very proudly. I am a big believer in the Second Amendment.” (Ayrshire, Scotland, July 31, 2015)
“I’m not a hunter and don’t approve of killing animals. I strongly disagree with my sons who are hunters.” (Twitter, March 15, 2012)
For a woman who has an abortion, “there has to be some form of punishment.” (MSNBC, March 30, 2016)
“If Congress were to pass legislation making abortion illegal and the federal courts upheld this legislation, or any state were permitted to ban abortion under state and federal law, the doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman …” (DonaldJTrump.com, March 30, 2016)
“Millions and millions of women — cervical cancer, breast cancer — are helped by Planned Parenthood. So you can say whatever you want, but they have millions of women going through Planned Parenthood that are helped greatly.” (Houston, February 25, 2016)
“But Planned Parenthood should absolutely be defunded. I mean, if you look at what’s going on with that, it’s terrible.” (Fox News, October 18, 2015)
“I continue to alienate members of the press on occasion, but on the whole, I like them.” (Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, 2004)
“They are the most dishonest people in the world. The media. They are the worst. They are very dishonest people. They are terrible.” (Indianapolis, April 20, 2016)
“I guess we wouldn’t be here, maybe, if it wasn’t for the media, so maybe we shouldn’t be complaining.”
“OK, no, I don’t hate anybody. I love the media. They’re wonderful.” (Indianapolis, April 20, 2016)
“I guess we wouldn’t be here, maybe, if it wasn’t for the media, so maybe we shouldn’t be complaining.” (Indianapolis, April 20, 2016)
“If you equivocate, it’s an indication that you’re unsure of yourself and what you’re doing. It’s also what politicians do all the time, and I find it inappropriate, insulting and condescending. I try not to do it.” (Trump: How to Get Rich, 2004)
“I tend to do what I do.” (Time, December 25, 2015)
“I do it to do it.” (Trump: The Art of the Deal, 1987)
“Define yourself in a big way. We all have self-definitions; give yourself a big definition.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I have an organization but it’s largely myself.” (New York Times, March 19, 2016)
“You are what you think you are.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I’m Swedish.” (New York Times, November 1, 1976)
“I’m proud to have that German blood. Great stuff.” (Kings of Kallstadt, 2014)
“I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.”
“I’m not the world’s happiest person.” (New York magazine, March 5, 1990)
“I’m a very happy man.” (Forbes, October 1, 2009)
“The worst hell you will ever face is the hell you create with your own mind.” (Trump: Think Big, 2007)
“I’m very capable of changing to anything I want to change to.” (Fox News, February 11, 2016)
“I am me.” (New York, April 26, 2016)
“What I say is what I say.” (Cleveland, Ohio, August 6, 2015)49ers linebacker Chris Borland speaks to Mark Fainaru-Wada about his decision to retire from the NFL over concerns about the effects of head trauma. (4:55)
BERKELEY, Calif. -- San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland, one of the NFL's top rookies this past season, told "Outside the Lines" on Monday that he is retiring because of concerns about the long-term effects of repetitive head trauma.
Borland, 24, said he notified the 49ers on Friday. He said he made his decision after consulting with family members, concussion researchers, friends and current and former teammates, as well as studying what is known about the relationship between football and neurodegenerative disease.
"I just honestly want to do what's best for my health," Borland told "Outside the Lines." "From what I've researched and what I've experienced, I don't think it's worth the risk."
Editor's Picks Gutierrez: Borland decision leaves 49ers short Instead of replacing Patrick Willis as a starting LB, Chris Borland is following Willis into early retirement, a stunning decision that leaves the 49ers with a huge void, Paul Gutierrez writes.
Barnwell: The definition of tough 1 Related
Borland becomes the most prominent NFL player to leave the game in his prime because of concerns about brain injuries. More than 70 former players have been diagnosed with progressive neurological disease after their deaths, and numerous studies have shown connections between the repetitive head trauma associated with football, brain damage and issues such as depression and memory loss.
"I feel largely the same, as sharp as I've ever been. For me, it's wanting to be proactive," Borland said. "I'm concerned that if you wait 'til you have symptoms, it's too late.... There are a lot of unknowns. I can't claim that X will happen. I just want to live a long, healthy life, and I don't want to have any neurological diseases or die younger than I would otherwise."
In a statement, the 49ers confirmed Borland's retirement and wished him the best.
"While unexpected, we certainly respect Chris' decision," general manager Trent Baalke said. "From speaking with Chris, it was evident that he had put a great deal of thought into this decision. He was a consummate professional from day one and a very well-respected member of our team and community. Chris is a determined young man that overcame long odds in his journey to the NFL, and we are confident he will use the same approach to become very successful in his future endeavors. We will always consider him a 49er and wish him all the best."
Borland was expected to be a key part of the 49ers' defense this season, after the retirement of All-Pro linebacker Patrick Willis last week. Borland replaced Willis, 30, after six games last season; Willis had sustained a toe injury.
Chris Borland before the game against the Seattle Seahawks at Levi's Stadium on Nov. 27, 2014. Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images
Willis' retirement had no role in his decision, Borland said.
Borland, who was scheduled to make $540,000 this season, said there was no chance he would change his mind. The third-round draft pick, who starred at the University of Wisconsin, said he has had two diagnosed concussions: one while playing soccer in the eighth grade, the other while playing football as a sophomore in high school.
Borland, who is listed at 5-foot-11, 248 pounds, earned accolades for his aggressiveness and instincts at inside linebacker. He had 107 tackles and a sack in 14 games, eight of them starts. He was the NFC's defensive player of the week for his performance against the New York Giants in Week 11. He led the 49ers with 13 tackles in that game and became the team's |
parents after witnesses could not identify who had taken the phone. The investigation is continuing.
BART police were “in the process” of reviewing surveillance video, Huckaby said. After The Chronicle revealed last year that most of the cameras on BART trains were decoys, the agency last week said it had outfitted all 669 cars with working cameras.
In the April robbery, which prompted increased police patrols, at least 40 juveniles swarmed a train stopped at Coliseum Station after jumping the fare gates, then vanished into the night after robbing and beating passengers.
BART later made at least two arrests, though it wasn’t immediately clear Wednesday how many of the suspects currently face charges. It also wasn’t clear if any of the juveniles detained Friday might be considered suspects in the first robbery as well.
Three members of a Dublin family who were accosted in April have filed legal claims, precursors to lawsuits, seeking $3 million while arguing BART could have prevented the incident with more stringent security measures.
Michael Bodley is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mbodley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @michael_bodley
Crime on BART? Tell us
Have you witnessed a serious crime on the BART system? We’d like to hear about it. Contact our reporters by email at metro@sfchronicle.com.After over 30 series of ultra detailed NFL likenesses McFarlane Toys has gotten into bed with EA sports and rewards Madden Ultimate Team players with 7 Pro Packs which is worth $10.50 ($1.50 Each) whenever you buy a collectible. I have a decent collection of these figures already and even though I am not a dedicated MUT player in the new Madden game I do find them more tempting to purchase. This year is set to have 3 series released each with at least 5 players not counting variants. I imagine hardcore MUT players might pick some up for those packs, and some toy collectors might check out Madden to see what those packs are all about. If you buy a figure and don’t want the packs feel free to send them my way. Check out my unboxing and review of the Rob Gronkowski figure in the video below, but before you do that here is what figures are in the pipeline:Stop carving that gravestone. Brick-and-mortar bookstores aren't dead, yet. On the contrary, independently owned bookstores are growing in number. According to the American Booksellers Association, since hitting a nadir in 2009, the number of indie bookstores in the U.S. has grown 19.3 percent, from 1,651 to 1,971. The current total is less than half the 1990s peak of around 4,000. But it still serves as a rebuke to the conventional wisdom that equates Amazon's relentless rise with the inevitable death of the physical bookstore.
What explains this renaissance? The collapse of Borders in 2011 is one big piece of the puzzle. (Removing a dominant carnivore from the savannah gives all the other animals a little more breathing room.) The end of the recession also contributed to a more nurturing economic environment.
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But there's more to the story. There is increasing evidence that the same digital transformation that has so dramatically reshaped the publishing industry, and driven millions of consumers online, also paradoxically rewards locally rooted authenticity. Our digital tools are steering us toward brick-and-mortar stores that promise a more satisfactory consumer experience than either chain stores or online emporiums can provide.
In a world increasingly influenced by our social media interactions, it's turning out there may well be enough room for the little guy to survive — and perhaps even thrive.
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Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, has a theory. Ever since the 1998 movie "You've Got Mail," the general public has been convinced that the kind of bookstore that perky Meg Ryan used to run is doomed.
"We know that the popular narrative about all this is that indie bookstores -- indie businesses in general -- are supposed to be up against the wall fighting the behemoths, and largely losing the fight," says Teicher.
"The data is quite contrary to that. It's absolutely not true. There are lots and lots of bookstore companies across the country that are increasingly profitable. Now, as with any small business, it's tough out there and the competition is fierce. But there is a recipe."
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Teicher identified several reasons for the fact that new indie bookstores are popping up across the United States: Bookstore owners have become adept at taking advantage of new technology to connect to customers. Publishers are more willing to collaborate in innovative ways with bookstores to boost sales. But most important, said Teicher, is a growing consumer preference for shopping locally.
"The localism movement in America is real," says Teicher. "The data is now indisputable: There are millions of American consumers making decisions every day to shop at a locally owned independent business."
Teicher's citation of the "shop local" movement jibes with what academia is starting to learn about how consumers are using social media to inform their purchasing behavior. Over the past five years researchers have been generating a vast amount of data pertaining to the impact of online reviews, ratings and social media buzz.
Unfortunately, almost none of that research focuses on bookstores, independent or otherwise. We know a lot about why consumers are choosing restaurants to eat at or hotels to stay in, but very little about where people buy books. And there are obvious huge differences between restaurants and bookstores. You can't -- at least not yet -- digitize a meal, and online takeout ordering doesn't substitute for a dining experience the way Amazon delivery substitutes for trudging to the bookstore.
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But there is still much to be learned from the research that's been done on restaurants. The values that emerge after the data is crunched help explain why the "shop local" movement is gaining traction. People crave authenticity, and they like supporting locally owned independents. What the data on restaurant choice tell is that now we have better tools than ever before to help us satisfy our cravings.
In 2011, Michael Luca, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, published a study on the impact of Yelp restaurant reviews. He discovered three interesting things:
(1) a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue, (2) this effect is driven by independent restaurants; ratings do not affect restaurants with chain affiliation, and (3) chain restaurants have declined in market share as Yelp penetration has increased.
His conclusion: Yelp was steering people to independently owned restaurants at the expense of chain restaurants.
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Luca's finding made intuitive sense. This is how we live today. We don't just get off the freeway and choose where to eat based on the sorry collection of fast food outlets within sight. We check our phones and find the high-rated diner that might be another mile or two down the road. Five more minutes of travel time is a logistical price we're totally willing to pay if we are confident in the ultimate reward. Smartphone in hand, with the collective intelligence of our social media networks at beck-and-call, we are no longer at the mercy of our environment. We get to choose.
In 2012, the National Restaurant Association reported 28 percent of Americans made their restaurant selections based on information from social networking websites. That's a number that's only going to go up.
Aileen Chua, an undergraduate at New York University, studied restaurant choice in New York City for her honors thesis in 2013, and confirmed Luca's findings. Independent restaurants received an average rating of 85 percent, compared to 77 percent for chain restaurants. Chua concluded that in the future, "building an independent restaurant might be more feasible than franchising a chain, because the accelerating growth of social media and the information that it makes available proves to be more beneficial to independent restaurants than chain restaurants."
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Another study published in 2013 analyzed more than a million online restaurant reviews published between 2004 and 2011 and discovered that "consumers assign higher ratings to restaurants regarded as authentic... we find that consumers perceive independent, family-owned, and specialist (single-category) restaurants as more authentic than they do chain, non-family-owned, and generalist (multiple category) restaurants."
Perhaps even more critically, numerous studies show that we take recommendations -- and the super-charged word-of-mouth that comes to us from people we are connected to via social media -- more seriously than we do online advertising and marketing. A study published in March 2013 in the journal Information Systems Research that looked at data from a chain store affiliated with an "international apparel brand" reported that user-generated content beats advertising.
"User-generated content (e.g., those by real consumers) on social media brand communities have a stronger impact than marketer-generated content on actual purchase behaviors in stores," one of the researchers, Goh Khim Yong, told me via email.
Why, you might wonder, do we trust each other more than we trust advertisers? Easy! Because advertisers have a monetary incentive to lie. That's not exactly breaking news, but amusing confirmation of this eternal truth -- along with a demonstration of how social media can be employed to counteract marketing -- comes in a paper published by two Dartmouth researchers that studied how ski resorts routinely exaggerated the amount of fresh snow that had fallen at their locations, hoping to lure skiers.
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The authors were able to prove the exaggerations by comparing ski resort marketing materials to government-reported snowfall figures. Then, in January 2009, "SkiReport.com added a new feature to its popular iPhone application that makes it easier for skiers to post 'first-hand reports' alongside the resort-provided reports. This feature sparked a sharp increase in the amount and timeliness of skier feedback on the accuracy of resort reports, with many first-hand reports filed from the chairlift or the lodge."
And guess what happened, next? Ski resort snowfall exaggerations dropped sharply.
How is ski-resort marketing relevant to the rise of independent bookstores? The crucial piece here is that social media isn't just steering us to the local independent, it's also helping us to find information that we trust. Social media -- people trusting each other, rather than blandishments of marketing campaigns -- cuts through the info-clutter. According to Teicher, the independent bookstore operators who have recognized that they can insert themselves into these social media webs, to be trusted members of their local communities, is crucial to their success.
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A review of the academic literature suggests strongly that we are trusting the recommendations of our social networks and the collective wisdom embodied by review and ratings sites to help us find locally owned, independent, authentic experiences. It also appears that we are more likely to trust such sources than the kinds of direct marketing and advertising that in the past pushed us toward whoever had the most capital to spend. We don't have the same kind of data on bookstores that we have on restaurants, but it isn't hard to make the cognitive leap. Technologies of connection encourage us to, well, connect. All things being equal, we like to support our local bookstores, and our social media tools make it much easier to build webs of community around local enterprises.
Indie-bookseller survival does not mean, however, that the larger trends unleashed by Amazon on the publishing industry are negated. We still don't know what Amazon's tremendous pricing pressure or the shift to ebooks will mean for the profitability of publishers and earning power of authors in the long run.
The ABA's Teicher acknowledged that it was a "fair question" to ask whether the health of the indie sector -- which only accounts for around 10 percent of the overall book sales -- would have any meaningful influence on the entire industry as it works through the changes wrought by e-commerce.
Even without the role played by Amazon's, says Teicher, "the book industry does face a pretty significant challenge. We are competing for people's leisure time in a way we never had to compete before. Everybody is walking around with a device that has access to every other form of entertainment there is. How do we make reading books compelling and fun?"
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But that very challenge he says, helps explain why indie bookstores are growing in number. The people who run independent bookstores, he says, "are extraordinarily passionate about books and reading."
"The underlying key to an independent bookstore's success is their knowledge about books and their ability to put the right books in the customer's hands. It's at the heart of what we do every day, and that authenticity builds credibility."
"Social media gives you a way to communicate that knowledge far more widely than you ever could do in the past, " said Teicher. "And we absolutely see the spread of that passion resulting in traffic in stores, and resulting in sales."Keeping herbicides out of groundwater and surface water
These six field practices can protect water quality from herbicide applications.
February 8, 2019 - Author:,
As you begin to prepare your fields for this growing season, make the necessary steps to ensure herbicides stay out of surface and groundwater. The following field practices recommended by Michigan State University Extension can effectively reduce pesticide runoff, leaching and protect groundwater and surface water.
Consider the geology of your area. When planning herbicide applications, be aware of the water table depth and the permeability of the geological layers between the surface soil and groundwater.
When planning herbicide applications, be aware of the water table depth and the permeability of the geological layers between the surface soil and groundwater. Consider soil and field characteristics. Determine the susceptibility of the soil or field site to leaching or runoff. Soil texture and organic matter content, in particular, influence chemical movement into groundwater. The slope of the field also influences surface runoff.
Determine the susceptibility of the soil or field site to leaching or runoff. Soil texture and organic matter content, in particular, influence chemical movement into groundwater. The slope of the field also influences surface runoff. Reduce compaction. Surface water runoff increases when soils are compacted.
Surface water runoff increases when soils are compacted. Utilize conservation practices that reduce erosion and surface runoff. These practices include but are not limited to no-till and other forms of conservation tillage, increasing crop residues, planting cover crops, planting grass waterways to retard soil and water runoff, and keeping buffer strips to protect surface water boundaries. Recent research suggests some conservation practices increase soluble phosphorus leaching, so in areas where this is a problem, use management practices that will not cause nutrient leaching.
These practices include but are not limited to no-till and other forms of conservation tillage, increasing crop residues, planting cover crops, planting grass waterways to retard soil and water runoff, and keeping buffer strips to protect surface water boundaries. Recent research suggests some conservation practices increase soluble phosphorus leaching, so in areas where this is a problem, use management practices that will not cause nutrient leaching. Use integrated pest management programs. Minimize herbicide use by combining chemical control with other pest management practices such as tillage, cultivation, crop rotation and pest scouting.
Minimize herbicide use by combining chemical control with other pest management practices such as tillage, cultivation, crop rotation and pest scouting. Rotate crops. Crop rotation can improve water infiltration, which reduces runoff. Crop rotations may also provide more surface crop residue and may reduce the need for applications of specific pesticides repeatedly to a given field site.
By using these basic principles, you can minimize the environmental impact on water quality by keeping herbicides out of the waters of the state. Remember that the label is the law, so before you do any pesticide application, read the label and follow the guidelines stated. It is very difficult to clean contaminated groundwater or surface water. Treatment is complicated, time consuming, expensive and often not feasible. The best solution to groundwater and surface water contamination is to prevent the problem.
Tags: field crops, msu extension, water quality, western lake erie basinA steel of an Amazon deal?
Representatives of mega e-tailer Amazon were at the old Finkl Steel site on the North Side last week taking notes... and pictures... of the property, according to a top Sneed source.
It marks the first time Amazon representatives have been spotted visiting sites in Chicago, which is vying with other large North American cities to try to land the company’s second headquarters, known as “HQ2.”
Developer Sterling Bay is targeting Amazon as the anchor tenant for its $10 billion mixed-use, riverfront development on the land it’s assembling in Lincoln Park and Bucktown that includes the old steel plant. Together with the vehicle fleet maintenance facility it bought from City Hall for $104.7 million, Sterling Bay hopes to put together nearly 100 acres for its project, called “Lincoln Yards.”
Lincoln Yards is one of 10 sites being presented to Amazon by the state of Illinois. Eight of those sites are in Chicago, including the state-owned Thompson Center office building and the “Downtown Gateway District,” which includes parts of the Willis Tower, Union Station and the now-vacant old main post office. Oak Brook and Schaumburg sites also are in the mix.
More than 600 of the Chicago area’s movers and shakers have signed on to a committee supporting the drive to win the heated competition for Amazon’s $5 billion investment and 50,000 jobs. Illinois is offering more than $2 billion worth of financial incentives for the company to come here.
Stay tuned.Also read: Driver With Suspended License Who Killed Biker In Crash Hasn't Been Charged Yet
The Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office has concluded its investigation into the traffic accident that claimed the life of Luka Balenovic on August 6, and for the family and friends of Balenovic, the results are upsetting. Gerardo Valdivia, the driver of the car that hit Balenovic's motorcycle, will be charged with a failure to yield the right of way and driving with a suspended license -- but not vehicular manslaughter.
"How this man is not being charged with some form of vehicular manslaughter is baffling," wrote Derek Malpass, a friend of Balenovic's, in an email to Riptide. "The courts have failed us all miserably, and it is so disgraceful to [Luka's] memory that his killer is being treated with such a meager slap on the wrist."Another premium cable TV network, Starz, is taking the plunge into the streaming video market with today’s launch of its own standalone streaming service, aimed at cord cutters. The move follows the launches of HBO’s over-the-top offering, HBO NOW, introduced last year, as well as a similar effort by Showtime. However, Starz’ service will differentiate itself by providing access to both streaming content and downloads, the company notes, and a lower price.
This is the first time the company has made its content library available through a subscription service, but unlike with HBO, it’s not breaking out its streaming service into a separate application. HBO, as you may recall, maintains two applications: HBO GO for cable TV subscribers and HBO NOW for those who stream its programming over the web.
Instead, Starz says that its single, all-in-one application will be used to offer access to the streaming service, access by authenticated “TV Everywhere” subscribers (those with a traditional cable TV or satellite subscription), and it will offer access for digital retail sales.
Starz’ service is also coming in at a lower price point than its competitors. Where HBO costs $14.99/month and Showtime is $10.99/month, Starz is a more competitive $8.99/month. Of course, the network doesn’t have a breakout success like HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” which could justify asking top dollar.
At launch, the programming lineup involves over 2,400 selections monthly, including its series “Outlander,” “Power” and the upcoming “American Gods.” However, it will be bringing in several notable Hollywood movies, like “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” and later this year, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
Once subscribed, up to four users can watch via the app simultaneously. The app is initially available for iOS, Apple TV, and Android.
The company is also heavily promoting how its app will allow users to download content for offline viewing. While this is definitely a great feature to have – especially if you plan to be somewhere with poor service, or without an internet connection, like an airplane. However, it’s not quite a streaming industry first.
Amazon Prime Video last fall began allowing users to download select titles for offline viewing as well – something that it hoped would help it stand out from Netflix. Unfortunately, in Amazon’s case, it’s a limited selection of its larger catalog. Starz, meanwhile, is promoting “virtually unlimited downloads.” (We asked the company to clarify this, and were told that “nearly all” of its catalog is available for download – or around 2,200 of the 2,400 total titles at launch.)
Also like Amazon, these downloads are only accessible to actively paying subscribers.
“Starz has entered the market today with an enormous value proposition for consumers. Our programing will now be more widely available to the 20 million broadband only homes of cord nevers, cord cutters and cord shavers, including Millennials and other underserved consumers who need other viable subscription service options,” said Starz CEO Chris Albrecht in a statement.
The new service is launching today, and will allow signups from the app or via the web.Milk and dairy products are not the health foods we’ve been told they are. Here are 11 reasons to stop consuming them:
1. Cow’s milk is intended for baby cows. We’re the only species (other than those we are domesticating) that drinks milk after infancy. And, we’re definitely the only ones drinking the milk of a different species.
2. Hormones. Not only are the naturally-present hormones in cow’s milk stronger than human hormones, the animals are routinely given steroids and other hormones to plump them up and increase milk production. These hormones can negatively impact humans’ delicate hormonal balance.
Related: The Dangers of rBGH in Your Milk
3. Most cows are fed inappropriate food. Commercial feed for cows contains all sorts of ingredients that include: genetically-modified (GMO) corn, GMO soy, animal products, chicken manure, cottonseed, pesticides and antibiotics.
4. Dairy products, when metabolized, are acid-forming. Our bodies are constantly striving for biochemical balance to keep our blood at 7.365 pH. Eating excessive acid-forming products can cause our bodies to overuse some of its acid-balancing mechanisms, one of which is the bones. Alkaline calcium is stored in the bones and released to combat excessive acidity in the body. Over time, bones can become fragile.
Related: 4 Herbs That Build Strong Bones
5. Research shows that the countries whose citizens consume the most dairy products have the HIGHEST incidence of osteoporosis.
6. Most dairy cows live in confined, inhumane conditions, never seeing the pastures of green grass they were intended to eat.
7. Most dairy products are pasteurized to kill potentially-harmful bacteria. During the pasteurization process, vitamins, proteins and enzymes are destroyed. Enzymes assist with the digestion process. When they are destroyed through pasteurization, milk becomes harder to digest, therefore putting a strain on our bodies’ enzyme systems.
8. Dairy products are mucous-forming. They can contribute to respiratory disorders. When I remove dairy and sugar from the diets of my clients, they stop experiencing hay fever and seasonal allergies.
9. Research links dairy products with arthritis. In one study on rabbits, scientist Richard Panush was able to PRODUCE inflamed joints in the animals by switching their water to milk. In another study, scientists observed more than a 50 percent reduction in the pain and swelling of arthritis when participants eliminated milk and dairy products from their diet.
10 Most milk is homogenized, which denatures the milk’s proteins, making it harder to digest. Many peoples’ bodies react to these proteins as though they are “foreign invaders” causing their immune systems to overreact. Research also links homogenized milk to heart disease.
11. Pesticides in cow feed find their way into milk and dairy products that we consume.
Related: Pesticides in Milk Linked to Parkinson’s
Check out my Dairy-Free Soft Cheese recipe for a delicious alternative to dairy cheese.
Related:
7 Alternatives to Conventional Milk
Vegan Alternatives to Butter
What the Dairy Industry is NOT Telling You
Dr. Michelle Schoffro Cook, PhD, DNM is the publisher of the free e-news World’s Healthiest News, the Cultured Cook, president of PureFood BC, and an international best-selling and 20-time published book author whose works include: The Cultured Cook: Delicious Fermented Foods with Probiotics to Knock Out Inflammation, Boost Gut Health, Lose Weight & Extend Your Life.Watch: First Trailer for Eli Roth's Netflix Horror Series 'Hemlock Grove'
As Netflix prepares for the premiere of its high-profile original drama “House of Cards,” from David Fincher and Kevin Spacey, on February 1st, the company has unveiled a first look trailer for “Hemlock Grove,” another of its originals slated for later in the year, on April 19. Like “House of Cards,” “Hemlock Grove” will be released in its 13-episode entirety all at once.
READ MORE: Mitchell Hurwitz on ‘Arrested Development’ on Netflix: ‘The show will look very different’
Executive produced by Eli Roth, who also directed the pilot, the series is based on the novel of the same name by Brian McGreevy, which reworks classic horror tropes like werewolves, vampires and mad scientists in the contemporary setting of a run-down former Pennsylvania steel town. Famke Janssen, Bill Skarsgard, Lili Taylor, Landon Liboiron and Dougray Scott are among the cast members. The first trailer for the series, which Netflix will be holding a panel at TCA for today alongside “Derek” and “Arrested Development,” is below.
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.Photo by Press Herald
It’s no mere coincidence that Arcade Fire boasts two musically gifted brothers in Will and Win Butler. No, as Fergie herself has attested to on countless occasions, the siblings got it from their mother, renowned jazz harpist Liza Rey Butler.
Born of equally illustrious stock (her father and the boys’ grandfather, Alvino Rey, spent the 1930s co-developing the electric guitar), Rey Butler began performing with her mother’s singing group, The King Family, in the 1960s. More recently, she’s played the harp on several Arcade Fire efforts, most notably the Funeral and Neon Bible albums. She even allowed Arcade Fire to tear through the family farm on Mount Desert Island in Maine to record their self-titled debut EP. And to think, your mama won’t even come to your show at the local rec center.
In addition, Rey Butler is something of a solo act herself, performing in local clubs and bars around the Maine region. Don’t expect anything like the bombast of Arcade Fire, as most of her material is geared toward the fiery jazz of a Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald. There is, however, evidence in their mothers’ performance style of what makes the Butler brothers so dynamic: the certain intensity, an innate charisma, and the ability to thrust seemingly un-cool things (sorry, harp) directly into the heart of rock ‘n’ roll canon.
Below, watch her perform back in 2008.
And here she is performing and discussing her various parts on Arcade Fire’s records.Major renovations began at the end of the season, when the team began reshaping the club level and upper-deck areas to improve concessions and make them more open. The club level is receiving a floor-to-ceiling makeover that will include a pair of bar areas with views of the field and improved concessions.
HOUSTON -- Minute Maid Park figures to look drastically different over the next couple of years, as the Astros continue to make changes to improve the fan experience throughout the ballpark.
HOUSTON -- Minute Maid Park figures to look drastically different over the next couple of years, as the Astros continue to make changes to improve the fan experience throughout the ballpark.
Major renovations began at the end of the season, when the team began reshaping the club level and upper-deck areas to improve concessions and make them more open. The club level is receiving a floor-to-ceiling makeover that will include a pair of bar areas with views of the field and improved concessions.
Bigger changes lie ahead following the 2015 season, when the Astros renovate the areas behind the center-field wall, including the possible removal of Tal's Hill and repositioning of the bullpens. There could even be a Hall of Fame area and a plaza outside the ballpark.
For next season, the food-and-beverage stands on the club level will be repositioned to allow fans a clear view of the field from various points on the concourse. The general infrastructure of many of the new concession stands will also be renovated to allow for fresher, higher-quality food-and-beverage products.
"It's going to be a nice place," said Astros senior vice president of business operations Marcel Braithwaite. "Club has always been a premium area for fans. There's a group of people that just love that vantage point of the field, and there's always some special amenities that go with it.... Ours has just become dated, and it's time to give them that fresh feel and look.
"The tastes of the community have changed. This was a beautiful park when it was built, and it still is. It was built for private locations and kind of secluded spots -- and dark colors and kind of away from things. Now, people like to see the food made in front of them. They want to be around the action, they want a place to be social."
One of the best features coming on the club level is the removal of the ticket office along the third-base side. That area will be opened up, giving fans a view outside the stadium on to Texas Avenue.
"The ballpark is so beautiful and has all of this tremendous architecture," Braithwaite said. "We want people to look out and in, and just experience the daylight and the sun or the lights shining through the window at night."
The Astros have hired MSA Architects out of Cincinnati to rework the area beyond center field. Braithwaite said with an urban community growing around the stadium, the club wants to create some hang-out spots and make Minute Maid Park a destination for more than just baseball.
Braithwaite and president of baseball operations Reid Ryan visited more than 20 other ballparks last season to get ideas for re-imagining the center-field areas in Houston.
The Astros view the area beyond center field as a space with the infrastructure to support large-scale events and gathering areas. There could even be changes to the 5-7 Grill, which doesn't have views of the field from well beyond center field.
"You have to look at what you can change, structural beams and things of that nature," Braithwaite said. "Can you put a roof deck over the top of Tal's Hill? Could you tie it into the Champions Pavilion? Could you do different restaurant spaces like a batter's-eye club in Arlington? There's so many different options out there.
"We don't want to plagiarize [other stadiums], but use them as a reference point to bring something that has the identity of Houston into that area. And as the city develops around us, we could potentially have an open walkway like Eutaw Street [at Camden Yards] in Baltimore."
Braithwaite said any renovations will be done with respect to the Astros' rich history. This could mean more areas around the ballpark to commemorate great moments in team history, like Jose Altuve's batting title and Craig Biggio's 3,000th hit, for example.
The bottom line is giving fans a ballpark they can enjoy for years.
"We don't want to build something that, in two years, the fans go, 'The newness has worn off and we're not interested anymore,'" Braithwaite said. "We want to do this right, so it's something that can be used and enjoyed for years to come -- and not something that's just new and different and then it wears off. We want people that, when they come to the World Series, they have lots of places to enjoy, lots of places to create memories."
Brian McTaggart is a reporter for MLB.com and writes an MLBlog, Tag's Lines. Follow @brianmctaggart on Twitter.Page Content Zone 1
Dendritic cells, or ‘DCs’, are a hot topic when it comes to cancer immunotherapy development, making them heavily investigated by the scientific community. The findings of prof. Van Ginderachter’s research team suggest a new approach in which DCs are taken from surgically-removed tumors and used to “vaccinate” the same patient, making use of the patient’s own immune system in slowing tumor growth. In the search for the “perfect” DC for this kind of therapy, these researchers may have a definitive answer.Contrary to expectations, the team was able to discover and identify two immune system-stimulating DC groups in tumors, dubbed cDC1 and cDC2. Each of them cause specific types of immune responses, and they are present in both human and mouse tumors.Prof. Van Ginderachter (VIB-VUB): “We believe that DCs taken from tumors are well-suited for cancer immunotherapy, since they’ve been confirmed present within removed tumors and cause a strong anti-tumor response even in low numbers. The fact that we even discovered two different suitable DC types comes as a surprise!”Prof. Van Ginderachter and his team, which was largely driven by PhD student Jiri Keirsse and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Damya Laoui, relied on the help of outside experts to both identify dendritic cells and to get the human tissues needed to perform the research. As an authority on DCs, Martin Guilliams of the Inflammation Research Center in Ghent was essential to the study. Massimiliano Mazzone (VIB-KU Leuven) had access to human tumor samples and was responsible for coordinating the availability of these tissues.Prof. Van Ginderachter (VIB-VUB): “For this study, we performed vaccinations using the DCs that we took from actual tumors to reveal their potential. Logically, the next step will be to find out whether vaccination will be successful in a therapeutic setting. We will have to remove the tumor, isolate the DCs and then re-inject them into the same individual to discover whether we can prevent the formation of new tumors and relapse of the main tumor. These next steps are also crucial for us to better understand why some tumors respond better to cDC2, and others to cDC1 vaccination. For this part we are actively looking for a partner.”* The research group of prof. Van Ginderachter is part of the VIB Center for Inflammation Research*___________________________________________________________________________________DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13720As this research may raise questions, we want to ask you to list the e-mail address that the VIB has made available for questions in your report or article. Everyone can contact us with questions about this research and other medical research: patients*Replace*With*At*Sign*vib.beOn her show Wednesday night, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow explained how the Libertarian Party might get presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney removed from the ballot in Washington State.
Earlier this month, the Libertarian Party of Washington State filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent Romney’s name from being printed on Washington’s general election ballot.
Under Washington law, the Republican Party is no longer considered a majority party because they did not formally nominate a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010. As a minority party, Republicans can only place a name on the ballot for President by collecting 1,000 signatures of registered voters, which they have not.
“If the lawsuit succeeds, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan might have to run as write-in candidates in Washington State,” Maddow said. “And look, nobody expects Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan to have any chance in heck in Washington State. So it probably in the long run does not matter whether Romney is on the ballot or not.”
“But for every Republican who delighted in [attempts to remove Obama from the ballot], you can file this one under ‘medicine comma taste of your own,'” she joked.
Watch video, courtesy of MSBNC, below:
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Last week, Mother Jones published an in-depth report exposing vicious, degrading tactics used by gun-rights activists against women, from Arizona to Texas to Indiana. In response, right-wing pundit Dana Loesch and others have claimed that an assault on Jennifer Longdon—a mom, gun owner, and gun violence survivor paralyzed by a bullet—is a hoax. Their attack on Longdon (and Mother Jones) is as inane and illogical as it is wrong.
As I reported in detail last week, a man who recognized Longdon as a gun-reform advocate from a television broadcast approached her in the Indianapolis airport on April 25 and spat in her face. Loesch says that because no video evidence of the attack was presented with the story, it simply could not have happened. “I was in the same airport on April 25th and it was quite busy,” she wrote. “Should be easy to obtain security footage.” Beyond Loesch’s faith in the 24/7 surveillance state as the new standard of fact-finding—nothing is true unless you roll tape!—her comrades say that further proof of a conspiracy rests with CNN supposedly monopolizing all TVs in the Indy airport and having “no record” of the Longdon footage. Got it.
Longdon spoke to me in detail, in multiple interviews, about what she went through in Indianapolis. It was one of several such incidents of harassment and bullying she has endured over several years as an outspoken woman and advocate of gun reform. I confirmed her account of the spitting attack in the airport with other people who she spoke to about it at the time of the incident. The additional harassment and stalking she endured in Phoenix last year, also detailed in my report, was corroborated by a Phoenix police official directly involved in the case.
Each person I spoke with about Longdon in the course of my reporting conveyed that she is a person of integrity and fortitude, qualities you might not be surprised to hear attributed to a person who travels around the country in a wheelchair, in constant physical pain, to advocate for greater public safety. Nobody I spoke with relied on bizarre conjecture and a quick google search, keyword “CNN,” to insinuate she was a liar.
The tactics deployed by Loesch and others to try to discredit our report are nothing new. If they have one shred of evidence that the spitting assault on Longdon didn’t take place, we are all ears. B |
students and adjunct professors make ends meet, corporations eagerly organized turkey drives to benefit the local food banks. Its community activists and politicians are debating what to do about the problem of “food deserts” – neighborhoods with no access to grocery stories with fresh, affordable food.
And in spite of all that community spirit, Raleigh has made it a lot tougher for organizations feeding the homeless. Nonprofits can feed the homeless from public parks – only if they obtain a permit that costs $800 a day.
Some groups and city officials have found ways to work together, such as Dining with Dignity in St Augustine, Florida. Other organizations have combined their direct missions of feeding the hungry with creative advocacy efforts, attempting to do everything from convincing cities and states to adopt a homeless bill of rights (in place in Illinois and Rhode Island) or extend anti-discrimination laws to cover the homeless, to boost federal funding for various food and nutrition programs.
If you’re feeling truly ambitious, you could even launch an effort to have your community recognized as a “compassionate city”. These include Seattle, whose mayor, for Thanksgiving, just ceremonially pardoned not the traditional Turkeys, but two packages of Tofurky, “to draw attention to hunger in the community”.
The destination of the Tofurky? Local food banks, of course.August 04, 2017 DONALD J. TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT, INC. CITES JOBS REPORT AS PROOF THAT PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS BEGUN TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
New Report Crushes Expectations as Summer of Recovery Begins
NEW YORK, NY – Today Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. trumpeted the new jobs report just released, announcing that 209,000 new jobs were created, on top of revised numbers in June of 231,000 jobs, up from 222,000, as proof that the President has already begun to Make America Great Again.
Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. Executive Director Michael S. Glassner commented on the new report, stating, “This jobs report is proof positive that President Trump’s policies and principles are creating and returning new jobs to Americans who had been left on the sidelines of our economy for way too long. Better yet, as President Trump said this morning, he has ‘only just begun’ to create new jobs in America. The continued elimination of job-killing regulations and tax cuts are the next steps that will increase this initial momentum in a new era of economic growth in our nation.”
Also commenting on the new jobs report today was Donald J. Trump for President Advisory Board member Stephen Moore, a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, stating, “This jobs report is a blockbuster, and may very well put us on pace to surpass 20 million new jobs under President Trump’s leadership. Even without tax cuts yet, this economy likes what is it seeing from President Trump, and the summer of recovery is clearly underway.”Paget Brewster is back on Criminal Minds!
The 47-year-old actress returns full-time as Emily Prentiss on CBS’ police procedural in Wednesday’s episode, and only ET has the exclusive first look at her grand homecoming, less than one week after Thomas Gibson’s final episode.
RELATED: How 'Criminal Minds' Handled Thomas Gibson's Final Episode
Though Brewster, who last appeared as a series regular in 2012, has come back for an episode here or there, this will be a permanent stay. Her co-stars -- and even Brewster herself (“Wee! Very exciting!”) -- couldn’t be happier about the reunion.
“She’s been running Interpol for four years and now it’s just really nice to be back on the team full-time,” the actress said of Prentiss’ whereabouts over the last several years. “So far, they’ve made [Prentiss] powerful and good at the job and invested.”
Originally, Brewster was only slated to appear in six episodes this season, but she was quickly promoted “because she’s a fan favorite and we all love and miss her so much here,” executive producer Erica Messer explained.
RELATED: 'Criminal Minds' Is Bringing Back a Fan Favorite Full-Time
The Criminal Minds cast also spoke glowingly of new series regular Adam Rodriguez,who made his debut in the season 12 premiere as Luke Alvez.
“All of a sudden, you bring a new, great player you’ve traded,” Joe Mantegna said of the former CSI: Miami star, “and all of a sudden you bring back a player that was with the team back in the days when you were winning all the games and now you’re still doing it.”
Longtime star A.J. Cook explained why Criminal Minds is able to keep chugging along, even with changes in front of the camera.
“We’re finding new personalities that fit into this machine that works really well and we’ve been lucky enough to find those pieces,” she said.
Criminal Minds airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
For more on Gibson’s final Criminal Minds scene and his character’s fate, watch the video below.
EXCLUSIVE: Adam Rodriguez on Filling the Void Left by Shemar Moore on 'Criminal Minds'Drinking while flying drones would be illegal under a bill in the state Senate, the latest effort by New Jersey lawmakers to regulate the flying robots.
A bill sponsored by state Sen. Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen), the chairman of the Senate budget committee, would be the first statewide drone law at a time when the unmanned aircraft are becoming more prevalent.
It would impose a range of restrictions on operating drones, barring residents from using the robots to harm humans or snatch up animals. Flying drones while drunk or on drugs would be made illegal. Violating the rules would be a disorderly persons offense, punishable with up to six months in prison, a fine of up to $1,000, or both.
“The use of drones has increased dramatically in recent years for a variety of purposes,” Sarlo said in a statement. “There are many benefits for commercial and recreational purposes but they can also pose threats to safety, security and privacy. The technology has outpaced regulations.”
The Senate and Budget and Appropriations Committee unanimously advanced the bill on Monday.
State lawmakers have tried before to regulate drones, namely to impose limits and rules on law enforcement agencies using the aircraft. One plan that twice passed the Legislature would have required police to get a warrant before using the aerial vehicles to conduct surveillance. Gov. Chris Christie twice pocket vetoed the legislation, meaning he let it expire without taking action, most recently in January 2016.
The latest bill, S-3370, deals with civilian, not law enforcement, use of drones. The measure would make it a fourth-degree crime to endanger the security of a correctional facility or interfere with first responders. That would be punishable by up to 18 months in prison, a $10,000 fine, or both.
Conducting surveillance of a correctional facility would be a third-degree crime, punishable by three to five years in prison, up to a $15,000 fine, or both. Using a drone to bypass a restraining order would be a violation, too.
Drones are rapidly growing in popularity and are easily available at retail stores. The Consumer Technology Association, a trade organization for the electronics industry, estimates that total drone sales in the United States will reach 3.4 million units in 2017.
“The Federal Aviation Administration regulates drones used near airports or that could interfere with airspace routes and the U.S. Department of Transportation regulates the use of commercial drones, but there are no statewide rules in place to cover their more expansive use in communities,” Sarlo said. “There are more unmanned drones in the country than piloted aircraft.”
Some New Jersey towns already have drone laws on the books, according to Senate Democrats. Provisions of the Senate bill would preempt any law, ordinance, resolution or regulation adopted by local governing bodies.
A companion bill has not been introduced in the Assembly, and even if it were, and it passed, there is no indication Christie would sign it before leaving office Jan. 16. Without the governor’s signature, the bill would expire and would have to be reintroduced at the beginning of the new legislative session in January, when Governor-elect Phil Murphy is set to take office.In an attempt to woo both kids and their TV-watching, Internet-surfing parents, Sesame Street does a lot of timely pop culture parodies, from a Grover-centric take on Game Of Thrones to “Star S’Mores,” which is exactly what it sounds like. The show’s latest, “The Aveggies: Age Of Bon Bon,” is especially smart, with Onion Man, Captain Americauliflower, Dr. Brownie, Black Bean Widow, Zuchin-Eye, and the Mighty Corn taking on the evil Bon Bon and his giant flying cookie ship. With tasty looking s’mores, cotton candy, and chocolate chips sprinkled throughout, the pro-veggie parody might not do the best job at getting viewing kids to eat their vegetables, but it’s smart and funny, especially for fans with a rough sense of Avengers lore. With swipes at both Captain Americauliflower’s vanity and Zuchin-eye’s uselessness, it’s packed with in jokes and adult-centric asides. There’s even a shawarma joke at the end.
AdvertisementFull text of "Investigation of Communist activities in the Los Angeles area. Hearings"
■•f"ff INVESTIGATION OF COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA-PART 7 c HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES EIGHTY-THIRD CONGRESS FIRST SESSION SEPTEMBER 4, 1953 Printed for the use of the Committee on Un-American Activities INCLUDING INDEX UNITED STATES UOVEKNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 31747 WASHINGTON : 1953 Boston Public Library Superintendent of Documents H NOV 4 1S53 COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES United States House of Representatives HAROLD H. VELDE, Illinois, Chairman BERNARD W. KEARNEY, New York FRANCIS E. WALTER, Pennsylvania DONALD L. JACKSON, California MORGAN M. MOULDER, Missouri KIT CLARDY, Michigan CLYDE DOYLE, California GORDON H. SCHERER, Ohio JAMES B. FRAZIER, Jr., Tennessee Robert L. Kunzig, Counsel Frank S. Tavenner, Jr., Counsel Louis J. Russell, Chief Investigator Thomas W. Beale, Sr., Chief Clerk Raphael I. Nixon, Director of Research II CONTENTS September 4, 1953 : Statement of— Page Lucille Desiree Ball Arnaz 2561 Desiree E. Ball 2572 Fred Henry Ball—- 2577 Index 2583 in Public Law 601, 79th Congress The legislation under which the House Committee on Un-American Activities operates is Public Law 601, 79th Congress [1946], chapter 753, 2d session, which provides : Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, * * * PART 2— RULES OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Rule X SEC. 121. STANDING COMMITTEES ******* 17. Committee on Un-American Activities, to consist of nine members. Rtjle XI POWERS AND DUTIES OF COMMITTEES (q) (1) Commitee on Un-American Activities. (A) Un-American activities. (2) The Committee on Un-American Activities, as a whole or by subcommit- tee, is authorized to make from time to time investigations of (i) the extent, character, and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the United States, (ii) the diffusion within the United States of subversive and un-American propa- ganda that is instigated from foreign countries or of a domestic origin and attacks the principle of the form of government as guaranteed by our Constitution, and (iii) all other questions in relation thereto that would aid Congress in any neces- sary remedial legislation. The Committee on Un-American Activities shall report to the House (or to the Clerk of the House if the House is not in session) the results of any such investi- gation, together with such recommendations as it deems advisable. For the purpose of any such investigation, the Committee on Un-American Activities, or any subcommittee thereof, is authorized to sit and act at such times and places within the United States, whether or not the House is sitting, has recessed, or has adjourned, to hold such hearings, to require the attendance of such witnesses and the production of such books, papers, and documents, and to take such testimony, as it deems necessary. Subpenas may be issued under the signature of the chairman of the committee or any subcommittee, or by any member designated by any such chairman, and may be served by any person designated by any such chairman or member. RULES ADOPTED BY THE 83d CONGRESS House Resolution 5, January 3, 1953 ******* Rule X STANDING COMMITTEES 1. There shall be elected by the House, at the commencement of each Con- gress, the following standing committees : ******* (q) Committee on Un-American Activities, to consist of nine members. ******* Rule XI POWERS AND DUTIES OF COMMITTEES ******* 17. Committee on Un-American Activities. (a) Un-American Activities. (b) The Committee on Un-American Activities, as a whole or by subcommittee, is authorized to make from time to time, investigations of (1) the extent, char- acter, and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the United States, (2) the diffusion within the United States of subversive and un-American prop- aganda that is instigated from foreign countries or of a domestic origin and attacks the principle of the form of government as guaranteed by our Constitu- tion, and (3) all other questions in relation thereto that would aid Congress in any necessary remedial legislation. The Committee on Un-American Activities shall report to the House (or to the Clerk of the House if the House is not in session) the results of any such investi- gation, together with such recommendations as it deems advisable. For the purpose of any such investigation, the Committee on Un-American Activities, or any subcommittee thereof, is authorized to sit and act at such times and places within the United States, whether or not the House is sitting, has recessed, or has adjourned, to hold such hearings, to require the attendance of such witnesses and the production of such books, papers, and documents, and to take such testimony as it deems necessary. Subpenas may be issued under the signature of the chairman of the committee or any subcommittee, or by any member designated by such chairman, and may be served by any person desig- nated by any such chairman or member. VI INVESTIGATION OF COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA— PAET 7 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1953 United States House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, Hollywood, Calif. executive statements x Executive statements, given September 4, 1953, at room 512, 7046 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, Calif., commencing at 2 p. m. Present : William A. Wheeler, investigator. TESTIMONY OF LUCILLE DESIREE BALL AKNAZ (The witness, having been previously duly sworn, testified as follows:) Mr. Wheeler. State your full name, please. Miss Ball. Lucille Desiree Ball Arnaz. Mr. Wheeler. Where were you born? Miss Ball. Jamestown, N. Y. Mr. Wheeler. You are presently a resident of Los Angeles County? Miss Ball. Yes. Mr. Wheeler. And your profession? Miss Ball. Actress ; television actress now. Mr. Wheeler. How long have you been engaged as an actress? Miss Ball. Since 1933, 1 guess; 1932 or 1933. Mr. Wheeler. What is your educational background? Miss Ball. Just school, high school. Mr. Wheeler. Are you here under subpena or are you appearing voluntarily? Miss Ball. I am appearing voluntarily. Mr. Wheeler. You graduated from high school? Miss Ball. No ; I didn't even graduate. Mr. Wheeler. You have been employed in motion-picture work since that time, since you left school? Miss Ball. No ; I was in New York working. Mr. Wheeler. How long have you been a resident here? Miss Ball. 1933. Mr. Wheeler. You have pursued acting since that time? Miss Ball. Yes. Mr. Wheeler. For whom have you worked in the studios? 1 By direction of the chairman and members of the Committee on Un-American Activities, the following executive statements have been printed for release. 2561 2562 COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA Miss Ball. Goldwyn and Columbia and RKO and Paramount and M-G-M. Mr. Wheeler. Where were you employed in 1936? Miss Ball. It was, I think, RKO. It might have been Columbia. Mr. Wheeler. What was your salary bracket in 1936, approxi- mately? Miss Ball. Well, if it was at Columbia I was getting $75 a week. If it was RKO I was getting $50. Mr. Wheeler. Did you have any screen credits about that time? Miss Ball. I might have been getting more in 1936, maybe $75. No screen credits. Maybe a bit part here and there. I doubt that, even, in 1936 ; possibly a bit part. Mr. Wheeler. Did you ever reside at 1344 North Ogden Drive? Miss Ball. Yes. Mr. Wheeler. Who owned that residence? Miss Ball. We rented it. I don't remember who owned it. Mr. Wheeler. When did you first register to vote? Miss Ball. I guess the first time I ever did was in 1936. Mr. Wheeler. I would like to hand you a photostatic copy of a voter's registration and ask you if that is your signature. Miss Ball. That looks like my handwriting. Mr. Wheeler. You will note that the party that you intended to affiliate with at that time was the Communist Party. Miss Ball. In 1936? Mr. Wheeler. Yes. Miss Ball. I guess so. Mr. Wheeler. You did register to vote then as a Communist or intending to vote the Communist Party ticket? Miss Ball. Yes. Mr. Wheeler. Would you go into detail and explain the back- ground, the reason you voted or registered to vote as a Communist or person who intended to affiliate with the Communist Party? Miss Ball. It was our grandfather, Fred Hunt. He just wanted us to, and we just did something to please him. I didn't intend to vote that way. As I recall, I didn't. My grandfather started years ago — he was a Socialist as long as I can remember. He is the only father we ever knew, my grand- father. My father died when I was tiny, before my brother was born. He was my brother's only father. All through his life he had been a Socialist, as far back as Eugene V. Debs, and he was in sympathy with the workingman as long as I have known, and he took the Daily Worker. It never meant much to us, because he was so radical on the subject that he pressed his point a little too much, actually, probably, during our childhood, because he finally got over our heads and we didn't do anything but consider it a nuisance, but as a dad, and he got into his seventies, and it became so vital to him that the world must be right 24 hours a day, all over it, and he was trying his damnedest to do the best he could for everybody and especially the workingman ; that is, for the garbageman, the maid in the kitchen, the studio worker, the factory worker. He never lost a chance to do what he considered bettering their positions. That was fine, and we went along with it wherever we could. Some- times it got a little ridiculous because my position in the so-called COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA 2563 capitalist world was pretty good and it was a little hard to reconcile the two. We didn't argue with him very much because he had had a couple of strokes and if he got overly excited, why, he would have another one. So finally there came a point where my brother was 21, and he was going to see that Freddie registered to help the workingman, which was, in his idea then, the Communist Party. At that time it wasn't a thing to hide behind doors, to be a member of that party. As I recall, because of this he influenced us. We thought we wanted to do him a favor. We thought we could make him happy. I at no time intended to vote that way. And I remember discussing it with my mother, how I could register and make him happy. When I go behind a curtain to vote, nobody knows whom I vote for. He also considered it a personal victory at the time — that he had the entire family to register. He didn't influence us enough at any time to vote ; at least, he didn't influence me. He influenced us to give a great deal of thought to whether he was right or wrong, and we always decided he was wrong, because the things he was shouting about didn't seem to be practical for this country. He admired the workingman and the peasants all over the world, the 5-year plan and anything that was great for the working- man. Mr. Wheeler. He considered the Communist Party as a working- man's party? Miss Bale. That is all I ever heard. I never heard my grand- father use the word "Communist." He never said that he read the Daily Worker. He always talked about the workingman. He got very confused in his latter years, when Russia and — who got together? — Russia and Germany got together and he got so lie couldn't answer our questions at all then. And he would get mad and change the subject. He never quite could find out what had hap- pened to the workingman after that, I guess. We were never able to keep a maid, although we paid the highest prices we could afford or they were getting at the time. My grand- father would walk out into the kitchen and see a maid and would say, "Well, what is your name? How much are you getting?" "Oh, $20 or $25 a week," or whatever they were being paid. And he would say, "That is not a working wage. What are you doing here? And after a few times of that, you know, they would leave. That is just one instance. He was always talking to the garbageman early in the morning, or anybody doing any kind of a menial task. He would say, "Why are you doing that? Why aren't you doing something else?" He was just a fanatic on bettering the world. That is as far as we knew, and that is why we could endorse it at all. Mr. Wheeler. Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Miss Ball. No ; not to my knowledge. Mr. Wheeler. Have you ever been asked to become a member of the Communist Party? Miss Ball. No. 31747— 53— pt. 7 2 2564 COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA Mr. Wheeler. Did you ever attend any meetings that you later discovered were Communist Party meetings? Miss Ball. No. Mr. Wheeler. Do you know whether or not any meetings were ever held in your home at 1344 North Ogden Drive? Miss Ball. No, I know nothing of that. I don't believe it is true. Mr. Wheeler. How old were you in 1936. Miss Ball. I am 42 now ; 24. Mr. Wheeler. I would like to introduce the affidavit of registra- tion as Lucille Ball Exhibit No. 1, Kegistration No. 847584. (The document referred to was marked "Lucille Ball Exhibit No. 1" and was received in evidence.) Mr. Wheeler. This affidavit of registration is signed by Lucille Ball and dated the 19th day of March 1936. Have you ever known an individual by the name of Emil Freed? Miss Ball. I never heard the name before, to my knowledge, as I recall. Mr. Wheeler. Have you ever known an individual by the name of Jacob or Jack Breger? Miss Ball. Not until I read it today. Mr. Wheeler. Are you aware that you were a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party for the year 1936? Miss Ball. Was I aware before you told me, you mean? Mr. Wheeler. Yes. Miss Ball. No. Mr. Wheeler. Well, I would like to hand you a document entitled "Appointment of Members of the State Central Committee Meeting at Sacramento in the Year 1936." It is stamped "Communist Party," and this document discloses that Emil Freed was a delegate by nomi- nation to the State Central Committee of the Communist Party for that year. And he appointed three individuals as delegates. Those appointed, according to the document, are Jacob Breger, 822 North Orange Drive ; Fred Hunt, 1344 North Ogden Drive ; and Lu- cille Ball, 1344 North Ogden Drive. Now, I would like to hand you this document and have you give any explanation that you desire. Miss Ball. I have no explanation. I haven't signed it. I don't know where it came from, or what. My name is misspelled. The address is right ; that is all. I don't know Emil Freed. I never heard of Emil Freed, and if Emil Freed appointed me as a delegate to the State central committee it was done without my knowledge or consent. Mr. Wheeler. I notice your grandfather, Fred Hunt, was also ap- pointed as a delegate for the year 1936. Were you aware of that? Miss Ball. No, I was not aware of it. Mr. Wheeler. Do you know who could be responsible for your name appearing on this document? Miss Ball. Possibly my grandfather, Fred Hunt. Mr. Wheeler. Do you recall if anyone contacted you in 1936 in regard to obtaining your proxy to vote? Miss Ball. No, except my grandfather. Is that what you mean? Mr. Wheeler. You stated that you were appointed without your knowledge or consent ; is that right? COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA 2565 Miss Ball. That is right. Mr. Wheeler. I assume you did not attend the meeting of the State central committee at Sacramento. Miss Ball. I didn't even know there was one. I still don't know what it means. Mr. Wheeler. Do you recall whether or not you were contacted by any individual to obtain from you your voting proxy at the central committee meeting in Sacramento? Miss Ball. Never. Mr. Wheeler. I will introduce this as Lucille Ball Exhibit No. 2. It is dated the 15th day of September 1936. Miss Ball. I should say never, to my knowledge. (The document referred to was marked "Lucille Ball Exhibit No. 2" and was received in evidence.) Mr. Wheeler. I might say, for the record, that the last document was obtained from the files of the secretary of state in Sacramento. Also, there is no record of the proxies filed by different delegates in the office of the secretary of state. I would like to refer to the report of the un-American Activities Committee in California for the year 1943, and refer to page 127 of that document, which is a portion of an affidavit submitted by Rena M. Vale. The affidavit begins on page 122 and continues through page 176, and bears the date of 23d day of November 1942. I would like to read a portion of page 127. In this affidavit she has admitted she was at one time a member of the Communist Party and she is discussing how she became a member. That within a few days after my third application to join the Communist Party was made, I received a notice to attend a meeting on North Ogden Drive, Hollywood ; although it was a typed, unsigned note, merely requesting my pres- ence at the address at 8 o'clock in the evening on a given day, I knew it was the long-awaited notice to attend Communist Party new members' classes ; That on arrival at this address I found several others present ; an elderly man informed us that we were the guests of the screen actress, Lucille Ball, and showed us various pictures, books, and other objects to establish that fact, and stated she was glad to loan her home for a Communist Party new members' class ; That the instructor introduced himself as Sidney Martin, but I later knew him by the name of Sidney Davidson, which he stated was his true name ; That there were about 7 or S other members of this class, but the only names I recall are those of Herb Harris, an actor, whom I encountered from time to time within the Communist Party, and who took part in the play, The Black- guard, which ran for several years in Los Angeles around 1938 and 1939 ; and Libby Jacobson, who, in 1939, was active in consumer cooperatives in Los Angeles. Do you have any knowledge of any meetings held in your home, Miss Ball? Miss Ball. None whatsoever. Mr. Wheeler. Are you acquainted with Kena Vale? Miss Ball. I never heard the name before in my life. Mr. Wheeler. Are you acquainted with or have you ever been acquainted with Sidney Martin or Sidney Davidson? Miss Ball. No, sir ; I never heard the name. Mr. Wheeler. Are you acquainted with or have you ever been acquainted with Herb Harris? Miss Ball. I never heard the name. Mr. Wheeler. Are you acquainted with Libby Jacobson? Miss Ball. I never heard that name. 2566 COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA Mr. Wheeler. Do you know whether or not your grandfather, Fred Hunt, held meetings at the home? Miss Ball. Not to our knowledge ever, and he was always with someone. As we look back now, we can't remember at any time he was ever alone, because he had had two strokes and we had a nurse that lived there at the time, and there was — he was never alone that we remember ; no evidence of any meeting ever held being in our house when we were out. This is something we knew nothing about. Mr. Wheeler. I also have a photostatic copy of an affidavit of registration for the year 1936 for Mrs. Desiree E. Ball, and it discloses that she also registered to vote as a person who intended to affiliate with the Communist Party on the 12th day of June 1936. What rela- tion is Desiree Ball to you? Miss Ball. My mother. Mr. Wheeler. Do you know whether or not she was ever a member of the Communist Party? Miss Ball. Not to my knowledge. Mr. Wheeler. I have a second photostat here, a voter's registration, signed by Fred E. Hunt, who also intended to affiliate with the Com- munist Party. Miss Ball. Fred E.Hunt? Mr. Wheeler. Well, it looks like an "E." What is his middle initial? Miss Ball. Fred C. Mr. Wheeler. Fred C. Hunt, rather. This document is dated the 12th day of June 1936, and also shows he changed the vote to Demo- crat on November 18, 1940. I believe you testified that Fred C. Hunt was your grandfather? Miss Ball. That is right. Mr. Wheeler. Is he living? Miss Ball. No. Mr. Wheeler. I have a third document here, a photostat of an affi- davit of registration, bearing the signature of Fred H. Ball, who intended to affiliate with the Communist Party in the ensuing election of 1936. It is also dated the 12th day of June 1936. What relation is Fred H. Ball to you? Miss Ball. Brother. Mr. Wheeler. Do you know whether or not he was ever a member of the Communist Party? Miss Ball. Not to my knowledge, nor to his. Mr. Wheeler. Where is your brother presently residing? Miss Ball. Scottsdale, Ariz. Mr. Wheeler. Do you know whether or not he has ever been inves- tigated by the Government or any agency or employer who does Gov- ernment contract work in regard to this Communist registration? Miss Ball. Yes ; he has. Mr. Wheeler. What was the outcome of this investigation? Miss Ball. He has always been cleared. Mr. Wheeler. You mean he retained his employment? Miss Ball. I think so. I don't know. He can tell you more about that. I don't think he has always retained his employment ; no. If during the war there was a hint of that suspicion, the investigation probably went on, but you didn't retain your employment. COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA 2567 Mr. Wheeler. I notice now that your mother and your brother and grandfather all registered on the 12th day of June to vote, and you registered on the 19th day of March. Is there any significance to that? Miss Ball. See, I didn't go. They were trying to recall to my mind where we might have registered, and I couldn't remember. Isn't this what he is talking about? I couldn't remember having gone down where they said they went. They said they went way downtown, where grandpa wanted us to go, way downtown near Main Street. I don't ever remember going down that far. I really racked my brain over a 17-year period, and all I remember was something like a garage and a flag, like a voting day. They said it didn't tie up for registration. I can't explain it. But that bears me out ; I didn't go on that trip. I don't know where I registered. I would have said, if I hadn't talked to you last year, that I voted. You said you had no record of my voting. I would have said I voted when I went in there. I remember feeling very foxy about the thing, because I registered.. We had a very bad feeling we had done that. 1 always felt I would! be all right if I didn't vote it, just to appease grandpa. Mr. Wheeler. The affidavit of registration discloses you voted in the primary for the year 1936. That would be, I assume, in June. However, you did not vote in the general election. Miss Ball. That could have been what I did there that morning. Mr. Wheeler. The deputy registrar of voters, who signed this docu- ment, is a Mrs. Dodd. Does she mean anything to you? Miss Ball. What did you say she was? Mr. Wheeler. Deputy registrar of voters. Miss Ball. No. Mr. Wheeler. She is the deputy registrar of voters. She would be the individual in whose presence you would sign that document. Well, now, the affidavit of registration on the reverse side discloses that you signed two petitions for the year 1936, the Freed nominating petition for the 57th assembly district or, rather, it is a sponsor certifi- cate. This document, was also obtained from the files of the secretary of state and I will introduce it in the record as Lucille Ball Exhibit 3. (The document referred to was marked "Lucille Ball Exhibit No. 3 r and was received in evidence.) Mr. Wheeler. I will read the following from the document : I, the undersigned, sponsor for Emil Freed for the Communist Party nomina- tion to the office of member of the assembly 57th district, to be voted for at the primary election to be held on the 25th day of August 1936, hereby assert as follows : My knowledge of the said Emil Freed is sufficient to warrant my urging his election to tbe office of member of the assembly 57th district and, in my opinion, he is fully qualified — mentally, morally, and physically — for the said office and should be elected to fill it. I am a qualified elector of Los Angeles County and I am registered as affiliated with the Communist Party and am not at this time a signer of any other certificate nominating any other candidate for the above- named office, or in case there are several places to be filled in tbe above-nain?d office, I have not signed more certificates than there are places to be filled in the above-named office. I would like to refer to the second page of this document, under line 23, and there appears the signature of Lucille Ball, 1344 Ogden Drive, and occupation, artist. It is dated June 16, 1936. Is that your signature [indicating]? 2568 COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN THE LOS ANGELES AREA Miss Ball. I would say it was. Mr. Wheeler. Do you recall signing the document? Miss Ball. No; but I recall at that time doing what I could to appease grandpa and this is just part of it. At that time it didn't probably seem very important to appoint this man. Mr. Wheeler. You will note what I read to you, that before sign- ing the document it states that you know the man, and he is morally, physically, and mentally qualified. Miss Ball. It is something I signed without looking at it, or if I looked at it, it didn't seem like a big thing at the time. Mr. Wheeler. I believe your grandfather's signature appears on there, as well as the whole family? Miss Ball. Yes, Fred, myself, and my mother, and my grand- father. My name appears on the second page of this document. Our names appear there. It is possible that this was handed to us just as a list of names, without the strong-sounding sponsor certificate on the front of it. I don't recall that I ever heard anything which right now sounds very strong, and impossible to sign at this day and age, but I might have because at that time I was of a mind to try to do something that would please daddy. It just didn't seem like an important, awful thing to do, like it does these days. But, to my knowledge, I didn't ever see the first part of this certificate I signed. Mr. Wheeler. Are you familiar with the words or the phrase "criminal syndicalism"? Miss Ball. No, but it is pretty. What does it mean? Mr. Wheeler. Criminal syndicalism? Miss Ball. What does |
both to aircraft and spacecraft. Aircraft could be diverted by air-traffic control restrictions. All objects in stable orbits that have perigee below the maximum altitude of the cable that are not synchronous with the cable would impact the cable eventually, unless avoiding action is taken. One potential solution proposed by Edwards is to use a movable anchor (a sea anchor) to allow the tether to "dodge" any space debris large enough to track.[2]
Impacts by space objects such as meteoroids, micrometeorites and orbiting man-made debris pose another design constraint on the cable. A cable would need to be designed to maneuver out of the way of debris, or absorb impacts of small debris without breaking.
Economics [ edit ]
With a space elevator, materials might be sent into orbit at a fraction of the current cost. As of 2000, conventional rocket designs cost about US$25,000 per kilogram (US$11,000 per pound) for transfer to geostationary orbit.[66] Current space elevator proposals envision payload prices starting as low as $220 per kilogram ($100 per pound),[67] similar to the $5–$300/kg estimates of the Launch loop, but higher than the $310/ton to 500 km orbit quoted[68] to Dr. Jerry Pournelle for an orbital airship system.
Philip Ragan, co-author of the book Leaving the Planet by Space Elevator, states that "The first country to deploy a space elevator will have a 95 percent cost advantage and could potentially control all space activities."[69]
International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC) [ edit ]
The International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC) is a US Non-Profit 501(c)(3) Corporation[70] formed to promote the development, construction, and operation of a space elevator as "a revolutionary and efficient way to space for all humanity"[71]. It was formed after the Space Elevator Conference in Redmond, Washington in July 2008 and became an affiliate organization with the National Space Society[72] in August 2013[71]. ISEC hosts an annual Space Elevator conference at the Seattle Museum of Flight [73][74][75].
ISEC coordinates with the two other major societies focusing on space elevators: the Japanese Space Elevator Association[76] and EuroSpaceward.[77] ISEC supports symposia and presentations at the International Academy of Astronautics[78] and the International Astronautical Federation Congress[79] each year. The organization published two issues of a peer-reviewed journal on space elevators called "CLIMB"[71][80][81] and a magazine "Via Ad Astra"[82].
ISEC also conducts one-year studies focusing on individual topics. The process involves experts for one year of discussions on the topic of choice and culminates in a draft report that is presented and reviewed at the ISEC Space Elevator conference workshop to allow input from space elevator enthusiasts and other experts. Study Reports are usually published early the following year, to date these are as follows : [83]
2010 - Space Elevator Survivability, Space Debris Mitigation [36]
2012 - Space Elevator Concept of Operations [84]
2013 - Design Consideration for Space Elevator Tether Climbers [85],
, 2014 - Space Elevator Architectures and Roadmaps [86]
2015 - Design Characteristics of a Space Elevator Earth Port [87]
2016 - Design Considerations for the Space Elevator Apex Anchor and GEO Node [88]
2017 - Design Considerations for a Software Space Elevator Simulator [89]
2018 - Design Considerations for the Multi-Stage Space Elevator [90]
Related concepts [ edit ]
The conventional current concept of a "Space Elevator" has evolved from a static compressive structure reaching to the level of GEO, to the modern baseline idea of a static tensile structure anchored to the ground and extending to well above the level of GEO. In the current usage by practitioners (and in this article), a "Space Elevator" means the Tsiolkovsky-Artsutanov-Pearson type as considered by the International Space Elevator Consortium. This conventional type is a static structure fixed to the ground and extending into space high enough that cargo can climb the structure up from the ground to a level where simple release will put the cargo into an orbit.[91]
Some concepts related to this modern baseline are not usually termed a "Space Elevator", but are similar in some way and are sometimes termed "Space Elevator" by their proponents. For example, Hans Moravec published an article in 1977 called "A Non-Synchronous Orbital Skyhook" describing a concept using a rotating cable.[92] The rotation speed would exactly match the orbital speed in such a way that the tip velocity at the lowest point was zero compared to the object to be "elevated". It would dynamically grapple and then "elevate" high flying objects to orbit or low orbiting objects to higher orbit.
The original concept envisioned by Tsiolkovsky was a compression structure, a concept similar to an aerial mast. While such structures might reach space (100 km, 62 mi), they are unlikely to reach geostationary orbit. The concept of a Tsiolkovsky tower combined with a classic space elevator cable (reaching above the level of GEO) has been suggested.[11] Other ideas use very tall compressive towers to reduce the demands on launch vehicles.[93] The vehicle is "elevated" up the tower, which may extend as high as above the atmosphere, and is launched from the top. Such a tall tower to access near-space altitudes of 20 km (12 mi) has been proposed by various researchers.[93][94][95]
Other concepts for non-rocket spacelaunch related to a space elevator (or parts of a space elevator) include an orbital ring, a pneumatic space tower,[96] a space fountain, a launch loop, a skyhook, a space tether, and a buoyant "SpaceShaft".[97]
References [ edit ]Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Aerial footage shows Haxby house explosion devastation
A man died in a huge explosion, believed to be a gas blast, that destroyed a house in North Yorkshire.
Police believe the victim, named locally as Paul Wilmott, 63, was the resident of the detached property in Haxby, near York.
Only a pile of rubble remains where the house once stood. About 12 nearby homes were also damaged, police said.
Neighbour Brett Duncan, who was one of the first on the scene, said: "It was like an aeroplane had hit the house."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Dan Johnson : "There is very little left that is recognisable"
'Debris across road'
Insp Steve Breen, from North Yorkshire Police, said: "I have to confirm there has been one casualty, a 63-year-old man found dead in the debris.
"The identity is not confirmed as yet but we think we know who he is and we are currently speaking with his family, trying to console them."
He said the cause of the explosion in Springwood, Haxby, which happened at about 07:30 GMT, was still under investigation but was not thought to be suspicious and was being treated as an accident.
Image caption Only a pile of debris remains where the detached house once stood
"What we found was a house completely demolished, with debris strewn across the road and gardens, and substantial damage to neighbouring properties," Insp Breen added.
He said the force was working with structural engineers to access damage to neighbouring properties but expected to lift the cordon and allow people to return to their homes later on Friday afternoon.
"Hopefully, we can help people get back to some degree of normality but for some people, whose houses have been dreadfully badly damaged, that will take some time," he said.
Stuart Simpson, from North Yorkshire Fire Service, said his officers' focus had been on ensuring the safety of neighbouring properties.
'Garage gone'
"It's literally a pile of rubble at the moment. The actual property yes, it's a dangerous site to be working on, but on the actual property there's no further risk of collapse on that one.
"It's the buildings either side that we're concerned with. It has all the signs of a gas explosion but we just can't confirm that until we get the investigation under way."
Peter Hurst, whose father lives next door to the blast site, said: "He woke up to a loud bang this morning. All the windows are caved in, the car gone, the garage gone, the back door gone.
Image copyright John Giles/PA Image caption The blast caused significant damage to neighbouring properties
Image caption Police said properties immediately adjacent to the destroyed house had been very badly damaged
"He is all right but is very shaken up and does not want to talk about things. His bedroom backed on to the house."
Neighbour Brett Duncan said it was a chaotic scene.
"All of the car alarms were sounding, I saw debris across the street. I ran up the street and saw a pile of rubble, it was shocking.
"There was no smoke or fire at that point. Me and another gentleman just shouted for everyone to evacuate the street and that's when the smoke started, it then caught fire."
Paul Foster, who lives about 150 yards (140m) from the scene, said: "There was a massive bang and the whole house shook.
Image copyright Rob Varley Image caption There were reports of a loud bang at about 07:30 GMT
"I looked out of the window and at first I couldn't see anything, I thought an aircraft could have come down. There was a large plume of smoke coming up."
Properties adjacent to the destroyed house have suffered damaged windows, roofs and garages.
Windows at St Margaret Clitherow Church on Holly Tree Lane and the presbytery are also understood to have been damaged.
Image caption The explosion happened in a quiet residential area in Springwood, Haxby
Marie, who lives nearby, told BBC Radio York: "It was such a large jolt and noise.
"We were living down south when the Buncefield oil storage depot exploded off the M1 and it felt exactly the same, it was just a boom."
Another neighbour reported that the blast sounded "like a bomb going off".
Members of the public are being urged to stay indoors but police say they "do not believe there is a risk to general public".
'Nothing left'
Tony Richardson, a councillor on Haxby Town Council, said: "The house is completely gone.
"At the present time we believe five houses have been evacuated.
"We don't know if other houses need to be evacuated until we know the cause, we are yet to establish that yet."
A rest centre has been established at the nearby Memorial Hall for residents requiring help.
"There's just nothing left," said Rob Varley on Twitter.Andre Marriner, who awarded Chelsea a controversial penalty against West Bromwich Albion last week, will officiate in the Premier League this weekend despite an acceptance within refereeing circles that he had erred in giving the stoppage time spot-kick.
Ramires had gone down after contact with the visiting defender Steven Reid with Marriner's view of the incident having suggested the full-back caught the Brazilian's back leg to knock him off-balance. Replays have since indicated the clash was a collision rather than a foul, with Marriner and Mike Riley, head of the Professional Game Match Officials' Limited, conceding the referee should have played on rather than awarding the penalty.
"I can understand why Andre gave it when you consider what he saw at the time," said Riley. "He thinks he sees Ramires getting in front of Reid and that there is contact, the defender catching his back leg to make him off-balance without playing the ball, so it's a penalty. You can see Marriner thinking to himself: this is what I've seen, pausing to replay it in mind, and then giving the penalty. But he should have played on. Watching the incident again, you can make a case for simulation because Ramires changes body angle. The truth is only Ramires truly knows [whether he dived]."
The penalty, converted by Eden Hazard, allowed Chelsea to extend their unbeaten home record under Jose Mourinho in the Premier League to 66 matches and prompted criticism from the West Brom manager, Steve Clarke, and a furious reaction from his players. Yet Marriner will still officiate Fulham's home game against Swansea City on Saturday. In contrast his fellow referee Robert Madley, who awarded Stoke a late penalty in the 3-3 draw at Swansea for handball against Wayne Routledge, will not officiate this weekend. The Welsh club's manager, Michael Laudrup, later claimed Madley owed him and his players an apology.
Incidents of simulation are actually significantly down on this time last year when a flurry of early season controversies had prompted calls from within the game for players to eradicate diving. "We think there have been six simulation offences this season whereas, this time last year, there had been 19 offences," said Riley. "Players and managers saw the moral imperative to stamp it out: the Professional Footballers' Association said 'don't dive', managers like Sir Alex Ferguson said it was unacceptable, as David Moyes has this season.
"So we've seen a drop off in simulation offences. We should be proud it's not an accepted part of our game. Players say it is not acceptable. Supporters say it is not acceptable. The moral imperative is on players not to get involved in it, and the onus is on players not to do it. Of course, there have been some bookings for dives which aren't dives, such as that of Gareth Bale at Fulham last season when he was trying to avoid a tackle (from Steve Sidwell)."
The incidents that have occurred have prompted calls for the introduction of retrospective punishment for simulation. "But it would have to be enforceable," added Riley. "Five years ago Italy had it, retrospective action for diving, but the policy was disbanded after three weeks. They stopped it because nobody could agree what was and what wasn't a dive. There have been incidents where action has been taken in Australia and Scotland, but Fifa's position is you cannot take retrospective action in this regard."It’s getting hard to keep track of all the government regulations that stemmed from the last financial crisis and are still working their way through banks and other financial institutions.
So Republican SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher charted it.
“We as regulators are, when it comes to the possibility that our rules are causing death by a thousand cuts, the proverbial ostrich—head firmly entrenched in the sand,” Gallagher wrote in a statement this week that accompanied an intricate chart he presented at an annual bankers conference. “I hope this stark depiction can spark a much-needed debate about the regulatory burden that has been placed on our financial services industry.”
Gallagher is arguing that the regulatory burdens are driving capital away out of the economy, creating bigger barriers for new financial services companies to start up and further entrenching the mega banks.
Everyone can agree the onslaught of Wall Street regulations are overwhelming. But as lawsuits, market manipulation scandals and government investigations continue, it remains to be seen if the regulations are working to make the banks safer.The Super Bowl is just 39 days away. Let’s look at the Super Bowl from 39 years ago to honor this not that significant occasion!
Miami’s Orange Bowl hosted Super Bowl XIII on January 21, 1979. The game pitted the NFC champion Dallas Cowboys against the Pittsburgh Steelers of the American Football Conference. The public looked forward to this match up with keen anticipation. These were not just the best teams in football, but the two most popular teams. Terry Bradshaw, Roger Staubach, Tom Landry, and “Mean” Joe Greene were as famous as President Carter in 1979.
Both teams had been there before. In fact, the winner would become the first three-time champion. It was 1978 when Dallas was first called, “America’s Team.” But, there were far more Steelers’ fans in attendance at Super Bowl XIII.
Dallas Cowboys 39 Years Ago
The Cowboys won Super Bowl XII behind the brilliance of Tony Dorsett, an innovative offense and a top-notch pass rush. During the first half of the season, the Cowboys were inconsistent. They battled with the Rams for top seed in the NFC playoffs. Dallas got hot late in the season to the tune of six straight wins.
There were five playoff teams per conference for the first time in 1978. Thus, Dallas hosted the Wild-Card winning Falcons in the divisional round. Atlanta led by defensive coordinator Jerry Glanville came to play. Their famed “Gritz Blitz” defense hounded Staubach in the first half. The clubs went to the break with Atlanta leading, 20-13. The Cowboys came back with 14 unanswered in the 2nd half due to picking off Steve Bartkowski three times.
The Cowboys next would play at the LA Coliseum against the Rams. The game was scoreless until the closing seconds of the third quarter. Then, Doomsday took over. The Rams turned the ball over 5 times in the second half leading to 28 Cowboys’ points. The last points were scored by Hollywood Henderson on an interception return.
Pittsburgh Steelers 39 Years Ago
Pittsburgh came into Super Bowl XIII with a 14-2 regular season record. While their earlier championship teams thrived due to their running game and Steel Curtain defense, the ’78 squad was about the passing attack. Bradshaw with his rifle could hit Lynn Swann and John Stallworth from any spot on the field. This wide open aerial attack made the Steelers’ brand as exciting as the Cowboys.
In the playoffs, Pittsburgh played a dominant second half against Denver and tremendous first half against Houston. In the AFC championship game, they stifled Earl Campbell and the Oilers in the cold, wet conditions of Three Rivers Stadium. It was on to beautiful Miami and a date with Dallas.
First Half Excitement
The Cowboys received the ball first. Dorsett sprung three chunk plays on the opening possession. The drive stalled when Dallas tried an ill-fated reverse. Drew Pearson’s fumble led to a Steelers’ scoring drive on an incredible pass from Bradshaw to Stallworth.
The Steelers sacked Staubach twice in the 1st quarter, but Dallas responded with two takeaways. On the final play of the first quarter, Staubach found a wide-open Tony Hill for the tying TD.
Just two minutes later and the Steelers turned the ball for a third straight possession. Mike Hegman robbed Bradshaw of the ball and scored. It took just three plays for Pittsburgh to respond. On a simple slant, Stallworth made the reception, made a move and a made a 75-yard score.
This first half could not have been any more exciting. Big play after big play! Mel Blount intercepted Staubach late in the first half leading to an acrobatic score by Rocky Bleier and a 7-point halftime lead for Pittsburgh.
Super Steelers
Dallas dominated the third quarter, but could not punch it in the end zone. Veteran tight end Jackie Smith dropped a pass that would have tied the score. Verne Lundquist uttered, “Bless his heart, he’s got to be the sickest man in America.” It was a cruel turning point for the Cowboys.
The Steelers took over from there. They got a controversial PI, a run up the middle by Harris when the referee wiped out a would-be tackler and a fumble by Randy White on a squib kickoff. All those shenanigans led to gorgeous catch by Lynn Swann for a touchdown and a seemingly insurmountable 35-17 lead.
Dallas was relentless in their come back efforts registering two late scores. But, their last onside kick was secured by the Steelers with 22 seconds left. Pittsburgh prevailed 35-31 in a fantastic game.
The Steelers would be back to repeat as champions in 1979. The Cowboys would knock at the door for the next four seasons, but knock get back to the Super Bowl until the 1990’s. Tom Landry’s team participated in 5 of the first thirteen Super Bowls and had nothing to be ashamed of. However, the Steelers of the ‘70’s were a cut above. They were the team of the decade.
Brandon Fazzolari is a Super Bowl expert…@spot_BillsFujifilm FinePix X100 Highlights
Custom 12.3-megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor
The FinePix X100 features a custom 12.3-megapixel APS-C CMOS high-performance sensor, internally optimized and developed exclusively for this model. Optimization of the angle-of-incidence in conjunction with the specially developed lens maximizes light gathering efficiency extending to the perimeter of the sensor for a sharper image with exceptional clarity. When shooting HD movies, the combination of the large-sized sensor and the large aperture F2 lens, lets users create a soft out-of-focus image--a capability not available in conventional compact cameras. The ideal combination of a fixed focal length lens, high-sensitivity sensor (approximately 10 times the sensitivity of a conventional compact*) and a high-performance image processor captures extremely high quality images from low sensitivity to high sensitivity. In standard form, the planned ISO range is from 200 to 6400, but this can be expanded to include 100 and 12800.
The newly developed EXR Processor takes EXR processing to new heights. Combined with the high-sensitivity sensor, the EXR Processor achieves the highest resolution, sensitivity and dynamic range ever produced by a FinePix digital camera for the ultimate in image quality. The high-speed CMOS sensor read-out and the EXR Processor's enhanced focusing system contribute to the high-speed AF performance, while the combination of the optical viewfinder and extremely low shutter lag time enhance the image capture experience.
EVF/OVF Focus Area : The FinePix X100 offers users the choice between the 49-point auto EVF focus area or the 25-point OVF auto focus area as well as the selection of 5 different focus area sizes in EVF mode. Depending on the needs of each scene, the FinePix X100 offers easy focusing by design.
: The FinePix X100 offers users the choice between the 49-point auto EVF focus area or the 25-point OVF auto focus area as well as the selection of 5 different focus area sizes in EVF mode. Depending on the needs of each scene, the FinePix X100 offers easy focusing by design. HD Movie mode : Lets users capture the action in 720p high-definition detail. Just like taking still photos, users can capture movies with aperture-priority AE and enjoy a soft, defocused background effect. In addition, the built-in HDMI Mini connector allows users to easily and directly connect the FinePix X100 to high-definition TVs for showing stills and movies with plug-and-play ease.
: Lets users capture the action in 720p high-definition detail. Just like taking still photos, users can capture movies with aperture-priority AE and enjoy a soft, defocused background effect. In addition, the built-in HDMI Mini connector allows users to easily and directly connect the FinePix X100 to high-definition TVs for showing stills and movies with plug-and-play ease. Motion Panorama : With the built-in Motion Panorama function, it is easy to capture 180? and 120? panoramic photos. Later users can print the results as pin-sharp A3-size (11.7" X 16.5") enlargements and share the enjoyment of high-quality panoramic photography.
: With the built-in Motion Panorama function, it is easy to capture 180? and 120? panoramic photos. Later users can print the results as pin-sharp A3-size (11.7" X 16.5") enlargements and share the enjoyment of high-quality panoramic photography. Multi-Bracketing Functions: The FinePix X100 has four types of bracketing functions: AE, ISO, Dynamic Range and Film Simulation. One click of the shutter captures 3 bracketed images of the scene so the photographer knows he's captured the moment. Star Quality--Premium Accessory Lineup
The FinePix X100 comes with a new Fujinon non-collapsible lens structure that expands the realm of photographic expression with sharper resolution from the center to the corners. It has a 23mm (135 equivalent: 35mm) F2 lens, with eight elements in six groups. One aspherical glass molded lens. The adoption of the non-collapsible lens structure with minimized lens length not only contributes to the compact size, but also eliminates telescoping of the lens when the power is on. It's ready to start taking photos the moment the user turns it on. In addition, the lens features not only the large F2 aperture value, but also an optical architecture that maintains a high degree of resolution even when closed by 1 to 2 stops. The adoption of a 9-blade aperture diaphragm combined with the large F2 aperture and high-quality optics lets users take photos with a beautiful circular soft out-of-focus (bokeh) effect. With macro shooting capability as close as four inches, users can explore the fun and fascination of close-up photography. The built-in ND filter (equivalent f-stop reduction of three) can be switched ON/OFF via simple in-camera settings.The true enjoyment of photography begins with the thrill of seeing the world through a viewfinder. The new Hybrid Viewfinder has been developed to reintroduce users to this essential camera experience. It combines the window-type "bright frame" optical viewfinder found in rangefinder-type film cameras such as the classic 135-size or medium-format cameras, with the electronic viewfinder system incorporated in most compact or mirrorless digital cameras. By integrating a prism for the 1,440,000 dot LCD panel image on the viewing screen in the reverse-Galilean optical finder, the Hybrid Viewfinder can show both the shooting frame and a variety of electronic shooting data. It can also be used as a high-quality electronic viewfinder to compose or playback shots. With this ability to instantly switch between optical and electronic viewfinder modes using the simple "one touch" control, the new Hybrid Viewfinder offers users expanded freedom in the composition and enjoyment of photography in a wide range of challenging shooting conditions.The reverse Galilean optical finder with a 0.5x magnification features all-glass elements made from high-refractive index glass and demonstrates low chromatic aberration and distortion.In optical viewfinder (OVF) mode, the brightness of both the "bright frame" and text data is automatically adjusted according to the brightness of scene area, ensuring that shooting information is always easily and clearly viewable. Also, the displayed shooting data is constantly updated according to changes in shutter speed, exposure, sensitivity and other settings, so that the user's eye never has to leave the viewfinder. In electronic viewfinder (EVF) mode, the photographer can preview the picture or playback the result with the "through the sensor" image review and high-resolution 1,440,000-dot quality. With a flick of the one-touch lever, the user can switch to EVF to preview and confirm exposure settings, depth-of-field, and white balance--an especially useful capability when shooting macro shots and other scenes that are hard to confirm with only an optical viewfinder.The FinePix X100 features a beautiful, high-quality design inspired by the classic look and feel of traditional film cameras. The top cover of the upper control deck and the bottom surface have been die-cast from magnesium alloy (semi-solid metal casting), contributing to a high-precision camera body. All dials and rings are precision milled from metal. The ergonomics of the design offer the perfect balance between compact convenience and user-friendly functionality. Traditional'manual' dials lets the user confirm the position of the settings without turning on the power. The camera's controls have been carefully thought out to give the photographer simple and speedy access to aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation, etc, allowing maximum creative expression with minimum hassle and enabling the user to view settings--even when the power of the camera is turned off. Custom modes can also be accessed with a one-touch settings change. The chassis has been finished with high-quality leather-like accents and is both a delight to use and a pleasure to hold.Capturing the scene in RAW format is easy with just a press of the readily accessible RAW Button on the back of the camera. Photographers can use the built-in RAW Development function to process the RAW data in-camera using the camera's image quality settings. In addition to Fujifilm's original Film Simulation Modes that give photos the distinctive look of Velvia, PROVIA and ASTIA color reversal film emulsions, X100 expands the scope of photo expression with Monochrome Mode that can be fine-tuned with R/Ye/G filter settings. Separate adjustment of shadow tones and highlight tones lets users reproduce the rich tonality of high-contrast subjects.
Product DescriptionBOSTON – A Dominican national was sentenced yesterday in federal court in Boston in connection with trafficking heroin and fentanyl in Taunton and surrounding communities.
Manuel Romero-Gonsalez, aka Pablo, 40, who previously resided in Providence, was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. to 66 months in prison and three years of supervised release. Romero-Gonsalez will face removal proceedings following the completion of his federal sentence. In January 2017, Romero-Gonsalez pleaded guilty to a superseding indictment charging him with conspiracy to possess with the intent to distribute and distribution of heroin and fentanyl.
In October 2015, Romero-Gonsalez was arrested and charged along with 24 others in connection with a heroin trafficking ring operating in southeastern Massachusetts; an April 2016 superseding indictment brought the number of defendants charged in the case to 26. These charges are the result of a 15-month investigation into heroin and fentanyl trafficking in Taunton, Mass., and surrounding communities, which have seen a steep increase in overdoses and related deaths since 2013. Romero-Gonsalez worked with his brother, Francis Gonsalez-Romero, his sister, Maria Elena Ocasio, Cory Nickerson and William Rodriguez to buy and sell heroin and occasionally fentanyl.
Seventeen of the 26 defendants charged in the superseding indictment have pleaded guilty (including Gonsalez-Romero, Ocasio, Nickerson and Rodriguez) and six, including Romero-Gonsalez, have been sentenced.
Acting United States Attorney William D. Weinreb and Michael J. Ferguson, Special Agent in Charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Boston Field Division, made the announcement today. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Thomas E. Kanwit, Katherine Ferguson and Ann Taylor of Weinreb’s Narcotics and Money Laundering Unit are prosecuting the cases.The Hershey Bears announced today that defenseman Connor Hobbs is expected to miss six to eight weeks with a fractured left wrist. The announcement was made by Hershey’s Vice President of Hockey Operations, Bryan Helmer.
Hobbs, 20, was injured in the first period of Hershey’s 4-1 loss to Toronto on Saturday. The defender did not return to the game after colliding with the boards in front of Hershey’s bench.
This is the play that injured Connor Hobbs. Looks like he missed on a hit and went full bore into the boards in front of his own bench. pic.twitter.com/xatUbus5gs — Sin Bin Bears (@SinBinBears) November 5, 2017
Earlier in the day the Bears announced the recall of Defenseman Kris Bindulis, which sent signals that Hobbs injury was likely, pretty significant.
FROM BEARS MEDIA RELEASE
Bindulis, 22, was re-assigned to the Stingrays earlier this week, and made his ECHL debut on Friday at Greenville. He has also appeared in one game for Hershey, making his AHL debut on Oct. 22 at Rockford.
Bindulis was signed to a three-year, entry-level deal by the Washington Capitals on Mar. 7. Last season, he recorded 12 points (one goal, 11 assists) in 28 collegiate games with Lake Superior State.
More from the Bears here.The Silverstone-based team has enjoyed a strong uplift in form since a new aerodynamic package was delivered at the British Grand Prix.
And although the points gap to Red Bull and Williams ahead of it in the constructors' championship remains too big to close down, in performance terms the outfit senses the opportunity for progress.
Deputy team principal Bob Fernley said: "We have been showing since Silverstone that the car is a top ten car really.
"I think, apart from the DNFs at Hungary, we have managed to deliver that all the way through, so I am comfortable the pace is there.
"But it is not quite where we would want it to be – and our key objective now is to get into our peer group, which is Williams.
"They are in the same engine group as we are and we have to work with them. Lotus are damn quick too. I think the three Mercedes customers are doing a good job."
Updates must prove themselves
Although Force India will continue to bring developments to each race, Fernley has said that any major overhaul will now only come if it is guaranteed to deliver a good step forward in pace.
But even without that, he thinks that there is plenty of potential to extract more from the current package.
"We are now in to an optimisation programme for the B-spec," he said. "Everything is on that is going to go on, and I would like to have a bit of stability now.
"So let's get the best out of it we can, before we start to bolt anything else on."
When asked if that meant no more updates, amid talk that more could come for Mexico, Fernley said: "We would desperately like to do that and we have things in the pipeline, but [technical director] Andrew Green won't release it until he is happy it is a meaningful step.
"If we can get it, it would be wonderful. But let's optimise what we have because there is still more in that car yet to get out."Split vision
John Stuart Millibit Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 19, 2017
Two and a half week have passed since the Battle of the branches took place.
You would imagine that the dust has started to settle by now.
It certainly has not.
The calm before the storm, just before the roads started fighting each other
What is clear now is that there are two versions of Bitcoin which seem to be permanent. Unless some major turn of events occur. The Bitcoin network is also facing more risks of splits in the time to come. Possibilities if you are the optimistic kind.
There is no fork
If you are engaging in discussions on evolution of Bitcoin you will soon encounter the terms soft fork and hard fork. These are highly politicised words. Fork used to refer to the actual event of a blockchain diverging in two different directions, having a common history. A Y-shaped division where the base of the letter represents the history, each arm being the new direction that the respective branch is taking.
It’s pretty obvious that there is no fork. That’s a spoon. Stupid kid
Here’s a little secret some people don’t want you to hear. There are no such things as hard forks and soft forks. There are rule changes that keep the network intact, and then there are changes that have the potential to split it. If you redefine a rule, say for example the anyone-can-spend rule, you are not forking. You are just redefining a rule. If the network as a whole agrees with you, you have just upgraded. If it doesn’t, you are exposing it to the risk of a split. People can actively oppose you. Or subversively if they want to fight in that way. A disagreement can also live in the network for a long time as a virtual branch. Even if the network divide hasn’t occurred yet.
What is currently happening in the Bitcoin network isn’t forks. It is suggested rule changes that may or may not result in network splits.
And split means exactly that. The network physically separates into two disconnected sections that cannot be put together again.
How do I split thee? Let me count the ways
In the Bitcoin world, there are three main directions right now, with different supporters for each direction.
Beautiful city of Split, Croatia. Contrary to popular belief, the city has always only been a single unit
The first and simplest one to describe is Bitcoin Cash (BCC). It is a clean split in the Bitcoin network. BCC only shares a common history and distribution of coins with the rest of Bitcoin. Apart from that it is a completely separate network. It manifested as a defensive measure. Partly as a response to the suggested inclusion of a new set or rules, segwit, but also as a response to an ultimatum put forth by a group that intended to force implementation of segwit onto the network. It was above this also a response to the multi year long struggle to remove the artificial transaction limit of the network.
The second direction is what is now the main branch (BTC). This is what came out of the so called New York Agreement (NYA). It aims to implement segwit followed by a one time upgrade of the block size to 2MB. These changes were activated on the BTC branch on the 1st of August. None of the changes are actually truly active yet, but within the branch lies an implicit promise to activate them within the coming months. Segwit is in a sense already active, but segwit transactions will first be allowed the 21st of August.
The third direction is a branch that hasn’t manifested yet. Here segwit is implemented, but no changes to the block size cap will be done. This hypothetical direction currently lives within the BTC branch as well. If it would manifest, this branch would be the same as what the so called User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) was aiming to achieve. This could happen by subverting the current main branch but it could also happen as another network split.
Timing is everything
Was it the right decision for BCC to split on the 1st of August? Maybe November would have been better, if the 2MB block size cap that were promised in the NYA wouldn’t appear?
The BCC split happened mainly due to two reasons. The first was that a large part of the network demanded to remove the block size cap. The details of the NYA were vague and couldn’t persuade investors that the block size cap really would be raised. It was also perceived as too late, too little. The other and probably more important reason was that if the split would have occurred only a month later, segwit would have been implemented in the network. Thereby bringing those changes into the new branch. By forking beforehand, the branch stayed clear of unwanted network changes. All in all, the split was probably inevitable, and the 1st of August was the natural timing.
Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?
An odd decision was made when the NYA was agreed upon. It was decided that the two changes wouldn’t happen simultaneously. Instead segwit would be activated first, with larger blocks being added approximately three months later.
It’s hard to tell the reasoning behind this decision. Since there are two fractions that inherently distrust each other, the natural thing |
usher in a new renaissance of economic growth and job creation in Alaska," he said.
Alaska's current Resources commissioner, Andy Mack, said the announcement follows other good news suggesting the "tremendous potential" for much more oil production near the northeastern edge of the NPRA. That area is home to ConocoPhillips Alpine oil field in the Colville River Unit, discovered in 1994. The field saw record production of 139,000 barrels of oil daily in 2007.
Now, interest in the area is growing again.
"We are pretty excited because it is a confirmation of the notion that this area is really ripe for activity," he said.
ConocoPhillips in January announced it had made a large discovery in NPRA, called Willow, that could produce up to 100,000 barrels of oil daily.
In one sign of the industry's increasing interest, ConocoPhillips hopes to expand the Colville River Unit to absorb an additional 9,150 acres of state land in the area. The state has rejected the expansion so far, suggesting Alaska might be better off auctioning off that acreage to competitors to bring in extra state income from bids and possibly faster production.
Also, about 75 miles northwest of Nuiqsut in Smith Bay and just north of NPR-A, Caelus Energy Alaska said it too is sitting on a large prize. That offshore discovery announced last year could hold recoverable oil ranging from 1.8 billion to 4 billion barrels, Caelus has indicated, but that field is far from industrial infrastructure, unlike the discoveries near Nuiqsut.
The state natural resources department will learn more in the future about the Horseshoe prospect, when it has a chance to access confidential information associated with the well, Mack said.
"We have a lot of confidence in what they're doing there, so we're comfortable with what they're saying in their announcement," he said.
Houseknecht, the USGS geologist, said that based on the very limited data he has seen so far, primarily from Repsol's announcement, the oil at Horseshoe and in the Pikka Unit to the north appear to be the same pool of oil.
If that is correct, the discovery could be the largest onshore discovery in Alaska since Kuparuk River oil field on the North Slope in 1969, now operated by ConocoPhillips. One of the largest fields in North America, Kuparuk has produced about 2.3 billion barrels of oil. It is expected to produce more than 3 billion barrels before its life ends, he said.
Repsol's estimate that its play could yield 1.2 billion barrels of oil would make it bigger than the Alpine field, discovered in 1994. Houseknecht said that field will ultimately produce, by his estimates, about 750 million barrels of oil.With the ETF decision out of the way, the focus in the Bitcoin community has turned back to the scaling debate. While some proponents of an increase in block size are in favor of a hard fork, South African Bitcoin entrepreneur Vinny Lingham feels that this would negatively impact Bitcoin.
Scaling arguments
The Bitcoin network seems to be choking at the moment, with unconfirmed transactions piling up, transaction fees shooting through the roof and a general sluggishness across the network. Microtransactions have more or less ended, with high transactions fees making them unviable. Everybody agrees that there is a problem but unfortunately, consensus eludes the Bitcoin community on what the solution should be.
The Core team believes that retaining block size at 1 MB is crucial to maintaining the distributed nature of the Bitcoin network, while others advocate increasing the block size to increase the network capacity.
Bitcoin Unlimited
Bitcoin Unlimited (BTU), which seeks to transfer power to decide on the block size to the miners, has emerged as a frontrunner to handle this problem.
The proportion of nodes who have “signaled support” to Bitcoin Unlimited has increased steadily to over 30 percent. It has overtaken SegWit, currently backed by the Bitcoin Core team, which has 28 percent of nodes supporting it.
The increasing support for Bitcoin Unlimited has had some unintended consequences, with a bug in the software (since rectified) resulting in a number of codes crashing and doomsday scenarios being predicted if Bitcoin Unlimited becomes successful.
Once the number of miners signaling support for Bitcoin Unlimited crosses 50 percent, it is possible for a miner to generate a block size greater than 1 MB, thereby forking Bitcoin.
Why is Vinny Lingham against a hard fork?
Vinny Lingham believes that Bitcoin has the potential to reach $3000, only if there is no hard fork.
“Danger on the horizon. If Bitcoin forks, all bets are off and we can kiss $3k BTC in 2017 goodbye…”
Vinny believes that Bitcoin’s greatest asset is its brand awareness, which will get diluted if there is a hard fork.
It could lead to confusion for the common man of which Bitcoin is the real one. Merchants might avoid both BTC and BTU because of the confusion.
It could also result in rival factions dumping both versions of Bitcoin at exchanges, thereby depressing the price.
Vinny points out to what happened to Ethereum Classic when the Ethereum Foundation sold off their coins. Moreover, the network effect would decrease with users divided between BTC and BTU, thereby lowering the overall value of Bitcoins in circulation.
While the block size debate has sharply polarized the Bitcoin community, working together would be the only way to ensure that Bitcoin’s value is not destroyed.Patriarchy is inventive. The minute a generation of women has figured out how to not be enslaved by Ideology A, some new cultural pressure arises in the form of Internalisation B, making sure they don’t get too far too fast. The latest example: the most empowered generation of women ever – today’s twentysomethings in North America and Britain – is being hobbled in some important ways by something as basic as a new fashion in how they use their voices.
This demographic of women tends to have a distinctive speech pattern. Many commentators have noticed it, often with dismay. Time magazine devoted a column to the mannerism called vocal fry, noting a study that found that this speech pattern makes young women who use it sound less competent, less trustworthy, less educated and less hireable: “Think Britney Spears and the Kardashians.”
“Vocal fry” is that guttural growl at the back of the throat, as a Valley girl might sound if she had been shouting herself hoarse at a rave all night. The less charitable refer to it privately as painfully nasal, and to young women in conversation sounding like ducks quacking. “Vocal fry” has joined more traditional young-women voice mannerisms such as run-ons, breathiness and the dreaded question marks in sentences (known by linguists as uptalk) to undermine these women’s authority in newly distinctive ways. Slate notes that older men (ie those in power over young women) find it intensely annoying. One study by a “deeply annoyed” professor, found that young women use “uptalk” to seek to hold the floor. But does cordially hating these speech patterns automatically mean you are anti-feminist?
Many devoted professors, employers who wish to move young women up the ranks and business owners who just want to evaluate personnel on merit flinch over the speech patterns of today’s young women. “Because of their run-on sentences, I can’t tell in a meeting when these young women have said what they have to say,” confided one law partner.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kim Kardashian. Photograph: Francois G Durand/Getty Images
“Their constant uptalk means I am constantly having to reassure them: ‘uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh’. It’s exhausting.”
I myself have inadvertently flinched when a young woman barraging a group with uptalk ran a technology-based conference call: “We’ll use Ruby on Rails? It is an MVC framework to support databases?” Well, will we?
One 29-year-old woman working in engineering told me it was easier for gatekeepers in her male-dominated field to disregard running-on, softspoken, vocally frying and uptalking women. “It is difficult for young women to be heard or even responded to in many male-dominated fields if they don’t strengthen their voices, That kind of disregarding response from men made me feel even softer and even lesser – in a vicious circle of silencing.” she said.
It's that guttural growl, as a Valley girl might sound if she'd been shouting herself hoarse at a rave all night
Style is content, as any writing teacher knows. Run-ons and “non-committal-ness” dilute many young women’s advocacy powers and thus their written authority. Many young women have learned not to go too far out on a limb with their voiced opinions; but the dilution of “voice” and the muddying of logic caused by run-on sentences in speech can undermine the power of their written thought processes and weaken their marshalling of evidence in an argument. At Oxford University young women consistently get 5% to 10% fewer first-class degrees in English – and the exams are graded blindly. The reasons? Even the most brilliant tend to avoid strong declarative sentences and to organise their arguments less forcefully. Elleke Boehmer, an Oxford English professor, says: “I often observe my female students’ silence and lack of confidence in class with concern. How anxious they are about coming forward to express an opinion, to risk a point of view, so often letting the male students speak first and second and even third. And in this way they lose out in the discussions that are going to help them hone their pitch, write winning essays, secure the out-and-out firsts that male students in Humanities subjects still are securing in far greater numbers, proportionately, than they are.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scarlett Johansson at Cannes. Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex
The problem of young women’s voices is gaining new cultural visibility. Recent books and plays have dealt with the suppression of young women’s voices: Boehmer’s own recent novel The Shouting in the Dark narrates the inner life of a young woman in South Africa in the 1970s – and shows how abuse breaks such a voice. The hit play Nirbhaya, in which Indian actresses narrate stories of their own rapes, also shows how young women’s voices are stifled by cultural silencing, even today.
Voice remains political at work as well. A Catalyst study found that self-advocacy skills correlate to workplace status and pay more directly than merit. In other words, speaking well is better for your career than working hard.
But Amy Giddon, director of corporate leadership at Barnard College’s Athena centre for leadership studies in New York, found in original research that “there is a disconnect between women’s confidence in their skills and abilities – which is often high – and their confidence in their ability to navigate the system to achieve the recognition and advancement they feel they deserve. Self-advocacy is a big part of this, and identified by many women in the study as the biggest barrier to their advancement.” In other words, today’s women know they can do great things; what they doubt – reasonably enough – is that they can speak well about those great things.
It's easier for gatekeepers to disregard running-on, softspoken, vocally frying and uptalking women
When you ask young women themselves what these destructive speech patterns mean to them, you get gender-political insights. “I know I use run-on sentences,” a 21-year-old intern at a university told me. “I do it because I am afraid of being interrupted.” No one has ever taught her techniques to refuse that inevitable interruption. “I am aware that I fill my sentences with question marks,” said a twentysomething who works in a research firm. “We do it when we speak to older people or people we see as authorities. It is to placate them. We don’t do it so much when we are by ourselves.” Surely we older feminists have not completed our tasks if no one has taught this young woman that it was not her job to placate her elders.
Ally Tubis, a 29-year-old star in the male-dominated data analysis field, explained that at first sounding far younger than her years helped her to feel safe. But finally: “Admitting that I had a voice problem and then having the guts to practice strengthening it gave me confidence, as that process took a lot of courage.” Tubis took voice training, and her career soared.
Why vocal fry is a feminist issue | Letter from Cally Foster of the Society of Teachers of Speech and Drama Read more
“Why was it scarier to have a strong voice rather than a very breathy voice?” I asked her. “I would purposely do things in the past to detract from getting even positive attention,” Tubis explained. The breathier voice camouflaged her.
What is heartbreaking about the current trend for undermining female voice is that this is the most transformational generation of young women ever. They have absorbed a feminist analysis, and are skilled at seeing intersectionality – the workings of race, class and gender. Unlike previous generations, they aren’t starting from zero. They know that they did not ask to be raped, that they can Slutwalk and Take Back the Night, Kickstarter their business ventures and shoot their own indie films on their phones – and that they deserve equal pay and access.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zooey Deschanel in Elf (2003). Photograph: New Line/Sportsphoto/Allstar
Which points to the deeper dynamic at play. It is because these young women are so empowered that our culture assigned them a socially appropriate mannerism that is certain to tangle their steps and trivialise their important messages to the world. We should not ask young women to put on fake voices or to alter essential parts of themselves. But in my experience of teaching voice to women for two decades, when a young woman is encouraged to own her power and is given basic skills in claiming her own voice then huge, good changes follow. “When my voice became stronger, people took me more seriously,” says Ally Tubis. “When people feel from your voice that you are confident, they will believe that you are smarter, and that you are better at what you do – even when you are saying the exact same thing.”by
If a draft agreement between the Obama administration and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is finalized, U.S. troops will remain in that country indefinitely — instead of being withdrawn at the end of 2014, as the administration has said.
This is a confession of failure. America’s longest war is nowhere near its end.
The draft agreement (PDF) dated July 25, 2013, which was obtained by Richard Engel of NBC News, states,
This Agreement shall enter into force on January 1, 2015.… It shall remain in force until the end of 2024 and beyond, unless terminated pursuant to paragraph 4 of this Article [requiring two years written notice]. [Emphasis added.]
Under the proposed agreement, the U.S. government would continue to train, arm, and assist the Afghan military. “In addition,” the unsigned document continues, “the Parties acknowledge that continued U.S. military operations to defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates may be appropriate and agree to continue their close cooperation and coordination toward that end.”
“Continued U.S. military operations” reportedly includes raids on the homes of Afghans, which have created so much anti-American sentiment. The issue of raids has held up a final agreement, but the New York Times reports that the logjam was broken when the Obama administration agreed to write a letter “acknowledging American military mistakes in Afghanistan and vowing not to repeat them.”
The Times said the two governments have agreed to terms “allowing American-led raids on Afghan homes under ‘extraordinary circumstances’ to save the lives of American soldiers.” That language is not found in the July 25 draft agreement, which instead contains an Afghan government insertion stating, “No detention or arrest shall be carried out by the United States forces. The United States forces shall not search any homes or other real estate properties.” This restrictive provision must have been dropped from a later draft in return for the U.S. pledge to write the letter conceding “mistakes.”
[UPDATE: In announcing that a final agreement had been reached, Secretary of State John Kerry said a letter of apology was not requested by Karzai. Meanwhile, a group of senators are backing an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would require President Obama to get congressional permission to keep troops in Afghanistan after 2014.]
Despite a $17 trillion national debt, American taxpayers will continue to be on the hook, as the agreement commits the U.S. government to
seek funds on a yearly basis to support the training, equipping, advising and sustaining of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), so that Afghanistan can independently secure and defend itself against internal and external threats, and help ensure that terrorists never again encroach on Afghan soil and threaten Afghanistan, the region, and the world.
One wonders how independent Afghanistan can be if Americans are footing the bill.
According to NBC’s Nov. 19 report, “The bilateral security agreement will be debated this week in Kabul by around 2,500 village elders, academics and officials in a traditional Loya Jirga. While the Loya Jirga is strictly consultative, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said he won’t sign it without the Jirga’s approval.”
Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. government would continue to be the guarantor of Afghanistan’s sovereignty and its authoritarian regime, a commitment that could endanger Americans, as well as cost them much money. The Afghan government, at U.S. insistence, would waive jurisdiction over U.S. military and civilian personnel who commit war crimes. The U.S. government would have sole jurisdiction: “Members of the force and of the civilian component are exempt from personal arrest or detention.” Further, “Afghanistan and the United States agree that members of the force and of the civilian component may not be surrendered to, or otherwise transferred to, the custody of an international tribunal or any other entity or state without the express consent of the United States.”
We don’t know how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan, but NBC says that an Afghan source estimated 10,000–15,000, while a U.S. source said 7,000–8,000, along with NATO troops.
What’s clear from the negotiations is that the United States is not close to ending combat operations in Afghanistan, which began in October 2001.
Thousands of Afghan noncombatants have died in the 12-year war, yet Afghanistan remains a dangerous place, and reports of U.S. progress are not merely gross exaggerations, but outright lies. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and its offshoots have spread to Iraq, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa.
In other words, the U.S. government has lost a war it never should have begun.
Further U.S.-inflicted bloodshed will do nothing but make matters worse. It’s time for the U.S. military to leave.
Sheldon Richman is vice president and editor at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va. (www.fff.org).When Angel Ramirez woke up on the last Wednesday in July and checked his Facebook feed, he let out a heavy sigh and uttered an obscenity not fit to print. With a series of tweets, President Donald Trump put his happiness and health in jeopardy.
Ramirez, a resident of north Chesterfield and a transgender man, has been receiving hormone therapy treatments for about a year thanks to his veteran’s benefits. He joined the Army in the early 1990s at 23. It was a way for him to escape rough years growing up in New York.
“I got to see almost every borough in New York,” he says of his childhood bouncing from foster home to foster home. In his 20s, Ramirez was living in a halfway house and unemployed. One day, a trip to the pawn shop led instead to a trip to the recruiter’s office. He saw it as a chance to travel, serve his country and most importantly, he says, “Do something good.” Years later, after leaving the military and meeting members of a local support group, the James River Transgender Society, he realized he was transgender and began transitioning with the help of Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center. Ramirez says the staff is always respectful. Most used the right pronouns, and if they make mistakes, offer genuine apologies.
And Sophia Lakis, a self-described military brat who spent many of her formative years in South Carolina, was similarly exasperated by Trump’s early morning outburst. She joined the National Guard at the age 17 at the behest of her father, who was a recruiter.
“It was more of a desperation thing,” she says. Lakis always knew she was different, but growing up in insular military communities in the South left her without the language to describe what she was feeling and with the problems that came with not knowing her own identity.
click to enlarge Scott Elmquist
Sophia Lakis was in the National Guard after her father recruited her.
“Bases are like wombs — gated with armed guards,” she says, sitting in Saison Market wearing a Napalm Death T-shirt. Once she left the Guard years later, she slowly began living life as transgender female and hasn’t looked back.
In the case of Trump’s tweets, she questioned his motives and noted the early hour of the morning when they were sent out into the world.
Although Lakis doesn’t receive health benefits from the Department of Veteran Affairs as Ramirez does, the two are linked by both their service to their country and the lack of security under the new president. Back in 2016, on the campaign trail, Trump said that he’d do “everything in his power to protect LGBTQ citizens,” although his promise to uphold religious freedom — which could legalize discrimination against LGBT people — and his rollback of protections for transgender students have painted a very different picture for advocates.
Trump said that the military was “burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender” troops would cause. A 2016 study from the Rand Corp. estimates the total number of active, transgender troops to be fewer than 7,000. The economic impacts of trans medical treatment and number of troops who would lose readiness from that treatment is less than a tenth of one percent.
“You’re going to ruffle the feathers of a someone who is really loyal to their trans lieutenant or sergeant and wants to see them survive through a firefight,” Lakis says. “You take that person away, that’s detrimental for morale.” Ramirez pointed to the lack of any actual policy from the White House since the tweet. The Pentagon says that no formal policy has been received, and it doesn’t plan to change anything until that happens.
Ramirez, himself a person of color, points to the history of banning groups from serving their country. Trump’s concerns are almost identical to ones offered over the years — and these concerns citing troop morale or readiness have proven unwarranted again and again. “Just like gays in the military or blacks in the military or the Native Americans in the military,” he says “there’s always [been] discrimination. And none of the people that were biased against impeded [troops].”
Transgender service members have only been allowed to serve openly for the last year. President Barack Obama pushed for the change in policy, and that shift allowed people such as Ramirez access to the medical treatment he’s now receiving.
“I always knew I was transgender — I never thought I was transitioning,” he says. “I didn’t verbalize it, I lived it.”
Whether he’ll continue to live that life will depend on Trump. SHair Pro – The only multi-action hair growth treatment
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[productalsobuy]I liked listening to emo music back in the early ’00s, they had crazy melodies and there was a lot of arpeggiated guitar riffs. [‘Drugs You Should Try It’] is two chord progressions: an arpeggiated guitar riff that follows C#m, A, G7, but I’m playing it note-by-note. Then I ended up layering another single note lead over it to make it move a bit more. For the bridge, I just played power chords—I strummed an A, C#m, F#m, E. I put some distortion on that and ran the whole thing through CLA Guitars plug-in stacked with your basic RVerb and H-Delay plugins.
For this particular one, I started doing drums and just wasn’t really feeling it, but I had a session with FKi later that week and they were writing a bunch of weird, left-of-center hooks at the time. So we went into a session and pulled up four or five different ideas and they wrote hooks to all of them. The ‘Drugs’ record was the standout. It wasn’t the exact same lyrics; what Travis changed it to is stronger than the initial idea, but the melody was still there. Then I told the guys to throw drums on it ’cause FKi has a very specific drum sound. They did and it sounded super fucking hard.
For the actual placement, I was with Lifted one day and we went to Big Sean’s house and were playing a bunch of tracks. Sean was like, ‘Yo, throw this one on a hard drive, I’m going to write to it.’ I’m thinking, ‘Okay cool, it’s going to be a Big Sean record.’ Then I got a phone call from Lifted one day and he’s like, ‘Yo, go check out Travis’ mixtape, your track is on there!’ And I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ There was no warning, no production credit, we hadn’t done splits, I hadn’t gotten any bread from it. At the time I didn’t have an attorney and I didn’t really know how to get in touch with Travis, but I loved the record.
The crazy thing is, Travis never had any stems. He basically had the mp3 and EQ’d it so that the vocals were low-passed. And then he sang the exact same melody over that and put his lyrics on it. So Markous from FKi’s vocals are also on the track, you just don’t really hear them.
[Later that year] A-Trak was throwing his Fool’s Gold thing and I knew Travis and Vic Mensa were performing. Vic’s the homie so I went backstage with him, I broke off to go find Travis and when I walked up to him I think he thought I was a fan ’cause I was like, ‘What’s up man? The ‘Drugs’ record is my shit.’ And he was like, ‘Oh thanks.’ I’m like, ‘No, it’s literally my shit. I produced that.’ He looked really confused and then some of his people came up to talk to me ’cause they didn’t know what was going on.
It was a little weird at the beginning but we ended up working everything out. Now, I think Travis is about to throw a verse on this new Young Thug ‘Me or Us’ track which I also produced. We got some other shit in the works, too.CLOSE Libertarian candidate for president Gary Johnson sits down with Burlington Free Press Reporter Jess Aloe on Wednesday, August 24, 2016, saying that he has more in common with Bernie Sanders than any other candidate. RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS
Buy Photo Libertarian candidate for president Gary Johnson greets supporters after speaking at the Sheraton Hotel in South Burlington Wednesday night. (Photo: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS)Buy Photo
SOUTH BURLINGTON - When Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson took the stage in South Burlington Wednesday night, he asked the crowd if this year's presidential election was the craziest election of any time.
"You know how crazy it is?" he asked, as the crowd cheered. "I'm going to be the next president of the United States."
Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, is running on a platform of increasing civil liberties, legalizing marijuana, reducing military spending and removing barriers to free trade. He spoke about a wide range of policy positions to a crowd at the Sheraton Burlington Hotel and Conference Center from relieving student debt to finding a free market approach to rising health care costs.
Prior to the event, he and his running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, met with a handful of Republican lawmakers, including Reps. Kurt Wright, R-Burlington, Heidi Scheuermann, R-Stowe, Tim Burditt, R-West Rutland, Paul Dame, R-Essex Junction, and Patti Komline, R-Dorset.
Burditt, Komline and Scheuermann appeared on the dias with him as well.
Scheuermann said she had come to the meeting leaning towards supporting the Libertarian ticket, and was swayed into publicly supporting the two governors after having a conversation with them. Their message of fiscal conservatism and social tolerance would appeal to Vermonters, she said.
Burditt told the governors he was glad to have candidates he could vote for, rather than simply choosing between the two major party candidates.
Buy Photo Libertarian candidate for president Gary Johnson speaks at the Sheraton Hotel in South Burlington Wednesday night. (Photo: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS)
"The lesser of two evils is still evil," Komline said. "We're very happy to have the two of you step up," she said.
Weld told the politicos gathered at the Sheraton that their candidacy was giving Republicans who were put off by Donald Trump to hide out, and said having the Johnson/Weld option could bring many Republicans who might otherwise stay home out to the polls.
Johnson sat down with the Burlington Free Press prior to his evening rally at the Sheraton in South Burlington to detail his policy proposals and talk about his campaign.
He is the only minor party candidate who will appear on the ballot in all fifty states. He previously ran for president on the Libertarian ticket in 2012, and received around 1 percent of the vote. This cycle, he's polling closer to 10 percent. He attributed his success to dissatisfaction with the two major party candidates, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton.
But most people, he added, don't know he's running. He said he expects to see his numbers rise as his campaign continues to push out his message.
Buy Photo Archie Flower, 45, of Middleburg listens to Libertarian candidate for president Gary Johnson at the Sheraton Hotel in South Burlington Wednesday night. (Photo: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS)
Johnson summed up his ideas by saying he believed in letting Americans choose. He believes in school choice, he said, and he wants to abolish a federal Department of Education to place control of schools in the hands of state governments.
Though he strongly believes in free trade and free market capitalism, he said he does see a place for government regulation. He cited the Environmental Protection Agency as an example, saying he sees companies polluting water as an issue the government can play a role in.
Though he believes in free trade and supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he said he was opposed to crony capitalism, and compared his view to Sanders.
"Crony capitalism is when the government gets involved and skews the market," he said. "The free market is devoid of government."
He cited recent media reports about rising costs for the EpiPen as an example. He said he'd want to look into how Mylan, the maker of the epinephrine injection device used to reverse life-threatening allergy attacks, achieved a monopoly on the drug.
Buy Photo Mylie Benjamin, 9, of Essex Junction listens to Libertarian candidate for president Gary Johnson at the Sheraton Hotel in South Burlington Wednesday night. (Photo: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS)
Johnson made a pitch to supporters of Vermont's Bernie Sanders, who ended his bid for the Democratic nomination at last month's party convention to endorse Clinton. Johnson said his beliefs are closer to Sanders' than any of the other candidates.
But Andre Clark of Winooski, who came to Johnson's rally in a Bernie Sanders t-shirt, said he wasn't fully convinced by Johnson.
Clark, 26, said he felt Johnson was the only sensible candidate polling high enough to get the debates, but felt that Johnson's position on cutting taxes was the opposite end of the spectrum from Sanders.
"I need to do a lot more research," he said.
Johnson is focused now on getting his poll numbers to 15 percent. Reaching that threshold means he'll be able to appear in the presidential debate on Sept. 26 alongside Clinton and Trump.
Buy Photo Libertarian candidate for president Gary Johnson thanks supporters after speaking at the Sheraton Hotel in South Burlington Wednesday night. (Photo: RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS)
And Weld said he was confident that if the Libertarians could get into the debates, they'd "run the table."
If they got into the debates, he said, they would start to get lots of attention from the national press, and be able to bring their message to voters |
to police that content in the wake of a newly published German ruling. Stuttgart's Higher Regional Court has determined that the organization is liable for Wikipedia articles. While Wikimedia won't have to screen content, it will have to verify any disputed passages and remove them if they're known to be false. The court isn't telling Wikimedia how to handle this verification, although the legal presumption of innocence will still apply. We're not expecting a chilling effect on Wikipedia given that takedowns will only be necessary in a handful of circumstances. However, it gives Wikimedia's moderators an extra level of responsibility -- they'll now have to pull some content quickly to minimize the chances of lawsuits.
Updated: Wikimedia has clarified the ruling. The court sees Wikimedia as a service provider that, on a basic level, isn't liable for content. However, the site will only maintain its immunity so long as it pulls any content that allegedly violates German laws. If it declines, it risks opening itself to legal action.Ayahuasca is an Amazonian psychoactive brew of two main components. Its active agents are β-carboline and tryptamine derivatives. As a sacrament, ayahuasca is still a central element of many healing ceremonies in the Amazon Basin and its ritual consumption has become common among the mestizo populations of South America. Ayahuasca use amongst the indigenous people of the Amazon is a form of traditional medicine and cultural psychiatry. During the last two decades, the substance has become increasingly known among both scientists and laymen, and currently its use is spreading all over in the Western world. In the present paper we describe the chief characteristics of ayahuasca, discuss important questions raised about its use, and provide an overview of the scientific research supporting its potential therapeutic benefits. A growing number of studies indicate that the psychotherapeutic potential of ayahuasca is based mostly on the strong serotonergic effects, whereas the sigma-1 receptor (Sig-1R) agonist effect of its active ingredient dimethyltryptamine raises the possibility that the ethnomedical observations on the diversity of treated conditions can be scientifically verified. Moreover, in the right therapeutic or ritual setting with proper preparation and mindset of the user, followed by subsequent integration of the experience, ayahuasca has proven effective in the treatment of substance dependence. This article has two important take-home messages: (1) the therapeutic effects of ayahuasca are best understood from a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model, and (2) on the biological level ayahuasca may act against chronic low grade inflammation and oxidative stress via the Sig-1R which can explain its widespread therapeutic indications.
Introduction
Ayahuasca, a psychoactive Amazonian sacrament, has raised increased scientific and lay interest during the last two decades. Traditionally ayahuasca has been used in Ecuador, Columbia, Peru, and Brazil, where it is also known as natema, hoasca, daime, yagé, or yajé The decoction is prepared by simultaneously boiling two admixture plants, the Banisteriopsis caapi (Malpighiaceae) containing β-carboline type alkaloids such as harmine and tetrahydroharmine; and most commonly Psychotria viridis (Rubiaceae), which provides the psychoactive alkaloid DMT (McKenna, 2004; Szára, 2007). Sometimes Psychotria viridis is substituted by other DMT containing plants such as Diplopterys cabrerana (formerly B. rusbyana) of the family Malpighiaceae. The name ayahuasca is a compound word in Quechua language, where aya means soul, ancestors or dead persons and wasca (huasca) means vine or rope (Luna, 2011). Therefore, the most prevalent translation of the word is “vine of the soul”. Skeptics may prefer the other linguistic alternative: “rope of death”, but this paper will provide arguments favoring the former interpretation above the latter one.
Ayahuasca has been used as a central element of religious, magical, curative, initiation, and other tribal rituals for millennia (Naranjo, 1986), originally by the indigenous groups and later by the mestizo populations of the region, who respect the brew as a sacrament and value it as a powerful medicine. The indigenous and mestizo communities regularly use ayahuasca to treat physical ailments, mental problems and frequently handle their social issues, spiritual crises with the help of the brew. A Peruvian tradition called vegetalismo regards ayahuasca as one of the teacher plants that convey knowledge to humans (Luna, 1986), and considers the experience induced by its ingestion trabajo (work). In addition to its traditional and mestizo uses, ayahuasca also forms a central component of the rituals of three Brazilian syncretic churches: the Santo Daime, the União do Vegetal and the Barquinha. The history of these churches dates back to the first half of the 20th century, and by now they are present in 23 countries (de Rios and Rumrrill, 2008; Liester and Prickett, 2012). Obviously there is a striking discrepancy between the indigenous South American and official Western view on ayahuasca use, which calls for scientific explanation and a healthy resolution.
Due to the growing popularity of the sacrament, masses of people from all parts of the world travel to the Amazon to participate in ayahuasca rituals. This unique phenomenon characterized by some as “drug tourism” (de Rios, 1994) is not as frivolous pursuit as it sounds (Grunwell, 1998), since a significant number of travelers searches for spiritual and therapeutic opportunities. The principal motivations can be characterized as: seeking improved insight, personal growth; emotional healing; and contact with a sacred nature, deities, spirits and natural energies produced by the ayahuasca (Winkelman, 2005). The trend of popularization—known as the “globalization of ayahuasca”—flows both ways, as this Amazonian tradition spreads beyond its native habitat and gets adopted into non-indigenous circles of the Western world (Tupper, 2008) either within or outside of the context of syncretic churches.
During the last couple of years several publications have been written with the goal to summarize our knowledge about ayahuasca from various perspectives (see in Labate and Cavnar, 2014). The primary aim of this article is to give an overview about the facts and hypotheses related to the possible therapeutic mechanisms of the brew in light of recent advances of the field; with the secondary aim of addressing its known adverse effects. By adhering to a biopsychosociospiritual model (Bishop, 2009) the authors will explore every level in the following order: starting with biochemistry, neuropharmacology, physiology, brain imaging, then moving to the psychological effects, social ramifications, and finally addressing spiritual implications. Efforts are taken to keep a balance among the biomedical, psycho-social and spiritual aspects of healing since “Madre Ayahuasca, la sagrada medicina (Mother Ayahuasca, the sacred medicine)” is best understood within this quadrilateral framework.
The Neurobiological Background of Ayahuasca
From a pharmacological perspective the main ingredients of ayahuasca are DMT and the β-carboline derivative alkaloid harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine (Callaway et al., 1996). The harmine, tetrahydroharmine, and harmaline work as reversible inhibitors of the A-type isoenzyme of the monoamine oxidase (MAO), while tetrahydroharmine also exerts selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) effects (dos Santos, 2010). The hallucinogenic component DMT is abundant in the plant kingdom (Khan et al., 2012) and it is also present in mammalian organism; studies have detected it in human blood, brain, cerebrospinal fluid (Wallach, 2009), and the pineal gland of rats (Barker et al., 2013). While DMT is classified as an endogenous hallucinogen, together with bufotenin and 5-methoxy-DMT (Christian et al., 1977; Hollister, 1977), its exact function is yet unclear (Barker et al., 2012).
More than 50 years of research has proven to be insufficient to provide a proper neurobiological description of the role of endogenous hallucinogens. This is in part due to a paradigm problem in which these natural substances with many biological functions have been primarily studied in terms of being “hallucinogens,” producing false perceptions. It is obvious that these substances play a role in producing alterations of consciousness such as dreaming, psychosis, and near death experience (Strassman, 2001). These effects presumably reflect action on serotonin (5-HT) receptors (5-HT1A, -2A and -2C) as well as the trace amine associated receptors (supposedly TAAR6) (Wallach, 2009). While the scientific knowledge about trace amine associated receptors is rapidly increasing, it is still deficient. However, the Sig-1R action of DMT may turn out to be more revealing about its physiological function (see below).
Dimethyltryptamine exerts anxiolytic effects through 5-HT1A receptor agonism (Jacob and Presti, 2005), and its psychedelic effect is connected to its 5-HT2A receptor-activating capacity (Nichols, 2004). However, simple 5-HT receptor mediated actions are not sufficient to explain drug-induced hallucinations since 5-HT itself, and some 5-HT2A agonists (i.e., lisuride) are not hallucinogenic. Over the past two decades, it became clear that different agonists having similar binding affinities for the same sites, could elicit distinct signaling pathways within the cell. These observations are interpreted on the basis of receptor–receptor and ligand–receptor interactions such as “receptor oligomerization,” “receptor trafficking,” or “biased agonism” (Moreno et al., 2011; Borroto-Escuela et al., 2014) which activate different G proteins resulting in divergent intracellular cascades. Figure 1 schematically illustrates the mechanism of receptor dimerization wherein metabotropic glutamate (mGlu2) receptors belonging to an entirely separate receptor family form a complex with the 5-HT receptor and trigger an intracellular pathway for hallucinogenic action. This may explain why lisuride which has a similar receptor binding profile to the chemically similar ergoloid lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), lacks the psychedelic effects of its sister compound (Rogawski and Aghajanian, 1979). In case of DMT, a recent study (Carbonaro et al., 2015) concluded that while 5-HT2A receptors play a major role in mediating its effects, mGluR2 receptors likely modulate the action. Unlike the related tryptamine derivative psilocybin, DMT does not precipitate tolerance upon repeated use (Strassman et al., 1996); this produces further complications for simple receptor-based interpretations.
FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1. Cross-talk between receptors by dimerization. The 5-HT2A receptor mediated hallucinogen-specific intracellular pathway requires the dimerization of the 5-HT2A receptor with the mGlu2 receptor. This unique (G protein-coupled) pathway is associated only with the dimer and not activated by either receptor alone. Serotonin lacks the mGlu2 receptor binding feature and the psychotropic effects of hallucinogens are abolished by the elimination of the mGlu2 receptor. The 5-HT2A-mGlu2 dimer is the prime target of some serotonergic hallucinogens (Moreno et al., 2011).
The latest identified target for DMT’s action is the Sig-1R. Sigma receptors were originally misclassified as opioid receptors but later turned out to be non-opioid receptors of their own type. The Sig-1R subclass has been demonstrated to consist of chaperone molecules concentrated in normal cells of the brain, retina, liver, lung, heart, immune system, but also in many tumor lines (Maurice and Su, 2009). Chaperones are proteins that assist the correct folding of other protein clients. The Sig-1R chaperon has many unique features with an amino acid sequence distant from mammalian proteins and homologous to fungal sterol isomerases (Moebius et al., 1997). Sig-1R sites are concentrated in the human brain with the highest densities in the cerebellum, nucleus accumbens, and cerebral cortex (Weissman et al., 1988). Inside the cell Sig-1R is located mainly at the ER–mitochondrion interface—referred to as the MAM—and regulates cellular bioenergetics, particularly under stressful conditions (Su et al., 2010; Mori et al., 2013; Hayashi, 2015). There is another mode of Sig-1R action at the plasma membrane where it translocates under stimulation by agonists.
As an intracellular receptor localized at the MAM, Sig-1R integrates many signaling pathways and serves as a “tunnel” for lipid transport and Ca2+-signaling between the ER and mitochondria (Hayashi and Su, 2007). Its involvement is critically in ion channel activities and neuronal differentiation. The wide scope and effect of ligand binding to Sig-1R indicate that Sig-1Rs are intracellular signal transduction amplifiers (Su and Hayashi, 2003). The ER-mitochondrion interface at the MAM serves as an important subcellular entity in the regulation of cellular survival via Sig-1R by enhancing the stress–response signaling (Mori et al., 2013). Sig-1R also protects the cells against reactive oxygen species and activates the antioxidant response elements (Pal et al., 2012), therefore Sig-1R agonists such as DMT may function as indirect antioxidants. More interestingly the induction of Sig-1R can repress cell death signaling: up-regulation of Sig-1R suppresses the apoptosis caused by ER stress (Omi et al., 2014). Tryptaminergic trace amines as well as neurosteroids (e.g., dehydroepiandrosterone, pregnenolon) are endogenous ligands that activate the Sig-1R (Fontanilla et al., 2009).
The Sig-1R ER chaperone function is essential for the metabotropic receptor signaling and for the survival against cellular, particularly ER stress. Dysfunctional chaperones are responsible for numerous diseases (Tsai et al., 2009). Altogether, no other receptor has ever been associated with so many different diseases as the Sig-1R. It has so far been implicated in illnesses like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, cancer, cardiomyopathy, retinal dysfunction, perinatal and traumatic brain injury, frontal motor neuron degeneration, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, HIV-related dementia, major depression, and psychostimulant addiction (Su, 2015). How those two modes of actions of the Sig-1R may relate to this plethora of diseases remain to be clarified but its protective influence has been verified on various aspects of cellular processes, such as calcium signaling, mitochondrial functions, ER stress, survival and apoptotic pathways (to be discussed later), and tumor cell proliferation (Tsai et al., 2014). As Sig-1Rs are expressed in the immune system, immunomodulatory functions have also been reported in the literature (Szabo et al., 2014; Dong et al., 2015).
The Possible Role of DMT in Tissue Protection and Neuroregeneration
Dimethyltryptamine is considered as a natural ligand, an endogenous agonist of the Sig-1R (Fontanilla et al., 2009). It is assumed that the Sig-1R might be involved in the DMT-induced psychedelic effects (Su et al., 2009); however, this is somewhat counterintuitive since many drugs—including non-hallucinogens—bind promiscuously to the Sig-1R with higher affinity than DMT. The results of a recent surge in Sig-1R research are pointing toward a different horizon by outlining a physiological role of DMT instead of the long-held pathological view. If the Sig-1R promotes cellular (neuronal) survival against oxidative stress (Pal et al., 2012) and regulates immune processes (Jarrott and Williams, 2015), one may attribute the same physiological role to its endogenous ligands, like DMT (Frecska et al., 2013). Since the Sig-1R is also known to regulate morphogenesis of neuronal cells, such as neurite outgrowth, synaptogenesis, and myelination (Ruscher and Wieloch, 2015); neurorestorative effects are reasonably expected from DMT. In a previous paper (Frecska et al., 2013) we concluded that the function of DMT may extend central nervous activity and involve a more universal role in cellular protective mechanisms. We provided converging evidence that while DMT is a substance which produces powerful psychedelic experiences, it is better understood not as a hallucinogenic drug of abuse, but rather an agent of significant adaptive mechanisms like neuroprotection, neuroregeneration, and immunity.
Nevertheless, immunoregulation by DMT is a bidirectional process. Sig-1Rs are expressed together with 5-HT receptors in immune cells conveying both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory signals (Szabo, 2015). These receptors are essential in the “fine-tuning” of innate and adaptive immune responses. Human clinical studies showed that ayahuasca can alter the number and distribution of blood immune cells in a way that can increase the antiviral and anti-tumor immunity of the consumer (reviewed in Frecska et al., 2013). Ayahuasca also influences the distribution of lymphocyte subpopulation: CD4 lymphocytes decrease and the number of natural killer cells increase significantly with time (dos Santos et al., 2012). The possible anti-cancer activity of the decoction makes it a promising candidate for further researches in novel pharmacotherapies (Schenberg, 2013). Furthermore, DMT may also be an adaptogen increasing the survival rate of neurons or other cell types during acute hypoxia or under chronic oxidative stress.
Mechanisms Proposed as a Basis for Ayahuasca’s Effects on Systemic and Degenerative Illnesses
Chronic LGI is becoming widely accepted as a common basis for many diseases of civilization (Ruiz-Núñez et al., 2013; Table 1). Repeated psychological stress, constant environmental pollution, and smoking behavior are associated with chronic LGI, which is one of the main causes of insulin resistance that is the pathological foundation of metabolic diseases (Aseervatham et al., 2013). Moreover, chronic LGI is involved in all stages of the atherosclerotic process and is being increasingly recognized as a universal mechanism in various chronic degenerative diseases, such as autoimmune diseases, certain cancers, neuropsychiatric diseases (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, major depression), and osteoporosis. Dysbiosis of the gut microbiota with increased intestinal permeability (“leaky gut”) are all possible root causes of LGI (Carrera-Bastos et al., 2011).
TABLE 1
TABLE 1. Common diseases of civilization.
Chronic LGI is closely related to oxidative stress and ER stress, and together they form a molecular web, a network interwoven with loops exacerbating each other (Chaudhari et al., 2014). Regulation of protein folding homeostasis (proteostasis) is essential for the execution of fundamental cellular functions. ER is the cellular organelle responsible for this role. Disturbance in protein folding is central to a large diversity of illnesses and growing evidences suggest ER stress as being a cardinal component in the development of a pathological condition (Díaz-Villanueva et al., 2015; Srivastava and Kumar, 2015). The cause of diseases may be various, but ER stress resulting from chronic LGI or oxidative stress may contribute to the severity and the poor prognosis of the diseased state. ER function can be altered and made dysfunctional by hypoxia, hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, viral infections, disturbances in cellular calcium levels, redox regulation, or by endogenous reactive oxygen species production (Chaudhari et al., 2014). These so-called stress signals exhaust the ER machinery and result in accumulation of unfolded proteins. An adaptive process called UPR is triggered with an aim to restore ER homeostasis. However, if the stress signal is severe and/or prolonged cell death pathways are elicited in form of apoptotic and pro-inflammatory reactions (Hiramatsu et al., 2015).
ER stress with UPR is thought to play a key role in neuropsychiatric illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, bipolar disorder, and in other illnesses of civilization such as atherosclerosis, diabetes, cancer, autoimmune, and cardiovascular disorders (Chaudhari et al., 2014). All of these disorders may have common mechanism: failure of protein homeostasis. Deficits in ER-proteostasis lead to the formation of misfolded proteins characteristic of neurodegenerative diseases (Hetz and Mollereau, 2014; Plácido et al., 2014). Originally UPR has a cell protective effect: it prevents overload of ER lumen with newly synthesized proteins and activates degradation of misfolded proteins. However, misfolded proteins directly enter from ER into mitochondria and after prolonged UPR activation they cause dysfunction in energy production (Schon and Area-Gomez, 2013; Volgyi et al., 2015). Targeting Sig-1R by agonists may regulate ER stress and UPR, manage ER perturbations, regulate the formation of toxic misfolded proteins, and prevent the cell-killing apoptotic pathways (Rivas et al., 2015). Similar effects are expected from the endogenous Sig-1R ligand DMT.
Tracing Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, or major depression to inflammatory processes (chronic LGI), “leaky gut”, ER stress, protein folding deficit, glutamate excitotoxicity, mitochondrial dysfunction, calcium overload, death receptor pathways, and Sig-1R involvement means following the loops of the same web of interactions since all are different aspects of the same core phenomenon. The Sig-1R located at the MAM is an excellent candidate for interfering with the conversion of environmental stress in general and psychological stress in particular into cellular stress response by its regulatory effect on signaling between the ER and mitochondrion (Hayashi, 2015). This is the point where DMT and ayahuasca take their place in this puzzle via Sig-1R action. It seems to us that the ingenuity of South American people discovered a broad-spectrum remedy, which hits the dead center of the discussed vicious circle of the malfunctioning molecular web involved in oxidative stress (Figure 2).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2. The polygon of self-destructive forces. Every angle of this octagon represents a pathophysiological process closely related to almost all of the others, and each pathological process is known to be involved in several illnesses of civilization (see Table 1) with extensive overlap (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease has chronic low grade inflammation, increased nitric oxide signaling, calcium dyshomeostasis, apoptosis, mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative, and endoplasmic reticulum stress in its etiopathology). The central position of the Sig-1R illustrates its significant influence in mitigating these pathological processes. The number of angles is rather arbitrary: one may add others like insulin resistance, glutamate release, plasma membrane deficiency, etc.
There is more to ayahuasca’s therapeutic potentials besides its DMT content and above the neurobiological level. The psychological aspects will be discussed later. Here we address the other important active agents of ayahuasca, the β-carboline alkaloids, which act as selective, reversible MAO-A inhibitors (McKenna and Towers, 1984; dos Santos, 2010) with almost no effect on MAO-B (Herraiz et al., 2010). MAO inhibition is crucial as without the β-carbolines the DMT content of orally ingested ayahuasca would be broken down before crossing the blood-brain barrier. Moreover, the fact that MAO is located inside cells bound to the outer membrane of mitochondria in proximity of the Sig-1R raises the possibility that the synergy between the active compounds of ayahuasca happens not only at the periphery, but also inside neurons and glial cells. Without this intraneuronal MAO inhibition less DMT would reach the Sig-1R at the MAM. Furthermore, there are indications that the β-carboline alkaloids themselves have medicinal properties, such as anthelmintic (Hassan, 1967), antimicrobial (Ahmad et al., 1992), and vasorelaxant (Shi et al., 2001) effects, in addition to ethnopsychiatric (Shepard, 1998), sociopsychotherapeutic (Andritzky, 1989), and rehabilitative functions (Mabit et al., 1995). Harmala alkaloids have demonstrated strong psychoactive properties (Naranjo, 1967), and they act as stimulants on the central nervous system (Venault and Chapouthier, 2007). Osório’s team (Osório et al., 2011) attributed an observed antidepressant effect of ayahuasca (Osório et al., 2015) to these alkaloids, which is in line with ethnographic observations suggesting that many native users of ayahuasca ascribe sacramental respect to the B. caapi and not the DMT containing plant constituents.
From a biological standpoint the extent to which DMT and harmine play a role in ayahuasca effects is difficult to judge since the brew contains a significant amount of bioactive substances in addition to the indole and β-carboline alkaloids. An important example of such compounds is the group of antioxidant polyphenols, which can also be linked to the observed immunomodulatory effects (Szabo et al., 2014). Antioxidants are known for their capacity of reducing inflammatory processes or even stopping them (Grimble, 1994; Geronikaki and Gavalas, 2006). Malignant transformation is also inhibited by polynucleotides through providing protection against oxidative stress for other cellular compounds (Marquardt, 1984). In addition to the immunomodulatory effects, ayahuasca may also exhibit neuroprotective and neurorestorative qualities. Hence, it has been suggested that ayahuasca can be applied therapeutically in Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases (Samoylenko et al., 2010). Ayahuasca’s high content of bioactive materials points toward a combined mechanism of the various effect and calls for further clinical research to reveal the detailed pharmacology of the constituents.
Vegetative and Adverse Effects of Ayahuasca
Serotonin stimulation is known to affect the whole organism not just the brain. It causes vegetative changes such as increase in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, pulse rate, provokes nausea, vomiting, and pupil dilation (Boyer and Shannon, 2005). Ayahuasca was found to significantly raise the systolic and diastolic blood pressure by 35 Hgmm and the pulse rate by 26 bpm in a 2 min time interval while the rate of increase declines upon repeated intake (Riba et al., 2001). Besides actions on the vegetative nervous system ayahuasca also induces endocrine response. Elevation in prolactin, cortisone, and growth hormone levels has been reported (dos Santos et al., 2011; dos Santos et al., 2012).
While the intravenously injected DMT can cause considerable cardiac stress, it is less burdensome for humans if taken orally. Based on animal research Gable (Gable, 2007) developed a model calculation that determined the median lethal dose of DMT in 8 mg/kg for oral ingestion in human subjects. The average ceremonial dose of DMT in ayahuasca preparations is about 27 mg; therefore, the safety margin for ayahuasca is approximately 20 (Gable, 2007). Scientific sources mention only one fatal case of ayahuasca consumption (Sklerov et al., 2005). The toxicological judgment based on uncontrolled street abuse is largely influenced by cases when extra ingredients other than the two basic components (e.g., datura or tobacco) are mixed into the decoction since the intoxicating effects of these extra ingredients can in turn be attributed to ayahuasca by the toxicological reports.
The MAO-A inhibition induced by the β-carboline alkaloids presumably results in an increased level of serotonin in the neural pathways, which theoretically can lead to serotonin syndrome in extreme cases (Callaway and Grob, 1998). However, the competitive, reversible nature of the inhibition may explain the lack of well documented serotonin syndrome cases despite the globalization of ayahuasca and probable inclusion of a large number of session participants taking SSRIs. What makes the issue more complicated is that at the time of onset, ayahuasca’s vegetative effects represent some sort of mild or moderate serotonin syndrome. Nevertheless, materials which may negatively interact with ayahuasca and capable to induce hyperserotonemia include ginseng (Panax ginseng), St John’s-wort (Hypericum perforatum), dextromethorphan, 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, SSRIs or MAO inhibitors (Callaway and Grob, 1998). Furthermore, cardiovascular or endocrine problems, abnormal lipid metabolism, glaucoma, fever, and pregnancy are contraindications for ayahuasca consumption (Gable, 2007).
A tendency for psychosis or family history of mental illness predispose ayahuasca for triggering a psychotic episode or long-term depersonalization syndrome. dos Santos and Strassman (2011) reported a case where a young male individual with prior experience in the use of psychedelic substances and having previous positive experience with ayahuasca fell repeatedly into psychosis after two Santo Daime ceremonies. Even without proper screening the statistical probability of such cases seems to be low. The majority of the encountered problems originate from the unpreparedness of the participants, the inadequate setting (the parameters of the circumstances in which the ingestion of ayahuasca takes place), the lack of socio-cultural-cosmological embeddedness of the experiences or the lack of their integration afterward.
There is not yet any scientific evidence—or even personal reports—indicating that ayahuasca use elicits substance dependence. The ritual use of ayahuasca shows considerable differences to the traditional psychosocial harms of drug consumption (Fábregas et al., 2010). As with other psychedelic experiences an elevated emotional state may remain for a few days or weeks after ayahuasca consumption. In such cases life seems more beautiful and joyful, filled with a deeper meaning than before the experience. Therefore a feeling of emptiness or grayness can arise after the experience fades away but this is not generally the case.
Central Nervous System Effects of Ayahuasca
Riba’s group (Riba et al., 2006) conducted single-photon emission computed tomography to reveal the brain areas affected by ayahuasca ingestion. Increased activity was recorded bilaterally in the anterior insula, in the fronto-medial cortical anterior cingulate of the right hemisphere and the left amygdala. The latter two play a role in the regulation of emotional arousal and the information processing of emotions. Moreover the anterior cingulate is involved in somatic attention and the experience of subjective feeling states (Bouso and Riba, 2011). By analyzing the binocular rivalry under the effect of the brew, conclusions were drawn that ayahuasca influences hemispheric dominance (Frecska et al., 2003) and gamma oscillations (Frecska et al., 2004).
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging technique de Araujo et al. (2012) found that ayahuasca induces a robust activation of occipital, temporal, and frontal areas during a closed-eyes imagery task. The consumption of the brew activated an extended network in the brain (that has previously been correlated to visual perception, memory and intention) in which the Brodmann areas BA10, BA17, BA30, and BA37 play a central role. The ayahuasca-produced stimulation of the primary visual cortex was comparable to the effect of natural images with the eyes open. Moreover, this effect correlated significantly with the occurrence of perceptual changes measured by rating scales. These authors concluded that by boosting the intensity of imagination to the same level of sensory perception ayahuasca lends a status of reality to inner experiences.
Several studies have employed electroencephalographic methods to record brain oscillatory activity after ayahuasca intake. Results indicated significant power increase in the slow gamma (36–44 Hz) band at left occipito-temporo-parietal electrodes, with tendencies to power decreases in theta and delta bands (Don et al., 1998). Another study revealed alpha power decrease at left temporal and centro-parietal sites peaking 90 min after ingestion, while decreases were found for delta and theta waves in the parietal areas (Riba et al., 2002). The analysis of Alonso’s group (Alonso et al., 2015) showed that ayahuasca preparation significantly changed the coupling of brain oscillations between anterior and posterior recording sites in the following pattern. Frontal structures decreased their influence over posterior (central, parietal, and occipital) sites which correlated with the intensity of subjective effects. On the other hand, posterior areas increased their influence over signals measured at anterior locations in parallel with the degree of incapacitation experienced (Alonso et al., 2015). These effects reflect the general action of psychedelics hypothesized by Winkelman (2007) in the proposed concept of psychointegrator, where the normal domination of cognition by frontal brain activity is replaced by intense discharges from the lower areas of the brain that are imposed on the frontal cortex.
Another recent project addressing the time course of ayahuasca effects on the electroencephalogram revealed a biphasic feature (Schenberg et al., 2015). After 50 min from ingestion of the brew there was observed a reduced alpha band activation over the left parieto-occipital cortex, followed by increased slow- and fast-gamma power (30–50 and 50–100 Hz, respectively) between 75 and 125 min. The slow-gamma power increase was located at the left centro-parieto-occipital, left fronto-temporal, and right frontal cortices while fast-gamma increases were significant at left centro-parieto-occipital, left fronto-temporal, right frontal, and right parieto-occipital areas. These effects correlated significantly with the circulating levels of ayahuasca’s main ingredients, such as DMT, harmine, tetrahydroharmine, and some of their metabolites. The significance of gamma power in the broader context of consciousness involves its role in binding of information across diverse regions of the brain and in driving theta wave responses.
Based on the conceptual framework of integrated information theory Gallimore (Gallimore, 2015) supposed that the promotion of gamma oscillations is responsible for the perceptual effects of psychedelic drugs and surmised that the psychedelic state might be characterized by an increase in integration compared to a normal waking state. Gallimore referenced a small study which employed quantitative electroencephalography to measure changes in gamma oscillatory power and coherence following ayahuasca ingestion and reported a highly integrated brain state (Stuckey et al., 2005). This finding is in accordance with an earlier study showing an increase of the gamma band power in ayahuasca users (Don et al., 1998). However, contrary to these results, other studies found generalized decreases in power across all frequency bands (Riba et al., 2002, 2004). While the neuropsychological correlates and clinical relevance of these electroencephalogram patterns remain to be elucidated, Gallimore’s work underscores the necessity of a comprehensive approach to ayahuasca’s pharmacology and the mechanisms of its cognitive, affective, and emotional effects.
The central nervous system effects of ayahuasca are distinct from our normal resting mental states sustained by the Default Mode Network as defined by specific brain areas which are activated when the person is at rest and/or not engaged in specific mental tasks. This Default Mode Network is usually active in meta-cognition, day-dreaming, reflecting on memories, but is apparently disabled by psychedelics (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014). Psychedelics alter this relaxed brain function by reducing cerebral blood flow and the oscillatory power in brain areas of the Default Mode Network that are typically synchronized and functionally connected. Ayahuasca decreases the functional connectivity within the prefrontal cortex and in connections with other areas of the brain that are involved in a wide range of ordinary cognitive processes (Palhano-Fontes et al., 2015).
This decoupling phenomenon results in increased flexibility of high-level networks involving a more open communication among them. It permits a freer operation of the medial temporal lobe structures, which are associated with the release of cognitive states closely related to emotions and fears. The outcome is a complex mental condition characterized by increased somatic awareness and subjective feelings, but lacking the metacognitive ability for self-reflection on personal behavior and one’s mentalization provided by the frontal cortex. This so-called primary cognition produces a state of heightened suggestibility because of the suspension of the frontal networks that are typically used to maintain control over mental processes and perceptions of the outside environment.
Bouso and Riba (2014) suggested that these varied effects of ayahuasca may also result from its ability to increase activity in various areas of the right hemisphere (anterior insula, anterior cingulate/fronto-medial cortex). These areas are implicated in somatic awareness, emotional arousal, feelings, and processing of emotional information. Ayahuasca also appears to increase activity in the left hemisphere’s amygdala/parahippocampal gyrus structures that play a role in emotional arousal and memory, enabling ayahuasca to make repressed memories conscious and to re-experience emotions associated with them. Such apperception enables one to reprocess these memories in more constructive ways and with a potential for processing traumatic pasts in novel ways.
Neurochemical and Psychophysiological Mechanisms Proposed as a |
very close to becoming president-elect.
UPDATE: Well, apparently the VoteCastr folks have some work to do on their model. Trump won Florida handily.A man wheels a refrigerator across the platform at an Australian train station before boarding a commuter train. Screenshot: Queensland Rail/Facebook
July 12 (UPI) -- Transit officials in Australia said a man was fined nearly $200 for bringing a refrigerator onto a commuter train in Queensland.
Queensland Rail posted security camera footage to Facebook showing the man wheeling the fridge on a dolly from a rail overpass to an elevator at a Brisbane station.
The man then rolls the fridge to the Bowen Hills platform and onto a waiting train.
The footage shows the man was directed back off the train by security guards, who issued the man a $192 fine for bringing an oversized item onto the train. He was issued an additional fine for fare evasion, officials said.
"I hope he decided to book a removalist as we would encourage people to do, or call up one of his mates with a ute," Queensland Rail spokeswoman Justine Scarff told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
The Facebook video included footage of a second incident where a man attempted to bring a full-sized couch onto a train.
"We obviously need to be mindful of other people traveling; trains are for people, they aren't for fridges and couches unfortunately," Scarff said.In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt advanced what may have been the most politically daring policy proposal of his entire presidency. FDR called for the equivalent of a maximum wage. No individual American after paying taxes, Roosevelt declared, should have an income over $25,000, about $370,000 today.
A half-century later, in 1992, Bernie Sanders — then a relatively new member of the House of Representatives — marked the 50th anniversary of FDR’s maximum wage initiative. Sanders placed a commentary on FDR’s 1942 proposal in the Congressional Record.
This past Tuesday, in the 75th anniversary year of Roosevelt’s 1942 proposal, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn gave FDR’s income cap idea a considerably wider public airing. In a series of media interviews, Corbyn called for a ceiling on UK individual income.
“There ought to be a maximum wage,” Corbyn told The Herald, a Scottish newspaper. “The levels of inequality in Britain are getting worse.”
The Labour Party leader repeated that call for “some kind of high-earnings cap” the same day in a radio interview with the BBC.
“We cannot set ourselves as being a sort of grossly unequal bargain basement economy on the shores of Europe,” Corbyn explained. “If we want to live in a more egalitarian society and fund our public services, we cannot go on creating worse levels of inequality.”
Corbyn didn’t have the time in his early Tuesday media interviews to spell out any specifics on the income cap he had in mind. He did have that time later in the day when he delivered a major policy address in Peterborough, a small city north of London.
Corbyn’s address pledged the Labour Party to creating “a more equal country, in which power and wealth is more fairly shared amongst our communities,” and then outlined a variety of initiatives to build that “genuinely inclusive society.”
The UK needed, Corbyn noted, a National Investment Bank to rebuild regional economies and mandates that require collective bargaining in key economic sectors “so that workers cannot be undercut.” The national minimum wage, he added, should be raised high enough to become a true living wage.
But the UK, Corbyn stressed, needed to do much more than “tackle low pay at the bottom.”
“We also have to address the excess,” he pointed out, “that drives that poverty pay that leaves millions of people in poverty even though they work.”
Where to start confronting that excess? A Labour government, Corbyn related, would deny government contracts to corporations that pay their top execs over 20 times what they pay their workers. Top UK execs currently take home nearly 150 times what average workers earn.
“It cannot be right,” the Labour Party leader declared, “that if companies are getting public money, that that can be creamed off by a few at the top.”
What else could government do to crack down on excess income at the top? Corbyn’s address listed an ambitious set of possibilities.
Companies that don’t pay any executive more than a modest multiple of the pay of the company’s lowest earners could get a reduced rate on their corporate taxes. The government — by making company pay ratio data publicly available — could also encourage consumers to patronize companies with modest pay gaps.
And the government could help stop excess at its source by mandating that top executive pay “be signed off by remuneration committees on which workers have a majority.” A more traditional egalitarian move — raising the income tax rate on top 1 percent incomes — could help slim down any windfall annual “earnings” not covered by other reforms.
In other words, Corbyn’s address summed up, we have “many options.”
“But what we cannot accept,” the Labour leader stressed, “is a society in which a few earn in two and a bit days what a nurse, a shop worker, a teacher do in a year. That cannot be right.”
Britain’s conservative media outlets, predictably enough, almost immediately subjected Corbyn and his egalitarian pronouncements to some maximum abuse. They ridiculed his sentiments as an “attempt to ‘reboot’ marred by confusion and contradictions.”
Right-wing think tanks chimed in with more vituperation. Corbyn, the Adam Smith Institute charged, had gone “bananas.” The leader of Donald Trump’s favorite UK party, the anti-immigrant UKIP, claimed that Corbyn was practicing the “politics of envy.”
Franklin Roosevelt’s critics made the same sort of hyper-ventilating attacks 75 years ago when FDR proposed his cap on the income of the awesomely affluent. In the end, Roosevelt didn’t get from Congress everything he wanted on the pay-cap front. But the political courage he showed helped pave the way for the much more equal — and average-people friendly — America of the mid-20th century.
Jeremy Corbyn, to be sure, may well have some envy in him. Not for the rich, of course. For FDR.
Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org. His most recent book: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900–1970. Follow him on Twitter @Too_Much_Online.The Treaty of Tientsin, now also known as the Treaty of Tianjin, is a collective name for several documents signed at Tianjin (then romanized as Tientsin) in June 1858. They ended the first phase of the Second Opium War, which had begun in 1856. The Qing, Russian, and Second French Empires, the United Kingdom, and the United States were the parties involved. These treaties, counted by the Chinese among the so-called unequal treaties, opened more Chinese ports to foreign trade, permitted foreign legations in the Chinese capital Beijing, allowed Christian missionary activity, and legalized the import of opium.
They were ratified by the Emperor of China in the Convention of Peking in 1860, after the end of the war.
The Xianfeng Emperor authorized negotiations for the treaty on May 29, 1858. The treaty with the British was signed less than a month later on June 25.[1]
Terms [ edit ]
Major points [ edit ]
Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States would have the right to station legations in Beijing (Peking, a closed city at the time). Eleven more Chinese ports would be opened for foreign trade, including Newchwang, Tengchow (Chefoo), Tamsui, Tainan, Teochew (Swatow), Qiongzhou, Hankow, Nanking, Kiukiang and Chinkiang. The right of foreign vessels including warships to navigate freely on the Yangtze River. The right of foreigners to travel in the internal regions of China for the purpose of travel, trade or missionary activities. Religious liberty to all Christians in China. China was to pay an indemnity of 6 million taels of silver: 2 for France, 2 for Britain military expenses and 2 for compensating British merchants. Official letters and other documents exchanged between China and Britain are to be banned from referring to British Officials and Subjects of the Crown by the character "夷" (yí), meaning "barbarian".
Definitions [ edit ]
The Treaties of Tientsin uses several words that have somewhat ambiguous meanings. For example, the words "settlement" and "concession" can often be confused. The term "settlement" refers to a parcel of land leased to a foreign power and is composed of both foreign and national peoples; locally elected foreigners govern them. The term "concession" refers to a long-term lease of land to a foreign power where the foreign nation has complete control of the land; it is governed by consular representation.
American involvement [ edit ]
Following the pattern set by the great powers of Europe, the United States took on a protectionist stance, built up its navy, and tried to create a mercantile empire. The United States was one of the leading signing "treaty powers" in China, forcing open a total of 23 foreign concessions from the Chinese government. While it is often noted that the United States did not control any settlements in China, it shared British land grants and was actually invited to take land in Shanghai but refused because the land was thought to be disadvantageous.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Wang, Dong. China's Unequal Treaties: Narrating National History. Lexington Books, 2005, p. 16.
References [ edit ]Brain scans of dogs could give researchers a new tool for studying what happens in the mind of man's best friend.
"I think it could open a whole new type of research on cognition," said neuroscientist Greg Berns of Emory University, lead author on a dog-scanning study that will be published in Public Library of Science One.
Berns described the initial findings, in which brain regions expected to become active in anticipation of reward did just that, as a proof-of-concept to show that studying a dog inside a functional magnetic resonance imager was logistically feasible.
According to Berns, who typically investigates how human decision-making plays out in our brains, dogs may be a better animal model for studying cognition than the monkeys commonly used in such research.
FMRI representations of neurological activity produced by reward anticipation in the brains of Callie and McKenzie. Image: Berns et al./SSRN
To a monkey, a laboratory full of humans is a profoundly strange and unnatural environment, which could influence how it thinks – whereas interacting with humans is second nature to dogs.
Of course, standing inside an FMRI machine isn't exactly a normal canine experience, and Berns' team needed eight months to train his dogs, a 2-year-old feist named Callie and a 3-year-old border collie named McKenzie, to remain motionless inside the machine while wearing noise-reducing earmuffs.
Among the questions that might be studied is whether dogs understand the language of human commands, or respond more to body movements or other cues.
"One of the things we're interested in is how dogs represent humans: Are we all just a pack to them, like Cesar Millan says? What part of the brain represents humans and other dogs? It could be sound, or scent, or any of those modalities," Berns said.
Dog empathy, and how it compares to the human version, is another possible area of investigation.
"Dog-lovers are convinced their dogs know what they're feeling. Honestly, I'm on the fence about that. Maybe that's because of my own dogs," said Berns. "Skeptics out there – a.k.a. cat people – think dogs are just good actors. I don't think it's quite like that. But how far it goes, I'd love to figure out."
Citation: "Functional MRI in Awake Unrestrained Dogs." By Gregory Berns, Andrew Brooks and Mark Spivak. Public Library of Science ONE, publication date to-be-determined.
Images: Berns et al./SSRNThe muscles connected to the ears of a human do not develop enough to have the same mobility allowed to monkeys. Arrows show the vestigial structure called Darwin's tubercle
In the context of human evolution, human vestigiality involves those traits (such as organs or behaviors) occurring in humans that have lost all or most of their original function through evolution. Although structures called vestigial often appear functionless, a vestigial structure may retain lesser functions or develop minor new ones. In some cases, structures once identified as vestigial simply had an unrecognized function.
The examples of human vestigiality are numerous, including the anatomical (such as the human tailbone, wisdom teeth, and inside corner of the eye), the behavioral (goose bumps and palmar grasp reflex), and molecular (pseudogenes). Many human characteristics are also vestigial in other primates and related animals.
History [ edit ]
Charles Darwin listed a number of putative human vestigial features, which he termed rudimentary, in The Descent of Man (1890). These included the muscles of the ear; wisdom teeth; the appendix; the tail bone; body hair; and the semilunar fold, in the corner of the eye. Darwin also commented on the sporadic nature of many vestigial features, particularly musculature. Making reference to the work of the anatomist William Turner, Darwin highlighted a number of sporadic muscles which he identified as vestigial remnants of the panniculus carnosus, particularly the sternalis muscle.[1][2]
In 1893, Robert Wiedersheim published The Structure of Man, a book on human anatomy and its relevance to man's evolutionary history. This book contained a list of 86 human organs that he considered vestigial, or as Wiedersheim himself explained: "Organs having become wholly or in part functionless, some appearing in the Embryo alone, others present during Life constantly or inconstantly. For the greater part Organs which may be rightly termed Vestigial."[3] His list of supposedly vestigial organs included many of the examples on this page as well as others then mistakenly believed to be purely vestigial, such as the pineal gland, the thymus gland, and the pituitary gland. Some of these organs that had lost their obvious, original functions later turned out to have retained functions that had gone unrecognized before the discovery of hormones or many of the functions and tissues of the immune system.[4][5] Examples included:
the role of the pineal in the regulation of the circadian rhythm (neither the function nor even the existence of melatonin was yet known);
discovery of the role of the thymus in the immune system lay many decades in the future; it remained a mystery organ until after the mid-20th century;
the pituitary and hypothalamus with their many and varied hormones were far from understood, let alone the complexity of their interrelationships.
Historically, there was a trend not only to dismiss the vermiform appendix as being uselessly vestigial, but an anatomical hazard, a liability to dangerous inflammation. As late as the mid-20th century, many reputable authorities conceded it no beneficial function.[6] This was a view supported, or perhaps inspired, by Darwin himself in the 1874 edition of his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. The organ's patent liability to appendicitis and its poorly understood role left the appendix open to blame for a number of possibly unrelated conditions. For example, in 1916, a surgeon claimed that removal of the appendix had cured several cases of trifacial neuralgia and other nerve pain about the head and face, even though he stated that the evidence for appendicitis in those patients was inconclusive.[7] The discovery of hormones and hormonal principles, notably by Bayliss and Starling, argued against these views, but in the early twentieth century, there remained a great deal of fundamental research to be done on the functions of large parts of the digestive tract. In 1916, an author found it necessary to argue against the idea that the colon had no important function and that "...the ultimate disappearance of the appendix is a coordinate action and not necessarily associated with such frequent inflammations as we are witnessing in the human..."[8]
There had been a long history of doubt about such dismissive views. Around 1920, the prominent surgeon Kenelm Hutchinson Digby documented previous observations, going back more than thirty years, that suggested lymphatic tissues, such as the tonsils and appendix, may have substantial immunological functions.
Anatomical [ edit ]
Appendix [ edit ]
Appendix vermiformis on fully functional Ileum, caecum and colon of rabbit, showingon fully functional caecum
The human vermiform appendix on the vestigial caecum.
In modern humans, the vermiform appendix is a vestige of a redundant organ that in ancestral species had digestive functions, much as it still does in extant species in which intestinal flora hydrolyze cellulose and similar indigestible plant materials.[9] Some herbivorous animals, such as rabbits, have a terminal vermiform appendix and cecum that apparently bear patches of tissue with immune functions and may also be important in maintaining the composition of intestinal flora. It does not however seem to have much digestive function, if any, and is not present in all herbivores, even those with large caeca.[10] As shown in the accompanying pictures however, the human appendix typically is about comparable to that of the rabbit's in size, though the caecum is reduced to a single bulge where the ileum empties into the colon.[6] Some carnivorous animals may have appendices too, but seldom have more than vestigial caeca.[11] In line with the possibility of vestigial organs developing new functions, some research suggests that the appendix may guard against the loss of symbiotic bacteria that aid in digestion, though that is unlikely to be a novel function, given the presence of vermiform appendices in many herbivores.[12][13] Intestinal bacterial populations entrenched in the appendix may support quick re-establishment of the flora of the large intestine after an illness, poisoning, or after an antibiotic treatment depletes or otherwise causes harmful changes to the bacterial population of the colon.[14] A 2013 study, however, refutes the idea of an inverse relationship between cecum size and appendix size and presence. It is widely present in euarchontoglires (a superorder of mammals that includes rodents and primates) and has also evolved independently in the diprotodont marsupials, monotremes, and is highly diverse in size and shape which could suggest it is not vestigial. Researchers deduce that the appendix has the ability to protect good bacteria in the gut. That way, when the gut is affected by a bout of diarrhea or other illness that cleans out the intestines, the good bacteria in the appendix can repopulate the digestive system and keep the person healthy.[15]
Coccyx [ edit ]
The coccyx, or tailbone, is the remnant of a lost tail.[16] All mammals have a tail at some point in their development; in humans, it is present for a period of 4 weeks, during stages 14 to 22 of human embryogenesis.[17] This tail is most prominent in human embryos 31–35 days old.[18] The tailbone, located at the end of the spine, has lost its original function in assisting balance and mobility, though it still serves some secondary functions, such as being an attachment point for muscles, which explains why it has not degraded further. The coccyx serves as an attachment site for tendons, ligaments, and muscles. It also functions as an insertion point of some of the muscles of the pelvic floor. In rare cases, congenital defect results in a short tail-like structure being present at birth. Twenty-three cases of human babies born with such a structure have been reported in the medical literature since 1884.[19][20] In rare cases such as these, the spine and skull were determined to be entirely normal. The only abnormality was that of a tail approximately twelve centimeters long. These tails were able to be surgically removed, and the individuals have resumed normal lives.[21]
Wisdom teeth [ edit ]
Wisdom teeth are vestigial third molars that human ancestors used to help in grinding down plant tissue. The common postulation is that the skulls of human ancestors had larger jaws with more teeth, which were possibly used to help chew down foliage to compensate for a lack of ability to efficiently digest the cellulose that makes up a plant cell wall. As human diets changed, smaller jaws were naturally selected, yet the third molars, or "wisdom teeth", still commonly develop in human mouths.[22] Currently, wisdom teeth have become useless and even harmful to the extent where surgical procedures are often performed to remove them.
Agenesis (failure to develop) of wisdom teeth in human populations ranges from zero in Tasmanian Aboriginals to nearly 100% in indigenous Mexicans.[23] The difference is related to the PAX9 gene (and perhaps other genes).[24]
Vomeronasal organ [ edit ]
In some animals, the vomeronasal organ (VNO) is part of a second, completely separate sense of smell, known as the accessory olfactory system. Many studies have been performed to find if there is an actual presence of a VNO in adult human beings. Trotier et al.[25] estimated that around 92% of their subjects who had not had septal surgery had at least one intact VNO. Kjaer and Fisher Hansen, on the other hand,[26] stated that the VNO structure disappeared during fetal development as it does for some primates.[27] However, Smith and Bhatnagar (2000)[28] asserted that Kjaer and Fisher Hansen simply missed the structure in older fetuses. Won (2000) found evidence of a VNO in 13 of his 22 cadavers (59.1%) and in 22 of his 78 living patients (28.2%).[29] Given these findings, some scientists have argued that there is a VNO in adult human beings.[30][31] However, most investigators have sought to identify the opening of the vomeronasal organ in humans, rather than identify the tubular epithelial structure itself.[32] Thus it has been argued that such studies, employing macroscopic observational methods, have sometimes missed or even misidentified the vomeronasal organ.[33]
Among studies that use microanatomical methods, there is no reported evidence that human beings have active sensory neurons like those in working vomeronasal systems of other animals. [33][34] Furthermore, there is no evidence to date that suggests there are nerve and axon connections between any existing sensory receptor cells that may be in the adult human VNO and the brain.[35] Likewise, there is no evidence for any accessory olfactory bulb in adult human beings,[33] and the key genes involved in VNO function in other mammals have become pseudogenes in human beings. Therefore, while the presence of a structure in adult human beings is debated, a review of the scientific literature by Tristram Wyatt concluded, "most in the field … are sceptical about the likelihood of a functional VNO in adult human beings on current evidence."[36]
Ear [ edit ]
Right: The non-vestigial auricular muscle in the Left: Muscles of the human ear.Right: The non-vestigial auricular muscle in the donkey can help it to move its ears like antennae
The ears of a macaque monkey and most other monkeys have far more developed muscles than those of humans, and therefore have the capability to move their ears to better hear potential threats.[37] Humans and other primates such as the orangutan and chimpanzee however have ear muscles that are minimally developed and non-functional, yet still large enough to be identifiable.[9] A muscle attached to the ear that cannot move the ear, for whatever reason, can no longer be said to have any biological function. In humans there is variability in these muscles, such that some people are able to move their ears in various directions, and it can be possible for others to gain such movement by repeated trials.[9][38] In such primates, the inability to move the ear is compensated mainly by the ability to turn the head on a horizontal plane, an ability which is not common to most monkeys—a function once provided by one structure is now replaced by another.[39]
The outer structure of the ear also shows some vestigial features, such as the node or point on the helix of the ear known as Darwin's tubercle which is found in around 10% of the population.
Eye [ edit ]
The plica semilunaris is a small fold of tissue on the inside corner of the eye. It is the vestigial remnant of the nictitating membrane, an organ that is fully functional in some other species of mammals.[40] Its associated muscles are also vestigial.[9] Only one species of primate, the Calabar angwantibo, is known to have a functioning nictitating membrane.[41]
The orbitalis muscle is a vestigial or rudimentary nonstriated muscle (smooth muscle) of the eye that crosses from the infraorbital groove and sphenomaxillary fissure and is intimately united with the periosteum of the orbit. It was described by Johannes Peter Müller and is often called Müller's muscle. The muscle forms an important part of the lateral orbital wall in some animals, but in humans it is not known to have any significant function.[42][43]
Reproductive system [ edit ]
Genitalia [ edit ]
In the internal genitalia of each human sex, there are some residual organs of mesonephric and paramesonephric ducts during embryonic development:
Human vestigial structures also include leftover embryological remnants that once served a function during development, such as the belly button, and analogous structures between biological sexes. For example, men are also born with two nipples, which are not known to serve a function compared to women.[44] In regards to genitourinary development, both internal and external genitalia of male and female fetuses have the ability to fully or partially form their analogous phenotype of the opposite biological sex if exposed to a lack/overabundance of androgens or the SRY gene during fetal development.[45][46] Examples of vestigial remnants of genitourinary development include the hymen, which is a membrane that surrounds or partially covers the external vaginal opening that derives from the sinus tubercle during fetal development and is homologous to the male seminal colliculus.[47] Some researchers[who?] have hypothesized that the persistence of the hymen may be to provide temporary protection from infection, as it separates the vaginal lumen from the urogenital sinus cavity during development.[48] Other examples include the glans penis and the clitoris, the labia minora and the ventral penis, and the ovarian follicles and the seminiferous tubules.[47]
In modern times, there is controversy regarding whether the foreskin is a vital or vestigial structure.[49] In 1949, British physician Douglas Gairdner noted that the foreskin plays an important protective role in newborns. He wrote, “It is often stated that the prepuce is a vestigial structure devoid of function... However, it seems to be no accident that during the years when the child is incontinent the glans is completely clothed by the prepuce, for, deprived of this protection, the glans becomes susceptible to injury from contact with sodden clothes or napkin.”[49] During the physical act of sex, the foreskin reduces friction, which can reduce the need for additional sources of lubrication.[49] "Some medical researchers, however, claim circumcised men enjoy sex just fine and that, in view of recent research on HIV transmission, the foreskin causes more trouble than it’s worth."[49] The area of the outer forskin measures between 7–100 cm2,[50] and the inner foreskin measures between 18–68 cm2,[51] which is a wide range. Regarding vestigial structures, Charles Darwin wrote, “An organ, when rendered useless, may well be variable, for its variations cannot be checked by natural selection.”[52] In the March 2017 publication of the Global Health Journal: Science and Practice, Morris and Krieger wrote, "The variability in foreskin size is consistent with the foreskin being a vestigial structure."[53] Charles Darwin speculated that the sensitivity of the foreskin to fine touch might have served as an “early warning system” in our naked ancestors while it protected the glans from the intrusion of biting insects and parasites.[52]
Musculature [ edit ]
A number of muscles in the human body are thought to be vestigial, either by virtue of being greatly reduced in size compared to homologous muscles in other species, by having become principally tendonous, or by being highly variable in their frequency within or between populations.
Head [ edit ]
The Occipitalis Minor is a muscle in the back of the head which normally joins to the auricular muscles of the ear. This muscle is very sporadic in frequency—always present in Malays, in 56% of Africans, 50% of Japanese, 36% of Europeans, and is nonexistent in the Khoikhoi people of southwestern Africa and in Melanesians.[54] Other small muscles in the head associated with the occipital region and the post-auricular muscle complex are often variable in their frequency.[55]
The platysma, a quadrangular (four sides) muscle in a sheet-like configuration, is a vestigial remnant of the panniculous carnosus of animals. In horses, it is the muscle that allows it to flick a fly off its back.
Face [ edit ]
In many non-human mammals, the upper lip and sinus area is associated with whiskers or vibrissae which serve a sensory function. In humans, these whiskers do not exist but there are still sporadic cases where elements of the associated vibrissal capsular muscles or sinus hair muscles can be found. Based on histological studies of the upper lips of 20 cadavers, Tamatsu et al. found that structures resembling such muscles were present in 35% (7/20) of their specimens.[56]
Arm [ edit ]
The palmaris longus muscle is seen as a small tendon between the flexor carpi radialis and the flexor carpi ulnaris, although it is not always present. The muscle is absent in about 14% of the population, however this varies greatly with ethnicity. It is believed that this muscle actively participated in the arboreal locomotion of primates, but currently has no function, because it does not provide more grip strength.[57] One study has shown the prevalence of palmaris longus agenesis in 500 Indian patients to be 17.2% (8% bilateral and 9.2% unilateral).[58] The palmaris is a popular source of tendon material for grafts and this has prompted studies which have shown the absence of the palmaris does not have any appreciable effect on grip strength.[59]
The levator claviculae muscle in the posterior triangle of the neck is a supernumerary muscle present in only 2–3% of all people[60] but nearly always present in most mammalian species, including gibbons and orangutans.[61]
Torso [ edit ]
The pyramidalis muscle of the abdomen is a small and triangular muscle, anterior to the rectus abdominis, and contained in the rectus sheath. It is absent in 20% of humans and when absent, the lower end of the rectus then becomes proportionately increased in size. Anatomical studies suggest that the forces generated by the pyramidalis muscles are relatively small.[62]
The latissimus dorsi muscle of the back has several sporadic variations. One particular variant is the existence of the dorsoepitrochlearis or latissimocondyloideus muscle which is a muscle passing from the tendon of the latissimus dorsi to the long head of the triceps brachii. It is notable due to its well developed character in other apes and monkeys, where it is an important climbing muscle, namely the dorsoepitrochlearis brachii.[63][64] This muscle is found in ≈5% of humans.[65]
Leg [ edit ]
The plantaris muscle is composed of a thin muscle belly and a long thin tendon. The muscle belly is approximately 5–10 centimetres (2–4 inches) long, and is absent in 7–10% of the human population. It has some weak functionality in moving the knee and ankle but is generally considered redundant and is often used as a source of tendon for grafts. The long, thin tendon of the plantaris is humorously called "the freshman's nerve", as it is often mistaken for a nerve by first-year medical students.
Tongue [ edit ]
Another intriguing example of human vestigiality occurs in the tongue, specifically the chondroglossus muscle. In a morphological study of 100 Japanese cadavers, it was found that 86% of fibers identified were solid and bundled in the appropriate way to facilitate speech and mastication. The other 14% of fibers were short, thin and sparse – nearly useless, and thus concluded to be of vestigial origin.[66]
Breasts [ edit ]
Extra nipples or breasts sometimes appear along the mammary lines of humans, appearing as a remnant to mammalian ancestors who possessed more than two nipples or breasts.[67][68]
Behavioral [ edit ]
Goose bumps are an example of a vestigial human reaction to stress.
Humans also bear some vestigial behaviors and reflexes.[69] For example, the formation of goose bumps in humans under stress is a vestigial reflex; a possible function in human evolutionary ancestors was to raise the body's hair, making the ancestor appear larger and scaring off predators.[70][69] Raising the hair is also used to trap an extra layer of air, keeping an animal warm.[69] Due to the diminished amount of hair in humans, the reflex formation of goose bumps when cold is also vestigial.[69]
The palmar grasp reflex is supported to be a vestigial behavior in human infants. When placing a finger or object to the palm of an infant, it will securely grasp it. This grasp is found to be rather strong.[71] Some infants—37% according to a 1932 study—are able to support their own weight from a rod,[72], although there is no way they can cling to their mother. The grasp is also evident in the feet too. When a baby is sitting down, its prehensile feet assume a curled-in posture, similar to that observed in an adult chimp.[73][74] An ancestral primate would have had sufficient body hair to which an infant could cling unlike modern humans, thus allowing its mother to escape from danger, such as climbing up a tree in the presence of a predator without having to occupy her hands holding her baby.
It has been proposed that the hiccup is an evolutionary remnant of earlier amphibian respiration.[75] Amphibians such as tadpoles gulp air and water across their gills via a rather simple motor reflex akin to mammalian hiccuping. The motor pathways that enable hiccuping form early during fetal development, before the motor pathways that enable normal lung ventilation form. Thus, according to recapitulation theory, the hiccup is evolutionarily antecedent to modern lung respiration. Additionally, they point out that hiccups and amphibian gulping are inhibited by elevated CO 2 and may be stopped by GABA B receptor agonists, illustrating a possible shared physiology and evolutionary heritage. These proposals may explain why premature infants spend 2.5% of their time hiccuping, possibly gulping like amphibians, as their lungs are not yet fully formed. Fetal intrauterine hiccups are of two types. The physiological type occurs before 28 weeks after conception and tend to last five to ten minutes. These hiccups are part of fetal development and are associated with the myelination of the phrenic nerve, which primarily controls the thoracic diaphragm. The phylogeny hypothesis explains how the hiccup reflex might have evolved, and if there is not an explanation, it may explain hiccups as an evolutionary remnant, held-over from our amphibious ancestors. This hypothesis has been questioned because of the existence of the afferent loop of the reflex, the fact that it does not explain the reason for glottic closure, and because the very short contraction of the hiccup is unlikely to have a significant strengthening effect on the slow-twitch muscles of respiration.[citation needed]
Molecular [ edit ]
There are also vestigial molecular structures in humans, which are no longer in use but may indicate common ancestry with other species. One example of this is L-gulonolactone oxidase, a gene that is functional in most other mammals and produces an enzyme that synthesizes vitamin C.[76] In humans and other members of the suborder Haplorrhini, a mutation disabled the gene and made it unable to produce the enzyme. However, the remains of the gene are still present in the human genome as a vestigial genetic sequence called a pseudogene.[77]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]‘The world is not only queerer than we suppose,” said JBS Haldane. “It is queerer than we can suppose.” Haldane was a biologist and something of a polymath (Peter Medawar, himself a Nobel laureate, described him as “the cleverest man I ever knew”), and whenever I read anything about quantum mechanics, it’s Haldane’s aphorism that comes to mind.
Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that studies what goes on inside atoms. It is not for the faint-hearted, not least because it teaches you that everything you know about the physical, tactile world is wrong. “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost,” the great physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” And at the quantum level, the things that apparently are there are seriously weird. For example: subatomic particles can be in two places at the same time – a phenomenon known as “superposition” – and any pair of them can be “entangled” in such a way that they can instantly coordinate their properties, no matter how great the physical distance between them. And the strangest thing of all is that since subatomic |
entertainment business all month, which began with the allegations that longtime Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein had sexually harassed or sexually assaulted women for decades.
The Weinstein scandal reportedly inspired scores of women in media to contribute to a secret spreadsheet detailing varying degrees of both illegal and inappropriate behavior by their male colleagues.
In breaking the news of Steele's firing, The Awl's Silvia Killingsworth noted "the lack of Vox representation on" the spreadsheet.
"The aforementioned viral Medium post by Eden Rohatensky alleges misconduct by more than one Vox employee," Killingsworth wrote, "one wonders how many more firings are yet to come."Doctors in Turkey have detailed the case of a man who exhibited all the traits of a real-life vampire.
" In a chilling case report, doctors in Turkey have described what they claim to be a real-life vampire with multiple personalities and an addiction to drinking blood. "
The 23-year-old individual came to the attention of doctors when he developed a strong addiction to blood, an obsession that would lead him to slice in to parts of his own body with a knife so that he could collect and drink it. His addiction eventually progressed to the point where he had need to stab and bite people to get his 'fix' and even relied on having his father obtain packs of blood from a blood bank to help quench his insatiable thirst.The unusual case was published in a recent report released by the Journal of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. Doctors concluded that a series of traumatic and violent events in the man's life were likely to have been the trigger of his strange obsession and that it is the only known case of vampirism they had ever come across.One Point Five Seconds? Accident Reconstruction Truth
A car is going to make a left hand turn in front of you. How much time will you really have? Are you going to survive, or will you be toast? What happens, second by second, to determine who makes it, and who gets hurt? We know that time, speed, and distance are all involved, but how do things really happen?
Most law-enforcement investigators and accident reconstructionists who are not trained in motorcycle accidents make a simple analysis based on the assumption that it takes the rider.75 seconds to perceive the danger, and another.75 seconds to react, for a total of 1.5 seconds. At the end of that period, the rider starts to brake (and/or steer), and the reconstructionist uses formulae to determine how much time, speed, and distance would elapse before impact. Since the rule of thumb is that feet per second is about 1.5 times the speed in mph, this is a simple and convenient way to figure out what happened.
For example, if the motorcycle is going 30 miles per hour, it travels at 45 feet per second. Once the left-hand turn starts, the rider takes 1.5 seconds to perceive and react, so he travels about 67.5 feet before he begins to brake.
Simple, elegant, easy to use. Unfortunately, also completely wrong.
These shopworn estimates of perception and reaction time come from experiments done long ago, using simulators with a fake steering wheel, accelerator and brake. When the light goes from green to red, the subject moves their foot from the accelerator to the brake, and a timer records the result; not very realistic.
Let’s try again, and see what you are faced with in a real accident.
Your perception time includes the time it takes to see, the time it takes to focus attention, and decision time. Only then can you begin to react, and only when your reaction is complete and you do something will your motorcycle begin braking or swerving. The whole time, you are moving towards disaster.
You’re not expecting an accident. You’re cruising along, enjoying the ride, as you approach an intersection. There’s an oncoming car in the left-turn pocket, but you expect it to wait for the light. As you get closer, you notice that the car is slowly pulling forward. You figure it’s just pulling closer to the line. You keep going, but pay a little more attention to the car. Now you are closer to the intersection. The car gets closer to the line, then over it, and accelerates into the intersection. At this point, you have to make sense of a complex and confusing set of facts, one that is contrary to your expectations, and you are beginning to panic. It takes time for your brain to understand what is going on, calculate the trajectory of the car, and deal with the danger.
It doesn’t take a scientist to realize that the perception of this set of circumstances is confusing, and it is going to take you longer than reacting to a green light switching to red. Precious time is gone. Studies show that perception and response time is greatly increased by situations that do not initially seem critical. Your motorcycle keeps going forward until you brake or swerve.
Included in “perception time” is the concept of attention. It took time for you to take attention from the tasks of riding and transfer attention to the task of tracking the now-dangerous left-turning vehicle, and analyze evasive options.
Attention is something we all agree is critical to accident avoidance. Attention is related to the ability to process information. Studies show the ability to switch focus of attention does not change with age. However, uncertainty about the location of information relevant to a certain task does change with age. This would suggest that older drivers are at a disadvantage in complex and demanding traffic situations. This may be one of the reasons many older drivers drive slowly. Vision, particularly night vision, is worse, and it takes longer to clearly see the situation.
Unfortunately, you’re not done. Included in “perception time,” is “decision” time. In that situation an internal dialogue takes place. How fast is the car going? How fast it is accelerating? Will the driver see and stop? Can I slow enough to go behind? Can I get in front? At what point should I get off the brakes and swerve? How much front brake should I use? How much rear? More time is gone. Your bike keeps going forward. While you sort this out, the car accelerates into the intersection in front of you.
Forget the theoretical 3/4th of a second. More like several seconds have been spent.
Finally, you begin deciding what to do. More time, more distance. Time’s up. You are now way too close to do anything successfully. You are going to hit the side of the car, and go flying over it. Even if you catch a little brake, expect to be six or seven feet in the air as your limbs flail towards a landing more than 20 feet away.
We can talk about things that will help avoid a collision. Covering the front brake can save a small amount of time. Having a foot on the rear brake saves time, but can lead to a skid-induced highside. But we need to stop looking at motorcycle accidents using methods designed for car accidents.
Mike Padway is a motorcycle lawyer with a passion for riding and riding safety. He handles cases throughout the state and can be contacted by email: mike@michaelpadway.com.
This article was originally published in Citybike Magazine.
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How To Think Like A Mad Man, Find Your Edge & Risk Little For Lots
The enigma that is eccentricity can be unravelled by grasping of this single statement; that which you perceive is both a matter of the object of your perception (in this case; the eccentric person) and your apparatus of perception. Eccentricity, then, is as much a quirk of the popular mind as it is of a particular person. So with the assumption that you seek creativeness and intrigue — here’s how to think eccentrically, find your edge and risk little for lots.
It may sound peculiar that contrary thinking is required to achieve creative thoughts… This, however, becomes self-evident when we realize that thinking the way someone else thinks results in mimicry — a “copy-cat” requires the minimum of creative thought… Therefore, the inference is that to achieve any creativeness, some change has to be made. From this, it stands to reason that the optimum in creativeness must approach the maximum change… and the maximum change must be close to the opposite.
Rid Yourself of Nebulous Terms – Define, Redefine & Refine. Unless you’re an orator or something it’s highly likely that nebulosity is your enemy. If you speak and think in vague terms, then simple, logical deductions are likely to evade you. But since life involves doing one thing or another, chances are that you’ll default to linking concepts in the ‘default’ way — the way suggested by the crowd. In that case it is likely that the succession of vague, emotive images will govern your action. The power of words is bound up with the images they evoke, and is quite independent of their real significance. Words whose sense is the most ill-defined are sometimes those that possess the most influence. Such, for example, are the terms democracy, socialism, equality, liberty, etc. whose meaning is so vague that bulky volumes do not suffice to precisely fix it. Yet it is certain that a truly magical power is attached to those short syllables, as if they contained the solution of all problems. They synthesise the most diverse unconscious aspirations and the hope of their realisation. — Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, A Study of the Popular Mind Since eccentricity involves a capacity to deal with reality in a supposedly ‘odd’ manner and since the crowd deals mainly in vague images, one clear way to surpass them is simply to define the terms in which you speak and think. This can seem daunting — especially at first. However, since the crowd remains ever-ponderous and dogmatic, it takes but a very small amount of clarity to achieve oversized gains. One need not plan out the redefinition of one’s entire vocabulary — just start with one concept that you use a lot in your daily life. I expect that the incentive gleaned from the initial reward will be enough to prompt further redefinitions and refinements.
Allocate All of Your Available Resources Contrarily. Contrary allocation of capital seems to be well-acknowledged as a key to success in certain investment and entrepreneurial communities. However, it also seems to remain compartmentalized as a theory about allocating capital and capital only – I say that if you wish to reach the honourable status of the ‘Mad Man’, it is prudent to apply this theory to all of the resources at your disposal: The truth is that you should allow your mind ruminate contrarily for more than just your money – but also for your time, energy and your attention. The integrated eccentric is he who doesn’t give up in any of these fields. Whenever you are next faced with a seemingly trivial matter (such as whether or not to read a newspaper, take a taxi or express interest in an uninteresting matter) allow yourself to consider what the ‘common way’ is and just try the opposite.
Adopt a Kantian Distaste for Intellectual Discussion & Stop Checking with Others. Sometimes, if not most of the time, it is quite unnecessary to acquire the opinions of others before you act. Yet nevertheless I see a strong tendency for people to check and verify trivial and non-trivial matters with one another. This brings about two serious hindrances to the wannabe wacko; 1) it forces you to adapt your language to that of someone that is probably confused and using nebulous terms and 2) it will likely introduce unneeded emotions into your mind. In order to acquire a sense of creativity I suggest that you act before you tell others about your actions and – in particular – adopt a Kantian distaste for intellectual discussion: By and large Kant, unlike Socrates, avoided the company of philosophers and philosophically minded fellow citizens. He did this not because of any conviction that philosophers as a breed are inevitably frivolous or consumed by the need to prattle on about their most recent publications; some are, to be sure, and these one would seek to avoid in any case. He was certainly aware that in his field of study there existed colleagues with whom he could talk about bank accounts, ball games or battle plans. But philosophyers tend to talk about philosophy. And even if such talk is motivated by infinite charity and fraternal goodwill, it provokes some response, comment or counter-arguement to the ideas and theories presented. In print the same arguments have quite a different impact; they can be simply registered without requiring an immediate response, or can be interpreted to suit one’s frame of mind, and as a last resort a page can be turned and a book can be closed. But in conversaation courtesy demands that the addressee react and relate himself. And this, in Kant’s view, is a dangeerous exercise and one that certainly lacks the productive element that Socrates may have found in it. Philosophyers, or so Kant thought, work best in isloation…
Test Your Revelations in Small Ways. Proceed to Fail Small & Win Big. So by now hopefully you’ve defined at least one term that has significance to your life, considered allocating your time, attention and money contrarily and considered doing something big without checking with anyone at all. Chances are that you may have thought of something interesting. The default consensual reaction is to elaborate a plan in a manner that requires significant resources (be that money, time, energy, attention or whatever else). I urge you to take a step back and consider how you might test it in the smallest possible way.
I’m always astounded by the degree to which people attempt to impose the property of permanence upon themselves. [facepalm] Why oh why? [/facepalm] Permanence through life is most frequently a large and onerous speculation — and indeed a type of speculation that is likely to be unattainable due to the ever-changing nature of each and every living individual. I suggest that if you wish to maintain your newfound eccentric temperament and demeanour, then risk little, lots rather than lots, little. If you risk little, lots you will not suffer the emotional turmoil that accompanies a large drawdown – and if you’re thinking contrarily you’ll likely be risking little for lots.Economic reforms have been blamed by some critics for widening the gap between the rich and the poor in India. They have also created another divide: between doctors and engineers. According to the 2011 census, India has 35 doctors for every 100 engineers in the 60-plus age-group. The doctor- engineer ratio keeps declining among younger people and falls to 15.7 for the 20-24 year age-group. It is commonly believed that more women opt for medicine while men go for engineering. The data confirms this as the doctor-engineer ratio is higher for women across all age-groups. However, the fall in this ratio from the oldest to youngest age-cohorts has been much sharper among women.
To be sure, the ratio was skewed in favour of engineers in the 2001 census as well. However, this gap increased further between the 2001 and 2011 census. In 2001, there were 29.7 doctors per 100 engineers, which fell to 20.7 in 2011. The data also suggests that women became more open to careers in engineering after the 1950s. There were more women doctors than engineers in the 60-plus age-group in the 2001 census. This trend reversed itself in the 2011 census. But as mentioned above, the fall in this ratio from the oldest to youngest age-cohorts is also sharpest among women -- perhaps a function of a rapid strides the IT services business has made in India. Women account for almost a third of the employees in Indian IT services companies
Does this mean the post-reform generation has shunned the medical profession for engineering? Mint has reported that there are currently 28000 seats in government medical colleges in India. According to the AICTE website, the sanctioned intake for under graduate course in government engineering and technology colleges for 2015-16 was 67,571. So, it is more difficult to get into a government medical college than an engineering college. To be sure, one can always get into a private college where capitation fees can be paid to get admission. Even through this route, medical college capitation fees are much higher than for engineering colleges, making it difficult to get admission in the latter.
What explains the deterioration in the doctor-engineer ratio? Growth in medical college seats has been a fraction of the growth in the number of engineering college seats. In 1985, 57,888 seats were on offer in engineering colleges in India. By 2016-17, the number had increased almost 27 times to 1,553,711. The 1985 numbers are from a 1989 paper published in the Indian Journal of History of Science, while the 2016-17 numbers are taken from the All India Council for Technical Education’s website. Contrast this with the number of seats in medical colleges. They have risen less than three times from 19,745 in 1985 to 52,205 by 2016, shows data available on the Medical Council of India (MCI) website. To put it differently, India added more than 48,000 seats per year to its engineering colleges in these 31 years. For medical colleges, the increase was just above 1,000 per year. In fact, the medical college seats available in India have only increased by 14 times since independence.
India’s scarcity of doctors is a big problem. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends one doctor per thousand people in a country. The latest figures for India are below this benchmark, and much behind that for countries such as China and Brazil. The rapid growth in the number of engineering graduates suggests that India should be ahead of its peers in cutting edge research in technology. Even that does not seem to be true. World Bank data suggests that India’s progress in increasing the number of researchers (in R&D) has been insignificant compared to that made by China and Brazil.
These findings seem to be in keeping with many surveys which describe the bulk of Indian engineers as unemployable. The Hindustan Times reported in January 2016 that more than 80% of Indian engineers remained unemployable. These figures also underline the challenge of maintaining even a minimum standard of education with increasing privatisation. The Medical Council of India (MCI) has been accused of being miserly in granting affiliation to medical colleges; yet, it is scary even to contemplate what the situation may have been in the event of a rapid increase in the number of medical schools, were it to produce results similar to that in engineering. To be sure, a check on increasing private medical colleges has not helped us create a commendable medical education set-up. A Reuters report published last year exposed fraudulent practices in India’s private medical colleges. A Washington Post story published by NDTV showed that more than half of India’s medical schools had not produced a peer-reviewed research paper in a decade.
The government think tank NITI Aayog recently released a draft bill to overhaul the state of medical education in the country. The bill calls for radical reforms including scrapping of the MCI, allowing for-profit medical colleges after doing away with capitation and other hidden fees, and tapping the pool of qualified doctors to meet a shortage of faculty. While there is bound to be a debate on the effectiveness of such regulation in ensuring quality private medical education, there can be little argument over the fact that all such strategies should ultimately keep in mind the inability of a majority of poor people to pay for healthcare.Graduate students at the University of Texas are protesting wages they consider too low as well as a measure passed by the U.S. House that would tax their tuition exemptions as income.
About 200 staged a walkout at noon Wednesday to rally on UT’s Main Mall, chanting “Grad students will not stay overworked and underpaid” and brandishing signs with messages like “UT runs on grad student labor.”
UT doctoral student Zoya Brumberg at Wednesday�s walkout and rally seeking higher pay for grad students and opposing a proposed tax on tuition waivers. pic.twitter.com/45bMOXczOg
— Ralph Haurwitz (@ralphhaurwitz) December 6, 2017
Graduate students at UT rallying for higher pay and against a federally proposed tax on tuition waivers. pic.twitter.com/d25GILDhfD
— Ralph Haurwitz (@ralphhaurwitz) December 6, 2017
Would've been difficult to rationalize going to UT for my MFA had I been taxed on tuition waiver.
Makes no sense, will cheat students out of their education and cheat the country out of professionals across disciplines who can't afford graduate ed.
And for what? https://t.co/E2UaIuFYP6
— Lucas Schaefer (@LucasESchaefer) December 6, 2017
#HAPPENINGNOW: Graduate students protest tax reform bill and their treatment at UT. pic.twitter.com/Hj2c3e5fbg
— KVR News (@KVRNews) December 6, 2017 ]]For other places with the same name, see Al Bayda'
City in Cyrenaica, Libya
Bayda, or Elbeida ( or ; Arabic: البيضاء al-Bayḍāʾ (help·info) ) (also spelt az-Zāwiyat al-Bayḍāʾ,[3] Zāwiyat al-Bayḑā’,[4] Beida[5] and El Beida;[5] known as Beda Littoria[6] under Italian colonial rule), is a commercial and industrial city in eastern Libya. It is located in northern Cyrenaica. With a population of 250,000 people,[7] Bayda is the 4th-largest city in Libya[8][9] (after Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata). It is the capital city of the Jabal al Akhdar district.
History [ edit ]
Bayda's history stretches back to classical antiquity, when it was known as Balagrae.[10] The 2000-year-old ruins of the ancient Greek colony of Cyrene are located nearby in Shahat.[11][12][13][14]
One of the greatest attractions in the city is the tomb of a famous companion (sahabah) of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, Ruwaifi bin Thabit al-Ansari. For that reason, the city was known as Sidi Rafaa after him. After the arrival of Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi in the area in the 19th century, and the construction of a zāwiyah, the city was renamed az-Zāwiyat al-Bayḍāʾ.[11]
The modern city was built in the 1950s. It was originally intended to be the new capital of Libya and most of the necessary government buildings were constructed there. Eventually, the plan to move the capital from Tripoli to Bayḍāʾ was dropped.[15] Bayda is the administrative seat for Jabal al-Akhdar.
Name [ edit ]
Bayḍāʾ means "white" in Arabic.[16] The naming of the city is connected with the Senussi movement, which had dedicated zāwiyahs in the town to educate local people in fiqh, Quranic memorisation to the young, as well as local and tribal conflict resolution, as was customary at the time. The town became known as az-Zāwiyat al-Bayḍāʾ ("the White Monastery") because of the white painted zāwiyah, which lies on top of a high hill and was clearly visible from a distance. Within time, the word zāwiyah was dropped and the city became known simply as al-Bayḍāʾ.[17]
The ruins of the ancient Greek city of Balagrae in Bayda.
When the settlement was first founded by the Greeks, it was known as Balagrae. During Fascist Italian rule, the city was known as Beda Littoria. During monarchy, the zāwiyah at Bayḍāʾ was considered a focal point for the Senussi movement, and in addition to the zāwiyah, the city was also the political capital and seat of government of the Kingdom of Libya until the 1969 Libyan coup d'état. The zāwiyah still exists, but it is in a neglected state and sits near Omar Al-Mukhtar University at the western entrance to the city.
Geography and natural history [ edit ]
A snowy road on the outskirts of the city
The city is famous for the valleys and forests nearby, which are not found in the other cities of the 'Green Mountains'—Akhdar Mountains. It is named the "Green Mountains" because they are covered by dense forests and woodlands, of which the best known are the Hamri, Alpellnj, and Belaid forests. The highest point in the Akhdar Mountains is around 850 metres (2,790 ft), located in the Hamri area.
Native habitat [ edit ]
The Akhdar mountain range lies within the Mediterranean dry woodlands and steppe ecoregion. The region has many native plants closely related to those found in similar Greek, Italian, and Spanish coastal mountains and forests. There are about 1,800 species of Mediterranean forests, woodlands, and scrub trees, plants, and flowers. The forests are characterized by many species of oak, juniper, pine, carob, cypress, hawthorn, Luffa aegyptiaca, and olives. There is a network of natural springs in most parts of the mountains, which makes them one of the most fertile areas of coastal Maghreb. The forested areas and springs provide habitat supportive of a diversity of birds and wildlife.
The Akhdar Mountains are part of the larger Jabal al Akhdar Plateau, an area of 15,000 square kilometres (5,800 sq mi), with a length of 200 km (120 mi) from the Albakur in the west to the Valley of Bef to the east of Derna, and a width of 75 km (47 mi). Beaches stretch along the chain for about 350 kilometres (220 mi), in a diverse terrain with many coastal bays and inlets.[18] Bayda is famous for the neighboring locale of Susa, a seaside resort on the Mediterranean Sea.
Agriculture [ edit ]
Cultivated plants include many fruit trees, including apples, grapes, nuts, and other fruits estimated at about four million trees, as well as many medicinal and herbal plants, such as thyme, wandering herb Alkhalap, and rosemary. In the past the mountains probably also had the Silphium plant, which was treasured in antiquity but is now believed to be extinct. Honey is also found in this region, due to the abundance of herbs.[19] Bozharh is a center for the production of honey, for which Jabal al Akhdar is famous. The finest honey comes from bees which feed on the thyme and lotus plants. Honey is also extracted from the chammari or strawberry plant, Arbutus unedo, which blooms in the months of December and January. Honey-murr from the cove region has proved to be useful for the treatment of liver diseases, such as diabetes.
Climate [ edit ]
The city of Bayda has a mild mediterranean climate (Csb, according to the Köppen climate classification) with an average annual precipitation of 540 mm (21 in). It is famous for recurring snow falls and heavy rains, where the temperature rises in the summer time to 30 °C (86 °F), but in the winter snow and freezing temperatures can occur. The city is in a Mediterranean-berber/arab area about 241 kilometres (150 mi) south of Crete, and it is referred to as the City of Snow, which distinguishes it from the rest of the cities of Libya. The altitude added to the northern location sustains the nival precipitation (even if hardly accumulates), different from other near coastal areas. The region of Jabal al Akhda is characterized by a moderate climate, being cooler in the winter with an average annual rainfall of about 540mm. [20]
New Bayda neighborhood
Climate data for Bayda Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year Average high °C (°F) 11.8
(53.2) 12.9
(55.2) 15.6
(60.1) 19.6
(67.3) 23.4
(74.1) 27.2
(81.0) 26.9
(80.4) 26.7
(80.1) 25.5
(77.9) 23.7
(74.7) 19.0
(66.2) 14.5
(58.1) 20.6
(69.0) Daily mean °C (°F) 7.9
(46.2) 8.4
(47.1) 10.6
(51.1) 13.7
(56.7) 17.1
(62.8) 20.6
(69.1) 21.4
(70.5) 21.4
(70.5) 20.0
(68.0) 18.1
(64.6) 14.2
(57.6) 10.3
(50.5) 15.3
(59.6) Average low °C (°F) 4.0
(39.2) 4.0
(39.2) 5.6
(42.1) 7.8
(46.0) 10.8
(51.4) 14.0
(57.2) 16.0
(60.8) 16.1
(61.0) 14.5
(58.1) 12.6
(54.7) 9.0
(48.2) 5.1
(41.2) 10.0
(49.9) Average precipitation mm (inches) 121
(4.8) 105
(4.1) 58
(2.3) 25
(1.0) 9
(0.4) 2
(0.1) 0
(0) 0
(0) 6
(0.2) 38
(1.5) 55
(2.2) 121
(4.8) 540
(21.4) Source: Climate-data.org[20]
Economy [ edit ]
Bayda is one of the major cities in eastern Libya, and one of its major economic centers. It is also the industrial and commercial center in Libya. The major manufactured goods include food products, fertilizers and agricultural products, food processing, and imported goods, and produce from villages near the city in the Akhdar region, including cereals, dates, olives, wool, and meat. Bayda also has one of the most important markets of vegetables and fruits in Libya, because of the naturally fertile lands.
Financing is also important, and the city's National Commercial Bank is the second largest bank in Libya. It also has a number of other large banks, including the Office of the Central Bank of Libya in the city center. There is also the Agricultural Research Centre and the main animal and large national firms, such as Brega Oil Marketing Company and Gulf Oil, are important to the city's economy. Coupled with an increase in consumer prices, is an increase in the importance of the retail sector in the economy of the city. In recent years, international companies such as United Colors of Benetton, H & M, and Nike, have opened in Bayda.
Tourism [ edit ]
Tourism as an industry is still in the very early stages in Libya. Bayda is an important tourist city in Libya, a base to explore the nearby tourist areas such as the Ancient Greece ruins of Cyrene and Apollonia, and Libyan Desert trips south into Kufra. The village Balagrae contains several large hotels, due to the tourist population.
Demographics [ edit ]
As with other cities in Libya, there is a reasonable amount of ethnic diversity in Bayda. The people of eastern Libya, Bayda included, have in recent centuries been of predominantly Berber/arab mix descent. The earliest inhabitants were Berber peoples, and from the 7th century BCE until the 7th century CE, the main ethnic group was Greek. In recent times, there has been an influx of African immigrants into Bayda. The city also hosts many Egyptian immigrants. A small Greek community is also present. The Greek island of Crete is a short distance from Bayda, and many modern families in the city bear Cretan surnames.
The majority of Libyans in Bayda are of Berber, Arab and Greek descendants century, historically controlled a section of Libya. Bayda and its surrounding areas were controlled by the Barasa clan. In modern times, a large number of Libyans from different parts of the country have moved into the city.
Education [ edit ]
Education in Bayda, as is the case throughout Libya, is compulsory and free. Compulsory education continues up until ninth grade. There are many public primary and secondary schools throughout the city, as well as some private and international school and others. Omar Al-Mukhtar University education is also free for all Libyan citizens in Bayda. It holds the country's second largest university, the former Al-Jami'a al-Libiya.
Omar Al-Mukhtar University is the second university established in the country, and the first Islamic university, but after the Revolution of 1960, it was changed to the University of Agriculture, and then to a regular university. It now includes 14 colleges in several cities, such as Tobruq and Derna, Libya.
Religion [ edit ]
The predominant religion in Bayda is Islam. Almost all of the city's inhabitants are Sunni Muslims. During Islamic holidays such as Ramadhan, most abstain from food; restaurants are usually empty during the day, with the exception of some expatriates and tourists. Alcohol is banned by law in Bayda and throughout Libya in accordance with Islamic principles. The conservative Islamic nature of Bayda creates a strong sense of family life in the city: almost all teenagers and young adults live at home until they marry. Many in Bayda adhere to the traditional Maliki school of religious law. In recent years however, some people are beginning to practice schools of thought popular in Saudi Arabia such as Salafism, with an increase in the number of literalist-inclined Islamic television channels. It is not uncommon, therefore, to see women wearing black niqabs and men with full beards.
There are many mosques throughout the city; the oldest and best known is the Mosque Ruwayfi bin Thabit Al-Ansari; the oldest mosques are located in and around the medina. There is also a small foreign Christian community in the city: the Franciscan-run Maria Immacolata Parish Church serves Bayda's Catholic community of roughly 4000,[21] as well as a Protestant church belonging to the Church of Christ.
Sports [ edit ]
Bayda has some of the best sports facilities in the country. The city has various sporting centres of different standards, such as football stadiums, as well as several other public and private facilities. Football is the most popular sport in Bayda, and one of the country's most successful football clubs, Alakhdhar, is based in the city.
The largest sporting centre in Bayda is the Medina al-Riyadhia (Sports City). The complex is situated just north of the city centre, and houses the Al Bayda Stadium and athletics stadium, and the Slayman al Tharrat basketball stadium. Several matches of the 2009 FIBA Africa Championship were hosted at the arena.
Judo and taekwondo are popular men's sports in Bayda. In recent times, rugby sevens has seen great success, with three clubs to its name. Gyms have also become more popular in the city in recent years, because of a greater concern for healthy living amongst Libyans.
Transportation [ edit ]
Road network [ edit ]
Bayda is on the historic Libyan Coastal Highway. The local road network is generally well designed. An efficient system of highways, flyovers, ringroads and underpasses serve the city, and allow for the transport of goods and vehicles. The roads are not always well-maintained however, and often have |
time after their initial argument Thursday afternoon.
Anyone with information in this case is urged to contact the HPD Homicide Division at 713-308-3600 or Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS.
Copyright 2015 by Click2Houston.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.New Delhi: The international Yoga Day will be celebrated on a "grand scale" this year with the government issuing an "improved" common protocol of asanas, besides holding other events to attract people specially students.
Ayush Minister Shripad Yesso Naik today said the Ministry of Human Resources Development has also been asked to organise a Yoga Olympiad to popularise the practice among students.
"The Ayush Ministry has decided to celebrate the International Yoga Day on a grand scale as compared to last year. A 45-minute common yoga protocol has been developed by experts committee of the yoga gurus, which is an improved version of last year's event.
"We are requesting various yoga institutions to provide necessary technical support and guidance to the state for the event," Naik said.
He was addressing the ministers and senior bureaucrats of states and Union Territories.
June 21 is celebrated as the World Yoga day.
"In addition, we have also requested Ministry of Human Resources Development to organise a Yoga Olympiad involving school children," Naik said.
Anil Kumar Ganeriwala, Joint Secretary in the Ministry, said "we are requesting important yoga institutions to provide technical guidelines to a group of states within their states so that there will be collaboration between the state governments and yoga institutions."
The Centre for Support for Yoga and Naturopathy will give funds to NGOs in each district of the country to organise a one-month training programme.Why it matters: If we did, even though the mandate has never been popular, our polling shows that the public does not necessarily want to eliminate it as part of tax reform legislation, once they understand how it works and what the consequences of eliminating it might be.
The back story: Republicans have targeted the ACA mandate because they want the $318 billion in savings the Congressional Budget Office says they would get to help them pay for their tax cuts. (The change would save money because fewer people would get federal subsidies on the ACA marketplaces or apply for Medicaid coverage.)
They have also targeted the mandate because they think it's so unpopular. Our polls have consistently shown that the mandate is the least popular element of the ACA and in the abstract, more Americans (55%) would eliminate the mandate than keep it (42%).
Yes, but: When people know how the mandate actually works, and are told what experts believe is likely to happen if it's eliminated, most Americans oppose repealing it in the tax plan.
When people learn that they will not be affected by the mandate if they already get insurance from their employer or from Medicare or Medicaid, 62% oppose eliminating it.
When people are told that eliminating the mandate would increase premiums for people who buy their own coverage, as the CBO says it will, they also flip, with 60% opposing eliminating the mandate.
And when they're told that 13 million fewer people will have health coverage – another CBO projection – 59% oppose eliminating the mandate.
The bottom line: Many people change their minds when they learn more about facts and consequences, which happens as the lights shine brighter on them in legislative debates. This happened to the “skinny repeal" proposal, and it would happen to single payer.
But as the tax legislation rushes through Congress and heads to the final negotiations, there is almost no chance for the public to grasp the tradeoffs that would come from eliminating the mandate and who is affected and who is not. If they did, the polling suggests, eliminating the mandate might prove far less popular than Republicans seem to think it is.EDWARDS TWP, MI -- Note to hunters: If you are at risk of falling asleep, be sure your finger isn't resting on your firearm's trigger.
A 32-year-old Bay City man learned this tip the hard way.
Between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 18, the man was in a deer blind near Rau and Dunham Lake roads in Ogemaw County's Edwards Township. He ended up dozing off with his.45 caliber handgun resting in his lap, said Sheriff Howie Hanft.
A short while later, the man's cellphone alarm went off, shocking him awake and leading him to compress the gun's trigger. The fired bullet entered one of the man's thighs and struck his femur, Hanft said.
The man called a friend of his, who came to his rescue and escorted him to a road, where an ambulance subsequently picked him up, the sheriff said.
The man was taken to a hospital for treatment of a non-life threatening wound. Hanft said the man won't face criminal charges related to the reckless discharge.Older adults whose lives have meaning enjoy better sleep quality and less sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome
Cultivating purpose in life could be drug-free strategy to improve sleep
Findings similar in whites and African Americans
Older adults have more insomnia and sleep disturbances
CHICAGO --- Having a good reason to get out of bed in the morning means you are more likely to sleep better at night with less sleep apnea and restless leg syndrome, reports a new Northwestern Medicine and Rush University Medical Center study based on older adults.
This is the first study to show having a purpose in life specifically results in fewer sleep disturbances and improved sleep quality and over a long period of time. Previous research showed having a purpose in life generally improves overall sleep when measured at a single point in time.
Although the participants in the study were older, researchers said the findings are likely applicable to the broader public.
"Helping people cultivate a purpose in life could be an effective drug-free strategy to improve sleep quality, particularly for a population that is facing more insomnia," said senior author Jason Ong, an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "Purpose in life is something that can be cultivated and enhanced through mindfulness therapies."
The paper will be published Sunday, July 9, in the journal Sleep Science and Practice.
Individuals have more sleep disturbances and insomnia as they get older. Clinicians prefer to use non-drug interventions to improve patients' sleep, a practice now recommended by the American College of Physicians as a first line treatment for insomnia, Ong said.
The next step in the research should be to study the use of mindfulness-based therapies to target purpose in life and resulting sleep quality, said Arlener Turner, the study's first author and a former postdoctoral fellow in neurology at Feinberg.
The 823 participants -- non-demented individuals 60 to 100 years old with an average age of 79 -- were from two cohorts at Rush University Medical Center. More than half were African American and 77 percent were female.
People who felt their lives had meaning were 63 percent less likely to have sleep apnea and 52 percent less likely to have restless leg syndrome. They also had moderately better sleep quality, a global measure of sleep disturbance.
For the study, participants answered a 10-question survey on purpose in life and a 32-question survey on sleep. For the purpose in life survey, they were asked to rate their response to such statements as, "I feel good when I think of what I've done in the past and what I hope to do in the future."
The next step in the research should be to study the use of mindfulness-based therapies to target purpose in life and resulting sleep quality, Turner said.
Poor sleep quality is related to having trouble falling asleep, staying asleep and feeling sleepy during the day. Sleep apnea is a common disorder that increases with age in which a person has shallow breathing or pauses in breathing during sleep several times per hour. This disruption often makes a person feel unrefreshed upon waking up and excessively sleepy during the day.
Restless leg syndrome causes uncomfortable sensations in the legs and an irresistible urge to move them. Symptoms commonly occur in the late afternoon or evening hours and are often most severe at night when a person is resting, such as sitting or lying in bed.
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This research was supported by grants R01AG22018, P30G10161, R01AG17917, P20MD6886 from National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health and the Illinois department of public health. The cohorts were from the Minority Aging Research Study and the Rush Memory and Aging Project.
More News at Northwestern NowIn 1998, Congress voted to double the budget of the NIH over the next five years. Ten years later, Michael White looks back on what actually happened.
(PHOTO: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
In June of 1998, the U.S. Congress, with bipartisan support, committed itself to double the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget over the next five years, arguing that "biomedical research has been shown to be effective in saving lives and reducing health care expenditures." Shortly thereafter, a trio of scientists representing the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology laid out a vision of what increased funding could achieve: it would help the biomedical research community take advantage of an "untapped reservoir of talent and an underutilization of valuable human resources" by encouraging more innovative project proposals, and by helping more young scientists start their own labs, leading to a more productive scientific enterprise.
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Congress finished doubling the NIH budget in 2003. Now, 10 years later, success rates for grant proposals have plummeted to historic lows, and the proportion of labs headed by young scientists has declined to nearly half of what it was in 1998. What happened?
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The failure to sustain the NIH budget after it doubled is wreaking havoc in the biomedical research community.
A big part of the answer is that the U.S. government is letting the nation's biomedical research infrastructure go to seed. Like my former landlord who paid for a major remodel of his property, and then let his investment decay out of utter neglect, the U.S. government built up our nation's biomedical research capacity, and then let the NIH's purchasing power steadily erode for a decade. In 2007, an analysis published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that decline of the NIH budget since 2003 would soon bring it to what it would have reached anyway if had Congress simply stuck with its pre-1998 historical trend of modest annual increases.
And that was before the economic crisis struck. The NIH received a sizable boost in 2009 as part of the financial stimulus legislation, but that was gone after two years. The worst hit came earlier this year, when the NIH had to trim five percent from its annual budget, six months into the fiscal year, in response to Congress' sequester legislation. The Obama administration's budget request for the 2014 fiscal year is $31.3 billion, more than 23 percent lower than the 2003 funding level in purchasing power, and almost 40 percent less than where a projection of the historical trend would put it (see the figure below). All trace of the doubled NIH budget has vanished, along with similar efforts to double the budgets of other science agencies (PDF).
Predictably, the failure to sustain the NIH budget after it doubled is wreaking havoc in the biomedical research community. It has changed how scientists spend their time and even the very makeup of the biomedical community. Because funds are scarce, scientists are spending more of their time writing and re-writing more grant proposals, each of which has an increasingly smaller chance of getting funded. The tighter competition for funding has put the squeeze on younger scientists with fledgling labs; the proportion of young scientists with NIH grants is half of what was in 1998, while the proportion of funded scientists over 65 has doubled. Because scientific training typically takes over 10 years, students who decided to enter graduate school in the boom days of the mid-Aughts are now entering a job market that looks nothing like what they expected.
The budget crunch has been bad, but there is a strong case that the biomedical research community's problems stem from more than a simple lack of money. A major effect of federal R&D funding policy over the last decade has been to exacerbate trends and structural problems that were evident well before Congress committed to double the NIH budget.
Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University, argues that many of the research community's problems flow from two big features of how we do research. First, we staff our labs with low-wage, temporary workers—graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who move on after a few years. This means that universities have an incentive to recruit and train more students and postdocs, regardless of their eventual job prospects. The result is unsustainable. As Stephan writes, "the research enterprise itself resembles a pyramid scheme."
The second structural problem is that career rewards in science are doled out according to a "tournament model," a situation in which small advantages—in productivity, skill, or network connections—translate into large differences in rewards like faculty jobs, grant funding, and tenure. Tournament models foster intense competition, but they can be incredibly wasteful: the differences between a proposal that is funded and one that is not can be small and arbitrary. These small and arbitrary differences are making and breaking scientific careers in which taxpayers have invested substantial resources. As Stephan writes in her book How Economics Shapes Science:
The public has invested resources in tuition and stipends. If these ‘investments’ are then forced to enter careers that require less training, resources have not been efficiently deployed. Surely there are less expensive ways to train high school science teachers than to turn PhDs who cannot find a research position into teachers.... The current system may be "incredibly successful" from the perspective of faculty, as a recent report described it, but at whose cost?
These structural problems are deeply ingrained in our current research institutions, and solving them will require difficult decisions regarding how to fund scientific training, and whether to stop staffing labs primarily with temporary workers. More money by itself certainly won't solve the structural problems of the biomedical research community.
But we're not solving any problems by letting our substantial investment in training and research infrastructure erode away. Not only will we get less overall R&D, we'll get a system that is too risk-averse, one that fails to nurture the next generation of scientists, and one that promotes those who can work well in the hyper-competitive environment, while discouraging others who're looking for a better work-life balance, or whose scientific instincts lead them off the well-trod path, into potentially revolutionary, but less immediately publishable territory.When I look for information on mob spawning and mob grinders I find a lot of links to these two items:
The problem is, they seem to have contradictory information in them.
The first one espouses the much-credited idea that to improve your mob spawning area you must light up all the caves around it. This is built on the assumption that when the game goes to spawn a monster, it looks for an appropriate place to put one, so eliminating anywhere but your mob machine would increase the rate of mobs spawning within it.
The "Mob Spawning Science" post claims an algorithm that goes chunk by chunk, and within each chunk it picks a random block and sees if that block is a legit spawning location (standing on something, correct light level, etc.). If so, it puts a mob there. (I'm simplifying, but this is the idea.) This would imply that for any given block in a chunk, there is a 1/32768 chance of it being selected. So given a block X that is a nice, dark, mob-spawnable place, it has a 1/32768 chance each time the chunk is processed of spawning a monster regardless of any lit or unlit caves anywhere around it.
So which one is correct?What is “SKL-X”?
“Skylake-X” (E/EP) is the server/workstation/HEDT version of desktop/mobile Skylake CPU – the 6-th gen Core/Xeon replacing the current Haswell/Broadwell-E designs. It naturally does not contain an integrated GPU but what does contain is more cores, more PCIe lanes and more memory channels:
Server 2S, 4S and 8S (sockets)
Workstation 1S and 2S
Up to 28 cores and 56 threads per CPU
Up to 48 PCIe 3.0 lanes
Up to 46-bit physical address space and 48-bit virtual address space
512-bit SIMD aka AVX512F, AVX512BandW, AVX512DWandQW
While it may seem an “old core”, the 7-th gen Kabylake core is not much more than a stepping update with even the future 8-th gen Coffeelake rumored again to use the very same core. But what it does do is include the much expected 512-bit AVX512 instruction set (ISA) that are are not enabled in the current desktop/mobile parts.
On the desktop – Intel is now using the “i9” moniker for its top parts – in a way a much needed change for its top HEDT platform (socket 2011 now socket 2066) to differentiate from its mainstream one.
In this article we test CPU core performance; please see our other articles on:
Hardware Specifications
We are comparing the top-end desktop Core i9 with current competing architectures from both AMD and Intel as well as its previous version.
CPU Specifications Intel i9 7900X (Skylake-X) AMD Ryzen 1700X Intel i7 6700K (Skylake) Intel i7 5820K (Haswell-E) Comments Cores (CU) / Threads (SP) 10C / 20T 8C / 16T 4C / 8T 6C / 12T SKL-X manages more cores than Ryzen (10 vs 8) which considering their speed may just be too tough to beat. HSW-E topped at 8 cores also. Speed (Min / Max / Turbo) 1.2-3.3-4.3GHz (12x-33x-43x) 2.2-3.4-3.9GHz (22x-34x-39x) 0.8-4.0-4.2GHz (8x-40x-42x) 1.2-3.3-4.0GHz (12x-33x-40x) SKL-X somehow manages higher single-core turbo than even SKL-A (42x v 43x) – but its rated speed is a match for Ryzen and HSW-E. Power (TDP) 140W 95W 91W 140W Ryzen has comparative TDP to SKL while HSW-E and SKL-X are both almost 50% higher L1D / L1I Caches 10x 32kB 8-way / 10x 32kB 8-way 8x 32kB 8-way / 8x 64kB 8-way 4x 32kB 8-way / 4x 32kB 8-way 6x 32kB 8-way / 6x 32kB 2-way Ryzen instruction cache is 2x the data cache a somewhat strange decision; all caches are 8-way except the HSW-E’s L1I. L2 Caches 10x 1MB 16-way 8x 512kB 8-way 4x 256kB 8-way 6x 256kB 8-way Surprise surprise – the new SKL-X’ L2 is 4-times the size of SKL/HSW-E and thus even beating Ryzen. Large datasets should have no problem getting cached. L3 Caches 13.75MB 11-way 2x 8MB 16-way 8MB 16-way 15MB 20-way In a somewhat surprising move, the L3 cache has been reduced pretty drastically and is now smaller than both Ryzen and even the very old HSW-E!
Native Performance
We are testing native arithmetic, SIMD and cryptography performance using the highest performing instruction sets (AVX2, AVX, etc.). Ryzen supports all modern instruction sets including AVX2, FMA3 and even more like SHA HWA (supported by Intel’s Atom only) but has dropped all AMD’s variations like FMA4 and XOP likely due to low usage.
Results Interpretation: Higher values (GOPS, MB/s, etc.) mean better performance.
Environment: Windows 10 x64, latest AMD and Intel drivers. Turbo / Dynamic Overclocking was enabled on both configurations.
Native Benchmarks i9-7900X (Skylake-X) Ryzen 1700X i7-6700K 4C/8T (Skylake)
i7-5820K (Haswell-E)
Comments Native Dhrystone Integer (GIPS) 446 [+54%] AVX2 290 AVX2 185 AVX2 233 AVX2 Dhrystone does not yet use AVX512 – but no matter SKL-X beats Ryzen by over 50%! Native Dhrystone Long (GIPS) 459 [+57%] AVX2 292 AVX2 185 AVX2 230 AVX2 With a 64-bit integer workload nothing much changes. Native FP32 (Float) Whetstone (GFLOPS) 271 [+46%] AVX/FMA 185 AVX/FMA 109 AVX/FMA 150 AVX/FMA Whetstone does not yet use AVX512 either – but SKL-X is still approx 50% faster! Native FP64 (Double) Whetstone (GFLOPS) 223 [+50%] AVX/FMA 155 AVX/FMA 89 AVX/FMA 116 AVX/FMA With FP64 the winning streak continues. The Empire strikes back – SKL-X beats Ryzen by a sizeable difference (50%) across integer or floating-point workloads even on “legacy” AVX2/FMA instruction set. It will only get faster once AVX512 is enabled. Native Integer (Int32) Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 1460 [+2.7x] AVX512DQW 535 AVX2 513 AVX2 639 AVX2 For the 1st time we see AVX512 in action and everything is pummeled into dust – almost 3-times faster than Ryzen! Native Long (Int64) Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 521 [+3.3x] AVX512DQW 159 AVX2 191 AVX2 191 AVX2 With a 64-bit integer vectorised workload SKL-X is over 3-times faster than Ryzen! Native Quad-Int (Int128) Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 5.37 [+48%] 3.61 2.15 2.74 This is a tough test using Long integers to emulate Int128 without SIMD and thus SKL-X returns to “just” 50% faster than Ryzen. Native Float/FP32 Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 1800 [+3.4x] AVX512F 530 FMA 479 FMA 601 FMA In this floating-point vectorised test we see again the power of AVX512 with SKL-X is again over 3-times faster than Ryzen! Native Double/FP64 Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 1140 [+3.8x] AVX512F 300 FMA 271 FMA 345 FMA Switching to FP64 SIMD code SKL-X gets even faster approaching 4-times Native Quad-Float/FP128 Multi-Media (Mpix/s) 24 [+84%] AVX512F 13.7 FMA 10.7 FMA 12 FMA In this heavy algorithm using FP64 to mantissa extend FP128 but not vectorised – SKL-X returns to just 85% faster. Ryzen’s SIMD units were never strong – splitting 256-bit ops into 2 – but with AV512 SKL-X is unstoppable: integer or floating-point we see it over 3-times faster that is a serious improvement in performance. Even against its older HSW-E it is over 2-times faster a significant upgrade. For heavy vectorised SIMD code – as long as it’s updated to AVX512 – there is no other choice. Crypto AES-256 (GB/s) 32.7 [+2.4x] AES 13.8 AES 15 AES 20 AES All CPUs support AES HWA – thus it is mainly a matter of memory bandwidth – and with 4 memory channels SKL-X reigns supreme – it’s over 2-times faster. Crypto AES-128 (GB/s) 32 [+2.3x] AES 13.9 AES 15 AES 20.1 AES What we saw with AES-256 just repeats with AES-128; Ryzen would need more memory channels to even HSW-E never mind SKL-X. Crypto SHA2-256 (GB/s) 25 [+46%] AVX512DQW 17.1 SHA 5.9 AVX2 7.6 AVX2 Even Ryzen’s support for SHA hardware acceleration is not enough as memory bandwidth lets it down with SKL-X “only” 50% faster through AVX512. Crypto SHA1 (GB/s) 39.3 [+2.3x] AVX512DQW 17.3 SHA 11.3 AVX2 15.1 AVX2 SKL-X only gets faster with the simpler SHA1 and is now over 2-times faster. Crypto SHA2-512 (GB/s) 21.1 [+6.3x] AVX512DQW 3.34 AVX2 4.4 AVX2 5.34 AVX2 SHA2-512 is not accelerated by SHA HWA thus Ryzen is forced to use SIMD and loses badly. Memory bandwidth rules here and SKL-X with its 4-channels of ~100GB/s bandwidth reigns supreme (we can only imagine what the 6-channel beast will score) – so Ryzen loses badly. Its ace card – support for SHA HWA is not enough to “save it” as AVX512 allows SKL-X to power through algorithms like a knife through butter. The 64-bit SHA2-512 test is sobbering with SKL-X no less than 6-times faster than Ryzen. Black-Scholes float/FP32 (MOPT/s) 320 [+36%] 234 129 157 In this non-vectorised test SKL-X is only 36% faster than Ryzen. SIMD would greaty help it here. Black-Scholes double/FP64 (MOPT/s) 277 [+40%] 198 108 131 Switching to FP64 code nothing much changes, SKL-X is just 40% faster. Binomial float/FP32 (kOPT/s) 66.9 [-21%] 85.1 27.2 37.8 Binomial uses thread shared data thus stresses the cache & memory system; somehow Ryzen manages to win this. Binomial double/FP64 (kOPT/s) 65 [+41%] 45.8 25.5 33.3 With FP64 code the situation gets back to “normal” – with SKL-X again 40% faster than Ryzen. Monte-Carlo float/FP32 (kOPT/s) 64 [+30%] 49.2 25.9 31.6 Monte-Carlo also uses thread shared data but read-only thus reducing modify pressure on the caches; SKL-X is just 30% faster here. Monte-Carlo double/FP64 (kOPT/s) 51 [+36%] 37.3 19.1 21.2 Switching to FP64 where Ryzen did so well – SKL-X returns to 40% faster. Without the help of its SIMD engine, SKL-X is still 30-40% faster than Ryzen but over 2-times faster than HSW-E showing just how much the core has improved for complex code with lots of shared data (read-only or modifyable). While Ryzen thought it found its “niche” it has been already beaten… SGEMM (GFLOPS) float/FP32 343 [5x] FMA 68.3 FMA 109 FMA 185 FMA GEMM has not yet been updated for AVX512 but SKL-X is an incredible 5x faster! DGEMM (GFLOPS) double/FP64 124 [+2x] FMA 62.7 FMA 72 FMA 87.7 FMA Even without AVX512, with FP64 vectorised code, SKL-X still manages 2x faster. SFFT (GFLOPS) float/FP32 34 [+3.8x] FMA 8.9 FMA 18.9 FMA 18 FMA FFT has also not been updated to AVX512 but SKL-X is still 4x faster than Ryzen! DFFT (GFLOPS) double/FP64 19 [+2.5x] FMA 7.5 FMA 9.3 FMA 10.9 FMA With FP64 SIMD SKL-X is over 2.5x faster than Ryzen in this tough algorithm with loads of memory accesses. SNBODY (GFLOPS) float/FP32 585 [+2.5x] FMA 234 FMA 273 FMA 158 FMA NBODY is not yet updated to AVX512 but again SKL-X wins. DNBODY (GFLOPS) double/FP64 179 [+2x] FMA 87 FMA 79 FMA 40 FMA With FP64 code SKL-X is still 2-times faster than Ryzen. With highly vectorised SIMD code, even without the help of AVX512, SKL-X is over 2.5x faster than Ryzen, but more than that – almost 4-times faster than its older HSW-E brother! Blur (3×3) Filter (MPix/s) 1639 [+2.2x] AVX2 750 AVX2 655 AVX2 760 AVX2 In this vectorised integer AVX2 workload SKL-X is over 2x faster than Ryzen. Sharpen (5×5) Filter (MPix/s) 711 [+2.2x] AVX2 316 AVX2 285 AVX2 345 AVX2 Same algorithm but more shared data does not change anything. Motion-Blur (7×7) Filter (MPix/s) 377 [+2.2x] AVX2 172 AVX2 151 AVX2 188 AVX2 Again same algorithm but even more data shared does not change anything again. Edge Detection (2*5×5) Sobel Filter (MPix/s) 609 [+2.1x] AVX2 292 AVX2 271 AVX2 316 AVX2 Different algorithm but still SKL-X is still 2x faster than Ryzen. Noise Removal (5×5) Median Filter (MPix/s) 79.8 [+36%] AVX2 58.5 AVX2 35.4 AVX2 50.3 AVX2 Still AVX2 vectorised code but here Ryzen does much better, with SKL-X just 36% faster. Oil Painting Quantise Filter (MPix/s) 15.7 [+63%] 9.6 6.3 7.6 This test is not vectorised though it uses SIMD instructions and here SKL-X only manages to be 63% faster. Diffusion Randomise (XorShift) Filter (MPix/s) 1000 [+17%] 852 422 571 Again in a non-vectorised test Ryzen just flies but SKL-X manages to be 20% faster. Marbling Perlin Noise 2D Filter (MPix/s) 190 [+29%] 147 75 101 In this final non-vectorised test Ryzen really flies but not enough to beat SKL-X which is 30% faster. As with other SIMD tests, SKL-X remains just over 2-times faster than Ryzen and about as fast over HSW-E. But without SIMD it drops significantly to just 20-60% showing just how good Ryzen performs.
When using the new AVX512 instruction set – we see incredible performance with SKL-X about 3x faster than its Ryzen competitor and about 2x faster than the older HSW-E; with the older AVX2/FMA instruction sets supported by all CPUs, it is “only” about 2x faster. When using non-vectorised SIMD code its lead shortens to about 30-60%.
While we’ve not tested memory performance in this article, we see that in streaming tests its 4 DDR4 channels trounce 2-channel CPUs that just cannot feed all their cores. Being able to use much faster DDR4 memory (3200 vs 2133) allows it to also soundly beat its older HSW-E brother.
Software VM (.Net/Java) Performance
We are testing arithmetic and vectorised performance of software virtual machines (SVM), i.e. Java and.Net. With operating systems – like Windows 10 – favouring SVM applications over “legacy” native, the performance of.Net CLR (and Java JVM) has become far more important.
Results Interpretation: Higher values (GOPS, MB/s, etc.) mean better performance.
Environment: Windows 10 x64, latest Intel drivers..Net 4.7.x (RyuJit), Java 1.8.x. Turbo / Dynamic Overclocking was enabled on both configurations.
VM Benchmarks i9-7900X (Skylake-X) Ryzen 1700X i7-6700K 4C/8T (Skylake)
i7-5820K (Haswell-E)
Comments.Net Dhrystone Integer (GIPS) 69.8 [+1.9x]
36.5 23.3 30.7 While Ryzen used to dominate.Net CLR workloads, now SKL-X is 2x faster than it and naturally older HSW-E..Net Dhrystone Long (GIPS) 60.9 [+35%] 45.1 23.6 28.2 Ryzen seems to do very well here cutting SKL-X’s lead to just 35% – while still being almost 2x faster than HSW-E.Net Whetstone float/FP32 (GFLOPS) 112 [+12%] 100.6 47.4 65.4 Floating-Point CLR performance is pretty spectacular with Ryzen and SKL-X only manages 12% faster..Net Whetstone double/FP64 (GFLOPS) 138 [+14%] 121.3 63.6 85.7 FP64 performance is also great (CLR seems to promote FP32 to FP64 anyway) with SKL-X just 14% faster. While Ryzen used to dominate.Net workloads, SKL-X restores the balance in Intel’s favour – though in many tests it is just over 10% faster than Ryzen. The CLR definitely seems to prefer Ryzen..Net Integer Vectorised/Multi-Media (MPix/s) 140 [+50%] 92.6 55.7 75.4 Just as we saw with Dhrystone, this integer workload sees a 50% improvement for SKL-X. While RiuJit supports SIMD integer vectors the lack of bitfield instructions make it slower for our code; shame..Net Long Vectorised/Multi-Media (MPix/s) 143 [+47%] 97.8 60.3 79.2 With 64-bit integer workload we see a similar story – SKL-X is about 50% faster..Net Float/FP32 Vectorised/Multi-Media (MPix/s) 543 [+2x] AVX/FMA 272.7 AVX/FMA 12.9 284.2 AVX/FMA Here we make use of RyuJit’s support for SIMD vectors thus running AVX/FMA code – SKL-X strikes back to 2x faster than Ryzen..Net Double/FP64 Vectorised/Multi-Media (MPix/s) 294 [+2x] AVX/FMAX 149 AVX/FMAX 38.7 176.1 AVX/FMA Switching to FP64 SIMD vector code – still running AVX/FMA – SKL-X is still 2x faster. With RyuJIT’s support for SIMD vector instructions – SKL-X brings its power to bear, being the usual 2-times faster than Ryzen; it does not seem that RyuJIT supports AVX512 yet – something that will make it evern faster. With scalar instructions SKL-X is “only” 50% faster but still about 2x fasster than HSW-E. Java Dhrystone Integer (GIPS) 716 [+39%] 513 313 395 Ryzen puts a strong performance with SKL-X “just” 40% faster. Still it’s almost 2x faster than HSW-E. Java Dhrystone Long (GIPS) 873 [+70%] 514 332 399 Somehow SKL-X does better here with 70% faster than Ryzen. Java Whetstone float/FP32 (GFLOPS) 155 [+32%] 117
62.8 89 With a floating-point workload Ryzen continues to do well so SKL-X is again “just” 30% faster. Java Whetstone double/FP64 (GFLOPS) 160 [+25%] 128 64.6 91 With FP64 workload SKL-X’s lead drops to 25%. With the JVM seemingly favouring Ryzen – and without SIMD – SKL-X is just 25-40% faster than it – but do note it absolutely trounces its older HSW-E brother – being almost 2x faster. So Intel has made big gains but at a cost. Java Integer Vectorised/Multi-Media (MPix/s) 135 [+40%] 99 59.5 82 Oracle’s JVM does not yet support SIMD vectors so SKL-X is “just” 40% faster than Ryzen. Java Long Vectorised/Multi-Media (MPix/s) 132 [+41%] 93 60.6 79 With 64-bit integers nothing much changes. Java Float/FP32 Vectorised/Multi-Media (MPix/s) 97 [+13%] 86 40.6 61 Scary times as SKL-X manages its smallest lead over Ryzen at just over 10%. Intel better hope Oracle will add vector primitives allowing SIMD code to use the power of its |
marker of the Paleoindian period. Remains of flint from Ohio, jasper from eastern Pennsylvania and marine shells from the Atlantic coast suggest that the people inhabiting the area were mobile and involved in long-distance trade. At least one basin-shaped hearth was reused over time.
Meadowcroft has also yielded the largest collection of flora and fauna materials ever recovered from a location in eastern North America.[10] The arid environment provided the necessary and rare conditions that permitted excellent botanical preservation. In total, animal remains representing 149 species were excavated. Evidence shows that people gathered smaller game animals as well as plants, such as corn, squash, fruits, nuts and seeds.
Dating Edit
Radiocarbon dating of the site indicated occupancy beginning 16,000 years ago and possibly as early as 19,000 years ago. However, the dates are still controversial. A recent survey carried out by the Society for American Archaeology reported support from 38% of archaeologists, with 20% rejecting the early dates.[11] Criticism of these early radiocarbon dates has focused on the potential for contamination by ancient carbon from coal-bearing strata in the watershed.[12] The samples, tested by an independent third party geomorphologist, concluded that the samples showed no evidence of groundwater activity. Tests performed via accelerator mass spectrometry also support the earlier dates.[13] If authentic, these dates would indicate that Meadowcroft was used in the pre-Clovis era and, as such, provides evidence for very early human habitation of the Americas.[14][15] Meadowcroft Rockshelter may be the oldest known site of human habitation in North America, providing a unique glimpse into the lives of prehistoric hunters and gatherers. Paleoindian, Archaic, and Woodland remains have all been found at the site.
The Miller complex Edit
An unusual type of arrowhead was found at the site, that has been named as the Miller Lanceolate projectile point. Similar unfluted lanceolate points have also been found at the adjacent sites. As Goodyear writes:
Enough lithic artifacts were recovered to define the Miller complex. This complex consists of thin bifaces, including one lanceolate point, the Miller Lanceolate; small prismatic blades; retouched flake tools and blades; and debitage related to latestage core and biface reduction and tool kit maintenance. The Miller complex is further defined by surveys done in the Cross Creek watershed, where other lanceolate points, small prismatic blades, and small polyhedral blade cores have been recovered. According to Adovasio et al,[16] this complex has a Eurasiatic and Siberian appearance. These authors also note that small blades and polyhedral cores are absent from subsequent Paleoindian fluted-point assemblages in this region, reinforcing the technological distinctiveness of the Miller complex.[17]
The adjacent Krajacic Site is located about 10 miles southeast of Meadowcroft, and it is also important in defining the Miller complex. This site yielded a great variety of the distinctive Meadowcroft-style blade implements and several small, cylindrical polyhedral cores.
At Cactus Hill in Virginia, similar points have been found, where they are dubbed as the Early Triangular type. Some similar finds were made at the Page-Ladson site in Florida as well.
Because of the very long occupational sequence at Meadowcroft, it became a very important site, and is seen as quite valuable for comparative analysis.
The Pre-Clovis artifacts from Meadowcroft Rockshelter include a lanceolate point (named the Miller Lanceolate), bifaces, unifaces, prismatic blades, core fragments, and debitage. Remains from other Pre-Clovis sites (e.g., Cactus Hill and Saltville, Virginia, Topper, South Carolina, etc.) are usually compared to the Meadowcroft assemblage.[18] In addition, claims for Pre-Clovis inhabitants in other sections of the New World also are evaluated with Meadowcroft in mind (Lozano Ruiz 2000).[19]
According to some scholars, Clovis, Folsom and other fluted point complexes may have derived from such unfluted lanceolate points.The Titan Framework is a new WordPress options framework that was released on WordPress.org this week. This set of tools was created to make it easy for WordPress theme and plugin developers to add options to their projects. This first release contains more than 20 options, including meta boxes, Google font selector, a media uploader, multicheck categories and taxonomies, theme customizer options and more.
Titan claims to be the easiest options framework you’ll ever use. With just a few simple lines of code you can quickly add customization options that are easy for clients to use and understand. For example, to get an instance of the Titan Framework for your plugin, you’d add just one line to the the main plugin file:
$titan = TitanFramework::getInstance('my-plugin' );
Setting up an admin page and menu for your options is as easy as adding a couple lines of code:
$panel = $titan->createAdminPanel( array( name => 'Theme Options', ) );
This helps to keep your code clean with the Titan engine powering the details related to building options.
The Titan Framework Was Built For Efficiency
I had the chance to speak with Benjamin Intal, Titan Framework’s creator, to ask him why he decided to put another WordPress options framework out into the wild, despite the fact that there are already so many. Intal said that Titan resulted from a bit of spring cleaning he completed on his themes.
“When I started creating WordPress themes 4 years ago, as my number of projects grew, I had a hard time managing all the code from the different themes I had,” he said. “By instinct, I started unifying all the similar code to make things more manageable. After months of work, I ended up with a huge framework that handled everything the theme needed.”
From there his private framework evolved as he learned more about WordPress best practices. Intal began removing much of the functionality and turning it into plugins:
My mindset was that every feature should be included with the theme. As I learned more and more about the ins and outs of WordPress, I learned that what I did was a big no no. So now, I’m dissecting those themes, and turning its innards into plugins. One of those is the Titan Framework.
Intal’s spring cleaning resulted in a powerful set of options that speed up development. He uses it regularly in client projects. In one example he needed to provide information on various locations on a map, so he created a custom post type for locations and Titan powers most of the meta box options for inputting custom fields such as latitude, longitude and other location properties.
While Intal maintains the framework for the purpose of efficiency in his own work, it’s now something that anyone can use. “Titan Framework focuses on ease of use,” he said. “For me, that translates to minimal coding and fewer things to remember.”
When creating the Titan Framework, Intal wanted to make a standardized way of adding options, so that it’s easy for developers to remember how to accomplish common tasks. He described the problem he was trying to solve and how Titan can improve your workflow:
In WordPress, admin options, custom fields and theme customizer controls are all different from each other. These are set up differently and getting the saved values for each type is performed differently. Titan Framework unifies all these so that you won’t really have to know whether you’re using an admin option, a custom field or a customizer control. Everything is just an option. Because of this, getting your saved values is just one simple method: the getOption method.
How to Include the Titan Framework in Your Project
Currently, if you want to use Titan with your work, you’ll need to have the plugin activated alongside your own theme or plugin. This will allow you to call the framework’s functions inside your project. Refer to the developers’ documentation on the Titan project page for further instructions and a snippet for checking to see if Titan has been activated.
“Ideally, Titan should always be a plugin that’s separate from your theme or plugin so that Titan can be updated for bug fixes or new features,” Intal said. However, he recognizes that some developers might want to bundle the framework within their projects. He plans on performing an update soon that will make that possible.
Future Additions to the Titan Framework
Intal has plans to expand the number of options in the framework, which currently includes most of the basics. He’ll be adding a palette selector, widget area selector and menu selector further down the road.
He also plans to include functionality for easily creating and selecting widget areas, as well as new functions for creating shortcodes.
Ital said that what he’s trying to accomplish with Titan is not based on a desire to improve deficiencies he’s seen in other frameworks. “When I was in the process of creating Titan Framework, I honestly did not dive into the other existing frameworks since I already had everything I needed to complete it,” he said. “I’ve just started now to check out what’s out there and I’m finding that there are a lot of great frameworks such as Redux and OptionTree.”
Of course, if you’re trying to learn how to code plugin and theme options from the inside out, then using an options framework is not the way to go. The idea behind using a framework is to save yourself time in development and focus on building your project. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time you need to add a few options. Titan saves you the hassle of having to code them from scratch. For more information and examples on how to use it, check out the Titan Framework homepage and documentation.
Like this: Like Loading...Alexey Pajitnov was the proverbial Russian bear, albeit more of the teddy than the grizzly variety. Big-boned and bearded, loose-limbed and always a little rumpled, his sunny disposition would brook no opposition even from the perpetual gray of the Mirror World. Not that he had much cause to complain, all things considered. Compared to many of his fellow citizens, Pajitnov had an easy time of it, being born into an intellectual family in Moscow; both of his parents were writers. Like many Russians, Pajitnov’s parents harbored no love for the Soviet system, but weren’t willing to die in a gulag in the name of some abstract cause of Freedom either. They taught their son to master the art of remaining quietly noncommittal when politics entered a conversation, and when the day came for young Alexey’s class to visit Lenin’s tomb, his mother wrote a note to the school saying he was sick. For the nonce at least, such small rebellions would have to suffice.
A lover of logic games and puzzles from an early age, Pajitnov excelled at math competitions as a teenager, and went off to university to study the subject. “Mathematicians are usually very strange people,” he admits. This mathematician, however, was a little different from the norm, a kid who loved movies almost as much as he loved numbers, who wasn’t any stranger to vodka and girls. With his big toothy smile, Pajitnov could be ingratiating even when he wasn’t trying to be. It was a quality that would serve him as well as an as-yet latent talent for game design over the course of the very unlikely career to come.
In 1984, Pajitnov was 28 years old, married, and starting a family; his wife was an English teacher, another stroke of luck that would serve him well in his future life. His early interest in pure mathematics had long since passed into a fascination with computers. “It doesn’t matter to a hacker what he is working on,” he says. “It could be a game or an abstract math problem, but if a computer is involved, he is a god and can do whatever he wants inside that world.” Living in the restricted society of the Soviet Union, such a sense of control was very appealing indeed to Pajitnov. He’d therefore managed to get a position at the Moscow Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, one of the oldest and most important hubs of computer research in the Soviet Union. (You may recall from the first article in this series how prominently it featured in the first extended visit by an American computing delegation to the Soviet Union back in 1959, or from the second article how it was the workplace of Leonid Genrikhovich Khachiyan when he made a significant discovery in linear programming.)
But with the excitement of Soviet computing’s early, pioneering days and the heyday of the cybernetics dream now well in the past, the Computer Center was limping along, like the rest of the country, without a great deal of direction. Pajitnov was supposed to be doing research into artificial intelligence and voice recognition, but that was difficult given the overcrowded conditions at the Computer Center. There was barely enough physical space to breathe there, let alone get real work done. He took to working a late shift, going in in the afternoon and staying at the office until around midnight, because that was the only way he could get a desk to himself. Nor was he happy about the uses to which the state dreamed of putting his work in voice recognition, such as a bugging device that would switch on automatically if certain words were spoken within a room. Still seeing programming as a form of escape, he started spending much of his time tinkering with games, beginning a friendly competition with a similarly disposed colleague named Dmitry Pavlovsky to see who could make the most popular software distractions. The computer on which they both worked was called the Elektronika 60, a clone of the American DEC PDP-11 minicomputer. Their terminals had no graphics capabilities whatsoever, sharply limiting the sorts of designs they could hope to implement. Initially, the audience they wrote for consisted only of their comrades at the Computer Center.
That began to change when Pajitnov and Pavlovsky added a third programmer to their little game-making collective. Vadim Gerasimov was a 16-year-old hacker who, thanks to the good offices of a high-school teacher, had gotten permission to hang around the Computer Center. Gerasimov became something of an expert in programming a very exotic bit of kit in the Soviet Union of those times: the EC-1840, a Soviet knockoff of the IBM PC, of which the Center had a few examples. As Pajitnov and Pavlovsky came up with promising games on their text-only Elektronika 60 terminals, Gerasimov ported them to the EC-1840, adding real graphics and sound effects.
Later accounts would often paint Pajitnov as a complete babe in the woods when it came to the idea of selling games, but reality paints a somewhat different picture. While they were isolated from goings-on in the West in countless respects, he and his two friends were tuned-in enough to know that plenty of people on the other side of the Iron Curtain were making real money doing exactly what they were doing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t at all clear how they could turn games into a business in the Soviet Union, where business itself in the Western sense was largely illegal, where there was no way whatsoever to buy software even if you had the money to do so. So, Gerasimov distributed their games for free among the few other people in Moscow with access to the computers that were needed to run them, and the trio continued to complain, speculate, and dream.
The game that would change Pajitnov’s life and in its modest way change the world was born when he came across a pentomino puzzle in a toy shop one day. If you’ve played the popular board game Blokus, you have a good idea what such a thing is all about. A set of geometric shapes made up of differing arrangements of five squares — thus the name of “pentomino” — must be arranged onto a grid to fill every space on the grid and/or to use up every shape. For a mind like Pajitnov’s, the attraction was immediate. Indeed, pentomino puzzles were actually a rediscovery rather than a new find for him; he’d spent many hours playing with them as a boy.
His first reaction to this reignited passion was to attempt a fairly literal translation of a pentomino puzzle to the computer, departing from his inspiration in just one significant respect. Pajitnov realized that five-square shapes would be too complicated on the computer, too difficult for the programmer to draw and too difficult for the player to place in the limited screen space available. So, he decided to use four-square shapes — tetrominoes — instead. He called his game Genetic Engineering. The player had to move the pieces around the screen using the arrow keys, assembling them into larger “organisms.” But the concept lost something in the translation from the physical to the virtual. It wound up being, in the words of Vadim Gerasimov, “rather dull” to play.
Then a new idea burst into his imagination with the force of vision. He saw a never-ending stream of shapes falling toward the bottom of a rectangular “glass” at ever increasing speeds, the player trying frantically to arrange them into filled rows. Once filled, a row would be wiped off the screen, buying the player a little time and space in what must ultimately be a fruitless battle against entropy. Pajitnov called his game Tetris, a contraction of “tetromino” with, for reasons nobody could ever quite get him to explain, “tennis.” (One is tempted to imagine the name being some form of homage to Tennis for Two, arguably the first true videogame ever, and/or Pong, the game of electronic table tennis that kicked off the arcade craze in the West, but Pajitnov was nowhere near familiar enough with the Western videogame tradition to draw such inspiration from it. Chalk it up as just one more example of so many early videogame designers’ odd fixation on tennis.)
Working on his text-only Elektronika 60 terminal, Pajitnov was forced to draw the “graphics” using brackets and spaces. Monochrome, absolutely silent, and possessed of plenty of ugly flicker as the shapes drew and erased their way down the screen, Tetris was a long way from any Westerner’s idea of a cutting-edge videogame. But it didn’t matter. From the first, Tetris captivated.
Some years later, pop psychologists would take to using the term “Tetris Effect” to describe the state of mental flow, of complete yet almost unconscious absorption, that could cause Tetris players to begin seeing the real world around them as a manifestation of the game. But the phrase could serve equally as shorthand for the effect Tetris has always had on the productivity of people who encounter it. When Pajitnov started to show the game to his colleagues, the sterile confines of the Moscow Computing Center became host to the first ever cases of both versions of the Tetris Effect. “Everybody who touched this game couldn’t stop playing it,” remembers Pajitnov. His fellow programmer Mikhail Kulagin remembers how “people started to gather together and play Tetris. There was a time when the whole Computer Center started to play Tetris.” “The game was compelling, and many of the employees got carried away, often to the detriment of their work,” says Yuri Yevtushenko, the director of the Computer Center. Vladimir Pokhilko, a psychology researcher working on a project with the Computer Center, saw the game there, liked it, and made a copy to play back at the medical institute where he usually worked. Productivity plummeted so badly thereafter that he finally had to erase every copy he had handed out. “I can’t live with your Tetris anymore,” he told Pajitnov, only half joking.
Of course, the Tetris Effect wasn’t wholly unprecedented in the hallowed halls of institutional computing. One is reminded of the unleashing of Adventure upon the world of Western computing in 1977, and the apocryphal claim that it set an entire industry back by two weeks while everyone solved it. Tetris, though, was even more dangerous in that it could never be solved. There was just that never-ending stream of falling shapes, and that never-ending compulsion to clear a few more rows than you managed the last time around.
With Tetris so popular inside the Center, it was inevitable that Vadim Gerasimov would program it for the EC-1840 in short order. Thus Gerasimov’s version became the first of the countless thousands of ports of Pajitnov’s original that were still to come. Writing in Turbo Pascal, a programming language that had been smuggled out of the West and was now as commonplace on Soviet PC clones as it was back where it had come from, Gerasimov not only added color to the game but did much to refine the way it played. In a telling indication that he and his partners continued to harbor grander, more international ambitions than what might be apparent on the surface, Gerasimov also translated all of the text in the game to English. Even if it never left Moscow, doing so would ironically make it more likely to be taken seriously by his fellow Russians. A huge cachet came attached to games out of the West; fascination with the Mirror World applied no matter which side of the mirror you happened to be on. And if Tetris should get beyond Moscow, beyond the Soviet Union even… well, you never knew, right? Gerasimov started passing Tetris around Moscow for free, as he had his previous ports of Pajitnov and Pavlovsky’s creations.
The Tetris Effect didn’t disappoint. Pajitnov describes the game spreading across Moscow, then across the Soviet Union, then across Eastern Europe “like a wood fire.” The fire’s spread was limited only by a lack of tinder, in the form of extant IBM PC clones behind the Iron Curtain to run the game. Hackers being hackers, other programmers took up the slack. Within a year, very good versions of Tetris were available on relatively more common homegrown Soviet microcomputers like the Agat and the BK-0010, along with their equivalents in many other Warsaw Pact countries. The Tetris Effect followed in the wake of each new version. For instance, the management of the Scientific Research Institute of Computing Systems, the home of the Agat, complained that further development on the machine’s systems software essentially stopped once Tetris invaded the programmers’ offices.
A Digression on Design
My task of writing about Tetris as a design is made easier by the game’s sheer ubiquity. In 2010, it was estimated that two-thirds of all Americans had played Tetris at one time or another. Never before have I and never again will I be able to write about a game with more confidence that absolutely everyone likely to read my words has played it. So, I won’t bore you with a detailed description of its mechanics.
Yet the what of Tetris isn’t the why. Why do so many people find this incredibly simple game so addictive?
One answer is its unpredictability. Often classified as a puzzle game, Tetris can just as validly be seen as a throwback to the classic arcade game. Reflexes are as important as logic, and, thanks to the magic of the random-number generator that decides which of the seven possible shapes to drop next, every game of Tetris is different. If Tetris was deterministic in the way of its inspiration, the pentomino puzzle, it could be solved and dispensed with. Ditto if it offered a winning screen of any sort. But a game of Tetris ends always in defeat and that siren call to try again for a higher score. (“Life is hard and unjust, and ends always in death,” my father-in-law loves to say in his deadpan German. Tetris agrees wholeheartedly with that philosophy.)
The sheer simplicity of Tetris is actually its greatest asset, not only for the would-be player but also for the would-be programmer. Requiring as it does no artificial intelligence or advanced algorithms of any stripe, it’s become the first game ever made by thousands upon thousands of programmers over the course of decades. The countless legitimate and illegitimate versions have won it the official title according to Guinness of most-ported videogame in history. Whatever digital gadget you care to name, chances are it plays Tetris.
Yet the game’s simplicity has also been of more subtle benefit. Within the context of its goals, no other game design has ever been more perfect than Tetris. As many disappointing attempts to iterate on the concept proved — including quite a number of attempts by Alexey Pajitnov himself — you can’t add to, take away from, or modify Tetris in any way to turn it into a better game of falling shapes. The first iteration on the Tetris concept remains the definitive iteration, almost a unique phenomenon in the history of videogames.
Tetris is as abstract as any videogame ever made, without even the modicum of context provided by arcade classics like Pac-Man and Centipede. You’re never given any reason why you need to clear row after row of shapes; the game lacks any sense of embodiment or physicality whatsoever. For this reason, it’s often been held up as an ideal by members of the ludological school of game design. By many metrics the most popular videogame ever created, Tetris is also the ultimate in process intensity, proof positive that games are better — or so the ludologists allege — without messy distractions like story. When the narratological versus ludological debate was still in its infancy, academic theorist Janet Murray decided — full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes! — to wrench Tetris into a narratological frame. “The game is a perfect enactment of the overtaxed lives of Americans in the 1990s,” she wrote, “of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught.” Even if one forgot that this “perfect embodiment of the overtaxed lives of Americans” was designed by a Russian who had never been to America, it sounded a little ridiculous, and the ludologist contingent justifiably savaged her for it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes an abstract game of falling shapes is just an abstract game of falling shapes.
In its abstraction and its complete disinterest in the experiential side of gaming, Tetris is the extreme opposite of the sort of games I usually write about. As an old literature major, I tend to approach games with an eye to story, texture, theme… all the things Tetris so conspicuously lacks. It may come as little surprise, then, that the Tetris Effect is to a large extent lost on me. Personally, I find Tetris amusing in short bursts, but grow bored in pretty short order. I appear to be immune to its legendary addictive qualities. I can recognize that it’s the quintessential masterpiece of minimalism in game design, even as I also recognize that I’m really not a minimalist sort of guy. Certainly I don’t think that we can take Tetris‘s undoubted success as a game design as proof that other, radically different approaches to the art are illegitimate. Tetris, a game bereft of context — almost bereft, one is tempted to say, of culture — is very nearly the polar opposite of what I personally look for in a game. In that perverse light, perhaps the greatest tribute I can offer to its genius is to note that I can actually enjoy it in short bursts.
If I wished to sculpt a less personal critique of Tetris, I would have to start with the words that always seem to surround it: words like “addiction,” “compulsion”, “obsession.” Writer Jeffrey Goldsmith coined the term “pharmatronic” to describe it — as in, an electronic drug. Pajitnov responded that “many people say that, but my feeling is it’s more like music. Playing games is a very specific rhythmic and visual pleasure. For me, Tetris is some song which you sing and sing inside yourself and can’t stop.” Fair enough — except, as Goldsmith himself countered, a song that gets stuck in your head can start to feel as much like a compulsion as any narcotic. A 2014 study showed that playing Tetris reduced cravings in smokers and drinkers by 24 percent. Could this be a case of one sort of addiction supplanting another?
While a dependence on Tetris is probably preferable to a dependence on cigarettes or alcohol, it is interesting to note how often negative adjectives like “addictive” are used in connection with Tetris in lieu of words with more positive connotations. As I viewed the (highly recommended) film Ecstacy of Order, about a Tetris “world championship,” I couldn’t help but wonder whether most of the eccentric cast of characters on the screen were really better off for having Tetris in their lives. “I’ve been playing Tetris for, like, twenty years” says one; “I don’t even want to know how many hours I’ve played Tetris,” says another; “I play it, like, non-stop,” says a third; “I daydream it during the day and I have Tetris dreams at night,” says a fourth. Perhaps most ominously, one character in the film describes playing Tetris as “programming yourself to do it.” There is, it seems to me, not a lot of joy in Tetris.
Beginning in 1992, University of California, Irvine, professor Richard Haier conducted a series of studies measuring the effect playing Tetris had on subjects’ brain activities. He discovered that as his subjects spent more time with the game and were able to advance to higher levels their brains showed less activity rather than more as they played. There are many ways to interpret these results, most of which I’m eminently unqualified to even broach. It does, however, strike this non-neuroscientist as interesting that Tetris comes to engage less of the mind the longer you play it. All others things being equal, I think I prefer games which do the opposite.
But whatever your opinion of Tetris as a force in gaming and, indeed, in society, few would argue that there’s genius of some sort or other in this simple game of falling shapes. Many more words than those I’ve just spent here have been used trying to come to terms with why so many people find it so irresistible. Call it genius, call it kismet, call it addiction if you must. In the end, it’s grappling with the ineffable.
Tetris had become a sensation within the circumscribed and sparsely populated world of Eastern European computing, but it remained unknown in the West. In 1986, that situation began to change, thanks to a chance encounter in Budapest, Hungary.
The confluence of factors that made Hungary Tetris‘s port of departure for Western climes began with the country’s long pre-communist tradition of scientific and engineering excellence. In the twentieth century alone, this tradition had yielded such pivotal figures as John von Neumann, the most important early computer-science thinker this side of Alan Turing, and Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb. In the Soviet era, Hungary had played a major role in Project Ryad and other joint computer-development projects, and had been officially designated, along with the similarly capable Czechoslovakia, as one of the Warsaw Pact’s two non-Soviet centers of electronics development and manufacture. The Hungarian government took the assignment very seriously; children were required to start taking computer classes while still in elementary school.
Indeed, the Hungarian version of communism in general was progressive in some ways, at least by the standards of most of its Warsaw Pact peers. Years before Perestroika, Hungary had begun allowing a certain degree of private enterprise and private ownership. The result was an economy that worked just a little better than was the norm behind the Iron Curtain, one that could even manifest a modicum of entrepreneurial spirit on occasion.
The final great advantage enjoyed by Hungary was that of simple geographic proximity. Budapest and Vienna were only about 100 miles apart, the shortest distance between any two major Eastern and Western capitals. Alone among their peers living behind the Iron Curtain, Hungarian citizens could slip across the border for a day or a weekend in the West, then slip back into their homeland relatively painlessly. A steady stream of licit and illicit goods flowed into Budapest with them, and from there across the rest of Eastern Europe. For example, the master copies of most of the hand-dubbed cassettes of Western rock music that were at the center of a booming underground trade throughout the Warsaw Pact had their point of origin in the bright shopping districts of Vienna.
By the mid-1980s, the Hungarian habit of smuggling in goods from the West, not officially condoned by the country’s government by any means but not all that seriously prosecuted either, had come to include computer software and even hardware. A fair number of Hungarians managed to secure for themselves Commodore 64 systems, the ultimate gaming machine of the era; again, this made them uniquely blessed among Eastern Europeans. Others had access to the knockoff Sinclair Spectrums that were being produced in several Warsaw Pact nations. Every weekend a huge flea market was held in the courtyard of Budapest’s Petőfi Csarnok concert hall, during which thousands of pieces of software were sold, almost all of it pirated from the West. A Hungarian cracking group who called themselves FBI Crew became a prominent member of the international piracy scene as early as 1984, a first for any Eastern European country. FBI Crew made their name as “importers” from the West to the East, receiving pirated software from Western contacts via the post and then selling or trading it to locals. Thus the group became just one more part of Hungary’s cottage industry of bridging the capitalist and communist worlds.
Along with all of the goods moving eastward, it wasn’t totally unknown for Hungary to send something to the West. In the late 1970s, Ernő Rubik, a Budapest architect, had come up with a three-dimensional puzzle, a cube of colored squares which challenged one to twist and turn them in such a way as to make each face of the cube a single color. Tibor Laczi, a Hungarian entrepreneur who had partnered with Rubik, took it to the Nuremberg Toy Fair in West Germany in 1979, and soon signed a deal with the Ideal Toy Company to sell it throughout the West. The Rubik’s Cube became an early-1980s pop-culture sensation, selling in the hundreds of millions and spawning a whole library of often-bestselling books purporting to describe the best way to solve it. For once, the communists had managed to beat the capitalists at their own game.
Robert Stein saw the story of the Rubik’s Cube as an inspiration. Born in 1934 in Hungary, he’d come to Britain as a refugee following the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. There he’d made a successful career for himself in office equipment and electronics, going from selling typewriters to calculators to microcomputers. As managing director of an electronics distributor called Vulcan, Stein played a major role in popularizing Commodore’s first low-cost home computer, the VIC-20, by getting it into department stores across the United Kingdom.
Commodore at the time sold games for their computers as well as hardware, and was keenly interested in acquiring new titles on the cheap. Stein, for his part, still had connections in Hungary; in fact, he had recently inked a deal that let Vulcan import single-purpose chess-playing computers from Hungary for sale on British high streets. He knew there was a treasure trove of eager young programming talent in his homeland with no commercial outlet for their skills. Best of all, he knew that, the differences between the economies of East and West being what they were, he could hire these programmers cheap. He quit Vulcan and started a company of his own, naming it Andromeda Software. He would buy games from a stable of Hungarian hackers and sell them to Commodore and other Western publishers eager for more product to feed the demand of Britain’s big home-computing boom.
Stein had no personal interest in games, and Andromeda didn’t place a big priority on quality as opposed to quantity. Over the course of just two or three years, he imported several dozen cut-price original games and ports, many of which went entirely uncredited to his company on the packaging and none of which are much remembered today.
When the home-computing boom began to tail off circa 1985 and the market settled back toward its natural equilibrium, it was largely the second-tier companies like Andromeda that failed first. Stein’s little venture would doubtless have fallen into the dustbin of history without another peep had he not dropped in on the Institute of Computer Science in Budapest, one of his big sources of programming talent, one day in 1986, just to see if they had anything new and interesting in the works that might save his declining business. Stein:
We were wandering around in a big room with all kinds of computers going, all kinds of software going. And suddenly in a corner I saw a game which consisted of bricks coming down, or some kind of shapes. It was tucked away somewhere in a corner. I was asking, “What is this?” They said, “Oh, ignore it.” So we wandered on, but I kept coming back to it.
Stein eventually sat down to try the game, and promptly had an experience all too typical of many avowed non-gamers’ first exposure to Tetris: he couldn’t stop playing. His tour guides could only sympathize; their Institute was itself in the full thrall of the Tetris Effect. But the reason they’d been so reluctant to show the game to Stein soon became clear: Tetris wasn’t actually one of their games. The Hungarians had ported the game, just for personal pleasure, to the Commodore 64, a far more marketable platform in Britain than the IBM PC on which Vadim Gerasimov’s version ran. Stein would have happily bought that version from them without another thought about its real origins. But the Hungarian programmers were too honorable to take the deal. Tetris simply wasn’t their game to sell to him, they insisted. If he wanted to buy it, he would have to do so from the Russians who had originally created it.
Back in Moscow, a colleague of Pajitnov at the Computer Center handed him a telex message written in English. “It looks like someone is interested in your game,” the colleague said. The message was indeed from a someone in Britain, who said he had seen Tetris while visiting Hungary and wished to license it and sell it in the West. Pajitnov, who had dreamed for years of something like this happening to rescue him from his life of institutional captivity, felt like a Cinderella who had just been handed a glass slipper. Still, as he would soon learn at extensive length, the devil is always in the details. It took him several weeks just to collect the authorizations he needed to send a telex back. “Yes, we are interested,” he wrote. “We would like to have this deal.” There followed a trans-European dance that sometimes resembled a farce more than a serious negotiation, complicated by the limited organs of |
buses at Farragut Square. A lot of frustrated and confused Metro riders this a.m pic.twitter.com/u4c20KEklU — John Gonzalez (@ABC7John) December 16, 2014
Updated at 7:38 a.m.
Authorities now say it will likely take up to 12 hours Tuesday to fix a water main break at 12th and F streets NW that has caused major disruptions on three of Metro’s rail lines. DC Water said it has 12th Street NW closed between E and F streets as crews work in the area. It is not immediately known what caused the water main break and it is unknown when Metro will be able to resume service on three of its lines — the Blue, Orange and Silver.
Metro said tens of thousands of riders are going to face “a serious disruption” in their morning commute because of the water main break. Water coming into its Metro Center stop forced the transit system to suspend service on part of its busiest lines.
The agency suspended service just before 6 a.m. on the Blue, Orange and Silver lines between the Farragut West and L’Enfant Plaza stops. The rupture has put water on the rail tracks at the Metro Center stop.
Remember your worst commute ever? Well, today may "top" it. Please be patient with yourself and others today. #wmata #dcwater — Council of DC (@councilofdc) December 16, 2014
Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said water “came down and into Metro Center” stop, causing the water level to go “above the height of the rail” line so trains can not run. The water came into the lowest part of the station at Metro Center, he said. The tracks sit about 8 inches from the ground floor, he said, and water is above that point — although he said he did not immediately know how many feet of water is standing in the station.
The water main in that area has been shut off. In a Twitter message, DC Water officials wrote just after 7 a.m., “We’ll work as fast as we can to make repairs.”
Water main break @ 12th & F St NW. 12th St closed and Blue/Orange/Silver line service affected. We’ll work as fast as we can to make repairs — DC Water (@dcwater) December 16, 2014
#wmata suspended cause of this @nbcwashington: Photo of water main break on 12th and F St. http://t.co/Pnhnt1Au38 pic.twitter.com/msPfnR3eay — Rob R. (@robierap) December 16, 2014
The water main break is also likely to create major gridlock on the streets of downtown D.C. in Tuesday morning’s commute. DC Water closed 12th Street NW between E and F streets because of the water main break.
On Metro, trains Tuesday morning are coming from the east on the Blue, Orange and Silver lines and turning around at L’Enfant Plaza. Trains are coming from the west and turning back at Farragut West, according to Metro officials.
Metro officials said they plan to run shuttle service buses between the closed stations, but warned riders that the timing of the incident is going to cause major headaches for morning commuters. They said “tens of thousands of riders” will be impacted.
“Even if you don’t travel through this area,” Stessel said. “You will feel the effects of these delays. This is the morning to seek alternate travel options.”
“We’re going to see major congestion from one end of these lines to the other and crowding at stations,” he said.
The major problem is that the lines impacted — the Blue and Orange lines — are among the busiest in the system. Roughly 750,000 ridership trips are taken on the Metro rail system during an average weekday.
“There is no way to replicate the capacity and when you consider that it is rush hour and we have a water main break in the mix that’s why you see us out there saying consider other options,” Stessel said. He said the water officials have turned off water in that area near Metro Center.
He said there are 58 pumping stations in the Metro system — and “a few” at Metro Center — and that they are “on full power right now.”
“We’re working to get the water level down,” he said. But he warned that it could take awhile for operations to return to normal because even once the water is out of the station, the tracks have to be inspected and that will determine when trains can run again in the impacted areas.
Commuters reacted on social media to the Metro delays and traffic problems —
Well, #wmata has the Olympic swimming venue taken care of! — Chris Bucky Barnes (@TheBarnesology) December 16, 2014
I'm especially thankful for my 10-min bike commute on days like today. #wmata — Steven Schwark (@stevenschwark) December 16, 2014
Today is the day to either put on your walking shoes or work from home. 8 inches of standing water at Metro Center. That sucks. #wmata — Jenny P (@jennyinDC) December 16, 2014
Updated at 6:15 a.m.
Metro warned that riders should expect delays and crowding Tuesday morning as it has suspended service on three of its lines — the Silver, Orange and Blue. There is a water main break at 12th and F streets NW at Metro Center.
The transit agency said it has suspended service between the Farragut West and L’Enfant Plaza stations. It is not immediately clear how long the delays would last and Metro warned riders to avoid using the system.
Metro said it will run shuttle buses between Farragut West and L’Enfant Plaza stops.
Original post at 5:58 a.m.
Metro said a water main break at the Metro Center stop Tuesday morning has suspended service on the Silver, Orange and Blue lines.
All rail service, the transit agency said, is suspended between the Farragut West and L’Enfant Plaza stations. Metro warned that riders should find other options and not take the rail system.
Blue/Orange/Silver:Water main break at Metro Center. All BL/OR/SV train service SUSPENDED btw Farragut West & Metro Center. Major delays. — Metrorail Info (@Metrorailinfo) December 16, 2014
Staff writer Peter Hermann contributed to this report.Motorola has been testing Android 5.0 for their 2013/early 2014 phones for a bit now, but there’s a reason they haven’t given the green light for a rollout: they’re planning to leapfrog it. Company man David Schuster confirmed on Google+ that the Moto X 1st Gen, Moto E 1st Gen and Moto G with LTE 1st Gen would all go straight to Android 5.1.
It might not be the most popular choice to learn that more time will be needed to go straight from KitKat to Lollipop, but considering how many issues Android 5.1 addresses you’ll be glad Motorola decided to go this route.
Unfortunately that’s all they had to share at this time. There is no new timeline on when to expect the upgrade, nor do we know if there will be a separate testing period (there usually is). All we know is that you’ll have to deal with KitKat just a while longer to ensure your path to Lollipop is as bump-free as possible.Corruption: Now that the FBI has found nearly 15,000 more emails and documents missing from Hillary Clinton's server, the strategy is clear: Clinton will admit to nothing even as more emails dribble out, then when the pattern of criminality becomes clear in October or early November, her campaign will sing that it's "old news" or blame others. And Big Media will ignore it.
The Washington Post notes that the FBI's yearlong investigation of Hillary's home-brew email server has yielded another 14,900 work-related emails and documents that weren't disclosed by her attorneys. And these are among "tens of thousands" of other documents the FBI has found and turned over to the State Department, a Justice Department attorney told the Washington, D.C., District Court on Monday.
Put that in context: Clinton's attorneys had said earlier that there were only about 30,000 emails on her server that were related to Hillary's tenure as secretary of state. Now that number has grown to 45,000. Anyone want to bet it won't go even higher from there? Or that some of them will contain national secrets that shouldn't be put on the internet?
That the documents are being discussed at all in a court is due almost entirely to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch, a legal advocacy group that has challenged the State Department's plan to dribble out the documents on a weekly basis starting on Oct. 14. U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg rejected that plan, and told the State Department's attorneys to come back with a better one on Sept. 22.
We applaud Judge Boasberg's decision, because it's absolutely clear what Hillary's goal is: Let the bad news barely trickle out until the presidential election is over. Then, presumably, no matter what revelations may come, a triumphant Hillary Clinton will be able to say, "What difference at this point does it make? I have a mandate. The people have spoken. This is old news. Let's move on."
That's exactly what Judicial Watch is trying to stop from happening.
"We're trying to work with the State Department here," said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, "but let's be clear: They have slow-walked and stonewalled the release of these records. They've had many of them since July 25... and not one record has yet been released, and we don't understand why that's the case."
We'll repeat the obvious: If such a transparent attempt at obstruction of justice were made by a Republican candidate, the media would be braying for that candidate's head. Inevitably, unfavorable comparisons would be made to disgraced former President Richard Nixon.
But what, exactly, is she trying to hide? Her lies and possible breaches of national security that resulted from using her home server, for one.
"I did not email any classified material to anyone," Clinton has said. "I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time," she's also stated. And don't forget: "I had not sent classified material nor received anything marked classified."
All of these are flat-out lies — as FBI Director James Comey said in a stunning July news conference in which he all but indicted Clinton then announced that, despite her lies and law breaking, he would not recommend charges.
But even more troubling are possible corrupt links between the Clinton Foundation, its donors and Hillary Clinton's State Department.
Judicial Watch on Monday also released a batch of previously unreleased emails that indicated Hillary's former top aide at the State Department, Huma Abedin, "provided expedited, direct access to Clinton for donors who had contributed from $25,000 to $10 million to the Clinton Foundation."
In one egregious example, notes Judicial Watch, the crown prince of Bahrain was forced to go through the Clinton Foundation to see the secretary of state — but only after pledging to give $32 million to the Clinton Global Initiative.
If true, this would make the Clinton Foundation a front for fraud, and Hillary Clinton guilty of malfeasance and corruption of the highest order.
As the examples of misconduct pile up, Clinton has taken the art of deflecting blame to a new level, reportedly even telling investigators that her use of the off-site, home-based server was due to advice from respected former Secretary of State Colin Powell. But that, too, is a lie.
"Her people have been trying to pin it on me," Powell told the New York Post on Sunday. "The truth is she was using (her home email server) for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did."
We'd be thrilled if the mainstream media that hang on each and every verbal slip of Donald Trump would look into what seems like an egregious case of criminality at the highest levels of government. But no doubt we'll be disappointed. After all, the media by their actions have all but announced they're all in for Hillary.
It's an ill omen that a possible future president could engage in such behavior with no consequence. Here's to hoping that, thanks to the efforts of Judicial Watch and the diligence of the U.S. court system, Hillary's tactics of delay and deny will be ended — and that Americans will have a chance to vote knowing fully the character of the person they're electing to the highest office in the land.
Related:
What's The Latest News On The Hillary Clinton Email Scandal?
Clinton Email Scandal: Hillary Blames Colin Powell For Her Private Server?!
The Clinton Foundation: Hopelessly Corrupt Or Just A Lousy Charity?
Email Scandal: Was The Fix In For FBI's Investigation Of Hillary?Hackaday member CNLohr has created some stunning images of a Wi-Fi network using a remarkably simple technique. He documented his experiments on his Hackaday project page.
He achieved the results by capturing wireless signal strength using a Wi-Fi chipset hooked up to a single multi-color LED. The LED rapidly changes color depending on signal strength. He then captures long-exposure photographs of the LED, as his buddy, holding the piece of kit, moves around a space. The result is a multi-colored graphic with variations representing signal strength.
Pinging the chipset
This simple, but apparently effective, signal strength measurement is created by pinging the chipset from a PC. Software on the PC then looks at the receive power and sends a unique color command to the Wi-Fi module, which delivers it to the LED.
The changing LED colors indicate the relative changing of signal strength. In other words, wherever you wave the chipset-connected LED, the LED's color indicates the receiver power at that point in the space.
Hence the graphic. Blue indicates powerful signals and green represents areas where signal is less powerful.
Tools
Tools used include a four-dollar, quarter coin-sized ESP8266 Serial-to-Wi-Fi module. The ESP8266 is a self-contained Wi-Fi networking device with TCP/IP and an on-board processor that allows it to host applications.
It's also a good choice, by the way, for those wishing to experiment with the Internet of Things. You might be able to run a web server on it, if you can figure it out.
Lohr provides power to the kit with a 1S mini-drone lithium-polymer battery at 3.7V. He uses a Hubsan battery, but I'm sure any 1S lipo would work just fine.
The video below provides a full run-down of the experiment, including further details on the kit.
CNC milling images
The second phase of his experiment includes using a computer-mapped CNC Mill, a tool ordinarily used to create machined parts. He attaches the Wi-Fi module and uses a zigzag grid pattern. This grid-mapping, where the scans occurs uniformly, allowed him to create an in-depth 3D image.
In the CNC experiment, he recorded the position of the mill, along with the Wi-Fi strength to create the data. He then uses gaming non-euclidean ray-tracing graphics software to create the 3D image, which he exports to a browser. You can see the final animated result here.
CHLohr
Other mapping tools
Lohr's system isn't the only tool out there if you're interested in not-spot mapping your Wi-Fi network. Some off-the-shelf solutions can do the trick too, although they're mostly limited to 2D images.
How-To Geek explains how to create a heat map using a free copy of Ekahau HeatMapper. The Windows-based software works best if you can import a blueprint of your space—like an architectural drawing of an office.
Reddit user iSuchtel uses Netspot for OS X and reported positive results.
And I've used Farproc's Wi-Fi Analyzer for Android, which I think is one of the best analyzers, because you can download the app on a smartphone and walk around with it easily.Yes the future edges ever closer, here it comes now, it’s getting closer… there it goes! And what a lovely tube it has used to get here. A firm in Daytona, America has actually invented the transport we have been pining after for millennia. I didn’t imagine that it would look quite so much like Bioshock’s Rapture setting but hey-ho that gets it bonus points in my books.
You may have watched the video above by now and to be honest I was a little disappointed to see that it was still reliant on a platform actually lifting you into the air (at the pacey speed of 1 foot a second!). I had always imagined the tube of transportation – patent pending – would use anti-gravity and negate the need to be constrained but the pesky floor.
The technology behind this amazing contraption is still pretty good though – the companies website explains:
‘When the piston gear depressurizes the area inside the cylinder above the vacuum elevator cab, the cab is then lifted by higher atmospheric pressure below the cab. The inside of the vacuum elevator cab always remains at the atmospheric pressure. As air pressure is lowered above the cab, the cab is lifted. A valve regulating inflow of air in the upper part of the shaft controls the pneumatic depression and enables descent. When the valve lets in air (at atmospheric pressure) into the low pressure chamber, the vacuum elevator cab will safely lower to the desired level. This valve also controls the speed of the cab.’
Now I just have to get a house more than two stories high… ‘cos I can definitely afford this lift alternative!
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Former Rangers owner Craig Whyte has been declared bankrupt in the wake of losing an £18m damages claim.
Ticketing firm Ticketus successfully sued the 44-year-old for damages in 2013 over his part in the takeover of the Ibrox club in 2011.
The bankruptcy petition was filed at the High Court in London after Mr Whyte did not pay a judgment debt, plus costs and interest, currently worth £20.8m.
Mr Whyte also faces criminal charges over his part in the Rangers takeover.
A spokesman for Ticketus said: "Ticketus is pleased with the outcome of today's hearing and will now support the appointment of a trustee in Bankruptcy, who can start the process of claiming any assets that Mr Whyte holds for the benefit of Mr Whyte's creditors."
Ticketus provided cash to help Mr Whyte purchase Rangers in 2011.
The agreement was later terminated when the club entered administration in February 2012.
'Combed the building'
In its action against Mr Whyte, Ticketus said that he fraudulently or negligently made representations which induced the company to enter into agreements related to the sale or purchase of Rangers season tickets, and claimed damages.
The firm sought £17.6m - the value of what it invested.
Whyte was absent when bankruptcy registrar Nicholas Briggs accepted Ticketus's evidence and ruled "the debts in the bankruptcy petition are true".
The registrar said Mr Whyte "was called six times this morning and staff combed the building" to see if he was present.
The registrar declared Whyte bankrupt, despite his non-appearance, after examining his written submissions to the court.
Matthew Collings QC, appearing for Ticketus, said there had been "a degree of radio silence" from Whyte, as he faces trial in Scotland.
Mr Collings said there was firm evidence that he was currently on bail somewhere in England, but it was believed his address was not being revealed "for his own safety".
'Unpopular man'
The QC told the court: "Mr Whyte has said he is an unpopular man in Scotland.
"It is absolutely plain he has been in England. He himself says he provided an English address for the Scottish proceedings and the purposes of bail."
In April 2013, a High Court master ruled against Mr Whyte prior to a trial after Ticketus argued that the former Rangers boss had "no real prospect" of mounting a successful defence.
The master ordered Mr Whyte to pay £17.6m.
Mr Whyte bid to overturn the ruling on appeal was rejected at the High Court in London in November 2013.Georgia Bulldogs star linebacker Jarvis Jones is declaring for the 2013 NFL Draft, according to a report from CBS Sports' Jeremy Fowler. He joins a flood of talent from the Dawgs into the NFL, including linebacker Alec Ogletree, defensive tackle John Jenkins and others.
Jones is widely regarded as one of the top defensive prospects in this year's upcoming draft. In SB Nation's latest mock draft by Dan Kadar, Jones is tabbed to go No. 9 to the New York Jets.
For the season, Jones finished with 14.5 sacks, 85 tackles and 24.5 tackles for loss. The two-time All-American did all this despite missing two games due to injuries.
Jones recently capped off a record-setting season at Georgia with an eight-tackle, two-sack performance in a 45-31 Capital One Bowl victory over the Nebraska Cornhuskers on New Year's Day. In the game, Jones broke the school record for sacks that was previously held by defensive end David Pollack.I spent my first full day with the Incredible 4G LTE yesterday after putting it off over the holiday, and noticed something a bit frustrating almost immediately. See that screenshot above on the left? The “Ongoing” message to turn WiFi on. As an “Ongoing” notification, it never goes away. I’m not kidding about this either. If you take a look at the “Advanced Wi-Fi” shot to its right, you can see that there isn’t an option to remove this. So no matter what you are doing on your phone or where you are, which could mean you are 400 miles away from the nearest WiFi router, you will have that WiFi icon with a slash through it telling you to turn WiFi on. The only way to get that obnoxious little icon to go away, is to connect to a WiFi network.
To make matters worse, this doesn’t seem to be isolated to the new Incredible. Samsung Galaxy S3 owners who received shipments from Verizon this week are reporting the exact same thing. From what we have heard, Big Red actually went as far as to remove the WiFi toggle in the notification bar that Samsung’s TouchWiz has become known for, and replaced it with this ongoing notification, that again, cannot be removed.
It’s probably safe to assume that this move is to get people to use WiFi more. If they are constantly reminding you to turn on WiFi, you probably will turn it on. Then you’ll use WiFi and not their network, which might be a smart idea for those of you stuck on those tiered or ridiculously overpriced shared data plans. I can’t help but admit that I find this ultra-obnoxious, though. I understand that this is a good way to remind novice users, but give the advanced population the ability to turn it off if we don’t like it.
If anyway finds a way to turn this off, please pass it along.ESPN will make its annual upfront presentation to advertisers Tuesday morning in a Broadway theater, four days after scripting the latest act in its relationship with Bill Simmons, if not its final one. Last Friday, John Skipper, ESPN’s president, effectively fired Simmons, one of the company’s best known employees and the founding editor of its Grantland website, by announcing that he would not renew his contract.
The message was clear: Regardless of your influence or the number of people who listen to your podcasts, no one is bigger than the brand.
Since Skipper’s Friday morning putsch, Simmons has remained publicly silent. His last message on Twitter, posted Friday morning, referred to the previous night’s edition of “The Grantland Basketball Hour.” He has gained about 200,000 followers since then, most of them waiting for his next post, preferably one that punches his bosses in the snout.
But do not expect Simmons to say anything, at least about his departure, until he and ESPN are legally done with each other. Talent contracts like Simmons’s typically contain nondisparagement clauses, so if Simmons strikes out angrily before negotiating his exit — if, say, he verbally slapped Skipper or ESPN — he would forfeit about a third of his estimated $5 million salary, based on just over four months left on his contract.Cheerwine Type Soft drink Manufacturer Carolina Beverage Corporation Distributor Local bottlers and distributors Country of origin United States Introduced 1917 Color Burgundy Flavor Black cherry Variants Diet Cheerwine
Caffeine-free Diet Cheerwine
Retro Cheerwine
Holiday Cheerwine Punch
Cheerwine Kreme (Krispy Kreme flavored) Website www.cheerwine.com
Cheerwine is a cherry-flavored soft drink by Carolina Beverage Corporation of Salisbury, North Carolina. It has been produced since 1917, claiming to be "the oldest continuing soft drink company still run by the same family".[1]
Overview and history [ edit ]
When the Maysville Syrup Company of Maysville, Kentucky went bankrupt in 1917, Lewis D. Peeler and other invested businessmen moved the company to North Carolina and renamed it the Carolina Beverage Corporation.[2] That same year, Peeler purchased a recipe for a cherry flavored soda from a Saint Louis flavor salesman, which eventually became Cheerwine.[3] Though it has been around since 1917, Cheerwine first became a registered trademark in 1926.[4]
The family of Lewis Peeler has run the Cheerwine company since its founding, and his great-grandson[5] Charles Clifford “Cliff” Ritchie[6] has been CEO and president of Cheerwine's parent company, Carolina Beverage Corporation since 1992.[7]
Cheerwine has a mildly sweet flavor with strong cherry notes, most notably black cherry; is burgundy-colored; and has an unusually high degree of carbonation compared to other soft drinks. The product was named for its color and taste; the company website states that "it made sense to name a burgundy-red, bubbly, cherry concoction—Cheerwine."[4] The "Retro Cheerwine" variant is sold in glass bottles and is sweetened with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. Despite its name, Cheerwine is not really a wine and contains no alcohol.
The company also markets Cheerwine flavored ice cream, sherbet, and cream bars, mainly in Food Lion, a Salisbury, NC-based supermarket chain.[8] A commercially baked Cheerwine cake, based on an old Southern recipe, became available through a Salisbury-based company in 2008.[9]
In 2009, the company began a re-branding campaign designed to revamp the drink's image, especially among younger consumers. The re-branding called for a redesign of the Cheerwine packaging, with a new, retro-style logo based on an early Cheerwine logo.[10]
In 2010, Cheerwine partnered with the North Carolina-based doughnut company, Krispy Kreme, and released a limited-offered Cheerwine flavored donut on July 1 of that year. It was sold only at select grocery stores for the month of July,[11] and at the Salisbury Krispy Kreme. The Cheerwine doughnut returned again in July 2011.[12][13] Cheerwine Kreme, a soda with the flavors of Cheerwine and Krispy Kreme, was sold during the summers of 2016 and 2017.[14]
In 2010, Canton, Ohio-based Old Carolina Barbecue became the first restaurant chain in Ohio to offer Cheerwine as a fountain drink. By 2014, Cheerwine-based products including iced slushi,[15] Cheerwine cakes and floats had become a signature part of the Old Carolina concept.[16][17]
Morgan Shepherd ran an entry in the NASCAR Busch Series (now the Nationwide Series) in the mid-1990s with Cheerwine sponsorship.
Cheerwine is sometimes mixed with Captain Morgan rum to make a drink called "Captain Cheerwine"[18] or the "Whining Pirate".[19]
A Cheerwine Recipe Book was published in 2017, by Sandy Carol Sider.
As of June 2017, Cheerwine is certified as kosher.[20]
Slogans have included "Born in the South. Raised in a Glass", "Nectar of the South", "Betcha can't not smile." and, starting in March 2018, "Uniquely Southern."[21]
Availability [ edit ]
Cheerwine is currently available in much of the southeastern United States, from West Virginia south to Florida, but is better known in the Carolinas and Virginia.[5] Other spots to find Cheerwine are the many "specialty soda" stores throughout the country, as well as WinCo Foods in Washington state, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store restaurants,[5][22][23] Sheetz convenience stores in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and overseas, in Norway.[24] It is sold either as a single bottle or as a pack of four.[25]
In April 2005, other regions of the United States began to bottle Cheerwine, mainly through Pepsi distributors.[5][26]
On March 9, 2011, The New York Times Diner's Journal referred to "The Expanding Cult of Cheerwine".[27]
On April 5, 2011, the company announced plans for nationwide distribution by 2017, the product's 100th anniversary. The same day, the company also introduced a new advertising campaign, "Born in the South. Raised in a glass."[1] At the time, Cheerwine was available in 12 percent of the nation.[28] Radio commercials for that campaign include "The Caper", where criminals left everything from a store except Cheerwine; and "Battle of the Bulge", in which a soldier from the Salisbury area has two bottles sent to him during World War II and gives one to his friend.[1]
Also in April 2011, Cheerwine announced it was searching for a woman to represent the company as "Miss Cheerwine". Candidates had to be 21 to 25 years old and live in Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, or Virginia. A company spokesperson stated, "We’re looking for a poised, enthusiastic young woman who can help us spread the legend and get Cheerwine into the hands of our fans with charm, confidence, sweetness and a sense of fun."[29] On June 3, 2011, Spencer Cummings, named the first Miss Cheerwine, began the Miss Cheerwine Summer Legend Tour.[30]
On October 18, 2011, Cheerwine announced plans to partner with Pepsi Beverages Co. in Atlanta, Florida, and Memphis, Tennessee. The same week, the company began using glass bottles to distribute the "Original 1917 Formula" with sugar, as well as introduced 12-pack cans.[28]
On June 16, 2014, Birmingham's Buffalo Rock Co. announced Cheerwine distribution in Alabama, western Georgia, and the Florida Panhandle. This added about 6.5 million potential new customers to their distribution footprint.[31]
Cheerwine has sponsored the North Carolina band the Avett Brothers on tour.[32]Though pets in children's movies often speak English, in real life they prefer to communicate through purring, wagging their tails, and arranging household items into rebuses for their owners to solve. Learn the language of the animals with today’s Groupon: for $34, you get full adoption fees for any animal at the SPCA of Wake County (up to a $115 value). Prospective pet owners must meet all adoption guidelines.
The SPCA of Wake County places over 3,000 animals in homes each year, helping build furry families humanely and responsibly. Adopters can visit the SPCA Curtis Dail Adoption Center to select a feline playmate for lonely balls of yarn, a dog to watch over children drawn to wells, or littler critters including rabbits and guinea pigs. Each adoption package includes a spaying or neutering, vaccinations, and a full physical including a behavior assessment along with a heartworm test for dogs and feline-leukemia test for cats. The SPCA of Wake County is a no-kill facility and is open for family-forming unions on every day but Thursdays, when animals help support shelter costs by filming footage of themselves to send to America’s Funniest Home Videos.I was just packing up at work last evening when I came across this horrible piece of news on Facebook.
Alan Rickman had passed away after battling cancer.
At first, I thought it was a hoax. A stupid prank that would soon be revealed to be false. However, that was not to be.
Alan Rickman, the legendary actor, with the “most perfect voice in the world,” had truly left this world.
You know how people sometimes feel so devastated that they want to curl up in a ball and just cry for hours? When I heard this news, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. The only thing that stopped me from shedding a tear was the fact that I was at my workplace. I went through every possible website and social network to find out more on this. And with every story that confirmed this tragedy, my heart broke a little more each time.
One of the first characters that truly left an impression and made me feel strongly towards them from the start, was Severus Snape from Harry Potter. I loved to hate him in books 1 -6 and then, after reading the last book, couldn’t help but fall in love with this severely misunderstood character who was the epitome of complexity and despondency.
When I first saw Philosopher’s Stone, the only actor I could easily imagine being like the character they were playing, was Alan Rickman. With his dark, euphonious voice, brooding face and formidable personality, Alan breathed life into Snape in a manner that no other actor could possibly do. I only had to see one scene with him as Snape, and I was able to picture him as the character, for all the times I read the books afterwards.
In the last movie, Alan Rickman’s performance as Snape went to a whole new level of brilliance. His death scene, and the way he delivered lines like, “you have your mother’s eyes,” and “after all this time? Always..” caused millions of fans like me, to reach for their tissues in order to stop the out-pour of tears that just wouldn’t stop at the revelation that Snape wasn’t a bad guy after all.
That was the moment in the movie, when Snape made me fall in love with the actor Alan Rickman.
I had only ever seen Alan in Love Actually and the Harry Potter movies before. But after seeing Deathly Hallows, I literally watched any Alan Rickman movie that I could get my hands on, starting with Robin Hood, Die Hard, Rasputin, Truly Madly Deeply, Sense & Sensibility, Blow Dry, The Search for John Gissing, Snow Cake and The Song of Lunch.
I loved him as Hans Gruber when he, so coolly swore “Yippee ki yay Motherfucker” to Bruce Willis in Die Hard, and enjoyed his absurd threats of “cutting Robin Hood’s heart out with a spoon” as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. But I fell head over heels in love with him after watching him sing and romance Juliet Stevenson in Truly, Madly, Deeply, as the ghost of Jamie the cellist. And this love was only reinforced further after watching him in Sense & Sensibility. The beauty of Alan’s acting prowess was that, he could use his same talents and unique traits to marvelously play roles that were so diverse, that they literally ranged from one extreme to another.
He brought an element of eccentricity and uniqueness to each of his characters, making them unforgettable in the minds of those who’ve seen the films. And his voice…His magical voice could charm, scare and soothe you at the same time. With his death, the theater and film industries have lost one of their most celebrated artists, who personified the British acting class for me and many others from all around the world. With his loss, I’ve lost that part of my childhood which was defined by Harry Potter and all the characters in that story, including and especially Severus Snape, forever.
As I left from work after getting this terrible news yesterday, I had to restrain myself from breaking down in public, before I could reach home and react properly. Once at home, I didn’t care if my parents thought I was acting excessively weird by crying over someone whom I didn’t even know personally, I broke down and shed a few tears for Alan, and for that part of my teenage when I idolized him for playing one of my favourite characters, and for being a super-actor and super-human being in general.
Thank you Alan Rickman, for entertaining me, and making me laugh, scream, hate, cry, and love. Thank you for being one of the people who gave wings to my imagination. Finally, thank you for existing, and sharing your great self with the world.
Goodbye, Hans Gruber, Jamie, Grigori Rasputin, Col. Brandon, Sheriff of Nottingham, Judge Turpin, John Gissing, Alex Hughes, Phil Allen, Harry, and the most beloved Half-Blood Prince.
I will be your fan, ALWAYS.With the offseason officially underway, Around The NFL will examine what's next for all 32 teams. The series continues with the Oakland Raiders.
What's changing?
Former Broncos defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio has taken over as head coach in place of fill-in Tony Sparano. Del Rio tapped Bill Musgrave to serve as offensive coordinator while former Seahawks linebackers aide Ken Norton, Jr. will play call a defense anchored around last year's rookie sensation, Khalil Mack.
Some were surprised to see general manager Reggie McKenzie retained after presiding over a team that has produced an 11-37 mark under his watch. While he unearthed a potential franchise passer in Derek Carr, McKenzie has plenty of work to do to upgrade a roster weighed down by his own aging, hand-picked free agents. With roughly $51.9 million in cap room -- and the No. 4 overall pick in April's draft -- the Raiders are in good position to add talent under Del Rio.
Biggest free agents
» RB Darren McFadden: McFadden is five years removed from a 1,000-yard campaign and no longer the centerpiece of Oakland's offense. While he ran well at points last season, McFadden was essentially replaced by Latavius Murray down the stretch. The Raiders can rely on Murray and a younger pair of legs to carry the ground game instead of overpaying McFadden for 2015.
» WR Denarius Moore: Speed alone made him a mysterious and tantalizing potential deep threat, but Moore failed to emerge in 2014. With just 115 yards off 12 grabs, the fifth-year wideout doesn't loom as a priority signing for a team that last season handed more snaps to James Jones, Andre Holmes, Kenbrell Thompkins and Brice Butler.
» DT Pat Sims: A |
of year.
The 2017 Benzinga Global Fintech Awards is a competition to showcase the companies with the most impressive technology that are paving the future in financial services and capital markets.
To get you prepared for this year's awards, Benzinga will profile each fintech company that has applied. Want to get involved? Submit your company here. For this installment, we spoke with I Know First (answers have been edited for length and clarity).
Benzinga: What does your company do?
I Know First: I Know First’s self-learning forecasting algorithm utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to find relationships and patterns in large sets of historical stock market data in order to analyze and predict behavior and identify the best daily market opportunities.
Benzinga: Who are your customers?
I Know First: On the institutional side, our typical clients are family offices, hedge funds and other asset management firms, as well as banks. We also help private investors benefit from this technology by offering a variety of standardized subscriptions.
Benzinga: How long have you been in business?
I Know First: Our company was incorporated in 2011 and has been operating profitably since 2012.
Benzinga: Where are you located?
I Know First: We are headquartered in Israel. Our R&D team is located in Netanya, and operations, analytics and marketing department is based in Tel Aviv. We also have several local representatives that are supporting I Know First’s business activities abroad, specifically in the United States, Italy, South Korea, the Netherlands, South Africa and Japan.
Benzinga: Who is your company's leadership? What kind of experience do they have?
I Know First: The groundwork was laid decades ago by our co-founder and current chief technology officer Lipa Roitman. He holds a Ph.D. in organic and physical organic chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science and was obsessed with finding order in highly complex and even seemingly random chemical processes. He succeeded by applying a wide range of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, including neural networks and genetic algorithms.
Later, he started experimenting with his extensive AI knowledge in other fields. Together with CEO Yaron Golgher, they identified the growing need of artificial intelligence application in the capital markets.
Benzinga: Anything else Benzinga should know about your company?
I Know First: The company is entering/developing new markets in Europe and East Asia.
It is possible to train I Know First's advanced algorithmic forecasting system virtually on any local stock market. We have structured a tiered product offering, which consists of algorithmically generated forecast reports (standardized or tailored to client's needs) and development of systematic trading and allocation strategies for hedge and mutual funds as well as structuring of smart-beta or actively managed ETFs and other investment vehicles.
If you’re looking for cool fintech startups and access to top financial institutions, and are sick of attending stuffy corporate conferences, the Benzinga Global Fintech Awards is the event for you. From its first year in 2015, the competition grew to over 250 applicants and over 500 attendees in 2016.
Connect with us on social media — use the hashtag #BZAwards and #Fintech to spread the word!SAN FRANCISCO/TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp said five PC makers including Hewlett-Packard Co and Toshiba Corp will recall 100,000 computer battery packs made by the Japanese electronics maker due to a fire hazard.
A lithium-ion battery manufactured by Sony Energy Devices Corporation of Japan in a photo released by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission on October 30, 2008. REUTERS/CPSC
Sony said the recall is expected to have limited impact on its earnings, and its shares outperformed a falling Tokyo stock market on Friday.
The recall is a fraction of a much bigger recall of 9.6 million Sony PC batteries in 2006, which cost the company around 35.5 billion yen ($360 million).
The U.S. government issued on Thursday a recall of 35,000 Sony batteries and the Tokyo-based company said it would recall a further 65,000 batteries worldwide.
PC makers have reported 40 cases of overheating, including four cases where users suffered minor burns, and 21 cases of minor damage from fires and overheating, a Sony spokeswoman said.
The recall affects around 74,000 notebook PCs sold by HP and 14,400 from Toshiba.
The faulty batteries are also used in laptop PCs from Dell Inc, Acer Inc and Lenovo Group Ltd, Sony said.
Sony blamed the faulty batteries on factory changes dating back up to four years, which it believes may have affected the quality of some battery cells.
Other incidents of overheating may have involved a problem with raw materials, the company said.
Sony recalled last month 438,000 of its Vaio laptops due to concerns about overheating batteries.
Shares in Sony rose 3.5 percent to 2,350 yen, compared with a 0.7 percent slide in the Nikkei average.
($1=98.54 Yen)Photo: Georges Biard (Flickr)
The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold broke the story today that Donald Trump used more than $250,000 from his charitable foundation to settle legal disputes for his for-profit businesses. In other news, Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from Brad Pitt. Can you guess which story got more attention?
. @Fahrenthold just dropped maybe the most substantive AND colorful Trump story of 2016. Dammit, Brangelina. https://t.co/DhdA3FOrAO — Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) September 20, 2016
Frustrated by this dynamic, some journalists on Twitter have turned to a version of the bait-and-switch affectionately known as Rick-rolling. Indeed, Emma Roller, a freelancer and contributing writer for the New York Times opinion page, tweeted out the Post story story using the line, “wow, so THIS is why Angelina left.”
wow, so THIS is why Angelina left https://t.co/9iKV3SowMx — Emma Roller (@emmaroller) September 20, 2016
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The tactic is part-joke, partly a means of capitalizing on readers’ outsized interest in celebrities, and partly an expression of exasperation about hard-reported, important journalism getting buried by stories about famous people. This problem has reached a new level during the recent election cycle, as so much impressive investigative work and relentless fact-checking seem not to be putting a dent in Trump’s image, at least among his supporters.
Related: Election results: Here’s what to expect and when
Journalists are competing not only with celebrity news and Trump himself, but with other journalists. In an email, Roller says her tweet was not meant to criticize celebrity gossip, but to comment on “the flightiness of the news cycle”:
I was reading Twitter, and David Fahrenthold’s big scoop about Donald Trump’s shady spending of other people’s charitable donations broke. I follow a lot of political reporters on Twitter, and they all started to share David’s story. But … the Brangelina news broke at the same time, and like moths to a bug zapper, all these political reporters stopped talking about David’s story and started sharing Jennifer Aniston GIFs.
Roller didn’t expect her tweet to get so much attention (more than 4,000 retweets and likes as of Tuesday evening), but others soon followed, including Politico’s Hadas Gold, who retweeted Roller with an “OMG, read this.” In Gold’s tweets, unlike in Roller’s, the image and headline of Trump are not visible—perpetuating the misconception that Roller’s tweet was actually about Angelina.
One person responding on Twitter called it the “first documented case of responsible clickbait.” It is a journalist’s job to act responsibly in the public interest, but straight misrepresentation is not responsible. Tweeting out a link with misleading text—even as a joke—is the equivalent of changing a headline. The text of a tweet, from a trusted reporter, is the Twitter user’s path into an article; a journalist has a responsibility to accurately describe the piece.
I spoke briefly to the Society of Professional Journalists’s Head of Ethics Andrew Seaman this Sunday, before this latest Twitter eruption. He emphasized that the SPJ’s ethics code for journalists applies universally; journalists should not act differently on Twitter than they do in their writing. So does tweeting like this violate the SPJ’s code to “label advocacy and commentary,” and “never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information”?
Related: 7 photos that capture the absurdity of this election season
Roller is an opinion writer, which gives her more leeway than others. The New York Times has repeatedly reminded reporters to remain unbiased; BuzzFeed sent a similar memo to staff last month. Most media organizations now have guidelines for their employees on Twitter, but even so, writes Tow fellow Svenja Ottovordemgentschenfelde, journalists feel there is a great deal of risk involved in tweeting.
Referring to how “Twitter has a way of blowing things out of proportion,” one journalist admitted, “I definitely would not be surprised if, say a year from now, I tweet something just kind of candidly and it ends up coming back to haunt me and getting me fired.”
Much of this is uncharted territory. Even seasoned reporters who don’t misrepresent the content of the piece are trying to capitalize on Brad/Angelina readership. See The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, who jokingly calls it a #mediaconspiracy that the announcement coincided with the Post piece. But she uses the #brangelina hashtag, thereby driving traffic to Fahrenthold’s story. What are the ethics of misleading an audience that is trying to find content about something else?
I’m freaking out about Brangelina and all, but also Trump used 258k from his charity to settle legal disputes womp https://t.co/wQKk5v7BOp — Alana Abramson (@aabramson) September 20, 2016
Twitter has given journalists space to show more personality, but this extra room also opens up risk. That the news cycle pays more attention to Brad and Angelina is a dilemma that goes beyond the purview of journalists alone–and it is not the job of a single journalist to solve it. Some stories are culturally engineered to attract attention, and Twitter is only the latest tool to reward playfulness over credibility and seriousness. Ultimately, newsrooms and journalists need to work together with platforms such as Twitter to slow the news cycle and bring more attention to stories that matter.
Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today
Nausicaa Renner is digital editor of CJR.The Medieval era is well-known for being littered with feudal societies, ruled by royalty and served by serfs who kept the system running with back-breaking labor. Contrary to popular opinion though, the serfs weren’t exactly what we would call ‘slaves.’ They definitely had more rights and opportunities than many of their ancestors from the Roman Empire, and they weren’t owned by other people.
Instead, they were merely ‘tied down.’ They often didn’t have the freedom to move about, not because there were walls and watch towers keeping them penned up, but because they were beholden to the land. They had to pay part of their income if they wanted to stay on that land, and if they wanted any kind of protection.
And because their world was far more dangerous than ours, they desperately needed the protection of the lords and their soldiers, which meant that they couldn’t risk leaving their land for better opportunities. In most feudal societies, it wasn’t politics that kept the people down, it was their financial situation.
In much the same way that feudalism kept its people tied to the land for multiple generations, our current financial system is also producing a perpetual serf class; mainly through the issuance of student loans. Unlike most debts (of which we have plenty) there is no escaping these loans. In most cases, you don’t have the option to declare bankruptcy and start anew with a clean slate. As a result, many of our citizens are not only carrying heavy debts, they’re laying the groundwork for having indebted children as well.
Data analyzed exclusively by the AP, along with surveys about families and rising student-debt loads, show that: • School loans increasingly belong to Americans over 40. This group accounts for 35% of education debt, up from 25% in 2004, according to the New York Federal Reserve. Contributing to this surge are longer repayment schedules, more midcareer workers returning to school, and additional borrowing for children’s education. • Generation X adults — those 35 to 50 — owe about as much as people fresh out of college do. Student-loan balances average $20,000 for Generation X. Millennials, 34 and younger, have roughly the same average debt, according to a report by Pew Charitable Trusts. • Gen X parents who carry student debt and have teenage children have struggled to save for their children’s educations. The average they have in college savings plans is just $4,000, compared with a $20,000 average for teenagers’ parents who aren’t still repaying their own school loans, Pew found. A result is that many of their children will need to borrow heavily for college or pursue cheaper alternatives, thereby perpetuating a cycle of family debt. • Student debt is surpassing groceries as a primary expense for many borrowers, with the gap widening most for younger families. The average college-educated head of the household under 40 owes $404 a month in student debt payments, according to an AP analysis of Fed data. That’s slightly more than what the government says the average college-educated family spends at the supermarket.
There are now two separate debt cycles at work here. Ever since the government started issuing these loans and made them nearly impossible to default on, it has given the colleges an incentive to raise prices. And since these loans allowed more people to go to college, the marketplace is saturated with college grads, and their education quality is often watered down. This means that the average person now needs a higher education to set themselves apart from their peers, which of course costs more money. And on and on it goes.
And these massive debts have spawned another horrible cycle between parents and their children. It’s already incredibly difficult to start a family when you owe tens of thousands of dollars, but for those who do, they now have less money to save for their children’s education. Surely, their progeny will also be burdened with debt if they decide to follow their parent’s footsteps. Considering that around half of America’s college graduates are stuck in jobs that don’t require a college degree, that would probably be an awful mistake to make.
Our society is already populated by millions of people working menial jobs while burdened with absurd debts that will keep them ‘tied down’ for the rest of their lives. So there really isn’t much distance left between us and our medieval ancestors. The only thing that was missing from this situation, was the passing of these debts to our children. However, we’re no longer robbing our future progeny with these debts. Now it’s happening to our children in the present. Feudal America has officially arrived for those who are trying to improve their lot in life with a college education.
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While surfing the internet at work this morning, my husband ran across a blog with a post so… um...interesting that he emailed me the link and accompanied it with a note: “Be sure to read this in an open field, so that when your head explodes it won’t make a mess in the house.” I was intrigued. As soon as I had the baby down for a nap, I sat down to read the post, Heidi Yewman’s ‘My Month With a Gun’, which you can find here. I then spent the first half of the baby’s nap writing a retort response, which you can’t find at the address at the link, as, to the surprise of no one, it did not pass the blog’s mediation standards...
However, if you’re interested, here it is:
Allow me to be clear and frank, so as to avoid confusion. The author is not a “good guy with a gun” nor will she ever be, until such time as she begins to take her new found responsibility as a gun owner seriously instead of using it as a social experiment in order to further her own political views.
Owning, and worse, carrying a gun about which you have no knowledge is one of the absolute least responsible things an individual can do. Furthermore, all of this about “shaking hands” and “surges of adrenaline” make the author sound like an over dramatic teenager- so perhaps she is just an irresponsible individual and I’ve previously overestimated her… but I digress.
And, for the information of the author and whoever may find her melodrama intriguing, the reason that the handgun purchase was so fast was because she already held her concealed carry permit. That background check and fingerprinting process ran her information through the system of her state’s Bureau of Investigations. Once you have passed the BI check and are “in the system” that same check can be performed much more quickly and easily by simply running your permit number for future firearm purchases. In addition, the author failed to mention the waiting period between the application and background check and the actual awarding of the concealed carry permit. It must have slipped her mind.
How do I know these things? Because I am a legal concealed carry permit holder. I underwent the same application process, though fees in my state are much more steep. Furthermore, several years ago, before obtaining my permit, I purchased a pistol for my husband as a gift (no worries, he’s not a felon, either.) Purchasing that gun took me several hours. As a permit holder, I appreciate the expedited process for obtaining new firearms, as I have now proven that I am responsible with the ones that I own.
Now, I do hate to burst the bubble of the legions of adoring fans of this blogger, but come on. Even the leftest of leftist individuals can see the hilarity of this post. We all get the point. She’s proving how easily firearms can be legally obtained by individuals who have absolutely no business obtaining them.
I’d like to invite you all to look at the facts of the matter. Real facts. How many of the murderers in shooting deaths this century obtained their firearms legally? Careful. I don’t mean “How many of the guns were obtained legally?” I mean “How many of the SHOOTERS, THEMSELVES legally obtained the guns?” If you can even find this information on the internet, I’ll be impressed.
Again, I digress. Supporting this woman’s warped idea of a social experiment is almost as ridiculous as her decision to perform it. Go home. Hug your kid. Remember that this woman actually believed a reputable gun dealer might have sold her a loaded gun. (Omigod, if ONLY firearms came with free ammo! Have you priced 9mm rounds lately?!)
So, the moderator didn’t care for my opinion, again, to no great surprise. However, it did get me thinking — what the hell are we thinking?! Is this really what passes for research these days? Worse, as I read through a few of the comments that were published, I realized that this piece was apparently part of a series that was set to run in The New York Times – a well-known, long running, and once-respected publication. And THIS is what it sells?
The talk of “shaky hands” and “surging adrenaline,” as if the gun is going to magically jump off her hip, load itself (as I’d bet you dollars to donuts this woman is carrying it openly and unloaded,) and fire into a crowd of children is nauseating. I credit women like this one for the prevalent misconception that all women are frivolous and dramatic little creatures who live for buying pretty little things that they don’t need. I cannot understand this mindset. And again, how utterly irresponsible of her as someone with no gun knowledge, no gun experience, and no interest in actually using a gun for self-defense to go and purchase and carry a gun “just to see what it’s like.”
I apologize for rambling and jumping from subject to subject, but honestly, the number of issues that I take with this woman, her ridiculous idea of an experiment, and the number of vapid fans proclaiming their support and talking about how they’d “never have the nerve to do something like that” is so vast that I’m having difficulty narrowing my thoughts. I suppose I’ll start from the beginning.
As I attempted to share in my response to the original post, the idea that this woman is “a good guy with a gun” is about as far from the truth as it can be. Carrying a gun (loaded or unloaded) openly and without any intention of putting it to use in a self-defense situation is just plain ignorant. A gun that a person is willing to carry but not to use is a liability, not a weapon. This is even more true if the gun is being carried openly.
People can sense discomfort in others. If she is actually half as obviously uncomfortable carrying her pistol as she says she is, she’s just painted a giant red bull’s eye on her back. Uncomfortable carrying will make her and anyone else in her situation stand out to those meaning to do her harm, whether physically or otherwise.
A person with a gun he or she is unwilling to use is, in my opinion, at least as big a danger to themselves and those around them as any armed individual can be. What happens if, God forbid, she is actually threatened? Can you imagine the delight in the perpetrator’s eyes when she pulls out the Glock of which she is so afraid, then pulls her ammo (assuming she bought some- remember, she thought it might have been sold to her already loaded) out of her pocket, Barney Fife- style, and starts loading it, while her hands are shaking and her adrenaline is pumping?
Furthermore, the fear with which she speaks of this gun is preposterous. It’s as ludicrous as if I wrote of a fear of purchasing kitchen knives out of concern that one might fall out of the closed drawer and kill me or a member of my family. WHAT?
In closing, please allow me to rant briefly about what women like this one and those who support her are doing for the social perception of American women. It isn’t good. Magazines tailored to women focus on fashion and diets and the next shiny thing we just have to have. News outlets are mesmerized by the name of Kim Kardashian’s baby. And here we have a woman trying (albeit misguidedly) to actually stand up for something she believes in and this is what we get? A weak and weepy woman shaking like a leaf out of fear of an experiment (albeit a stupid one) that she voluntarily undertook? Really?
This is not feminism. This is not a woman standing for what she believes. This is a woman in fear for fear’s sake. Rosie the Riveter is shamed and disappointed. We can do better. I know we can.Mozilla has published a new test pilot project for the organization's Firefox web browser that brings Cliqz suggestions to Firefox's address bar.
Cliqz, available as a standalone desktop browser, mobile apps, and a Firefox extension, is a service that returns rich suggestions as you type.
While most browsers support suggestions, they are limited usually to search queries, page titles, or URLs. Cliqz advances that concept by delivering results directly while you type.
If you type "weather Essen" for instance, you get a weather report and forecast delivered to you directly without having to open any sites for that.
Please note that the Cliqz Test Pilot experiment appears to be limited to deliver German results right now. While it does understand English queries, e.g. weather "cityname", all of its results are in German right now even if your version of Firefox is set to a different language.
The experiment works like any other available for Firefox. Head over to the Firefox Test Pilot website, and install the Test Pilot extension first if you have not done so already.
Once that is out of the way, open the Cliqz page on the Test Pilot site and click on the enable link there to activate it.
Make sure you read the privacy information on the page before you do so. Information, what you type or do, is collected. This includes web page interactions like mouse movements or time spent on sites.
Second note: Mozilla holds an investment in the German Cliqz GMBH since 2016. This was done to strengthen web search in regards to privacy according to the German press release.
Third note: The experiment replaces the home page and the new tab page with a new version. There is no option to prevent this from happening.
It is interesting to note that the Test Pilot experiment resembles the functionality of the Firefox add-on.
You can use it to display direct results to some queries including weather reports, flight information, conversions, news, calculations and more. The experiment may prompt you to share your location with it to deliver local results. If you enter Stau for instance, the German word for traffic jam, you get prompted to share your location with the service.
A click on a result takes you to the site directly without opening a search results page first.
Closing Words
You are probably wondering why Mozilla launched a Test Pilot project for something that is already available as a browser extension. Mozilla did not tell, but the most likely reason is that experiments allow Mozilla to grab telemetry data which it would not have access to otherwise.
It remains to be seen how well this is received by users who take part in the experiment. The browser extension for Firefox is quite popular with roughly 121,000 users currently. (via Sören Hentzschel)
Summary Article Name Firefox Cliqz Test Pilot experiment available Description Mozilla has published a new test pilot project for the organization's Firefox web browser that brings Cliqz suggestions to Firefox's address bar. Author Martin Brinkmann Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo
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Un total de 17 personas permanecen ingresadas en el Hospital La Paz-Carlos III tras registrarse en la tarde de este viernes tres nuevos ingresos, el de una peluquera del centro de Alcorcón donde se depiló Teresa Romero, una enfermera y una limpiadora del centro de salud alcorcoreño donde acudió la auxiliar de enfermería contagiada por ébola.
De las 17 personas ingresadas en el citado centro hospitalario, hay un caso confirmado de contagio de ébola, el de la auxiliar de enfermería Teresa Romero, un caso en investigación correspondiente a una enfermera del equipo que atendió al misionero fallecido Manuel García Viejo y que está pendiente del resultado del segundo test tras dar el primero negativo, y quince personas consideradas como contactos de riesgo pero todos ellos asintomáticos.
Según el balance facilitado tras la primera reunión del Comité Especial para la gestión de la enfermedad bajo la presidencia de Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, en la tarde de este viernes han ingresado en el centro hospitalario una nueva peluquera del centro donde se depiló Teresa cuando ya presentaba los primeros síntomas, otra enfermera de La Paz y una mujer del servicio de limpieza que trabajaba en el centro de salud de Alcorcón donde acudió Romero.
Además de estos tres nuevos ingresos, permanecen en la planta de vigilancia activa de contactos de alto riesgo el marido de Teresa, la médico del centro de salud y el facultativo de las Urgencias del hospital de Alcorcón que la atendieron, así como un médico procedente del hospital, que también había atendió a la auxiliar de enfermería, un sanitario del Summa, otras dos peluqueras que depilaron a Teresa, un médico, dos enfermeras, un enfermero supervisor y un celador.The federal government wants to let Canada’s airlines fly with fewer flight attendants, a move that one union says is a threat to passenger safety. Transport Canada this week granted WestJet an exemption to the existing rules, allowing the airline to operate with one flight attendant for every 50 passengers, instead of one cabin staff for every 40 passengers.
President and Chief Executive Officer of WestJet Airlines Gregg Saretsky says the rule exemption allowing fewer flight attendants on WestJet planes helps “level the playing field” for Canadian airlines, by adopting the U.S. and international standard. (May 7, 2013) ( TODD KOROL / REUTERS ) Transport Canada has granted WestJet an exemption to existing rules, allowing the airline to operate with one flight attendant for every 50 passengers, instead of one cabin staff for every 40 passengers. (Dec. 26, 2012) ( RICK MADONIK / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO ) Airlines based in the United States and other countries operate with one flight attendant for every 50 passenger seats. In Canada, it's one attendant for every 40 but that appears to be changing. (June 26, 2000) ( PASCAL ROSSIGNOL / REUTERS FILE PHOTO )
And the department quietly signalled this week it intends to change the rules so Canadian carriers can fly with fewer flight attendants in the future — seven years after rejecting the same move because of safety concerns. “The department has considered WestJet’s request carefully and is confident that the same levels of safety will be maintained,” Transport Minister Denis Lebel said in a statement Monday. Transport Canada said the exemption puts WestJet on a competitive footing with international standards, saying that airlines based in the United States and other countries operate with one flight attendant for every 50 passenger seats.
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“This decision will make WestJet more competitive with U.S. airlines while maintaining a high safety standard,” Lebel said. The department also said it would “begin work on a regulatory change so that airlines can meet this internationally-recognized standard without seeking an exemption.” That was a surprise to the union representing 10,000 flight attendants in Canada which warned that fewer cabin staff will mean less help for passengers during emergencies inflight or on the ground. “What does competitiveness with U.S. airlines have to do with the safety of these employees and the flying public,” asked Paul Moist, national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents flight attendants at such airlines as Air Canada, Air Transat, Canjet and Sunwing. “It deserves much more debate than an innocuous news release,” Moist said in an interview.
He noted that in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackings, pilots are sealed behind a locked door in the cockpit, leaving flight attendants to cope with inflight disruptions, such as unruly passengers or security threats. “It’s you and flight attendants and no one else,” he said.
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Moist said the move is especially surprising given that the Conservatives rejected taking that very step in 2006. Then Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon said at the time that the government was “committed to aviation safety” and recognized the “important contribution that flight attendants make, particularly with respect to the orderly evacuation of aircraft.” New Democrat MP Olivia Chow called the announcement “downright dangerous.” “It is compromising the passenger’s safety,” she told the Star. “They are trying to slip it through.” Chow noted the 2005 crash of an Air France jet at Pearson International Airport when flight attendants helped hustle 297 passengers to safety without a fatality after the Airbus overran the runway while landing and burst into flames. “When there is an accident, when there is a problem, the flight attendants are the first responder,” Chow said. Transport Canada refused to make anyone available Tuesday for an interview to provide clarification about the impact of the proposed rule change. WestJet president and CEO Gregg Saretsky told analysts during a conference call that the rule change helps “level the playing field” for Canadian airlines, by adopting the U.S. and international standard. The airline, based in Calgary, said the move is expected to bring about $30 million in annual cost savings, though WestJet said no jobs will be effected. Saretsky added that in conversations with Lebel, WestJet made it clear the rule change isn’t about Air Canada versus WestJet. “It’s more about as we expand into the U.S., making sure that we have a cost-structure which is competitive with the players we are now going to be competing against,” Saretsky said. “He made it clear in his pronouncement (Monday) that the one-in-50 is available to all Canadian carriers. So over time, I would expect they will move in that direction,” Saretsky said. Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick said the airline will study this change. “We’ll evaluate this industry development with a view to ensuring we remain competitive in all the markets we serve,” Fitzpatrick said, adding Air Canada as well as its new leisure carrier Rouge, which launches in July, will seek exemptions on select aircraft types as needed. Earlier this year, flight attendants with Air Transat agreed to cost-cutting measures that include one fewer flight attendant on its wide-body Airbus 330 planes, which hold about 345 passengers. Instead of 11 flight attendants, there will now be 10.
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Details are emerging surrounding a night where prosecutors say three Hispanic men took turns raping a woman at a house party in Bellevue, Nebraska.
One of the men responsible for crime faced a judge Friday after being charged with sexually assaulting the victim. Cristian Vasquez, Cesar Lopez-Barbosa, and Victor Guzman are all facing charges of sexual assault. Vasquez tried to flee but was found in Texas and had to be extradited back to Nebraska to face the charges.
One neighbor named Chaunicy Roddy who lives just feet away from the home where the party took place said, "This is like my first time hearing this. You don't know like…you could be at that party one time or something and that could happen."
Deputy Sarpy County Attorney Laurie Burgess described the crime saying, "The victim had gone to bed and she woke up to being assaulted by several males. It's something actually the prosecutor's office sees every day."
Prosecutors say that sexual assault charges are far too common but the nature of this case, in particular, is deeply disturbing. "It's a case that's pretty difficult for prosecutors. There's a lot of emotion," Burgess said.
Often the victim of the sexual assault is faced with testifying in court in order for those responsible to face justice. Burgess went on to explain, "You have to relive the whole incident. It's just a real emotional thing for victims and it's a hard thing to do."
The crime horrified local parents say their children play very near to where the crimes happened on the night of September 23rd. One neighbor named Laquita Roddy said, "Keep your kids closer. I don't think no one is safe. You just got to be alert to everything that's going on around you."
Three men have been charged so far but the victim described at least 4-5 men assaulting her and more suspects could be brought on charges in the future. Bond for each man charged has been set at $500,000.
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Source: http://www.wowt.com/content/news/Three-men-charged-in-Bellevue-gang-rape-at-house-party-461405063.htmlIf you’re new to audio recording and editing on your Mac, or upgrading from GarageBand or another audio recording suite to Apple’s Logic Pro X, Logic Pros 101 has you covered.
In this first installment, we give you an introduction to the app with a tour of its user interface. In the future, we’ll break down basic recording and editing features, using virtual instruments and effects, and much, much more:
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Getting Started: Your Studio and Logic Pro X
The way Logic Pro X communicates with the physical elements of your studio is very important. You might be able to get started with USB accessories like speakers and instruments that you can already connect to your Mac’s ports, but connecting guitar cables, microphones, studio speakers and other professional audio gear usually requires an audio interface that expands your connectivity options. Audio interfaces vary in price point and range dramatically in terms of input and output options. Many connect to your computer over USB and some require a separate power supply or use Thunderbolt and other connectivity options.
Logic will automatically configure itself to correspond with the physical elements of your audio interface, including the speakers/headphones, audio inputs/outputs, MIDI I/O and more.
For example if you have an Apogee Duet with two mic/line/instrument inputs, then every time you load an audio track in Logic, it will make those physical inputs available to you. If you want to record the guitar plugged into “Input 2” on your interface, then simply choose Input 2 on the audio track you want to record it on inside of Logic. The same goes for outputs to your speakers/headphones. Logic’s master stereo audio output will automatically come out of the master outputs on your interface (usually labelled something along the lines of Outputs 1-2).
Logic Pro X Audio Preferences: Just in case things aren’t working as they should, you can go to the Logic Pro X top bar menu > Preferences > Audio tab and then ensure your interface is selected in the Input Device and Output Device pull-down menus. It looks like this.
If you’re not using an audio interface, Logic Pro X will simply default to using the physical audio output and input on your computer to interface with Logic.
Most MIDI controllers, which commonly come in the form of keyboards/drum pads and used to control virtual instruments inside Logic, will work right out of the box with your Mac and Logic Pro X. After connecting the device to your system via USB or MIDI cables, it should work with Logic straight away.
And with that out of the way, it’s time to dive into the Logic Pro X user interface.
Settings: To get the most out of Logic Pro X, you’re going to want to enable all of the advanced settings right from the get-go, despite being new to the app. Go |
ostensible subject is the poet John Milton, but the author, William Blake, also creates a character for himself in his own poem. Blake examines the entire range of mental activity involved in the art of poetry from the initial inspiration of the poet to the reception of his vision by the reader of the poem. Milton examines as part of its subject the very nature of poetry: what it means to be a poet, what a poem is, and what it means to be a reader of poetry.
In the preface to the poem, Blake issues a battle cry to his readers to reject what is merely fashionable in art:
Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever in Jesus our Lord.
In attacking the "ignorant Hirelings" in the "Camp, the Court & the University," Blake repeats a familiar dissenting cry against established figures in English society. Blake's insistence on being "just & true to our own Imaginations" places a special burden on the reader of his poem. For as he makes clear, Blake demands the exercise of the creative imagination from his own readers.
In the well-known lyric that follows, Blake asks for a continuation of Christ's vision in modern-day England:
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green & pleasant Land.
The poet-prophet must lead the reader away from man's fallen state and toward a revitalized state where man can perceive eternity.
"Book the First" contains a poem-within-a-poem, a "Bard's Prophetic Song." The Bard's Song describes man's fall from a state of vision. We see man's fall in the ruined form of Albion as a representative of all men and in the fall of Palamabron from his proper position as prophet to a nation. Interwoven into this narrative are the Bard's addresses to the reader, challenges to the reader's senses, descriptions of contemporary events and locations in England, and references to the life of William Blake. Blake is at pains to show us that his mythology is not something far removed from us but is part of our day to day life. Blake describes the reader's own fall from vision and the possibility of regaining those faculties necessary for vision.
The climax of the Bard's Song is the Bard's sudden vision of the "Holy Lamb of God": "Glory! Glory! to the Holy lamb of God: / I touch the heavens as an instrument to glorify the Lord." The vision of the "Lamb of God" is traditional in apocalyptic literature. In this case the Bard's final burst of vision is important not only for its content, but also for its placement in the poem. The Bard's sudden vision of the Lamb of God testifies that man need not remain "in chains of the mind Lock'd up." The Bard begins by describing the fall from vision, but he ends with a vision of his own that indicates that man still possesses the powers of vision.
At the end of the Bard's Song, the Bard's power of vision is questioned much as Blake's prophecies were criticized. The Bard's spirit is incorporated into that of the poet Milton. Blake portrays Milton as a great but flawed poet who must unify the separated elements of his own identity before he can reclaim his powers of vision and become a true poet. Upon hearing the Bard's Song, Milton is moved to descend to earth and begin the process of becoming an inspired poet. It is a journey of intense self-discovery and self-examination that requires Milton to cast off "all that is not inspiration."
As Milton is presented as a man in the process of becoming a poet, Blake presents himself as a character in the poem undergoing the transformation necessary to become a poet. As Milton is inspired by the "Bard's Song," Blake is inspired by the spirit of Milton:
Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift:
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, enter'd there
But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe.
This sudden moment of inspiration extends to the very end of book one. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, the character Blake is not fully aware of the importance of this moment of illumination. Like Milton, Blake is in the process of becoming a poet.
In a moment of sudden inspiration, Blake overcomes his "earthly lineaments" and binds "this Vegetable World" as a sandal under his foot so that he can "walk forward thro' Eternity." Blake's act of creativity enables him to merge with Los:
And I became One Man with him arising in my strength
'Twas too late now to recede. Los had enter'd into my soul:
His terrors now possess'd me whole! I arose in fury & strength!
Blake's act of faith in the world of the imagination enables him to increase his powers of perception and sets a pattern for the reader to follow. Blake's union with Los marks the end of one stage of the unification process that began at the completion of the Bard's Song. In each case faith in the power of the imagination precedes union.
Only Milton believes in the vision of the Bard's Song, and the Bard takes "refuge in Milton's bosom." As Blake realizes the insignificance of this "Vegetable World," Los merges with Blake, and he arises in "fury and strength." This ongoing belief in the hidden powers of the mind heals divisions and increases powers of perception. The Bard, Milton, Los, and Blake begin to merge into a powerful bardic union. Yet it is but one stage in a greater drive toward the unification of all men in a "Universal Brotherhood."
In the second book of Milton Blake initiates the reader into the order of poets and prophets. Blake continues the process begun in book one of taking the reader through different stages in the growth of a poet. Ololon, Milton's female form, descends to earth to unite with Milton. Her descent gives the reader a radically new view of this world. Ololon's unique perspective turns the reader's world of time and space upside down to make him see the decayed and limited nature of this world. If he can learn to see his familiar world from a new perspective, then the reader can develop his own powers of perception. Indeed "learning to see" is the first requirement of the poet.
The turning of the outside world upside down is a preliminary stage in an extensive examination of man's internal world. A searching inquiry into the self is a necessary stage in the development of the poet. Milton is told he must first look within: "Judge then of thy Own Self: thy Eternal Lineaments explore, / What is Eternal & what Changeable, & what Annihilable." Milton descends within himself and judges the separate parts of his own identity; he must distinguish between what is permanent and what transitory. Central to the process of judging the self is a confrontation with that destructive part of man's identity Blake calls the Selfhood. The Selfhood continually hinders man's spiritual development. Only by annihilating the Selfhood, Blake believes, can one hope to participate in the visionary experience of the poem. Unless the Selfhood is annihilated, one cannot become a true poet, for the Selfhood continually blocks "the human center of creativity."
The Selfhood places two powerful forces to block our path: the socially accepted values of "love" and "reason." In its purest state love is given freely with no restrictions and no thought of return. In its fallen state love is reduced to a form of trade: "Thy love depends on him thou lovest, & on his dear loves / Depend thy pleasures, which thou hast cut off by jealousy." "Female love" is given only in exchange for love received. It is bartering in human emotions and is not love at all. When Milton denounces his own Selfhood, he gives up "Female love" and loves freely and openly.
As Blake attacks accepted notions of love, he also forces the reader to question the value society places on reason. The Seven Angels of the Presence warn that the "memory is a state Always, & the Reason is a State / Created to be Annihilated & a new Ratio Created." Both Memory and Reason exercise the lesser powers of the mind. Nothing new can be created by the mental processes involved in memory and reason. In his struggle with Urizen, who represents man's limited power of reason, Milton seeks to cast off the deadening effect of the reasoning power and free the mind for the power of the imagination. Milton gains control of Urizen, and it is clear that in Milton's mind it is now the imagination that directs reason.
Destroying the Selfhood allows Milton to unite with others. He descends upon Blake's path and continues the process of uniting with Blake that had begun in book one. This union is also a reflection of Blake's encounter with Los that is described in book one and illustrated in book two. As was the case with seeing Los, Blake is startled by Milton's arrival. Los appears as a "terrible flaming Sun," and Milton's arrival turns Blake's path into a "solid fire, as bright as the Clear Sun." Both events describe the process of union and the assumption of the powers of the imagination necessary to become a true poet. All of this comes about through the individual annihilation of the Selfhood. To become a poet and prophet, the man of imagination must first look within and destroy the Selfhood.
Milton's final speech in praise of the virtue of self-annihilation is followed by Ololon's own annihilation of the Selfhood. She rejects her virgin Selfhood and joins with Milton:
Then as a Moony Ark Ololon descended to Felpham's Vale
In clouds of blood, in streams of gore, with dreadful thunderings
Into the fires of Intellect that rejoic'd in Felpham's Vale
Around the Starry Eight; with one accord the Starry Eight became
One Man, Jesus the Savior, wonderful!
As Noah's Ark saved lives upon earth, the "Moony Ark" of Ololon preserves man's individual nature. The Seven Eyes of God that had instructed Milton are now merged with Milton, Blake, and all men on earth. Jesus is "One Man," for he unites all men in a Universal Brotherhood. By destroying the Selfhood, we do not lose our identity but rather gain a new identity in the body of the universal brotherhood. Our entry into this union prepares us for the promise of vision.
The apex of Blake's vision in Felpham is the brief image of the Throne of God. In Revelation, John's vision of the Throne of God is a prelude to the apocalypse itself. Similarly Blake's vision of the throne is also a prelude to the coming apocalypse. Blake's vision is abruptly cut off as the Four Zoas sound the Four Trumpets, signaling the call to judgment of the peoples of the earth. The trumpets bring to a halt Blake's vision, as he falls to the ground and returns to his mortal state. The apocalypse is still to come.
Blake's falling to the ground is not a mystic swoon, but part of his design to take himself out of the poem and leave it to the reader to continue the vision of the coming apocalypse. The author falls before the vision of the Throne of God and the awful sound of the coming apocalypse. However, the vision of the author does not fall with him to the ground. In the very next line after Blake describes his faint, we see his vision soar: "Immediately the lark mounted with a loud trill from Felpham's Vale." We have seen the lark as the messenger of Los and the carrier of inspiration. Its sudden flight here demonstrates that the vision of the poem does not end but continues. It is up to the reader to follow the flight of the lark to the Gate of Los and continue the vision of Milton.
Milton does not come to a firm conclusion, for it can only be concluded by the reader. The reader, armed with the creative power of poetry and the power of his own imagination, is asked to continue the work of the poet and prophet.
Before Blake could leave Felpham and return to London, an incident occurred that was very disturbing to him and possibly even dangerous. Without Blake's knowledge, his gardener had invited a soldier by the name of John Scofield into his garden to help with the work. Blake seeing the soldier and thinking he had no business being there promptly tossed him out. In a letter to Butts, Blake recalled the incident in detail:
I desired him, as politely as possible, to go out of the Garden; he made me an impertinent answer. I insisted on his leaving the Garden; he refused. I still persisted in desiring his departure; he then threaten'd to knock out my Eyes, with many abominable imprecations & with some contempt for my Person; it affronted my foolish Pride. I therefore took him by the Elbows & pushed him before me till I had got him out; there I intended to leave him, but he, turning about, put himself into a Posture of Defiance, threatening & swearing at me. I, perhaps foolishly & perhaps not, stepped out at the Gate, & putting aside his blows, took him again by the Elbows, &, keeping his back to me, pushed him forwards down the road about fifty yards--he all the while endeavouring to turn round & strike me, & raging & cursing, which drew out several neighbours....
What made this almost comic incident so serious was that the soldier swore before a magistrate that Blake had said "Damn the King" and had uttered seditious words. Blake denied the charge, but he was forced to post bail and appear in court. Hayley came to Blake's aid by helping to post the bail money and arranging for counsel.
Blake left Felpham at the end of September 1803 and settled in a new residence on South Molton Street in London. His trial was set for the following January at Chichester. Hayley was almost forced to miss the trial because of a fall he suffered while riding his horse, but he was determined to help Blake and appeared in court to testify to the good character of the accused. The soldier's testimony was shown to be false, and the jury acquitted Blake. A local newspaper, the Sussex Weekly Advertiser (16 January 1804), reported on the acquittal: "After a very long and patient hearing, he was by the Jury acquitted, which so gratified the auditory, that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations."
Blake's radical political views made him sometimes fear persecution, and he wondered if Scofield had been a government agent sent to entrap him. In any event Blake forever damned the soldier by attacking him in the epic poem Jerusalem. One positive result of the trial was that Blake was reconciled with Hayley, whose support during the trial was greatly appreciated.
Jerusalem is in many ways Blake's major achievement. It is an epic poem consisting of 100 illuminated plates. Blake dated the title page 1804, but he seems to have worked on the poem for a considerable length of time after that date.
In Jerusalem Blake develops his mythology to explore man's fall and redemption. As the narrative begins, man is apart from God and split into separate identities. As the poem progresses man's split identities are unified, and man is reunited with the divinity that is within him.
In chapter one Blake announces the purpose of his "great task":
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
It is sometimes easy to get lost in the complex mythology of Blake's poetry and forget that he is describing not outside events but a "Mental Fight" that takes place in the mind. Much of Jerusalem is devoted to the idea of awakening the human senses, so that the reader can perceive the spiritual world that is everywhere present.
At the beginning of the poem, Jesus addresses the fallen Albion: "'I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend; / 'Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me.'" In his fallen state Albion rejects this close union with God and dismisses Jesus as the "Phantom of the overheated brain!" Driven by jealousy Albion hides his emanation, Jerusalem. Separation from God leads to further separation into countless male and female forms creating endless division and dispute.
Blake describes the fallen state of man by describing the present day. Interwoven into the mythology are references to present-day London. There one finds: "Inspiration deny'd, Genius forbidden by laws of punishment." Instead of inspiration man is driven by the "Reasoning Power" which Blake calls "An Abstract objecting power that Negates everything." It is against this mental error that Los wars: "'I must create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's. / 'I will not Reason & Compare : my business is to Create.'" Like the poet Blake, Los emphasizes the importance of the human imagination. Systems of thought, philosophies or religions, when separated from men, destroy what is human. To put an end to the destructive separation, Los struggles to build "The Great City of Golgonooza." Like a work of art, Golgonooza gives form to abstract ideas. It represents the human form and is composed of bodies of men and women.
In chapter two the "disease of Albion" leads to further separation and decay. As the human body is a limited form of its divine origin, the cities of England are limited representations of the Universal Brotherhood of Man. Fortunately for man, there is "a limit of contraction," and the fall must come to an end.
Caught by the errors of sin and vengeance, Albion gives up hope and dies. The flawed religions of moral law cannot save him: "The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions, / Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix'd into furrows of death." Our limited senses make us think of our lives as bounded by time and space apart from eternity. In such a framework physical death marks the end of existence. But there is also a limit to death, and Albion's body is preserved by the Savior.Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia
These two large Etruscan cemeteries reflect different types of burial practices from the 9th to the 1st century BC, and bear witness to the achievements of Etruscan culture. Which over nine centuries developed the earliest urban civilization in the northern Mediterranean. Some of the tombs are monumental, cut in rock and topped by impressive tumuli (burial mounds). Many feature carvings on their walls, others have wall paintings of outstanding quality. The necropolis near Cerveteri, known as Banditaccia, contains thousands of tombs organized in a city-like plan, with streets, small squares and neighbourhoods. The site contains very different types of tombs: trenches cut in rock; tumuli; and some, also carved in rock, in the shape of huts or houses with a wealth of structural details. These provide the only surviving evidence of Etruscan residential architecture. The necropolis of Tarquinia, also known as Monterozzi, contains 6,000 graves cut in the rock. It is famous for its 200 painted tombs, the earliest of which date from the 7th century BC.
Description is available under license CC-BY-SA IGO 3.0Younger generations haven’t experienced staggeringly monumental historic events like older generations have, such as World Wars or landing on the Moon. Our historic events so far — mostly related to personal technology, such as the rise of he PC and the internet — are more of a slow, incremental burn. However, a team of UK scientists from Imperial College London are aiming for that staggering historic event that the younger generations can experience, and have designed a mission to land three humans on Mars.
The mission consists of two spacecraft, the first of which is a Martian lander equipped with a heat shield that will send the crew off into Earth’s orbit. The second craft would be a habitat vehicle, which is the craft that the crew would live in during the voyage. The habitat vehicle would consist of three floors, and measure in at around 30 feet (10m) tall and 13 feet (4m) in diameter. So, while the habitat might be a little cramped for three humans, it should do. The astronauts would be situated in the lander during takeoff, and would move to the habitat when the dual-craft reaches Earth orbit. Once the astronauts are safely within the habitat, a rocket would shoot the dual-craft off on its journey to Mars, which would take a shorter-than-you-thought nine months at minimum.
Perhaps sounding like something Jeff Goldblum would think of when attempting to save the planet from hostile aliens, the dual-craft would then split apart by around 200 feet (60 meters), but would still be attached by a tether. Then, thrusters from both vehicles would spin them around a central point, creating artificial gravity similar to Earth’s in the habitat for the astronauts. Not only would this help the astronauts feel at home for the better part of a lonely year, but is thought to reduce the bone and muscle atrophy that extended periods of weightlessness cause. If the craft required increased maneuverability, such as due to incoming emergencies like a solar flare or large debris, the tether can be retracted, and the craft can be better piloted.
Body atrophy isn’t the only threat facing the crew, as nine months in cramped quarters would drive anyone insane, so the team will have to look for ways keep the astronauts occupied. The craft would have to be well-stocked with medicine, and the crew would have to be trained to use it, as practically no one remains in fine health for nine months straight. Superconducting magnets, as well as water flowing through the shell of the craft, would be employed to help reduce both cosmic and solar radiation.
Perhaps the biggest positive to the concept is that each stage of the mission has been proven to work in an individual capacity.
Once the dual-craft reaches Mars, it would tether back together, and the crew would move back into the lander, detach from the habitat, and descend to the Red Planet’s surface. The mission would involve sending a habitat and return vehicle to Mars before the astronauts arrived, so the crew would have shelter upon landing as well as a way home. The crew would spend anywhere from two months to two years on Mars, depending on the goals of the mission and the distance between Mars and Earth (which would dictate a faster journey). On the way back home, the mission would dock with the ISS, then take a craft back to Earth from there.
Unfortunately for space enthusiasts, there is no real timetable for this mission. However, considering every individual step of the mission has been proven to work on its own, the proposed overall journey could work. Hopefully the current young generations will see this kind of voyage take place in their lifetime, as they’re surely not impressed by the rise of smartphones and the internet anymore.
Now read: The first private mission to Mars will launch in 2018 and use poop for radiation shielding
[Image credit: gdefon.ru]The NFC North this year has been a case of who doesn’t want it, ever since the Packers lost their quarterback in Aaron Rodgers. The Packers seemed destined to runaway with the division early on, however the untimely injury to Rodgers sent the division into a tailspin. At times both the Bears and Lions seemed to be the likely team to step forward and claim the division out from underneath the Packers. However, with the Lions now officially eliminated from playoff contention in a fashion that couldn’t have been more inept if they tried to lose, fans of the NFC North are left with a one-game showdown between the Packers and Bears to see who will represent the division in the playoffs.
A lot of questions remain to be answered leading into this game and answers that will likely weigh heavily on the outcome.
The questions of uncertainty of this game both start and end with Aaron Rodgers and the endless will he, won’t he. It has been made clear from the Packers that they are not rushing their quarterback into the line-up before he is absolutely ready, even if that comes at the cost of hosting a home game in the playoffs. A detail that should be respected and admired from football fans, inside and outside of the game. In an industry that the bottom line is what’s most important, the Packers are choosing the long-term health and outlook of their quarterback and team over the short-term payoff of a single home playoff game. Even if Rodgers is unable to go, the Packers go into the final week of the season with a chance. Matt Flynn, a quarterback who’s been cut by three teams since 2012, seems to squeeze everything he’s got while out there on the field for the green and gold.
On the other side of the field, questions around the quarterback exist as well. Jay Cutler is undoubtedly the number one option for the Chicago Bears, however with the play of their back-up Josh McCown in the absence of Cutler, Marc Trestman and company understand they have a viable option to turn to in a one-game scenario if they need to.
Coming back to the Packers, week 16 was a game like no other. The Packers have become heavily reliant on an effective running game and it was on display against the Steelers. Eddie Lacy had 15 carries for 84 yards and two touchdowns and possibly equally as important, moved the ball downfield in a manner that allows McCarthey to be confident in his back when needing to convert. It’s one thing to put up some stats that sometimes don’t tell the full story, it is another to give your coach the belief that you will get what is needed. Eddie Lacy has given that to the Packers. With another injury to his ankle, fans and fantasy owners will remain in the dark until Thursday to know Lacy’s status heading into the final week. His presence might not be the most important for the Packers as Aaron Rodgers will stake claim to that, but Lacy is damn important to the success of this team.
In his absence though, James Starks continues to do what he does. In limited action late in the game, Starks picked up 47 yards on 10 carries and also had a 23 yard reception to go with it. The one-two punch of these two would be welcomed by any Green Bay fan, however if Starks needs to step into the number one option, he’s proven over and over again that he is capable.
Clay Matthews suffered another injury to the same thumb that kept him out for a month earlier in the season and is unlikely to see action in week 17, a big blow to the Packers defense. News is a little better when it comes to Randall Cobb; he’ll continue to practice this week and could be activated from the short-term injured reserve list for week 17.
If the Packers can come out of the final week with a win, the conversation quickly turns to their playoff match-up. With so many movable pieces in play for week 17, it’s difficult to forecast just who the Packers would host. But in most of the possible scenarios, Lambeau is not going to be a friendly place that welcomes a team who will most certainly have had a better season as they go on the road to Green Bay.
For another week the waiting game continues. My sense is that Rodgers won’t start, Flynn will have a mediocre game and because the Bears are more like the Lions than they are what is expected from Chicago, the Packers will win the NFL North this season. And the apathy that I feel towards this team heading into week 17, if they are to book a ticket to the playoffs, a lot of this apathy subsides. The underdog role is one that this team has embraced for some time and it may serve them well once again.
Another conclusion I hope is safe to draw is that the horrendous penalties that the team was taking late, is not something that will be seen again. A late encroachment and a false start resulting in a ten second run-off, it was an odd finish to the game. In the span of two minutes, the Packers fumbled, took an awful penalty to extend the drive resulting in a touchdown instead of the inevitable field goal, had a +70 yard kickoff return to set up an improbable touchdown drive for the tie, instead of the win had they only allowed the field goal. And then once in the red zone, they managed to get two plays off in a span of over a minute. A late snap as the clock ticked to zero and a pass into the end zone that seemed to have no chance of being caught resulted in the end of a game that seemed like the Packers would send to overtime. It was a dagger that stung the hearts of Packers fans everywhere.
But then out of a bad afternoon soap opera, the Bears got beat-down by a team who had nothing to play for.
Week 17, we’re all waiting.
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(Image via Bing Creative Commons)DALLAS -- Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock thought his team was set up to fail, having to play three road games in four nights after the Christmas break with a depleted lineup.
Much to his surprise, the tough trip was a rousing success.
The Red Wings scored six unanswered goals to battle back from a two-goal deficit and defeated the Dallas Stars 7-3 at American Airlines Center for their third consecutive victory.
Patrick Eaves notched his first career hat trick and added an assist. The Red Wings scored four goals in the third period to snap a 3-3 tie.
“A trip like this after Christmas, back-to-back to start out, you’re set up to fail,’’ Babcock said. “Our guys found a way to get it done. (Dallas) played last night, that helped us as well. But still, you could easily go on this trip and end up 0-3.’’
It was Detroit’s first win in Dallas in seven games (1-4-2).
Nicklas Lidstrom and Jiri Hudler each had a goal and an assist. Brad Stuart and Kris Draper also scored goals. Todd Bertuzzi and Johan Franzen each had a pair of assists. And Jimmy Howard made 28 saves to raise his record to 20-6-2.
“We showed a lot of character by the way we played on this trip,’’ Red Wings captain Nicklas Lidstrom said. “We responded really well to the third game in four nights on the road. It’s great to see, especially with key people being out of the lineup.’’
After losing Pavel Datsyuk and Danny Cleary to injuries in the last week, the Red Wings need more contribution from other players. Eaves, a fourth-line grinder and penalty killer, is seizing the opportunity.
He scored his first power-play goal since March 3, 2009, when he played for Carolina, to tie the game at 3-3 at 17:38 of the second period. With his team leading 5-3, Eaves added a couple of insurance goals in the third, at 14:07 and at 17:46, shorthanded, into an empty net.
“That was awesome,’’ Eaves said. “There were some pretty special passes coming my way. I was finding some open spots and they went in. I’ll take all of them. It was a huge win for us. We responded after being down 3-1. It was a good road trip for us.’’
Eaves earned some shifts with Henrik Zetterberg and Johan Franzen and responded. He has 11 goals.
“It’s great to see,’’ Lidstrom said. “He’s got a great shot, he finds that open spot and knows where to go. He got rewarded by shooting the puck and finding his open spots.’’
Stuart snapped a 3-3 tie, giving his team the lead for good, at 5:29 of the third period. Stuart scored on a blast from just inside the blue line. Drew Miller worked down low to get the puck to Hudler at the point. Hudler passed to Stuart and Justin Abdelkader screened goaltender Kari Lehtonen.
Draper then one-timed a pass from Eaves, after Darren Helm battled for the puck in the corner, for his second goal in three games at 13:23.
“Our third and fourth lines were what I expected in Colorado (in Monday’s 4-3 overtime win) and didn’t get,’’ Babcock said. “I expect them to play with that kind of energy.’’
The Red Wings came back to tie the game at 3-3 in the second period, after Dallas had scored three goals in a span of 1:14— from Brad Richards, Mark Fistric and Jamie Benn -- to take a two-goal lead.
The Red Wings were reeling, but Lidstrom settled things down a bit by scoring at 8:56. He blasted in a one-timer on a pass from Valtteri Filppula, while Bertuzzi provided a screen.
“It was a tough minute and change, but we stuck with it,’’ Stuart said. “They got a little undisciplined at times, we capitalized. It was anybody’s game going into the third and we kept it simple, got the go-ahead goal and went from there.’’
The Red Wings led 1-0 after the first period, despite being outshot 12-4, on Hudler’s power-play goal at 1:36.
Bertuzzi, from the slot, corralled the puck after a shot by Lidstrom was blocked and made a nice, quick backhand pass to Hudler, who fired the puck into an open net before Lehtonen could get across to cover.
“I thought we played a real solid road game, especially when they scored three quick goals in the second,’’ Lidstrom said. “We didn’t give up, we worked our way into it again. We didn’t panic. We stuck to our game plan and slowly we took that game over.’’The nation will remain grateful to him for its peaceful transition from feudalism to democracy
In view of the recent burst of interest in the media, I would like to recall the association that I was privileged to have, over six decades ago, with the great Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. In fact, had it not been for the Sardar, I would have spent the rest of my life in a wheelchair. In my youth I had developed a problem in my hip and had been confined to a wheelchair for many months. When Gandhiji visited my father in August 1947, I insisted on sitting in at the meeting and my chair was wheeled in under the chinar tree at Gulab Bhavan Palace with its magnificent view of the Dal Lake.
When towards the end of October, after the Pakistani tribal invasion, we moved to Jammu on the advice of V.P. Menon, my chair was brought down in a station wagon. In November 1947, Sardar Patel visited Jammu and came to see us. When he learnt that I had been confined to a wheelchair for six months, he told my father that I should immediately be sent to America for treatment. Since I was an only child, my mother, of course, was very reluctant for me to go abroad. But my father realised that Sardar's wise advice needed to be followed. As a result, arrangements were made to send me to New York for medical treatment, and it was due to surgery and prolonged treatment in the United States that I was able to walk again and finally resume a normal life, including playing tennis (doubles), badminton and golf. I, therefore, owe an undying debt of gratitude to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, without whose intervention I would certainly have spent my whole life under a severe handicap.
... contd.
ALSO READ The taper tigers
Please read our terms of use before posting commentsBut wasn’t George Zimmerman a “white Hispanic?”
Author Terry McMillan says white men shoot black boys “to show who has the power.”
Via Twitchy:
I think a lot of white men are afraid of and intimidated by black boys and black men. Shooting them is one way to show who has the power.
It would be nice if at least one of these race hustlers would have their facts straight.
Heather MacDonald reported:
If a black parent wants to radically reduce his son’s chance of getting shot, he should live in a white neighborhood. New York’s crime profile is typical of urban-crime disparities across the country. The per capita shooting rate in predominantly black Brownsville, Brooklyn, is 81 times higher than that of predominantly white and Asian Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, according to the New York Police Department. Blacks in 2012 committed about 75 percent of all shootings in New York, and whites a little over 2 percent, though blacks are 23 percent of the city’s population and whites 35 percent. Blacks are 60 percent of the city’s homicide victims. Their killers? They aren’t white.
The picture is the same nationally. Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 committed homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males combined in the same age category in 2008, resulting in a homicide victimization rate nearly as disproportionate. As for interracial crime, black homicide offenders in 2010 had nearly three times the absolute number of white and Hispanic victims as there were black victims of white and Hispanic homicide offenders, despite blacks’ much lower population numbers.Manatee deaths linked to pollution have resumed in the algae-stricken Indian River Lagoon of Brevard County, according to state wildlife officials.
Since the end of May, eight manatee carcasses have been recovered, bearing signs of trauma that has killed more than 150 of the marine mammals in the past four years.
"We are still narrowing down the cause, but the hypothesis is still that the change of vegetation that the manatees are eating makes them to susceptible to |
outside existing domestic court systems.
“As under ISDS, businesses would retain their prerogative to sue state authorities and they would continue to be able to choose to do so through private courts outside the legal system”, said French Green MEP Yannick Jadot.
Greenpeace’s Jurgen Knirsch described it as a “two-speed justice system” that benefits multinational corporations.
Last nail in the coffin
But others, like the centre-right, socialist and liberal groups in the European Parliament, back the commission proposal.
Bernd Lange, the centre-left German MEP who heads the file at the parliament, praised the commission court proposal and described it as “the last nail in the coffin for ISDS”.
The Belgian leader of the liberal group, Guy Verhofstadt, said an alternative to ISDS is needed and welcomed Malmstrom’s proposal.
"Today's announcement shows the Commission is responding to the legitimate concerns of the European Parliament and European citizens”, he noted.
The commission will next discuss its plan with the European Parliament and member states before presenting a formal text to the US.Americans spend at least $3.2 trillion on health care each year. That's well beyond any other country in total and per capita. A great many factors feed the glut, but a primary contributor is overtreatment. Unnecessary tests and procedures account for at least $200 billion in spending every year. That's ten NASA budgets spent on health care that doesn't make anybody healthier.
Doctors are well aware of this problem, and yet, it persists. According to a new survey of 2,106 physicians conducted by researchers at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University, 20.6% of of medical care is unnecessary.
The survey is published in PLoS ONE.
The responding physicians were randomly selected from the American Medical Association master file. Just over half were primary care physicians and the rest were specialists. Four in ten of the specialists focused on general internal medicine. All of the doctors answered the question, "In your specialty, what percent of overall care do you think is unnecessary?" The group collectively replied that 22.0% of prescribed medications, 24.9% of conducted tests, and 11.1% of completed procedures were not needed.
The most cited reason for overtreatment was "fear of malpractice." An astounding 84.7% of the responding physicians feared a lawsuit if they didn't exercise every treatment precaution. "Patient pressure/request" and "difficulty accessing prior medical records" were the next most common reasons, at 59% and 38.2% respectively.
Just over half of respondents suggested additional training and guidelines to help curtail overtreatment. Interestingly, only one in ten doctors thought that more government regulation could solve the problem.
The researchers who conducted the survey were perplexed that "fear of malpractice" seemed to be the primary motivator for unnecessary medical care.
"Only 2–3% of patients harmed by negligence pursue litigation, of whom about half receive compensation. Paid claims have declined by nearly 50% in the last decade..." they wrote.
Ultimately, physicians may be the most important arbiters of medical spending. If we want to begin cutting into the massive waste plaguing or medical system, and thus drive down costs for all, doctors will need to lead the effort.
Source: Lyu H, Xu T, Brotman D, Mayer-Blackwell B, Cooper M, Daniel M, et al. (2017) Overtreatment in the United States. PLoS ONE 12(9): e0181970. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0181970The HP Elite x3 is expected to arrive sometime this summer presumably near the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Besides its Bluetooth certification the powerhouse Windows 10 Mobile device was spotted on the FCC recently, suggesting its launch is rapidly approaching.
Up until now, the Elite x3 was only seen in one color option: A Graphite polycarbonate body with a Chrome speaker grill at the bottom. In a July 1 updated specification sheet, however, a second color option is now listed: Gold/Gold.
Unfortunately, no images or mockups were posted by HP leaving its final appearance guesswork at this time.
The design will presumably have a gold body with a gold metal component at the bottom, which is a bit curious. HP recently released a new Spectre laptop with a black and gold motif, and a matching design would seem appropriate for Elite x3.
Additionally, the color option appears to be more limited than the standard Graphite/Chrome model with a footnote mentioning "Gold/Gold color option not available in all countries."Korey Waikiki is an American rollerblader who recently received his first pro skate from Razors.
We talk about Korey’s blading childhood in NorCal, his travels, brotherly influence, oversensitive people, having “stones,” and why Korey isn’t very competitive.
You can listen to this and other episodes on iTunes and Sticher. Or you can directly download the episode by clicking here.
His pro skate edit:
Here’s some clips of Korey skating in Australia:
Here’s Sneak’s edit from when he first went pro:
Buy his new pro skate at AggressiveMall.com and follow him on Twitter as @KoreyWaikiki.
Check out the interview I did with Sneaky in 2012 when he was first named pro: http://bladeordie.com/blader-digest-thanks-for-kids-like-sneaky/.
The Rock Town Podcast is made possible by our supporters on Patreon, a way creative people can make cool stuff. So thanks Dustin and Trudie for your support.Below are what I consider to be some of the most interested sales, auctions and listings for Nintendo games (all systems) during 2012.
1. Wildwaters Extreme Kayak X-Stream Unreleased N64 Game
Wildwaters (also know as “Extreme Kayak†and “X-Streamâ€) was a cancelled racing game that was in development by Looking Glass Studios for the Nintendo 64 in 1998 / 1999.
The project was announced at E3 1999 by Ubisoft (that was interested as a publisher) while the studio was working on Destruction Derby 64 (published in the same year), but sadly it was never finished.
Itwas very promising as Looking Glass were able to create an engine with real physics running for the waterflow through the river on an N64, but it needed more time and love which eventually ran out. Five different gameplay modes, including Arcade, Time Trial, Championship, Finals and Versus Battle were planned for the game.
Some months later, on May 2000, Looking Glass Studios went out of business during a financial crisis related to their publisher at the time, Eidos Interactive.
The only known prototype sold in January 2012 for $1,600. Since then, the ROM has been dumped and made available.
2. Mini Racers Nintendo 64 Unreleased Prototype Game
Mini Racers is a cancelled 96Mbit multiplayer racing game that was also in development by Looking Glass Studios. The project was announced in 1998, but unfortunately it was delayed many times and in the end in was never released. Mini Racers was going to have a strong multiplayer mode, similar to Micromachines or RC PRO-AM, for up to four players.
It had several game modes in single and multiplayer, including a track editor to create your own course, and a random track generator. The radio-controlled cars could be given a turbo boost with a press of the Z button. N64 Magazine played an early version are voiced their frustration at the poor camera, though when they next played it at Spaceworld 1999 they noted the angle and viewing distance were now configurable and could even be played in a top-down view. Most likely the game was cancelled because it was shown in the final days of the Nintendo 64, when the new 128-bit consoles were almost out.
The only known prototype sold in March 2012 for $2,938.00. The ROM has also been released as well.
3. Tamiya Racing Unreleased Nintendo 64 Prototype
This is the third unreleased game auctioned off from the same seller and when this was listed there was absolutely ZERO information on the game out there anywhere. According to the auction, the game is from Intermetrics, associated with Looking Glass Studios. The label had No Gamma written on on. The seller also thought it was very similar to the unreleased Mini Racers.
It is probably an unfinished sample due to the lack of finesse and functionality. Aside from the questionable camera angles and very sensitive controls, Tamiya Racing seems to only contain one level.
This sold for $1,358.33 in Feb. 2012. Like the other two, it has since been dumped.
4. Street Fighter II 2 Turbo New Sealed PAL Metal Tin Edition
Long time gameSniped readers know I love SNES era Limited and Special Editions. The PAL only Metal Tin SFII is somewhat hard to find, but easy enough to pick up with some patience. Usually for under $40.00 as well. This was the first time I saw a sealed version however.
Sold for $1,935.90 in Nov 2012.
5. Sealed Super Mario World SNES PAL Yellow Box
PAL SNES games seem to rarer than their NSTC counterparts by default. However, I was still amazed at this sale.
Sold in Nov 2012 for $13,170.44
.
6. Legend of Zelda Nintendo GameCube Prototype Controller
It’s an officially licensed controller by NubyTech and Nintendo. NubyTech released the Mega Man Nintendo GameCube controller, but decided against releasing the GameCube Zelda Controller due to higher costs.
This controller was to be released in an oversized “book” box. Â The proto is non functional but has a little leather outfit at the bottom end of the controller and was an expensive mock-up done when the licensing was ongoing.
According to the seller who often deals in such materials, they only know of two of these that exist and have never seen the second one.
Sold in Feb. 2012 for $2,500.
7. Complete US NTSC Super Nintendo Collection
A complete SNES collection is no small feat, even loose. To date, I only know of three that have actually been offered for sale. I believe all times the seller eventually parted their collections out.
The seller is actually byuu, creator of the SNES emulator bsnes. He acquired the set in his quest to make sure each game was emulated perfectly in bsnes, and has personally dumped each rom as well.
Surprisingly, he didn’t go cart only and the entire set is boxed, with around 85% complete with manual. The original BIN / OBO was reasonable too. Around 33.50 a game counting the handful of duplicates included.
Auction Is Still Here, No Buyer Yet
8. Original SNES Campus Challenge
Mike of GameGavel has spent the year courting a lot of high end auctions such as this cart. In 1992 Nintendo created another nationwide contest after the success of the 1990 NWC and the 1991 NCC. This was the first official competition cart made for the Super Nintendo. The event traveled to around 35 different college campuses where thousands of students battled for a chance to compete for the next Nintendo World Championships title. To compete, gamers had to grab 50 coins in Super Mario World, finish two laps on the first track in F-Zero, and reach the highest score they could in Pilotwings, all before time ran out. At the event all three games were combined into a special cartridge made specifically for the 1992 SNCC. Almost all of these cartridges were destroyed.
Sold for $6,000 in Nov. 2012.
9. Original NES Captain Comic Source Code Floppy Disk
This was listed for $300 but did not sell. It’s 3.5″ Floppy Disc that includes the Source Code for the Nintendo NES Color Dreams game Captain Comic. This is dated 11/7/89 and was acquired directly from the current owner of Wisdom Tree/Color Dreams and included a signed document proving it’s authenticity. It was tested to function and still includes all of the original data on it.
10. NES 1990 NWC Nintendo World Championships Competition Cartridge #311 VGA 85+
Now, I’m not a fan of VGA to begin with. Nor do I agree with the grading of items like these, protos etc. It is smart on the sellers behalf though, as VGA items have become accepted enough to lend credibility to sales.
Sold for $8,356.00 in Dec. 2012.
1990 NWC Nintendo World Championships Gold Competition Cart – VGA GRADED 85
This one got a lot of hate (on here at least) when it was listed. While nothing I would ever do, it is an interesting idea and certainly got a lot of attention.
Relisted at $27,000 several times, no bidders.
11. The Ultimate Nintendo Power Collection
From Howard Phillips, Nintendo’s original “Gamemaster” who worked at Nintendo from 1981 to 1991. During that time one of his many roles at Nintendo was Senior Editor of Nintendo Power magazine. I remember him best from the in the magazine comic, “Howard & Nester”.
Lots of goodies in the auction, but the highlight is the original Howard and Nester Tetris block models used in the photo shoot for the Jan / Feb ’90 issue – An Adventure In Tetris World.
Relisted several times and finally sold for $3,000.
12. Rare Nintendo 64 Turok Rage Wars Grey Variant
A seller listed a case (120) of these in Feb. 2012 for $12.99 each. They quickly sold out.
It seems this may have been a replacement for a recall Nintendo had on the origional cart, due to an in-game glitch.
A couple sources hint that this cart was offered as a fixed replacement for those who sent in their black cart back to Nintendo. Seeing as the game probably wasn’t a huge success, followed by the fact that the black cart glitch only affected co-op, these replacements were likely in very low demand. I can’t find any sources of anyone that’s seen/owned the grey cart before now. There’s a very slim chance that it was never released, but that’s just speculation for now until people come forward with NTSC greys that weren’t purchased from the recent seller. In any case it’s a very rare cart variant.
Since the original listings, many have been flipped at prices from $99.00 – $227.50
13. Complete Japanese Game Boy Advance Cartridge Set
This was pretty awesome, the complete 795 game set. At roughly $7.00 a cart it may be a bit expensive, but definitely not insane – buyer has OBO too.
Fun fact: Final Fantasy VI Advance was the last Japanese GBA game, released November 2006, the last Nintendo-published game for the system.
Still available, for $5,104.00.
14. Nintendo R. O. B. Light Up Store Display
This is by far, my all time favourite display. I had never seen one before this year either.
Sold for $7,100.00 in July 2012.
15. The Legend of Zelda NES Nintendo Prototype
I really don’t know what to say about this one. Another item I don’t really like, but it certainly is noteworthy. Worth the sale price? That argument is kind of pointless, as it was for a least one person.
Sold for $55,000.00 in Aug. 2012.
16. Final Fantasy II NES Demo/Sample
The Zelda sale lured this one out into the open. This is the only known legitimate copy of the NSTC version of Final Fantasy II.
Remained unsold at $50,000 OBO.
17. NES Tengen Tetris Prototype – Licensed by Nintendo
This is pretty cool. It was a review copy sent to EGM directly from Tengen. It’s a prototype of the Tengen Version of Tetris which states Licensed by Nintendo on the title screen.
The label reads “Tetris Property of TENGEN INC. #4 Prototype:”. It’s housed in a modified Duck Hunt Cartridge. The EPROMs are protected with a thick tape and the cartridge is glued together to prevent piracy and or duplication.
After being listed for $45,000.00 OBO, it later ended up on GameGavel with a high bid of $1,500. That was under the reserve however, and the game remains unsold.
Honerable Mentions:
EarthBound for Super Nintendo VGA Qualified 85+ CIB -$4,700.00
SNES Metal Warriors SNES Sealed – $3,050.00
Super Nintendo NES Value Pak Factory Sealed – $1,299.99
SNES Mickey Playtown Adventure Unreleased Prototype – $238.02
Nintendo M82 Store Display Demo Kiosk with Full Size Arcade-style Cabinet – $4,550.00
Jack Bros Virtual Boy Nintendo Sealed NSTC
N64 Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time PAL Special Edition – $3.304.23Â
Complete N64 Collection – Unsold
SNES M.C.A.S. Multipurpose Arcade Combat Simulator Light Gun – $1,025.00
SNES M.C.A.S. Multipurpose Arcade Combat Simulator Cartridge – $660.00
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D Scroll – $474.98
Starfox E3 “N” Gold N64 Controller – $571.50
E3 97 Star Fox 64 Competion Controller – $1,100.00
The Millennium 2000 Controller, The Nintendo Power 100 Gold Controllerband the DK 64 Banana Controller – $1,025.00
Sealed SNES Super Copa – $4,049.00
NES Family Fun Fitness: Stadium Events – $14,890.00
Nintendo NES Stadium Events (NTSC) VGA Sealed – Unsold at $500,000.00monitoR: Acoustic Template Detection in R
Acoustic template detection and monitoring database interface. Create, modify, save, and use templates for detection of animal vocalizations. View, verify, and extract results. Upload a MySQL schema to a existing instance, manage survey metadata, write and read templates and detections locally or to the database.
Version: 1.0.7 Depends: R (≥ 2.10), tuneR, methods Imports: graphics, grDevices, stats, utils Suggests: fftw, parallel, RODBC, knitr Published: 2018-02-14 Author: Sasha D. Hafner and Jon Katz, with code for the Fourier transform from the seewave package (by Jerome Sueur, Thierry Aubin, and Caroline Simonis), and code for the readMP3 function from the tuneR package (by Uwe Ligges). Therese Donovan provided creative direction and database design support. Maintainer: Sasha D. Hafner <sdh11 at cornell.edu> License: GPL-2 URL: http://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/vtcfwru/R/?Page=monitoR/monitoR.htm NeedsCompilation: no Citation: monitoR citation info Materials: README NEWS ChangeLog CRAN checks: monitoR results
Downloads:
Reverse dependencies:
Reverse imports: warbleR
Linking:In the last half-billion years, life on Earth has been nearly wiped out five times—by such things as climate change, an intense ice age, volcanoes, and that space rock that smashed into the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago, obliterating the dinosaurs and a bunch of other species. These events are known as the Big Five mass extinctions, and all signs suggest we are now on the precipice of a sixth.
Except this time, we have no one but ourselves to blame. According to a study published last week in Science Advances, the current extinction rate could be more than 100 times higher than normal —and that’s only taking into account the kinds of animals we know the most about. Earth’s oceans and forests host an untold number of species, many of which will probably disappear before we even get to know them. ( See pictures of 10 of the earth's rarest animals. )
Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert ’s book The Sixth Extinction won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. We talked with her about what these new results might reveal for the future of life on this planet. Is there any chance we can put the brakes on this massive loss of life? Are humans destined to become casualties of our own environmental recklessness?
The new study that's generated so much conversation estimates that as many as three-quarters of animal species could be extinct within several human lifetimes, which sounds incredibly alarming.
Yes. That study is looking at very well-studied groups of animals. They restricted themselves to vertebrates—like mammals and birds and reptiles and amphibians—and said, OK, let’s look at what is actually happening. And they document pretty compellingly that extinction rates were already extremely elevated in [the year] 1500, and are just getting worse and worse.
They’re very high figures, and people are kind of getting inured to it. Kids who are born 10, 20 years ago—they’ve grown up their whole lives with these numbers. They don’t really think, OK, well that really is fantastically unusual. ( Read about a study that says extinction rates are a thousand times higher because of humans. )
View Images Due to over-collection for horticultural purposes and habitat loss, 99 percent of Asian slipper orchids (such as Paphiopedilum appletonianum, above) are threatened with extinction. Photograph by Karl Gehring, The Denver Post/Getty
People have been debating whether we really are in the throes of a sixth mass extinction. What is your opinion?
To be honest, that’s one of those debates where I think we’re focusing on the wrong thing. By the time we have definitive answers to that question, it’s possible three-quarters of all species on Earth could be gone. We really don’t want to get to the point where we definitively can answer that question.
What is clear, and what is beyond dispute, is that we are living in a time of very, very elevated extinction rates, on the order that you would see in a mass extinction, though a mass extinction might take many thousands of years to play out.
Are there habitats or species—or groups of animals that you think are especially vulnerable to the changes that are going on?
Island populations are very vulnerable to extinctions for a couple of reasons. They tend to have been isolated. One of the things we’re doing is removing the barriers that used to keep island species isolated. New Zealand had no terrestrial mammals. Species that had evolved in the absence of such predators were incredibly vulnerable. A staggering number of bird species have already been lost on New Zealand, and a lot of those that remain are in deep trouble.
So, places that have been isolated for a long time. Those are very vulnerable. Species that have a very restricted range, that exist only in one spot in the world, those tend to be extremely vulnerable. They have nowhere to go and if their habitat is destroyed, say, then they’re gone.
The human component of this story—the fact that we appear to be responsible for the sixth extinction—what is some of the best evidence for our involvement?
I don’t think there’s any dispute that we are responsible for the elevated extinction rates we see now. There are very few, if any, extinctions that we know about in the last 100 years that would have taken place without human activity. I have never heard anyone argue, “oh extinction rates, that’s just a natural thing that would have happened with or without humans.” It’s just pretty much impossible to argue that.
If we’re pulling the trigger, what did we load the gun with?
There are thousands and thousands of scientific articles that have been written about this. We loaded it with simply hunting. We brought in invasive species. We are now changing the climate, very, very rapidly, by geological standards. We are changing the chemistry of all the oceans. We are changing the surface of the planet. We cut down forests, we plant mono-culture agriculture, which is not good for a lot of species. We’re overfishing. The list goes on and on.
There’s no shortage of bullets. We have a pretty big arsenal right now. ( Read about which animals are likely to go extinct first due to climate change. )
Is it still possible for us to slow down the loss of life?
All of the ways that we’re changing the planet that we just discussed—in each case, I could point to a library’s worth of reports suggesting how we could do things better. Just take dead zones in the ocean as one tiny little example. We could change fertilizer regimens in all sorts of ways. We dump nitrogen on fields in the Midwest and the fertilizer runs down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico, and that causes these dead zones.
The sort of fundamental question is, can 7.3 —going toward 8, going to 9 billion people —live on this planet with all of the species that are now still around? Or are we on a collision course, in part because we consume a lot of resources that other creatures also would like to consume? That’s a question I can’t answer.
The other five mass extinctions – how long did it take the planet to recover from those?
To get to the previous level of biodiversity, it seems to take several million years.
View Images New Zealand Sea Lion or Hooker's Sea Lion (Phocarctos hookeri) group frolicking underwater near breeding colony, Enderby Island, New Zealand Photograph by Tui De Roy, Minden/National Geographic
So it’s possible that from now on, humans might never actually live in a world that is not in some state of recovery from a major extinction event, if not in the midst of one.
Yes. If you give vertebrate species (and we are another vertebrate species) an average lifetime of a million years, and you say humans are 200,000 years into their million years, and you precipitate a mass extinction—even laying aside the question of whether humans will be the victim of their own mass extinction—you can’t expect that same species to be around by the time the planet has recovered.
That is an interesting question you just mentioned—will humans be the victim of their own mass extinction?
I don’t want to claim that we can’t survive the loss of many, many species. We’ve already proved that we actually can. We’re very adaptable. But I think the bottom line is, you wouldn’t want to find out.
There are two questions that arise: One is, OK, just because we’ve survived the loss of X number of species, can we keep going down the same trajectory, or do we eventually imperil the systems that keep people alive? That’s a very big and incredibly serious question.
And then there’s another question. Even if we can survive, is that the world you want to live in? Is that the world you want all future generations of humans to live in? That’s a different question. But they’re both extremely serious. I would say they really couldn’t be more serious.
Follow Nadia Drake on Twitter.Im so excited that the I+TA sub is back up! There also some slots opening up, so if you’re interested, go check it out here. You can follow on Facebook to find out when they open up! Onto this month’s colors!
I love that this sub always has a theme, and this month’s theme is the mysteries of life. Of course, it also came with a 35% off code for a new order. Linda included 2 additional colors, Wintertide and Reverse Bear Trap, due to samples not arriving from other companies. All swatches are over Fergie Wet n Wild Take on the Day Eyeshadow Primer.
Illusionary Stars
Breathtaking Wonders
Splendor of Life
Majestic Life
Wintertide
Reverse Bear Trap
For the samples from other companies:
Bathhouse from Victorian Disco
People have a lot of feels about Victorian Disco, but that is neither here nor there. This color is really pretty, and Shiro is now distributing Victorian Disco.
Copper (Cu) from Mad Lab Cosmetics
Love this color, and it applied very smoothly.
Thoughts are Stars from Beauty for the Win
This color was only OK. It was difficult to apply, and isnt unique in my opinion.
AdvertisementsPurchasing a preinstalled Linux system may have gotten a little harder, as one Gripe Line reader and loyal Dell customer recently found out.
"I've always supported Dell and enjoyed the availability of the company's Linux systems," writes Cal. "But I was recently appalled when a Dell sales rep hung up on me when I tried to order some Linux systems for my business. The Dell rep made it clear that unless I wanted Windows, Dell didn't want my money. Linux has been a blessing to my company. And we have paid Dell to supply us with those systems in the past. But now I guess Dell doesn't want to sell Linux/Ubuntu machines in an effort to kill off that product line."
[ Linux naysayers take note: Desktop Linux is ready to go mainstream | Frustrated by tech support? Get answers in InfoWorld's Gripe Line newsletter. ]
[ The InfoWorld roundup: 5 rock-solid Linux distros for developers. ]
Could this be so? I headed to Dell.com to find out. I browsed to the Business section and ticked the FreeDOS and Linux button to filter out all but these open source systems. The site returned only a handful of laptops and no desktops, so I called the sales line to see whether they could set me up. My sales representative hunted around for a bit, then told me, "Nope. We don't have any."
So I contacted Dell representative Anne Camden to find out if there is any merit to Cal's suspicion that Ubuntu systems have been dropped from the Dell product roster.
"I suspect that what is going on here is that we recently refreshed most of our consumer desktop portfolio, and unfortunately the Linux model is lagging and is not currently available," she says. "We will offer Ubuntu pre-installed again in the future, but it will not be for several weeks. We offer systems with FreeDOS installed, which allows users to install their preferred Linux distribution. If Cal called the customer consumer sales department, though, they may not know this and obviously would try to sell him a Windows-based PC. The majority of purchasing for these systems happens online -- and are made by Linux enthusiasts, not by mainstream users."
Anne had a sales rep who was well-versed in Dell's open source offerings contact Cal directly to help him get the open source systems he needed.
Got gripes? Send them to christina_tynan-wood@infoworld.com.
This story, "Dell dropping its Ubuntu offerings?," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.I am a full-time teacher in the US public schools, so I depend on my school’s rather dated website for many of my job functions. My site looks like the other staffers’, down to the identical font and color choices. I am not the school’s web designer, nor would it do any good if I were. I have very, very limited control to my pages. In fact, the school employee in charge of our website has very limited control over the site.
Like many schools in the U.S., my school’s website is strictly controlled by the district’s IT department, which doesn’t (as a rule) employ web designers or developers.
And even our school’s IT department has its hands tied, because the district signed a long-term contract to use a particular CMS that restricts everyone’s ability to go beyond its strictures.
I will give you two phrases that should tell you all you need to know about my school’s site design: “FrontPage” and “HTML 2.0.”
Yes, really.
The Suckage
By and large, American public school websites suck. They suck like an Electrolux. They could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. Getting the picture yet?
Voyaging into the world of public school websites is like taking a trip back in time — and using a smelly school bus to get there.
It’s a world of outdated and massively invalid code. It’s a world whose information is presented in Times New Roman and Comic Sans. It’s decorated with animated clip art. It favors notebook paper backgrounds and chalkboard graphics (yet I haven’t had a chalkboard in my classroom in a decade).
In this world, site accessibility is considered important (Section 508 regulations), but in practice is largely left unaddressed. It’s ruled by Internet Explorer (and all too often, IE6).
Overall, public school websites is a huge section of the World Wide Web that has largely ignored or rejected modern design and coding techniques. It’s an entirely different paradigm than the one that professional designers and developers are used to working in.
Should it be this way? Hell, no.
First, let’s take a look at what’s going on with most public school sites, then let’s focus on how the paradigm can be changed.
Ranting and Finger-Pointing is Simplistic and Unfair
It’s easy to just blame and mock the public school systems for having sadly outdated and poorly designed websites. Whether you want to go after individual schools, IT departments, or the districts themselves is your choice.
But the reality is a bit more complicated. Most school personnel have little or no idea how to construct or maintain a website, nor do they have the time to learn. Their time is spent doing, among other things:
Teaching Wrangling students and parents Trying to fulfill an ever-expanding and ever more contradictory set of expectations from communities, districts, states, and federal agencies Keeping up with a huge amount of paperwork
You can add many, many more duties and tasks to this list.
Designers and developers Ted Adler of Union Street Media, Abi Cushman of Brown Bear Creative, and Tim Dailey of Digital Gibberish, who’ve all worked in the acedemic industry, all agree. Their firms are among the few that has had any involvement at all with public schools.
An individual school’s website needs to be structured so that every staff member — from custodian to principal — can access their pages, input the necessary information, and move on to another task without having to battle with code or access issues.
Most public schools don’t have a staff member who can devote the time, understanding, and effort necessary to maintain a website on their own, so they have to depend on each staffer to handle their own end of things.
Schools also have to choose an approach that can give a reasonable guarantee of privacy and security, in large part because of privacy and safety issues surrounding the children of those schools, and their legal responsibilities in protecting its online information about their students.
And they have to create websites for users with old, obsolete operating systems and the browsers that lurk there — this applies to both school and community computers.
As Ted Adler pointed out, school websites have to appeal to such a broad swath of users — parents, students, staff, community members, and people who might be considering relocating to the particular school district — that another priority of a school website is its information architecture and structure.
Any school’s home page worth its electrons will let the first-time visitor know instantly where all the different information is, and how to get to it.
The Poor IT Guys
All of this gets thrown into the laps of the schools’ IT departments, which are invariably understaffed, underfunded, and manned by people with little or no knowledge of web development. Their jobs are to keep the computers running, maintain security, and install new software, among other tasks.
Those departments often make the sensible choices to:
Implement a system wide CMS Give each staffer limited access to a small area of the site — usually their own home page or series of pages, and nothing more Restrict site access to a very small number of trusted (and monitored) staffers in concert with the department
They’re told to get their schools on the Internet, and get it done by tomorrow, regardless of their lack of knowledge or understanding of the nature of the task. Hence the need for quick and often very dirty solutions.
“School Internet Providers”
Then there are the “school Internet providers.” There is an entire industry of CMS and “site builder” providers tailoring their products for school use.
Instead of Drupal, Joomla, and Expression Engine, schools are purchasing products from finalsite, CMS4Schools, SchoolCMS, Chancery SMS, and TeacherWeb, among others.
Most of these are standalone, all-in-one CMS and site-builder products developed, not to ensure aesthetically pleasing, standards-compliant and easily configurable websites, but to create sites that are easy for novices to use, specifically configured for school usage, and relatively secure.
CMS4Schools, for example, touts Wisconsin’s Arrowhead Union High School as an exemplar of CMS4Schools’s capabilities. The site is aesthetically satisfactory, more or less, but the site has a table-based layout and boasts 264 validation errors last time I checked. Obviously CMS4Schools’s primary concern is not to provide modern, standards-compliant and valid websites.
Many of these products are attractive for schools because unlike Joomla or Drupal, for example, their systems are “pre-configured” for school use, with sections dedicated to school sites, board and district announcements, school calendars, and the like.
Most IT departments have no one with the skills to configure an off-the-shelf CMS for their district’s needs. Oftentimes, the providers offer “bundled” software to both school districts and town governments, an additional attraction for confused and overworked IT directors.
They All Do It
When Abi Cushman of Brown Bear Creative, a company that has worked on public school websites, was asked why she thought so many schools used a school-oriented CMS and “site builder” providers, she answered simply, “I think because other schools do it.”
I think she’s right.
A (Slightly) Better Way
School administrator Robert Kennedy, who has had the experience of bringing computing to schools, advised how websites in schools should be created: “For lots of good reasons, many school websites have been designed by the school’s computer department. I firmly believe that the Public Relations and/or Marketing arm of the school should come up with the design, and that the computer staff implement it. Or have the tagging done professionally if you wish and can afford the cost.”
Lack of Modern Resources
The resources specifically targeted for school websites do not approach those made available for commercial or personal designs. Many websites on designing sites for schools themselves are web zombies.
Old School Techniques and Information
One of the first resources to come up on a Google search for “school web site design” is a page called Designing School Web Sites to Deliver. The site itself is sadly designed (using Adobe’s now-discontinued GoLive), lacks a doctype, and sports other fundamental no-nos of web design like table |
path towards corporatism." The Deep State is in a nefarious partnership with corporatists. With the systematic destruction of the South, the prospects of a populist national movement were set back. The power of finance and industrial enterprises resided in the northeastern establishment. The spirit of Southern distinctiveness always presented a peril to the elites, who eagerly adopted an internationalist and global orientation for their economic empires. The counter balance against an unholy alliance of treacherous usurpers bent on destroying an America First government took hold with the Trump movement. While not exclusively residing in the southern states, the similarities of discontent and frustrations with a corporatist political system of the super privileged, share the risk of an actual civil war. Therefore, the natural push back from populism has the federal plutocrats working overtime to eradicate our rightful heritage. The Alt-Right Defends Southern Heritage In Charlottesville sums up the real reason why the commemorate Southern statures were removed from the public square. "It makes sense when you think about it. As Richard Spencer has repeatedly said, the Alt-Right is about identity. These Confederate monuments are expressions of Southern identity. They were erected by the sons and grandsons of the Confederate generation and were put in prominent public spaces in the South as a tribute to the sacrifices of our fathers in the War Between the States. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are Southern heroes. 1 out of every 4 Southern White men died in the War Between the States. 1 out of every 3 were maimed or killed. The horrific toll of that war has no parallel in our history. It’s not like there are only Confederate monuments in the South. There are Union monuments in the North which were erected for the same reasons. This is about wiping all of us out – all of us for being White. This isn’t about history so much as it is about the modern day Mao Zedong’s and their Cultural Revolution." Yes, Virginia, this is a definite cultural revolution with the stakes as high as they get. The coming toll from the establishment purge of American patriots will be in the millions. And if such hostilities can be averted, only the boot of unmitigated subjugation will become the fate of a once proud people. Standing up for your honorable heritage is a prerequisite for regaining your community self-respect. The perverted political correct society has failed at every turn of producing a social order worthy of defending. Only a rebirth in timeless and traditional principles can restore a legitimate and sensible civilization. SARTRE - May 23, 2017The CAS sent the matter to its legal department, which will issue a letter of apology before the end of the week, he added.
Smith, who first complained to the agency in mid-December, received a letter from the CAS on Dec. 23 saying it was investigating and would contact her the first week of January.
But Smith says she hasn't received anything yet and more importantly, has received no apology.
Verticchio said a formal apology is coming. He also said he is undertaking to have staff undergo better training.
"We're upfront that we sent some information that we shouldn't have," he said. "I'm not defending the CAS. We made an error and we're accepting it."
Smith was in a relationship with Johnston before the confidentiality breach. They broke up in May but have remained friends and business partners, she said.
She is figuring out where to take her complaint next and plans to contact a lawyer, she said.
The Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner's office declined to comment because it does not have oversight of children's aid societies. Spokesperson Trell Huether, however, said the agency has been calling for such oversight since 2004.
Ministry of Children and Youth Services spokesperson Anne Machowski-Smith said complaints can be made to the CAS, which convenes a review panel, and to the independent Child and Family Services Review Board.
The Ontario Ombudsman does not have CAS oversight, but can investigate complaints about the review board.“Our society has been marked by horrific acts of violence recently”, said Löfven.
“Although statistics show that security has increased and that crime against individuals has decreased in the last 10 years, we cannot have organized crime that terrifies families.”
He spoke specifically about the summer grenade attacks in Malmö, and directed a special message to residents of the city in southern Sweden.
“This will not be tolerated in our Sweden. The community should be safe for you and your family. On this we will not give one inch.”
Löfven said it was time to meet force with force, and pointed to a series of measures the government had already taken by increasing police resources and changes in legislation.
“The weapons should be removed from Sweden's streets, nothing else will do,” he said.
Löfven also talked about the increasing polarisation of the public debate. He asked everyone to stand up against hate speech, whether during a coffee break or on Facebook. “Stand up for the Sweden you believe in, do not stand silently,” he said.
Löfven also introduced a new measure for the autumn budget - a major investment in vocational training to address imbalances in the labour market.
“There is no shortage of jobs, but there is a lack of proper training,” he said. “If we come to grips with this problem, we can have the EU's lowest unemployment rate,” Löfven said.
The increase in investment means that places at vocational colleges will increase by 2,500 places in 2016 to 6,000 per year from 2017 to 2019. The investment is planned over four years and will cost 2 billion kronor ($235m).
“It is absurd that we have 400,000 unemployed, while companies can not find the right skilled staff,” concluded Löfven.On the day of Planned Parenthood’s official endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the women’s health organization’s president Cecile Richards declined to comment in interview with TIME on the recent attacks by Donald Trump on Bill Clinton’s sexual history.
Instead, Richards said her organization’s endorsement was intended to focus on Hillary Clinton’s record on women’s issues.
“It’s really not the focus of this event today. It’s a political campaign, I’m sure there’s going to be all kinds of mud everywhere,” Richards told TIME. “But to me, reason we’re endorsing her today—the reason why hundreds of people across this country got together—is because Hillary Clinton is a longstanding champion of women’s health and women’s rights and not just planned parenthood: equal pay, access to birth control, access to safe and legal abortion.”
“That’s what’s going on and that’s what’s important,” Richards said.
Bill Clinton’s infidelity has come to the fore in recent days as Donald Trump and other Republicans have claimed that his history damages Hillary Clinton’s claim to be a candidate for women.
Richards’ comments to TIME came hours after Trump, who is leading the Republican presidential primary, told NBC’s Meet the Press, that Clinton is “married to an abuser. A woman claimed rape, and all sorts of things. I mean, horrible things.”
Bill Clinton has admitted to multiple extramarital affairs, but he has denied all accusations of sexual abuse. One woman, Juanita Broderick, has accused Bill Clinton of raping her in the late 1970s, and two women accused him of sexual assault during the 1990s.
Planned Parenthood’s endorsement comes as the organization has faced concerted efforts by Republicans in Congress to defund it. The organization provides cancer screenings, affordable birth control, and performs abortions. The abortions are not government-funded.
Hillary Clinton has lambasted Republican attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and made it a central talking point in her campaign. “I have stood with you throughout my life and throughout my career,” Clinton told an audience of mostly women. “And I promise you this: as your president, I will always have your back.”
Introducing Clinton, Richards warned of the consequences if Clinton is not chosen in a general election. “We know if Donald Trump or Ted Cruz have their way we’ll back in the stone age,” Richards said in her speech. “Hillary Clinton’s pledge, our pledge, my pledge will be that Planned Parenthood’s doors stay open.”
Contact us at editors@time.com.Translations Archive
With the first movie in about 17 years, Akira Toriyama-sensei was deeply involved in the production; we reveal his behind-the-scenes stories!
About the movie’s production
What are your thoughts on having participated in the movie’s production?
With animation, up to now, I had no free time and not much interest in it. But having tried getting just a little bit involved for the first time, I felt that it might be quite an attractive realm, with many aspects that can’t be fully expressed in comics. However, after getting properly involved, I understood how tough it is, and I also felt that it’s probably not meant for someone like me, who prefers working all by his lonesome. After all, I’m a rank amateur in the world of animation. Also, I wasn’t really able to judge the time with regards to the contents. I had thought that I’d come up with something that had some leeway, but in the end, it seems that it went quite a bit over the [running] time, so it was cut down by a lot. It’s hard. By the way, don’t you think the Dragon Ball anime uses bold colors more than is really necessary? That might just be a way of doing things that’s unique to animation, but personally, I prefer limiting the use of those bold colors to certain points.
With what stance did you approach your work?
To be honest, I was busy as it was with just my own job1, so I didn’t intend to get involved with the animation. The rough script I read in order to check it over had an interesting-sounding theme of a God of Destruction, but the contents were a little dark, so while I was in the midst of giving advice on how to improve it, I got carried away and ended up writing almost everything. For the character designs, as well, I had an image of them to a certain extent while I was thinking up the contents [of the movie], so I decided that it would be faster to just draw them myself rather than asking for this or that.
About the movie-original characters
When you heard “God of Destruction”, what ideas did you suggest, Toriyama-sensei?
The God of Destruction I [initially] received was a malevolent, dark character. For a twisted guy like me, I took the stereotypical image you’d think of from the name “God of Destruction”, then went ahead and reversed everything, leaving only his fearsomeness. My style is to first tear down the image, then think up the contents. Also, there was a request to have the whole cast appear since it was the first animation in a while, so that’s how the contents came about.
Did you make any requests for the direction of Beerus’ battle?
I did generally write in a rough idea of their exchanges, but apart from that, I left the battle scenes up to the people on the anime staff. They’ve been doing Dragon Ball for a long time, and I believed that leaving the animation up to talented professionals would result in something much better than thinking it up for myself. And it was just the kind of quality I expected.
Why did you create an enemy character who “isn’t completely evil”?
There would be no sense of freshness if it were just a strong enemy making his appearance, so I thought I’d make a change in that pattern. Dragon Ball, or rather, Goku’s basic rule isn’t defeating an enemy, but “winning”, so he doesn’t mind whether it’s a good guy or a bad guy.
What is your favorite scene with Beerus?
I pictured him as a cat, so I love the scene of him waking up. I used the family cat as his [design] motif. His ears are big, so it seems there are a lot of people who thought he was a rabbit, but it’s because our cat is a big-eared breed2. Incidentally, even when my daughter shows a picture of our cat to her friends, not once has it ever been called “cute”.
What is the [design] motif of Beerus’ planet?
I had a somewhat Egyptian image for Beerus, so I guess the Pyramids. It is pyramidal.
About Super Saiyan God
What was your concept for [Super Saiyan] God’s appearance?
I was resistant to [the idea of] Goku getting more and more macho, or having a flashy transformation, so I wanted to make a course-correction. Except, visually-speaking, a Goku who doesn’t have any change at all would be difficult to understand, so I changed just his hair color and his eyes.
Why did you go with the concept of “6 Saiyans”?
To be perfectly frank, as a story concept, it was just a convenient number for the author.
Compared to Beerus, God of Destruction, how strong is [Super Saiyan] God?
I suppose if Beerus’ strength is a 10, [Super Saiyan] God would be right about 6. Only, Saiyans rapidly increase in strength as they fight against strong opponents, so the longer they fought, the more that gap would shrink, and it might even be possible for them to eventually turn the tables. Incidentally, I guess Whis would be about a 15.
Why did you decide on a conclusion where [Super Saiyan] God Goku loses to Beerus?
Story-wise, that development seemed like a gamble, but it was out of respect for the character of Beerus, God of Destruction. I wanted to have a development where, by his being unable to win, you could get a sense of a further future for Goku and the other Saiyans.
Will Goku be able to transform into [Super Saiyan] God in the future?
I think you’ll understand if you watch [the movie], but Goku has already absorbed [Super Saiyan] God’s power and made it his own, so there is no need for him to transform into [Super Saiyan] God. Goku basically only thinks of fighting as a sporting match, so borrowing the power of five people isn’t fair, and he resisted doing that; however, it seems his curiosity towards the realm that lay even further beyond him won out.
Is it possible that other Saiyans will be able to become [Super Saiyan] God in the future?
Of course. However, strength will vary depending on the battle power of the Saiyan who becomes [Super Saiyan] God.
The Future of Dragon Ball
What about future developments in Dragon Ball?
To be honest, I haven’t given it any thought at all.
If there’s another movie, would you want to be involved?
I don’t think I’d want to be actively involved, but if I get a request and I have the time, I suppose I might.
What is the work Dragon Ball to you, Toriyama-sensei?
It’s my foundational manga. Thanks to this work being loved for so long, I’ve been able to pick and choose my other jobs to a certain extent.
Finally, a message for the readers, if you please.
In this work [i.e., the movie], gags are scattered throughout, and even in the powerful battle scenes, the content has been made so you can have good fun watching all the way to the finish. Please receive power from the characters and cheer up! Lastly, compared to the wonderfully active role all the staff members and voice actors played, what I did was insignificant. I am sincerely and utterly grateful. It’s too bad you can’t hear the voice actors in action in the anime comic!Jake Tapper (CNN / Screengrab)
CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday unloaded on the White House for failing to provide evidence for Donald Trump’s “demonstrably false” lie insisting former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential election, charging defenders of the president with “twisting themselves into pretzels” and “wasting time defending the indefensible.”
Discussing the House Intelligence Committee’s March 13 deadline to the Department of Justice to provide any documents to the president’s claim earlier this month that his predecessor engaged in “Nixon/Watergate”-style surveillance of Trump Tower, Tapper noted that he and his colleagues were unable to find one person who could substantiate the president’s claim.
“To recap, since those tweets nine days ago, this charge by the president has been called ‘false’ by the director of the FBI, ‘false’ by the former director of national intelligence, and not one credible, informed source that we can find in Washington has said that the presidents’ accusation is true, and I’m including Vice President Pence in that group,” Tapper said on CNN’s “The Lead.”
“We as a nation have had to live in this farce for the last nine days, where defendants of the president have twisted themselves into pretzels to try to suggest the possibility that the tweets weren’t preposterous by rejiggering the facts of the tweets to try and make this wild, unfounded claim by the president seem to live somewhere in the vicinity of the neighborhood of possible,” the CNN anchor continued, playing footage of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer using what Tapper called a “Trump-to-English-dictionary” to make the charge seem plausible.
“Sometimes revisionism is so blatant, it’s not revisionism, it’s a complete rewrite,” Tapper noted, adding that “other than the word ‘Obama,’” Spicer’s interpretation of the president have little in common with Trump’s actual words.
“This White House is now spending its energy and your tax dollars trying to change demonstrably false assertions into perfectly understandable beliefs tangentially related to the original lie,” Tapper explained. “And while doing so they’re squandering their own credibility and they’re wasting time defending the indefensible, instead of devoting time to, say, improving your lives.”
Watch the full video below, via CNN:This is incredible. Scientists have found an underground water reserve in Kenya so large that it could meet the entire country's water needs for the next 70 years. Using satellite, radar and geological technology, scientists found an aquifer—an underground layer of water-bearing material—that contains 200 billion cubic meters of fresh water.
UNESCO and the Kenyan government put together a team to find water in Kenya. The just discovered Lotikipi Basin Aquifer, which is about 1000 feet underground, measures 62 miles by 41 miles and is significantly larger than other aquifers discovered in the region. In fact, it holds 900% more water than what's in Kenya's current reserves. Just look at the size of this thing:
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For a country like Kenya that deals with droughts all too often, the discovery is life changing. Possibly even country changing. If Kenya's government is able to create the proper infrastructure for the water, the nomadic tribespeople of the region can settle down instead of searching for rain which could lead to farms sprouting up, towns growing and a whole country developing. This won't happen overnight, of course, but having a water supply that can last for more than half a century is definitely a jumpstart.
How did the aquifer get discovered? It sounds so simple. Alain Gachet, the CEO of Radar Technologies International and the guy behind the search for water in Kenya, and his team used a mapping system they called WATEX to find the water. WATEX basically uses existing satellite, radar and geological maps and combines them to see what's underneath the ground. The mapping system was originally meant to find mineral reserves in Africa but is now being used to find water. UNESCO now hopes to take this system in hopes of finding water in other African countries.
[ITV, ITV, The Verge]The CIA doesn't just steal Russian malware. It also covers its tracks by using Russian language.
Via Wikileaks:
Russian hackers
Marble is used to hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA.
Marble does this by hiding ("obfuscating") text fragments used in CIA malware from visual inspection. This is the digital equivallent of a specalized CIA tool to place covers over the english language text on U.S. produced weapons systems before giving them to insurgents secretly backed by the CIA.
Marble forms part of the CIA's anti-forensics approach and the CIA's Core Library of malware code. It is "[D]esigned to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation" as "string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop."
The Marble source code also includes a deobfuscator to reverse CIA text obfuscation. Combined with the revealed obfuscation techniques, a pattern or signature emerges which can assist forensic investigators attribute previous hacking attacks and viruses to the CIA. Marble was in use at the CIA during 2016. It reached 1.0 in 2015.
The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.The Japan Football Association on Thursday adopted an action plan that focuses on helping Fukushima Prefecture continue its recovery from the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters.
The prefecture is home to the J-Village soccer training center, which has been used as the forward base for dealing with the tsunami-triggered accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant but will end its services at the end of March.
At a board meeting in Tokyo, the national governing body for soccer decided to set up its and the J. League’s branch office where board meetings of the two bodies will take place and events like under-18 tournaments and J. League preseason matches will be held.
The JFA will also draw up a plan to reopen the JFA Academy’s Fukushima school locally to promote player development.
J-Village, straddling Naraha and Hirono towns, opened in 1997 as the first national training center in Japan.
JFA Academy Fukushima was established on the village premises in 2006 to train secondary school students, but it was temporarily relocated to Gotemba, Shizuoka Prefecture as the entire facility was turned into the base after the disasters struck six years ago.
Moves toward resuming soccer-related functions at the village heightened four years ago when Tokyo was chosen as host of the 2020 Summer Games.
“The big push forward came at a good timing,” says Eiji Ueda, JFA executive and vice president of the company that operates J-Village.
The plan to restore the village to a soccer center took shape with an eye on the Tokyo Olympics, and the facility was formally chosen to be the training center for the Japan men’s and women’s national soccer teams before the 2020 Games.But the latest batch of emails released by the State Department on Friday tell a tale far different from what Hillary would prefer. Sarah Westwood reports at the Washington Examiner :
Now that Libya has become a base for ISIS and a source of refugees overwhelming Europe, Hillary Clinton is attempting to pretend that she had little to do with it, even though she was secretary of state. And the deaths of four Americans including our ambassador are a topic that reveals you to be a conspiracy theorist if you dare mention it.
…in one exchange from October 2011, Clinton's aides discussed an upcoming article titled "Clinton's key role in Libya conflict" that indicated Clinton personally persuaded President Obama to approve the use of military force to overthrow Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The conversation between Philippe Reines, a longtime Clinton spokesman, and aides Jake Sullivan and Cheryl Mills was partially redacted by the State Department. "Clinton, ignoring the advice of the State Department's lawyers, convinced Obama to grant full diplomatic recognition to the rebels," read an excerpt from the unpublished Washington Post story Reines sent to Clinton in 2011. The story indicated Clinton actively sought to "secure crucial backing from Arab countries" before stepping into the civil conflict.
This is totally at odds with the storyn Clinton is telling now:
…when pressed on the issue in the first Democratic debate last year, Clinton defended the intervention by arguing European allies were "blowing up the phone lines begging us to help them" and that the U.S. "had the Arabs standing by our side saying, 'we want you to help us deal with Gadhafi.' "
So she was an architect of the disaster and now is lying about her role in it.
… emails made public over the course of the past nine months have painted a picture of a secretary of state eager to take credit for her "leadership" and "ownership" of the Libyan engagement.
Hillary’s sole selling point is her “experience,” but we seem to experience disaster when she is calling the shots.Treasury is calling for a radical policy shake-up across the board, including reform of retirement income and tax settings, the return of interest on student loans and bigger class sizes, in changes aimed at boosting the economy.
In its briefing to incoming ministers, released today, Treasury said lifting growth and productivity would require reforms in "education, welfare, tax, regulation, science and innovation, infrastructure and the management of natural resources".
As well as a firm commitment to returning the Government's books to surplus by 2014/15 and reducing net debt to 20 per cent by 2020, it said reforming "retirement income settings" could help as part of a "wide and ambitious" reform programme.
It also called for a smaller, more effective and responsive state sector, including greater innovation and contestability in service delivery.
Early childhood education should be targeted to children in low-income households, and school teacher quality should be improved, funded by "consolidation of the school network and increasing student/teacher ratios".
It also calls for the interest on student loans to be reintroduced and for tertiary funding to be targeted to younger students and higher level qualifications.
On welfare, it calls for contracting out of services where appropriate, simplification of the benefit payments and alignment with work expectations.
Treasury said personal and company taxes should be cut, funded by more base-broadening of the tax system and/or cuts to low value spending.
Science and innovation policy should be focused on "firm-led research and development and commercialisation".
Infrastructure investment should be focused on a "realistic and confidence-building plan for Auckland transport, including network pricing - effectively flexible motorway tolls - and other demand management tools.
The Resource Management Act should be reformed further to ensure appropriate consideration of economic objectives and incentives for better local level planning.
There should also be market structures put in place to facilitate more efficient use of water.
The short term costs of the Emissions Trading scheme should be reduced, it said.
On the broader economic front, Treasury said growth in New Zealand's trading partners was below the main scenario set out in the pre-election update but "some way from the downside scenario", which centred on a worse crisis in Europe.
Much weaker growth was still a risk, though.
But in the long run, the demand from the growing middle classes in Asia would keep New Zealand's commodity export prices high.
It said the impact of weaker economic conditions had been most visible in the incomes of the top 20 per cent of households, which had seen average incomes decline between 2006/07 and 2009/10. That was due to falls in earnings from self-employment.
"For other households gross income from wages and salaries, investment and self-employment was broadly static on average over the same period," Treasury said.
But disposable income had increased, as a result of the tax switch and higher government transfers.
It warned that the Government would face a balancing act if global events worsened to the point that the its fiscal credibility was at risk.
Then "further discretionary fiscal tightening may be necessary", but that should be aimed at minimising the short term impact of reductions in demand in the economy while generating credible savings over time.
On tax, it did not make a specific recommendation for change. But it pointed to the improvement in savings that followed the switch to higher consumption tax (GST) in Budget 2010.
It said the real effective tax rate on some types of capital income remained high and there was a wide range of rates that applied to different investment types.
"Treasury is continuing to examine a range of options for taxing capital more evenly, and at lower rates," it said in the briefing.(Reuters) - Potential anti-establishment upsets in national elections in France, the Netherlands and Germany, alongside a global rise in protectionism pose the biggest threats to the euro zone economy, according to a majority of economists polled by Reuters.
FILE PHOTO:Cranes are seen at a construction site in north Madrid, Spain January 23, 2017. REUTERS/Juan Medina/File Photo
Euro zone economy graphic - here
These risks come ahead of the threat of impending divorce negotiations between the European Union and Britain becoming fractious, which was the number one concern for Britain in a similar Reuters poll published this week.
The findings, released on Wednesday, contrast with financial markets around the globe, particularly stock markets, being priced for a lot of positive news.
“With populist parties still gaining support and opinion polls consistently proving unreliable, there are plenty of events that could unsettle markets,” Simon Wells, chief European economist at HSBC, said.
The euro zone economy is forecast to grow 0.4 percent in coming quarters, a respectable pace by recent historical standards, the latest survey taken Feb 9-15 showed.
Few economists strayed far from the median view, and those decent-yet-uninspiring growth predictions have barely budged over the last two years in Reuters polls.
Still, most economists who answered an additional question said the recent revival in the euro zone economy is sustainable.
But with the European Central Bank already purchasing tens of billions of euros a month in bonds and its key interest rates at zero or negative, there is little more it can feasibly do to revive the economy should it stumble.
That leaves the pace of economic growth, much like that of the United States and Britain, vulnerable to political forces at a time when global trade is at risk.
Inflation expectations remain well below the ECB’s target of just under 2 percent until at least 2019. Inflation is predicted to average 1.5 percent this year and 1.4 percent next, similar to a poll in January.
“With growth set to maintain a slow but steady pace, underlying price pressures are likely to stay muted. Although headline inflation is set to rise due to the drag from lower energy prices ending, core inflation remains stubbornly low,” noted HSBC’s Wells.
The recent optimism on the region's economic outlook has coincided with a weak euro, making the currency bloc's exports relatively cheap on world markets. The euro EUR= is predicted to weaken 3 percent against the dollar over the coming year, a separate Reuters poll of FX analysts showed. [EUR/POLL]
POLITICAL RISK RISING
In recent weeks, the euro has come under pressure in the run up to the French presidential election.
The latest opinion polls show far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen winning the first round of the election, but the losing heavily to independent candidate Emmanuel Macron or slightly less heavily to conservative Francois Fillon in the second round.
Despite this, few are discounting an upset give the failure of polls in recent British and U.S. votes.
“A victory for Ms Le Pen is well within the bounds of possibility,” said Florian Baier, senior economist at Fathom. “Latest polls show that Ms. Le Pen will make it to the second round, which she will then lose...(but) polls have got it wrong before. Mr Trump won, and Brexit happened.”
Over 90 percent of the 42 economists who answered an extra question in the latest survey said a win for the National Front party was unlikely.
Economists also gave a very low probability of any country leaving the currency union over the next few years.
That suggests the outlook for the euro zone economy, which is widely believed to lack the momentum to withstand a major political change, is based on the assumption that the political status quo across the region is maintained.
Slideshow (2 Images)
“It is not our central scenario that she (Le Pen) wins, but the risk scenario is that she wins as the chances of that happening is higher than what is priced into the markets,” Fathom’s Baier said. “If Le Pen wins the French election then it is the end of the euro area as we know it.”
If the National Front wins the election, it pledges to hold a European Union referendum within six months, abandon the euro and reintroduce the franc as the country’s primary currency.
Far-right and anti-establishment parties in the Netherlands and Italy also want to leave the euro zone.Get a Taste of Miami’s Food Scene in Downtown Birmingham!
A few months ago, I had the privilege of being the first customer at Miami Fusion Cafe. The food was delicious then and has only gotten better since! Lunch during Birmingham Restaurant Week is always fun and I was excited to see what “MFC” had to offer.
The exterior and interior of the cafe is decked out with the Art Deco style that Miami is known for. As soon as you enter you feel transported from Birmingham to Miami Beach. The food solidifies this feeling.
The Miami Fusion Cafe lunch menu for #BRW2017 is set at the $15 price point and includes a salad, one of two featured entrees, and dessert! It’s a lot of great food for just $15.
The Fresh Garden Salad was topped with a fresh, seasoned, tomato that comes from their rooftop garden! They use a House Vinaigrette dressing that is full of flavor! For the entree, I chose to go with the Roasted Pork Plate. The pork tastes like it has been slow roasted and is so tender and juicy that you won’t even need a knife to cut it! It has a well balanced garlic flavor and had just enough fat to lock that flavor in.
The pork is served with Black Beans & Rice. I heard one customer say that the beans were as good as his grandmother’s! (I didn’t ask his name, because no one wants to upset their grandmother.) The rice is served outside of the bowl, but I wasted no time in blending them together. This side could have been a meal on its own.
The other side that you get is a plate of Sweet Plantains. They are BIG and came on a separate plate! The warmth and sweetness makes this side seem like a dessert. You probably won’t be able to eat all of them, so be sure to take the leftover home.
Sweet sweet Jesus Cake! This dessert is probably called Jesus Cake because you may need to ask forgiveness for eating something that is so sinfully good! At first glance, this dish looks like a creampie in a metal dish, but it’s so much more. Below the chilled whipped cream you’ll find a large portion of a Tres Leches style cake! I know some people hate the “M” word used in food reviews, so I’ll say that it’s the opposite of dry. Each bite is like heaven on a spoon! After trying, unsuccessfully, to conquer my entire meal; there was no way I was finishing all of dessert. I sealed it back up and brought it home. (It’s calling my name as I’m typing this.) This dessert is top notch!
As I was saying goodbye I noticed some coffee was being made. I’m a self-proclaimed coffee snob, so I was ecstatic when I found out that they were brewing Cuban Coffee! For those who don’t know, Cuban Coffee very popular in Miami and there are even coffee trucks that serve it. There’s no venti option here. This super concentrated caffeine bomb comes in 4oz-6oz serving sizes. It has a bold flavor and smooth finish. Miami Fusion is the only place in Birmingham, and is actually the first place I’ve found in Alabama, that serves Cuban Coffee.
I had a wonderful lunch and enjoyed speaking with the energetic staff. (They probably were doing coffee shots.) I highly recommend heading to Miami Fusion Cafe during Birmingham Restaurant Week! You can also get the #BRW2017 lunch to-go! I look forward to seeing your photos of the delicious food and bright decor!
Enjoy!
-Russell H.By December 2018, all 2.5 lakh panchayats are to be provided fiber optic connectivity
Taking note of the slow progress in the execution of the plan to provide high speed internet connectivity to all village panchayats, government think tank NITI Aayog has urged the department of telecommunications to “rapidly complete” the BharatNet project.
It made these observations in draft ‘Three Year Action Agenda’.
Under BharatNet, the government had to provide 100 Mbps connectivity to 2.5 lakh gram panchayats (GPs) using optical fibre network. Under phase one, ending March 31, 2017, 2.2 lakh km underground optical fiber was to be laid down to connect one lakh GPs.
“But as of March 5, 2017, only 1.76 lakh km of fibre had been laid down with 77.8K GPs connected,” the draft report said.
In the second phase that is to be completed by December 2018, the report said, all 2.56 lakh GPs are to be provided fiber optic connectivity. “During this phase underground fibre, fibre over power lines, radio and satellite are to be optimally mixed. In this phase, use will also be made of the electric pole network, on which electronic power lines are mounted,” the Aayog recommended.
It noted that the access to the internet to be made available under BharatNet is a pre-requisite for enhancing other aspects of digital connectivity. “For example, two of the pillars of the DI campaign – e-Kranti and ‘Information for All’ – require GPs to access the internet. In this respect, the current progress of BharatNet is less than satisfactory,” the report said. To speed up bringing the fibre to GPs, the option to carry the cable on electric poles should be more aggressively pursued, the report said.
“It is also important to plan for last mile connectivity. For this purpose, we must urgently provide policy support to ISPs such as Right of Way (RoW) permission and permission to promote access at select locations. We should explore commercial models to deploy Wi-Fi services. For example, we could facilitate arrangements between different ISPs to share infrastructure or transfer assets at the end of the contract period…. Our goal should be to bring 15Kbps connections to at least 30 percent of the rural household by December 2019,” the report said.France’s attempts to deradicalize jihadis have been a complete failure, a parliamentary report reveals.
The country moved to open 12 deradicalization facilities last fall where jihadis could go through a year-long personalized program. The centers, along with a number of other measures, have now been deemed a “total fiasco.”
“It’s a total fiasco |
Thursday told the Florida federal judge presiding over the case that evidence stemmed from a warrant targeting the defendants issued by a closed-door tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court was adopted in the wake of the President Richard M. Nixon Watergate scandal, and provided authorities a way to conduct authorized surveillance in secret while under the auspices of a court for the purpose of acquiring "foreign intelligence."
However, the law creating the court was greatly expanded in 2008 and again in 2012, under what is known as the FISA Amendments Act.
The act, which even a member of Congress said is constitutionally suspect, generally requires the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to rubber-stamp terror-related electronic surveillance requests. The government does not have to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the secret FISA court rejects the surveillance application.
U.S. Magistrate John O'Sullivan, the judge in the brothers' case, said the law allows for "the mass acquisition of U.S. citizens' and residents' international communications without individualized judicial oversight or supervision." It's the same form of surveillance the Bush administration conceded it began employing days after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Magistrate O'Sullivan, agreeing with a defense motion, ordered (.pdf) prosecutors last week to say whether the government first acquired evidence against the indicted brothers (.pdf) using the Bush-style surveillance, and then used that evidence to obtain the traditional warrant from the secret court.
The path the authorities chose is relevant for a host of reasons.
Among them, the government has never publicly admitted in a prosecution that it employed warrantless surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act. Doing so likely would trigger legal challenges over whether the tactic is constitutional – and would threaten the Qazi brothers' case and perhaps countless others.
"This could open the door again at the Supreme Court," said Patrick Toomey, national security fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union.
The development comes nearly three months after a fractured Supreme Court halted a legal challenge to the warrantless surveillance law at issue in the brothers' case.
A divided Supreme Court, ruling 5-4, set aside the challenge because the plaintiffs – journalists and human-rights groups – had no evidence they were surveilled under FISA Amendment Act authority. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said the plaintiffs "merely speculate and make assumptions."
But the court's decision did not foreclose a constitutional challenge. The justices said that, if the government "intends to use" evidence obtained in such a manner, the defendant "may challenge the lawfulness of the acquisition."
Justice Breyer, in dissent, said the case should have proceeded to trial. Of the spying, he wrote: "Indeed it is as likely to take place as are most future events that commonsense inference and ordinary knowledge of human nature tell us will happen."
In court documents Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen E. Gilbert urged O'Sullivan to set aside his order in the Qazi matter.
Gilbert said that, within weeks, the authorities will file a declaration from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that the information O'Sullivan has ordered disclosed is "sensitive national security information." (.pdf)Rails 2.2 is almost ready for its final release, but before we christen the gems, we’d like to have everyone test out a release candidate. Rails 2.2 is a major upgrade that includes a wealth of new features and fixes.
Chief inclusions are an internationalization framework, thread safety (including a connection pool for Active Record), easier access to HTTP caching with etags and last modified, compatibility with Ruby 1.9 and JRuby, and a wealth of new documentation.
Mike Gunderloy has compiled an exhaustive list and walk-through of many of the interesting new features for the Rails 2.2 release notes.
To help test the Rails 2.2 release candidate, please install with:
gem install rails -s http://gems.rubyonrails.org -v 2.2.0
Hopefully there will not be too much folly in the RC and we can quickly move to a final release. But it requires your help to get there.
Note that this release is called 2.2.0, not 2.1.99 as our previous naming scheme would have dictated. So the final release of Rails 2.2 will actually be 2.2.1 (if we only need one RC).As part of an effort to nationalize the November elections by tying Republicans to their lightning-rod presidential nominee, House Democrats have begun collaborating with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to build what they’re calling their “Trump model” of persuadable voters.
With Donald Trump heading to Washington to meet with the House GOP on Thursday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is also preparing to go up on television in districts earlier than in any previous cycle with an ad campaign designed to buttress the Trump-centric messaging guidance that’s already emanating from Washington — all built around a “party over country”-themed plan of attack for the fall.
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The hope is that a combination of Democrats riled up by Trump, moderate Republicans and independents turned off to the party brand, and disaffected Republicans staying home, will accelerate blue shifts in marginal districts to start their long road back to the majority. But more immediately, they’re hoping to pick off enough moderate Republicans to leave House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) squeezed by the Freedom Caucus come January, which they believe would neutralize him both in Congress and as a potential 2020 challenger to Clinton.
The presumptive Republican nominee has already taken on a starring role in House campaigns around the country.
In Texas, Pete Gallego, who’s running against Rep. Will Hurd to try to win back his seat, simply asked the Clinton campaign to post its Spanish-language ad full of Trump’s comments about immigrants on his own website.
In Kansas, while trying to flip a suburban district where the DCCC thinks Trump makes the race competitive, Jay Sidie uses the presumptive nominee as his closer as he campaigns against Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder.
Congressional issues like the fiduciary rule “kind of put people to sleep, to be honest with you,” Sidie said. “And then there’s Trump — and then they wake up.”
In the New York City suburbs, Josh Gottheimer has what he believes is an extra advantage running against Rep. Scott Garrett: New Jersey moderates are out of sync with Trump’s positions, but also a lot of people know Trump, have done business with him, know someone who’s done business with him, have stories about the unpaid bills they call the “Trump tax.”
“One guy told me he did all the legal and regulatory work on the casinos,” Gottheimer said. “He insisted on getting paid half upfront because of Trump’s reputation, and then at the end, Trump said, ‘I’m not paying the other half.’”
Yet all of that is taking place against a backdrop of uncertainty. House Democrats are worried about being forgotten amid the higher-profile White House and Senate races — or falling victim to ticket-splitting voters sticking with down-ballot Republicans because they still dislike Clinton. Then there is the prospect of being flooded by outside money rerouted from the presidential race.
And as they aim to nationalize races into a referendum on Trump, there is another concern: Internal polls show that many people planning to vote for the Republican nominee won’t admit it publicly and aren’t as turned off to the rest of the GOP by his candidacy as they’d like.
For that reason, the “Trump model” leans instead on data from written questions, much of it from online questionnaires, with wording focused on whether voters like Trump and share his values rather than asking them to choose between him and Clinton.
Voters who say they’ll vote for Clinton but like Trump, for example, are voters the DCCC expects will likely stick with the Republican House candidate — and aren’t worth the investment of time or money in persuasion efforts.
“In each district, we will know: This crop of voters is most inclined to be swing voters who don’t like Trump and would vote for the House Democrat,” said DCCC Executive Director Kelly Ward.
Going into this cycle, House Democrats had expected to net fewer than 10 seats, barely enough to track back from their historically low current numbers. Trump’s already pushed that number into the mid-teens. Now they’re looking for ways to get closer to 20. (They’d need 29 to win the majority.)
Many House Republicans, though, point to the numbers Trump racked up in their districts during his primaries, seeing strength in swing and suburban areas that encourage them not to distance themselves, and have them thinking his coattails could put additional districts in play for them.
“These guys are staying one inning and projecting a baseball game,” quipped former DCCC chair and retiring Rep. Steve Israel, whose own Long Island district is seen as one where Trump might lift the Republican candidate. (“That’s just crazy,” he said.)
Trump’s most likely to help elect Democrats in districts trending more diverse and more highly educated — and they’re counting on him being the factor that puts races in places like Florida and California over the top. But some people involved in races in such states as Pennsylvania, Iowa and Minnesota are pushing back on the DCCC’s strategy.
“In their zeal to nationalize, they’re actually potentially hurting us in races they need to win,” said one Democratic operative working on multiple House races.
None of this is being discussed between the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Trump campaign directly. Unlike with Democrats, who are regularly communicating on strategy and data between Brooklyn and the DCCC, NRCC Executive Director Rob Simms says he continues to have no contact with the presidential campaign, coordinating instead with the Republican National Committee.
Nonetheless, Simms says he’s confident that his members will be able to stand on their own.
“The Democrats are stretching if they think they’re going to merrily morph our members’ faces into the nominee’s and say this person is that person, so go vote for the Democrat,” Simms said. “They’re severely underselling not just the intelligence of the voters in the district but the work the members have done in the district.”
Ward, meanwhile, is in regular contact with a Clinton campaign that’s stocked with DCCC alumni, including campaign manager Robby Mook, who preceded her as executive director during the 2012 cycle, political engagement director Marlon Marshall and his deputy Brynne Craig, as well as deputy press secretary Jesse Ferguson and deputy rapid response director Josh Schwerin, both of whom did tours as DCCC press secretary.
Ward projects that 60 to 70 seats are now in play with Trump, as opposed to the 40 to 50 they had been expecting. She predicts they could be up to 70 to 80 after the Republican convention.
Others who’ve drilled down on the races see a much narrower battlefield and argue that recruiting issues left Democrats out of contention or behind in districts where the Trump factor might have made the race more competitive.
But with Trump’s name coming up all the time in focus groups, the DCCC continues to keep pushing candidates to campaign on the notion that House Republicans all have the same positions as the nominee. The committee wants its candidates to hold GOP opponents to account for sticking with him every time he says something offensive, especially when they condemn the comment themselves.
(Significant resources are being poured into trying to corner House Republicans into being asked about Trump by trackers, reporters and whoever else they can muster).
“It feels so icky: To a voter, they are hearing, ‘I know he’s bad, but I’m standing with him anyway,’” Ward said.
The money disadvantage, Democrats think, might be mitigated by coordinated campaigns, since most of their top targeted districts overlap with presidential and Senate battlegrounds.
“Right now we have a wind,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has been saying at donor meetings. “We have to exploit that wind for as long as we have the wind.”
Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey is another Democratic hopeful using Trump's comments to fuel his campaign. | AP PhotoCrusader Kings - The Crappy Chronicles of House Cerdicing Part 1
Crusader Kings II is a game about building a dynasty. You’re not tied to petty nationstates or borders but to your family - it’s about making sure that you have a legacy to last the ages. The game, now a few years after release and well-supported with DLC, can span a truly staggering amount of time. From AD 757 to 1453 the brave, the bold and those with infinite patience can guide a noble family to greatness.
It’s with such an idea that I approach House Cerdicing, a family that in 757 are the rulers of a petty kingdom in South England named Wessex. I will be taking over the fortunes of this Anglo-Saxon dynasty and chronicling their journey from obscurity to European domination… Or until I accidentally drive them into ruin, death and despair. Let the historical games begin!
Cynewulf I - 757-771
Cynewulf is a mild-mannered man of long years. Neither exceptional nor unexceptional, he sits upon the petty throne of Wessex controlling the counties around him with a fair, if not impressive, rule. Cynewulf I is also a semi-historical figure from Anglo-Saxon sagas. His real children will go on to create a powerful English kingdom, but will his virtual ones? Cynewulf marries a young - very young - woman to try and ensure that more children are born as he only had the one heir.
Not much of note happens in Cynewulf’s reign. His wife is young, beautiful and fabulously adulterous. Wessex potters on without anything too interesting happening, apart from a few infrastructure projects here and there. Without warning Cynewulf kicks the bucket in 771, aged 51, to a resounding “meh” from his citizens.
Beorhtric - 771 - 773
Beorhtric is a different man than his father - strong, confident and iron-willed. The first thing he does is marry his dead father’s widow, raising a few eyebrows in court. Ambitious as well as headstrong, the young king orders that a claim be fabricated on Sussex, the neighbouring county to the east. His councillors write up some fake news about Sussexians committing violent acts of war and create a good enough casus belli for conquest to become a legitimate action.
Beorhtric marches forth at the head of an army, greatsword at his side, in 773. His luscious brown beard flows in the autumn breeze. A few days later he catches the pox and dies at the age of 23. The Dark Ages have not gone well so far for the ruling family of Wessex.
Cyneheard - 773-775
Beorhtric had fathered no sons, so the crown passes to the old king Cynewulf’s distant relative Cyneheard, who is also a semi-historical figure. Cyneheard is an old man, 68 when he sits the throne, yet manages to finish the war in Sussex and claim the county from its overlords. He then marries Beorhtric’s widow and settles down to a cup of cocoa and starts the business of fathering an heir.
Evidently the strain of marital obligations is too much on poor Cyneheard’s heart - he pops his clogs at 70. Thankfully his son, Cynewulf II has just been born. Fingers are pointed at the dead king’s wife, who no doubt is annoyed that there aren’t any more monarchs to marry.
Cynewulf II - 775-812
Cynewulf has a lot to do, what with inheriting the throne at age 0. Court politics is too much for the infant king to understand and he is tutored by a succession of men who somehow, for some reason, keep being murdered and replaced. Finally, a priest manages to hold on to the young king long enough to give him an education.
Unfortunately that education is fairly lacking and Cynewulf II enters adulthood as a bit of a dimwit and dullard (much like his namesake). He marries a Lombard woman well out of his league in 790 and begins on an ambitious project of rebuilding the entirety of Winchester. The young king is also confronted with the sombre reality that the Age of the Vikings has now started.
Cynewulf has a daughter in 792 and comes perilously close to death from fever in 793. The king defeats a horde of Vikings in Dorset in the same year, before celebrating by fathering a son in 794. Unfortunately the boy, named Oscytel, inherits the family propensity for illness and dies a year later. Cynewulf II descends into depression at the loss and takes his anger out on any and all vikings he can find, defeating four separate warbands in 795 alone.
In 801 his second daughter is born. Unhappy at his poor Italian wife for not having a boy, Cynewulf declares war on Surrey to sate his growing distaste for life. In a lightning campaign he conquers the region and deposes the unfortunate child-duke in 803. Two years later the warmonger strikes at Kent, absorbing it into Wessex.
A third daughter is born in 809 and Cynewulf II decides enough is enough and succumbs to the family curse - he dies of illness aged 39.
Ecgbert - 812 - 825
Ecgbert is the next in a line of kings who weren’t really ready for it. He’s another distant relative in the Cerdicing line, and already has a young heir-in-waiting. This is a bonus, as apparently everyone in the kingdom despises him. He’s undiplomatic, a poor general and a bad statesman. If ever there’s an argument against autocratic primogeniture then poor Ecgbert is it.
The growing kingdom needs more lands, and Ecgbert decides that Devon will be the next county swallowed up by it. He conducts a fairly short and bloodless war against the county's ruler, taking only two years between 812-815. He also has another daughter in that time. The new king makes sure to marry off all of Cynewulf II’s daughters to ensure they’re away from his throne.
All this expansion comes with a cost, though. Fed up at having a succession of illness-prone kings, the nobles of Wessex come a-knocking at Winchester in 817 and demand a switch of the succession rules in the petty kingdom from primogeniture to gavelkind. This would mean that all lands are split between the king’s sons, and often results in fractured states. What’s worse, it usually splits the family in two as well. With the future of the dynasty at stake Ecgbert says no, despite the fact that the nobles have come armed with very sharp-looking swords.
Civil war erupts across Wessex, pitting brother against brother and illness-prone king against sanguine noble. Outnumbered and defeated in multiple battles due to his overwhelming incompetence, Ecgbert makes a plea to the king of Asturias, his father-in-law, to help in the war. The Asturian king says “fine” as long as Wessex helps them against the Moors in Spain. Ecgbert agrees and prepares to take back his lands.
Asturian reinforcements never arrive and Ecgbert loses the civil war in 820. Not too long after that the Asturian king calls for aid against the Moors, who are invading en masse. Ecgbert doesn’t even reply. A few months later he discovers his wife is having an adulterous affair with two other men. A loser unloved by his people, his subjects and even his family, Ecgbert gives in and dies of illness in 825 aged 56.
---
Times have been tough for the kings of Wessex. But a new figure appears from the gloom - will the son of the hated Ecgbert bring glory to the family name at last?There's new heat on Donald Trump over a rather dry topic: his tax returns. Mitt Romney, who has been making the TV news rounds, claimed this week that he expects a "bombshell" in Trump's tax returns, if only the candidate would release them.
Trump, in turn, raised eyebrows at the Republican presidential debate on Thursday when he said that he can't release his tax returns yet because he is in the midst of an audit. He also added this claim, a different sort of bombshell: "I’ve been audited every year. Twelve years or something like that.”
Is that plausible? And, if Trump isn't exaggerating: Why would he get audited 12 years in a row? We consulted four tax experts to dissect the claim.
Possible, but a stretch
The odds of getting audited 12 years in a row are slim, but not impossible, experts say.
Less than 1% of Americans get audited every year, and that number shrinks each year as the IRS workforce and budget has slimmed down. But among "high net-worth individuals," the rate is higher: Nearly 7% get audited. And Trump is certainly a high net-worth individual.
"As your income increases, your chances of being audited go up significantly," says John Petosa, a CPA and professor at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management. "If you think about it, it makes sense—is the IRS going to spend time and money and resources auditing somebody who makes $30,000 a year? Or are they going to spend their time auditing someone who makes billions of dollars? There is probably more tax revenue to collect from a guy like Donald Trump, especially if he's being aggressive in his deductions." (As the campaign cycle has proven, there are few areas in which Trump is not aggressive.)
The IRS actually has a rule, in its agent manual, that if a person is audited and receives an assessment of zero (that is, does not owe additional money), the IRS cannot audit them again for two years. That means if Trump is telling the truth, then the IRS has repeatedly found discrepancies in his returns.
Until recently, it was typical for big corporations to get audited every year. This was called the Coordinated Examination Program. Many big public corporations even had rooms specifically designated for use by visiting IRS agents. But as the IRS's budget has been slashed, it has shrunk the program.
It's worth noting that for wealthy individuals, the stigma once associated with an audit has faded. As Steven Burke, a partner at McLane Middleton and a tax professor at the University of New Hampshire Law School, explains, "Many wealthy people welcome an audit, because once an audit occurs, your return is done, you don’t have to worry about it. If you take an aggressive position in something, for example, once the IRS has audited it, it is highly unlikely they will ever come back and give you trouble about it again." For regular, non-mogul folks, too, an audit is less unpleasant these days. "It used to be an agent would come to your house and it was an embarrassing thing. Many audits now are done just electronically by correspondence; you get an email, you send back a check," Burke says. "That said, the IRS does still do some in-person audits, and it is still a scary, nerve-wracking experience for the average person."
Investments abroad
Although Trump is more prone to tax audits because of his wealth, experts say it's the geographical breadth of his business interests, more than his wealth, that makes him a target. When Trump says he has been audited, he is likely referring to both himself, as an individual, and to his companies, or companies in which he has a stake. Audits can occur on an individual basis or a corporate basis, and some companies Trump has a hand in may be considered "passthrough entities," which do not pay federal taxes, just report it to the IRS, and the individual owners or investors have to report and pay it.
"With all of his real estate abroad, he must have foreign income coming in, and that's what I imagine they're checking," says Vincent Cervone, who runs VRC Associates, a tax shop in Brooklyn, N.Y. "His regular income is kind of straightforward, but the foreign income is what they would be investigating. Right now the IRS has a pet peeve with foreign accounts because a lot of people are taking their money overseas to get certain benefits."
Story continuesRussia's permanent representative to NATO says the Kremlin fears US plans to deploy an armored brigade in Eastern Europe are a threat to his country. Alexander Grushko told DW it was a "further step establishing NATO's transition to confrontational patterns."
The plans' military importance, he said, must be considered together with other efforts of the alliance "to consolidate its eastern flank." Grushko said these included "permanent troop rotations, exercises, air policing, strengthening its activities in the Baltic and Black Seas, building additional headquarters, modernization of military infrastructure."
All this, he said, weakens European security, calling into question the viability of the Russia-NATO Founding Act of 1997 as "one of the last effective pillars" of this security. Russian military experts would analyze the US announcements and make appropriate corrections to Russian military planning, Grushko said.
But overall, Russia has reacted relatively calmly to the US plans. Both the foreign and defense ministries in Moscow had no initial comment. Russian media are also not treating it as a headline issue.
Washington explained its decision in terms of supporting NATO members "in the wake of an aggressive Russia in Eastern Europe and elsewhere." The move, it said, came in response to Russia's actions in Ukraine.
Defense by rote
The Pentagon on Wednesday provided greater detail. From February 2017, a complete armored brigade with a total of 4,200 troops, 250 tanks and other heavy military equipment will be stationed on NATO's eastern flank. The brigade will change its location in various Eastern European countries on a rotating basis. Which countries these are, is still open. Troops and material will be replaced every nine months.
"No-one can be misled any more by talks about NATO's military activities having only a rotational character," Grushko said. "Continuous rotations differ little from a permanent military presence in the traditional sense." The plans called for war materiel to be kept permanently in Europe, he said.
New divisions
Russian military expert Alexander Golz
Moscow's lack of anger at these US plans has a simple explanation, said Alexander Golz, an expert on the Russian military. "The deployment of the armored brigade was already decided at the NATO Summit in Wales in 2014. Russia has already responded."
Moscow already announced it would set up new divisions in the west of the country. Lately there have been conflicting statements about their number. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said a few days ago, Russia planned to station two new divisions permanently in Russia's Western Military District.
"NATO is expanding its military potential in Europe, including in the immediate vicinity of the Russian border," he said. Russia was concerned, he said - and forced to react. But earlier, the defense minister had spoken about three new divisions in Russia's west. One of these divisions would be created from a brigade in the Smolensk region on the border with Belarus.
In addition, the Russian defense ministry announced in early February that it was reactivating the 1st Tank Guards Army, dissolved in 1998, in the west of the country. The new army is being formed from existing divisions and brigades that are to be reorganized and strengthened.
Such a step is "logical" because the US and NATO are pursuing an "increasingly clear strategy of containment of Russia," state news agency RIA Novosti said. This tank army also forms part of Russia's response to the increased US military presence in Eastern Europe, Golz said.
No new Cold War
The increased US military presence in eastern NATO states and Russia's troop reinforcements in its west are "by no means a repetition of the confrontation in the former Cold War," he said. "At that time, hundreds of thousands of armed men faced each other."
Golz said the US plans indicate a desire to be prepared for a possible so-called "hybrid war" such as the annexation of Crimea by Russia, in which the absolute numbers of troops or tanks would not be as significant.
Grushko described NATO's plans as a further burden "for the already complicated relationships" between the alliance and his country. But, he added, it would have little effect on the practical cooperation between the two. "It is difficult to influence something that does not exist," he said - and blamed NATO for this state of affairs.Lady Problems is a weekly column that looks at how the entertainment industry — and its corresponding culture and constituents — is treating women in a given week. (Hint: It will almost always be “poorly.”) Every Thursday we’ll review the week's most significant woman-centric conflicts, then provide a brilliant solution to each problem that nobody in Hollywood will ever listen to or enforce.
The Lady Problem: Settle in for Very-Long-Story Time, dear readers.
Earlier this week, New York comedian Aaron Glaser was banned from performing at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater after several women came forward accusing him of rape. Other comedy clubs soon followed suit. Glaser, in a now-deleted Facebook post, denied the allegation and called the whole thing a "witch hunt," bemoaning the fact that he didn't have the opportunity to "face my accusers" (even though he has the opportunity to appeal UCB's decision). The Revelist spoke to one of Glaser's accusers anonymously; she recalled that, during her sexual encounter with Glaser, "I wasn't able to give consent, I couldn't speak, it was like my body was too heavy."
Among the (male, naturally) comedians who have since sprung to Glaser's defense: Kurt Metzger, a writer and comedian who's written for Inside Amy Schumer [Comedy Central and MTV are both owned by Viacom] and appeared on Louis CK's Horace and Pete. For the past several days, Metzger has been posting unhinged tirades on his Facebook page, railing against the UCB's decision, "social justice warriors," his critics — "the stupidest people alive" — and the women who accused Glaser, who should've gone to the police if they'd really been raped.
After commenters and multiple media outlets called Metzger a rape apologist and victim-blamer (among other things), Metzger just doubled down, writing, "YOU shitbag phony grandstanding 'internet feminists' need to pull your heads out of your cunts and your cunts out of your blogs, and try actually helping victims instead of spotlighting how unique and enlightened you are for being against rape." He went on to call the investigation a "lynch mob" and refer to the accusers as "the whitest women ever" (despite having zero knowledge of their race).
You won't be surprised to learn that Metzger has a history of shitting all over women online.
Other "internet feminists" called on Schumer, a vocal feminist and decrier of rape culture, to publicly denounce Metzger's posts and to fire him from her show. According to Vulture, Schumer at first blocked these women (Amy!), but later addressed the controversy, saying that Kurt didn't work for her (and also, confusingly, implying that Inside Amy Schumer had been canceled, a misconception that she's since sort of clarified). The whole thing is shady, really:
In a recent Facebook post, Metzger claimed that Schumer only spoke up because he "told her to... I will not have other people go down for me."
The Solution: The only real solution here is for Metzger to shut the fuck up and get off Facebook. Not only is he making a full ass of himself; more significantly, he knows not of what he speaks. There are approximately 1 billion reasons why a woman wouldn't report her rape, or would report it anonymously — Reductress, which devoted its entire homepage this week to pieces that sent up this particular controversy, sums them up beautifully in "I Anonymously Reported My Rape for the Anonymus Attention." And as comedian Nikki Black wrote in a fire response to Metzger on Medium:
There are a myriad of reasons a woman might choose not to go to the police, be it that she is afraid she will get laughed out of court for a lack of evidence (gee, what kind of people could be giving her that idea, Kurt?), the aforementioned low rates of imprisonment, rampant rape kit destruction in the US, or, you know, because she didn’t fucking want to. Because it might be more work for her and she is already dealing with, you know, having been raped.... Metzger thinks women who are speaking out against rape are the system. We are not the system. We have been forced to work outside the system because the system has failed us.
Failing that, us shitbag phony grandstanding internet feminists will reanimate a pile of dead raccoons, sew them into a trenchcoat, name the resulting figure Jiff Dilfyberg, then send it to loiter about Kurt Metzger's property, peeking in his windows and looming over him as he sleeps. When he complains about it, nobody will believe him, because that shit sounds insane.
As for Schumer: I don't totally blame her for being slow and a little weird on the draw. Girl's got Lady Problems of her own...
The Lady Problem: On Tuesday, Schumer released The Girl With The Lower Back Tattoo, the book for which she received an advance somewhere between $8 and $10 million. Despite a slate of positive reviews and sitting at No. 7 on Amazon's list of bestsellers, the book only has a three (out of five) star rating on Amazon. Why? Because Reddit. It's always because Reddit.
As The Week reports, "Nettled, perhaps, by the book's success, or by the fact that a female comic's business acumen landed her one of the most lucrative celebrity book deals in the business, a small group of fans of the now-defunct Opie and Anthony radio show are trying to sabotage the comedian by leaving fake one-star book reviews." Opie and Anthony, for those unfamiliar, was a profligately racist radio show that fired its titular Anthony back in 2014 for a Twitter rant in which he accused a black woman of hitting him, calling her a "savage" and a "lying cunt," and writing that black people "aren't people." So, to be clear, this is the caliber of humans we're dealing with: Reddit bros who idolize a macro Reddit bro who tweeted that he was preyed upon by a "savage violent animal fuck" because he was white.
Yesterday, these tragic figures decided to create fake accounts and purposefully tank Schumer's ratings, urging each other to "Do your part. Submit more reviews. It’s still too high at 2.4 stars." Fortunately, these men are incapable of putting comprehensible sentences together; should any relatively intelligent person take a minute to read the fake reviews, they'd likely dismiss them instantaneously. "My friend Steve from Yellowstone recommended this book to me, though I couldn't understand him since he was yelling to his friend Ramon for some reason. I don't know what he was thinking recommending this to me. He must have been pranking me or something," reads one. "My daughter purchased this book and his [sic] come away from it loathing men. I was afraid of this but didn’t want to be a bigot. I’ll never have my sensible little girl back," reads another.
The Solution: Yet again, the solution is simple: These dudes need to get off the goddamn internet, remove their dicks from their own mouths, creep out from beneath the pile of hamburgers they've amassed, and take a walk around the block, gulping fresh air and shedding little pieces of hamburger as they go. But seeing as how we're dealing with Redditors — the most aggressive internet infection, impervious to the antibiotic of "common human decency" — we'll have to take matters into our own hands. Each time a Reddit bro creates a fake account just to give a one-star rating to Schumer's book, Amazon will henceforth only allow this bro to purchase one-star products. Some examples:
• SimCity: Limited Edition, which user BirdOPrey 5 describes as "easily the worst way to spend $60 since your 'Jello of the Month' membership."
• Org's Odyssey: A Tale of Post-Human Earth, which user girlvinyl describes as "pretty much the worst book I have ever read. It makes no sense and rambles on about things like how furries and humans get into these thunderdome type wrestling matches and then the humans eat the furrie/antro creatures."
• Reborn Baby Doll Bottle Adorable ABC Design Yellow Lid + PLUS Yellow Orange White Pacifier with Putty AGES 8 YEARS + THIS IS A PROP - NOT A TOY, which user Amazon Customer describes as follows: "I thought I was purchasing a magnetic pacifier and it wasn't. Have to put tape on pacifier in order for it to stick to dolls mouth and it didn't work just as I though."
• Just Scentsational FS-1 All Natural Scented Stone Bird Feeder Pest Repellent, which user grrrmama describes as follows: "Didn't Work At All... squirrel went right to it..."
• 2 Piles Large 6 Inch Spat of Realsitic [sic] Fake Rubber Barf, which user cat lover called "stupid" in a review titled "stupid."The woman convicted of stealing money raised for local children battling cancer began her jail sentence in February, after months of delays.
Deputy District Attorney Victor Barr told NBC 7 Investigates Brianna King, the former CEO of the non-profit WishWarriors, started her sentence after a court hearing on February 28.
The district attorney’s office opened a criminal investigation into King after an NBC 7 Investigates story revealed children profiled by the charity never received the donations they were promised.
King pleaded guilty to grand theft charges in 2015 but a judge delayed her jail sentence four times after King requested the sentence be delayed, citing health concerns surrounding her newborn baby.
Barr told NBC 7 Investigates King asked the judge at the February 28 court hearing for another delay but her request was denied and King was taken into custody.
According to prosecutors, King would solicit items and gift cards from stores as donations to auction off at fundraisers but instead, would use them herself. King would also spend donation money at hair salons, spas and on car payments and other personal bills, according to prosecutors.
King was sentenced to serve a year in prison and the judge in her case added an additional 45 days to her sentence, stemming from the delays. When her sentence is complete King will be on probation for five years. In addition, King has been ordered to continue making restitution payments for what she stole from the charity.
In an email, Barr told NBC 7 Investigates, “since December |
man regarded in most foreign capitals as a buffoon, and a dangerous one.
Trump is not particularly ideological, and it’s possible that as president he would surround himself with experts and would back off extreme positions. It was a good sign that on Friday he appeared to reverse himself and pledged that he would not order the U.S. military to commit war crimes, yet that’s such an astonishingly low bar that I can’t believe I just wrote this sentence!Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said his wife is looking forward to seeing former President Bill Clinton serve as first gentleman. | AP Photo Italian prime minister jokes about Bill Clinton as 'first gentleman'
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi joked on Monday that his wife was looking forward to seeing former President Bill Clinton in a new role as first gentleman at the next G-7 meeting, scheduled for next May in Sicily.
Renzi’s joke came at the end of a forum hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative, moderated by the former president and featuring not just the Italian prime minister but also Argentinean President Mario Macri, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the chair of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and a former Nigerian finance minister.
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“Mr. President, also [in] the name of my friends, only one thing, thirty seconds to give this message,” Renzi said after asking Clinton to make one final point at the end of the issues-based discussion. “Those issues will be discussed in the next G-7 in Italy in May 2017 in Sicily. My wife waits for you as first gentlemen in G-7, in G-7 meeting.”
Macri quickly jumped in, adding that he looked forward to seeing Clinton at the next G-20 meeting in 2018.
If Clinton’s wife Hillary Clinton is elected to the White House, it remains somewhat unknown which, if any, of the traditional first lady roles that the former president would absorb. The Democratic nominee has indicated that her husband might be charged with working on economic issues but also said he would not be given a cabinet-level position.EVER since Donald Trump’s victory emboldened the Republican Party’s nativist wing, the dirtiest words with which a Republican can be tarred have not four letters, but 8 and 13: “moderate” and “establishment”. Unfortunately, those accurately describe the two Republican candidates for governors’ mansions this year.
In New Jersey, Kim Guadagno has spent two terms as lieutenant-governor. Mrs Guadagno is pro-choice, believes that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change and has addressed her state’s LGBT Chamber of Commerce. Before Ed Gillespie decided to run for governor of Virginia he was a lobbyist, political strategist, head of the Republican National Committee, adviser to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney and, in college, a Senate car-park attendant—hardly the outsider that the Republican base seems to crave.
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But recent commercials suggest both candidates have turned Trumpian, meaning nativist, race-baiting and unconcerned with accuracy. Mrs Guadagno’s advert stars Jose Carranza, an “illegal alien and child rapist”. The ad warns that Phil Murphy, the Democratic candidate, “will have the backs of deranged murderers like Carranza”.
Mr Gillespie’s ads both play on voters’ fears of MS-13, a notoriously violent Salvadoran street gang linked to several crimes in northern Virginia. One shows a hooded figure holding a baseball bat in a dark alley while the words “Kill, rape, control” appear on screen; another shows heavily tattooed dark-skinned men behind those words, while an announcer warns, “MS-13 is a menace.” (In fact, those men were members of a different gang, photographed in a Salvadoran prison.) Mr Northam “increase[s] the threat of MS-13”, the ad warns, because he “voted in favour of sanctuary cities.”
Virginia has no sanctuary cities. And Mr Murphy gave an uninspired, rambling answer in support of undocumented immigrants brought to America as children that Mrs Guadagno took out of context. But both Mrs Guadagno and Mr Gillespie trail mainstream Democrats in states that Hillary Clinton won easily. The Democratic base appears motivated by its hatred for Mr Trump, while the Republican base seems depressed by his lacklustre record. Though Democrats have lost four special congressional elections this year, they outperformed expectations in staunch Republican districts. To rally the base, both candidates have repudiated their past comity, and turned to the same anti-immigrant sentiment that vaulted Mr Trump into the Oval Office.CBS Fall Preview has Supergirl 8/6/2015 5:55 am
Are you having trouble waiting until October for Supergirl to officially begin? We are too! But it looks like CBS might have something to help us make it all the way to Oct 26th. CBS Fall Preview is scheduled to premiere on Monday, September 7 at 8.30pm. The CBS Fall Preview is a special 30 minute program hosted by Jane Lynch. Lynch will offer an extended look at her own new series, as well as new dramas and comedies that are airing on CBS this Fall. Among the new shows to be showcased is Supergirl!
Given the fact that this is more than a month away and CBS knows that they have an audience that's has seen a lot of the first episode (if not all of it), we are thinking that this extended look might offer some unique interviews, and scenes from new episodes! Be sure to check it out in September!
October was a tall order to ask fans to wait until, but we are really enjoying that CBS is giving these little pit stops along the way. Are you going to mark this on your calendars? Let us know in the comments below, and if you aren't a member already, join up and start talking with the best fans on the internet in our forum!The 2000s saw a rise in Chicago juke or juke house,[4] a faster variant of ghetto house[6] which began forming in the late 1980s. Chicago juke songs are generally around 150–165 BPM[5] with beat-skipping kick drums, pounding rapidly (and at times very sparsely) in syncopation with crackling snares, claps, and other sounds reminiscent of old drum machines.[6] The production style is often markedly lo-fi, much like baile funk. Chicago Juke evolved to match the energy of footwork, a dance style born in the disparate ghettos, house parties and underground dance competitions of Chicago. RP Boo, a former footwork dancer, is generally credited with making the first songs that fall within the canon[7]
Living hand in hand with juke music, "footwork" is one of the popular "hood" dance music styles in the world.[8] Footwork is a controlled and complex moving of the feet at high speeds, a modern form of house dance footwork and breakdancing footwork. Producers in the Chicago juke and booty house genre include DJ Deeon, Dude 'n Nem,[5] DJ Slugo,[1][2] DJ Chip,[1][2] DJ Nate,[5][8][6] DJ Tha Pope, DJ Nehpets, DJ Rashad,[8] and Spinn.[8] Teklife is a footwork collective.[citation needed]
In December 2005, DJ Gant-Man became the first DJ/producer to have a Chicago Juke house remix for a major artist on a major label with his remix for Beyonce's "Check on It" featuring Slim Thug on Columbia/Sony Records and Gant-Man also helped develop Chicago juke sound.[2][8] Missy Elliott was the first artist to showcase Chicago dance and music scene on BET's 106 & Park in 2005 with her song "Lose Control". She hired a female dancer choreographer from Chicago to do the choreography for the "Lose Control" music video. Elliott discovered Chicago juke watching television in Chicago on tour. She performed with Chicago dancers at some of her music events over the years and has helped bring Chicago juke into the mainstream.[2]
In Europe Edit
Juke has been popular in European clubs, particularly in Paris, Brussels, and Spain for years. UK label Planet Mu's compilation Bangs and Works Volume 1 (2010) has brought the work of Chicago DJs to a wider audience, drawing some media attention. The Hyperdub label has been a supporter of juke and footwork, releasing much of DJ Rashad's material. Deeon has released two projects on the famous French Ghetto Music Label "Booty Call Records" in 2013 [9]Binyamin Netanyahu brands EU guidelines specifying whether goods come from settlements as ‘discriminatory’ and a hindrance to the peace process
Israel has said it is suspending contacts with European Union bodies involved in peace efforts with the Palestinians after the bloc started requiring exports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be labelled.
On Sunday, the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, ordered the foreign ministry to carry out “a reassessment of the involvement of EU bodies in everything that is connected to the diplomatic process with the Palestinians”, a ministry statement said.
“Until completion of the reassessment, the prime minister has ordered a suspension of diplomatic contacts with the EU and its representatives in this matter.”
The EU published new guidelines on 11 November for labelling products made in Israeli settlements, a move Brussels said was technical but which Israel branded “discriminatory” and damaging to peace efforts with the Palestinians.
Drawn up over three years by the European commission, the guidelines mean Israeli producers must explicitly label farm goods and other products that come from settlements built on land occupied by Israel if they are sold in the EU.
The EU’s position is that the lands Israel has occupied since the 1967 Middle East war – including the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights – are not part of the internationally recognised borders of Israel. As such, goods from there cannot be labelled “Made in Israel” and should be labelled as coming from settlements, which the EU considers illegal under international law.
After the EU announcement, Netanyahu called it “hypocritical and a double standard“, saying the EU was not taking similar steps in hundreds of territorial conflicts elsewhere in the world.
“The European Union should be ashamed of itself,” he said while on an official visit in Washington earlier this month. “We do not accept the fact that Europe is labelling the side being attacked by terrorist acts.“
The development of settlements has been one of the obstacles to negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. US-backed peace talks stalled in April 2014.
“It is an indication of origin, not a warning label,” the EU ambassador to Israel, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, told Reuters after the bloc’s decision was announced.
Following the decision, all 28 EU member states will have to apply the same labelling. Britain, Belgium and Denmark already affix labels to Israeli goods, differentiating between those from Israel proper and those, particularly fruit and vegetables, that come from the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank.
Israel’s economy ministry estimated this would affect goods worth about $50m (£33.2m) a year, including grapes and dates, wine, poultry, honey, olive oil and cosmetics made from Dead Sea minerals. That is around a fifth of the $200m-$300m worth of goods produced in settlements each year, but a drop in the ocean next to the $30bn of goods and services traded annually between Israel and the EU.
Israeli farmers and wine growers in the West Bank have expressed worry about the impact on their business and some have begun diversifying into markets in Russia and Asia to escape EU rules.
The Israeli foreign ministry said contacts with individual EU countries – it named Germany, France and Britain – would not be affected by Sunday’s announcement.
A ministry official said Israel would cease assisting EU-sponsored projects intended for the Palestinians, but no specific instances or bodies were named.Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has apologized for joking that Mahatma Gandhi used to run a gas station here, saying it was ''a lame attempt at humor.''
Mrs. Clinton, the junior Democratic senator from New York, made the remark on Saturday at a fund-raiser. During an event here for a Senate candidate, Nancy Farmer, Missouri's state treasurer, Mrs. Clinton introduced a quote from Gandhi by saying, ''He ran a gas station down in St. Louis.''
After laughter from many in the crowd of at least 200 subsided, the former first lady continued, ''No, Mahatma Gandhi was a great leader of the 20th century.'' In a nod to Ms. Farmer's underdog status against a Republican senator, Kit Bond, Mrs. Clinton quoted the Indian independence leader as saying, ''First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.''
After being approached by The Associated Press to clarify the remarks, Mrs. Clinton suggested in a statement Monday that she never meant to fuel any stereotype that certain ethnic groups were synonymous with operating America's gas stations. ''I have admired the work and life of Mahatma Gandhi and have spoken publicly about that many times,'' Mrs. Clinton said. ''I truly regret if a lame attempt at humor suggested otherwise.''Well now… Wasn’t that something? On a night that saw Clint Dempsey return to the where it all began, the Seattle Sounders were coming in to Foxborough on a team high. The Rave Green were sporting a club high winning streak of 5, an unbeaten streak of 6, and road unbeaten streak of 4. The Comeback Kids, as they’ve been of late, had had little rest playing their third game in a week plus traveling across the country but spirits were still high. Top of the MLS table will make any team a giddy bunch. The New England Revolution, on the other hand, were looking to keep a streak of their own alive as they had recorded 3 straight clean sheets at home enroute to claim the #2 spot in the East. A stalwart defence facing the leagues most effective offence. This had all the makings of a gong show.
Sadly, it was. And not the good kind.
Sounders forward Obafemi Martins controls the ball while Revs defender/midfielder Chris Tierney & midfielder Daigo Kobayashi work a stellar defence.Mandatory Credit: Bob DeChiara-USA TODAY Sports
The Sounders only line-up change was switching one veteran for the other as Djimi Traoré was back in after Zach Scott started on Wednesday night. USMNT star Brad Evans remained at the LB position with Leo González riding the pine, likely to come in late in the match. All-in-all, standard fare for the Rave Green. The side started strong, rocketing off a pair of shots in the opening 5 minutes of the match. Wanting to maintain the pressure the Sounders dominated possession, playing the excellent passing game they’ve displayed of late (They would complete 83% of their 532 passes). In spite of the Revs playing a counter-strike style, the Sounders remained in control. That is… Until the 14th minute.
In what has also been typical of the Sounders of late, an early goal put the Rave Green behind early. After the ball became loose in the crowded Seattle box, Revs Patrick Mullins cashed in on the mishandled rebound to put the home team up 1-0. No big deal, really. Opponents taking a 1 goal lead on the Sounders? Puh-leeze. Nothing we haven’t seen over the last four matches. The Comeback Kids had read this story before.
Apparently there was a re-write.
“I don’t think they’re five goals better than us. But today they were five goals better than us, and we have to accept it.” – Sounders Coach Sigi Schmid on the loss
At minute 29 the floodgates opened. Diego Fagúndez would crank home a goal (his first of 2014), a lead pass from Chris Tierney from the top left side of the box from just shy of 18 yards. 2-0 Revolution and it had only just begun. Only 5 minutes later Teal Bunbury would fire off a pair of shots from a hard angle, capitalizing on the rebound to blast it into the back of the net and putting the Sounders on their heels 3-0. Diego, who was New England’s leading scorer in 2013, would bag a second off of an expertly placed ball from Bunbury in the 41st minute (a two-touch beauty that is sure to be up for Goal Of The Week) and place the Sounders in a large 4-0 deficit. Heading in to halftime this was not what anyone had expected – a clinical counter-attack that was all but a step ahead of the Sounders back four.
Revs forward Diego Fagundez netted a pair on the nights as New England routed Seattle, 5-0Mandatory Credit: Bob DeChiara-USA TODAY Sports
The Sounders came out after the half with full intention of imposing their will on the match. All hope was not lost, a charge could be made and maybe even bring this thing level. The Comeback Kids were ready to live up to their name once more. This was going to be Sounders soccer at its finest. The whistle blew and 30 seconds later the Sounders had their first goal of the match… Sort of. Bunbury’s would nab the ball at midfield, work his way down field, lay down a right-wing cross that deflected off the shoulder of Chad Marshalland rolled past Frei who was caught playing the wrong foot. 5-0 to the Muskets and that, as they say, was that. A few scoring opportunity’s for the Sounders that amassed to little was all that was mustered sending Seattle to their worst defeat since October 2013 (a 5-1 blowout away to Colorado).
While the Sounders controlled 61% of the possession on the night but it was the surgical, precise counter-attack by the Revs that truly dictated the match. How exactly did this all come to pass? Well, as it turns out, the Revolution did their homework before Seattle’s arrival. During their weekly film sessions the Revolution studied the key points of the Sounders back four, particularly MLS sophomore defender DeAndre Yedlin. His penchant to push up the field leaving holes in the back is something yours truly has spoken of before and it would seem that others have also taken notice. That became clearly evident on the second Fagúndez goal when a full speed Bunbury launched the cross to hit Fagundez in stride after the he had blown clear past Yedlin and into the Sounders box. Fagúndez brought the ball down on his first touch and fired past Stefan Frei with his second. A veteran bit of play from a spirited young player.
“I feel like we have one of these games every single year where we get blown out, like last year in Colorado where we got crushed. There’s no excuse, we said we were ready to go and a couple of defensive lapses put us on the back foot and now all we can do is prepare for San Jose.” – Sounders Captain Brad Evans on the loss
The result brought the Revolution to a 5-3-2 record on the year and propped them up to a tie for first place in the Eastern Conference and extending their home clean sheet streak to 4 matches. The loss dropped the Western Conference-leading Sounders to 7-3-1, breaking several previously mentioned streaks. In an interesting bit of statistics, the Sounders have the most points AND the most wins in MLS, however, they’re also tied for most goals allowed. The offence has done well to bail out the team late but for the first time in 6 matches, they were held but a defence that appeared to have all the answers.
The yacht was a bit leaky Sunday afternoon and the team have only a week to not only sort out the mistakes ahead of next week’s home match against San Jose but to also set up their lineup moving forward. This was the last match the Sounders will have MLS leading scorer Clint Dempsey and Captain Brad Evans as the two will be leaving for the USMNT camp ahead of the 2014 World Cup. US Coach Jürgen Klinsmann will announce his 30-player preliminary roster on 12 May in the afternoon, as per his Twitter.On Tuesday the Winston & Strawn law firm rented out the main hall of Houston's River Oaks Country Club and brought in some smart guys to provide perspective for a cocktail-hour discussion on the topic: U.S. Energy Outlook. The panel consisted of T. Boone Pickens, former Houston Mayor Bill White and Dan Pickering of investment banking firm Tudor, Pickering & Holt.
Their consensus: the U.S. energy outlook is great. Really fracking great. And that means great things for the rest of the U.S. economy as well -- as long as oil prices don't get too low.
It's not news that America is undergoing an oil and gas boom. Or that the boom has been brought to us by the dedicated efforts of dozens of independent oil companies working to perfect the one-two punch of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
What is news is that the boom is showing no signs of slowing down. Ten years into the shale drilling revolution, oil and gas companies have proven that this is "the real deal," says Pickering. And as drilling expands it will continue to be "the next big thing" for another 20 years.
Pickens marveled that despite oil prices surging threefold over the past decade, "The United States is the only place that has added production."
Yes the production growth has been shocking. America's crude oil output first peaked in 1970 at 10 million barrels per day. The nadir was in 2008, when oil hit a record high $147 per barrel amid sadsack U.S. output of 5 million bpd. Since then the surge has been asymptotal, with output topping 8.5 million bpd in June. If oil prices stay strong there is little doubt that we will hit a new record in 2015.
The growth in natural gas output has been just as stunning. This year total gas withdrawals will approach 31 trillion cubic feet, up 32% since 2005.
And yet the reality of this revolution hasn't yet been fully appreciated even by the economists whose job it is to appreciate it. Yesterday Thomas Tunstall at the University of Texas at San Antonio published a report stating his findings that the economic impact of the Eagle Ford shale of south Texas was more than $87 billion in 2013. Just 18 months ago Tunstall had figured that level wouldn't be achieved until 2022.
Driving those revisions is the realization that with all this oil and gas is coming massive investments in petrochemical plants and pipelines and roads and railroads and housing for workers.
"Capital is mobilizing. Industry is putting a lot of money into the ground," says Bill White, now chairman of the Houston office of Lazard, and former CEO of Houston oil and gas service company Wedge Group. "Now is a good time to be pipeline welder or to be Trinity Industries," which makes new rail cars to carry oil.
Pickering, who got his start working in Alaska for Arco, had a number to put on it: over the next 20 years more than $600 billion will be invested in oil and gas infrastructure like pipelines. And to think that's just a small fraction of what will be spent on drilling and fracking.
So what could go wrong?
Mae West famously said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful." While all this oil and gas has been a wonderful boon for post-recession America, could there be such a thing as too much of it?
Boone Pickens thinks so. "We now have too much oil," sighs Pickens. At $93 per barrel this week U.S. crude has fallen $13 per barrel since June. And that price is what you get at trading hubs, not out in the field. "Midland oil [from west Texas] can only fetch $83. That's $10 below the market price. If the price gets below $80 they'll lay some rigs down" and stop drilling.
Why the big discount? Because as fast as they're building pipelines and rail spurs to get the crude out to trading and refining hubs, they're not building fast enough to keep up with the drilling rigs.
Natural gas prices are under pressure too. Six years ago U.S. drillers were running 1,300 gas rigs. Now that's down to 300. "We found too much gas," says Pickens. "2015 is going to be bad for gas," says Pickering, meaning that prices should be heading down from current levels of $4.50 per thousand cubic feet. "You don't make money in $2s. You make a ton of money in the $5s."
Present at the event Tuesday was Gary Evans, CEO of Magnum Hunter Resources, which is drilling what he calls the "heart of the heart" of the Utica shale in Ohio. The Utica and neighboring Marcellus shale of Pennsylvania are proving to be so prolific that they've dried up interest in other giant shale gas fields. "The Haynesville, Barnett and Fayetteville don't work at $3 gas," says Pickering. That's especially the case when so much of our natgas supply is coming as so-called associated gas, produced alongside oil in the Bakken, Permian and Eagle Ford. Says White: "So much gas is a byproduct. When something is a byproduct the marginal cost is zero."
The average Joe should welcome lower prices for oil and gas, right? After all, cheap energy should spur broader economic growth outside the fracking fields. And soft prices gives the pipeline and petrochem builders some time to catch up, right?
Don't tell that to the oil and gas companies. Tens of billions of dollars in market capitalization is contingent upon oil companies maintaining growth. They have to drill fast enough to hold their acreage before leases expire. At the same time, they have to get their volumes up high enough that they can generate enough free cash flow to pay back their debt. If you can't drill economically it all unravels.
Pickens understands this intimately. In 1996 his Mesa Petroleum had taken on too much debt while betting that the price of natural gas would go high enough to return the company to profitability. It didn't, and in 1997 Pickens had little choice but to sell Mesa to a stronger rival and walk away.
It even happened to his Dad. In 1931 Pickens' Dad had a small oil company. But it went out of business after the discovery of the East Texas oilfield drove the price of oil down to 10 cents a barrel. Dad "couldn't stay alive" because he needed 50 cents a barrel to make money.
No matter what era you're in, when excess oil floods the market it will wipe out the little guy.
Pickens is drilling on his own ranch up in the Texas panhandle. "The sad thing is I'm 86. I'm not gonna see another 20-30 years of this," he says. "I may get 20." The audience laughed.
It is a testament to the power of American oil and gas that prices have softened so much, even in the face of Middle East strife. Libya's oil industry remains in chaos, with rival government arguing over who controls it. Iraq's and Russia's output has been flat. Iran is down to 3 million bpd from 3.7 mm in 2012.
If the U.S. were not adding so many barrels, "oil would be sky high," says White. That said, anything could happen, he says. "If anyone thinks they know oil 5 years out they're a crank."
Indeed a lot could happen in five years. In 2009 absolutely no one predicted the growth in U.S. oil supply. So what will happen between now and 2019? Should American drillers, already worried about oil prices slipping below their marginal costs, worry too about competition from shale drilling in the rest of the world?
Eh, not so much.
"There's going to be shale plays developed in other parts of the world, but we've got a big headstart," says White. We already have pipelines, rigs, a trained workforce, and tons of mental capital.
To a large extent these factors are more important than having amazing geology because they dramatically reduce upfront costs. Argentina, for instance, has world-class shale formations, but the politics muddies the waters.
And then, says Pickens, there's perhaps the biggest factor in America's favor: private ownership of mineral rights. America is virtually unique in the world in that private landowners, rather than the state, hold title to the oil and gas under their acres. With average royalty rates in Texas paying landowners 25% off the top for any oil and gas recovered, that's an enormous incentive for ranchers and farmers to welcome drilling rigs onto their land.
That's not the case in Russia, Mexico, China, the Middle East, and virtually everywhere else -- where the government owns the minerals and farmers have to be coerced into giving access to drillers.
The most striking comments from the panel came in response to a question about whether they believed the oil and gas liberalizations underway in Mexico (i.e. allowing private companies to operate alongside state monopoly Pemex) would succeed in spurring production growth there.
Pickens' answer: "No. It will fail."
Why? First of all, because Pemex in its "Round Zero" licensing phase will already cherrypick the best prospects. Second, because corruption in Mexico's oil sector remains rife. Third, because security costs will be substantial in areas controlled by drug cartels -- that includes the Burgos Basin region between the Rio Grande and Monterrey into which the Eagle Ford extends from Texas.
"Eagle Ford gas production is so much cheaper than in the Burgos Basin," says Bill White. So on pure economic grounds it would make more sense for Mexico to import cheap U.S. gas.
Indeed, with so many opportunities in the U.S., the captains of capital will be thinking: why should I try to reinvent the wheel elsewhere when I can just invest in America?Government and rebel-held parts of Syria's Aleppo have been without safe water for nearly three weeks because the war-torn city's only pumping station is not functioning, residents said Thursday.
The cause of the problem is disputed, with some residents saying a lack of fuel was the issue, but a monitor reports that the opposition group controlling the facility shut it down.
"There is a water crisis in the whole city," said Mamun Abu Omar, head of a pro-rebel press agency.
"All our water was from the Euphrates River. The pumps would bring it in, filter it, and it would reach Aleppo's residents," Abu Omar told AFP.
But for the past 20 days, residents have been forced to purchase individual cisterns of unfiltered water.
"The water from these cisterns isn't healthy - it's often uncovered and exposed to the air," Abu Omar said.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group, people were drawing water from wells.
"Many residents have suffered cases of poisoning after drinking this water... Those who can are buying bottled water," the Britain-based monitor said.
An AFP journalist in Aleppo city said the water had caused rashes and cases of poisoning among inhabitants.
In a video filmed by activists, a man identified as a doctor said that residents were suffering gastrointestinal infections after drinking "unsafe" water.
"Water from the wells is not safe to drink, and it's often polluted with insect waste," the man said.
Clashes in the city since mid-2012 have severely damaged Aleppo's electricity infrastructure, leaving the city's sole water pumping station to run on diesel, residents and the Observatory said,
Residents told AFP that the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra Front group, which controls the Sleiman al-Halabi pump, says it has run out of diesel to operate it.
But the Observatory's Abdel Rahman said the group is trying to pressure the government to restore electricity.
"They have issued a list of demands, including constant provision of fuel from the Red Crescent, but mainly they want the regime to provide electricity to all of Aleppo city," he said.
Mohammed al-Khatieb, an activist speaking on the Internet from Aleppo, said an initiative by a neutral grouping of residents was trying to resolve the issue.
Last month, local health authorities issued distress calls over severe fuel shortages resulting from an Islamic State blockade.Atari's 800XL from 1979. Flickr/quagmirez31 After reporting earlier this week that Atari seemed to be working on a new console (and hiring developers) we can now confirm both. CEO Fred Shesnais told GamesBeat today that everyone's favorite classic game company is indeed working on a new console.
While the company did forego any sort of announcement pertaining to the console at E3 this year, we did get this puzzling teaser video a few days before.
There's not a lot of information to be gained from the video, but the YouTube headline "First Look: A brand new Atari product. Years in the making" seemed to hint at a new console. Foregoing a formal announcement at the world's biggest video game conference, however, left us to wonder whether this was indeed the case — and if it were a new console, or an emulator-type system — like the NES Classic— to play old Atari favorites.
Many even wondered if the Ataribox teaser was fake.
Chesnais declined to describe what exactly Atari was working on, but he did say the system was based on PC technology. We'll keep you posted.EW talked with creator/executive Kurt Sutter about the latest episode’s shocking death — and who may be next. But first, SPOILER ALERT! Don’t go to the jump if you haven’t seen the episode.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Did you know at the beginning of the season that you’d kill off Clay?
KURT SUTTER: I had a pretty good sense.
The violence has been crazy. Do you ever ask yourself whether you’ve gone too far?
I guess I don’t necessarily look at it in terms of that. That’s a completely justified question. I guess I don’t necessarily look at an episode and go oh, I’ve done that. I’ve done that. Maybe I shouldn’t do that. For me it’s like I tell the story and as these opportunities come up and if these things feel real and organic and will keep us a little pulpy and epic … I take the opportunity to do them. So, I never necessarily think in terms of is that too much.
Why was it time for Clay to die?
Ultimately he made choices that hurt a lot of other people, that came back to hurt him. And for me, the betrayal of Gemma at the end of last season was the thing that broke him. Once she broke that connection, once she said okay, you’re too despicable for me and to the point where she betrayed him, then it really became the beginning of the end for him. What I tried to do this season was to let him have some sort of self‑awareness and remorse about the choices he’s made. That’s not unrealistic with the way these guys live. Clay begins this season where he’s looking at the end. He doesn’t think he has much time. And so there’s a part of him that’s really trying to clean up the wreckage and make things right before he goes out. It’s interesting to see a guy like that. I didn’t suddenly expect people to turn around and have compassion for this guy, though I think a lot of people were wondering, oh, yes, it’s all a plan. It’s all a play. He’s got something else up his sleeve because that’s who Clay is. I like the idea of a guy who is trying to make it right. He really does want to do the right thing by the club. He really does want to do the right thing by Gemma. And so, that by [the 10th episode] when you think okay, they’ve done everything they could to keep this guy alive and they’re going to keep him alive … when you have some sense that maybe you don’t hate Clay as much as you used to … that’s when we kill Clay. As a storyteller, it would have been too easy for me to put a bullet in his head when he’s just a scumbag. The more interesting arc was have him earn that peace. I think it will be more satisfying for people. Because as much as people say that want Clay dead, they don’t want Clay dead. They want to still see that relationship play out. They want to see it be complicated. They want to see how Gemma feels about betraying Clay. They want to see how Juice feels about betraying Clay. They want to see that play out even though in their gut, they know the guy should be dead. It would be very unsatisfying I think to have killed him already. Here’s a guy who’s lived by a certain code and done bad sh– but at least, you know, let him go out dying with some of the nobility.
Has Jax become Clay?
The sort of irony of the crown is that you can’t necessarily sit at the head of that table and not become Clay. In Jax’s mind, he is the anti‑Clay. Like he’s doing everything for completely different reasons. But the truth is, the behavior is still the same. Ultimately that’s what Chibs is trying to get through to him. But in Jax’s mind, he knows he’s not Clay. He’s not doing things out of greed. He’s not doing things out of self‑motivation. In his mind, he’s doing things for his family and the club, but he’s still doing things like Clay would do them. How do you rectify that? It’ll be up and down for Jax, as it should be. I think he’ll have those moments where he has awareness and does the right thing and then he’ll have those moments in episodes where, you know, he is who he is and he’s going to respond the way he knows how to respond.
So who else is going to meet Mr. Mayhem?
I don’t kill off characters, you know, at least the main characters easily. It would be difficult if I got rid of characters like Tig and Juice and Chibs, especially with Opie gone. They feel like family to people. You have to be very careful not to be arbitrary in terms of who lives and who dies.Introduction
Ted Waitt, co-founder of Gateway, Inc. Jack Smith/AP
Elections are notoriously tough for independent political candidates. And it appears just as difficult out there for super PACs touting politicians not affiliated with either major political party.
The super PAC icPurple Inc. — established in April 2012 to support “in |
STATUS: Ryan Bird, a spokesperson for the TDSB, sent us an email confirming its use as an exit and entrance to the Market Lane passageway. “It was used for a brief time prior to leaks developing, at which point it stopped being used. The tunnel is currently on the school’s list of needed repairs, but it is not urgent and will likely not be addressed in the near future,” he said, noting the school board’s $3.4 billion repair backlog. “In the meantime, staff will be taking a look at the tunnel to determine if it is even necessary. Students currently cross the street to the park with the help of a crossing guard.” What’s broken in your neighbourhood? Wherever you are in Greater Toronto, we want to know. To contact us, go to thestar.com/yourtoronto/the_fixer or call us at 416-869-4823 email jlakey@thestar.ca. To read our blog, go to thestar.com/news/the_fixer. Report problems and follow us on Twitter @TOStarFixer.Corporate Profits Take a Sharp Hit as Revised Numbers show a 1 Percent Annual Rate of Decrease in US GDP
The second revision of the US national income accounts for the first quarter of 2014, released today by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, showed that real GDP fell at an annual rate of -1.0 percent. The advance report had shown an annual rate of increase of 0.1 percent. Today’s report also showed that corporate profits fell sharply in the quarter.
As the following table shows, most of the change in the numbers between the advance and second estimates for the quarter came from a much faster rundown of inventories than had previously been reported. Inventory depletion contributed -1.62 percentage points to growth, compared with the advance estimate of -.57 percent. Fixed investment was marginally higher than previously reported.
Other sectors showed less change. Consumption was fractionally stronger than previously reported. Government spending decreased a bit more than reported earlier, with all the change due to a bigger decrease at the state and local government level. Exports decreased a bit less than previously estimated, but the decrease in net exports was slightly greater because imports rose, rather than decreasing slightly, as reported in the advance estimate. (Imports are entered in the national income accounts with a negative sign, so that a the positive 0.24 percentage points for the advance estimate shows a decrease while the -.12 points for the second estimate shows an increase.)
Today’s data release included the first look at corporate profits for the first quarter. Profits, which have been at or near record highs for the past two years, fell precipitously. Corporate profits before tax with inventory valuation adjustment fell by 10 percent, while after tax profits fell by 14 percent. As a share of GDP, corporate profits were the lowest since 2010. However, as the following chart shows, after-tax profits still account for a larger share of GDP than they did even at the peak of the pre-recession boom, and before-tax profits also remain well above their historical averages.
The decrease in real GDP in the first quarter is particularly unwelcome since it comes at a time when official estimates show that the US economy is still operating well below potential. Some observers still think that the first quarter downturn may be an aberration caused by harsh winter weather. Additional data on employment and output to be released over the next two months will show whether that was the case.But even such a dramatic house cleaning doesn't change the reality: a large number of organizations focused on achieving a single goal – however desirable that goal – makes achieving that goal more difficult. That's certainly the case in corporate management, where such an approach typically results in fragmented markets and reduced market share for an ever-larger number of market participants. Of course, in the for-profit world, there are any number of solutions to the problem of too many companies competing for the same customers. Companies, for a variety of reasons, fail all the time. And as part of that process, their investors and shareholders lose their investment and, in theory, become smarter about where and how to invest the next time.
Yes, I'm aware that nonprofits sometimes close their doors and disappear. I also know that in 2011 the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of some 275,000 nonprofit groups for failing to file an annual information return or notice with the agency for three consecutive years.
As someone who came to a second career in nonprofit management after working at some of the best-known consumer products companies in the world, I'd ask that we carefully consider whether there might simply be too many small nonprofits and charities in the United States for them all to be effective.
Every year, Americans start thousands of nonprofit organizations. Some are dedicated to eradicating disease, others to addressing social issues such as poverty, homelessness, or gun violence. In fact, according to the Urban Institute, the number of registered nonprofits in the United States grew some 25 percent, to 1.57 million, between 2001 and 2011.
PhilanTopic is on vacation this week. While we're away, we'll be sharing some of our favorite posts from the last year or three. This post was originally published in April 2014. Enjoy.
In contrast, an over-supply of small nonprofits and charities typically leads to duplication of effort, an ever-growing percentage of scarce resources devoted to overhead, an overall reduction in funding for new ideas and approaches (i.e., R&D), and, critically, more competition for donor funding and other kinds of support.
I'm not suggesting that the nonprofit sector should operate like the for-profit sector. Nor am I dismissing the possibility that large organizations can have a significant impact on a major social, environmental, or health issue. They can, and have…but largely because they have the resources to bring to bear on a problem that small nonprofits and charities simply lack.
Yes, a small nonprofit that employs new social media or crowdsourcing tools, or one that has a better solution to a problem, may grow up to become the twenty-first century equivalent of the Red Cross or American Heart Association. Every iconic nonprofit with which you are familiar was, at one point in time, a start-up. That's the alluring promise of the nonprofit sector – the possibility of creating an innovative solution to a problem that will improve the human condition.
No, what I am saying is that we all need to take a long, hard look at the sector's long-standing tendency to reinvent the wheel. Think about the tens of thousands of new tax-exempt organizations that will be created this year and ask yourself: How much thought did the founders of those nonprofits give to the question of whether a larger, more established organization could do the same thing they're hoping to do, but better? And what are the chances that any of those new nonprofits will ever have a significant impact on the problem they were founded to address?
As I see it, there's a related question: Why are so many larger, better established nonprofit organizations perfectly content to operate in silos, fenced off from ideas and new approaches pioneered by others? Why is there so little collaboration in the nonprofit space? Has the explosion of nonprofits over the last decade or two turned fundraising into a zero-sum game?
Speaking both as a leader of a large human services nonprofit and as an individual who believes deeply in the sector's potential to come up with innovative solutions to some of our biggest problems, I urge you to consider these questions – and to think twice before taking the plunge and starting your own nonprofit.
At the end of the day, only you can decide whether the expenditure of time and energy, and the financial support of your donors, is the best and most effective way to advance the cause you care about. Just remember: there are others out there doing the same thing who would welcome your passion and contributions to the cause.
Susan Danish is executive director of The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. A founding member of 1,000 Women for Mentoring, she is a member of the board of the National Human Services Assembly and national representative for the U.S. for the International Association for Volunteer Effort.Garry Ringrose, Sean O'Brien, Rory Scannell, and Ross Molony. Just four players who have had big seasons in 2015/16, who owe their development to their time spent with the Ireland U-20s this year.
Ireland have been warming up for tournament next month with games against Leinster and Munster development teams.
WATCH: Highlights of Thursday's clash @thomondstadium where Munster A/Development defeated Ireland U20s 26-24https://t.co/z4IknvrZNp — Munster Rugby (@Munsterrugby) May 21, 2016
Nigel Carolan named his 28-man squad for the upcoming Junior World Cup for the latest crop of U-20s after a mixed year in the Six Nations. There is some real talent in this squad, not least captain James Ryan who has already been compared to Paul O'Connell.
But the other 27 names in the team should be watched too, and here is everything you need to know about these players.
Ireland U20s 2016:
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Loosehead Props:
1st Choice: Andrew Porter.
Also in the Squad: James Bollard, Vakh Abdaladze.
Andrew Porter is an absolute beast. He was the second most impressive Ireland forward in the Six Nations and will have a big career.
The best way to describe Porter is that he is Cian Healy-esque without the impression that he feels the need to smash his head through a window.
St. Michael's College past pupil James Bollard was his backup during the Six Nations, and it was a clear first choice backup role for Bollard. It's likely to remain that way, but the presence of the uncapped Vakh Abdaladze who was brilliant in Clontarf's march to the Ulster Bank League title might complicate that.
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Hookers:
1st Choice: Adam McBurney
Backup: Vincent O'Brien.
For someone who already has a year's experience at U-20 level, Adam McBurney was underwhelming in the Six Nations. The Ulster hooker is a better player than he showed in February and March - where his line-out throwing wasn't the best.
Munster's Shane Fenton has been ruled out through injury, so his backup at provincial level Vincent O'Brien comes in.
Ireland could really use one of these hookers to develop. We've never had an Ireland U-20 hooker go on to play for the Ireland senior team, and one of the best in recent years - George McGuigan has just been named in the England Saxons squad.
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Injured: Shane Fenton
Tighthead Prop:
1st Choice: Conor Kenny
Backup: Ben Betts
Promising Connacht tight-head Conan O'Donnell has failed to overcome an injury. O'Donnell has senior appearances for Connacht this season, and was exceptional in last year's Junior World Cup. He probably wasn't at his best in the Six Nations - but in his Connacht teammate Conor Kenny and Munster's Ben Betts - Carolan has two quality options at his disposal.
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You'd have to think that both Kenny and Betts have the potential to at least have provincial careers. Kenny is a big prop who is extremely mobile and powerful. His technique needs a bit of work, but has been greatly improved since entering the Connacht sub-academy. Betts is more of a traditional scrummager.
I would expect a near equal share of time given to both props. Kenny is more likely to stand out to regular viewers, but might have a greater impact off the bench.
Injured: Conan O'Donnell
Second Rows:
1st Choice: Sean O'Connor & James Ryan
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We all know about James Ryan. His Six Nations partner, Peter Claffey is injured however. Sean O'Connor is the only other sole lock in the squad - but both Munster's Evan Mintern, and Connacht's Cillian Gallagher have played there before.
Mintern played with Ryan against Munster development last week:
Ireland U20 teamsheet for game versus Munster Development/A, via @Munsterrugby. pic.twitter.com/nFySiMQYPP — Murray Kinsella (@Murray_Kinsella) May 19, 2016
Blindside Flankers:
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1st Choice: Cillian Gallagher
Backup: Greg Jones
Still only U-19, Sligo RFC's Gallagher was the player who surprised me the most in the Six Nations. He was brilliant. I had seen him most as a lock, but his all round game from blindside flanker was fantastic. He's got a good engine, and just keeps going.
St. Andrew's alum Greg Jones is also a handy player, getting some game time in the Six Nations. He's more of a traditional backrower. Expect both to get a lot of time - and keep an eye on both to get academy contracts.
Matthew Cosgrove was unlucky to miss out.
Openside Flankers:
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1st Choice: Will Connors
Backup: David Aspil
Ireland flew out of the blocks in their opening Six Nations game with Wales in the first half, and the biggest reason why was the running game of Will Connors. It was my first exposure to Connors, and it seemed like he was part of every good thing that Ireland did.
Connors had to leave that game early, and Ireland ended up letting that game slip away from them to a strong Wales team, but it was mostly errors from misfiring backs.
Dan Walsh was unlucky to miss out after impressing in the Six Nations.
No. 8s:
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First Choice: Max Deegan
Backup: Evan Mintern
Max Deegan has been on the radar for a while. His Six Nations was interrupted by a concussion - but the strong No. 8 is a leader. He carries well, putting himself about. Mintern will probably play more in the second row, meaning we'll see a lot of Deegan before he goes into the Leinster academy.
Scrumhalves:
First Choice: Stephen Kerins
Backup: Niall Saunders
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For the third year in a row, a Munster scrumhalf who played in the Six Nations doesn't make the Junior World Cup squad. This time, it's John Poland. Poland started the Six Nations with a man of the match performance against Wales - but fell out of favour for Kerins by the end.
Kerins is a livewire of a scrumhalf. He's one of the best when given front foot ball, and will provide extremely quick ball to his outside backs. Kerins looks less than assured when his pack is under pressure - who doesn't? - but with Ireland's tricky pool draw, that might happen a lot.
Niall Saunders is a Harlequins academy player, who replaced Poland in the Six Nations. Highly thought of in England, he's one to watch.
Outhalves:
First Choice: Bill Johnston
Backup: Johnny McPhillips
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Bill Johnston is Munster's most hyped back since Keith Earls.I'll admit I've yet to seen him play - but as an 18-year-old already featured for Munster A, and Munster in the pre-season. Injury ruled him out of the Six Nations - meaning that his U-19 colleague Johnny McPhillips got the start.
McPhillips was less than assured in the tournament, growing into the game. He improved massively when Brett Connon started to play - and mixed in some fantastic kicking, with some questionable decisions. That's a fixable mistake, and one that will come with more experience. He's still only 19, and this is where he's meant to learn.
Centres:
First Choice: Conor O'Brien & Shane Daly
Backups: Jimmy O'Brien & Paul Kiernan
Shane Daly was the favourite of many during the Six Nations. The Munster centre scored two tries, and the consensus was that he was one of the better backs.
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I thought Conor O'Brien showed a bit more however. Comfortable from 11-14, O'Brien is a strong running player, with power and pace. He does have a little bit of subtlety to his game however.
Backing them up is Jimmy O'Brien and Munster U-20 captain Paul 'Chippy' Kiernan. O'Brien is a former outhalf, who plays as a second-five eighth. Chippy is an undersized centre who is probably the most talented centre of the lot. Kiernan didn't really get the opportunity to show us what he can do.
Munster bound centre Sam Arnold would have been the best player in the squad, but was unavailable through injury.
Back Three:
First Choice: Jacob Stockdale, Hugo Keenan, & Matthew Byrne
Backup: Tery Kennedy
Stockdale is the best and most versatile player in the backs. He missed the start of the Six Nations due to Ulster senior squad commitments, and Ireland didn't lose when he came back. He's been tried at full-back in the warm-ups with Jack Power out, and Brett Connon inexplicably left out.
Tery Kennedy is a pacy player with 7s experience, but I'd expect Keenan and Byrne to continue their run as the first choice.
Jack Power was the first choice full-back in the Six Nations, but was injured. Newcastle's Brett Connon should be in the squad.
See Also: Five Irish U20s Who Showed They Can Make The Step Up To The ProsIt’s that time of year again! Wonder Festival! Lots of great figures are coming up in the next few months. I hope you are excited as much as I am.
As per usual this is just a the scaled/prepainted figures that appear at Wonderfest. You can view the full list of items here. There are also NSFW figures throughout these pages. I marked them with a NSFW banner at the top of the section if the company has any. If I missed anything let me know! There is a lot to sort through.
Just a disclaimer, I didn’t take any of these photos. If you took one of the photos and would like me to credit you and or have me take it off this website, please contact me.
Go directly to company: Max Factory | Good Smile Company | Kotobukiya | Alter | Alphamax | FREEing | Mega House | Wing | Griffon Enterprises | Plum | Pulchra | Native | Phat Company | Aquamarine | Union Creative International Ltd | Ques Q | Bandai | Aoshima | Di molto bene | Broccoli | Kaitendoh | Flare | Aniplex | Orca Toys | SEGA | AmiAmi Zero | Embrace Japan | Rockey Boy | Lechery | X-Plus | OtherLast December, kitchen helpers, wait staff and dim sum chefs at two Regal Chinese restaurants in Scarborough and Richmond Hill learned that their employer was abruptly closing its doors. According to the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, about 60 workers now find themselves owed a total of $300,000 in unpaid wages, overtime, vacation pay and termination pay. If the numbered Ontario companies operating the restaurants simply declared bankruptcy or entered receivership, these workers could apply to the federal Wage Earner Protection Program (WEPP). The WEPP pays workers the unpaid wages they are owed — up front, subject to an annual cap. Then the federal government joins the bankruptcy or receivership proceedings as a creditor to recover those monies.
Regal Palace restaurant in Richmond Hill closed its doors last December without paying its employees the hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to them. ( Provided )
Unfortunately, in the Regal case, it wasn’t quite so simple. Although the controlling director filed for personal bankruptcy in July, the company formally employing Regal workers must file for bankruptcy or become subject to receivership for workers to be eligible for the WEPP. This case is not uncommon, and highlights one of the shortcomings of the WEPP, which is now undergoing a five-year review. Since coming into effect in 2008, the WEPP has provided a measure of fairness for precarious workers trying to recoup unpaid wages from defaulting employers. According to Industry Canada, more than 60 per cent of bankruptcies in a given year can occur in industries like retail and accommodation and food services, sectors characterized by low-paid, precarious employment, often lacking union protection. As important as the Wage Earner Protection Program is, however, there are key shortcomings that need addressing.
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First and foremost, the ceiling on payments is too low. The maximum WEPP payment, equal to four weeks of maximum insurable earnings under the Employment Insurance Act ($3,738 in 2014), means that too many workers are recovering only a portion of the money owed to them. According to the government’s statistics, the average amount owed is equal to twice the maximum WEPP payment, and the average WEPP payment as a share of the amount owed to workers is falling. The federal government needs to dramatically increase, or even eliminate, the cap on unpaid wages recoverable under the program. Second, employers commonly walk away from businesses, shut their doors or change names without entering formal restructuring or officially declaring bankruptcy. The government should therefore look at more ways that the WEPP could apply to defaulting employers who have substantially ceased operations, but have not declared bankruptcy. At a minimum, WEPP’s coverage for monies owed should be extended to two years after cease of operations prior to bankruptcy, receivership or commencement of restructuring proceedings. Finally, there is a close link between employment standards violations of workers while on the job and the wage theft that occurs when employers shut their doors. Low-wage, precarious workers are already at higher risk of wage theft and employment standards violations, including unpaid wages, overtime violations and minimum wage violations. Newcomers and immigrant workers are often paid under the table, making it difficult to prove unpaid wages in the event the employer does go bankrupt. There is no substitute for strong enforcement of employment standards legislation, with strong measures to deter employers from breaking the rules. But workers would also standards from better integration between the WEPP and provincial employment standards enforcement. Whenever workers file a proof of claim under the WEPP, a file should be opened with the provincial ministry of labour section responsible for administering employment standards. In 1991, the Ontario government amended the Employment Standards Act to include an employee wage protection program. The provincial program helped workers recover unpaid wages from insolvent and bankrupt employers, but also when employers didn’t pay for other reasons. It’s worth noting that defaulting employers could be ordered to pay a maximum of $5,000, a limit that even in 1991 was well above today’s maximum WEPP payment. We can and should do a lot more for vulnerable workers victimized by unscrupulous employers. Hassan Yussuff is president of the Canadian Labour Congress.Steven Gerrard has revealed that the next MLS season could be his last as a player, with rumours of a Liverpool loan unlikely.
The 35-year-old’s maiden campaign with the LA Galaxy ended in disappointment, losing out to Seattle Sounders in the knockout round of the MLS Cup playoffs at the end of October.
Galaxy finished fifth in the Western Conference, but failed to secure silverware, with Gerrard’s defensive mixup with goalkeeper Donovan Ricketts at fault for Seattle’s second goal in a 3-2 defeat.
Gerrard scored two goals and assisted on three in 14 MLS appearances this season, and will be hoping to improve his output in what he admits could be his last campaign in football.
“It could be my last season as a footballer,” he told the Galaxy’s official website.
“I certainly don’t want to feel like I’m feeling right now come next year.
“I’d love to go out on a high. It’s a long season and I only came here for the last four months, but I’ll certainly be better for the experience next year.”
Much of Gerrard’s struggles came due to a culture shock on his arrival in Los Angeles, with the former Reds captain seemingly underestimating the challenges of MLS.
“Going on the road, playing on turf, playing at altitude, playing in humidity, those are the hurdles that I’ve had to face over the last three months that I wasn’t aware of,” he continued.
“Every away game has a different challenge.”
Gerrard has returned to Liverpool for the off-season, and could train with Jurgen Klopp‘s squad to preserve his fitness.
But it is unlikely that the midfielder will return to the club in a playing capacity this January, despite suggestions on the contrary on his Reds departure.
“I have been invited to come back and spend time here and join in with the lads in training, which is a fantastic gesture from the club,” he said in May.
“So I will certainly be around during the winter months.
“Some [other] clubs have already asked about a loan, but that would be a very difficult one. I plan stay in touch with people at Liverpool who I have long-term relationships with.”
But, when asked whether Gerrard and fellow Galaxy Designated Player Robbie Keane could leave the club on loan this winter, Galaxy head coach Bruce Arena refuted any suggestions.
Speaking to reporters at the end of October, the 64-year-old responded with a curt, one-word answer: “No.”
This underlines the Galaxy’s intention to preserve their squad during the winter months.
Gerrard would likely find himself at odds with Klopp’s hugely demanding midfield system, but his presence at Melwood could be a vital boost as the German plots a top-four challenge this season.The following instruction was released by the Department of Defense on February 27, 2013.
1. PURPOSE. In accordance with the authority in DoD Directive (DoDD) 5111.1 and Deputy Secretary of Defense Memorandum (References (a) and (b)), this Instruction:
a. Establishes DoD policy, assigns responsibilities, and provides procedures for DoD support to Federal, State, tribal, and local civilian law enforcement agencies, including responses to civil disturbances within the United States, including the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and any territory or possession of the United States or any other political subdivision thereof in accordance with DoDD 3025.18 (Reference (c)).
b. Prescribes the regulations required by section 375 of title 10, United States Code (U.S.C.) (Reference (d)).
c. Incorporates and cancels DoDDs 3025.12, 5525.5, and 5030.46 (References (e), (f), and (g)).
…
4. POLICY. It is DoD policy that:
a. DoD shall be prepared to support civilian law enforcement agencies consistent with the needs of military preparedness of the United States, while recognizing and conforming to the legal limitations on direct DoD involvement in civilian law enforcement activities.
b. Support of civilian law enforcement agencies by DoD personnel shall be provided in accordance with sections 112, 351, 831, 1116, 1751, and 1385 (also known and hereinafter referred to as “The Posse Comitatus Act, as amended”) of title 18, U.S.C. (Reference (n)); chapter 18 of Reference (d); section 1970 of title 2, U.S.C. (Reference (o)) (for support to the U.S. Capitol Police); and other Federal laws, including those protecting the civil rights and civil liberties of individuals, as applicable.
…
ENCLOSURE 3
PARTICIPATION OF DoD PERSONNEL IN CIVILIAN LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITIES
1. GUIDING STATUTORY REQUIREMENTS AND SUPPORTING POLICIES
a. Statutory Restrictions
(1) The primary restriction on DoD participation in civilian law enforcement activities is the Posse Comitatus Act. It provides that whoever willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute U.S. laws, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, shall be fined under Reference (n), or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.
(2) Section 375 of Reference (d) provides that the Secretary of Defense shall prescribe such regulations as may be necessary to ensure that any activity (including the provision of any equipment or facility or the assignment or detail of any personnel) under chapter 18 of Reference (d) does not include or permit direct participation by a member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps in a search, seizure, arrest, or other similar activity unless participation in such activity by such member is otherwise authorized by law.
b. Permissible Direct Assistance. Categories of active participation in direct law-enforcement-type activities (e.g., search, seizure, and arrest) that are not restricted by law or DoD policy are:
(1) Actions taken for the primary purpose of furthering a DoD or foreign affairs function of the United States, regardless of incidental benefits to civil authorities. This does not include actions taken for the primary purpose of aiding civilian law enforcement officials or otherwise serving as a subterfuge to avoid the restrictions of the Posse Comitatus Act. Actions under this provision may include (depending on the nature of the DoD interest and the authority governing the specific action in question):
(a) Investigations and other actions related to enforcement of chapter 47 of Reference (d) (also known as “the Uniform Code of Military Justice”).
(b) Investigations and other actions that are likely to result in administrative proceedings by the DoD, regardless of whether there is a related civil or criminal proceeding. (See DoDI 5525.07 (Reference (u)) and Memorandum of Agreement Between the AG and the Secretary of Defense (Reference (v)) with respect to matters in which the DoD and the Department of Justice both have an interest.)
(c) Investigations and other actions related to a commander’s inherent authority to maintain law and order on a DoD installation or facility.
(d) Protection of classified defense information or equipment or controlled unclassified information (e.g., trade secrets and other proprietary information), the unauthorized disclosure of which is prohibited by law.
(e) Protection of DoD personnel, equipment, and official guests.
(f) Such other actions that are undertaken primarily for a military or foreign affairs purpose.
(2) Audits and investigations conducted by, under the direction of, or at the request of the IG, DoD, pursuant to the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended.
(3) When permitted under emergency authority in accordance with Reference (c), Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances because:
(a) Such activities are necessary to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order; or,
(b) When duly constituted Federal, State, or local authorities are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for Federal property or Federal governmental functions. Federal action, including the use of Federal military forces, is authorized when necessary to protect Federal property or functions.
(4) DoD actions taken pursuant to sections 331-334 of Reference (d) relating to the use of Federal military forces in specified circumstances with respect to insurrection, domestic violence, or conspiracy that hinders the execution of State or Federal law.
(5) Actions taken under express statutory authority to assist officials in executing the laws, subject to applicable limitations. The laws that permit direct DoD participation in civilian law enforcement include:
(a) Protection of national parks and certain other Federal lands consistent with sections 23, 78, and 593 of title 16, U.S.C. (Reference (w)).
(b) Enforcement of the Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, as amended, pursuant to section 1861(a) of Reference (w).
(c) Assistance in the case of crimes against foreign officials, official guests of the United States, and other internationally protected persons pursuant to sections 112 and 1116 of Reference (n).
(d) Assistance in the case of crimes against Members of Congress, Members-of-Congress-elect, Justices of the Supreme Court and nominees, and certain senior Executive Branch officials and nominees in accordance with section 351 of Reference (n).
(e) Assistance in the case of crimes involving nuclear materials in accordance with section 831 of Reference (n).
(f) Protection of the President, Vice President, and other designated dignitaries in accordance with section 1751 of Reference (n) and Public Law 94-524 (Reference (x)).
(g) Actions taken in support of the neutrality laws in accordance with sections 408 and 461-462 of title 22, U.S.C. (Reference (y)).
(h) Removal of persons unlawfully present on Indian lands in accordance with section 180 of title 25, U.S.C. (Reference (z)).
(i) Execution of quarantine and certain health laws in accordance with section 97 of title 42, U.S.C. (Reference (aa)) and DoDI 6200.03 (Reference (ab)).
(j) Removal of unlawful enclosures from public lands in accordance with section 1065 of title 43, U.S.C. (Reference (ac)).
(k) Protection of the rights of a discoverer of an island covered by section 1418 of title 48, U.S.C. (Reference (ad)).
(l) Support of territorial governors if a civil disorder occurs, in accordance with sections 1422 and 1591 of Reference (ad).
(m) Actions in support of certain customs laws in accordance with section 220 of title 50, U.S.C. (Reference (ae)).
(6) Actions taken to provide search and rescue support domestically under the authorities provided in the National Search and Rescue Plan (Reference (af)) and DoDI 3003.01 (Reference (ag)).
…
ENCLOSURE 4
DoD SUPPORT OF CDO
1. GUIDING STATUTORY REQUIREMENTS AND SUPPORTING POLICIES
a. The President is authorized by the Constitution and laws of the United States to employ the Armed Forces of the United States to suppress insurrections, rebellions, and domestic violence under various conditions and circumstances. Planning and preparedness by the Federal Government, including DoD, for civil disturbances is important due to the potential severity of the consequences of such events for the Nation and the population.
b. The primary responsibility for protecting life and property and maintaining law and order in the civilian community is vested in State and local governments. Supplementary responsibility is vested by statute in specific agencies of the Federal Government other than DoD. The President has additional powers and responsibilities under the Constitution of the United States to ensure that law and order are maintained.
c. Any employment of Federal military forces in support of law enforcement operations shall maintain the primacy of civilian authority and unless otherwise directed by the President, responsibility for the management of the Federal response to civil disturbances rests with the Attorney General. The Attorney General is responsible for receiving State requests for Federal military assistance, coordinating such requests with the Secretary of Defense and other appropriate Federal officials, and presenting such requests to the President who will determine what Federal action will be taken.
d. The employment of Federal military forces to control civil disturbances shall only occur in a specified civil jurisdiction under specific circumstances as authorized by the President, normally through issuance of an Executive order or other Presidential directive authorizing and directing the Secretary of Defense to provide for the restoration of law and order in a specific State or locality in accordance with sections 331-334 of Reference (d).
e. Planning by the DoD Components for CDO shall be compatible with contingency plans for national security emergencies, and with planning for DSCA pursuant to Reference (c). For example:
(1) Guidelines concerning the use of deputized State or local law enforcement powers by DoD uniformed law enforcement personnel are outlined in Reference (ah).
(2) Guidelines concerning the use of deadly force and/or the carrying of firearms by DoD personnel while engaged in duties related to security or law and order, criminal investigations, or counterintelligence investigations; protecting personnel; protecting vital Government assets; or guarding Government installations and sites, property, and persons (including prisoners) are outlined in Reference (ai) and any additional Secretary of Defense-approved rules for the use of force contained in Reference (aj).
2. DoD REQUIREMENTS
a. Federal military forces shall not be used for CDO unless specifically authorized by the President, except under emergency authority as provided in Reference (c) and subparagraph 1.b.(3) of Enclosure 3.
b. Federal military forces shall be made available for CDO as directed by the President. The Secretary of Defense or other authorized DoD official may, where authorized and consistent with the direction of the President, establish the source and composition of those forces to achieve appropriate balance with other national security or DoD priorities.
c. Federal military forces employed in CDO shall remain under Secretary of Defense command and control at all times.
d. The pre-positioning of Federal military forces for CDO shall not exceed a battalion-sized unit in a single location unless a larger force is authorized by the President.
e. DoD Components shall not take charge of any function of civil government unless absolutely necessary under conditions of extreme emergency (e.g., when using emergency authority as described in Reference (c) and subparagraph1.b.(3) of Enclosure 3). Any commander who is directed, or undertakes, to control such functions shall strictly limit DoD actions to emergency needs and shall facilitate the reestablishment of civil responsibility at the earliest time possible.next Image 1 of 2
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A massive sinkhole that opened up under a Kentucky museum Wednesday morning swallowed several vintage and rare Corvettes.
The National Corvette Museum said the Bowling Green Fire Department estimates the sinkhole to be around 25-30 feet deep and 40 feet wide.
"This is going to be an interesting situation," Museum Executive Director Wendell Strode told the Bowling Green Daily News, noting that a structural engineer is at the Bowling Green facility to evaluate the damage inside its Sky Dome section.
Six of the cars in the sinkhole are owned by the museum; two others are owned by General Motors.
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"It is with heavy hearts that we report that eight Corvettes were affected by this incident," the museum said in a press release.
The museum said the cars are a 1993 ZR-1 Spyder and 2009 ZR1 "Blue Devil" on loan from General Motors; a 1962 Black Corvette; 1984 PPG Pace Car; 1992 White 1 Millionth Corvette; 1993 Ruby Red 40th Anniversary Corvette; 2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette and a 2009 White 1.5 Millionth Corvette.
Strode told the Courier-Journal that emergency personnel allowed museum staff to remove the only surviving 1983 Corvette, which was at risk of joining |
. Griffin also awkwardly connects her experience to the sexual harassment scandal in Hollywood even though her situation was a) self-inflicted and b) didn’t involve sexual harassment.
“I just want to be honest,” Griffin said. “As far as what we’re going through and hoping this is a turning point for feminism and women’s equality, I just want you to know that at 57, for me it’s not a marathon, it’s a sprint,” she added.
“You know I read today that my pal Lena Dunham is sticking up for some male writer that was accused of sexual harassment…I don’t know the details but my first instinct is ‘Girl, that’s not helping the movement,” Griffin said.
Griffin is referring to a story which broke last Friday, though Dunham later retracted her statement and said she regretted making it. Griffin never explains what her situation has to do with Lena Dunham but she seems to be implying that supporting her career is somehow part and parcel of standing up for sexual assault victims.
“I just want you guys to know I’m fully in the middle of a blacklist,” Griffin said. She continued, “I am in the middle of a Hollywood blacklist. It is real. I am not booked on any talk shows.” “When I get home I do not have one single day of paid work in front of me,” she added.
Griffin later veered off into borderline paranoia saying, “There’s a lot of forces coming against people like me that are trying to do something.” She added, “I mean, look at Harvey Weinstein hired Kroll…and some company called Black Cube to, like, follow Rose McGowan. So, you know, I’m kind of assuming I’m next. I’m already on the Interpol list and all this other stuff.”
“I know I took a picture that offended a lot of people,” Griffin said, “but this wall of crap has never fallen on any woman in the history of America like it has on me.” There’s no doubt Griffin has taken a beating since her severed head stunt went viral. If she wanted to say that no comic has ever been attacked by the president the way she has been, she might have a point. But having brought up sexual assault accusations twice, her comment about having it worse than any woman in history is pretty tone deaf.
Having invited the comparison herself, it’s fair to ask: Does Kathy Griffin really think she has had it worse than Rose McGowan? Does she have it worse than someone who (allegedly) was raped and then had actual spies befriend her to get information out of her? I don’t think so.
Maybe that’s not the comparison Griffin intended but it’s the one her monologue almost begs us to make. It’s not a good look for Griffin. In fact, even Lena Dunham, fresh from putting her foot in her feminist mouth, probably would have advised her to avoid suggesting she’s had it worse than any woman ever.
The one common thread since this story began is that Griffin continues to be her own worst enemy.Abortion rights groups have announced a press conference, apparently to announce a lawsuit challenging the state's new abortion restrictions set to take effect Oct. 29.
On Friday morning, the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Reproductive Rights and Planned Parenthood said they will announce "a new joint effort in support of women's health."
These three groups have come together in the past to challenge similar restrictions in other states.
The new law, going into effect at the end of next month, includes a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Additionally, it requires physicians performing surgical abortions or administering abortion-inducing medication to have admitting privileges at a hospital less than 30 miles from where the abortion is performed. Physicians will also be required to follow FDA protocol when administering abortion-inducing medication.
Another requirement that all abortion facilities meet the same standards as surgical centers goes into effect next year.A Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee met Thursday afternoon to examine the government’s process for granting security clearance.
The purpose of the meeting was to figure out how someone like Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, could get access to some of the most secret information in the country.
The subcommittee failed in that regard: Merton Miller, associate director of investigations at the Office of Personnel, said he had no information on Snowden’s specific case. OPM Inspector General Patrick McFarland said he did have information on Snowden, but couldn’t reveal it to the committee just yet.
That’s not to say that the committee lacked revelation. Six witnesses and three lawmakers revealed a security clearance system so broken that it would be comical if a 29-year-old wasn’t hiding in Hong Kong and leaking American secrets to the press.
They include:
87 percent of background checks are never fully completed. OPM uses the information it has to make a judgment on whether to approve these checks.
There are no uniform guidelines across the government for different levels of clearance. This means that top-secret clearance at one agency means something completely different at another.
Within each agency, there are no strict guidelines for determining security clearance.
USIS, a private contractor, conducts 65 percent of all U.S. government background checks.
USIS, which conducted a background check on Snowden, is now under investigation by OPM’s IG for failing to conduct proper background checks.
OPM has already paid USIS $200 million this year.
The $1-billion-dollar fund that OPM uses to pay for background checks has never been audited.
OPM’s IG said they have not been granted access to documentation on the fund.
Miller said the documentation did not exist.
Even if it did exist, OPM’s IG said he didn’t have the staff to audit the fund.
OPM’s IG was unable to answer the first two questions he was asked without extensive consultation with members of the audience.
One question was passed from one witness, then to another, who called someone named Stanley Sims out of the audience to answer it.
I didn’t catch Sims’ title, but he did say there are more than 10,000 private facilities in the United States that have security clearance.
Eighteen OPM investigators have been convicted of falsifying information contained in investigations they’ve conducted. Eleven work for OPM, while the other seven work for private contractors.
Forty other investigators are currently being investigated for falsifying background checks.
When asked if there are more than 40, IG McFarland said, “I believe there may be considerably more. I don't believe we've caught it all by any stretch.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) asked Miller why OPM so heavily relied on contractors.
He answered because they were cheaper than hiring government workers.
She asked him for a cost-benefit analysis proving this.
He said there is no cost benefit analysis.
McCaskill again asked how he knew they were cheaper.
Because they are cheaper, Miller said.
“I'm tired of this assumption that contractors are cheaper. I just think it's easier,” McCaskill then said.
With that, Thursday’s matinee of the absurd lowered its curtain.
Little was revealed about Snowden. But the hearing did prove what McCaskill said in her opening statement: OPM is a “government agency where there is rampant fraud, limited accountability, and no respect for taxpayer dollars.” It also revealed how easy it was for Snowden to get access to the nation’s most sacred secrets.
“This situation we have with Snowden,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-MO) said, “we shouldn't be surprised at all.”Schools face relentless pressure to up their offerings in the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math. Few are making the case for philosophy.
Maybe they should.
Nine- and 10-year-old children in England who participated in a philosophy class once a week over the course of a year significantly boosted their math and literacy skills, with disadvantaged students showing the most significant gains, according to a large and well-designed study (pdf).
More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another’s thoughts and ideas.
Kids who took the course increased math and reading scores by the equivalent of two extra months of teaching, even though the course was not designed to improve literacy or numeracy. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds saw an even bigger leap in performance: reading skills increased by four months, math by three months, and writing by two months. Teachers also reported a beneficial impact on students’ confidence and ability to listen to others.
The study was conducted by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a non-profit group that wants to close the gap between family income and educational attainment. The EEF tested the effectiveness of the philosophy intervention through a randomized controlled trial, similar to the way many drugs are tested.
Twenty-two schools acted as a control group, while students at the other 26 took the philosophy class (which met once a week for 40 minutes). The researchers tried to control for school quality: in each one, at least a quarter of students received free lunch and many had significant populations performing below grade level.
The beneficial effects of philosophy lasted for two years, with the intervention group continuing to outperform the control group long after the classes had finished. “They had been given new ways of thinking and expressing themselves,”said Kevan Collins, chief executive of the EEF. “They had been thinking with more logic and more connected ideas.”
England is not the first country to experiment with teaching kids philosophy. The program the EEF used, called P4C (philosophy for children), was designed by professor Matthew Lippman in New Jersey in the 1970s to teach thinking skills through philosophical dialog. In 1992, the Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education (SAPERE) was set up in the UK to emulate that work. P4C has been adopted by schools in 60 countries.
SAPERE’s program does not focus on reading the texts of Plato and Kant, but rather stories, poems, or film clips that prompt discussions about philosophical issues. The goal is to help children reason, formulate and ask questions, engage in constructive conversation, and develop arguments.
Collins hopes the latest evidence will convince heads of schools, who have significantly more power in the UK than in the US, to make room for philosophy in their budgets. The program costs schools £16 ($23) per student to run.
Programs like this “push you toward teaching up, not down, to disadvantaged children,” Collins told Quartz. “It’s not a reductionist, narrow curriculum, but an expansionist broad curriculum.”
According to the EEF, 63% of British 15-year-olds achieve good results on exams, compared with 37% of disadvantaged students. The group hopes that by using evidence-based research and randomized controlled trials, schools will adopt the most effective policies to address the disparity.
Socrates said that “true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.” But to close the gap in education outcomes, some teachers seem to believe that philosophy has an important role to play.A member of the Prince George’s County Police comforts a grieving woman on Brooke Jane Drive, where officers are investigating the deaths of three children on Friday in Clinton. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
The accused killer of three young girls muttered incoherently as several sheriff’s deputies pulled him to the defendant’s table in a hearing that ended in a near melee among victims’ families in a Prince George’s County courtroom.
Antonio Williams, 25, continued with loud outbursts for the few minutes he sat in his initial court appearance Monday on murder charges in the fatal stabbings of his sister and two cousins, all under the age of 10.
As the judge abruptly ended the proceedings and ordered Williams to undergo a mental health evaluation, a woman triggered chaos as she exclaimed “Mommy loves you” to Williams.
In an instant, other family members of the girls found dead Friday rose to their feet and hurled curses and threats across an aisle, as a half-dozen officers and court staff members moved in to prevent a fracas.
Williams is charged with killing the girls as they lay in the same bed in a downstairs bedroom of the Clinton, Md., home where they had been left in his care, police have said.
Antonio Williams (Prince George's County Police)
The brief hearing Monday did not reveal why Williams allegedly killed his sister, Nadira Janae’ Withers, 6; and his visiting cousins, Ariana Elizabeth DeCree, 9; and Ajayah Royale DeCree, 6, of New Jersey. A 2-year-old sister of Williams’s was found unharmed when police responded to the house on the 6400 block of Brooke Jane Drive.
They had been called by Andrena Kelley, the mother of Williams and Nadira, who found the bodies around 7:30 a.m. Friday after she returned from working a nursing shift, police said.
Police arrested Williams and have said he confessed to killing the girls. He is charged with three counts of first-degree murder and other related charges.
Before the hearing started, a man could be heard shouting from behind a door adjacent to the courtroom and Williams was soon brought into court.
During the brief appearance, Williams began excitedly and repeatedly shouting “I am not the one you’re looking for!” as his defense lawyer and a prosecutor spoke with District Court Judge Patrice E. Lewis at the bench.
Lewis ordered the state to complete a mental evaluation of Williams by Aug. 29.
At one point, Williams said, “That’s my mom,” before the judge asked him to focus for a few minutes, prompting a woman in the crowd to weep.
Three deputies pulled Williams from the courtroom as the weeping woman yelled to him.
“Mommy loves you! Mommy is here,” the woman said. “I love you. Mommy love you!”
Her words sparked an immediate reaction from other victims’ family members, including a man who said he was a father to one of the girls.
A half-dozen deputies, prosecutors and courtroom staff members had to separate the sides.
“He killed his sister!” one man yelled before shouting “F--- you and your whole family!”
Authorities escorted the families from the courtroom, and afterward family members declined to speak with reporters.
Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Angela Alsobrooks said outside the court that prosecutors were surprised by Williams’s demeanor and had not had any indication he would be agitated and act as he did.
“We are not aware of any mental health issues he has,” she said. “He cooperated in the interrogation process; as such, we have every reason to believe he is competent.”
Alsobrooks said she expects a quick mental health evaluation process and that it will end with the continued prosecution of Williams.
Alsobrooks described “excruciating” moments for the victims’ families, who last week had been shopping for school supplies for the coming school year.
“You had two fathers in the courtroom this morning grieving, quite honestly, for their daughters who were expected to start first grade this week and the other daughter, I think, who was starting third grade.”
“One dad said, ‘She is supposed to bury me,’ ” Alsobrooks said. “They cannot yet understand how to move forward and bury their baby.”
[Man arrested after three girls found dead in Prince George’s home]
The DeCree sisters had spent the summer visiting with the Maryland family from their Newark home. Their mother and Williams’s mother are first cousins.
Police said they had not had contact with Williams before the girls were found dead and had not been called previously to the Brooke Jane Drive address.
[He was supposed to be caring for his sister and two cousins. Instead he killed them, he told police.]000 WTNT44 KNHC 120848 TCDAT4 Post-Tropical Cyclone Michael Discussion Number 23 NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL AL142018 500 AM EDT Fri Oct 12 2018 Satellite imagery and surface observations indicate that Michael has become a storm-force extratropical low as it moves off of the coast of the United States. The initial intensity has been increased to 55 kt based on the surface observations, and some additional increase in strength is expected during the next 12-24 h. After that time, the cyclone should gradually weaken, and it is forecast to dissipate over the eastern Atlantic by 96 h. The revised intensity and size forecast are based mainly on the guidance from the Ocean Prediction Center. The initial motion is 065/25. The cyclone should move very rapidly toward the east-northeast, followed by a more eastward motion near the end of the cyclone's life. This is the last public advisory issued by the National Hurricane Center on this system. Additional information on this system can be found in High Seas Forecasts issued by the National Weather Service, under AWIPS header NFDHSFAT1, WMO header FZNT01 KWBC, and available on the Web at https://ocean.weather.gov/shtml/NFDHSFAT1.shtml. Additional information on the remaining impacts over the United States can be found in products issued by local National Weather Service forecast offices. Key Messages: 1. Heavy rainfall may lead to flash flooding this morning from eastern New Jersey to southern New England. Elsewhere high water, flooding, and flash flooding may persist today where heavy rain fell very recently in the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic states. 2. Gale-force winds will continue for a few more hours over portions of southeastern Virginia, the southern Chesapeake Bay, and the Delmarva Peninsula. FORECAST POSITIONS AND MAX WINDS INIT 12/0900Z 38.0N 73.1W 55 KT 65 MPH...POST-TROP/EXTRATROP 12H 12/1800Z 40.4N 66.8W 60 KT 70 MPH...POST-TROP/EXTRATROP 24H 13/0600Z 43.8N 55.5W 60 KT 70 MPH...POST-TROP/EXTRATROP 36H 13/1800Z 46.2N 42.0W 55 KT 65 MPH...POST-TROP/EXTRATROP 48H 14/0600Z 47.0N 28.5W 50 KT 60 MPH...POST-TROP/EXTRATROP 72H 15/0600Z 46.0N 11.0W 35 KT 40 MPH...POST-TROP/EXTRATROP 96H 16/0600Z...DISSIPATED $$ Forecaster BevenCrop prices have shot alarmingly high over the past year. Corn rose 63% during the year through January and wheat, 51%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks U.S. inflation data. Grain-fed hogs and chickens are 9% pricier. Wool is up 18% and raw cotton about twice that.
Conspicuously immune to recent inflation, however, is a crop some researchers say is now America's largest revenue producer: marijuana. Despite its illegality for recreational use and the vast sums spent by taxpayers to curtail its production, it sells today for a little less than it did a year ago.
Naturally, the government doesn't include marijuana in its consumer and producer price data, but there are a few ways non-users can get fairly reliable prices. There's STRIDE--the System to Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence--where undercover officers report what they paid for drugs. Also, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health contains a bit of information on aggregate volumes and prices, but it's mostly useful for learning, say, that half of Americans drink alcohol, one-quarter smoke cigarettes and 6.6% smoke marijuana, and that only the third category is growing.
For detail and freshness, neither government source matches High Times, a 37-year-old New York magazine for cannabis enthusiasts. Its monthly Trans-High Market Quotations are based on reader submissions of prices by strain and location.
There's a bit more information than the average economist needs. "Prepare to be stuck on the couch for hours," wrote a Baton Rouge respondent who provided a price for something called OG Kush Bubble Hash. "Very, very stinky with hints of sour cream, Parmesan and blueberries," wrote another about the "TGA/Subcool version of U.K. Cheese," which probably isn't a dairy product.
What's clear from the numbers is that prices are looking lazy. The High Times index for "kind" (superior) cannabis fell 4% in the year through January, while the "mids" index fell 6%. January marked the first month that no reader submitted a price for "schwag," or inferior cannabis. The broad U.S. Price Index increased nearly 3% over the past year, presumably because respondents have traded up to better weed.
High Times didn't respond Friday to a request for comment.
It seems clear why marijuana might buck the inflation trend. Recent commodity pressure can be traced to rising demand among the swelling middle classes in emerging markets like China, for whom pot isn't likely a priority. Also, the price of marijuana bears little relation to farming costs or prices for typical crops. Medium quality strains sold for $283 an ounce in January, according to High Times. Corn futures recently traded at $7.10 a bushel (about 70 pounds for ear corn). That's close to the June 2008 peak of $7.65.
Indeed, the high price of marijuana makes U.S. production of it more valuable than that of corn and wheat combined, according to a 2006 study by Jon Gettman, a High Times contributor and former head of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Marijuana is the top cash crop in 12 states, according to the study. California is the overwhelming production leader, growing pot worth more than its grapes, vegetables and hay combined. Marijuana proceeds trump peanuts in Georgia and tobacco in the Carolinas, according to Gettman.
Falling prices ought to worry the White House. In an October position paper titled "Marijuana Legalization: A Bad Idea," it argued that "legalization would lower price, thereby increasing use." A 2005 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the two most important predictors of marijuana use are perceived harmfulness and price.
The marijuana price decline also presents an awkward irony for policy makers. A 2005 Harvard report found that federal, state and local governments spend $7.7 billion a year to make marijuana more difficult to come by. That's roughly what the federal government spent in 2009 to make corn, cotton and wheat more plentiful.SAN FRANCISCO—The Google Pixelbook is the latest in a line of flagship Chrome OS laptops that are extremely nice and extremely expensive. If it ran anything other than Chrome OS, it would be a top-tier laptop, but it does run Chrome OS, so for $1,000, it's kind of a hard sell.
Boy, is it a sharp piece of hardware. It's wrapped in aluminum, like previous Chromebook Pixels. The palm rest is covered in a rubbery silicon pad, which feels fantastic to rest your wrists on while typing. It also serves as a great gripping point when you fold the laptop into its various modes. Hopefully this surface can stand up to the wear and tear of a laptop palm rest.
The back has a top glass panel, just like the Pixel Phones, which serves to let wireless signals in and out. The screen has a glass cover, too, along with the trackpad. The Google Hardware division is clearly working hard to make its products look like a cohesive family, and you can tell the basis for the Pixelbook's back design is the white-and-silver Google Pixel. Just like the phone, the laptop has a silver-colored metal body with a contrasting, white-colored glass back. The only problem is that the silver/white color scheme only matches last year's Google Pixel. This year, a silver body is not an option on the Pixel 2. So close, Google!
The hinge folds all the way around, letting you use it in laptop, tent, and tablet modes. Tent is a great mode for watching a video without using too much desk space. But the 1kg, 12.3-inch device is pretty unwieldy to hold with one hand, and I never got used to having an exposed keyboard on its back side. Like I said in the announcement post, it's 60 percent heavier than a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. It's just as heavy in person as it is on paper.
The buttons are all designed around the tablet mode, so just like a phone or tablet, you get a power button and volume rocker combo on the left edge of the device. A side-mounted volume rocker would be very awkward to use in laptop mode, but thankfully the volume controls are duplicated in the usual spot in the keyboard function row. You'll also find a USB-C port on the left, and—take note Pixel 2—a glorious 3.5mm headphone jack. On the right side, you'll find another USB-C port. The Pixelbook comes with a USB-C charger, and just like on the Chromebook Pixel 2, either port can be used for charging.
What kind of shallow-laptop keyboard can you expect? The travel isn't as paper-thin as an Apple butterfly switch, but more like the previous Pixel keyboard or a last-gen Macbook Pro. I tested the Pixelbook keyboard after using my 2014 Macbook Pro, and I found the keyboard instantly comfortable. There are a few new keys in the Chrome OS layout. Chrome OS famously demoted the Caps Lock button in favor of a "search" key, but this key has been changed to a small circle label. Like on current Chrome OS devices, the search key opens a hybrid web-search/app-search panel. In the top right is a new settings button labeled with three horizontal lines. The most important new button is probably the "Google Assistant" button, which lives on the bottom row between "Control" and "Alt," right where you'd find the Windows key on a Windows laptop.
Tapping this brings up the Google Assistant, which makes the Pixelbook the first laptop ever made with Google Assistant built in. The interface looks and works just like the phone app, and I swear it's even in a window with a 9:16 aspect ratio. The window pops up in the lower left, just like Windows Start Menu. You can ask questions by voice or type right into the window, and the Assistant will return the usual results. Like the Pixel C, the Pixelbook has a suspiciously powerful microphone setup, with four far-field microphones. This is two more than even the Google Home, and theoretically this will allow you to talk to the laptop from across the room.
They problem with an across-the-room use case is that I was told the Pixelbook wouldn't have always-on "OK Google" hotword support at launch. For now, the hotword only works when the screen is on. The laptop apparently has a low-power DSP (digital signal processing) that is designed for always-on listening, but for now, Google needs to figure out how to it wants to manage voice commands with a multi-user lock screen. This is something it has figured out on Google Home, which can identify and authenticate users just by their voice, but that hasn't come to Chrome OS just yet. When (or if) it does, you'd have a portable Google Home of sorts.
Speaking of oddities, the Pixelbook has a whopping 128GB of storage as a standard option. Chrome OS devices typically get by with just 16GB of storage, as these are designed as "cloud-first" devices which require minimal local storage. Sure, there are Android apps, available through the Google Play Store, but 128GB is still a lot of storage for the small handful of apps you'd actually like to use on a Chromebook. 128GB is just the starting storage amount, too. The Pixelbook goes all the way up to 512GB. But if you want to store massive amounts of media—movies, music—locally, the Pixelbook gives you that option.
If you want to spend another $99 on your $1,000 Chrome OS laptop, you can buy the Pixelbook Pen. This is an aluminum and metal stylus with a 10ms lag, 60° of angular measurement and 2,000 levels of pressure sensitivity. Most of the time it works just like a finger, scrolling web pages around and rearranging windows. In a drawing all the low latency feels great. There's basically zero delay between writing and the line appearing on the screen, making it feel just like a real pen. If the right kind of app support for the Pixelbook Pen were to show up, this could be a serious device for artists.
There's a button on the pen which will allow you to perform a visual search with the Google Assistant. Just hold the button down and you'll begin to draw a blue line. Circle whatever you want to perform a search on, and a snippet of the image will be sent to the Google Assistant. This can do things like recognize people or landmarks.
You won't find any complicated charging setups here. The Pixelbook Pen is powered by a AAAA battery. Yes that's a quadruple-A battery. I had no idea these existed until today.
It's hard to justify the purchase of a $1,000 laptop that can only display web pages and run unimpressive Android phone apps. You can't really use the Pixelbook for the kind of things that typically justify a $1,000+ price tag, like gaming, photo processing, development, or video. Chrome OS defenders can come up with some janky web or Android apps that roughly emulate some of these use cases, but none of them are the kind of industry-defining programs you get on other platforms. This is the third generation of these premium Chrome OS flagships, though, so Google must be happy with the presumably low-volume sales of a device like this. If you liked the other Chromebook Pixels, you'll like this one, but nothing here closes the gap between Chrome OS and other laptop OSes.Taken together, European nations have put together a bailout for financial institutions three times bigger than the U.S.--$2.25 trillion vs. $700 billion. The goal, though, is the same: recapitalization of troubled banks to improve liquidity and help boost interbank lending.
Coordination across the Atlantic is growing--and may do so further after this weekend's meeting at Camp David between Presidents George W. Bush and Nicholas Sarkozy of France. Sarkozy will press the case for a summit on global financial regulation on behalf of the E.U., which France currently chairs.
His host will probably politely decline and say the U.S. must put its financial house in order first, and that won't happen before he leaves the White House in January.
The meeting takes place against a backdrop of weakening economies that look set to continue to decline over the next few months regardless of the success of the recapitalization of the global banking system, a result that still isn't assured.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund now predict that the growth in world output will slow to 3.9% this year and 3% in 2009. It hit its cyclical peak in 2006 at 5.1%.
More gravely, the IMF forecasts that global-trade growth will slow even more rapidly--to 4.9% this year and 4.1% next, from its 2006 rate of 9.3%--as barely growing developed economies lessen their appetite for imports and commodity prices fall. Continuing, albeit slower, growth in emerging economies won't make up the shortfall.
This general global gloom will reinforce policy shifts in the developed economies that the financial crisis has already got underway, particularly in Europe. But on both sides of the Atlantic, the culture of light-touch regulation and corporate self-regulation has given ground to firmer government-driven regimes.
The clearest example of this shift is in the financial sector, where governments are taking ownership stakes in firms and injecting new capital. But this new regime brings with it new expectations and requirements regarding a broad range of corporate governance issues from risk-tolerance to reserve ratios to executive compensation.
Even countries that haven't taken stakes in banks have taken initiatives to put themselves on banks' boards. Ireland, for example, made the appointment of two government-nominated directors a condition of banks getting deposits fully state insured.
This is being matched by more national and international coordination among fiscal and monetary authorities. How far this will go remains debatable. Intergovernmental and supranational institutions still seem far from reach, despite Europe cheering on the International Monetary Fund's desire to play global financial cop.
America isn't anywhere close to being ready for that, and maybe never will be--just as it isn't ready to accept global accounting standards. There are too many vested domestic interests at risk.
But some of the coordination across international borders seen during the current crisis will continue in a more formal way, particularly between central bankers and bank regulators. Also likely: consolidation of regulatory agencies within countries to give governments a more holistic view of the risks to their financial systems.
In Europe, certainly, this financial crisis will have advanced the cause of harmonization of fiscal policy. Monetary policy, too, is changed, with European central bankers becoming more pragmatic and less single-minded about fighting inflation. They will take on a broader remit, much like the Federal Reserve.
Other changes, more embryonic at this point, include an intent to re-couple Wall Street with Main Street, getting financial institutions to return to focusing on financial services for real investment, production, distribution and consumption, instead of on speculative financial engineering.
That may prove less than lasting once profits return and capital is flowing freely again.Real-life boss fights rarely resemble video game ones.
At 10.30 on the morning of May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s most trusted and ardently anti-Semitic lieutenants, was being chauffeured to work through the streets of Prague when a man armed with a Sten submachine gun stepped out in front of his Mercedes convertible as it slowed to negotiate a sharp bend. The cheap SMG refused to fire but shrapnel from an anti-tank grenade thrown by the Sten wielder’s companion pierced the Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in several places causing wounds that led to his death a week later.Nazi reprisals were brutal. Hundreds were rounded up and executed in the Czech capital and its environs. Lidice and Ležáky, two villages erroneously linked with Heydrich’s killers, were wiped from the map along with most of their inhabitants.
Was Operation Anthropoid wise given the predictable repercussions? Attentat 1942, a revealing docu-game about life in Czechoslovakia during WW2, sensibly declines to answer this question directly preferring instead to explore the tangled lives of a group of gently fictionalised Czechs caught up in the traumatic aftermath of the assassination.
A naturalistic sleuth-em-up set in 2001, you play an individual keen to get to the bottom of a family mystery while the people at the centre of that mystery – your grandparents – are still around. By interviewing a growing cast of characters, by inspecting artefacts and playing mini-games, a web of dramatic stories emerges and a collection of lazy classifications (hero, collaborator, victim…) is challenged.
Like Venti Mesi and 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, Attentat 1942 has no obvious agenda beyond ‘This stuff happened. We’re sure you’ll find it interesting’. It captivates from start to finish by humanising history brilliantly rather than by ludologising it exceptionally well. In fact the brief mini-games that dot proceedings are the weakest part of the package.
Tasks like decoding Jindřich’s beautifully crafted journal by manipulating a series of letter substitution sliders and helping Egon, a Jewish friend of Jindřich’s, flee police by arranging picture cards in a sensible sequence, are so easily accomplished they end up trivialising the events that inspired them rather than enriching them. There is one genuinely tricky mini-game but as it owes much of its challenge to a lack of clues it ultimately disappoints too.
Attentat 1942 justifies its format during the unusual ‘cinematic interview’ sections. If the team at Charles University had gone down the book or TV documentary route we’d have been denied the satisfaction that comes from personally winkling out truths with canny questioning.
We’d doubtless have gone without the delightful distance-dissolving doorstep scenes too. Say the wrong thing on the threshold of a character’s apartment and understandably you may not be invited in for čaj and memories.
I’d be interested to hear a Czech speaker’s thoughts on the acting in the video segments. While the odd cast member looked a little too youthful to have been a young adult during WW2, I quickly came to accept them in their roles.
Although subtitling the interviews and translating the sizeable integrated encyclopedia in readiness for the English language release must have been a mammoth task there’s no sign of corner or cost-cutting in the texts. Production values throughout the game are high, the only slips I noticed being a single typo, a questionable translation of the word ‘marmeláda’, and some library footage of Soviet armour and aircraft carelessly used to illustrate a section about Operation Overlord.
If you buy your PC playthings by the yard this £7-until-November-7 release may seem expensive (I uncovered Jindřich’s war story in around three hours). However, assay Attentat 1942 the way you’d assay a novella or movie, and the brevity shouldn’t rankle. Generations of weapon and combat-obsessed computer games have scoured the surface of WW2. Rare treats like Attentat 1942 go deeper and linger in the memory because of it.
* * *
I struggle both physically and ideologically with Heliborne’s helo-only dogfights. There’s something preposterous about swirling chopper skirmishes and I’m not sure I’ll ever acquire the necessary skills to accurately hose hurtling Hueys and helixing Helixes.
At the moment what draws me to JetCat’s Early-Access-no-longer collective collective game is lummoxi like the Yak-24, the Sea Stallion, and the Flying Banana. Teams have no real hope of conquering the LZs that freckle maps unless someone decides to dawdle about in these unglamorous aerial ominibuses. When the Cobras, Hinds, and Apaches are busy tearing chunks out of each other over the frontline I’m usually to be found sneaking through valleys and gorges with a belly full of the soldiers necessary to seize victory nodes.
As the larger aerodynes tend to fly like wild turkeys rather than arctic terns, vigilance and timing are everything when you’re operating them. Pick the wrong moment to quit your hiding place behind the ridge, descend, and deposit your vital cargo, and, chances are, you’ll be plucked from the sky or trashed on the ground before you can say “Frank Robinson”.
The dedicated transport pilot tends to earn most of their points through base captures but they can supplement this income by carrying specialist weapon teams along with the infantry. MANPAD and RPG teams deposited in promising spots |
the audits of growers to determine their practices. As it relates to our purchases, we provide records of our Florida tomato purchases to CIW’s auditors so they can see what we’re buying from whom and for how much.
RENÉE FELTZ: And what about the reason that Chipotle will not sign the contract? What are your concerns?
CHRIS ARNOLD: The last time that we looked at this, which was about three years ago, there were provisions in the agreement that we had trouble with. The agreement takes into consideration only variables that matter to CIW, and there are a lot of things that matter to us in terms of sourcing the ingredients that we use. So, the thing that gave us—the point that gave us the most concern was that, at the time, there were, you know, no growers, initially, who were participating in CIW’s program, and then only one, initially, when the first grower came online. And yet the agreement requires that if you go outside of that system, you do so only with CIW’s approval. And that’s not a degree of control over our supply that we’re going to relinquish to anybody. If we can’t get ingredients that meet our high standards, we need to have the flexibility to go to other sources. We’re not going to compromise the quality of the food that we serve. And in effect, that provision in the agreement would have required that. Now, things have changed some since we’ve looked at that agreement, and today 90 percent of Florida’s tomatoes are grown under that agreement. So, it’s entirely possible that it’s no longer an issue.
RENÉE FELTZ: So, do you think that the company may reconsider now to sign the contract, in part, for example, because the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has presented the failure to sign the contract, so far, possibly as putting concerns over quality over concerns about the human rights of the workers? So, do you think that Chipotle may now reconsider signing the contract with them for the Fair Food Program?
CHRIS ARNOLD: Yeah, I think that’s certainly a possibility.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Chris Arnold, spokesperson for Chipotle, speaking to Democracy Now!'s Renée Feltz. Gerardo Reyes-Chavez, he's saying that they are weighing signing onto this contract.
GERARDO REYES-CHAVEZ: Yeah, there has been six years since they were first approached, and there’s been a lot of agreements that have been signed with other corporations, 10 in total—Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, just to give a few examples. Through that, through the Campaign for Fair Food, which is the approach that consumers nationwide are taking with us to convince corporations to motivate them to do the right thing, we have been able to create a Fair Food Program, which is addressing the abuses that have been historically happening in the tomato industry. For the first time, we created a whole new system to eliminate the abuses, to identify where abuses are going on and uproot them from the system. This is an opportunity for Chipotle to do the right thing. They claim that they sell food with integrity, and they are really focused on the sustainability part of that conversation as one of the main spokes-corporations. And what we are saying is, this is an opportunity for them to make it a reality.
AMY GOODMAN: But they say they’re making it a reality even without signing, that 90 percent of the tomatoes grown in Florida actually use this contract.
GERARDO REYES-CHAVEZ: It is true that 90 percent of the tomato industry is on board with us, but the question is, all of them need the support of the corporations buying. And the corporations need to pay a premium that addresses poverty wages, and that corporations need also to be able to cut purchases, if necessary, when there are abuses that are violated.
AMY GOODMAN: So, very quickly, October 6—I had mis-said November 6th. October 6th, this Saturday, you’re having a rally here. Your message to Chipotle at this big festival?
GERARDO REYES-CHAVEZ: Yeah, they are going to be talking about how good a corporation they are, and we’re going to be there to remind people that without workers, there is no food with integrity or without integrity; there is no food, period.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Gerardo Reyes-Chavez, farm worker, organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. And that does it for the show. Tune in tonight to our debate coverage as we expand it to include third-party candidates here in Denver. We’ll be beginning at 8:30 p.m. Eastern time. Your TV or radio station might be running it, but also you can go to democracynow.org. Democracy Now! is on a 100-city tour. We’ll be in Colorado Springs on Thursday night, then on to the Western Slope.ADVERTISEMENT
Nothing like a good book burning to stir up a debate on free expression, said Alison Flood in the Guardian. A group of Christians in Wisconsin is suing for the "right to publicly burn a copy of" Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop, a gay teen coming-of-age novel. The lawsuit comes after a court threw out a request by a West Bend, Wisc., group to pull books they deemed to be sexually explicit off of library shelves.
It's hard to believe "we are still plagued by book burning religious zealots" in the 21st century, said Micha Jaystone in Examiner.com. At least this campaign by some West Bend, Wisc., scolds to "restrict access to teenage books they deemed sexually explicit" was tossed out of court recently—hopefully, this "frivolous" book-burning lawsuit will be, too.
Nobody wants to ban legitimate literature, said the West Bend citizens blog Wisconsin Speaks Up. We're simply asking "for a balance of information and simple identification of sexually explicit books for minors." In fact, "religion, morality, politics, even pornography, have little to do with this matter"—we just want to "protect" our children "from inappropriate material in the public library."John Elway is playing chess against Bill Belichick while the rest of the division plays checkers.
The Broncos breezed through the division last season while the Chiefs overachieved in Andy Reid's first season, the mediocre Chargers snuck into the playoffs via the backdoor and the Raiders fielded a roster devoid of young talent.
A month into the new league year, Kansas City and Oakland have met San Diego in the middle as Elway's team continues to pull further away from the pack.
The NFL's pied piper of free agency, Elway built his Super Bowl contender with a perfect sales pitch to Peyton Manning in 2012 and a bumper crop of veteran additions last offseason.
He hasn't lost a step this year, importing a Hall of Fame pass rusher, a lockdown cornerback and a tone-setting safety to fix a defense that was too often the team's Achilles' heel last season.
No matter what happens in the 2014 NFL Draft next month, the Broncos have to be viewed as the heavy favorites in the AFC West.
In our Roster Reset series, Around The League will rank teams in each division based on how much they improved this offseason. The AFC West is below.
1. Denver Broncos
Why they remain heavy favorites: It's not just the high-profile additions of DeMarcus Ware, Aqib Talib and T.J. Ward -- a trio of Pro-Bowl caliber impact defenders.
Speedster Emmanuel Sanders is capable of filling Eric Decker's shoes, and Montee Ball's promotion to the starting lineup offers potential for more big plays in the ground attack. The Broncos' offense remains the league's most dangerous.
The Broncos made it to Super Bowl XLVIII in spite of injuries that wiped out a handful of core players last season. They are now welcoming back their best offensive lineman (Ryan Clady), most dominant defensive player (Von Miller), a pair of stout run defenders (Derek Wolfe and Kevin Vickerson) and a rangy safety (Rahim Moore) in addition to the high-profile acquisitions.
Armed with a generous new contract, John Fox is back to steer this ship back to the playoffs.
What's next
» Lock up Thomas and Thomas: Elway deemed Demaryius Thomas and Julius Thomas more important to his record-breaking offense than Decker. Both of the Thomas playmakers are entering the final year of their rookie contracts. The team's capologists can figure out a way to dole out new deals with cap-friendly 2014 figures.
» Middle linebacker: Nate Irving finally showed signs of life as an early-down thumper during the playoff run. The courting of D'Qwell Jackson suggests the coaching staff still isn't completely sold on the 2011 third-round draft pick, though.
» Backfield questions: Has Ball mastered the fundamentals to the point where he's ready to step into Moreno's three-down role? Can Ronnie Hillman escape the doghouse? Fox has always harbored a bit of veteran fetish in the backfield. Might Elway have one more trick up his sleeve?
2. Oakland Raiders
How they improved: For most improved position group in the division, the Raiders' defensive line gets the nod over the Broncos' secondary. Dennis Allen's front four has added versatile pass rushers Justin Tuck, LaMarr Woodley and Antonio Smith in the NFL's latest "over-the-hill gang."
Although the 2013 versions of Matt Schaub and Maurice Jones-Drew are merely theoretical upgrades at quarterback and running back, the offense is in much better shape than last season.
General manager Reggie McKenzie bounced back nicely from the Rodger Saffold fiasco to rebuild the tattered offensive line with legitimate NFL-caliber starters in Donald Penn and Austin Howard. That's progress. Bringing James Jones back home was a coup for the passing "attack."
What's next
» Find franchise QB: Actions speak louder than words. The Raiders have talked up Schaub as an elite quarterback who can take them to the promised land and stay under center for three or four years. The truth is the team can cut bait at midseason with no guaranteed money due next season. McKenzie needs to draft and develop a face of the franchise.
» Draft nucleus players: Coach Dennis Allen has identified tight end Mychal Rivera and linebacker Sio Moore as his "foundation" players. You can be forgiven if those names don't ring a bell. They're not exactly household names. This roster desperately needs young, impact talent.
» Find a taker for Terrelle Pryor: Viewed as a potential savior as recently as October, Pryor is persona non grata following the Schaub trade. The Raiders have already gotten a few "trade feelers."
3. San Diego Chargers
What's changed: Not much of significance. The biggest change was losing offensive coordinator Ken Whisenhunt, who helped get Philip Rivers' career back on track.
Up against the salary cap, general manager Tom Telesco threw in the towel on 2013 free-agent bust Derek Cox and dumped fullback Le'Ron McClain. He also convinced veterans Jarret Johnson and Eddie Royal to accept pay cuts. He used the savings to lock up inside linebacker Donald Butler, one of the few talented young defensive building blocks.
What's next
» Get faster: Cornerback was the biggest weak spot on the roster last season, and it has yet to be addressed in free agency. The Bolts can also use a field-stretcher at wide receiver to complement Keenan Allen. Danario Alexander is no longer in the picture, and Malcom Floyd's football career is in jeopardy.
» Pass rush: There's immediate pass-rushing help on the horizon with Dwight Freeney and Melvin Ingram returning to full health, but defensive coordinator John Pagano needs depth and young legs.
» Reward Ryan Mathews: Mathews has earned a contract extension by running as hard as any back in the league last season. It wasn't a great sign when Telesco gave Donald Brown a higher annual average than most running backs have landed on the open market.
4. Kansas City Chiefs
Why they have regressed: The Chiefs can thank an easy schedule for their 9-0 start last season. At one point, they faced a second- or third-string quarterback in five consecutive victories.
Faced with a tougher slate this year, the roster already has lost roughly 6,000 snaps in free agency when a half-dozen unspectacular but solid starters walked out the door. The offensive line took more than a glancing blow, with left tackle Branden Albert and guards Geoff Schwartz and Jon Asamoah moving on.
As Andy Reid's lone playmaker, Jamaal Charles carried the offense last season. If he goes down with an injury, the 2014 season is shot.
What's next
» Extensions for Smith and Berry: Chairman Clark Hunt acknowledged the Chiefs will make a long-term commitment to Alex Smith after the team averaged 35 points over the final seven games. Safety Eric Berry has made the Pro Bowl in all three seasons in which he's been healthy. Now he's entering the final year of his rookie contract.
» Playmakers for passing game: The Chiefs have the NFL's most overpaid wide receiver in Dwayne Bowe, who can no longer be viewed as a true No. 1 after showing a disturbing lack of playmaking ability last season. Donnie Avery is more of a three than a two. Anthony Fasano isn't getting any younger at tight end.
» Complete the offensive line overhaul: Andy Reid will be leaning heavily on young, unproven players such as Eric Fisher, Donald Stephenson and Jeff Allen. There's a need for insurance.
In the latest edition of the "Around The League Podcast", the guys welcome Browns star Joe Haden to the studio and talk about the uncertain future of Chris Johnson.“He didn’t necessarily want to direct them," said Howard of George Lucas. “He told me that he had talked to [Robert] Zemeckis, he talked to me, he talked to Steven Spielberg.”
Director Ron Howard revealed that his résumé of blockbuster films could have included Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. In a podcast interview on Happy Sad Confused with Josh Horowitz, the director said that he along with Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg passed on golden offers from Lucas to direct the franchise prequels.
“He didn’t necessarily want to direct them,”said Howard. “He told me that he had talked to [Robert] Zemeckis, he talked to me, he talked to Steven Spielberg. I was the third one he spoke to. They all said the same thing: ‘George, you should just do it. This is your baby.' Nobody wanted to follow that act I don’t think at that point. That was an honor, but it would’ve been just too daunting."
Lucas ended up directing the trilogy including, Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, Episode II — Attack of the Clones and Episode III — Revenge of the Sith. Howard lauded Lucas as his "directorial mentor" whom he worked with on Willow (1988) and American Graffiti (1973) and shared Lucas' impact on his latest film, In the Heart of the Sea.
“There are some subtle, contemporary themes in the story and it surprised me when I read it. And yet, there’s also this bedrock classic story of going to sea and nature turning on the whalers," said Howard. "This is what attracted Herman Melville to the story of The Essex when he wrote Moby Dick. I think those elements attracted me, but I wanted to present them in as modern of a way as I possibly could. I was borrowing a little bit from George’s inspiration, about how do you tell classic story, preserve that, but make it a modern movie experience for audiences.”
Howard also expressed that he passed on offers to direct blockbuster superhero films.
“I’ve had opportunities over the years. … I was never a comic book guy. I like the movies when I see them for the most part, especially the origin stories. I never felt like I could be on the set, at 3 o’clock in the morning, tired, with 10 important decisions to make, and that I would intuitively on a gut level know what the story needs. It’s a little bit different tone. For me, I’d be copycatting and not inventing, so I’ve just never said yes to one."
Howard said he is set to produce the adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. When asked if Matthew McConaughey will star in the film, Howard replied, “We’re hoping.”
“Dark Tower is looking very promising," said Howard. "I’m not going to be a director on it and I couldn’t be, given schedules and so forth, but I’m going to remain a producer with it if it goes. … It’s a really strong adaptation and we’ll see if we finally get it over the goal line and get to make it.”
Listen to Howard’s full podcast interview below.BYU Cougars star defender Ezekiel Ansah blew up the 2013 NFL Scouting Combine just shortly after impressing NFL scouts at the Senior Bowl. At the combine, Ansah ran a 4.68 second 40-yard dash, added a 34.5-inch vertical jump and broad jump of 9-foot-10. The numbers were off the charts for a man that stands 6-foot-5, 270-pounds, but a nugget of information that surfaced makes those numbers even more impressive.
According to the National Football Post, Ansah had his standout performance in Indianapolis despite never training for the combine. He decided to stay in class while others were getting trainers to specifically train for the combine.
Per the National Football Post:
Many people were impressed with Ziggy Ansah’s 4.56 40 yard dash at 271 pounds, and rightfully so. But they would have been more impressed if they knew Ansah didn’t even train for the event. Unlike probably every other player in attendance, Ansah kept going to class and never worked with an outside trainer to prepare for the combine. In fact, the 40 yard dash he ran at the combine was the first of his life, according to his agent Frank Bauer. It should be noted, however, that Ansah did run 100 meter dash and the 200 meters on the Brigham Young track team before he became a football player.
The numbers are incredible and it just goes to show how scary and exciting of a prospect Ansah is.
Ansah is still learning the game of football and has a lot of learning left to do. Once he gets to the next level with NFL coaching staffs and legitimate trainers, his potential is limitless.
It is becoming more and more obvious why NFL teams are viewing Ansah as a top fifteen selection, despite not having much film onthe defensive lineman.I’ve had this experience more often as a TV critic than I care to remember. A new batch of fall pilots arrives. Most are forgettable. One of them stands out, fresh, risky, experimental. “Funny. Delightful,” I write in my notes. “Totally going to get canceled!”
It’s more rare that the show’s theme song will dramatize its challenges. The opening of the CW’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” lays out the show’s premise: Rebecca Bunch (the viral-video comic Rachel Bloom), a depressed lawyer in Manhattan, quits her job and moves to West Covina, Calif., because — though she won’t even admit it to herself — her teenage crush, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III) lives there.
“She’s the crazy ex-girlfriend!” the chorus chimes in. “What? No, I’m not! That’s a sexist term!” Ms. Bloom answers, in character. “The situation’s a lot more nuanced than that.”
It turns out she’s right. And I was, thankfully, wrong: After a season that won a Golden Globe for Ms. Bloom but relatively low ratings, this musical comedy, whose season finale airs Monday night, will be back for another season.Idaho is one of the most conservative states in the country–McCain carried it with over 61 percent of the vote in 2008–yet, even in this deep-red state, the people overwhelmingly support allowing individuals access to medical marijuana, according to a new poll. From the Spokesman-Review:
The respected Boise State University Public Policy Survey, a statewide poll that’s been conducted in the state for more than 20 years, yielded a surprising result Tuesday: 74 percent support for allowing “terminally and seriously ill patients to use and purchase marijuana for medical purposes.” Just 23 percent said “no” to that in the statewide survey, and 3 percent said they didn’t know.
There is probably not another issue in contemporary politics where there is a larger disconnect between the public’s view and the position of their elected representatives.
Time to re-schedule cannabis
It is absurd that given near-universal popular support for medical marijuana, even in the most conservative of states, that both Congress and the President still refuse to even at least re-schedule cannabis.
Marijuana is currently “schedule I,” meaning that no doctor can prescribe it for any reason. There is no reason our elected representative can’t fill the overwhelming wish of the public and move marijuana to a lower schedule. Lowering its schedule would allow it to prescribed without changing its illegal status for personal use. For example, cocaine, morphine, and methamphetamine are schedule II drugs, while steroids, Ketamine, and GHB are all schedule III.[Updated March 20, 3:20PM, with Microsoft statement and timeline]
Here’s a pro tip if you’re planning to get into the industrial espionage business: Don’t use your company’s free email, file storage, and messaging services to do the actual business of transferring that same company's trade secrets to a shadowy figure overseas.
That advice comes courtesy of the very bad example set by Alex A. Kibkalo, a former Microsoft employee who was charged this week with a single count of violating Title 18, United States Code, Section 1832, Theft of Trade Secrets.
According to an affidavit from FBI Special Agent Armando Ramirez III, a disgruntled Kibkalo stole top-secret source code and software development kits, pre-release hotfixes, and documents from Microsoft. He then used Windows Live Messenger to send links to the stolen files, which he had placed in his personal Windows Live SkyDrive account. And for good measure, he sent email messages with additional details to the Hotmail address of his contact in France.
The French Windows enthusiast, widely believed to have used Canouna as his alias, developed quite a reputation during the months leading up to the release of Windows 8, when he became a star in underground circles with leaks of information and code.
According to the FBI, Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Investigations department (TWCI) had been trying to track down Canouna’s true identity but had failed. They could not determine if the blogger was an external party obtaining information from a contact within Microsoft, or whether the blogger was a Microsoft employee.
Around September 3, 2012, Canouna sent an email to a person in Redmond, allegedly including some sample code from the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit and asking if the recipient could help him “better understand its contents.” The outside source, who asked to remain anonymous, contacted Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky instead.
Four days later, on September 7, 2012, the FBI says Microsoft acted:
The source indicated that the blogger contacted the source using a Microsoft Hotmail e-mail address that TWCI had previously connected to the blogger. After confirmation that the data was Microsoft’s proprietary trade secret, on September 7, 2012 Microsoft’s Office of Legal Compliance (OLC) approved content pulls of the blogger’s Hotmail account. [emphasis added]
Those email messages in turn led to instant messaging conversations and links to files shared on SkyDrive. Every piece of data was stored on Microsoft servers using an account allegedly linked to Kibkalo.
And there's no question that both parties knew they were breaking the law, as this snippet of conversatrion shows:
Three days after that exchange, on September 24, Microsoft investigators hauled their employee, Kibkalo, in for two days of questioning.
If the messages and files in question had been transferred using Gmail and Dropbox, Microsoft would have probably asked for and received court orders to get access to these communications. But because Kibkalo and his French connection had used servers that are run by Microsoft, the company was able to exercise the rights it had reserved in section 3.5 of the Microsoft Services Agreement:
Content that violates this agreement … or your local law isn’t permitted on the services. Microsoft reserves the right to review content for the purpose of enforcing this agreement. [emphasis added]
In its Code of Conduct for Microsoft services, which is part of the agreement mentioned in that section of the TOS, Microsoft expressly mentions "software piracy" under the Prohibited Uses section.
Microsoft Online Privacy Statement includes similar wording:
We may access or disclose information about you, including the content of your communications, in order to: (a) comply with the law or respond to lawful requests or legal process; (b) protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers, including the enforcement of our agreements or policies governing your use of the services; or (c) act on a good faith belief that such access or disclosure is necessary to protect the personal safety of Microsoft employees, customers or the public. [emphasis added]
The internal-only code that Kibkalo allegedly leaked includes the Microsoft Activation Server SDK, which is a core piece of Microsoft’s anti-piracy infrastructure. In the FBI affidavit, Microsoft admits that “the potential for harm from misuse of the SDK is generally considered low,” but the risk is that someone could use the code to reverse-engineer a reliable generator of valid product keys for Windows and Office. That prospect is guaranteed to give Microsoft executives major heartburn.
It's worth noting here that this whole incident happened in Summer 2012, before Ed Snowden upended all the pieces on the online privacy game board. In response to a request for comment on this story, a Microsoft spokesperson initially nprovided the following statement:
During an investigation of an employee we discovered evidence that the employee was providing stolen IP, including code relating to our activation process, to a third party. In order to protect our customers and the security and integrity of our products, we conducted an investigation over many months with law enforcement agencies in multiple countries. This included the issuance of a court order for the search of a home relating to evidence of the criminal acts involved. The investigation repeatedly identified clear evidence that the third party involved intended to sell Microsoft IP and had done so in the past. As part of the investigation, we took the step of a limited review of this third party's Microsoft operated accounts. While Microsoft's terms of service make clear our permission for this type of review, this happens only in the most exceptional circumstances. We apply a rigorous process before reviewing such content. In this case, there was a thorough review by a legal team separate from the investigating team and strong evidence of a criminal act that met a standard comparable to that required to obtain a legal order to search other sites. In fact, as noted above, such a court order was issued in other aspects of the investigation.
One interesting detail in Microsoft's statement is not included in the FBI Special Agent Ramirez's affidavit. According to Microsoft, there was "clear evidence that the third party involved intended to sell Microsoft IP and had done so in the past." That suggests the possibility that more charges will be filed, perhaps in France.
The FBI affidavit and Microsoft's statement only tell one side of the story, of course. Kibkalo will get the opportunity to present his defense soon. Meanwhile, the facts were compelling enough that the United States Attorney asked a Federal magistrate to detain Kibkalo pending trial because of the “serious risk the defendant will flee,” presumably to his native Russia.
In a further update, Microsoft says it will tighten its procedures going forward:
John Frank, Vice President & Deputy General Counsel: We believe that Outlook and Hotmail email are and should be private. Today there has been coverage about a particular case. While we took extraordinary actions in this case based on the specific circumstances and our concerns about product integrity that would impact our customers, we want to provide additional context regarding how we approach these issues generally and how we are evolving our policies. Courts do not issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves, since obviously no such order is needed. So even when we believe we have probable cause, it’s not feasible to ask a court to order us to search ourselves. However, even we should not conduct a search of our own email and other customer services unless the circumstances would justify a court order, if one were available. In order to build on our current practices and provide assurances for the future, we will follow the following policies going forward: To ensure we comply with the standards applicable to obtaining a court order, we will rely in the first instance on a legal team separate from the internal investigating team to assess the evidence. We will move forward only if that team concludes there is evidence of a crime that would be sufficient to justify a court order, if one were applicable. As an additional step, as we go forward, we will then submit this evidence to an outside attorney who is a former federal judge. We will conduct such a search only if this former judge similarly concludes that there is evidence sufficient for a court order.
Even when such a search takes place, it is important that it be confined to the matter under investigation and not search for other information. We therefore will continue to ensure that the search itself is conducted in a proper manner, with supervision by counsel for this purpose.
Finally, we believe it is appropriate to ensure transparency of these types of searches, just as it is for searches that are conducted in response to governmental or court orders. We therefore will publish as part of our bi-annual transparency report the data on the number of these searches that have been conducted and the number of customer accounts that have been affected. The only exception to these steps will be for internal investigations of Microsoft employees who we find in the course of a company investigation are using their personal accounts for Microsoft business. And in these cases, the review will be confined to the subject matter of the investigation. The privacy of our customers is incredibly important to us, and while we believe our actions in this particular case were appropriate given the specific circumstances, we want to be clear about how we will handle similar situations going forward. That is why we are building on our current practices and adding to them to further strengthen our processes and increase transparency.
TIMELINE
The following timeline of events in this case is taken from documents filed with the United States District Court in Seattle, Washington:
July 31, 2012: Kibkalo uses an email account associated with his Windows Live Messenger account to communicate with his contact in France, sending SkyDrive links to six zip files of prerelease hotfixes for Windows RT.
August 1, 2012: Kibkalo requests access to Microsoft's Out-Of-Band [OOB] server. Access is granted on August 2.
August 18, 2012: Kibkalo accesses the OOB server and transfers code to a virtual machine on a server in Redmond. He subsequently places one compressed file (PIDGENXSDK.RAR) on his personal SkyDrive account and then uses MSN Messenger to provide the blogger with links to files on his SkyDrive account and encourages him to share the SDK with others to write "fake activation server" code.
September 3, 2012: Outside source contacts Steven Sinofsky, indicates he had been contacted by blogger who sent proprietary code.
September 7, 2012: After what it describes as "a thorough review by a legal team separate from the investigating team and strong evidence of a criminal act that met a standard comparable to that required to obtain a legal order to search other sites," Microsoft's Office of Legal Compliance (OLC) approves "content pulls of the blogger's Hotmail account."
September 9, 2012: Via IM, Kibkalo and the French blogger discuss the logistics of exchanging data.
September 24, 2012: Microsoft investigators interview Kibkalo over the course of two days; those investigators tell the FBI Kibkalo admitted to stealing a large number of products. Investigators also say they found evidence that he had given the blogger access to servers on Microsoft's corporate network.
July 2013: Microsoft investigators share the results of their internal investigation with the FBI.
March 17, 2014: On the basis of an affidavit submitted by the FBI, United States Magistrate Judge Mary Alice Theiler "finds that there is probable cause to believe the Defendant [Kibkalo] committed the offense set forth in the Complaint."They’re well matched. One’s an obnoxious hard-left attention-seeker whom nobody likes, and the other’s Anthony Weiner.
Fifteen minutes is a lot to ask but trust me when I tell you that the second clip’s more enjoyable than the first. This is the most entertaining vid you’ll watch online today — with the possible exception of Weiner’s concession speech, which should go live sometime around 9 p.m. ET and which, with nothing left to lose, may finally see him drop all pretenses of candidate decorum. (Fingers crossed!) Ace thinks Scary Larry’s belligerence is being driven by Democratic servility to the Clintons, with O’Donnell doing his part to neutralize an “unhelpful” storyline regarding Her Majesty’s star aide before 2016. I don’t know. If you’re going to ceremonially banish a guy from public life, logically you’d want the banisher to be less of an insufferable jackhole than the banishee. Right? To get the audience to condone ritual shaming, you need them to identify with the shamer. Watch the clips and tell me: By the time this car crash is over, is there anyone who doesn’t like Weiner more than O’Donnell?
Even worse is that Weiner, because he’s quick on his feet and unpredictable, is better on TV than Larry is. Check him out at the start of clip two freezing O’Donnell in his tracks by asking why he has such a desperate need to be on television. Coming soon to MSNBC: “The Last Word with Anthony Weiner”?The Hypocrisy of the October so-called “Women’s Convention”
S. Novi Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 13, 2017
Image Source: Snopes
So exactly when is a gathering entitled “women’s convention” not about women?
Answer: When it’s organized and sponsored by the Bernie Sanders cult
Background:
In January, 2017, the Women’s March was organized by Linda Sarsour, called in a NY Times article: “a hijab-wearing Palestinian-American and the former head of the Arab-American Association of New York.” While millions showed up to stand up to the sexist Trump regime, and there were quite a few well-known speakers around the country, there was a dark and not-so-well-hidden aspect regarding the organizers.
Beyond the obvious snub to Hillary Clinton, who has been the single main voice for women’s issues for over twenty five years, there is the rather twisted version of Sarsour and their group, who yell “women’s rights” and yet carry ideologies that are far from it.
In the same NY Times article they state:
“Start with Ms. Sarsour, by far the most visible of the quartet of organizers. It turns out that this ‘homegirl in a hijab,’ as one of many articles about her put it, has a history of disturbing views, as advertised by... Linda Sarsour.
There are comments on her Twitter feed of the anti-Zionist sort: ‘Nothing is creepier than Zionism,’ she wrote in 2012. And, oddly, given her status as a major feminist organizer, there are more than a few that seem to make common cause with anti-feminists, like this from 2015: ‘You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?’ She has dismissed the anti-Islamist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the most crude and cruel terms, insisting she is ‘not a real woman’ and confessing that she wishes she could take away Ms. Ali’s vagina — this about a woman who suffered genital mutilation as a girl in Somalia.”
Continuing in the article they reference another of the organizers, Ms. Tamika Mallory:
“Ms. Mallory, in addition to applauding Assata Shakur as a feminist emblem, also admires Fidel Castro, who sheltered Ms. Shakur in Cuba. She put up a flurry of posts when Mr. Castro died last year. ‘R.I.P. Comandante! Your legacy lives on!’ she wrote in one. She does not have similar respect for American police officers. ‘When you throw a brick in a pile of hogs, the one that hollers is the one you hit,’ she posted on Nov. 20.”
They continue with: “On May 11, Ms. Mallory posted a photo with her arm around Mr. Farrakhan, the 84-year-old Nation of Islam leader notorious for his anti-Semitic comments, on Twitter and Instagram. ‘Thank God this man is still alive and doing well,’ she wrote. It is one of several videos and photos and quotes that Ms. Mallory has posted of Mr. Farrakhan.”
But there is one key aspect of this group that needs to be highlighted: They are supporters of Bernie Sanders and they are extreme activists that have had the intention of trying to overturn everything within the Democratic Party.
In reference to the Democratic Convention of 2016, a Politico article covered Sarsour and her cohorts:
“Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York, posted on Facebook that she was going to the convention as one of Sanders’ 23 at-large delegates from New York and had to ‘decide if I’m going to behave or not.’ ”
In an interview, Sarsour said she plans to act out if she feels excluded from the process. “Not behaving is protesting,” she explained of her cryptic post. ‘I’m not expecting violence or assaults, but chanting, doing mass walk-outs. It depends on what happens there. What you’re going to watch unfold is democracy. The onus is on the party to make sure our voices are heard.’ ”
This places Sarsour as part of what is referred to as the “Sanders cult” and during the entire election process we saw them appear as BernieBros, BernieBots and BernieCrats. They demanded to have their voices heard, but it went beyond that. This is a group of extremists that want to take over the Democratic Party, force their agenda on everyone, and have all that are not in agreement with them thrown out.
Their spoiled brat attitude was covered in the same Politico article regarding the Democratic convention:
“Chaos at the Nevada state Democratic convention — where Sanders supporters reporters threw chairs, booed and shouted |
Postmodernism is no longer as fashionable as it was a generation ago on campus but it lingers as a background assumption for many faculty members and is filtered into numerous courses in the humanities and social sciences. Pragmatism, the oldest of three rejections, has a following in some law faculties, and is extolled by the literary critic Stanley Fish, but it might be said to have its strongest hold on faculty members in some of the specialized sciences, where it serves as a convenient way to avoid questions that might complicate the strictly drawn lines of specialized inquiry.
To recognize these rejections of the pursuit of truth as factors within contemporary higher education is not to refute them—a task larger than this statement of principles can accommodate. This much, however, is clear: all three positions are parasitical on the idea of the university as an institution rooted in the pursuit of truth. If “truth” is an illusion employed by the powerful to subordinate the weak, will the weak be better off if the powerful were to accept that proposition and proceed to subordinate the weak by direct exercise of power? The university in that circumstance would cease to exist as a place where knowledge is pursued for any purpose other than domination, and those who now advocate a preference for power over truth would be summarily excluded. The postmodernists inhabit small sub-disciplinary worlds that are wholly subsidiary to the university as a sheltering and protective environment. If their preference for fragmentation were to prevail against the university, their islands of imaginary defiance would be swept away. The pragmatists likewise enjoy a pax Romana maintained by their opponents—the legions of those who believe that the universe is knowable and entire. Shorn of that premise, the institution that permits pragmatists to indulge in playful heuristic dissents would dissolve into the rough and tumble of each having to prove its immediate worth to a doubting world.
These observations, once again, do not suffice to establish that these forms of anti-truth are mistaken. But none of them offers a foundation for the university. Indeed, sometimes all three arguments are referred to as “anti-foundationalism.” No one yet has conjured a vision of an anti-foundationalist form of higher education that suits the larger purposes of the institution. We have no Anti-Idea of the University to set beside John Henry Newman’s classic.
VII. CONCLUSION
Intellectual freedom is a foundational principle of higher education, but only one of several. Even taken by itself, it is an idea that is hedged in, governed, and ordered by the various and complicated contexts in which it must be applied. The classroom, the quad, the student newspaper, the advisor’s office, and the soccer field are different places that demand different applications. Faculty members, students, administrators, staff, and invited speakers all carry different privileges and different responsibilities. The sciences and the humanities differ too in key ways, and teaching, research, and extramural speech all involve distinctive interpretations of what intellectual freedom can and should mean for higher education. Different kinds of institutions rightly emphasize different aspects of intellectual freedom.
None of this is news. At some level nearly everyone who has written seriously about academic freedom has surveyed this terrain—and there are literally hundreds of books on the topic. Nonetheless, in the current rush to comment on, commend, or condemn recent developments, these distinctions have been brushed aside. We thought it useful to refresh the public memory.
Beyond that we are concerned over the recent emergence of versions of academic freedom that conflate it with intellectual freedom—and sometimes conflate both academic and intellectual freedom with First Amendment freedoms. This blurring of key distinctions puts all three at risk. Universities are not places where anything can be said anywhere and at any time. They are places where the truth is pursued by disciplined means; where a hierarchy of knowledge prevails; and where intellectual authority is maintained. These matters are sometimes rhetorically downplayed but in practice they are rigorously upheld.
A university must also embrace intellectual diversity; it must find ways to distinguish worthy from unworthy intellectual pursuits, and important from trivial topics; it must strike a balance between teaching matters of substance and teaching skills; it must establish for students and faculty alike some locus of authority for determining which matters must be taken as settled and which are open to examination—and must also make provision for shifting these categories.
Intellectual freedom and its highly contextualized embodiment, academic freedom, exist in a final sense to make students into free men and women, capable of wise and responsible stewardship of a free society. That’s an educational enterprise of dauntingly large scope and on the evidence of our campuses today, we are not doing a very good job of achieving it. We offer these words as a step towards improving the prospects.He would wander the streets of occupied Mosul by day, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by the extremists. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and stonings, so he could hear killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.
By night, anonymously from his darkened room, Mosul Eye told the world what was happening. If caught, he too would be executed.
But after more than three years, his double life has grown too heavy to bear. He misses his name.
His secrets consume him, sap energy he'd rather use for his doctoral dissertation and for helping Mosul rebuild. In conversations with The Associated Press, he agonized over how to end the anonymity that plagues him. He made his decision.
Mosul Eye is Omar Mohammed, historian, scholar, blogger. He is 31.
The revelation of his identity is for his thousands of readers and followers, for all his volunteers in Mosul who have been inspired by a man they have never seen. But above all, it is for the brother who died in the final battle and for his grieving mother.
"I can't be anonymous anymore. This is to say that I defeated ISIS. You can see me now, and you can know me now," he told The Associated Press.
Mohammed first posted about the Islamic State group under his own Facebook account, in the first few days after its fighters swept into Mosul, but a friend told him he risked being killed. So in those first days he made himself a promise: trust no one, document everything.
A newly minted teacher with a reputation for secular ideas, he had lost his university job.
He found another calling.
"My job as a historian requires an unbiased approach which I am going to adhere to and keep my personal opinion to myself," he wrote on that first day, June 18, 2014.
Mosul Eye became one of the outside world's main sources of news about the Islamic State fighters, their atrocities and their transformation of the city into a grotesque shadow of itself.
During Friday sermons, Mohammed feigned enthusiasm. He collected propaganda to post online later. He drank tea at the hospital, fishing for information.
Much of what he collected went on the blog. Other details he kept in his computer, for fear of giving away his identity. Someday, he promised, he would write history with them.
The most sensitive details initially came from two old friends: a doctor and a high school dropout who had joined an Islamic State intelligence unit.
Mohammed's information sometimes included photos of the fighters and commanders, complete with biographies surreptitiously pieced together during the course of his normal life _ that of an out-of-work scholar living at home.
"I used the two characters, the two personalities to serve each other," he said. He expanded into a Facebook page and a Twitter feed to parcel out information at a time when little news was escaping.
Intelligence agencies made contact as well and he rebuffed them.
"I am not a spy or a journalist," he would say. "I tell them this: If you want the information, it's published and it's public for free. Take it."
In March 2015, his catalog of horrors got to him.
"I was super ready to die," Mohammed said. "I was so tired of worrying about myself, my family, my brothers. I am not alive to worry, but I am alive to live this life. I thought: I am done."
He cut his hair short, shaved his beard and pulled on a bright red sweater. His closest friend joined him.
They drove to the banks of the Tigris blasting forbidden music. They shared a carafe of tea. Heedless of people picnicking nearby, Mohammed lit a cigarette_ banned by IS. Somehow, incredibly, he wasn't caught.
"At that moment I felt like I was given a new life."
He resumed what he had taken to calling his duty. He grew out his hair and beard, put the shortened trousers back on.
He tested out different voices, Christian, Muslim. Sometimes he indicated he was gone, other times that he was still in the city.
Finally, after leaving Mosul a thousand times in his mind, he decided it was time to get out.
"I think I deserve life, deserve to be alive."
A smuggler agreed to sneak him out for $1,000. Mohammed left the next day, the contents of his computer transferred overnight to a hard-drive that he packed with him.
No one gave him a second look during the two days and some 500 kilometers (300 miles) it took to reach Turkey.
Once there, Mosul Eye kept at it: via WhatsApp and Viber, from Facebook messages and long conversations with friends and relatives who had contacts within IS. From hundreds of kilometers away, his life remained consumed by events back home.
By mid-2016, deaths were piling up faster than he could record. The Islamic State group was on a hunt for traitors and the airstrikes were taking an increasing toll on everyone. His records grew haphazard, and he turned to Twitter to document the atrocities. In February 2017, he received asylum in Europe.
Only after his elder brother Ahmed was killed in a mortar strike and IS was gone from the city did Mohammed reveal his secret to a younger brother _ who greeted the news with a shock of pride and happiness. His sibling spoke on condition of anonymity from his refuge in Iraq because he was fearful for his life.
"People in Mosul had lost hope and confidence in politicians, in everything," his brother said. Mosul Eye "managed to show that it's possible to change the situation in the city and bring it back to life."2k
With a little tweeking, this recipe is fantastic. I've been modifying this recipe for quite some time to perfect it. I thought the pumpkin taste was too weak originally, and it lacked a true "...
Nancy 92 45
Changed recipe for simplicity: 2 1/2 Cup Aunt Jemima Original Pancake Mix, 3 TBS brown sugar, 2 1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spice, 1 egg, 1 3/4 cup milk, 2 TBS vegetable oil, 2 TBS vinegar, 1 cup pumpki... Read more
rokzane 1 2
I love this recipe; it's a hearty, stick-to-your-ribs breakfast. The following are a couple tips for the best pancakes. Don't thin the batter with more milk. This washes out the pumpkin flavor.... Read more
Tammy M Curry 573 235
We ate Pumpkin pancakes at the restaurant, IHOP, last winter. I have searched for recipes to try and duplicate the pancakes...This recipe took the first place ribbon! Thank you so much! It w... Read more
RobnMandy 4 3
With a little tweeking, this recipe is fantastic. I've been modifying this recipe for quite some time to perfect it. I thought the pumpkin taste was too weak originally, and it lacked a true "... Read more
mrcook 0 1
As an old pancake/waffle baker I was eager to try this recipe. I followed many suggestions in the reviews (2 eggs, 1 cup whole wheat PASTRY flour) and tweaked it even further. My daughter had... Read more
ANNIESMYTH 53 24
These pancakes are OUT OF THIS WORLD! They're moist and delicious! As always, I used REAL pumpkin instead of the canned stuff (I think it makes a HUGE difference and real pumpkins are so easy... Read more
Lisa 18 2
I used an electric skillet on 300 degrees...if you follow the recipe completely your pancakes will come out great. Adding water or more milk takes away from the flavor. Once you place the batt... Read more
Pamela J Hagen-French 749 89
AWESOME!!! I start by making the recipe just as it calls to be made so that when I rate a recipe those who read the review know what the recipe might be like from my perspective if you make it... Read moreWhen I started pinhole, you could say it was a reaction to everything else going on in my photographic life. I had been building a commercial photography practice and was doing well in digital photography. That was, until the great recession swallowed my practice in what felt like an instant.
As 2008 came to a close, I had a heap of ashes that had for years been one of my deepest passions. Life had put me in a position where I could do nothing but self reflect on what went right and what went oh so wrong. I quickly realized that I had developed an obsession with pixel perfection. I was in desperate need of an antidote. I knew “everything” about the mechanics of photography – ratios, numbers, formulas – but was losing perspective on the importance of photography.
I’m not sure I shot a single photo in 2009 or 2010. I didn’t even own a DSLR. But in 2011 I dug out some old pinhole cameras that I had just started to play with years before. My incredible wife and son gifted me my first Zero Image at that time as well. Having kept myself away from the art long enough, I started to pull at the old heartstring again.
One of the best ways to keep moving forward in your personal growth is to jump into things that make you a rookie again. While pinhole is photography, the “rules”, mechanisms, and aesthetics are so different from digital photography that it really is a different art. The first rolls came out so boring. Pinhole’s lack of detail quickly showed everything that was going wrong with my digital photography. For this reason, making pinhole my only photographic tool has been therapeutic in clearing out the creative blockage.
In sports, athletes often isolate a technique in order to focus on improving. For me, pinhole has acted in much the same way. By freeing myself from pixel perfection and techno features, I’ve been able to focus more on the creative side of things.
Elliott Bay at Dusk
Shot around the time that I finally started figuring out this pinhole thing. Elliott Bay at Dusk, ©Kier Selinsky 2016
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” -Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Up until a month or two ago, I hadn’t shot a DSLR in years. I’m trying to bring my photography back into balance now. While I still shoot plenty of pinhole, I’m using the DSLR again. I’ve found that this time around, I’m able to see better much better. I check more angles, concern myself with light and movement more, and my ability to previsualize is greatly improved.
I won’t be dropping pinhole. Not now, not ever. It’s too important to me to have that reminder of what this art is about. That’s what ƒ/D has really been about. If pinhole is your only photographic practice and you’re happy with that, great. But for many of us, it is important to have a reminder of what’s important. Like getting out into the country for some fresh air – your soul needs this.
Work the pinhole process. Shoot a lot. Challenge your boundaries. No matter what you shot yesterday, your best work is yet to come.The Long, Hot Summer of Transportation Initiatives
[This piece also ran in Checkerboard City, John Greenfield’s transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the street in print on Wednesday evenings.]
Trust me, my friends, this is the year sustainable transportation blows up in Chicago. Say what you want about Rahm Emanuel’s record on education, crime and privatization. But since he took office in early 2011, joined by forward-thinking Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein and shrewd CTA President Forrest Claypool, the city has embarked on a number of bold projects to encourage walking, biking and transit use. I promise the next three months are going to be a tipping point as we make the move from the car-centric status quo to becoming a healthier, more efficient and more vibrant city.
Where to start? The elephant in the room is the south Red Line shutdown, or rehab, depending on whether you see the glass as half empty or half full. Launched on Sunday, May 19, this $425 million project has closed the entire line south of Roosevelt for an extreme makeover, featuring the elimination of slow zones through track replacement, plus station enhancements.
It’s true the work is forcing South Siders to dramatically alter their commutes for the next five months, but the alternative to a complete closure would have been four more years of weekend work and $75 million in additional costs. The CTA appears to have done a solid job of getting the word out about the overhaul, and is getting good reviews from customers for providing numerous alternatives, like free shuttle buses to and train rides from the Green Line’s Garfield stop. In October riders will be rewarded for their patience with a twenty-minute-faster roundtrip from 95th Street to the Loop.
The South Side will also be getting a new ‘L’ station with the $50 million Cermak Green Line stop, a stone’s throw from McCormick Place, slated for June construction. And, starting this summer, the Wilson Red Line station, often cited as the system’s most disgusting facility, will undergo a complete reconstruction that will transform it into a transfer point between Red and Purple Express service, albeit at a jaw-dropping $203 million price tag.
The transit authority recently announced plans for high-speed bus rapid transit service on Ashland between 95th and Irving Park, as well as a central Loop corridor between Union Station and Navy Pier. There’s sure to be plenty of backlash as they move forward with these groundbreaking plans, since they will involve replacing car lanes with dedicated bus lanes. This summer the Chicago Architecture Foundation will announce the winner of a contest to design the BRT stations. Hopefully the winning entry will be as iconic as the futuristic, tubular bus stops of Curitiba, Brazil.
One summer transit initiative I’m less excited about is the debut of the Ventra payment system. While it should cause no problems for the majority of Chicagoans, I’m worried about the impact on low-income residents, since cash fare for ‘L’ rides will spike from $2.25 to $3. You can avoid this increase by buying a reusable fare card for $5, which is refunded to you as a transit credit if you register it within ninety days, but this requires having a five-spot in your hand, plus access to a phone, the Internet, or the CTA headquarters. Plus, when you register, you’ll be given the option of activating the card as a prepaid debit card with numerous hidden fees, a temptation that many unbanked folks can ill afford. Fortunately, last week the agency announced plans to roll back some of these fees.
On a more positive note, this summer construction will start on the Bloomingdale, the 2.65-mile, $91 million elevated greenway and linear park that will have a huge impact on the Northwest Side. While it promises to be a gorgeous, Millennium Park-quality facility, unlike New York’s celebrated High Line it won’t just be a tourist attraction. The Bloomingdale will provide much-needed additional green space and a handy, car-free walking and biking route, since it will connect to a number of parks, schools and transit lines.
The city has been pushing for other innovative uses of public space – witness the 20-bike parking corral that replaced two car spots in front of Logan Square’s Revolution Brewing earlier this month – and more on-street corrals and “People Spot” mini parks are in the works. As part of efforts to improve Andersonville’s already thriving pedestrian retail district, the strip will be swapping multiple car parking stalls for two parklets and a gaggle of corrals this summer. Not to be outdone, Lakeview will be getting its second People Spot in front of Uncle Dan’s outdoor store, 3551 North Southport, featuring lush plantings and a groovy, undulating seating wall.
But the real game-changer this summer will be a massive increase in cycling. Klein has already made waves by installing dozens of miles of protected and buffered lanes, in keeping with Emanuel’s grand plan for 100 miles by 2015. Most dramatically, he turned a Dearborn car lane into a two-way protected bike lane, which immediately made the street feel less like a speedway and more like the civilized business, retail and residential corridor it was meant to be.
Now Milwaukee Avenue is undergoing a similar transformation. Two weeks ago the Chicago Department of Transportation began repaving the street to make way for long-awaited protected bike lanes that will be the missing link between existing PBLs on Kinzie and Elston. This gutsy project will involve relocating about half of the car parking spaces on the strip to side streets—expect to hear plenty of grumbling from motorists.
Milwaukee and other new PBLs, plus a “neighborhood greenway” bike-priority, traffic-calmed street debuting on Berteau between Lincoln and Clark this summer, are sure to encourage new folks to try urban cycling. But what’s really going to make biking explode is the Divvy bike-share system, a $22 million network of 4,000 vehicles at about 400 docking stations, which should launch by the Bike to Work Rally on Friday, June 14, in Daley Plaza.
This do-it-yourself public transit system, featuring comfy cruisers for short trips and errands, will eliminate barriers to cycling for thousands of residents and visitors. As has been the case in other bike-share cities, we’ve already begun to hear business owners griping as CDOT sites docking stations in front of their property, but once they understand how the facilities attract customers and tenants they’ll be begging for the stations. There’ll be hand-wringing about the many new, helmet-less riders on the streets, but this will actually make cycling safer by forcing motorists to watch out for bikes and think twice before opening their doors. Mark my words, after this summer there’ll be no turning back.Sunday night, as I stood in my back garden observing the lunar eclipse, I noted that the moon turned dark on the very day that the Pope celebrated a huge public mass in Protestant America. I am biblical enough to know that prophetic movements can be accompanied by celestial ‘signs’; I also know that the old Adventist teaching as to how the ‘deadly wound’ of the papacy will be ‘healed’ has lost favor with many of Adventism’s educated elite. Still, I would invite us all to read Revelation 13 once again, and note that for such a maligned interpretation of Scripture, this one is proving to be uncannily accurate.
We all know that the Pope spoke at length in the Senate Chamber to a highly receptive audience. Were I not an Adventist, the Pope’s address would probably have seemed both fortuitous and welcome. Yet, 50 years ago, such an event would have been unthinkable given America’s protestant identity and heritage. Things have changed in our country: the old antipathy between Catholics and Protestants has vanished. Most consider this to be a good thing; only Adventists do not see this change as hopeful in quite the same way as others do.
I could not believe my ears when I heard a journalist quip, “I’m an atheist, but I could actually follow this Pope!” Even more bizarre, I listened as a chorus of commentators intoned the Pope’s unimpeachable moral credibility. What I did not hear were any media voices willing to observe how this papacy has pretended to great moral authority in spite of the serial rape of children at the hands of its clergy over many years and around the world. To be sure, the Pope met with some of the abused victims; he expressed great sorrow for their pain, but I cannot understand how this culture of abuse can be described as now possessing such a vast weight of moral authority in the person of its head bishop! I should think quite the opposite would be the case.
The Pope’s formal statements appear to urge reform and real sorrow for victims, but just this week, the Pope congratulated hundreds of his American Bishops for their ‘courage’ in handling the child sex abuse scandal. For the victims of the abusive priests, this comment represents an outrageous level of duplicity, given that some of these same bishops did all that they could to cover-up the scandal and to shuttle priests from diocese to diocese in an effort to protect both the criminal priests from prosecution.
The Pope has dismissed three bishops guilty of gross negligence for allowing offender priests to continue abusing children, but they have not been stripped of their office as bishops. Meanwhile, a recently appointed Chilean Bishop, Juan Barros, has been accused of protecting a notorious paedophile priest (his mentor, as it turns out). Three actual victims have identified Bishop Juan Barros of having been present in the room as the abuse took place. Of course, the offending priest has escaped government prosecution due to the statute of limitations and is now living in solitude protected by the Church. Thirteen-hundred Chilean church members sent a letter to Pope Francis begging him to rescind the Barros’ appointment; 30 priests sent a similar letter, but the Vatican did nothing; instead, it reiterated its unqualified support for Barros. At Barros’ innaguration, protestors filled the Church, while most of the diocese’s priests boycotted the event. In this light, Pope Francis’ uplifting rhetoric rings false. How could a man of such supposedly high moral credibility read even a few of those 1,300 letters from his own members (and priests) and decide to retain Barros in such a high office?The vice president of Iraq has accused President Emmanuel Macron of going against France's constitution by interfering in foreign affairs after he called on Baghdad to disband Shia militias that proved crucial in the fight against ISIL.
Macron met Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), on Saturday in France.
Macron later called on the central government in Baghdad to dissolve the powerful militias - known as Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) - which have now been integrated into Iraq's military.
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Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi vice president, criticised Macron's comments in a statement late on Sunday.
"France's constitution calls for non-interference in other country's internal affairs. We are baffled by the French president's calls for dissolving the Hashd al-Shaabi, which is a legal and official institution in Iraq," he said.
"We strongly reject this as interference in our domestic affairs. We reject the imposition of any other state's will on the Iraqi government and people."
Hashd al-Shaabi played a major role in defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) after the armed group took over large expanses of the country in a rapid offensive in 2014.
ISIL has now been expelled from the major cities, including Iraq's second largest, Mosul.
Macron's statement was also denounced by the vice president of Iraq's parliament, Humam Hammudi.
"We expect the international community, especially France, to show respect for the noble warriors, many of whom have perished in Iraq for the sake of world peace," Hammudi said in a statement on Monday.
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"The Daesh [ISIL] terrorist group would have stabbed France in the heart if it hadn't been for the Hashd al-Shaabi."
At a joint news conference in Paris with Iraqi Kurdish leaders, including Barzani, Macron called on Saturday for the demobilisation of all militias in Iraq that fought ISIL, also known as ISIS.
"France calls for a constructive national dialogue to engage in Iraq," Macron said.
"Having a strong, reconciled, pluralistic Iraq which recognises each of its components is a condition for the immediate and medium-term stability."
The central government in Baghdad has been in a dispute with the KRG since it held an independence referendum that resulted in a "yes" vote in September.
Iraqi forces backed by militias responded by seizing the oil-rich Kurdish-held city of Kirkuk in October along with other disputed territory.GREENWOOD, Ind. (WTHR) - Prosecutors in Johnson County filed charges against a seven-year-old boy for shooting his father.
It's an unusual case and the boy isn't the only one in trouble.
Prosecutors also charged his father and stepmother with felony neglect.
In the Greenwood home on Westwood Drive, where police called conditions "deplorable," prosecutors say a seven-year-old boy fired a gun at his father when he was told he had to spend the weekend with dad.
"He went into the room, got the gun, loaded it, went back into the room, pointed it at his father and pulled the trigger," said Johnson County Prosecutor Brad Cooper.
The shot hit his dad, Charles Yancey, in the wrist. The handgun belonged to the boy's stepmom, Ruby Yancey.
Prosecutors say along with ammunition, the Ruger SR22 was stored in a small, unlocked nightstand with easy access.
"Not under a lock, not under key, no trigger lock, nothing of the sort," Cooper said. "When a seven-year-old has access to a firearm like this, under these circumstances, you get what happened here."
Cooper says that's why Charles and Ruby Yancey now face felony neglect charges, which carry a potential sentence of six months to two years in prison, if convicted. He says this could have been simply a child's temper tantrum over not getting his way.
"Instead, it turned into a shooting because the parents of the house did not lock up their firearms," Cooper said.
"The gun should have been put up. Parents, they gotta watch stuff like that," said neighbor Kristi Wilson.
"I don't know why people don't just put the guns away. Kids should not get guns. It's crazy," added neighbor Brenda Hohman.
But prosecutors charged more than the adults. The seven-year-old faces trouble, too.
Prosecutors filed a juvenile delinquency charge that's comparable to criminal recklessness in adult court.
"That's too much. I can see the parents being charged but the child? No. That's crazy," Wilson said.
But Cooper says the case was clear-cut because the boy told officers what happened was no accident.
"In the interview that was done - it was an intentional shooting," Cooper said.
Prosecutors say the point of the juvenile charge isn't about punishment, but rather to help the boy avoid future trouble.
"That would be our ultimate goal is to do whatever we have to do to correct this problem so that it doesn't happen again and so we're not back here later on with another incident with the same kid," Cooper said.New Dragon Quest X Info and Screenshots Confirm Keyboard, Showcase Communication and Priests.
Giuseppe Nelva November 30, 2011 11:45:28 AM EST
Today Square Enix released another batch of screenshots and information on Dragon Quest X, mostly focusing on the means of communication within the game and on the Priest class.
First and foremost, compatibility with USB Keyboards has been confirmed. You’ll be able to plug one to your Wii and just type away like you were playing on PC (even if there’s no word about a mouse, I doubt they thought about that one).
In the case you’re completely crazy and really really want to talk using the controller, there are communication options for you as well:
First of all there are two menus with selectable sentences of frequent use, one for normal communication and one for battle. All the lines included in those menus can be freely edited and personalized.
Secondly, there will be several animated emotes that will allow players to express their feelings easier. Each emote can be attached to the predetermined lines described above, and animations are different by race and gender.
After the Warrior and the Dancer, this week is the Priest’s turn to be introduced between the basic classes of Dragon Quest X. Priests have low HP and their attack and defense are weak, but they can heal the party, proving invaluable allies. Original, isn’t it?
As all classes priests will have access to three weapon types: Spears, Staffs and Wands (actually they’re named “Stick”, but that sounds horrible, so I’m going to stick with “Wand”, pardon the pun).
When equipping a wand priests will be able to use a small shield and their attacks will also absorb mana points from the enemy.
Specializing in different weapons will grant different special attacks. For instance the Spear grants Lightning Thrust, that does exactly what it says on the tin, delivering a lightning fast attack. On the other hand the wand provides the player with Charming Ribbon (what is this, Sailormoon?), that will confuse an enemy making him fight on the side of the priest.
Several Faith spells are also available: Holy Prayer, Protection of the Angels and Purification Ceremony are a few examples.
Some further details have been shared about the class and skill system itself.
Players will be able to level a class, and then switch to another whenever they want, retaining the skills of the previous class and its levels. When going back to that class, they will continue their progression where they left.
Leveling up each class will grant skill points that can be used to purchase different skills.
Some skills will be usable with other classes. For instance a character that learned Purification Ceremony as a Priest can use it as a Warrior as well in order to remove negative status aliments from the party. Other skills will only be usable with their original class, in order to ensure a level of specialization and clear party roles.
Finally, a few of the monsters that will populate the game has also been revealed. Three of them are returning from previous installments of the franchise: The Cumaulus and Caterpillar from Dragon Quest III and the Dasshuran from Dragon Quest VII.
You can see a gallery with all the screenshots released today below:Measuring the yuck factor: recycled water and public opinion
Measuring the yuck factor: recycled water and public opinion
Some people call it “purified water.” Others deride the process of turning wastewater into potable supplies as “toilet to tap.”
Whatever you call it, recycling sewage into drinking water is something we’re likely to see more of as communities look for new sources to support growing populations.
The key challenge for delivering treated effluent to customers isn’t technical: we already know how to remove the impurities and contamination.
The bigger obstacle for this approach is public opinion: how do you sell and communicate about something that makes many people squeamish?
Public opinion surveys on recycled water
Public acceptance of recycled water has been the subject of a number of polls. In a January 2015 paper in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, researchers reported results from two surveys: one from a sample of more than 2,000 Americans from five metropolitan areas–Phoenix, San Diego, San Jose, Eugene, and Philadelphia–and the second from a smaller sample of undergraduate students.
“Approximately 13% of our adult American sample definitely refuses to try recycled water, while 49% are willing to try it, with 38% uncertain,” the researchers wrote. “Both disgust and contamination sensitivity predict resistance to consumption of recycled water.” The graphic below (click on image to enlarge) shows the respondents’ willingness to try various types of water, ranging from the seemingly pristine bottled spring water to various types of treated water and, at the bottom of the barrel, raw sewage.
In March 2016, water technology firm Xylem released results from an online poll of Californians that asked whether residents approved of using recycled water as a long-term solution for managing water. Nearly half of the respondents (49%) said they were very supportive and 38% said they were somewhat supportive. The poll also found that 42% of Californians were willing to use recycled water in their everyday lives and another 41% said they’re somewhat willing.
Below is an infographic from the survey that summarizes the results:
Public education is a critical part of any strategy to increase the use of recycled water. When respondents in the Xylem survey were read a statement explaining the treatment process, 89% said they were more willing to use recycled water. Similarly, 88% said seeing a demonstration of the purification process would make them more comfortable using and drinking recycled water.
What to call recycled water is a communications challenge for supporters of the technology. Treated wastewater doesn’t thrill most people, and few outside the water world know what “effluent” is. The Xylem poll found that the term “purified water” was a bit more likely to trigger support (90%) than “recycled water” (87%) or “reclaimed water” (82%).
Results from polls in Bay Area and San Diego
The Xylem poll is based on a California statewide sample, but other studies have focused on much smaller geographies. In 2015, for instance, the Bay Area Council polled residents of the San Francisco Bay region on a variety of water issues and found that 88% supported the use of recycled water. The graphic below shows how other drought preparedness strategies fared.
The San Diego County Water Authority has done extensive polling on water issues and asked some questions about treating recycled water. As shown in the graphic below, about six in 10 respondents said they favored mixing recycled water into the existing supply, with men expressing greater support than women. Of the 31% of people against the idea, about half strongly opposed mixing in the recycled water.
Oregon survey: type of use matters
A 2008 survey of voters in Corvallis, Oregon concluded that “the city can expect significant support for water reuse in the community, especially if the program demonstrably adheres to the principles of sustainability.” This survey found that how recycled water is used plays a big role in influencing public acceptance.
“Low contact uses like irrigation of business park landscaping were more preferred than high contact uses like irrigation of edible crops,” wrote researcher Karen DuBose. “There is significant uncertainty among respondents about the safety of reclaimed water for all uses listed in the survey. Given more information, citizens may be more willing to support higher contact uses.” The graphic below shows that in Corvallis, acceptance varied from 89% supportive of irrigating business park landscaping with recycled water to only 33% in favor of irrigating edible crops.
Messengers are crucial in any communications campaign and the Corvallis poll found that university professors–especially those from the hometown Oregon State University–were rated the most credible sources of information on the use of treated wastewater. The decision to use recycled water is usually made at the local |
you. Likewise, the shift from Armor Pen to Attack Speed is again aimed at extending Olaf's engagement window. Armor Pen was allowing Olaf to burst harder vs. low armor targets (due to Q benefiting largely from it), which was one of the biggest pain points of playing against Olaf and I'm hoping that shifting the burst potential of that armor pen will 1. allow Olaf to brawl other frontliners better with sustained damage and lifestealing and 2. force him to stick to carries for longer to kill them rather than bursting them down super quickly.
Quote:
Edit: I am also wondering with the mana changes and the new minimum distance added to undertow why mana is even on olaf now, the previous infinite axe issue should be resolved with the minimum travel distance. keeping him tied by mana seems silly if only undertow is using it I've discussed this quite a bit earlier in the thread, but the tl;dr on this is that mana constraining his Undertow is what allows the pattern of the ability to not be abusive, and I'd really like to preserve Undertow's use pattern because I think it's thematic and awesome.
Quote: It sounds like the passive Armor and MR are lost when Ragnarok is cast (and maybe also while on cooldown)?
They are only lost during the active duration of Ragnarok. It would be pretty awful if they were lost while it's on CD IMO. Basically my feeling is that Olaf feels super clunky when Ragnarok is down and when he's in this clunky state in teamfights, he needs the defense to make up for the fact that he's very kiteable and pokeable."
"Strongly disagree. Undertow has an awesome chasing pattern and an awesome thematic. I threw my axe, and by going to pick it up again, I get to throw it again. This is just friggin' sweet, one of the coolest abilities in our entire game IMO. What doesn't make it cool is repeatedly slamming your axe into the ground at your feet to deal unreasonably high burst that then forces the rest of the character to be balanced around an abuse case. I dunno, please argue with me here if you really think I'm off base with this, but I think having a 0 minimum distance allows players to use this skill in an unintuitive way that forces the rest of the skill to be worse for the sake of balance."
"Probably shouldn't have put a number to the minimum range...
Olaf's pick up detection on Axes is fairly generous and I played with that number quite a bit before arriving at 450. With no boots, throwing at minimum range, it'll take you about half a second of walking towards the axe before you pick it up. The intent here is solely to prevent repeated axes at your feet and if people disagree with my tuning of this number, I'll tweak it until it feels right."
"I've thought of a floor and it feels like an inelegant solution because it creates weird optimization regarding when you're supposed to pick up the axe.
The other option I've considered is having the pickup's cooldown decrease scale multiplicatively with CDR as opposed to additively with CDR (think Hecarim's Rampage mechanics), but with the variable times when you can pick up the axe, this starts to make optimizing really messy again.
Basically, I just want Olaf to feel good about picking up the axe when he wants to throw it again without needing to consider further optimization and I think the flat reduction feels good for this and that the minimum range both feels appropriate and solves the 0 range abuse cases. I will continue to monitor how up close and personal axes feel on Olaf and explore other options if this proves problematic, but based on the initial testing with minimum range, I think it's promising. I can understand the concerns about the feel of low range axes with a minimum range, but I do want to urge you to not be too hasty in your judgement of the mechanic based on the range number (subject to tuning as appropriate), as ultimately what matters here is that low range axes feel appropriate to Olaf players and fair to opponents."
Xelnath
"I want to emphasize an important point here. This is the beginning of our testing cycle on Olaf's changes. If changes don't play out well, we won't ship them. However, we're picking changes that remove invisible, uncounterable power and making sure players understand why they died and understand how they can handle that situation better next time.
What mechanics do you think we should adjust on Olaf to help us achieve those goals? (Visibility, Clarity, Counterplay, Learning)"
SmashGizmo
"Probably need to get to bed soon so that I can get ready to head out to Evo tomorrow, but I want to ask yall something else before I go.
How would you feel if the AD bonus from Vicious Strikes was just a (higher) flat number instead of scaling off total health? I'm currently finding this tooltip to be a big gross nightmare of mechanics and am wondering if the health -> damage component of this skill is really adding anything to it at this point. Changing this to a flat value should make offensive itemization feel better since he loses the theoretical hyper scaling off of defense and the base numbers could be scaled to the point where they make Olaf sufficiently threatening even if he built tank."
"Largely depends on the numbers. From how I see it, Olaf is building his largest health items within his first 2 items most of the time, and maxing W last. Which means he's probably usually sitting at somewhere in the 2.5-3k ballpark at level 13 with a rank 1 W (35ish AD). By level 18, he gets to rank 5 W and ~4k hp (75ish AD). So the growth from mid to late game is roughly 40 or so AD during his W's uptime.
If instead it was something like 20/35/50/65/80 bonus AD, we're instead looking at his level 13 with a rank 1 W giving 20 AD and his level 18 rank 5 W giving 80 AD, adding an extra 50% scaling to the ability between levels 13 and 18. It's weird because at first glance it looks like the one with the ratio will scale harder, but since it's scaling up with your base HP while staying at rank 1, you're getting a larger portion of the power earlier. Of course, this approach runs the risk of Olaf going all Irelia on us and maxing W in lane and being a giant sustain jerk, but I still think there's potential to adjust his power curve in a healthier way towards late game even by removing the HP ratio."
Continue reading for more information.Here's draft of how to fix up Olaf:He continued, answering several summoner questions:He continued, diving deeper into his thoughts on the Undertow change and a small note on that change also jumped in with a friendly reminder capped off the discussion by presenting a new idea on Vicious Strikes:The United States has taken another step in ramping up its military presence in Africa, deploying about 100 troops to Niger to man a drone air base.
Located temporarily in the capital, Niamey, the base will house about half a dozen unarmed Predator drones whose mission, for now, will be to collect intelligence to help the French-led combat against Islamist extremist groups trying to take over the government of Mali.
A military official told The Washington Post that eventually the U.S. would like to relocate the base to the northern Niger city of Agadez, which is closer to the Malian territory where the rebels are located. U.S. contractors have already been operating surveillance flights out of Agadez for several months.
About 60 American military personnel were previously sent to Niger, with another 40 arriving last week. Most of the recent arrivals consisted of Air Force logistics specialists, intelligence analysts and security officers.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
To Learn More:
U.S. Troops Arrive In Niger To Set Up Drone Base (by Craig Whitlock, Washington Post)
New Drone Base in Niger Builds U.S. Presence in Africa (by Eric Schmitt and Scott Sayare, New York Times)
U.S. to Expand Drone Operations with New Base in West Africa (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman, AllGov)San Antonio FC goalkeeper and captain Josh Ford has been suspended for four matches by the USL, the league announced today. SAFC will appeal the decision in an effort to reduce Ford’s suspension.
Ford was shown a red card following a scuffle in the box during the second half of the San Antonio FC match against OKC Energy FC on July 9. Energy FC midfielder Michael Thomas was also shown a red card for his actions.
Following the mandatory one-game suspension, the USL Disciplinary Committee ruled an additional three-game suspension for Ford. The 28-year-old shot-stopper is scheduled to miss matches against Whitecaps 2 on July 9, Galaxy II on July 23, Swope Park Rangers on July 30 and Sacramento Republic FC on August 6.
Ford has appeared in 15 USL matches, allowing 13 goals and making 43 saves. The Liverpool, NY native has conceded just one goal or less in 14 of his 15 starts this season.
San Antonio FC continues its three-game homestand at Toyota Field when they host Vancouver Whitecaps 2 on July 16 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets to the match can be purchased at SanAntonioFC.com or by calling 210-444-5MLS.Part 1 – Untitled
On my way to the airport my mother mentions that a Nigerian man will be coming to live with her. His brother, who is named after a day in the week, is constantly texting her.
“No one has ever said such nice things to me” she says, showing me one of his text messages.
The Nigerian is coming to go to college. “It feels nice to be able to change someone’s life” she says. I wonder why it can’t be her life, or my life, or my autistic brother’s life. She’s given up on us, I suppose.
It is a beautiful July Sunday in Southwest Michigan. The sun beats brilliant down upon the I-94 where the animals know to stay the fuck away.
We arrive at Gerald R. Ford Memorial Airport. An interstate hub. I’m going to visit my Grandmother.
I’m flying with with an airline named Allegiant which I am certain is being run by a couple of computers in a call center basement somewhere in India.
As I arrive to my gate I survey the other passengers. I think of the movie Final Destination but decide to fly anyway. I imagine us all getting sucked out of the pressurized cabin into the air. I think they are all looking around thinking the same thing.
Maybe I’m projecting.
They have the passengers split up into sections. I’m in group three, there is no group one or two, some of group four has window seats but they’re seated last.
I am sat next to an attractive young woman. Potentially younger than 18, although, in my 20s, it is hard now for me to call. She has deep dark red hair and is dressed in a black, laced dress. There’s a seat open still and I say “maybe we’ll get an extra seat, that would be nice.”
She says “yeah.”
A young family of four are to sit near us, a mother and three girls. One of the girls fills the window seat. She looks just like my ex-girlfriend’s younger sister, but thinner. Has the same name: Julie. She wears glasses. She, too, is probably under 18, though I still cannot tell.
Their skin is like porcelain. To my right is the smell of fruit, to my left is the smell of lavendar. I sneak glances at them on occasion, but I never say a word. I imagine fucking them both, and how disappointed we would all be about it; myself, each of them, those I love, damn near everybody. I decide it’s best to not say a word for almost the whole trip.
“The landing is the worst part” I finally say, as we begin to descend.
Part 2 – Let me explain
Florida is much more humid than Michigan. This is the first thing I think as I step off the plane. I arrive in Tampa. My grandmother is waiting in a newly leased Nissan.
Let me explain:
1. I am here to visit and vacation with my grandmother
2. I am here to detoxify my system from a decade of high amounts of consistent marijuana use
3. I am here to remember my grandmother as she is healthy and as I am healthy
I find her amongst the other cars waiting in the impossible arrivals ramp.
Part 3 – We drive deeper into Florida
We drive deeper into Florida.
Part 4 – Skeletons in Sports Cars
I saw skeletons in sports cars draped in newly borrowed skin. I saw cities filled to the brim with the old, adopting a special type of entitled hedonism, vomiting endlessly upon marshlands floating haphazardly close to the water-table. I saw failed entrepeneurial attempts blotching the places in between new and old cities. I saw no land, only property.
I saw the young licking the boots of death, flirting with the reaper. I saw jubilence, denial, childish glee, and an endless sea of chain stores, mini-malls, and pharmacies. I heard the familiar groan of the earth buckling under the weight of overgrown humanity louder than ever. The crux of the weight is here. The epicenter of destruction.
The roads were all smooth blacktop with keenly placed reflectors and brightly colored lane markings. I drove my grandmother’s car with a push button starter, no keys. The car merely sensed that the key fob was near, unlocked, and let us in. I had never owned more than several jalopies. The car was so accomdating, all the cars were like this, and on lease, they would run for hours in the hot Florida sun with the A/C on full blast. They ran so seemlessly one could fall asleep and still arive home safely. They gave rise to delusions of grandeur by the very nature of their cleanly designed interior lines, their smooth ride, their immaculate luxury.
This is the land that was promised to my grandmother’s entire generation. “You work hard” said Raegan “and just before you die I promise you a car that will comfortably steer you to heaven’s gates. I’ll give you a land with every familiar scent from every familiar chain store. I promise you marketing so clever and subtle you may mistake it for your best friend and sit in front of your television all day watching nothing but commercials. I will condition your air. I will put the world at the tip of your phone and you can spend the remainder of your pocket book without a breath in your lungs. I will give you pretty and young faces to fuck, even, if that’s your thing. You give me your youth” he continued “and I will give you the youth of your grandchildren.”
Of course, he didn’t actually say any of that. But he might as well have when they started building Florida out of the alligator infested swampland which nature intended.
I saw many things in Florida. All in the first day, even. I was to be there for 4.
Part 5 – About this bar my grandma takes me to
The bar’s name is a pun. It’s my grandmother’s hangout. There is music on the patio. It is a mixture of sweat, alcohol, and regurgitated youth. I try and sit as far in the back as possible and look unassuming, nonjudgemental, as I witness the local band enact every artist’s nightmare played out note for note.
I am such a sweet, nice grandson. I am at least 50 pounds overweight and the waitresses my age don’t even look at me.
My grandmother’s friends tell me how wonderful she is, I am, the bar is, the bands are, this area is, life is, in general. They live in a fever dream. A hallucination so strongly supported by their minds that if you tried to wake them they would get mad enough to kill.
They sit and smile at the bands and it is best not to tell them to do otherwise.
Part 6 – On: Seaworld
On our way out to the beach where human property ends and the Golf of Mexico begins we discuss how the people in Florida actually care deeply about the wildlife here. I learned long ago not to argue things with my grandmother.
Her version of saving wildlife is a worker on an oil rig cleaning off an oil soaked seagull, naming it, holding it closely and weeping profusely, then letting it go back in to the wild (to die shortly after?). Then go back to work. Maybe the owners of the oil rig donate to the save-the-seagull foundation. Maybe they have calendars with seagulls on them. Maybe that’s how they fundraise their seagull saving efforts: by selling seagull themed calendars. Anyway that’s my grandmother’s version of charity.
She tells me zoos are great because bottling up the animals and selling them in digestible forms helps the general public understand them more, care about them more, and potentially help the few they may come in contact with. She tells me this all while steering a plastic boat across a smooth gravel and blacktop sea.
Part 7 – A young couple on the beach kissing and holding hands
We arrive at the beach and it’s like a prepackaged meditation CD. There are birds, obnoxious children in the distance, the ocean is luke-warm and salty. I lay on my back and spread out my body like I am a plant and require sunlight for photosynthesis. I close my eyes and the inside of my skull echoes a reddish-orange hue.
I sit and think about how great it is to not be thinking about all of the things that I don’t want to think about. I am a 230 pound pile of white lumpy birdshit. I wish the water could have washed me clean. I wish the sun could have melted me away.
I tried one, then the other, then in reverse.
Part 8 – It was probably just my taste buds
On the way back inland I marvel at the idea that someone could not make a decent meal out of freshly caught fish straight from the ocean. Furthermore, price it as if they had shipped it across the country beforehand. In another life I slam the check on the table, walk back to the fucking kitchen, and tell the cooks that I have had better prepared seafood 3 states from the coast in the middle of the winter. That’s a better life, I think.
Part 9 – Exploration
I replace the THC slowly draining from my system with doses of alcohol. I have choked the very last bit of insight from my surroundings.
I am dehydrated, squeezing a wet rag above me with my mouth agape, waiting for something to sustain me.
I am left only with the very last great adventure: the exploration of myself.
Part 10 – Burn Brush
My soul is a mountain. Atop the mountain is a great lightning storm. The bolts reach the ground, light fire, burn brush, then wait for new life to take hold. I am a traveler on this mountain adorned in only a loin cloth. My legs are worn my feet are bloody my eyes are grey. The mountain goes beyond where the clouds begin.
Part 11 – Untitled
I stand now with the wind threatening to whip me down the side of myself.
My face nearly touches the great storm.
I am too scared to scream.
Part 12 – On my way home
I can step forward and disintegrate. That would be noble and great.
I can turn tail and walk back down. That would be shallow and meaningless.
AdvertisementsTurkey, which had had a relatively friendly relationship with Syria over the decade prior to the start of the civil unrest in Syria in the spring of 2011, condemned the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad over the violent crackdown on protests in 2011[51] and later that year joined a number of other countries demanding his resignation.[52] In the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, Turkey trained defectors of the Syrian Army on its territory, and in July 2011, a group of them announced the birth of the Free Syrian Army, under the supervision of Turkish intelligence.[53] In October 2011, Turkey began sheltering the Free Syrian Army, offering the group a safe zone and a base of operations. Together with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Turkey has also provided the rebels with arms and other military equipment. Tensions between Syria and Turkey significantly worsened after Syrian forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet in June 2012, and border clashes erupted in October 2012.[54] On 24 August 2016, the Turkish armed forces began a declared direct military intervention into Syria pursuing as targets both ISIL and the Kurdish-aligned forces in Syria.
Turkey also provided refuge for Syrian dissidents. Syrian opposition activists convened in Istanbul in May 2011 to discuss regime change,[55] and Turkey hosts the head of the Free Syrian Army, Colonel Riad al-Asaad.[56] Turkey has become increasingly hostile to the Assad government's policies and has encouraged reconciliation among dissident factions. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been trying to "cultivate a favorable relationship with whatever government would take the place of Assad."[57] Beginning in May 2012, some Syrian opposition fighters began being armed and trained by the Turkish National Intelligence Organisation.[58]
Human rights groups, including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch have reported that Turkish troops have killed hundreds of civilians fleeing the civil war in Syria.[59] This includes 75 children and 37 women killed by Turkish border guards.[60]
Turkey and anti-government forces in Syria [ edit ]
Since 1999, when Bashar al-Assad's father Hafez al-Assad expelled Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, relations between Syria and Turkey warmed.[61]
In the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, Turkey trained defectors of the Syrian Army on its territory, and in July 2011, a group of them announced the birth of the Free Syrian Army, under the supervision of Turkish intelligence.[53] In October 2011, Turkey began sheltering the Free Syrian Army, offering the group a safe zone and a base of operations. Together with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Turkey has also provided the rebels with arms and other military equipment.
Al-Qaeda and the Army of Conquest [ edit ]
Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have supported the Army of Conquest.[62] The coalition includes the al-Nusra Front (the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda) and Ahrar al-Sham, but it also included non-al-Qaeda-linked Islamist factions, such as the Sham Legion, that have received covert arms support from the United States.[63] According to The Independent, some Turkish officials admitted giving logistical and intelligence support to the command center of the coalition, but denied giving direct help to al-Nusra, while acknowledging that the group would be beneficiaries. It also reported that some rebels and officials claim that material support in the form of money and weapons to the Islamist groups was being given by Saudis with Turkey facilitating its passage.[64] Al-Ahram reported that President Obama of the United States chose not to confront Saudi Arabia and Qatar over the issue at a May 2015 meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council, although al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham troops made up 90% of the troops in the Idlib region, where they were making substantial gains against the Assad government.[65]
Turkey had reportedly criticised designation of the Nusra Front as a terrorist organisation. Feridun Sinirlioğlu had reportedly told his American interlocutors that it was more important to focus on the "chaos" that Assad has created instead of groups such as al-Nusra.[66] Al-Monitor claimed in 2013 that Turkey was reconsidering its support for Nusra. Turkey's designation of the Nusra Front as a terrorist group since June 2014 was seen as an indication of it giving up on the group.[67][68] Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, Leader of the Opposition in Turkey has alleged that Erdogan and his government have supported terrorism in Syria.[69][70] In June 2014, İhsan Özkes, a parliamentarian from CHP, claimed that a directive had been signed by Turkish Interior Minister Muammer Güler, ordering the provision of support to Al-Nusra against PYD. Güler denied this claim and argued that a directive with the letterhead of the Governor's Office of Hatay could not be possibly signed by a minister, which is a direct proof of the document's inauthenticity.[71][72] Former United States Ambassador to Turkey, Francis Ricciardone claimed that Turkey had directly supported and worked with Ahrar al-Sham and al-Qaeda's wing in Syria for a period of time thinking that they could work with extremist Islamist groups and push them to become more moderate at the same time, an attempt which failed. He said that he tried to persuade the Turkish government to close its borders to the groups, but to no avail.[73] Seymour Hersh in an article published on London Review of Books on April 17, 2014 claimed that senior US military leaders and the intelligence community were concerned about Turkey's role and stated that Erdogan was a supporter of al-Nusra Front and other Islamist rebel groups.[74]
RT reported in March 2016 that al-Nusra had pitched their camps along the Turkish border and regularly receives supply from the Turkish side near the border town of Azaz. While filming a number of vehicles coming from the Turkish side through the Bab al-Salam crossing to Azaz, the RT crew reported that Turkish military vehicles were at most a kilometre away from them. Abdu Ibrahim, head of YPG in Afrin claimed that Turkey was definitely providing support to al-Nusra. Some Syrian rebels also told RT that Turkey was providing support to ISIL and al-Nusra.[75] This claim was branded "an ugly lie" by the Turkish media and attributed to the impaired relationship between Russia and Turkey after the 2015 Russian Sukhoi Su-24 shootdown incident and to the fact that RT is a Russian state agency.[76] In October 2016, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, the Turkish foreign minister, called on the al-Nusra Front to withdraw from Aleppo and called on other Syrian rebel groups to split from Nusra.[77]
On 5 May 2017, Mehmet Görmez, the Turkish president of religious affairs, met with Harith al-Dhari,[78] an Iraqi Sunni cleric who was designated by the Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee as an "individual associated with al-Qaeda" in 2010. Al-Dhari was reported to have "provided operational guidance, financial support, and other services to or in support of al-Qaeda in Iraq."[79]
Turkistan Islamic Party [ edit ]
Arab media claimed that the village of Az-Zanbaqi (الزنبقي) in Jisr al-Shughur's countryside has become a base for a massive amount of Uyghur Turkistan Islamic Party militants and their families in Syria, estimated at around 3,500. They further accused the Turkish intelligence of being involved in transporting these Uyghurs via Turkey to Syria, with the aim of using them first in Syria to help Jabhat Al-Nusra and gain combat experience fighting against the Syrian Army before sending them back to Xinjiang to fight against China if they manage to survive.[80][81] Arab news agencies reported that the Uyghurs in the Turkistan Islamic Party, the Chechens in Junud al-Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are being coordinated by Turkish intelligence to work with the Army of Conquest.[82] Turkish media agencies, on the other hand, denied this and claimed that it was a scheme of the Chinese government to promise a holy cause and new lands to Uyghur forces with Islamic tendencies, which would eventually be cited by the government as the reason for more oppressive policies towards the Uyghur people.[83] The validity of the Chinese claims had also been challenged by Sean Roberts of Georgetown University in an article on global terrorism.[84] Conversely, other reports emphasized on the Uyghur fighters' ties with ISIL, which lead to the 2017 Istanbul nightclub shooting against Turkey.[85]
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) [ edit ]
Allegations of Turkish cooperation with and support for ISIL [ edit ]
Ever since the formal founding of ISIL from its Islamist predecessor groups in June 2014, Turkey has faced numerous allegations of collaboration with and support for ISIL in international media.[86][87][88][89] Several of the allegations have focused on Turkish businessman and politician Berat Albayrak, who has faced calls for his prosecution in the United States.[90][91]
Turkey has, despite national and international criticism, largely refused to directly engage militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), despite continued threats from ISIL to pursue more operations on Turkish soil. The Turkish response to the ISIL-led Siege of Kobanî as well as a series of terrorist attacks on Turkish soil allegedly linked to ISIL perpetrators, was largely subdued apart from a series of incidents on the Turkish–Syrian border. On 23 July 2014 one Turkish sergeant was killed by fire from ISIL forces in Syria, and four Turkish tanks returned fire into ISIL held territory in Syria.[92] The following day ISIL and Turkish soldiers actively engaged in the Turkish border town of Kilis, marking a dangerous new escalation in the ties between Turkey and ISIL.[93] Turkish F-16 Fighting Falcons struck ISIL targets across the border from Kilis Province with smart bombs, the Turkish government announced.[94]
The Turkish government claimed that this was to prevent an attempted invasion by ISIL troops.[95]
On August 25, 2015 the Turkish newspaper Bugün ran a front-page story, illustrated with video stills, about what it said was the transfer, under the observation of Turkish border guards, of weapon and explosives from Turkey to ISIL through the Akcakale border post. Bugün reported that such transfers were occurring on a daily basis and had been going on for two months. In response, a couple of days later offices of Koza İpek Media Group, the owner of the newspaper, were raided by Turkish police.[96][97] In October 2015 control of Koza İpek Media Group was seized by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office which then appointed new managers with links to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), and in July 2016 Bugün was closed down on the orders of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.[98][99]
In late November 2015, Turkey started tougher controls to stop ISIL militants crossing on a 60-mile stretch of the border with Syria where ISIL had control of the Syrian side. The crossing was used for smuggling and for arms transfers. This followed Russian President Putin directly accusing Turkey of aiding ISIL and al-Qaeda, and pressure from the U.S.[100]
In April 2018 an article was published by Foreign Policy in which it was stated that In 2013 alone, some 30,000 militants traversed Turkish soil, establishing the so-called jihadi highway, as the country became a conduit for fighters seeking to join the Islamic State. Furthermore it was claimed that wounded Islamic State militants were treated for free at hospitals across southeastern Turkey. Among those receiving care was one of the top deputies of Islamic State chieftain Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Ahmet el-H, who was treated in a private hospital in Sanliurfa in August 2014.[101]
From July 2015: Alleged ISIL terror attacks in Turkey [ edit ]
On 7 July 2015, reports surfaced that Turkish security forces seized a truck bound for Syria loaded with 10,000 detonators and explosive primers with total length of 290,000 metres (950,000 feet) in Akcakale, Sanliurfa province, southeastern Turkey. Five people were arrested. The detainees admitted attempts of crossing the border from the village of Aegean into Tal Abyad city in the Al-Raqqah Province.[102]
On 20 July 2015, a cultural center in Suruç was bombed by a 20-year-old male Turkish ISIL member.[103] 32 people were killed in the town of Suruç's municipal culture center in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, and at least 100 people were hospitalised.[104]
On 10 October 2015 at 10:04 local time (EEST) in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey, two bombs were detonated outside Ankara Central railway station. With a death toll of 103 civilians,[105] the attack surpassed the 2013 Reyhanlı bombings as the deadliest terror attack in modern Turkish history.[106] Another 500 people were injured.[107][108]
On 19 March 2016, a suicide bombing took place in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district in front of the district governor's office. The attack occurred at 10:55 (EET) at the intersection of Balo Street with İstiklal Avenue,[109] a central shopping street.[110] The attack caused at least five deaths,[111] including that of the perpetrator. 36 people were injured, including seven whose injuries were severe.[109][110] Among those injured were twelve foreign tourists.[110] Among those killed, two were of dual Israel-US nationality.[112] On 22 March, the Turkish interior minister said that the bomber had links with ISIL.[113]
On 28 June 2016, ISIL militants attacked Istanbul's Atatürk Airport. The three suicide bombers opened fire at passengers before blowing themselves up.[114] The attacks left 45 dead and 230 wounded.[115]
From April 2016: Cross-border confrontations [ edit ]
Turkish artillery strikes killed over 54 ISIL militants on April 2016,[116][117][118][119] whilst 5 people were killed and 22 others were wounded by ISIL rocket projectiles hitting the border province of Kilis.[120][120][121]
The Turkish Foreign Ministry has demanded raising awareness on the Kilis to the U.S. Department of State. Turkey also demanded the deployment of High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) rocket launchers at Turkey's Syria border. According to Turkey, such moves would push ISIL militants southwards, leaving the border province of Kilis out of battery ranges.[122]
From 3 May 2016 to 6 May rocket fire struck the Turkish city of Kilis from ISIS controlled territory with the Turkish Army responding with fire at every attack.[123][123][124][125]
On 6 May the governor's office in Kilis released an official statement declared the province a "special security area," effective for 15 days until 5:00 p.m. on May 20.[125]
Also, in the morning hours, the Turkish military carried out four separate air strikes against ISIL positions in northern Syria, as part of a joint effort and intelligence with the U.S.-led coalition forces. Two Katyusha rockets were fired from ISIL positions in Syria on the southeastern province of Kilis following the air strikes. Turkish armed forces responded to the attack by shelling ISIL targets with howitzers from the border.[126]
In the evening hours, reconnaissance and surveillance vehicles spotted ISIL positions in the Suran region north of Aleppo and the Baragidah and Kuşacık regions northeast of Tal el Hişn. Army shelled them. A total of 55 ISIL militants were killed in the shellings, while three vehicles and three rocket launchers belonging to the jihadist group were also destroyed.[126]
From 11–15 May a total of 55 ISIL militants were killed by Turkey and U.S.-led coalition in operations targeting positions belonging to the jihadist group in Syria, Turkish security sources have said.[127][128]
Turkey and Syria's government [ edit ]
Numerous incidents along the Syrian–Turkish border have taken place during the Syrian Civil War, straining the relations between the countries and resulting in dozens of civilians and military personnel killed. Syria has repreatedly urged UN Security Council action to "put an end to the crimes of the Turkish regime".[129]
Turkey and Rojava [ edit ]
Turkey has received the co-chair of Rojava's leading Democratic Union Party (PYD), Salih Muslim, for talks in 2013[130] and in 2014,[131] even entertaining the idea of opening a Rojava representation office in Ankara "if it's suitable with Ankara's policies."[132] Nonwithstanding, Turkey is persistently hostile, because it feels threatened by Rojava's emergence encouraging activism for autonomy among Kurds in Turkey and the Kurdish–Turkish conflict, and in this context in particular Rojava's leading Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the People's Protection Units (YPG) militia being members of the Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) network of organisations, which also includes both political and militant assertively Kurdish organizations in Turkey itself, including the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Turkey's policy towards Rojava is based on an economic blockade,[133] persistent attempts of international isolation,[134] opposition to the cooperation of the international Anti-ISIL-coalition with Rojava militias,[135] and support of Islamist Syrian Civil War parties hostile towards Rojava,[136][137] in past times even including ISIL.[138][139][140] Turkey has on several occasions also been militarily attacking Rojava territory and defence forces.[141][142][143] The latter has resulted in some of the most clearcut instances of international solidarity with Rojava.[144][145][146][147]
In the perception of much of the Turkish public, the Rojava federal project as well as U.S. support against ISIL are elements of a wider conspiracy scheme by a "mastermind" with the aim to weaken or even dismember Turkey, in order to prevent its imminent rise as a global power.[148] Opposition leader Selahattin Demirtas has argued for Turkey and other countries to recognize Rojava and work with it as a partner.[149][150]
From fall 2014: Kobanî in focus [ edit ]
With the Turkish government thinking that a declaration was enough, and with only a minimum of western airstrikes helping the defenders of Kobanî, ISIL troops edged closer to the city, eventually entering it from the south and east.[151] Feeling betrayed by the Turkish government and hearing that Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu's previous vow not to let Kobanî fall was in fact a lie, refugees on the border and citizens in the cities of Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Antalya, Eskişehir, Denizli, Kocaeli, Diyarbakır, Siirt, Batman, and elsewhere began to protest. Turkish police responded with tear gas and water cannons, and live fire in the southern province of Adana, killing protestors.[152][153]
By 7 October, ISIL militants and Kurdish defenders were fighting in the streets of Kobanî, with many dead and scores wounded on both sides.[154][155] As the battle for Kobanî continued to rage, rioting continued in Turkey, and almost 40 people were killed in street clashes by mid- |
Despite all that, Local 1999 has kept its membership numbers steady, losing fewer people than expected when the right-to-work law allowed workers at unionized plants to opt out of the union. It did this mostly by being willing to fight, even when circumstances suggested that the union should simply accept whatever concessions were demanded.28
That willingness to fight was on display on March 8. While some of the workers at Rexnord were training their replacements and those at Carrier had one last day to choose early retirement, the workers at Sumco—also members of Local 1999—voted 63-to-2 to go on strike. Their vote ended at 4 ᴘᴍ, and within an hour, they were walking a slow picket line in front of the building.29
For the Sumco workers, like those at Rexnord and Carrier, the frustrations date back to the financial crisis. “Right now, we’re just trying to get back everything we lost in 2009 and 2010,” says Bill Horton, a 23-year Sumco employee and the unit president at the plant. “That year, we lost over half our vacation days, half our personal time; we agreed to not take a pay raise for two years.” In the interim, the company continued asking for concessions, even though, as far as the workers know, it had become profitable again. (When contacted by The Nation, Sumco refused to confirm information about its profitability.)30
The anger at Sumco was palpable. More than once, workers told me that Sumco’s owners bought themselves new pickup trucks the same year that the workers agreed to forgo raises. The work itself is dangerous—Sumco workers do electroplating with caustic chemicals that often results in burns, and Horton rattles off a list of some of the more gruesome injuries. “Back in October, one guy lost his foot,” he says matter-of-factly.31 “There hasn’t been a political party in a long, long time that thought about the working man.” —Rexnord worker John Feltner
The two-tier wage structure was a key issue at Sumco. Marco Gutierrez, who moved to Indianapolis six months ago, tells me, “I didn’t really know what it was when I first got in, but now that I understand it, it’s pretty unfair. We do the same amount of work.” The Sumco strike was his first experience on the picket line; he appreciated that the higher-tier workers were holding out for him.32
Going on strike for decent manufacturing work while layoffs and closures were happening all around them was a gutsy move. But making even more concessions was unthinkable. “We honestly were expecting them threatening to move to Mexico,” Horton shrugs. A passerby underscores that fear, saying that he’d like to support the striking workers but that, in demanding higher wages, they were simply hastening the outsourcing.33
But that remark misses the fact that these workers have already given up plenty. “We’re not asking for much,” they tell me over and over—but when you get them talking, you can hear the anger: Why can’t we ask for more? “You can only kick a dog so many times,” one of the strikers says. Their health-care plan already has a high deductible: “Single-payer is the only way,” more than one worker tells me. Darren Dilosa, another union official at the plant, states flatly: “You want something, you have to fight.”34
These are people who work hard, and it shows in their bodies; you can hear it in their voices, rubbed rough from cigarettes and chemical fumes. No one expects to enjoy the job: The hours are long, and taking away vacation time and days off, as Sumco did, seems like an even crueler joke because it’s what these people work for. They tell me about their hobbies—a new camera, a vintage pickup truck—and they tell me, too, about the high rate of divorce at the plant: When you work up to 80 hours a week, when forced overtime is both common and random, it’s hard to plan on anything but going to your job and perhaps having a beer at Sully’s when you’re done.35
Yet these workers continue to fight for one another. On March 11, the Sumco workers voted on a contract that gives newer workers a path out of the two-tier system—a rare victory in today’s world. They also got colleague Darron Tichoner’s job back after he had been fired, Tichoner says, for returning to the workplace to pick up his asthma inhaler and staying too long in the plant. “I think it was the best we could do,” Dilosa tells me. Fourteen of the workers, though, voted to stay on the picket lines, to demand more.36
All around Local 1999’s union hall and the factories are the signs of the “new economy.” Around the corner from the hall is a sign for OnDemand Staffing, a temp agency; across from Sumco and Carrier are Target and Amazon distribution centers—jobs that pay around $12 an hour, less than half what many of the plant workers make, and with no union to protect them. “We all know that NAFTA and all these trade deals have done damage as far as manufacturing jobs go,” James says. “But it’s not just manufacturing jobs. You call Microsoft now, it’s over in India. It’s just jobs in general.”37 Ready to Fight Back? Sign Up For Take Action Now
Indeed, in many parts of the country, manufacturing work is now performed by workers hired by temp agencies, and some of the Rexnord jobs may be moving to Texas—where there are lower wages and fewer unions—rather than Mexico. Other manufacturing jobs are being done by robots. For Canter, there’s no job on the horizon that will pay him what he made at Rexnord. “I know we’re all about free enterprise and making money, but we were making you profitable,” he says about the company. “Then, just to turn your backs on us like that for a dollar—in my opinion, it’s being allowed to happen.”38
Canter is a lifelong Democrat, but he voted for Trump. So did Feltner and Beaman. Each of them feels slightly different about the president now: While Beaman is inclined to think that Trump’s statement to the Carrier workers was an honest mistake, Canter calls it a “misleading” deal and is frustrated with Trump’s inaction on Rexnord and other closures. “I thought, ‘Let’s give this man a shot and see what happens.’ Well, we’re not seeing anything.” “There hasn’t been a political party in a long, long time that thought about the working man, and that’s gotta change,” Feltner adds. He has a button with a picture of Indiana’s own Eugene Debs, the labor organizer and five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate, pinned to his bag. And he’s right: Neither Republicans nor Democrats have had much to offer working people since the wave of outsourcing began. Republicans have taken the position that the workers are going to have to lower their standards. Democrats, notes Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, have tended to push “better” trade deals that enforce labor standards—but are opposed by organized labor. “The failure to deliver results that lift up communities impacted by trade, while advancing expanded trade, has presented in people’s minds a very unhealthy contrast between their lived experience of dislocation, decline, and despair and the flowery language Democrats use about putting people first,” Price says.39
During the primaries, Sanders suggested that companies should be denied government contracts and face penalty taxes if they offshore jobs—something that Trump echoed on the campaign trail, though his deal with Carrier featured a tax giveaway instead (for which, Jones says, “the taxpayers of Indiana ought to be in a rage”). But such company-by-company fixes are not enough. “You have to have a systemic answer,” says Price. A more effective approach would involve taxing the wealthy, and financial speculation in particular, to drive down the incentives for executives to make short-term decisions intended simply to boost the bottom line. It would also involve using the money raised by those taxes to invest in retraining, relocation, and income supports for workers whose jobs are lost to offshoring or automation, and negotiating rules for global trade that include labor and environmental standards. Changing the corporate structure could help, too, Price points out: Worker-owned cooperatives would have a bigger incentive to keep jobs here than shareholder-owned corporations do.40
As outsourcing and technological change continue to erode Americans’ job security, bigger ideas like a universal basic income or a job guarantee are getting more attention. But despite their postelection hand-wringing over reaching working-class voters, Democrats haven’t put forward a coherent plan to address the issues those voters face.41
Local 1999 hasn’t entirely given up hope. The workers at Rexnord gathered signatures for a petition asking for the state to help save their jobs and delivered it to the new governor, Republican Eric Holcomb, who agreed to meet with them. They held rallies in front of the Rexnord plant, generating honks of support. But the layoffs began in late March anyway, and most of the workers know that their days at Rexnord are numbered.42
In any event, the increasingly desperate situation of American workers won’t be remedied by handing out yet more tax breaks to corporations like Rexnord. Truly addressing their plight will involve confronting the problems of global capitalism—or, at the very least, halting the constant downward pressure on their standards of living. Nor is it a matter of prioritizing the concerns of white, male workers to the exclusion of others: The workers at Carrier, Rexnord, and Sumco are black and white and Latino, men and women, and eliminating jobs at any of the plants will hurt all of them. “When you strip away the middle class,” Feltner says, “or even close to the middle class, you start making people settle and settle and settle for less, and it brings everyone down.”43Visitors of all ages will enjoy interacting with Siberian sled dogs when Husky Heroes returns to The Morton Arboretum, January 26 and 27, 2019.
Guests can watch demonstrations of husky sled-pulling and skijoring, a winter sport where the dogs pull a person on skis. Children and adults can visit the dogs and sled teams, inspect equipment, and have their pictures taken with the rigs. In addition, information will be available about husky adoption for those who fall in love with these canine champions. Please visit the Adopt-a-Husky website for more information.
This event is fun in all weather! If there is not enough snow, the dogs are still able to pull the sleds on wheels. Be sure to dress for the weather, this event is entirely outdoors.
View pictures of the 2018 event on our Facebook Page.
Please leave pets at home.
2019 Event Schedule
Dog Sledding Demonstrations
Approximately 11:30 am, 12:45 pm, 2:00 pm, and 3:15 pm
Watch lively dog sledding and skijoring demonstrations and meet the champion husky dogs between demonstrations.
Outdoors near Visitor Center
Siberian Husky Information from Adopt-a-Husky
9:00 am to 4:00 pm
Learn more about the breed and meet adoptable dogs!
Visitor Center
Wildlife Photography Show
11:00 am to 4:00 pm
See wildlife-themed nature photography from The Morton Arboretum Photographic Society.
Sterling Morton Library
Enchanted Railroad
Enjoy an intricate model railroad as trains chug through a miniature landscape. Free timed tickets are available in the Visitor Center. The Enchanted Railroad is open daily through February 24.Move over, Frank Thomas. You're not the only baseball-themed beer in Chicago anymore.
The Kane County Cougars on Thursday unveiled the name of its specialty craft beer, created with Two Brothers Brewing. It is believed that Raging Cougar ale makes Kane County the first minor-league baseball team with its own branded beer.
As for the flavor, a statement from the team describes it as "golden in color with a nutty, caramel malt flavor."
The brew will be available at Fifth Third Bank Ballpark, home of the Cougars, beginning this season, as well as Two Brothers' facilities in the Chicago suburbs and at the Arizona Diamondbacks' Chase Field. The Diamondbacks are the Cougars' MLB affiliate.
"This project symbolizes our commitment to our local Chicagoland community,” said Jason Ebel, co-owner of Two Brothers. "We have enjoyed working with the Kane County Cougars and strengthening our existing partnership through this opportunity, supporting one of our favorite pastimes."
Raging Cougar Ale was chosen the winner via social media, beating out finalists Grand Slame Ale and Home Run Ale. Yeah, it looks like fans made the right choice.
Chris Sosa is RedEye's sports editor. @redeyesportschi
For more RedEye sports, click here.Alex Bruce will miss the remainder of Hull City’s promotion campaign after becoming the third City player to be struck down by an Achilles injury this season.
The defender was helped from the field during Saturday’s win over Middlesbrough at the Circle and joins Sone Aluko and Matt Fryatt on the list of players who have suffered Achilles tendon injuries. He will find out in a week’s time whether he needs an operation.
It is a sad end to a decent first season with the Tigers for Bruce, who has managed to overcome accusations of nepotism to play a key and courageous role as one of City’s three-man defence, though recent displays as a holding midfielder have proved less impressive.
With Bruce ruled out, it was expected that the Tigers would have to revert to a 4-4-2 formation due to having only two fit central defenders left, but there is unexpected good news on the progress of Jack Hobbs.
The towering defender limped off with an ankle injury against Watford last week but instead of the initial three-week lay-off predicted, he now could be in contention to face Ipswich Town on Saturday after the original diagnosis of ligament damage was altered to just a twist."I let the president down," White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Wednesday morning, expressing humility one day after saying that even Adolf Hitler didn't "sink to using chemical weapons" during World War II.
Spicer's choice of words while comparing Hitler and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was widely condemned.
On Wednesday, speaking at a forum at the Newseum, Spicer called the incident "my mistake" and "my bad."
He said his original comments were "inexcusable and reprehensible."
Spicer brought up Hitler at Tuesday afternoon's press briefing, and then made repeated, failed attempts to clarify.
Two conservative news outlets had made a similar comparison between Hitler and Assad earlier in the week.
Amid a drumbeat of criticism, Spicer appeared on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer" Tuesday evening and profusely apologized.
He repeated the apology at Wednesday morning's event.
"This was mine to own, mine to apologize for. Mine to ask forgiveness for," Spicer said.
Journalists and politicians in Washington are abuzz about whether Spicer's job is in on the line -- whether he has become too much of a liability to continue as press secretary.
But this is not the first week in which Spicer's credibility has come under withering scrutiny. His briefings have been riddled with mistakes and misstatements, prompting concerns among White House correspondents and jokes from late night comics.
After Spicer's apology on Blitzer's broadcast Tuesday evening, a person close to Spicer told CNN's Jeff Zeleny that the press secretary's fate is unknown.
"He will have to wait to see if the president thought it was effective," the person close to Spicer said.The hand-crafted puppets of Coraline, ParaNorman and characters from stop-motion studio Laika’s upcoming Kubo and the Two Strings are taking a bow at Universal Studios Hollywood.
Laika, the Portland, Ore.-based studio behind a trio of Oscar-nominated animated features — Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls — as well as Kubo and the Two Strings, which Focus Features releases in the U.S. on Aug. 19, is showing its art in a new exhibit. “From Coraline to Kubo: A Magical Laika Experience” opens this weekend and can be viewed at Universal Studios Hollywood’s Globe Theatre through Aug. 14. (The exhibit is included in the price of admission to the theme park.)
The exhibit starts with 2009’s Coraline — featuring stop-motion puppets of Coraline and the Other Mother, as well as the model of Coraline’s house — which the company began to make a decade ago. Viewers can then see the puppets and sets from ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls and finally, Japan-set fantasy Kubo, with explanations of the steady advancements in their work.
Kubo includes Laika’s first puppet to be made entirely with a 3D printer, as well as a giant skeleton, which, at 16 feet tall, is believed to be the largest stop-motion puppet ever created.
Friday’s exhibit opening was a thrilling walk down memory lane for the filmmakers in attendance, some of whom have been with the studio for production on all four of its films. That includes Laika’s president/CEO Travis Knight, who makes his directorial debut with Kubo; Georgina Hayns, creative supervisor of puppet fabrication; VFX supervisor Steve Emerson and Brian McLean, director of rapid prototype.
“The process of putting this exhibit together was oddly moving,” Knight told The Hollywood Reporter. “All these experiences come flooding back, making these movies and bringing these characters to life. The real trick was trying to figure out what to bring down.”
Watch THR's Facebook Live tour of the Laika animation event at Universal Studios below:Phoenix Beck, a young woman in recovery, talks about her experience in the short video Why Girls Take Meth (the video doesn’t quite fit its frame, scroll down a bit to see the play button). A good point she makes is that while she was using the drug others treated her as “disgusting” and “shameful” but when she quit everyone was supportive and helpful. She says that if they’d been supportive and tried to get her help while she was using then she mightn’t have felt so depressed, which kept her going back to do more drugs, and instead might have sought recovery earlier.
So why did she take meth? Phoenix had low self-esteem and was bullied, and started hanging out with drug users for a sense of community. Within two weeks she was addicted. Researcher Marie Hoskins of the University of Victoria points to peer pressure, and using it for quick weight loss.
This video doesn’t go into it but crystal meth psychosis is severe, resembling schizophrenia or bipolar psychosis, and users can often become violent while psychotic. It may also trigger ongoing episodes of psychosis that happen even when not using the drug. The comprehensive article Crystal Meth Produces Schizophrenia-like Symptoms quotes some research:
A 2001 publication by the WHO [World Health Organization], “Systematic Review of Treatment for Amphetamine-Related Disorders”, found that five to 15 percent of meth users who develop a related psychosis fail to recover completely. Most users, the organization also reports, become psychotic within a week after continuous meth administration.
It’s also one of the most damaging drugs to the brain: check out the very cool animated Mouse Party to see neurological effects of meth and some other commonly abused drugs. I also recommend the acclaimed Montana Meth Project research-based ads that show horrifying, but real, consequences.
So why do girls do meth? Peer pressure is hard to resist, and teens are impulsive. But maybe some smart young women can teach their peers to impulsively avoid meth instead.
Why Girls Take Crystal MethHANOVER, N.J. – The number one seed is all but locked up, but don’t expect the Red Bulls to ratchet back their intensity.
With just one game left in the regular season, New York have virtually guaranteed that the road to MLS Cup will travel through Red Bull Arena, as New York City FC would need to overturn a 13-goal differential to unseat the Red Bulls from their perch.
They may not be able to improve their position, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be something to play for this Sunday.
“If Colorado slips up and we win, then we’d host anyone but Dallas in MLS Cup, so that’s definitely a factor,” head coach Jesse Marsch explained. “We want to keep pushing so that down the stretch we’re still sharp and fit and ready to go.”
Given their lofty position, it wouldn’t be much of surprise to see some of New York’s most worked players, such as Felipe and Aurelien Collin, get some time off against the Philadelphia Union. However, neither is interested in taking any time away from the pitch.
“I feel great,” Felipe told NewYorkRedBulls.com. “I’m ready now more than ever to go down the stretch and give my best.”
Added Collin: “When you play in the summer in nearly 100 degrees and then it gets colder, you can run a lot. It’s no problem; I feel very, very good.”
For his part, Marsch is ready to put his best foot forward with a full compliment of players at his disposal.
“You’re not going to see us take our foot off the pedal,” he added. “We might make some changes here or there, but we’re going to put a good team on the field and go after it.”This post in the sixth in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here, and the next post is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook.
"The aim of physiology is to explain the organism in health and disease; the aim of mechanics is to understand machines which work and machines which fail; bridges which stand as well as those which fall. Similarly the sociologist seeks theories which explain the beliefs which are in fact found, regardless of how the investigator evaluates them."
David Bloor (1942 – ) is a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh and founder of the Edinburgh School in the field of Science Technology and Society (STS.) In Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976) he continued the Scottish tradition pf philosophical skepticism and defined a new and controversial approach to the Sociology of Knowledge, called the Strong Programme.
According to David Bloor, sociologists in the past confined their investigations to the explanation of false beliefs. True beliefs were either self-evident or arose out of a rational process of discovery, and therefore required no explanation. Or, put another way, their truth was their explanation. This habit of deference amounted to a structural lack of nerve within sociology, which he called the Weak Programme. Bloor challenged his colleagues to explain true as well as false beliefs in terms of the same social processes. Just as natural scientists investigate all corners of the physical world, and do not admit that any kind of physical phenomena is beyond their powers of investigation, so too, the scientists of society (sociologists) should be willing to investigate the origins of all kinds of beliefs, whether true and false – especially the hitherto forbidden realm of scientific knowledge.
Bloor defined knowledge as beliefs which people confidently hold to and live by, and the goal of Sociology of Knowledge as the discovery of the causes which produce it. Scientific knowledge, like any other kind, has a social origin. That is to say, it arises out of a particular context, and that context is demonstrably a product of contingent historical and social factors. It follows, then, that scientific theories cannot be understood in separation from that context, any more than a work of literature, art, or music can be.
In consequence, both scientists and philosophers of science misunderstand the nature of scientific knowledge when they attribute the success (or failure) of a theory to its value (or lack thereof) as a descriptor of objective reality. This practice amounts to a Teleology of nature (i.e. a faith that it contains a special purpose for man, and that this purpose can be treated as a causal factor in history.) Because teleological explanations are always invalid in science (if not necessarily in philosophy), these kinds of explanations can and should be rejected out of hand.
Having dispensed with “The Weak Programme,” Bloor went on to outline his own, “Strong” alternative. A scientific (that is, sociological) theory of knowledge should adhere to four principles:
Causality: the sociologist is concerned to explain how and why beliefs gain currency; Impartiality: he does not attempt to distinguish between true and false beliefs – instead of arbitrating truth claims, he investigates their origins and function in society; Symmetry: he applies the same causes to true and false beliefs - the same causal mechanisms will explain the success of true and false beliefs alike, just as the same mathematical principles explain the stability or instability of a bridge, and the same physiological principles explain the health and disease of the organism; Reflexivity: he applies the same analytical tools to himself and to his work.
These tenets were cast in the manner of methodological assumptions which did not have to be proven before they could be used. Rather, just as in physics, the validity of the approach would be demonstrated retroactively, by evaluating the practical results it produced.
Whereas Thomas Kuhn had suggested that science might not be an entirely rational activity, and Paul Feyerabend had drawn certain philosophical and political conclusions from a rather more strident belief, David Bloor was the first scholar to offer a methodological approach for systematic study. Rather than taking the claims of science for granted, and adopting an internalist view of science that either sought to justify its results or prescribe better practices, Bloor argued for an approach that ignores the truth status of scientific theories and instead concentrates on their social context of production. Needless to say, the idea that truth claims arising out of science can be ignored at all, let alone as a systematic methodological principle, was and is controversial. Between Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Bloor, the anti-realist and critical posture known to its opponents as “relativism” emerged as a serious position within the academy. Attempts to hash out the issues raised by these three, and to incorporate them in some way with the philosophy and actual practice of science, led to the establishment of Science, Technology, and Society departments across the United States in the 1960’s and 70’s. It remains a vibrant, multidisciplinary field of inquiry today.
Daniel Halverson is a graduate student studying the history of Science, Technology, and Society in nineteenth-century Germany. He is also a regular contributor to the PEL Facebook page.You see, for 30 years American politics has been dominated by a political movement practicing Robin-Hood-in-reverse, giving unto those that hath while taking from those who don’t. And one secret of that long domination has been a remarkable flexibility in economic debate. The policies never change — but the arguments for these policies turn on a dime.
When the economy is doing reasonably well, the debate is dominated by hype — by the claim that America’s prosperity is truly wondrous, and that conservative economic policies deserve all the credit.
But when things turn down, there is a seamless transition from “It’s morning in America! Hurray for tax cuts!” to “The economy is slumping! Raising taxes would be a disaster!”
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Thus, until just the other day Bush administration officials were in denial about the economy’s problems. They were still insisting that the economy was strong, and touting the “Bush boom” — the improvement in the job situation that took place between the summer of 2003 and the end of 2006 — as proof of the efficacy of tax cuts.
But now, without ever acknowledging that maybe things weren’t that great after all, President Bush is warning that given the economy’s problems, “the worst thing the Congress could do is raise taxes on the American people and on American businesses.”
And even more dire warnings are coming from some of the Republican presidential candidates. For example, John McCain’s campaign Web site cautions darkly that “Entrepreneurs should not be taxed into submission. John McCain will make the Bush income and investment tax cuts permanent, keeping income tax rates at their current level and fighting the Democrats’ plans for a crippling tax increase in 2011.”
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What “crippling” tax increase, which would tax entrepreneurs into submission, is Mr. McCain talking about? The answer is, proposals by Democrats to let the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year expire, returning upper-income tax rates to the levels that prevailed in the Clinton years.
And we all remember how little entrepreneurship there was, how weakly the economy performed, during the Clinton years, right? Oh, wait. (I’ve put some charts comparing job performance during the Clinton and Bush years on my Times blog, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com. It’s pretty startling how comparatively weak the Bush era looks.)
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Never mind. The whole point of scare tactics is that they can work even in the face of inconvenient facts.
And what I’m not sure about is whether the Democrats are ready for the fight they’re about to face.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Barack Obama won his impressive victory in Iowa with a sunny, upbeat message of change.
But there’s a powerful political faction in this country that understands very well that any real change will create losers as well as winners. In particular, any serious progressive reform of health care, let alone a broader attempt to reduce middle-class insecurity and inequality, will have to mean higher taxes on the affluent. And members of that faction will do whatever it takes to scare people into believing that change means disaster for the economy.
I don’t think they’ll succeed. But it would be a big mistake to assume that they won’t.Thanks to the Cassini mission we’ve known about the jets of icy brine spraying from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus for about 8 years now, but this week it was revealed at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outside Houston, Texas that Enceladus’ jets very likely reach all the way down to the sea — a salty subsurface sea of liquid water that’s thought to lie beneath nearly 10 kilometers of ice.
Enceladus’ jets were first observed by the Cassini spacecraft in 2005. The jets constantly spray fine particles of ice into space which enter orbit around Saturn, creating the hazy, diffuse E ring in which Enceladus resides.
Emanating from deep fissures nicknamed “tiger stripes” that gouge the 512-km (318-mile) -wide moon’s south pole the icy jets — and the stripes — have been repeatedly investigated by Cassini, which has discovered that not only do the ice particles contain salts and organic compounds but also that the stripes are surprisingly warm, measuring at 180 Kelvin (minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit) — over twice as warm as most other regions of the moon.
Read more: Enceladus’ Salty Surprise
Where the jets are getting their supply of liquid water has been a question scientists have puzzled over for years. Is friction caused by tidal stresses heating the insides of the stripes, which melts the ice and shoots it upwards? Or do the fissures actually extend all the way down through Enceladus’ crust to a subsurface ocean of liquid water, and through tidal pressure pull vapor and ice up to the surface?
Researchers are now confident that the latter is the case.
In a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference titled “How the Jets, Heat and Tidal Stresses across the South Polar Terrain of Enceladus Are Related” (see the PDF here) Cassini scientists note that the amount of heating due to tidal stress seen along Enceladus’ tiger stripes isn’t nearly enough to cause the full spectrum of heating observed, and the “hot spots” that have been seen don’t correlate with the type of heating caused by shear friction.
Instead, the researchers believe that heat energy is being carried upwards along with the pressurized water vapor from the subsurface sea, warming the areas around individual vents as well as serving to keep their channels open.
With 98 individual jets observed so far on Enceladus’ south polar terrain and surface heating corresponding to each one, this scenario, for lack of a better term… seems legit.
What this means is that not only does a moon of Saturn have a considerable subsurface ocean of liquid water with a heat source and Earthlike salinity (and also a bit of fizz) but also that it’s spraying that ocean, that potentially habitable environment, out into local space where it can be studied relatively easily — making Enceladus a very intriguing target for future exploration.
“To touch the jets of Enceladus is to touch the most accessible salty, organic-rich, extraterrestrial body of water and, hence, habitable zone, in our solar system.” – Cassini imaging team leader Carolyn Porco et al.
Research notes via C. Porco, D. DiNino, F. Nimmo, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute at Boulder, CO, and Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, CA.
Top image: color-composite of Enceladus made from raw Cassini images acquired in 2010. The moon is lit by reflected light from Saturn while the jets are backlit by the Sun.2011-Dec-6 -> from the entertainment-fun-and-games department
One of the biggest complaints I've heard from people about Linux is its lack of support for any decent games. I'd like to illustrate today how woefully wrong this myth is. I've been using Linux on my personal system for over four years now, and have picked out a number of fantastic games that have full Linux support, done by big name studios.
I'll start out with three big FOSS games, because I'm all about the free.
FreeCiv
FreeCiv started as a project by some CS students that mimics the look, feel and game play of the wildly popular Civilization game. It has since continued to grow and prosper, and is a fairly well rounded fan variant of the mainstream game.
Doom
Id Software really deserves a huge kudos for making the entire Doom trilogy free and open source. This is really swell of them, and proves that even mainstream games can be ported to Linux without too much trouble. If the god of all 3D shooter games can run on Linux, anything can.
Urban Terror
This game was a personal favourite that started out as a full environment Quake 3 mod, and eventually moved on to its own engine to become a standalone game. This is another 3D shooter that is very entertaining in a LAN environment, and is fully functional on Linux.
What about non-FOSS games?
If you would rather have the commercial appeal, there are a number of titles currently available for sale that are functional on Linux as well. Here are some of the best ones I've heard of:
Osmos
Hemisphere games did the Linux gaming scene a HUGE favor when they ported Osmos to Linux. I haven't played this myself, but I have it on good word that this game is great fun to play. If I was to simplify the game play to it's most basic level, I would say this is a game of absorption. You play an organism that must absorb smaller organisms in order to grow, and avoid larger organisms that can swallow you whole.
World of Goo
2D Boy really put together a great game here. I played through it, and talk about addictive. I couldn't stop until I'd beaten every level, and even after that, the replay value is in trying to beat levels faster, and by using fewer pieces. There is also a very cool mini game that involves you building the absolute tallest structure you can with the little goo balls that roam around.
Game play was easy to pick up, the music was fantastic, and the settings and artwork ranged from cute to downright demented. This is a real gem, and worth every penny to purchase.
Penumbra Trilogy
So you like horror games? This is the second scariest game I've seen yet. I bought it. I installed it, and I played through parts, and had other parts described to me through reviews. The game is absolutely terrifying.
Your only weapon? Light. And you go from level to petrifying level trying to keep your light going, no matter what. This game has a very unique physics engine that makes almost every aspect of the game movable and easily manipulated. It immerses you in game play by matching game actions with mouse actions. Want to open a drawer? Door? Grab the handle, and pull. This creates a much more real environment, and if you play with all the lights off, you'll catch yourself looking over your shoulder, expecting to see some monstrosity.
Buy it. You wont be disappointed.
Amnesia
Penumbra was the second scariest game I've seen, only because this is the scariest. The creators of Penumbra, Frictional games, really outdid themselves with this one.
You don't fight things in this game. You run, you hide, you use whatever you can grab to wedge the doors shut behind you and run some more. If you try to fight the horrors in this game, you will die. The point is not to beat them, it's to survive. The game is so well done, and so encompassing, that you'll forget that you're playing a game.
And so many more...
I could drag the list on for ages with all the great games that are available on Linux now. The fact that the major blockbuster games (Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3, etc) are not currently supported on Linux, is just studio laziness. Is there a market for Linux games? Frictional Games thought so, as did 2D Boy, and a number of other big game studios.
So how long do you think it will take studios like EA to catch up with this growing trend?
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Thanks for reading!
I'm always interested in hearing what you have to say. Contact Me, I'd love to hear from you.
Don't forget to join in on the conversation in the comments section below.Image copyright AP Image caption King Abdullah has decreed jail terms of up to 20 years for anyone belonging to "terrorist groups"
Saudi Arabia has formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation.
An interior ministry statement also classified two jihadist groups fighting with the Syrian rebels - the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant - as terrorist groups.
The statement gave Saudis fighting in Syria |
in October. I have given talks on family genealogy, screened films and promoted authors and publications here. Libraries are at the heart of multicultural London. They are a meeting point and place of dialogue,exchange and understanding. Libraries are the glue to connect local residents and communities, especially if the Big Society is going to work in places like Haringey, Hackney, Brent, Lambeth and Lewisham.
5.48pm: Vanessa Wood was in Brixton today:
Despite the extremely blustery conditions in Brixton providing a challenge when trying to get people to sign bits of paper, we had a very successful day. In addition to collecting stories from library users as to how important the library was to them, we got over 300 people to write letters to their councillors about their concern over the proposed cuts. Lambeth has already announced that its mobility services are to go.
5.57pm: I spoke to author Alan Gibbons earlier who has been involved with the organisation of a great deal of today's activities. Here's what he had to say:
(Again, apologies – you can barely hear me! But again, it's what Alan has to say that counts)
6.20pm: That pretty much wraps up this live blog, and a very active day for library campaigners across the UK. A huge thank you to everyone who joined in by posting comments, sending emails and tweeting @Culture_Cuts – many apologies if I didn't get around to including your contribution. Thanks also if you added your protest to our Twitter map, which is looking lovely. I'll leave you with some final words from We Love Libraries campaigner Ken Kutsch, who reminds us that although it's the end of Save Our Libraries day, the campaign is by no means over.A request by Germany's opposition Left party has revealed that hundreds of soldiers serving with the Bundeswehr have decided to rethink their planned career since summer 2014. A total of 469 soldiers have entered a plea to leave the army on grounds of having a conscientious objection.
Katrin Kunert, the Left's spokeswoman for military matters, believes it's not surprising. and wonders whether some soldiers have been shocked by their first taste of combat.
"The risk of being a professional soldier, to have to kill or be killed, often becomes appreciable for the first time only in a genuine combat situation," Kunert told the Rheinische Post newspaper. "Often, that's the first time that the full extent of the risk can be grasped."
When Germany's military became voluntary in 2011, it was part of an effort to professionalize what was seen as "ineffectual" armed forces "in desperate need of modernization."
Kunate, from the opposition Left party, thinks there could be a link between deployment and a change of heart
In light of its Nazi past, Germany has long recognized a right to conscientious objection. During World War II, the Nazi regime did not recognize the status. Objectors were executed.
Break with the past
After the war, there was a will to break decisively with the past. East Germany was unique among Eastern bloc members in allowing objectors to instead join "construction units."
In West Germany, a section of the constitution ensured that: "No person shall be compelled against his conscience to render military service involving the use of arms. Details shall be regulated by a federal law."
Military service was long a rite of passage for many young German males, but there were a number of ways to avoid conscription to the army. Those with health problems or pacifist views, for instance, could be posted in care homes, hospitals and aid organizations.
Since the end of conscription in 2011 - when new recruits were assumed to be fully on board with the idea of combat - an individual's reasons for leaving the military on grounds of conscience have become more intensively scrutinized.
The decision can also prove costly for many, especially those who have been highly trained at great expense. The government has asked for more than 5.6 million euros in training costs from officers, or those in training to become officers. The amount varies from anywhere between 1,200 and 69,000 euros, depending on the case.
'Basic right is still there'
However, courts sometimes waive or reduce the costs. And the right to leave remains enshrined in the constitution - if a clear crisis of conscience can be proven.
Members of the military who receive intensive training could be hit with a heavy bill
"There was always this basic right in the constitution that was primarily used by conscripts who had military service and it's a rule that applies in exactly the same way for anyone who signs up for the army voluntarily," said a spokesman for Germany's Office for Family and Civil Responsibilities, which assesses applications. "It's still possible to be a conscientious objector - the numbers are very different than they were when there was compulsory service - but the procedure is the same."
"The test of conscience is the same as before, but it would be a bit more intensively tested now," said the spokesman. "You would question how someone could have changed their mind overnight, but in principle the same criteria are valid as they were before."Semiconductor engineering sat down to whether changes are needed in hardware design methodology, with Philip Gutierrez, ASIC/FPGA design manager in IBM‘s FlashSystems Storage Group; Dennis Brophy, director of strategic business development at Mentor Graphics; Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing of the System Development Suite at Cadence; Tom De Schutter, senior product marketing manager for the Virtualizer Solutions at Synopsys; and Randy Smith, vice president of marketing at Sonics. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. To view part one, click here. To view part two, click here.
SE: For Agile to work in hardware, we need a methodology that covers all systems and deals with how all the different pieces fit together and how the people developing those systems work together. We also may need to change out some of the tools. Is that realistic?
Brophy: Good question. It may even be right brain, left brain. I look at the rigor and precision of step one, two and three, and question how you can toss out that rigor for something that might be a bit more chaotic and collaborative. What it’s going to take is some examination of project results of groups that have introduced this into their worklife and see what they’ve been able to accomplish. We’re not going to have four- or five-to-one design verification engineers to each engineer forever.
Smith: We all have some level of concern about whether the Agile software manifesto applies to IC design. We probably need some group to get together and work on that problem to figure out if we need an Agile IC manifesto or Agile electronics systems manifesto. We have a couple natural standards organizations. Does it become reasonable for any of them to examine this? We still need the precursors of what we’re going to define in a solution before we figure out how we’re going to do them.
Schirrmeister: Sadly, a lot of things don’t happen until something has gone really wrong. The people who are making changes are the ones who have had these bad experiences. But the complexity is so big that it’s mind-boggling. One of the issues is that you don’t necessarily know at the beginning is where to look. Some people found out the hard way. We always knew power was a big issue in mobile, but now we realize it’s extending into thermal. There we were happily adding cores, but then the chip shuts itself down because it’s not supposed to burn through the package.
Brophy: The good news is that it did shut itself down. In the past we would run programs that would fry computers.
Schirrmeister: You don’t always know what you don’t know. Some of the tools we’re working on to make verification smarter fits into that. Software-driven verification, where you can re-use software across different engines horizontally defined with software scenarios, plays into that. The coherency guy needs to talk to the power guy to see whether the shutdown messed up coherency. And the power guy needs to talk to the thermal guy to tell him that if it runs too hot it will slow down the processors, so make sure the benchmarks are still in sync.
Brophy: The real issues may be solved with what we have today, but there’s a resistance and a role for others to help eliminate that resistance. There’s the IEEE 268515 software user for Agile environment documentation. On the hardware side, the methodology we’ve all come to say is globally used, UVM, is from Accellera. But is there a way for some of these groups to come together. What is our 2025 vision? What do we expect to happen in five years? Should we be thinking a little further out? Most of the standards groups don’t. They’re more immediate. IEEE with Agile is based on success and things people are doing today. This almost has to be driven through user success, and then institutionalized as a standard and more proactively pushed throughout the world. Maybe we can take a different way of looking at it and fostering discussions.
De Schutter: There is a lot of emphasis about what people are already designing. One thing that is changing—and UVM is addressing this on the power side—is where you look at early architecture design and how you try to influence it and incorporate what kind of algorithms will you have. What kind of user scenarios are there? What is the power/performance tradeoff? Thermal is starting to come into play on that. Architecture prototyping early on is starting to feed into that. We’re seeing more and more people looking at that as a way to try to get to something, which is more adjusted rather than just a spreadsheet where it assumes you understand. When you’re looking at all the different pieces of Agile, one of the items is how to incorporate all the things your customer wants to do. What we’re seeing is that if you have your architecture prototype, you get early feedback and that helps get through that feedback loop very early on. It’s not just a single, monolithic task you do up front. It’s more of an integrated task. It’s not just the N+2 design. It’s what are the impacts on the power, performance and thermal sides, so you can make adjustments there and revisit the hardware and the software. That upfront piece and merging that into the methodology will help, rather than just looking at it from a verification perspective or a pure hardware side of things.
SE: Is it possible to change out everything that’s been done in the past and put in a broader and different approach?
Gutierrez: We’ve been talking about Agile being used in designs that are somewhat chaotic. That doesn’t mean it’s the only thing Agile can do, though. If you have your specs up front and you do have everything planned out, there’s nothing preventing you from using Agile there, too. We’re breaking up the tasks into smaller chunks, which in our case is two-week sprints. That works, whether you’re goal is fixed or moving. It also helps that we bring together the RTL and the DV and the software guys up front, so we get immediate feedback from the software guys as opposed to first developing the IP block and integrating it into the top level, and then getting feedback from the software guys. We’re able to get that feedback much earlier. We do meet every morning. It’s a very brief meeting, but we do bring everyone together.
Schirrmeister: That’s for what kind of design?
Gutierrez: It’s an embedded processor with half a dozen IP blocks.
Schirrmeister: So this is processor, IP, communication to the outside with all the interfaces. This is equivalent to an ARM subsystem in a mobile SoC, right?
Gutierrez: Yes.
Schirrmeister: That’s where scope comes in. These processes are very different, depending on the scope of what you’re designing. As EDA vendors we tend to gravitate to the most complex things out there, like mobile or complex servers with 60 cores. But if you look out to 2020 or 2025, there’s clearly a bifurcation. You have these complex things, which are very important and valuable, but if the predictions are true there will be a lot of things in the middle, such as subsystems, and a lot of smaller designs. My willingness to accept Agile becomes larger the smaller the design gets.
SE: You’re obviously hinting at the IoT world. In addition to smaller, these devices need to be very customized for very specific applications. The need for getting it to market quickly with a low cost, though, point to a methodology. Is Agile the right one?
Smith: On the hardware side we are way behind software in a couple areas. One is in the use of requirements management. Software teams are used to keeping track of all the different software requirements. They put together the spec and they often can have linkages between one feature and another, and the specs are very completely integrated. In the hardware space, we don’t have full requirements management, so the first linkage is hardware architecture. For hardware architecture we don’t even have an executable language. Architects use Word and Excel to specify what a device will look like and what might be included. They might reference IP-XACT for what some of those blocks might be. And they have tables about who has to talk to what. We’re missing the executable languages. Everyone in the software world has an executable language for talking to the next group. Hardware architects don’t have anything but tables, and going down the other way they don’t have anything except IP-XACT, which is incomplete. When you talk about how to get this to work with a structured methodology, we have to complete the methodology if we want it to be automated. We lack that automation today.
De Schutter: The automation flow isn’t ready yet. SystemC has offered an executable spec, in a sense, for architects. You can describe the most important components. If you look at it from a QoS point of view—latency, throughput, power, thermal—you can extract a lot of pieces and still figure out what your executable spec will be and even exchange that with your customers. In that sense, some pieces are in play. It’s not an automated flow. And then with UVM you have your power overlay. You can get to an environment where you can try things out, and then feed that back on the software side. And then you can figure out what happens if you over-design or under-design, how can you mitigate some of the power issues. It becomes more of a simulated spreadsheet environment, but at least you’re simulating it in an executable spec.
Smith: SystemC is at the beginning of the implementation of the specification.
Schirrmeister: Let’s define executable spec. To me, it’s the piece from which you derive everything and which is golden. The challenge is that RTL doesn’t seem to be there for everything yet. You have the system environment and some analog/mixed signal you might not be able to capture. Looking back to my first design, gate-schematic entry and RTL seemed like the system level to integrate six chips. In EDA, we did everything in synthesis for RTL and we had a semi-golden spec for RTL. I’m close to taking a bet that by the time I retire we will not have gotten to the point where there is something above RTL. I agree with virtual platforms and some level of architectural analysis at the coarse-grain level. But then at the end, all the decisions tend to be delayed until you have the more detailed bus analysis at the interconnect level. Having something above RTL that is golden was something that should have happened 20 years ago, and we don’t seem to be getting there. The question is why not.
De Schutter: It would have been nice to get there. I’ve given up on the dream of one spec that drives everything else. That doesn’t mean there is no value in different types of descriptions. But for software and hardware you need different architects. There is no one single golden reference. There are different kinds of executable tasks.
Schirrmeister: I agree. That makes it localized, and I’m a proponent of agility at a localized level. It’s much more difficult at an SoC level. The challenge in all those localized pieces is they’re not talking to each other, and they’re not being kept up to date when you’re going further down.A Fishy Function
Sunday, July 16, 2017 · 17 min read
I started thinking about these ideas in late May, but haven’t gotten a chance to write about them until now…
If you want to take a boat from the Puget Sound to Lake Washington, you need to go across the Ballard Locks, which separate the Pacific Ocean’s saltwater from the freshwater lakes. The locks are an artificial barrier, built in the early 1900s to facilitate shipping.
Today, the locks have a secondary function: they are a picnic spot. A while back, I visited the locks on a sunny and warm day. A band was playing in the park by the water, and there were booths with lemonade and carnival games. Every few minutes, a boat would enter the locks, be raised or lowered, and continue on its way.
If you walk across the locks, you can check out the fish ladder, a series of raised steps designed to help fish — in this case, salmon — migrate, since the locks cut off their natural path between the water bodies. There is usually a crowd around the fish ladder. Around once a minute, a salmon leaps out of the water and goes up a step; the children gasp and cheer as they watch over the railing.
This is the idyllic scene that we will soon destroy with the heavy hammer of mathematical statistics. You see, it turns out that a little bit of thought about these salmon can give us a way to use historical earthquake data to approximate ($ e $).
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.
What is the probability that a fish jumps out of the water right now? This is a tricky question to answer. Suppose there’s a 10% chance that a fish jumps out of the water right now. That means the probability that a fish doesn’t jump is 90%. In the next instant of time, there’s again a 10% chance that the fish jumps. So, the laws of probability tell us that over the course of ($ n $) instants, there’s a ($ 0.90^n $) probability that no fish-jumps occur.
But there’s an infinite number of instants in every second! Time is continuous: you can subdivide it as much as you want. So the probability that no fish-jumps occur in a one-second period is ($ 0.90^\infty $), which is… zero! Following this reasoning, a fish must jump at least every second. And this is clearly a lie: empirically, the average time between fish-jumps is closer to a minute.
Okay, so “probability that a fish jumps right now“ is a slippery thing to define. What can we do instead? Since the problem seems to be the “right now” part of the definition, let’s try to specify a time interval instead of an instant. For example, what is the probability that we will observe ($ n $) fish-jumps in the next ($ t $) seconds?
Well, we’re going to need some assumptions. For simplicity, I’m going to assume from now on that fish jump independently, that is, if one fish jumps, then it does not affect the behavior of any other fish. I don’t know enough about piscine psychology to know whether or not this is a valid assumption, but it doesn’t sound too far-fetched.
While we’re on the subject of far-fetchedness: the math that follows is going to involve a lot of handwaving and flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. We’re going to guess at functions, introduce constants whenever we feel like it, evaluate things that may or may not converge, and, throwing caution and continuity to the wind, take derivatives of things that might be better left underived.
I think it’s more fun this way.
Yes, we could take the time to formalize the ideas with lots of definitions and theorems and whatnot. There’s a lot to be said about mathematical rigor, and it’s really important for you, the reader, to be extremely skeptical of anything I say. In fact, I encourage you to look for mistakes: the reasoning I’m about to show you is entirely my own, and probably has some bugs here and there. (The conclusions, for the record, match what various textbooks say; they just derive them in a slightly different way.)
A couple of lemmas here and there might make the arguments here much more convincing. But they will also make this post tedious and uninspiring, and I don’t want to go down that road. If you’re curious, you can look up the gnarly details in a book. Until then, well, we’ve got bigger fish to fry!
Okay, back to math. We can model the probability we’re talking about with a function that takes ($ n $) and ($ t $) as inputs and tells you the probability, ($ P(n, t) $), that you see ($ n $) fish-jumps in the time period ($ t $). What are some things we know about ($ P $)?
Well, for starters, ($ P(n, 0) = 0 $), since in no time, there’s no way anything can happen.
What about ($ P(n, a + b) $)? That’s the probability that there are ($ n $) fish-jumps in ($ a + b $) seconds. We can decompose this based on how many of the fish-jumps occurred in the “($ a $)” and “($ b $)” periods:
\begin{align} P(n, a+b) & = P(0, a)P(n, b) \\ & + P(1, a)P(n-1, b) \\ & + \ldots \\ & + P(n, a)P(0, b) \end{align}
Hmm. This looks familiar… perhaps…
Yes! Isn’t this what you do to the coefficients of polynomials when you multiply them? The coefficient of ($ x^n $) in ($ a(x)b(x) $) is a similar product, in terms of the coefficients of ($ x^i $) and ($ x^{n-i} $) in ($ a(x) $) and ($ b(x) $), respectively.
This can’t be a coincidence. In fact, it feels appropriate to break out this gif again:
Let’s try to force things into polynomial form and see what happens. Let ($ p_t(x) $) be a polynomial where the coefficient of ($ x^n $) is the probability that ($ n $) fish-jumps occur in time ($ t $):
\begin{align} p_t(x) &= P(0, t)x^0 + P(1, t)x^1 + \ldots \\ &= \sum_{n=0}^\infty P(n, t)x^n \end{align}
(Yes, fine, since ($ n $) can be arbitrarily large, it’s technically a “power series”, which is just an infinitely long polynomial. Even more technically, it’s a generating function.)
We know that ($ p_0(x) = 1 $), because nothing happens in no time, i.e. the probability of zero fish-jumps is “1” and the probability of any other number of fish-jumps is “0”. So ($ p_0(x) = 1x^0 + 0x^1 + \ldots $), which is equal to just “1”.
What else do we know? It should make sense that ($ p_t(1) = 1 $), since if you plug in “1”, you just add up the coefficients of each term of the polynomial. Since the coefficients are the probabilities, they have to add up to “1” as well.
Now, taking a leap of faith, let’s say that ($ p_{a+b}(x) = p_a(x)p_b(x) $), because when the coefficients multiply, they work the same way as when we decomposed the probabilities above.
Why is this property interesting,? We’re turning a property about addition into a property about multiplication. That sounds awfully like something else we’re used to: logarithms! Forgetting for a moment that ($ p $) is a power series, maybe we can “solve” for the function ($ p_t(x) $) by messing around with something like this:
\[ p_t(x) = e^{tx} \]
Okay, ($ e^{tx} $) doesn’t quite work because we want ($ p_t(1) = 1 $). Maybe ($ e^{t(x-1)} $) will work? It seems to have all the properties we want…
Let’s take a moment to stop and think. At this point, it’s not even clear what we’re doing. The whole point of defining ($ p_t(x) $) was to look at the coefficients, but when we “simplify” it into ($ e^{t(x-1)} $) we no longer have a power series.
Or do we?
Recall from calculus class that you can expand out some functions using their Taylor Series approximation, which is a power series. In particular, you can show using some Fancy Math that
\begin{align} e^x &= \frac{x^0}{0!} + \frac{x^1}{1!} + \frac{x^2}{2!} + \ldots \\ &= \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{x^n}{n!} \end{align}
If you haven’t taken calculus class yet, I promise this isn’t black magic. It’s not even plain magic. It’s just a result of a clever observation about what happens to ($ e^x $) when you increase ($ x $) by a little bit.
If you have taken calculus, bet you didn’t think this “series approximation” stuff would ever be useful! But it is, because a quick transformation gives us the series representation for ($ p_t(x) $):
\[ e^{t(x-1)} = e^{tx}/e^t = \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{(tx)^n}{n!e^t} \]
and so the coefficient of ($ x^n $) gives us ($ P(n, t) = t^n/(e^t n!) $).
Now we have a new problem: this formula doesn’t depend at all on the type of events we’re observing. In particular, the formula doesn’t “know” that the salmon at Lake Washington jump around once a minute. We never told it! Fish at other lakes might jump more or less frequently, but the formula gives the same results. So the formula must be wrong. Sad.
But it might be salvageable! Let’s go back and see if we can add a new constant to represent the lake we’re in. Perhaps we can call it ($ \lambda $), the Greek letter “L” for lake. Where could we slip this constant in?
Our solution for ($ p_t(x) $) was:
\[ p_t(x) = e^{t(x-1)} \]
but in retrospect, the base ($ e $) was pretty arbitrarily chosen. We could make the base ($ \lambda $) instead of ($ e $), but that would mess up the Taylor Series, which only works with base ($ e $). That would be inconvenient.
However, we know that we can “turn” ($ e $) into any number by raising it to a power, since ($ e^{\log b} = b $). If we want base ($ b $), we can replace ($ e $) with ($ e^{\log b} $). This suggests that ($ \lambda = \log b $) could work, making our equation:
\[ p_t(x) = \left(e^\lambda\right)^{t(x-1)} = e^{(\lambda t) (x-1)} \]
This seems to fit the properties we wanted above (you can check them if you want). Going back to our Taylor Series expansion, we can just replace ($ t $) with ($ \lambda t $) to get:
\[ P(n, t) = \frac{\left(\lambda t\right)^n}{e^{\lambda t} n!} \]
Let’s step back and think about what we’re claiming. Knowing only that fish jump randomly, and roughly independently, we claim to have an expression for the probability that ($ n $) fish-jumps occur in a time interval ($ t $).
“Okay, hold up,” you say, “something smells fishy about this. This is pretty bold: we know nothing about how fish think, or fluid dynamics, or whatever other factors could influence a fish’s decision to jump. And yet we have this scary-looking expression with ($ e $) and a factorial in there!”
That’s a fair point. I’m just as skeptical as you are. It would be good to back up these claims with some data. Sadly, I didn’t spend my time in Seattle recording fish-jumping times. But, in a few more sections, I promise there will be some empirical evidence to assuage your worries. Until then, let’s press on, and see what else we can say about fish.
We have a way to get the probability of some number of fish-jumps in some amount of time. What’s next?
One thing we can do is compute the average number of fish-jumps in that time interval, using expected value. Recall that to find expected value, you multiply the probabilities with the values. In this case, we want to find:
\[ E_t[n] = \sum_{n=0}^\infty P(n, t)n \]
This looks hard… but also oddly familiar. Remember that
\[ p_t(x) = \sum_{n=0}^\infty P(n, t)x^n \]
because, y’know, that’s how we defined it. Using some more Fancy Math (“taking the derivative”), this means that
\[ \frac{dp_t(x)}{dx} = \sum_{n=0}^\infty P(n, t)nx^{n-1} \]
and so ($ E_t[n] = p^\prime_t(1) $).
That… still looks hard. Derivatives of infinite sums are no fun. But remember from the last section that we also have a finite way to represent ($ p_t(x) $): what happens if we take its derivative?
\begin{align} p_t(x) &= e^{(\lambda t) (x-1)} \\ p^\prime_t(x) &= (\lambda t)e^{(\lambda t) (x-1)} \\ p^\prime_t(1) &= E_t[n] = \lambda t \end{align}
Aha! The average number of fish-jumps in time ($ t $) is ($ \lambda t $). If ($ t $) has units of time and ($ \lambda t $) has units of fish-jumps, this means that ($ \lambda $) has units of fish-jumps-per-time. In other words, ($ \lambda $) is just the rate of fish-jumps in that particular lake! For Lake Washington, ($ \lambda_w = 1/60 \approx 0.0167 $) fish-jumps-per-second, which means that the probability of seeing two fish-jumps in the next thirty seconds is:
\[ p_{30}(2) = \frac{(0.0167\times30)^2}{e^{0.0167\times30}2!} \approx 0.076 \]
I think that’s pretty neat.
What about the standard deviation of the number of fish-jumps? That sounds ambitious. But things have been working out pretty well so far, so let’s go for it.
Standard deviation, or ($ \sigma $), the Greek letter “sigma”, is a measure of “how far, on average, are we from the mean?” and as such seems easy to define:
\[ \sigma = E[n-\lambda t] \]
Well, this isn’t hard to evaluate. Knowing that expected values add up, we can do some quick math:
\begin{align} \sigma &= E[n] - E[\lambda t] \\ &= \lambda t - \lambda t = 0 \end{align}
Oops. We’re definitely off by a little bit on average, so there’s no way that the standard deviation is 0. What went wrong?
Well, ($ n - \lambda t $) is negative if ($ n $) is lower than expected! When you add the negative values to the positive ones, they cancel out.
This is annoying. But there’s an easy way to turn negative numbers positive: we can square them. Let’s try that.
\begin{align} \sigma^2 &= E[(n-\lambda t)^2] \\ &= E[n^2 - 2n\lambda t + (\lambda t)^2] \end{align}
Now what? We don’t know anything about how ($ E[n^2] $) behaves.
Let’s go back to how we figured out ($ E[n] $) for inspiration. The big idea was that
\[ \frac{dp_t(x)}{dx} = \sum_{n=0}^\infty P(n, t)nx^{n-1} \]
Hmm. What if we take another derivative?
\[ \frac{d^2p_t(x)}{dx^2} = \sum_{n=0}^\infty P(n, t)n(n-1)x^{n-2} \]
We get an ($ n(n-1) $) term, which isn’t quite ($ n^2 $), but it’s degree-two. Let’s roll with it. Following what we did last time,
\begin{align} p_t(x) &= e^{(\lambda t)(x - 1)} \\ p^\prime_t(x) &= (\lambda t)e^{(\lambda t)(x - 1)} \\ p^{\prime\prime}_t(x) &= (\lambda t)(\lambda t)e^{(\lambda t)(x - 1)} \\ E[n(n-1)] &= p^{\prime\prime}_t(1) \\ &= (\lambda t)^2 \end{align}
And now we have to do some sketchy algebra to make things work out:
\begin{align} \sigma^2 &= E[(n-\lambda t)^2] \\ &= E[n^2 - 2n\lambda t + (\lambda t)^2] \\ &= E[n^2 - n - 2n\lambda t + n + (\lambda t)^2] \\ &= E[(n^2 - n) - 2n\lambda t + n + (\lambda t)^2] \\ &= E[n^2 - n] - E[2n\lambda t] + E[n] + E[(\lambda t)^2] \\ &= (\lambda t)^2 - 2(\lambda t)(\lambda t) + \lambda t + (\lambda t)^2 \\ &= \lambda t \end{align}
…which means ($ \sigma = \sqrt{\lambda t} $).
Seems like magic.
Okay, fine, we have this fancy function to model these very specific probabilities about fish-jump-counts over time intervals. But the kids watching the fish ladder don’t care! They want to know what’s important: “how long do I need to wait until the next fish jumps?”
Little do they know, this question opens up a whole new can of worms…
Until now, we’ve been playing with ($ n $) as our random variable, with ($ t $) fixed. Now, we need to start exploring what happens if ($ t $) is the random variable. This needs some new ideas.
Let’s start with an easier question to answer. What is the probability that you need to wait longer than five minutes (300 seconds) to see a fish-jump? (Five minutes is way longer than my attention span when looking at fish. But whatever.)
It turns out that we already know how to answer that question. We know the probability that no fish jump in five minutes: that’s equal to ($ p_{300}(0) $). Why? Well, when we plug in ($ x = 0 $), all the ($ x $) terms go away in the series representation, and we’re only left with (the coefficient of) the ($ x^0 $) term, which is what we want.
Long story short, the probability that you need to wait longer than five minutes is ($ e^{0.0167\times300(0-1)} = 0.00674 $). This means that the probability that you will see a fish-jump in the next five minutes is ($ 1 - e^{0.0167\times300(0-1)} $), which is around 0.9932. This is the probability that you have to wait less than five minutes to see a fish-jump. For an arbitrary time interval ($ T $), we have ($ P(t<T) = 1 - e^{-\lambda T} $), where ($ t $) is the actual time you have to wait.
Sanity check time! This gets close to 1 as ($ T $) gets higher, which sounds about right: the longer you’re willing to wait, the likelier it is that you’ll see a fish jump. Similarly, if fish jump at a higher rate, ($ \lambda $) goes up, and the probability gets closer to 1, which makes sense. Indeed, encouragingly enough, this equation looks very close to the equation we use for half-lives and exponential radioactive decay…
Now things are going to get a bit hairy. What is the probability that you have to wait exactly ($ T $), that is, ($ P(t = T) $)? This should be zero: nothing happens in no time. But let’s be reasonable: when we say “exactly” ($ T $), we really mean a tiny window between, say, ($ T $) and ($ T + dT $) where ($ dt $) is a small amount of time, say, a millisecond.
The question then is, what is ($ P(T < t < T + dt) $), which isn’t too hard to answer: it’s just ($ P(t < T + dt) - P(t < T) $), that is, you need to wait more than ($ T $) but less than ($ T + dT $). In other words,
\[ P(t \approx T, dT) = P(t < T+dT) - P(t < T) \]
where ($ dt $) is an “acceptable margin of error”.
This looks awfully like a derivative! We’re expressing the change in probability as a function of change in time: if I wait ($ dT $) longer, how much likelier am I to see a fish-jump?
Let’s rewrite our above equation to take |
Americans have been hurt by closed factories, exported jobs, and broken political promises. Under President Trump’s leadership, USTR will negotiate a fair deal. We will seek to address America’s persistent trade imbalances, break down trade barriers, and give Americans new opportunities to grow their exports. President Trump is reclaiming American prosperity and making our country great again.”
At the direction of the President, on May 18, 2017, Ambassador Lighthizer sent a letter notifying Congress of the Administration’s intent to initiate NAFTA renegotiations.
Since then, USTR has been conducting extensive consultations with Congress, stakeholders, and the public at large. USTR sought public comments, received more than 12,000 responses, and heard directly from over 140 witnesses over three days of public hearings. During this process, the Administration received valuable advice that directly impacted the development of the negotiating objectives.
Further, these objectives reflect the negotiating standards established by Congress in the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act of 2015 (TPA), which requires that USTR release objectives at least 30 days prior to formal negotiations. Negotiations will begin no earlier than August 16, 2017.
Through these negotiations, the Administration seeks an effectively implemented and enforced Agreement for more open, equitable, secure, and reciprocal market access. The Administration remains committed to conducting the negotiations with timely and substantive results for America’s workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses.
KEY LINK:
Text of USTR Negotiating Objectives for NAFTA.
###Technology giant Google has developed state of the art software which proactively scours hundreds of millions of email accounts for images of child abuse.
The breakthrough means paedophiles around the world will no longer be able to store and send vile images via email without the risk of their crimes becoming known to the authorities.
Details of the software emerged after a 41-year-old convicted sex offender was arrested in Texas for possession of child abuse images.
Police in the United States revealed that Google’s sophisticated search system had identified suspect material in an email sent by a man in Houston.
Child protection experts were automatically tipped off and were then able to alert the police, who swooped after requesting the user’s personal information from Google.
It is hoped the software will play a significant role in the ongoing fight against paedophiles who believe they can use the Internet to operate in the shadows and avoid detection.
Google, which has sometimes faced criticism for not doing enough to tackle paedophilia online, has been developing highly specialised software for a number of years.
In 2008 it rolled out new technology that helped the authorities trace those who were using its search engine to look for illegal images.
But while the company refused to comment on this latest case, the arrest in Texas confirms that the software is now being applied to scan the Google’s hugely popular email service
Google’s Gmail is the world’s largest free web-based email service with more than 425 million users worldwide.
It is understood that the software works by comparing images held in users’ accounts against a vast database of child abuse images which have been collated by child protection agencies around the world.
Each one of the images is given a unique fingerprint, known as a hash, which is then used to compare with those held in the database.
The system operates automatically and nobody working for Google is able to see any of the images being examined.
If a match with one of the images on the database is found a red flag is raised and one of the child protection agencies such as the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation or the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the US is alerted.
Trained specialists at the organisations then examine the image and decide whether to alert the police.
While the technology will be seen as a huge boost to the fight against child abuse and exploitation, the ability of Google to look into people’s personal email accounts has raised questions for privacy campaigners.
Earlier in the year Google confirmed that email accounts were being scanned for content to provide "personally relevant" adverts to users.
Last month the National Crime Agency (NCA) announced that more than 600 suspected paedophiles including doctors, teachers and care workers had been arrested in a major crackdown on the trade in images of abuse.
While the NCA refused to discuss tactics it is thought experts had made a breakthrough in cracking the so-called ‘dark web’, a part of the Internet which has been notoriously difficult to monitor and police.Population: 822,553
Median home sales price (Q1 2014): $99,900
Unemployment: 4.8%
Unemployment change July 2013-June 2014: -26.2%
Population growth 2008-2012: 9.4%
Pop. Age 25-39 (2012): 26.7%
Change in Pop. 25-39, 2010-2012: 1.3%
Violent crime (annual, per 100,000 people): 608.3
FORBES' Business and Careers Rank: 30
"There are a number of things that we have to offer," says Steven Schoney, director for the dept. of development for the City of Columbus. "No. 1 is that mix between employment opportunity, cost of living, and all the amenities of a big city. And so that means having a very vibrant cultural scene, and having a very young city. And part of that really is driven by having one of the largest universities in the country located right in the middle of the city."
FORBES/Sperling’s BestPlacesDeepwater Horizon Oil Shows Up in Sparrows
LSU graduate student Allison Snider conducts research on Seaside Sparrows that reside in Louisiana marshes year-round. New research shows Deepwater Horizon oil in these native birds. Photo Credit: Philip Stouffer, LSU School of Renewable Natural Resources
11/15/2016
BATON ROUGE – Scientists have identified the first evidence of Deepwater Horizon oil in a land animal - the Seaside Sparrow. The scientists analyzed the diet and feathers of sparrows collected more than a year after the oil spill. The birds that were captured in habitats that were exposed to the oil had a different chemical signature in their tissues than the birds that were found in areas of the marsh that were not exposed to the oil. The scientists’ results show that the oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was incorporated into the prey and feathers of the exposed birds.
“We know that carbon from oil entered the offshore and nearshore food webs as demonstrated for plankton, fish and filter feeders. But this is the first demonstration that carbon from oil was also integrated into a terrestrial vertebrate species, the Seaside Sparrow,” said LSU School of Renewable Natural Resources Associate Professor Sabrina Taylor.
The Seaside Sparrow is a year-round resident of Louisiana marshes. This new study suggests that direct exposure to the toxic oil may have been detrimental to the birds’ reproductive success.
“These results suggest that the differences we have observed in sparrow gene expression and reproductive success between oiled and unoiled sites may be caused by direct toxicological effects not just habitat degradation or loss of prey species,” she said.
The researchers encourage further studies on the effect of the oil spill on terrestrial species.
Oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill laps up into the Gulf of Mexico marsh. Photo Credit: Andrea Bonisoli Alquati, Cal Poly Pomona
“We tend to think of terrestrial ecosystems as safe from oil contamination. However, the boundary between marine and terrestrial ecosystems is much less defined than we assume. Species that live at the boundary are not only vulnerable to the toxic effects of oil, but they can also be responsible for the transport of oil into the terrestrial food webs. Future risk and damage assessments should incorporate an evaluation of the potential threat to terrestrial wildlife from oiling operations and oil spills,” said Andrea Bonisoli Alquati, a professor of environmental toxicology in the Department of Biological Sciences at Cal Poly Pomona and the lead author of the study.
This research by scientists from the LSU School of Renewable Natural Resources, the LSU Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, the Cal Poly Pomona Department of Biological Sciences and Austin Peay State University Department Biology was published today in Environmental Research Letters.
Additional Link:
Incorporation of Deepwater Horizon oil in a terrestrial bird, Environmental Research Letters: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/11/114023
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Contact Alison Satake
LSU Media Relations
225-578-3870
asatake@lsu.eduIf you're at all tapped into the world of tech, you've no doubt noticed that there is a higher than usual number of acronyms flying around as of late. While gamers typically find themselves embroiled with issues of DRM, the Senate's recent PROTECT Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the House's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) have raised some hackles here on Destructoid, and rightly so.
We're not the only ones upset, though. I recently got in touch with Trevor Longino, head of PR and Marketing at Good Old Games, a company that has spent its entire existence fighting against a tech industry that wants tighter and tighter control over our games, to get another perspective on PIPA, SOPA, and the effects these bills might have on game consumers.
Here is a bit of a primer: In the United States, economic times are tough, and politicians are looking down the barrel of upcoming elections. Needless to say, they're worried that things haven't gone quite as planned, and many are looking for a way to bolster support and make some powerful friends before the next round of elections.
What better way to do that than get cozy with to the Hollywood elite and write a few friendly laws to support those in control of one of the United States' greatest exports, entertainment? Enter PIPA and SOPA, two sister pieces of legislation aimed at allowing the government and big entertainment companies to wrap their gnarled, bony fingers around the throats of consumers.
Ok, ok. That's a little one sided and no doubt sounds hyperbolic, but trust me when I say that these bits of legislation could fundamentally change the way we use the Internet for the worse. If someone is hosting copyright-infringing materials on their website, then a copyright holder should have a right to go after them, right? I think we can all agree on that, but PIPA and SOPA make this process far too simple by removing basic protections.
Suddenly, if you're an advertiser on a website where copyright infringing material shows up, you're liable. If you sold an IP address to someone who then goes and does something illegal with it, you're liable. If someone complains to the government about your website, you might end up on a government blacklist and will be legally removed from Google search results. More than that, IP holders would be allowed to threaten and scare off everyone involved with a website from the top to bottom without ever taking someone to court.
PIPA and SOPA profess to protect IP, but in reality, they offer an unprecedented degree of power to publishers and other IP holders all in the name of stopping piracy and "protecting" IP holders. PIPA and SOPA might well allow big companies to curate the content of the Internet as a whole, and that's something we should all fear. Needless to say, if you're on this website, you have an interest in keeping the Internet free from government and industry control, but it hits even closer to home than that.
In my interview with Trevor Longino of Good Old Games, we discussed the effects of piracy and the ways PIPA and SOPA might effect games and commerce on the Internet.
In your opinion, what effect is piracy having on the entertainment industry? On the games industry specifically?
There's no disputing that piracy is hurting the industry. Even though we're very, very opposed to DRM, we don't argue that fact, but there are a few facts that are worth noting. Piracy isn't nearly as devastating as some studies would have you believe. People throwing around numbers in the billions of dollars of lost revenue are making some false equivalencies.
Every copy of a game that is downloaded does not equate to a lost sale. In many cases, torrent trackers display inflated numbers of seeds and downloads. Those scary numbers aren't real, and by letting ourselves be deluded as to the impact of piracy, we don't rationally look at what it really means for the industry and how to go about minimizing it in an effective manner.
Legislation, DRM, even advertising campaigns ("Don't copy that floppy!" should ring a bell for gamers of a certain age) aren't what reduces piracy. Convincing your customers that what you are selling is worth their money is the only way to do that.
Many big entertainment conglomerates have argued that the PROTECT IP Act is necessary to stop pirates from "stealing" their products. It even states that it has been created "to promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property...." What effect do you think DRM is having on "prosperity," "creativity," and "innovation"? Is DRM necessary to stop gamers from "stealing" their entertainment?
DRM doesn't stop theft of games, let's make that clear. It's a false argument to say it does. Every game that came out this year -- every single one regardless of the kind of DRM on it -- was pirated. Frequently before the game was even for sale on retail shelves but within 48 hours after launch, either way.
There's a whole industry devoted to selling DRM solutions to publishers and developers, and no one seems to be clued into the fact that it doesn't stop piracy.
If DRM doesn't stop theft, what does? Well, according to that very interesting survey that Vigilant Defender conducted a few months ago, the value of the game offer. Almost 50% of the users surveyed stated that one of the main reasons why they pirated games was the lack of perceived value of the package. Either they wanted the game for less money or they wanted more bonus content in the package. That should sound familiar, given that it's GOG.com's business model.
DRM isn't necessary to curb piracy. We've proven that. Make the value of what you sell evident, and you'll reduce the numbers of gamers who don't pay for the games they play.
The PROTECT IP Act allows IP holders to not only request that sites take down content which they believe is copyright infringing but also allows IP holders to go after advertisers on the website, domain registrars, and payment processors. These people would share liability for any illegal actions a website might be taking. Does this seem fair?
That's a tricky question and a bit of a loaded one -- different cultures have different expectations for "fair." I don't think I can judge whether it's fair or not. I think it is an inelegant solution to the problem of piracy, and I do not think that it will be effective. There is a host of reasons why it fails to perform as well as even the flawed DMCA does, and I do think it will have a definite chilling effect on Internet commerce.
America -- and I speak as an American citizen, here -- is losing ground to new marketplaces across practically every industry. Internet businesses are one of the things that we still excel at, and handicapping ourselves by creating what is more or less our own bowdlerized version of the Internet will only hamper our ability to compete in this arena too. It seems short-sighted.
Search engines are under attack too. The PROTECT IP Act would require search engines like Google to stop listing sites in searches if the Department of Justice puts the site on its "blacklist." This does not require going to the courts. What potential problems can you foresee websites like Good Old Games or other digital distributors might face as a result?
That depends on the level of abuse the system sees. Currently, some people abuse things like the DMCA requirements for takedown notices, forcing content to de-list that they don't even own the rights to. I can see the possibility that some people could definitely exploit this "blacklisting" for their own purposes, which would cause an immense amount of trouble for the website that has been blacklisted.
In general, for companies like GOG.com, I don't foresee a particular problem. We're a legitimate company, we have excellent customer service, we have a strong reputation in the industry, and we obviously have the legal rights to sell the games that we sell. I don't think we're at risk for being targeted as a scam.
However, a lot of the abandonware websites (sites that take a curatorial view of their downloads, saying that they're preserving these games from the ash heap of history) that have games that GOG doesn't sell yet could certainly find themselves in a bad situation. Anyone who advertises on these websites could also find themselves in a certain amount of hot water, which will cause the abandonware sites problems even if they aren't directly targeted for blacklisting. Advertisers will leave in droves.
Do you think gamers should be worried about the PROTECT IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act? What would you suggest they do if they don't approve?
I don't think that the problems of PROTECT IP and SOPA are unique to gamers. If you use the Internet, PROTECT IP has a good likelihood of impacting how you will consume your information. I'd say the best thing to do in regards to PROTECT IP is to read up on it (Wikipedia has an excellent summary of the bill); if you don't like it or SOPA, then call your representative and let him or her know.
Don't send a form email -- those don't have the same impact as a flood of calls. Call. Better yet, organize a few dozen people to all call at the same time. Flood the phone lines and make your voice heard.
---
Trevor Longino brings up a good closing point. We're all effected by what PIPA and SOPA might bring to the Internet and the entertainment industry. If we value our rights and our laws, we need to go out in support of consumers rights and join the rogues gallery of other voices already fighting the good fight. EA, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and many other game publishers have all pledged their support to the bills, and with such powerful allies, it's going to take every voice possible to stop them.
We as gamers occupy a unique position in society. We're vocal, we're intense, we're connected, and we're technologically savvy. If anyone stands a chance of truly understanding the impact these laws will have on the Internet, it's us. So let's turn all that nerd rage and vigor to a cause for good. Let's break these bills.
Here are some good places to start: For a good overview and to sign an online petition, check out stopcensorship.org. If you really want to make a difference, take GOG's advice and get in touch directly with you senators here or your house representatives here. They are your elected officials, so make them speak for you!
And big thanks to Trevor Longino and Good Old Games for taking the time to answer my questions about PIPA and SOPA!
You are logged out. Login | Sign upThe seven-time premier class champion ended up second quickest on Monday's opening test day, just over a second adrift of factory Yamaha teammate Jorge Lorenzo.
And Rossi says he is already feeling more at home with the new-for-2016 Michelin rubber compared to the post-season Valencia test last November, which was characterised by numerous front-end washouts.
"The Michelin has improved already," Rossi told media after the conclusion of testing at Sepang. "Already the rear was not so bad, but they have improved the front and the first feeling is not so bad.
"You can arrive a little bit closer to the limit; a little bit stronger. It's a long way [off] still, we need to improve, but we start development to understand what the Michelin needs from the bike.
"If you use the settings we used [last year] with Bridgestones with Michelins, the bike is impossible. Now we start to understand the Michelin needs to give the maximum performance."
Rossi also said much of his day's running was done on a hybrid 2015/2016 YZR-M1 machine, with only limited laps completed on the fully updated version that he will spend the next two days getting used to.
"One bike was the 2015 [model], I did some laps just to get the feeling, and then we have two more bikes – one similar to 2015 and one more modified," the Italian explained.
"Today I concentrated on the one similar to 2015, because we have to work on the electronics especially.
"I tried the other one once, and the feeling was not so bad, but at the moment I don't know if it's better or worse. Tomorrow and the third day it will be important to understand this."
Lorenzo: "We couldn't start better"
Lorenzo, meanwhile, was left satisfied with his day of running, lapping less than a tenth slower than his best race lap from 2015's race at Sepang.
"To be honest, today everything was pretty easy," said the Spaniard.
"I was surprised about the possibility to go so fast with the Michelin, and also the electronics have improved so much compared to the first day at Valencia.
"I feel good with the tyres, especially under acceleration, I can take my best potential in this area. So, for the moment, we couldn't start better."Fired up a new sour mead back in July, and I’m just now getting to it. I’ve been very busy working on some final details for the sour mead book. This recipe is very similar to my original lambic mead from 5 and a half years ago. This recipe will create a nice balance between mild acidity and mild brettanomyces funkiness. Originally I had used Wyeast Lambic blend, this iteration uses Wyeast Roselare, another popular sour blend from WYeast.
This pack was fresher than my original Belgian lambic blend packet, so I didn’t smack the pack and let it sit. I only broke the nutrient packer, then pitched.
Sour Mead Recipe with Roselare Blend
Ingredients for 1 gallon:
Brew Date: July 15th 2017
1.5 pounds – Wildflower Honey
0.25 pounds – Maltodextrin
10-15 – Medium Toast Oak Chips
Wyeast Roselare Blend
SG: 1.070
FG: 1.000*
ABV: 9.19%*
*Starred numbers are estimates at this moment
Process
The process does vary a bit from the previous version. I dissolved the honey lightly heated water, added maltodextrin, then and dissolved that before adding to a carboy. In the previous version.
8 Weeks
This did have some active fermentation after a few days. I didn’t take any updated measurements though. I’m going to check on this in a week or so most likely.
6 Months
I added some dregs from my sour funky cyser (ECY20 gen1). We’ll see what it does, if it adds anything. In another 5-6 months, I’ll bottle this one and drink a few, then sit on the rest to see how they turn out as it ages for a few years. My last bottle of classic lambic mead is approaching 5 years old! I will have a tasting of that one in a couple months on its 5th birthday.
5/26/18, topped up the carboy with Cere’s Peach Juice Blend. This is a blend of peach juice and pear juice, but the flavor is dominantly peach.
Share this content Connect with Hive Mind Mead× This page contains archived content and is no longer being updated. At the time of publication, it represented the best available science.
With miles of sandy beaches and generally good weather, coastal North Carolina isn’t a place you would usually expect to find snow. But the view from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on February 14, 2010, shows snow extending to the Outer Banks. The sandy islands, normally pale tan, are bright white in this image. Harkers Island received 8.8 inches of snow, reported CNN. The snow fell in a winter storm that moved across the southern United States from Texas to the Atlantic Coast on February 12-13.
The highest resolution version of this image is provided above. The image is available in additional resolutions from the MODIS Rapid Response System.
NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Holli Riebeek.Irish rocker Bono feared for his life when he was chased down a street by a group of angry anarchists in Germany.
The U2 frontman, who has long campaigned on political issues and global problems, was in Heiligendamm in 2007 for the 33rd G8 summit meeting of world leaders when he was cornered by a number of protesters opposed to his presence at the event.
The group was supporting the 'Make Bono History' campaign, which aims to "remove Bono from the public-eye and restore a sense of dignity to mankind", and the singer was terrified when the placard-waving demonstrators started chasing him.
He tells Britain's Guardian newspaper, "I was chased down the street in Germany by a bunch of anarchists at the G8 summit, wielding placards and shouting 'Make Bono history!' - which even as I was running for my life I thought was a pretty good line."After growing up with few role models who looked like them, Afro-Germans Barbara Mabanza (left) and Esther Donkor (right) didn't want the same thing to happen to girls in Germany's next generation. So they created a website to bring together a community.
Twelve-year-old Magdalena Inou is one of those girls the two had in mind. Magdalena has her Austrian mother's quick smile and her Cameroonian father's kinky hair. Tonight those tresses are pulled into a ponytail. She sits beside her mother, Sylvia and is quick to point out the obvious.
"My hair is different from the hair of my mother," she explains, matter-of-factly. Her mother, Sylvia Inou adds. "I have German hair. Austrian hair. Straight hair."
They've traveled more than eight hours from Vienna to Cologne to meet more than 50 fellow members of the online community called "Krauselocke," or "kinky curls." They want to get tips on how to care for Magdalena's hair and, most importantly, to show Magdalena she's not alone.
"She's a dancer and she went to a conservatory in Vienna," Inou says of her daughter. "Of course all the girls there have long, blond hair. She used to cry at night because she was afraid she would be excluded from performances. She was afraid they would expect hair like mine."
Mother-daughter duo Magdalena and Sylvia Inou traveled eight hours from Vienna to attend the online community's face-to-face celebration in Cologne
Up until last summer, the young dancer kept her hair bound in cornrow braids. After she found the krauselocke.de community, Magdalena undid her braids to let her hair fall naturally.
"Krauselocke is a website for people with curly hair, for people with natural hair," Esther Donkor said. She and Barbara Mabanza, both in their mid-20s, launched the Krauselocke website two years ago. Afro hair care and lifestyle sites exist in the US and in the UK. But the journalist and law student said they were missing such a platform for the black community in their home country, Germany.
Starting with hair
"In the US you have a big black community, and here in Germany there is also something like a black community, but it's not connected, so you don't have people exchanging information to each other," Mabanza says. "In Germany we know that we are black, but we are also German."
Mabanza and Donkor use themselves as guinea pigs to test products, and then write about them on krauselocke.de. They test over-the-counter products from drugstores, they order from retailers in the US or UK and visit "Afro" shops, which are often hair-care grocery store depots with goods imported from Africa.
Despite a growing multicultural population in Germany, they say it's nearly impossible to find products for non-European hair.
Zeebra Tropicana salon in Cologne is one of few specializing in Afro hair. Across from a rainbow of wigs, a wall of styling products looks like a Tetris game of hair creams, oils and sprays.
Ghana native Baba founded Cologne's first Afro hair salon 24 years ago, but must still order haircare products from abroad
Owner Baba came from Ghana to Bonn, Germany, 40 years ago to work in her country's embassy. Back then, she and her colleagues struggled to find stylists and products for their hair.
"We had to go to London to do all the shopping for our needs for a year," Baba says, while rinsing a client's hair.
One day, she packed up her scissors and went to England to train as a stylist. Then, 24 years ago, the Ghana native opened the first-ever Afro hair salon in Cologne. She still orders supplies from abroad.
Special techniques
What makes Afro hair unique? Baba says European stylists aren't sure how to deal with curly hair, since it's not part of the German training program for stylists. They tend to overuse thinning scissors to "tame" it, she adds.
"Every curl is an S," she explains, "So you must make sure you don't cut the S in the middle. When you cut the S in the middle, you blow it out. Always cut the curls where the new S starts to form."
People ask Baba 'Can you comb your hair?' Of course, she says, but it's best to do when it's wet
Over the years, Baba has noticed more and more mothers attending her hair-care seminars for their children.
"This is a special thing I do with German mothers with Afro children," she says. "The hair is a science of its own. Once you know what you're doing, Afro hair isn't so difficult to maintain."
Ideal beauty
To achieve straight hair, some women undergo a chemical process called "relaxing" to remove the curl. Beyond chemical damage, Barbara Mabanza warns of the self-esteem damage in considering European hair the ideal beauty. She hopes krauselocke.de will help women embrace their natural locks - and educate those who don't have curly hair.
"So that questions like 'Can I touch your hair?' or just touching without asking will not happen anymore," Mabanza says.
Do people really just walk up to Barbara and Esther and touch their hair?
"Yes," both women say simultaneously. Donkor explains, "They do. When I am at work, for example, people pet my hair like I'm a pet, and I don't like that."
More than hair care
Beyond hair care tips, Krauselocke is a support forum. One mother wrote for help after her son was hit by a classmate because he isn't white.
"They really ask for help," Mabanza says. "They say, 'This happened, and I'm angry now but how can I express it, and how can I help my child.' Then there are a lot of people who say, 'Oh yes, I know that, and oh yes, I did that and that.' And this is so great about that community."
Beyond haircare tips, live music, food and networking are part of the Krauselocke gatherings
Krauselocke is not just about hair, Donkor adds. "People are not talking about hair and beauty, they are talking about racism. They talk about relationships. They talk about food. It's so interesting. And we feel so home."
In this together
Music fills the room back at the Krauselocke get-together, where fans have gathered from around Germany and parts of Europe to meet face-to-face. For some, the most important journey has been in finding their identity, and Krauselocke has played a major role.
"Before I wasn't quite comfortable with my hair," says one attendee. "My color is no issue anymore. I had some horrible experiences as a child."
Many Krauselocke members say they were forced to wear short hair as children because their parents weren't sure how to deal with locks
Another is surprised to be surrounded by so many people like her. "I was really excited when I got into the room because I've never seen so many biracial people and girls with curly hair in one place. Most of us are always the only girl with a lot of white friends."
An exchange student from the US says the site served a special niche in Germany: "In America there are a lot of people who have natural hair, whether it's dreadlocks or whether they do twist-outs or different styles. Here, it can be rare."
As for Magdalena, the young dancer, her mother says the online community not only changed her daughter's hairstyle, it changed her life.
"Krauselocke helped her through a very, very difficult period of finding who she is. Isn't that right?" the mother looks to her daughter.
Magdalena confirms with a smile, "That's right!"Posted on by ChildHealthSafety
Court evidence now available on-line at the University of California library shows drug giant Merck systematically targetted “hit-lists” of doctors to discredit, neutralise or destroy critics of the safety and effectiveness of Merck’s drugs.
You can read the documents yourself at the links below [see heading at end “Merck Documents Revealed in Court Evidence”].
One memo stated:
we may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live….”
Dr Andrew Wakefield said when interviewed by CBS:-
This is not conspiracy. This is corporate policy.” – [ CBS News – Research Links Kids Vaccines & Brain Damage – October 9, 2009 childhealthsafety].
Wakefield is the British medical doctor who put child health safety over autism and the MMR vaccine before his career and has been hounded by big money ever since.
Governments expect parents to trust the health and safety of their children to drug companies like Merck, a manufacturer of the MMR and other vaccines.
And do vaccines cause autistic conditions? If you read nothing else we strongly recommend you read this: PDF Download – Text of May 5th 2008 email from US HRSA to Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News]. In it the US Health Resources Services Administration [HRSA] state to CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson
We have compensated cases in which children exhibited an encephalopathy, or general brain disease. Encephalopathy may be accompanied by a medical progression of an array of symptoms including autistic behavior, autism, or seizures.”
Despite all the lies and deceit by health official worldwide, the question “do vaccines cause autism” was answered after the Hannah Poling story broke in the USA in February 2008 [see CHS article here]. Hannah developed an autistic condition after 9 vaccines administered the same day. Under the media spotlight numerous US health officials and agencies conceded on broadcast US nationwide TV news from CBS and CNN. Full details with links to the original sources can be found in this CHS article: Vaccination Causes Autism – Say US Government & Merck’s Director of Vaccines. [Blue Text added 10 April 2011]
Other recent examples of blatant ‘fixing’ of the published scientific evidence base includes that by Merck and by drug maker Wyeth.
Merck paid medical journal publisher company Elsevier [whose CEO Sir Crispin Davis sits on GlaxoSmithKline’s board] to publish a fake medical journal with articles favourable to Merck’s drugs: [Merck published fake journal – Bob Grant – The Scientist – 30th April 2009].
Drug maker Wyeth flooded medical journals with some 40 ghostwritten articles penned by prominent physicians who sold their name for cash, in an all-out effort to offset the scientific evidence linking its female hormone replacement drug, Prempro, to breast cancer: [Judge orders Wyeth papers unsealed – Associated Press – July 25, 2009].
Covert lobbying and manipulation is endemic:-
‘The use of PR to counter negative publicity’ ‘221. ………. Considerable resources are invested into building long-term, sustainable relationships with stakeholders and ‘key opinion leaders‘ and journalists. These relationships are used to promote the use of certain brands and counter concerns relating to safety. Efforts to undermine critical voices in particular were identified, under terms of “issues management”. In later evidence, in response to the ISM’s memorandum, Pfizer stated that PR is entirely legitimate and can “help to educate and inform”. According to the PMCPA, PR activities may include “placing articles in the lay press, TV documentaries, soap operas etc“.’ [p60 ‘The Influence of the Pharmaceutical industry‘ 2004 – English Parliamentary Health Select Committee report [emphasis added]]
______________________________________
Merck Documents Revealed in Court Evidence
Email from Green to Gertz re: William Harvey research conference
To: Gertz, Barry J.
From: Greene, Douglas Alan Cc Bcc:
Date: 2001-10-15 11:12:34
Subject: RE: William Harvey Research Conference
“we may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live….”
____________________________________________________
Email re list of physicians to neutralize
To: Johnson, Sherrin E
From: Baumgartner, Susan Cc ZZYarbrough, Caroline
Date: 1999-07-23 18:44:43
Subject: Physicians to Neutralize
Attached is the complete list of 36 physicians to neutralize with background information and recommended tactics. You will notice that some have already …
____________________________________________________
List of doctors — Neutralize/discredit
List of 36 physicians “to neutralize with background information and recommended tactics”.
____________________________________________________
Physicians to Neutralize
To: Baumgartner, Susan
From: Méndez, Leonardo Cc Yarbrough, Caroline; Johnson, Sherrin; McKines, Charlotte; Jensen, John; Reiss, Sandra
Date: 1999-04-29 18:31:26
Subject: RE: Physicians to Neutralize
Susan great Job!!! in formatting and gathering this information. Now that we have a formal ….
____________________________________________________
Physicians to Neutralize
To: Baumgartner, Susan L
From: Freundlich, Bruce Cc McBride, William; Bell, Gregory
Date: 1999-07-26 00:41:22
Subject: RE: Physicians to Neutralize Susan-
I’ve recently spoken to S Lindsey, Rollie Moscowitz and Len Calabrese- discussed data in some |
in your child’s abilities
Part of learning is giving your kids a chance—they’ll amaze you with what they can do. A four-year-old who can do two-digit addition? Yes, it can be done. Your preschooler finished a 50-piece puzzle? Yup, totally possible.
While kids can’t do everything, they can do a lot more than parents sometimes give them credit for. Let them try, even if they stumble. Let them fail and learn how to bounce back. And don’t be afraid to encourage challenge, even if you’re not sure they’ll get there just yet.
Because the best way to tell if your kid isn’t ready? When learning becomes a drag. They don’t enjoy the process, and the challenge is too difficult for them right now. When learning isn’t fun anymore but a power struggle between the two of you.
Otherwise, believe in your kids—they can do pretty amazing things.
Get more tips:
Did you like these tips on raising a bright child? Pin it on Pinterest!Ears illustration By: Mahesh Sarin
An angry boyfriend was arrested on charges of attempted murder after allegedly plotting to use chemicals to remove his girlfriend’s ears, police in China said.
Zhengzhou Police said that they arrested the 25-year-old student identified as Zhang, after being accused of hiring a thug to assault his former girlfriend.
He ordered the man to cut off the ears of his girlfriend so that no man would want to marry her.
Zhang, an engineering student, was arrested after Wang Wei told police that he hired him to assault the woman identified as Lulu.
According to the police investigation, Zhang hired Wei to cut off the ears of his girlfriend in exchange for 50,000 RMB ($8,000).
Zhang bought several chemicals and instructed Wei how to use them to attack his girlfriend. Wei was also arrested on charges of attempted murder.To the Editor:
“ ‘Soon,’ ‘Very Soon,’ ‘Eventually’: A Detailed List of Things Trump Said Would Happen” (Oct. 2) documents a manner of speaking by President Trump that, unfortunately, says a lot about his psychological makeup.
When he comes up against issues for which there is no easy solution — that is, most of what a president faces — he kicks the proverbial can down the road, reassuring himself that one day it will all be worked out.
This is a kind of imaginary thinking common in childhood that typically gives way to a more realistic view of the world. That our president still thinks this way should be of concern to all of us, regardless of party affiliation.
LARRY S. SANDBERG, NEW YORK
The writer is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.German Chancellor Angela Merkel is acting naively and irrationally by inviting more refugees in the country, former Czech President Vaclav Klaus said in an interview with RT’s Worlds Apart program.
Social cohesion is essential for any country to “function normally” and “migration is killing the social cohesion” in Europe, Klaus told Worlds Apart host, Oksana Boyko.
“I disagree totally with madam Merkel; with welcoming gestures... more and more migrant can come. It is naive and absolutely irrational,” he stressed.
The former Czech president stated that the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan flocking to the EU in recent months was not a spontaneous crisis.
“Those massive movements of people are organized somehow, are motivated by something,” Klaus said.
The 74-year-old political veteran decried this type of “collective migration” as being “absolutely wrong.”
“I put the net benefits of collective migration – either at zero or minus in a very high level,” he said.
Klaus compared the refugees now arriving to the EU to “the first European migrants to the US 500 years ago when they totally liquidated all the native populations.”
However, he acknowledged that solo migration “has many positive aspects… in [the] history of mankind,” stressing that “no rational person would deny this possibility.”
The former Czech leader said that it’s not Europe, but the US, who should be held accountable for the refugee crisis.
“What created the current trouble was, in many respects, US policy in the last two decades, with their promoting the so-called color revolutions or making wars in countries like Afghanistan; and Iraq; and Syria,” he said.
Klaus again criticized the EU, by saying that it’s far away from becoming a viable geopolitical entity like the US.
“I don’t want to project, to forecast how many centuries it’ll take Europe to become an entity,” he said.
PEGIDA protesters lash out at 'dangerous' Merkel amid Antifa clashes with police (VIDEOS) http://t.co/fMSgaQGKiKpic.twitter.com/W0BFB5ECZG — RT (@RT_com) October 14, 2015
According to the politician, Europe “made a tragic mistake some 25 years ago by transforming itself from [the] EC (European Community, a conglomerate of nations) to [the] EU (European Union) in an attempt to get rid of national states and countries.”
“So, we’re now living in more or less supranational atmosphere where decisions are made somewhere in Brussels and not in Prague or some other places in Europe,” he added.
Klaus believes that reforms won’t help solve the EU’s problems, and the block is in need of a “radical fundamental change.”
READ MORE: Migrants sue Berlin’s main refugee center for delays to welfare handouts
However, he stressed that such a transformation should resemble the Velvet Revolution, which saw Czechoslovakia parting with the Soviets in a peaceful and legal manner back in 1989.
The politician also touched upon the Ukrainian issue, saying that it’s only the Ukrainians who can find the solution to the crisis.
“There’s no way of imposing upon the country and the people a would-be perfect solution prepared in Washington, Beijing, Moscow or Brussels,” he said, urging the people in the western and eastern parts of Ukraine to “start to seriously negotiate.”
READ MORE: Germany fears up to 1.5mn refugees to arrive in 2015, calls for limits on influx to EU
Back in 1993, Klaus played a key role in parting of Czechoslovakia into two countries – the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
He stressed that he would never suggest the same for Ukraine, but added that a split of a country is not always a bad thing, as relations between the Czechs and the Slovaks are currently better than when they were living in the same state.
LISTEN MORE:Just in case, let’s get this out of the way early: Kevin Kiermaier is the Rays’ center fielder. You probably already knew that, but you can never be too safe. Kiermaier is considered by everyone to be something of a defensive whiz. They say you’re supposed to open with a joke. Here’s a funny picture that proves even a defensive whiz can end up in a humiliating screenshot:
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There’s a perfectly good explanation for what happened that relieves Kiermaier of pretty much all blame, but it’s more fun if you don’t know. Look at that guy! What a silly person.
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Realistically, for the hitter, it’s probably a good thing that what happened happened. Spoiler alert: By rule, the hitter was awarded a home run. Had a physical structure not interrupted the flight of the baseball, there’s a decent chance Kevin Kiermaier would have, a few seconds later.
Major League Baseball fans were first introduced to Kiermaier late in 2013, when the Rays called him up for tiebreaker game 163 and the AL Wild Card Game. Kiermaier wasn’t promoted to serve as some sort of dangerous slugger off the bench. Nor was he around to be a potential pinch runner. Kiermaier was brought up specifically for his outfield defense. The Rays knew it was a little crazy, but they thought Kiermaier was the best defensive outfielder in the organization, so it wasn’t hard to talk themselves into it. Kiermaier played an inning in the first game. He played two in the second. That was it. Over the winter, Baseball America called Kiermaier the No. 10 prospect in the system.
Some prospects go away. Some hype proves to be unjustified. I don’t think it would’ve been a shock had Kiermaier never shown up again or had he been limited to a bench role. But he wound up playing 108 games last year as a rookie, and he’s already close to 130 as a sophomore. Kiermaier’s bat has developed enough for him to play nearly every day. And because he’s played so often, we’ve seen ample evidence of his defensive skill. The Rays, back then, were on to something. I’m obligated to share some defensive highlights. The hardest thing is picking. Here’s a highlight
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Wonderful! Here’s a highlight:
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Pretty great! Here’s another highlight:
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Outstanding! Based on anecdotal evidence, Kiermaier’s a hell of a center fielder. We can also do a little better than anecdotal evidence.
Maybe soon we’ll be able to pull some really interesting information from Statcast. Maybe it’s going to be our solution to wanting to understand defense a little better. We don’t have that much yet, but I can at least offer this simple tweet from not long ago:
OK, that’s curious, but still sufficiently unfamiliar that one shouldn’t make too much of it. You can envision a guy covering a lot of ground to make a routine catch. So let’s look at some defensive metrics. I know the term "defensive metrics" makes some people automatically roll their eyes, and that’s perfectly fine. But while the numbers could be improved, they’re the best we have. They’re not measuring nothing. So we should take them into consideration.
FanGraphs offers two numbers in particular — Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR). The units for both are runs above or below average at the given position. The stats are different because the equations are different, but the general idea is to compare plays made and not made to how often similar plays are made on average. If a player makes more plays than you’d expect, he’d get a positive rating. Fewer plays, negative rating. It’s pretty intuitive. Allow me to repeat: The numbers aren’t perfect, or even all that close to it, but they’re also far from worthless, especially when DRS and UZR agree with one another. Let’s get to some measurements.
DRS is available going back to 2003. UZR is available going back to 2002. For these purposes, we’re going to ignore catchers, who are defensively unique. First, the best seasons on record in terms of DRS per 1,000 innings:
Kevin Kiermaier, 2015, CF, +38 runs per 1,000 innings
Gerardo Parra, 2013, RF, +35
Juan Lagares, 2013, CF, +32
Carlos Gomez, 2013, CF, +31
Jack Wilson, 2009, SS, +31
Interesting. Now, the best seasons on record in terms of UZR per 1,000 innings:
Alfonso Soriano, 2007, LF, +30 runs per 1,000 innings
Brett Gardner, 2010, LF, +28
Shane Victorino, 2013, RF, +27
Franklin Gutierrez, 2008, RF, +27
Juan Uribe, 2013, 3B, +27
Kevin Kiermaier, 2015, CF, +26
Juan Lagares, 2013, CF, +26
Gerardo Parra, 2013, RF, +26
By one, Kiermaier’s at the top. By the other, he’s near the top. It’s not entirely clear which measure is the better measure, so one compromise: Just take the average of the two. So, combined, here are the best seasons on record:
Kevin Kiermaier, 2015, CF, +32 runs per 1,000 innings
Gerardo Parra, 2013, RF, +30
Juan Lagares, 2013, CF, +29
Franklin Gutierrez, 2008, RF, +29
Brett Gardner, 2010, LF, +29
Kiermaier slots in at No. 1. Now, importantly, Kiermaier’s season isn’t over yet. He’s got another month, and it’s hard to sustain such a level of performance. Also, importantly, it can’t be overstated that we don’t understand defense like we understand offense. A lot of it is sort of guessing. Every number comes with error bars, but that’s why this post’s headline is the headline. Something might not be true, but it appears that it might be true.
Oh, and I should note — position is important. Kiermaier plays a premium outfield position. In the list above, Gerardo Parra is in second, but Parra was in an outfield corner, so his defensive performance means less than, say, Juan Lagares’ right below. Lagares is a good comp here, in that he plays the same premium position as Kiermaier. And like a healthy version of Lagares, Kiermaier derives a decent amount of his value from his throwing arm. This year, he already has 13 assists. Defensively speaking, there’s nothing he can’t do. And he can do enough at the plate to look like a borderline star player despite roughly average offensive production.
When you take position into consideration, Kiermaier’s up there with Lagares, Carlos Gomez and Andrelton Simmons. Prime Jack Wilson. Prime Adam Everett. There’s no conclusive way to know, but this much is fair: Right now, Kevin Kiermaier might be having the best defensive season we know of. That stretches back only a little more than a decade, but that’s a lot of time, with a lot of players. Kiermaier’s outshining quite possibly all of them.
Last year, it was Lorenzo Cain who made this sexy. It’s not a fashion that goes out of style.15 Million Students Learned to Program This Week, Thanks to Hour of Code
Hour of Code, a five-day-old initiative to get kids to take programming tutorials during Computer Science Education Week, will soon reach 15 million students, organizers said.
From the start, Hour of Code had boosts from friends in high places. It was on the front page of both Google.com and Apple.com this week, and U.S. President Barack Obama even made a promo video. Code.org’s efforts apparently drove so much traffic to Khan Academy that the non-profit educational web site went down.
But the single biggest referrer to Code.org this week was individual teachers and schools who used the programs in their classrooms, according to Hadi Partovi, who co-founded the organization with his brother Ali Partovi. The two are repeat tech entrepreneurs and angel investors and have raised tens of millions of dollars to help increase the dismayingly low percentage of computer science classes in U.S. schools.
“I had hoped we could get one million students to do it and we were pleasantly surprised when 4.5 million signed up in advance,” Hadi Partovi wrote in an email to AllThingsD. “We’re now going to end the week with over 15 million, which is insane. That means every other school family in the U.S. has a child that has done the Hour of Code. I’m not aware of any technology or service that has spread so quickly, and this is computer programming.”
The 15 million number (it’s currently just shy of that) also doesn’t include participation in offline coding classes, which teachers are submitting over the weekend. CSEd week officially ends on Sunday at midnight.
The Partovis put together some estimates of the amount of computer science education that has happened in U.S. schools in the past 30 years. Their guess: a little under 5 million, including less than 1 million females (this would be hard to check, but it’s based on extrapolating from AP class enrollment to other levels).
Meanwhile, Hour of Code students were 73 percent from the U.S., and 51 percent female.
So in Code.org’s estimation, Hour of Code has reached twice as many U.S. students as have ever taken a computer science class, and five times as many U.S. females as have taken a computer science class. Ever.
Of course, it’s only an hour of code, so you don’t want to put too much weight on the extrapolation. But that’s the point: if more students get a taste of learning to code, more are likely to stick around.NYPD Officers. Image via Agence-France-Presse
Officer secretly recorded conversation with his supervisor in which he is apparently told to target ‘male blacks 14 to 21’
The New York police department’s controversial stop-and-frisk program is being driven by a high-pressure quota system imposed upon lower-ranking officers by their supervisors, two NYPD officers testified in court this week.
The claims were made as part of a landmark class action lawsuit that began Monday. The suit seeks to prove that the nation’s largest police department has demonstrated a widespread and systemic pattern of unconstitutional stops that disproportionately target minorities.
Lawyers for the city have dismissed allegations of quotas and scrutinized the credibility of the suit’s plaintiffs, including their allegations of racial bias on the part of the department.
“The quota allegations are a sideshow,” city attorney Heidi Grossman said in opening statements Monday. “Crime drives where police officers go,” she added. “Not race.”
The trial represents a historic challenge to the legacies of NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly and mayor Michael Bloomberg, who have both vocally supported stop-and-frisk.
The NYPD has stopped approximately 5 million people over the last decade. According to department data, the vast of majority of those stopped are African American or Latino, many of them young men. In recent years nearly nine out of 10 of those stopped by police have walked away from the stops without a summons or arrest.
Darius Charney, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in opening statements that the trial is about more than numbers. “It’s about people,” he said. The NYPD has “laid siege to black and Latino communities” through “arbitrary, unnecessary and unconstitutional harassment”, Charney added.
Supporters of stop-and-frisk, including Bloomberg and Kelly, maintain that it is an essential tool that save lives and removes guns from the streets. Without stop-and-frisk, New York City would descend into violence not seen in decades, they argue. Young men of color – the group most frequently cited as victims of the program – would bear the brunt of violent crime, they say.
Both the mayor and the commissioner – as well as the city itself and several named and unnamed officers – are the defendants in the suit.
By law, the NYPD is permitted to stop a person if it has a reasonable suspicion to believe the person is about to commit a crime, is in the process of committing a crime, or has just finished committing a crime. An officer can frisk a person – patting them outside the clothing – if they have reason to believe the person is an armed threat. An officer can search someone – reach inside clothing – if they have encountered an object they have reason to believe is a weapon.
These conditions regularly go unmet, stop-and-frisk critics argue. They say the program has produced a sense of second-class citizenship in minority communities in which individuals – particularly young men – are routinely subjected to illegal and degrading stops.
‘We were handcuffing kids for no reason’
The trial began Monday with two packed courtrooms; one where the actual proceedings are taking place and one for the overflow of spectators, activists and politicians. The first four witness were each African American men who described stops they had experienced. City attorneys worked to expose inconsistencies between the witnesses testimonies and depositions, prove bias against the police department and discredit their claims of racial profiling.
By mid-week lawyers for the plaintiffs shifted focus from the experience of street stops to the internal NYPD incentive structure that allegedly motivates them.
Officer Adhyl Polanco began his testimony Tuesday by saying “there’s a difference between” the department’s policies on paper and “what goes on out there”, on the city’s streets.
Polanco testified that in 2009, officers in his Bronx precinct were expected to issue 20 summons and make one arrest per month. If they did not they would risk denied vacation, being separated from longtime partners, undesirable assignments and other consequences.
Polcano claimed it was not uncommon for patrol officers who were not making quotas to be forced to “drive the sergeant” or “drive the supervisor”, which meant driving around with a senior officer who would find individuals for the patrol officer to arrest or issue a summons to, at times for infractions the junior officer did not observe.
“We were handcuffing kids for no reason,” Polanco said. Claiming he was increasingly disturbed by what he was witnessing in his precinct, Polcanco began secretly recording his roll call meetings.
In one recording played for the court, a man Polanco claimed was a NYPD captain told officers: “the summons is a money–generating machine for the city.”
Bronx police officer Pedro Serrano also secretly recorded comments made by supervisors at the same Bronx precinct. His recordings were also played for the court this week.
On a track played Thursday, Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack was heard telling Serrano he needed to stop “the right people, the right time, the right location”. When asked what he believed McCormack meant Serrano told the court: “he meant blacks and Hispanics.”
Later in the tape McCormack says: “I have no problem telling you this … male blacks. And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem [to] tell you this, male blacks 14 to 21.”
Serrano claims his attempts to raise concerns about stop and frisk and the existence of quotas have been met with retaliation, including fellow officers vandalizing his locker with stickers of rats.
He choked up on the witness stand Thursday, as he described his reason for joining the suit.
“As a Hispanic living in the Bronx, I have been stopped many times,” Serrano said. “I just want to do the right thing.”
© 2013 Guardian News and Media
[NYPD photo via AFP]Sometimes, we hurt the ones we love. Which is why even if we didn’t mean to be so harsh, many products we use every day have become the victims of trademark genericization, meaning they’ve morphed from a single product identified under a name to an entire product category. And when courts get involved it becomes “genericide,” which sounds even more murderous. Can’t you just imagine Law & Order: Genericized Trademarks? [dun dun]
While some of the 15 products below are truly victims of genericide, having had their trademarks canceled in a court, others simply failed to register as trademarks at all, or in some cases, weren’t renewed or were abandoned for other reasons. Which means now you can have your own escalator company or sell flooring and call it linoleum. Wouldn’t suggest setting up your own heroin company, however.
15 GENERICIZED TRADEMARKS
1. Aspirin: Formally known as acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin was created in 1897 and originally trademarked by Bayer AG. The name means “pain relief, speed, reliability and tolerability,” according to Bayer. Aspirin comes from “acetyl” and Spirsäure, a German name for salicylic acid. Its time as a trademarked word would be short — in 1917 many of Bayer’s U.S. assets were confiscated as a result of World War 1, including its patents and trademarks.
2. Heroin: Speaking of losing trademarks, heroin was also stripped from Bayer in 1917. The drug derived from morphine was named trademarked by the company in 1898 based on the German word heroisch, which means “heroic, strong.” Couldn’t find mention of its heroin history on Bayer, which is unsurprising.
3. Cellophane: Cellophane gets its name from regenerated cellulose (the stuff that makes up much of plant’s cell walls) and diaphane, or transparent. It was created by Swiss chemist Jacques E. Brandenberger and patented in 1912. In 1923, DuPont chemists created a moisture-proof system for cellophane. It has since become genericized in the U.S., though still trademarked in other countries. Plastic wrap isn’t cellophane, by the way — it’s polyvinyl chloride.
4. Escalator [PDF]: First coined by Charles Seeberger of Otis Elevator Co. in 1900 when he debuted his device. The word comes from the roof the word scala for “steps” in Latin, with “E” as the prefix, and a suffix of “Tor.” Roughly, that means “traversing from.” It was also supposed to be pronounced with the accent on the middle syllable — es-CA-lator. Otis lost the trademark when the U.S. Patent Office ruled that even Otis had used escalator as a generic descriptive term in its own patents. It was officially genericized.
5. Trampoline: The first modern trampoline was built by George Nissen and Larry Griswold in 1936, and comes from the Spanish for “diving board” — trampolin. The generic term for it before was actually the “rebound tumbler.” It’s unclear when it lost its trademark, but anyone can now sell a trampoline.
6. Thermos: The predecessor to the thermos was Sir James Dewar’s “vacuum flask,” invented in 1892. The Thermos first hit the market in 1904 for commercial use, named as such by German glass blowers who held a contest to name the product. A Munich resident suggested Thermos from the Greek Therme for “heat.” Thermos GmbH sold trademark rights to three independent companies in 1907, who then began producing it and selling it around the world. It was named a generalized trademark in the U.S. in 1963, but remains a registered trademark in some other countries.
7. Dry Ice: Trademarked in 1925 by the DryIce Corporation, dry ice is solid CO2. It lost its trademark in 1932.
8. Kerosene: Abraham Gesner registered a trademark for combustible hydrocarbon liquid, derived from the Greek “kerns” for wax, in 1854. The North American Gas Light Company and the Downer Company were the only ones allowed to use the term for some years, until it eventually became genericized.
9. Laundromat: Named by George Edward Pendray, Westinghouse Electric introduced the Laundromat in 1940, the first automatic washing machine that could be wall-mounted. It was last registered to Westinghouse in 1952, and has since expired as a trademark, according to USPTO.gov. Westinghouse Nuclear still maintains a history page for the original company.
10. Linoleum: While Linoleum — from the Latin linum for “flax” and oeum, “oil” — was considered to be the first term to become generic, it was never trademarked by its English inventor, Frederick Walton. He established the Linoleum Manufacturing Company Ltd in 1864, but apparently never trademarked the term in the first place. That fact came to light when Walton was facing competitors in court in the late 1870s. By that time, the generalization had already happened, and it was too late.
11. App Store: Apple sued Amazon in 2011 claiming consumers could be confused by its “Appstore for Amazon” but then abandoned the trademark and the lawsuit in 2013.
12. Yo-Yo: Trademarked in the U.S. in 1932 by entrepreneur Donald F. Duncan, his company lost a case brought by ac competitor in 1965, when a federal appeals court ruled that the trademark was improperly registered and therefore invalid.
13. ZIP code: Otherwise known as the Zone Improvement System, the ZIP code was originally registered as a servicemark by the United States Postal Service in 1976 but has since expired due to non renewal.
14. Zipper: The word zip was already around as a noun and a verb, referring to sound it makes when you make the motion that accompanies that kind of noise. You zip and it goes “zip!” It was first registered as a trademark in 1925 by B.F. Goodrich for overshoes with fasteners invented by Gideon Sundback. An executive is said to have slid the fastened up and down saying, “zip ‘er up,” thus, Zipper. The company sued to protect the trademark in 1930 but only got to keep the rights to Zipper Boots, as zipper had entered the common lexicon by then as a generic term.
15. TV Dinner: C.A. Swanson & Sons developed the pre-packaged, frozen dinner meal in 1953 and trademarked it as TV Brand Frozen Dinner, but stopped using TV Dinner in 1962. Today, any kind of frozen meal you can eat in front of a screen could be called a TV dinner.
SO WHO’S NEXT?
The below names are still protected by trademarks so they can’t be used by competitors without possibly facing trademark infringement lawsuits. They could be in danger of genericide, however, as with a recent trademark dispute between Skee-Ball and Brewskee-Ball shows — the trademark name for the game could be up close to genericide.
Some you might know and use full well knowing it’s a brand name — how often do you tell someone to just “rip the Band-Aid off”? But what about cooking something in the Crock-Pot, or perhaps calling a Realtor — who knew?
42 TRADEMARKS WHO NEED TO WATCH THEIR BACKS
1. Adrenalin
Generic name: Epinephrine
Owned by: Parke-Davis
2. AstroTurf
Generic name: Artificial Turf
Owned by: Monsanto
3. Band-Aid
Generic name: Adhesive bandage
Owned by: Johnson & Johnson
4. Bubble Wrap
Generic name: Inflated cushioning
Owned by: Sealed Air
5. Bubbler (only included because I’m from Wisconsin, if I haven’t mentioned)
Generic name: Drinking fountain
Owned by: Kohler Company
6. ChapStick
Generic name: Lip balm
Owned by: Wyeth Consumer Healthcare
7. Crock-Pot
Generic name: Slow cooker
Owned by: Sunbeam products
8. Dumpster
Generic name: Front loader waste container
Owned by: Dempster Brothers, Inc.
9. Fiberglas, Fiberglass
Generic name: Glass wool
Owned by: Owens Corning
10. Formica
Generic name: Wood or plastic laminate
Owned by: Formica Corporation
11. Frisbee
Generic name: Flying disc
Owned by: Wham-O
12. Hackey Sack
Generic name: Footbag
Owned by: Wham-O
13. Hula Hoop
Generic name: Toy hoop
Owned by: Wham-O
14. Jacuzzi
Generic name: Hot tub or whirlpool
Owned by: Jacuzzi
15. Jet Ski
Generic name: Stand-up personal watercraft
Owned by: Kawasaki
16. Kleenex
Generic name: Facial tissue
Owned by: Kimberly-Clark
17. Lava lamp
Generic name: Liquid motion lamp
Owned by: Mathmos
18. Mace
Generic name: Pepper spray
Owned by: Mace Security International
19. Memory Stick
Generic name: Flash memory storage device
Owned by: Sony
20. Muzak
Generic name: Elevator music, background music
Owned by: Muzak Holdings
21. Onesies
Generic name: Infant/adult bodysuit
Owned by: Gerber Products Company
22. Ping Pong
Generic name: Table tennis
Owned by: Parker Brothers
23. Plexiglas, Plexiglass
Generic name: Acrylic glass
Owned by: Altuglas Internaional, Rohm & Haas
24. Popsicle
Generic name: Ice Pop
Owned by: Good Humor-Breyers
25. Putt-Putt Golf
Generic name: Miniature golf
Owned by: Putt-Putt Fun Center
26. Q-Tips
Generic name: Cotton swabs
Owned by: Unilever
27. Realtor
Generic name: Real estate agent
Owned by: National Association of Realtors
28. Saran Wrap
Generic name: Plastic wrap, cling wrap
Owned by: S.C Johnson & Son, Asahi Kasei
29. Scotch tape
Generic name: Clear adhesive tape
Owned by: 3M
30. Sharpie
Generic name: Permanent marker
Owned by: Sanford L.P., owned by Newell Rubbermaid
31. Skee-Ball
Generic name:
Owned by:
32. Stetson
Generic name: Cowboy hat
Owned by: John B. Stetson Company
33. Styrofoam
Generic name: Extruded polystyrene foam
Owned by: Dow Chemical Company
34. Super Glue
Generic name: Cyanoacrylate adhesive
Owned by: Super Glue Corporation
35. Super Heroes
Generic name: Superhero
Owned by: DC Comics, Marvel Comics
36. Tarmac
Generic name: Asphalt road surface
Owned by: Tarmac
37. Taser
Generic name: Electroshock weapon, stun gun
Owned by: Taser Systems
38. Teflon
Generic name: Polytetrafluoroethylene
Owned by: DuPont
39. Telecopier
Generic name: Facsimile machine
Owned by: Xerox
40. Tupperware
Generic name: Plastic storage containers
Owned by: Earl Tupper
41. Velcro
Generic name: Hook-and-loop fastener
Owned by: Velcro company
42. Xerox
Generic name: Photocopier to make a photocoyp
Owned by: Xerox
For more on genericide and genericized trademarks, check out these articles:
Genericide: Cancellation of a Registered Trademark by Jacqueline Stern in the 1982 Fordham Law Review [PDF]
The Genericide of Trademarks by John Dwight Ingram [PDF]
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Consumerist.Donald Trump Jr. could be the one to officially make his father the GOP nominee for president at the party convention in Cleveland.
Donald Jr., 38, is a New York delegate and the state GOP has offered him the role of announcing the New York vote from the convention floor, which could be timed to put his dad “over the top” of the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination.
State GOP chairman Ed Cox confirmed the ceremonial role has been offered to Donald Jr. and said the plan is being reviewed by the Trump campaign. The convention runs from July 18 to 21.
“We would like to be the delegates to put Donald Trump over the top. We deserve to be the state. It would be an honor,” Cox said.
“We would love to have Donald Jr. do it. It would be wonderful to have a member of the Trump family announce that. The whole room would go wild.”
Cox said he personally discussed the plan with both Donalds.
Trump’s landslide victory in the April 19 New York primary — his home state — put him on the path to the nomination.
The rout came after he lost the Wisconsin primary to Ted Cruz two weeks before.
Two of Trump’s other children, Ivanka and Eric, like Donald Jr., play major roles in their dad’s campaign.
But Ivanka and Eric could not vote for their dad in New York ‘s GOP primary in April because they were not registered Republicans at the time.Oak Brook has offered to take over traffic enforcement of the Route 83/22nd Street intersection after Oakbrook Terrace issued a statement claiming new establishments at Oakbrook Center have increased traffic requiring red light cameras to effectively enforce traffic violations at the busy intersection.
The Illinois Department of Transportation recently issued Oakbrook Terrace a permit to install red light cameras at the intersection, and a move Oak Brook officials have opposed. The shopping mall is in Oak Brook but the intersection is in Oakbrook Terrace.
Oak Brook Village President Gopal Lalmalani said he would be happy to help with costs by having the Oak Brook Police Department handle traffic enforcement without red light cameras.
"If this really is about safety and not about generating additional revenue from red light violations, I don't see why Oakbrook Terrace wouldn't be in favor of us taking over enforcement there if they no longer can handle it," Lalmalani said. "This is a cash grab by them."
Oakbrook Terrace officials have not responded to such allegations, except through a news release Nov. 16 stating "We respect the additions to the Oakbrook Center and would hope that the village of Oak Brook would respect our concerns for traffic safety." The release noted Oakbrook Terrace does not receive tax revenue from the mall or the new businesses.
Lalmalani said he and village staff are continuing to reach out to state legislators in hopes of having the red light cameras put on hold, while some concerns are addressed. He has called issuance of the red light camera permit "suspicious," and village manager Rick Ginex said "The circumstances are too strange."
The permit was issued Oct. 28, giving Oakbrook Terrace 180 days to complete installation for southbound traffic on Route 83 and for eastbound traffic on 22nd Street.
Oak Brook officials have issue with the fact that IDOT originally determined red light camera enforcement was not supported at the intersection.
A March 3 IDOT justification report review denied the camera request and noted that data for 2015-2017 could be submitted for another review. Then, a May 20 letter from IDOT stated approval was granted, based on video files dated November 2015, which "demonstrated a pattern of violations at the intersection."
Oak Brook officials also are upset because they said they never received a letter of notification from Oakbrook Terrace that was part of the installation submittal review process. Oak Brook recently received a copy of the letter, dated July 20, from IDOT.
The Oakbrook Terrace City Council unanimously approved a contract in September 2012 with SafeSpeed LLC, a Chicago company that handles the installation and maintenance of red light cameras.
Nikki Zollar is president and chief executive officer of SafeSpeed and of Triad Consulting Services, the latter of which made a $2,500 contribution to the campaign committee for the mayor of Oakbrook Terrace. Illinois State Board of Elections records show the |
possible imminent deportation hanging over them.
Greece [ edit ]
Greece is the most common entry point into the EU for Iraqis. A large proportion enter the country after a treacherous journey across the quasi-border separating Central and Southern Iraq from the northern regions, from where they cross the mountains into Turkey. Thereafter, they continue along the same routes as thousands of illegal migrants, arriving at one of the Greek islands by speedboat or crossing the Greek–Turkish land border. From Greece, Iraqis generally travel on before making an asylum claim, either to the northern European countries, or to Madrid, Spain from where the USA or Latin America can be reached.[13]
Hungary [ edit ]
Approximately 1,200 Iraqi refugees have immigrated to Hungary.[19]
Ireland [ edit ]
Sources claim there to be 340 Iraqi refugees living in Ireland.[19]
Italy [ edit ]
The current population of Iraqis in Italy stands at around 1,300; however one source claims there to be 1,068, which is approximately 50 families.[19] Most of these are priests, nuns and seminarians who have come to pursue their studies in Italy.[25] The majority are residents of Rome.
There have been recent appeals from the Iraqi community living in Italy to free any Italian and Iraqi Italian residents currently working in Iraq.[26]
In November 2007, 800 Iraqi Kurds sought refugee in Italy, of which only 20 of them applied for asylum and the other received 15-day expulsion orders.[27]
Norway [ edit ]
Netherlands [ edit ]
Romania [ edit ]
Sources claim there are 450 Iraqi refugees living in Romania.[19]
Russia [ edit ]
Significant groups of Iraqis have emigrated to Russia as early as the 1990s.[28] Iran credits Russia with being one of the first countries to provide concrete assistance in processing Iraqi refugees; Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry began preparing two sites for refugee camps in western Iran in April 2003.[29] However, Iraqis admitted to Russia often find themselves the targets of racism; as with Afghan refugees, they are mistaken for migrants from the Caucasus, who are stereotyped in Russia as drug dealers and criminals.[28]
Spain [ edit ]
The current population of Iraqis in Spain is unknown; however, since the Iraq War, Spain has been host to 45 Iraqi refugees. An additional 42 Iraqis requested asylum in 2006.[30] There are roughly about 3,700 asylum seekers in Spain, and a further 642 Iraqis hold residency permits.[31]
Iraqi immigration to Spain accounted for 1,706 permanent residents in the year 2006.
Sweden [ edit ]
Switzerland [ edit ]
The current population of Iraqis in Switzerland is estimated to be around 5,000. However, the Swiss government is currently closing doors to future Iraqi refugees, and offering to send external aid instead. Christoph Blocher, the Swiss Justice and Police Minister, stated that "We already have 5,000 Iraqis in Switzerland and our country is in second place in Europe in accepting them".[32][33]
Turkey [ edit ]
Turkish citizens of Iraqi heritage currently number around 60,000-90,000. Turkey currently hosts 600 recognized Iraqi refugees. The Turkish government had approved Iraqi asylum seekers in 2001 by a rate of 78 percent.[34] In September 2004 only 407 Iraqis applied to the UNHCR for asylum in Turkey.[35] As of June 2006, UNHCR in Ankara had registered only 2,404 Iraqis as asylum seekers in Turkey.[36]
Most Iraqi refugees living in Turkey are Christian, mainly Chaldean Catholics, and often face indifference by their Turkish counterparts.[35]
United Kingdom [ edit ]Art is a cry of distress from those who live out within themselves the destiny of humanity … Inside them turns the movement of the world; only an echo of it leaks out – the work of art Arnold Schoenberg, 1910.
Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, like many gifted artists throughout history, suffered for his art. Popular artists of the modern era have kept this tradition alive. For all the superficial glamour of the pop music world, let us not delude ourselves - today’s popular music scene is brutal.
The “pop-cultural scrap heap”, to borrow journalist Drew Magary’s term, is piled high with the dead or broken bodies of young musicians whose personal and musical aspirations collided with the aspirations of those occupying the commercial edifices erected around them, which turn them into income-generating commodities whose role is to satisfy capricious and ever-changing consumer demands.
Many of those musicians end up feeling suffocated, caged and possessed by their minders, exploiters and fans. And many end up dead.
How big a problem is the pop music industry, really?
The rock scene is a volatile mix of glamour, instant wealth, risk-taking, rebellion and psychological distress accompanied by taken-for-granted assumptions that pop musicians will live dangerously, abuse substances and die early. Journalist Amanda Hooten, writing about Robbie Williams, identifies the components of the “classic rock’n’roll script” as “sex, drugs, rehab and bitterness”.
Blogger Jacob Katel expresses the same sentiments in a more forthright manner:
[d]ead rock stars are a dime a dozen. They usually drink themselves to death, overdose on narcotics, crash cars, or get on faulty aircraft with drunk pilots …
Previous research does not answer the question
Why do so many pop musicians die young?
Few studies have systematically examined the popular musician population to ascertain the extent of the problems codified in the media comments above.
Existing studies are limited in scope. Adrian Barnett, for example, tested the “27 club hypothesis”. Tucker, Faulkner and Horvath only included a narrow sample of the population, that is, musicians who died between 1959 and 1967. A John Moores University study only looked at artists with top rating albums.
At the other end of the scale, the study reported by Howard Sounes in his book 27 is over-inclusive as it covers not only performing musicians but also songwriters, record producers, managers and promoters.
New research
AAP Photo
I’ve undertaken the first population study of performing pop musicians (n=12,665) from all popular genres who died between 1950 and June 2014 of whom 90.6% (11,478 musicians) were male.
Data on age, circumstances and manner of death were accessed from over 200 sources, including The Dead Rock Stars’ Club; Nick Tavelski’s (2010) Knocking on Heaven’s Door: Rock Obituaries, Pop star mortality; R.I.P. Encyclopaedia Metallicum; Voices from the Dark Side for Dead Metal Musicians; Wikipedia’s List of Dead Hip Hop Artists and Hip Hop obituaries;
I went to rapper death websites, Dead Punk Stars and similar sites for all popular music genres. The genres I covered included African, ballad, bluegrass, blues, Cajun, calypso, Christian pop, conjunto, country, doo-wop, electroclash, folk, funk, Gospel, hard rock, hip hop, honky tonk, indie, jazz, Latin, metal, new wave, polka, pop, psychedelic, punk, punk-electronic, rock rap, reggae, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly, ska, soul, swamp, swing, techno, western and world music.
Longevity, suicide, homicide and accidental death rates in pop musicians
I examined four outcomes – longevity and the proportion of deaths by suicide, homicide and non-intentional injury or accident. Longevity was determined by calculating the average age of death for each musician by sex and decade of death. These averages were then compared with population averages by sex and decade for the US population (per 100,000) (see Figure 1, below).
Figure 2 (below) provides a graphical summary of percentages of musicians who died by decade from each of the three causes of death studied; these are juxtaposed with deaths in the US population from the same causes by decade. All comparisons shown in these figures were highly statistically significantly different from the US population.
The pop music scene is toxic and needs rehabilitation
The results of this study are disturbing. Across the seven decades studied, popular musicians’ lifespans were up to 25 years shorter than the comparable US population. Accidental death rates were between five and 10 times greater. Suicide rates were between two and seven times greater; and homicide rates were up to eight times greater than the US population.
This is clear evidence that all is not well in pop music land.
Why is this so? The pop music “scene” fails to provide boundaries and to model and expect acceptable behaviour. It actually does the reverse – it valorises outrageous behaviour and the acting out of aggressive, sexual and destructive impulses that most of us dare only live out in fantasy.
The music industry needs to consider these findings to discover ways of recognising and assisting young musicians in distress. At the very least, those who make their livings from these young people need to learn to recognise early signs of emotional distress, crisis, depression and suicidality and to put some support systems in place to provide the necessary assistance and care.
The Conversation is currently running a series on Death and Dying.TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Democratic state senator is asking the Kansas Legislature's audit division to evaluate whether a former commerce secretary followed state law and procedure in awarding agency consulting contracts and when charging business expenses.
Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley told the Topeka Capital-Journal on Friday that the Legislature's oversight committee was expected to authorize the review of Antonio Soave, who led the Kansas Department of Commerce for about 18 months until June.
Gov. Sam Brownback, who appointed Soave, had praised Soave when he left the administration. But the governor's office later confirmed Soave was fired partly over questions about state contracts.
Soave has said he resigned by mutual agreement with the Brownback administration. He also defended the agency's consulting contracts.
The Kansas City Star first reported that at least nine Soave associates landed contracts during Soave's 18 months as secretary.
___
Information from: The Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal, http://www.cjonline.com“There are two armies ruining the game: Eldar and Tau.”
I hear some form of this a lot. Any mention of overpowered factions, units that need nerfing, ‘What’s wrong with the state of 40K’ etc. brings up our Blue Goatfish Friends. And given the Eldar are indeed pretty unquestionably overpowered, you’d think there might be a grain of truth to this idea.
But is there?
The short answer: Not really.
The long answer involves math.
When I wrote my analysis of the results of the 2016 Las Vegas Open, I included the following passage:
Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Tau? I hear the Tau called out a lot for being OP, for ruining the game, for being one of the codexes that must be feared and dreaded and nerfed. That’s just not born out in the data. They’re a solid army, on par with Cult Mechanicus/War Convocation, Dark Angels or Chaos Renegades, but they’re not at the big kids table – that’s held by Space Marines, Eldar, Necrons, and Daemons.
But that was just one (admittedly large) tournament, and the real effects of the new Tau units might not have been able to be seen yet. So I’m revisiting the question, with the results from two more recent tournaments in different parts of the country: The Broadside Bash and the Midwest Conquest GT.
Shall we take a look?
First, lets consider the distribution of armies at the two events:
I’ve eliminated a couple single-army factions, like the Militarum Tempestus (sorry Reece) or Eldar Corsairs. The Tau are a popular army, but not nearly as popular as either the Eldar or the Space Marines, and on part with a number of other factions. If they were game-breakingly good, there’d be a considerable amount of selective pressure toward playing them (hence the popularity of Eldar in the tournament scene). There’s…well…there’s not.
Alright, but what about how well they actually do? For this, I looked at the battle points for the two tournaments, normalized so that for each the winner got 5500 points so they can be analyzed together on equal footing.
The median score is a super-even 3000 points. As we can see, there are some under-performing armies (Tyranids, my beloved Sisters of Battle, etc.) and some strong performers (Space Marines, Chaos Daemons, Chaos Space Marines, Eldar, Necrons and Imperial Knights). The Chaos Space Marines performance is driven by some very strong showings at the Broadside Bash – and ignoring the drama around the illegality of the winning list, it’s also not really a “CSM” list as much as it is an unholy mish-mash of CSM, KDK and Daemons.
Notably absent on this list? Tau. They’re a solid, midrange performer, as they were in the LVO – it’s hard to end up at the bottom tables with them, but it’s also hard to end up at the top. Looking at this another way, I used a regression model to predict the increase over the average score you could expect based on army choice for a number of armies, expressed as a multiplier (i.e. an army with a score of 1.50 should earn 1.50 times the points as compared to all other armies).
Lets take a look at some of those:
Eldar: 1.22
Necrons: 1.35
Space Marines: 1.02
Chaos Daemons: 1.17
Tau: 1.12
Astra Militarum: 0.68
Some of those armies are very strong – the Eldar and Necrons especially. The Space Marines are hampered by a lot of lower-performing entries, presumably people playing less-than-optimum Space Marine armies. But again, the Tau are far from the kind of multiplier the Eldar or Necrons see. They’re not in trouble (unlike the poor guard…), but they’re not setting the tournament world on fire either.
Which brings us back to the core question: What is it about the Tau? Why does every Tau release cause the salt to floweth over?
I have two theories, which I’ll present here:
Theory 1: Hating Tau Says More About The You Than the Tau
Statistically, most of us are average players. That’s how averages work. And then a bulk of us (and I would include myself in this category) are below average players. The Tau’s wheelhouse is being a middling-good army. That means lots of us are playing at or below the level where the Tau can be expected to do well, and relatively few of us reach the rarified air where we’re good enough that they’re no longer a threat.
Theory 2: The Tau Are Somehow Unfun
There are mechanics in the Tau codex I’d define as “unfun” – things where really only one side of the battle is enjoying things, rolling dice, etc. The flexibility of the Tau in countering certain mechanics in the game (anything cover related, anything with a vulnerable rear armor value, etc.) can trigger a feeling of helplessness. And that’s not fun.
Like my cover-dependent Eldar, who just get smacked around for a few turns playing Tau…
Beyond that, because of the synergy in the Tau army and their weakness in melee, Tau success is very front-loaded. There’s lots of killing while the full army is up, marker lights are abundant, and units can support each other. So for the first few turns, the Tau roll dice, and their opponent removes units.
Then, if their opponent survives that, the tables start to turn. When the Tau crumble, in my experience, they start crumbling fast. Which means that un-funness switches. Tau are being removed in droves, and then the final tally ends up being much closer than it felt like earlier in the game. And while in a game sense this might be balanced, two or three turns of unfun on both sides doesn’t average out to a fun game.
In reality? I suspect it’s a combination of the two.
But calling the Tau overpowered, or ruining the game? There’s really no empirical support for that.
Enjoy what you read? Enjoyed that it was ad free? Both of those things are courtesy of our generous Patreon supporters. If you’d like more quantitatively driven thoughts on 40K and miniatures wargaming, and a hand in deciding what we cover, please consider joining them.This article is about the fast food chain Lotteria. For the horse racing event, see Gran Premio Lotteria. For the Latino game, see Lotería
Lotteria is a chain of fast food restaurants in East Asia that grew out of its first shop in Tokyo, Japan in September 1972. Taking its name from its parent company, Lotte Corporation, it currently has franchises in Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar.[1]
Its menu includes typical fast-food items such as burgers, fried potato, fried chicken, chicken wings, and chicken fingers.
History [ edit ]
The company was founded in February 1972 in Tokyo, Japan by Shin Jun Ho, a Korean entrepreneur. Its first franchises opened in Nihonbashi, Ueno, and Yokohama in September of that year.[2] In 1979 the brand was established in Seoul, South Korea.[3] Lotteria later spread throughout East Asia adding locations in China, Myanmar, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
Businesses by country [ edit ]
Japan [ edit ]
In Japan, Lotteria's most popular menu items are hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and teriyaki burgers. It invented its other popular item, the shrimp burger, in 1977, which has since been copied by McDonald's and MOS Burger in Japan.
In addition, the menu in Japan also includes fresh sandwiches along with fresh Jerome as well as desserts like crepes, apple pie, shakes and frozen cake-sticks. The premium cheese burger is the top selling menu item in Japan.
In 2005, Genichi Tamatsuka, the former president of Fast Retailing Co. (which operates the Uniqlo brand), was appointed as chairman and CEO during a management restructuring in 2005.[4] The appointment was the result of a previous contract undertaken by Revamp Corp, a business revitalization company.[4]
A Lotteria lunch in Japan. A sandwich set accompanied by chicken sticks and a crepe.
South Korea [ edit ]
Lotteria South Korea was founded in 1979,[5] as part of an expansion of the Lotte Group which also included Lotte Chilsung Beverages, Lotte Food, and Lotte Ham. Lotteria became the number-one fast food restaurant chain in South Korea. The company achieved a 45% market share in 2001 (compared to 20.1 percent for McDonald's).[3] Lotteria's success was achieved in part by introducing lines of Koreanized fast food including its now signature kimchi burger, leading to it being seen by most Koreans as a native version of most Western-style fast-food restaurants. The company tries to imitate the western idea of fast food through "cleanliness, bright interior, Western pop music as an audio background," with the idea of trying to create "the impression of a'small piece of America in the middle of Korea'".[3] Their business strategy resulted in growth rates of 10 percent in 2006 and 16 percent in 2007; by 2009, Lotteria had 920 outlets across the country.[6]
The menu in South Korea includes baked potatoes, yogurt, salads, cheese sticks, squid rings, and a popular shaved iced dessert called pat bing soo (팥빙수). One of the restaurants most popular burgers is the 'Bulgogi Burger' with bulgogi sauce serving as relish. In South Korea too, a specially priced lunchtime menu is offered focussing on less expensive and often reduced items. The timing of the lunch menu differs from store to store but falls within the hours of 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., with prices fluctuating from location to location. There are a few stores which carry weekend lunches but these are relatively rare.
In March 2009, Lotteria took full control of the South Korean branch of T.G.I. Friday's.[6] It had previously invested 10 billion won in the chain in 2002.[7] Lotteria also runs Natuur, one of South Korea's major ice cream franchises,[8][9] itself introduced to South Korea by Lotte in 1998.[10]
Vietnam [ edit ]
The restaurant entered the Vietnamese market in 2004.[1] Its menu there includes regular menu burgers and fried chicken but not side items like baked potatoes and pat bing soo. They also have an ice cream-based dessert (like a McFlurry) called a Tornado. It comes in five flavors: chocolate, cookie, peanut, sprinkles or green tea.
They also have Shrimp Burgers and some items that include rice, such as drumsticks with rice.
Indonesia [ edit ]
The chain opened its first Indonesian franchise in 2011.
Cambodia [ edit ]
The chain opened its first Cambodian franchise in June 2014 at Aeon Mall, followed by a second store in December 2014 at Soria Mall.[1]
Myanmar [ edit ]
The first Lotteria restaurant in Myanmar was opened in Junction Square in Yangon in April 2013, with plans to open 24 more by 2016 from Yangon to Nay Pyi Taw. Along with the regular fare of chicken and burgers, Lotteria is offering dishes tailored to Myanmar consumers, such as chicken rice.[1]
Other business strategies [ edit ]
In 2003 Lotteria partnered with KT and Intel to provide Wi-fi access in its restaurants,[11] to help attract more customers. This service has also been available in every restaurant in Japan for Docomo's and Au's mobile users since 2006.
Lotteria has followed the global fast-food trend of shifting towards health-conscious foods and rebranding its image. In the face of health trends, it eliminated trans fats from its French fries.[12] It also introduced healthier menu items, such as a rye bread burger that totals only 350 calories.[13] From 2008, perhaps as a response to McDonald's strategy to become more upmarket, Lotteria began a campaign to change "the image of our stores to create a mood similar to a cafe, geared toward the health-conscious as well as female customers".[14]
Recycling (South Korea only) [ edit ]
In South Korea, waste is separated by category.
Since 2003, the South Korean government has required a 50-to-100 Won deposit to be levied against all disposable cups sold in restaurants to ensure that they were returned to be recycled.[15] As such, products (such as drinks and ice cream) to be consumed in-store are served in reusable plastic containers; or if a customer purchases their product in a disposable cup and pays the deposit, they can have their deposit refunded if they return the empty cup to the counter staff. The recycling law yielded recycling rates for cups of 14 percent in 2003, 22 percent in 2004, and 25 percent in 2005.[15] This law has since been repealed.
The Seoul city government requires mandatory garbage sorting with food, recyclables, and general trash to be separated from each other. Specialized receptacles thus exist (for liquids, paper, uneaten food, plastic, and other general waste) at all Lotteria restaurants. In addition, Lotteria also charges a fee of 50-to-100 Won on bags as is the norm for most western-style stores and other shopping venues in South Korea.
See also [ edit ]Many of my English-language colleagues and friends complain that it is surprisingly difficult to translate North Korean language texts into English. The result, they say, often sounds highly artificial and rather comical.
The present author does not face such problems when he has to translate North Korean texts into his native Russian. There are some exceptions, to be sure, but most North Korean idioms are expressed perfectly well in the Russian language, or rather, the official and semi-official language of Soviet publications (which remains quite familiar to a majority of Russians). There is little doubt that Koreans took pretty much all of these expressions straight from Russia. In many cases, Soviet Koreans who often felt more comfortable with Russian than with Korean translated these expressions.
The official dialect of North Korea is, essentially, a rather literal translation of the Soviet Russian
Let’s look at a few examples – all taken from the first paragraph of a lengthy indictment against Jang Song Thaek, released by the Korean Central News Agency last December. For every Russian it is clear that 당 중앙의 두리에 굳게 뭉쳐 is nothing but splotivshsis vokgrug tsentralnogo komiteta partii (“to be firmly united around the party Central Committee”), while 위대한 김정일동지의 유훈을 관철하기 위한 투쟁 is word by word copy of borba za vypolnenie zavetov velikogo Lenina (“the struggle to fulfill the posthumous will of the great Kim Jong Il/Lenin”). Countless examples can be added: The official dialect of North Korea is, essentially, a rather literal translation of the Soviet Russian.
Unfortunately, it is obvious for me that, in two or three decades, this connection will be lost on nearly all readers of such texts. I myself belong to probably the last generation that grew up learning Soviet official idioms and, as a matter of fact, reproduced it whenever appropriate. Even our younger siblings who were teenagers in the late 1980s have far poorer command of this now-extinct Russian dialect. Thus, I would not be surprised if, half a century from now, there will be Korean scholars who spend a great deal of time looking for the “pure Korean roots” of such North Korean slogans as 죽음을 미제침략자들에게 (“death to imperialist aggressors”) which is actually a literal (and rather ungrammatical) translation of a Soviet slogan from the Second World War.
After all, the scholars of North Korea keep quoting the official description of North Korean art which is described as 민족의 형식의 사회주의 내용 (“national in form, socialist in content”). This sentence is from the 1972 DPRK Constitution, to be sure, but it is a literal translation of the oft-repeated Soviet description of the Soviet art, which is, of course natsionalnoie po forme, sotsialisticheskoie po soderzhaniiu. This sentence was coined by Stalin in 1930 and then repeated countless times, so it still remains one of few Soviet era cliché which are easy recognizable by younger educated Russians – but not by Koreans, North Korean populace and South Korean academics alike.
NORTH KOREA’S PARIS
And what about the slogan of the North Korean Children’s Union, 항상준비 (“always prepared”)? If our Western readers recognize the origin of the slogan in the Boy Scout movement, they will be correct, but North Koreans learned it from the Young Pioneers, a nationwide children’s organization which once existed in the Soviet Union. The Young Pioneers, first established in the 1920s, made good use of the Boy Scouts’ paraphernalia, without admitting it – the general semi-military style of organization, badges and grades, triangle ties and uniform, and, of course, greetings. In due time these traditions were borrowed wholesale by the Children’s Union. The traditions still persist, but few people understand the origin of this peculiar culture – since, predictably, the North Korean ideologues invented for the Children’s Union a proper (and completely fake) pedigree, making it a successor to the children’s groups which allegedly existed in the Communist-controlled areas of Manchuria in the 1930s.
For many decades, the USSR remained the major source of information about the outside world for most North Korean officials and intellectuals
When people discuss Soviet influence over North Korea, they nearly always discuss influence over policy, administrative structure and ideology. However, Soviet influence was much wider than just this. For many decades, the USSR remained the major source of information about the outside world for most North Korean officials and intellectuals. As one keen observer of North Korea’s social and cultural life in the 1960s remarked to me, “for North Korean intellectuals of the 1950s, Moscow was their Paris.”
While Moscow of the 1960s – let alone the 1950s – is rarely seen as a city of light, Soviet culture even in the darkest days of 1940s late-Stalinism was far more permissive and, if I am allowed to be politically incorrect, far more creative than the culture of North Korea. It could easily deal with a number topics that were completely taboo in North Korea itself, and it also allowed a measure of stylistic experimentation that would not be tolerated by North Korean ideological watchdogs. Last, but not least, the Soviet Union in general, and Moscow in particular have always been far more prosperous than North Korea.
It also helped that for decades, Russian remained by far the most widely studied language in North Korea, and North Koreans (those very few with the right political connections) most frequently visited Moscow.
A RANGE OF INFLUENCES
Thus, influence was wide and varied. Few people know, for example, that the lyrics of 휘바람 (“Whistle”), widely seen as the most popular of North Korean popular songs, is retelling of a popular Soviet song from the 1940s (the original song is called “every morning a lad walks near my house,” composed by Issakovsky).
There is little reason to be surprised, since the lyrics of “Whistle” were penned by Cho Ki Chon, an ethnic Korean who was born and lived in the Soviet Union until after the Second World War, and had not visited Korea before that. Predictably, when Cho was named as North Korea’s most outstanding poet, his biographers began to claim that he was born and brought up in North Korea. Even though Tatiana Graboussenko discovered original documents from Cho’s family archives that leave no doubt about his biography, it is remarkable that South Korean scholars still repeat the official fairy tale – perhaps to some extent because the idea of a purely North Korean culture fits nicely into nationalist narratives of the country that some in the South are so fond of.
…it was the Soviet Koreans and/or North Korean graduates of Soviet art schools who brought late Stalinist socialist realism to North Korea
It might be instructive to have a look at the famous statue of the Worker, Intellectual and Farmer in front of the Tower to the Juche Idea in downtown Pyongyang. This statue was allegedly designed to show the unique nature of Juche socialism, but Russians can seldom help smiling in recognition when they see this monument because the source of inspiration is just too obvious. The statue is a basically a transparent homage to the Soviet sculpture “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” by Vera Mukhina, erected in 1937 for the World Fair in Paris, and then moved to Moscow.
Once again, one should not be surprised. Initially, it was the Soviet Koreans and/or North Korean graduates of Soviet art schools who brought late Stalinist socialist realism to North Korea. This style disappeared in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, while in North Korea it survived and flourished, but its origins still remain obvious to any Russian observer.
The same is also applicable to daily life: fashion, food and interior design in pre-1990 North Korea have also not escaped Soviet influence. While there is little doubt that Korean cuisine is quintessentially Korean (food culture is generally very conservative in most countries and changes slowly), many dishes one can now eat in North Korean restaurants owe much to Russian/Soviet versions of official cuisine. The generous application of mayonnaise and other similar sources to salads and other cold dishes is clearly a feature of Russian (or rather bygone Soviet) cuisine.
All such parallels are obvious for those (very few) people who have a clear idea about daily life in Soviet Russia and North Korea. I sometimes feel bad that the number of such people is numbered in the low dozens at most, and none of them has ever bothered to write down such observations even in Russian. Time is not on our side: I am already 51 and people even slightly younger than me usually have no clue.
Picture: Eric LafforgueMumbai, India (CNN) -- Eager to fend off any criticism that he's globetrotting just days after a disastrous midterm election, President Obama unveiled about $10 billion in new contracts for U.S. exports to India on Saturday as he launched an aggressive push to show his trip to Asia will deliver jobs back home.
"The United States sees Asia, and especially India, as a market of the future," Obama said at a meeting here with business leaders from the U.S. and India. "For America, this is a jobs strategy."
It is a delicate balancing act for Obama to promote broader trade relations with India, given American frustration with the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to call centers in cities like Bangalore here in India.
But Obama took the issue head-on, by asserting that the notion of Indian outsourcing being a net drain on the U.S. economy is part of a "caricature of India as a land of call centers and back offices that cost American jobs."
"But these old stereotypes, these old concerns ignore today's reality," Obama said. "In 2010, trade between our countries is not just a one-way street of American jobs and companies moving to India. It is a dynamic, two-way relationship that is creating jobs, growth, and higher living standards in both our countries."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and other Republicans back in Washington, however, immediately expressed skepticism about Obama's renewed interest in the issue after failing to move forward on pending trade deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.
Don Stewart, spokesman for McConnell, said the senator delivered a speech on the Senate floor the day after Obama's inauguration urging the new president to make the trade deals a top priority because "increasing markets overseas for our farmers, entrepreneurs and manufacturers through trade agreements will grow good jobs."
Stewart said at a subsequent meeting, McConnell renewed his call to move the trade agreements but "sadly, Democrats in Congress said 'no' to these agenda items."
But Stewart did add that McConnell is "encouraged" that Obama suggested Saturday that he is now moving forward on the trade deal with South Korea, another country the president is visiting later in the week.
"It's certainly welcome," Stewart said. "We know that expanding markets for American goods, services and agriculture overseas will help increase jobs here at home. And maybe the president's renewed focus will encourage Democrats in Congress to join us in this bipartisan effort."
Obama penned an op-ed in Saturday's New York Times headlined "Exporting Our Way to Stability," in which he vowed that in Seoul he would "work to complete a trade pact that could be worth tens of billions of dollars in increased exports and thousands of jobs for American workers."
Obama also reiterated his call to double U.S. exports all around the world in the next five years. "We want to be known not just for what we consume, but for what we produce," he wrote. "And the more we export abroad, the more jobs we create in America. In fact, every $1 billion we export supports more than 5,000 jobs at home."
Obama announced Saturday that about 54,000 U.S. jobs will be created by $10 billion in new contracts for the Indian government and private companies here to buy a slew of American products, including jet airplanes from Boeing as well as engines and gas turbine technology from General Electric.
James McNerney, Boeing's chairman of the board who serves on an advisory council for the president and made the trip to India, credited Obama with helping to encourage the deals that will enable his company to sell 10 C-17 military transport planes to the Indian air force as well as 30 737s to commercial airlines in India.
"Having the president here, it helps," McNerney said. "Ever since the civil nuclear deal, which really brought closer ties between India and the United States in a lot of areas, I think the follow-on impact of that has been closer military ties. For the president to state as a priority, by his presence, that closer cooperation, sharing technology across the two countries, can only help. And in this case, it has."
McNerney also addressed the issue of outsourcing by American companies, suggesting that it may have gone too far.
"Big companies like Boeing have gone through a period of making their business models very horizontal," McNerney told reporters. "I think we're all wrestling with that model. It's become overextended in some cases."
He added that he predicts there will be a lot of global cooperation "but somewhat less outsourcing. That's just my take."This week, Roblox Corporation, the San Mateo, California-based developer of the popular online social gaming platform for kids known as Roblox, announced the closure of its first private equity offering in more than five years.
The funding round, which raised $92 million for the company, was primarily backed by Meritech Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that was an early investor in many tech giants such as Snapchat, Facebook and Index Ventures. In addition to expanding the company’s mobile strategy, the funds raised will also be used to repurchase shares from those employees who wish to cash out of some of their equity. (For related reading, see: Is Microsoft Stock a Bargain at Tech-Bubble Highs?)
Minecraft Rival
The game Roblox allows its players to create their own virtual worlds, and is often described as being very similar to Microsoft’s Minecraft video game. Microsoft acquired Minecraft for $2.4 billion in 2014. The funds raised from the recent funding round could help to better position Roblox to compete with Minecraft. The main ages for the users of both gaming platforms ranges from 6 years to 16 years.
According to the company’s corporate website, Roblox’s platform currently sees 48 million monthly users while a March 2017 article in Bloomberg reports that Minecraft has a total of 55 million active users. (For more, see also: Can LinkedIn Become Microsoft's Instagram?)
The Business ModelWith these thirteen simple words GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush struck terror into the entire world yesterday. He said,
"If you want to know who I listen to for advice, it’s him."
To whom was he referring? As hard as it is to believe, he was talking about his brother, George W. Bush.
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Now it's true that the question referred to Israel and the Middle East specifically, but it doesn't really matter. There isn |
amber and green colour coding. This means consumers can easily check, compare and choose foods based on their nutritional characteristics."HDNet's Dan Rather stepped on one mine after another in the racial minefield that exists when talking about the nation's first black President as the former CBS anchor, on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show over the weekend, uttered the following take on the President's ability to get health care passed and how the GOP and independents would view it. [audio available here]
DAN RATHER: Part of the undertow in the coming election is going to be President Obama's leadership. And the Republicans will make a case and a lot of independents will buy this argument. "Listen he just hasn't been, look at the health care bill. It was his number one priority. It took him forever to get it through and he had to compromise it to death." And a version of, "Listen he's a nice person, he's very articulate" this is what's been used against him, "but he couldn't sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic."
While Rather may not have been being intentionally racist one has to wonder what the reaction would be if a conservative had used similar language on the show. (Thanks to the MRC's Bob Parks for alerting us to the remark and creating the video.)
UPDATE: Rather Apologizes for "Watermelons" Comment
Earlier Rather called the current legislation a "Republican health care bill" as seen in the following exchange as it was aired on the March 8th Chris Matthews Show:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Will health care, the health care bill of Barack Obama, the one he roughly is for now, coming out of the Senate and coming out of the House. Will it become law? Will he win?
...
DAN RATHER: Yes because what we have now is basically a Republican health care bill, if it gets through. It's, it's got a lot...but I think the President finally putting his whole sack in on it, yes he wins but it's not a certain thing.
MATTHEWS: Andrea?
ANDREA MITCHELL: I think close call it has to win or else this presidency is in serious...
MATTHEWS: So in other words they'll make it happen.
MITCHELL: They've got to make it happen.
MATTHEWS: Joe Klein?
JOE KLEIN, TIME: Congressional Democrats are dreadful but they're not entirely stupid. They have to pass it.
MATTHEWS: And Nancy Pelosi will have her greatest triumph.
KLEIN: Sort of.
RATHER: When you talk about a triumph though. One, part of the undertow in the coming election is going to be President Obama's leadership. And the Republicans will make a case and a lot of independents will buy this argument. "Listen he just hasn't been, look at the health care bill. It was his number one priority. It took him forever to get it through and he had to compromise it to death." And a version of, "Listen he's a nice person, he's very articulate" this is what's been used against him, "but he couldn't sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic."
Before that exchange Rather and Andrea Mitchell, as noted by NB's Noel Sheppard, agreed that Obama made a big mistake by pushing health care.19 Min read time Share:
Focusing on the top 1 percent is a mistake. The real class divide is between the upper middle class and the rest of America.
In January 2015, Barack Obama suffered an acute political embarrassment. A proposal from the budget he’d sent to Congress was dead on arrival—but it was the president himself who killed it.
The idea was sensible, simple, and progressive. Remove the tax benefits from 529 college saving plans, which disproportionately help affluent families, and use the money to help fund a broader, fairer system of tax credits. It was, in policy terms, a no-brainer. You can easily see how the professorial president would have proposed it. But he had underestimated the wrath of the American upper middle class.
As the 2016 election helped us see, the real class divide is between the upper middle class and everyone else.
As soon as the administration unveiled the plan, Democrats started to quietly mobilize against it. Representative Chris Van Hollen from Maryland (now a senator) called his colleague, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi happened to be traveling with Obama from India to Saudi Arabia on Air Force One. As they flew across the Arabian Sea, she persuaded the president to drop the reform. The next day, White House spokesman Eric Schultz declared that the 529 plan had become “a distraction” from the president’s ambitious plans to reform college financing.
The episode was a brutal reminder that sensible policy is not always easy politics, particularly when almost every person writing about, analyzing, or commenting on a proposal is a beneficiary of the current system. Pelosi and Van Hollen both represent liberal, affluent, well-educated districts. Almost half of their constituents are in households with six-figure incomes. I should know: Van Hollen was my congressman at the time. My neighbors and I are the very people saving into our 529 plans. More than 90 percent of the tax advantage goes to families with incomes in the top quarter of the distribution.
As Paul Waldman noted in the Washington Post, the proposal “was targeted at what may be the single most dangerous constituency to anger: the upper middle class—wealthy enough to have influence, and numerous enough to be a significant voting bloc.” Like the flash of an X-ray, the controversy revealed the most important fracture in American society: the one between the upper middle class, broadly defined as the top fifth of society, and the rest.
The triumph of Donald Trump also exposed some dangerous fault lines in America’s class structure. It is a mistake to attribute the result of the November 2016 election to a single cause. Years of work lie ahead for social and political scientists picking over the data and trends. But it is pretty clear that Trump attracted the support of many middle-class and working-class voters, especially whites, who feel left out or left behind.
Race played a significant role here, with whites reacting (almost entirely incorrectly) to a sense that Americans of color were overtaking them. But inequality in general has become a lively political issue—indeed, the “defining challenge of our time,” according to Obama. Too often, however, the rhetoric of inequality points to a “top 1 percent” problem, as if the “bottom” 99 percent is in a similarly dire situation. In fact, it is the Americans in the top fifth of the income distribution—broadly, households with incomes above the $112,000 mark—that are separating from the rest. This separation is economic, visible in bank balances and salaries. But it can also be seen in education, family structure, health and longevity, even in civic and community life.
Trump’s success among middle-class whites might seem surprising, given his own wealth. But his supporters have no problem with the rich. In fact, they admire them. His movement was about class, not money, and he exuded the blue-collar culture. For his supporters, the enemy is upper middle-class professionals: journalists, scholars, technocrats, managers, bureaucrats, the people with letters after their names. You and me.
The glass floor protecting affluent children from falling is also a glass ceiling, blocking upward mobility for those born on a lower rung of the ladder.
And here is the difficult part. The popular obsession with the top 1 percent allows the upper middle class to convince ourselves we are in the same boat as the rest of America; but it is not true. However messily it is expressed, much of the criticism of our class is true. We proclaim the “net” benefits of free trade, technological advances, and immigration, safe in the knowledge that we will be among the beneficiaries. Equipped with high levels of human capital, we can flourish in a global economy. The cities we live in are zoned to protect our wealth, but deter the unskilled from sharing in it. Professional licensing and an immigration policy tilted toward the low-skilled shield us from the intense market competition faced by those in nonprofessional occupations. We proclaim the benefits of free markets but are largely insulated from the risks they can pose. Small wonder other folks can get angry.
The upper middle class has been having it pretty good. It is about time those of us in the favored fifth recognized our privileged position. Some humility and generosity is required. But there is clearly some work to do in terms of raising awareness. Right now, there is something of a culture of entitlement among America’s upper middle class. Partly this is because of a natural tendency to compare ourselves to those even better off than us. This is the “we are the 99 percent” problem. But it is also because we feel entitled to our position since it results from our own merit: our education, brains, and hard work.
These problems were illuminated by the 529 furor. Veteran tax scholar Howard Gleckman noted sadly that the demise of Obama’s plan “reflected the lack of serious interest in reform by most lawmakers today.” I think it reflected something much worse. The lawmakers were fairly honestly reflecting the views of their constituents and reacting to commentary in the media. But there was a lack of interest in self-reflection by the upper middle class. Those of you who don’t follow tax history closely may not recall that it was George W. Bush who, in 2001, gave us the chance to grow capital tax free in 529 plans. When Republicans proposed it during Bill Clinton’s second term, he promptly vetoed it. Look how a regressive, Bush-era tax cut can become so precious to the upper middle class, including its most liberal members.
• • •
I am British by birth, but I have lived in the United States since 2012 and became a citizen in late 2016. There are lots of reasons I have made America my home, but one of them is the American ideal of opportunity. I always hated the walls created by social class distinctions in the United Kingdom. The American ideal of a classless society is, to me, a deeply attractive one. It has been disheartening to learn that the class structure of my new homeland is, if anything, more rigid than the one I left behind and especially so at the top.
Indeed, the American upper middle class is leaving everyone else in the dust. The top fifth of U.S. households saw a $4 trillion increase in pretax income in the years between 1979 and 2013. The combined rise for the bottom 80 percent, by comparison, was just over $3 trillion. The gap between the bottom fifth and the middle fifth has not widened at all. In fact, there has been no increase in inequality below the eightieth percentile. All the inequality action is above that line.
Income growth has not been uniform within the top fifth, of course: a third of the income rise went to the top 1 percent alone. But that still left $2.7 trillion for the 19 percent just beneath them. Failing to join the ranks of the plutocrats does not mean life as a pauper. It is not just the “upper class” that has been flourishing. A much broader swath of American society is doing well—and detaching themselves.
These facts can cause some discomfort. Few of us want to be associated with the hated super-rich. Very often it seems to be those quite near the top of the distribution who are most angry with those at the very top: more than a third of the demonstrators on the May Day “Occupy” march in 2011 had annual earnings of more than $100,000. But, rather than looking up in envy and resentment, the upper middle class would do well to look at their own position compared to those falling further and further behind.
Even the most liberal pundits don’t want to make us look in the mirror. In his book Twilight of the Elites, the liberal broadcaster and writer Chris Hayes positions the upper middle class as losing out: “The upper middle class [are] people with graduate school degrees, homes, second homes, kids in good colleges, and six-figure incomes. This frustrated, discontented class has spent a decade with their noses pressed up against the glass, watching the winners grab more and more for themselves, seemingly at the upper middle class’s expense.”
Trump's supporters have no problem with the rich. Their real enemy is the upper middle class.
Hayes may be right about the frustration and discontent. Much of the political energy behind both the Bernie Sanders left and the Tea Party right came from the upper middle class. But Hayes is wrong to imply that the frustration is warranted, or that the very rich are gaining “at the upper middle class’s expense.” As the 2016 election helped us to see, the real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else.
Politicians don’t help much, either. Democrats took fright at the plans to remove precious 529 upper middle-class tax breaks. Some elected officials also seem to have a warped view of the income distribution. According to Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, the 529 plan beneficiaries are “as middle class as it gets.” Really? Most of the tax benefit from 529 plans goes to households with incomes over $200,000. Congressman, that’s not the middle: median household income at the time was just under $54,000.
None of this is to say we should disregard the growing inequality at the very top. There are plenty of reasons to worry about the amassing of extreme wealth and, specifically, how it is distorting the political process. But the upper middle class has outsized political power, too. An individual billionaire can have a disproportionate influence on an individual politician (in Donald Trump’s case, by becoming one). But the size and strength of the upper middle class means that it can reshape cities, dominate the education system, and transform the labor market. The upper middle class also has a huge influence on public discourse, counting among its members most journalists, think-tank scholars, TV editors, professors, and pundits in the land.
• • •
Compounding this problem is the fact that upper middle-class children are advantaged from birth. In particular, their upbringing ensures they develop the skills, attributes, and credentials valued in the labor market. By the time Americans are old enough to drink alcohol, their place in the class system is clear.
Upper middle-class parents obviously have more money to spend on their children, but there is also a social fracture. Class is not only defined in dollars, but by education, attitude, and zip code, by its way of life. America, warns Robert Putnam in Our Kids, faces “an incipient class apartheid.”
The typical child born and raised in the American upper middle class is raised in a stable home by well-educated, married parents, lives in a great neighborhood, and attends the area’s best schools. They develop a wide range of skills and gain an impressive array of credentials. Upper middle-class children luck out right from the start, even though this country was founded on antihereditary principles.
As part of the process of naturalization, I had to sign part 12, question 4 of Form N-400, which reads as follows: “Are you willing to give up any inherited title(s) or order(s) of nobility that you have in a foreign country?” I had none to give up, sadly, but very much enjoyed this question. Inheriting a particular position is un-American, after all. But while the inheritance of titles or positions remains forbidden, the persistence of class status across generations in the United States is very strong. Too strong, in fact, for a society that prides itself on social mobility.
The obsession with the top 1 percent allows the upper middle class to believe they are in the same boat as the rest of America. They are not.
There is a lot of concern among politicians and scholars about the lack of relative social mobility in the United States. But what is really striking is that the greatest class persistence is at the top. Gary Solon, the godfather of mobility studies, describes U.S. mobility like this: “[Rather than] a poverty trap, there seems instead to be more stickiness at the other end: a ‘wealth trap’ if you will. There are probably more rags to riches cases than the other way around... there seems to be better safety nets for the offspring of the wealthy.”
There is clear danger of a vicious cycle developing here. As inequality between the upper middle class and the rest grows, parents will become more determined to ensure their children stay near the top. We will work hard to put a “glass floor” under them, to prevent them from falling down the chutes. Inequality and immobility thus become self-reinforcing.
Downward mobility is not a wildly popular idea, to say the least. But it is a stubborn mathematical fact that, at any given time, the top fifth of the income distribution can accommodate only 20 percent of the population. Relative intergenerational mobility is necessarily a zero-sum game. For one person to move up the ladder, somebody else must move down. Sometimes that will have to be one of our own children. Otherwise the glass floor protecting affluent kids from falling acts also as a glass ceiling, blocking upward mobility for those born on a lower rung of the ladder. The problem we face is not just class separation, but class perpetuation.
• • •
There are two factors driving class perpetuation at the top: the unequal development of “market merit” and some unfair “opportunity hoarding.”
In a market economy, the people who develop the skills and attributes valued in the market will have better outcomes. That probably sounds kind of obvious. But it has important implications. It means, for example, that we can have a meritocratic market in a deeply unfair society, if “merit” is developed highly unequally and largely as a result of the lottery of birth.
Human capital has become more important in the labor market, a trend that Brink Lindsey describes as “the cephalization of economic life.”13 Education has therefore become the main mechanism for the reproduction of upper middle-class status across generations. This helps to explain the virulent reactions to the 529 reforms. By targeting a tax break for education, specifically college education, the president threatened something sacred to the upper middle-class tribe. (The Obamas included: in 2007 alone they put $240,000 in the 529 plans for their daughters.)
Americans have historically lauded education as the great equalizer, allowing individuals to determine their own path in life regardless of background. But if this was ever true, it certainly is not today. Postsecondary education in particular has become an “inequality machine.” As more ordinary people have earned college degrees, upper middle-class families have simply upped the ante. Postgraduate qualifications are now the key to maintaining upper middle-class status. The upper middle class gains most of its status not by exploiting others but by exploiting its own skills. But when the income gap of one generation is converted into an opportunity gap for the next, economic inequality hardens into class stratification.
Class rigidities of this kind may blunt market dynamism by reducing the upward flow of talent and leaving human capital underutilized among the less fortunate. To take just one narrow example, fund managers from poor backgrounds perform better than those from more affluent families, controlling for a range of institutional factors, according to one study. It seems likely that this is because they have to be smarter in the first place in order to make it into financial services.
Increasing the number of smart, poor kids making it to the top of the labor market is likely to mean an improvement in quality and therefore productivity. Market competition is not only essential for growth and prosperity; it also provides an opportunity for meritocratic social mobility, but only if there are fair chances to acquire the kind of merit that is being rewarded. Right now we have meritocracy without mobility.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. The Rise of the Meritocracy, Michael Young’s 1959 book that coined the term, describes a dystopia in which “those who are judged to have merit of a certain kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.”
• • •
Not all upper middle-class advantage results from an open contest, however. We also engage in some opportunity hoarding, accessing valuable, finite opportunities by unfair means. This amounts to rigging the market in our favor.
When we hoard opportunities, we help our own children but hurt others by reducing their chances of securing those opportunities. Every college place or internship that goes to one of our kids because of a legacy bias or personal connection is one less available to others. We may prefer not to dwell on the unfairness here, but that’s simply a moral failing on our part. Too many upper middle-class Americans still insist that their success, or the success of their children, stems entirely from brilliance and tenacity; “born on third base, thinking they hit a triple,” in football coach Barry Switzer’s vivid phrase.
Dream hoarders flourish in a global economy. They proclaim the benefits of free markets but are insulated from the risks they pose.
Three opportunity hoarding mechanisms stand out in particular: exclusionary zoning in residential areas; unfair mechanisms influencing college admissions, including legacy preferences; and the informal allocation of internships. Each of these tilts the playing field in favor of upper middle-class children. Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles see these as evidence of a “captured economy.” Reihan Salam dubs it “incumbent protection.” I call it a glass floor, which protects the upper middle class against the risk of downward mobility.
There is one point that I probably can’t stress enough: being an opportunity hoarder is not the same thing as being a good parent. Many of the things we do for our kids—reading stories, helping with homework, providing good food, supporting their sports and extracurricular activities—will equip them to be more successful in the world and increase their chances of remaining in the upper middle class. All of this is great—indeed, laudable. Much of what the upper middle class does ought to be emulated. The problem comes when we use our power to distort competition.
Opportunity hoarding is bad for society in the same way that commercial market rigging is bad for the economy. It is good that parents want the best for their kids, just as it is good that company directors want to make profits. But companies should make their profits by competing fairly in the marketplace. That’s why we stop them from forming cartels. In just the same way, we need to stop parents from rigging the market to benefit their own kids. Right now, the markets that shape opportunity, especially in housing and education, are rigged in our favor.
• • •
There is much that can be done to equalize chances to acquire education and skills as well as to curb opportunity hoarding. The first priorities focus on equalizing human capital development so that the distribution of “market merit” is more even. Specifically, I propose reducing unintended pregnancy rates by expanding access to better contraception; narrowing the parenting gap by investing in home visiting; paying the best teachers to work in poorer schools; and making college funding more equal (including, yes, those 529 plans).
But we also need to take aim at reducing opportunity hoarding by curbing exclusionary zoning through fairer land use regulation; widening the doors into postsecondary education (entailing the abolition of legacy admissions); and opening up internships. Here the goal is largely to reduce anticompetitive behaviors, to make the contest itself a little fairer.
This is not a comprehensive list, but my goal is to show that there is much that can be done if the political will and money can be found. There will be price tags attached to some of these policies, of course, but the upper middle class can be asked and can afford to pay.
The problem is that many of these efforts are likely to run into the solid wall of upper middle-class resistance, even those that simply require a slightly higher tax bill. A change of heart is needed: a recognition of privilege among the upper middle class, the ability to hold up a mirror. Some of us in the upper middle class already feel a degree of cognitive dissonance about the advantages we pile up for our own kids, compared to the truncated opportunities we know exist for others. We want our children to do well, but also want to live in a fairer society. My friend and colleague E. J. Dionne put it to me this way: “I spend my weekdays decrying the problem of inequality, but then I spend my evenings and weekends adding to it.”
We are all guilty, on some level, of taking actions on our children’s behalf that conferred an unfair advantage. If more of us start to feel Dionne’s cognitive dissonance, some political space might open up for reforms. The big question is then whether we are willing to make some modest sacrifices in order to expand opportunities for others or whether, deep down, we would rather pull up the ladder.
• • •
As he put the final touches to a book, the historian James Truslow Adams was pleased with his idea for the title: The American Dream. But his publishers told him not to be silly. Americans were a practical people. They would never buy a book about a dream. (It was published in 1931 as The Epic of America.) But his phrase, nonetheless, jumped off the page and into common use. The American dream, according to Adams, is “a dream of being able to grow to the fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations... for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being.”
The American dream is not about superwealth or celebrity. The American dream is of a decent home in a pleasant neighborhood, good schools for our kids, a steadily rising income, and enough money put aside for an enjoyable retirement. It is about sustaining a strong family and seeing your children off to a good college.
It has become a staple of politicians to declare the American dream dying or dead. But it is not dead. It is alive and well; but it is being hoarded by those of us in the upper middle class. The question is: Will we share it?Holding a copy of the Supreme Court order he got from a local reporter, G Kannan, principal of the privately-run Sivaraj Homeopathic Medical College, was busy making arrangements for the arrival of Akhila Asokan, now Hadiya, on Tuesday evening when mediapersons told him that her flight has landed at Coimbatore — a two-hour drive from the college.
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“We have no information except what we learnt from media reports and the copies of the order journalists shared with us. Since it is a Supreme Court order and everyone is saying it is a sensitive case, we have asked for police protection for as many days as possible,” he said.
The principal was also seen asking mediapersons if the court had appointed him Hadiya’s guardian.
Two dozen Tamil Nadu police personnel headed by DCP G Subulakshmi and Kalpana Sivaraj, MD of the college, were busy in the preparations too. Subulakshmi said, “There is no official communication. We will give 24X7 protection at the college and hostel for sometime,” she said.
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College authorities and police were also seen checking the CCTV cameras and gates.
Around 7 pm, Hadiya reached the college with Kerala police personnel. She had no luggage except a small bag. After she completed the paperwork to resume her course, Hadiya was taken to the hostel, about 8 km away, in a private vehicle.
ALSO READ: Supreme Court agrees Hadiya has the right to choose, not her parents
Before she left, Hadiya was asked whether she wanted to tell anything to her father. “I spoke to them,” she said. About her plans after finishing the course, she said she wants to work.
The college has 700-odd students in various streams, including Siddha medicine. The two hostels house about a 100 students and have two wardens. Students travel between the college and hostel in a college bus.
Principal Kannan said Hadiya will follow the same rules as any other student.
Will she be allowed to use a cellphone, watch TV or go out of the college?
Kannan said students are allowed to use cellphones at the hostel for only an hour in a day. “(Cellphones are) strictly restricted on college campus. In view of this sensitive case, we are also considering banning cellphones for all students in hostel. Since they are here to study, a phone with the warden is more than enough,” he said, adding that the hostel does not have a TV.
As per rules, students are to report in college at 8.45 am and lights at hostel are turned off at 10.30 pm. “Once in a week, they may be allowed to go out for shopping but they are escorted by a warden,” said Kannan.
RELATED REPORT: I have won battle to get back wife, says Shefin Jahan; College says Hadiya is welcome
Will Asokan, Hadiya’s father, and Shefin Jahan, her husband, be allowed to meet her?
“See, I do not know who her husband is. She is still Akhila for us, and her guardians are her parents who admitted her. In the present scenario, I will not allow anyone except her parents. We will make sure that I or an official are present when her parents visit her,” Kannan said.
However, while leaving the college office, Hadiya said she will be allowed to meet her husband, adding that the police had promised that.
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All batchmates of Hadiya, who joined the BHMS course in 2010, including her two Muslim friends who inspired her to convert, completed their courses in 2016. “She has to spend another 11 months here,” Kannan said.>>
09/16/08(Tue)02:26:03 No.85536912 Read this
http://www.viceland.com/int/v12n1/htdocs/poster.php
and when you get a girl in bed, do this
http://www.redtube.com/2325
She will have an intense full-body orgasm, and will cling to you like a magnet.
extra:
One more thing - 76 beats per minute. Listen to a metronome, tap your fingers along with that beat. Find or make songs that are at 76 bpm tempo. Learn it.
Leading up to and during orgasm, the female pelvic muscles involuntarily contract at this rate. If you stimulate, with your tongue, her VAGINA at the same rate as it is contracting, it will lengthen the orgasm and increase the intensity
you can also bring a female orgasm on without actually getting her naked or grinding with her. you massage the area right above her pelvic bone (but below the waist) and you should actually be stimulating her g-spot externally. she'll cum without you even touching her VAGINA.
spread the word, /b/tards can get a girl and keep her.THERE is a new way to travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco. At $230 for a round trip, it may not be cheaper than flying, but at least it is slower.
Cabin is an interesting experiment; an attempt to compete with airlines by promising a better night’s sleep. Flying between the two cities may take less than an hour and a half. But getting to the airport, shuffling through the security queue, waiting at the gate, picking up your bag upon arrival, and getting from the airport to your actual destination can nearly quadruple the total travel time. That means a trip can eat up most of the day. Or if you want to travel at night, you have about an hour to sleep, between several hours of hassle and tedium.
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Rather than go through that rigmarole, Cabin is betting that some passengers will instead choose an overnight bus, on which they crawl into sleeping pods, stacked like bunk beds but ensconced behind curtains and soundproof walls, and wake up eight hours later at their destination. On offer: water, coffee, melatonin and a communal area for people who are not sleepy. Not on offer: room to sit up within the sleeping pod. There is one objective on a Cabin (called SleepBus in an earlier iteration), and that is to reach the destination via the land of nod. The drivers intentionally go slowly and take back roads so that the trip, normally six hours, lasts eight.
The service currently runs only between Los Angeles and San Francisco, leaving each city at 11pm and arriving at 7am. Although Cabin is looking to expand to other cities, the current route is a perfect example of that awkward travel distance to which there is no good solution. Others abound, such as Washington-Boston or London-Edinburgh: a short flight that sounds easy, until you realise it is part of a four- or five-hour total travel itinerary.
There are, of course, other options. You can drive, but being behind the wheel tends to limit the chance of getting some shut-eye. You can take a train, but Amtrak routes between Los Angeles and San Francisco can be several times as expensive as Cabin or flying, plus you don’t have a bed and are likely to be woken up periodically by stops, announcements or fellow passengers bumping your elbows.
The arrival of self-driving cars could provide a nice alternative for these types of trips. They do not come with beds or fully reclining seats—at least not yet—but passengers will probably be able to programme a route that allows for a full night’s sleep, and unlike Cabin, they can travel between any two cities or addresses, not just along a prescribed route. Cabin itself, meanwhile, is hoping that its buses will one day be autonomous.
There is another option on the table that could, at least hypothetically, obviate the need to worry about balancing sleep and travel. Various companies have pitched a “hyperloop” concept that could ostensibly transport carriages between Los Angeles and San Francisco in as little as half an hour along near frictionless tubes. (Last month, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX claimed on Twitter that he had received “verbal govt approval” to construct an underground hyperloop that would connect New York and Washington, DC in 29 minutes, although the lack of details provoked scepticism.) At those kinds of speeds, there is no need to budget time: you could leave Los Angeles after work and be in San Francisco for dinner, with a full eight hours of shut-eye ahead of you.
But that project is a long way and a few potentially insurmountable hurdles from reality. In the meantime, for those of us not on the Cabin route, the same distasteful choice persists, between a plane, train and automobile that might offer the shortest travel time or the lowest cost but definitely no California dreaming.The Muckleshoot Indian Tribe garnered a $20,000 grant from the National Indigenous Elder Justice Initiative (NIEJI) Innovation program at the Center for Rural Health at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
The grant is earmarked to help fund a program to address elder abuse.
Tribes throughout the United States submitted proposals to create programs to prevent, identify, and address elder abuse, neglect and exploitation in their communities. NIEJI Innovation awarded funding to eight tribes from eight states to help them develop programs for their communities. Muckleshoot Indian Tribe of Washington’s proposal is titled “Elders Abuse Community Empowerment.”
NIEJI Innovation provides grants to tribal community-based organizations to carry out activities to prevent, identify, and/or address elder abuse, neglect, or exploitation in local tribal communities (rural or urban).
There are five distinct areas of intervention in local tribal communities in addressing elder abuse:
1. Innovative approaches to preventing and addressing elder abuse in Indian Country;
2. To create awareness of elder abuse, its signs and impact;
3. Development of tribal resolution code, and laws to address elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation;
4. Development of infrastructure, policies and procedures for reporting, investigating, and intervening in elder abuse cases in tribal communities; and
5. Development of cross-jurisdictional processes for reporting, investigating, or intervening in elder abuse cases.
These grants will be for one year for projects to address the areas above or other innovative projects that will address elder abuse in their community.
These grants are funded by an award (#90EJIG003) from the Administration for Community Living.
UND’s Center for Rural Health, works with tribal communities to help improve health outcomes and well-being for American Indians.The weekend before Thanksgiving the American Studies Association, at its annual meeting, considered an academic boycott of Israel. As of Thanksgiving, the ASA’s National Council had not taken action, though the proposed resolution had wide support at the meeting. I have written on ASA and the Boycott Israel resolution here and here. But it’s worth focusing on just one false yet revealing claim.
Supporters of the resolution say that the ASA meeting should be considered “historic,” whether the resolution passes or not. It is very “controversial to talk about Palestinian solidarity activism, in most American settings, especially an academic one” (my emphasis). So the mere fact that ASA members were “talking about things like Israel’s various apartheid systems” was an event of national, if not world-historic, significance. At last, the ASA has shown that it is possible “to speak and to hear others speak publicly about an issue that has for so long been the third rail not only of US politics, but of academic discourse.”
Because anti-Israel activists so regularly trot out this storyline, that criticisms of Israel and especially calls for a boycott have been stifled in academia, let’s put it to rest. While I don’t expect leading boycott propagandists to stop making the claim, perhaps others will be reluctant to repeat it when they learn that it is demonstrably false.
It is demonstrably false because Israel’s critics and boycott proponents are mainstays of the academic lecture circuit. Almost three years before the “historic” ASA meeting, Max Blumenthal was invited to debate BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) at Princeton. More than two years before the “historic” meeting, Omar Bhargouti, a founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), spoke at NYU, Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, Brandeis, Harvard, and Brown. And remember the controversy over a BDS event at Brooklyn College back in February? Students have since been graced with Ben White on “Israel: Apartheid, not Democracy,” and Josh Ruebner, national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, who observed that “the Israel lobby sets the agenda in Washington” and argued in favor of a boycott.
In short, when Israel’s critics complain about being suppressed on college campuses they complain into microphones provided by America’s most prestigious colleges.
Although I am aware of no recent polls that ask faculty members what they think |
(i.e. the Justice Department).
That such activities are part of the private lives of the secularist elites should surprise no one. All ideas of sexual mores and restraints are religious in nature, and in the West that means Christian. The rejection of Christian morality thus opens the way for a sexual free-for-all, where, quite simply, anything goes. It should come as no surprise therefore that the liberal elites of various European societies, such as the UK, have already been exposed as harbouring massive networks of paedophiles and deviants of other hues. As in America, they have used (and still use) their positions of power to protect themselves. The recent revelations of horrific abuse by public figures such as the DJ Jimmy Savile and the MP Cyril Smith — as well as several others — are but the tip of an enormous iceberg, which the Cameron (and presumably also now the May) administration succeeded in keeping a lid on. And the extent to which the secularist elites approve this behaviour may be judged from the fact that Harriet Harman, the former Labour Party Deputy Prime Minister, and left-wing activist, once headed a body (the National Council for Civil Liberties) which had, as one of its affiliated associations, the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange.
Whether the elites in America will also continue to be able to suppress the truth, in view of the Trump victory, remains to be seen. Indeed, the exposure or non-exposure of the truth in this matter may be the litmus test whether Trump is a genuine alternative or just another tool of the anti-Christian elite.
Time will tell.
Emmet Scott is the author of Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy and The Impact of Islam.
Previous posts:Yes, we know that SmashingApps is dedicated to designers and developer but I think it would be good if we can be able to give some awareness and knowledge to our readers for some environmental issues. Today, Earth Day Network is celebrating a Earth Day all over the world, this is a day when they try to create awareness and educate people about keeping their environment clean and motivate them to Go Green for their surroundings. Today, we are posting another post that probably will make you look twice. In this post we are listing 28 Beautiful And Inspiring Photographs Dedicated To Earth Day. I appreciate to all those talented photographers who taken these excellent photos with their efforts, imaginations and creativity to give us a chance to see these photographic wonders from their creative eyes. This list is not long in numbers but I promise you that when you start browsing them in details it will surely refresh you and force you to know more about Earth Day and motivate you to save your planet. These are the wonder creations of photographers who use their creativity with a different angle and approach to get the result that makes a difference.
You are welcome if you want to share more creative photography that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well. Click on the images to go from where the images has been taken and learn more about their creators and to appreciate them.
You may be interested in these older posts
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Earth from above by Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Morning by Krzysztof Browko
Goðafoss by Ragnheidur Arngrimsdottir
Morning impression by Przemyslaw Wielicki
Central Balkan by Vladimir666
Flowing Water & Ice Formations by Doug Roane
Morning Sun by Norbert Maier
Planet Earth by steler
A Reflective Morning by John Parminter
Gold Fields by Janusz Wanczyk
Sea by jtangen
Morning line by Janusz Wanczyk
Mountain Waves by Alan Czekierda
Dream about a green valley by Janusz Wanczyk
Two valley view by Bergljot
Autumn curve by Janusz Wanczyk
Lovely Old Lane by Northman
Morning valley by Janusz Wanczyk
Elf’s Land by Alexander Maslarski
Thin Ice by Doug Roane
In the mist’s sea by Janusz Wanczyk
The Sky Goes All the Way Home by Mark Broughton
Strolling on the Dolomites by Robert Strahinjic
Glacier Formation by Axel Gimenez
Sea by Boots
Pangong Tso by Prateek Dubey
The Other Side by Stefan Bingham
Seljalandsfoss by Henrik SpranzTransgenderism and pro-abortion advocates at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan were shown a contrarian perspective on Thursday during a Q&A session with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro.
After being challenged by a young woman who told him he is invalidating transgender individuals, Shapiro responded by debunking the popular narrative on transgenderism.
“As far as the actual psychological issues at play, it used to be called gender identity disorder; now they call it gender dysphoria,” he said. “The idea that sex or gender is malleable is not true. I’m not denying your humanity if you are a transgender person. I am saying that you are not the sex which you claim to be. You’re still a human being, and you’re a human being with an issue then I wish you Godspeed in dealing with it in any whatever way you see fit. But if you’re going to dictate to me that I’m supposed to pretend, I’m supposed to pretend that men are women and women are men, no. My answer is no. I’m not going to — I’m not going to modify basic biology because it threatens your subjective sense of what you are.”
The young woman attempted to make an argument for objective transgenderism by claiming gender is decided in one’s own mind and thus deserves validation from others. Shapiro debunked that claim as well.
“Let me ask you this. I won’t ask how old — I will ask how old you are, because you’re young enough that it’s probably not insulting to ask you,” he asked the young woman.
“I’m 22, so I’m probably a little bit naïve, right?” she said.
“No. Why aren’t you 60?… Why can’t you identify as 60?” he asked.
“It’s not the same as gender. You can’t just….”
“You’re right,” he said. “Age is significantly less important than gender. You can’t magically change your gender. You can’t magically change your sex. You can’t magically change your age.”
The young woman tried to argue that legal age can be changed, which isn’t true. Eventually, it was accepted that legally or mentally changing your identity does not make you a physically different person. Age and gender are both qualities that cannot be physically changed by self-identification.
Watch the back-and-forth below:It might be time to rethink fertility treatment.
Here’s the scoop: scientists at Northwestern University 3D printed a functional ovary out of Jello-like material and living cells. When implanted into mice that had their ovaries removed, the moms regained their monthly cycle and gave birth to healthy pups.
The scientists presented their results last week at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Boston.
Although the study was done in mice, “we developed this implant with downstream human applications in mind,” says lead author Dr. Monica Laronda in a press release.
If successful in humans, the prosthetic would be able to extend the female reproductive lifespan by decades. What’s more, it may also help restore fertility and hormone function in women who can’t have kids due to ovarian issues.
The Problem
According to the CDC, 1.5 million women in the US are infertile. The causes are many, but roughly a quarter of all cases are due to irregular or abnormal function of the ovaries.
The ovaries are central organs for female reproduction because they release eggs that, once fertilized, develop into embryos. The ovaries also act like conductors, releasing hormones that orchestrate the entire reproductive system to function as one dynamic unit to sustain fertility.
It’s a highly complex and fragile system that sometimes goes awry.
Age is a big factor. Although increasingly couples are waiting longer to have kids, it becomes much harder for women to get pregnant past the age of 35. Most scientists currently believe that women are born with all the eggs that they will ever produce (although recent research suggests otherwise).
With age, the quality of the eggs declines and may result in higher chances of acquiring random genetic mutations. The ovary milieu — a niche of hormone-releasing cells and other structures that help nurture the eggs — also begins to decay, making it harder for ovaries to release eggs on schedule.
Childhood cancer is another big factor.
Chemotherapy drugs often damage a dividing cell’s DNA, which kills off cancer cells but also harms egg cells and increases the chance of infertility.
“One of the biggest concerns for patients diagnosed with cancer is how the treatment may affect their fertility and hormone health,” says Laronda.
We hope that the prosthetic implant helps to restore their quality of life, she says.
The Implant
In order for the implant to properly work, it needs three things: immature egg cells (called “oocytes”), hormone-releasing cells that support oocytes, and a flexible but rigid enough scaffold that can support the growth of both cell types.
To generate the scaffold, scientists turned to gelatin, a glutinous biomaterial derived from the skin of animals. (It’s also the main ingredient of Jell-O.) Rather than recreating the entire complex structure of an ovary, the team took a minimalistic approach: using 3D printing, they generated scaffolds of different sizes and shapes to see which configuration works best.
Using immortalized human cells, Laronda and team found that the best structure had crisscrossing struts. The design probably worked best because it has multiple anchor points for cells to latch onto and also has a sufficient amount of space for oocytes to grow, explained the team.
Finally, mouse ovarian follicles — ball shaped units that contain both the oocyte and supporting cells — were seeded onto the scaffold to complete the prosthesis, which was then implanted into female mice that had their ovaries surgically removed.
The first promising sign came when the mice restored their hormonal cycle, suggesting that at least the hormone-producing cells were alive and functional.
Just this one result would’ve been awesome. Many women have decreased production of reproductive hormones due to diseases such as PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) that can cause problems with bone density, weight and cardiovascular health, explained the researchers.
A similar prosthesis may be able to combat those issues in at risk women.
But then came the bombshell: following the implant, the mice ovulated, gave birth to healthy pups and were able to nurse them until weaning.
When researchers examined the implant, they found that blood vessels had innervated the entire structure, thus providing nutrients and washing away waste and allowed the oocytes to develop normally into viable pups.
The fact that blood vessels automatically formed a network around the implant is huge. Often we need to add substances to stimulate the process, says Laronda, which could cause side effects and other complications. This 3D printing manufacturing technique bypasses that requirement and could influence future work on complex soft tissue replacement, she says.
The Future
It’s an impressive study, but for the implant to work in humans, the technique needs another element: stem cell technology.
Remember, a woman’s oocytes and supporting cells are a central component of the implant, but they’re often damaged due to age or disease treatments. Laronda and team believe that human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology can overcome this barrier.
The ability to recreate the oocytes and supporting cells has progressed rapidly in recent years, writes Laronda and colleagues in an earlier review paper. Human iPSCs derived from skin cells can be turned into primordial oocytes and supporting cells that display the same molecular signs of their natural counterparts, although whether they can fully develop remains to be tested.
Going from skin cell to stem cell to reproductive cells may seem like a difficult process, but much of this transformation process relies on physical forces, including the rigidity and structure of the ovary, wrote the authors. And that’s something that scientists can easily control with 3D printing.
iPSCs may not be the only solution either. A recent, potentially paradigm-shifting study suggests that women may have egg-making stem cells hidden away in their ovaries well into their 40s.
If — and that’s a big “if” — these cells could be coaxed in a dish to make egg cells, it would mean an unlimited supply of healthy egg cells that could be used to innervate the prosthetic ovary.
Whatever the case, in vitro fertilization (IVF) — now a decades old technology — may soon be getting a 21st century upgrade.
Image credit: Shutterstock.comOn brainy pop trio Jukebox the Ghost’s current tour—which arrives at Irving Plaza on Saturday, February 28—Jesse Kristin has been getting to enjoy his very own regular “Beth” moment. For those readers whose classic-rock knowledge may be deficient, I’m referring to what used to happen at Kiss concerts when Peter Criss (and later Eric Singer) would leave his seat behind the drums and sing “Beth,” the sensitive ballad that also happened to be the biggest hit those grease-painted rockers ever had.
One of the standout tracks on Jukebox the Ghost’s 2014 self-titled album, the incisive and more than a little Randy Newman-ish “Hollywood,” is sung by Kristin, the band’s drummer. Now, when that song comes around, in a break from past group protocol, he gets out in front of his kit to take the center stage microphone. And as was the case with Kiss, audiences … well … lick it up.
“That’s a highlight every night,” singer/keyboardist Ben Thornewill says. “There’s a big clap-along, and it’s just this explosion of energy that happens in the middle of the set, which sets the rest of the songs on fire. It’s like, ‘Oh, this isn’t supposed to happen. What’s going on? Are you messing with my mind?’ ”
Here’s another way the Jukebox men like to mess with listeners’ minds: By writing and recording songs that seem almost annoyingly perky at first but on closer examination show a much darker hue. “That’s part of our natural writing style,” Thornewill says. “We shy away from anything that’s too brazenly happy. We want to do something that’s fun but can also be rewarding on multiple listens.”
Achieving this multi-layered effect on Jukebox the Ghost (the band’s fourth album) was a lengthy process, which involved deconstructing and then reconstructing dozens of songs. “Writing 50 songs isn’t the hardest thing in the world,” Thornewill notes. “The excruciating thing is figuring out what happens to them. Some of it is natural selection. We’re not making a ballads record, so there’s only so much room for those—lop off one chunk of songs. And then in the demoing process, we spent four months chopping up songs, combining them, finding the parts that worked and the parts that didn’t.”
The boys in the band thought they’d be through with all this tinkering once they entered the recording studio. They were wrong. “Oh, we recorded multiple versions of everything, different verses, different choruses,” Thornewill says. “We could spend six hours on four seconds of music. The verses of [leadoff track] ‘Sound of a Broken Heart’ were a real struggle. The original version was very Stevie Wonder, choppy bass, big seventh chords on piano, super groovy. Our producer said it wasn’t working and I’d say, ‘No, this is why I love the song,’ and it went on and on. Now it’s much more pure-sounding, not quite as groovy, but it’s better for all the changes. In my mind, though, it’s still preserving some element of Stevie Wonder-style piano playing—but if you listen, you won’t hear anything remotely like that.”
‘When I was 3, my dad would play classical guitar and I’d weep. I’d tell him that it made my heart too full.’
Similarly, critics often say they hear traces of artists like Elton John, Billy Joel, Joe Jackson and Ben Folds in Jukebox the Ghost’s music, but whether they’re really there is debatable. Often these comparisons seem born of convenience; Thornewill’s also a piano-pumper. “I certainly don’t mind being compared to those people,” he acknowledges, “though I’d say Regina Spektor’s playing and writing is closest to what I’m doing, which is why I try not to listen to her too much. Actually, if I could change one element of my personality, I’d listen to more music. I tend to only put on three to four songs a day.”
One suspects this wasn’t always the case, and Thornewill confirms that his childhood was steeped in music. “My origin story’s pretty good,” he says. “When I was 3, my dad would play classical guitar and I’d weep. I’d tell him that it made my heart too full. When I was 6, I started taking piano lessons and my mom said, ‘If you like it, I want you to sign a contract that says you’ll take lessons until the end of high school.’ Now my mom is not a tyrannical woman, but she knew there was a psychological element to it. So she still has this contract somewhere, signed by 7-year-old me, saying that I’d take classical piano till I graduated high school.”
Thornewill not only honored that contract but also went on to major in music at George Washington University, where he met Kristin and guitarist Tommy Siegel. The threesome formed Jukebox the Ghost in 2003 and established a reputation the old-fashioned way, through tireless gigging. “Our attitude was just, ‘Let’s see what happens,’ ” Thornewill recalls. “And now here we are, having inadvertently become touring veterans. People say, ‘Wow, you guys have really played this smart, you built it from the ground up.’ That was never our plan. But it’s been a blessing.”
In January, Jukebox the Ghost made its next step up the music-biz ladder, signing a deal with Cherrytree Records, part of the Universal distribution empire. Under the terms of that deal, the Jukebox the Ghost album, which was originally released in October on Yep Roc, will be reissued with an extra disc. When asked what that disc will contain, Thornewill is cryptic: “It’s a cool, totally unique thing. We didn’t want to do just a rebranding. It’s not new songs, but it is a full album’s worth of other material. It’s something that we haven’t done before and I actually don’t know if anyone’s done it before. Yes, it already exists, we have completed it. I’m sorry to be so coy and vague.”
Whatever could this mysterious bonus item be? And might it be even more exciting than Jesse Kristin’s nightly “Beth” moment? Stay tuned.Utopia is alive and well; it’s just gotten very small. The utopian art of our time is the kitchen or bathroom renovation—renotopia. Renotopia is the dream that if we could just rip everything out and start again, the perfect world might indeed come into being—if one could just get the appliances and the finishes right. Renotopia is a small but perfect world.
Utopia is often imagined as a separate world where perfection is achieved, where harmony reigns and time stops. It can be either a system that tries to account for everything, or a momentary flash of hope.
But there is another way to think about utopia; it’s not an idealistic form, but a very realistic one—a rigorous thinking through of everyday life. Utopia is the genre that pushes realism to the limit. If one compares the utopian writings of Charles Fourier to the bourgeois novel, it is Fourier who has a better grip on reality. He asks questions the novel usually doesn’t, such as: who takes out the trash?
Today, utopia is living in your bathroom or kitchen. These two places are built on one of the truly great, realized utopias: running water and sewerage, not to mention gas and electric. The great socialist utopia that actually got built is service infrastructure. Yet as I write this, people in the city of Baltimore have had their water cut off. It’s a reminder of how imperfectly distributed this utopia was and is, even in the United States.
If there’s a core characteristic of renotopia, it is a denial of the necessity for large, infrastructural utopias as foundations for the private ones of kitchen and bathroom. Renotopia is the dream of a civilization in retreat.
The problem becomes one of how to live the good life. Let’s renovate! Let’s rip out those ugly kitchen cabinets and be done with that leaky shower! Utopia is an impulse that comes of surplus. But how far can that impulse go in a civilization in decline? Only as far as the bathroom fixtures.
Utopias always involve boundaries—the lines that keep chaos and violence at bay. The bathroom and kitchen have faucets and switches to manage all the boundaries, whether of solids, liquids, or gases. These are the zones that have the most to do with our mammalian bodies; renotopia promises that through careful attention to the inside and outside surfaces of your body, you too can attain a certain form of life.
It is curious that kitchens have become open plan but bathrooms have not. The bathroom is still a domain for artifice, for making the smelly, creaky, saggy body over as something inhuman and fabulous, using cosmetic arts based on the latest in industrial chemistry. The bathroom is the most private of privatized zones. You can close and even lock the door.
Like classical utopias, renotopia promises to remake our species-being into something more refined, more harmonious, more elegant. It’s a weird mix of making us both more natural and so much less natural. The kitchen is mostly about nature, but not completely. Your new appliances will be made of weird new materials, and run by computers. The bathroom is mostly about artifice but not completely. There could be natural stone and wood finishes. Renotopia mixes ultra-low and ultra-high tech and cuts out the middle, to make a new species that is über-human.
While writing my book Molecular Red, I was interested in what I call meta-utopia. It’s neither the total vision of utopia, nor the fragment of something like renotopia, but the condition through which different fragmentary visions of the good life might negotiate with one another. How might the aspiration for better living through kitchen appliances be broadened, opened up?
Rather than shutting down that kind of ambition, perhaps we can imagine a whole world adequate to our fabulous self-images, a world with high-end everything for everyone? Could we aspire to what theorist Kristin Ross calls “communal luxury”?
Communal luxury is what Ross thinks we can learn from the Paris Commune. Reviving this line of thought and feeling—utopian in the best sense—might be a way forward in our times, which seem trapped in two imperatives: to renovate at home and to innovate at work. We’re supposed to be renewing or “newing” all the time, but not to be making history.Filipinos in Europe, particularly in Italy, have something exciting to look forward to.
Jollibee, the most famous and most loved fast food chain in the Philippines, is bringing a piece of home to Filipinos in Europe, starting in Italy.
According to ABS CBN, Jollibee is partnering with Singaporean company BlackBird to open their first ever restaurant in Europe. The expansion is expecting up to 1 million Euros in investment and aims to tap the new market.
“Expansion to Italy is in line with diversification efforts. They are present outside Philippines, they are in China, the Middle East and the US. I guess, eventually, growth in the Philippines will slow down because they have so many stores here already,” said April Lee Tan of COL Financial.
Rappler reported that the companies are considering Milan to be their first European location.
Because of the growing population of Filipino migrant workers in Europe – with Italy having more than 200,000 Filipinos in their population – Jollibee has long planned to enlarge their territory in the global market.
At current, there are 620 Jollibee stores overseas which include countries like the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Singapore, and more. They recently opened Jollibee joints in Canada and Oman and is planning to further expand in Japan, United Kingdom, and Australia.
In the Philippines, the well-known store operates 2,670 chains.[Test-Announce] Fedora 18 Final to slip by one week
Today at Go/No-Go meeting it was decided to slip Fedora 18 release by one week due to unresolved blocker bugs [1]. See the meeting minutes [2] for more details. As a result, Fedora 18 will be pushed out by one week with final release on 2013-01-15. Check current schedule [3]. The next Go/No-Go meeting is on Wednesday, Jan 09. Time will be announced on Monday. Please, help us with resolving currently accepted blocker bugs and review proposed bugs reported to your components. Thanks Jaroslav [1] http://qa.fedoraproject.org/blockerbugs/milestone/18/final/buglist [2] http://bit.ly/VzpMXH [3] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/18/Schedule ============================================= #fedora-meeting-1: F18 Final Go/No-Go meeting ============================================= Meeting started by jreznik at 17:01:20 UTC. The full logs are available at http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2013-01-03/f18_final_gono-go_meeting.2013-01-03-17.01.log.html. Meeting summary --------------- * Roll Call (jreznik, 17:01:48) * Purpose of this meeting (jreznik, 17:07:00) * Purpose of this meeting is to see whether or not F18 Final is ready for shipment, according to the release criteria. (jreznik, 17:07:16) * This is determined in a few ways: (jreznik, 17:07:23) * No remaining blocker bugs (jreznik, 17:07:30) * Test matrices for Final are fully completed (jreznik, 17:07:37) * LINK: http://qa.fedoraproject.org/blockerbugs/milestone/18/final/buglist (jreznik, 17:07:44) * LINK: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_18_Final_Release_Criteria (jreznik, 17:07:49) * LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Current_Base_Test (jreznik, 17:07:55) * LINK: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Current_Installation_Test (jreznik, 17:08:00) * LINK: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Current_Desktop_Test (jreznik, 17:08:05) * agenda (jreznik, 17:08:59) * current status (jreznik, 17:12:40) * Fedora 18 Final Test Compose (TC4) is available, no release candidate (RC) yet (jreznik, 17:13:44) * currently 7 blocker bugs are unresolved (not in ON_QA/VERIFIED/CLOSED state) based on accepted blocker bug list (jreznik, 17:14:56) * 3 proposed blockers (minus the KDE tracking one) (jreznik, 17:15:37) * "mini" review of accepted/proposed blocker bugs (jreznik, 17:17:56) * (891443) crash when reusing existing Btrfs volume (adamw, 17:20:20) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=891443 (adamw, 17:20:20) * Proposed Blocker, anaconda, NEW (adamw, 17:20:20) * AGREED: 891443 is accepted as a blocker per criterion "The installer's custom partitioning mode must be capable of the following: Creating, destroying and assigning mount points to partitions of any specified size using most commonly-used filesystem types" (adamw, 17:30:01) * (881624) U.S. keyboard layout used for encryption passphrase entry during fedup second phase (adamw, 17:30:12) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=881624 (adamw, 17:30:12) * Proposed Blocker, fedup, NEW (adamw, 17:30:12) * AGREED: taking into consideration the general tenor of the wider devel@ discussion, the fact that this is likely documentable and workaroundable and that it could well be fixed with an update to f17's fedup, 881624 is rejected as a blocker (adamw, 17:48:16) * (889699) systemd drops X11 keyboard layout settings during upgrade (adamw, 17:49:01) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=889699 (adamw, 17:49:01) * Proposed Blocker, systemd, ASSIGNED (adamw, 17:49:01) * AGREED: 889699 is accepted as a blocker per criterion "...it must be possible to successfully complete an upgrade from a fully updated installation of the previous stable Fedora release with that package set installed, using any officially recommended upgrade mechanisms. The upgraded system must meet all release criteria." in the case of non-U.S. keymaps (adamw, 18:20:21) * (888089) ValueError: A RAID0 set requires at least 2 members (adamw, 18:24:28) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=888089 (adamw, 18:24:28) * Accepted Blocker, anaconda, POST (adamw, 18:24:28) * this is now committed and awaiting a new anaconda build / compose / test cycle (adamw, 18:26:51) * (832510) vnc server starts before the network (adamw, 18:26:56) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=832510 (adamw, 18:26:56) * Accepted Blocker, anaconda, NEW (adamw, 18:26:57) * developer (rvykydal) is on PTO this week, bcl is trying to take a look on the issue (jreznik, 18:29:22) * (877658) [i18n] some storage-related error messages not marked for translation: "Not enough free space on disks for automatic partitioning" (adamw, 18:29:38) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=877658 (adamw, 18:29:38) * Accepted Blocker, anaconda, ASSIGNED (adamw, 18:29:38) * this just needs an anaconda rebuild, should be fixed with a new build (adamw, 18:32:16) * (890577) drop to dracut shell if /usr is on a btrfs subvol (adamw, 18:32:26) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=890577 (adamw, 18:32:26) * Accepted Blocker, dracut, ON_QA (adamw, 18:32:27) * we need to do a TC5/RC1 with the updated dracut to fix and test this (adamw, 18:39:06) * (883075) fedup upgrading is too quiet (adamw, 18:39:37) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=883075 (adamw, 18:39:37) * Accepted Blocker, fedup-dracut, MODIFIED (adamw, 18:39:37) * this either needs some kind of action to build a new upgrade.img or can be considered done with tc4, need to clarify with tflink (adamw, 18:41:47) * (875846) [i18n] "ON" and "OFF" not translated in switches on DVD (gtk30.mo not on DVD) (adamw, 18:41:57) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=875846 (adamw, 18:41:57) * Accepted Blocker, lorax, ASSIGNED (adamw, 18:41:57) * this just needs a re-spin with new lorax (adamw, 18:43:21) * (889562) Console keymap set to "us" if you install with a keymap not provided by systemd-localed (adamw, 18:43:27) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=889562 (adamw, 18:43:27) * Accepted Blocker, systemd, NEW (adamw, 18:43:28) * plan here is to try and fix up the most prominent missing conversions in systemd's kbd-model-map where corresponding console keymaps are actually available (adamw, 18:49:31) * (876218) pxeboot/netinst + nfsiso repo = hang on reboot (adamw, 18:51:36) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=876218 (adamw, 18:51:36) * Accepted Blocker, systemd, ASSIGNED (adamw, 18:51:36) * we still seem to be playing hot potato between anaconda, systemd and nfs developers here. poettering believes it is an anaconda bug (adamw, 18:56:47) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=876218#c17 is relevant here. we *did* waive a similar bug for f17 final. qa in general thought that was a fudge too far. (adamw, 19:05:04) * ball is in development team's court, we need anaconda, systemd and nfs folks to agree on a plan and just fix the damn thing, jreznik and rbergeron please supervise (adamw, 19:15:18) * (891489) anaconda cannot find matching keyboard layouts for several languages, sets them to U.S. English (adamw, 19:15:48) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=891489 (adamw, 19:15:48) * Proposed NTH, anaconda, POST (adamw, 19:15:48) * AGREED: 891489 is accepted as NTH: it's a safe improvement to language->keymap mapping in anaconda which is desirable for non-english installs (adamw, 19:18:56) * (891487) Anaconda keyboard layout list is missing many offered by GNOME, including some associated with languages for which we offer a translation (adamw, 19:19:03) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=891487 (adamw, 19:19:03) * Proposed NTH, anaconda, NEW (adamw, 19:19:03) * AGREED: 891487 is accepted as NTH as a potential improvement in keymap availability, we may choose not to take the change if it is too big (adamw, 19:22:03) * (855250) Change the default filtering for Quick and Cangjie (adamw, 19:23:00) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=855250 (adamw, 19:23:00) * Proposed NTH, ibus-table-chinese, ASSIGNED (adamw, 19:23:00) * AGREED: 855250 accepted as NTH, improves default input config for Hong Kong users, safe change that does not affect anything else (adamw, 19:24:17) * (854557) Keyboard layout testing doesn't work as expected and lacks indication of the active layout (adamw, 19:24:27) * LINK: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=854557 (adamw, 19:24:27) * Proposed NTH, anaconda, MODIFIED (adamw, 19:24:27) * AGREED: 854557 is rejected as NTH as the fix just clarifies the input dialog a bit, it doesn't improve the interface, and would necessitate new translations (adamw, 19:28:17) * go/no-go (jreznik, 19:28:57) * there's no RC build, there are outstanding accepted blockers, and test coverage is incomplete. so in accordance with policies, QA votes no-go (jreznik, 19:30:05) * AGREED: to no-go (jreznik, 19:31:19) * AGREED: to slip one week with release date on Tue 2012-01-15 and Go/No-Go meeting on Wed 2012-01-09 (jreznik, 20:04:42 |
Europe were little accepted. The only known case of accepted female gender inversion in Medieval Europe comes from the Balkans, and extends back as far as the 15th century, as noted by a mention in the Kanun. These women could escape the very rigid social rules by declaring themselves sworn virgins, and would dress as men, live as men, and share the same status as them. Families without male heirs could even declare their infant daughters to be men and rear them as boys. Such a tradition did not exist elsewhere in Europe at the time. Dr. Carleton S. Coon noted the same custom among the mountaineers of Albania, and that under certain circumstances a woman dressing as a man becomes the head of the family and assumes a completely male role.
Bennett and Froide, in "Single women in the European Past", note: "Other single women found emotional comfort and sexual pleasure with women. The history of same-sex relations between women in medieval and early modern Europe is exceedingly difficult to study, but there can be no doubt of its existence. Church leaders worried about lesbian sex; women expressed, practiced, and were sometimes imprisoned or even executed for same-sex love; and some women cross-dressed in order to live with other women as married couples." They go on to note that even the seemingly modern word "lesbian" has been traced back as far as 1732, and discuss lesbian subcultures, but add, "Nevertheless, we certainly should not equate the single state with lesbian practices." While same-sex relationships among men were highly documented and condemned, "Moral theologians did not pay much attention to the question of what we would today call lesbian sex, perhaps because anything that did not involve a phallus did not fall within the bounds of their understanding of the sexual... Some legislation against lesbian relations can be adduced for the period... mainly involving the use of "instruments," in other words, dildoes."[15] Crane agrees, commenting on a "penitential doctrine that conceived homoerotic acts but not homosexual identity... Discourses of sexuality such as fine amor and mystical marriage with God may be less visible now than penitential doctrine, but their effects on subjectivity deserve the greater efforts of recovery."[16]
In the context of the time, Joan was familiar with a long line of female cross-dressers living fully male lives, often at what they saw as God's calling. However, while she may have been aware of the context, she knew that her transvestism, while potentially acceptable to a degree, still carried social risks.
Historical perspective [ edit ]
Joan of Arc in armor, with a sword.
During and immediately following her life, perspectives on Joan varied widely, often (although not always) along factional lines. Rumors of a woman leading an opposing army was historically used to incite troops against the obvious heresy, sorcery, and immorality. Comments from English soldiers at the time concerning Joan range from referring to her as a "bloody tart" to asking "whether she expected [her soldiers] to surrender to a woman" and referring to her troops as "unbelieving pimps". The English author of The Brut claimed that her troops followed her by "crafte of sorcerie".[17] After his defeat at Orleans, Bedford reported to the English crown that his men had been bewitched by a satanic agent in the form of a woman dressed as a man.[18] Crane notes that she was referred to as "femme monstrueuse," "femme désordonnée et diffamée, estant en habit d'homme et de gouvernement disslut" ("monstrous woman, disorderly and notorious woman who dresses in men's clothes, whose conduct is dissolute").[19]
On the other side of the English channel, the situation was largely reversed. From the beginning, for whatever reason, there was surprisingly little hesitation on the side of the French. Of special note was the loyalty given to her by her soldiers, who were among the most skilled in France. The Bourgeois of Paris claimed that this was because, "all who disobeyed her should be killed without mercy", but the author of the Journal du siege d'Orleans noted that "All regarded her with much affection, men and women, as well as small children." Jean de Macon, an eyewitness to the siege of Orleans, noted that there was only one act of derision, while the Cronique de Lorraine added that "All the army promised to always obey her. Each victory motivated more loyalty and further victory. Even disobedience to her higher command seems to have invited loyalty; she brought action and victory, while the older, noble generals achieved nothing but inaction and defeat.[20]
These viewpoints tended to extend to her trials : first the Condemnation trial in the hands of the English, and later the rehabilitation trial under a commission appointed by Pope Calixtus III and organized by Charles VII. As Pinzino notes, "The pro-English (Burgundian) party into whose hands Joan fell in 1430, over a year after her role in the vital French victory at Orleans, worked to defame her self-asserted divine calling and executed her at age nineteen in the marketplace of Rouen in 1431. In the years following, however, political power in France permanently reverted to the pro-French (Armagnac) party of Joan's supporters. Promptly after Normandy and the city of Rouen itself had been restored to the French (1449) and the ecclesiastical archives there were retrieved and opened, the proceedings to nullify Joan of Arc's condemnation were undertaken by her supporters... these proceedings were virtually unprecedented in ecclesiastical judicial history."[21]
Charles VII, who owed his crown to Joan and had followed her, believing her to be divinely inspired, found himself now having been brought to power by a convicted heretic. On February 15, 1450, Charles dispatched a letter ordering the creation of a Royal Commission to reexamine the Condemnation trial, under the leadership of Guillaume d'Estouteville, Charles's cousin. As Pernoud and Clin note, "That trial was now a symbol of complex cultural fissures in search of closure: of the internal fractures of a riven France, of national splits enervated by English invasion, and of religious and civil power struggles sustained by the University of Paris."[22] The rehabilitation trial focused strongly on the transvestism charge, which Pope Pius II noted was problematic.[23] Individuals testifying during the trial stressed the necessity of her dress, both for means of keeping order in her troops in battle and for protecting her chastity. As the trial noted, she wore "long, conjoined hosen, attached to the aforesaid doublet with twenty cords (aiguillettes)" and "tight leggings", with the cords being used to securely tie the parts of the garment together so her clothing couldn't be pulled off by the English guards.[24] Guillaume Manchon testified, "And she was then dressed in male clothing, and was complaining that she could not give it up, fearing lest in the night her guards would inflict some act of [sexual] outrage upon her," a claim backed up by a number of other witnesses. The same justification was given for her relapse by a number of witnesses, such as Friar Martin Ladvenu, Pierre Cusquel, Giullaume Manchon, and Friar Isambart de la Pierre, although a number of others, such as Jean Massieu, Pierre Daron, and Guillaume Colles, alternatively claimed that she was entrapped into wearing male clothing by a guard who took away her female clothing). Jean Moreau testified that he had heard Joan reply to the preacher that she had adopted male clothing during her campaign because she had to live among soldiers, among whom it was more appropriate for her to be in male, rather than female clothing. The court ruled that "nothing improper has been found in her, only good humility, chastity, piety, propriety, simplicity."
These viewpoints remained the dominant perspective on Joan's crossdressing up until the modern age. As Régine Pernoud comments in the foreword to Joan of Arc, serious books about her in any language "numbered only a few dozen".[25] Likewise, the lack of modern acceptance of and knowledge about gender identity and sexuality further limited discourse on the subject.
Modern perspective [ edit ]
One of the first modern writers to raise issues of gender identity and sexuality was novelist Vita Sackville-West. In "Saint Joan of Arc", published in 1936, she indirectly suggests that Joan of Arc may have been a lesbian.[26]
Rebuttals were forthcoming and are widely mentioned. The most prominent rebuttal refers to the common medieval practice of women sharing beds with one another; bed sharing had no connotations in regard to sexuality. Bonnie Wheeler of the International Joan of Arc Society called the book "dead wrong but fun".[27]
Pernoud credits Joan's clothing to necessity and her belief that it was ordained by God. Among other things, Pernoud cites large amounts of testimony, including Guillaume Manchon from the Rehabilitation trial: "... at that time, she was dressed in male clothing, and kept complaining that she could not do without it, fearing that the guards would violate her in the night; and once or twice she had complained to the Bishop of Beauvais, the Vice-Inquisitor, and Master Nicholas Loiseleur that one of the guards had attempted to rape her."[28]
Warner argues that in pre-industrial Europe, a link existed between transvestism and priestly functions, hence justifying the historical interpretation of her as both a witch and a saint. Warner further argues for Joan as not occupying either a male or female gender. "Through her transvestism, she abrogated the destiny of womankind. She could thereby transcend her sex.... At the same time, by never pretending to be other than a woman and a maid, she was usurping a man's function but shaking off the trammels of his sex altogether to occupy a different, third order, neither male nor female". Warner categorizes Joan as an androgyne.[29]
Under the direction of L’Académie française, the Centre Jeanne d'Arc in Orleans has been working on a re-edition of Jules Quicherat's Procès de Jeanne d'Arc. According to Bouzy, Quicherat's work forms the basis of most modern scholarship on Joan, but has been discovered to contain a number of errors, selective editing, and use of "originals" that were often highly edited or manipulated versions of earlier documents. Relevant to Joan's crossdressing is Jacques Gelu's treatise, one of the theological treatise ordered by Charles VII for her rehabilitation. Quicherat criticized the text as "uninstructive hodgepodge", and, according to him, "made it considerably shorter, taking out parts of the passages where points of religious dogma are discussed." As Bouzy, a member of the Centre working on the project notes, "This text has hardly ever been consulted by historians, although it provides interesting evidence for the way the fifteenth-century church perceived Joan. The text stresses the problem of Joan's cross dressing — this shows that in 1429, even the prelates who supported Charles VII were reluctant to accept a young girl dressed as a man. Apparently, Charles VII decided in favor of Joan only because his confessor, Gérard Machet, was convinced that Joan was the girl whose coming had been announced in a prophecy by Marie Robine, a hermit from Avignon; and even then, Charles required that she be thoroughly examined. Several other treatises that have never been translated (apart from Gerson's tract) are likely to hold surprises for us as well."[30]Congress has taken away a set of internet privacy protections consumers never actually had.
While it has often been reported that the public has lost something, you can't really lose something that was never yours. Instead, the Republican-led House and Senate have voted to stop rules that would have prevented content providers from selling your browsing and app history to third-party advertisers.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) -- at least the previous version of it under Chairman Tom Wheeler -- wanted consumers to have more control over their data. It passed a rule which gave consumers significant control over how internet service providers (ISPs) can use the data they collect from consumers. Specifically, before using that data, they would have to get explicit consumer consent. That would have given the American public protection for their browsing history.
Basically Congress has decided to toll back these rules, in favor of allowing big companies like AT&T (NYSE:T), Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA), Verizon (NYSE:VZ), and many others to do whatever they want with user data.
What does this mean for consumers?
Whether you search online for ugly Christmas sweaters, paint for your living room, or something more personal like treatments for whatever might ail you, your internet provider can share that info with advertisers. That allows companies to target ads to consumers based on their search history. Some people will actually like this because they want targeted ads touting sweaters, paint, or medicine for their chronic constipation, restless leg syndrome, or whatever else they may have.
Under the new ruling from Congress, that FCC decision has been set aside before it took effect. Now, if you don't want to share your search history, you will no longer have the option of privacy (unless you take fairly extreme technical steps to block ISPs from seeing it). That's only the tip of the iceberg for how the new legislation will allow big business to use your personal data, according to The Washington Post.
[P]roviders could also sell their users' information directly to marketers, financial firms and other companies that mine personal data -- all of whom could use the data without consumers' consent. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission, which initially drafted the protections, would be forbidden from issuing similar rules in the future.
Those who support companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast having access to this data will point out that search engines have always had access to your personal search history and they use it. That's why if you search for "new cellphone plan" or "Caribbean cruise" you will get ads for those things for days (whether you are still searching for either or not).
Instead of arguing that consumers should have the right to always decide how their personal information is used, this legislation takes the opposite path. It says that because some companies have access to this info, every company should be able to access it. That does level the playing field for big business, but it comes at the expense of consumers who could in theory not use search engines or social media sites that already exploit this data, but have little choice when it comes to internet providers.
Who is this good for?
The sad thing about Congress making this ruling is that many of us would have opted into ad targeting at least some of the time. If I search for info about hotels in Orlando it may be because I'm going to Disney World and I want information about the surrounding area.
This is a big win for Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and any other company looking to sell this information. It's also a victory for advertisers who will be able to get more for their money by aiming ads at consumers looking for what they are selling.
Some companies of course will opt to not collect or sell this sort of data. In addition some consumers will take fairly extreme steps like using a virtual private network (VPN) to encrypt their personal data on the internet. In most cases however, this legislation means the end of internet privacy and consumers should be aware that unless they make an effort to protect their data, it will be visible, sold and used.(PhysOrg.com) -- Psychologist Prof Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire) today revealed the results of The Taste Test - a large-scale experiment to discover whether expensive wines are good value for money. The experiment was carried out as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival and involved over 400 members of the public tasting either an expensive or inexpensive wine, and then trying to tell which was which.
The inexpensive wines cost less than £5 per bottle, and the expensive ones were priced between £10 and £30. The experimenters tested a mixture of red and white wines from various countries, including Sauvignon Blanc, Rioja, Claret and Champagne.
The test was conducted 'double-blind', with neither the tasters nor experimenters knowing the cost of the wine. By chance the volunteers would have correctly classified their wine as expensive or inexpensive 50% of the time. Volunteers' actual accuracy was exactly at chance, demonstrating that they could not distinguish between the two types of wine by taste alone.
"These are remarkable results," commented Wiseman. "People were unable to tell expensive from inexpensive wines, and so in these times of financial hardship the message is clear - the inexpensive wines we tested taste the same as their expensive counterparts."
The Edinburgh International Science Festival runs from 9 to 22 April 2011 with over 200 events in 30 venues across the city.
Explore further: Wine and cheese: serious scienceThe tiny Himalayan state of Nepal, bordered by Asian giants China and India, has arguably achieved what its neighboring nations haven't even thought about: Kathmandu is all set to host the region's first sports competition for the LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex) community in September.
Sunil Babu Pant, Nepal's first openly gay politician and a member of Nepal's parliament, is at the helm of affairs at the Gay Olympics which will reinforce Nepal's enviable status of being South Asia's most LGBTI-friendly country.
Pant, who engaged in a legal battle in 2007 to ensure equal rights to the gay community of Nepal, says hosting a sports event for gays is important since it needs to be proved that sexual orientation or belonging to the third gender has nothing to do with a person's physical or mental fitness.
An LGBTI sports event is important because we want to prove to the society that we are mentally and physically fit, Pant said in an interview with International Business Times, adding that it is also aimed at boosting self-esteem and the sense of belonging.
Nations, political parties, and society do not take the gay community seriously, and we want to show them that we have tremendous capacity to participate equally in all walks of life including sports, Pant said, who also hopes to enhance the level of government participation in the LGBTI movement by hosting the meet.
There have been numerous cases where winners at sports events, including the Olympics, are stripped of their medals after failing the gender test. While it is necessary for authorities to strictly adhere to the regulations of sports events due to differences in the physical abilities of both genders, the third gender gets sidelined in the process, leaving them little chance to participate in mainstream sports events.
The Australian government is funding the event with 1.6 million Nepali rupees (about $20,000) through its Australian Sports Outreach Program (ASOP).
Pant hit the headlines last week when he wrote an open letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and founding partner Chris Hughes appealing that the social network allow its users to list their gender as other.
People who do not identify as male or female continue to be sidelined by Facebook's options, Pant wrote. As you allow users to identify only as male or female, many in the LGBTI community feel as if they are hidden on the site, unable to identify as their true selves.
However, Zuckerberg or the Facebook management has yet to respond to his letter. I haven't had any formal response from the Facebook which is very disappointing, Pant said. LGBTI community, apart from being sidelined politically, socially, culturally and economically is facing a similar fate in the virtual world. With one of the board member himself being a gay person (Chris Hughes), Facebook discounting this community is quite unacceptable, Pant, who maintains a favorable view of Google's open support to the gay community, said.
Pant has since disabled his Facebook account, angered by Facebook's reluctance to add a third gender option. If Facebook doesn't respond, a lot of LGBTI people will switch to other options, he said.
The Supreme Court order of 2007, which ensured equal rights to the gay community, is often misconstrued as the ruling which legalized homosexuality.
However, law experts say Nepal had legalized homosexuality in the 1960s, since the nation's unnatural sex law didn't explicitly state homosexuality in its realm.
Nepal's unnatural sex law never defined unnatural sex in any documents and it didn't actually criminalize any specific acts (such as homosexuality), Kyle Knight, a Fulbright Research Fellow in Kathmandu, said. Most arrests of LGBTI people in Nepal before 2007 were carried out on charges of public indecency, which still occurs today. The legal language which outlawed homosexuality was on the books (in the Criminal Code) in Nepal until 1963, which then disappeared. So, in effect, homosexuality became legal in the 1960s.
Being the founder and director of the LGBTI rights organization Blue Diamond Society, Pant has been actively campaigning for legalizing same-sex marriages and held the first public gay wedding ceremony of Nepal in June 2011 when a lawyer and a college professor from Denver, Colorado, got married in Kathmandu in the Hindu-Nepalese tradition.
However, he feels the legal change is happening at a rather slow pace.
Pant, an assembly member from the Communist Party of Nepal (United), is happy about the media support which facilitates high visibility, while acknowledging that the social attitudes are slowly changing too.
He recently unveiled Nepal's first gender-inclusive public toilet, in a small compound next to male and female public toilets in Bhageshwori Park in Nepalgunj.
For Pant, the construction of the toilet marks a symbolic step forward for the transgender and intersex people who are denied their right to access toilets.CAIRO  Two police officers were jailed on Wednesday for four days pending an investigation into the death of a 28-year-old man reportedly killed after they beat him to death, a security official said.
“The prosecutor in (the northern city of Alexandria) has ordered the detention for four days of Mahmud Salah Amin and Awad Ismail Suleiman, pending an investigation into the circumstances of the death of Khaled Said,” the official told AFP.
The two are accused of “excessive use of force” but are not facing murder charges.
Two autopsies ordered by Egypt’s state prosecutor concluded that Khaled Said had died of asphyxiation after swallowing a bag of marijuana when he saw the police officers approaching on June 6.
According to witnesses, Said was killed when plainclothes policemen dragged him out of an Internet cafe and beat him to death on a busy Alexandria street.
Rights groups have rejected the official account, and Said has since become a symbol for rights activists against police brutality, for which Egypt has been criticised at home and abroad.
Graphic pictures of a bruised and battered Said had appeared on social networking websites, sparking public outcry and condemnation from local and international rights groups.
His death sparked several protests in Cairo and Alexandria.
The Associated Press adds, “The charge sheet filed by the Alexandria prosecutor accused the two officers, Warrant Officer Mahmoud Salah and Sgt. Awad Ismail Suleiman, of ‘illegal arrest, using physical torture and brutality.'”HOUSTON - Two men have been charged in a scam where the alleged burglars posed as tree trimmers.
According to Pct. 1, 40-year-old John Thompson and 42-year-old Paul Frank have been charged with burglary of a habitation. The charges stem from one of the alleged scams in Shepherd Park and another in Tanglewood.
In each case, investigators say one man would knock on the door and tells the homeowner he needs to go into the backyard to trim a neighbor’s tree or work on a fence.
When the homeowner is in the backyard, another suspect enters the house and steals cash, jewelry and other valuables.
Related: Pct. 1 warns residents of fake tree trimmers scam
“I’m sure this is not something that’s happened four or five times. I think it’s happened a whole lot more, and a lot of people don’t even know their stuff is missing,” said Chief Lofton Harrison with Precinct 1.
Investigators believe these men are responsible for some, if not all, of the cases - including more that have been identified in Fort Bend County.
Police say that Thompson is in custody. Frank is not yet because Pct. 1 says he has priors for a similar scam in Florida.
Pct. 1 says that they were able to catch the suspects because one of the victim's family members pulled up to the house as the suspects were leaving. They took of a picture of the truck the suspects were driving.
The suspects were in a U-Haul rental with the brand markings covered up. U-Haul was able to inform deputies of who had rented the vehicle.
Charges are pending against a third accomplice who police are still trying to identify.Image caption Greg Carr says Gorongosa is a “human development and conservation project"
In 1962, six-year-old Vasco Galante was treated to his first cinema trip - to see Charlton Heston in the Hollywood epic, The Ten Commandments.
But despite the blockbuster's eye-popping sequences, the images that most impressed young Vasco came from a short advert shown before the film, which showcased the elephants, lions and buffalo in the verdant floodplains of Gorongosa National Park - a Mozambican safari paradise once marketed as "the place where Noah left his Ark".
As he left the Lisbon picture house, young Vasco vowed to visit the park one day, and more than 40 years later, he finally got the chance.
But the park he encountered was a far cry from the Gorongosa of '60s showreels that once attracted the likes of John Wayne, Joan Crawford and Gregory Peck.
A brutal 15-year civil war in the aftermath of Mozambique's independence from Portugal in 1975 had devastated much of the province, and Gorongosa, one of its key battle grounds, was almost destroyed.
Image copyright Gorongosa National Park Image caption In the 1960s, Gorongosa was advertised as a showpiece for former Portuguese East Africa
Image copyright Antonio Jorge Image caption Filmstars and tourists alike flocked to see the wildlife in the park
Image copyright Gorongosa National P:ark Image caption But the park was largely destroyed during a 15-year civil war
During the war, rebel forces from the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), made the foothills of Mount Gorongosa their home, and through a combination of hunting and environmental vandalism, managed to annihilate 90% of the large animal population.
Local poaching compounded the problem, and by the time Vasco arrived in 2005, "you could drive all day long and not encounter any wildlife," he says. Chitengo, the park's main campsite, had been reduced to rubble.
Lifetime devotion
Gorongosa's predicament was in many ways indicative of the state of Mozambique's tourist industry, which had once been a significant part of the country's economy.
Despite more than 2,700 kilometres of coral-fringed coastline, abundant natural beauty, rich cultural heritage, and its proximity to South Africa, one of the world's top tourist destinations, Mozambique was making far less money from international visitors than neighbours such as Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Years of armed conflict scared off holidaymakers, and vital infrastructure such as cross-country roads and train lines had been all-but destroyed.
Labyrinthine visa processes and the relative paucity of tour operators certainly didn't help matters, but most importantly, investment in tourism was desperately low.
Today, Vasco is the communications director of a newly restored Gorongosa, which is once again making a name for itself as a premier safari destination, while acting as a model for many of Mozambique's long-neglected attractions.
The restoration project, which began in 1994 with the help of the African Development Bank, is spearheaded by 56-year-old Greg Carr, an ebullient tech entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist from Idaho Falls in the US who made his fortune at an early age, and was looking for a venture to which, as he puts it, he could devote the rest of his life.
Mr Carr visited Mozambique in 2004, at the invitation of the country's ambassador to New York, at a time when the country was "the single poorest nation on earth," he says.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Wild buffaloes and other animals have been re-introduced to the park
"I asked myself the question - what can Mozambique do for economic development, how can it compete in a world economy, how can it create good jobs?," Mr Carr recounts, as he relaxes in Gorongosa's modern reception lounge.
"And I said, well why doesn't Mozambique have a multi-billion-dollar tourism industry like other African countries, Kenya or Tanzania."
The same question was being asked by the Frelimo government, who in 2000 identified the country's nascent tourism industry as one of the sectors with the highest potential to ease unemployment.
With the help of bodies like the World Bank, private sector partners were courted for specific sustainable tourism projects, and regulatory reforms such as the creation of designated "tourism development zones" were pushed through.
Mr Carr was shown around Gorongosa, and, a few years later, signed a public-private partnership with the Mozambique government to run the park for the next two decades.
The park also attracted the support of the US, Portuguese and Irish governments, universities including Harvard and Princeton, as well as many sub-Saharan African businesses and tourism operators.
One-by-one, species were reintroduced to the plains. Buffalo, wildebeest, eland, elephant and hippo populations began to rise, and even the lions returned in moderate numbers, although some predators, such as leopards, seem to have been obliterated for good.
Documentary teams from around the globe, including the BBC's, and wildlife experts, began to take note. The renowned American biologist EO Wilson took a shine to the park - famously branding it "ecologically the most diverse park in the world" due to the scale of its insect life. Gorongosa's on-site laboratory now bears his name.
Initial opposition
The hope, Mr Carr says, is that all this publicity will help the park to eventually pay for itself, through a combination of tourism, agricultural projects and a thriving local economy.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "During the war, the soldiers had eaten all the animals," says Greg Carr
Indeed, the local economy is vital to the park's success. The 200,000 people who live around Gorongosa are among the poorest in the country, and lack the most basic provisions.
Some were initially hostile to the restoration project, which ring-fenced land previously used by local farmers, and by poachers.
But Mr Carr says he has always seen Gorongosa as a "combined human development and conservation" effort.
"We probably spend as much time outside the park as inside the park," he says, constructing schools, hospitals and water sources, and helping with farming.
Image caption Vasco Galante fell in love with Gorongosa because of a cinema advert he saw as a six year old.
One new initiative is a coffee farm in Mount Gorongosa's rainforest, where the locals used to cut down 500-year old trees to plant corn or beans, with limited success. Now, hundreds of people are involved in growing Arabica coffee beans, which will wind their way into cafes next year.
Many locals now work in the park, such as 21-year-old Domingas Aleixo, who grew up just a few kilometres away, and was destined to work on the land like most other women in the community.
Now she is a part of the lion conservation project at Gorongosa, working with world-renowned experts, while also studying for her animal biology degree in Portugal.
Celebrity visits
"I didn't know the importance of bio-diversity," she says, but these days she helps educate the community on how to deal with and preserve the local environment, and, along with many other Gorongosa employees in the region, is trying to foster a sense of pride in the extraordinary natural resource on their doorstep.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Wildlife is returning to the park - like this group of sable antelopes
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Reedbucks are also once again living in the park
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption Warthogs are yet another species which has returned to Gorongosa
However, despite such successes, Gorongosa is still some distance from its former glories.
Currently, tourism accounts for less than 1% of the park's income, despite the arrival of a luxury hotel brand, and the occasional celebrity visits.
Miles of badly paved roads on the approach to the park which have been neglected by the local authority, and occasional outbreaks of violence in the area further threaten to deter holidaymakers.
In 2006, Gorongosa attracted fewer than 1,000 visitors, and by 2011 the number had risen to 7,000, just shy of the 1960s average.
However, in 2013 and 2014, because of civil conflict in central Mozambique and travel warnings issued by several embassies and travel sites, the number of international visitors dropped dramatically.
Yet the future of for Mozambique's multiple attractions looks bright.
Last year, the total income from tourism-related activity in Mozambique exceeded $1.1bn, and some 700,000 were directly or indirectly employed in travel or tourism jobs.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption "Here you can see the best of Africa," says Vasco Galante
Furthermore, the World Travel & Tourism Council estimates that the sector will grow by more than 6% each year over the next decade - well above the global average.
For the infectiously positive Vasco, it's the landscape and wildlife - which so captivated him back in a Portuguese cinema decades ago - that holds the key to Mozambique's resurgence as a holiday destination of choice.
"Here," he says, reclining at the side of a roaring fire in Gorongosa's luxury campsite, "you can see the best of Africa".(Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department)
For years, the mystery woman had been living a life of luxury, allegedly all on someone else’s dime. She went by various names, authorities say: Maria Hendricks, Gia Hendricks, Maria Christina Gia, or Maria Hainka.
Capitalizing on her good looks, authorities alleged, the “prolific” serial fraudster lured her victims through dating websites and targeted high rollers through real estate brokers. She allegedly manipulated her way into their homes, stole their identities and their family members’ identities, and their money. She allegedly checked into ritzy hotels, opened up new credit cards and even forwarded one victim’s cellphone calls to her own number to carry out her identity takeover.
By the time Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies found the woman, whose real name is Maria Christina Johnson, staying at a luxury, beachside resort in Santa Barbara under the name of her latest alleged victim, she had already racked up charges of nearly $250,000 in that case alone, authorities said in a statement.
[Companies are betting on a new way to protect your identity: the selfie.]
“She has no legitimate source of income and lists her occupation as a dog trainer, yet appeared to live the high-dollar lifestyle of the cafe society entirely off stolen identities,” the statement said.
After her years of alleged scheming, the sheriff’s department said it still does not know how many victims Johnson allegedly accrued, nor have authorities released the total amount of money she may have scammed. She was arrested at the end of April on two felony warrants and is due in court this week. Her bail was initially set at $2 million, deputies said.
Johnson, 43, has a lengthy criminal history dating to 1997, when she started committing crimes in her home state of Washington, then moved on to Oregon and eventually California, authorities said.
According to the Daily Breeze, Manhattan Beach detectives investigated Johnson in 2011 when someone she encountered in a Hermosa Beach bar and who took her home realized later she allegedly had charged $10,000 on his American Express card. She then went on a spending spree that included $1,000 for two bottles of liquor at a Manhattan Beach bar, giving $200 and $300 tips, and buying an $800 bicycle.
Operating under various aliases, Johnson was convicted of several felonies in Washington state and Oregon between 1997 and 2008, authorities said.
In California, Johnson served prison time on 11 felony counts of identity theft, grand theft and credit-card fraud after she was arrested in 2011.
[Why so few identity theft victims turn to the government for help]
Johnson was investigated by Manhattan Beach police after she posed as a wealthy owner of a modeling agency and a member of the Hendrick Motorsports Racing Team dynasty, KTLA-TV reported in 2011.
“It’s her charm,” Chris Hainka, Johnson’s husband, told the TV station. “She can get anything she wants.”
Hainka claimed he was among her victims, leaving her after a few short months of marriage when she allegedly stole thousands of dollars from him and his friends, KTLA-TV reported.
When the Southern California High Tech Task Force Identity Theft Detail started looking into Johnson again at the end of March, authorities learned that she had shifted her game to dating and home-rental websites, according to the sheriff’s office. She would con her way into her victims’ homes, then search for and take personal identifying information to open lines of credit without their knowledge. Johnson would change the mailing addresses of her victims’, authorities said, and pretend to be them.
[The IRS suspends hacked tool meant to help identity theft victims]
From that point, she allegedly would make the family members and friends of her victims her next target.
“After assuming an identity without permission, suspect Johnson moved into high-end hotels and charged up thousands of dollars worth of goods and services,” the sheriff’s department said.
When prowling for victims, Johnson would make appointments with real estate brokers to tour expensive homes, authorities said. In one case, she stole the identity of the broker.
“Investigation revealed suspect Johnson’s elevated sense of entitlement compelled her to go to great lengths in aggressively assuming identities,” the sheriff’s department said. “No one was immune from being exploited.”
CBS Los Angeles quoted Stephanie Younger, who said the woman she knew as Gia Hendricks fooled her by wearing designer clothes and said she was looking for an assistant to attend Hollywood events for her modeling agency. “She had a couple of designers that she was wearing,” Younger told the station. “Anyone would have been fooled.”
Younger said she accepted the job and provided the woman with bank account information for payroll purposes. “Hendricks issued Younger paychecks and asked her to withdraw surplus amounts. The checks bounced, and Hendricks disappeared,” the station reported.
“After finding information posted online by other victims, Younger created a Facebook profile and set up her own sting operation to help cops bust Hendricks.”
Authorities ask anyone who may have been a victim |
screaming overhead.
Choking tear gas canisters streaked through the air, mingling with the smoke. He heard rifle fire, the crump of a grenade. Jan ran along the badly surfaced street; one hand gripping Eva’s forearm, the other fastened around the clammy metal of a revolver, held inexpertly. A row of grey shapes emerged from the smoke, visors lowered and riot shields held ready. Eva screamed and Jan pushed her aside, motioning for her to run. There was no time for last words.
Jan and the shields closed as he fired the pistol, rounds sloughing off of armour uselessly. He swung the butt of the pistol at a visor in desperation, but the blow never made it further. A baton caught Jan across the head and he collapsed to the ground, retching uncontrollably. He tried to scream for Eva one last time, but his traitorous body wouldn’t even allow that much. He couldn’t draw another breath.
Jan jerked awake, his head bursting with a pain. The choking he’d felt in the dream didn’t abate; there was something inside his mouth, rubbery and cold. His arms and legs were bound tightly by what felt like plastic cords. His eyes opened to a dim purple light and he thrashed hard. The cords gave way slightly and Jan drew a ragged breath in through his nose. That gave him the strength to convulse until the restraints broke. He reached up with both hands, grasped whatever was covering his face, and tore it away.
Extracting himself from the creepers was easy enough, but Jan cursed himself for making such a simple mistake; he shouldn’t have been so clumsy about finding a place to sleep. Another couple of hours and he’d have become fertiliser. He sat, spluttering out greasy white and purple fragments, hoping he hadn’t swallowed any. It wasn’t all that surprising that he’d been careless when bedding down for the night. For once, he’d had a moment of unexpected good luck.
The hunger Jan had felt after the narrow escape from the Pitchfork had almost exhausted him completely – until he’d discovered an ancient cache of supplies lying amongst the tattered remains of a tent. The spherical, lurid green fruits he’d found were impossibly perfect; they grew on a symmetrical tree within the cache. The fruits were bulbous, ripe and strangely meaty, and the most delicious thing Jan had ever tasted. He recalled biting into the sweet flesh, feeling the juices run down his face.
Packing up the box was a minutes’ work. It somehow folded into itself, taking up much less space than should have been possible. Jan found he could lift it easily and he hoisted it onto his back alongside the pack. With one last look at the campsite he set off, moving silently through the jungle that steamed with the heat of the rising sun, its dappled rays almost blinding him as they spread through the mist.
Finding his way this deep within the jungle was difficult – Jan had long since left the lands he knew and there were very few landmarks. The roads that penetrated this far were unsafe and the other wastelanders were best avoided. As Jan made his way along a crater rim, the thought suddenly struck him that he was dangerously close to forbidden territory, land that didn’t belong to him or his kind. On the other side of the half-kilometre wide rim, walled by centuries old impact glass, Jan spotted a high concrete wall topped with barbed wire. Not even Arco would dare to breach that barrier.
Jan had been moving for over an hour when he felt a vibration. He pressed his ear to the ground, hearing the rumble of an engine. It sounded powerful. Apprehension filled him; he wasn’t in the mood to meet Enforcers today. He scurried inside a collapsed building, hastily hiding in dense moss and pulling the cloak over himself. A few pale grey y-shaped worms fell softly from the wall; perfect miniatures of the Pitchfork.
A few minutes passed, with Jan barely daring to breathe as he heard the rumble of the engine grow louder. A figure dressed in drab combat fatigues passed by, then another, scouting ahead. Jan risked a glance, but from where he lay behind a low wall the source of the noise was still invisible. He spotted a row of trees fold up as if they’d been uprooted by a giant, and a small group of armed soldiers crashed through the jungle, walking directly towards his hiding spot.
Jan buried his head underneath the cloak again as the footsteps drew closer. He felt two boots plant themselves either side of his head. There was a momentary pause, and then the cloak was torn away with the tip of a bayoneted rifle. Jan stared mutely up into the face of a very young man, barely more than a teenager. Even in that moment of terror, something about the soldier struck Jan as out of place – it wasn’t just his age, it was the strange camouflage pattern he wore, not like any set of Arco fatigues. And the armband; in place of the ubiquitous delta symbol of Arco, there was a crude, hand-stitched emblem that looked like a sharp mountain or a predator’s tooth. The boy kept his rifle level and grinned, showing several missing teeth. Then he said something in a language Jan didn’t recognise, shouldered the rifle and walked back off to join the rest of his party. The rumble of the engines faded away.
Jan lay, trying to understand what he’d just seen. That war party wasn’t with Arco. If it were, he’d either be dead or handcuffed and on his way to a holding facility. He’d never seen anyone sporting that jagged mountain emblem before – they had to be insurrectionists.
By following a stream uphill, Jan was able to climb a little way above the oppressive mist, enough that the morning sun shone almost unimpeded. Squinting, he spotted the brown haze of smog that indicated a conurbation in the distance – it looked to be on his side of the horizon; he could be there by this evening. There was a column of smoke poking higher into the sky, as if a large segment of the city was on fire, and leading directly to it was a broad swathe of demolished trees – the result of whatever vehicle the strange army had used.
Jan wasn’t officially an outlaw, but only because he had no official status. He’d never accumulated so much as a single identity document to justify his existence. But, if he was looking to link up with a renegade army, that probably wouldn’t matter.
Jan sighed, leaning back against a tree and staring out at the misty rainforest. He didn’t know quite how that thought had come to him, but he knew where it would lead. An itch at the back of his mind was telling him ‘go to the conurbation’, and it looked as though his body had already decided to obey. Jan slid back down the rock face and started walking towards the distant column of smoke.
The crush outside the conurbation was unbelievable. To Jan it was almost unbearable. He’d walked straight out of the false jungle and into the overcrowded outskirts, still homing in on that tower of smoke. Bicycles and rickshaws competed for space with pedestrians, loud arguments breaking out by the minute. The dark, imposing pyramids of housing and holding facilities were seething with activity – crawling figures and flickering lights. The rooftops and walls were plated with the green and turquoise of thousands of high-density farms; most Conurbations were self-sufficient in food. Jan thought he heard shouts of protest; something about staple crops being shipped further north.
Jan continued to shove through the crowd, eliciting loud protests and a few threats as he tried to approach the fence guarding the interior. Eventually, he pushed his way into a more open space, his attention drawn by a burst of feedback from a loudspeaker. The crowd had buffeted him towards a public screen that displayed a gaunt-looking man with grey hair. A few moments of concentration and Jan had sounded out the letters underneath – ‘Ambassador Vash’. The speaker’s voice was clipped and had an accent Jan had never heard before – it sounded ancient and dry. Emotionless.
‘You have to disperse,’ Vash said, his voice calm and a little sinister. The man was dressed in a severe, neatly pressed grey uniform. An ominous note crept into his voice. ‘You are all in breach of the directives. You are placing yourself in harm’s way.’ The man clearly didn’t understand the protesters; such was true of all those like him.
‘If you’ll just return to your homes, I promise that protest leaders can meet with our representatives to discuss terms – ’
Someone with a slingshot jeered and flung a rock, cracking the screen to general cheers from the crowd. As he tried harder to retreat, Jan noticed a jagged line drawing of a mountain scrawled underneath the broken screen; identical to the marking on the soldier’s armband. He was getting closer, though he couldn’t quite say to what.
The column of smoke Jan had spotted was rising some way in the distance, in the wired-off interior of the conurbation. Something about it seemed to draw him in. If he waited until nightfall it might be possible to sneak inside.
Jan found somewhere to barter the fruit tree he’d found, a provisions station that was doing a side trade forging identity papers. Slipping through the fence that guarded the interior of the conurbation, he walked closer to the rising column of smoke. The crowds within were more subdued, walking in ordered rows through grey streets or cycling down the centre on rusting old bikes and rickshaws. He spotted a few city workers hosing down another jagged mountain symbol daubed on a whitewashed wall. As he continued deeper into the conurbation, Jan became more and more conscious of just how out of place he seemed; it was becoming harder to explain just what he was doing here. It only took five minutes of fast walking to escape the cramped residential area and reach a disused industrial plant.
Suddenly, a white flash burst in the sky, shining harshly and illuminating the whole conurbation like an arc welder. The flash turned into a flickering line that divided the clouds in half and met the ground less than a mile away, just outside the conurbation’s boundary. Pressing himself up to a building, Jan felt the earthquake rumble and wash of heat as the falling star buried itself in the ground. A few people paused or shouted, turning to run away or towards the strike. A loudspeaker started ordering emergency workers to their stations. Jan merely picked himself up again and continued to walk. A strike on the protest wasn’t surprising; the crowd outside had grown large enough to seem threatening, even to eyes watching far above the sky.
Two more city blocks were sufficient to escape most of the crowd. Jan spotted a flight of helicopters overhead, moving quickly towards the site of the strike. He turned a final corner, the column of black smoke he’d spotted from miles away now easily visible. The big open plaza contained a heavy industrial warehouse; the blot in the sky Jan had spotted from far away wasn’t from a meteor strike or a battle but a working factory. His inner disappointment deepened – whatever he’d hoped to find wasn’t here. He turned to leave and walked right into the barrel of a rifle. Behind it stood the white-uniformed body of an enforcer.
‘Papers!’ the guard snapped. Jan reached inside his coat as smoothly as he could and produced the forged documents. The enforcer scanned them quickly, frowning at Jan.
‘You’re not supposed to be here.’
‘Yeah, I know. Got scared by that meteor strike. Sorry,’ Jan replied. He didn’t think he sounded convincing. The enforcer’s frown turned into a cruel smile.
‘You weren’t a part of the protest, were you? What’s your name?’
Jan cringed inwardly, realising he hadn’t bothered to read the forged papers himself. He smiled weakly at the enforcer, letting the officer think he was in control, that he had power. Then, before the pause stretched too long, Jan drove a fist at the man’s windpipe. The enforcer coughed violently and fired, the shot glancing off the concrete pavement. Jan heard shouts from the street ahead and behind him and swung another fist at the enforcer’s head, feeling something crack. The man staggered and collapsed, dropping the rifle with a loud clatter.
Jan heard loud footsteps and reached behind his back for the dotbow, clicking back the bolt and walking quickly towards the warehouse, away from the tell-tale body of the enforcer. The footfalls grew louder and turned to shouts as more guards rounded the corner. Jan didn’t bother turning, he just ran for a small side door at the warehouse and yanked down the handle. It wouldn’t turn. He pulled again, frantically, and heard the crack of a bullet glancing off the pavement behind him.
‘Give it up, wastelander!’ an enforcer shouted.
Jan sighted along the dotbow, picking out the nearest light in the gloom, and released a bolt. A strangled gasp and the light skittered to the ground. Three more rounds glanced off the warehouse door, missing Jan entirely. He was still shrouded in night while they were easy to spot by their torches, but that advantage wouldn’t last. A sense of sick panic rose as Jan realized he had nowhere to run. Even if he was fast with the dotbow three enforcers presented impossible odds. He turned desperately to the door and yanked the handle one last time.
The door twisted inwards with unexpected force and Jan stared at the face of another armed man. A round glanced off the wall outside, the shouts of the guards growing louder. The man in front of Jan was mostly in shadow, but he spotted the same mountain emblem on a breast patch; it seemed more reassuring than sinister. The man raised the rifle and pointed it at Jan, moving so fast that he didn’t have the slightest chance to react.
Two shots echoed loudly as the stranger fired over Jan’s shoulder, deafening him. He raised both hands to his ears and staggered backwards, unable to hear anything over the ringing.
‘Thanks,’ he managed to say. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
The stranger grinned back at Jan and smashed him over the head with the butt of the rifle.
AdvertisementsI’ve mentioned this in a couple reviews and other articles having to do with displays on Chromebooks, but I wanted to make sure that there was a quick article dedicated to one of my favorite new features of Chrome OS.
This change seems to be only applying to Chromebooks in the 13-inch range at this point, and it is a very welcome addition.
Now, a quick disclaimer: I’m not a display tech professional. There are many things I don’t fully grasp about displays. I know what looks good and what looks bad and a bit about why.
One of those bad things, in the past, has been the resolution scaling for Chrome OS. It has been hit or miss over the years, seemingly working on some and not on others.
Screen Resolution and Scaling
What I mean by this is Chrome OS didn’t scale multiple resolutions very well. In basic terms, scaling is the ability of the UI to resize elements on the screen without losing definition. If your display is full HD, you have 1920 pixels left-to-right and 1080 pixel top-to-bottom.
When the OS is told to render at this resolution, the display knows exactly what to do with that resolution. When you adjust that resolution down a notch to make things larger on your screen (fonts, icons, etc.), your next step is to 1536×864. Up until recently, this resolution did the trick and made things large enough to work with on 13-inch screens, but most fonts and screen elements were left fuzzy and low-resolution.
This is due to LCD screens having specific numbers of pixels unlike the CRT monitors of old. When the pixels rendered by the OS don’t match the number of pixels on offer by the display, things don’t render well.
With both Chromebook Pixels, though, this didn’t seem to be a problem. Those displays are 2560×1700. If those were using native resolution (which you can select if you want), things are literally too small to use. Text is so tiny that you couldn’t read standard size fonts without a bit of magnification.
Yet, out of the box, the Pixel actually selects a 1280×850 resolution as standard and labels it ‘best’. And, it is the best use of the pixels, to be honest.
HP’s Chromebook 13 G1 does this same trick with its 3200×1800 resolution being set as 1600×900 as the ‘best’ default. And on a 13-inch screen, it is the best UI experience I’ve had on a Chromebook.
So what is happening?
This is where Chrome OS scaling takes over. If the display was actually 1280×850, we would have a lower-res look to the screen. You’d see pixels and text wouldn’t be nearly as sharp. So, Chrome OS is using 4 times the pixels on its UI elements in this situation. So if a standard app icon in 1280×850 would be 50×50, when scaled, this icon would take up 100×100 pixels. The number of actual pixels and the number of effective pixels are not the same.
So now, in the space of 50×50 pixels, we have an element using 100×100 pixels. They take up the same space, but one has 4 times the pixels in the same space. Thus, it looks sharp but retains a size that is way more usable.
The same thing has to be done with every element of the UI. Fonts, icons, etc. all have to be treated this way. Thankfully, images and videos can circumvent this treatment and be shown at their native resolution in the middle of all this scaling madness.
What This Means For You
In the end, regardless of whether or not any of that makes sense, you can know that all this scaling technology allows a very important thing to happen. You can select other resolutions in addition to your display’s native resolution and still get a crisp, detailed experience.
Specifically for 13-inch Chromebooks, this has been a pitfall. 1080p natively makes everything very small on 13-inch devices, but there weren’t other options. Sure you could crank up the fonts, but that only effected certain things. You could zoom certain pages and parts of the UI, but that also felt like a stop-gap.
As of now, 13-inch Chromebooks come out of the box set to 1536×864 (the next step down for Chrome OS from 1920×1080). This is a 125% scale. Everything is 25% larger than if you viewed it on a standard 1080p resolution.
While we’ve had this option for some time, Chrome OS treats it like the Pixel and HP 13 G1, re-rendering elements for this resolution. The result is crisp, clear and beautiful. It’s not tough to show, but I’ll try. The images below are my QHD (2560×1440) screen scaled down to 1080p. You’ll see the elements are fuzzy and non-optimized. Below it is a screen grab from the ASUS C301SA in 1536×864. Though this is a notch down, just like the QHD screen, you’ll see things are crisp and clear, not fuzzy.
You can click each to see a full-sized version.
ASUS QHD Screen Scaled To 1080p
ASUS C301SA 1080p Screen Scaled to 1536×864
This single change has absolutely changed my attitude towards 13-inch Chromebooks. No longer is the resolution a hindrance. Instead, 1080p is now an asset that is being fully utilized to enhance the user experience.
To say I am pleased with this change is a massive understatement. I think this is the second most important adjustment to the OS, following the addition of Android Apps. It legitimizes the most popular screen size/resolution combo and makes the experience so much better.
Well done, Google. Well done.The FUTURE becomes unstable, help us save humanity
Dear Duskers,We need your help. Nasty infestations (bugs) of all forms are about to run rampant throughout the 'future' (branch). If you want to be safe then by all means move to the NONE/default branch. But if you want to help us fight the good fight till 1.0 please join us, report things that are wrong, be braced to reset or possibly even clear your data. Updates could be as often as daily so the pace will be blinding, but together we can make a stable future, for the players of tomorrow!For info on how to switch branches see THIS thread.Please cite the game's version number (lower right of main menu and pause menu) in any reported bugs (eg [v0.328])Thank you as always for all the help in these trying times.-Tim Keenan, Commanding Officer: Duskers ProgramThe government has made quoting of biometric identity number Aadhaar mandatory for opening of bank accounts as well as for any financial transaction of Rs 50,000 and above.
Existing bank account holders have been asked to furnish the Aadhaar number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) by December 31, 2017, failing which the account will cease to be operational, according to a revenue department notification.
The government in Budget 2017 has already mandated seeding of Aadhaar number with Permanent Account Number to avoid individuals using multiple PANs to evade taxes.
The notification issued amending the Prevention of Money- laundering (Maintenance of Records) Rules, 2005, mandated quoting of Aadhaar along with PAN or Form 60 by individuals, companies and partnership firms for all financial transactions of Rs 50,000 or above.
Tightening the rules for small accounts, which can be opened without having officially valid KYC documents, the amendment said such accounts - which can have maximum deposit of Rs 50,000, can be opened only at bank branches which have core banking solution.
It can also be opened at a branch where it is possible to manually monitor and ensure that foreign remittance are not credited to such account and stipulated limits on monthly and annual aggregate of transactions and balance are not breached, the amended PMLA rules said.
Such small account shall remain operational initially for a period of 12 months and thereafter for a similar period if the account holder provides evidence that he or she has applied for officially valid identification documents.
"The small account shall be monitored and when there is a suspicion of money laundering or financing of terrorism or other high risk scenarios, the identity of claim shall be established through the production of official valid documents," it said.
The amendment makes it mandatory for individuals, companies and partnership firms to quote Aadhaar along with PAN or Form 60 for all financial transactions of Rs 50,000 or above with effect from June 1.
Post June 1 if a person does not have an Aadhaar number at the time of opening of account, then he has to furnish proof of application of enrolment for Aadhaar and submit the Aadhaar number to the bank within six months of opening of the bank account.
"In case the client, eligible to be enrolled for Aadhaar and obtain a PAN... does not submit the Aadhaar number or the PAN at the time of commencement of an account based relationship with a reporting entity, the client shall submit the same within a period of 6 months from the date of the commencement of the account based relationship.
"Provided that the clients... already having an account based relationship with reporting entities prior to date of this notification, the client shall submit the Aadhaar number and PAN by December 31, 2017," the notification said. So far, as per the PMLA Rules it is mandatory to provide PAN number or Form 60 to banks while opening of accounts or for high value transactions.
For companies opening bank accounts, Aadhaar number of managers, or employees holding an attorney to transact on the company's behalf will have to be provided. Commenting on the development, Nangia & Co Managing Partner Rakesh Nangia said: "With the amendment, obtaining Aadhaar and PAN have gained paramount importance, since the banks are now required to report Aadhaar and PAN in respect of each of its clients' at the time of account opening and in case of existing accounts at the time of making transactions worth Rs 50,000 or more".
The Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) forms the core of the legal framework put in place by India to combat money laundering and generation of black money.
The PMLA and rules impose obligation on reporting entities like banks, financial institutions and intermediaries to verify identity of clients, maintain records and furnish information to Financial Intelligence Unit of India (FIU-IND).
As per Rule 9, every reporting entity shall at the time of commencement of an account-based relationship, identify its clients, verify their identity and obtain information on the purpose and intended nature of the business relationship. In all other cases, identity should be verified while carrying out transaction of an amount equal to or exceeding Rs 50,000, and in any international money transfer operation.Complaints claiming misuse or drift of dicamba herbicide continue to mount in Arkansas. (Graphic courtesy of the Arkansas Agriculture Department)
DECATUR, Ill. (DTN) -- The Arkansas State Plant Board (ASPB) has voted to pass a proposed emergency rule to ban the use of in-crop dicamba, with an exemption for pastureland. The board also ruled to expedite the rule increasing civil penalties for dicamba misuse.
Earlier this year, the board had agreed to increase misuse fines up to $25,000, but those were not originally supposed to kick in until August.
These are just the first steps in the process of establishing an emergency rule, noted Adriane Barnes, Arkansas Agriculture Department director of communications. The next step includes a review of the proposed rule by the governor before being submitted to the Executive Subcommittee of the Arkansas Legislative Council for approval.
Barnes said Gov. Asa Hutchinson has followed this issue closely and has sent a task force to visit farmers in areas with heavy dicamba damage.
The governor reviews rules pursuant to Executive Order 15-02, which ensures that the rules do not place an unnecessary burden on business. Also, the governor only approves the rule for promulgation. It is up to the executive subcommittee to approve the rule as effective.
The ASPB had met earlier this week and appeared to reject the proposed ban. However, after the meeting, a procedural error was discovered. An error in the number of votes needed to pass required the group reconvene for another count.Taking a look at over a thousand of projects waiting for their days to start off once they have passed the moderation stage we can say far too many projects have two things in common: first, they set their Hard Cap, or the maximum sum they are intending to raise during the campaign, not in accordance with their real necessities but with their brightest hopes to become millionaires right away, before ever providing a real product to the audience, and second, putting their Soft Cap, so the minimum expected sum to be raised, almost to the level of charity.
Let us speculate why both things are not just signs of faulty intention or disorder, but actually indicators that the project is very likely to deceive its customers, or even turn out scam in the nearest future.
At first, we all have to consider an incredibly high Hard Cap for most projects is in most cases unreachable and even dangerous for several reasons. One of those is that a hard cap of, for instance, $100 million is too difficult to be raised in the current conditions. Yes, months ago and before it was natural for a big project to collect substantial sums quickly, often without any good quality shown, but several things have changed: the market is getting full of low-quality products, the backer is getting more picky and the supply is growing faster than the demand. Here are the reasons why a hard cap too high to be collected scares a backer away:
the main one is that setting a hard cap way over the actual sum the project needs and setting it over the actual market value of the project makes a backer realize that even if this cap miraculously gets raised, it will consume all the demand for the token on the market and there will be no buyer for it after the ICO; once having been listed on exchanges after the campaign, the token price will inevitably drop due to low demand, therefore for a backer it will be both cheaper and safer to buy the token after the ICO, when the token hits exchanges and the product of the project is already deployed;
another reason is that a project’s ability to deliver a good product relies not solely on a new concept, but also on a fundamental research of the market and its expectations; if one is unable to run such studies, no backer is willing to support the project, since it appears obvious a good product shall not be built on guesses and dreams of a fresh entrepreneur, but it shall be based on solid investigation of the market and have its goals carefully estimated and calculated;
in addition to the two above, let us remind everyone backers normally make a judgement based on what they can see and analyze and not what one promises them, so a project expecting a high cap without a reasonable basis for it would be naturally considered a scam and therefore ignored.
Besides the described above mistake of letting the project’s hard cap skyrocket before the project itself, there is also the mentioned intention of many projects to provide a threshold level soft cap often 10 and sometimes even more times lower than their hard cap. That is nothing better than selling a project too high, for it tells a backer the project team underestimates the conditions and overestimates the product provided:
the first important point is that a low soft cap in the backers’ opinion does not seem to correspond with a high hard cap; again, this is not about a low soft cap itself but about a clearly designed project in which every part complies with the market standards; if a project sets a hard cap of, for instance, $20 million, and its soft cap of $1 million, it means either the hard cap is heavily overestimated and will cause all the problems described above, or that the soft cap is unduly understated, and thus, even if the soft cap is collected, the project might not have enough funds to start off and will probably take years to launch;
the second point to consider is that a soft cap is basically the border hitting which the project states it has gained enough support to start operating; if a project doesn’t reach its soft cap, it is required to refund all its backers — therefore a soft cap too low in comparison with a high hard cap is often a sign that the project neither realizes its true value and is hunting to collect as much as possible no matter what, nor it is actually willing to refund its backers in case of failure.
Altogether, we regard such seemingly minor aspects of a campaign as Hard Cap and Soft Cap as absolutely essential for they provide us with an opportunity to estimate the credibility of a project and financial wisdom of a team. Having said that, we hereby declare we will not welcome projects with unreasonably high hard caps and we will make it a requirement to set the soft cap not lower than 30% of the hard cap in order to make ICOs easier to evaluate and thus safer for backers.
Do not forget to follow our further updates and news in: Telegram (eng),Twitter (eng), Facebook(eng),Facebook group (eng)Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio) on Tuesday rejected President Obama’s offer to negotiate a long-term fiscal deal in exchange for temporary measures to end the government shutdown and lift the debt ceiling.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Obama said that if House Republicans re-opened the government and lifted the nation’s borrowing authority — even for a few months — he would enter into wide-ranging talks that could include his signature healthcare law and issues related to the debt.
“If they want to do that, reopen the government. Extend the debt ceiling. If they can’t do it for a long time, do it for the period of time in which these negotiations are taking place,” Obama said.
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But Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE shot down that opening at his own press conference, characterizing it as a demand for “unconditional surrender” from the GOP.
“What the president said today was, if there’s unconditional surrender by Republicans, he’ll sit down and talk to us,” Boehner said. “That’s not the way America works.”
It was not immediately clear whether Obama’s suggestion for a short-term deal represented a possible way out for both sides ahead of an Oct. 17 deadline for raising the debt ceiling.
During a press conference lasting more than an hour, Obama said he could not take unilateral action to lift the borrowing limit, and warned that a default would be catastrophic for the economy.
“There would be a significant risk of a very deep recession,” Obama said. “This is our word. This is our good name. This is real.”
The president has refused to offer concessions in exchange for Republicans raising the borrowing limit and ending the shutdown, but his comments on Tuesday suggested he would be willing to do so, provided Republicans first agreed to short-term extensions.
Speaking about 90 minutes after Obama’s press conference ended, the Speaker detailed a history of presidents from Ronald Reagan to Obama himself who negotiated broad deficit-reduction packages.
“The long and the short of it is, there’s going to be a negotiation here,” Boehner said.
The Speaker said he wants a deal now: “… it’s time to have that conversation — not next week, not next month.”
His remarks closed a long day of political posturing in which the status quo prevailed: the federal government remained shuttered for an eighth consecutive day, and the nation moved a day closer to the Oct. 17 deadline set by the Treasury Department for avoiding a first-ever default on the debt.
The House voted to reopen the Head Start program in its 10th piecemeal funding measure, a strategy that the White House and Senate Democrats have rejected.
And House Republicans moved forward on a separate package to pay federal employees deemed “essential” while forming a special, bicameral committee of 20 to hash out a long-term deficit-reduction plan that would include a budget and an increase in the debt ceiling.
The plan was announced to Republicans in passing during a closed-door conference meeting Tuesday morning, and the GOP leadership brought it quickly to the floor for an evening vote.
“The Senate is refusing to talk and work out a solution to the imminent problems that we are into,” Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said. “The purpose of the bill is to create a place, an avenue to get together with the White House and the Senate.”
While Republicans said the move was designed to highlight Democratic intransigence and force them to the negotiating table, it drew unfavorable comparisons to the failed supercommittee that emerged from the last major debt-ceiling deal, in 2011.
The inability of that earlier panel to reach a budget deal set in motion the sequestration spending cuts that both parties have criticized.
GOP leadership aides pushed back on the suggestion that the new panel would be a rehash of the 2011 effort.
“House Republicans are proposing a working group for bipartisan discussions about a path forward — a negotiating team, NOT a ‘supercommittee,’ ” one aide wrote in an email to reporters.
The GOP plan would not include a timetable for striking an agreement, nor would it have triggered policy changes if a deal failed to materialize.
The White House issued a formal veto threat for the legislation late Tuesday afternoon.
While Obama signaled openness to a short-term deal to buy time for a broader plan, he questioned the need for a new committee — and the sincerity of the Republican offer to negotiate.
“The leaders up in Congress, they can work through whatever processes they want, but the bottom line is either you’re having good-faith negotiations in which you’re having a give and take, or you’re not,” Obama said.
The president said that it appeared the GOP was pursuing a framework for the panel in which Republicans would demand negotiations on areas of the budget that concern them, while eliminating discussion of items like closing corporate tax loopholes that Democrats have demanded.
“I don’t know why Democrats right now would agree to a format that takes off the table everything they care about,” Obama said.
“They can design whatever formats they want,” he said. “What is not fair and will not result in an actual deal is ransom taking or hostage taking.”
With the debt-ceiling deadline approaching, talk about a stopgap plan increased in the Capitol.
Boehner ally Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said he hoped Obama’s openness to a short-term increase to the debt ceiling meant he was moving toward a debt negotiation, but he noted that the openness was accompanied by a lot of heated rhetoric.
“I hope so, but it didn’t sound optimistic listening to his press conference — an hour and a half of saying ‘no, I’m not going to negotiate,’ ” Simpson said. “So we’ll see. But I’m sure Republicans would go along with that.”
“The only reason to do a short-term [deal] is if there is a framework laid out to negotiate. If he is willing to do that, there could be a short-term increase in the debt limit,” he said.
Earlier in the day, another senior Republican close to the leadership, Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.), also voiced openness to a short-term measure.
“I suspect if it’s a serious negotiation, that could probably happen,” he said. “That’s not unusual. That’s the history of these things.”
But even that kind of temporary measure would need Democratic votes, Cole added.
“I think we could support what our leadership asks us to support, and if it’s a real negotiation, there will be votes from both sides,” he said after the House GOP meeting.
Bernie Becker contributed.
Updated at 8:34 p.m.Typically I would hand out game balls for the previous game today, but looking around the World Wide Web, I noticed game balls are kind of a bland award.
The new rage is rewarding the unheralded big guys (not Ryback, he is bad). There's the Piesman Trophy that SB Nation is now doing and Stephen White gives out his Hoss Of The Week awards. So, I thought to myself as a fat guy, I too, would like to recognize the big guys.
So I am happy to introduce the Big Cat Country Fat Cat Award. Each week, I’ll hand out the award to one of the big uglies in the trenches for the Jacksonville Jaguars. It may not be the person with the best stat line or who made the best plays, but someone who made an impact in my eyes on the field.
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in Foreign Affairs. They even quote former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's line about "known unknowns," (that is, things that Saddam Hussein might be hiding) being a cause to consider going to war with Iraq in February 2002.
They write that in the case of Iran, the "known unknowns" are "troubling," and go on to outline a case for a broad US war to bring down the Islamic Republic. Having asserted that US airstrikes targeting Iran's nuclear sites would probably fail in ending the program, they write: "Given the likely fallout from even a limited military strike, the question the United States should ask itself is, Why not take the next step? After all, Iran's nuclear program is a symptom of a larger illness – the revolutionary fundamentalist regime in Tehran."
They then suggest that a broad US air campaign against Iran would be popular with Iranians. "It is sometimes said that a strike would lead the population to rally around the regime. In fact, given the unpopularity of the government, it seems more likely that the population would see the regime's inability to forestall the attacks as evidence that the emperor has no clothes and is leading the country into needlessly desperate straits. If anything, Iranian nationalism and pride would stoke even more anger at the current regime."
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That flies in the face of Iranian history and what most Iranians – including members of the Green Movement – say about how the population would respond to war. While there is clearly great discontent with the regime, and many millions of Iranians would like to throw off clerical rule, the history of Iran suggests that war would probably result in an uptick in support for the regime, confronted as it would be by a hostile foreign power. When Saddam Hussein gambled that Iran was weak in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and went to war, the result was a rallying of support for the fledgling Iranian regime and a ruinous war that helped the country's new theocrats consolidate their power.
For now, the war talk looks set to go on. But with Iranian parliamentary elections scheduled for March – a chance for the opposition to perhaps show its political strength, or another occasion for Iran's rulers to fix the results, as happened in the 2009 presidential reelection – the chances of action soon are vanishingly slim. Diplomats and leaders, from President Obama to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will sit back awhile and watch to see if sanctions are working, if the regime will start to unravel from within, well aware that wars are much easier to start than to get out of.Dolphins are 'people' say scientists BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Dolphins deserve to be treated as non-human "persons" whose rights to life and liberty should be respected, scientists meeting in Canada have been told. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/dolphins-are-people-say-scientists-28716960.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/migration_catalog/article25826722.ece/2fbf7/AUTOCROP/h342/dolphin
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Dolphins deserve to be treated as non-human "persons" whose rights to life and liberty should be respected, scientists meeting in Canada have been told.
A small group of experts in philosophy, conservation and dolphin behaviour were canvassing support for a "Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans".
They believe dolphins - and their whale cousins - are sufficiently intelligent and self-aware to justify the same ethical considerations given to humans.
Recognising cetaceans' rights would mean an end to whaling and the captivity of dolphins and whales, or their use in entertainment.
The move is based on years of research that has shown dolphins and whales to have large, complex brains and a human-like level of self-awareness.
This has led the experts to conclude that although non-human, dolphins and whales are "people" in a philosophical sense, which has far-reaching implications.
Ethics expert Professor Tom White, from Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, author of In Defence of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier, said: "Dolphins are non-human persons. A person needs to be an individual. If individuals count, then the deliberate killing of individuals of this sort is ethically the equivalent of deliberately killing a human being.
"The captivity of beings of this sort, particularly in conditions that would not allow for a decent life, is ethically unacceptable; commercial whaling is ethically unacceptable.
"We're saying the science has shown that individuality, consciousness, self awareness, is no longer a unique human property. That poses all kinds of challenges."
The declaration, originally agreed in May 2010, contains the statements "every individual cetacean has the right to life", "no cetacean should be held in captivity or servitude, be subject to cruel treatment, or be removed from their natural environment", and "no cetacean is the property of any state, corporation, human group or individual".
It adds: "The rights, freedoms and norms set forth in this declaration should be protected under international and domestic law."
The US authors brought their message to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Vancouver, Canada, the world's biggest science conference.
Psychologist Dr Lori Marino, from Emory University in Atlanta, told how scientific advances had changed the view of the cetacean brain.
She said: "We went from seeing the dolphin/whale brain as being a giant amorphous blob that doesn't carry a lot of intelligence and complexity to not only being an enormous brain but an enormous brain with an enormous amount of complexity, and a complexity that rivals our own. Its different in the way it's put together but in terms of the level of complexity its very similar to the human brain."
Dolphins had a sense of self which could be tested by the way they recognise themselves in mirrors, she added.
"When you get up in the morning and look in the mirror and know that's you, you have a sense of 'you'," said Dr Marino. "They have a similar sense. They can look in a mirror and say, 'Hey, that's me'."
She argued that whaling was an example of mass murder rather than a commercial operation.
"Once you shift from seeing a being as a property, a commodity, a resource, to a person, an autonomous entity that has a right to life on his or her own terms, the whole framework shifts.. this is not about harvesting resources, this is about murder," said Dr Marino.
The experts cited unusual examples of dolphin and whale behaviour both in the wild and in captivity.
A member of a group of orcas, or killer whales, in Patagonia had a damaged jaw and could not feed. The elderly whale was fed and kept alive by its companions.
Dolphins taking part in an experiment had to press one of two levers to distinguish between sounds, some of which were very similar. By pressing a third lever, they were able to tell the researchers they wanted to "pass" on a particular test because it was too hard. "When you place dolphins in a situation like that they respond in exactly the same way humans do," said Dr Lori. "They are accessing their own minds and thinking their own thoughts."
A number of captive dolphins were rewarded with fish in return for tidying up their tank. One of them ripped up a large paper bag, hid away the pieces, and presented them one at a time to get multiple rewards.
In Iceland, killer whales and fishermen have been known to work together. The whales show the fishermen where to lay their nets, and in return are allowed to feed on part of the catch. Then they lead the fleet to the next fishing ground.
Belfast TelegraphVladimir Putin has declared victory in Russia's presidential elections, returning for a third term after spending the last four years as the country's PM.
Exit polls and preliminary results gave him about 60% of the vote.
Mr Putin told supporters at a rally in central Moscow they had won in an open and honest battle.
But opposition groups have reported widespread fraud, with many people said to have voted more than once.
They have called for mass protests in central Moscow on Monday.
Meanwhile tens of thousands of supporters of Mr Putin gathered with Russian flags and banners outside the Kremlin for a concert to celebrate his victory.
Making a brief appearance with current President Dmitry Medvedev, Mr Putin thanked his supporters from "every corner" of the country.
Analysis The clear majority of around 60% of the vote for Vladimir Putin, being predicted by exit polls almost the moment polls closed, probably came as no surprise to many Russians. Those who favour him would say that it reinforced their view that his experience and strongman style always made him the most appropriate candidate for president, and the exit polls merely showed that most Russians agreed with them. Those opposed to him would say it confirmed their suspicion that this Russian presidential election, like the parliamentary elections in December, was once again not a fair reflection of the country's preferences, but a precooked theatrical display, manipulated to produce the result the Kremlin always wanted. It will take time to confirm whether or not the suspicions of violations hold water. In the meantime, a pro-Putin election rally in front of the Kremlin, has already sent out a message that the contest is over and the third age of "Putinism", his return to the presidency for a third time, is now beyond dispute.
"I promised you we would win, and we won," he said, his eyes watering. "Glory to Russia!"
"We have won in an open and honest battle.
"We proved that no-one can force anything on us."
Slogans on the banner included "Putin - our president" and "We believe in Putin", but there were indications that some participants had been ordered to attend.
There is tight security in the city, with 6,000 extra police brought in from outside.
High turnout
The electoral commission showed preliminary results, with returns from more than half the polling districts, showing Mr Putin gaining over 64%, enough to give him a first-round victory over nearest rival Gennady Zyuganov, with about 17%.
The other three candidates were in single digits.
In a news conference after the polls closed, Mr Zyuganov described the elections as "unfair and unworthy".
But he said that with increasing public anger, Mr Putin "would not be able to rule like he used to".
"These elections cannot be considered legitimate in any way," said Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the leaders of the street protest movement, which was not represented in the election.
Meanwhile Mr Putin's campaign chief Stanislav Govorukhin described the poll as "the cleanest in Russian history".
The turnout was 58.3% by 18:00 Moscow time (14:00 GMT), considerably higher than in 2008 elections. Electoral officials forecast a final turnout of 62.3%.
The election was held against a backdrop of popular discontent, sparked by allegations of widespread fraud during December's parliamentary elections in favour of Mr Putin's United Russia party.
Observer organisations said there had been thousands of violations including so-called carousel voting, with busloads of voters being driven around to different polling stations.
The alleged fraud came despite the presence of thousands of independent observers and web cameras at polling stations.
Opposition blogger and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny told the BBC: "Grandiose scale of falsifications, especially in Moscow... mass use of carousel voting."Friday on ABC’s “The View,” former ESPN and MSNBC broadcaster Keith Olbermann said he believed Osama bin Laden did less to hurt the United States than President Donald Trump.
Partial transcript as follows:
HOSTIN: You said recently via tweet that Trump and his family have done more damage to America than bin Laden and ISIS combined. Do you believe that?
OLBERMANN: Yeah, we did really well after 9/11. I don’t think that the country has given itself enough credit for what we did not do. We did not restrict all the freedoms in this country. We did not single out people.
MCCAIN: 3,000 people died on 9/11.
OLBERMANN: Yes.
MCCAIN: The comparison is absurd.
OLBERMANN: But more people died in the Iraq War than died in 9/11. We didn’t need to be there as a response.
MCCAIN: You think Bin Laden did less to damage America than President Trump?
OLBERMANN: Yes.
MCCAIN: Can I tell you something? When I hear rhetoric like that, I think Whoopi and I are in agreement that we want Americans to come together. Rhetoric like that is so damaging. By the way, my brother fought in the Iraq war and deployed numerous times. So before we start tit for tatting, there’s a lot of service in my family. So I don’t understand, when you are saying things like that, bin Laden was dedicated to destruction of all, everything that we hold dear and our freedom, so when you compare it to that —As we watched with the new promotional video and the halloween masks of environmental horrors, created by Sid Lee Toronto and the Sid Lee Collective, WWF’s new ad campaign with halloween is showing us who the real scary monsters are.
“The damage humans are doing to the planet is much scarier than any imaginary monster,” says executive creative director Jeffrey Da Silva of Sid Lee Toronto. “Kids seem to know this better than adults, and Halloween night felt like the perfect time to spark a conversation about what they are truly scared of.”
The “Real Scary” line includes masks for Factory Farming, Overfishing, Pesticides and Oil Spills. Along with the masks, posters and social posts will be shared far and wide. Also a pop-up exhibit took place at Rally in Toronto, with all proceeds going to the WWF.
Here download the pdf with high-res print ready masks; print, cut, wear and scare.
You can find more information on campaign website realscary.caBaggy the housemeow is a hilariously cheeky calico cat who lives at Care Rescue Texas with her loving human Derek Krahn aka BigCatDerek, and a whole bunch of beautiful rescued wild animals. Feeling a little feisty one day, Baggy very boldly picked a fight with a confused lion named Noey, staring the big cat down through a fence until she decided to break the gaze. Krahn was absolutely amazed by the audaciousness of his little calico and wasn’t afraid to say so. Luckily, figurative fences were mended and the two felines are once again friends.
Baggy the housemeow has always been a tough little cookie, but I never thought she was this degree of crazy. All is well, everything settled, and her & Noey (the lion) are back on speaking terms.
While Baggy showed her tough side with Noey, she was much less impressed with Krahn’s fidget spinner.
A post shared by Derek Krahn (@bigcatderek) on May 19, 2017 at 6:56pm PDT
via MashableNewswise — As anyone who’s ever mixed up the sugar and salt while baking knows, too much of a good thing can be inedible. What hasn’t been clear, though, is how our tongues and brains can tell when the saltiness of our food has crossed the line from yummy to yucky — or, worse, something dangerous.
Now researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the University of California, Santa Barbara report that in fruit flies, at least, that process is controlled by competing input from two different types of taste-sensing cells: one that attracts flies to salty foods, and one that repels them. Results of their research are described in the June 14 issue of Science.
“The body needs sodium for crucial tasks like putting our muscles into action and letting brain cells communicate with each other, but too much sodium will cause heart problems and other health concerns,” explains Yali Zhang, Ph.D., who led the recent study as part of his graduate work at Johns Hopkins. To maintain health, Zhang says, humans and other animals perceive foods with relatively low salt concentrations as tasty, but avoid eating things with very high salt content.
To find out how the body pulls off this balancing act, Zhang worked with his adviser, Craig Montell, Ph.D., a leading scientist in the field of sensory biology and now a professor at UC Santa Barbara, and graduate student Jinfei Ni to get an up-close view of the fly equivalent of a tongue: its long, curly proboscis. They zoomed in on the proboscis’ so-called sensilla, hair-like structures that serve as the fly’s taste buds.
Previous research had identified several distinct types of sensilla, one of which attracts flies to a taste, while another repels them. Zhang loaded an electrode with a mixture of water and different concentrations of salt, and touched it to each type of sensilla, using the same electrode to detect the electrical signals fired by the sensilla in response to the salt. He found that up to a point, increasing salt concentrations would produce increasingly strong electrical signals in the attractive sensilla, but after that point, the electrical signals dropped off as the concentration continued to rise. In contrast, the repellant sensilla gave off stronger and stronger electrical signals as the salt concentration rose.
Zhang said the team realized that the taste receptor cells in the attractive and repellant sensilla were likely locked in a tug-of-war over whether the fly would continue eating or go off in search of better food. At lower concentrations, the attractive signal would dominate the repellant signal, sending a cumulative message of “yum!” But at high concentrations, the repellant signal would overwhelm the attractive signal, sending the signal “yuck!”
To further test this conclusion, the team mutated a gene called Ir76b that codes for a protein they suspected was involved in the action of the attractive sensilla. To their great surprise, Zhang found that loss of Ir76b function caused flies to avoid the otherwise attractive low-salt food. The reason for this, he found, was that mutating Ir76b only impaired the responses of the attractive sensilla, leaving the repellant sensilla to win the day. Looking further into the action of the protein produced by Ir76b, the team found that it is a channel with a pore that lets sodium pass into the taste cells of the sensilla. Unlike most pores of this type, which have gates that must be opened by certain key chemical or voltage changes in their environment, this gate is always open, meaning that at any time, sodium can flood into the cell and spark an electrical signal. “It’s an unusual setup, but it makes sense because the local sodium concentration outside taste receptor cells appears to be a lot lower than that surrounding most cells. The taste receptor cells don’t need to keep the gate closed to protect themselves from that excess sodium,” Zhang says.
Long before we humans started worrying about regulating our sodium intake, it was a problem all animals had to deal with, Zhang says, and thus his research has implications for other animals, including humans. Although animal taste buds and insect sensilla have different makeups, he suspects that the tug-of-war principle may apply to salt-tasting throughout the animal kingdom, given that different species behave similarly when it comes to salty foods. Identifying the low-salt sensor in humans could be particularly useful, he says, as it could lead to the development of better salt substitutes to help people control their sodium intake.
This study was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (DC007864).
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Fruit Fly Discovery Generates Buzz About Brain-Damaging Disorder in ChildrenTonight marks the premiere of The A-List: Dallas, the second installment in Logo's ongoing investigation into the shopping habits, eating disorders and testicular size discrepancies of the 10 percent of the 1 percent who make up America's homosexual elite. And already it's tinged with sssssscandale!
Last week, cast member Taylor Garrett — a "powerhouse Christian Gay Republican," according to his Logo bio, with "a resume that includes the likes of Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry" — tweeted, "My place is nice and breezy now thanks to a liberal!" Attached was a photo of a threatening message which was allegedly tied to a rock and thrown through his window. The message, which you can read above, was written in the voice of a gay person, who Garrett claimed was outraged over Logo's decision to have conservative pundit/black-hole-of-decency Ann Coulter appear on the show.
Blogger Joe Jervis suspected the message may have been faked, and tweeted a response to Garrett questioning the lack of a police report. Garrett tweeted back: "there were plenty of reports! Kudos to your research abilities!" No police reports have yet surfaced. Garrett also prodded John Hill, executive producer of the series, after he tweeted congratulations to Garrett for "making headlines." Not long after that, both Garrett's tweet and Hill's well-wishes had vanished from Twitter.
The only statement from Logo on the incident, relayed via the network's official blog, conveys that they believe the incident really happened. And maybe it did! Come to think of it, does Marcus Bachmann have an airtight alibi for the night of the rock-throwing? If there's anything a Republican de-gayer hates, it's a proudly gay Republican. [Joe.My.God. via Towleroad, Photos via Joe.My.God, DallasVoice.com]Starting with the Spotify API
Before we can preform any analysis, we need to learn how to login, here is how I did that:
import spotipy
from spotipy.oauth2 import SpotifyClientCredentials
import spotipy.util as util
cid ="<Client ID from Earlier>"
secret = "<Client Secret from Earlier>"
username = ""
client_credentials_manager = SpotifyClientCredentials(client_id=cid, client_secret=secret)
sp = spotipy.Spotify(client_credentials_manager=client_credentials_manager)
scope = 'user-library-read playlist-read-private'
token = util.prompt_for_user_token(username, scope)
if token:
sp = spotipy.Spotify(auth=token)
else:
print("Can't get token for", username)
The first thing this does is to initialize a client_credentials_manager, which tells Spotify which of your Spotify Applications to connect to. Once we know which application we want to connect to, we define a scope. This scope tells Spotify what our application will need to do, check out the link below for more info.
After the scope is defined, we can login. If this works, the script should redirect you to a fancy Spotify login page. After you login, it will redirect you to the Redirect URL that we defined earlier. Also, the notebook will ask you to paste the url you were redirected to into a prompt to continue. Once you do that and it accepts the request, you are logged into Spotify!
With the basic Spotify stuff out of the way, we can turn to the data analytics part of the project.
Data Gathering
This was the most tedious part of the whole process. I needed to gather two playlists, one filled with songs that I didn’t like and one filled with songs that I did.
Finding the songs I liked was relatively easy, I just added all the songs I had saved and all the songs off some playlists I like. But that was only half the battle.
Have you ever tried to seek out bad music?? Trust me: It’s a pain.
I started by paying a visit to some friends who’s music taste I don’t like and added a bunch of their favorite songs. Eventually, I ran out of friends. But, then I remembered that Spotify has genre sorted playlists! Huzzah! I went into genres I didn’t like and added a bunch of songs. This eventually got me to about how many songs I wanted.
Disclaimer: I know this isn’t the best way to gather the data but I really didn’t want to spend the time to get a representative sample of songs I don’t like, I just wanted to get something that worked good enough.
All of this song gathering involved a bunch of moving songs from one playlist to another. Here’s a code snippet to get the songs from one playlist into another:
sourcePlaylist = sp.user_playlist("<source user>", "<Source Playlist ID>")
tracks = sourcePlaylist["tracks"]
songs = tracks["items"]
while tracks['next']:
tracks = sp.next(tracks)
for item in tracks["items"]:
songs.append(item)
ids = []
print(len(songs))
print(songs[0]['track']['id'])
i = 0
for i in range(len(songs)):
sp.user_playlist_add_tracks("<target user>", "<Target Playlist ID>", [songs[i]["track"]["id"]])
In order to move the songs, you need the user and playlist id. You can get it from the link to the playlist, heres an example: https://open.spotify.com/user/<user>/playlist/<playlistID>
Side note: I would recommend about 1500–2000 songs in your good and bad playlists at the end of this.
Data Analytics
Getting the Audio Features
Now that we have our playlists of good and bad songs, how do we analyze them?
Luckily for us, Spotify provides us a way to do that — the Audio Feature Object.
This is the object, from the docs:
This object is the cornerstone of our analysis. We don’t really have access to the raw audio waveforms or other statistics (ie. number of plays, how long we listen to a song, ect.) to make our analysis better. This, while it is not perfect, helps us to draw some basic conclusions on characteristics we like in a song.
To get the audio features of the a song, we need to use the sp.audio_features(<SongID>) call. This requires us to pass in a Song ID to get the features for that track.
Q: But all we have so far is two playlists of good and bad songs, how do we get the song ID’s for all those songs?
A: I got you.
good_playlist = sp.user_playlist("1287242681", "5OdH7PmotfAO7qDGxKdw3J")
good_tracks = good_playlist["tracks"]
good_songs = good_tracks["items"]
while good_tracks['next']:
good_tracks = sp.next(good_tracks)
for item in good_tracks["items"]:
good_songs.append(item)
good_ids = []
for i in range(len(good_songs)- 500):
good_ids.append(good_songs[i]['track']['id'])
First, we grab the playlist by the user id (“1287242681”) and playlist ID (“5OdH7PmotfAO7qDGxKdw3J”). Once we have the playlist, we need to iterate through it to pick out each song in the playlist and then pick out the id from that song. After this block ends we will have the good song id’s in the good_ids array.
Now we make the call to get the audio features from Spotify:
features = []
for i in range(0,len(good_ids),50):
audio_features = sp.audio_features(good_ids[i:i+50])
for track in audio_features:
features.append(track)
features[-1]['target'] = 1
The only quirk about the audio features call is that we can only get the features for 50 songs at once. So, we can just split the ids by 50 and pass them in 50 at a time. Here we add all the audio features to an array along with a “target” field to specify if we like the song or not.
All that is left is to do repeat the same steps for the bad playlist and we can start doing some actual analysis!
Graphs on Graphs on Graphs
All we need to do in order to start looking at our graphical goodness is to insert the data into a Pandas DataFrame.
trainingData = pd.DataFrame(features)
I used matplotlib for my plotting. Here are some of the interesting comparisons from my listening data.
Note: Songs I like represented by blue and songs I don’t like are in red.
Tempo comparison between songs I like and don’t
Valence comparison between songs I like and don’t
The first graph looks at the tempo of the songs. From that graph, we can see that we can’t really use tempo to reliably predict if I’ll like a song. The next graph is something called Valence. Valence is a measure of how happy a song sounds. This graph is showing that I strongly prefer sad songs rather than happy ones. The rest of the graphs for all the other audio features can be found in the notebook.
Now that we have some graphs, lets train a classifier and see how good it is at predicting the songs I like!
Using different classifiers and seeing how they preform
Just a little bit of a definition before we get started.
Classifier: something that tries to classify data into a couple different buckets based on different input values.
Here is a nice comparison between different classifiers and how they shape around different data.
If you still want to learn more about different types of classifiers, Google is your friend!
In order to make any classifier work, we need to split our data into a training and testing set so we have some data to train our model with and some data to test the aforementioned model. This can be accomplished with an sklearn function called train_test_split() which splits the data according to a test_size percent specified in the method. The code below breaks up the data into 85% train, 15% test.
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
train, test = train_test_split(trainingData, test_size = 0.15)
After we split the data we will put it into a train/test x and y variables to input into our classifiers.
#Define the set of features that we want to look at
features = ["danceability", "loudness", "valence", "energy", "instrumentalness", "acousticness", "key", "speechiness", "duration_ms"]
#Split the data into x and y test and train sets to feed them into a bunch of classifiers!
x_train = train[features]
y_train = train["target"]
x_test = test[features]
y_test = test["target"]
Decision Tree Classifier
A Decision Tree Classifier is the first classifier I’ll look at because it is the easiest to visualize. Here is a code snippet that shows how you fit the model to the training data, predict values based off of the test data and then show the accuracy of the model.
c = DecisionTreeClassifier(min_samples_split=100)
dt = c.fit(x_train, y_train)
y_pred = c.predict(x_test)
score = accuracy_score(y_test, y_pred) * 100
print("Accuracy using Decision Tree: ", round(score, 1), "%")
The most important part of this classifier configuration is the min_samples_split value. This is the value at which the tree will split based on a characteristic. Here is a little part of the decision tree.
A snippet of the Decision Tree to show the decisions and number of samples in each bucket
The Decision Tree gave me an accuracy of only 80%, which is good, but we can do better.
KNeighborsClassifier
from sklearn.neighbors import KNeighborsClassifier
knn = KNeighborsClassifier(3)
knn.fit(x_train, y_train)
knn_pred = c.predict(x_test)
score = accuracy_score(y_test, knn_pred) * 100
print("Accuracy using Knn Tree: ", round(score, 1), "%")
The K-Nearest Neighbors classifier looks at the neighbors of a data point in order to determine what the output is. So in our case, it takes in a new songs audio features, plots it and looks at the songs around it to figure out if I will like it or not. This approach only gave us an accuracy of 80%, the same as the Decision Tree. I wasn’t very hopeful for this type of classifier because the data I was training from wasn’t well separated along distinct characteristics.
AdaBoostClassifier and GradientBoostingClassifier
from sklearn.ensemble import AdaBoostClassifier
ada = AdaBoostClassifier(n_estimators=100)
ada.fit(x_train, y_train)
ada_pred = ada.predict(x_test)
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score
score = accuracy_score(y_test, ada_pred) * 100
print("Accuracy using ada: ", round(score, 1), "%")
from sklearn.ensemble import GradientBoostingClassifier
gbc = GradientBoostingClassifier(n_estimators=100, learning_rate=.1, max_depth=1, random_state=0)
gbc.fit(x_train, y_train)
predicted = gbc.predict(x_test)
score = accuracy_score(y_test, predicted)*100
print("Accuracy using Gbc: ", round(score, 1), "%")
Both of these classifiers operate in a similar way. They both start by creating a relatively weak “learner” (something used to make predictions) and then use the results of classifying to modify the “learner” and make it better at predicting things in the future.
AdaBoost works by fitting that learner and then between every iteration of the data, it modifies the way it predicts in order to try and classify the more difficult cases with a better accuracy. This classifier had 84.3% accuracy when I ran it.
Gradient Boosting uses the loss function (a measure of how far off the prediction was from the true value) and tries to reduce that loss function with each iteration. This classifier had a 85.5% accuracy when I ran it.
Disclaimer: These accuracy values will change every time you run the classifiers, so don’t worry if you don’t get the same values that I do.
All we have to do now is to pick the classifier that had the highest accuracy on our training data (for me it was the Gradient Boost) and measure how well it preforms in the real world!
Results
In order to test my classifier, I ran it on my Discover Weekly for 4 weeks. Discover Weekly is 30 songs, so I had a total of 120 songs to test. In order to do this, repeat the steps we went through for loading our good and bad playlists, but after, just call the predict function of the classifier.
pred = gbc.predict(playlistToLookAtFeatures[features])
i = 0
for prediction in pred:
if(prediction == 1):
print ("Song: " + playlistToLookAtFeatures["song_title"][i] + ", By: "+ playlistToLookAtFeatures["artist"][i])
i = i +1
The classifier picked 66 songs that it thought I would like. Listening to all the songs, I picked out 31 songs that I liked. The classifier and my personal likes shared 23 songs. So, my classifier identified 43 songs that it said I would like but didn’t. However, it only missed 8 songs that I liked. In spite of getting a bunch of false positives, I would call that a success for my first delve into anything like this!
The Future
Eventually I want to get into using Tensorflow, the open source machine learning library from Google, and hopefully make a better model out of the tools that they provide me. I also eventually want to incorporate this classifier into a larger system to pick me out a “Discover Weekly” playlist every day so I can constantly be on the lookout for new music.Starward Rogue is a roguelite bullet-hell shooter from indie studio Arcen Games with 157 positive reviews out of 158 on its Steam page at the time of this writing. Released barely one week ago on January 22nd, its launch sales have compelled the founder and CEO of Arcen, Christopher Park, to announce something quite unexpected: most of the company’s staff will be laid off. As of January 28th, Starward Rogue’s absolute peak on the Steam bestseller ranking was #98, a far cry from the top 40 minimum that Arcen was counting on.
“Unfortunately, Starward Rogue has seen financially the worst launch for us except for [prior Arcen titles] Tidalis and Shattered Haven,” writes Park in a blog post detailing the crisis. According to SteamSpy’s numbers as of January 29th, the end of the launch discount period, Starward Rogue is owned by under 4000 people – including a small surge since the publishing of Park’s post.
There appear to be many possible factors in the dismal launch of an apparently quality indie title. Park himself is quick to lay part of the blame on a complicated situation involving a title Arcen is still developing, Stars Beyond Reach, which seems to have been a little too ambitious. “I have over 160 hours playing the game, and it is a fun and intriguing game in quite a lot of ways,” Park writes. “But it is just missing… something.” Ultimately, he concludes, “The game was not (and still is not) at a state it needs to be for me to feel good about trying to sell it to you.”
To generate revenue for the overtime and overbudget Stars Beyond Reach, the less demanding Starward Rogue was pushed into production around October 2015. Unfortunately, the breakneck development pace meant that the usual pre-launch marketing was severely truncated. Although the push was helped with a Bionic Dues bundle, unfortunate timing only added to the visibility problem, as searches for upcoming 2016 film Star Wars: Rogue One swallowed up Starward Rogue in the Google rankings. (For reference, these are the YouTube results for “Starward Rogue trailer.”)
Meanwhile, Steam had changed its discounting policies. The resulting decreased revenue from period discount sales and store-wide sales “gutted” Arcen’s income, forcing the company to depend more than ever on Starward Rogue’s January launch to fund further development. With sales far below what the positive reception would seem to indicate, Park has been left with no choice but to lay off all but two of his full-time employees.
“It’s very embarrassing for me to come back and do this a second time,” Park writes, referring to revenue problems publicized by games media in 2010. Still, he’s not abandoning Starward Rogue, which will continue to receive bug fixes and even additional content, such as new enemies, through a team of “former-contractors now-volunteers.” The future may yet look up for Arcen, according to Park: “Our problem seems to be one of exposure for Starward Rogue. Unless I am very much missing something, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why it shouldn’t be happily finding a smiling audience about now […] the only thing that I’m wanting is for the game to have a chance to actually find its audience.”
Do you think Starward Rogue has yet to find its playerbase? Given all the recent coverage, we’ll hope for the best!
Share Have a tip for us? Awesome! Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take a look!MBTA, Taxes and Budget Issues, Transportation
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THE MBTA’s COMMUTER RAIL operator thinks it has a secret weapon in the effort to recoup as much as $35 million in lost revenues from fare evasion – snitches.
That was among several |
satisfactory” Mr Hanney said.
The council has decided to change tack and concentrate on specific, small areas at a time within the north inner city for improvement. Starting this week it will focus on the Rutland Place, Summerhill and Summerhill Parade area.
Bin collection
Signs have been erected in the area indicating the correct bin collection day. Letters are being sent to all property owners and occupiers advising them of their legal obligations in relation to waste and informing them of the council’s “zero tolerance approach” to enforcement. The letters will be followed by a visit by litter wardens to every property.
“Multi-tenanted properties with no visible waste disposal arrangements in place will get top priority,” Mr Hanney said.
CCTV will be installed at the dumping blackspots and will be used to build court cases against offenders.
The council is also taking legal advice on the possibility of taking still images from the footage and posting them in the area. All dumped bags will also be searched by litter wardens with a view to initiating prosecutions.
Where there is appropriate storage space the council will insist that occupiers switch from using bags to wheelie bins.Gun rights advocates showing up armed at political events has been one of the more disturbing images of the past few years. It changes the very nature of political debate to have one side of an argument carrying a lethal weapon, particularly when they are also carrying a sign with the Jefferson quote "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with blood of patriots and tyrants." You don't have to be a history professor to understand what that person is saying. Guns and politics are a combustible combination best avoided if at all possible.
But the epidemic of gun violence, particularly mass killings (a number of which have taken place as the campaign unfolded) has put the issue of gun rights front and center in this election. Democrats had been treading lightly on the issue of gun safety for many years but the rise in mass shootings and the recognition that guns are now taking more than 30,000 lives per year, including many children, has changed their view. And the blowback from the gun proliferation activists and the gun lobby has been furious and hysterical. They have greeted every attempt to enact common sense gun regulation with total obstruction, unwilling to give even an inch. Gun owners rush out to buy more weapons, particularly the semi-automatic types, whenever a bloodbath takes place. And throughout the nation, Republican office holders have responded by loosening the gun laws wherever they could, allowing them on campuses, churches, and even bars as an exercise of citizens' fundamental freedom.
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The one notable exception has been the laws against carrying weapons in government buildings where they work, for which they have an interesting rationale. As a Republican legislator and gun rights proponent from South Dakota explained, “we have the most contentious issues being debated in public policy, affecting people in irate, angrily ways and affecting millions and millions of dollars. This is different than when you go work at the bar. This is different than you working at the bank.”
The central gun rights argument is that the Second Amendment is necessary for the citizenry to protect itself from government tyranny which is the reason why people showing up at rallies and political events armed has such a resonance. These people consider themselves to be patriots, fighting for freedom. But they are instead operating as thugs intimidating people who disagree with them, a fundamentally undemocratic act.
This brings us to Donald Trump and his shocking suggestion this week that Hillary Clinton wants to abolish the Second Amendment and if she were to be elected and allowed to appoint judges to the Supreme Court there would be nothing his followers could do about it "although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is." He was clearly saying that the gun patriots might take things into their own hands if Clinton were to win the election and frankly, he might be right. It has caused a firestorm and for good reason. Reports are that the Secret Service took the comments seriously enough that they had a little chat with the campaign about it.
It's not the first time a politician has made such a provocative remark. Recall that the late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms famously said that President Bill Clinton was so unpopular with the military in his state that he'd better not show up without a bodyguard. But there is something very different about what Trump is doing.
From the time he announced his candidacy, there has been a violent subtext to Donald Trump's message. He's been ginning up fear of immigrants and Muslims, calling for torture, summary execution, extrajudicial killings and fetishizing "law and order." At his rallies he has commonly called for violence against protesters, lamented that "nobody wants to hurt anyone anymore" and said:
"Protesters, they realize there are no consequences to protesting anymore. There used to be consequences. There are none anymore. Our country has to toughen up folks. We have to toughen up. These people are bringing us down. They are bringing us down. These people are so bad for our country, you have no idea."
The crowds love it and cheer lustily whenever he makes these "un-PC" comments. But nothing gets his febrile mob excited as much as ad hominem attacks on his rival Hillary Clinton. From the early days of the campaign he has been building a case that Clinton is a criminal who "shouldn't be allowed to run for president". He says, "I will say this, Hillary Clinton has got to go to jail. Folks, honestly, she's guilty as hell."
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These comments have always been met with feral shrieks of delight from his fans but at the GOP convention Trump supporters Alex Jones and Roger Stone introduced a new "Hillary for Prison" meme for mainstream consumption supplying mobile billboards and signs for the convention goers. And many of the headliners, including Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie and General Michael Flynn stoked the crowd with more accusations of criminality leading to the now ubiquitous chant, "lock her up!" Delegates appeared dressed in orange jumpsuits and Clinton masks (a depressing routine that's being repeated in small towns in America.) Now Trump is accusing her of rigging the election to steal it from him and many Republicans believe him. These people will not accept that she is a legitimate winner.
This is the context in which Trump's very unfunny Second Amendment comment was made. In an era of excessive gun violence we have a paranoid gun culture that is (literally) loaded for bear and a political environment where gun rights and regulations are a top level issue And we have a Republican presidential nominee whose message encourages paranoia, violence and anger among his followers directed generally at various "others" and specifically toward his opponent who he characterizes as a criminal and an illegitimate tyrant who plans to abolish the Second Amendment. What could go wrong?Nissan’s participation in the 2016 Blancpain Endurance Series with at least one GT-R GT3 looks set to continue as planned, despite the abrupt cancellation last month of the brand’s headline WEC LMP1 programme.
This is the first time in several years that Nissan has not had a presence at the Dubai 24 Hours with its latest crop of GT Academy graduates, but paddock sources at the Dubai Autodrome have confirmed to DSC that race staff have been booked for the championship and Bob Neville’s RJN team will continue to run the cars.
Before the LMP1 project was discontinued, Australian Matt Simmons (winner of the 2015 GT Academy International competition) was announced as the first confirmed driver for Nissan’s 2016 Blancpain programme.
The Japanese brand won the Pro Class of Blancpain Endurance last season with drivers Wolfgang Reip, Katsumasa Chiyo and Alex Buncombe.
SEGERRY Adams is set to step down as Sinn Féin president in the autumn to be replaced by Mary Lou McDonald, it has been claimed.
The Sunday Times reported that the Louth TD will hand over the leadership to Ms McDonald at the next ard fheis, likely to take place in October or November.
Mr Adams, who turns 69 in October, has been the party's leader for more than three decades, taking over as president from Ruairí Ó Bradaigh in 1983.
In January, Mid-Ulster MLA Michelle O'Neill was named as Sinn Féin's 'northern leader' after being ratified by the party's ard chomhairle.
At the time of Mrs O'Neill's appointment, Sinn Féin declined to outline the full selection process involved, with a party spokesman stating: "The Sinn Féin president brought forward a recommendation that was ratified by the ard chomhairle."
The moves towards a change in leadership follow the death of Martin McGuinness in March and the decision of veteran republican Pat Doherty to stand down as West Tyrone MP.
The Sunday Times reported that Ms McDonald, the party's vice-president and Dublin Central TD, was expected to be the only candidate, with Donegal TD Pearse Doherty ruling himself out of contention for the top job.
Sinn Féin is understood to have been due to hold an ard fheis in Dublin earlier this year, but the conference was cancelled due to the Assembly election, with the upcoming Westminster poll causing it to be further postponed.
A Sinn Féin spokesperson said: "Gerry Adams has made it clear that Sinn Féin is in transition.
"He has a plan in mind for the future which has to be endorsed by the party.
"He will make that plan public when it is appropriate to do so."You know when you feel like a place is going to be absolutely amazing, yet somehow it exceeds all expectations? That is what my first time in Saint-Barth felt like. If you want to read about where to stay in Saint-Barth, read my last post here.
Saint-Barth has style. Saint-Barth has class. Time to pack up that cute lil’ ass.
When packing for trips, I like to do some research and prepare accordingly. For example, if I’m headed into a humid environment, I’m getting a Brazilian blowout to maintain this Italian af mane, packing a plethora of hair-ties, swimsuits, bug spray, flowy dresses, open-toe shoes, and definitely leaving all long sleeves and coats at home. I aim to sensibly narrow down items to save some space for any purchases I make while traveling. And to be real, it’s pretty difficult to pack everything in a carry-on when I’m traveling with a drone, cameras, AND outfits. But, ya gotta do what ya gotta do. Somehow just make it work, right?
Right.
SO. I’m sharing with you what I wore in Saint-Barth and hope it makes it easier and inspires you for when you’re packing for your next trip.
Comment your favorite below and follow on Instagram for daily updates. <3
Here are 4 outfits I wore in Saint-Barth below.
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Look 1: The White Monochromatic
A perfect outfit for day to night. Accessorize with a hat. Throw on some white Purcells. Good to go.
Look 2: A One Piece Swimmie
You always want to pack one of these for vacation because they can work as a top or swimsuit. You’ll be prepared for all adventures you come across in Saint-Barth. Accessorize with silk scarves – they always come in handy when your hair needs to be tamed.
Look 3: Butterfly Beach Chic
This look was perfect for dinner at Francois Plantation. It’s casual, yet chic and comfortable. Realistically, you can wear this look day to night. PS. notice I wore the same shoes for 2 outfits. Carry-on packing at it’s finest;)
Look 4: Trop Rouge – Spicy Night Out
Do you ever get all dressed up, drink some wine with your lover, and then decide to order room service? Same.
But in all reality, this pretty little jumpsuit is perfect for date night, a night on the town, and just good to have for any events you may have planned on your trip. Always pack at least 1 jumpsuit or dress that is easy to throw on – they take up the least space and are always fire. #spiceupyolife
Shop similar looks from this post below:A Texas woman was found to be in good health after spending 36 hours trapped in a restroom at the West Waco Library. A spokesman for the city said staff failed to perform their routine restroom check before closing the library on Saturday. Photo by FeyginFoto/Shutterstock
WACO, Texas, April 5 (UPI) -- A woman who had been trapped in the restroom of a Texas library over the weekend was rescued on Monday.
Employees at West Waco Library discovered the woman when they returned to the library at 6:30 a.m. Monday after it had been closed since Saturday.
The woman, who was described as elderly, although her age was not released, had been trapped in the library for 36 hours after she was unable to get out of a restroom stall.
City of Waco spokesman Larry Holze said the woman entered the restroom just before the library closed on Saturday, but staff did not notice she was there before it was locked for the weekend.
"We usually check those things, but this time we did not," he said.
The woman did not have a cellphone, so she was unable to contact family members or local authorities for help.
After her rescue, paramedics did not find any injuries and declared her to be in good health.NEW DELHI: The challan drive against errant motorists during the odd-even rule has earned the government Rs 40 lakh in fines. Besides, the numberplate scheme has reduced the peak-hour traffic volume by about 30%. A rough analysis by the traffic police has attributed Tuesday's compliance to the heavy prosecutions and the fear of the Rs-2,000 fine Cops booked 401 drivers for violations, while the transport department fined 207 drivers. A total of 639 challans were issued by SDMs. Moreover, the policemen posted at the intersections have been asked to focus more on traffic management than prosecution during peak hours. The move comes after the cops drew flak for traffic snarls at the Gurgaon border on Monday.Though adequate number of policemen were deployed, police officers said that most drivers were found complying with the norms on Tuesday. They were also asked to check vehicles for genuine CNG stickers following complaints about sale of stickers at some gas stations.Though there were more even-numbered vehicles on the roads than the challans showed, the hefty fine proved a deterrent. "Panic seemed to have gripped road-users after Monday's drive. At some points, not a single challan was issued," said Muktesh Chander, special commissioner, traffic.Even the number of other violations was also less. According to police' estimate, more than 50% lesser challans were issued on Tuesday. On an average, cops issue 1,000 challans, including the regular ones, every day, but the number dropped by about 40% on Tuesday.Though no traffic snarls were reported during peak hours, vehicular movement was slow in parts of central and east Delhi as unruly bus drivers flouted lane discipline. "Most buses stopped for a longer duration to woo passengers as they ran empty even during peak hours," said a traffic police officer.Meanwhile, the traffic cops have planned to hold meetings with other agencies to discuss ways of challaning vehicles in order to avoid snarls during peak hours. "Since there are multiple authorities involved in the challaning process, we have requested each one of them to follow a protocol about stopping vehicles. We have asked them to avoid stopping vehicles on the busy intersections during peak hours, which leads to snarls," added the officer.2 2011's New Advice Animals
Photo: via Tumblr
The concept of an "advice animal" started on 4Chan back in 2006 with the introduction of Advice Dog. He was an adorable puppy, set against a color wheel background, that dispensed nonsensical, terrible or ridiculous advice.
Since '06, the Advice Animal format has exploded, encompassing now hundreds of different memes, each utilizing the same basic format of a photograph and a rotating series of humorous captions.
Here are the best new advice animal spin-offs we met in 2011:
Business Cat
The image of a cat (named Emilio!) in front of the traditional starburst backdrop. Business Cat jokes combine traditional corporate and managerial speak with the sort of things a typical house cat might say (were it able to talk, of course.)
Schrute Facts
Based on the character of Dwight Schrute from NBC's "The Office" (played by Rainn Wilson), "Schrute Facts" images take a trnaditional idiom or folksy saying, then add the word "false" and an obvious ref*tation of the original figurative claim.
Chemistry Cat
Also known as "Science Cat," Chemistry Cat is based on a comical photo of a cat wearing glasses and a bow tie, posed to resemble a science teacher. (Know Your Meme suggests the original image may be a stock photo of Russian origin.) Captions take the form of corny chemistry jokes, particularly puns.
Ordinary Muslim Man
One of the most prevalent examples of a "bait-and-switch" or reversal-style Advice Animals entry, the Ordinary Muslim Man at first appears to be saying something pro-terrorist or anti-American. The lower half of the caption, of course, then reveals that he's in fact saying something innocuous and mainstream in nature. The photo itself is from iStockPhoto and features an unidentified middle-aged Pashtun Muslim.
Imminent Ned
Also called the "X is Coming" meme, this is a reference to the popular HBO fantasy series "Game of Thrones." The character of Eddard "Ned" Stark from "Thrones" (played by Sean Bean) is captioned with a warning to "Brace Yourself," because something is coming. The joke plays on the refrain "Winter is Coming" that is repeated ominously in the show (and the books on which the show is based.) The Imminent Ned meme is most often used for meta-humor, particularly on message boards and Reddit, predicting what types of posts are about to dominate the conversation.
Annoying Childhood Friend
The "Annoying Childhood Friend" image is actually a photo of a boy originally posted to Flickr in February of 2009, and titled "Quite an annoying kid..." The photo didn't inspire a meme until April of 2011, however, when the first captioned image appeared online. The captions function as sort of a younger version of Scumbag Steve, nostalgically recalling irritating or obnoxious behavior readers would have experienced with playmates back in their school days. (Manners and etiquette surrounding video game playing is a common theme.)
Baby Godfather
The Baby Godfather image features an upset-looking baby, dressed in a tuxedo, pointing down at the ground. Captions surrounding the image typically depict the baby as a Mafia kingpin, giving blunt orders to an unseen member of his crew. (Often, the jokes combine things a mob boss might say with concerns that a baby would have.) Alternate variations of the image have substituted the baby in for recognizable gangster figures like Don Corleone and Tony Soprano.
Harmless Scout Leader
A photo of an older man wearing a Boy Scouts of America uniform, making kind of a creepy half-smile, inspired the "Harmless Scout Leader" meme. (See Ranker's ultimate guide to the Harmless Scout Leader here.) Another bait-and-switch meme, this time the top caption makes it sound like the man is molesting the boys in his care. The lower caption then makes it clear that the statement is innocent, and something any scout leader might say.
Anti-Joke Chicken
A more traditional advice animal, Anti-Joke Chicken submissions feature a photo of the titular bird in front of a familiar starburst backdrop. The top caption is usually the set-up of a familiar or classic joke, but instead of the expected punchline, the lower caption instead applies logic to the humorous set-up, or otherwise ruins the joke by taking things too literally.
Horrifying Houseguest
Also known as "Never Alone," the "Shadowlurker" or the "Uninvited Guest," the Horrifying Houseguest was born in June 2011 from a random pencil sketch of a creepy, hooded figure posted to 4Chan. The strange face is now captioned with "scary" narratives or imagery, reminiscent of campfire ghost stories or other "shock" stories that keep kids (and some anxious adults) up at night.
Dating Site Murderer
Also known as the "Good Intentions Axe Murderer," this is yet again a bait-and-switch meme, similar to Ordinary Muslim Man. It features a creepy, low-lit photo of Reddit user spawn02000. The captions initially make it seem like the man is plotting a murder, while the lower caption reveals he's actually trying to be romantic or sweet.
Internet Grandma Surprise
A photo of an elderly woman gawking in shock at a laptop screen is at the center of the "Internet Grandma Surprise" meme (or sometimes just the "Grandma Meme.") The captions indicate the Grandma's upset (and often naive) reaction to recognizable explicit or shocking Internet content. Many selections refer to specific, infamous Internet content, like the below entry, which includes an allusion to the notorious "2 Girls 1 Cup" video. (DON'T GOOGLE THAT!)Posted by Adam Gilbert on Mar 5, 2014
In 2007, Adam Gilbert quit his full time job to start mybodytutor.com. Since then he’s helped thousands of people of all ages, sizes and shapes get and keep the body they want with his proven program. Follow him on Twitter
I’m going to teach you why (sadly) some of our coworkers, friends and even family members might try to sabotage our efforts.
With consistency comes results. And with results = us looking better and better…
Sadly, this is also when the saboteurs try to work their toxic magic.
Ya know, I get a lot of email from clients who tell me how their friends / coworkers and even family members try to break their consistency, and try to sabotage their efforts.
Ugh, I know. It’s frustrating.
But instead of fighting reality – let’s explore why this might happen. If we understand why, it’s a lot easier to deal with.
First, we have to understand human behavior – at its WORST.
A study quoted in the book The Paradox of Choice gave participants hypothetical choices concerning status and asked for their preferences. For example, people were asked to choose between a) earning $50,000 a year with others earning $25,000 or b) earning twice as much, $100,000 a year but being surrounded by people earning $200,000.
Which would you choose?
Sadly, more than half the respondents chose the option that gave them the better relative position. That means earning $50,000 to $100,000 because at $50,000 they were earning more than others, while at $100,000 they were earning less than others.
(I think this is crazy! BUT, it doesn’t matter what I think. For many, this is how they feel. For some humans, this IS their nature.)
Although we’re hard wired to compare, it’s who we compare ourselves to that can make or break our happiness. Ideally, we wouldn’t compare ourselves to anyone. Really!
Besides, your status compared to other people isn’t how YOU’RE doing.
Because we now know that many would prefer the better relative position, it’s easy to see why people would sabotage our efforts.
Let’s go even deeper…
Are you familiar with the term cognitive dissonance? This happens when we have two conflicting desires. For example, smoking. It is well known that smoking cigarettes can cause lung cancer yet every person I’ve ever met wants to live a long, healthy and fit life.
The uncomfortable tension caused by these two opposing ideas — wanting to smoke but also wanting to be healthy and fit — is known as dissonance.
As humans, we look to get rid of this uncomfortable feeling. This is known as dissonance reduction.
The only way to get rid of this uncomfortable feeling is by a) quitting smoking b) denying that people actually get sick from smoking or c) justifying and rationalizing.
For example, a smoker could rationalize their behavior by believing that few people get sick from smoking, it only happens to people who smoke more than they do, if smoking doesn’t kill them something else will, they’ll quit next year, it’s too expensive to quit, or they only live once and they deserve to smoke.
In essence, they either need to take action (quit smoking and get whatever help they need <—-this is very hard!) or they need to make themselves feel better by rationalizing their smoking – which is what most people do).
Sooooo……..
This might cause your friends/family/coworkers to feel an uncomfortable feeling —-> “Ugh, so and so looks so good! I wish I could have the ‘discipline’ it takes to look that good too!”
(I quote discipline because it’s not all about discipline. As we know, it’s about having a system in place along with support and accountability to monitor and track our progress.)
They need to get rid of this uncomfortable feeling somehow though…
Sadly, these people know deep down that they’re not going to take any action, and nothing is going to change on their end.
SO, if they can’t change their own body (most people don’t really want to change — they would rather TALK about changing), they’ll try to bring down the people around them who ACTUALLY are.
This is how they get rid of the dissonance (or uncomfortable feeling) they’re experiencing.
Again, as sad as it is – it’s human nature. Fighting human nature is silly.
When we understand what’s going on around us, we can call it what it is and move on.
WHAT IF: every time someone was trying to sabotage us, we flipped it, and said to ourselves, “Bring it! I must be looking good! Damn. This consistency business is working! I love My Body Tutor! What an amazing program!” And just smiled to ourselves?
Sure it can be hurtful that our coworkers and friends are sabotaging us — even our loved ones! But, if we understand human behavior, and accept it, rather than fight it, we can at least understand why they’re doing it.
And maybe, just maybe, look at it in a completely different way.
Photo used under a Creative Commons Attribution License. “Sabotage” by Flickr user screenpunk, “Smiling Mirror” by Flickr user Robert Wallace.Tensions are escalating between Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and despite attempts by both sides to cool tempers, a confrontation between the two figures appears virtually inevitable.
Votes by Yisrael Beiteinu ministers against the state budget this weekend, the battle over the conversion bill, the foreign minister's appointment Friday of an acting UN ambassador without Netanyahu's consent and Lieberman's call for a "disengagement" from Gaza on the eve of the premier's Egypt visit - all have only exacerbated an already strained working relationship.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Knesset in 2009. Archive / Tess Scheflan
Sources close to Netanyahu said the deterioration has been perceptible for weeks, peaking when Lieberman fumed at being left out of arranging the June meeting in Brussels between Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and the Turkish foreign minister.
Still, the sources said, Lieberman's actions over the past few days came as a surprise to the prime minister. Netanyahu learned of the foreign minister's unilateral appointment of an acting UN envoy by reading it in the press, and reportedly denounced the move as unacceptable. The prime minister had delayed filling the post for months, hoping to appoint a senior public figure rather than the relatively unknown diplomat Lieberman chose, Meiron Reuven.
Lieberman's "disengagement" plan, widely viewed as a slight to Cairo ahead of Netanyahu's visit, was neither coordinated with the prime minister nor received his approval - points Netanyahu is expected to emphasize at today's meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
"Policies on this matter are set by the prime minister and the cabinet," a Netanyahu source quoted the prime minister as saying this weekend. "That's how it has always been, and that's how it will remain."
In closed-door meetings over the weekend, Netanyahu said that in the coming days he intends to ask Lieberman to explain his actions. The prime minister and foreign minister had already held conciliatory meetings after the Ben-Eliezer incident, though this time Netanyahu is expected to strike a firmer tone in a bid to iron out the differences of opinion between the two officials and their respective parties.
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Budget stunner
Netanyahu was reportedly stunned during Friday's budget meeting by the behavior of Yisrael Beiteinu ministers, who had apparently received instructions from Lieberman before his trip to Kazakhstan to firmly oppose the budget backed by Netanyahu and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz.
Leading the Yisrael Beiteinu offensive was Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov, appointed by Lieberman to oversee budget negotiations in his stead. A source at the cabinet meeting said Misezhnikov addressed Netanyahu bluntly, essentially "hurling insults" at the prime minister.
"All of the other Yisrael Beiteinu ministers joined him shortly after," the source said. "It was like a well-synchronized orchestra."
Another item on the Netanyahu-Lieberman agenda is the row over a bill that would ease the terms of religious conversion, scheduled to be heard in the Knesset a week from now, before the summer recess gets underway. Under pressure from U.S. Jewish groups, Netanyahu has sought to stall the bill's passing, but Lieberman and members of his Knesset faction maintain that failure to pass it would signify a violation of coalition agreements.
Amid the rising tension, Lieberman and his associates have issued conciliatory statements insisting they have no intention of quitting the coalition. They explained the UN ambassador's appointment as the result of an urgent need to fill a vacant post, and noted that the foreign minister had raised his plan to sever ties with Gaza on several earlier occasions.
"We believe the matter will ultimately be settled," Lieberman associates said.
This weekend Misezhnikov reiterated that his party is not planning to leave the coalition. "We don't want to replace the coalition or leave the government that we built with our own two hands," he said. "But we aren't the ones who sent Fuad [Ben-Eliezer] to talk to the Turks. When Netanyahu needed us a week ago in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, he knew exactly how to speak to us nicely and make all kinds of promises over the budget."
On the budget, Misezhnikov said, "This is not how you conduct negotiations. Whoever thinks he has defeated us is plain wrong."But despite increases in renewable energy supply outstripping fossil fuels last year, renewables still accounted for only 3 per cent of primary energy consumption in 2014.
Non-fossil fuels including hydro, nuclear and other renewable sources had also provided a bigger overall contribution to global energy supply growth in 2014 than fossil fuels, for the first time in 20 years.
Global carbon emissions rose by only 0.5 per cent last year, compared with an average rate of 2 per cent over the last decade, [Dale] calculated. “The one trillion tonne question is whether these developments in China are likely to persist, so possibly signalling the beginning of a lower trend in emissions growth, or whether they are likely to reverse in the near future,” said Mr Dale.
[Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist] said the slowdown in demand for coal in China last year, much of it consumed in iron, steel and cement industries, had contributed to a welcome slowdown in world carbon emissions.
The global economy has entered a new phase which may go on for many years. The post-crash growth boom in the "developing" economies came to an end in 2014. A weaker global economy will slow the growth rate in carbon emissions going forward. As is often the case, the story starts in China (Financial Times, June 10, 2015).
As the global economy weakens, we see a dramatic slowdown in energy consumption growth (left panel above). Much is being made of the fact that new energy from renewables exceeded new fossil energy in 2014. (Bloomberg, June 10, 2015, graph source). Bloomberg and others also note China's energy intensity (toe per thousand 2010 dollars) is getting closer to that of Europe and the United States.
In 2015 China's coal consumption appears to have declined sharply. I say "appears" because there is little reason to trust China's official data, as Brad Plumer explains (Vox, May 22, 2015). Here's the context.
Arguably the most important climate story in the world right now is the question of what's happening in China. A recent analysis by Greenpeace International found that China's carbon dioxide emissions have plunged nearly 5 percent, year over year, in the first four months of 2015 [graph omitted]. That's... unexpected. Ever since 2000, China's CO2 emissions have been rising at a relentless pace, as the country rocketed itself out of poverty by burning billions of tons of coal for electricity, heat, and industry. China is now the world's biggest CO2 emitter, getting two-thirds of its energy from coal, and officials have long assumed emissions would keep rising until 2030 or so. It's a big reason global warming forecasts look so dire. But suddenly, China's emissions are falling, spurred by a sharp decline in coal use. As Greenpeace's Lauri Myllyvirta explains, China's coal consumption dropped in 2014 for the first time this century. Then, in the first four months of 2015, coal use fell another 8 percent, year on year — which translates to a roughly 5 percent decline in CO2 emissions... To put that drop in perspective, that's the equivalent of a whole year's worth of CO2 emissions from the United Kingdom, gone. Because China is so incomprehensibly massive, even its hiccups have outsized effects on international coal markets and global-warming outlooks...
But are China's coal emissions really declining? If so, how much? Here's Plumer again.
1) Be very, very wary of China's energy statistics This caveat deserves to go up high. Glen Peters, a researcher at the University of Oslo, pointed out that China's coal consumption numbers are notoriously unreliable, and often get revised significantly years later. Case in point: back in the late 1990s, China announced it was shuttering a bunch of smaller, illegal coal mines, and early estimates suggested that nationwide coal use dropped 20 percent in 1998. But it turned out that those coal mines didn't actually close, they just stopped reporting their numbers to the government. When BP reviewed the data years later, it turned out that China's coal use hadn't dropped at all in 1998 [graph omitted]... Similarly, in its most recent five-year census, China revised upward its estimate for coal use in 2013 by about 8 percent. That's a massive edit. So we should be cautious about these latest stats. As in the late '90s, China is currently attempting to close many of its smaller coal mines, but there's evidence that illegal mining is still ongoing. It's not impossible to think the latest coal numbers could be revised upward in the future.
Plumer goes on to question China's target 7% growth rate—is their economy really growing that fast? (And read here.) And he notes that there was a surge in hydro-electric power in 2014, which easily replaced whatever additional coal China might have consumed. Read the vox.com article for the details.
The main question raised by Plumer is whether China's slowdown is temporary. If it is, energy consumption will rebound sometime sooner rather than later, and humanity will once again be on the suicide fast track. However, as Plumer notes, economists generally expect China to gravitate away from heavy industry toward a more services-oriented economy. In short, China will eventually look more and more like other "advanced" economies.
Declining coal consumption? A services-oriented economy?
The issues are complex, but there is a missing "human factor" in these stories about China. You will recall that China has pledged an emissions peak by (or before) 2030 and a cap on coal consumption by 2020. Can we trust the Chinese to be straight with us?
For example, when "China revised upward its estimate for coal use in 2013 by about 8 percent" in its most recent 5-year census, were global carbon emissions similarly updated for 2013?
I don't know the answer, but as China embraces "green" energy policies, moves toward a "services" economy, and tries to fix its enormous smog problem, there will be considerable psychological pressure to make the numbers look good, regardless of physical reality. There are lots of ways to fudge the numbers, and making after-the-fact revisions is only one of them.
As Brad Plumer noted, what happens in China has an "outsized" impact on the global environment. Supposedly, China's emissions decline in the first four months of 2015 equals the total annual emissions of the U.K! China is definitely the elephant in the room.
China does not want to be seen as pushing humankind over the climate cliff. It's that simple. China needs to maintain a positive self-image and be seen as advancing, not hindering, humankind's progress toward some future utopia.
So I believe we have entered a new era of bogus emissions data. I believe the 2015 China data we've seen so far is an example of such... bogosity
I also believe that China's economic slowdown is not temporary. As Herb Stein might have said about China's post-crash growth boom, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Slower real growth will skew the official data to the downside. The impetus there is psychological because lower emissions are now more valued than higher emissions. Combined with China's new-found love of renewable energy, I see under-reported emissions going on for many years.
And if China does indeed throttle back on heavy industry (e.g., cement and steel), those industries will eventually migrate to other countries (e.g., India) as demand dictates. In 2015, global demand is weak and so the global economy is weak.
In 2016, the headlines will read GLOBAL ECONOMY GROWS AS EMISSIONS SHRINK.
With the lies will come Delusion and Hope.
And here's a parting thought: growth in renewable |
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Title Page of the original paste-up pages.Search Gallery Adventure time related Willow and Tara: A magical love chocomax 44 Advertisement Advertisement Fionna lineart(free use) chocomax 20 Fionna chibi chocomax 31 Princess bubblegum icon chocomax 7 Bunny and kitty lineart colored chocomax 51 Birthday present for natto-99 chocomax 20 Adventure Time request chocomax 0 Riding Tree trunks chocomax 27 Adventure Time fanart: Marshall Lee and Gumball chocomax 51 Adventure time fanart: Finn bust chocomax 145 LSP icon chocomax 17 Princess bubblegum icon chocomax 10 OH MY GLOB!!! it's an LSP fanart!! chocomax 110 Adventure time fanart: Ice king chocomax 121 Rea the human O3O chocomax 19 BMO- Adventure Time Fanart chocomax 333 Finn The Human: Adventure time fanart chocomax 114 Adventure time fanart: Jake sketch chocomax 12 Princess Bubblegum Fanart chocomax 32 Adventure time fan art: Marceline chibi chocomax 25 BMO icon chocomax 118 Yinku shimada the human(?) chocomax 6 Ichiji fanart in adventure time style chocomax 4 What Time is It? Finn The Human Fanart chocomax 41WTSHTF maybe you are prepared for an extended survival scenario away from civilization, but you have to get out of the city first (maybe). In a disaster situation that might not be so easy. If you have these three things in place you will greatly increase your chances.
1. Get Home Bag (GHB)
Imagine for a minute that you work downtown in a large city, maybe you ride the subway or take a bus to work everyday. You are in a large office building with many floors, thousands of people, and you are on the fifteen or twentieth story. If a disaster strikes how are you going to get out? I mean literally. If there is an earthquake, or a catastrophic man made event how are you going to get out of your building? How are you going to get down the street? How are you going to get home? Do you want to be one of the people covered in dust wandering around in shock? I sure don’t.
But I have my Bug out Bag you say!
Oh really, where is it? Even if it is in your car it is useless to you at this point. The parking garage is at street level and possibly blocks away. That could mean life or death in this situation and you need to act now.
Even if you could get to your Bug Out Bag, how much good would it do you in this environment? Most people’s B.O.B. is packed for survival in the wilderness. Camping gear, food, clothing, etc.
A Get Home Bag contains an entirely different set of tools and serves one purpose: To get you from wherever you are to your Home.
How to Choose an Urban Survival Bag
Your GHB should contain things that are going to get you out of the building like a prybar. Things to help you make it through the aftermath like water and breathing masks. Things you might use to help rescue others like flashlights or radios. Things that will help you on what could be a very long walk home such as food and maybe shoes.
Clearly a GHB is not a Bug Out Bag. Sure they have some overlap, but a GHB can be much smaller, less weight conscious, have more specific tools, and be planned for one purpose. Do you have one cached in your office or place of work?
Gear for your Get Home Bag:
Use Sunglasses to Maintain a Tactical Advantage
The Platypus Collapsible Water Bottle
Dust Mask for Toxic Dust and Debris
Window Punch: Because It’s Quieter Than a Rock
Why Ear Plugs could make your Urban Survival more Bearable
30 Uses for a Bandana
2. A Bug Out Plan
So you made it home, now what? Let’s assume that the SHTF out there. You have surveyed the situation and determined that the city is in mass chaos and you need to get out now. What do you do? Again, you have your Bug Out Bag, but you still have to get out of the city. Do you have a Bug Out Plan?
For our purposes here lets assume that your Bug Out Plan needs to get you from your home to your serious survival cache or Bug Out Location outside of the city. I understand that not everybody has caches hidden in various places, and even fewer people have a dedicated But Out Location. While you should probably be working on that, you still need a Bug Out Plan.
There’s no way I can go through all of the various problems you might encounter while trying to bug out of your city so you will have to plan for yourself. What I will give you are some questions to consider and one rule: Contingency. Is your way out double, triple, and quadruple backed up?
If the highways are shutdown do you have a surface street route?
If no roads are passable do you have an off road route?
If driving is out of the question do you have a planned walking or riding route? (Do you have maps of your area in your Bug Out Bag?)
Do you have a rendezvous point with other family members?
3. A Bug In Plan
Lets back up a minute. Pretend you just got home again, but this time you surveyed the situation and decided that you are not in immediate danger but are still not at situation normal. Now what do you do? A Bug In Plan is for emergency situations where you can stay in your own home but have to rely on your own preparations to survive. This might just mean that you will be without power or water for an extended period. Maybe it means you actually can’t leave your home at all for whatever reason.
What plans do you have in place to live like this? A Bug in Plan should include food and water preparations first and foremost. What will you eat since all of the food in your refrigerator is going to be bad soon? Do you really want to live on the backpack meals out of your Bug Out Bag when you don’t have to? (Be sure to stock the Top 100 Items that will Disappear First).
Gear for Bugging In:
The Survival Food Pyramid
The Easiest 100 Gallons of Emergency Water Storage
9 Common Spices to Stock (and 5 Uncommon)
37 Things You Should Stock but Probably Aren’t
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SaveKevin Devine at The Bell House in 2015 (more by Amanda Hatfield)
Kevin Devine is not only a great musician, he’s a great tastemaker too. As his awesome Devinyl Splits series and his tendency to take great newer/smaller artists on tour prove, Kevin always has his ear to the ground when it comes to new music, so we were excited to find out what his favorite albums of 2017 are, and his list does not disappoint.
He has two albums that tie for number one — Big Thief‘s great sophomore album Capacity and Mount Eerie‘s depressingly powerful A Crow Looked At Me — and the rest of his list is in alphabetical order. He included artists he has collaborated with like Manchester Orchestra, The Front Bottoms and The Mynabirds, artists he has toured with like Julien Baker, Adult Mom and Torres, and bigger artists that appear on lots of year-end lists like Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z and St. Vincent. His list also finds room for Slaughter Beach, Dog (the solo project of Jake Ewald of Modern Baseball, who Kevin almost toured with this year), Phoebe Bridgers, David Bazan (who Kevin has covered), and more. Check out his full list below.
Kevin has a few shows coming up before the year ends, including two special shows in NYC. On December 14 at The Bell House, he’ll do an acoustic set performing 2003’s Make the Clocks Move and this year’s We Are Who We’ve Always Been in full with Worriers opening (tickets). On December 16 at Music Hall of Williamsburg, he’ll play a full-band set including 2006’s Put Your Ghost to Rest and last year’s Instigator with Petal opening (tickets). (In case you haven’t heard it, We Are Who We’ve Always Been is the acoustic version of Instigator. Stream it below).
Kevin also plays New Year’s Eve in Philly with The Get Up Kids (tickets). Shannen Moser is on that show too.
Today, Kevin announced solo shows happening in Upstate NY and Vermont in February. All dates are listed below.
We Are Who We’ve Always Been by Kevin Devine
Kevin Devine’s Favorite Albums of 2017
1A.) Big Thief, Capacity
1B.) Mount Eerie, A Crow Looked At Me
And, in (artist) alphabetical order:
Adult Mom, Soft Spots
Julien Baker, Turn Out The Lights
David Bazan, Care
Megan Michelle Bird, Sad Songs For Happy People
Phoebe Bridgers, Stranger In The Alps
Father John Misty, Pure Comedy
The Front Bottoms, Going Grey
Jay-Z, 4:44
Kendrick Lamar, DAMN.
Manchester Orchestra, A Black Mile To The Surface
The Mynabirds, Be Here Now
Slaughter Beach, Dog, Birdie
St. Vincent, Masseduction
Torres, Three Futures
—
Kevin Devine — 2017/2018 Tour Dates
Dec 14 The Bell House Brooklyn, NY w/ Worriers
Dec 16 Music Hall of Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY w/ Petal
Dec 31 The Trocadero Philadelphia, PA w/ The Get Up Kids
Feb 15, 2018 Funk N Waffles Syracuse, NY
Feb 16, 2018 The Colony Woodstock, NY
Feb 17, 2018 ArtsRiot Burlington, VTCAIRO — A man in a white lab coat sat alone among piles of blown-off ceiling, mangled metal and splintered wood here on Thursday inside the Museum of Islamic Art — home to a world-renowned collection that covers centuries of art from countries across the Islamic world. He carefully separated ochre-tinted pieces of old glass from the clear shards of modern showcases.
The precious glass came from exquisite medieval lamps — or meshkawat — from some of Cairo’s most important mosques. They were among the biggest material losses from a truck bomb blast on Jan. 24 that tore through this 111-year-old museum, blowing out windows and sending metal and glass flying through its halls. The bombing, which was aimed at Cairo’s police headquarters across the street, killed four people and injured 76. It occurred a day before the third anniversary of the revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak. The museum’s staff was struggling to cope with the devastation wrought on this collection of artifacts, many of them from Islam’s Golden Era and representing Islamic history from the Umayyads in the seventh century to the Ottoman period in the 19th.
“The explosion caused so much damage,” said Ahmed Sharaf, director of the Antiquities Ministry’s museum division. “So many pieces have been destroyed, ceramics, glass, wood.”
Egypt’s minister of antiquities, Mohamed Ibrahim, said on Friday that 74 precious artifacts had been destroyed and that 90 were damaged, but repairable. The museum had nearly 1,471 artifacts on display in 25 galleries and 96,000 objects in storage. Situated near Islamic Cairo, the museum building, with its impressive neo-Mameluke facade, had recently undergone a six-year, $10 million renovation. The complex includes Egypt’s National Library on the second floor, where several rare manuscripts and papyri were also damaged.An Irish Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter crew is to be given a prestigious international award this week for “exceptional performance” in rescuing an injured climber.
Four crew attached to Rescue 118, based in Sligo, are due to leave for Canada today to receive the Fredrick L Feinberg award, conferred by the American Helicopter Society since 1961.
Named after a helicopter test pilot, the award is given to the pilot of a vertical flight aircraft who has accomplished the “most outstanding achievement” in the preceding year.
The Sligo pilot and crew was chosen from a shortlist of 200 for the rescue in the Bluestack mountains in Co Donegal on May 15th, 2013.
The rescue involved hovering a half-rotor diameter’s distance from a cliff face for 20 minutes above a 365 metre sheer drop in the Bluestack Mountains in severe weather, with darkness falling.
Capt Paul Forbes, co-pilot Paraic Slattery, winch operator John McCartney and winchman Conal McCarron, along with engineers Francis Perris and Declan McGrath, were on duty when they were tasked by Malin Head Coast Guard to attend to a climber with a suspected broken leg.
They were flying an S-61 Sikorsky, and this was one of its last missions before being replaced by the newer S-92 model.
Wind was gusting to 32 knots, with low cloud and rain. Using an infra-red camera, the crew located the casualty at the base of a sheer cliff.
Capt Forbes and co-pilot Mr Slattery had to maintain an “out of wind” hover right up to the cliff face to try and avoid the gusts coming over the top of the peak, while the winch crew had to struggle with severe downwash from the helicopter.
There was no light from the moon or stars, so the crew relied on the hover floodlights, landing lights and torch-light from the ground to maintain a safe distance while Mr McCartney and Mr McCarron worked to immobilise and strap up the climber in a rescue basket stretcher.
The casualty, who has since made a full recovery, was taken to Sligo airport, and from there by ambulance to hospital.
The Sikorky manufacturers conferred the Sligo rescue crew with an award last year and made the nomination to the American Helicopter Society.
Co-pilot Slattery said that he and his colleagues were “delighted”, adding “it’s great to receive recognition for a job well done”.The Pentagon paid a UK PR firm half a billion dollars to create fake terrorist videos in Iraq in a secret propaganda campaign exposed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
PR firm Bell Pottinger, known for its array of controversial clients including the Saudi government and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s foundation, worked with the US military to create the propaganda in a secretive operation.
The firm reported to the CIA, the National Security Council and the Pentagon on the project with a mandate to portray Al-Qaeda in a negative light and track suspected sympathisers.
Both the White House and General David Petraeus, the former general who shared classified information with his mistress, signed off on the content produced by the agency.
Fake news and false flags: How the #Pentagon paid a British PR firm $500M for top secret Iraq propaganda https://t.co/Wg86h9GXrY pic.twitter.com/9q45cOJ1ZI — The Bureau (@TBIJ) October 2, 2016
The Bell Pottinger operation started soon after the US invasion of Iraq and was tasked with promoting the “democratic elections” for the administration before moving on to more lucrative psychological and information operations.
Former employee Martin Wells told the Bureau how he found himself working in Iraq after being hired as a video editor by Bell Pottinger. Within 48 hours, he was landing in Baghdad to edit content for secret “psychological operations” at Camp Victory.
The firm created television ads showing Al-Qaeda in a negative light as well as creating content to look as though it had come from “Arabic TV”. Crews were sent out to film bombings with low quality video. The firm would then edit it to make it look like news footage.
They would craft scripts for Arabic soap operas where characters would reject terrorism with happy consequences. The firm also created fake Al-Qaeda propaganda videos, which were then planted by the military in homes they raided.Employees were given specific instructions to create the videos. “We need to make this style of video and we’ve got to use Al-Qaeda’s footage,” Wells was told. “We need it to be 10 minutes long, and it needs to be in this file format, and we need to encode it in this manner.”
The videos were created to play on Real Player which needs an internet connection to run. The CDs were embedded with a code linking to Google Analytics which allowed the military to track IP addresses that the videos were played on.
According to Wells, the videos were picked up in Iran, Syria and the US.“If one, 48 hours or a week later shows up in another part of the world, then that’s the more interesting one,” Wells explained. “And that’s what they’re looking for more, because that gives you a trail.”
The Pentagon confirmed the PR firm did work for them under the Information Operations Task Force (IOTF) creating content they say was “truthful”. The firm also worked under the Joint Psychological Operations Task Force (JPOTF). The Pentagon said it could not comment on JPOTF operations.
US law prohibits the government from using propaganda on its population, hence the use of an outside firm to create the content.
Documents show the Pentagon paid $540 million to Bell Pottinger in contracts between 2007 and 2011, with another contract for $120 million in 2006. The firm ended its work with the Pentagon in 2011.
In 2009, it was reported that the Pentagon had hired controversial PR firm, The Rendon Group, to monitor the reporting of journalists embedded with the US military, to assess whether they were giving “positive” coverage to its missions.
It was also revealed in 2005 that Washington based PR company the Lincoln Group had been placing articles in newspapers in Iraq which were secretly written by the US military. A Pentagon investigation cleared the group of any wrongdoing.TORONTO — The Canadian Football League (CFL) announced Monday that it has imposed the following discipline arising out of play No. 98 and an ensuing incident in the bench area of the Ottawa REDBLACKS during Game No. 14 on Thursday, June 30, 2016, Ottawa at Montreal:
Following a hearing, Montreal Alouettes receiver Duron Carter has been assessed a one-game suspension for actions that violated the standards of acceptable conduct within the CFL.
Ottawa REDBLACKS head coach Rick Campbell has been fined for his part in the incident. A thorough review concluded he could have done more to avoid contact with the player.
Ottawa REDBLACKS safety Jermaine Robinson has been fined for a high hit to Carter’s head area on Carter’s touchdown reception during the third quarter.
Ottawa REDBLACKS defensive back Jerrell Gavins has been fined for delivering a punch to an opponent during the incident in the bench area and for an inappropriate gesture towards fans following his disqualification from the game.
Carter came down with a difficult catch in the end zone as the Alouettes looked to cut into the REDBLACKS second-half lead but penalties followed after he took his celebration onto the Ottawa sideline. A major foul penalty and an ejection followed, forcing Carter to join slotback S.J. Green in the locker room after Green left with an injury in the first half.
“To tell you the truth I don’t even know what happened,” Carter told reporters post-game in reference to colliding with Ottawa head coach Rick Campbell. “I didn’t even see the replay until I got (into the locker room) and I ran into the coach apparently, I didn’t even know I knocked him over.”
When asked how he wasn’t aware of the contact with Campbell, Carter said, “It’s a football game, it’s an emotional game. I got hit and I got two cuts on my face from that hit so you tell me … there is a lot of emotion that goes into that.”
Additional discipline pertaining to other plays and other games in Week 2 will be announced later in a separate release.Google is soon to release a game based on Google Maps, the company announced in a short video.
This is not the first time Google Maps has inspired fun stuff, not only from artists but also from Google developers themselves, as Google Maps is well known for its easter eggs.
Still, this upcoming game seems quite promising. Based on WebGL, it was developed by the Google Maps team, but will be available on Google+ Games from February.
For the company, it will also be an opportunity to showcase Google Maps’ latest features, including indoors views. Here’s the teaser:
Thanks to our reader Michel Wester for this tip.
This post is part of our contributor series. The views expressed are the author's own and not necessarily shared by TNW.
Read next: Microsoft's first Patch Tuesday of 2012 brings 7 fresh bulletinsFirst rumored the other week, actor Michael Fassbender has confirmed that he’ll play multiple roles in Ridley Scott’s upcoming “Alien: Covenant”.
In Scott’s “Prometheus,” Fassbender played the bleached blond android David. He reprises that role for this continuation and precursor to “Alien,” but he also takes on the role of another android named Walter who is much more straightforward. He told Coming Soon at the “Assassin’s Creed” premiere the other night:
“I think Walter’s a real different kettle of fish. David was definitely a work-in-progress, somewhat of a prototype I suppose. The elements of him that were the human elements I think people found a little disturbing, so Walter’s more of a straightforward robot. Pretty logical, much more of a servant without the ego.”
Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Jussie Smolett, Amy Seimetz, Carmen Ejogo, Callie Hernandez, Billy Crudup, Noomi Rapace and James Franco also star. “Alien: Covenant” will open on May 19th.Become the evil laboratory assistant that you’ve always dreamt of being in this free-to-play, repeatable Halloween event.
Join Dr Fenkenbrain for four D&D-type activities as you help create a monster. Then, explore the outskirts of a darkened Falador as you gather the parts to make your very own mechanical pet.
Find out all the details in this news post along with any other announcements and stream info.
Halloween Event 2016
Requirements None. This event is entirely free to play. Recommended There are no special stat requirements or gear, but there might be…complications...so bringing a little food might be a good idea. How to start Head to a new portal outside the Invention Guild, north-east of Falador, and zip through to Dark Falador.
Build a Monster
Meet up with your old pal Dr Fenkenbrain on the other side of the Halloween portal and talk to him to begin.
Lend the doc a hand (and probably a few more body parts to boot) as you work to create a replacement for his failed zombies.
There are four activities to take part in every day – body-part sorting, driving a conveyor belt with a bicycle, divine entanglement and generator charging.
The doc assures us that any deaths that may occur will be safe ones – so have fun!
Rewards
Helping to build the monster will earn you grey matter which you can use to buy Halloween-themed rewards from Dr Fenkenbrain.
These include a lightning rod hat, a creeptastic pet and the “Mad Professor” title.
Upon your first completion of this year’s event, you will also be rewarded with last year’s Halloween emotes and music, if you missed those.
You can repeat this year’s event as much as you like to earn more grey matter, but you will earn the most on your first completion each day. Note that the concluding stage of the event also only occurs on your first completion of the day.
Mechanical Spider Pet Hunt
When you’re done, explore the area outside of Fenkenbrain’s lab to locate eight pieces of a mechanical spider pet. Assemble them and you’ll be able to purchase the pet in the event’s reward shop.
This event will run for two weeks until update on November 7th.
Patch Notes
Patch notes for today’s update can be found on the forum.
This week’s live streams
Watch streams and find a full schedule over on the Twitch channel. Check the YouTube channel, too, for videos you may have missed.
Tuesday, October 25th| 16:00 Game Time | Ninja Q&A
This week, we give to the floor to our Ninja team – the kings of Quality of Life updates, quick fixes and seasonal content. Expect an update on Bounty Hunter, as well as other projects the Ninjas are working on. We'll also have a special extended Ninja Quickfire session, so post us all of your niggling suggestions!
Post any questions you have in the forum thread, on Reddit, or by using the #RSQA hashtag on Twitter.
Tuesday, October 25th| 17:00 Game Time | The Loot from 5,000 Hard Clue Scrolls
Welcome to Cluetober! This week, we’ll be showing you the loot from 5,000 hard clue scrolls. Join us from 17:00 UTC for all the fun.
Friday, October 28th | 20:00 Game Time | Update preview with Mod Shauny
Find out what you can expect from Monday’s patches and more with Mod Shauny this Friday night.
In Other News
Elite Skilling Outfits Update
In case you have not seen it, be sure to head over to the forums for an update post on Elite Skilling Outfits and how they will work.
WIN: A life-sized Golden Scythe!
This October, we’re asking for you to tell us a pint-sized scary story.
Get your creative juices flowing for your chance to win a life-sized Golden Scythe, as part of our 15th birthday celebrations. Find out how you can get involved on the forums.
Have a spooky week!
The RuneScape TeamI’ve been busy with site business today, which is by far the shittiest part of this gig. But, I did get a YouTube episode about George Soros recorded, so be on the lookout for that later. In my absence, things were blowing up on Twitter…as usual. Today, it involves Bill Mitchell, who I’ve never spoken to in any fashion. He’s gotten to be well-known off his support for the Donald Trump campaign and he does some radio show. I think most of you probably know him. There’s been profiles of him in the mainstream media, etc. The Free Beacon recently named him Man of the Year (in a tongue-in-cheek fashion). That article dubbed him The New Nate Silver. And to be fair, his prediction of a Trump win came through in spades, although he was hardly the only one to make that prediction.
Still, since he was one of the main Trump supporters on Twitter, he’s gotten a lot of shine for his stance. Plus, I think the media just loves laughing at the guy. I don’t have any issues with him. Still, I never looked towards him for serious analysis. Someone on twitter tells me his radio show is good. I wouldn’t know. Maybe it is. However, one thing that isn’t good is trying to get people fired based on who they call their friends or what accounts they follow on Twitter. That’s the fire surrounding Mr. Mitchell today.
I can’t say if it’s true, but there are certainly some troubling things surrounding the silver-haired host.
Here’s the statement from Amy Moreno, a writer for TruthFeed. That’s the one who has allegedly been targeted by Mitchell. In the past, she’s tweeted out one or two of my stories and laughed at a couple of my tweets. I’ve never spoken to her in any personal capacity. I like her, though. She seems very nice. In fact, she seems a lot nicer than Bill Mitchell, truth be told…but again, I don’t really know the guy. Maybe he’s super nice.
However, stuff like this doesn’t help his case…
https://twitter.com/VivaLaAmes/status/815992990296657920
There are two things that get under my skin about her allegations.
I, too, associate with accounts which maybe be considered extreme. I’m not a white nationalist, but some of my followers definitely are. Do I feel like I need to disown anyone? No. If I can find common cause with people on certain issues, I take that opportunity. I’m pretty sure some of them might not like my race-mixing ways, just as I don’t care for the idea of a white ethnostate. I’m marrying a woman of Pakistani origin, for fuck’s sake. If I feel the need to distance myself from controversial ideas, I do so and then move on. Singling potential allies out personally is not something I do, unless they do it to me first. For example, I thought Richard Spencer saying “Hail Trump” and the subsequent Nazi salutes that surrounded it (salutes done by others, not Spencer himself) were stupid as hell. I said that once or twice on Twitter. After that, I was done. Banging the drum didn’t interest me much. The other thing that got to me is this seems petty as hell. Why is Bill Mitchell going after this women, if what Ms. Moreno says is true? And given what I’m about to show you, I tend to think it is.
Here’s a screenshot of text messages that were supposedly sent to Amy Moreno. If they’re fake, I haven’t yet seen any denials.
He’s talking about Jared Wyand, who was recently booted from Twitter after putting out a tweetstorm about Jewish control of the media, and “the Jewish Question” (among other things). I’m not surprised he got banned, as he definitely violated the code of conduct (even though I believe that code should be much more liberal). And while I do think that Israel is not a great ally to the United States, and that the Israeli Lobby has too much influence over our politicians, that’s where it stops for me.
People who talk about “the Jewish Question” and other antisemitic tropes actually weaken this argument, in my opinion…and that’s one reason why I wish they would stop, even though I defend their right to say what they want. I don’t think there’s some major Jewish conspiracy. Many rich Jews (and our own military industrial complex, who get billions off the arms deals we have with Israel) just advocate for a place they see as their homeland (Israel) over the place they actually live (America). I think it’s undeniable that money and power have been used to put Israeli foreign policy interests above our own, but I don’t call it some sinister plot.
I do call it, however. Does that make me antisemitic? I don’t think so. It’s an analysis of foreign policy. I’m getting off into the weeds, but I wanted to address that real quick.
Back to Bill Mitchell. The things he’s saying aren’t consistent.
Yea, other than pretty much calling her a Nazi-by-association, you said nothing disparaging about Amy Moreno. Also, if we want to talk public positions people could be fired for (and she is being attacked merely for knowing people, not taking positions on her own…but I digress), this tweet from Mitchell himself might be up at the top of the list.
I don’t wish Bill Mitchell any harm. I’ve never been a fan of his and I don’t follow much of what he does. But the stuff coming from his Twitter account today is out of line. Trying to use guilt-by-association tactics against a fellow Trump supporter is uncalled for. Saying all the outrage against his tactics is the work of George Soros is idiotic. In fact, some people might call that antisemitic as well (Soros is a rich Jew), if we were taking a less charitable view of Bill’s tweets. Regardless, I think he should apologize to Ms. Moreno and move on with his radio show. That would be the best thing for everyone. Allegedly, he has a video statement coming out this evening. If he posts it, I will update this article with a link to it.
UPDATE: Bill Mitchell has responded via video…
UPDATE II: Amy Moreno’s daughter has jumped in to defend her mother while noting that she’s the product of a mixed race union. Mitchell really seems to have stepped in it with this one.
https://twitter.com/MorenoEren/status/816071610872385536
UPDATE III: Things just went from bad to worse. Now Bill has decided to take on…Pepe the Frog. This was a mistake.
.@mitchellvii this is a bad idea, Bill. You're taking on Pepe now? Just stop! pic.twitter.com/BHCacmD2FV — Ethan Ralph (@TheRalphRetort) January 3, 2017
https://twitter.com/franz_gmbh/status/816129577084817408
.@mitchellvii We love PEPE. He is the most beloved meme EVER! pic.twitter.com/AIRsYzqgFb — Wiretapped Patriot❌ (@T64Pamela) January 3, 2017
https://twitter.com/kirbaay/status/816124598341214209
https://twitter.com/nes709/status/816125991961722880
You know who else hated it? Hillary pic.twitter.com/IxniS3am3f — Valwinz (@ValPeroPero) January 3, 2017
.@mitchellvii People who are smarter than you did. — Comrade Stump (@GranTorinoDSA) January 3, 2017
That was just a small sampling. I have no idea what this guy is thinking. Why would he move from his horrible day right into taking on Pepe? It’s utter madness.
UPDATE IV: Pepe slays another…
Maybe it's because I'm an old dude, but I just never got Pepe. To those who love Trump and love Pepe, I apologize if I offended you. — Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) January 3, 2017They stood in the centre of Brussels. Row on row.
Hands held high, making hearts to the heavens. Showing the slaughtered they were not forgotten. Reminding themselves they were here with love. Looking to show humanity wins. That love conquers all.
They lay in the centre of London, face down where they fell. Stabbed by a knife, rammed with a car, flung, broken, into the Thames, life bleeding out on the curb.
And the news came thick and fast.
An injured woman is assisted after a man drove a 4x4 into pedestrians along Westminster Bridge on Wednesday afternoon
A car rammed deliberately into pedestrians on the bridge. Ten innocents down.
A police officer stabbed at the House of Commons. Confirmed dead.
Another woman now, dead at the scene.
Shots fired. An Asian man rushed to hospital.
People make hearts with their hands during a ceremony in Belgium to commemorate the first anniversary of the bomb attacks in Brussels
A woman, plucked from the water.
And I grew colder. And more tiny.
No anger for me this time. No rage like I’ve felt before. No desperate urge to get out there and scream at the idiots who refused to see this coming.
Not even a nod for the glib idiots who say this will not defeat us, that we will never be broken, that cowardice and terror will not get the better of Britain.
Because, as loyal as I am, as patriotic as I am, as much as my whole younger life was about joining the British military and fighting for my country — I fear we are broken.
Not because of this ghoulish spectacle outside our own Parliament. Not because of the lives rammed apart on the pavement, even as they thought about what was for tea. Or what train home they might make.
Bystanders stop to give people mouth to mouth after the driver mowed them down. Katie Hopkins says we are now a broken London
But because this is us now.
This is our country now.
This is what we have become.
To this, we have been reduced.
Because all the while those forgiving fools in Brussels stood with their stupid hands raised in hearts to the sky, another mischief was in the making. More death was in the pipeline.
As the last life-blood of a police officer ran out across the cobbles, the attacker was being stretchered away in an attempt to save his life.
London is a city so desperate to be seen as tolerant, no news of the injured was released. No clue about who was safe or not.
Liberals convince themselves multiculturalism works because we all die together, too.
An entire city of monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Blind. Deaf. And dumb.
Members of the civil protection outside the damaged front of Brussels Airport, in Zaventem, a year ago today. The attacks left dozens dead and hundreds injured
Immersed in a seething pit of hatred, hidden in pockets of communities plagued by old animosities and ancient strife.
These people may have left their lands. But they have brought every tension, every conflict, every bit of fight here with them.
The Afghans hate the Somalias who loathe the Eritreans. As it was before, it is now. London is a city of ghettos behind a thin veneer of civility kept polished by a Muslim mayor whose greatest validation is his father's old job.
Son-of-a-bus-driver Sadiq.
I see him now, penning a missive about how London is a beautiful and tolerant city, how we are united by shared values and understanding, and how we will not be cowed by terror.
Sure enough, there he was, saying exactly that, just now. Fool.
A police officer is led away from the scene after she tries to revive her colleague who was stabbed in the attack on Wednesday afternoon
Even as mothers text to check their children are safe. Including my own, worrying about me as I sit overlooking the scene, feeling fearful of this place where monsters lurk and steal lives away in an instant. For nothing.
I |
McDormand will be voicing the almighty. It's important to note she is playing God, not simply the voice of God (like Alan Rickman in Dogma).
Amazon also released the first video from the set, which gives us glimpses artwork for sets and costumes, behind-the-scenes footage from filming, and plenty of looks at Michael Sheen, David Tennant, and Jon Hamm.
Nick Offerman Joins the Cast
This cast just keeps getting better and better, with Parks and Recreation's deadpan king Nick Offerman becoming the latest big name to sign on. He'll be playing the U.S. ambassador who was picked by here to raise the Antichrist, but who instead was accidentally given a totally normal baby.
Seen here testing local drums for a 2 year old for volume+suitability (none of them were loud enough): our Secret Guest Star. Ladies, Gentlemen & All Others, as the father (sort of) of Warlock Dowling, the (Not-) Antichrist,I present the temporarily beardless Mr @Nick_Offerman. pic.twitter.com/SLen4qKs7b — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) March 6, 2018
A Touching Tribute to Terry Pratchett
His Good Omens co-author is no longer with us, but Neil Gaiman is making sure there's at least one touching (and fitting) tribute to the late Terry Pratchett on the show.
Some of the late writer's most beloved books will be included in Azriphale's book shop, along with a hat someone will be back to get someday.
A post shared by Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) on Dec 12, 2017 at 2:39am PST
The inclusion of even a hint of Pratchett makes us feel all the better about this new adaptation of Good Omens, especially given that such a hint is orchestrated by his longtime friend and colleague. Keep watch for more new Good Omens details!
First Look at Jon Hamm as the Archangel Gabriel
Neil Gaiman has shared the first image of Jon Hamm as the Archangel Gabriel from the set and it looks like Heaven is one very stylish place, because the man...err, angel...looks chic.
So for you, for me, for all of us. FOR PEOPLE NOT YET BORN. This is what Jon Hamm looks like as the Angel Gabriel in the upcoming TV series of GOOD OMENS. A thing of beauty, and a joy for ever. pic.twitter.com/OK84PDZXLs — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) November 30, 2017
The Bard Joins the Show
More casting news from Neil Gaiman himself, as it looks like Shakespeare will get on on the act. Actor Reece Shearsmith will play the greatest playwright of all time, and the show has already filmed at the Globe Theatre.
Delighted to welcome @ReeceShearsmith to the Good Omens family as an Elizabethan playwright whose name escapes me. #alrightItsShakespeare pic.twitter.com/sjcaUk3Iug — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) November 2, 2017
No, you're not crazy, Shakespeare is not in the novel (at least not in anyway anyone would have known).
In the book he’s the author of The Trapping of the Mouse and of Golde Diggers of 1589. But this is a new scene. https://t.co/0CDDEvztbb — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) November 2, 2017
But Gaiman explained he will be part of the series because it will fill in some of the gaps in the 6,000 years his leads have been on Earth.
There are things about Crowley and Aziraphale’s doings over the last 6000 years that were not revealed in the book. This is one such thing. https://t.co/0Nnw3RiSEt — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) November 2, 2017
The Show Finds Its Agnes Nutter, Three (of Four) Horseman, and Beelzebub
Heaven help us Good Omens' casting agent has been busy lately. First the show found its Agnes Nutter, as Josie Lawrence (Whose Line is it Anyway?) will reprise the role after originally playing the accurate prognosticating witch on the BBC Radio adaptation. And now it has also cast three of its Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, as Mireille Enos (War), Yusuf Gatewood (Famine), and Lourdes Faberes (Pollution--penicillin retired Pestilence) will make the end of the world an all female affair, especially since they'll also be joined by Anna Maxwell Martin (Bleak House), who will take on the role of Beezlebub.
You know what? @neilhimself is one of the loveliest men on the planet. Here’s a writer and his witch. pic.twitter.com/f7I6MUuNKL — Josie Lawrence (@josielawrence1) October 30, 2017
Good Omens Will Hamm it Up
Every time we think we can't be more excited for this series, we find out we were wrong, and today is no different. In fact, we should be sounding trumpets to announce this latest news of the newest star to join the show: Jon Hamm, and he's playing a very famous angel.
Deadline reports that Hamm will play the archangel Gabriel, God's primary messenger and leader of the angels. While Gabriel has a small role in the novel, it looks like it will be much larger on the show. Gaiman said a sequel novel that he and Terry Pratchett had planned to write together before Pratchett's passing would have featured lots of angels, and that the two tried to include them in a failed movie adaptation years ago. Now he is finally introducing them to the story.
Image: AMC
Based on Gaiman's description of Gabriel, Hamm (who said he loved the book when he first read it 20 years ago) was the perfect choice for the role. "[Gabriel] is everything that Aziraphale isn’t: he’s tall, good-looking, charismatic and impeccably dressed," said Gaiman. That sounds like Jon Hamm, who is probably what all angels look like in many people's minds.
The Novel in a Nutshell
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch is an hilarious action-fantasy novel about an angel and demon working together to stop the young, unaware Antichrist from bringing about the end of days. It was co-written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and released in 1990, and since then the beloved novel has developed a passionate and rabid fan base.
Image: Workman Publishing
The Wheres and Whens of Production
The six-part series is being co-produced by Amazon Studios and the BBC. Other movie and television adaptations have been attempted over the years, but only a radio series from BBC in 2015 ever made it to air. The series will debut on May 31, 2019 on Amazon Prime.
Probably closer to 17 months. https://t.co/VJpKAw2CX1 — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) September 18, 2017
Gaiman has also explained the lengthy production time--the six hour-long episodes are mini-feature length movies.
It's the equivalent of a six hour long feature film. We are shooting four pages of script a day. Then editing, FX, music... #GoodOmens https://t.co/ao8VJ5Lk5b — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) September 21, 2017
The Cast and Crew
Not only did Gaiman write all six episodes, he is the showrunner for the series. So if anyone has complaints about any changes from the book, you won't have Gaiman as an ally. Meanwhile, playing the leads are two more Nerdist favorites: David Tennant as the demon Crowley, and Michael Sheen as his opposite (and friend) the angel Aziraphale. Gaiman shared a look at the two in character from "11 years ago" when the story starts.
They are amazing. This is them in the opening scenes, 11 years ago, in St James's Park. David and Michael, demon & angel. #GoodOmens pic.twitter.com/ceK4XYY881 — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) September 18, 2017
Playing Anathema Device, the last living descendant of the witch and world’s most accurate prophet Agnes Nutter, is Adria Arjona. She starred as Dorothy Gale on NBC's Emerald City, and as Emily on season two of True Detective.
Image: NBC
Arjona will have have plenty of days on set with English comedian Jack Whitehall, who will play Newt Pulsifer, the wages clerk who opts for a far more interesting job as a member of the Witchfinder Army.
Playing Whitehall's curmudgeonly old boss and condensed milk enthusiast will be Michael McKean, who you will know from a long career of being amazing in everything, but most recently as Jimmy's brother Chuck on Better Call Saul.
Image: AMC
Playing Madame Tracy, the sweet owner of The Painted Jezebel next door to Shadwell, is Miranda Richardson, who many readers will know as Rita Skeeter from Harry Potter.
Image: Warner Bros.
So far other cast members include Ariyon Bakare and Ned Dennehy as Dukes of here Ligur and Hastur, Jasmine Hyde as Sister Grace, and Nina Sosanya as Sister Mary Loquacious.
The Young Family and the Them
The BBC has announced they have found both their Young family and the Them, including 11-year-old Antichrist Adam will be played by Sam Taylor Buck. His father Arthur will be played by Daniel May (Rogue One) and Sian Brooke (Sherlock) will play his mother Deidre.
Of course you can't have Adam without his friends/gang the Them. The other three kids in the cast will be Amma Ris as Pepper, Ilan Galkoff as Brian, and Alfie Taylor as Wensleydale.
Photos from the Set
Make sure you follow Neil Gaiman on Twitter and Instagram, because he has not been shy about sharing photos from the set, including a few of the different looks Crowley has employed over the years.
A cocktail pianist is playing Bohemian Rhapsody. Crowley & Aziraphale are dining in Piccadilly. In the next scene they get bookshop drunk. pic.twitter.com/X73VqEH81A — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) September 20, 2017
Day two in St James's Park. Feeding the Victorian ducks. pic.twitter.com/HJ08BRlDbq — Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) September 19, 2017
Terry Pratchett's Part in All This (from Beyond the Grave!)
After Pratchett passed away in 2015, Gaiman swore he would never do anything with the novel without his co-writer. That was until he received a handwritten letter from the late Pratchett, who had instructed the note only be given to Gaiman after his death. In the latter, Pratchett encouraged Gaiman to work an adaptation without him. Since it was impossible for Gaiman to argue with Pratchett at this point, he had no choice but to honor his friend's request. He has also made sure Pratchett's presence would be felt on set.
At the read through. We brought the book. A post shared by Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) on Sep 13, 2017 at 8:11am PDT
We'll keep our eyes out for more information as we get it, so make sure to check back here for the latest on the show. And head to our comments below to tell us what you're most looking forward to, or to let us know if we missed any news.
Featured Image: AmazonTory aides have compiled a spreadsheet accusing 36 serving Conservative MPs of inappropriate sexual behaviour, Guido can reveal. The dossier includes specific allegations against MPs, including one minister who is “handsy with women at parties”, an MP on the government payroll who had “sexual relations with a researcher”, one backbencher who is “perpetually intoxicated and very inappropriate with women”, and another who allegedly “paid a woman to be quiet”. It was produced by a number of current and former Tory staffers in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Guido has redacted names and identifying details above.
Several of the allegations on the list are already in the public domain, for example Mark Garnier asking his researcher to buy sex toys. The vast majority of the others will come as little surprise to anyone who regularly speaks to staffers in Westminster. Guido had heard all but three of the stories before. Many of the allegations are historic, others are ongoing. The breakdown includes:
2 serving Cabinet ministers accused of inappropriate behaviour towards women
18 serving ministers accused of various forms of inappropriate sexual behaviour
12 MPs who are said to have behaved inappropriately towards female researchers
4 MPs who are alleged to have behaved inappropriately towards male researchers
Senior Tories have spent the last 72 hours denying such concerns were being circulated by researchers, tonight Guido has the proof they are. 36 MPs is 11% of the Tory parliamentary party. This is not just a Tory problem and there are a significant number of Labour and LibDem sex pests as well. Though this spreadsheet is going to send shockwaves through the Tory party and government…
UPDATE: The redacted spreadsheet:Apr 17, 2015; Vancouver, British Columbia, CAN; Vancouver Canucks fans celebrate the win against the Calgary Flames during the third period in game two of the first round of the 2015 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Rogers Arena. The Vancouver Canucks won 4-1. Mandatory Credit: Anne-Marie Sorvin-USA TODAY Sports
With the lottery out of the way, what is on your Vancouver Canucks offseason bucket list?
What a month of April it was for the Vancouver Canucks! The Canucks were able to stock up on young talent through the acquisitions of top NCAA free agents, defenseman Troy Stecher and netminder Michael Garteig. Great hockey stories too — what a way to come back home for the Richmond native and the Prince George native!
And now, here is May. What can possibly excite non-playoff hockey fans in May? Here is your survival guide for the month!
Signings Tracker: Drake Caggiula and Dan Hamhuis
With Stecher and Garteig out of the way and providing solid depth for the Canucks, now is the time to sweep the NCAA ranks and take the biggest fish out there — left winger Drake Caggiula. A decision seems to be imminent.
UND's Drake Caggiula returned home yesterday after visiting approximately 8 NHL teams, with a decision expected this week… — Elliotte Friedman (@FriedgeHNIC) May 2, 2016
Caggiula was in Van City just last week. Jim Benning seems to have linked Brock Boeser and Stecher — both North Dakota products — to the discussion in attempts of luring Caggiula over to the west coast.
I like Vancouver’s chances here. Besides the fact that former ND coach Ron Hextall is now a Philadelphia Flyers coach, I don’t see too much competition that would deter Caggiula from coming to re-kindle his chemistry with Boeser here in Vancouver.
And of course, let none forget the case of Dan Hamhuis. Jim Benning has not talked too extensively with the pending free agent while hopes are that the veteran defender will stay with the Canucks and fill out what is shaping up to be a very crowded — and perhaps very potent — 2016-17 blueline in Vancouver.
IIHF World Championships
It is here, the 2016 World Championships. The world’s finest ice hockey players will gather from all over the world, unless they are injured, tired, or simply too good of players that they are still competing in the playoffs.
On that note, the inclusion of Finn Patrik Laine to the national team seems to have cost a Canuck a spot in the lineup.
Markus Granlund didn't make the Finnish national team for the worlds. #Canucks — Tommi Seppälä (@TommiSeppala) May 1, 2016
And Bo Horvat, rumored to be making the trip to Russia for Team Canada, has yet to be seen. More to come, and soon, as the round robin play begins Friday, May 6th.
Here are highlights from last year’s tournament to get you hyped for the tournament. Let us bemoan the lack of Canucks content here.
Before we head to Russia let's look at the best 10 goals from the 2015 #IIHFWorlds! Which one was your favourite?https://t.co/Z2EnMG6cSY — IIHF (@IIHFHockey) May 2, 2016
This year, however, the Canucks will be well represented at the Worlds. Chris Tanev, Ben Hutton, Thatcher Demko, Jannik Hansen, and even Ronalds Kenins seem to be making the trip oversees.
We will have complete coverage of this year’s tournament. Stay tuned.
The Aftermath
So the Canucks are picking fifth overall, eh? The aftermath of the lottery is sure going to be interesting. Benning was on the morning show on TSN1040 on Monday and had this to say about this year’s draft class:
Benning doesn't think there is true number 1 defenceman in this draft. — TSN Radio Vancouver (@TSN1040) May 2, 2016
So it will now be up to the Edmonton Oilers, who are dangling their fourth-overall pick big time. Regardless of who the Oilers draft, the Canucks will likely now draft a forward.
Most likely candidates, should they remain, are Logan Brown, Matthew Tkachuk, and Pierre Luc-Dubois. The Canucks may look to make a trade to go up, go down, or to add more picks.
The playoffs are creating quite the havoc, too. With the firing of Bruce Boudreau and the potential of a Milan Lucic signing making quite the financial mess in Los Angeles, the Canucks will be exploring all their options.
Here’s to a great month of May! June is going to be madness!As educated consumers around the world become increasingly concerned about corporations’ impacts on social issues including worker conditions, income inequality, and environmental sustainability, the global luxury industry has been grappling with ways to shed an ostentatious image and catch up with the times. Kering, one of the world’s biggest luxury conglomerates and the owner of some of the world’s top high-end brands including Gucci, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen, has been undertaking some of the biggest corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability initiatives in the industry in a move that aims to redefine what future generations associate with the word “luxury.”
Kering is working to weave the ideas of sustainability and social responsibility into its business model and brands’ DNA with a comprehensive plan to meet benchmarks in areas such as supplier practices, carbon emissions, PVC-free products, hazardous chemicals, sustainably sourced raw materials such as gold and diamonds, and more. It also publishes a report on its “environmental profit and loss,” and sponsors programs to prevent violence against women worldwide.
As China remains one of the brand’s most important consumer markets while facing significant struggles with issues such as worker conditions, product safety, and pollution, the country is a key area of focus for Kering (especially as China’s younger generation becomes increasingly socially conscious). On June 3, the Kering Corporate Foundation held a social entrepreneur awards ceremony in Beijing, which provided a grant to charitable jeweler the Starfish Project. One day earlier, it held an event in Hong Kong where it recognized the sustainability efforts of its brands.
To learn more details about Kering’s CSR and sustainability initiatives—and why they’re so important in China—we interviewed Kering Chief Sustainability Officer and Head of International Institutional Affairs Marie-Claire Daveu.
How does China factor into Kering’s global corporate social responsibility strategy?
At Kering, we go beyond the conventional concept of CSR, which is often more focused on philanthropy, with the aim of becoming a truly sustainable business.
We are integrating sustainable practices across all of our operations, and implementing new business models that take into account the conservation of our planet’s natural resources. Via the innovations we are developing, our aim is to reduce our environmental impact in every single one of our operating regions, so as to create a better future for everyone. This certainly applies to China, as the region is a key source of raw materials for the Kering Group, be it silk, cotton, or gold, and it is also one of our Group’s major retail hubs.
We are also committed to sharing our know-how with our stakeholders in China, as collaboration is a key element of sustainability. By open-sourcing and sharing our new solutions, like we did recently with our EP&L (Environmental Profit & Loss), we want to contribute to a smarter planet whilst encouraging others to do so also.
Take, for example the partnership we launched with the Tsinghua Foundation last year, to educate and empower China’s next generation. With five creative talents and 10 female students selected each year, the “Tsinghua and Kering Personnel Training and Artistic Innovation Fund” empowers participants via training and education programs.
Turning to the social aspects of sustainability, Kering is focusing its actions on an urgent global concern: violence against women. Established in 2009, The Kering Foundation—whose slogan is “Stop violence. Improve women’s lives”—supports local NGO projects all over the world. In 2014, the Foundation appointed its first Chinese board director: Yuan Feng. A journalist by practice, Yuan has been an advocate for women’s rights and gender equality in China since the mid-1980s. On June 3 this year, the Kering Foundation held its biennial Awards in Beijing, naming Starfish Project its 2015 Social Entrepreneur Award winner in China. Starfish Project is a social business, owned and operated by women, which designs and manufactures jewelry. As a recipient of the Kering Foundation’s Award, Starfish Project will now receive support in the form of a €30,000 grant from the Kering Foundation and two years mentoring from Shirley Jiang, China Head of Communication & Marketing at Qeelin.
How important is CSR to consumers in China right now compared to the rest of the world?
We’re facing many challenges in the 21st century: we are moving towards a population of nearly 9 billion people on this planet, with diminishing resources, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. In light of this, we have no other choice but to act responsibly. We need to change the paradigm; we need to change our consumption habits and change our business models, so as to become less impactful and more efficient.
I believe that behind each customer, there is a citizen, and as citizens we all have a responsibility to our planet. This is as true in China as it is anywhere else in the world.
A recent trend we are seeing is that consumers around the world are saying loud and clear that a brand’s social purpose is among the factors that influence their purchasing decisions. According to a Nielsen Global Survey on Corporate Social Responsibility, the propensity to buy socially responsible brands is strongest in Asia-Pacific (64 percent), Latin America (63 percent), and Middle East/Africa (63 percent), whereas the figures for North America and Europe are 42 percent and 40 percent respectively.
Do you think demand for CSR in China will increase in the future?
In China—like in the rest of the world—I believe that behind every customer there is a citizen. People are becoming more and more aware of environmental issues.
Focusing on China, I have noticed during my time spent here on business that people are increasingly concerned about pollution issues, evidently due to the direct impact of this issue on their health and daily lives.
We’ve been reading a lot about the growth of “slow fashion” or “eco-fashion.” Kering recently held a sustainability awards ceremony in Hong Kong, where it recognized the efforts of brands like Gucci, Balenciaga, and Bottega Veneta. Would you say that any Kering brands could be considered a part of the slow fashion movement?
The link between luxury and sustainability is obvious: the luxury sector sets the trends in fashion. Hence, we believe we have a responsibility as a luxury group to change the paradigm and build a more sustainable industry, in which brands continue to offer top-quality products that meet consumer demands, without adding to our planet’s resource scarcity and environmental issues.
To achieve this, we are taking a supply-chain approach, developing new solutions for smarter sourcing that better address animal welfare and environmental impact, and empower communities in our operating regions. For example, Kering brands such as Gucci and Bottega Veneta have developed more environmentally-friendly, metal-free leathers; Gucci’s Fairmined gold; and Kering’s python and crocodile conservation programmes.
We believe there is a growing interest in sustainable fashion, and hope to inspire other companies to join us in driving this trend.
Consumers often feel that companies’ CSR initiatives may be just about generating good PR for the company rather than making an impact. Is Kering doing anything to address this attitude?
Let me be clear: at Kering, our interest in sustainability is not driven by a desire to sell more handbags to our customers. We are in this because we believe it’s the only way to run our businesses, now and in the future.
As a global group, it is our responsibility to take the lead and to embrace better practices. We put the products on the shelf; we control what is available to our customers and our stakeholders. In ensuring our products are as sustainable as possible, we are ensuring they are of the highest quality, because sustainability to us also means quality. After all, the role of the fashion industry is to offer both beautiful and sustainable products.
Our brands, however, are free to communicate, or not, on their sustainability actions. It’s not our style to talk too much about what we do, instead our style is to take action, to “walk the talk.”
Kering is focusing significantly on sustainability. Do you believe that China’s pollution levels have impacted Chinese consumers’ interest in sustainability? Do you think younger Chinese consumers are more concerned with CSR than the older generation?
As I said previously, sustainability is the answer to many of the major issues of the 21st century, not just in China but worldwide. And yes, this will particularly impact younger generations!
Looking to our future consumers, the next generation, the “millennials,” they are the most environmentally conscious generation to ever grace our planet. They are not only our future consumers but also our future talent and future leaders. Eighty-three percent of millennials believe that businesses must take responsibility for their environmental impact.
Is sustainability a necessity for global luxury brands to succeed in the future?
Our chairman and CEO, François-Henri Pinault, strongly believes that becoming a more sustainable business is not only a responsibility, but also a business imperative.
As a business, we know that the pursuit of sustainability is a non-negotiable. In our rapidly changing world, sustainability is the only way to ensure a business will thrive now, and in the future.
The fashion industry has a critical role to play. We are in a unique position, where we influence and set the trends and aspirations in fashion. This can ultimately drive and inspire sustainable change. Like any business, fashion brands rely on natural resources—they are essential to the running and the very success of a business.
Taking Kering for example, you just need to look at our raw materials to understand our reliance on nature; cotton, silk, leather, cashmere, wool, and so on. As for our manufacturing processes, they depend on water and energy, amongst other resources. At Kering, like the entire fashion industry itself, our supply chains are complex and often stretch across multiple countries around the world. What we must also take into account is that the livelihoods of people and communities living in these regions rely on our supply chains. Running your supply chain in a resilient manner, which protects the environment, supports people, economic development and business growth, is no longer a luxury—it is a necessity. In our rapidly evolving and volatile world, a robust sustainability strategy can provide your business with the focus, knowledge, and solutions necessary to address and adapt to the said resource constraints, to the changing needs of consumers, and to other unprecedented events.
This interview was edited and condensed.A guys night out turns out to be a GOLDEN experience. We recap Richards crusade towards sobriety and hate of edibles. Enjoy some great inebriated conversation with some fantastic music!
We go over some issues with Vegas, and just go over some things that lead us up to the moment of recording
We talk about getting too high on edible chocolate bar, fecal matter, murder...
Sorry for the terrible editing. I used a new software and i was getting used to it.
NSFW - do not listen if easily offended
We talk podcasts, san francisco, mushrooms, the sacred plant, coachella, and Tony Villar. With special guest Cesar and Alfredo, always offering great insight on what real life really is
Our Black Friends talk about their struggle. What did I get myself into…either way i enjoyed this interview…hope you guys do too! Stay tuned for more
We talk about a plethora of things…
How to be happy, focusing on goals, getting busted, and RON PAUL!
Pilot try number 2
Pilot Episode“Because of Bessie Coleman, we have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream” -Lieutenant William J. Powell
Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman, the first African American female pilot, had the drive and ambition to achieve more in 6 short years than many people achieve in a lifetime.
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Bessie had quite a few obstacles blocking her goal of becoming a pilot. Born in 1892 in Texas, she grew up in a society that didn’t offer many opportunities to young black women. Her family was poor, and education was often out of reach. Coleman, however, was so determined to get an education that she would walk 4 miles to attend classes in a one-room shack, starting at the age of 6. She finished school at the top of her class, doing especially well in mathematics.
In search of better opportunities, 23-year-old Coleman moved to Chicago to live with two of her older brothers. She found work in a barber shop as a manicurist, and it was there that the thrilling stories of returning WWI soldiers inspired her dream of becoming a pilot. Coleman began searching the US for a trainer, only to be turned down repeatedly for her race and gender. Not to be stopped, she took the advice of one of her clients, the owner of the newspaper the “Chicago Defender” Robert Abbott, and decided to head to France in order to earn her pilot’s license. She learned French, and with financial support from the “Chicago Defender”, banker Jesse Binga, and her own savings, Coleman departed on November 20, 1920. She studied for 7 months and was awarded an international pilot’s license in June of 1921, making her both the first American to be awarded a license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale and the first African-American woman to have a pilot’s license.
Upon returning stateside, Coleman caused a media stir. However, she quickly realized that she would need more training in order to earn a living from her new career as a stunt flier. But not much had changed since the last time she sought training in the US – despite her newfound fame, she still could not find anyone in the country that would work with her. She traveled once again to Europe and was trained in several countries, returning to the US to become an aviation sensation. Known as “Queen Bess” and admired for her daring stunts and flamboyant style, Coleman would perform at many air shows over the next 5 years.
In February 1923, Coleman’s plane stalled and crashed, a disaster which she survived with a few broken ribs and leg. She wouldn’t be so lucky in her next crash, which occurred on April 30, 1926. She and William Wills, her mechanic, were flying together in a newly-purchased but poorly-maintained plane, with Coleman in the passenger seat. Because she was planning a parachute jump for the next day, Coleman had her seatbelt unbuckled in order to peer over the cockpit to scout the terrain. The plane dived unexpectedly, throwing Coleman to the ground where she died instantly. Wills lost control and plummeted to the ground, dying upon impact. The culprit was determined to be a wrench that had been jammed inside the gearbox. She was only 34 years old.
During her career, Coleman remained true to her ideals and worked to encourage other African-Americans to take up flying. For example, she refused to perform at any air show that that wouldn’t admit members of her race. She also put her foot down when it came to perpetuating derogatory racial stereotypes. She was offered a role in the film Shadow and Sunshine, which she accepted until learning that her first scene would portray her as a caricature, dressed in tattered clothing with a pack on her back.
In 6 short years, Bessie Coleman achieved her own dream of becoming a pilot, entertaining and inspiring crowds of people around the world. She is still one of history’s most inspiring people today, who managed to both soar and remain grounded without letting society’s barriers stop her from achieving many of her goals. Although she died before achieving her goal of starting a flying school, or as she put it, “mak[ing] Uncle Tom’s cabin into a hangar by establishing a flying school”, her legacy continues to live.
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Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to get high on historyMerseytravel agree pilot of Liverpool City Centre bicycle hire scheme
Merseytravel councillors last month at its Annual Meeting agreed to start a pilot of a Liverpool City Centre bicycle hire scheme. A pilot will start this month and if successful the project for a larger scheme will go out to tender with the first phase rolled out in March 2014 (just in time for politicians to take credit for it in the upcoming local elections next May).
So, is Liverpool looking to copy London’s “Boris Bikes”? Will it be used by the locals or will it just mainly be used by the tourists?
On cycle related news, I spotted quadricycles being hired at New Brighton for £10 an hour recently. Certainly they seemed popular with the increasing number of tourists that are visiting New Brighton, so maybe Merseytravel can make it a success. Please leave your best bicycle related puns on Merseytravel’s new project as comments.
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PrintSALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Gov. Gary Herbert said Thursday he remains committed to defending Utah's same-sex marriage ban, calling decisions by other state leaders to not defend bans the "next step to anarchy."
Herbert made the comments Thursday during his monthly televised news conference on KUED. The Republican governor said he's dismayed by the suggestion that Utah should drop its defense of the 2004 voter-approved ban because public opinion and social mores are shifting.
He said seeing Oregon and Pennsylvania leaders this week decide not to appeal rulings from federal judges striking down bans there does nothing to change his thinking. He said those leaders should be "called on the carpet" for their decision.
"For elected officials, governors or attorney generals, to pick and choose what laws (they) will enforce I think is a tragedy, and is the next step to anarchy," Herbert said. "We have an obligation as a state to defend those laws."
Oregon and Pennsylvania became the 18th and 19th states to allow gay marriage.
A federal judge struck down Utah's ban in December, leading more than 1,000 same-sex couples to marry in the state before the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency stay pending an appeal. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver is weighing the appeal, with a ruling expected soon on the constitutionality of Utah's gay marriage ban.
What you choose to do with your sexual orientation is different in my mind than what you're born with as far as your race. What your attraction may be is something else, but how you act upon those impulses is a choice. –Gov. Gary Herbert
The governor said Utah officials have not decided if they'll appeal a separate ruling this week by a federal judge ordering the state to recognize the gay and lesbian marriages that took place in Utah, and move forward with benefits for those couples.
Herbert said he's scheduled to meet with attorney general Sean Reyes and other state officials, with a decision expected in the next few weeks. The judge put a 21-day hold on the ruling, giving the state time to decide on an appeal.
The governor also commented on his views on homosexuality, after being asked if he thinks approving gay marriage is analogous to the legalization of interracial marriage 47 years ago.
"What you choose to do with your sexual orientation is different in my mind than what you're born with as far as your race," Herbert said.
He added later: "What your attraction may be is something else, but how you act upon those impulses is a choice."
___
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Related StoriesThe people's council of Gregorio Arleé Mañalich, in the western province of Mayabeque, is better known as el Central, which means sugar mill in Cuban Spanish. However, sugar harvest isn’t talked about there anymore. Twelve years ago, production at the mill was halted, and then came the dismantling. Piece by piece, the mill was taken apart until there was nothing more than steel infrastructure and concrete.
About 272 employees had to reinvent themselves. Some changed jobs. Others traveled daily to mills that continued grinding.
The sugar harvest doesn't worry Nene, an old welder who still gets up everyday at 4 in the morning. He doesn't lose any sleep over the sugar harvest. But then he heard that there were mills in the east that had begun grinding again after a lot of inactivity. They had apparently been maintained.
That did keep him awake that night.
In Mañalich, Nene remembers perfectly, they said they’d maintain the mill, but they didn't.
The sugar industry in Cuba has encountered many merciless hurdles: the collapse of the socialist block, low market values, inefficiencies, bad administrative decisions and climate change.
In 2016, production |
3,437 majority in 2015. It is not clear whether he will seek the UKIP nomination himself or will stand as an independent.
'Little future'
Mr Farage has claimed the party's only MP has been "totally disconnected" from UKIP since February 2015 and it was time for him to sever his links entirely.
"From the date of the result of the general election, he has actively been working against UKIP," Mr Farage wrote about Mr Carswell in the Daily Telegraph.
"I think there is little future for UKIP with him staying inside this party. The time for him to go is now," he added.
Mr Farage told the BBC: "If Paul [Nuttall] is constantly contradicted and dragged in the wrong direction by our one MP, that's not where he should be."
MEP Bill Etheridge has also said Mr Carswell should lose the party whip as he was "not compatible with what UKIP is trying to achieve". He told Radio 5 live that Mr Carswell should "look elsewhere" for his political future.
He told Radio 4's World at One the situation was "not a party at war it is one man... who has gone out of his way to subvert the party's leadership".
"I'm not suggesting that Douglas isn't a good MP he just doesn't have the UKIP principles at heart," Mr Etheridge said.
But UKIP Welsh Assembly member Mark Reckless said Mr Carswell should stay, saying "we have got to learn from him" as he won a Parliamentary election.
Mr Carswell, who has urged the party to project a more positive image and tone down its rhetoric on immigration, has warmer relations with Mr Nuttall and several of his key advisers.
Current UKIP chairman, Paul Oakden, said after the Stoke result that it might be years before his party can pick up another seat via a by-election.
Mr Banks criticised Mr Nuttall's tactics in the Stoke campaign, saying he wrongly adopted a "red UKIP" strategy, copying Labour policies on the NHS.
The businessman has said UKIP needs to become more professional if it is to make further headway, saying that as chairman he would oversee a new membership drive, and install a new team of "trained professional agents" to focus on target seats.
Unless this happened, he has suggested he could turn his back on the party.The Arbitrary Day gifts started with some reddit gold. My work-addled brain was trying to remember what clever comment had been worthy of gilding (alas, none), when my santa told me that she (I think) was responsible.
Next up were Pixar shorts DVDs. I love these and have been meaning to get them! The perfect addition to the Pixar collection.
Soon after this, another package arrived with Paul Hollywood's British Baking. I love baking, and I'm a huge fan of the Great British Baking Bake-Off, so quite looking forward to trying out some of his stuff.
I think that there's something else on the way, but wanted to post these in the meantime, and will update if/when anything else is received.
Thanks so much, Santa!! Your gifts were the perfect choices :)TLC Announced as Headlining Act for 90sFEST! 2017
Photo via Facebook.
Some of the lineup for 90sFEST! has been released, and it’s pretty dope. Headlining will be the group that brought everyone classic tracks “Waterfalls” and “Creep” as well as a self-titled album released this year — TLC. And they’ll be accompanied by other familiar artists from that bygone decade. The nostalgia-fueled music fest makes its Columbus comeback in August, setting up at Columbus Commons.
“We received a ton of positive feedback from 90sFEST in 2016, including coverage on the Today Show and articles in outlets like the New York Times,” said Marc Weinstein, an original founder of the brand, in a press release. “With backing from unparalleled talents like TLC, we are ready to grow into new cities while building a fan-based brand in places like Columbus.”
90sFest And Partners started the fest in Brooklyn, NY in 2015. Not simply a musical event, 90sFEST! brings back the fashion and culture of the 90s, creating a “totally immersive, time-traveling experience.” For their second year in Columbus, they’ll partner with Prime Social Group, and bring Grammy award-winning Blackstreet and DJ Suga Ray, who’ll perform all night. C+C Music Factory (Gonna Make You Sweat) and 17th Floor, a “Hip-Rock and R&B cover band” will take the stage as well.
General Admission tickets are currently on sale for $25, VIP for $55; but the prices will go up once more of the lineup is announced.
It’ll run from 4 to 11 p.m. on Saturday, August 12, accompanied by food, beverage and merchandise vendors.
For more information, visit 90sfest.com.
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About the Author Lauren Sega is the Associate Editor for Columbus Underground. She covers political issues on the local and state levels, as well as local food and restaurant news. She grew up near Cleveland, graduated from Ohio University's Scripps School of Journalism, and loves running, traveling and hiking.
Tags:An American surgeon is looking for love - and his requirements are, well, incredibly specific and more than a touch creepy.
The unnamed but self-professed "very successful" man sent out a very long email to around 30 people he met at a New Jersey networking event last week (all openly cc-ed), offering cash rewards to the person who could find him the'skinny', 'Caucasian' and 'Christian' girl he's after (only once he'd approved her picture, of course).
One of these strangers then leaked the email to the American press.
A first date set-up with the surgeon's perfect woman (she has to have spent significant time in a city of one million or more and would preferably be a Highly Functional Type B) would get someone NZ$125, but by the fifth date, the matchmaker would be rewarded with NZ$630 and a free Lasek eye surgery (where can we get his email addy? Just joking. Maybe).
Here's the full, unedited email (we kept in his wonderful punctuation) in all its glory from this definitely Type A guy, as published on Jezebel:
"dear fellow networking event attendees,
i was very late to last night's event, so i only got to meet a small fraction of you guys (i tried to hurry, but you really can't hurry-up surgery!)
sorry about this mass email, but it's more efficient on my end. i'm also kind of a "semi-professional networker" with 10,000 people in my gmail contacts list, 1,000 friends on my various FB accts (even though i don't use FB myself), 1,000 followers on Twitter, and google will "auto populate" my name, so perhaps some of you "beginning" networkers will learn some tips of how i'm always trying to create a "win-win" (this skill set was stressed a lot when i got my MBA from NYU)
my situation is somewhat unusual in that i am the #1 surgeon of my type in the northeastern US by volume, and have performed nearly 20,000 procedures over the last 15 years, so i really don't need additional income (which is the unusual part). i'm actually so successful that most of the reason i attend networking events these days is for personal networking, not business networking-i'm trying to meet the right woman to fall in love with, marry, and start a family with (i'm single, never married, and really want kids before i'm old!)
i've hired some professional matchmakers over the years, with OK results (eg i've dated 2 of the matches for 6 months each, which is pretty good). the services vary enormously in quality and price (with an imperfect correlation). for example, doing the math (ie taking their fee and dividing by the number of introductions they made), i've paid between $100 and $1,000 per introduction (which is worth it to me, even on the high end, since i have an unusual time/$ preference, ie have more $ than time)
clearly, i'm still trying to meet the right woman the "normal way" like out at events, or through dating websites (which is, shall i say, "normal-ish"). however, i do strongly feel that having as many sources as possible only increases the potential candidate pool, and increases my chances of meeting the right person (hence my offer to you)
so if you (or any of your friends) like playing matchmaker, please read my preferences/parameters below and try to help me out.
please send me the parameters and picture of the potential setup, so i can say if i'm interested, before you start introducing us (otherwise it's kind of awkward then saying that i'm not interested). if interested, i'm offering the following "thank-you gifts" for your kind help:
first date set up: $100 cash
second date (with either same person, indicating a better match, or a 2nd person): +$200 or free latisse worth $300
third date (again can be w same person): + $300 or free botox worth $500
4th date (w same or diff person): + $400 or free Juvederm injections worth $900
5th date (same conditions): + 500 cash or 1 eye free LASEK worth $2000:)
this is what i am in general looking for.
These are my Hard (Objective) Dating Parameters which are NOT Flexible:(this means I am only willing to pay for introductions if ALL these criteria are met)(if you want to set me up w someone missing 1 of these criteria, I may accept, but will not pay for that)
Age 27-35 (ideally 28-34)
No kids, wants kids in the next 1-2 years
College graduate, doesn't have to be a great school, but needs to have finished the degree
Skinny (i.e. dress size 0-2, if you don't know what that means (many men don't) it means very skinny)
Caucasian (not black, not Hispanic, not Asian)
Healthy lifestyle (defined as no smoking, no drugs, good diet, no hard drinking,
These are things that I would ideally prefer, but don't require (i.e. I am flexible about these criteria)
Christian (any denomination is fine, I'm Catholic but not very religious, prefer any religion over none, must be religiously tolerant, will not be compatible with someone who thinks everyone else is damned)
Graduate degree or very good undergraduate school (more compatible since I went to 3 Ivy League schools i.e. Dartmouth, Columbia & Harvard, as well as Emory and my MBA from NYU)
Spent significant time in another country other than the US (either born somewhere else or lived out of the US for a total of a 6 months or more, not on a vacation, doing something like school or work)
Spent significant time (>1 yr) living in a city of 1 million or more (so can live in NYC if moves here)
Likes animals and pets, particularly dogs (because I plan to have a dog for the rest of my life)
These are the Soft (Objective) Criteria I require, but are difficult to match (because they're qualitative)
Attractive (like an 8 out of the 1-10 scale, 9-10 is actually bad as it comes with a lot of downside)
Nice, normal, sweet, kind, altruistic, selfless, not entitled, bitchy, materialistic, selfish, self-centered
Stylish, fashionable, polished, confident but not vain, superficial, overly concerned about looks
Hard-working, real career, full-time job (unless in graduate school), achievement-oriented
Highly functional Type B (not a Type A because too similar, not a Type B who can't get stuff done)
Easy-going, sense of humor, doesn't take life or things too seriously, gets along well with everyone
Good person, follows the Golden Rule, nice and kind to others, never does bad things because of valuesGood family, good role models, ideally good nuclear family so can emulate good patterns of behavior."
Oh wow. Many people are guessing that it's this guy at it again. Who knows.At Greenhouse Group, we’ve been working with tag manager for over 3.5 years now. Over the last part of that period, a lot of articles popped up about Google Tag Manager (GTM), Google’s solution to tag management. It’s a great option, but there are some other vendors out there that also offer great tag management systems (TMS). A TMS that we have used and still use a lot is Qubit Opentag, which was recently updated to version 3. So I thought now would be a good time to discuss this TMS and how it compares to GTM.
How Qubit became our tag manager of choice
First, let’s rewind back to late 2012. We were just starting to look at tag management options for our clients. Qubit popped up as our number one choice because of three reasons:
It has a built-in cookie consent window.
It supports tag dependencies.
It is open source.
The first benefit is clear, as cookie consent windows were about to become mandatory for all websites in the Netherlands (where most of our clients are located).
The second one is extremely powerful. The option for dependencies allows you to easily fire tags in order. Let’s look at a basic Google Analytics setup as an example:
GA core tag : first, we load our GA core tag on all pages. It only loads the library and configures the tracker.
: first, we load our GA core tag on all pages. It only loads the library and configures the tracker. GA page view tag: this tag also loads on all pages, but is dependent on the GA core tag. Because of that, it will only fire after the core has fired.
This feature is very powerful because you break your tags down into several components. If there’s a new setting we want to apply to each analytics hit we send (page view, event and ecommerce). We simply add it to the core tag, and it’ll be applied to all dependent tags.
The third benefit (open source) allowed us to look under the hood and see how the TMS works.
Back then, GTM didn't have as many features as Qubit Opentag, and therefore it wasn't a serious option for us.
What’s new with Qubit Opentag version 3
Over the course of 2014 and 2015, GTM catched up to Qubit Opentag, and in some areas even surpassed it. Luckily Qubit released version 3 of their TMS in February 2016. With it, Qubit upped their TMS game. These were the four most important updates for us:
One thing we really missed in Qubit, especially over the later part of the past 3.5 years, was versioning. With version 3, they've added versioning to their TMS, but not as other TMS vendors do it. Where you normally have a version for each release, Qubit has a version for each tag. So if you release a big update, and only one tag has an issue, you can simple roll back to an old version of that one specific tag.
Qubit Change History. It allows you to roll back to an older version of a specific tag with the icon on the right.
2: Keep track of changes with tabs
The second great improvement is the use of tabs. When you’re working on several changes, including tags, load rules, and/or variables, it can be hard to keep track of what you've been working on. Qubit Opentag opens a separate tab within their interface for every change your working on. This gives you an instant overview and allows you to quickly see what has changed.
Qubit shows you an overview of your recent changes by opening a tab for each changed tag, rule or variable.
Qubit allows you to set a tag to three possible states:
Active : when published, the tag will be active for everyone.
: when published, the tag will be active for everyone. Inactive : when published, the tag will only be active if you run it manually.
: when published, the tag will only be active if you run it manually. Archived: when published, the tag will not be active.
The inactive state is a great way to test new tags. As you can see, Qubit doesn’t allow you to delete tags, you’re only able to archive tags. The benefit of archiving over deletion, is that you’ll be able to unarchive old tags instantly. Say your client doesn’t want to use a heatmap tool anymore. You archive it. After six months, they change their mind and see great value in that same tool. All you have to is unarchive the tag, and you’re done.
Compared to GTM, Qubit had one key point to catch up to: centralized management of tags, rules and variables. Before version 3, you had to set up a rule per tag. Not optimal, but manageable (because we could work with tag dependencies). Luckily, all has changed, and tags, rules and variables are ‘first class citizens’ now.
Other benefits
Besides the big updates mentioned above, Qubit Opentag has some other great features in their TMS:
A/B test deliver tags.
Pure JS tags (no <script></script> tag required).
tag required). Copy tags from one container to another.
Now you know what's great about Qubit, it's time to see how it compares to the well known alternative by Google.
Qubit Opentag compared to Google Tag Manager
When comparing tag managers, I look at four things:
1: features
2: data layer
3: support
4: pricing
1: Features
Both GTM and Qubit support roughly the same features. Some features are unique to Qubit and offer a benefit, e.g. tag dependencies, tracking changes with active tabs and tag specific versions. Other features are better in GTM, e.g. variable management. In Qubit, variable management is more quirky as it should be. You set up a variable, and then you’ll need to create a tag specific script parameter to use it. An unnecessary extra step. Though in practice we haven’t really run into this isue, because of the tag dependencies (we only need to put the Google Analytics property ID in the core tag for example).
2: Data layer
Regarding the data layer, my vote goes to Qubit’s Universal Variable setup. I’ve explained the differences of both in detail in my post about the CEDDL standard. In short, my vote goes to Qubit because the data layer is a) more readable, and b) setup as an easy to use data layer, whereas Google’s is really focused on measuring Google Analaytics via GTM.
3: Support
There’s a key difference here. Google has a large community of users. This will make it easy for the community to answer any GTM related questions. Because of this, you’ll hardly ever contact support. Qubit on the other hand, has great support that’ll normally reply within a day, or within the hour if it’s urgent.
4: Pricing
Qubit is free if your volumes are low enough. If you keep to a maximum of 1 million page loads a month, you won’t have any costs. If you top that number, it’ll be $99/mo. After this, it’ll be an extra $99 for each 10 million page loads. GTM is always free. The good thing is that Qubit offers support.
Conclusion
Currently, I would pick Qubit over GTM because of several key differences. Because of these differences, it feels more suited for users with a background in development compared to GTM. Therefore, it's a better fit for me personally. This doesn’t mean that GTM is a bad choice, some of our clients have it running as well, and I also use it for some personal projects.
At Greenhouse Group, we strongly believe in picking the best tool for our clients challenges. Right now, it’s Qubit (though GTM is close), but this might change in the future. To make sure we’re flexible with our solutions, we run tests where we mix different setups: e.g. Qubit Opentag with Google’s dataLayer, or Google Tag Manager with Qubit’s Universal Variable. As long as they both support custom JavaScript tags, we’re able to interchange tag managers if one of them would greatly outperform the other. A comforting thought.
If you’re familiar with another tag manager and like to share your experiences with it, let us know in the comments.In early February concurrent with Retromobile, Bonhams will offer this 2000 Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR Coupé, estimated to bring $2-2.2 million. When Mercedes-Benz first unveiled its CLK GTR road car in 1998, it sold for $1.5 million, making it the most expensive production car up to that time. To meet racing regulations, Mercedes was obligated to build 25 road-going versions. Supplied new to Switzerland, chassis number “23” has traveled just over 2000 miles, effectively remaining in as-new condition.
It can be imported to the U.S. under the federal government’s show and display rules. For such efforts, auction houses engage specialist firms that can deliver U.S. compliance at a cost of $20,000 to $60,000 in most cases, and there are already CLK GTR's in the U.S. Bear in mind one of Mercedes-Benz’s finest corporate attributes is an almost holy devotion to maintaining their historic vehicles. Mercedes can most likely provide the needed talent to maintain it through its U.S. Heritage Center. That said, I suspect a Mercedes dealer in Switzerland or Germany will place the winning bid, but for a major U.S. collection with an emphasis on exotic cars, this is a special piece.
It’s also a measuring stick for just how far we have come. It covers 0-60 in 3.8 seconds, about a second behind a current Ferrari 488GTB. And it tops out at 199 mph. Of course, it also generates massive downforce and thus incredible cornering speeds, and race cars are about lap times, not the quantifiable performance measures applied to road cars. But it’s the rarity and thundering nature of the car that matter, and its place in sports car history.
For those who care, here’s the backstory. After the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA, the governing body of motorsports) destroyed the highly successful Group C category of the 1980s and early ‘90s by forcing them to adopt 3.5-liter engines related to the then-new Formula One engines, sports car racing was deeply damaged.
But sports car racing has a habit of bouncing back. And in this case, it started with the BPR series developed by Jürgen Barth (ex- Porsche ), Patrick Peter and Stéphane Ratel. BPR started as a one-marque series in Europe based on hot-rodded versions of the French MVS Venturi mid-engine GT car. But BPR evolved into a racing category for all manner of exotic cars. BPR races ran four hours in duration.
Though McLaren and its F1 supercar blitzed all the 4-hour BPR races in 1995, there was no expectation that any of the BPR cars could actually beat the older, faster prototypes that were grandfathered into the Le Mans field for 1995. But it rained that year at Le Mans, and rained heavily. McLaren and its F1 scored a fluke victory that saved what otherwise would have been a lost decade for sports car racing.
With Max Moseley by then more secure in his role leading the FIA, in 1996 there was a rapprochement of sorts between the FIA and the ACO (Automobile Club de l’Ouest, the organizing body for Le Mans). The regional BPR series morphed into the FIA GT Championship, which was a new set of regulations for extremely exotic but fully homologated GT cars, "homologation" meaning the companies had to produce 25 examples for the road. Both Porsche and Mercedes lobbied hard at FIA headquarters in Paris. End result, the GT1 category was allowed more downforce and more exotic materials than found in BPR. They’d be full-tilt racecars masquerading as road cars.
Porsche entered the GT1, which was based primarily on a Porsche 962 Group C car with a 911-inspired body and 911 front suspension. In evolved GT1-98 form it would win Le Mans in 1998. Mercedes brought the CLK GTR to the fight, also a pure sports-racing car, and it utterly dominated FIA GT in 1997-98, securing both the manufacturers and drivers championships both years. In 1999 all manufacturers but Mercedes withdrew from the championship. The FIA then shifted the GT Championship to the less exotic GT2 cars, which was Porsche-dominated thanks to hordes of 911 Carrera privateers.
And that’s the source of the CLK GTR’s quirky, enduring appeal. It did such a great job saving sports car racing that it killed off its category in only two years. When Mercedes decides it's time to win, it usually does.Bobby Zamora: In action for QPR at Athlone Town
QPR strikers Bobby Zamora and Charlie Austin were both on target as Harry Redknapp's men won 2-0 at Athlone Town on Tuesday.
Rangers followed up their 4-0 triumph over Shamrock Rovers on Saturday with a second clean-sheet victory, this time over the League of Ireland's bottom club at Lissywollen.
Summer signing Steven Caulker started in central defence, as Redknapp fielded a 5-3-2 formation which included Shaun Wright-Phillips at left wing-back.
Championship play-off final goal hero Zamora opened the scoring with a close-range finish in the first half after being set up by Wright-Phillips.
It was Zamora who assisted his strike partner Austin to double the Rs' lead early in the second period.
Rangers complete their pre-season friendly programme with a home clash against Greek outfit PAOK on Saturday, with Hull City the visitors to Loftus Road on the opening day of the new Premier League season a week later.Irvine Welsh portrait, by Rankin
Sure, there were those trailblazers who came before. Keith Richards. Thomas De Quincey. Zammo. But really it was Trainspotting that introduced the British public—sitting on their sofas and growing fat off a combination of Viennetta ice cream and crap game shows hosted by Noel Edmonds—to smack. Fortunately, Danny Boyle did such a great job at translating Irvine Welsh's novel to the screen that the film defined a generation. Unfortunately, arriving at a time when British people didn't know very much about drugs, it meant that I spent a great deal of my teens trying to explain to my mom that a little bit of crap hash wouldn't make overdosing and not realising that my baby had just died regular parts of day-to-day life.
Another film adaptation of an Irvine Welsh book landed in Britain earlier this month. Filth, directed by Jon S. Baird and starring James McAvoy (who reputedly drank half a bottle of whiskey each night in preparation for the role) has been lauded by critics and is in line to have made $4.8 milluon at UK box offices by the end of this weekend.
Where Baird’s approach undoubtedly differs from Boyle’s—the production value is more slick and cinematic, the tone is almost always hyperreal—it's still possesses the type of charismatic nastiness that would give Love, Actually director Richard Curtis PTSD. Like Begbie throwing that pint glass over his shoulder and hitting those cry-babies on the head, Filth is the kind of film that will leave you shaken, cold, and crying out for your mummy.
“James [McAvoy] sent me a photo of a guy dressed for Halloween as main character Bruce Robertson,” Welsh told me proudly over the phone earlier this week. “With the two fingers in the air and the beers and the coat and all that. I like to create these cultural moments, not just good books or a good movie that people are going to go and see and forget about.”
Now working and living in Chicago, Leith, Scotland’s finest and the author of six celebrated novels, four short story collections (including 1994's unbeatable The Acid House) and a succession of scripts, was clearly excited by the film’s success and happy to share his thoughts on Savile, skag and Scottish independence.
VICE: You never set out to be a writer. Do you think that’s why you’re able to speak to such a wide audience?
Irvine Welsh: Writers can become too knowledge based. If you’re constantly reading the classics, you’re going to try to write something to emulate that, and it’s never going to be as good. But if you’re more socially engaged and you try to keep active and go out, meeting people, talking to people and travelling on public transport… all these things, I think, are important.
Do you still do all of those things?
Yeah, I do all that in Chicago. It’s important also to hang out with people who are a bit of a pain in the ass and all that, but are interesting rather than comfortable. As you get older you want comfortable, and there’s something in me that rebels against comfortable.
I was watching Candyman last night for Halloween, which is set in Chicago…
I really like that movie! It’s set in Cabrini Green, which has been torn down now. It was one of the big black ghettos on the north side. The racial segregation in this city continues at a pace, and they’ve torn it down and relocated all the families onto the South Side. I hate the ethnic polarization in America. You can’t help but see it. Where I live in Chicago is a very white neighbourhood. And Chicago is one of the most multi-ethnic cities in America, but it’s not really—it’s like wedges of different ethnicities stuck together. There’s a great map online that shows America by ethnicity. If you pull up Chicago, you will see this enormous divide. I mean, South Africa during apartheid probably wasn’t as divided as this.
You’ve always been a political writer. Skagboys presents heroin addiction as a consequence of the decline in industry in the north of the UK. Is that something you saw firsthand?
Yeah. If there is no employment, no educational opportunities, no career opportunities, no sporting or leisure facilities, what else is there but drugs? They’re going to win by default. That’s never talked about, never addressed—how drugs won by default through the absence of anything else.
People need dramatic highs…
They need highs, which the drug gives, but also the whole culture around the drug, which is kind of the compelling drama people need. People don’t realise it, but the workplace provides drama—finishing a project, bonding, the highs and lows of promotions and disciplinaries, office affairs. Workplaces are packed with different narratives, which we need in our lives. If you’re not getting them in a workplace you’re getting them on the street in the underground economy—drug dealing, gangs, weapons, police.
It starts off with a kid, just hanging out with his mates having a bit of fun, then there’s nowhere to siphon off that energy. It just goes straight into the underground economy and into gangsterism; it becomes a straight career path.
Where does the pornography in your work fit into all this? Because it was a big theme in both Porno and Filth.
Once again, it’s to do with the feeling of alienation and the need for compelling drama. Modern consumerism has created this strange zoo for us that we don’t quite fit into. It’s like the polar bear wandering around in the same pattern, back and forth. It’s obviously disturbed because it’s not in its right environment, and we are as well. We’re all looking for schadenfreude—so much pornography is about humiliation. The same with these so-called talent shows, like X Factor and all of that, and with online bullying—it’s all part of a culture that lost sight of itself.
It’s been said that you based the necrophiliac pedophile Freddy Royle (from Lorraine Goes to Livingston, a novella published in 1996) on [disgraced BBC host and child abuser] Jimmy Savile. Is that true?
Yeah, I’d heard some stories from people who work in the hospitals about Savile and I didn’t take them too seriously, because you know everyone thought Savile was weird and a bit creepy. I remember my dad watching Top of the Pops and saying, "There’s something wrong with that guy." And I’d say, "Well, you say that about everybody who's got long hair and dresses a bit funny." But, like, "Nah, nah, nah," he’d say, "it’s way beyond that." A lot of people just seemed to sense something. I thought maybe he was just a great British eccentric and all that. Alan McGee talks about meeting Savile in his autobiography and getting a strange feeling off him.
And that's what made you base Freddy on him?
I’d heard all these rumours that Savile was a necrophiliac and a serial sex abuser. I just thought they were over-the-top rumors, fisherman's tales that get spread around. But rumors are always interesting, so I thought I'd base this character on the rumors I'd heard about Savile, not really believing at the time that they were true. Now I can believe it, obviously. But as a writer I wasn’t that concerned if it was true or not. I was just interested in the idea of someone putting up this massive front of quite bland positivity, you know? He had that bland, presenter's positivity.
He was hiding in plain sight.
Yeah, and it was also interesting to me that he was too big to take down. Savile reputedly spent 14 New Year's Eves with Thatcher at [the UK Prime Minister's country house retreat] Chequers. Well, her father was reputedly a sex pest and all that. Not saying there was anything between them, but obviously because of that dynamic she must have felt very comfortable with him and not really seen that sinister side. When you’re right in the heart of the British establishment, it makes it very hard for some nurse, who's burst in on him shagging a corpse in a morgue, to go to their senior and report him. Much easier to just turn the other way.
So are you writing the Savile film?
[Laughs] No! That was a joke. My point was that James [McAvoy] is such a powerful and empathetic actor that he could almost play Jimmy Savile and make people fall for him. It was a trite joke on my part.
Yeah, they might want to hold off on making that one for a while.
Yeah, like forever.
Trainspotting
Do you believe people can be born evil?
I think people can be born with a lack of empathy, with some mental deficiencies. But by and large, I think it's steps that lead to it. Being born under adverse circumstances, being brutalized by other people and not being in a position to make the right moral choices because of the brutality that’s been put on you… it can push people down that road. We have a cut-off point, which is adulthood, where we say, "Look, you’re an adult now, we do expect you to make moral choices." I think, as a society, we’re right to have that cut-off point. We have to, really, otherwise we would forgive everything.
I’ve been writing the intro to [the new edition of] Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick based the film on the American edition of the book, which omitted the last chapter, which was very British, very pragmatic. Whereas the American one was very clear: there’s good and there’s evil.
Yeah. Do you think characters like Begbie from Trainspotting resonate with today’s audiences more than, say, Mark or Spud; that the perceived threat of the waster in the 90s has now morphed into rioters and violent protest groups?
Yes, but I think there’s a lot of apathy. The waster today just sits in the house, on the couch, playing video games. It’s somebody’s kid who's maybe dropped out of college or has graduated and is just sitting around. They could be almost 30 and they’re invisible because, unlike Mark and Spud, they have no social life. The visible waster, bouncing along the street from pub to pub, has gone.
So many of the pubs in Leith have been shut down. You don’t see old guy pubs now. They can’t afford to go to the pub, so they’re sitting in the house—going to the supermarket then back to their house because it's cheaper.
We’ve just got these weird, hybrid pub-bar-club-restaurant things instead.
Yeah. There’s a bar in Leith that’s been everything. It’s been a Moroccan-themed bar and a Swedish disco bar. Now it's, like, a gastro pub. Things now, unless they have an established niche, have a very short life.
Are you for Scottish Independence?
I think it’s something that's part and parcel of the whole opposition to 30 years of neoliberalism. The UK, this imperialist, hegemonic state, is not able to deliver the expectation of Scotland as a social-democratic, Northern European state. So it’s aligned to all that—the end of the British Empire and industry and all the things that held these constituent nations of Britain together.
The end of the welfare state, the end of the National Health Service—the result isn’t just the campaign for Scottish independence, but also the resurgence in pride for the St George’s cross. The English Defense League, the British National Party, and United Kingdom Independence Party are all a result of this. Politically, it has been very on the right. But Danny Boyle’s Olympic ceremony was another expression of it: a call for an aspirational, multicultural England.
Why did you move to Chicago?
Family reasons, really. My wife’s from here, we’d lived in London and Dublin. We always had a place here and came back a lot. I’d been doing more work here in America.
Are you still able to write about the subjects that used to interest you now?
Well, I’ve got a place in Miami and Crime is set there. And my next book, coming out in May, is also set in Miami. The narrators are both American. |
point of view. Nor is there a unified view even in her own country.
"Berlin is quite divided about this," says Judy Dempsey of Carnegie Europe. "[Merkel] knows Vladimir Putin. She knows his KGB past. She has a very difficult relationship with him and she knows exactly what's at stake."
But Dempsey says the German Foreign Ministry is controlled by the Social Democrats. "They're very much this old-fashioned, ostpolitik, with a 'keep talking, move slowly, don't alienate Russia' approach to dealing with Moscow." So Dempsey says it will be up to Merkel to decide how tough Germany will be with Russia. "And what Merkel decides will influence the overall EU attitude."
The divisions within Europe over how to respond to the crisis mirror the divisions within Germany. Dempsey finds this astonishing given the potential for instability.
"There are experts, including Russian experts, who believe that Putin won't stop just at Crimea, that he might just go a step further, toward Odessa." Dempsey says the implications for neighboring Moldova would be huge — and Merkel knows this.
"She has to decide which way she's going to jump and, once she jumps, she'll have to bring in the other EU member states behind her." But Dempsey says that won't be easy.
"At the moment they're just so divided. They can't agree on the sanctions. They can't agree on the policies. They can't agree how tough they should be. They have no hard power. This is all about soft power and they can't even agree how to use soft power."
Sweden wants tough sanctions against Russia. So does Poland. The Baltic states want much tougher action against Russia.
"Italy is saying, 'Oh well, another crisis. We can't corner Putin,'" Dempsey says. Britain hasn't gotten tough yet, but she thinks Prime Minister David Cameron might move in that direction, with a caveat.
"Britain may come around to being much tougher, but remember, if Britain agrees to sanctions on assets, well, you know where most of Russia's assets are at the moment? They're in London," she explains.
France, Dempsey says, is slightly ambiguous. "They're willing to give diplomacy a chance. If push comes to shove, I think President Hollande will go for sanctions, depending on what they are and whether anyone can agree on sanctions."
Part of Germany's influence with Moscow is that it is Russia's most important trading partner, mostly in oil and energy. And there are more than 5,000 German companies with operations in Russia. Dempsey doesn't believe Putin will stop German companies from operating or void their contracts because Russia needs German know-how and technology.
"If he restricted German businesses in Russia, he would lose an awful lot and, at the end of the day, the Russian economy would suffer."
Dempsey believes the Russian economy is the key to ending the crisis. "Yesterday and today, the stock markets in Russia plummeted to the lowest in five years. $12 billion have been wiped off Gasprom, Russia's state energy monopoly, which is Putin's political and economic instrument."
She says Russia's central bank is trying to prop up the ruble and she thinks capital flight from foreign investors will probably be accelerated because of the crisis in Crimea. "This isn't going to be a short crisis," says Dempsey, who added that the same things happened during the 2008 crisis when Russia invaded Georgia.
"This is different. This is big time. This is Ukraine. If this is sustained, this sort of chiseling into stock markets and into Russian capital and foreign direct investment, it will really affect Putin because [what] he has relied on for so long is oil and gas."
Dempsey says German officials have long encouraged Putin to diversify his economy, to no avail. "At the moment, I think this is a big weakness for him."BALTIMORE — People around the country are chipping in to help the father of a Marine killed in Iraq after a court ordered him to pay the anti-gay church he's been battling in court
Albert Snyder of York, Pa., is suing the Westboro Baptist Church, whose members picketed the funeral of Snyder's son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder. The Topeka, Kan.-based church contends that U.S. military deaths are God's punishment for tolerance of homosexuality. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on the case.
Meanwhile, an appeals court has ordered Snyder to pay $16,510 in appeal costs to Westboro founder Fred Phelps.
Snyder tells The Baltimore Sun he's received about 3,000 e-mails from people who planned to contribute to the payment. The American Legion is also asking people to donate.
"I was appalled," said Sally Giannini, a 72-year-old retired bookkeeper from Spokane, Wash., who had called The Baltimore Sun after seeing an article about the court decision against Albert Snyder. "I believe in free speech, but this goes too far."
Snyder sued Westboro because its members waved signs saying "God hates fags" and "God hates the USA" at the 2006 funeral in Westminster of his son, Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who had been killed in Iraq. A federal jury in Baltimore awarded Snyder $11 million in damages in 2007, saying Phelps' group intentionally inflicted emotional distress on the family. The award was later reduced to $5 million, and eventually overturned on appeal.
As news of the order to pay some of the court costs spread through the news media and online, strangers were moved to send money and set up funds to support Snyder's court battle. Tuesday night, commentator Bill O'Reilly of Fox News Channel offered to pay the court costs owed by Snyder, according to WBAL Radio.
Mark C. Seavey, new-media director for the American Legion, also posted a message Tuesday on his Legion-affiliated blog, The Burn Pit, urging readers to donate to the Albert Snyder Fund. The American Legion's message was picked up by conservative political blogger Michelle Malkin, who called the Westboro protesters "evil miscreants" and urged readers to donate.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Snyder said he was "exhausted" by the long legal ordeal but heartened by the outpouring of support. He said he has received about 3,000 e-mail messages from people across the country who planned to contribute.
"It kind of restores your faith in mankind after dealing with this wacko church," Snyder said. "Win or lose, I'll know that I did everything I could for Matt, and for all the soldiers and Marines who are still coming home dying."President Trump’s big idea for Israeli-Palestinian peace was the “outside-in” plan in which Israel’s new Saudi allies would squeeze the Palestinians until they accepted a bogus “state,” as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.
By Paul R. Pillar
Donald Trump never has given evidence that he has new, fresh, and promising ideas to achieve his declared objective of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. His statements on the subject can more plausibly be interpreted as another piece of braggadocio about his self-declared deal-making ability.
The obstacles to an Israeli-Palestinian peace have long been painfully apparent, even if much discussion of the subject does not candidly acknowledge them. The contours of any fair and stable resolution of the conflict also have long been well known and have found expression in, for example, the “parameters” that Bill Clinton outlined.
Rather than offering anything that would be either fair or stable, the Trump White House has seized on the idea of outsiders imposing a formula on the Palestinians, with selected Arab governments to play a major role. This has become known as the “outside-in” approach. The approach fits well with some of the administration’s other inclinations that constitute what passes for a strategy toward the Middle East.
One of those inclinations is to go all in with the right-wing government of Israel. For Trump, this deference to the Netanyahu government has roots in his coming to terms during the presidential campaign with major donors who are allies of Netanyahu.
During the transition period, the deference was demonstrated by Michael Flynn’s appeal to Russia to flout the will of the rest of the international community (and an abstention by the incumbent U.S. administration) by vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution critical of Israel’s continued construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank. Although Flynn’s pre-inauguration machinations have been viewed mainly as part of the story of the influence in U.S. politics of Russia, the foreign country exerting influence in this case was not Russia (which voted for the resolution) but instead Israel.
Once in office, Trump appointed as ambassador to Israel his bankruptcy lawyer, who has been an advocate less for U.S. interests than for the Israeli right wing and has personally assisted construction of more settlements. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to whom the President has given the Israeli-Palestinian peace portfolio, also has aided settlement construction, although we are only belatedly learning of the extent of his involvement because Kushner conveniently failed to disclose a major part of that involvement in his government ethics filing.
Only Lip Service
Given the all-too-obvious posture of Netanyahu’s government toward the Palestinians and the issue of making peace with them, the posture of a deferential Trump administration on the same subject also is obvious. Despite periodic lip service by Netanyahu toward a peace process, his government opposes the yielding of occupied territory or the creation of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu says so when speaking to his domestic base, and other senior members of his ruling coalition are even more direct than he is in saying so.
Ergo, for the deferential deal-maker in the White House, a deal for genuine peace is not on the agenda. His newest statements about Jerusalem’s status and a move of the U.S. embassy are just another facet of his deference to the government of Israel and its American backers.
The other inclination of the Trump administration that meshes well with the idea of outside-in is the going — well, if not all in, then mostly in — with the young de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS). Kushner is a key figure in this relationship as well. The two unelected thirty-somethings, with power handed to them through paternal favoritism, reportedly have become best buddies.
Here the U.S. deference has included Trump’s support for the Saudi-led effort to isolate Qatar, despite his own Secretary of State’s efforts to reconcile the disputatious Gulf Arabs. It also has included continued U.S. support for the Saudi military assault on Yemen, despite the resulting humanitarian catastrophe there.
The strengthening of the remaining link of this love triangle, with Israeli-Saudi cooperation becoming a more open and frequently discussed topic, also fits the outside-in notion. The Netanyahu government always has sought more salient ties with Arab governments as a demonstration that Israel need not resolve the Palestinian problem to avoid international isolation.
For MbS, developing a relationship with Israel is one form of getting help wherever he can get it amid the challenges of consolidating power internally after his coup and coping with a series of foreign policy setbacks involving Yemen, Qatar, and Lebanon, while staying in good graces with a U.S. administration that is in bed with the ruling Israeli right-wing.
All three points of the triangle are making their maneuvers to the drumbeat of Iran, Iran, Iran as a constant preoccupation and rationalization. For Netanyahu, the drumbeat continues to serve as an all-purpose distraction and blame-shifter. MbS has made opposition to Iran his rallying cry in trying to justify operations such as the calamity in Yemen and the attempts to strong-arm smaller states such as Qatar and Lebanon.
Iran-Bashing
And of course, anti-Iranism has been the one loud and consistent theme in a Trump Middle East policy in which many observers have a hard time discerning a clear strategy.
None of this has anything to do with the issues underlying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has involved a contest between two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, over the same land. Once again, Palestinians have become collateral damage of the pursuit of unrelated objectives by others.
Earlier in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this included the objective of atoning for the genocidal sins of Europeans. Now the objectives include a young Saudi prince trying to shore up his position and an unpopular U.S. president trying to score points with his political base.
With such dynamics driving the latest chapter in what is still called the “peace process,” it is no surprise to read reports that MbS has presented Palestinian leaders with a proposal that no Palestinian leader could ever accept. The proposal supposedly would create a Palestinian state, but one with only noncontiguous pieces of the West Bank, only limited sovereignty over even that territory, no East Jerusalem, and no right of return for Palestinian refugees.
The Saudi suggestion included naming Abu Dis, an Arab-inhabited suburb of Jerusalem, as the capital of the Palestinian entity — an idea that has been advanced before. Such a proposal being advanced now undermines the contention that Trump’s new declaration regarding Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has no implication for how Jerusalem will be handled in final status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
The history of Palestinian activism does not support the central concept of outside-in, which is that powerful Arab regimes will be able to impose their will on the Palestinians. The Arab League, with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt playing a leading role, did create the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1960s. But only a few years later, the PLO came under the control of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, which had originated before the PLO. Subsequent actions and postures repeatedly demonstrated that the PLO, despite its origin, was no tool of Arab regimes but more a reflection of popular Palestinian sentiment. Later history featured the rise of Hamas, which owed its existence to no regime and became such an expression of the frustration of Palestinians over Israeli occupation that Hamas even defeated Fatah in a free election.
There are strong reasons that the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict evokes strong sentiments, and will continue to do so until and unless a genuine resolution of the conflict — not an imposed substitute for such a resolution — is achieved. One thing Kushner got right was his recent public comment that “if we’re going to try and create more stability in the region as a whole, you have to solve this issue.”
Anger Over Injustice
Sheer anger over occupation and all of the injustices in daily life that are part of the occupation is an underlying driver of instability. Another is the strength of nationalism and the desire of any people for self-determination. Such sentiment, among Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Arabs, is why a two-state solution, despite how much more difficult the half century of Israeli colonization of occupied territory has made it, still is an essential part of any resolution of the conflict.
Arab empathy with Palestinian brethren continues to be strong, despite much talk in recent years about all the other problems in the Middle East that are on Arab minds, and notwithstanding how much the Bibi-MbS-Trump triangle would like to think that the only thing anyone cares about is Iran.
The Jerusalem issue — the focus of Trump’s latest appeal to his base — is especially a hot button. As Shibley Telhami, who regularly uses polling to test Arab sentiment, observes, Jerusalem “remains a mobilizing issue even in a polarized environment: Even if Arabs don’t go out into the streets in consequential numbers, a declaration will play into the hands of those plotting in the basement.”
And Arabs do still go out in the streets. Telhami notes that they did so a few months ago in response to Israel’s installation of new security measures at the al-Aqsa Mosque, generating enough of an uproar to lead governments to intervene.
What the Trump administration is doing, in concert with the rightist Israeli government, can be interpreted as just another episode in stringing along a “peace process” while Israel unilaterally establishes still more facts on the ground that are difficult to reverse. It is that, but there probably also is some self-delusion involved, especially when coupled with the inexperience of Kushner and MbS.
Sometimes when a rhetorical theme is repeated as often and for as many purposes as the drumbeat of Iran, Iran, Iran has been repeated, the drummers start to believe their own rhetoric.
In his public remarks the other day, Kushner asserted, “Israel is a much more natural ally today than they were 20 years ago because of Iran and ISIS extremism.” No, it isn’t. The growing intolerance in a state defined by religious and ethnic discrimination, with the cementing of a system of apartheid with a large subjugated population lacking political and civil rights, has made Israel even less of a natural ally of the United States over the past 20 years.
As for Iran, Netanyahu’s political exploitation of that issue in a way that goes, with respect to the biggest Iran development in recent years — the agreement that restricts Iran’s nuclear program — against even Israel’s own security interests reflects how big the gap has become between Netanyahu’s policies and U.S. interests.
Saudi Arabia always has had interests significantly different from those of the United States, notwithstanding mutually beneficial cooperative arrangements involving oil and security. The differences have become even greater with the rise of a young prince preoccupied with his internal power and his troubled campaign to claim regional dominance.
By hitching his Middle East policy to these two wagons in the vain hope that Palestinians can be browbeaten into permanent subjugation, Donald Trump is doing no favors either to U.S. interests or to the cause of Middle Eastern peace.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is author most recently of Why America Misunderstands the World. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)WASHINGTON — President Obama on Friday named James F. Dobbins, a veteran diplomat who oversaw the return of the United States to Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, as his third special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, an administration official said on Friday.
Mr. Dobbins, 70, a former assistant secretary of state for European affairs with a history of difficult assignments from Kosovo to Somalia, will confront a fraught relationship between Washington and Islamabad, as well as a rapidly dwindling American military presence in Afghanistan.
The special representative post was first held by Richard C. Holbrooke, a larger-than-life diplomat who assembled an extensive staff at the State Department and threw himself into a broad range of political and development issues in Afghanistan.
After Mr. Holbrooke’s death in December 2010, the job went to Marc Grossman, another career diplomat who devoted his tenure to efforts, ultimately fruitless, to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban. Mr. Grossman deliberately cultivated a lower profile than Mr. Holbrooke, scaling back his staff and negotiating behind closed doors.Image copyright Gilbert Van Ryckevorsel Image caption An Atlantic bluefin tuna strikes at its prey
Scientists say that tuna swimming in the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill may have experienced heart damage.
Lab research has demonstrated how crude oil chemicals can disrupt heart function in the fish.
The study, published in Science magazine, is part of the ongoing work to try to understand the impacts of the disaster.
The gulf is an important spawning ground for bluefin and yellowfin tuna.
Tracking studies have indicated that many of these fish would have been in the area during the 2010 disaster.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Prof Barbara Block: “The Gulf of Mexico spawning population is the most threatened”
Scientists have long known that certain chemicals in crude oil – such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) – can be harmful to the hearts of embryonic and developing fish.
These molecules, which have distinct ring-like structures, cause a slowing of the heart, irregularities in rhythm and even cardiac arrest at high exposures.
Pathways blocked
But earlier studies never explained the precise mechanisms involved.
Now, scientists from Stanford University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) think they have some answers.
Image copyright US COAST GUARD
Working on tuna heart tissues in the lab, they have detailed how PAHs can block important cellular pathways. These are pathways where potassium and calcium ions move in and out of cells. Their ability to do so quickly is vital to the proper functioning of those heart cells.
“What we found was that oil blocked key processes in the cardiac cells involved with linking excitation to contraction, which means that beat to beat, we slowed the heart cells down and we also decreased their contractility,” Barbara Block, a professor of marine sciences at Stanford, told BBC News.
Human implications?
Because the mechanisms involved operate in the same way in the hearts of all vertebrates, it is highly likely, the team says, that other animals swimming in waters around the crippled rig would have been exposed to similar cardiac risks.
And the questions also reach across to human health - because vehicle engines put PAHs into the air in our cities.
“Impressively, the cardiac excitation-contraction coupling pathways are the most conserved pathways in all of animals,” said Prof Block.
“It means that the same ion channels present in tuna to make its heart beat are present in humans.
"So we’re interested in the impact of oil petroleum products on our own excitation-contraction coupling, and we’re interested in linking air pollution, for example – a place where petroleum products are often found, volatiles from our exhausts - to the problems of cardiac morbidity that are seen across the planet on a very smoggy day.”
Prof Block was explaining her research at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago.Amidst the ongoing legal barriers and the outages, The Pirate Bay, the renowned torrent site, is up and still running. (Photo : Twitter/The Pirate Bay)
The Pirate Bay is all set to be blocked in Iceland as local ISPs agreed to block access for its customers. However, a Pirate Party MP criticized the ban and stated that website banning would happen without any sort of trial first.
Local ISPs of Iceland and major copyright holders have come to an agreement to block access to The Pirate Bay and Deildu.net, according to RUV.
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Ásta Guðrún Helgadóttir, a Pirate Party MP strongly came down on the blockade of The Pirate Bay. "This is just censorship and there occurs what is called "public-private partnership" in English as a private company, which said beneficiaries, are to conclude an agreement on something that the courts and police authority, or executive, to be his," she said to Visir.
Back on October last year, Reykjavík District Court of Iceland ordered Hringdu and Vodaphone to block The Pirate Bay as well as Deildu for the customers in Iceland. And now the blockade is put into action.
"It seems to me the ruling will set a precedent for blocking access to websites without taking the matter to trial first and proving [the torrent sites] have hurt anyone," Helgadóttir added via Grapevine.
Even after The Pirate Bay is blocked in Iceland by major ISPs, people can still access TPB using various other mediums like proxy servers. It has to be seen how strong this implementation of the blockade will be.
Stay tuned for more updates on The Pirate Bay blockade. Share your views and thoughts in the section below.Alex Wong/Getty Images
Rep. John Conyers stepped down as the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee on Sunday following reports that he settled with a former staff member who said she was fired after rebuffing his sexual advances.
"After careful consideration and in light of the attention drawn by recent allegations made against me, I have notified the Democratic leader of my request to step aside as Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee during the investigation of these matters," Conyers said in a statement on Sunday.
Conyers reiterated that he denied allegations that he harassed several former staffers, instead criticizing the far-right online provocateur Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist who nevertheless helped surface the claims.
But the 88-year-old Michigan Democrat acknowledged that he could be a distraction from Democratic priorities while the House Ethics Committee investigates his behavior.
"I have come to believe that my presence as Ranking Member of the Committee would not serve these efforts while the ethics committee investigation is pending," Conyers said. "I cannot in good conscience allow these charges to undermine my colleagues in the Democratic caucus, and my friends on both sides of the aisle in the Judiciary Committee and the House of Representatives."
Democratic leaders have increasingly faced questions over whether Conyers should resign from the House altogether amid mounting claims against him.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was criticized Sunday after she defended the longtime Michigan Democrat, calling him an "icon" and dodging questions about whether he should resign.
She seemed to reverse course following Conyers' decision to step aside, however, saying "no tolerance means consequences."
"We are at a watershed moment on the issue, and no matter how great an individual's legacy, it is not a license for harassment," Pelosi said. "I commend the women coming forward."Product description
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“The time has long been ripe for it, but we are currently concentrating on the fight against ISIS,” Kurdish prime minister Nechirvan Barzani told Germany’s Bild daily.
“As soon as Mosul is liberated, we will meet with our partners in Baghdad and talk about our independence,” he said according to the German translation.
The premier of the Kurdistan Regional Government added that “we have been waiting for too long, we thought that after 2003 there would be a real new beginning for a democratic Iraq. But this Iraq has failed.
“We are not Arabs, we are our own Kurdish nation... At some point there will be a referendum on the independence of Kurdistan, and then we will let the people decide.”
In February, Kurdish president Massoud Barzani, the premier’s uncle, had called for a referendum on a Kurdish state in northern Iraq, raising tension with Baghdad which opposes secession.
The Kurdish peshmerga have fought with Iraqi government forces in a joint offensive to retake Mosul from the ISIS.
Barzani said he estimates the coalition would need three months to retake the city and asked for more German weapons to aid his forces, as well as EU aid for refugees from the conflict.
On the battle against ISIS, he said "we have taken the outlying districts quickly, but it’s not clear how strongly ISIS will defend the city itself.
“We are seeing that they have hundreds of suicide bombers, they must have entire factories where they are making the explosives. That is the greatest threat to the offensive.”
Last Update: Friday, 28 October 2016 KSA 16:29 - GMT 13:29Turkey, Pakistan sign free trade agreement framework
ISLAMABAD - Anadolu Agency
AA photo
Turkey and Pakistan have paved the way for a new free trade deal, which has the potential to reduce barriers in bilateral trade and investment.Turkish Economy Minister Mustafa Elitaş and Pakistani Commerce Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan inked the free trade agreement framework in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad on March 22.The free trade agreement between the two countries was expected to be signed before the end of 2016.Elitaş discussed with Khan a number of ways to further enhance trade and economic cooperation between the two countries.Negotiations over the deal were launched by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif during the latter’s visit to Turkey in October 2015.Last year, bilateral trade was around $600 million, including $289 million in imports from Turkey.Turkey mainly exports telecommunication equipment, televisions, textiles and machinery, while imports from Pakistan include textile yarn, cotton fabrics, plastics and organic chemicals.Elitaş said the two nations can increase bilateral trade to $2 billion, if the governments and private sector “paddle faster.”“Technical teams from the countries will start negotiations on goods and services after signing the framework agreement,” Elitaş said.“The Turkish contractor sector has undertaken 45 projects, mainly energy and infrastructure, worth $2.9 billion to date in Pakistan,” he said.Still, it is one thing for Mr. McCain to say he would be better at protecting the American people from danger than Mr. Obama. It is another for Mrs. Clinton to say it.
Should Mr. Obama win the nomination, Mr. McCain will cite Mrs. Clinton as an expert on Mr. Obama’s shortcomings as a commander in chief many times. And should Mr. Obama lose in November, it’s a good bet that when the when the finger-pointing starts, Mrs. Clinton would be one of the top targets for recriminations.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
But this new tack could have reverberations for Mrs. Clinton should she win the nomination. In recent days, Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton have, with obvious calculation — with an eye to courting Democrats entranced by Mr. Obama but nervous about whether he is ready for the Oval Office — floated the idea that Mrs. Clinton might ask Mr. Obama to be her running mate should she win the nomination.
Presidential candidates invariably say that their first consideration in choosing a running-mate is finding someone who is ready to step in and be president. What would Mrs. Clinton say when asked why she was choosing, in Mr. Obama, someone whose readiness to defend the nation she has questioned? (Whose qualifications to be a commander in chief rested on the fact that he, as she put it, “gave a speech.”)
Yes, presidential candidates often pick as their running-mates one-time rivals, and thus have to endure a few days of stories recounting all the nasty things the two said about one another in the heart of the primary battle. This, arguably, rises to another level: Mrs. Clinton has suggested that the Republican candidate for president was more qualified than Mr. Obama when it comes to defending the nation.
There is no mystery why this is happening. The Clinton campaign was running out of options. Mr. Obama’s lead in delegates barely changed after Mrs. Clinton won Ohio and the popular vote in the Texas primary. This race is in a whole new stage now: Everything — even the upcoming contests in Pennsylvania and Indiana — is about what it takes to influence the uncommitted superdelegates, the elected Democrats and party leaders whose voters are ultimately going to determine the outcome of the race.
This audience is far different than the voters Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are facing as they campaign. These are Democrats who are going to think about electability and are going to consider just how vulnerable Mr. Obama is to these kind of attacks — and more than that, whether he has the fortitude to withstand them. It is a high-risk strategy for Mrs. Clinton — one that might come to define her legacy as much as anything else. But it may be the only choice she has.Alberto E. Rodriguez via Getty Images At Comic-Con, the cast of "Thor: Ragnarok" said about "95 percent" of the film was improvised. A kid from the Make-A-Wish Foundation also got in on the improvisation and came up with the funniest line in the teaser trailer.
A kid visiting the set of “Thor: Ragnarok” thanks to the Make-A-Wish Foundation has now left his mark on the film, and it’s one of the best parts of the teaser trailer.
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight at Comic-Con in San Diego, Chris Hemsworth, who plays the hammer-wielding Thor in the franchise, said about “95 percent” of the movie was improvised. A child visiting the set with help from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, a nonprofit organization that grants wishes to kids battling life-threatening medical conditions, got in on the improvisation.
As Hemsworth filmed a scene in which Thor comes faces to face to battle the Incredible Hulk (one of of his superhero colleagues), the kid offered a funny suggestion.
“We had a young kid ― a Make-A-Wish kid ― on set that day, and in between the takes I was talking with him and coming back and forth,” Hemsworth said. “And he goes, ‘You know, you should say he’s a friend from work.’”
The quick yet humorous line made it into the teaser trailer below for “Thor: Ragnarok” that Marvel released in April.
You can catch the line at about 1:30.
Movies have been the inspiration for many other kids’ wishes granted by Make-A-Wish. In 2014, three kids asked to attend the premiere of “The Fault in Our Stars” and met John Green, the author who wrote the book on which the movie is based. And in 2011, three children had spots in the movie “We Bought a Zoo” as extras, thanks to the organization.Superb. However, got to pull a star due to Medal issues.
FOR THOSE HUNTING MEDALS: VERY IMPORTANT. If you go close to 500K points, DO NOT exit to main after getting it. You must "retry" the level to get it properly (I had to, after I erased my data entirely, and I had beaten at least 2 dev scores)
The brain: Located at level 3-8, the one who needs a flaming corpse to destroy the wall. Play it with Vincent (the demon) which starts on fire, try to dismember a piece, blow the spheres and put the flaming piece in direct contact with the cranium.
The king: Defeat the T-rex (you probably forget that you received his letter at the beggining, right? Well, after so many ragdolling, it's not your fault). The strategy is simple enough: Break the bridge. There's bombs above it, a huge missile to push him to the bridge, and smaller ones under the lava (use the down passage to the right).I've been reading the Times pretty much every single day since I was ten-years-old. That's more than a half-century by now.
Along the way, I've been informed, inspired, and occasionally infuriated.
This week, there was cause for infuriation.
First, it came on Monday, in the form of four photographs that appeared on the first page (p. A4) of the International section.
The largest of the four, 6 x 9 inches, was at the top of the page and immediately caught the reader's attention.
It was a poignant picture of a little girl leaning against a largely empty wall and staring upward, as the caption explained, to a small picture of her grandfather.
Walid Aqel, 48, was to be among those Palestinian prisoners released in the exchange for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in 2006 and held incommunicado until his release this week.
The paper failed to mention, in the caption or elsewhere, that Aqel was a founder of Hamas' military wing, had much Israeli blood on his hands, and was sentenced by Israel to life imprisonment.
Instead, the overriding impression conveyed was that Aqel was, above all, a grandfather, whose adorable granddaughter was pining for his return from his Israeli captors.
Then, just below the photo was the article itself -- "Israel Names 477 to Go Free in Trade for Hamas-Held Soldier."
And beneath the article were three small photos, each measuring 2 x 3 inches, which conveyed images of the human havoc wreaked in Israel by some of those Palestinians to be released in the deal.
Because of their diminutive size and busy images, those photos didn't draw the eye easily, although they should have been the heart of the story.
After all, they conveyed the nature of the terrorists to be freed, helping readers understand how gut-wrenching the decision must have been for Israel.
Yet those photos, together totaling 18 square inches, were submerged, while the single, stark photo at the top, 54 square inches, dominated.
Then came the Times' editorial, "Gilad Shalit's Release," on Wednesday.
It was, frankly, among the most upsetting I've ever read.
The day after Shalit was released and returned to Israel, with 477 Palestinian prisoners sent to Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere, and a second group to be freed soon, the paper chose to go after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yet again.
He's been a favorite whipping boy for the editorial writers since he assumed office in 2009.
They give him little credit for what he's done to advance prospects for peace and Palestinian development -- the ten-month settlement freeze, the lifting of blockades and checkpoints on the West Bank, oft-expressed support for a two-state outcome, and help for the rising Palestinian economy. And they spare no criticism for his alleged misdeeds.
But this editorial took the cake.
By the second of eight paragraphs, and barely 24 hours after the drama of what had just taken place with Shalit, the editorial was already darkly suggesting this was really a Machiav |
Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails.
At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect's location from a "confidential source" rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.
A series of five emails (.pdf) written in April, 2009, were obtained today by the American Civil Liberties Union showing police officials discussing the deception. The organization has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with police departments throughout Florida seeking information about their use of stingrays.
"Concealing the use of stingrays deprives defendants of their right to challenge unconstitutional surveillance and keeps the public in the dark about invasive monitoring by local police," the ACLU writes in a blog post about the emails. "And local and federal law enforcement should certainly not be colluding to hide basic and accurate information about their practices from the public and the courts."
The U.S. Marshals Service did not respond to a call for comment.
Stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick any nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. When mobile phones—and other wireless communication devices—connect to the stingray, the device can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the device’s location. By moving the stingray around, authorities can triangulate the device’s location with greater precision than they can using data obtained from a fixed tower location.
The government has long asserted it doesn’t need a probable-cause warrant to use stingrays because the devices don’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages, but instead operate like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information. The ACLU and others argue that the devices are more invasive than a trap-and-trace and should require a warrant. By not obtaining a warrant to use stingrays, however, police can conceal from judges and defendant's their use of the devices and prevent the public from learning how the technology is employed.
But the emails released Thursday show police in Florida are going even further to conceal their use of the equipment when they seek probable cause warrants to search facilities where a suspect is located, deceiving the courts about where they obtained the evidence to support their application for the search.
The initial email, which bears the subject line “Trap and Trace Confidentiality," was sent by Sarasota police Sgt. Kenneth Castro to colleagues at the North Port (Florida) Police Department. It was sent after Assistant State Attorney Craig Schaefer contacted police to express concern about an application for a probable cause warrant filed by a North Port police detective. The application "specifically outlined" for the court the investigative means used to locate the suspect. Castro informs his colleague that the application should be revised to conceal the use of the surveillance equipment.
"In the past," Castro writes, "and at the request of the U.S. Marshalls (sic), the investigative means utilized to locate the suspect have not been revealed so that we may continue to utilize this technology without the knowledge of the criminal element. In reports or depositions we simply refer to the assistance as'received information from a confidential source regarding the location of the suspect.' To date this has not been challenged, since it is not an integral part of the actual crime that occurred."
He then requests that "If this is in fact one of your cases, could you please entertain either having the Detective submit a new PCA and seal the old one, or at minimum instruct the detectives for future cases, regarding the fact that it is unnecessary to provide investigative means to anyone outside of law enforcement, especially in a public document."
Capt. Robert Estrada, at the North Port Police Department, later confirmed in an email, "[W]e have changed the PCA within the agency after consulting with the [State Attorney's Office]. The PCA that was already within the court system according to the SAO will have to remain since it has already been submitted. At some point and time the SAO will submit the changed document as an addendum. We have implemented within our detective bureau to not use this investigative tool on our documents in the future."
The release of the emails showing interference by a state attorney and the U.S. Marshals Service comes two weeks after agents from the Marshals Service took the extraordinary measure of seizing other public documents related to stingrays from the Sarasota Police Department in order to prevent the ACLU from examining them.
The documents, which were responsive to a FOIA request seeking information about Sarasota's use of the devices, had been set aside for ACLU attorneys to examine in person. But hours before they arrived for the appointment to view the documents, someone from the Marshals Service swooped in to seize the documents and cart them to another location.
ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler called the move “truly extraordinary and beyond the worst transparency violations” the group has seen regarding documents detailing police use of the technology.
The U.S. Marshals Service is not the only entity conspiring with police to prevent the public from learning about the equipment. The Harris Corporation, a Florida-based company that makes one of the most popular models of stingrays called Stingray, has made law enforcement agencies sign a non-disclosure agreement explicitly prohibiting them from telling anyone, including other government bodies, about their use of the secretive equipment.Fail0verflow disclosed the details of a PS4 4.05 Kernel exploit a few weeks ago. Although I was expecting this to lead to a full release very quickly, the scene has not seen anything so far.
PS4 Developer SpecterDev, who revealed he had found the exploit independently a while ago, and also runs a blog where he writes about the inner workings of console exploits, was nice enough to answer some of my questions.
Wololo: Could you introduce yourself for those among our readers who don’t know you?
SpecterDev: I’m just a curious developer who got interested in exploitation and reverse engineering a little over a year ago. The PS4 seemed like a fun place to start and I got started by tinkering with stuff that was already released (most notably FireKaku) and released some projects for those like me who were interested in researching the PS4 such as Playground 3.55. I was lucky enough to have some friends experienced in exploit development guide me along the way to eventually developing a kernel exploit. While at the time I had this I could not disclose details, I did try to spread some knowledge and answer questions where I could about information on higher firmwares.
Wololo: I’ll start with the very obvious question. When Fail0verflow released details about the PS4 4.05 Kernel exploit, myself and lots of people on the scene were expecting a release to happen within days. The exploit is explained in details on Fail0verflow’s blog. What do you think explains that it’s taking (from a naive perspective) “so long” to see a release?
SpecterDev: Well, the 4.05 kernel exploit is very complex and involves a lot of moving parts. While the details f0f disclosed detailed how to arbitrarily free() any address, they did not go into detail on how you would go about obtaining the pointer to a good object to target, which is the most difficult part of the exploit by far. Finding a suitable object to leak while blind takes a lot of guessing and trial and error, making the exploit development a very time consuming process.
Wololo: That exploit was known for a long time, and has been patched by Sony a while ago, in firmware 4.06. Why was it kept secret for a while by multiple hackers?
SpecterDev: It was really just developers who had it not wanting to step on other people’s toes, f0f were the original devs who found the exploit, and many of us received help from either f0f or those who were assisted by f0f, so in respect for everyone involved, we didn’t want to disclose until f0f was ready to.
Wololo: Do you think your plans to release an implementation of the exploit have had an impact on other people willing to dig into it?
SpecterDev: I think they have in the way that some other developers have been asking for insight on how the exploit (or at least certain parts of it) work, and I think that’s cool. Provided I have the time I always try to answer these questions as best I can, as I remember when I was in a similar position not too long ago. [note from wololo: on that topic, we have a thread on /talk where you can ask your technical questions on the exploit]
Wololo: Speaking of your implementation, do you still plan on releasing it? If so, do you have a rough estimate of how far you are? What are the issues you’re dealing with when it comes to this implementation?
SpecterDev: Yes I do, I’m at that point of leaking a good object to ensure the exploit is stable. I do have a good object leaking as well as a trigger for code execution, it’s just a matter of how practical it is to implement into the exploit, which I am currently testing now. After I know the object can be used effectively in the exploit, things get much easier. I hope to get a release out soon (within the next week or so) – I’ve just been busy with real life stuff so with the exception of weekends, I don’t have a lot of time to work on the exploit during the week.
I’ll also be publishing a write-up for the kernel exploit when it is ready, in it I’ll break down how the exploit works step by step. My hope is it will not only be a nice read for security researchers interested in the PS4, but will also give those in the community without a background in infosec a bit more information on how big releases involving kernel exploits work behind the scenes. Maybe it will inspire some to look into software security where they otherwise would not have 😀
Wololo: How many people or groups do you think have access to kernel exploits on 5.xx PS4 firmwares?
SpecterDev: On higher firmwares I can’t say. Qwerty has kernel access on 5.xx firmware as he displayed on his Twitter, but as for other people and groups I’m not sure.
Wololo: What homebrew, tools, plugins would you like to see running on a hacked PS4?
SpecterDev: In terms of homebrew, I think emulators would be neat to have running on the PS4. But the coolest thing I found with PS3 was the custom games that homebrew developers created such as Neo Tanks. It allows people to get creative and make cool things and play it (and share it) on a platform which they otherwise would not be able to publish to.
Thanks to SpecterDev for his answers. Note that you can follow him on twitter here.
So there you have it: hope that we might see a release within the next week or two from him. How cool would that be?Time travel, as presented to us by Back To The Future, is basically a good deal: You get a hoverboard! You get to teach a gang of '50s teenagers how to rock! You get to drink sodas at completely un-ironic diners! But while a DeLorean ride through time may seem all fun and games, there's a grim fact at its center.
After reading this comprehensive ranking of time travel movies, a discussion began about the movie at the top spot, Back To The Future.
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At the end of Back To The Future, though we're only following one Marty, the movie has essentially created two: one that grew up in the original timeline and one that grew up in the alternate. So just what happens to that other Marty?
Mweyer Interesting how "Timecop" and "Back to the Future" share the same underlying horror ending: Marty and Walker both have no memory whatsoever of the great lives they've had in these new futures and so everything is going to be strange around them. I admit, it does kind of bug me. I mean, how many times will the McFlys mention some great family bit and Marty just brushes off "oh, yeah, right" without them noticing he's not into it? I know, plenty of holes in the film as is but that still bugs me. MarlowePI I rationalize it as there being a delayed effect to his memory, kind of like the picture and him gradually fading away as changes to his parents' history were made. This is supported — for me, anyway — in the second movie when he and Doc treat the 1985 the first movie ends with as the "real" 1985. commandersalamander Another disturbing possibility is that Doc Brown, by the end of the first film's 1955, knew that he would invent the time machine and that he had already sent Marty back to an altered future as he saw the improved version of George McFly grow up. Years later, he befriended the new, well-adjusted, well-to-do "Marty 2" under false pretenses, only to send him to his likely death in a sabotaged time machine in Oct 1985, thus clearing the timeline for the return of the original Marty.
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And the problem isn't limited to just Doc and Marty, characters who didn't make the trip may find their timelines getting messier, too:
euge04 BTTF II is a great movie but the time travel logic is messed up. How does old Biff return to the decent future where Doc Brown and Marty are? The Doc should have to rebuild a new time machine to go back in time to get to the point before Biff got there. I like to believe once they change the timelines they create an alternate timeline and can never return to the old one unless they go back to before they left. Of course this creates a new alternate timeline. But all the people in those old alternate timelines do not cease to exist. Marty and Doc just no longer exist in those timelines. So really that means that Jennifer should be stuck on the porch in the crappy 1985 and was left behind by Doc and Marty. I always wanted to do a one-shot comic where she wakes up and has to become pretty badass to survive. It would make a good movie too.
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What do you think? Do you have any theories about how the alternate and parallel timelines worked out in Back To The Future? Tell us them, along with timeline spinoffs you're dying to see onscreen, in the comments.One of France’s most celebrated chefs, whose restaurant has been honoured with three stars in the Michelin guide for almost 20 years, has pleaded to be stripped of the prestigious ranking because of the huge pressure of being judged on every dish he serves.
Sébastien Bras, 46, who runs the acclaimed Le Suquet restaurant in Laguiole where diners look over sweeping views of the Aubrac plateau in the Aveyron while tasting local produce, announced on Wednesday that he wanted to be dropped from the rankings of France’s gastronomic bible.
Humble French restaurant swamped after Michelin mistake makes it a star Read more
Michelin said it was the first time a French chef had asked to be dropped from its restaurant guide in this way, without a major change of positioning or business model.
Bras said he wanted to be allowed to cook excellent food away from the frenzy of star ratings and the anxiety over Michelin’s anonymous food judges, who could arrive at his restaurant at any moment.
Le Suquet had been consistently described by the Michelin guide’s restaurant judges as so good it was “spellbinding”.
Bras, dressed in his chef’s whites, announced his decision in a Facebook video with the local landscape rolling out behind him, saying: “Today, at 46 years old, I want to give a new meaning to my life... and redefine what is essential.”
He said his job had given him a lot of satisfaction but there was also huge pressure that was inevitably linked to the three Michelin stars first given to the restaurant in 1999. He asked to be allowed to continue his work with a free spirit and in serenity away from the world of rankings, without tension. He said he wanted to be dropped from the guide from next year.
Bras, who took over the family restaurant from his parents 10 years ago, later explained to AFP: “You’re inspected two or three times a year, you never know when. Every meal that goes out could be inspected. That means that, every day, one of the 500 meals that leaves the kitchen could be judged.
“Maybe I will be less famous but I accept that,” he said, adding that he would continue to cook excellent local produce “without wondering whether my creations will appeal to Michelin’s inspectors”.
Reacting to his decision, Claire Dorland Clauzel, a member of the French tyremaker’s executive committee, said: “We note and we respect it.” She said the request would not lead to Le Suquet’s automatic removal from the list, and would have to be given due consideration.
Bras said that like all chefs he sometimes found himself thinking of Bernard Loiseau, the acclaimed French chef who killed himself in 2003, an act widely seen as linked to rumours that he would lose his third Michelin star. “I’m not in the frame of mind,” Bras said.
Bras is one of only 27 French chefs who hold top rankings in the Michelin restaurant guide. He is not the first chef to walk away from the competitive world of Michelin-star cooking. However, others have only done so as part of a closure or a radical change to their restaurants.
In 2005, Paris restaurateur Alain Senderens – one of the pioneers of nouvelle cuisine – shocked the culinary world by giving back his three stars, claiming that diners were turned off by excessive luxury. He later reopened the restaurant under another name, with a simpler menu at a fraction of his old prices.
In 2008, three-star chef Olivier Roellinger closed his luxury restaurant in the Breton fishing village of Cancale, saying he wanted a quieter life.I get a lot of client requests for “Store Locators” or “Location Finders”. There are some plugins like MapPress and WP Store Locator that work well for simple Location Searches, but as soon as the client has requests for specific functionality or designs, these pre-made options start to fall short, and you end up spending more time fighting their code than writing your own.
What makes it especially frustrating is that, using the Google Maps API most of the features of a store locator or location finder are fairly easy to write. The only hard part is getting posts that are within a certain distance from a specific latitude and longitude. This requires a somewhat complicated trigonometric formula called The Haversine Formula, to calculate distance between two points on a sphere. All the other filters and selections can be handled with a simple WP Query, but distance is a trickier beast.
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Most of the existing plugins that I’ve seen do a great job at the distance calculation, but don’t include much of a framework for building more complicated queries that match post meta and taxonomies. So I wrote one that comes at things from the other direction. It takes the standard WP Query that offers so much flexibility, and adds a geo_query option that will calculate distance from a point.
You use it like this:
<?php $query = new WP_Query(array( //... include other query arguments as usual 'geo_query' => array( 'lat_field' => '_latitude', // this is the name of the meta field storing latitude 'lng_field' => '_longitude', // this is the name of the meta field storing longitude 'latitude' => 44.485261, // this is the latitude of the point we are getting distance from 'longitude' => -73.218952, // this is the longitude of the point we are getting distance from 'distance' => 20, // this is the maximum distance to search 'units' =>'miles' // this supports options: miles, mi, kilometers, km ), 'orderby' => 'distance', // this tells WP Query to sort by distance 'order' => 'ASC' ));
In addition, there are two included functions that can be used to retrieve distance in the resulting loop: the_distance() and get_the_distance(). Both support two optional variables: a post object, and the number of integers to round the distance to.
The full code for the plugin is included below.Police seek help to find 16-year-old girl from Curtis Bay
Anne Arundel County police are asking for the public's help to find a 16-year-old girl.Rebecca Emilee Karlowitz was reported as a runaway missing person around 10:40 p.m. Friday in the 7000 block of Chestnut Brook Court in Curtis Bay. Police said she might be in the Parkville or Towson areas.Rebecca is described as 5 feet 1 inch tall, weighing 140 pounds, and has brown eyes and brown hair.Anyone with information is asked to call police at 410-222-4731 or 410-222-8610, or call the tip line at 410-222-4700.Also on WBALTV.com:
Anne Arundel County police are asking for the public's help to find a 16-year-old girl.
Rebecca Emilee Karlowitz was reported as a runaway missing person around 10:40 p.m. Friday in the 7000 block of Chestnut Brook Court in Curtis Bay. Police said she might be in the Parkville or Towson areas.
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Rebecca is described as 5 feet 1 inch tall, weighing 140 pounds, and has brown eyes and brown hair.
Anyone with information is asked to call police at 410-222-4731 or 410-222-8610, or call the tip line at 410-222-4700.
Also on WBALTV.com:
AlertMeTug Gillingham of Bridgeport wanted to know:
“What qualifications do you need to be professional Zamboni driver?”
Our search for the answer led us into the chilly depths of Chicago’s United Center to meet head ice technician Dan Ahearn. He's called “The God of Ice in the Midwest” by a fellow Zamboni driver. Ahearn’s certainly earned the nickname. He’s been behind the wheel of a Zamboni for the 31 years.
Resurfacing ice is the technical term used to describe what Ahearn actually does on his Zamboni: the shaving, cleaning and smoothing of the surface of an ice rink. The Zamboni and other machines that do this are all known as ice resurfacing machines. But since Zamboni was the original, the brand name is often adopted to describe any and all ice resurfacing machines. (It’s become what Xerox is to copy machines or Kleenex is to facial tissue.) Dan Ahearn says there’s a good reason for that.
“Zamboni's the best," he said. "They’ve been building them the longest. The other ones are copies off them, to an extent. There’s a company, Olympia, that makes machines. A couple companies in Europe makes machines. But Zamboni probably has 75 percent of the market... Just in the Chicago area, there’s 60 rinks and probably 50 of them have Zambonis.”
While the Zamboni Company wouldn't confirm that number for WBEZ, it did say that, “the Zamboni Company sells more machines annually than [their] competitors combined. [And] it would be safe to say that [they] have the majority of the market share.”
You might be surprised to learn that operating a Zamboni requires no special license or certification, according to Ahearn, who also works as a welder and mechanic at the United Center. He said that most ice rinks that need a driver will likely show you everything you need to know.
But after talking with him, it was clear that a little bravery and an enthusiasm for winter sports are probably a plus for landing the job. Or, in Ahearn’s case, a lot of both.
When he was 12, he was refereeing a hockey game for younger kids. The guy who was supposed to resurface the ice that day never showed up. All Ahearn had done up to that point was park the machine.
“[So I think to myself], well the guy’s not there, and I drive the thing, so I can probably figure this out,” Ahearn said. “That’s the first time I ever did it - missed a lot of spots, but the ice got done.”
Still can’t get enough of Zamboni? Then check out these fun facts from the company’s website:
The machines travel an average of three miles per hockey game, which makes sense if you think each resurfacing is 3/4 of a mile. Add that up over the course of a year, and these ice makers on wheels each travel close to 2,000 miles a year.
Prior to the invention of the Zamboni machine, it took three or four workers more than an hour to resurface the ice by hand.
More than 10,000 Zamboni machines have been delivered around the world.
The machine’s top speed is 9.7 mph, and it can go from 0 to ¼ mile in 93.5 seconds. That’s according to an April 2005 issue of Road & Track magazine, which performed an actual road test.
Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayerA big problem with the data, however, is that it dramatically overestimates poverty. (Reuters)
Though the central and state governments are believed to have agreed to start using data from the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) of 2011 to guide their social-sector spending, according to a report in The Economic Times this week, they would be well advised to re-evaluate the plan. The advantage of the SECC, undoubtedly, is that there is a Census-based list of people suffering from some kind of deprivation—once this list is populated with Aadhaar numbers, the entire social sector spending can be better targeted. While updating the list is a big issue—a Census takes 4-5 years to complete—a bigger advantage of SECC is that, since there are many deprivation parameters, each programme can choose their list of households; there are, for instance, 2.38 crore households that have one or less room and have kuccha walls and kuccha roofs.
A big problem with the data, however, is that it dramatically overestimates poverty. It is true, the old definition of poverty based on a recommended calorie count wasn’t the best, but the SECC data is quite at variance with what the NSS survey shows. So, for instance, the NSS showed 35% of households were engaged in casual labour while SECC puts the number at a much higher 51%. The SECC shows that 75.5% of households have an income of below R5,000 (based on the income of the highest-earning member) while the NSS puts this at 62.8%. The NSS, as a result, has a mean household income that is around 45% higher than that in the SECC.
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Not surprising, then, that the SECC has a significantly higher number of poor than India has had in the last many decades, even if you use the higher World Bank parameters. In rural India, the SECC data puts the number of deprived households at 10.74 crore, of the total of 17.97 crore. It is true the number will be lower for households with different types of deprivation—2.38 crore households with only kuccha houses will be the target for subsidised home-loan schemes, for instance—but if 60% of the population is to be considered deprived and social sector schemes have to be designed for them, the costs are going to be significant. In which case, the central and state governments need to think carefully if they want to use the SECC data. Also, with the central government now talking of a universal basic income—the chief economic advisor is on record saying this will feature in the Economic Survey—the costs of it can only be met by eliminating various existing schemes.Every captain, beginning with the next one after you connect the account, receives a chest, regardless of what previous captains have done with it, including finishing the related quest or throwing it in the waves.
The chest shows up as an item that does not take up space in your hold, and possession of it allows you to take it to the Alarming Scholar in London to begin the quest to open it, though at many points during the quest you can also sell it, and you can also attempt to force it open or sacrifice it to Salt at any time from your hold. The quest is not an Ambition, nor does it replace one.
The "next Captain" line is a very poorly worded method of indicating that you won't receive it until you die, if you have a game already in progress.Michael Bacall set to write
The remake train shows no sign of slowing down, especially when new versions of name brands such as Evil Dead keep making money. Next stop: a possible remake of Weird Science.
Despite ranking lower in quality terms among John Hughes' output, Weird Science still holds a special place in the hearts of film fans of a certain age thanks to its high-concept hi-jinks – nerds attempt to create the perfect woman and get more than they bargained for – and the fact that Hughes wrote and directed it.
Joel Silver, still best known for producing big action movies, is spearheading the movement on this one, working with Universal via his own Silver Pictures.
Michael Bacall, who won plenty of fans with his 21 Jump Street script, is the man who will take on the challenge of crafting a new take on the story, which will apparently be “edgier” this time around, in much the same way that Jump Street used the TV show’s core concept of undercover cops in high school as a jumping-off (sorry, couldn’t resist) point for the madness that follows.
Whether any Hughes film needs remaking is something that will be debated endlessly, but for now at least it’s not The Breakfast Club…Officials with the European Union and its formerly sovereign member states are conspiring to usurp control over national militaries, with a goal of eventually building a transnational EU military loyal only to the unelected regime ruling Europe from Brussels. Outrage surrounding the plot, however, is growing.
The process, taking place without a shed of democratic legitimacy, is already well underway. German and Dutch forces, for example, are being “merged” into a unified command — the “nucleus” of the future EU force that will be beyond the reach of voters and their elected parliaments. Under the guise of dealing with the orchestrated “refugee crisis,” the EU is also imposing a transnational armed force with power to intervene in members states, even against their will. EU military missions in Africa are also picking up steam. And the EU's extremism is only growing.
Critics of the EU's military ambitions, though, are already speaking out forcefully. Among other responses, opponents of the agenda said the dangerous machinations offer even more reason for nations to urgently secede from the totalitarian-minded super-state in Brussels. The “British Exit” campaign, or “Brexit” as the prospect of U.K. secession is known casually, received a major boost from the news, with multiple media outlets noting that the EU military scheme would eventually ensnare the United Kingdom if voters do not vote to secede from Brussels' rule.
In an article headlined “SECRET PLOT EXPOSED: EU in stealth plan to set up ARMY by merging German and Dutch forces,” the U.K. Daily Express newspaper noted that the plan to give Brussels its own military was being advanced “by stealth.” The plan was reportedly outlined last year by the increasingly radical and unpopular German government, which has been flooding Germany with Middle Eastern and African migrants while showering German tax dollars on the EU and its poorer member governments.
According to the report, Dutch military brigades have already come under German command, including the 43rd Mechanized Brigade last month and the 11th Airmobile Brigade last year. “As things stand the Dutch Army has been reduced to its 13th Mechanized Brigade along with special forces, support and headquarters staff but there are plans to merge these with the German Army too,” the Express reported, adding that the two governments' naval forces were in the process of being merged as well.
The agenda to impose an EU military on Europe was all outlined last year by German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leye. “The European Army is our long-term goal, but first we have to strengthen the European Defense Union,” she was quoted as saying. “To achieve this, some nations with concrete military cooperation must come to the fore — and the Germans and the Dutch are doing this.” Controversial German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been bullying her foreign counterparts to join the bandwagon. And the Czech Republic's government, among others, is also reportedly preparing to surrender its armed forces to the emerging EU military.
Critics were fuming about the developments. United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) Defense Spokesman Mike Hookem, for example, said the military centralization plot would eventually engulf Britain if the nation does not secede from the EU. He also said the German and Dutch governments were “creating an EU army by stealth,” trying to bypass the EU Council of Ministers and other official organs by quietly building the nucleus of the EU military and then adding other nations' militaries to it. However, the official with the UKIP, which opposes EU membership and is seeking a “Brexit,” vowed to ask questions of the EU and fight against the plan.
“The EU was supposed to be about corralling Germany military dominance in Europe,” explained Hookem, whose party has long warned of the EU's agenda to crush liberty, self-government, and national sovereignty. “That aspiration has clearly died and just as Germany now politically dominates the EU, this latest move with the Dutch army shows that in time Germany wants to expand and control as much as it can militarily.”
In addition to the ongoing merger of national militaries, the EU is also scheming to impose what it calls a “European Border and Coast Guard.” The controversial military and law enforcement outfit is set to have the power to militarily interfere inside and outside of the EU, whether national authorities agreed or not, under the guise of everything from “crime” and “terror” to “migration.” An EU “fact sheet” explains that the new armed EU force will be able to “ensure that action is taken on the ground even where there is no request for assistance from the Member State concerned or where that Member State considers that there is no need for additional intervention.”
The pretext for imposing the radical agenda is dealing with the so-called “refugee crisis” and defending the EU's external borders. However, as this magazine has documented extensively, the EU and its members not only played a key role in creating the migrant tsunami by helping destroy foreign nations such as Libya and Syria, they also have no intention of actually sealing the border. When Hungarian authorities tried to seal the border, they were chastised by Brussels. Hungary's prime minister has warned that Brussels-based globalists involved in a “treasonous conspiracy” were using the “refugee” tsunami to destroy nation-states and Judeo-Christian Western civilization.
Of course, the EU is hardly the only illegitimate regional government attempting to usurp control over national militaries and build up unaccountable transnational forces on the road to what the architects of the “regional orders” often refer to publicly as the “New World Order.” In Africa, the EU- and Beijing-funded African Union, almost a caricature of itself, already has “AU troops” deployed on various missions across the continent. Indeed, the EU just approved an EU military “training mission” for the regime in the Central African Republic, a mission dubbed EUTM RCA, that will last for two years. In South America, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR or UNASUL) is similarly working on a regional military beyond the reach of voters or national governments.
Ironically, while the Kremlin cites the EU as a key reason for imposing Vladimir Putin's “Eurasian Union” on former victims of Soviet terror across five nations, EU bosses have pointed to Putin's machinations to justify an EU military. “You would not create a European army to use it immediately,” declared self-styled EU “President” Jean Claude Juncker, who recently admitted that extreme EU meddling in every aspect of European life had driven surging opposition to the Soviet-style super-state. “But a common army among the Europeans would convey to Russia that we are serious about defending the values of the European Union.”
It was not clear what the “values” of the EU, dubbed the “New European Soviet” by former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev, might be. However, the EU has become infamous for, among other “values,” lying to the public for decades about its real agenda, ignoring European voters when they overwhelmingly reject the EU agenda in public referendums, using public money to support extremist groups with links to the promotion of pedophilia, censoring the Internet under the guise of “extremism,” dictating the speech of journalists under threat of possible imprisonment, secretly stealing liberty and sovereignty from people, and more. In fact, the “values of the European Union” would appear to be rather similar to those supposedly held by Putin, against whom the EU military will supposedly defend.
The peoples of Europe are facing a full-blown assault on their liberties, their cultures, their nations, and their heritage. That assault is being orchestrated by unelected globalists and bureaucrats in Brussels and beyond, and it is extraordinarily dangerous. For the sake of freedom and Western civilization, the British should lead the way in peacefully seceding from the EU super-state while it remains possible. And the rest of the world should pay close attention to what is happening in Europe, because the plan is to subjugate humanity using essentially the same process across the globe. At least that is the plan if the public does not rise up and stop it.
Photo: AP Images
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
Related articles:
EU Exploits Refugees to Usurp More Power, Build Armed Force
Globalists Exploit Brussels Terror to Push Police State
Refugee Crisis: Using Chaos to Build Power
Hungarian PM: Mass Migration a Plot to Destroy Christian West
In African Union, Globalist Agenda Becomes Clear
EU “Police” Will Censor Internet to Fight “Extremism”
The EU: Regionalization Trumps Sovereignty
WikiLeaks: IMF Plans New Economic Crisis Before Brexit Vote
Brexit: EU on Trial
Dirty Campaign to Stop Brit EU Exit: Refugee Del |
has been a passion project for many years, the themes of family unity and courage in the face of adversity are particularly important these days.”
Tremblay is starring in Lionsgate’s “Wonder “alongside Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson. Lloyd is best known for his roles as Emmett “Doc” Brown in the “Back to the Future” trilogy. Thompson is a cast member of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and is currently in production on Dylan Brown’s “Amusement Park” alongside Mila Kunis, Jennifer Garner, and Matthew Broderick.
Brooks’ best-known films include “The Producers,” “The Twelve Chairs,” “Young Frankenstein,” “High Anxiety,” and “Robin Hood: Men in Tights.”
Tremblay and Thompson are represented by United Talent Agency, Lloyd is represented by the Gersh Agency, Brooks by CAA and DPN, and Lani Pixels by attorney Michael E. Morales.The following article, written by VPJ Arponen, originally appeared on The Players’ Aid blog earlier this week. To make sure that all of our GMT customers get to see this excellent article, we’re including it here in InsideGMT as well, with the permission and agreement of our friends at The Player’s Aid. We hope you enjoy the article!
A while ago Grant asked me to write about “bot” design for The Players’ Aid Blog and I eagerly jumped at the chance. Over the past two years or so, I’ve had the pleasure of spending some time designing solitaire play systems for a number of board games.
I began with the variant “bots” for the COIN Series game Volume III, A Distant Plain by Brian Train and Volko Ruhnke. These were published in early 2017 in C3i Magazine Nr. 30 produced by RBM Studio and Rodger B. MacGowan. Next came the FLN “bot” for the COIN Series Volume VII Colonial Twilight by Brian Train. This game is due to hit the shelves in the Summer of 2017. My latest design work is for the Axis “bot” for Hitler’s Reich by Mark McLaughlin. All three games are GMT Games publications.
As I began to write this guest spot, the text sprawled so much that it was decided to split it in two volumes. In this first volume, I want to discuss a number of topics pertaining to the COIN “bot” design. In the second, forthcoming installment, we’ll talk about the Hitler’s Reich “bot”.
Designing a COIN “Bot”
For me, the design work begins with getting to know the base game. When you get to know the game, particular do’s and don’ts begin to emerge for each faction.
For me this is a particularly exciting bit of the design process. I feel I’m deciphering the complexity that the designer has built into the design – and each COIN game works differently. The factions tend to interact on so many levels, some more overt and explicit than others, and all factions interact at once, making the overall picture really quite complex.
To give an example, in A Distant Plain, I spent a lot of time trying to get the Coalition “bot” behavior right with regard to the split personality that that faction has in the game. On the one hand, the Coalition has to set up, build, and maintain support – a task where it is hindered at least as much by the nominal ally, the Government, as by the insurgent factions. In regards to these goals, many crucial things can happens during the Coalition Air Lift and Surge special activities to set up and maintain support. It seems fair to say Surge is the key special activity in the Coalition’s palette.
On the other hand, sometimes the Coalition just has got to conduct some old fashioned Sweeps, Assaults and Air Strikes as well. Some added challenges come from the fact that the Coalition “bot” needs to pay special attention to the factions controlled by the player or players – after all, the players are the most intelligent and flexible, and therefore the most dangerous enemies. As a result, if you play against the Coalition “bot”, you might notice how the bot behaves quite differently depending on which faction or factions are player-controlled. There is quite a bit of customization like that needed for the Coalition “bot”, which to me was a moment of exciting discovery and development as well as a great balancing act.
Next in the design process, once I’ve established a basic idea of how a given faction might go about winning the game, I begin the painstaking process of nailing it down in the format provided by the flow chart that the solitaire player uses to process the non-player “bot” decisions. In a COIN game, often the factions must go through multi-turn processes to achieve particular objectives. Such multi-turn processes get implicitly built into the flowchart: a March action now can be used to set up the placement of a base in the course of a Rally at some later time in the game, to give a simple example.
From the design perspective, all this is a learning-by-doing process essentially, and only testing will tell you what ultimately works. Testing plays an important role in hopefully revealing some of the ways in which the player might be able to manipulate a “bot” faction. In the course of drawing up the FLN “bot” for the upcoming Colonial Twilight, I had some great fun with my gaming buddy and tireless playtester Matthias. He kept leading the poor FLN “bot” into all sorts of dark places and we had to walk it back out again and revise the flowchart.
As a result, however, the FLN “bot” grew pretty darn competent, especially in the short scenario upon which our testing efforts focused. We look forward to getting to hear the player’s reactions once the game gets published.
A further and perhaps a more salient aspect of “bot” design concerns sprinkling the “bot” behaviour with just the right amount of controlled randomness. The idea is to avoid designing the “bots” such that they always proceed along the same lines of action, always target the same set of spaces, and so on. Therefore, sometimes the specifications regarding space selection is left intentionally open to give the “bot” some room to expand into unanticipated yet still hopefully competent directions. An example of controlled randomness might be to give the “bot” the instruction to select randomly among spaces with two or more population as opposed to stipulating that the “bot” ought to select the highest available population spaces. A minor-looking tweak like that can make a big difference in having different games pan out in different ways.
What you’ve read about above are some thoughts on what the design process looks like from my perspective. I’ve had the good fortune of getting to peer over the shoulder as, recently, the master builder himself, Volko Ruhnke, has been putting together the bots for the next game in the COIN Series, Pendragon by Marc Gouyon-Rety. I’ve learned from Volko, as well as from the “botman” himself Örjan Ariander, and am learning more with each project I work on.
Do the “Bots” Have to Be So Complex?!
This one gets asked a lot about the COIN “bots” in particular, so I thought I’d write about my view on this issue.
Some years ago, when I was having my first forays into the COIN Series, I was absolutely ecstatic to discover that each game in the series came with a full blown solitaire system allowing a gaming experience that pretty damn closely resembles the base game among humans.
How do the COIN “bots” manage that? It’s because these “bots” are a little bit intelligent.
In a COIN “bot”, the intelligence comes from the fact that the “bot”, so to speak, monitors the board state and makes decisions based on that monitoring. If you look at a COIN “bot” flowchart, you’ll see it’s structured around a set of questions – something like, does a given faction have so many pieces available, or could a given action, taken right now, produce such and such a result. The questions, therefore, as it were, monitor what are supposed to be the essential features of the board state in what comes to the “bot” action selection. Once a particular action gets selected, a host of “if something, then something” type of clauses further refine the execution of the chosen action.
The result is a “bot” that with a few rules exceptions, plays the game like a human player would – only not always quite as creatively and flexibly as a human player.
In some ways, most COIN games resemble chess: you’ve got to be thinking a few turns ahead and strategically place your pieces such that you enable some critical actions of your own while you prevent your enemies from undertaking actions that damage you. It is my view that the “bots” only manage to provide the superb solitaire experience that they do, because they are intelligent enough to deal with this chess-like quality of the game. Without such an ability, the solo play would not be the same.
Intelligence, by the way, is not a given in solitaire design. In fact, many if not most of the more popular solitaire engines are not intelligent, but rather based on something you might call calculated randomness. Games like D-Day at Omaha Beach by John Butterfield (Decision Games), or Mound Builders by Ben Madison and Wes Erni (Victory Point Games), involve a deck of enemy action cards: you reveal a random card and execute the instructions printed on it.
The solitaire challenge here builds upon the deck being designed such that, even with the random order that the cards come out in, the human player has more than his or her hands full trying to contain what the cards throw the player’s way. Similarly, Joel Toppen’s excellent Navajo Wars and Comancheria (GMT Games) build upon an enemy action display that churns out random-ish actions at the player.
The solitaire systems in many popular so-called “Euro-games” build upon randomly reducing the options available to the human player. In a game like that, the solitaire system randomly removes tiles, cards or other tokens from the market place from which the player is about to purchase his or her next asset. Similarly, the system randomly builds stuff in the spaces in which the player could next attempt to build, and so on.
I do not wish to pretend that running a COIN “bot” is a breeze. Frankly, it is not, especially if your point of comparison is a solitaire “Euro-game”. Which takes me to my next topic.
Understanding “Bot”
If you like as an innovation, in my “bot” design work, I’ve sought to alleviate the “processing stress” placed upon the human player by devising what is intended as a more straightforward and logically more explicit notation for laying out the flowcharts. As a fan of the series, I had had my own struggles with the interpretation and processing of the flowcharts.
As the first step, my notation distinguishes two different types of priority already on the level of formatting the flowcharts: sequential and nested or tie breaker clauses. In the previously published flowcharts, oftentimes, this distinction is implicit and has required interpretation by the player to make it explicit.
The sequential priorities are numbered (1., 2., and so on) and are to be executed to their fullest possible extent before you move on to the next sequential priority. A simple example might be:
Rally at all friendly Bases Rally in all spaces with already existing own Guerrillas
The nested or tie breaker priorities, by contrast, are ordered by letters (a, b, c, and so on) and work just as the name says: they break ties within the sequential priorities. An example would be:
Rally at all friendly Bases:
(a) at highest Population
(b) where least of Guerrillas
Here the tie breaker clauses (a, b) offer further criteria for prioritizing some Rally spaces over others: from among all spaces with friendly Bases you select first those with the highest population, and if further refinement of the selection resolution is needed, you select spaces with the least Guerrillas. If desired, the tie breakers can quickly, and at a relatively low printing space cost (always a problem on these 1-pager flowcharts) introduce a lot of depth to the design.
I’ve found that laying out the flowcharts like that speeds up solo play by minimizing the need to interpret what the flowchart is trying to say. I’ve also found that my own “bot” design process becomes more structured when I think about the doings of the “bots” in terms of these two categories of statements. From what I’ve seen in terms of feedback on the new flowchart formatting, the gamers have also received this innovation well.
In the next volume in this series, we’ll take a look at the Hitler’s Reich “bot” design.
Vesa “Vez” Arponen is a Finn currently residing and working in academic research in Germany. Whenever he is not playing a historical consim with his group, he is an avid solo gamer and has contributed a few solitaire system designs to the hobby, most recently to Hitler’s Reich and the COIN Series Vol. VII Colonial Twilight.
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Like this: Like Loading...This blog post originally appeared on RealMoney Silver on March 29 at 8:07 a.m. EDT. "Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering, and it's all over much too soon." -- Woody Allen Interest rates went up across the board last week, likely reflecting a combination of four factors: a strengthening economy;
a growing deficit caused by geometric growth in government spending, which, in some circles, has called into question the creditworthiness of the U.S.;
concerns about the upcoming supply of U.S. notes and bonds; and
forecasts of higher inflation. Most feel that the last bullet point (of higher inflation) has made the least significant contribution to the current rise in interest rates due to the wide output gap, a moribund residential real estate market, wage deflation and the effects of globalization, to name just a few of the reasons. Interest rates went up across the board last week, likely reflecting a combination of four factors:Most feel that the last bullet point (of higher inflation) has made the least significant contribution to the current rise in interest rates due to the wide output gap, a moribund residential real estate market, wage deflation and the effects of globalization, to name just a few of the reasons. The current artificially low readings on inflation and its salutary impact on real incomes might create the false illusion that the U.S. consumer appears poised to contribute to a self-sustaining domestic economy. Indeed, the recent strength in first-quarter 2010 retail sales is now being comfortably extrapolated by many managements, strategists and analysts. The current artificially low readings on inflation and its salutary impact on real incomes might create the false illusion that the U.S. consumer appears poised to contribute to a self-sustaining domestic economy. Indeed, the recent strength in first-quarter 2010 retail sales is now being comfortably extrapolated by many managements, strategists and analysts. From my perch, however, there remains little question that the From my perch, however, there remains little question that the current inflation readings underestimate the true rate of inflation. As such, the misery index and real incomes are under more pressure than is apparent and represent a challenge to consensus growth expectations. The durability of the consumer's strength remains to be seen, but I would not necessarily extrapolate the recent consumer strength into the balance of the year. While the future course of personal consumption trends will be primarily dictated by the degree to which jobs are created in the months ahead (and secondarily by the slope of the housing recovery), one could argue that the improvement in spending over the past three months is a temporary catch-up to the hiatus in discretionary sales over the prior 12 months. If correct, once caught up, the consumer might be increasingly vulnerable, especially in light of the higher tax rates and the costs associated with sweeping regulatory reforms that will adversely impact both consumer and small business behavior as we move toward year-end. The durability of the consumer's strength remains to be seen, but I would not necessarily extrapolate the recent consumer strength into the balance of the year. While the future course of personal consumption trends will be primarily dictated by the degree to which jobs are created in the months ahead (and secondarily by the slope of the housing recovery), one could argue that the improvement in spending over the past three months is a temporary catch-up to the hiatus in discretionary sales over the prior 12 months. If correct, once caught up, the consumer might be increasingly vulnerable, especially in light of the higher tax rates and the costs associated with sweeping regulatory reforms that will adversely impact both consumer and small business behavior as we move toward year-end. "Have you ever wondered why the CPI, GDP and employment numbers run counter to your personal and business experiences? The problem lies in biased and often manipulated government reporting." - John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics Williams might be hyperbolic, but I continue to believe that, by including owners' equivalent rent (OER) as well as other substitution and hedonic adjustments, reported inflation understates the real rate of inflation ( Williams might be hyperbolic, but I continue to believe that, by including owners' equivalent rent (OER) as well as other substitution and hedonic adjustments, reported inflation understates the real rate of inflation ( see Barry Ritholtz ) and the pressure on the middle-class consumer and on small businesses, which remain an important engine to domestic economic growth and job creation.
The CPI is a statistically tortured number, and this helps to explain why the misery index of the average American consumer may be worse than meets the eye (or the statistic). The CPI is a statistically tortured number, and this helps to explain why the misery index of the average American consumer may be worse than meets the eye (or the statistic). As an aside, a critical eye would question the myopic focus on the U.S. CPI within the context of a global economy. Global inflation rates matter over here (and so does the policy reaction to those rates over there). China and India's inflation rates are heating up -- there is no OER in their calculations of inflation -- and China's policy actions to deal with this are especially important to us. In fact, one could argue that, at times, the Chinese inflation rate could be more important for the U.S. than the U.S. inflation rate. As an aside, a critical eye would question the myopic focus on the U.S. CPI within the context of a global economy. Global inflation rates matter over here (and so does the policy reaction to those rates over there). China and India's inflation rates are heating up -- there is no OER in their calculations of inflation -- and China's policy actions to deal with this are especially important to us. In fact, one could argue that, at times, the Chinese inflation rate could be more important for the U.S. than the U.S. inflation rate. Here is how owners' equivalent rent is calculated. Owners' equivalent rent is the amount of rent that could be paid to substitute a currently owned house for an equivalent rental property. OER is a dollar amount that is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to measure the change in implicit rent, which is the amount a homeowner would pay to rent or would earn from renting his or her home in a competitive market. The rental equivalence figure is obtained by directly asking sampled homeowners the following question: "If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?" OER is one of the two main components of the CPI, which measures the average change over time in the prices paid by consumers for a market basket of goods and services. Owners' equivalent rent is the amount of rent that could be paid to substitute a currently owned house for an equivalent rental property. OER is a dollar amount that is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to measure the change in implicit rent, which is the amount a homeowner would pay to rent or would earn from renting his or her home in a competitive market. The rental equivalence figure is obtained by directly asking sampled homeowners the following question: "If someone were to rent your home today, how much do you think it would rent for monthly, unfurnished and without utilities?" OER is one of the two main components of the CPI, which measures the average change over time in the prices paid by consumers for a market basket of goods and services. The idiocy of the calculation is best seen when, during the biggest speculative housing bubble of all time in the early to mid 2000s, the OER calculation barely moved up. It might even be more idiotic that policy is based on such a questionable CPI statistic. "Core CPI less OER (owners' equivalent rent) and RPR (rents of primary residence) is running near the highs that we've seen in the last 12 years. As a matter of fact, December's number of 2.47% was just a couple of tenths off of a 12-year high in this measure." -- Jim Bianco Since well over 90% of homeowners -- 67% of American families own homes -- have fixed shelter costs and don't often move from their residence, the owners' equivalent rent calculation, which embodies nearly 25% of the CPI, artificially influences the CPI. Its methodology seems faulty as does its high weighting on the construction of the consumer price indices. It would be preferable to see the introduction of a more accurate cost of shelter component to the CPI that incorporates existing- and new-home price inflation, the cost of renting, debt service costs (including mortgage loan rates and balances) as well as a statistic that somehow measures and incorporates the percentage of homeowners and renters that take on a new residence. The idiocy of the calculation is best seen when, during the biggest speculative housing bubble of all time in the early to mid 2000s, the OER calculation barely moved up. It might even be more idiotic that policy is based on such a questionable CPI statistic.Since well over 90% of homeowners -- 67% of American families own homes -- have fixed shelter costs and don't often move from their residence, the owners' equivalent rent calculation, which embodies nearly 25% of the CPI, artificially influences the CPI. Its methodology seems faulty as does its high weighting on the construction of the consumer price indices. It would be preferable to see the introduction of a more accurate cost of shelter component to the CPI that incorporates existing- and new-home price inflation, the cost of renting, debt service costs (including mortgage loan rates and balances) as well as a statistic that somehow measures and incorporates the percentage of homeowners and renters that take on a new residence.India's population living abroad is the largest in the world at 16 million
India-headquartered bitcoin exchange Coinsecure announced today it can now service NRO (Non-Resident Indian) accounts. Many Non Resident Indian citizens (NRIs) have shown interest in Coinsecure and would like to leverage the company’s services.
Now, if classified as an NRI and would like to use Coinsecure’s service for an NRO account, users can go about creating a Coinsecure account as normal, with just a few additional steps which are noted below.
First, all NRIs need to submit a scan of their Permanent Account Number (PAN) card.
Subsequently, the following further information is needed from NRIs who would like to deposit rupees on Coinsecure:
Proof of Identity (both mandatory)
1. Copy of the relevant pages of Passport
2. Copy of valid Visa / Work Permit
Proof of Address (any of the following work)
1. Copy of the relevant pages of Passport
2. Electricity Bill
3. Telephone Bill
4. Original copy of latest bank statement of account overseas
5. Copy of Employee ID Card
6. Copy of Labour Card
7. Copy of Social Security Card
Other Documents (any of the following work)
1. Cancelled / Paid Cheque of your overseas Bank account
2. Copy of Proof of Income / Pay Slip / Tax return
The Coinsecure team said:Copyright by WAVY - All rights reserved Traffic outside Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek on Jan. 20, 2016. ReportIt Photo
Copyright by WAVY - All rights reserved Traffic outside Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek on Jan. 20, 2016. ReportIt Photo
NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) -- Authorities have arrested a man accused of threatening to bomb a naval base.
Khalid Mohamed Abdalla, 28, was arrested Wednesday and made his first court appearance Thursday afternoon in Virginia Beach. He is accused of threatening to bomb JEB Little Creek-Fort Story.
Copyright by WAVY - All rights reserved Photo Courtesy: Virginia Beach Police
Copyright by WAVY - All rights reserved Photo Courtesy: Virginia Beach Police
The incident happened Wednesday night around 5 p.m. Police got a call about a suspicious package outside of Gate 5. The area was roped off, streets were blocked and bomb squads were called in.
An alert from the base was also sent out advising Gate 5, near Independence Boulevard, was closed and the base was on security alert.
Several streets nearby were closed for almost three hours while authorities investigated.
During that time, the FBI and Virginia Beach Police went looking for the suspect. They found him a short time later. He was questioned by the Joint Terrorism Task Force and then turned over to Beach Police.
At around 8 p.m., officials confirmed the scene had been cleared and no one was injured.
Abdalla remains in jail and is being held with no bond. On Wednesday during his arraignment, the judge tried to ask him his name, but he wouldn't answer that question. He kept saying that couldn't see the judge because he did not have his glasses and he didn't believe she was a real judge.
He also kept saying he needed to detox and needed a Xanax.
His parents were in the courtroom and they told the judge Abdalla has a history of mental illness and has been institutionalized in the past. They said Abdalla is in "bad shape."
The judge says most likely Abdalla will have a mental health evaluation to determine if he can stand trial.This story about Chuck Grassley's response to a constituent's pointed question comes by way of the Huffington Post:
After sharing his family's personal struggle with the burden of high health care costs, an audience member asked, "My question is... why is your insurance so much cheaper than my insurance and so better than my insurance?"
The question made Grassley cranky.
He responded, first, by suggesting the questioner "go work for John Deere," since they "don't pay anything" for their insurance plan.
When the questioner refused to let the senator wriggle out of answering the question, Grassley revealed how little he knew about his own insurance plan.
Another audience member had to help the senator out by describing the details of the plan. After she finished, the original questioner again asked, "Okay, so how come I can't have the same thing you have?"
Grassley's response: "You can. Just go work for the Federal government."Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Nov. 15, 2016, 12:39 AM GMT / Updated Nov. 15, 2016, 12:48 AM GMT By The Associated Press
BALTIMORE — The nation's Roman Catholic bishops on Monday urged President-elect Donald Trump to adopt humane policies toward immigrants and refugees, as church leaders begin navigating what will likely be a complex relationship with the new administration.
Meeting just days after the election, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said serving people fleeing violence and conflict "is part of our identity as Catholics" and pledged to continue this ministry.
"We stand ready to work with a new administration to continue to ensure that refugees are humanely welcomed without sacrificing our security or our core values as Americans. A duty to welcome and protect newcomers, particularly refugees, is an integral part of our mission to help our neighbors in need," the bishops said.
Related: Obama to Trump: Think 'Long and Hard' on Endangering Dreamers
Trump had said during the campaign that he would build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and immediately deport all 11 million people in the country illegally, though he later distanced himself from that position. In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes," he said he would focus on deporting people with criminal records beyond their immigrant status, "probably two million, it could even be three million." The Obama administration has deported more than 2.5 million people since taking office in 2009, according to the Homeland Security Department.
Members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops attend the USCCB's annual fall meeting in Baltimore, Monday, Nov. 14, 2016. Patrick Semansky / AP
Trump also told "60 Minutes" that his promised solid border wall might look more like a fence in spots. House Speaker Paul Ryan rejected any "deportation force" targeting people in the country illegally.
In a speech at the Baltimore assembly, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president of the bishops' conference, underscored that protecting refugees would remain a priority. He also highlighted an area where the bishops may find more common ground with Trump. Kurtz noted the importance of conscience rights for people who do not want to recognize same-sex marriage or comply with other laws they consider immoral. Trump has pledged to appoint anti-abortion justices to the U.S. Supreme Court and protect religious liberty.
"Don't allow government to define what integrity of faith means," Kurtz said. Dozens of dioceses and Catholic charities sued President Barack Obama over the Affordable Care Act requirement that employers provide coverage for birth control.
Related: Analysis: Breitbart's Steve Bannon Leads the 'Alt Right' to the White House
On Tuesday, the bishops meeting will elect Kurtz' successor, who will become lead representative from the conference to the Trump administration. After being on the defensive with Obama over abortion, LGBT rights and other issues, some conservative Catholics are optimistic about the chances for a rollback on some policies, such as the birth control rule.
Still, they are deeply concerned about the plight of immigrants after a brutal election in which Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals and urged a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. although he later watered down that proposal. American Catholics have a vast network of aid programs for immigrants and refugees, and Pope Francis has put the issue at the core of his pontificate. About 4 in 10 U.S. Catholics are Latino and Hispanics are already a majority in several dioceses.
Archbishop Joseph Tobin of Indianapolis had opposed a request from Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, now the vice-president elect, that the Catholic church stop settling Syrian refugees in the state. Tobin will be made a cardinal Sunday by the pope.
"We've just begun a conversation about how we're going to move forward," under Trump, said Bishop Christopher Coyne of Burlington, Vermont. Coyne said the bishops have known how to deal with Democrats and Republicans previously in the White House, but "this election has thrown all that out the window."
Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, whose archdiocese is about 70 percent Latino, held a prayer service a few days ago to calm parishioners fearful of potential deportation. "They don't know what to make of it, especially many of them who have been here for a long time and they have families," Gomez said.
Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami has tried to reassure local Catholics by pointing back to the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was first elected, and panic spread through the Haitian community. Reagan eventually signed immigration reform that enhanced border security, but also created an opening for some immigrants to stay in the U.S. who had entered the country illegally.
"It's time to take a deep breath and continue our advocacy," Wenski said. "If they're going to build a wall, we're going to have to be sure they put some doors in that wall."Image copyright Real3Peaks Image caption Fourteen volunteers took part in the clean-up of Ben Nevis at the weekend
A bag of chewing gum and an empty 1980s packet of peanuts were among 121kg (267lbs) of rubbish found on Ben Nevis.
Fourteen volunteers filled 21 bags during a litter pick on Scotland's highest mountain on Saturday.
The debris found on the hillside included a peanut packet with a best before date of January 1987 and a ball of chewing gum weighing 4kg (9lbs).
It was one of a series of events across the UK organised by the Real 3 Peaks Challenge.
A total of 570kg (1,256lbs) of waste was taken off seven peaks in Scotland, England and Wales. They were:
Ben Nevis
Scafell Pike (Lake District)
Snowdon (Wales)
Ben Lomond (Scotland)
Lochnagar (Scotland)
Ben MacDui (Scotland)
Mam Tor (Peak District)
Dovestone reservoir (Peak District)
Organiser Rich Pyne said it was "not a bad day out" for the 109 volunteers who took part in the nationwide clean-up.
Image copyright Real3Peaks Image caption Rich Payne organised the litter pick where 4kg of discarded chewing gum was collected
Image copyright Real3Peaks Image caption The peanut packet had a best before date of 24 January 1987
Among the debris were lots of tissues, cigarette ends, banana peel, orange peel, bottle tops, tampons, sweet wrappers, foil, crisp and sandwich wrappers.
Some of the 150,000 people who climb Ben Nevis every year even abandoned walking poles, tents and flags on the mountain.
One volunteer also came across a horseshoe they believe belonged to one of the ponies which worked Ben Nevis in the early 1900s.
Image copyright Real 3 Peaks Image caption A horseshoe believed to date back to the early 1900s was among items picked up on Ben Nevis
My Pyne told the BBC Scotland website that they generally receive a good reaction from other hillwalkers during their annual litter picks.
"They always say thank you, they're always grateful," he said. "Quite often they ask if there's anything they can do and then they might pick up a few bottles on the way down."
The mountain guide, from Kinlochleven, set up the Real 3 Peaks challenge in 2013, in a bid to clean up the mountains before the winter snowfall.Military vehicles cross the Quetta Chaman highway at the Kojak Pass border area after leaving the Kandahar province, Afghanistan. Eighteen Afghan soldiers were killed in a Taliban attack on a military base on Monday in Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar province. File Photo by Matiullah Achakzai/UPI | License Photo
May 26 (UPI) -- At least 18 Afghan soldiers died in a Taliban attack on a Kandahar province, Afghanistan, military base earlier this week, according to government sources.
The attack was launched late Monday in Shah Wali Kot district and lasted until Tuesday morning. It came four days after 10 Afghan soldiers were killed in an attack on a nearby base in southeastern Afghanistan and the day after at least 20 police officers died in raids on outposts in the Arghandab district of central Zabul province. Taliban insurgents typically step up offensives in the spring.
Afghan Ministry of Defense spokesman Gen. Dawlat Waziri said at least 10 soldiers died and nine were injured in the Sha Wali Kot attack. Local media put the death count at 18, the Daily Pakistan reported.
Waziri added that weapons and ammunition were seized by the Taliban, and that at least 12 Taliban members died in the attack. The Taliban, in a message on its website, said it killed 35 Afghan soldiers.A new species of dinosaur with bird-like wings has come to light in China’s rocks dating to some 125 million years ago.
The new dinosaur, named Zhenyuanlong suni, belonged to a family of feathered meat-eaters that was widespread during the Cretaceous period. The species is a close cousin of the famous Velociraptor and is the largest dinosaur ever to have a set of bird-like wings.
The near-complete skeleton of Zhenyuanlong suni was studied by paleontologists Dr Steve Brusatte from of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and Prof Junchang Lü from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences’ Institute of Geology.
Zhenyuanlong suni grew to more than 5 feet (1.5 meters) in length. Its wings were very short compared with other dinosaurs in the same family and consisted of multiple layers of large feathers – complex structures made up of fine branches stemming from a central shaft.
“Although larger feathered dinosaurs have been identified before, none have possessed such complex wings made up of quill pen-like feathers,” the paleontologists said.
Despite having bird-like wings, Zhenyuanlong suni probably could not fly, at least not using the same type of powerful muscle-driven flight as modern birds. It is unclear what function the short wings served.
“This new dinosaur is one of the closest cousins of Velociraptor, but it looks just like a bird. It’s a dinosaur with huge wings made up of quill pen feathers, just like an eagle or a vulture,” said Dr Brusatte, who is a co-author of a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
“The movies have it wrong – this is what Velociraptor would have looked like too.”
Prof Lü added: “the western part of Liaoning Province in China is one of the most famous places in the world for finding dinosaurs.”
“The first feathered dinosaurs were found here and now our discovery of Zhenyuanlong suni indicates that there is an even higher diversity of feathered dinosaurs than we thought. It’s amazing that new feathered dinosaurs are still being found.”
_____
Junchang Lü & Stephen L. Brusatte. 2015. A large, short-armed, winged dromaeosaurid (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Early Cretaceous of China and its implications for feather evolution. Scientific Reports 5, article number: 11775; doi: 10.1038/srep11775Today's editorial cartoon is about the relationship between the 'League of Legends World Championship' and the usage of the sixth man.
Before we knew it, Worlds began.
At the tournament, top teams from around the globe are set to clash, and as curious it is for the viewers to find out which team will fight against whom, who the sixth member will be on any given team also sparks the interest among fans.
On September 22nd, Inven Global had the opportunity to speak with the head coaches of the three LCK teams who will be competing at Worlds, and they all had the same negative sayings towards the sub limitation of the tournament. As a matter of fact, SKT's head coach, cCarter, went as far as to show discomfort in titling one of his players as a "sub".
In traditional sports, mainly basketball, a'sixth |
forget that I'm supposed to be having fun. The Vector SDP makes all of that impossible, simply through its sheer awesome insanity.
You see, the KRISS Vector as a pistol makes no sense. In a tactical, law enforcement setting, the Vector as a submachine gun makes sense for teams that want.45 ACP entry guns; for civilians the carbine version is a fun, reliable plinker. But the pistol version—lacking a stock and with a short barrel—is just bonkers.
And I love it for that. It took me all of 20 minutes to figure out how to rig up a sling for the Vector SDP so I could shoot it pressed out against the sling, SAS-style. The next 20 minutes were filled me with slicing the pie all over my house, dry firing and generally making silly machine-gun noises. There's something about the KRISS Vector SDP that makes my inner child smile in the same way a loud muscle car does. We know it's not practical, we know it's not really tactical and we just don't care because it's so much fun.
Every time I take the Vector SDP to the range, I get this silly grin on my face while shooting it. When you loan it to friends, they don't want to give it back. Take it to a range, and it'll be picked up and shot more than any traditional-looking firearm there. I take it with me to the range even if I'm not planning to shoot it, and sure enough, it ends up getting a couple of boxes of ammo put through it.
Let's get serious here for a second. Say for a moment that "because I can" or "because it's fun" isn't enough of a reason to justify the $1,600 price tag of the KRISS Vector SDP. Is there a practical use for this pistol? Absolutely. It actually is quite easy to shoot well, and I think it could quite readily be used as a home-defense gun. In fact, when used with a sling, it becomes an excellent choice for home defense, especially if paired with a tactical light. Now, before you e-mail me and call me a mall ninja, let's work through the benefits.
The Vector SDP offers plenty of firepower with a 30-round magazine full of.45 ACP, the proprietary recoil system makes it easier to shoot than a standard.45 ACP handgun and having it on a sling means that at a moment's notice you can have two hands free to do important things like call 911. Because the Vector SDP can be suppressed (where legal) you can have a gun for home defense that won't cause permanent hearing damage in the event you're forced to use it indoors without hearing protection.
But all of that information is just a justification, because the bottom line on the KRISS Vector SDP is it's just plain, old-fashioned fun. It's like a Pagani Zonda—an insane, fast car that's fast and insane for the sake of being fast and insane. The Vector SDP takes the unique mechanical design of the KRISS Vector submachine gun, plugs it into a pistol format, says "ta-da!" and presents the shooter with an experience unlike firing any other gun.
If you can get your hands on a KRISS Vector SDP, I recommend you do. Take it to the range, shoot it and see if you don't have a big silly smile on your face when you've put a couple of magazines through it. Do crazy mag dumps with it, pretend you're a special operations forces operator or a character in "Modern Warfare," but I dare you to try and not have fun while shooting the pistol.
With so much time and ink spent on reviewing the latest tactical gizmos, with guns and gear running the gamut from old-school to practical, it's nice to live in a world where we have things like the KRISS Vector SDP. It's big, it's silly, it's fun—and it's everything we loved as kids watching sci-fi and action movies.
Is a regular old Glock 21 a better choice for concealed carry? Yes. Is a shotgun or carbine a better choice for home defense? Probably, yes. But then again, a Volkswagen Beetle gets better gas mileage than my Dodge Charger, but I wouldn't trade my Charger for 100 VW Beetles. Because of this, the KRISS Vector SDP uniquely embraces the American way—it exists not for any tactical or serious purpose, but simply because someone thought "Hey, this would be totally sweet." It's awesome just for the sake of being awesome.In episode two of Hash Power, we spend time with the leading investors in the field. Like any frenzied asset class, there are countless cryptocurrency hedge funds popping up everywhere. But founders from three of the original firms—Polychain, Metastable, and BlockTower Capital—are our primary guides this week. Episode one, on understanding blockchain technology, is available here.
PRESENTED BY
A big part of my goal with this episode is to introduce you to the players who are shaping the investment ecosystem, and how the investing ecosystem—with exchanges, trading, and weird custody problems—works in action. Collectively our guests run hundreds of millions of dollars, likely now approaching a billion dollars, in pure play cryptocurrency investment strategies. While we do explore some examples of how to think about individual tokens, these are not investment recommendations. Rather, this is an introduction to the various stages of cryptocurrency invest—from early white papers to full fledged liquid tokens—and the strategies and skillsets being deployed by the pure play investors.
This experiment has led to many relationships within the field, which is growing fast. If you are a full-stack generalist engineer looking to work for well-funded companies developing decentralized apps, email me at hashpowerdocumentary@gmail.com. Please write [Developer] in the subject line, and include a link to your Github account, please also include a short summary of your skills. You do not need previous experience with blockchains, but a couple of pluses are: Experience with React, Redux, Swift and Objective-C, Commits to a top open source project, or an open source project on GitHub with 25+ stars. Remote work is fine.We would like to thank all of our fellow gut-lovers for the support over the last 5 years. The MyNewGut project has officially come to an end at the end of November 2018. The consortium celebrated the project findings during their final conference on 18 October 2018 where the partners provided clear evidence that:
Bacterial strains in our gut could be the next generation of probiotics
Consuming an excess of proteins generates some toxic metabolites
Diets rich in fibres are associated with fewer symptoms of depression, help to maintain body weight and reduce the risk of developing chronic metabolic diseases
fibres A high fat diet may have a negative impact on the gut microbiota and the brain
high fat The gut microbiota influences metabolic health
For a complete overview of the project outcomes:
Watch the video recordings from the final conference
Read our final conference summary document
Have a look at our most recent leaflet
Read the lay-language summary
MyNewGut Final Conference: highlights and project's achievements
On Thursday 18th October 2018, EUFIC hosted the MyNewGut final conference at the Stanhope Hotel in Brussels. The conference marked the culmination of the project, which over the last five years investigated the gut microbiome to prevent diet-related and behavioural disorders. The event was attended by around 120 participants, including representatives from the European Commission, project partners and interested stakeholders.
The main aim of the conference was to bring all consortium partners together and present the ground-breaking results of five years of research. The results showed that the influence of the gut microbiota on health is complex. Many factors such as proteins, fats and fibre all have different impacts on the microbiome and its metabolites depending on the food source and quantity. Further, the gut microbiome also influences gut health, affects cognitive function and the incidence of depression. The project outcomes are expected to support new dietary recommendations to guide consumers towards healthier food choices such as high intake of different fibre types, choosing polyunsaturated fats (seeds, nuts, fish) over saturated fat and being cautious in utilising high-protein diets on the long-term for weight loss.
The event was inaugurated with a keynote speech by Barend Verachtert, Head of Agri-Food Chain Unit of DG Research & Innovation, EC, who made a powerful statement ’Scientific research is useless without empowerment of the community in his talk about the EC’s FOOD2030 initiative. Next, Dirk Hadrich, Innovative and Personalised Medicine Unit, Health Directorate, DG Research & Innovation, EC, provided more in-depth information about funding human microbiome research in the European Union (EU). The first session concluded with project coordinator, Yolanda Sanz, giving an overview of the main project achievements.
The second session focused on ‘Microbiome-diet interactions in obesity and eating behaviour’, with Francois Blachier from INRA, France, talking about High-Protein Diets (HPD). Max Nieuwdorp from AMC, The Netherlands, then discussed what matters in metabolic health – microbes, metabolites or both. Next, Patrizia Brigidi from UNIBO, Italy, compared obese and lean gut microbiota before Sandrine Claus form UREAD, UK, closed the session with a talk on personal metabolic responses to diet.
In the third session ‘Gut-brain axis: A new route for programming health and mood’, three keynote speakers took the lead. First, Catherine Stanton from UCC, Ireland, talked about the impact of microbiota on the immune system of children followed by Cristina Campoy from UGR, Spain, who spoke about factors influencing the gut microbiome in infant studies, whereas Peter Holzer from MUG, Austria, concluded the session with a talk on the impact of a high fat diet on the gut and on mental health.
The focus of the fourth session was on ‘Translating microbiome science into applications.’ The three keynote speakers were Nathalie Delzenne from UCL, Belgium, explaining the dietary fibre impact on gut microbiota and the role of DDP-4 on the gut-liver axis, next Ted Dinan from UCC, Ireland, talked about psychobiotics and stress resilience, followed by, Thomas Meinert Larsen from UCPH, Denmark, who explained a study which is submitted for publication on prebiotic supplementation.
Two keynote speakers covered the fifth session of the day on ‘Implications of microbiome science for public health’. Namely, Jan-Willem van der Kamp from TNO, The Netherlands, provided insight into microbiome-informed dietary guidelines on proteins and fats, as well as dietary fibre intake recommendations. Finally, Ted Dinan in a second talk concluded on the role of microbiota in major depression suggesting potential treatment recommendations within the gut microbiome.
The closing session was chaired by project coordinator Yolanda Sanz speaking words of thanks to all attendees and partners of the consortium. The final presentation of the day was held by Carina Pereira from DG Research & Innovation, EC, highlighting the next steps towards a climate-smart and sustainable food system for a healthy Europe.
You can find the speakers presentations below⬇️As more and more sports fans call for members of the sports media to “stick to sports,” news has leaked that the NFL Network is now warning employees to avoid talking about politics on their social media accounts.
While ESPN continues to spiral into pure left-wing politics, the NFL Network seems ready to avoid the cable sports network’s troubles, Sports Business Daily reported.
NFL executives are becoming alarmed by the volatility of mixing politics with sports and see it as a sort of “no-win scenario.”
So, network execs are saying “avoid politics.”
“Those debates are healthy in the middle of newsrooms and discussions face-to-face,” NFL Network’s executive producer of studio and remote content, Mike Muriano, said. “But playfully or not, what happens in face-to-face conversations can be construed in ways that you don’t want on a public forum like Twitter — especially when it comes to politics.”
Execs essentially want employees to “stick to sports.”
One message the NFL gave its talent was to be cognizant that people follow them for their football knowledge. “When in doubt, keep it to the game,” NFL’s vice president of social media and emerging programming, Tom Brady said. “There’s always a time to showcase your personality and be able to engage with fans and go outside of your core. But at the end of the day, as a member of the NFL Media Group, try to stick to football because that’s what people want to hear from you about.”
“Talent needs to be careful with that level of engagement,” Muriano said. “Be smart and sensitive to if you’re getting trolled or not. Then just stop.
“Our talent, as the known quantity in this exchange, does not benefit by dressing down a fan — even if that fan is way off base. At some point, they have to know when to say that this has taken a turn and I’m not taking part anymore.”
“There is a danger to unfiltered messages that can be delivered to a mass audience immediately. The league told its on-air talent to use common sense when posting on social media,” the NFL Network told employees.
“Don’t fail the social media IQ test,” Muriano concluded. “Is what you’re about to put out there that important? Give it a second thought.”
With the troubles of ESPN as a guide, it is no wonder that NFL Network execs want their employees to avoid the pitfalls of angering millions of customers with constant left-wing political pronouncements.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.by Brett Stevens on May 17, 2015
The media inflates again with seemingly endless bloviation about the Iraq war. Again this exists to conceal some difficult truths behind the scenes. Let us investigate the Iraq war (II) and see what may be found.
At first the question seems simple and to coincide with the one asked by the media: was this a just war? Was it a successful war? And, did it simply damage American prestige worldwide?
Each of these questions aims to hide a more complex truth.
First, was this a just war? Meaning: did the bad guys deserve punishment, and are we in a moral position to do it? Glossing over for a moment the specious and irrelevant question of whether there is morality to war, as it is generally a thought debated by those far from the battlefields who have no intention of participating, let us look to Saddam Hussein. There was much to admire about him as he unified Iraq at least temporarily.
However, the dark side to Saddam Hussein was that he was also the ruling power in the Arab world and he had supported terrorist attacks against Israel including launching Scud missiles from long distances. That in turn prompted the question of whether Iraq had “WMD,” a term that in its honest use means NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical) weapons. Lobbing 150kg of Semtex into downtown Haifa is bad enough, but hitting it with the same amount of VX gas could achieve a measurable percentage of genocide and precipitate a collapse of Israel. Speaking as realists, we must recognize that the West would not simply sit on its hands when that happened, so a rather extensive conflict would result. Further, Iraq was the weapons clearinghouse of the middle east, and many of those ended up in the hands of Palestinian terror groups. For these reasons, the war on Hussein was “justified” if such a thing must be done.
In addition, the war against Hussein represented a clear response to the middle east as a whole: if terrorist attacks happen to the United States, we will show up to where you are and destroy enough stuff that you will regret your support. Then you will be engaged in fighting us in your backyard and will not have the time or resources to follow up on terror attacks. This also displaced all terrorists from Iraq, a populous area, to the more sparsely-populated regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan where they could be droned from armchair comfort.
The question of WMD was never resolved. Iraq had developed WMD in the past and might be doing so currently. What changed this question was Hussein’s ability to launch Scuds and the rising power of Islamic “extremism” in response to the 9/11 attacks. The Iraq war took all of that down a peg. Oddly, like the Viet Nam war, the Iraq war was massively successful in that it dissuaded others from following the path of mideast terror. Resistance happens in increments and is emboldened by a lack of strong response, because that means that one can be a revolutionary and also face a likelihood of zero penalty. When the penalty rises, support falls. In the same way that the Viet Nam war stopped Chinese Communist expansion, the Iraq war stopped Muslim extremist expansion. This re-asserted a geopolitical balance where the nations intolerant of this resistance movement held the upper hand by the fact of not only being unwilling to tolerate it, but picking a semi-arbitrary nation to sacrifice for having supported it in the past. Message delivered: support this and you may be next.
Then there comes the question as to whether Iraq was a successful war and with it, the question of whether America lost or won. The factors that determined these questions were beyond a single president. It makes sense to divide the Iraq action into two parts, the “war” and the “occupation.” The first resembles what Bush I did, which was to smash the opposing army and level huge parts of its industrial capacity, cutting it back if not to the stone age at least to less harmful levels. As in the first Iraq war, the second one — the war part at least — was successful. After that came the occupation, where almost all of the casualties and expense occurred. Occupations, as happened also in Viet Nam, are generally costly because all of the strategic advantage goes to the guerrillas, much as it did during the American revolution. As luck has it, occupations are also virtually demanded by any democracy fighting a war because it cannot support the un-democratic alternative, which is relocation or destruction of the subjugated population. You can avoid a guerrilla war, but it takes extreme means.
Saddam Hussein lobbed missiles at Israel, experimented with WMDs, gassed his own people and supported terrorists. Together these showed a pattern that revealed a strong nose-thumbing at Western authority in the middle east, which is essential since the middle east is Europe’s southern flank. This was in itself not a problem, but with 9/11 the Islamic terrorists got too arrogant and strong for our interests, so they had to be spanked down. In Iraq, this consisted of a successful war to depose a tyrant, and a less-successful occupation demanded by our “democratic feelings.” In Afghanistan, it consisted of a prolonged guerrilla war which drove its targets to remote areas where we identify them and drone them to this day. Much like Viet Nam, this war pushed back against a challenger to our authority, and radically reduced the support for terrorist organizations in the middle east.
Tags: afghanistan, european hegemony, george w bush, iraq, middle east, saddam hussein, terrorism, wahhabism, western hegemony
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Sanzaru Games is one of the many VR developers announcing an Oculus Touch title today. Welcome to Ripcoil.
Very little is known about this new Rift game from the Sly Cooper 4 developer right now. It’s merely been teased for now, and has been described as a “player vs. player arena” title in which you launch a speeding ‘Ripcoil’ disc as well as catch and punch them. There’s just the lone image of the game right now, but it suggests a gritty sci-fi game in which that Ripcoil resembles a spinning scythe of sorts. The game is an Oculus Studios title, thus fully exclusive to Rift.
It looks like this could be a rather gruesome, first-person action experience of sorts. Perhaps we can expect some sort of R-rated take on CCP Games’ Project Arena? It joins three other Oculus Touch titles that have been announced today, the first being Wilson’s Heart from Twisted Pixel, followed by SUPERHOT VR and Killing Floor: Incursion. Each game will be launching on Oculus Rift “first”, suggesting that they could possibly come to both the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR HMDs later down the line.
Combine that with the likes of The Unspoken from Insomniac Games and Rock Band VR from Harmonix and Oculus Touch is building quite the line-up.
This is actually both Sanzaru Games’ second Rift and Touch title, as it’s still working on VR Sports Challenge, a game that started life on the Xbox controller that comes with the HMD itself and eventually evolved to support the position-tracked devices. It offers a wide range of sports scenarios, spanning the likes of football, basketball and hockey, putting you in the shoes of elite athletes in crucial moments of gigantic games. It’s a fair bit different from Ripcoil, then, and looks set to launch with Touch itself in the second half of the year.
Ripcoil is on display at E3 this week, so expect plenty more details on it soon.
Tagged with: oculus rift, oculus touch, ripcoil, Sanzaru GamesWe here at the Curbediverse tend to focus our energies on things happening in real time—of-the-moment real estate news, shelter gossip, and design personalities. Yet we couldn't possibly tear our browser away when it landed on a real-life version of The Simpsons house standing proud in Henderson, Nev. Back in 1997—way before these things called "blogs" and all—the 2,200-square-foot four-bedroom yellow house was built by Kaufman and Broad Home Construction as a nationwide sweepstakes organized by FOX and Pepsi. How'd they do it? Well, for starters, by watching more than 100 episodes of the show, obsessing over 7,200 color swatches (before actually settling on 25), and ultimately choosing 1,500 Simpsons-themed styling props, from Duff Beer cans to the living room's sailboat painting. Part of an affordable-housing community—not Evergreen Terrace but still appropriately named Springfield—the house cost Kaufman $120K to build. And here's the extra-depressing part: the retired factory worker from Kentucky who won the sweepstakes decided, instead, to take the $75K payout instead of the house itself. In 2001, after being stripped of its Simpsons likeness, it was sold to another owner.
· Amazing Fantasy Inspired Homes [Choices Blog]
· The Simpsons House [Las Vegas Adventurer]
· Cartoon House Comes to Life; Kaufman & Broad Unveiled The Simpsons House to Fans, Contest Hopefuls [PR Newswire]
House Calls: This Colorful Family Home Stands OutMay 26th, 2009
Anyone who knows me knows I can’t cook. Never really tried. Didn’t get the gene.
But after enjoying a delicious meal at the home of Kim and Bryan, the bloggers I met last weekend, I decided I might like to try my hand at it. You see, Kim made homemade manicotti, including making the pasta shells from scratch!
I thought it would make a nice birthday dinner for my husband, Dave, and so I slaved away in the kitchen making my own pasta. You do it by pouring a thin mixture of eggs, flour, water and oil in a saute pan and swirling it around like you would a crepe. When the top dries, you simply pop it out on a plate and instant pasta!
I made 15 of those beauties and confidently went on to make the cheese filling and meatballs. Didn’t they turn out nice? Thanks for the recipe, Kim!
I basked in the glow of knowing that if I apply myself, I can pull off a decent meal and no one even has to go to the emergency room to get their stomach pumped.
And then God said "Get over yourself. It was a fluke."
The very next day I made a grilled cheese sandwich in the brand new saute pan I’d bought to make the pasta in, but didn’t wind up using.
When the pan heated, I started smelling something. I chastised my husband for not cleaning some burned food off the stovetop.
But the smell wasn’t exactly burnt food. Oh, no.
It was the smell of stupid.
We had a good chuckle over it, took this picture for proof a moron lives here and I ate my grilled cheese sandwich.
The very next day I was making an omelette in the very same pan.
Hmmmm. What’s that smell?
That’d be the smell of short term memory loss.
You’ll be happy to know I finally took the paper off the bottom of the pan and my house doesn’t smell like burning barcode anymore.
Is this universe’s way of telling me to get the hell out of the kitchen and leave it to the experts?We are all aware of the brave women and men who got us our freedom on 15th August, 1947. It is equally important for us to know the new & unsung heroes of our country who are impacting thousands of lives, changing the way we think and making India truly a better place. We bring to you a list of 69 heroes who have achieved extraordinary feats and moved our country forward.
When we talk about ordinary people bringing about change, we cannot afford to miss out on this man. He is the one who single-handedly converted a washed out land into a 1,360 acre forest. He started planting bamboo saplings when he was 16 years old. Today he is 47 and lives in his own forest, which is now also home to Bengal tigers, Indian rhinoceros, over 100 deer and rabbits, besides apes and several varieties of birds, including a large number of vultures. The forest department wanted to employ him but he rejected the job because he believed he wouldn’t be able to pay attention to the cause if he was bound by responsibilities. Read more.
This amazing woman has been working with one of the most under-developed tribal communities in central India. A gynecologist by profession, she has been serving in the remotest areas for over 20 years. She set up the Society for Education, Acton and Research in Community Health, along with her doctor husband Abhay, and started many such healthcare initiatives across India. She has managed to introduce modern medicine in tribal villages and made the villagers aware of good healthcare facilities. While many doctors are seeking high-paying jobs in the biggest hospitals of the country, this amazing woman and her husband is an inspiration to us all. Kudos to their efforts and passion. Read more.
She has taken her profession to another level. Beena Rao, who has been teaching slum children for free in Surat, Gujarat, has benefited over 5,000 students so far, working with 34 volunteers across the city. The curriculum lays emphasis on a holistic education by including discipline, yoga, mannerisms, and other aspects which are often neglected by the government schools. And all of this is free of cost for the children. We admire her dedication and love towards education. Read more.
This 96-year old freedom fighter takes words like ‘compassion’ to another level. His love for the country and fellow human beings touches the heart of anyone who meets him. After fighting for freedom of the country in his youth, he chose to settle down in a remote village in his after-years. Dedicating his life to children in need and their education, he runs Sri Ramakrisha Sevashram (SRKS). Even at this ripe age, his energy, enthusiasm, dedication and passion is commendable. Biswas sets an example of how age is just a number and does not matter if your intentions are pure. Visit his ashram to know how inspiring this person is. Read more.
While growing up in her home state of Mizoram, Pi Sangkhumi witnessed various atrocities and injustice meted out to women. She realized that this happened largely due to the archaic laws, regressive customs, and low levels of literacy and awareness among women. She made it her life’s mission to make things right. She has been working in this field for 40 years now. Former president of Mizo Hmeichhe Insuihkhawm Pawl (MHIP), an apex body representing several local women’s groups, Sangkhumi has been regularly working in the field of women empowerment, education and entrepreneurship. She is also fighting against domestic violence, rape and other forms of gender violence faced by women. While we show our disgust towards incidents like domestic violence, Sangkhumi is already out there saving many lives. Read more
Her own suffering with breast cancer made her take it up as her life’s mission to spread awareness among urban, rural and tribal reaches of India. She has been travelling across the country to spread awareness about breast cancer. She hold a record in Limca Book of Records, India as the first woman to do a solo drive to the four tips of India. A breast cancer survivor, she is working on an initiative called High>>>ways Beyond Cancer. She organizes various workshops at offices, schools, colleges, hospitals and army camps to spread awareness about the disease. Read more
This man has successfully rejuvenated a traditional water system in Maharashtra. Caught in between the Malguzaars (the local Zamindars or landlords) and the state government, the Malguzari tanks were left to die many years ago. Shirish Apte decided to change the situation and, since 2008, he has been successfully rejuvenating these tanks. His efforts and hard work have made the district administration restore 21 more such tanks. This project has helped many local people get employment, the irrigation output has increased in the area, the farmers have reduced the use of fertilizers in the farms and, above all, you now get to witness a great sight as many animals come and quench their thirst at these tanks. Read more
Gangadhara Tilak Katnam is a 67-years old retired Railway employee. He starts his car every morning and drives around on Hyderabad roads to repair the potholes. The backseat of his car always has a few gunny bags full of tar mixed gravel, which he collects from roadsides. Starting his venture with five bags, Gangadhara’s car now carries eight to ten such bags which are emptied whenever a pothole is spotted. He has filled over 1,100 potholes so far and has exhausted his pension in this process. Read more.
Some people are born brave and Khan is one of those rare ones. Ever since he was a teenager, Khan was furiously active and stood upright for the education rights of Dalit children and other excluded communities. Ever since, he has been working actively in the social sector. From working single-mindedly for the cause of rescuing girls who fall victim to ‘bride trafficking’ to leading a 300-kilometer ‘March Against Female Foeticide and Gender Inequality’ and starting an organization “Empower People”, Khan is a ray of hope that the country’s future is in safe hands. We have immense respect for this young man and all his endeavours. Read more
This inspiring man has dedicated his entire life to the rural sanitation sector. Working for over 50 years in this field, Dr. Mapuskar has implemented the principles of appropriate technology and community ownership at a time when these were not part of the national consciousness. He has been actively working in the field to promote the use of decentralized, low-cost sanitation options. He started promoting the bio-gas toilets and convinced villagers to use them. The efforts of Dr. Mapuskar are commendable and we hope his initiatives reaches out to more and more people. Read more
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However tough and hard a turtle might me, he still needs protection. And Dharini understood it pretty well when she saw kids playing cricket with turtle eggs. She has been working extensively to change the attitude of people towards turtles. Since 2002, she has released more than 44,654 hatchlings in the sea. Dharini’s efforts have brought people together from all sections of the community. From a student preparing for IAS exams to a fisherman, everyone has come together to protect the specie. Kudos to the lady who has given a new life to the specie which has mostly been ignored. Read more
He is the man who transformed 120 acres of barren land into a self-sufficient organic farm by developing a 50 feet lake on two acres of the land. Naik was determined to convert the fallow land into something useful. In spite of criticism from family members and friends he did not give up and continued to work on the land. Today, the lake generates 40,000 litres of water which irrigates the whole land. The farm is now one of the largest organic farms in the area and produces various fruits and vegetables like mangoes, haldi, pepper, bananas, cashew nuts, etc. So, in case you want to grow your own veggies, you know who to contact. Read more
This recipient of Indira Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar has transformed the fate of the beautiful Himalayas, which were going into a state of neglect. She engaged the community, took initiatives, ran cleanup drives, started vigorous campaigns and collected 15 truckloads of garbage weighing up to 50 tonnes which was sent for recycling. Between 1997 and 2000, she mobilized a community of nearly eleven thousand people across 82 villages to spend at least 1 day in a year for the restoration of their villages. This inspirational personality has been regularly working towards the betterment of the community in the hills without expecting anything in return. Read more
This young man has been making forests out of backyards. Having started experimenting in his own backyard, he now manages to create a lush green forest within a year’s time in any small plot. He has already created 33 forests across India and is currently working on many more such makeovers. He believes in making forests and not lawns. Holder of many fellowships and awards globally, Sharma has been able to create a stir in the way people approach environment conservation. Read more
He started his career as a cook but soon realized his love for cookstoves and innovations. His DEEP Chulha helps users to improve fuel efficiency by as much as 50%. Apart from creating this amazing stove that is helping the rural community at large, Sharma is also working with the elderly people in his area by running around 34 elders’ Self-Help Groups. Having started as a cook at a local NGO, he has been continuously working to improve the condition of the community through his innovations in the field of cooking stoves, traditional medicine, organic farming and animal husbandry. He is an inspiration to all of us and is a perfect example of how charity begins at home. Read more
Manipur is home to much violence which results in creating many widows who financially and emotionally weak. Nepram was witness to one such black day when a lady lost her husband, and it changed her life forever. Nepram then decided to remake the lives of widows in Manipur. Since then she has been helping these women to be financially independent, exploring livelihood options by giving them resources like sewing machines and soft loans. From helping these women open their bank accounts to providing them monetary help to kick-start a small business, Nepram has revived the lives of many such women who once had almost given up on their lives. Read more.
What started as a fellowship soon became his passion, and Viswanath started dedicating the majority of his time in teaching photography to tribal kids. In areas where even education is not taken seriously, photography was a far cry, but Viswanath did not give up and continued to gather students to teach new techniques. From developing pinhole cameras that are cheaper to triggering the attitude of learning among students, Viswanath has taken a path less followed. Though he faces many challenges, he is determined to bring a significant change in the community and how it looks at education. Read more
While most of us are in a race to get the latest gadget, this guy has been creating affordable computers from scrap. Targeting the economically weaker sections of the community as customers, Mukund has created over 10,000 computers from scrap. Not only this, they also provide free after-sale service for these machines for one year. At a time when the computer has become almost a necessity, Mukund is making a huge contribution in the field where those who need the machine but can’t afford it now have an opportunity to own one. Now, this is called putting skills to a better use. Read more.
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This amazing lady has taken a pledge to make 100% literacy rate a reality and she is trying to achieve this with her amazing initiative called ‘Door Step School’. She goes wherever the children are and starts the class right there. She has managed to take classes at places like pavements and road construction sites, building construction sites, outside big markets, railway stations, etc. Targeting children from age 3 to 18, hers is a school on wheels where the team can teach the children even if there is no place to conduct the classes. Amazing, isn’t it? How one can bring changes without cribbing about lack of resources. I guess we all can learn a thing or two from her incredible initiative. Read more.
We often see fancy toys in the market, and as we buy the latest ones, we push our old ones to the corner. While these old toys might not be useful to us anymore, they could still give immense joy to someone on the streets. Shweta Chari started an initiative, Toybank, with a vision to place a toy in the hands of every child in India. Chari started wrapping the donated toys and gave them to those who could not afford them. Having spread smiles on over 8,000 faces, Chari continues to do her bit to make the lives of these small kids a little better. Chari has been spreading joy for a couple of years now and we admire her spirit.Read more
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Ever since we are born we have known one thing – that paper is made out of trees and we should not waste it so as to save our trees. But this duo has transformed the way paper is made. They invented a paper that is made out of elephant dung! Mahima and Vijendra started Haathi Chaap, an organization that makes paper and several other products like bags, notebooks, stationery, coasters and many more, out of the elephant waste. Talk about revolutionizing the market! They are people who have done something most of us never thought of. Read more
She started an initiatives for the children of construction workers, who are mostly ignored. They spend their childhood in mud and dust, playing with dangerous tools, unfed and unclothed. While a child’s life should be carefree and happy, these children are living a life far from normal. She decided to help these kids and provide them a safe, healthy and educated childhood. She has been extensively working in this field through Mobile Crèches, and catering to the needs of thousands of such children who are deprived of basic necessities. Read more
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think is you are actually PROPERTY of the CROWN and any attempt to claim them is a willful and ignorant ACT of FRAUD and all things contained within these CONTRACTS are CHURCH/STATE/CROWN PROPERTY. • 8. All IDENTIFICATION created from the BIRTH CERTIFICATE NAME you think is yours is FALSE IMPERSONATION and FALSE IDENTITY using the PROPERTY of the CROWN without permission and is a CAPITAL OFFENSE. Anyone claiming to be a NON-BAR member TITLE such as a Police Officer is actually FALSE IMPERSONATION two-fold because they don't have RIGHT OF COPYRIGHT USE like everyone else. • 9. This FRAUD from the CROWN CORPORATION is EASILY dispelled and REVERSED by exposing the CROWN CORPORATION's (owners thereof) INTENT to DECEIVE/AID AND ABET humanity into FRAUD via ignorance of these CONTRACT facts.
Before any fraud can be revealed, a simple understanding of what fraud actually is is critical to grasp the enormity of the fraud placed on humanity overall. Fraud is simply a knowing attempt to deceive another to steal from them. Plain and simple, a fraud is hidden theft. What humanity is finding difficult to accept is the actual level of theft that has been achieved over every man, woman and child on what we call earth. Humanity has been duped into In-dependence upon the very thing that is draining their very souls of life and, literally, feeding it to the hounds of Hell. Not one part of humanity’s day to day activities escape this perfect net if you’re still willing to be their fishies. Every aspect of what you THINK of as a normal kinda day is soaked and dripping in this venom that has permeated the very mind of consciousness rendering it unconscious and thus, dead. All evil had to do was make being dead legally, fun enough to quell and lull the masses, and make sure you can’t imagine any other kind of normal day besides the matrix you’re spinning in. I’ll outline a few parables of this during this essay where it is my hope to be able to convey, in the simplest terms, the magnitude of this ruse while keeping your panic to a dull roar. Yes, this is serious business since your very soul is on THEIR lien/line/ligne until YOU un-Hook your Peter Pan and Tinkerbell but, the answer AND truth beyond in the living reality are so simple, you simply won’t believe it.
It’s because EVERY part of your life in what the masses of humanity think of as “normal” is affect-dead and in-fect-dead and THIS is the pole shift of 180 degrees spoke of in folklore. Yes, the physical ones occur but only for those that choose the dead physical, all there is reality whereas I and countless others chose the 180 degree about face and marched right out of Babyloan out from under their excrutiatingly relentless eyes until we literaly “went dark” on their radar screens. This is the Celestine Prophecy effect of the invisible shields go up and render you untouchable for standing in truth.
When pair-ents (two minds) or payer-rents choose to REGISTER their children, they are LITERALLY trading off the life source of the being that is SUCKED into that body in this reality for the whore of Baby-loans LEGAL NAME dead child, in essence, ADOPTING Satan’s child in LLEU of heaven’s child. The Laws-R-us effect, raising the dead NAME DEMON and razing the living consciousness you THINK of as YOU and every other human being as well as all sentient life in this reality. In short, YOU offer up your living child as a sacrifice to Satan while your living child commits sign after sign (sin upon sin) and ADOPT the dead LEGAL DEMON literally breathing life into evil with every creation thenceforth.
Have a look again at the Solomon story where two mothers were contesting one child where one mother (whore of Babyloan) who killed her child (smothering it in bed while she was sleeping is one version) and swapped babies with the living child of the other mother (living creation) claiming the living child as hers and the dead one belonging to the mother who is now fighting to save her kidnapped child. Solomon’s answer to this quarrel was to simply cut the living child in two and each could have half to which the real mother said no and to allow the liar to have the child versus halve the child. Solomon knew the real mother would never allow her child to be harmed while the whore of Babyloan stayed silent and happy with the outcome of cutting the child in two. The old “if I can’t steal your child, you’re not getting them back psychopathy” and this is exactly what’s going on in this reality. The child is life itself, the life in you, your child to protect and your child is owned, locked, stalked and B.A.R.-ruled whilst gleefully consenting to play along in the dead whore commerce kingdumb as nothing more than a minor subject in the book of the dead REGISTRARS, a page for their black night Sat-El-ite. Demons are also called El-ites, Graft-ites, Paris-ites etc…..
People will walk in circles within the matrix until they decide, once and for all, they’re not a legal anything….only the absolute removal of the literal idea of being a legal anything will finally put you out side of the box of this boxed legal matrix. Here’s an example of how 180 degrees opposite of the truth legally mind-dead people “evaluate” spiritual signs and clues with literal legal nonsense. If you’re talking in legal devil tongue in legal literal reality, you’re an El-ite just like the other El-ites that like to burroe underground as any wormwould do: THAT’S the real wormwood wiggling around in the grey clay called brain matter which is in fact, the dead and divided heart and why only following your true heart, to do what is right regardless of illusional consequence. In that walk, creation carries you.
I’ll post this segment and another segment to show how circular legal reality the mind goes, round and round only talking about the world reality from the dead legal illusion perspective…..the subject never changes because they are imprisoned in a CROWN SUBJECT I.D.-entity so their OBJECTIVE will always be from the dead legal whirled matrix trapped mined.
from the article (read the whole thing if you can stomach this much delusional programming and this one is a GREAT example of someone nailing their own box shut from the inside)
“The word “Shemitah” is a legal term that comes from the Torah of Moses, the first five books of the Scriptures. Shemitah in the Hebrew means a “legally permanent release”. The root idea of the word Shemitah in the Hebrew means to “violently throw something down with force—to utterly destroy something”. To a biblical court of Law, the Shemitah was a time-sensitive, permanent legal release that was to absolutely abolish whatever legal issue was at stake.””
back to now…..the word Shemitah is Hebrew for the latin phrase Clausula Rebis Sic Stantibus or the CRSS to bear, bare or B’heir. The Invocation of the CRSS was on December 25th, 2012….the CRSS is commonly referred to as “the escape clause/the S-cape Claus”…..the writers of the article missed the point entirely because they’re deluded into a one way only literal way of thinking, basing their whole reality that was built on the legal name fraud deception. humanity, in short, lives the lie until they know who, not watt, they truly are.
here’s the essay:
Invocation of the CRSS
and here’s the link to the Shemitah article literal nonsense explained:
http://beforeitsnews.com/prophecy/2015/09/the-shemitah-did-not-happen-as-expectedwhy-2473016.html
They’ll never know the real why speaking in devil’s tongue legal sorcery matricks…..
in laymen’s terms, the clausula rebis sic stantibus is the escape clause where a FUNDAMENTAL change in circumstances renders contracts/treaties etc. null and void…the fundamental change moment?….it’s illegal to be legal anything, mind, body, spirit. The original Birth Certificate contract is the PROOF and EVIDENCE of a clear and present INTENT to deceive another by it’s mere existence….registry buildings are proof of intent to foment this deception…everything created to put this fraud into practice is proof of fraud intent ab initio (since before it was ACT-DEAD upon where you are ACT-DEAD until truth is ACT-DEED…..when you throw down, with force, the dead legal name (all ideas ATTACHED/attacked to it), with intent to destroy that from your reality, the real Shemitah/CRSS comes into full force and effect.
You are trapped in the legal mate-tricks until YOU aren’t. Only you can utterly destroy that….and all it is, is an idea you need to 180 degree your mind on and yes, this will take your breath away when you see the full magnitude of the matrix and why BABY steps are all that’s required. The more you walk the baby steps, the sooner you’ll be running and jumping can-yans.
“Clausula rebus sic stantibus/CRSS/the “cross to bare”: A treaty provision
stating that the treaty is binding only as long as the circumstances in existence when the treaty was signed remain substantially the same. Therefore, every contract created with their Trademark is fraudulent, ab initio, ad infinitum, nunc pro tunc.”
These literal reality, because of legal dead I.D.ea of themselves, types can only interpret from a dead literal, same as always, reality and will go in circles. In this whirled filled with false jews/ewes/use/ you must become the living yew/you/U tree and you can’t do that while you still hold on to any dead idea of WHO you are based on WATT someone else NAMED/SEXED you in the physical. If you want to know about me, ask me, not the meatstick illusional idea of who you BELIEVE I am based on socio-pathic stereo-tip-eye-cull PHYSICAL ass-sumped-eye-ons/pre-sumped-eye-ons….you will find out very quickly WHO I am and how quickly I destroy any/all physical reality assumptions/presumptions thinking that somehow they know me better than myself.
A classic example of this schizophrenia freemen and paid-riots and legal goo-ruse of men go to jail and it’s easy to know why….legal is about minding everybody else’s business but your own and gone are the daze where we needed to do this legal challenge thing at all….that was before the fundamental change in the contracts all humanity is bound in where the knowledge of legal name fraud and, the legal fact that it’s illegal to use a legal name from any all birth certificates bares the clasula rebis sic stantibus escape clause into view. People like Notaries (not ari’s/knot-our-eyes) insist on schizophrenia where nothing can be not-arised without presenting your willingness to commit fraud by using a legal name that doesn’t belong to you but you think it does. Then the emotions kick in with “but my mummy and daddy gave me that name!!!!” as they stomp their widdle feet screaming like banshees vowing vengeance where the simple truth is all the vengeance you need. You’ll never get burned at the B.A.R. and be Cued again. Remember, evil won’t give up without a fight but it can’t harm you, only bluff you to extremes to try and coerce or trick you back into you being their hollow-wean tree-Te’s. It’s illegal to be a legal anything stops them in their tracks.
It’s sadly obvious that people don’t mind being brain-dead/brand-dead criminals but then this LEGAL FACT was never mentioned to them by those that enslave humanity via forced REGISTRATIONS into contracts IN-TEN-DEAD to DE-SEE-EVE another. It’s only AFTER THE FACT, once this LEGAL FACT is shared with anyone does it become a CRIME KNOWINGLY to continue simply going along with evil. Just ask gurus like Santo Bonacci and Dean Clifford about that, unfortunately, they’re both in jail along with a few other legal be-gulls still dancing with the devil in the houses of Satan commonly called court houses more aptly whored souses. You’re the meat in the soup of the broth-El filled with vegetative ramblings of circular saw mineds. Of all the legal gurus, these two heard me and ignored me the most regarding this legal and spiritual fact.
The truth is much simpler. The fight only continues while one thinks there IS a fight where none exists unless you pick one. We’ve all picked all the necessary battles to set ourselves free and in the case of those of the beligerent stance, to keep them away from humanity where only B.A.R. members are allowed to pick pockets through “legal laws” and they don’t like competition from freeman guru types where you’re making these pair-a-sites work versus being a typical roll-over human monster. If you want to play legal then I’d suggest you join them because it’s illegal to even try to beat them since you’re going to have to use a legal name to enter Satan’s realm. The only way to beat them is to not join in their silly little reigned-ear games and that’s easy because you’ll have to insist you’re a dead legal name to do that and well, that’s a crime ab initio (since before the beginning) since now you know legal names are illegal contra-banned. It’s easy to spot any demons, they all in-cyst on legal names, Satan’s membership consent and they’ll push you to your limitbut forbidden to pass the Rubicon of truth: it’s illegal to use a legal name. Know that fact and stand there? Nothing in Satan’s realm can enter yours.
Essay notes: add-end-dumbs
con, with or without…..phi, creation…..de, of or to undo…..ents, mind….with or without creation of or to undo the mind….a confidence game…con gmae
life is a con game…with life or against it….the confidence game is to see how pro life or not one is….creation’s version of the shell game….in life’s game, there is a pea under every walnut shell no matter how many times the shells are rearranged….
legal name reality is the against life con, full of con-victs etc….the game of feeding off life versus creating it….when one has the con-phi-de-ents to overcome the legal reality, one has literally overcome death….THAT’S the test…..so easy really….but so few choose the real confidence game….I only use “common speak” to convey literal concepts…everyone knows what “illegal” means, it equates to wrong doings….unfortunately, legal reality makes it legal to murder, they call it war….so I have to walk between common understandings in the literal to expand the concepts into spiritual anogogics….when in Rome, speak Roman until others can learn Phoenician
we don’t ever have to explain ourselves, just clear up the illusions and misconceptions of others so they can understand their own wrong doings thinking it’s ok because it’s legal, not ok if it’s illegal….it’s wrong to kill others period…people can grasp that much……if they are truly good people, it doesn’t take them long to see through that veil of deception.
Here’s an example of a literal spell and some pieces of the inner chamber/spell revealed: Helsinki, pronounced hell-sink-key, standard common speak HEARD/herd
Phonics concepts: Think “How many things can I RELATE to what is known as the literal SPELLED city of Helsinki and all of its PIECES (i.e. Hell, El, Lucifer, sync,sink, quay, X, che etc….and there are MANY) within?” What you begin to see when you do this, is the corelation of stories merging into one story but you have to have the objective of KNOWING THYSELF. This is the objective of humanity where the vastness of humanity is blind in their own mirror here. Phonics is using every rule to break every rule singularity code where EVERY letter, syllable, number spell can be MORPHED into either good intention or evil intention where the SPELLS default to evil, tipping the scales in its favour. You literally empowered evil with every word uttered unknowingly. All you need to do is let every letter be sounded EVERY way it can be, combinations of two letters, same thing and consonants where a “C” can sound like an “S” so a “K” can be replaced there as well since Kat works to SOUND the same idea. A SOUND mind hears ALL SOUND ideas as THEY define what INTENTION they carry beyond the COMMONLY ACCEPTED definitions of the masses. Phonics is the Phoenix of unified singularity where all things must, come back to YOU but what is the common denominator you need to see that objective? It has to be something that ties everyone together into thinking they are who somebody else says they are, and that YOU, didn’t create for yourself but defend it like you did. It has to be able to control every aspect of your life and so obvious, you’ll miss it because you’ve based your whole reality where your idea of what your life is, is fully dependent on it.
1.Legal Boundary
2. Norse Mythology
3. Hades, Hell, Plutos, Astrotheological (all Zodiacs), Religion (all variations)
4. Written and spoken language using sound/spells
5. Humans inhabit buildings there (commonalities are things like blood, pain, joy, human bodies, males, females, religions etc.)
6. Atlas drawn, flat earth, 2 dimensional
7. Education, banking, military, policing, taxing, government systems
For all those still seeking vengeance in any way whatsoever in any/all man made for-Um’s…..legal, common law, vigilante’, patriots, freemen, cops, lawyers, judges, priests, popes, false kings and queens, presidents and poly-tic-Sions….et fucking cetera ad infapukum…..apparently, YOU know better than creation….that’s called blaze-for-me and you burn for that…true story
I hate to tell you but you are crazy if you think you can do anything “legal”/ “common law (man’s law still legal reality called vengeance) without first committing a felony act yourself by using ANYTHING DEEMED LEGAL BY YOUR CONSENT, regardless if the “name” you use is on ANY legal paper ANYWHERE. You are contracting with COMMERCE/LEGAL entities that render you LEGAL TENDER long pork. The word “prosecute” means DO NOT PURSUE which is EXACTLY what everyone that doesn’t trust the REAL COMMON LAW which is the the law of natural order where any justice creation wants to allow on your behalf is BLOCKED by everyone(YOU) that seeks their OWN vengeance like somehow they/you know better than creation’s law/truth/natural order/god whatever you want to call it to make is visible…..In short, you trust Satan’s legal more than you trust creation’s law itself…..the LEGAL TRUST (Satan & the Harlot, Whore of Babyloan a.k.a. LEGAL/COMMERCE reality mate-tricks) VERSES (writes, creates, establishes etc.) trusting in creation, the truth and EVERY ACT of vengeance reflects back DOUBLED in that Satanic TRUST mirror…..
You enslave yourself by trusting that some human is going to look out for you more than creation itself…..that’s the short cut to Hell and the long rode home….the long and short of it..the common law is the calm-one law that allows creation to settle all accounts of evil for you….but then, you’d have to trust the truth more than the liars you already do and have been screwed over by…yeah, that’s insane…..
p.s. just call evil into the light and leave it at that….here’s the trumpet call, the seventh sign, trumpet, seal and crown…..seven deadly words to evil…..IT IS ILLEGAL TO USE A LEGAL NAME…..that’s the GOD-SPELL GO-SPELL breaker right there…..not one false profit expert can diffuse that thy-me bomb.
Babylon is Fallen
1. NAME: The master key to the entire system’s/CROWN CORPORATION’S game. The NAME is the lynch pin to the entire legal/control construct. Without a LEGAL NAME, which is your consent by agreeing to be said NAME, the system vampires cannot literally feed on your life blood/creation source energy that is typically shown in the physical materials we collect. It is only the CONSENT to be/use/have a LEGAL NAME/Mark of the Beast that is required for your absolute spiritual contract/deal with the devil motif to be in FULL FORCE AND EFFECT with you as a SLAVE and them as MASTER. For PROOF of this, look and see how much of your life/existence involves a LEGAL NAME and you will see the measure of control the system has over you.
2. REGISTER/REGISTRATION etc. : Any/all things registered are FULLY SURRENDERED with consent to the CROWN CORPORATION with NO legal recourse until such things are removed by exposing the INTENT by those who serve the CROWN CORPORATION to commit fraud knowingly/unknowingly. ex: A child that is REGISTERED is CROWN PROPERTY by ignorant consent where the truth of REGISTERING was not brought forth which is the original INTENT by CROWN CORPORATION SERVANT’S OWNERS to have people offer their children unknowingly into slavery of soul, and thus, body. It’s the soul they’re really after, so keep that in mind. 3. MONEY, GOLD, SILVER, ASSETS, BITCOIN etc. are ALL illusions of value where YOU are the true creator of all physical manifestations. Money, external value, has been the tool as the third party interloper “middle man” that has made draining your power possible. Money or the like only has value if one has been duped into thinking it does. This illusion is the ultimate distraction and destroyer of creator souls, literally. ALL money is based on the soul CONTRACT commonly known as a BIRTH CERTIFICATE.
4. BIRTH CERTIFICATE: The ORIGINAL SIN CONTRACT. The NAME you think/claim as yours is NOT your creation. Your “assumed NAME” was created by your parents/family members/adoptive kin, NOT YOU. This is an ORIGINAL CREATION manifested by another that is, in turn, REGISTERED thus rendering it CROWN CORPORATION PROPERTY as previously stated. It is upon this deception that YOUR literal soul was and is enslaved and upon which ALL MONEY/DEBT is created. A DEBT BOND “value” was placed in the BIRTH CERTIFICATE based on the assumed accruement of TAXES, LOANS, DEBTS a child is expected to pay as long as they are part of this FRAUD upon humanity. ex: If someone is expected to pay a certain amount of taxes etc. in their lifetime, the BOND is given a DEBT “VALUE”. A child born into a wealthy family will have a higher debt bond value than someone who is of a lesser perceived “income bracket” rating. This is slave trading at its finest which divides and conquers humanity in the SERF/CASTE/HIERARCHY system that encompasses the planet.
5. COMMAND AND CONTROL: The courts and governments are the system slaves within, bought and paid for where the true command and control aspects are the POLICE/MILITARY as the front line dogs and fear contractors for those above the courts and governments such as the BANKS/RELIGIONS and those that control them. The courts and governments are merely the filler for this “sandwich” of deception and illusion. Without the ability to CONTRACT via any/all NAMES at the front line level, the whole system of control is destroyed, most importantly those at the very top of this spiritual slavery pyramid. Without the NAME, all levels above are ultimately annihilated completely.
6. THE TRIPLE CROWN: This consists of ROME, CITY OF LONDON CROWN CORPORATION and WASHINGTON D.C. They are the unholy trinity of the 3 in 1, 1 in 3 as illustrated clearly in the Papal Crown: Religion, to control the beliefs, minds and spirituality of humanity, the Courts and Banks to control the money/bonds and the world Police/ Military to quash rebellion and act as frontline contractors of soul extractions.
7. PRINCIPALITIES OF DARKNESS: This is the true nature of the game that the vastness of humanity is blind to. Religions have been used to separate you from source by making one believe “god” is external and use the “savior” program to reinforce this. Money is the tool that is used to keep people in the physical-only realm by getting them to equate an external “value” on everything where nothing would exist without the people and their creativity. Physical death and harm is the tool used to clamp down your true essence which is all creation itself. The tools employed are languages with the corruption of pure frequency intent with multiple meanings of the same sounds/frequencies, using WORDS and SPELLINGS (literally), thus dividing and conquering us and redirecting our energy into THEIR creations and control. These entities CANNOT create anything since they are soulless and thus, utterly powerless. They know this and are absolutely terrified because this spells their doom, once and for all. We are life with consciousness where these entities are consciousness without life/soul/spirit. They are COMPLETELY AND SOLELY DEPENDENT on getting our CONSENT or spiritual contract agreement and this is easily achieved through the NAME deception, buying people off, ego comforts etc. Their whole house of cards/pyramid is BASED on this FACT. We are the fuel for their system/vehicle. Without spiritual fuel, they are destroyed.
References [ edit ]
Capitis Diminutio Maxima- http://loveforlife.com.au/content/08/10/26/capitis-diminutio-maxima-name-all-capitals-important-information
History of the Birth Certificate- https://registerofbirthsanddeaths.wordpress.com/
Blacks Law- http://thelawdictionary.org/
Chattel Trade/what are you worth?- https://forum.davidicke.com/showthread.php?t=69512
Holy Bible- http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/
Shemittah- http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/562077/jewish/What-Is-Shemittah.htm
Did you know?- http://losethename.com/birth-certificate-fraud/
Woodrow Wilson speech- http://www.morningliberty.com/
A Fraud Unveiled- http://legalnamefraud.com/ - https://kateofgaia.wordpress.com/ - https://nomoredead.wordpress.com/ - http://beforeitsnews.com/politics/2014/11/us-birth-certificates-make-you-a-private-corporation-2663492.html
http://www.morningliberty.com/CBS comedy Mom is forgoing an Emmy campaign.
In lieu of spending $250,000 on campaigning for TV's highest honor, Mom creator Chuck Lorre and two-time Emmy winner Allison Janney announced Thursday that the funds will instead be donated to support Planned Parenthood.
The powerful statement of support, Janney and Lorre (The Big Bang Theory) unveiled the plan on CBS This Morning, encouraging fans of the show and beyond to support Planned Parenthood.
Appearing on CBS This Morning to talk about the upcoming 2017-2018 CBS lineup, including Young Sheldon and new seasons of The Big Bang Theory and Mom, Lorre and Janney explained why they chose to make the donation.
Lorre said when he was discussing Mom's Emmy campaign with the show's studio, Warner Bros. Television, he "blurted out, 'Let's give the money to Planned Parenthood.' And they took me seriously."
He later added, "It's not a statement about the Emmys, we'd love to be included, but it just seemed like such a better way to put that money to work."
For her part, Janney said, "It makes sense because our show is all about women, and we don't shy away from issues that affect women and families. And Planned Parenthood is such an important organization that helps give health services to millions of women and it's in danger. The House of Representatives voted to defund it. And it's such a critical time. It made sense that we stand up now and say something and encourage other people to donate to this organization."
Lorre and Janney were both wearing Planned Parenthood pins and Janney was wearing an "I Stand With Planned Parenthood" t-shirt, which she showed off.
The news comes as the U.S. Senate is mulling legislation that would block low-income patients from going to Planned Parenthood for preventative care (like birth control and cancer screenings).
"In Los Angeles County alone, we answer approximately 2,000 calls each day from people asking us for help," said Planned Parenthood L.A. CEO Sue Dunlap. “Across the country, millions of women and men are relying on Planned Parenthood health centers for their basic care — like birth control, life-saving cancer-screenings, and STD testing and treatment. We are committed to being here for them, no matter what. Generous support from our community fuels this work, and we are honored that the team behind Mom is launching this campaign at this critical time.”
The donation — which stems from funds earmarked for awards campaigning from Mom producers Warner Bros. Television — comes as Mom has scored four Emmy nominations in its four-season run. Janney has won two of the three times she has been nominated.
Many networks and studios, like Warner Bros. Television, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars campaigning and competing for awards season as critical acclaim can boost interest in programming in a cluttered landscape of more than 450 scripted originals.
Co-created by Lorre, Mom has tackled serious subjects including substance abuse, addiction, suicide and more. The comedy revolves around a single mother (Anna Faris) trying to get her life back on track after years of questionable choices with her own mom (Janney) regularly testing her limits as they strive to build a better life for their family.
Janney and her family have supported Planned Parenthood and its Los Angeles affiliate for generations. Lorre, meanwhile, has been a long-standing benefactor of the Venice, Calif., Family Clinic where he established the Robert Levine Family Health Center in his father's name. Faris, for her part, supports the Global Alliance to Prevent Premature and Stillbirths.We appear to have opened a portal to the past in NW8. Suddenly, it’s 2013 all over again. Mitchell Johnson is ferocious, England are in disarray and if this Test lasts five days it will only be because Sunday’s forecast has turned watery. Much like England’s batsmen.
Scoreboard pressure. Yes, yes, we know. It was always going to be a different proposition to bat once Australia had amassed a cricket score that was like, well, a cricket score. Yet even with 566 to chase down — or 367 to avoid the follow on, which would be the first step to earning a draw — there really wasn’t much excuse for this.
Australia bowled well, as expected. Johnson and Mitchell Starc regularly hit the 90 mph mark, which on a dead track made all the difference — Jimmy Anderson did not get beyond 83 mph — and the 481 runs England remain short of Australia’s total looks mountainous.
Scroll down for video
England opener Adam Lyth went early after being caught behind off the bowling of Mitchell Starc
The bowlers were always going to be inspired by the thought of getting England on the run early, yet it cannot be ignored that England’s batsmen were weak, weak, weak.
Wafting at ones that could have been ignored, falling to age old flaws — Gary Ballance’s problem with the full ball is as troubling as Shane Watson’s penchant for lbw — and lacking the resilience, inclination and courage to dig in as the match situation demanded.
It is too easy to blame close to 150 overs and two days in the field. That’s the sport. If England can’t handle the long haul maybe they might do well to ask for wickets that act up a bit on this tour, to avoid the draining consequence of a losing toss.
Michael Clarke got lucky with his 50-50 bet, but there was little fortune in the rest of it. It would have been handy had Ian Bell caught Steve Smith on Thursday, seeing as he went on to make 215, but that is what a world-class batsman does with a good break that matters — and Australia’s No 3 has the best hand-eye co-ordination around at the moment.
England batsman Gary Ballance made 23 before he fell to Aussie paceman Mitchell Johnson
That he has been allowed to play himself in, after a disappointing time in Cardiff, is just another bonus from the wicket that keeps on giving.
Bell could be considered to have owed England 165 runs following that error and late yesterday afternoon with the bat he paid back a mighty one of them.
It was four minutes and two balls before he was clean bowled by Josh Hazlewood. It was a decent ball — full, and swinging away — but even so Bell’s shot was poor and it took out his off stump. He is having a dreadful match, so far, at a time when he is under most pressure. He cannot be indulged indefinitely, not when England’s high order is in continuing crisis.
The moment Australia made an imposing score, thoughts instantly turned to England’s frailty under pressure — and some alarming recent scores. A brief look back through 2015 shows this to be the eighth time England have fallen apart early in six Test matches.
Want to recap? First Test versus West Indies, Antigua — 34-3 and 52-3. Third Test versus West Indies, Barbados — 38-3 and 39-5. Second Test versus New Zealand, Headingley — 30-4. First Test versus Australia, Cardiff — 43-3 and 73-3. And now this.
Australia celebrate after Josh Hazelwood dismissed Ian Bell for one in the afternoon on Friday
It was 30-4 at the nadir, Alastair Cook standing at the non-striker’s end glowering at his colleagues through his visor. It was not his greatest innings, either — but he did what the job demanded. He hung about. Rode his luck occasionally, played and missed at the odd one, but dug in as opening batsmen are supposed to. Someone should tell Adam Lyth.
Had England got through to close with the opening pair intact it would have struck a sizable psychological blow.
Michael Clarke, the Australian captain, was already trying to mess with some minds by bringing England out for one over after tea, before declaring — giving the batsman 10 minutes to prepare rather than a more leisurely preparation. What was required, then, was dogged resistance. What England got from Lyth was two balls.
Well, one really, considering the second brought his demise. It was an atrocious shot, a dangled bat, that edged one from Mitchell Starc to rookie wicket-keeper Peter Nevill.
Joe Root could not repeat his heroics from the first Test and was caught by Peter Nevill for one
Root bows his head as Johnson celebrates taking his wicket as England's top order collapsed
He can’t have believed his luck. It was his first touch with the gloves in Test cricket and out went England’s opening batsman.
The scrutiny of Lyth’s place in the team was harsh and instant, yet this is a problem that began well before Friday afternoon.
England had the chance to go with Lyth and give him experience in the Caribbean last winter. Instead there was a failed, revisionist experiment with Jonathan Trott.
So Lyth got a run-out in two Tests against New Zealand this summer, before being thrown directly into cricket’s greatest contest. Is it really any wonder that he was found wanting in such a pressured situation? Then there is the fact that he elects to face. This has to be his decision, because invariably the senior partner — certainly the captain — would take the responsibility of the opening ball of the innings.
When Cook partnered Andrew Strauss he was No 2 — but then Strauss was captain. Since when, he has faced — until Lyth came along. He’s a decent guy, Cook, and if Lyth is particularly insistent that he wants to face, he will go along with that. If it settles him down, what harm can it do?
England captain Alastair Cook kept his side afloat with some solid batting and remained unbeaten on 21
Yet if, under pressure, Lyth is out second ball, perhaps it is time to rethink that arrangement and let Cook assume his rightful senior role. After all, it could barely get worse.
Who knows why Lyth wanted to face when he played the shot of a nervous wreck? Maybe he is superstitious, maybe he just wants to get that delivery over with; either way it didn’t look like plan A.
The loss of an opening batsman after two balls gave Australia the fillip they needed, and heaped more tension on England: stress they ultimately found overwhelming. Australia had a bad Test in Cardiff and ditched Shane Watson. It is too early to debate changes yet, but tweaks, a degree of tinkering is only to be expected if this Test follows its predicted trajectory.
The determined Cook and Ben Stokes had guided the hosts through to 85-4 by close, but one of them — at least — is going to need to be about for a hell of a long time if this Test is to come anywhere near to being saved and England are not to be visited by a blast from the past.
Steve Smith reached 215 before Australia declared at 566 for eight on day two of the second Ashes TestThis week tests my character to continue to write an article after getting the wind knocked out of me. “To put it shortly, this week has been by far the most uncomfortable to predict. Many of these matchups made me physically uncomfortable to consider.” was what I had to say last week looking forward to this prediction and that physical discomfort has turned into sickness. At least Sideshow did well, which should make this article series more interesting to the broader community.
You can find the previous prediction articles below:
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Sideshow continues his steady acceleration towards the top of the standings. Last week he had the second strongest performance of any analyst in a week after 4 straight weeks of above average performances. He was alone in predicting Cloud9 was favored over GamersOrigin and he was the only analyst to give a large edge to Team Gigantti over Team Singularity who had looked stronger the previous week |
was real, going onto claim it was standard practice around the world where the suspect was believed to be a possible suicide bomber.
According to Turkish newspaper Sabah, they said it was 'routine practice' around the world, and was done as a security precaution.
It did not comment on why men on the video can be heard swearing at the body, and one can be heard congratulating his colleague on the shooting dead of the 'terrorist' - who is the brother-in-law of pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Sirnak deputy Leyla Birlik.
The men are all believed to be police officers.
Sharing a photo of the incident on his Twitter account, HDP (Peoples' Democratic Party Turkey) co-chair Selahattin Demirta, said: 'Look at this photo closely. It was taken the day before yesterday in Sirnak.
'Nobody should forget this and we will never forget it.'
Innocent: The men who filmed the video, who are thought to be police officers, are heard congratulating themselves on shooting dead a 'terrorirst', but pro-Kurdish Facebook pages have said Birlik was no such thing
Disgust: Turkey's Prime Minister Ahment Devutoglu has said the treatment was 'unacceptable'
Even Turkey's prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu has condemned the footage.
'It is unacceptable to treat any corpse this way, even if it is a dead terrorist,' he said.
Davutoglu added that the interior ministry 'will conduct a comprehensive investigation, not into the incident itself, but into the way in which this incident was reflected to the world'.
The province of Sirna - where the video was apparently shot - has been the focus of clashes since a ceasefire between the army and the PKK broke down in July.
Speaking to reporters following the young man's funeral, held on Saturday, Leyla Birlik's husband, Mehmet Birlik, said that they will not surrender to the AK Party despite all the pressure it is putting on Kurdish people.AUDITIONS
7 Things (And A Bonus) You Can't Overlook
Before Sending Your Voice Over Auditions
November 10, 2015
By Dave Courvoisier By Dave Courvoisier
Voice Actor & TV News Anchor
There are maybe 15 to 20 things you CAN do before you send each voice over audition to a potential client, but these 7 points cannot be overlooked. They are the Holy Grail of "must-do" actions on the pre-flight list - a "basic necessities" list of pertinent reminders.
1. FOLLOW THE SPECS... OR DON'T
I've heard both schools of thought on this, and there are good arguments on both sides.
It just seems to me that if a client throws in a YouTube link for you to hear - and that's truly what they want from you - it might not hurt to give it a listen.
On the other hand, we all know that a good many clients have no idea what they want, 'cause their directions make no sense, or are contradictory.
Really good talent have a sixth sense about what a copy demands in terms of a read, and that's what they give. THAT read will certainly stand out from all the other reads that resemble the YouTube video.
Or follow the next suggestion...
2. GIVE ONLY ONE CUT... OR TWO... OR THREE
A good rule of thumb I keep hearing is to give the client what they want (the YouTube video example) on the first cut, and then do your OWN take on the copy with the second cut.
Got even more creativity? Give a third read in a character voice, or with a different pace.
The worst that could happen is that they stop listening after the first cut. But if they keep listening, they may hear just what they want (but didn't say in the specs) in your second or third read. Just be sure to say how many takes you're offering in the slate.
The only way this will get you in trouble is expressed in the next suggestion...
3. ALWAYS SLATE... OR NOT
Some clients/agents absolutely demand a slate, and others absolutely demand that you DON'T slate.
If you can or do slate, this would be the place to say how many cuts you're offering, along with the other verbiage you like to throw in.
Some job leads come with specific instructions for what you should say in the slate. Some give no direction.
I DO believe slates should not be long. Slates can or should not be done in character - your choice.
And slates can or cannot be done by someone else. IF done by someone else, it should or should not be done by a person of the opposite gender.
See? This gets confusing. And you'll see the entire spectrum of behaviors in job listings, which leads to the next suggestion...
4. READ EVERYTHING IN THE LISTING TWICE - NO... THREE TIMES
The decision about how many cuts, whether to slate, and whether extra cuts will even be LISTENED-TO are often clearly spelled out in the listing (be it from a P2P, an agent, or a friend).
Don't be too eager to get on with the audition and miss something important like good tips about timing, pacing, and scene descriptions if it's a TV ad.
Every job has a different personality behind it, and you can often get a "feel" for the job through the reading material accompanying the copy - especially as it relates to the next point...
5. PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION TO FILE-NAMING CONVENTIONS
Some agents are so rabid about this, that the job lead comes with this clear admonition:
"Failure to adhere to the exact request for naming this file will result in the audition being tossed out before even being heard."
So just give 'em what they ask for!
Were you one of those problem kids in Jr. High who couldn't follow directions? Then there are the job leads that come with no file-naming directions whatsoever - which leads me to my next suggestion...
6. PUT YOUR PHONE NUMBER IN YOUR FILE NAME
... and for sure your name, but only if there are no other directions for file-naming.
So, for instance, an audition for Parker University might be named:
Parker_University_Courvoisier_702-610-6288.mp3
You never know, something that simple might just get you the call for the job right then and there.
And that brings us to the final stop on our checklist...
7. DON'T FORGET TO ATTACH THE FILE!
Believe it or not, this is a universally-common mistake.
The agent/booking agent/P2P, etc. is not responsible for, and will not necessarily remind you to do so (although most P2P's will not let you finish the transaction without first uploading).
Just train yourself to attach the file when you first open up a blank email to send - before you write anything, before you address anything, before you add a subject header... ATTACH THE FILE.
And here's a bonus suggestion...
YOUR REPLY SHOULD BE SHORT, PLEASANT, WITH THANKS
Whoever is receiving the 200 auditions for this job has no time to read lengthy messages. Two to three short lines MAXIMUM.
Make sure you thank them.
Make sure you tell them what is attached.
Make sure they know who it's from (YOU!). HONORABLE MENTION: CHECK FOR ACCURACY
Before clicking SEND, always double-check your work. Listen to your take(s) while reading along with the script. Pay close attention to any omissions, mispronunciations or extra words. This drives some clients crazy!
Also check that the file is not glitchy or corrupt.
Be sure that playback is error free. Play back your audition on an least two different speaker systems. Use different monitors, headphones, or computer speakers.
That's a trick I've heard from more than one audio engineer. When the prospective client hears your audition, you have no idea what sort of equipment he/she will use. And I've heard that more than one agent/producer listens to auditions on car speakers on the way home.
OK, Sparky? If I offered something you haven't heard before, I'm happy. If you knew all this stuff, I'm sorry you wasted your time. If you're confused, join the crowd!
Regardless of my admonitions, sometimes you just have to figure out what's appropriate on your own, and hope you hit the mark.
--------------------- ABOUT DAVE
Dave Courvoisier is an Emmy Award-winning broadcaster, writer, producer, voice actor, and the main weeknight news anchor on KLAS-TV, Channel 8, the Las Vegas CBS affiliate. He also writes Voice-Acting in Vegas, a daily blog of voice over adventures, observations and technology, and is author and publisher of the book, More Than Just A Voice: The Real Secret To VoiceOver Success.
Web:
Blog:
Email: CourVO@CourVO.com Web: http://www.courvo.com Blog: http://www.courvo.biz More Than Just A Voice : http://courvo.com/more-than-just-a-voice
Your Daily Resource For Voice-Over Success Follow News & Featuresby Michael Corcoran
Austin was not big enough to hold all its grief on May 18, 1978, when two authority figures- a policeman and a schoolteacher- were shot to death hours apart while doing their jobs. The murder of Ralph Ablanedo of APD made news all over again in June 2010 when his killer David Lee Powell was executed.
But much lesser known is the case of Murchison Middle School teacher Wilbur “Rod” Grayson, who was shot to death with a.22-calibre rifle by 13-year-old student John Daniel Christian. Witnesses said Grayson, 29, a first-year English teacher, was sitting on a stool when Christian entered the classroom, raised his father’s rifle and shot Grayson three times.
The story was huge news at the time, but has been scrubbed from Austin’s conscience through the years. The young killer was the son of George Christian, former White House press secretary under Lyndon Johnson. John Christian spent 17 months in a psychiatric hospital and recovered his mental faculties to the point that he finished law school at the University of Texas and is currently a lawyer in Austin.
At John Christian’s 1978 hearing, a pair of psychiatrists testified that the 8th grade honors student suffered from latent schizophrenia and that putting him in a juvenile detention center would only increase the severity of his mental illness. Christian told doctors he didn’t single out Grayson, despite reports that he was angry about a failing grade.
Newly elected Democratic district attorney Ronnie Earle wanted to have Christian, too young to be tried as an adult, sentenced to five years at a reform school. But he didn’t offer any evidence to contest the motion by defense attorney Roy Minton to declare Christian mentally ill.
Christian’s best friend told the Austin American Statesman two days after the killing that John had changed in the last month from a peaceful kid to one who “started liking violence.” The friend said Christian talked about disturbing fantasies of shooting at Murchison from atop a hill “to see how the bullets landed on people.”
Classmate Helen Anderson recalled an incident that happened a few days before the shooting of Grayson. “We had a substitute for a few days and we were reading and discussing the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she said. “Normally reserved, John was extremely animated, vocal and quite inappropriate when he went up to the blackboard to discuss the chapter. Most of us nervously laughed and were quite shocked at this odd transformation that seemed to come out of nowhere.”
When Christian came into the classroom with the rifle on May 18, 1978, Grayson didn’t initially take him seriously. “The joke is up,” the teacher said, then Christian shot him in the head, chest and arm.
Christian’s parents paid $129 a day for him to be treated at Timberlawn Hospital in Dallas, where he remained for a year and a half before living in foster care with a doctor. John Christian graduated from Highland Park High School in Dallas before college at UT. In 2010 his sister declined to pass along an interview request.
Grayson’s widow, a teacher at LBJ High at the time, settled a lawsuit with the Christian family in 1981 for an undisclosed amount.
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A few months ago, I visited the Slot.it guys to check out post-Nürnberg progress on their Alfa 155 project and, shortly after that, I was one of the lucky few who got their hands on a limited-edition unliveried pre-release version made available at the UK Slot Festival… actually, after some rooting around on the stands, I emerged triumphantly with exactly the one I wanted – of 250, mine is number #155!
So, I was very excited to finally get my hands a production version of the CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM. Aside from the striking No.7 Nannini livery, the main difference between this and the pre-release I’d already been enjoying is the motor; the M-/15 series essentially being a slightly milder version of what has, up until now, been the box-standard ‘V12’ motor.
The Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI is a racing car built to race in the DTM (Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft) series in 1993. At that time the German Touring Car Championship was the peak of technology for touring car racing. The rules mandated cars with an engine displacement of 2.5 liters and 6 cylinders at most, derived from approved models and produced in no less than 25,000 units. The rules allowed deep changes to the car, provided that the external lines were maintained. This Slot.it model reproduces the works No. 7 racing on the legendary Nordschleife, driven by former Formula 1 driver Alessandro Nannini. [Slot.it]
…first impressions
As is usual for Slot.it, the model is a faithful scale reproduction of the 1:1, with an impressive level of detail. Mouldings at the rear of the chassis show the exhaust and aerodynamic features and, in addition to the vents, ducts and spoilers that you’d expect on the bodywork, Slot.it have gone the extra mile in creating a number of interior detail variations; in time, this will allow them to release models with the differing seat styles and helmet shapes favoured by those who raced in the DTM.
Previous
Next Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Tampo printing looks to be as clean and sharp as usual, although the red paint below could be a little more vibrant; but that’s an observation, not a grumble – this is for club racing, not concours d’elegance! And, aside from the gorgeous bodywork, details I particularly like are the heat-shrouds on the rear bumper, the interior, and the wheels… although, some brake-disc details would’ve looked fantastic peering out from behind those 6-spoke wheel inserts!
If there’s only one thing (and, to be fair, it’s a very small thing) which I’m not a fan of, it’s the chunky-looking roof aerial. On the plus side, it is made of a very flexible plastic that will resist damage if the car goes wheels-up… but, no matter how many times I try to persuade it to sit straight, it always ends up reverting to an odd angle of lean – which only serves to make it stand out more!
…out on track
Murmers online in the run-up to this release were concerned about the 155 V6 TI possibly being a little top-heavy but, especially with the magnet still in place, the Alfa corners far more confidently than you might expect – in fact, the manner in which it can so quickly change direction and flick through s-bends at speed seems contradictory to its thin, upright appearance. Maurizio explained that the Slot.it team have worked hard to reduce the mass of the higher-positioned components; parts such as the window moulding were carefully designed to keep the weight, and therefore the centre of gravity, as low as possible.
When testing a new car, I do usually like to spend perhaps a little too much time tweaking screws and adjusting settings, experimenting with front axle height and so on. So, this time I wanted to see how the box-standard setup worked with only the magnet removed.
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Next Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM | SlotsintheCity.com
The new 21,000rpm motor is smooth, allowing me to hustle the Alfa Romeo around our 38m Carrera clubtrack swiftly. 150gr of magnetic downforce, while not huge, does inspire confidence when cornering… but, a little care is still required. Provided you aren’t too overenthusiastic on corner entry, drive smoothly and feed in the power progressively, the car remains surprisingly stable – I found that I was putting in fairly decent lap-times within minutes of opening the box. But, if you’ve an aggressive trigger-finger and or like a bit of drifting, the magnet downforce from the motor is lost as the rear slides, the outside edges of the tyre can dig and, even if it doesn’t roll completely, it can rise up onto two wheels lifting the guide out of the slot.
So, as expected, the challenge comes as you approach the limit of the cars’ grip – and this is where keeping the standard rubber on the car actually works out well, because too much grip would only make it more likely to tip. It really is great fun to push around the track – certainly different to the low-slung LM cars Slot.it are famous for but, for me at least, that’s part of the charm of this rejuvenated class.
…wait, what – no 4WD?
With the 1:1 DTM racer boasting all wheel drive, it’s a shame that Slot.it chose not to include their excellent clutched and belt-driven all-wheel-drive system as standard – after all, the chassis was designed to allow the system to be fitted, and it was indeed a feature on the test versions I photographed in Italy.
Of course, the system can easily be retro-fitted – but, as the retail price of the CA35a is around the same as the Slot.it LMP cars on offer which have the 4WD system as standard, buying in the parts could become an expensive project by comparison.
On the plus side, extra parts (such as wheel trims) are bundled under the box to make the optional switch to 4WD that little bit easier.
…in a class of its own?
With the introduction of the Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM, Slot.it have created the new ‘Classic DTM’ category of racer for themselves. While I am not alone in rushing to become an owner of this model, it is going to be a little while before a racing series establishes itself at clubs in my area. Slot.it themselves are already well on their way to having the Opel Calibra V6 on our shelves by early 2017, and rumour has it that the DTM Mercedes could follow. But, aside from the Jägermeister-liveried Alfa coming out before then, what do we pit against the CA35a in the meantime?
My thoughts go back to the Ninco version of this same model, and the other DTM stalwarts they created at that time. While the mechanics and dynamics of these older models aren’t going to compare to the Slot.it, aftermarket 3D-printed chassis available from the likes of Olifer are able to accept Slot.it components, so who’s to say we won’t see a mixed-manufacturer ‘Classic DTM’ series on our club tracks soon?
…in conclusion
This, for me, is a very well-balanced slot car – the new motor, the standard tyres, and the dynamics of the car all work together very well indeed! Even prior to its release, the Slot.it CA35a Alfa Romeo 155 V6 TI DTM had already built up quite a following – it hits the shelves in a couple of weeks and, while it’s entirely possible that home-racers will be quicker on the uptake than club racers, it’s obviously going to be a big-seller.
The real Alfa Romeo V6 has always been one of my favourite noises – so, I couldn’t resist sharing the video below. And, you might need it because, although Slot.it have succeeded admirably in creating the Alfa Romeo 155V6 TI DTM in scale, there’s one thing that’s always going to remain conspicuous by its absence… that noise – enjoy!
Available in stores: July 12th, 2016
…thanks! Once again, a big thank you to Maurizio and everyone at Slot.it for making this model available to me so quickly, and to SlotRacing Mülheim for the track-testing facilities.
Tags: 1993, alfa romeo, club racing, home racing, slot.itSignup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
An asylum seeker who claims she is at risk of homophobic persecution is due to be deported to Uganda on Tuesday evening.
Happy Rwehobuganzi, a lesbian from Uganda, has been seeking asylum in the UK.
Having been detained for 4 months and had several applications and appeals rejected by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) and the High Court, on the grounds that there is not enough “evidence” to prove that she is a lesbian, Ms Rwehobuganzi is now facing deportation back to the violently homophobic country, with her flight due to leave at 8pm, Tuesday 18 June.
Human rights campaigners are desperately seeking for the deportation ordered to be halted and have cited the case of Jackie Nanyonjo, a lesbian asylum seeker who died earlier this year in Uganda following her deportation back to the country on 12 January.
She had fought strongly against the deportation order and continued to resist the decision, becoming ill in the process, during her transit to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport.
Human rights activists have repeatedly accused the UK Border Agency of trying to deport LGBT asylum seekers back to countries where they face homophobic persecution – the claims have always been denied by the Home Office and UKBA.
Research published in April from the University of Southampton showed LGBT asylum seekers are regularly being asked “inappropriate and insensitive” questions by immigration judges.
One lesbian seeking asylum from homophobic persecution in Uganda was asked by a judge whether she’d ever read Oscar Wilde.You can find 1000s of the same great products you used to love shopping at Woolworths, plus lots and lots of new ones too. Not only that but you can get your hands on your favourite high-street brands, lots of exclusive celebrity fashion, the latest home updates and top tech too! You don’t need to do anything to start shopping at Very, your account details won’t change and you won’t need to change your bank details either – just log on with your existing Woolworths account number and you’re away, you can even use the same payment options as part of your account.
In case you need reminding, there are some fabulous brands that you can still shop at Very – for instance did you know that you can still shop the Ladybird collection? It was always one of the most popular brands at Woolworths thanks to the super-cute trends, vibrant colours, adorable baby wear and everyday kids essentials and it’s still going strong. We’ve got a huge selection in stock and ready to shop right now!
If you were a bit of a Woolworths pick and mix addict don’t worry – we can still satisfy all your sweet tooth cravings with our amazing collection of foodie goodies, you can get your hands on delicious treats from The Jelly Bean Factory, Thornton’s, Haribo and lots more! Woolworths was always a great place to plan a party so you’ll be pleased to hear that you can find lots of inspiration for the fun times here at Very too – we’ve got it all covered from special themed birthdays, Halloween, Christmas and everything in-between. Need to dress up? You can find lots of fancy dress essentials for small and big kids, with 100s of accessories too.
Remember going to Woolworths to check out the Top 10 singles back in the day? Well we’ve got lots of amazing brands for all you grown-up music lovers including tech brands like apple, Samsung, Sony, Bose, Phillips, and all the latest gadgets like iPads, playbars, headphones and lots more, added to which we pride ourselves on getting all the latest tech updates as they happen from TVs to gaming and cameras. We hope you’re looking forward to shopping with us!The early release of a course car triggered a crowd invasion at the end of the Australian Grand Prix, an official investigation has revealed.
As first reported by Speedcafe.com, race organisers immediately launched a probe after a stream of spectators managed to emerge on the circuit during the cool down lap of Sunday’s race.
Television footage showed hoards of fans enter the track while the cars were returning to the pits following the chequered flag.
Australian Grand Prix Corporation chief executive Andrew Westacott says a failure in the race control process is at the centre of an ongoing investigation into the situation.
The AGPC is continuing to work alongside CAMS to analyse post race procedures to ensure the same mistake is not repeated in the future.
Organisers maintain that safety at its events remains paramount.
“CAMS as the ASN of the FIA is engaged to provide the official organising services as defined by the FIA sporting regulations, and what that means is they look after all sporting aspects on track,” Westacott told Speedcafe.com.
“They (CAMS) have indicated that their failure in the race control process led to an early release of a race control vehicle, which then signalled to people to that it was ok to access the track.
“They are continuing to review everything, being race control logs and talking to key personnel, CCTV footage and the like, and they are in contact with the Australian Grand Prix Corporation’s risk and safety team and the motorsport team to keep us updated.
“We will receive a full report in due course.”
CAMS declined to comment when contacted by Speedcafe.com.Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
In the upcoming vote on equal marriage legislation in the House of Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury will call for concessions to be made for teachers and faith schools, as the Church of England has reportedly “resigned” itself to same-sex marriage becoming law.
The Sunday Times reports that Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, plans to use his stand in the House of Lords to call for the bill to explicitly protect faith schools and teachers from prosecution, if they do not wish to promote marriage equality.
Lambeth Palace sources say he will call for the bill to be amended to prevent the prosecution of people whose faith conflicts with equal marriage, particularly teachers who do not wish to deal with the subject in school.
Sources in the Church of England have said that the institution is resigned to the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Archbishop Welby is expected to push for concessions to make this more palatable to religious groups.
In a conciliatory gesture towards the government, the Archbishop is expected to acknowledge that, thanks to the efforts of politicians to ensure the quadruple lock legal protections are in place, Church of England ministers cannot be forced to perform same-sex marriages.
Archbishop Welby is one of 86 peers who have requested to speak during the debate, which starts on Monday.
Supporters of marriage equality were concerned that a drawn-out debate could damage the bill – leading to the decision that the vote will take place Tuesday daytime after a break.
Peers are said to be set to stage a final attempt to thwart the bill from passing.Artist’s rendering of a young, kickboxing Roy Moore. Photo illustration by Derreck Johnson. Photos by Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images; OSTILL/iStock.
It’s been widely noted that Senate candidate and accused sexual abuser Roy Moore was allegedly banned from an Alabama mall at some point in the late 1970s or early 1980s because its proprietors got tired of the way he “repeatedly badgered teen-age girls.” Sadly, however, it is less well-known how Moore responded to this apparently difficult time in his life: by leaving the state to train as a kickboxer. (Moore’s version of the story, to be clear, is that he left Alabama for Texas in 1983 because he’d lost a race to become a circuit court judge the year before. Also, in a bizarre Wednesday appearance on MSNBC, a lawyer representing Moore appeared to admit that there had been “reports made” about Moore’s conduct at the mall but asserted that his name was never formally added to any list of banned individuals.)
Here’s an excerpt from Moore’s book So Help Me God: The Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny, and the Battle for Religious Freedom:
Punching! Kicking! Pow, bam, Roy Moore! Unfortunately, no records seem to have survived from that year’s Greater Gadsden Tournament of Champions. So Help Me God does mention, though, that Moore “won all [his] fights” after setting up a boxing ring in Vietnam for the purpose of allowing the troops under his command to release their frustrations after he told them to stop doing drugs, so it’s fair to assume he won the entire thing and was named the Greater Gadsden Tournament of Champions Kickboxing MVP for Life.He claimed his first major win and was the MVP of the whole tournament during ESL One Katowice.
But according to Olof ”Olofmeister” Kajbjer, Fnatic are nowhere near tired of dominating the CS:GO scene.
– It was the first major victory for me and Krimz, but we’ll win more, he tells Aftonbladet Esport.
In the first major finals of the year, both teams involved had a chance to become first ever with two wins. Fnatic eventually drew the longest straw as they beat Ninjas in Pyjamas in a thrilling finals after winning Dust2, losing Cache and getting revenge on Inferno, the map that cost them the major title in Cologne last year.
”It’s a mix of relief and euphoria”
But for tournament MVP Olof ”Olofmeister” Kajbjer, the win was his first major and afterwards he’s having a hard time describing what the victory means for him.
– It’s hard to put it into words. A mix of feelings, relief and euphoria. I have to process it for a couple of days because it’s hard to do while you’re up on that stage, but it was extremely awesome, he says.
Entering a packed arena in front of 10 000 screaming fans and over one million viewers at home is an experience he’ll probably never forget.
– It was incredible and kind of hard to fathom. It so cool to see that esports have come this far. Especially with CS:GO, and I think it’ll just continue to grow and grow.
Must feel good to be the best team in such a flourishing game?
– Yeah, we’re in a good spot, he says and smiles.
– And you grow along with the game too.
”Talked about not repeating our mistakes on Inferno”
During the whole tournament, Olofmeister has been one of the most standout players with the best stats in total.
– I usually play good at majors but it’s the first time I’ve been the MVP at a tournament and to pull it off at a place this big is really great, especially when records are being broken at the same time, he says and talks about the 1 million concurrent viewer mark that was surpassed during the last rounds of the game.
At ESL One Cologne, Fnatic lost to Ninjas in Pyjamas on Inferno, a map that would decide this game too. Before the decider, Olofmeister and his team looked back to what they did wrong in August last year.
– We started talking about our last major finals and what kind of mistakes we did then to not repeat them. On Cache we started using tactics we haven’t used in a long time so we said ”we have to get back to our game and prove we’re better than them”, which we did.
”I cheered before I got killed”
But even though Fnatic went up to match point, the Ninjas started creeping back into the game.
– When we got 15-8 it felt pretty calm, but of course we got nervous because NiP can always pull off a comeback. But they didn’t completely shut us out and won a lot of 1v1:s and 2v2:s, so we knew that eventually it had to turn to our advantage.
– I actually cheered before I got killed on the last round because I knew we’d win when Krimz had a good position and they were running out of time, I was sure of it.
How will you celebrate now?
– Since we missed the party last night we’re gonna sit in the hotel lobby and have a few beers and talk everything through. Then we’ll take a break for a couple of days.
Will you be able to preserve your amazing form going forward?
– To be honest we’re practiced more than before but not close to what some teams do, I think. A couple of teams have practiced 12 hour shifts which is too much. It’s better to have a quality practice and we’ll stay in shape. But it’s hard to claim the trone and even harder to keep it.
But Olofmeister still promises that Fnatic will stay on top for a long time.
– A couple of our players are the first to win two majors. For me and Krimz it was the first, but we’ll win more.Advocaat's side have not won in the league this season
Sunderland manager Dick Advocaat says he has no regrets about remaining in the job but will leave the post if he feels there is somebody better for it.
Advocaat was set to depart after keeping the club in the Premier League last season but was persuaded to stay and signed a one-year deal.
But his side are bottom, and winless, with two points from six games.
"Let's be clear, if I feel it is better for somebody else to take over then I will go. Believe me," said Advocaat.
Advocaat joined the club in March until the end of the season, replacing the sacked Gus Poyet, with the side one point above the relegation zone.
The 67-year-old former Rangers and Netherlands manager was offered a new deal at the end of the 2014-15 season, but had told the club "it is better to stop now", before being persuaded to change his mind.
Sunderland were beaten 2-0 at Bournemouth on Saturday and next host Manchester City in the League Cup on Tuesday before a league trip to Manchester United on Saturday.
Black Cats centre-back John O'Shea is expected to be back in the side against City after recovering from illness but fellow defender Younes Kaboul is suspended following his red card on the south coast.Military Seeks to Learn Lessons of 2017 Hurricane Season
The most recent hurricane season was not unprecedented in terms of the number of storms, but it was unprecedented in terms of damage, the commander of U.S. Army North said in a recent interview.
Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan said hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria delivered a combination of blows that caused great damage in Texas, Florida, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, and the military learned a great deal about defense support to civil authorities in the process.
Thousands of military personnel from all components mobilized and deployed to help the affected areas, and Buchanan -- as the Joint Force Land Component commander -- was in the thick of it.
U.S. Army North is the Army component for U.S. Northern Command. It works hand in glove with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the three storms were the largest domestic incident response in the history of that agency. “It was much larger than Katrina [in 2005],” Buchanan said. “It was many more days and from the total response of the government aspect, it was much larger.”
The swath covered by the storms contributed to the response.
Storms
Hurricane Harvey -- a Category 4 hurricane when it hit the Texas coast -- dropped record amounts of rain on Houston. Parts of the fourth largest city in the United States received more than 60 inches of rain.
Hurricane Irma -- a Category 5 storm -- hit the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Florida and Georgia.
Hurricane Maria -- a second Category 5 storm -- caused catastrophic damage in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
The storms hit close together, with Harvey lasting from Aug. 17 to Sept. 1, Irma lasting from Aug. 30 to Sept. 12, and Maria forming Sept. 16 and finally dissipating Sept. 30.
Officials said Harvey killed 82 people, Irma claimed 134 and the official death toll from Maria is 52.
The extent of the |
. 2g, color shading), coincident with anomalous southerly wind (Fig. 2c). We also compute the vertically integrated water vapor flux. The reduction of sea ice is associated with a net gain in water vapor transport of 12.2 × 106 kg s−1 (Fig. 2g). Increased water vapor content and cloud cover over Greenland reduces the incoming solar radiation while enhancing the downwelling infrared radiation. Associated with sea ice loss, we find reduced insolation extending from western-central to northeastern Greenland (Fig. 2i), corresponding to widespread significant increases in surface downwelling longwave radiation over Greenland (Fig. 2k). Low-level liquid clouds also play an important role in trapping heat near the surface of the ice cap. Associated with the reduction sea ice is an increase in the amount of ISCCP-retrieved low-level liquid clouds (defined as cloud-top pressure >680 hPa) in a large area extending from northwest Greenland into interior high elevations of Greenland (Fig. 4a). Overall, most of Greenland exhibits positive anomalies in surface net downward radiation associated with sea ice reduction (Fig. 2m), indicating the dominance of increasing downward longwave radiation over reduced insolation. This contributes to additional surface heating and further albedo reduction through enhanced snow grain metamorphic rates (Box et al. 2012).
We also repeat the regression analysis using the raw data (without detrending; Fig. 2, columns 2 and 4). It appears that variability of the ASIE with trend included is linked to approximately the same patterns of atmospheric circulation, temperature, humidity, and surface radiative flux anomalies as found in year-to-year variability in the detrended ASIE. This provides further confidence that the relationships revealed through regression analyses are physically meaningful.
Figures 5a and 6a present regression maps of detrended station- and satellite-based summer surface temperature anomalies on the detrended summer ASIE. They all show significant warming over Greenland associated with the reduction of Arctic sea ice, which resembles the patterns based on ERA-Interim (Figs. 5b and 6b). Moreover, the map of detrended satellite-based summer downwelling longwave radiation regressed onto the detrended summer ASIE shows widespread significant increases in downward longwave radiation over Greenland (Fig. 7a), which also resembles the reanalysis-based result (Fig. 7b). The consistency between these independent datasets lends confidence to ERA-Interim’s surface temperature and downwelling longwave radiation.
The observational analysis described in Fig. 2 indicates that both dynamical (heat transport) and thermodynamic (radiation) effects of decreasing Arctic sea ice are closely associated with atmospheric circulation patterns that appear to contribute to warming (surface melt) over Greenland. We find that the relationship is evident not only in the summer-mean atmospheric temperature (Fig. 2e) but also in increased frequency of extreme heat events over the surface of Greenland (70%–90% more than the climatological frequency of extreme heat events; Fig. 2o).
An indication of a causal relationship is provided by a lagged regression, in which the spatial patterns of detrended summer atmospheric circulation are regressed onto the detrended sea ice extent anomalies averaged over May, June, and July (MJJ), a period one month earlier than the summer average sea ice extent anomalies (JJA). The resulting regression maps are similar to those derived with coincident values (not shown). The similarity of the lagged and simultaneous patterns of atmospheric responses (in both spatial distribution and amplitude) suggests that MJJ sea ice extent anomalies persist into JJA, providing evidence that reduced sea ice may foster circulation patterns that favor warming over Greenland. Markus et al. (2009) showed that Arctic sea ice melt onset has been occurring earlier in recent decades, meaning earlier warming and melting of the sea ice surface, leading to earlier evaporation. The increase of water vapor causes increased cloudiness, which leads to an enhanced greenhouse effect, contributing to increased downward longwave radiation as partly indicated in Figs. 2f,h,l and in agreement with Kapsch et al. (2014).
To further investigate the mechanisms driving the atmospheric responses to the reduction of Arctic sea ice, we repeat the aforementioned regression analysis using the detrended Greenland ice sheet surface melt index. We find that all the atmospheric responses linked to the reduction of summer Arctic sea ice (first and third columns in Fig. 2 and Figs. 3a and 4a) closely resemble those associated with year-to-year variability of the summer GSME, in both spatial distribution and amplitude (Figs. 8, 3b, and 4b). This lends additional confidence that the associations are robust.Last updated on: November 25, 2014 18:53 IST
Watch out for the third Chopra girl, making her foray into Bollywood!
Priyanka and Parineeti Chopra's cousin Mannara is all set to make her Bollywood debut with the Vivek Agnihotri-directed erotic thriller Zid.
The pretty actress recently dropped by Rediff offices to promote her film and chat with readers online.
A look at the pictures:
Dressed in skinny jeans, a white shirt and nude heels, the actress poses for pictures upon arrival at the Rediff headquarters in Mumbai.
When quizzed by a reader about her famous cousin Priyanka Chopra's contribution to her big launch, Mannara said, 'Priyanka is one person who is very clear about her thoughts, so I can't expect a diplomatic answer from her.
'But looking at few scenes, from my upcoming film, she hugged me and said, "You are the right cast for the film" and according to her, it's a very intelligent film.'
The young actress was quite animated while fielding questions offline too.
When asked about her being compared to her more famous cousins (of course everyone is obsessed with filmi families!), the actress brushed potential rivalries aside.
'I don't like to compare my sisters. I believe that both of them are very hardworking and humble,' was her response.
Mannara types away on the Rediff ZaraBol page.
About her producer Anubhav Sinha, she said, 'He's one person who gives complete creative freedom to his director and I'm really happy that he had that faith that I can pull off such a difficult character, Maya, who has so many layers to it.'
There is a lot of curiosity regarding her name. Mannara's real name is Barbie Handa.
'I wanna grow up a little bit, so I changed my name from Barbie to Mannara. Mannara is a Greek name which means'something that shines'. I think its a beautiful name but for my family, I'll always be a Barbie,' she told another reader.
Discussing her career plans, the debutante actress said that she wanted to continue modelling in the future, but for now, she's supremely excited about her film debut.
Rediff's Abhishek Mande gets Mannara to reveal her Zid. Watch the video right here!
Photographs: Reuben NV. Video: Afsar DayatarNow this is diversity in America:
Members of Minneapolis’ Somali-American community say one of their main business districts — often referred to as “The Somali Mall” — is so ridden with crime, they no longer feel safe. Located at 24th Street East and home to dozens of businesses, more than 100 911 calls have been placed from the location since last October, according to police records. Problems include assaults, thefts, fights, and property damage… “Everybody is saying this place is not safe,” Hali Mohamud said through an interpreter. Others explained the security concerns are emblematic of larger problems in the Somali-American community, including a high unemployment rate and widespread poverty. “We don’t get any help,” Murio Khayre said, also through an interpreter.
It seems magic dirt doesn’t work as advertised. We imported Somalians intending to turn them all into brilliant masters of science and the arts, and all we got was our own little Mogadishu in return. Someday, the verdict of history will so ridicule the stupidity of modern leftism, it is beyond belief. How could anyone not realize that when the average IQ of your people is 69, and your entire history is of creating failed regimes, you are not designed for modern civilization.
This is a great way to keep immigrants from migrating though. If the place they are heading to is less safe than the place they came from, they will not migrate. To that end, immigration from third world countries is a self-limiting problem.
The only problem is a part of your nation has to be turned into a third world hell-hole before the migration begins to abate. Still, if you can keep that part small and isolated, and send all the migrants there, it will provide significant advantage in stemming the flow early on, until the Apocalypse hits and you can muster the political will to send them all back.
Spread r/K Theory, because we need to keep the hellholes as small as possible, so they can be reclaimed after the ApocalypseGeneral Motors was within days of shutting down its Cami Assembly plant in Ingersoll for good when it settled with its striking workers, labour sources said Tuesday.
The automaker notified Cami suppliers last week to prepare “supply lines” to Mexico, where it planned to shift production, said Tim McKinnon, chairperson of Unifor Local 199 at GM Canada’s plant in St. Catharines, which supplies Cami with transmissions.
“It is 100 per cent real. We talked to our suppliers and were given notice to get ready to ship parts to Mexico. Once they start going that way, it is hard to turn it around,” said McKinnon.
Workers at Cami Monday ratified a new four-year collective agreement after a 30-day strike that provides job security language in the form of costly payouts to workers if GM shuts the plant now.
GM told suppliers the strike was costing the automaker $5 million a day and it would not endure that hit much longer, said McKinnon.
“If they had been out another week, that would have been it,” he said.
The 2,800 workers at Cami walked off the job Sept. 17, largely over job security issues. They wanted contract language or a letter giving the plant preferred production status, meaning more of the popular Chevrolet Equinox crossover vehicles the plant makes would be assembled in Ingersoll than in Mexico.
In July, more than 400 workers were laid off at Cami when production of the GMC Terrain crossover vehicle was shipped to Mexico.
Jim Reid, who chairs Unifor Local 27, which represents workers at several Cami parts suppliers, agreed the Ingersoll factory was facing closing.
“They were serious about closing the Ingersoll plant. I am glad we have a deal,” said Reid.
“There were plans in place to shut the whole thing down. They were sending out that message to our people at different plants.”
General Motors has a plant in Coahuila, Mexico, the GM Ramos Arizpe assembly plant, making the Equinox and another plant in San Luis Potosi, which assembles the Equinox and GMC Terrain, among other vehicles.
“They were planning on setting up Ramos for exclusive Equinox production,” and could begin churning out more than 100,000 vehicles a year, said McKinnon.
In addition, the plant in Ramos, as well as GM’s operation in Springhill, Tenn., a former Saturn plant the automaker now uses for overflow production, would have assembled the Equinox.
That threat underscores the importance of the collective agreement workers ratified Monday, since along with wage improvements and lump sum payments, it established financial penalties for GM Canada if it closes Cami.
“It was critical we provided as much job security as we could in that situation,” said Dan Borthwick, president of Unifor Local 88, representing Cami workers.
The deal came together quickly last week, when Unifor negotiators were told Wednesday evening GM was to close Cami if a deal wasn’t reached.
Thursday morning the union abandoned its position wanting guarantees on job security, shifting to a financial penalty proposal.
“We put a plan in place that GM did not like at first, but we came to a common ground,” said Borthwick.
“GM told us if we don’t end this quickly they plan on moving to Mexico. In bargaining, you are always assessing the situation, where you are and you have to make critical decisions fast.”
Cami workers voted 85.9 per cent for the deal. The agreement also gives workers a four per cent wage hike and $8,000 in lump sum payments during the four-year life of the agreement. It also offers a $6,000 one-time bonus for those working from January to the ratification vote, upon approval of the deal.
GM spokesperson Jennifer Wright declined comment on whether GM was ready to close Cami.
“We need to make sure we are satisfying customer orders. We had to explore other solutions,” she said of the deal.
“Our preference was to secure a mutually beneficial agreement and now we are focused on getting back to work.”
Wright noted GM has invested $800 million in new tooling and machinery for Cami in recent years.
The new product launch Cami is just beginning — a new-look Equinox — usually lasts about seven years, she added.
“They have a great run ahead of them, building the Equinox,” said Wright.
As for the job security language, it will cost GM $300 million in worker pay-outs if it closes the plant. Before the deal, that penalty was $40 million.
“It would have hit us hard. We would have lost 300 jobs here,” McKinnon said of Cami closing.
The GM St. Catharines plant now employs 1,300, he said.
“That’s a very productive plant, the highest quality in GM, but these days everyone has to look over their shoulder” about the threat of losing work to Mexico, he said.
ndebono@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/NormatLFPressA new hospital building is under construction in Joplin, Mo., which was devastated by a tornado in May 2011. The United Arab Emirates has donated $5 million to Mercy Hospital to develop a neonatal intensive care unit.
Feb. 4, 2013 A new hospital building is under construction in Joplin, Mo., which was devastated by a tornado in May 2011. The United Arab Emirates has donated $5 million to Mercy Hospital to develop a neonatal intensive care unit. Julie Denesha/For The Washington Post
Two weeks after a mile-wide tornado tore through this city, killing 161 people and rendering a landscape of apocalyptic devastation, the public school system here received a telephone call from a man working for the United Arab Emirates Embassy in Washington.
“Tell me what you need,” the embassy staffer said.
Six schools, including the city’s sole high school, were destroyed in the May 2011 disaster. Insurance would cover the construction of new buildings, but administrators were scrambling to replace all of the books that had blown away.
Instead of focusing on books, the staffer wanted “to think big.” So the school system’s development director pitched the most ambitious plan that came to mind, a proposal to obviate the need for high school textbooks that had been shelved two years earlier because nobody — not the cash-strapped school system, not the state of Missouri, not even local charities — had the money for it: Give every student a computer.
Today, the nearly 2,200 high school students in Joplin each have their own UAE-funded MacBook laptop, which they use to absorb lessons, perform homework and take tests. Across the city, the UAE is spending $5 million to build a neonatal intensive-care unit at Mercy Hospital, which also was ripped apart by the tornado.
The gifts are part of an ambitious campaign by the UAE government to assist needy communities in the United States. Motivated by the same principal reasons that the U.S. government distributes foreign assistance — to help those less fortunate and to influence perceptions among the recipients — the handouts mark a small but remarkable shift in global economic power.
For decades, the United States has been the world’s largest provider of foreign aid, paying for the construction of schools, health clinics and vaccine programs in impoverished countries. It still is, but the level of donations has been increasing among nations with new financial clout, including China, India and oil-rich Persian Gulf states. And at least one of them now sees poor parts of the United States as worthy recipients for that same sort of assistance.
“We spot needs and we try to help,” said Yousef al Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the United States.
During the past two years, the UAE government has paid for the construction of all-weather artificial turf soccer fields in low-income parts of New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. The embassy wants to build three more fields this year. Otaiba hopes to break ground on the first of them this spring in the Washington area, although the embassy is still in discussions with potential partners and has not settled on a location.
Otaiba said he also has promised New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) about $5 million apiece to help rebuild their jurisdictions in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
Although U.S. hospitals and universities have long been recipients of Persian Gulf philanthropy, most of those gifts have come from the personal funds of royal family members, often to express gratitude for the education or medical care they received. Natural disasters also have prompted contributions: The UAE and Qatar, a fellow petro-wealthy Persian Gulf nation, both wrote $100 million checks to the State Department in 2005 to help with the reconstruction of the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.
Many other nations also spend money in the United States, but much of it is devoted to promoting their respective languages, traditions and national interests through educational grants, study-abroad programs and cultural centers, such as Germany’s Goethe-Institut and France’s Alliance Francaise.
Courting public opinion
The UAE’s unusual approach has its roots in the 2006 controversy that erupted when a firm based in Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, sought to take over the management of six U.S. ports. Intense congressional opposition, some of it resulting from misperceptions about the UAE’s relationship with the United States, scuttled the deal.
Afterward, the embassy commissioned a survey of American attitudes toward the UAE. Although 30 percent of respondents had an unfavorable view, 70 percent said they had no opinion. When Otaiba became ambassador in Washington in July 2008, the survey results provided him with a critical mission: to persuade Americans, particularly those with no opinion of his country, to develop a favorable view of the UAE.
Home to about 8 million people, the desert nation is among the world’s richest countries — and Dubai, with its gleaming skyline, has emerged as a global hub of trade and finance. The UAE is also a key Western ally in the region. Still, most Americans were unfamiliar with it.
“We had a responsibility to educate Americans about who we are,” he said. “We have been in Afghanistan with you. We went into Libya. We’re the largest export market for the U.S. in the [Middle East] region.”
Part of Otaiba’s response was to do what ambassadors have long done: He traveled the United States, giving speeches promoting his nation, explaining how his government has been a loyal partner in the fight against terrorism and how his leaders share U.S. concern about Iran’s nuclear program. The dapper, smooth-headed 40-year-old, whose English has only a hint of an Arabic accent, won over audiences.
But Otaiba, who received a master’s degree in international relations from Georgetown University and has a nuanced understanding of American politics, figured he needed to do more than just talk. In 2009, he helped facilitate a $150 million gift from the government of Abu Dhabi, the largest emirate, to Children’s National Medical Center in Washington to establish a new research center to develop innovations in pediatric surgery.
The UAE made large gifts to other hospitals, including Johns Hopkins and the Cleveland Clinic, but the ambassador also began branching into new areas — a Baltimore food bank, the New York Police Foundation and a nonprofit group that helps Washington high schoolers pay for university tuition.
In the case of Joplin, Otaiba said the decision to help started with a phone call from the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, who saw images of the devastation on CNN. A week later, an embassy staffer was in Missouri, looking for ways to assist.
Beyond a basic rebuild
Joplin, home to about 60,000 people, is a former mining town on the far southwestern edge of the state, near the border with Kansas and Oklahoma. Parts of the main drag have been rebuilt since the tornado, with the construction of modern strip malls and shiny fast-food restaurants. But the new structures, much of them funded by large companies, belie deeper economic troubles in the city, where many residents are dependent on low-paying service-sector jobs. Sixty-two percent of children in the school system live in families whose household incomes are below the federal poverty line.
The UAE did not want to just hand over money as it had done after Katrina, risking involvement in programs that might be plagued with waste and mismanagement, and it didn’t want to simply rebuild what had been damaged by the tornado. “We asked ourselves, ‘What can we bring to Joplin that probably won’t be forthcoming from anywhere else?’ ” Otaiba said. “We wanted to bring them something they didn’t have before.”
Otaiba’s staff member in Joplin quickly discovered that Mercy Hospital was one of the city’s principal economic engines. Not only was it among the largest employers, it drew residents from surrounding communities, generating business for restaurants and hotels. The hospital had not been equipped with a neonatal intensive-care unit, forcing some parents to travel hours by roads to hospitals in St. Louis or Springfield, Mo.
To Otaiba, the decision was simple: Give the hospital $5 million to build a 12-bed NICU.
“It was a huge shot in the arm,” said Gary Pulsipher, the hospital’s chief executive. “Their message to us — ‘Even though you’ve been through this awful event, we want to encourage you to come back stronger’ — was so inspiring.”
Because the rebuilt hospital will not open until 2015, the embassy also sought out a project that would yield a more immediate impact. The school system was an obvious target. If temporary schools did not open by the end of summer — in just three months — city officials worried that many families would move away. School administrators assumed they would be able to find interim structures in time, but they weren’t sure what to do about textbooks.
Then the embassy called.
When development director Kimberly Vann told her boss, Superintendent C.J. Huff, that the UAE government was willing to donate $1 million for laptops, he thought it was a joke.
“Back then, we were getting a lot of calls from people willing to help — but nothing like this,” Huff recalled. “I thought somebody was pranking us.”
The UAE gift came in two parts: $500,000 upfront and another $500,000 as a matching grant. If the school system could raise an additional $500,000, it would have a total of $1.5 million, bringing it very close to the price tag for 2,200 laptops, the attendant software and other equipment required to manage the project.
In the end, Huff’s staff did not have to pound the streets for money to meet the UAE’s challenge. Checks started arriving at his office, from companies and organizations with no connection to Joplin, sparked by news of the UAE matching grant.
The decision to accept the UAE money prompted an angry response from a few residents, and it sparked rants from some conservative radio commentators — one of them, Debbie Schlussel, accused the school system of taking “Islamic blood money” — but Huff stood firm. “I can live with the hate mail,” he said. “It’s the right thing for the kids.”
The laptops have transformed high school. Instead of sitting in rows of front-facing desks, listening to teachers present lessons, students spend their classes clustered together in groups, usually of five or six, their eyes fixed on the screens of their white laptops. Much of their instruction comes from viewing videos and interactive presentations copied from the Internet and stored on the school’s data server.
On a recent morning in an 11th-grade social studies class, the day’s lesson — about World War II — involved students watching a lecture that a high school teacher from another state had recorded and posted to YouTube. The teacher, Amber Travis, who lost six years of lesson plans in the tornado, said she learned about the YouTube video after posting a query to other teachers on Twitter.
In hallway conversations, students said they are happy to have the computers, but many of them did not know who provided the money to buy them. Unlike donations to other nations from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which often are emblazoned with stickers, there is nothing on the laptops that mentions the UAE.
But city leaders know. So do state officials and Missouri’s congressional delegation. Sen. Roy Blunt (R), who had opposed the Dubai firm’s ports deal in 2006, joined Otaiba on a trip to Joplin last May and expressed appreciation for the UAE’s financial contributions.
Huff said he sees no shame in accepting foreign aid to help his students. “Part of being a good neighbor is not just knowing how to give, but also how to receive,” he said. “It would be great if we had the money to pay for the laptops ourselves. But we didn’t. Sometimes you have to be willing to put pride in your pocket and accept gifts.”Environmental Protection Agency and FBI agents raided the ammunition company USA Brass over alleged “environmental violations” early Thursday morning.
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NBC Montana was tipped off by witnesses that federal investigators were there until at least 4 a.m. on Thursday. Federal agents could be seen going through the company’s building and taking items to a truck parked outside. EPA lead criminal investigator Bert Marsden said that the agency was looking into alleged “environmental violations” by USA Brass.
“We are investigating alleged violations of environmental law,” Marsden said on Thursday. “An investigation takes as long as it takes, and I can’t provide any details as it relates to that.”
“I can make a statement that there is no immediate threat to the public or the community at this time,” said Marsden.
It’s unclear exactly what the environmental violations were, but USA Brass has come under fire from federal agencies before for lead exposure. USA Brass cleans and resells used ammunition casings, and NBC Montana reports that local health officials found elevated levels of lead in the blood of 22 current and former employees.
Last September, the company was fined more than $45,000 by the U.S. Labor Department for 10 serious violations. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) also found that USA Brass has overexposed workers to lead and failed to “provide basic safeguards to reduce lead exposure, including breathing protection and protective clothing,” reports NBC Montana.
“The toxic effects of occupational exposure to lead have been well known for a long time, but this employer did not have basic safeguards to protect workers against this hazard,” Jeff Funke, OSHA’s area director in Billings, said last September.
It’s still unclear whether or not EPA and FBI agents were also looking into lead exposure issues. An OSHA inspection in March actually found that the company complied with federal requirements for several months, apparently learning from its mistake last year.
The company said it would reopen on Friday morning.
Follow Michael on Twitter and FacebookChip Kelly has only been on the job a week, but the 49ers offense is already scaring defensive coordinators — especially if Colin Kaepernick gets the nod at quarterback.
Kelly’s innovative offense schemes, coupled with Kaepernick’s athleticism, is already worrying several defensive coordinators that Kaepernick could give Kelly the read-option threat at quarterback he never had in Philadelphia with Nick Foles and Sam Bradford.
MORE: Kelly's five strikes | Kaepernick in good graces
"I think [Kaepernick] is a good enough passer, but obviously what'll be a nightmare is his ability to run," one defensive coordinator told NFL Media's Albert Breer on Friday. 'That offense is straight 'Freddy Krueger' when you have a quarterback that can pull the ball and run at any given time."
Kelly is already putting his imprint on the team. The 49ers fired defensive coordinator Eric Mangini Friday, and hired Lions running backs coach Curtis Modkins as offensive coordinator. Mangini’s firing came on the one-year anniversary of the team announcing his hiring as DC. He spent three seasons with the 49ers as an assistant.
Kelly, of course, takes an active role in calling his own offensive shots, so Bodkins will have a more limited role than a typical OC.
Another defensive coordinator told Breer that running back Carlos Hyde, who played in a spread offense at Ohio State, is another weapon Kelly could exploit.
"Awesome — could be scary," he said. "You get the run threat back to keep the ball on zone read.... And Kap can throw it deep."
All this depends on what Kelly actually plans to do with Kaepernick, who was once hailed the team's quarterback of the future before falling out of favor last season under Jim Tomsula. If the quarterback remains on San Francisco's roster after April 1, Breer reports it will cost the team $14.3 million, and $15.9 million against the cap.THE FACTS
For people suffering from sleep apnea, specialized breathing machines are the standard treatment.
The machines use a method called continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, which keeps the airway open and relieves potentially dangerous pauses in breathing during the night. But the machines are expensive, and some people complain that the mask and headgear cause uncomfortable side effects, like congestion.
One free and fairly simple alternative may be exercises that strengthen the throat. While they aren’t as established or as well studied as breathing machines, some research suggests they may reduce the severity of sleep apnea by building up muscles around the airway, making them less likely to collapse at night.
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In a study published last year in The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, scientists recruited a group of people with obstructive sleep apnea and split them into two groups. One was trained to do breathing exercises daily, while the other did 30 minutes of throat exercises, including swallowing and chewing motions, placing the tip of the tongue against the front of the palate and sliding it back, and pronouncing certain vowels quickly and continuously.
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After three months, subjects who did the throat exercises snored less, slept better and reduced the severity of their condition by 39 percent. They also showed reductions in neck circumference, a known risk factor for apnea. The control group showed almost no improvement.
Other randomized studies have found similar effects. One even showed that playing instruments that strengthen the airways, like the didgeridoo, can ease sleep apnea.Charles Augusto Jr., 75, of Irvington, N.Y., shot and killed two gunmen and injured two accomplices during a 2009 attempted robbery at his Harlem business. (Photo: Dwight R. Worley, The Westchester, N.Y., Journal News) Story Highlights Government estimates show Americans use guns to defend themselves or thwart crimes hundreds of times a day
Self defense debate goes to heart of Second Amendment
New York's strict gun control measure passed in January is being challenged by gun rights groups
WESTCHESTER COUNTY, N.Y. -- Charles Augusto's business had been a repeat target for violent criminals.
In 2009, four gunmen burst into Kaplan Brothers Blue Flame Corp. in Harlem, demanding cash and threatening and pistol-whipping an employee. The brazen daytime holdup mirrored a robbery at the commercial oven dealer 20 years earlier, which itself was followed by several muggings of employees off-site as they made deliveries and dropped off bank deposits.
But this time, Augusto, a 75-year-old Irvington resident, wasn't "defenseless." Fearing for his and his employee's lives, he grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun he purchased after the first robbery and fired on the gunmen, killing two and injuring two others.
"Either I'm going to kill them or they're going to kill me," Augusto recalled recently, sitting in his hilltop home near Irvington High School. "I didn't like doing that. I didn't have any choice."
By one government estimate, Americans use guns to defend themselves or thwart crimes hundreds of times a day. As gun owners and pro-gun advocacy groups say new gun-control laws in New York will swing the advantage to lawbreakers, others question whether gun ownership is an effective way for most people to protect themselves.
Alfred Grimaldi, a National Rifle Association-certified firearms instructor, said new state restrictions -- from making already stringent background checks more involved to reducing the number of bullets a gun clip can hold -- would make it tougher for individuals and business owners like Augusto to defend themselves. He doesn't much care for President Barack Obama's gun-control proposals, either.
"You can pass all the laws you want, but (civilians) are going to be at a disadvantage," Grimaldi said. "People who are inclined to violence are not going to obey a law just because you pass it."
Alfred Grimaldi of Ossining, N.Y., stands next to his firearms safe at his home on Feb. 14, 2013. He is a pro-gun advocate and a firearms instructor who believes the new gun laws will make the public less safe. (Photo: Joe Larese, The Westchester County, N.Y., Journal News)
Leah Gunn Barrett, a board member and incoming executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, said the right to self-defense must be balanced with public safety. All gun restrictions aim to track and control the flow of weapons, since even guns purchased legally can end up being used in crimes, such as the mass murder in Newtown, Conn., in December.
"With rights come responsibilities," Barrett said. "We don't want our streets, our neighborhoods, our malls, our schools turning into battlefields."
The debate goes to the heart of the Second Amendment, which guarantees an individual's right to bear arms, and whether citizens should depend on themselves or police for protection.
"The evidence doesn't indicate that having a gun is that protective. It probably makes your house less safe," said David Hemenway, a professor of health policy at Harvard School of Public Health who has studied the defensive use of guns for decades. "There is virtually no evidence that a gun is better protection than running away, calling police or using a baseball bat."
"Virtually no evidence" may be a bit strong. Gary Kleck, a criminology professor at Florida State University whose gun-use surveys are often cited by pro-gun groups, said data from the federal National Crime Victimization Survey found that individuals with guns are much less likely to be injured or suffer a loss during a robbery or assault.
“With rights come responsibilities. We don't want our streets, our neighborhoods, our malls, our schools turning into battlefields” Leah Gunn Barrett, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence
“With rights come responsibilities. We don't want our streets, our neighborhoods, our malls, our schools turning into battlefields” Leah Gunn Barrett, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence
Though 30.2 percent of all individuals involved in a robbery between 1992 and 2001 were injured, only 12.8 percent of victims possessing a firearm suffered an injury, according to a 2004 report by the Committee on Law and Justice, which reviewed Kleck's analysis. For assaults, the injury figures are 57 percent versus 28 percent for all incidents and firearms incidents, respectively.
"Tough Targets," a 2012 paper by the libertarian Cato Institute, highlighted hundreds of news reports nationwide where armed citizens thwarted criminals and determined that police departments underreport defensive gun uses because cases involving justifiable weapons use often are dropped. Kleck estimates defensive-gun-use incidents to be as high as 2.5 million a year, though the federal crime survey puts the figure just above 100,000.
"Guns in the hands of non-criminals is a social benefit," Kleck said.
Hemenway's research, including the 2000 survey "Gun use in the United States: results from two national surveys," suggests that individuals tend to overstate defensive gun uses, wrongly classifying arguments that escalate into physical altercations as self-defense. Judges who reviewed the survey results for the study's authors determined that at least half of reported defensive-use cases were probably illegal, though Hemenway and his researchers acknowledged the small sample size in the study and that they used only five judges from three states.
The issue of using guns for self-defense comes to the fore as more New Yorkers buy firearms and people become aware of the rising numbers of guns in their communities.
In December, The Journal News published an online map indicating the names and addresses of licensed handgun owners in Westchester and Rockland counties. The total number of handgun permits in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties was about 44,000 — 1 out of every 33 adults in the region — but Putnam was not represented on the map because the county clerk would not release the names and addresses of permit-holders.
The map sparked a national outcry and prompted a change in state law, allowing certain individuals to keep license information private. The map was removed last month after the law change.
Jonathan Galin, a Sloatsburg, N.Y., resident and licensed gun owner, said people rushed to buy guns before the enactment of laws they felt would limit their Second Amendment rights. However, many also were motivated by a rising number of burglaries and home invasions in recent years, he said. Burglaries rose 12 percent in Rockland from 2007 to 2010 before dipping sharply in 2011.
"I think everybody who qualifies should have a gun in their home," Galin said. "I don't know anybody who wants to break into a home knowing that person has a gun and knows how to use it."
Grimaldi said concern about new laws was well founded. Last month, state lawmakers expanded the ban on military-style weapons, barring the sale of some popular rifles and requiring those who already own such weapons to register them. Background checks now are required for all gun sales, including private transactions, and high-capacity magazines were outlawed. No magazine can hold more than seven rounds, down from 10.
"If I have seven rounds, I'm probably not going to make it if (criminals) have guns with 20 rounds," Galin said.
The Westchester County Firearm Owners Association and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association plan to sue, seeking to overturn New York's new gun laws. Neither group would comment for this article, but their notice of claim filed last month said the law "violates (plaintiffs') fundamental constitutional rights to lawfully |
bearings doesn’t sound exciting, but these little spheres can be useful in a lot of ways. Setting a handful on the ground and watching where they roll might help detect secret doors based on the slope of a passage. While thieves tools often get the glory when it comes to disabling traps, you can also wedge enough of these in a pressure plate gap to keep it from springing on members of the party. Additionally, in a moment of desperation, the whole bag could be cast out on the floor and cause some difficult terrain to pop up wherever it might be needed.
Hammer and pitons
Fifty feet of rope is the industry standard for the Dungeons and Dragons adventurer. (We look forward to the argument of hempen vs. silken rope in the comments.) Rope won’t do a lot of good without the support of these classic tools. The hammer drives the piton in a crack in the wall and the rope slide through it allowing for extra security and shaping the line to go into places where it might not normally be able to go. Having an extra hammer on hand is always useful in combat, as are a collection of pointy things that are strong enough to be driven into a rock face. It might not stop a vampire dead in its tracks like a stake through the heart, but it will certainly hurt.
Flask of oil
Fire is an important element to adventurers. Torches are often a necessity for those without Darkvision. When adventurers come across an unfamiliar monster or cursed relic, fire is often the first, last and only resort in dealing with it. These flasks are great for keeping that important torch burning as well as enhance characters who already have fire-based powers. Oil can also be used to ease the friction on doors and polish up magic items that might have an inscription on them with suggestions on how to be activated.
Map and scroll cases
It’s important to keep treasure maps and scrolls of spells dry and useful, but these cases are also useful for smuggling items where they might not belong. Does anyone suspect an enchanted dagger wrapped in a musty old scroll inside a scroll case? What about a rogue pulling a switch to keep the item the adventurers toiled to find in one case and handing shredded parchment to the rivals who have them under the blade? These cases also can keep items in isolation, unlike a backpack where everything rustles together.
Waterskin
This item is an obvious choice because everyone needs to stay hydrated when battling a hydra, but it has many other versatile functions. Any time an adventurer needs a small bag to hold something, the waterskin is a good choice, whether its some pocketed gems or a poisonous frog to unleash on sleeping rivals. An empty waterskin could also offer another splash of holy water against undead enemies.
New to RPGs? We got you. Catch our show, Starter Kit with Jason Charles Miller and friends. The show is full of tips for new D&D players, and is available exclusively on Alpha with new episodes going live every Thursday!
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Featured image: Wizards of the Coast
Image Credit: Wizards of the Coast, LucasBosch/Wikimedia (CC 2.0), Wikimedia (Public Domain)
Rob Wieland is an author, game designer and professional nerd. He writes about kaiju, Jedi, gangsters, elves and is a writer for the Star Trek Adventures RPG line. His blog is here, where he is currently reviewing classic Star Wars RPG adventures. His Twitter is here. His meat body can be found in scenic Milwaukee, WI.Tottenham hope to reinvigorate the surrounding area at Northumberland Park
Tottenham's revised proposal to build London's biggest club stadium have been passed by Haringey Council.
A lengthy council meeting on Wednesday drifted into the early hours of Thursday morning, but the vote went 8-2 in favour of Tottenham and their chairman Daniel Levy.
The 61,080-seater stadium, which will be built adjacent to the club's current home at White Hart Lane, will cost £400m and is expected to be completed in time for the 2018-19 season.
Aerial view of proposed new Spurs stadium. Image courtesy of Tottenham Hotspur
There is a also a provision for NFL games to be played at the new stadium using a retractable pitch, while 600 flats, a museum, medical centre and numerous shops and restaurants will be built as part of a £675m-£700m development.
The plans must be formally approved by London's Mayor Boris Johnson, but he has previously stated his enthusiasm for the project and passed the club's previous plans.
Chairman Levy said: "This marks yet another milestone in what has been a long and often difficult path.
Spurs' plans for a new home have been passed. Image courtesy of Tottenham Hotspur
"We are grateful to all those who expressed their support for the scheme. It is crucial that we now clear the final steps in the legal process. The application is due to be considered by the Mayor early next week.
"As we made clear at the start of last night's proceedings, the originally consented scheme is no longer feasible for a variety of reasons.
"This new scheme carries enormous public benefits and will play a key role in kick-starting place change, bringing exceptional opportunities for the local community and wider stakeholders.
The club believe their new stadium will increase the value of land and property in the wider Tottenham area
"We are very proud to be part of this important step forward for an area that has been our home for more than 130 years and where we shall continue to live and play our part."
Tottenham have forecast a completion date of August 2018, with next season expected to be their last final at White Hart Lane, so they will need a temporary home while their new stadium is being constructed.
The club have submitted a proposal to Wembley Stadium, but they face competition from rivals Chelsea, who also want to use the national stadium while they develop their current home at Stamford Bridge.
Spurs are prepared to share Wembley with Chelsea, and a decision now rests with the Wembley National Stadium Ltd.Raven Oak is the author of the bestselling fantasy novel, Amaskan’s Blood, and the upcoming sci-fi novels, Class-M Exile and The Silent Frontier. She spent most of her K-12 education doodling stories and 500 page monstrosities that are forever locked away in a filing cabinet.
She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband, and their three kitties who enjoy lounging across the keyboard when writing deadlines approach.
For more information and excerpts, visit http://www.ravenoak.net
We Are Invisible
by Raven Oak
7:32 AM.
Cats fed & medicated—check.
Husband & myself fed—check.
Dressed & ready—wait.
Oh god. Here we go again.That was me three days ago. One wrong movement reduced me to more than tears. It rendered me unable to move without excruciating pain.
It was so simple a movement; most people wouldn’t think anything of it. I reached across the counter for my hairbrush. Yet to look at me, most would never know I am disabled. Most would never see what they’ve never experienced, let alone been exposed to.
The first science fiction book I ever read was The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey. In it, people born with physical disabilities are given a chance at a normal life rather than be terminated. Their bodies are fused and wired into the metal hull of a galactic ship. They become a ship-person.
It would be another year before the first accident that triggered the ruination of my body. My thirteen-year-old self found the idea of being a ship quite romantic. I was too young to see the controversy involved in such an actions as explored in this book, and too able-bodied to understand the appeal of such an undertaking.
Science fiction loves to explore the wonders of technological advances, especially when they give people with special needs or disabilities the ability to function as normal people. Whether it’s a robotic arm attached to someone’s neurons or instantaneous knowledge via hard drives in the brain, we’re good at exploring the what-ifs of the body.
However, when writers venture into the world of physical pain, most focus on pain caused by wounds. Whether they’re received during war or an animal attack, authors love the pain that comes coupled with the easy backstory. Few authors explore character arcs involving chronic pain as a disability.
Multiple Sclerosis, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis—four diseases that carry with them the debilitating curse of chronic pain. Invisible disabilities that we love to ignore.
Imagine if Spiderman had M.S., how might his movement change? How capable would he be as a superhero? Would people still consider him a hero at all?
With pain comes the stigma that the sufferer is either lazy or lying. It’s a stigma well known to me since the first accident that destroyed my knee. If I’m not wheelchair bound, people assume that I’m not disabled. They don’t see the day-to-day struggles in maintaining normalcy. They see someone with all her appendages parking in a handicap spot and assume the worst about me. If Spiderman suffered from Lupus, would society tell him to “suck it up” as they have me?
Imagine not being able to shop for groceries because walking from the car to the store entrance sends your muscles into multiple spasms. Imagine needing help to wash your own hair or brush your teeth. Nothing is pain-free and yet, your pain is invisible to the world.
We read about war heroes with missing limbs or characters born deaf or blind, but rarely do we read about those suffering from chronic pain or diseases that cause it.
Why is that? Does society believe us to be incapable of being a hero/heroine? Or is it that society believes pain to be nothing more than a minor inconvenience?
Two accidents left me disabled. Thirty surgeries later and my good days far outnumber my bad. But one bad day sends me into a tailspin.
Despite the excruciating pain, I write. Despite the pain that makes five feet feel like a marathon distance, I edit and revise.
Spiderman’s heroism is like my own—made that much stronger by each pain-filled moment. Pain may prevent me from hiking through the mountains today, but rather than allow it to defeat me, I’ll use it as an opportunity to look at my world through a different lens.
I’ll use it as an opportunity to write and shape heroes who triumph in spite of their disabilities, be they mental, physical, or invisible.
Like this: Like Loading...SHAFAQNA – On the Day of Ashura when Shemr sat on the blessed chest of Imam Hussain (AS), Imam’s eyes were full of dust and blood, and Imam (AS) asked: Who are you sitting on my chest? Shemr replied: Shemr ibn Zeljoshan. Imam (AS) asked: Who am I? Shemr replied: You are Hussain ibn Ali. Imam (AS) asked: What do you want to do? Shemr replied: I want to cut off your head. Imam (AS) asked: Why? Shemr replied: If I do not do it; who else is going to take the prize from Yazid? Because Yazid said: Whoever brings Hussain’s head, I will give him a prize, and I want to receive that prize. Imam (AS) said: Do you want to make a deal? Shemr replied: What do I do? Imam Hussain (AS) replied: Forget the prize, I will ask the Prophet (PBUH) to intercede on your behalf. Shemr said: Swear to God, a prize for me, is better than you and your grandfather. It has been mentioned in historical references that, Imam Hussain (AS) smiled, and Shemr (the cursed one), cut off Imam’s blessed head [1].
[1] Jelvehayee az Ashura, Seyyed Ali Akbar Parvaresh, Page 301.Dave Anthony, a writer and director on Call of Duty: Black Ops and Call of Duty: Black Ops II, was recently invited to join a think-tank forum on the subject of threats to national security in Washington. Anthony gave a presentation which depicted potential future threats (such as a U.S. drone hacked by Iran and a hotel massacre in Las Vegas) and proposed new security measures to prevent such threats.
Anthony predicted that his proposed changes would be met with negativity from US citizens, and advised the US government to do what he did with Call of Duty: market it "to essentially brainwash people into liking it before it actually comes out."
During Anthony's presentation, he told US lawmakers that he sees the biggest threat to national security as coming from within. As such, one of Anthony's proposed national security plans is to station undercover US soldiers in schools around the country, serving as "School Marshals." Implementing this, he says, will require an extensive marketing plan.
The threat now, the invasion, comes from within. Imagine the concept of something like a ‘school marshal. Now these guys are U.S. soldiers who are in plainclothes, whose job and part of their responsibility is to protect schools. The public won’t like it, they’ll think it’s a police state. All of these are solvable problems. When we have a new product that has elements that we’re not sure how people will respond to, what do we do as a corporation? We market it, and we market it as much as we can—so that whether people like it or not, we do all the things we can to essentially brainwash people into liking it before it actually comes out. — Dave Anthony
It's a little surprising to see Anthony speak so freely about such a subject, and to use such a negative term to describe his own practices. I don't intend to get overly political, as that's not what we're about here, but I hope the government thinks long and hard before making any decisions based on advice that includes the word "brainwash."
Source: Business WeekReddit 18 133 Shares
Written by: Appei Porbeni
The Strong Black Woman – the ugliest cliche and stereotype ever to be forced onto a black woman; I like to call it, the black woman’s burden. It’s a plague on my psyche – while I understand that I can’t be strong all the time and I am well aware of my humanity, there’s just something about that external expectation from others that makes me expect it from myself. I feel I do a disservice to myself for that matter when I allow other people’s emotional baggage to somehow wind up on my doorstep but because of that representation of the ‘all powerful black woman,’ I carry that weight even though I know well enough that there is no reason for me to live up to this stereotype.
I saw a tweet not too long ago. In said tweet, a black woman was admonishing other black women for not being approachable and that black women have to bolster their tolerance for topics regarding racism, misogynoir, etc. Basically, she was saying that it’s part of the black woman’s burden to ‘coddle’ the oppressor in the hopes that they will finally be won over by our kindness because they finally see, “hey, I met one good black woman, maybe I’ll change my perception on ALL black women.” I honestly hope this woman didn’t think she was being ‘revolutionary’ or ‘deep’ because she was just regurgitating the exact same thing many others have said and funnily enough, that stuff doesn’t work.
It’s sad that this black woman has seen it as so important to force the world’s burdens on her brown shoulders… as well as having to deal with all her own personal stresses – who’s got the time or energy to deal with that?
It’s like I find myself repeating myself – I keep having to ask for representation in the media that doesn’t show people like me as either superhuman or below human (it’s a huge issue for me and it’s been the topic of most of what I even write about) – and that repetition is getting exhausting but I know that I can’t let up until I see more of the change I need.
I know comedians often joke about protesters by saying stuff like, “Don’t these people have something better to do? Don’t they have jobs? Hobbies?” and actually yes (!) we do have better things to do but if we don’t protest people will assume we don’t care and that it’s OK for oppressors to continue with their atrocious behavior! It’s as much about personal safety as it is about the principles! This also applies to when I as a black woman am so vocal about my displeasures concerning black women’s treatment and image in society – if I don’t voice these concerns over and over, people will assume that I’m OK with it when in fact I am not! I don’t repeat myself on these issues because I want to, I do it because I have to! It’s a must. It’s a must for me, for those who came before me and for those who will succeed me.
The people who feel I should be embarrassed how I often I have to repeat myself about these issues should be the ones embarrassed that they didn’t hear me the first time around. I will not stay silent and shoulder a false image or reputation because you refuse to see me as anything but human. So you best give in because I have no intention of doing so.Dawn of Radiance, Lost Forest, August 2014 (Flickr)
My first visit to Dawn of Radiance, Silvermoon Fairey’s marvellous homestead region, was back in November 2013. Back then, the region was in the grip of winter. Roll forward eight months, and the region is not only basking in summer colours, it has once again been beautifully remodelled, and from the high rocky buffs to the riverside grasslands, it offers a veritable smörgåsbord of visual delights for those who visit.
A rocky cove in the south-east corner of the region forms the arrival point, a narrow shingle beach between waves and cliffs; with a tall brick lighthouse casting its eye out to sea nearby as a fishing boat rides the breakers a short distance offshore. The little beach offers places to sit, but walk along it and you’ll come to a slope leading you up between the cliffs where eagles have nested, and on to a grassy meadow, which in one direction leads you down to a farm where horses graze.
Dawn of Radiance, Lost Forest, August 2014 (Flickr)
If you go in the other direction from the first meadow, you can make your way up to a rocky plateau dominated by the angular form of a church amidst the ruins of what might be an old castle. A switch back path hugs the cliffs here, the single link between ruins and another sheltered beach below.
Wander through the farm and you have a choice: you can follow the track leading out to the big windmill standing sentinel-like on the headland; or you can take the bridge over the river and explore the grasslands on the far side and walk up to another meadow where more horses graze; or you can follow the track inland.
Dawn of Radiance, Lost Forest, August 2014 (Flickr)
The latter route may take you through a rain shower and some undergrowth, but trust me when I say it’s very much worth taking, whether you turn right and cross the river over the little wooden bridge, or continue onwards, further in the heart of the island; both routes will lead you to places of whimsy and fantasy. Keep an eye out, as well, for another route up to the church and ruins …
Nor is that all; the north side of the island hides another beach, while up on the hills and down between their shoulders lie places to sit, either alone or with a close friend, and simply watch the world go by – or forget about it completely.
Dawn of Radiance, Lost Forest, August 2014 (Flickr)
Such is the design of the region that exploring it feels like you’re on an island that is bigger than an individual region, and providing you don’t set-out to discover everything all at once, it presents a series of delights; just when you think that you’ve seen it all, you turn a corner or pass around a bush and trees, only to find something new and quite unexpected. Hence why I’ve not described some aspects of the island here (although admittedly, one photo is perhaps a bit of a giveaway to what you might come across!); I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of discovery too much.
There is a marvellous blending of elements here as well, which encourages you to feel as if you’re walking through a more expansive landscape; the use of elevation not only physically sets apart the farm from the church with its surrounding ruins; it gives an added sense of distance to your explorations as you find your way up to the heights, climbing above the tree-line and grasslands and into the rocky preserve of an ancient site.
Dawn of Radiance, Lost Forest, August 2014 (Flickr)
The same can be said of the use of hills and woodland to enfold the heart of the island and separate it from farm and ruins; following path or river into the interior not only again heightens a sense of exploration and discovery, it encourages a feeling of stepping into another, hidden realm – the digital equivalent of stepping through the wardrobe.
With its regional windlight set to the first light of dawn, much in keeping with the region’s name, it almost goes without saying that Dawn of Radiance is a photographer’s delight, and lends itself to a wide range of windlights and sky settings. If you do pop over to take photos, I believe I’m right in saying that joining the group via the board at the landing point will give you rezzing rights for props, and there is a 30-minutes auto-return limit.
Dawn of Radiance, Lost Forest, August 2014 (Flickr)
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Sexual freedom is attainable.
Back with us for this piece is real-life submissive Madison Young. I have invited her to share some excellent tips on how to incorporate BDSM into your sex life. If you crave a bit of Fifty Shades action but don't know how to make those fantasies into realities, Madison has tons of helpful info for you. There's a lot of material to cover, so I'm splitting the class into two pieces. This one will lay the foundation for how to figure out what you want and express those desires to your partner(s). The second, which I'll write next week, will focus more on technique.
Because I am reconnecting with my own fantasies, I fully plan to try some of these exercises myself!
Jincey: Welcome back! Last time we talked, you helped us understand more about the psychological landscape of submissives. I think that column helped debunk some of the negative stereotypes around dominance and submission. In this piece I want to give women -- and people in general -- tools to help actualize the fantasies. First things first: How can women discover what their fantasies are?
Madison: This is a great question. In teaching sexuality workshops and directing feminist porn, I'm always talking with couples and individuals about their fantasies. Some individuals' faces light up when given space to verbalize their sexual fantasies. They know exactly what fantasy turns them on. Other people need permission to explore what their fantasies might look like in order to piece those notions together.
Fantasies are simply a culmination of our desires in an area of our erotic psyche that has not been explored yet. One possibility is that a fantasy can be the culmination of sensory and pleasure-based experiences that spring from moments in which we have experienced comfort, pleasure, connection and emotional or physical ecstasy. When rooting around in our erotic psyche for what turns us on, we can discover a lot by using the following exercises:
1. Ask yourself what the last magically orgasmic or pleasure-based experience you engaged in was.
Now close your eyes and visualize that experience. Were you alone or with others? What specific elements of that experience come to the forefront of your thoughts? Do you picture a specific sexual act? Do you recall where the sex was taking place? What you were wearing? What was the scent of your partner? Do you remember something your partner said to you while you were having sex? How did they embraced you? Where did their hands wander? How did you feel emotionally as this was happening?
Through answering these questions you begin to pinpoint your erotic desires and form what I call the "building blocks" of your fantasy.
For example, when I think about one of my hottest sexual experiences, I remember one experience when a beautiful dominant woman dragged me into her kitchen post-sex and ordered me to do her dishes while she flogged, caressed and fucked me. What do I remember from this experience? Well, several of my sexual fantasies take place in kitchens, bathrooms or semi-public places, so my building blocks for constructing a new fantasy to try out might consist of a kitchen, a bathroom or an element of exhibitionism. Also, although I'm not very domestic within my actual everyday life, I find domesticity to be erotic. Therefore, washing the dishes in the sexual situation mentioned above would fit in quite nicely with my deep-rooted building block.
Keep in mind that your fantasies don't have to be outlandish or crazy. A fantasy could be something as simple as you and your lover looking into each other's eyes while having sex in a particular position. It could even be asking your girlfriend to wear a particular body lotion you distinctly remember.
I have a friend who has garlic as a building block. Her last girlfriend loved garlic, so they would eat dishes with a lot of garlic, which always seemed to result in passionate sex. For her, the scent of garlic brings back pleasant feelings that she had for her past love. Such a building block could easily lend itself to a Lady and the Tramp-themed spaghetti-and-sex-in-the-kitchen fantasy. I know some people back away from garlic if they are expecting to be making out or kissing a lover, but if you both taste of garlic, this natural aphrodisiac can actually be a total turn-on.
2. People often need help letting go of shame, so I ask, "Where do you like to be touched?"
Some individuals will tell me that they don't know, that they're not picky or that they just like to be touched the normal way. To that I say, "Whatever you desire is normal for you." Everyone truly is a completely unique being. How and when we like to be touched, and the pressure with which like to be stimulated, are constantly in flux.
Let go of the idea that what you say or what you desire is or isn't going to fit into some expectation of norm. Discover your own norms. Think about when and how you like to masturbate. How do you like to touch yourself? Now picture sex with your partner or the last orgasmic, magical, sexy moment you experienced with a partner and how and where they touched you. What level and type of touch did you find the most arousing?
3. Another excellent way to explore and construct your fantasy is to use collage.
Grab some construction paper, scissors, magazines and glue sticks and look for images and words that relate to your desires or the emotional journey to your desire, or the passion or tranquility that your are seeking in your erotic fantasy and your sensual reality.
Jincey: Wow, those are really great action points. I can see how going through those exercises can help ground you in your own sexual desires. So, once you've dug into your soul, how do you talk to your partner(s) about what you discovered? In a relationship, how can you bring up the topic of kinky sex?
Madison: Kinky sex can mean a lot of different things to different people, as can the topic of BDSM. For some, kink might be anal pleasure or deriving erotic pleasure from feet, or it could be something like desiring spanking or bondage in a consenting and safe environment. In our culture there is a lot of sexual shaming, which can result in individuals internalizing fear. Often we do not know how to communicate our desires to our partners, especially if we perceive those desires to be "different."
Let's examine the idea of difference. We must first accept and love ourselves in order to fully love others and to share ourselves fully with others without shame.
Negotiation doesn't stop once erotic exchange starts. You can continue to communicate with your partner during sex about what feels good, meeting her needs and desires while exploring your own. Make it a journey that you are on together. Sometimes trying out new things sexually can be a little awkward, and that's OK. You can laugh when something is silly or feels different. Aim for open communication about how it feels, and for connectedness and space for your partner to communicate about your mutual journey through new sexual exploration.
Other excellent catalysts for mutual sexual exploration and communication about kink are:
1. Attending sexuality workshops together.
This is a great way to introduce and explore kink. You can find kink-related classes and workshops across the country at women-owned sex stores, sexuality resource centers and BDSM community spaces. Whether it is a basic bondage class or Spanking 101, you can introduce to your partner the idea of trying something new with a date at a kink workshop.
2. Planning an outing to your local women-owned sex shop.
While she is picking out her favorite lube, mention how you've been eyeing the luxurious silk blindfolds in the corner and how hot you think it would be to have her fuck you with a strap-on while you're blindfolded. Then ask her, "Does that sound hot to you?" If you know she loves fucking you with a strap-on, take a look at the different cocks at the store and see if there are any that get her excited. Then bring her over to the blindfolds and show her the one you were looking at. Start to build the fantasy with your girlfriend together. You want to create an experience that is mutually satisfying. Incorporating your partner's fantasy building blocks with your own helps create respect and intimacy.
3. Reading erotica or kink-related articles together.
While you're at the sex shop, pick up a book or two. Learn and explore kink together. One of the greatest opportunities that the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey has created is the opportunity for couples to talk about their fantasies and kink. The Fifty Shades trilogy is everywhere you look, from the airport bookstore to your local Walmart. Whether you think the series is all fluff or hype, it has handed us an easy opportunity to talk about kinky sex and kinky relationships. The pheonomenial success of those books can spark conversation about whether or not you relate to those themes. You can compare and contrast this book to other novels that talk about BDSM, like Carrie's Story or The Marketplace.
4. Watching sexy movies or kinky sex-ed movies together.
Find out what movies turn you on. Is it mainstream films or porn? Watching sexy movies together, especially if they contain kink, like Secretary, helps to open the door to talk about the imagery. You can also rent or buy DVDs that do an excellent job of introducing kink and BDSM elements. Sex educator Tristan Taormino has a fantastic series called Vivid-Ed, as well as a series called Rough Sex, in which she interviews women about constructing their own kink fantasies. Each woman discusses her fantasy and why it's hot to her, and later, they act out the fantasy.
Later this month Girlfriends Films will release an educational line, and I directed the videos. The movies feature lesbian and queer women's sexual exploration. The key is to make an exciting opportunity to talk about the subject of sex, kink being one element of the discussion.
5. Forwarding this interview to your partner.
Get the conversation going. My suggestions can spark conversation. Talk about what resonates for both of your or what doesn't.
6. Seeking cultural education.
Go to an erotic film festival or an art event, book reading panel or discussion that addresses sexuality, sexual identity or BDSM. Inviting your partner to a book reading or art event helps frame your conversation, because you can talk about the artist's point of view.
7. Hiring a Kink-Aware Professional or a sex coach.
If you feel like you need specific guidance and support through your individual coming out experience or in communicating with your partner about your sexual desires, I highly recommend seeking a professional guide. At Kink Aware Professionals you will find a listing of LGBTQ and kink therapists. You can also seek guidance from a sex coach or sexuality educator.
Jincey: Do you talk about your fantasies outside the setting of the bedroom first? Is it awkward to do that?
Madison: No, it totally doesn't have to be awkward. Many of the situations listed above create excellent catalysts for conversations about our fantasies outside the bedroom. Imagery, objects or media that address kink or sexuality in these spaces create space for our own dialogue around sexuality and fantasies to happen with our partners. You might find it to be sexy!
Talking about sex does not have to be tense. Communicating about sex can be hot if you treat it like foreplay as opposed to an awkward confessional of your desires. For example, if you have a foot fetish and you want to explore that with your partner, you could set the mood by mentioning that you bought some massage oil, and that you think it would be really hot to massage their legs and feet. You may get so turned on that you will want to devour every inch of her.
Jincey: I read about a woman who is divorcing her husband because he wouldn't act out her Fifty Shades fantasies. How do you tell your partner you're not feeling sexually fulfilled without hurting their feelings?
Madison: I wouldn't. You can communicate this same basic concept in another way. By saying that you are not sexually fulfilled, you are shifting blame to your partner. This can be a shaming experience, which result in feelings of inadequacy and will not lead to better sex.
A fulfilling sex life is simply one aspect of a healthy, well-nourished and balanced life. We need to first understand and know what level of touch, connection and intimacy contributes to a sense of balance and wellness for each of us. It is also important to create space for our partners to communicate their needs and desires to us. Once you have examined your individual needs and desires, you can work jointly on the journey of your sexual relationship.
Sex is a way in which individuals are able to connect and share energy and intimacy in a pleasurable way. If you are unfilled in your sex life, likely there is an emotional disconnect occurring within the relationship. The greatest tools that you can learn in technique-based workshops are confidence, enthusiasm and a better understanding of your partner's desires. If you try the exercises I've suggested here, you may find renewed energy that will enable you to connect erotically with your partner. If you are able to learn how to communicate your desires with confidence and allow your partner to communicate, as well, then you can start to build a sexually fulfilling relationship.
Jincey: How can single people go about exploring their fantasies and expressing their sexuality in a safe way? What are extra safety measures that they can take -- so that they don't get lured in by a Craigslist killer, for instance? What are "bad news" red flags to look out for?
Madison: If someone is single and seeking to explore and discover kinky sexual fantasies, I recommend going through the exploration that I mentioned before. Going through those exercises will help you identify the elements that turn you on.
Next I recommend seeking out a welcoming community in your area. Find local kink and BDSM groups that you can be a part of. I highly recommend getting to know the people within that community first before ever setting out to play with others. There are many BDSM events that do not involve actual kinky play happening. A good example of this is a "munch." A BDSM munch is a gathering, usually at a restaurant or café, to talk and get to know one another. People who go to munches don't just talk about kink; they discuss what is going on in their lives. This is a great low-pressure way to connect, get peer advice and receive feedback about what is going on in your own personal journey.
I also highly recommend volunteering. Whether you are a "top" or a "bottom," a "sub" or a "dom," service is a well-respected value within the BDSM community. You can volunteer at workshops, BDSM play parties or nonprofit community organizations that cater to the BDSM community.
I do not recommend randomly engaging in BDSM in an unfamiliar atmosphere with someone you do not know. When you meet someone who is interesting within the community, you can approach them to play at a BDSM party or ask people you trust about them. Watch how that person behaves, and pay attention to the level of communication they are using with people that they are playing with.
It is important to create a trusted bond with someone before rushing into any intense kinky experiences. Trust your intuition and your new friends in the community. BDSM in real life is not the same as in a fantasy novel, so before any power exchange happens, you must get to know each other in order to trust and respect each other as equal individuals. It doesn't matter if the experience is only for one night. Respect yourself and the intimacy you are creating.
Avoid meeting people only online and then meeting face-to-face in a private location. Just don't do it. Develop trust, community support and meet in a public space. Once you are there, you can get to know one another, discuss your desires and set the parameters for kinky play. Take your time; you are worth it!
* * * * *
A huge thanks to Madison for such thoughtful, solution-based answers to lead us toward sexual empowerment. Be sure to check out the slideshow below for a quick recap of some of her advice.
PHOTO GALLERY Madison Young's 7 Tips For Connecting With Your Erotic Desires And Kinky Fantasies!
See you next week, when Madison gives out her cheat sheet for exploring bondage in the bedroom.At the moment, Issa Rae's The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl — a memoir with a buzz largely fueled by the popularity of her similarly themed webseries — is currently sitting on the New York Times' bestseller list. Last week, Rae appeared on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, a show selected to replace The Colbert Report and fill the highly coveted 11:30pm spot after The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Rae and Wilmore are also working on a pilot together for HBO.
On Wednesday, ABC's black-ish — a show widely considered the best new sitcom of the season (and the best new Black sitcom in years) — will air its 16th episode. Scandal will air on the same network the next night, and Kerry Washington's cunning, calculated, and cold Olivia Pope will attempt to be as cunning, calculated, and cold as How to Get Away With Murder's Annalise Keating already is. (She might also attempt — and also fail — to have better sex.) For the past year, the biggest story on TV has been how Thursday nights are dominated by a 45-year-old Black woman (Shonda Rhimes) who |
anyone, and the groups who are more likely to die of influenza are the very young, the pregnant, and the elderly. Often those most at risk for dying from influenza are those least able, due to age or underlying diseases, to respond to the vaccine. You can help prevent your old, sickly Grandmother or your newborn daughter from getting influenza by getting the vaccine, so you do not get flu and pass it one to her. Flu, by the way, is highly contagious, with 20% to 50% of contacts with an index case getting the flu. However, Granny may be sitting on a fortune that will come to you, and killing her off with the flu is a great way to get her out of the way and never be caught. That would make a good episode of CSI. I can prevent influenza or treat it by taking echinacea, vitamin C, oscillococcinum or Airborne. Gullible Dumb Ass cubed then squared. None of these concoctions has any efficacy what so ever against influenza. And if you think oscillococcinum has any efficacy, I would like you to invest in a perpetual motion machine I have invented. None of the above either prevent or treat influenza. And you can’t “boost” your immune system either. Anyone who suggests otherwise wants you money, not to improve your health. Flu isn’t all that bad of a disease. Underestimating Dumb Ass. Part of the problem with the term flu is that it is used both as a generic term for damn near any viral illness with a fever and is also used for a severe viral pneumonia. Medical people are just as inaccurate about using the term as the general public. The influenza virus directly and indirectly kills 20,000 people (depending on the circulating strain and year) and leads to the hospitalization of 200,000 in the US each year. Influenza is a nasty lung illness. And what is stomach ‘flu’? No such thing. I am not at risk for flu. Denying Dumb Ass. If you breathe, you are risk for influenza. Here are the groups of people who should not get the flu vaccine (outside of people with severe adverse reactions to the vaccine): Former President Clinton, who evidently doesn’t inhale. Michele Bachmann. Wait, that’s the HPV vaccine. And people who want to be safe from zombies. If you don’t get the vaccine you do not have to worry about the zombie apocalypse, because zombies eat brains. The vaccine is worse than the disease. Dumb Ass AND a wimp. What a combination. Your mother must be proud. Unless you think a sore deltoid for a day is too high a price to pay to prevent two weeks of high fevers, severe muscles aches, and intractable cough. I had the vaccine last year, so I do not need it this year. Uneducated Dumb Ass. Each year new strains of influenza circulate across the world. Last year’s vaccine at best provides only partial protection. Every year you need a new shot. The vaccine costs too much. Cheap Dumb Ass. The vaccine costs less than a funeral, less than Tamiflu, and less than a week in the hospital. I received the vaccine and I got the flu anyway. Inexact Dumb Ass. The vaccine is not perfect and you may have indeed had the flu. More likely you called one of the many respiratory viruses (viri?) people get each year the flu. Remember there are hundreds of potential causes of a respiratory infection circulating, the vaccine only covers influenza, the virus most likely to kill you and yours. I don’t believe in the flu vaccine. Superstitious, premodern, magical thinking Dumb Ass. What is there to believe in? Belief is what you do when there is no data. Probably don’t believe in gravity or germ theory either. Everyone, I suppose, has to believe in something, and I believe I will have a beer. I will wait until I have symptoms and stay home. Dangerous Dumb Ass. Despite often coming to work ill, especially second year residents, about 1 in 5 cases of influenza are subclinical, hospitalized patients are more susceptible to acquiring influenza from HCW’s than the general population, and 27% of nosocomial acquired H1N1 died. And you wil never realize that you were the one responsible for killing that patient by passing on the flu. The flu vaccine is not safe and has not been evaluated for safety. Computer illiterate Dumb Ass. There are 1342 references on the PubMeds on safety of the flu vaccine, and the vaccine causes only short term, mild reactions. All health care requires weighing the risks of an intervention against the benefits. For the flu vaccine all the data suggests huge benefit for negligible risk. And as a HCW, it could be argued that we have a moral responsibility to maximize the safety of our patients. The government puts tracking nanobots in the vaccine as well as RFID chips as part of the mark of the beast, and the vaccine doesn’t work since it is part of a big government sponsored conspiracy to keep Americans ill, fill hospital beds, line the pockets of big pharma and inject the American sheeple with exotic new infections in an attempt to control population growth and help usher in a New World Order. Well, that excuse is at least reasonable. Paranoid Dumb Ass.
And here’s Mark Crislip’s sage advice:
So get the vaccine. And pass this essay on to someone else. The life you may save may be your own. Or be a Dumb Ass.
The flu vaccine is available now throughout the USA, Canada and other countries in the northern hemisphere. Go get them. They’re not going to hurt you, and they will save lives, maybe your own, maybe your child’s, maybe your parents.
Go. Now. You’ve read this, and now you know people who don’t get flu shots are Dumb Asses, so says one of the top infectious disease specialists on the planet. Go get your flu shot. You’re still here? I’m sure your insurance will cover it, so no more delays. GO.
Use the Science-based Vaccine Search Engine.
RelatedCliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media reports that An Open Secret, a new explosive documentary on Hollywood pedophiles opened on Friday night, July 3, 2015, at the Cinema Village at 22 East 12th Street in New York City. On July 17, the film will open in Los Angeles at Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills.
Directed by Amy Berg, An Open Secret exposes how pedophiles operate in Hollywood and cover up their crimes. Berg’s 2006 documentary on the Catholic Church’s cover-up of pedophilia/pederasty, Deliver Us from Evil, was nominated for an Oscar.
The Hollywood Reporter describes the film as “A sober look at…the sexual exploitation of teenage boys in the entertainment industry by the older men who can make or break their careers…. [W]ith any luck it will encourage other victims to speak up, and enlighten the parents of showbiz aspirants about the industry’s dangers.”
Several journalists are included in the film. One journalist said his story documenting the sexual crimes committed by top Hollywood figures was killed, that is, censored.
Even more shocking, director Berg said she could not find any company willing to distribute her film until Rocky Mountain Pictures, the distributor behind such ground-breaking conservative-oriented documentaries as Obama 2016, stepped up to make sure this important film gets released in various cities this summer. Vesuvio Entertainment is helping with distribution of the film.
The film is rated R, meaning those under 17 must be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. It includes interviews with victims and identifies by name those who have been caught, prosecuted and convicted for sexual abuse.
The film identifies a pedophile ring led by a convicted sex offender named Marc Collins-Rector, who had ties to the rich and famous in Hollywood. Collins-Rector established an Internet-based TV company called Digital Entertainment Network (DEN).
DEN’s first project, Chad’s World, was described by the Los Angeles Times as centering “on a 15-year-old from Michigan who questions his sexual orientation and ultimately flees his town’s intolerance to move in with a gay couple in a California mansion.” This and other questionable Digital Entertainment Network projects are discussed in the Berg film.
Digital Entainment Network’s investors reportedly included movie director Bryan Singer, David Geffen and Arianna Huffington’s homosexual ex-husband Michael Huffington.
David Geffen is the openly homosexual co-founder, with director Steven Spielberg, of DreamWorks Studios. In an interview with Vanity Fair, former Hollywood powerhouse Michael Ovitz identified Geffen as the demagogic leader of a shadowy cabal in Hollywood which Ovitz calls the Gay Mafia. (See “The Gay Mafia and America’s aggressive homosexual agenda“)
Bryan Singer is the openly bisexual director of the X-Men blockbusters who had been sued 3 times for sexual misconduct:
In 1997, a 14-year-old extra accused Singer of asking him and other minors to film a shower scene in the nude for the film Apt Pupil. A lawsuit was filed but dismissed for insufficient evidence. In April 2014, Singer was accused in a civil lawsuit of having drugged and raped a minor — 17-year-old actor and model Michael Egan — in Hawaii and Los Angeles in the late 1990s. Four months later, Egan withdrew his lawsuit after Singer’s attorney presented evidence that neither Singer nor Egan were in Hawaii at the time. In May 2014, attorney Jeff Herman filed a lawsuit on behalf of an anonymous British man against Singer and producer Gary Goddard for sexually assaulting “John Doe No. 117″ when the latter was a minor while in London for the premiere of Superman Returns. 2 months later, the charge against Singer was dismissed, at the accuser’s request, but the case against Goddard remains active.
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According to The Daily Beast, Singer is infamous for his “Twink” pool parties, described by an attendee as wild nights of no clothes and lots of alcohol. Among homosexuals, the word “twink” describes a uniquely disposable kind of young gay man: Hairless, guileless, witless. The term’s namesake is Twinkie, a junk food containing shiny packaging, a sweet taste, and zero nutritional value. “Twinks” can be bussed into parties, thrown into pools, put into a tiny Speedo—or no Speedo at all—and ornamentally placed around the water’s edge like living, breathing, giggling statuary.
~Éowyn
Dr. Eowyn’s post first appeared at Fellowship of the Minds.In some women abnormally high levels of a common and pervasive chemical may lead to adverse effects in their offspring. The study, published recently in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, is the first of its kind to shed light on the possible harmful side effects of perchlorate in mothers and their children.
Using data from the Controlled Antenatal Thyroid Study (CATS) cohort, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Cardiff University studied the effect of perchlorate, an environmental contaminant found in many foods and in some drinking water supplies, and its effects on children born to mothers with above average levels of this substance in their system. They studied 487 mother-child pairs from women with underactive thyroid glands and in the 50 women with the highest levels of perchlorate in their body, their offspring had below average IQ levels when compared to other children.
"The reason people really care about perchlorate is because it is ubiquitous. It's everywhere," said Elizabeth Pearce, MD, MSc, associate professor of medicine at BUSM. "Prior studies have already shown perchlorate, at low levels, can be found in each and every one of us."
Perchlorate is a compound known to affect the thyroid gland, an organ needed to help regulate hormone levels in humans. According to Pearce previous studies have attempted to implicate this anti-thyroid activity in pregnant mothers as a possible cause of hypothyroidism, or an underactive thyroid gland. Hypothyroidism in newborns and children can lead to an array of unwelcome side effects, including below average intelligence.What do Aldous Huxley and Hunter S. Thompson have in common? Both were great writers, of course. Both had a fondness for hallucinogens and wrote important books about mind-bending drugs. Both were astute social commentators. However, beyond that there’s not a great deal to link these men, who were very different characters.
But here’s an odd connection between them:
In 1928, Aldous Huxley, then famous for his socially satirical novels – which could hardly be further from Gonzo prose – wrote a letter to a friend:
What a strange hatred for the truth most human beings have! Or rather not for the truth, because it doesn’t exist, but for reality. A loathing and fear.
It was a peculiar phrase in an obscure letter from an author who at that point was only famous in his own country; yet reversed, it would become internationally renowned as a trademark phrase for Gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, and spread into even more common use after the 1998 movie by the same name, starring Johnny Depp.
Is this combination of words coincidence? Of course, it would certainly seem like that. Though not a particularly common phrase, it is not impossible to think of those words uttered together. It was not even the only time Huxley used them in a sentence. In an early novel, Crome Yellow, he settled the words closer to Thompson’s use, albeit separated by a comma:
The eccentricities of the artist and the new-fangled thinker don’t inspire it with that fear, loathing, and disgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them.
But where then did Hunter S. Thompson first come to use “fear and loathing”?
The first time Hunter ever typed out those words – which he would come to use over and over again during his life – was on November 22nd, 1962. He had just heard that John F. Kennedy has been assassinated:
There is no human being within 500 miles to whom I can communicate anything – much less the fear and loathing that is on me after today’s murder.
Had it not been for the assassination of the President of the United States, the news junkie might have heard word of another death that day: Aldous Huxley.
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This story was co-published with The Weather Channel.
NAGS HEAD, North Carolina—This hurricane season, Lance Goldner harbored an unusual wish: that his beach house on North Carolina's scenic Outer Banks would collapse in a storm.
Goldner bought the property with his brother 14 years ago, when it was part of a row of cottages perched above the high-tide line. They'd planned to rent it out, but for much of the past decade, the faded yellow structure has stood vacant. Today, insulation spills from its bowels. Windows are boarded up. And high tides wash underneath between pilings, even on calm days.
Ever since a nor'easter slammed the Outer Banks in 2009, damaging hundreds of homes along these barrier islands, Goldner's cottage has been largely uninhabitable. The storm sucked the land out from beneath the homes. Now only two remain in a row that once numbered 10. Erosion has gradually consumed the shoreline in the tourist town of Nags Head, seizing homes and threatening nearly a billion dollars' worth of property.
Sea level rise from climate change is making matters worse. For homeowners caught in the middle, the damage has left some facing substantial financial losses.
"I just want to break even," said Goldner, a tall man with tousled gray hair and blue eyes.
After the nor'easter, the town declared Goldner's home and nine others on East Seagull Drive public nuisances and ordered their demolition. Two were torn down, but the owners of the other eight fought back. Their lawsuits dragged for years and led to a ruling that said towns did not have the right to clear homes from the beach. Nags Head eventually paid $1.5 million to buy out the owners of six, but it was unable to remove the final two homes.
Goldner, his neighbor and the town are now in a stalemate. The owners of the two remaining homes are unable to secure permits to rebury septic tanks that now poke through the sand. Town officials don't want to spend any more to buy them out. Neighbors are upset that the town spent millions of taxpayer dollars on lawsuits and settlements, yet failed to clear the beach.
If Goldner's house collapsed, he could at least collect insurance.
What's happening along East Seagull Drive is a lesson and warning for coastal communities around the country, highlighting the complicated and expensive legal battles that result from failing to plan for how—and when—to retreat from the disappearing coast.
About 150 miles southwest of Nags Head, the tiny town of North Topsail Beach ended a legal fight by paying more than $1.5 million in 2008 to buy and condemn 12 homes wrecked by a hurricane. In New York City, the state spent more than $100 million buying out homes in three neighborhoods flooded by Hurricane Sandy, though a handful of holdouts have refused to leave.
Along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, beach erosion is worsening as sea level rise accelerates and increasingly violent storms batter the shore. By 2035, 170 communities along the nation's coasts will face chronic flooding from rising seas, about twice as many as today, according to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Many states and towns are relying on an expensive and temporary fix: dredging sand from the sea floor and pumping it onto beaches, a practice called nourishment. Nags Head spent $36 million on nourishment in 2011 and wants to spend as much as $48 million more in 2018.
A beach nourishment project underway in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, shows the difference between a newly nourished beach, in the background, and an area where the shoreline has eroded. Credit: Nicholas Kusnetz/InsideClimate News
In some cases, though, nourishment may only prolong the pain. The effort wasn't enough to save Nags Head's East Seagull Drive. The land there has been eroding at about six feet per year, more than four times the median rate for North Carolina's coast and higher than most of the town's beaches. Robert Young, who studies coastal development at Western Carolina University, said the high erosion rate there has been well understood for decades, so it shouldn't have surprised anyone.
"If you can't proactively handle a place like East Seagull Drive," he said, "how in the world do we expect the United States of America to be planning for rising sea level?"
Suing Nags Head, and a Fear of More to Come
Matthew Toloczko's cottage sits in a spot that almost any outsider would think is no place for a house. The salmon-colored home lies halfway between the dune and the water, suspended two stories above the sand on stilts. Toloczko's is the second remaining cottage on East Seagull Drive, and he's actually been able to fix it up enough for human occupancy, if only it had a functioning septic system.
Toloczko's wife, Lynn, inherited the home from her parents, and over time the land has moved out from under them. A town-zoning map shows that more than half the lot is now in the ocean. Like many beachfront property owners in Nags Head, the Toloczkos live elsewhere—in Great Falls, Virginia, a wealthy Washington, D.C., suburb—and primarily rent the cottage. They own another behind it, too.
Sea level rise is predictable. People are not. The 2009 nor'easter also damaged more than a dozen other homes elsewhere in Nags Head. Most homeowners allowed the town to demolish them. But Toloczko, Goldner and Roc Sansotta—who partially owned and managed six of the East Seagull cottages—refused, and their cases wound up in court. (The owner of the ninth East Seagull home did not resist the town. The tenth was demolished after a 2010 foreclosure.)
After a 2009 nor'easter damaged a row of homes on East Seagull Drive, Nags Head tried to condemn the cottages. Today, two of the original 10 cottages remain. The rest were demolished; their locations are outlined in red. The colored lines show how the shoreline has changed. Credit: USGS; Google Maps; Paul Horn/InsideClimate News
North Carolina courts have held that the public has a right to access the beach, even if property lines extend to the water. Nags Head relied on its ability to enforce this right when it moved to condemn the homes. But in 2012, the Goldners' challenge led to a ruling that gave that authority exclusively to the state, blocking Outer Banks towns from condemning homes when erosion puts them in the middle of the beach.
The Toloczko and Sansotta cases, aided by the 2012 ruling, dragged on. In Toloczko's case, it took three years and several appeals before it appeared headed for a jury trial.
By that point, Toloczko said he'd had enough. He said he has spent $500,000 on legal fees. So he offered to drop his suit in return for $200,000 and the deed to a vacant adjoining beach lot, where he hoped to bury the septic tank for his repaired home. With his property appraised at $212,200, he'd probably break even. The town agreed.
The Tolockzo home on East Seagull Drive could be habitable, but erosion has left the septic system above ground and the owners can’t get a permit to bury it. At high tide, the ocean sloshes underneath the home. Credit: Alex Wroblewski/Weather Channel
The following year, Nags Head settled with Sansotta, bought his six cottages for $1.5 million, and tore them down. While the legislature passed a bill after the Goldner ruling giving towns the authority to clear the beach, Nags Head officials have been unwilling to test it, fearing new lawsuits.
Meanwhile, Toloczko managed to get his septic system in and rented his house in the summer of 2016, until a series of storms hit and again exposed the tank. He's been unable to secure a permit to rebury it. He's counting on the next round of beach nourishment to build up the sand enough to allow him to bury the tank again.
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"When I saw nourishment coming, I said: I'll fix it, and I'll have a half-million-dollar property," he said. "That's the yin and yang. I'm here because I believe they finally will nourish it. And if I have 50 feet of beach in front of me or more, I'm fine."
Shifting Sands: 'We're Not Supposed to Be Here'
To a surprising degree, coastal policy is set, not by the federal government, or even in state capitals, but by part-time public officials in local town halls. One day this summer, John Ratzenberger, a retired Army colonel who now serves as a Nags Head commissioner, arrived in one such town hall wearing sandals, khaki shorts and an electric-blue fishing shirt. Ratzenberger is overseeing the town's beach nourishment program, but he's quick to acknowledge that the geology of the Outer Banks is no friend to human habitation.
John Ratzenberger, a town commissioner, heads beach nourishment projects in Nags Head. Credit: Nicholas Kusnetz/InsideClimate News
"We're not supposed to be here," he said.
The barrier islands stretch some 200 miles from southern Virginia to halfway down North Carolina's coast. They are, essentially, a string of shifting sandbars. For thousands of years, winds and waves have been washing sand off beaches and onto the islands, eating away at the shore on one side while building it up on the other. The problem comes when a house or a road gets in the way.
In 1979, the state ordered that new structures be set back from the vegetation line—where plants have taken root on the dunes—at 30 times the local annual erosion rate. If the shore is eroding at 1 foot per year in a given spot, a new home would have to lie at least 30 feet from the vegetation line.
"Guess what," said Young, of Western Carolina University. "If you set your house back 30 times the calculated erosion rate, 30 years later, it's in the ocean."
On the North Carolina coast, bulldozers spread sand as it is pumped through a pipe from a dredge offshore to nourish the beach. Credit: Nicholas Kusnetz/InsideClimate News
For decades, people here would move their homes—Lynn Toloczko's parents moved theirs—but as development has increased and the shore has eroded away, there's less land to move to. So towns are instead rebuilding the beaches.
After spending $36 million in 2011—and raising taxes on property owners—only 64 percent of the sand that Nags Head pumped onto the beaches that year remained in July. The town is now planning a $48 million project to replace it, though it's counting on the federal government to provide $20 million of that total. Nags Head qualifies for the help because Hurricane Matthew removed much of the sand last year, but it hasn't yet won approval for the funds.
Click on the map below to explore beach nourishment projects along the U.S. coasts.
Of North Carolina's 160 miles of developed beaches, three-quarters of it is slated for nourishment. A couple of decades ago only 12 miles were nourished regularly. At least $310 million was doled out in the state from 2007 through 2016 by local, state and federal governments, according to data compiled by Western Carolina University. This year, towns to the north and south of Nags Head spent an additional $64 million on their own projects. The work is temporary by design, generally holding back the sea for only a few years before it needs repeating.
"We have 127 miles of communities in the state of North Carolina that, in order to have an economy next year, they've got to pump sand because there's no beach anymore," said Stanley Riggs, a geologist at East Carolina University who has spent his career studying the islands. "This whole system is collapsing."
Communities up and down the East Coast are facing the same problem, and turning to the same solution. Nationally, at least $3.1 billion was spent on nourishment from 2007 through 2016, according to Western Carolina's data. The federal government has covered most of the cost.
"We're basically trying to build one giant beach from Connecticut to Texas, and it's really expensive," Young said.
The View from East Seagull Drive Photo slideshow by Alex Wroblewski of The Weather Channel The town of Nags Head, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, is known for its beaches. But erosion from storms and sea level rise has been taking a toll, and beachside homes are suffering the consequences. The high tide line has been inching deeper into the island over the years, eroding the shoreline in a community built on ocean tourism. Houses on East Seagull Drive now have beachfront property after most of the row in front of them was demolished. Matthew Toloczko’s salmon-colored cottage sits two stories up on stilts, halfway between the dunes and the water. It could be habitable, but its septic system is now well above ground and Toloczko can’t get a permit to bury it. Lance Goldner’s boarded up cottage is one of two homes left from a row of 10 that once stood on the ocean side of East Seagull Drive. The others were demolished, with six of them requiring a $1.5 million buy-out from the town. Goldner says he could recoup more of his investment from insurance if the house collapsed than what the town has offered. Beachcombers can walk under Goldner’s boarded up cottage, which sits high above the water on stilts. Some have left graffiti. Even on calm days, however, high tides slosh among the home’s pilings. Insulation is coming out the bottom of Goldner’s uninhabited cottage. The windows have been boarded up, and like his neighbor, Goldner is unable to connect his septic system, which is now above ground. Nags Head has invested in beach nourishment, building up the beaches every few years to protect neighborhoods and the town’s tourism-based economy. The town spent $36 million on beach nourishment in 2011 and is planning to spend as much as $48 million more in 2018. After repairing the one-block road after every major storm, Nags Head officials voted last year to abandon East Seagull Drive. Homeowners now maintain it as a private road.
Nags Head is developing a 30-year plan to repeatedly build up its beach. Over the same period, the sea is expected to rise 4 to 10 inches. Town officials say that, with nearly half of their tax base sitting within a couple of blocks of the ocean, they have no choice but to continue nourishment for as long as the town can afford it.
Such a tactic may only postpone an inevitable reckoning by encouraging people to continue to buy and build in risky spots like East Seagull Drive. State rules allow towns that have been able to extend their coastlines farther out to sea—through repeated beach nourishments—to approve new development, under a limited set of circumstances, by using their new dunes as the line for setbacks. This, effectively, moves development in tandem with the nourishment.
"Given what we know about the future of sea level rise and climate issues, it's not a prudent policy," said Todd Miller, executive director of the environmental group North Carolina Coastal Federation. "It's one thing to protect what we've got. It's another to create additional hazards for the future."
Waiting for the Hurricane
Back on East Seagull Drive, Goldner has found himself in something of a real estate purgatory, largely of his own doing.
Protecting his eroding property has proved challenging. In 2012, he said, the town offered him $100,000 to drop his lawsuit and give up his house. Goldner declined, intent on recovering the full $230,000 he says he owes on his mortgage. But over time the deals only soured. He and the town eventually agreed to drop their claims without an exchange of money or property. Then, in May, the town offered to buy his house for $35,000. Again, Goldner declined. Town Manager Cliff Ogburn said the town later upped its offer to $50,000, though Goldner said he never received such an offer and wouldn't accept it anyway.
"I knew real estate values can go down," he said. "I never imagined it could go down 100 percent." He was sitting in the breakfast room of a Travelodge he owns in Kill Devil Hills, just north of Nags Head. Families were eating cereal and drinking coffee out of Styrofoam bowls and cups.
Goldner, like his neighbors, has federal flood insurance, which could pay out up to $250,000 if the home collapsed in the waves. As he drove down to see his cottage later that day, Goldner said that although the last beach nourishment failed to help him rent out the house, he is counting on the next project to render the home habitable, so he can sell or rent the place.
If that doesn't work, he said, "I'm just gonna have to wait for the hurricane."
Top photo: Homes line the eroding shoreline in Nags Head, North Carolina. The town has spent millions of dollars rebuilding its beaches. Credit: Alex Wroblewski/Weather ChannelFor other people with the same name, see Frederick West
Frederick Walter Stephen West (29 September 1941 – 1 January 1995) was an English serial killer who committed at least 12 murders between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire, the majority with his second wife, Rosemary West.
All the victims were young women. At least eight of these murders involved the Wests' sexual gratification and included rape, bondage, torture and mutilation; the victims' dismembered bodies were typically buried in the cellar or garden of the Wests' Cromwell Street home in Gloucester, which became known as the "House of Horrors". Fred also committed at least two murders on his own, and Rose murdered Fred's stepdaughter, Charmaine. The couple were apprehended and charged in 1994.
Fred West fatally asphyxiated himself while on remand at HM Prison Birmingham on 1 January 1995, at which time he and Rose were jointly charged with nine murders, and he with three further murders. In November 1995, Rose was convicted of ten murders and sentenced to ten life terms with a whole life order.
Early life [ edit ]
Childhood [ edit ]
Frederick Walter Stephen West was born on 29 September 1941 at Bickerton Cottage, Much Marcle, Herefordshire, the first surviving child born to Walter Stephen West (5 July 1914 – 28 March 1992) and Daisy Hannah Hill (20 May 1922 – 6 February 1968).[3] His was a poor family of farm workers, close-knit and mutually protective; his father was a disciplinarian and his mother overprotective.
In 1946, the family moved to Moorcourt Cottage at Moorcourt Farm, where Fred's father worked as a milking herdsman and harvest hand. The cottage had no electricity and was heated by a log fireplace. By 1951, Fred's mother had given birth to eight children, six of whom survived, but Fred was always his mother's favourite. He was seen as a mother's boy, and relied mostly on his siblings for companionship.
The West children were expected to perform assigned chores, and all six did seasonal work, the three girls picking hops and strawberries, the three boys harvesting wheat and hunting rabbits. The necessity of working to earn a living, or even just to survive, instilled a strong work ethic in Fred, who also developed a lifelong habit of petty theft.
Classmates recall Fred as scruffy, dim, lethargic, and regularly in trouble. Throughout his life, he remained scarcely literate, yet displayed an aptitude for woodwork and artwork. He left school in December 1956 at age 15, initially working as a labourer at Moorcourt Farm.
Fred claimed he was introduced to sex by his mother at 12, to have engaged in acts of bestiality with animals in his early teens, and that his belief in incest being normal stemmed from his father's incest with Fred's sisters.[10] Fred's youngest brother, Doug, dismissed these claims as fantasy on Fred's part.[11]
Adolescence [ edit ]
By 1957, Fred and his brother John frequently socialised at a youth club in nearby Ledbury, where his distinct and guttural Herefordshire accent marked him as a "country bumpkin". He aggressively pestered women and girls, whom he objectified as sources of pleasure to be used as he saw fit, and would abruptly approach and fondle them. When a girl acquiesced to his advances, she would find his sexual performance unsatisfying, as his primary objective was his own gratification.
Shortly after his 17th birthday, Fred bought a motorcycle, and two months later suffered a fractured skull, a broken arm, and a broken leg in an accident. He was unconscious for seven days and walked with braces for several months; because of this incident, he developed an extreme fear of hospitals and became prone to fits of rage. Two years later, he suffered a further head injury when a girl he groped on a fire escape outside the Ledbury Youth Club punched him, sending him falling two floors.[15]
In June 1961, Fred's 13-year-old sister, Kitty, told her mother that Fred had been raping her since the previous December, and had impregnated her. Arrested the same month, Fred freely admitted to police he had been molesting young girls since his early teens and asked, "Doesn't everybody do it?" He was tried on 9 November at Herefordshire Assizes. Though disgusted by her son's actions, Daisy had been prepared to testify in his defence. Kitty refused to testify and the case collapsed.[19] Much of Fred's family effectively disowned him, his mother banished him from the household, and he moved into the Much Marcle house of his aunt Violet. By mid-1962, he had reconciled with his parents, but his relationship with most of his family remained fraught.
Rena Costello [ edit ]
Marriage [ edit ]
Fred became re-acquainted with Catherine ("Rena") Bernadette Costello in September 1962, when he was 21. He had first met Costello—who came from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire —at a Much Marcle dance hall in 1960, and dated her for several months before she returned to Scotland. Costello was pregnant by a Pakistani bus driver at the time of her marriage to Fred, and she may have relocated from Glasgow to England due to the stigma of her baby's mixed ancestry. She married Fred in Ledbury on 17 November, the sole guest being Fred's younger brother John. The couple initially lived in Fred's aunt's home, then moved to Coatbridge, where Fred worked as an ice cream van driver. Rena's daughter, Charmaine, was born in March 1963; to explain the child's mixed ancestry, Rena and Fred claimed that she had suffered a miscarriage and that Charmaine was adopted. Shortly thereafter, the couple relocated to Savoy Street, in the Bridgeton district of Glasgow.
In July 1964, Rena bore Fred a daughter, Anna Marie. The child was born at the couple's Savoy Street home.[27] The family nanny, Isa McNeill, and neighbours of the Wests, recall Rena as a considerate mother "struggling to bring up two children";[27] Fred treated the children harshly. He kept the girls in the bottom of a bunk bed with bars fitted to the space between the bunks, effectively caging them; they were allowed out only when he was at work. Via McNeill, the Wests became acquainted with 16-year-old Anne McFall,[30] a friend of McNeill's, who was despondent over the death of her boyfriend in a workplace accident. McFall spent a great deal of time at the West |
ais, who introduced her as “Rachel from Friends” at the 2010 Golden Globe awards.
But Kit wants people to know that he’s more than the character in the furry armor, and more than the “babe” that directors cast to play a young man with strong features, dark hair and green eyes.
In a recent interview with The Sunday Times Magazine, Harington took the very cliché ‘what about me?’ approach and claimed there were two sets of rules when addressing sexism in the film industry.
“I think there’s a double standard,” he told The Sunday Times Magazine. “If you said to a girl, ‘Do you like being called a babe?’ and said, ‘No, not really,’ she’d be absolutely right.
"I like to think of myself as more than a head of hair or a set of looks. It’s demeaning. Yes, in some ways you could argue I’ve been employed for a look I have. But there’s a sexism that happens towards men. There’s definitely a sexism in our industry that happens towards women, and there is towards men as well... At some points during photoshoots when I’m asked to strip down, I felt that. If I felt I was being employed just for my looks, I’d stop acting."
It’s not surprising that someone with a background in speech and drama, rather than gender studies or sociology would present ‘sexism’ incorrectly. But the issue here is that Harington’s popularity and access to a media amphitheater gives him the opportunity to express this misinformation to the public, and influence people that his own personal experience can be used as a case study of sexism in Hollywood.
Kit Harington's recent Jimmy Choo campaign - Clearly an ambassador for gender equality (Image: Jimmy Choo)
While celebrities are only human, put their trousers on one leg at a time and slip up like the rest of us do, Kit Harington really hung himself out to dry when he gave the publication several examples of this so called, “double standard” and suggested that he truly sees an injustice served to men, whose problems aren’t addressed in the same way that women’s are.
But what's more strange than having a person disparage an issue that affects so many of their colleagues, is that this person is Kit Harington.
Firstly, having worked on a show that depicts historic representations of physical and sexual violence toward women, Kit should probably be aware that women have been treated differently to men throughout history. To say that there is a ‘double standard’ between men and women never really makes sense, as it suggests that men’s and women’s opportunities and experience is on par. This is obviously impossible, given that our society was built on centuries of female oppression and years of sexist public policy, and consequently, still reflects this social structure.
Secondly, women do not hold political, economic and institutional power like men and until Harington is facing disadvantage because of his biological make-up, he is not the spokesperson for sexism. Sexism, racism and any other form of discrimination that is derived from the oppression of a dominating group onto an othered minority works in regards to who has the power and the priveldge. Cis-gendered men, like Harington, can't experience the the kind of discrimination that stems from oppression (ie: sexism) just from feeling objectified by the opposite gender. A person who has worked five years on a program which illustrates the power imbalance between male and female relationships probably should have clued onto this somewhere in between Games of Thrones’ portraying the patriarchal order of succession or simply, female characters being raped by men.
What Kit has experienced during his opportunities as a powerful player in Hollywood, is objectification and possibly prejudice. To his credit, being treated as an imaginary boyfriend for dozens of hopeful fans is particularly demeaning and not being allowed to cut your trademark hair, as it’s central to your job role, undermines you as an individual. However, it's secondary to say - an awards host performing a song and dance about'seeing your boobs' to an international audience. And for Harington to have such conversations within a discussion of sexism in an industry which is literally full of sexism, steers away from those making movies and TV shows who are actually facing discrimination because of their gender – like Kit Harington’s co-stars, for example.
It has been reported that Game of Thrones pays their actors in a tier system, which is determined by their character’s long-term value. While Emilia Clarke and Lena Headey share the highest paying 'A-Tier' bracket with male counterparts Kit Harington, Peter Dinklage and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, there are no men in the 'B-Tier' who receive less.
Contradictory to what this suggests, women are not actually killing it in the acting industry, dominating supporting roles and getting a sweet wage that simply reflects their contribution or input. It actually demonstrates the all too familiar gender pay gap problem in which women earn less than men because they do not have the same opportunities to be granted the highest paying role. As our film and television industry continues to have less demand for female characters in main roles, people like Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams will always sit in the B-tier and earn less than people like Harington, because script writers, casting directors, television networks and the audiences that love hit TV shows, want to see men in an ‘A-tier’ role.
So, before Kit Harington wants to make an expert comment on behalf of the industry that he works in, perhaps he should reflect on some of the things that HBO should have taught him about sexism.
MORE ON SEXISM IN HOLLYWOOD Hollywood's sexism is officially under investigation Finally Hollywood is looking into the industry's gender discrimination.I bought my yacht Wildwood the year before Seth was born, so he has been around yachts all his life. I remember being heavily pregnant and climbing up ladders in the haul out yard much to my mothers horror! I think Seth was about three weeks old the first time he went out in a yacht.
Lots of people take their kids off sailing around the world and I think that would be absolutely amazing and I really admire them. Unfortunately Seth’s father is not a sailor, and there is no way he would let me do that. But to be fair, I should probably not blame him, and admit that I would go absolutely mad being in a small confined space like a yacht 24/7 with Seth and his step siblings for an extended period of time… however in saying that, given the opportunity I would probably still give it a try and just take along extra wine to help ease my nerves perhaps.
So our sailing adventures for now are confined to weekends and school holidays, but we make the most of every minute of that time and take the kids out on the boat as much as we can.
Here are some of my tips for sailing with kids:
The rule on our yacht is that kids always need to wear lifejackets when they are up on deck, if they are in the cabin they can take their lifejackets off unless we are sailing in rough conditions. (Now I have said that, I realise that in about half the pics below Seth isn’t wearing a lifejacket! Ahh well – we AIM to have the kids wearing a lifejacket when they are in the cockpit!)
Get a decent comfy lifejacket that fits so that they are happy to wear it
Same goes with a decent jacket – no one has any fun if they are cold and or wet
Take spare clothes as the kids will always without fail get wet
When cruising try to give everyone their own space to have all their clothes, toys and stuff contained in one area
Have lots of books, games, colouring, iPads or whatever close at hand for rainy days
Have buckets and spades, and inflatable toys for them to use on sunny days
Teach kids how to use the dinghy, how to row, and how to use the motor when they are big enough. Preferably learn to row before learning to use the motor! Seth was six when he started motoring around on his own in the dinghy!
Teach them how to steer the yacht, practice a man overboard drill so they would know what to do if you fell overboard
Same with the VHF radio. Show them how to use it if something happened to you
Have lots of snacks and easy things for them to eat
Kids love fishing, but teach them how to take the fish off the hook early on so you don’t have to get up every time they catch a little spotty! (corks make great bait for four year olds… ;0)
Always have a parent on deck watching when they are swimming or jumping off the side
Have hats, sunglasses, sunscreen and t shirts to stay safe in the sun and keep them hydrated
Pick your days, you don’t want to freak them out and put them off sailing ever again! If it does get rough, make sure you explain to them what is going on and reassure them that all is going to be ok.
When they are big enough – 9 or 10 – teach them how to sail a dinghy like an Optimist, so they get a better understanding of how the bigger yacht works.
Teach them how to snorkel, kayak, waterski behind the dinghy, use the paddle board etc. They LOVE that!
Have a good first aid kit on board in case of any fish hook or cuts on shells etc
Make it fun and they will enjoy it as much as you do!
Kids having fun Star fishI received a huge box from Amazon a couple days ago. (I even left work early because I have absolutely no patience!) Inside was a big blue felt bag (which I can't wait to reuse--thanks Amazon). Inside the big blue felt bag? A Mr. Beer Brewing Kit!! I can't wait to get started. I have tried home brewing before and failed miserably. Hopefully this time I will succeed!
And today, I get home after nearly killing myself trying to drive through the snow/sleet crap that's happening right now and there's another box!! Inside are some of my Santa's favorite beers. IPA's happen to be my favorite too! I can not be more excited to try them. I've had Arrogant Bastard before, and it is really great. I will be having the 16th Anniversary IPA tonight with my SO. Sipping it all night of course (it's 10.0% ABV).
Cheers to you, u/rokskeptic (Cory)! I couldn't have asked for a better Secret Santa!Winter Cremes Collection by Hiya guys! Do you have any plans for the weekend? I see a lot of sleeping in my immediate future. Not only because I'll be heading to treatment this afternoon, but also because Jersey is expecting some snow. Yay fun... said no one ever, haha. But here's some to brighten everyone's day... a new Bliss release! Today I'm sharing swatches for the gorgeousby Bliss Polish, which consists of five muted creamy shades. And I know what you're thinking and the answer is a big yes - these do watermarble and stamp. I'll be showing examples in another post, but for now let's get to the swatches.
Bliss Polish - Salmon
Bliss Polish - Lilac
Bliss Polish - Moss
Bliss Polish - Berry
Bliss Polish - Pond
Be sure to follow Bliss Polish on social media:
Theby Bliss Polish is now available for purchase. Each full-size shade retails for $8 and the complete set can be purchased for $38.can be described as a dusty peachy colored creme. Peach shades will forever make me nervous, but once again Bliss manages to nail a perfect peach hue. Pun intended. It's such a gorgeous subtle hue that manages to look great against my skin complexion. Major plus in my book.The formula has a minimal sheer coverage on a first coat, but covers completely with a second. Amazing self-leveling. It dries to a very high-shine on its own before topcoat. Shown in two coats and sealed with a glossy topcoat.can be described as a dusty lavender creme. This shade brings me back to yester-year when I was fourteen and lavender was life. I insisted on having all my pink walls covered in this shade instead... little did I know that in the following two years I would want them painted black instead. Oh that transition to emo, every parents favorite phase I'm sure.The formula was a bit sheer on a first coat, but evens out perfectly with a second. Similar application and consistency to- smooth and very easy to work with. Shown in two coats and sealed with a glossy topcoat.can be described as a medium tone dusty green creme. I don't say this often about a greens, but I honestly love this particular shade. It looks very chic and modern! I have been obsessed with olive/tan camo print and this would go so well with those outfits.Another smooth application and formula with this one. I found this shade to be the most opaque of the bunch and definitely a one coater if you don't use a light hand (like I tend to do). Shown in two coats and sealed with a glossy topcoat.can be described as a dusty mauve color creme. So perfectly named! The shade just screams berrlicious to me! It's much more vibrant than the others in this collection, while still having that dusty low-key tone to it.The formula has a very opaque application, it almost feels like a one coater. Like the others, it dries to a high shine on its own. Shown in two coats and sealed with a glossy topcoat.can be described as a dusty medium blue teal creme. Doesn't this steal your heart away?! As a huge fan of blues this one certainly had me drooling. It just has such a unique tone and hue, I don't believe I had anything similar prior.Most similar in application and consistency to that of Berry. Shown in two coats and sealed with a glossy topcoat.Overall if you're a fan of creme finishes then these are all must-haves for your collection! Bliss Polish makes some of my favorite cremes, I am pretty sure I purchased nearly all of her creme quads last year. It's all about that flawless formula that is always consistent in any creme I have tried from Yvette. I also love the muted tones of these, they are so perfect to wear any-time not just winter! I cannot wait to do some nail art using these. So obviously I am head over heels for these, but tell me what you guys think!To recap, theby Bliss Polish is now available for purchase. Each full-size shade retails for $8 and the complete set can be purchased for $38.Image copyright EPA
Five people have been charged with multiple sexual offences after Sydney's police found footage apparently showing a gang rape of a 16-year-old girl.
Police said the suspects were four men in their 20s and a 17-year-old boy.
They were arrested after police conducting an anti-graffiti operation found the footage on a GoPro camera.
The alleged assault took place in May during a party in Sydney's suburb of St Clair, police said, and was not reported at the time.
The 16 minutes of footage, found later that month, depicted "multiple sexual assaults of a teenage girl by a number of male offenders," a New South Wales police statement said.
Police are alleging up to eight men were in the room at the time, with a number of them involved in the assault.
Detective Chief Inspector Peter Yeomans, from the Child Abuse squad, was quoted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that "it was quite obvious to investigators when viewing this footage that the child was either unconscious or semi-conscious during these assaults".
Officials believe that the victim - who has not been identified and is currently in counselling - may have had her drink spiked at the party.
Australian media have named two of the men charged with sexual assault at Penrith Local Court as Andrew Waters and Kurt Stevenson. Another man and an unnamed teenager also face similar charges.
A fifth person, Tristan Carlyle-Watson, was charged with concealing a serious offence.Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced early elections on September 20 asking Greek people to give SYRIZA a fresh mandate for a “free, democratic and socially just Greece.”
In his 14-minute speech Tsipras reviewed and praised the Greek government’s work in securing a new bailout agreement that saved Greece from bankruptcy. He said the agreement was the result of the determination of the Greek people and that 23 billion euros have already been disbursed for the recovery of Greek economy and bank recapitalization. He also criticized the SYRIZA dissidents for wanting a rift with Europe and return to the drachma.
“We didn’t achieve the deal we were hoping for, we had to make concessions, we were forced to by the circumstances. It was the best agreement we could make and now we must fulfill our duty,” he said.
“We won many things in negotiations and we managed to avert several illogical demands in labor market laws or pension cuts. We said no to mass layoffs in the public sector, we rehired the cleaners and school guards, we said no to the 5-euro hospital admission. We managed to avoid fiscal demands of 20 million euros. Also, it is agreed to negotiate Greek debt relief,” he continued.
“It is my political and moral obligation to ask you, the Greek people, to decide how we will move from now on. You will judge, through your vote, if we fared right with creditors, you will judge if we can implement the new reforms. You will decide who will proceed with the changes and reforms the country needs,” Tsipras stated.
“You will judge the stance of those who claim ideological consistency and righteousness and want us to have bailout agreements but with the drachma as national currency. Those who turned a majority leftist government into a minority government,” he further stated.
“During these months we made Greece a global concern, we sent the message that austerity in Europe is not the right strategy. We are protagonists in the future of Europe. I asked the European Council to be part of the bailout program review, to be ever present in Greece and monitor the progress of reforms,” he said.
“Now we have many fights to give, against corruption and injustice, against tax evasion and bureaucracy. All these require a fresh people’s mandate,” he continued.
“I will ask the Greek people to vote for us to govern for a free, democratic socially just Greece. We will not give up our values to no one. The best days are ahead of us. I invite you to fight with us to keep democracy and Greece in our hands,” he concluded.
Tsipras then went to the Presidential Mansion to submit his resignation to President of the Hellenic Republic Prokopis Pavlopoulos.
The elections day was decided during a meeting in parliament between the cabinet and key SYRIZA lawmakers. It was stressed that the election campaign period should be short.
The idea that elections should be held immediately was supported by key cabinet members such as Energy Minister Panos Skourletis Justice Minister Nikos Paraskevopoulos and Eurpean MP Dimitris Papadimoulis.
The SYRIZA Political Secretariat will meet on Friday at 2 pm.Image copyright Getty Images
UK unemployment fell by 75,000 in the three months to July, bringing the jobless rate down to 4.3% from 4.4% in the previous quarter.
The rate remains at its lowest since 1975, but a squeeze on real incomes continues, according to the Office for National Statistics figures.
Wages in the period were 2.1% up on a year earlier, little changed from the previous months' growth rates.
With inflation hitting 2.9% in August, wages are failing to keep up.
In real terms, wages have fallen by 0.4% over the last year.
Matt Hughes, a senior ONS statistician, said: "Another record high employment rate and a record low inactivity rate suggest the labour market continues to be strong.
"In particular, the number of people aged 16 to 64 not in the labour force because they are looking after family or home is the lowest since records began, at less than 2.1 million.
Inflation has picked up sharply since the pound fell after the Brexit vote last year.
Employment minister Damian Hinds said: "The strength of the economy is helping people of all ages find work, from someone starting their first job after leaving education, to those who might be starting a new career later in life.
"But there is more to do, and we will continue to build on our achievements through our employment programmes and the work of Jobcentre Plus."
Interest rates
Economists have been pondering what the latest data means for the course of interest rates.
The panel that sets interest rates at the Bank of England, the Monetary Policy Committee, will make its announcement on Thursday.
Last month two committee members backed a rate rise, and there has been speculation that the Bank's chief economist Andy Haldane could join them this week.
That would still leave the committee split 6-3 against raising rates from the record low 0.25%.
Some economists think that the latest data will favour the so-called doves, who argue in favour of keeping rates on hold.
"While the continued strength of employment will be welcomed by the MPC, the continued absence of a pick-up in wage growth is likely to keep the doves in the majority," said Andrew Wishart, UK economist for Capital Economics.
Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics, said: "The latest labour market data are, on balance, a setback for the hawks on the MPC arguing for higher interest rates," he said.
"The three-month average number of job vacancies in August was 0.9% lower than in the previous three months, pointing to a slowdown in employment growth ahead."
Pound reverses
The sluggish figures on wage growth were blamed for a fall in value of the pound against the dollar.
Sterling, which had been higher in morning trading, fell back after the ONS figures were released.
The pound was trading as high as $1.3329 before the data, but gave up those gains to trade at $1.3275.
Does your job pay less than it did five years ago?
Wage stagnation and an ever increasing cost of living have left many people feeling poorer over the last few years.
But for some workers skills shortages mean pay has shot up. Try out our calculator, then scroll down to find out the jobs market's winners and losers...It’s more pernicious than revenge porn—and it only takes one malware-infected email, instant message, or download to ruin lives.
Twenty-year-old Jared James Abrahams of Temecula, California was sentenced on Monday to 18 months in prison for “sextortion”—hacking into the computers of dozens of women, furtively snapping nude photos of them and threatening to leak the images if they didn’t send him more naked pics or strip down during Skype sessions.
Abrahams, a computer science major at Temecula College, managed to obtain photos of teens from Southern California to Russia—including current Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf—and had access to as many as 150 computers before he was arrested last September. Two months later, he pleaded guilty to one count of computer hacking and three counts of extortion.
The “sextortion case” made international headlines when Wolf, who attended the same high school as Abrahams, was revealed as one of his targets. Abrahams told Wolf that her “dream of being a model will be transformed into a porn star” and posted a naked photo when she didn’t respond to his threats.
But the most disturbing details of this particular case involve two teenage victims from Ireland and Canada who relented to five minute Skype sessions with Abrahams, in which they “undressed for him...while he recorded their video chat sessions,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Vibhav Mittal said during Abrahams’ sentencing.
Abrahams was menacing and pugnacious on Skype. According to FBI affidavits, he demanded one 14-year-old girl show “every part of you!” and warned a distraught 17-year-old victim, “I do NOT have a heart!”
Abrahams’ sentencing is the latest in a slew of California “sextortion” cases prosecuted by the U.S. District Attorney’s Office. In December, 27-year-old Karen “Gary” Kazaryan was sentenced to five years in prison for hacking and identity theft and declared a “sexual cyberterrorist” by prosecutors. And in 2011, 32-year-old Luis Mijangos was given six years for remotely accessing teenage girls’ webcams and playing “psychological games” with them for his own sexual gratification (the FBI estimated he was monitoring some 230 people, at least 44 of whom were underage, when he was arrested in 2010).
It’s unclear why Abrahams got a significantly shorter prison sentence than his “sextortionist” predecessors. His attorney noted that Abrahams suffered from “social anxiety and autism spectrum disorder,” but underscored that these were not grounds for mitigating his crimes.The New York Times Friday published several documents Microsoft used to make the case that a Google purchase of DoubleClick would give the search engine powerhouse several competitive advantages in the online advertising market.
Microsoft was hoping the documents, which include a three-page diagram (PDF) of the so-called online ad "pipeline" Google would control should the $3.1 billion deal be consummated, would sway the Federal Trade Commission into believing that the purchase would make Google the consummate monopolist.
Now that the FTC has blessed the merger (Merry Christmas, Google), Microsoft's documentation of Google's online ad position comes off as the data-driven equivalent of flipping the chess board up in frustration; Microsoft sees Google's checkmate coming, but the only thing it can do is make some noise and hope someone listens.
Will the European Commission listen? I doubt it. Turnabout is fair play. How many Microsoft competitors felt the same helplessness watching the presiding market gorilla eat all of its bananas?
Microsoft also articulated (Word doc) how the combination of Google's vast ad networks with DoubleClick's publishing tools will give the company overwhelming chunks of the market.
In fact, I owe Microsoft thanks because I learned more about what Google's position in the market will look like once it tucks in DoubleClick from Microsoft than from what Google offered.
But the best part of these documents is not the detail, it's the prognostications that could shed light on just how ingenious (and perhaps, insidious) Google's ad plans are with DoubleClick.
Drawing on Google's history of providing software or services for free in exchange for the right to have and use data, Microsoft suggested that Google will offer DoubleClick's DFP (DART for Publishers) hosted ad-serving platform for free in exchange for the first shot at publishers' remaining inventory.
The idea is that, like any tyrant, Google could sift through the good stuff and save the spoils for Microsoft, Yahoo and anyone else vying for pie.
Microsoft covered all the bases. Not only did it provide a document explaining how Google could lock others out of the market, but it composed a list (Word doc) of six suggestions for lessening the impact of a Google and DoubleClick marriage.
These include spinning off DFP businesses to an independent and viable purchaser; open access for competing ad networks; open access to AdSense/AdWords for competing tool vendors; elimination of restrictive API practices; prohibiting exclusive dealings; and setting up firewalls so that the Google commercial organization cannot access competitively sensitive data flowing through DoubleClick's ad-serving tools.
My guess is that any of these "remedies" would be a deal-breaker for Google.
Anyone who wants to really dive into the ramifications of the deal to see how it will affect the online ad market should check out these documents. Are they FUD? They most certainly are. But it's also some of the best organized and compellingly articulated FUD I've ever read.
I would love to know exactly what the FTC thought about these documents and how well it weighed them prior to making its decision. If you believe the allegations in the Microsoft documents, the DoubleClick deal could cripple competitors.
My guess is the FTC considered how the DoubleClick deal would hurt the consumer and not how it will hurt Microsoft, Yahoo, et al. Perhaps Microsoft should have spent more time explaining how a Google-DoubleClick union could harm consumers instead of toppling the online ad chessboard.
Perhaps Microsoft didn't go there because it didn't have the evidence to support a case for the deal harming consumers, in which case the point is moot.Throughout Rise of the Tomb Raider we’ve seen Lara Croft rise to a world fiercely protecting its secrets while overcoming a ruthless organization known as Trinity, prevail over the brutal conditions of Siberia in the ultimate woman-versus-wild tests of stamina in Endurance Mode, and most recently navigate through myth and reality in conquering the curse of Baba Yaga. The next and final piece of downloadable content in Rise of the Tomb Raider will have Lara encounter an army of nightmarish predators in Cold Darkness Awakened on March 29 in the Xbox Store and Windows Store.
A decommissioned Cold War research base has been breached, unleashing a deadly affliction from its Siberian slumber. As the illness seeps into the wilderness surrounding the base, Trinity soldiers transform into bloodthirsty killers who thrive on carnage. To prevent the affliction from spreading, Lara must rely on her wits, physical agility, and crafting abilities to overcome this new enemy and shut down the decommissioned base.
Cold Darkness Awakened is included in the Rise of the Tomb Raider Season Pass, which also contains the Endurance Mode and the recently released Baba Yaga: The Temple of the Witch DLC. For those who haven’t joined Lara Croft on her first Tomb Raiding expedition, Rise of the Tomb Raider for Xbox One and Xbox 360 are currently featured in the Xbox Store Spring Sale from March 22 – 28; be sure to check out Xbox.com for more great deals!NyanCat may never be looked at the same way again.
This article is meant to comprehensively break down the enormous material of Vault7's "Year Zero" into something more meaningful to readers less familiar with this technical material. Some highlights include the ability to manipulate cars, TVs, and your computer without you ever noticing and having your passwords stored on a "NyanCat".
Vault 7 is a series of WikiLeaks releases on the CIA and the methods and means they use to hack, monitor, control and even disable systems ranging from smartphones, to TVs, to possibly even dental implants. The Vault7 leaks themselves can be found on WikiLeaks.
More Vault 7 research can also be found on the Pizzagate Wiki's Vault 7 page.
Branches
The following are the different branches or departments of the CIA Information Operations Center and their purpose as well as the relevant tools or projects they are credited with developing or participating in.
Mission:
To be the premiere development shop for customized hardware and software solutions for Information Operations: utilizing operating system knowledge, hardware design, software craftsmanship, and network expertise to support the IOC Mission.
Source: WikiLeaks
DerStarke
YarnBall
SnowyOwl
HarpyEagle
Weeping Angel
Gyrfalcon
HIVE
Sparrowhawk
MaddeningWhispers
Bee Sting
UMBRAGE
Flash Bang
Fight Club/RickyBobby
Taxman
Improvise
Fine Dining
HammerDrill v2.0
Assassin
Frog Prince
Grasshopper
JQJSTEPCHILD
Perseus/MikroTik
Tools and projects
The following are software tools released in Vault7 and used by the CIA along with descriptions of their methods, reasons and implications for employment. They have been organized by the branch of which developed them.
EDB
Weeping Angel
Weeping Angel is a complex suite of software which gives the user multiple tools and vectors for attacking, monitoring and listening to a target machine, including Smart TVs.(1)
Weeping Angel is able to:(2)
Extract browser credentials or history
Extract WPA/WiFi credentials
Insert Root CA cert to facilitate MitM of browser, remote access, or Adobe application
Investigate the Remote Access feature
Investigate any listening ports & their respective services
Attempt to override /etc/hosts for blocking Samsung updates without DNS query and iptables (referred to by SamyGo)
Add ntpclient update calls to startup scripts to sync implant's system time for accurate audio collection timestamps
Gyrfalcon
Gyrfalcon is a Linux tool that ptraces an OpenSSH client collecting username, password, TCP/IP connections, and session data.(3)
HIVE
HIVE is a multi-platform CIA malware suite and its associated control software. The project provides customizable implants for Windows, Solaris, MikroTik (used in internet routers) and Linux platforms and a Listening Post (LP)/Command and Control (C2) infrastructure to communicate with these implants.
The implants are configured to communicate via HTTPS with the webserver of a cover domain; each operation utilizing these implants has a separate cover domain and the infrastructure can handle any number of cover domains.
Each cover domain resolves to an IP address that is located at a commercial VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider. The public-facing server forwards all incoming traffic via a VPN to a 'Blot' server that handles actual connection requests from clients. It is setup for optional SSL client authentication: if a client sends a valid client certificate (only implants can do that), the connection is forwarded to the 'Honeycomb' toolserver that communicates with the implant; if a valid certificate is missing (which is the case if someone tries to open the cover domain website by accident), the traffic is forwarded to a cover server that delivers an unsuspicious looking website.
The Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer, so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant.
Similar functionality (though limited to Windows) is provided by the RickBobby project.
Source: WikiLeaks
Sparrowhawk
Sparrowhawk's goal was to collect user-entered keystrokes from any system terminal, and collate in a unified format across multiple Unix platforms.(4)
HarpyEagle
HarpyEagle is a tool designed to gain root access on an Apple Airport Extreme and Time Capsule via local and/or remote means to install a persistent rootkit into the flash storage of the devices.(5)
Facedancer21, a component of HarpyEagle, is a client for keyboard emulation. You are able to send keystrokes to the host computer as if you were typing them into a keyboard.(6)
DerStarke
DerStarke appears to be a suite for discretely and persistently monitoring a target device, allowing the attacker to discretely connect to the Internet and thus beacon back to the attacker's device. Unlike typical Windows packages which do similar things, DerStarke was developed for Mac OSX Mavericks.(7)
YarnBall
YarnBall is a client for intercepting USB keyboard traffic for keylogging purposes on primarily Apple devices. The user can then move this data to a discrete storage device curiously labeled as, NyanCat:
Investigate on communication with NyanCat through USB Async/Sync data methods (Would allow larger than 64 byte commands to NyanCat)
Source: WikiLeaks
SnowyOwl
SnowyOwl is a Mac OS X tool that injects a pthread into an OpenSSH client process creating a surreptitious sub-channel to the remote computer.(8)
Bee Sting
Bee Sting is a discrete tool for injecting data in to iFrame media.(9) This would be coupled with something like Flash Bang to deliver a payload discretely through iFrame media (embedded videos, games, etc.).
MaddeningWhispers
MaddeningWhispers is a peculiar set of tools that allow the user to remotely access and beacon a target "Vanguard-based" device. The user is then able to run a command-line client on the target machine and use it as a beacon/listening post and can also manipulate USB devices on the same bus.(10)
RDB
UMBRAGE
The CIA's hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a "fingerprint" that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity.
This is analogous to finding the same distinctive knife wound on multiple separate murder victims. The unique wounding style creates suspicion that a single murderer is responsible. As soon one murder in the set is solved then the other murders also find likely attribution.
The CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.
Source: WikiLeaks
OSB
Flash Bang
Flash Bang is a tool designed to be able to migrate from a browser process (using sandbox breakout), escalate privileges, and memory load a NOD Persistence Spec dll.(11) This basically hacks target system and sets up persistent backdoor through iframe media (embedded videos, games, etc.).
Fight Club/RickyBobby
Fight Club is loaded onto sections of the target system where a set of future actions can be taken. RickyBobby then allows constant monitoring of the network Fight Club is loaded on and performs persistent tasks.(12)
Agents would load a customized malware payload with Fight Club on USB for physical delivery. Software would be loaded onto target's system discretely by disguising itself as WinRAR, VLC Media Player, and more. Nicknames for each, customized payload included MelomyDropkick (TrueCrypt), MelomyRoundhouse (VLC Player), MelomyLeftHook (Shamela) and MelomyKarateChop (WinRar).(13)
Taxman
Taxman is awesome. 'Nuff said.
Source: WikiLeaks
Improvise
'Improvise' is a toolset for configuration, post-processing, payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender), MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor). Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from 'Fine Dining' questionairies.
Source: WikiLeaks
Fine Dining
Fine Dining comes with a standardized questionnaire i.e menu that CIA case officers fill out. The questionnaire is used by the agency's OSB (Operational Support Branch) to transform the requests of case officers into technical requirements for hacking attacks (typically "exfiltrating" information from computer systems) for specific operations. The questionnaire allows the OSB to identify how to adapt existing tools for the operation, and communicate |
ging), among the corporations that fall in this category are General Electric, Honeywell, Ford, Boeing, Coca-Cola and Verizon. The latter company is demanding huge concessions from its workforce, which led to a two-week strike last month.
Corporate excess and tax dodging is a time-honored tradition in America. Indeed, it is a matter of public record that many of the largest corporations pay no taxes at all. The IPS report, however, comes at time when budget deficits at the federal and state level have been exploited to implement massive cuts in social services and worker pay, all on the grounds that there is simply “no money.”
The IPS found that the 25 CEOS who were paid more than their companies paid in taxes took home on average $16.7 million a piece. This is 50 percent more than the average CEO compensation for S&P 500 companies, of $10.8 million. These 25 companies received a tax rebate of, on average, $304 million.
Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg was compensated to the tune of $18.1 million in 2010, even as the company received a $705 million tax refund. “In effect,” according to the report, “every Verizon phone customer paid more in federal telephone excise taxes than Verizon paid in federal income taxes.”
Verizon is demanding that the 45,000 workers in its landline division accept major cuts in health care, pensions and job security. The company took in $11.9 billion in profits last year, the highest reported profits of all 25 companies cited in the report. Additionally, the report notes, “Despite its hefty profits, Verizon last year announced 13,000 job cuts, the year’s third-highest corporate layoff total.”
In spite of the company’s astronomical earnings, it is trying to make, in the words of a Verizon striker, “the average American worker an indentured servant to corporate America.”
Verizon was not alone in taking in huge profits while paying nothing in taxes, or less than nothing. The 25 companies reported average global profits of $1.9 billion.
The IPS report documents the chasm between pay for executives and workers, which increased significantly in 2010. A CEO of a company in the S&P 500 now makes on average 325 times the pay of the average worker, up from 263 in 2009.
The report further notes that “through a variety of tax and accounting loopholes that encourage executive pay excess,” the government supports ever growing CEO pay. “These perverse incentives add up to more than $20 billion per year in foregone revenue. One example: No meaningful regulations currently limit how much companies can deduct from their taxes for the expense of executive compensation. The more firms pay their CEO, the more they can deduct off their federal taxes.”
The report explains how the vast sums that are spent by the giant corporations on campaign contributions and lobbying are returned to them in the form of tax refunds from the government. Verizon alone spent almost $19 million in campaign contributions and lobbying last year. The funds were reimbursed by the government.
The report also notes, “This offshore tax gaming has spawned a massive global tax avoidance industry, with teams of lawyers and accountants who add nothing to market efficiency or product development. This ‘shadow’ banking industry played a key role in the 2008 financial crisis. The ‘shadow’ system’s reckless financial maneuvering operated through layers of opaque offshore tax havens.”
These figures underscore the fact that the economic crisis that began in 2008, produced by rampant speculation, has been utilized to drive down the wages and benefits of the working class, even as a tiny layer of the corporate and financial elite is now doing better than ever.No doubt you’re eager to re-watch Game of Thrones season 7 again and again (and again). The good news is that the upcoming DVD/Blu-ray release is chock-full of special features, including a full-length animated prequel – but the bad news is that anyone wanting a physical release will have to wait until winter has come. December 12 to be precise.
Read more: Game of Thrones season 7 review
As revealed by IGN, the digital download hits e-shelves on September 25 but it’s the physical Blu-Ray and DVD release that features a helluva lot of Game of Thrones goodies to tide fans over until the final Game of Thrones season. Here are 6 of the best features:
An animated prequel
A Thrones spin-off may not be coming for a while (no matter how many of its writers break their silence), so this is the next best thing. Clocking in at 45 minutes, there's seven animated prequels, collectively titled Conquest and Rebellion: An Animated History of the Seven Kingdoms, which chart Aegon Targaryen’s attempts to take over the Seven Kingdoms and you can watch Chapter One above.
A closer look at the new locations
One of the Blu-ray exclusives will not only feature new artwork and info detailing fresh locations including Highgarden and the Dragonpit, but it’ll also be narrated by Thrones cast members including Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Aiden Gillen.
How *that* battle North of the Wall came to be
If you’re quick on the draw and manage to snare a digital download copy in a few weeks then you’ll have access to an exclusive feature taken from Game of Thrones season 7, episode 6. In it, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at just how Jon’s expedition North of the Wall was filmed. It also means you’ll need both versions to get access to all of the features. That’ll fill the Iron Bank’s coffers...
A celebration of the show's unsung heroes
Jon Snow and the rest of the cast may be the faces that grace DVD covers, posters and glossy magazines but it’s the legion of artists and designers behind the action that makes the show really tick. The feature From Imagination to Reality will pay tribute to behind the painstaking process, including how they crafted brand-new sets for the season.
Exclusive interviews
Want to know how Tyrion felt about Jon and Dany’s coming-together? How Jaime felt on the field at the Loot Train battle (though our Loot Train battle breakdown gives you a pretty good idea)? Or how Bran managed to stare into the distance for so long without blinking? There’s a good chance all of that will be covered and more in an extensive section filled with interviews with the cast and crew.
Sure, this is a DVD/Blu-ray mainstay – but who doesn’t want to hear Gwendoline Christie’s dulcet tones talk over her sparring session with Arya or Liam Cunningham’s biting northern wit invade your ear canals? No one, that’s who.
Image: HBOA few weeks ago, my husband and I took our daughters to the neighborhood swimming pool. I ran into a colleague and casual friend who was there with her two boys. She was chatting with another mom of two boys, and the four kids were splashing together happily while their moms lounged on the edge of the pool. (Note to self- bring a buddy to the pool next time to enhance Mommy’s relaxation experience.)
My friend introduced us, and explained that they had all gone to college together, and wound up moving to Colorado at the same time. “We’ve been here for 13 years,” she told me, “and we met their oldest son in the hospital the day after he was born. Our boys are more like cousins than friends.”
I felt a pang of jealousy. These were her “people.” A few weeks ago, 3 Things For Mom ran a post that included this tip: “Find your people.” The full post articulates the importance of surrounding yourself with a tribe, and when I read it, I immediately felt grateful for all the fantastic girlfriends I had in my life.
My best friends from college who all live less than an hour away from me.
My two closest friends without kids who keep me grounded and know me as more than Mommy.
My fellow mom friends who listen without judgment and make me feel less alone.
The friend who “gets me,” sharing my sensitivity trait and even matching my exact Myers-Briggs type!
My blogosphere friends, most of whom I have never met, but who relate to my ambitions and frustrations so well.
But there is one thing that has always felt missing to me- my husband and I don’t have “that family.” You know- the other couple that you both like so much, whose kids are of a similar age. Maybe they live next door and you wander freely into one another’s backyard, understanding that the lack of shower and presence of pajamas is not a deterrent to sharing time. Maybe you’ve known each other since your wild college days, and you’ve navigated the transition into parenthood together. Maybe it’s your sister and her family, and a standing invitation for reciprocal baby-sitting.
We don’t have those people in our lives- not yet. It’s not that we don’t have friends with kids that we have suffered through birthday parties, street fairs, and carnivals with. It’s not that we don’t have neighbors with kids- we actually love spending time with the other families on our street. But there’s something different about having that couple that you know without a doubt would come stay with your kids if you went into labor in the middle of the night, or who can join you for dinner without inspiring that “hostess” panic. Those people.
It seems like this type of relationship is very elusive- both the husbands and the wives have to like each other, or worst case, the husbands have to tolerate one another! It helps if the kids are close in age, so you can plan activities that everyone will enjoy. It seems like the kid:kid ratio should be close as well- the family with one child may not mesh well with the family who has two sets of twins. Then of course you factor in proximity, schedules, parenting styles- how can all these factors possibly add up to the perfect dual family friendship?
I don’t want to appear ungrateful for the fantastic, loyal, empathetic friends that I have. Perhaps our inability to align ourselves with another family has more to do with conflicting schedules; I work part-time, and often my children are in school or childcare when my stay at home mom friends are available to socialize. Conversely, my friends who work full-time may not have the same flexibility that I do, and who has time to get together during the infamous Crappy Hour- that mad rush from 4:30-8:00 that involves frantic dinner preparation, a sit-down meal (or not!) and the bedtime countdown?
One of my favorite HerStories essays, from Christine of A Fly On Our Chicken Coop Wall, shares the story of two families who had weekly community dinners. Reading that post filled me with longing; I have always envied people who had another family that they dined with, played with, and traveled with on a regular basis.
My cousin lives in a neighborhood with several families whose children are of similar ages; she and her next door neighbor have traded off caring for one another’s children during pregnancy, illness, the post-baby months, or even Get-these-kids-out-of-here-right-now! moments. They often show up in one another’s kitchen, not necessarily having bothered to call or even knock, and frequently join each other for a communal backyard BBQ.
I want that. My parents have a couple they have known since college; their names are Charles and Charlene, and my brother and I have always known them as Uncle Charlie and Aunt Charlie. They haven’t shared a city with my parents in over 35 years, and yet the lack of proximity did not diminish the importance of their role in our lives; we routinely traveled to visit them and their two boys, or hosted them at our house. “The Charlies” were a staple in my life, and a model of what an enriching adult friendship could look like with another family. I have often remarked that I am still looking for “Our Charlies.”
I wonder if I will ever be fortunate enough to have another family that I consider to be my tribe, my people. It is possible that I am romanticizing the idea, but I have the sense that for those who have found their “Charlies”, this type of friendship is life-changing.
Have you found your people? Do you have another family that you spend time with regularly? How has it affected your life?After a busy Monday of rallies at the legislature, Senate Rules Chairman Tom Apodaca told an Asheville TV station Tuesday that he’s working on a possible voter referendum on House Bill 2.
Apodaca is the top lieutenant to Senate leader Phil Berger, and he told WLOS News 13 that staff attorneys are looking into a constitutional referendum that would make the controversial LGBT law permanent – or kill it.
“If it was up to me, I’d just put it out to a vote of the people – let them decide what they want to do,” Apodaca said. “Let’s put it on the ballot and get it over with once and for all. If the majority wants this, fine. If they don’t, fine.”
Berger – along with many other Republican lawmakers – has said he won’t support calls to repeal House Bill 2, despite mounting criticism from the companies, some of which are pulling jobs from North Carolina. Berger says he’ll consider Gov. Pat McCrory’s request to eliminate a provision that makes it harder to sue for workplace discrimination.
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Polling has shown that voters’ views of House Bill 2 are largely split down the middle – and which side wins often depends on how pollsters describe the law and phrase the question.THE central bank has little need to cut the cash rate in coming months because of its confidence about economic growth in the short and medium term, economists say.
In its Statement of Monetary Policy released today, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) said economic growth in 2012 would be higher than previously expected.
It now expects gross domestic product (GDP) to grow by 3.5 per cent in 2012, up from its 3.0 per cent forecast in May.
"The economy is then expected to grow at around three per cent over 2013 and 2014, little changed from the May statement," the RBA said.
HSBC chief economist Paul Bloxham said the RBA seemed content with how the Australian economy was travelling, despite an acknowledgement of possible risks from the euro zone.
"Europe does present the biggest downside risk, and it's clear that's where they think the biggest risk lies," he said.
"But in general it's a fairly upbeat statement - their medium term growth forecasts are pretty much what they were in May, and in the short term, growth is stronger and inflation is lower."
The possibility of another cash rate cut in 2012 was becoming a closer call, Mr Bloxham said.
AMP chief economist Shane Oliver said the statement showed that the RBA is still comfortable about current interest rate settings.
"I don't see any clear bias in this statement either way in terms of future interest rate moves," he said.
"It's sort of neutral, with the Reserve Bank in wait and see mode."
Dr Oliver said most of the interest from the Statement on Monetary Policy will be the comments on the high Australian dollar.
"It might get some thinking that the Reserve Bank is close to intervening," Dr Oliver said.
"It does suggest the strong Aussie dollar is on their mind, something they're looking at quite closely.
"A stronger Australian dollar would bear down on growth than (would) otherwise be the case."
Dr Oliver said if the Australian dollar stays strong because of investor demand for it, rather than strong commodity prices then the result could mean lower inflation in Australia.
"It would surely justify lower interest rates," he said.
"In one way it could be interpreted for interest rate cuts."Sand Mountain Sam, a weather-forecasting possum that stars in a Groundhog's Day promotional event by the Albertville-based country radio station 105.1 WQSB, says Punxsutawney Phil got it wrong this morning and spring will come early.
Sam, which is actually a name given to the possum chosen from the wild each year to do the forecasting, arrived at WQSB this morning and was featured on the morning radio show.
Co-host Mary Bailey said unlike Phil, Sam did not see his shadow.
"This morning Sam did not see his shadow so of course we're going to have an early spring," Bailey said.
Bailey said Dee Miller with the company's Christian-music station is known as the "Possum Whisperer."
"Dee handles the possum. He talks to him and determines if he sees his shadow," she said. Since the event began in 1993, Sam has only been wrong one year, Bailey said.
In conjunction with Sand Mountain Sam's weather predictions, the station holds a Possum Queen contest who reads the annual proclamation from Sam. This year, Sardis High School senior Dayleigh Dorsett was crowned Possum Queen.Related Transcript Biography Info
One of the greatest concerns of my life as scientist has been with economics, more precisely with the twin notions of inequality in all its forms and of financial variability. I must immediately say that I prefer to speak of them separately, after the mathematics and the physics, but in fact my interest in these topics started well before I became interested in either of the other activities I carried on. In fact in late '50s and early '60s this was my principal centre of interest, and I interrupted it for many years and came back to them only several years ago with very great intensity, I must say. The word 'fractal' did not figure in the first half. As a matter of fact, the tools of fractal thinking were developed very much in the context of economics, finance, inequality in general, and then, enriched, came back to be applied to these fields. Two names come to mind in this context, both of them contemporaries, or nearly contemporaries of the other great men mentioned in earlier segments of this interview. The names are Pareto and Bachelier. Pareto was a famous Italian professor of economics at Lausanne, and had a long career after that. In the late 1900s he wrote down an empirical law for distribution of income that had a very interesting history after that. Bachelier was, quite the contrary was quite a person of no social standing whatsoever, who presented a Ph.D. in 1900, at the University of Paris, and whose work was not at all understood except by very few until the '60s when he became very influential and, I would argue, after a while too influential to be beneficial. The same period as Hadamard and Poincaré, Cantor, Peano, Sierpinski and other names mentioned- was the time of these two men.In order to understand blockchain technology, we need to take a look at how we traditionally transfer data or information on the internet.P
Even through the technology has been around for a few years, and its key elements for even longer, today everyone wants to know what is “blockchain” and why is it the most secure way to exchange tokens.
While this system works well, it can suffer from a single point of failure, and more importantly, can facilitate censorship because the information is being controlled by particular entities or organizations.
Whenever you visit a website, you are basically requesting information that is available on a server or a cluster of servers. Be it Google, Amazon, Yahoo or Wikipedia — all the data that you receive or send is stored on a server owned or managed by these companies using databases.
Blockchain technology solves this problem on two levels — authentication and authorization — and removes the need for any other trusted party to be involved.
You can compare this to your use of services like PayPal where you trust the company to act as an intermediary between payments and transactions. We use services like that because of the trust problem — we need them to verify whether someone is who they are claiming to be and whether they have enough money in their account to make a transaction.
Blockchain technology changes the existing system by creating trustless, distributed ledgers or databases that are not stored in any single location and are not under any single entity’s control. A network is set up with multiple nodes, all of which maintain a record which is constantly updated and a state of consensus is maintained.
Its true nature as a decentralized system to record and distribute information is what makes blockchain technology so exciting.
How does the blockchain technology work?
Blockchain technology has three main elements that are connected in a way to achieve a trustless, distributed ledger.
Private Key Cryptography Peer-to-Peer Network Platform Incentivizing Participation
When these three elements come together, you don’t need a trusted party for a digital transaction to be executed and recorded.
As mentioned earlier, a major challenge that blockchain technology resolves is that of digital trust. We need middlemen to act as trusted parties because we don’t know “who is who” on the internet.
There are two parts to solving the trust issue — one is that of authentication and the second is that of authorization.
Photo by Daniel Jensen
Authentication is all about proving ownership of a digital asset or information (without ownership there can be no transaction). Blockchain technology employs private key cryptography to solve this. Whoever owns the private keys owns the tokens on that particular block. These are encrypted keys and are to be kept securely, just like keys to your house or your safe.
However, simply proving who you are is not enough for trust. You need to prove that you can also do what you claim to do. This means that when I share my intent to transfer a certain amount of tokens, my claim should be verifiable for you to trust that I can do what I am saying I will.
This problem is solved by the distributed network which records each transaction and the number of tokens on each block. Since every transaction has to undergo verification and the records are stored on nodes around the world, there is no chance of fraud.
A simple example can help explain this concept further
Photo by Maja Petric
Let’s say you and I intend to enter into a transaction where I give you twenty tomatoes in exchange for ten potatoes.
My tomatoes and your potatoes are stored in a glass box where everyone can see them, and each glass box has one half of a complete sticker with a code on it, and we have the other half, completing the sequence.
By showing each other the half stickers we can prove that we own the boxes and hence the tomatoes and potatoes in them (provided the sticker cannot be duplicated or forged — that’s where cryptography comes in).
The coded sticker solves the authentication problem — we both can verify each other’s ownership.
Now comes the distributed ledger part and in our example that is done by a group of people in the town who are all looking at the glass boxes every now and then to count the number of tomatoes and potatoes.
They write the numbers down in their notebooks and have a complete record of what is in the boxes. Even if one tomato leaves my box, it will be visible to them and they will all update their records, or at least the majority will.
In this case, when I say I have twenty tomatoes, you don’t have to believe me. You can simply verify the number by asking any of the people in the town maintaining their notebooks.
When we finally make the transaction, the same people note down the number of tomatoes and potatoes leaving our respective boxes and the records are updated, ready for the next transactions and so on.President Barack Obama, while addressing students at the University of Chicago Law School, opined that America’s voting system is “rooted in racism” because it “unabashedly discourages” some Americans from voting. He suggested “reducing polarization” in politics might help improve things.
Then, he added that “white folks” have been the problem all along:
“We really are the only advanced democracy on earth that systematically and purposefully makes it really hard for people to vote,” Obama said Thursday when speaking at the University of Chicago School of Law. “There is no other country on earth that does that. There is a legacy to that that grows directly out of a history in which first propertied men, then white men, then white folks didn’t want women, minorities, to participate in the political process and be able to empower themselves in that fashion. That’s the history. We should be a society in which at this point we should say, yeah, that history is not so good.”
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Via The Blaze
If that wasn’t offensive enough, Obama suggested it’s time for America to mandate that every American be required to vote on election day. Just like the healthcare mandate in Obamacare, the government should now compel you to vote, or else!
“Maybe the single biggest change that we could make in our political process that would reduce some of the polarization, make people feel more invested and restore integrity to the system is just make sure everybody is voting,” Obama said. “Australia has got mandatory voting. If you start getting 70 or 80 percent voting rates, that’s transformative.
Can you see why Obama has been so busy using his final year in office reinstating voting rights for felons, and expanding citizenship to illegal aliens?
If turnout is the problem caused by voter ID, Obama should take a look at Wisconsin. The Badger State just implemented their voter ID law, and their presidential primary days ago just had their biggest turnout since 1972. That should be impossible, according to Democrats like Barack Obama!
What do you think about President Obama’s comments? Please leave us a comment (below) and tell us!Rising sea levels pose a far bigger eco threat than previously thought. This week's climate change conference in Copenhagen will sound an alarm over new floodings - enough to swamp Bangladesh, Florida, the Norfolk Broads and the Thames estuary
Scientists will warn this week that rising sea levels, triggered by global warming, pose a far greater danger to the planet than previously estimated. There is now a major risk that many coastal areas around the world will be inundated by the end of the century because Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting faster than previously estimated.
Low-lying areas including Bangladesh, Florida, the Maldives and the Netherlands face catastrophic flooding, while, in Britain, large areas of the Norfolk Broads and the Thames estuary are likely to disappear by 2100. In addition, cities including London, Hull and Portsmouth will need new flood defences.
"It is now clear that there are going to be massive flooding disasters around the globe," said Dr David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey. "Populations are shifting to the coast, which means that more and more people are going to be threatened by sea-level rises."
The issue is set to dominate the opening sessions of the international climate change conference in Copenhagen this week, when scientists will outline their latest findings on a host of issues concerning global warming. The meeting has been organised to set the agenda for this December's international climate talks (also to be held in Copenhagen), which will draw up a treaty to replace the current Kyoto protocol for limiting carbon dioxide emissions.
And key to these deliberations will be the issue of ice-sheet melting. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - when it presented its most up-to-date report on the likely impact of global warming in 2007 - concluded that sea-level rises of between 20 and 60 centimetres would occur by 2100. These figures were derived from estimates of how much the sea will increase in volume as it heats up, a process called thermal expansion, and from projected increases in run-off water from melting glaciers in the Himalayas and other mountain ranges.
But the report contained an important caveat: that its sea-level rise estimate contained very little input from melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. The IPCC forecast therefore tended to underestimate forthcoming changes.
"The IPCC felt the whole dynamics of polar ice-sheet melting were too poorly understood," added Vaughan. "However, we are now getting a much better idea of what is going on in Greenland and Antarctica and can make much more accurate forecasts about ice-sheet melting and its contribution to sea-level rises."
From studying satellite images, scientists have watched the sea ice that hugs the Greenland and Antarctic shores dwindle and disappear. Sea-ice melting on its own does not cause ocean levels to rise, but its disappearance has a major impact on land ice sheets. Without sea ice to prop them up, the land sheets tip into the water and disintegrate at increasing rates, a phenomenon that is now being studied in detail by researchers.
"It is becoming increasingly apparent from our studies of Greenland and Antarctica that changes to sea ice are being transmitted into the hearts of the land-ice sheets in a remarkably short time," added Vaughan. As a result, those land sheets are breaking up faster and far more melt water is being added to the oceans than was previously expected.
These revisions suggest sea-level rises could easily top a metre by 2100 - a figure that is backed by the US Geological Survey, which this year warned that they could reach as much as 1.5 metres.
In addition, in September, a team led by Tad Pfeffer at the University of Colorado at Boulder published calculations using conservative, medium and extreme glaciological assumptions for sea-level rise expected from Greenland, Antarctica and the world's smaller glaciers and ice caps. They concluded that the most plausible scenario, when factoring in thermal expansion due to warming waters, will lead to a total sea level rise of one to two metres by 2100.
Similarly, a commission of 20 international experts, called on by the Dutch government to help plan its coastal defences, recently gave a range of 55cm to 1.1 metres for sea-level rises by 2100. "Equally important, this commission has highlighted the fact that sea-level rise will not stop in the year 2100," said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "By 2200, they estimate a rise of 1.5 to 3.5m unless we stop the warming. This would spell the end of many of our coastal cities."
This point was backed by Dr Jason Lowe of the Hadley Centre, the UK's foremost climate change research centre. "It is still not clear exactly how much the sea will rise by the end of this century, but it is certain that rises will continue for hundreds of years beyond that - even if we do manage to stabilise carbon dioxide emissions and halt the rise in atmospheric temperature. The sea will continue to heat up and expand. In addition, the Greenland ice sheets will continue to melt," he said.
This latter effect could, ultimately, have a particularly destructive impact. Scientists have calculated that if industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases eventually produce a global temperature increase of around 4C, there is a risk that Greenland's ice covering could melt completely. This could take several hundred years or it might require a couple of thousand. The end result is not in doubt, however. It would add around seven metres to the planet's sea levels. The consequence would be utter devastation.
Such a scenario is distant, but real, scientists insist. However, at present, the most important issue, they argue, is that of short-term sea-level rises: probably around one metre by 2100. When that occurs, the Maldives will be submerged, along with islands like the Sunderbans in the Bay of Bengal, and Kiribati and Tuvalu in the Pacific. The US - which has roughly 12,400 miles of coastline and more than 19,900 square miles of coastal wetlands - would face a bill of around $156bn to protect this land. Cities such as London would require massive investments to provide defences against the rising waters. Others, such as Alexandria, in Egypt, would simply be inundated.
Rising oceans will also contaminate both surface and underground fresh water supplies, worsening the world's existing fresh-water shortage. Underground water sources in Thailand, Israel, China and Vietnam are already experiencing salt-water contamination.
Coastal farmland will be wiped out, triggering massive displacements of men, women and children. It is estimated that a one-metre sea-level rise could flood 17% of Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest countries, reducing its rice-farming land by 50% and leaving tens of millions without homes.
Such destruction would not be caused merely by rising sea levels, however. Other effects of global warming will also worsen the mayhem that lies ahead: in particular, the increase in major storms. "When we talk about the dangers of future sea-level rises, we are not talking about a problem akin to pouring water into a bath," added Dr Colin Brown, director of engineering at the Institution of Mechanical Engineering. "Climate-change research shows there will be significant increases in storms as global temperatures rise. These will produce more intense gales and hurricanes and these, in turn, will produce massive storm surges as they pass over the sea."
The result will be the appearance of the super-surge, a climatic double whammy that will savage low-lying regions that include Britain's south-eastern coastline, in particular East Anglia and the Thames Estuary, along with cities such as London, Portsmouth and Hull, which are rated as being particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise.
In addition to these hotspots, the country will also face massive disruption to its transport and energy systems unless it acts swiftly, according to a report - Climate Change, Adapting to the Inevitable - published last month by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Many rail lines run along river valleys that will be flooded with increased regularity while bridges carrying trains and lorries often cross shipping lanes and may have to be redesigned to accommodate rising water levels.
"Power supplies will also be affected," added Brown. "The Sizewell B nuclear plant has been built on the Suffolk coast, a site that has been earmarked for the construction of several more nuclear plants. However, Sizewell will certainly be affected by rising sea levels. Engineers say they can build concrete walls that will keep out the water throughout the working lives of these new plants. But that is not enough. Nuclear plants may operate for 50 years, but it could take hundreds of years to decommission them. By that time, who knows what sea-level rises and what kinds of inundations the country will be experiencing?"
Most scientists believe Britain remains relatively well placed to combat sea-level rises. "The government has been fairly far-sighted over this issue, with projects such as Thames Estuary 2100 being set up to prepare flooding defence projects," said Professor Robert Nicholls, of Southampton University.
This does not stop the controversy, however. In its report, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers warned that many areas would have to be abandoned because they are simply too expensive to protect. In particular, large areas of the Norfolk coastline would be left to be inundated, a massive loss of human habitat.
But this approach represents an abrogation of national duty to many people - particularly those whose homes will be destroyed, individuals such as Martin George, former chairman of the Broads Society. "A country that has the technological know-how to extract oil and coal from below the North Sea should surely be capable of finding a way to protect a concrete sea wall against the effects of climate change. We should do our damnedest to safeguard our heritage," he said.
• Additional research by Lisa Kjellsson
Why the sea is rising
• Thermal expansion. All bodies expand when they are heated, and that is true for the water that covers 70 per cent of the planet. The oceans are expanding - upwards. It is estimated this increase in volume will raise levels by 10-40 cms.
• Melting glaciers and mountain ice caps - outside Greenland and Antarctica - are also adding water to rivers that flow to the oceans. However, these remain a modest source of sea-level rise. Possibly around 10 cms.
• The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets represent vast reserves of frozen fresh water. The former would add 7m to sea levels if melted completely; the latter would bring a further 60m rise to the levels of the world's oceans.. (Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto )
The family of an unarmed Georgia man fatally shot in a Newark park by an undercover sheriff’s officer has settled a wrongful death lawsuit against Essex County authorities.
Defarra “Dean” Gaymon, who headed the Atlanta City Employees Credit Union, was in New Jersey for a high school reunion in 2010. He was shot by a detective who was investigating public sex in Branch Brook Park.
Gaymon’s wife and four children settled Tuesday for $1.5 million and will receive about $730,000 when attorneys’ fees and costs are subtracted, according to court filings. As part of the settlement, the county sheriff’s office did not admit wrongdoing.
The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office said after the shooting that Officer Edward Esposito was investigating reports of public sex in the park along with a partner, who was in their patrol car at the time. Esposito told prosecutors they had already arrested one suspect around 6 p.m. when he realized he had dropped a pair of handcuffs in a wooded area.
Esposito located the handcuffs, and while leaning over to pick them up, was approached by Gaymon, who was “engaged in a sex act at the time,” according to prosecutors.
The officer said he identified himself and tried to arrest Gaymon, who fled.
While fleeing, Gaymon allegedly threatened to kill Esposito. The pursuit ended near the edge of a pond, where Gaymon allegedly reached into his pocket and lunged at Esposito, who fired one shot.
The 48-year-old Gaymon was pronounced dead about three hours later at University Hospital. A state grand jury declined to indict Esposito in 2011.
Attorneys for Esposito, the sheriff’s department and Essex County did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. Michael Critchley and Christopher Kinum, attorneys for Gaymon’s widow, Mellanie Gaymon, declined to comment on behalf of their client.
The shooting prompted the suspension of the undercover operation at the park, which had been criticized by civil rights groups for allegedly targeting gay men.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Read or Share this story: http://vineland.dj/1mJEs2xThe MINI Cooper made a splash in 1964 by being the overall winner of the Monte Carlo Rallye.
Feral Interactive has released a version of DIRT Rally for macOS that uses the full power of Metal 2. It requires macOS High Sierra (10.13.1 recommended). We conducted a "test drive" on various Macs with various GPUs to see which is the best Mac to run on.
GRAPH LEGEND
iMac 5K Vega 64 - AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (8GB) GPU installed in Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box connected to the 2017 iMac 5K TB3 port; Dell 5K was set to primary display and connected directly to the Vega 64's DP port.
iMac 5K Pro 580 - AMD Radeon Pro 580 GPU (8GB) internal discrete GPU in 2017 iMac 5K (4.2GHz Core i7) and using built-in display
Mac Pro 2013 Vega 64 - AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 (8GB) GPU installed in Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box connected |
conflict living in ghettos. Even more to the point, there is not an epidemic of rich people dying younger and younger or becoming sicker and sicker. Would it comfort Tom Perkins to know that the “life expectancy gap” in America is widening even more quickly as that of income? In 1980, the richest Americans could expect to live about 1.8 years longer than poorest; by 2000, they could expect to live 4.5 years longer, a jump of almost 40 percent. Meanwhile, income inequality has increased by 25 percent.
This is good news for the apocalyptic scenario of super-rich America! Perkins and his compatriots won’t have to fight off the poor; they’ll just have to wait them out. Far from facing “economic extinction”, the 1% will just have even more trouble finding good help.
Perkins’s insouciant ignorance when it comes to the basic reality of poverty extends beyond the physical wellbeing of the poor and straight into their finances. Which is odd for a financier, but then again Tom Perkins has already proven himself, in less than one month out in public and likely even longer, to be not much of thinker. His alarmism about “high taxes” as the engine of destruction of the upper classes doesn’t square well with current taxes on the top 1% being the second lowest in 30 years. His belief that “50 percent of registered voters don’t pay taxes” is just plain stupid; when all federal, local and state taxes are factored in, the bottom fifth of American households winds up paying about 16% of their income in taxes.
To be fair, I assume it’s been many, many years since Perkins has seen a sales receipt or a payroll stub. One gets the sense that, in general, Perkins does not spend a lot of time around people who aren’t in the top 1% – though his optimism about what such a commingling might bring is almost touching. As if to prove just how dear the Nazi metaphor is to his heart, Perkins returned to it again at the Fortune talk on Thursday night, though he attempted a positive spin; he implied that perhaps the poor’s animosity toward the rich is just a big misunderstanding: “The typical German had never met a Jew,” he explained.
The moderator helpfully completed the thought: “So perhaps the typical Occupy protester has never met someone who rides a Google bus.” (Personally, some of my best friends are rich.) Let’s say this is the case. Who do you think would gain sympathy from whom in that scenario?
My money is on an alliance between the Occupy protester and the Google bus rider against Perkins.
With his six-pack of Rolexes and absurd vanity projects (hello, bad romance novel!), Perkins is rather easy to vilify, which is why he needs people such as Mankiw, our pseudo-scientific apologist, a class warfare Eddie Haskill, if not Neville Chamberlain. Mankiw’s column in Sunday’s New York Times did not address class warfare directly – he just denied there was a conflict at all. You see, the rich deserve the money they make! What’s more, because Robert Downey Jr makes a lot of money and people still like him, well, there you go.
I’m not mangling Mankiw’s argument in that last bit. Go read the piece. He bases his entire argument on two points: 1) People like Robert Downey Jr – and the 50 Shades of Grey guy, and LeBron James – even though he makes a lot of money; and 2) most CEOs make a lot of money, so what they do must be very valuable and worth a lot of money. Ergo: people should like CEOs!
First of all, when Mankiw assumes that “people....are similarly unperturbed” about the wealth bestowed upon Downey, the Grey author or James, I think he must not talk to very many people. I suspect his own social circle tends to the Tom Perkinses of the world and not the Naomi Kleins, but surely there are some wealthy Cavaliers or Celtics fans out there.
Second of all, when big thinkers sit down to ponder why class animosity exists, “It shouldn’t” isn’t much of an answer. People are angry – and maybe people should be angry. Both Perkins and Mankiw seem to think that the poor (or just the not-rich!) resent the wealthy simply because they have so much. They think we resent the number of zeros in their paychecks. Of course not. We resent that those zeros come out of ours.
Mankiw asks the simplistic question: Are CEOs so valuable as to be worth their exorbitant paychecks? He answers it perhaps even more simply, by cherry-picking famous people. But the question on most people’s minds is simpler still, and yet somehow too difficult for the CEOs and their enablers to comprehend: Am I so expendable as to be worth such a small paycheck... or no paycheck at all?
To the extent that income inequality is a threat to the rich, it’s not because they are so wealthy – at some point, the wealth of the most wealthy just becomes absurdly unimaginable anyway. No, it’s because the wealth of the super-rich is just so damn far away, without any rungs in the ladder between, no assistance for that leap of faith that allows those who struggle to hope their struggles can cease.
The first casualty of the class war won’t be the “economic extinction” of the super-rich; it will be the disappearance of the middle class.
Income inequality’s growth is as staggering along the sides of the middle as it is at the edges of the graph, if not more so. Between 2010 and 2012, the income of the middle 60% – six-zero – of Americans declined by a greater percentage than that of the poorest 20 percent. In 1970, the middle 60 percent took home 53% of the nation’s income, and now it takes 45. Today, the upper range of the middle 60% of the population’s income is around $100,000 – just under the salary of a typical Google employee.
The flattening of the middle class squeezes a very few to the ranks of the wealthy; most end up alongside the poor. Human empathy might stir our unlikely seatmates on the Google bus, and so will the growing awareness of the middle and upper-middle class that their own positions are precarious.
Mankiw’s lead-off speculation about Downey’s popularity (disclaimer: I, too, think he’s pretty rad) pivots specifically off his $50m Avengers payday. But I’m guessing he didn’t see the movie, since the character Downey plays is, himself, a multi-billionaire, albeit one a lot more interesting and layered than Tom Perkins.
An alcoholic conflicted about what he owes the world (after making his fortune in arms dealing) and beset by a hubris-tempting ego, Tony Stark is a literary figure whose moral compromises are an intentional investigation of the very injustices Mankiw waves off. In the end, he does the right thing, which almost never includes laying people off or transferring manufacturing jobs overseas. He’s also famous for a single retort: “Patriotism doesn’t automatically equal conservatism”. And, for what it’s worth (ahem), he doesn’t take a paycheck. Let’s put Stark in that conversation with the Occupy protester and the passengers on the Google bus.
I’m starting to worry this fight won’t even be fair.The flight passed over Gotland, an island off the east coast of Sweden, on July 18th in the late afternoon.
A classified document from the Swedish Defence Force, which was leaked on Wednesday, revealed that the mystery flight passed over Swedish airspace from the east.
The plane, a Boeing RC-135, was denied permission to pass over Swedish airspace, but the pilots chose to disregard the refusal.
The plane crossed Gotland, passing over the town of Visby, and then moved south alongside the island of Öland.
On Thursday a source to the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper revealed that the plane was an American reconnaissance aircraft.
The paper reported that the plane was being chased across the Baltic Sea by a Russian aircraft that had flown up from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
The Defence Force had also kept a close eye on the plane for 90 minutes while it flew over 200 kilometres above the Baltic Sea, according to the source.
Neither the foreign ministry nor the Swedish Defence Force have confirmed or denied the report.By month’s end, a force described as battalion-strength, consisting of mostly army soldiers, will arrive in Helmand province to bolster the local military
Hundreds of additional US troops are slated to deploy to a volatile province in Afghanistan to bolster the local military against a resurgent Taliban, the Guardian has learned.
By month’s end, a force described as battalion-strength, consisting of mostly army soldiers, will arrive in Helmand province where US and UK forces have struggled in battles for over a decade to drive out the Taliban. The infantry battalion will relive a smaller one currently in Helmand.
In keeping with Barack Obama’s formal declaration that the US is not engaged in combat, despite elite forces recently participating in an hours-long battle in Helmand, defense officials said the additional troops would not take part in combat. But they will help the existing Helmand force defend itself against Taliban attacks, officials said.
US military officials declined to offer many specifics about an upcoming reinforcement, but they described the mission as primarily aimed at bolstering the performance of the embattled 215th Corps of the Afghan military, through training as well as protecting other troops training Afghans in Helmand.
The 215th Corps has recently had its commander replaced amid performance and corruption concerns, and has endured “unusually high operating tempo for long periods of time”, outgoing US commander General John Campbell testified to Congress last week. It is among four Afghan corps that still have US military advisers embedded within it, despite a recent pullback to advise at higher levels.
“Our mission remains the same,” said Colonel Michael Lawhorn, a spokesman for the US command in Kabul, “to train, advise, and assist our Afghan counterparts, and not to participate in combat operations.”
The Guardian understands the additional forces in Helmand will not increase the current total troop numbers in Afghanistan, which currently stand at 9,800, but will instead be deployed from troops already in the country. Batallion strengths vary, but can constitute a force of up to 800 troops. The incoming battalion, officials said, is comprised of around 200 more soldiers than the one it relieves.
While new advisers make up a significant component of the additional forces, Lawhorn said that another mission of the reinforcement will be to “bolster force protection for the current staff of advisers”, suggesting a concern for the safety of the existing Helmand force amid major recent Taliban gains.
The US military has sounded warnings of a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, in Helmand and beyond, that have prompted significant revisions in Obama’s war plans.
Already Obama has agreed to leave 5,500 troops in Afghanistan past the end of his presidency, but his newly confirmed commander, General John “Mick” Nicholson, told a Senate panel recently that increased insurgent violence will prompt him to re-evaluate troop requests, and left the door open to bolstering a force Obama has sought to draw down.
In January, a US special forces soldier died and two others were wounded as they assisted the Afghan military in repelling a Taliban assault in the province that lasted hours.
While the Pentagon initially resisted categorizing the battle as “combat”, press secretary Peter Cook called it a “combat situation, but [US troops] are not in the lead intentionally”, illustrating how the difference between combat and advisory missions can blur in practice.
Opium-rich Helmand has emerged as a Taliban priority, as most of its 2015 attacks focused on the province. Unlike earlier eras of the war, the Taliban have declined to take a winter break and have fought in the province all year.
The Taliban have come close to overrunning a district center in Helmand, Sangin, where more than 100 UK troops died during a war that has entered its 15th year, despite US airstrikes in late December. Kabul is said to control only three of Helmand’s 14 districts, including the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah.
Outgoing commander Campbell, testifying to Congress last week, said that while current rules of engagement prevented US troops who are not engaged in counter-terrorism raids from initiating fights with the Taliban, “I have no restrictions on providing force protection” for troops that train Afghans.
Lawhorn described the reinforcement as a “planned deployment of additional personnel”, but at least one congressional official contacted by the Guardian was unaware of the plan.
Two days after this story was published, a US defense official who would not speak for attribution clarified that the increased troop level represented an “enhancement of the existing force protection mission” for US troops training their Afghan counterparts.
“The battalion will bring a small number of trainers to assist with the efforts to re-man, re-equip and re-train the 215th Corps, but its primary mission will remain force protection,” the official said.The music and legal worlds that Kesha and Dr. Lukehave been operating in, sometimes together but more recently on opposing sides, just got that much smaller.
The New York judge who in April ruled that Kesha couldn't record outside her contract with Dr. Luke's Kemosabe Records, a Sony Music Entertainment imprint, calling the contract "heavily negotiated and typical for the industry," is married to an attorney who's a partner at a law firm that counts Sony as a client.
According to the New York Post, New York Supreme Court Justice Shirley Werner Kornreich's husband is Ed Kornreich of New York-based Proskauer Rose. E! News has confirmed via public records that the Kornreichs share a Manhattan address.
But what, if anything, does this mean for Kesha's case? On Aug. 1, the artist—who's happily just started touring again for the first time in almost a year—filed to dismiss her sex-abuse suit against producer and record exec Dr. Luke (real name Lukasz Gottwald) in California, though the case lives on in New York. After she first filed suit in California, Dr. Luke sued her for defamation and breach of contract in New York, prompting Kesha to counter-sue there for sexual harassment and other related claims. And that's where Kornreich dealt the blow that prompted the #FreeKesha movement on Twitter.Video screenshot by Danny Gallagher/CNET
Remember the opening scene from "The Andy Griffith Show" that showed Sheriff Taylor and his son Opie happily walking up to the ol' fishing hole? Just imagine if that iconic scene ran a few minutes longer and Andy reeled in a viscous-looking fish with human-style teeth. Not even Aunt Bea's famous apple pie could get Andy out of the fetal position.
That's what a fisherman in New Jersey found Sunday when he reeled in a fresh catch from a South Jersey lake called Swedes Lake in Delran. According to ABC affiliate WPVI-TV in Philadelphia, Ron Rossi caught a strange-looking fish sporting what appeared to be human-like chompers.
The fish isn't native to New Jersey's shores -- unless there's some kind of nuclear power plant nearby that's finding creative ways to get rid of its toxic runoff. It's called a Pacu, a fish native to the Orinoco and Amazon river basins in South America noted for having "two rows of molariform teeth," according to the US Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS). So how did it get to Jersey?
Officials from the New Jersey Division of Environmental Protection (DEP) told local media that the South American fish most likely ended up in the lake when a pet owner decided to get rid of it. Sightings of the Pacu fish have been reported at least once in 27 US states since 1982 due to pet owners dumping them in lakes and rivers and escapes from fish farms located in Florida and Georgia, according to the FWS.
"These fish do not survive in colder water, so we encourage people not to release it into the wild but to humanely destroy the fish," DEP officials told WPVI-TV.
The Pacu has a bit of a bad reputation. If you do a quick Internet search, you'll see the phrase "testicle biting" or "testicle eating" crop up in the results. Its reputation as a testicle-targeting fish appears to be unfounded, however, as it doesn't even prefer to eat meat. It's mainly a vegetarian that eats fruits and nuts (the OTHER kind, sickos), according to the US Geological Survey's description of the species.
The Pacu's legendary status as a testicle mangler originated with a professor at the Copenhagen Museum of Natural History, according to a report filed by CNN back in 2013. Zoology professor Pete Rask Moller said he joked with a fisherman who caught the Pacu off the coast of Denmark that men should keep their swimsuits tied up tight so the fish wouldn't mistake their "berries" for, well, "nuts." The Internet can't resist passing along a good testicle joke, so the fish earned its notorious but false label as a testicle attacker.
So in other words, guys, don't worry. The Pacu fish just isn't that into you.Backers of the proposed Energy East oil pipeline said too much Canadian capital is flowing out of the country to purchase foreign oil, when it should be benefitting economies across the country.
Refineries in Eastern Canada are spending billions to purchase about 700,000 barrels a day of foreign oil to meet customer needs, while Western Canadian oil is sold to the United States at a discount due to lack of pipeline capacity between producing fields in Western Canada and refineries in the East, said Ian Whitcomb, president of Irving Oil Ltd.
“This is a really important project for Canada,” he said in a meeting with the Financial Post’s editorial board Tuesday on the sidelines of an investment symposium organized by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. “We are spending so much Canadian capital to buy oil outside of Canada and those dollars should stay inside.”
Irving Oil, based in Saint John, N.B., runs Canada’s largest oil refinery. It processes about 320,000 barrels a day, including a third imported from Saudi Arabia, a third imported from the U.S., and the rest shipped by rail from Western Canada or elsewhere.
But Whitcomb said his refinery would continue to purchase foreign oil even if Energy East goes ahead because it wants access to diverse suppliers.
Imports from Saudi Arabia, which started when the refinery opened in 1960, are compelling because of the low cost of transportation on large tankers, he said.
“We will add Western Canadian crude to our portfolio as the economics dictate, but probably not at the expense of our Saudi barrels,” he said.
Irving Oil supports Energy East because of its job creation potential and because it would boost Atlantic Canada, a region that continues to lag economically, he said.
The company has partnered with proponent TransCanada Corp. to build a marine terminal to enable exports of Canadian oil to foreign markets.
Whitcomb said imported oil would eventually meet Canada’s stricter environmental standards and expectations.
“We will add Western Canadian crude to our portfolio as the economics dictate, but probably not at the expense of our Saudi barrels.”
“It’s very difficult to understand and influence directly and indirectly these foreign markets,” he said. “What we do know is that over time, things will come together. Over time, the environmental agenda is not a Canadian agenda, or a U.S. agenda or a European agenda, it’s a world agenda.”
Gary Houston, vice-president for Ontario and the Prairies at TransCanada, said the $15.7-billion Energy East pipeline is weeks away from finalizing its permit application before the National Energy Board and is anticipating a 27-month regulatory review and a permit in late 2018.
The proposed pipeline has run into strong opposition in Quebec. TransCanada is boosting efforts to address the province’s concerns about safety, he said.
“We have put as much effort into talking about safety and our pipeline in Quebec as anywhere in Canada, but somehow we have missed the market,” he said. “This is a great project for Canada and we are going to safely deliver oil from producers in Canada to refineries in Canada, we are going to get oil off the rails and we are going create a lot of jobs and revenue at the same time.”
Pipeline opponents found political allies in the federal NDP, which at its national convention last weekend voted to back consideration of the Leap Manifesto, a policy that would ban pipeline construction and keep Canadian oil in the ground. The Manifesto has been repudiated by Alberta and Saskatchewan, both major oil producers and pipeline supporters.
Houston noted that the vast majority of Canadians believe that building Energy East is a good idea.
Brian Porter, CEO of the Bank of Nova Scotia, echoed that opinion.
“I’m frustrated that it hasn’t moved ahead. I think Energy East particularly is critically important to this country from an economic perspective,” Porter said. “I would have liked to see further political progress on it at this stage, but it’s going to take time. I’m a realist. But I think that the time for consensus building, all those other things, is over.”
Porter was in Calgary Tuesday for Scotiabank’s annual meeting and said he sees the oilsands and pipelines as a national issue.
“I talk to a lot of industry people here and I’m seeing more this afternoon. I think this project is really important for the national fabric of this country, economically and who we are as a country,” he said. “It’s
time. All the economic assessments, environmental assessments, all that important stuff has been done. It’s time to move ahead.”
Dan Wicklum, president of Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, a consortium of oilsands companies that are collaborating to accelerate environmental improvements, said the new NDP stance will have no influence on its efforts.
“We are doing the right things for the right reasons,” he said. “We are going to be global leaders at reducing emissions in the oilsands.”
With files from Barbara Shecter
ccattaneo@nationalpost.comDirector Bryan Singer has shared a new X-Men: Apocalypse behind-the-scenes image on Instagram, featuring screenwriter/producer Simon Kinberg (Fantastic Four) goofing off on his war room set.
Looks like the United States military will be more active in X-Men: Apocalypse than they have been in previous X-Men films. We've seen them from time to time, but they've mostly stayed on the sidelines letting mutant-on-mutant mayhem go unchecked. In this snap, we can see a military command center equipped with maps and computers.
The set looks very familiar to the command center used in Jon Badham's War Games. That film, starring Matthew Broderick as a young computer hacker, was released in 1983 -- the same year X-Men: Apocalypse is set in. Coincidence? I don't think so. Check out the image below.The students in Highland Park Junior High's Gender Sexuality Alliance have been given high honours for their work in creating a gender-neutral bathroom at their school, including a human rights award and a designation as marshals of Saturday's Pride parade in Halifax.
But, for them, creating the bathroom was a no-brainer.
"We don't really call it a gender-neutral bathroom. You could go there even if you're too lazy to go upstairs to the bathroom," GSA member Ella Taylor told CBC's Information Morning.
"It's just for everyone."
'Make everyone feel comfortable'
The GSA began calling for a bathroom after one student at the school no longer wanted to be known as a girl.
"We wanted to make everyone feel comfortable, including that person," said Haillie Barton, another member of the GSA.
But Barton said the bathroom — plus other initiatives, such as encouraging the use of people's 'preferred names' rather than the names they were assigned at birth — will foster acceptance for all of the school's 130 students.
"We need to understand that we're all different, and that we all have similarities, and we need to find pride in our diversity," said Barton.
'Pride in Pride'
The students said they were excited to participate in the festival dedicated to celebrating that diversity.
"We have pride in Pride," said Barton.
Even if what they've done to make their school more inclusive has given the students a place of pride at the front of the parade, they said on Friday that they still had some work to do: crafting banners and T-shirts for Saturday's event, which begins at 1 p.m.
"I think we stand out a lot, because we are kids and we're also the parade marshals," said Taylor.
"But it's always good to have that extra glitter."As the acceptance of marijuana as medicine grows (even among people against it recreationally), more and more people are using it to treat numerous maladies. From the mental to the physical to the emotional, it’s turned into a bit of a miracle, pushing aspirin off of its “wonder drug” throne and proudly taking the crown.
Still, few conditions are as tightly tied to cannabis as seizures. Scientific studies, first person accounts, and reports from parents of epileptic children, all attest to the benefit of marijuana on the brain.
What is a Seizure?
According to the University of Chicago School of Medicine, a seizure is a sudden jolt of electrical activity that occurs in the brain. Normally, the electrical activity is balanced and even, allowing a person to function as usual. When a seizure occurs, the disruption causes seizing, changes in behavior, changes in sensation, changes in movement, and a loss or a reduction of consciousness.
While epilepsy is a condition marked by seizures, not all seizures occur in the epileptic. In fact, around ten percent of people may experience a seizure during their lifetime. Occasionally, it’s brought upon by other medical conditions and, other times, it’s the result of certain medications (especially when they’re mixed with other medications or alcohol).
Epilepsy, which is marked by chronic, recurrent seizures, affects about one percent of the population
But it’s a very inclusive disease: it affects people of all races, the young and the old, and both men and women. The causes are also varied: a genetic predisposition, previous trauma, stroke, or a head injury can lead to its presence. Many cases come about for no obvious reason at all.
The impact epilepsy has on a person can’t be understated; not only do seizures greatly impact everyday life and impair a person’s ability to drive or care for their children (or do the most mundane activities like walk upstairs), but the endless threat of a seizure is emotionally devastating.
Unfortunately, epilepsy is an elusive illness: according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, around thirty to forty percent of people continue to experience seizures despite use of conventional treatments.
That’s where cannabis comes in.
Cannabis and Epilepsy
Per the Epilepsy Foundation, laboratory studies, clinical studies, and patient surveys each give credence to marijuana’s reputation as a treatment for seizures. It’s controversial, since everything with cannabis seems to be. But the debate is also perplexing: the focus isn’t on the mind-altering THC. Instead, it’s on the benign cannabidiol (CBD), a cannabinoid without the ability to elicit a high. People and parents fighting for marijuana rights aren’t asking the government to allow Junior to smoke a joint during study hall; they’re asking for access to marijuana’s non-psychoactive benefits.
Yet, even with pot’s backing by the epilepsy community, not every medical study has produced the same results: some are conflicting in regards to CBD’s talents. Of course, one could argue that that occurs with everything. Health is an evolving field: one minute, salt is bad for us; the next, we’re told to invite it over for dinner. That’s why a handful of studies don’t say much: medicine is a field where research is the more the merrier (and by “merrier” I mean “accurate”).
But complicating this is the difficulty that surrounds research involving marijuana. Some scientists flat out refuse to conduct it in fear that they’ll lose their jobs or their funding; others find all the bureaucratic hoops too difficult, too expensive, and too time-consuming to jump through.
Epidiolex
Epidiolex, a drug derived from CBD and available through GW Pharmaceuticals, has recently garnered a lot of attention. It’s made of purified, 99 percent oil-based CBD extract. The FDA has approved it for compassionate use, allowing its administration in certain medical centers, as the clinical trials proceed.
What the results have shown so far is promising. A study presented in the American Academy of Neurology polled 137 patients who took the drug for 12 weeks; the study was focused on the young, with ages ranging from 2 years to 26 (and a median age of 11). Each participant had a type of epilepsy that was unresponsive to current treatments. Many had either Dravet Syndrome or Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome, two conditions known to make medical options difficult.
Fifty-four percent of the 137 patients reported that their seizures decreased
Sixty-three percent of patients with Dravet Syndrome reported a reduction, while those with atonic seizures did as well (a reduction of just under sixty-seven percent).
People who combined Epidiolex with another seizure medicine (Clobazam) found greater improvement, providing a possibility that CBD drugs could be supplemental medicines if not stand alone ones.
Charlotte Figi
Charlotte Figi, a Colorado girl whose Dravet Syndrome was so severe she was experiencing 300 seizures a week (including ones that stopped her heart) and declining cognitively, has become the unofficial poster child for CBD oil and the high CBD strain, Charlotte’s Web. After exhausting every traditional treatment, she began to use CBD-oil and her seizures dramatically reduced: a ninety-nine percent decrease.
Now advocates point to her as proof that CBD oil or CBD based medications, at the very least, are worth a shot.
The Future of CBD
For centuries, the story of cannabis’s ability to stop seizures has circulated like a legend passed down from generation to generation. If the past tells us anything, it’s that the future will see more CBD drugs in the hands of epileptics (and everyone else).
Marijuana possesses cannabinoids thought to have natural anti-convulsing effects, making it a plant ideal for treating epilepsy and other conditions that may cause seizures
It’s just another laurel upon which pot to rest; medically, we’re learning more and more about its advantages.
As weed becomes mainstream (and it is – thanks California!), more medical studies and research opportunities will arise and give scientists the ability to quit saying, “We think cannabis helps with this ailment,” and instead say, “Now we know it does.”Security experts at Recorded Future tracked a German hacker for the propagation of the Houdini worm through Pastebin sites.
A German hacker that goes online with the moniker Vicswors Baghdad is the responsible for the propagation of the Houdini malware on Pastebin sites.
According to the expert at Recorded Future, the same threat actor appears to be the author of an open source ransomware variant called MoWare H.F.D.
Experts at Recorded Future have observed three distinct spikes in malicious Visual Basic scripts posted on paste sites, in August, October, and in March 2017.
Most of the scripts are used to spread the Houdini worm, a threat that first appeared in 2013 and was updated in 2016.
“In early March 2017, we began to notice an increasing number of malicious VBScripts posted to paste sites. The majority of these VBScripts appeared to be Houdini. Houdini is a VBScript worm that first appeared in 2013 and was updated in 2016.” states the analysis published by Recorded Future. “The individual(s) reusing this Houdini VBScript are continually updating with new command and control servers. After further defining our search criteria, we isolated the Houdini scripts and quickly identified three distinct spikes around August, October, and March of this year.”
Recorded Future discovered 213 malicious posts to Pastebin sites, involving a single domain with 105 subdomains, the experts have found 190 hashes.
The domains and subdomains are from a dynamic DNS provider, the attribution was impossible because threat actors published the VBScript for the Houdini worm on guest accounts.
However, the experts were able to determine the name of the registrant for one domain, microsofit[.]net, it is “Mohammed Raad,” and the associated email is“vicsworsbaghdad@gmail.com,” from “Germany.”
Googling the above information, the researchers discovered a Facebook profile using the identical information. According to the profile, Mohammed Raad is a member of a German cell of Anonymous, it uses Vicswors Baghdad as an alias.
The researchers also highlighted that the Facebook profile also includes a recent conversation related to the MoWare H.F.D ransomware.
“The Facebook profile displays a recent conversation pertaining to an open source ransomware called “MoWare H.F.D”. It appears that they are studying, testing, and possibly configuring a ransomware.” continues the analysis.
“Upon further inspection of the screenshot posted on the “vicsworsbaghdad” Facebook profile, we noticed that the ransomware being configuring is an open source version available by commenting on the creator’s YouTube video. An account “Vicswors Baghdad” commented asking where he can find the file to download, to which the developer commented that they sent a private message. The account “Vicswors Baghdad” uses the same email “vicsworsbaghdad@gmail.com” as the registration of microsofit[.]net.”
Further details, including the threat actor profile, are available in the post published by Recorded Future.
Pierluigi Paganini
(Security Affairs – Houdini Worm, hacking)
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Share OnPirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde likes to innovate to improve people's lives, but with his latest project, he wants to save them too. Currently under development by members of the former Flattr team, the app is a digital version of traditional early warning siren-based systems that alert the public to fire, floods, gas leaks, or even war.
Of all the early founders of The Pirate Bay, it is Peter Sunde who has remained most obviously in the public eye. Now distanced from the site, Sunde has styled himself as a public speaker and entrepreneur.
Earlier this year the Swede (who is of both Norwegian and Finnish ancestry) sold his second most famous project Flattr to the parent company of Adblock Plus. Now, however, he has another digital baby to nurture, and this one is quite interesting.
Like many countries, Sweden operates a public early warning system. Popularly known as ‘Hesa Fredrik’, it consists of extremely loud outdoor sirens accompanied by radio and television messages.
The sirens can be activated in specific areas of the country wherever the problems exist. Fire, floods, gas leaks, threats to the water system, terrorist attacks or even war could trigger the alarm.
Just recently the ‘Hesa Fredrik’ alarm was sounded in Sweden, yet there was no planned test and no emergency. The public didn’t know that though and as people struggled to find information, authority websites crashed under the strain. The earliest news report indicating that it was a false alarm appeared behind a news site’s paywall. The national police site published no information.
The false alarm
Although Sunde heard the sirens, it was an earlier incident that motivated him to find a better solution. Speaking with Swedish site Breakit, Sunde says he got the idea during the Västmanland wildfire, which burned for six weeks straight in 2014 and became the largest fire in Sweden for 40 years.
“I got the idea during Västmanland fire. It took several days before text messages were sent to everyone in the area but by then it was already out of control. I thought that was so very bad when it is so easy to build something better,” Sunde said.
Sunde’s solution is the Hesa Fredrika app, which is currently under development by himself and several former members of the Flattr team.
“The goal is for everyone to download the app and then forget about it,” Sunde says.
When one thinks about the problem Sunde is trying to solve (i.e. the lack of decent and timely information in a crisis) today’s mobile phones provide the perfect solution. Not only do most people have one (or are near someone who does), they provide the perfect platform to deliver immediately deliver emergency services advice to people in a precise location.
“It is not enough for a small text to appear in the corner of the screen. I want to build something that makes the phone vibrate and sound so that you notice it properly,” Sunde told Breakit.
But while such an app could genuinely save lives in the event of a frankly rare event, Sunde has bigger ideas for the software that could extend its usefulness significantly.
Users will also be invited to add information about themselves, such as whether they’re a doctor or a blood donor. The app user could then be messaged if there was an urgent need for a particular match. But while the app will be rolled out soon, it won’t be rushed.
“Since it is extremely important to the quality of the messages, we want as many partnerships as possible before we launch something,” Sunde says, adding that in true Pirate Bay style, it will be completely free for everyone.
“So it will remain forever,” he says. “My philosophy is such that I do not want people to pay for things that can save their lives.”A top IRS official has admitted that Cincinnati IRS agents targeted groups requesting tax exempt status based on "party affiliation" and "guilt by association," according to documents obtained by the legal watchdog group Judicial Watch.
The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, included handwritten notes from an unidentified source at an interoffice meeting at IRS headquarters in Washington. The meeting apparently took place around August 2011.
According to an IRS court filing provided to Judicial Watch by the IRS, the notes were part of information taken from the following individuals:
-Four Chief Counsel employees -- Victoria Judson, Janine Cook, Susan Brown, and Don Spellmann
-Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division employee Nalee Park
-Former IRS employee Sarah Hall Ingram
The notes reveal former IRS Director of the Office of Rulings and Agreements Holly Paz's concern about the Cincinnati office's targeting of groups based upon ideology and party affiliation.
The Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuits came on the heels of the 2013 Treasury Inspector General report revealing that the IRS had singled out groups with conservative-sounding terms in their titles, such as "patriot" and "Tea Party."
The IG probe determined that "Early in Calendar Year 2010, the IRS began using inappropriate criteria, such as donor lists, to identify organizations applying for tax-exempt status.
According to the report, the illegal IRS reviews continued for more than 18 months and "delayed processing of targeted groups' applications" preparing for the 2012 presidential election.There are better ways to shake up your brain (Image: Federica |
; Print our message and stop execution mov si, message ; Put address of the null-terminated string to output into'si' call print ; Call our string-printing routine cli ; Clear the Interrupt Flag (disable external interrupts) hlt ; Halt the CPU (until the next external interrupt) data: message db 'This was outputted by a basic bootloader!', 0 ; Routine for outputting string in'si' register to screen print: mov ah, 0Eh ; Specify 'int 10h' 'teletype output' function ; [AL = Character, BH = Page Number, BL = Colour (in graphics mode)].printchar: lodsb ; Load byte at address SI into AL, and increment SI cmp al, 0 je.done ; If the character is zero (NUL), stop writing the string int 10h ; Otherwise, print the character via 'int 10h' jmp.printchar ; Repeat for the next character.done: ret ; Pad to 510 bytes (boot sector size minus 2) with 0s, and finish with the two-byte standard boot signature times 510 - ( $ - $$ ) db 0 dw 0xAA55 ; => 0x55 0xAA (little endian byte order)
This code, along with the bits I use to compile and test the bootloader can be found at the associated GitHub repo, here. Testing The Code Now we've actually finished writing our bootloader, we need some way to test it. I use Vagrant with a 'lucid32' box for all my OS testing, but in this case you might be able to get by in your local environment. You can first compile the NASM via something along the lines of nasm -f bin -o bootloader.bin bootloader.asm, and you can then use a utility such as 'dd' to copy the data to a floppy disk image file (or to a real floppy disk!): dd conv=notrunc bs=512 count=1 if=bootloader.bin of=bootloader.flp. Using QEMU, you could then boot the floppy disk image in a virtual machine with something like qemu -fda bootloader.flp -curses. And voilà, it works.
Our bootloader in action!Neko Case is hot. I mean, smoldering hair, Susan Orlean’s intellect, and a voice that could melt platinum (records)—that hot. And you don’t have to take my word for it. The New Pornographers’ singer-turned-solo-act was named Sexiest Babe of Indie Rock by Playboy, and GQ listed her right alongside the likes of Katy Perry and Liz Phair.
So why is it that nobody’s hitting on her?
As the singer recently tweeted: “No, ladies in bands don’t get ANY action.” Other female musicians backed her up. “SO TRUE!” tweeted Michelle Branch. Crooked Fingers singer Miranda Brown asserted, “You are 100% correct … I have gotten laid exactly one time on tour, and it was an ex. Laaaaame.”
This isn’t a call for the universal catcalling of female musicians. But in a world where sex appeal often trades as popular currency, what is with this double standard? Male rock stars’ sexing up fangirls is trite enough to warrant a book like Sex Tips From Rock Stars (which, naturally, only features men). So why is a musician like Colette Alexander saying things like “The best gift a friend can get a (girl)friend who’s about to go on tour is a vibrator”?
There are number of possible explanations. Salon asserted that male fans could be intimidated by the implied power dynamic of approaching a woman like Case.
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[T]he biggest reason for the lack of males in the groupie workforce likely stems from the power dynamic inherent in a sexual negotiation. A female fan, for all the chutzpah she may possess to throw herself in the path of R. Kelly, is chasing after a male of higher status. But the man standing outside by the stage door, despite the boldness of his move, is rarely viewed as her sexual equal.
We’ve heard that story countless times. (See: explanations for why Hillary Clinton’s a bitch or why breadwinner women are doomed to divorce.) Female rockers are powerful women and gearing up to approach any powerful woman—let alone a gorgeous celebrity with stage presence—can be tough on a guy’s masculinity. It’s the same code that directs nice guys to avoid hitting on the hot bartender because “she probably gets too much of that anyways.” It’s assumed that a woman like Neko Case wouldn’t want the guy who waits at the stage door. (Not to mention the different set of risks assumed when it’s a guy, not a girl, waiting.)
But here’s my question: why is it assumed that a female rock star wouldn’t want the sexual perks that come with the gig? Even Case herself admitted that it was a letdown, at least initially.
For female artists, it’s got to be weird doing the same job as their male counterparts and not getting the same payoff in attention. But the practical reality is that just because a woman rocks your world onstage, she’s probably not going to do it backstage as well. I’m too old to care now, but in my 20s I felt pretty robbed.
And further, why can’t male fans both respect and court their musical idol? Does a musical Madonna (not Ciccone)-whore complex come into play? I have mixed feelings about the idea of throwing one’s body at a rock star in general—but if it’s going to happen, why is it OK for fangirls to do it and not men?
Here’s Case again:
I didn’t want to be hit on by lots of men so much as I wanted to be hit on as much as men … Competitive inferior penis complex.
It’s often assumed that lady lead singers are dating someone in the band. Maybe overzealous band security has something to do with it.
But when I make it big with my one-woman xylophone-and-cymbal gig, I expect gender-equal sex perks.
So what do you think, readers? Where are all the fanboys?
Image Shadow1517/PhotobucketHeyou Media, a new startup launched by luminaries from Seattle’s tech and entertainment worlds, is raising cash to fuel the “alternative media revolution.”
That’s according to Seattle-based actor Tom Skerritt, of “Top Gun” fame, who serves as Heyou’s chairman. The company launched in Seattle last year but has been flying under the radar. Today, Heyou announced its first round of fundraising and the launch of its first video series on Amazon.
Heyou bills itself as a new media company that aggregates entertainment content, like film, web series, music, virtual reality, and special interest videos. Skerritt believes that by focusing on raising money and producing films at a lower cost than competitors in Hollywood, the company can support more independent work and leverage Seattle’s creative community.
“The issue is that Hollywood cannot make the price point necessary for new media and we feel here, in one of the most literate cities in the country … with all of the storytellers here, that we have a very good opportunity,” Skerritt said in an interview with GeekWire.
An SEC filing last week said Heyou had raised $225,000 of a $5 million funding round. The company said today that it “secured its first round of fundraising” but declined to confirm the amount or other details of the investment.
Skerritt has appeared in dozens of films and series, including “Alien” and “Steel Magnolias.” A self-described “storyteller,” he studied English at Wayne State University and UCLA. He has lived in the Northwest since the 1980s, splitting his time between his Seattle home and the San Juan Islands.
Heyou Media boasts an impressive lineup of other advisors including Pearl Jam Manager Kelly Curtis, well-known Seattle entrepreneur Mary Jesse, and Ed Fries, former head of Microsoft Games.
Skerritt wrote and directed Heyou Media’s first series, Stroller Gangs, which follows a group of “Seattle quad-shot latte moms.” All nine episodes are currently streaming on Amazon as part of its Prime Video offering.
Skerritt says Heyou has a “comfortable relationship” with Amazon. The two Seattle companies are discussing additional projects.
Heyou Media has also optioned “Widow Walk,” a historical drama that the company describes as “a ‘Game of Thrones’-style saga based in the Pacific Northwest.” Production of “Widow Walk” will begin this fall, using cash from Heyou’s first investment round. The company is also working on three additional films.
Julie Tokashiki, a journalism graduate who has worked with the heads of CBS Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Television is serving as CEO of Heyou Media.
Jesse is well known in the Seattle tech scene as an investor, advisor, and entrepreneur. She is the Chief Strategy Officer for VRstudios in Seattle, bringing mixed reality experience to her role as executive chair of Heyou’s board.
Fries also brings VR chops to Heyou, as a board member of virtual reality live streaming platform VREAL.
“We do have a project that we’re developing for VR that could also be a video game,” Skerritt said. “We’re putting together the business model itself that makes business sense.”
Heyou plans to a have a library of content across different media by the end of the year and is exploring ways to innovate and shake up the traditional media industry, which has been historically dominated by big studios.
“This is the Wild West we’re talking about,” Skerritt said.TUCSON, Ariz. (PAI) – For what the union involved says is the first time ever, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) declared taxi drivers are legally “employees” and have the right to vote to unionize, the Office and Professional Employees announced.
The Oct. 23 ruling, covering 200 AAA Transportation/Yellow Cab drivers in Tucson, Ariz., dismissed AAA’s appeal of NLRB Regional Director Cornele Overstreet’s decision for the drivers. The full board, in May, told Overstreet to re-rule on the case, under new conditions.
AAA contended that the drivers are “independent contractors” without the right to organize. Citing that ruling involving FedEx Home Delivery, the full board rejected AAA’s arguments and sent the case back to Overstreet.
Overstreet’s ruling clears the way for a recognition election for the Tucson Hacks Association, the Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) affiliate conducting the organizing drive among Tucson drivers. The election is expected before the end of this year.
OPEIU says the NLRB ruling is important because it puts official approval on the fact that taxi drivers, like millions of other such exploited workers nationwide, are not “independent contractors” but are really employees whose firms govern their wages and working conditions.
Those firms – such as taxi companies, port trucking firms and warehouse owners – argue that because workers are “free” to work on and off, they’re independent contractors, and cannot unionize. After hearing from both sides in the Tucson taxi case, the NLRB rejected the company’s argument.
In prior cases, including in Tucson, the NLRB ruled the taxi drivers are independent contractors, but the Tucson Hacks Association, with OPEIU’s help, appealed and the board reversed its prior ruling. OPEIU represents, among others, 4,000 taxi drivers in Las Vegas and San Diego.
“The key clarification was whether the individual” taxi driver “has an ‘actual entrepreneurial opportunity for loss or gain,'” OPEIU said. If she does, she’s an independent contractor. If he doesn’t, he’s an employee. The NLRB found that at both FedEx and in Tucson, the drivers did not have “real or feasible” opportunities for losses or gains. Therefore, they’re employees.
Overstreet said AAA controls the drivers through its dispatch system and thus can determine their income – and raise or lower it by changing dispatching orders and procedures.
“This group of drivers did as much as they could on their own,” said OPEIU President Michael Goodwin. “Within three months of turning to OPEIU, we’re pleased to see a favorable decision from the NLRB and are now preparing for an election.”
Photo: Taxi drivers will now be able to vote to unionize. | Frank Franklin II/APIt's just two weeks, so if the Flyers are able to advance beyond the first round, Sean Couturier could be ready to come back in round two.
But the Flyers announced on Friday that their best defensive forward is indeed out for the next two weeks with an upper-body injury. We know it's likely a sprain of his shoulder or his arm in that area.
Scott Laughton seems likely to check into the lineup in Couturier's place, although it's unclear whether coach Dave Hakstol will put Laughton on the second line as center or whether he'll otherwise mix up his lineup.
Couturier was the Flyers best hope at matching up against Alex Ovechkin in this series, and it's not necessarily a coincidence that it was a hit from Ovechkin that knocked him out. Couturier is also a key piece on the penalty kill, and in Game 1 the Capitals throttled the Flyers with the man advantage, only scoring one goal thanks to the brilliant goaltending of Steve Mason.
An uphill battle just got a lot steeper.Your Assistant is already available to help on phones, speakers and more. But sometimes you need something a bit more personal, just for you to hear. And that’s where headphones come into play. Like when you’re commuting on the train or reading at home. It would be nice to get on-the-go help from your Assistant, without glancing at your phone.
To help with those “in between” moments, together with Bose, we’re announcing headphones that are optimized for the Assistant, starting with the QC35 II. So now, you can keep up to date on your messages, music and more—with headphones that you’ve paired with your eligible Android phone or iPhone.
To get started, connect your QC 35 II headphones to your phone via Bluetooth, open your Google Assistant app and follow the instructions. From there, your Assistant is just a button away—push (and hold) the Action button on your headphones to easily and quickly talk to your Assistant.Ann Heisenfelt/Associated Press
On the Minnesota Vikings' to-do list this offseason, re-signing free agents is a pretty low priority. The future of star running back Adrian Peterson will be the biggest story, and what happens with him will have a big impact on what the Vikings do in both free agency and in the draft.
As far as their own free agents go, the Vikings really have no pressing concerns.
Middle linebacker Jasper Brinkley is the only starter in the group, and his value decreases because he gets off the field in Minnesota's sub-packages.
This isn't to say, however, that Minnesota has no work to do in keeping its own players. Of all the Vikings free agents, defensive tackle Tom Johnson had the biggest impact in 2014 and is the closest thing Minnesota has to a "must retain" player.
The Vikings certainly got their money's worth with Johnson in 2014, signing him to a one-year deal for $845,000 last offseason. Just a rotational player, Johnson, who backed up defensive tackles Sharrif Floyd and Linval Joseph, finished second on the team with 6.5 sacks and also had 22 tackles and a forced fumble.
Of 72 qualifying defensive tackles, Pro Football Focus ranked Johnson 12th in terms of pass-rushing efficiency. According to PFF, Johnson played just 447 snaps compared to starter Linval Joseph's 744, which makes his sack total all the more impressive.
A look at some of the top free-agent defensive tackles on the market proves what a bargain Johnson was for the Vikings in 2014:
Player Team 2014 Salary Tackles Sacks Ndamukong Suh Detroit $22.4 million 53 8.5 C.J. Mosley Detroit $1.54 million 26 2.5 Terrance Knighton Denver $2.75 million 30 2 Dan Williams Arizona $2.15 million 32 1 Jared Odrick Miami $2.77 million 29 1 Pat Sims Oakland $2.0 million 25 0 Ahtyba Rubin Cleveland $8.17 million 28 1 Dwan Edwards Carolina $2.01 million 40 4 Tom Johnson Minnesota $845,000 22 6.5
Of those listed, only Sims and Edwards played backup roles like Johnson.
Obviously, sack and tackle numbers don't come close to telling the whole story of how effective defensive tackles are, but Johnson's sack productivity in 2014 has earned him a pay raise in the coming seasons.
Johnson has certainly paid his dues as a football journeyman, playing for six different teams over the last nine years, including stops in the Arena Football League and the CFL. Johnson probably hopes he's done moving around, and as Matt Vensel of the Star Tribune reports, he's looking for a multiyear deal.
Johnson was one of the more valuable reserves on the Vikings' roster in 2014, as Sharrif Floyd battled a nagging knee injury for most of the season.
Johnson and Floyd combined for 11 sacks on the season, and while the hope is that Floyd continues to improve in his third season, having a veteran backup like Johnson will only help him develop.
Though it surely must irk defensive-minded head coach Mike Zimmer that his run defense ranked 25th in the league in 2014, the team seems to have good depth at tackle with Linval Joseph and rookie Shamar Stephen both showing good glimpses during the season.
Joseph played decently but didn't come close to paying off on the five-year, $31.25 million deal the Vikings signed him to last offseason.
Minnesota has to hope that another year under Zimmer will help Joseph, as it has with players in the past.
Cincinnati Bengals tackle Geno Atkins, playing in his third Pro Bowl in four years, gave Zimmer a lot of credit for his success in the league, according to Mike Tomasson of the Pioneer Press:
It was a pleasure to have Zimmer as a coach. I learned a lot from him. He helped my game get to the next level and I’m very thankful for that. He helped me in understanding the game, what the offense is trying to do and he always did a great job with putting players in position to make plays and just making sure everybody did their job while focusing on the team and not individual play.
Now, the Vikings certainly don't want to overpay for a guy who will be 31 years old when the 2015 season begins and had never recorded more than two sacks in a season before 2014.
Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press
Johnson deserves a raise, but it's unlikely that Minnesota would want to pay him much more than $6 million over a two- or three-year deal.
As we said at the top, the Vikings have themselves in terrific financial shape as they head toward free agency. They took care of their only two really meaningful 2015 prospective free agents last summer when they signed both tight end Kyle Rudolph and guard Brandon Fusco to extensions.
Depending on what happens with Peterson, the Vikings might be big players in free agency this year, but locking up Johnson before he hits the open market would serve them well.
Contract information courtesy of Spotrac.Heather Dubrow Demands An Apology From Vicki Gunvalson For Lying Before She Can Move On — Will That EVER Happen?
Heather Dubrow is waiting for an apology!
It appears that the Real Housewives of Orange County star is not quite ready to play nice with Vicki Gunvalson following Brooks Ayers‘ cancer controversy.
On Tuesday, while attending the 6th Annual Tree Lighting to commemorate World AIDS Day in West Hollywood, CA the 46-year-old dished about her feelings towards her RHOC costar.
Related: Yolanda & David Foster Are Divorcing
She explained:
“When someone apologizes to you in a real way, then you can accept it and move on. She’s apologizing for being duped. I agree she was probably duped, but the other truth is that she lied and she has admitted to lying but isn’t apologizing for lying.”
That’s a fair point. In case you forgot, the blonde beauty is currently facing criticism for previously defending her ex-boyfriend’s cancer claims — despite the fact Brooks has recently revealed he faked treatment documents. Yikes!
Vicki has since abandoned her support for her former flame and has done quite the media tour to share her side of the story. Still, it seems Heather’s not exactly buying the act.
She continued:
“You know what’s so funny and, to tear a page out of Vicki’s book, I actually started snoring and fell asleep halfway through [her interview]. It wasn’t that deep to me. I think there are still a lot of unanswered questions. I’m very fond of Vicki. She texted me on Thanksgiving. I texted her back. I care about her and I care about her family, but she lied. I just feel like all we are being told is she feels bad that she was duped. She has been caught in many lies, and I would have more respect for her if she just admitted it, and then maybe we could all move on.”
Oh we hope so! Nonetheless, the 53-year-old may be in touch with the brunette TV star — but that doesn’t mean she’s thrilled with what she has to say. Heather and fellow Housewives Shannon Beador and Tamra Judge dug into Vicki quite a bit on the opinionated celeb’s podcast.
The reality TV personality noted:
“[ Vicki ] reached out to me to tell me she was pissed off about my podcast. I talk about what’s going on in my life, and she is part of what’s going on in my life and she wasn’t that happy with what we have been talking about. I think that if she just sat down with someone real and answered real questions, we could all move forward.”
Hmm, very inneresting! We doubt Vicki will get on board with that.
As for Brooks and his supposed cancer, Heather concluded:
“There is nothing embarrassing about having cancer. If you had chlamydia and you didn’t want people to know, I kind of get that. Crabs, maybe? But cancer, we’re all on your team. You’re not showing documents because you’re a liar.”
Now that’s a burn. Here’s hoping we’ll learn the truth sooner than later — oh and on camera too! LOLz!
[Image via Apega/WENN.]Early ballots and voter registration numbers show a surge of Democrats in the important swing state of Florida.
As of Friday, roughly 311,00 Floridians had cast absentee ballots, and the numbers show Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is heavily favored in that group, according to a Politico report.
Republicans had been leading the way in absentee ballots by 1.9 percent, but Democrats submitted 503,000 new voter registration forms, compared to just 60,000 from Republicans in the same period.
Florida, which has about 12.5 million active voters, reportedly had 2 percent more registered active Democrats than Republicans as of the end of August.
Despite that report, Republican National Committee Sean Spicer praised his party's ground game in the Sunshine State as recently as two months ago.
"The Clinton camp knows that the Trump campaign and the RNC's combined efforts are outpacing their field organization, and their touting how many offices they have cannot cover up the fact they lag behind our effort in organizers, volunteers, and voter registration in key states," Spicer wrote.
With less than a month until Election Day, Clinton leads Republican nominee Donald Trump by 3.2 percentage points in Florida, according to a RealClearPolitics average of polls.NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — A Brooklyn woman got a big surprise when she returned home from a long trip.
Someone, or something, had made itself at home in her apartment.
A few days ago, after being on the road for two months, 33-year-old Genevieve Roman came home to her Williamsburg apartment and found she had a new roommate, or more specifically, a squatter, CBS2’s Scott Rapoport reports.
“When I opened the door, I just heard like flapping and noise and banging. I could tell it was a bird,” Roman said.
Kicked back and cool, chilling in her orange pasta strainer, unannounced and uninvited, was a pigeon.
The bird apparently decided to take advantage of Roman’s ever-so-slightly ajar window and made herself at home in her new crib.
Turns out, the pigeon was pregnant.
“I was extremely shocked. I didn’t know what to think,” Roman said.
The nesting process happened, meaning, like it or not, Roman is going to need a new strainer and decide what to do with her new tenant. She told Rapoport she’s an animal lover.
“I am thinking I’m going to let her stay,” she said.
Roman named the bird Adealaide, and the two now coexist in their Williamsburg kitchen.
She said Adealaide comes and goes as she pleases, flying the coop at times through the cracked open window, but always returning to sit on her eggs.
Roman said she’s reached out to several organizations, hoping one would step up to take the eggs and put them in an incubator, but said nobody seems to care about pigeons.
“They’re just laughing at me. They were like, well if this was a falcon, it would be different,” she said.
So now the plan is to let the mother and her babies to-be remain in the crib, at least until the eggs hatch, which could be in a couple of weeks.
Despite what some might think, Roman said Adealaide is a very clean and considerate roommate, for a pigeon.
“There’s no poop. I didn’t clean up any poop for you guys,” she said.
Animal experts tell CBS2 pigeons pose only minimal health risks to humans.Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) called on President Donald Trump to apologize to former President Barack Obama for falsely accusing him of wiretapping Trump Tower.
“I see no indication that that’s true,” Cole said of Trump’s claims, speaking to a group of reporters on Friday. “And so it’s not a charge that I would have ever made.”
“And frankly, unless you can produce some compelling proof, then I think the president ― President Obama is owed an apology in that regard, because if he didn’t do it, we shouldn’t be reckless in accusations that he did,” added Cole, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee who remains a deputy whip in the House Republican conference.
GOP Congressman @TomColeOK04 tells @mkraju: Trump should apologize to Obama over "wiretapping" claims https://t.co/R00CD7CxD2 — CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) March 17, 2017
To date, no other elected Republican has so strongly condemned the wiretapping allegations Trump made on Twitter earlier this month.
Leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Thursday presented their bipartisan assessment that there is no evidence of the federal government surveilling Trump Tower before or after the 2016 election. On Wednesday, the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee from both parties announced they had reached that conclusion as well.
FBI Director James Comey will have the opportunity to comment on the claims on Monday, when he testifies before the House Intelligence Committee.
Trump has refused to admit he was wrong, however. In a Wednesday interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, he attributed the allegations to unnamed news reports and suggested evidence would soon emerge to validate him.When details of their “sadistic torture” on a pair of young boys were read out to the court the two brothers sat emotionless. But today hearing tales of their own “toxic” homelife was apparently too upsetting.
Just a few minutes into his mitigation, as he told the court about regular beatings their father would administer to their mother, Peter Kelson QC was forced to pause as the brothers fidgeted behind him.
First the elder of the defendants, who is 12, was asked if he was okay. Then it became clear it was the youngest of the pair, now 11-years-old, who was in most distress.
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His face red, he folded his arms on the desk in front of him and buried his head in them. A social worker gave him a tissue to wipe his tears and then took him crying from the courtroom.
It was behaviour in stark contrast to the impassiveness shown by the pair during the hours it has taken the prosecution to tell the court about their robbery and assault of two boys who were just 11 and nine-years-old.
At times they have mouthed inaudible words and glanced along the table at each other, but on the whole they have looked straight ahead, drinking water and yawning occasionally.
But the reminder of their violent and unconventional upbringing brought a tearful reaction.
In mitigation the judge heard that the boys had a “toxic” homelife. The elder brother, in particular, was beaten by his father and had been drinking alcohol, smoking and taking drugs since he was nine-years-old.
He also used to watch his father’s pornographic DVDs and had also watched horror films including Child’s Play and Saw. The court was also told that the brothers’ elder sibling was in prison.
The court heard details of the brothers’ previous convictions. The older brother has four convictions and a reprimand which date back to August 2007. His offences include trying to steal the handbag of a 65-year-old woman and attacking an eight-year-old boy and his mother.
His brother has one reprimand which was given in March 2009, just weeks before the Edlington attacks, when he punched a 50-year-old woman and headbutted a 53-year-old man.
Earlier the court heard that the brothers told the police had only stopped their assault on their young victims in Edlington after an hour and a half because their arms were sore.
The siblings, aged 10 and 11 at the time, have admitted attacking their victims after luring them away from a playground and are expected to be sentenced today.
Yesterday Sheffield Crown Court was told about what the boys said in police interviews after being arrested following the attacks, which took place in Edlington, south Yorkshire, in April last year.
When asked by officers why he had stopped, the older brother replied: “Cos I’d had enough…I didn’t want to do any more…My arms were aching.”
He was then asked, on a scale of one to 10, how close he thought he and his brother had come to killing their victims. He said eight or nine.
His younger brother, who is now 11, was asked how he felt after the attacks. He replied: “Tired…my arms were hurting.”
The officer asked: “If your arms hadn’t been aching, would you have carried on?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
Handwritten letters from both victims have been handed to the judge telling him the impact the attacks have had on their lives. The elder boy, who is the uncle of the younger victim, says he still has concerns that the defendants will repeat their attack on him, but that his nightmares are less frequent.
The court heard that the younger boy’s behaviour at school has deteriorated and he does not go out as much as he used to.
Nicholas Campbell QC, prosecuting, added: “It is also clear that the experience of these two victims have put a real strain on their relationship. Where they were regularly in each other’s company now that is no longer the case.”
Speaking about the victims’ extended families, Mr Campbell added: “They have their own anxieties and their own feelings of guilt because of what was perpetrated upon their children when they were not there to protect them.”
Earlier in the day, the court had heard how both brothers attempted to pin the blame on each other for the attacks.
The elder brother said that his younger brother was responsible for one of the most serious injuries inflicted – a gaping wound to the arm of the younger victim – and that he had look away, telling police: “I don’t like looking at other people’s blood.”
The older brother also told police of his concern for his victims. He said that at one point, when the victims were covered with a plastic sheet, he had made holes so the boys could breath.
He also said that he had planned to tell his father about what they had done, because he was worried about the older victim in particular, saying: “He’ll freeze to death at night.”
The younger boy told police the attack had nearly made him sick. He told police that he had pleaded with his brother to go back and help the older boy, saying: “It’s tight just leaving him there to die.”
Older brother police interview (extract):
Police Officer: Why have you done all this?
Boy: Don’t know. ‘Cos there were nowt to do.
He said he had been bored and was asked:
PO: What made you stop?
B: ‘Cos I’d had enough, me.
PO: You’d had enough?
B: And I thought it was tight.
PO: What do you mean by you saying ‘I’d had enough’?
B: I didn’t want to do any more.
PO: And why didn’t you want to do it anymore?
B: My arms were aching.
If his arms had not been aching, he said he would have carried on.
Younger brother police interview (extract):
Police Officer: Have you meant to kill them?
Boy: No.
PO: Why did you stop?
B: Erm, he kept screaming, so I stopped it.
He was then told by the police that his brother had said he stopped when his arms got tired.
PO: How were you feeling?
B: What, when I kept hitting ‘em?
PO: Afterwards?
B: Tired…my arms were hurting.
PO: If your arms hadn’t been aching, would you have carried on?
B: Yeah.
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Subscribe nowThe Silver Bug: Eric Sprott is the Chairman of Sprott Money Ltd. as well as Sprott, Inc. With more than 40 years of experience in the investment industry, Eric has earned a recognized standing not only as one of the world’s premier gold and silver investors
but also as an expert in the precious metals industry.
In this interview, Eric covered a number of crucial topics that are currently affecting precious metals investors. Such as:
Recent geopolitical events
Supply and demand data
Gold and silver manipulation
The end of the silver fix
The current state of the mining industry
Plus much more…
Eric’s more than 40 years of experience enables him to step back and see the forest through the trees. We hope you enjoy this in depth interview with one of the premier names in the precious metals industry.
This article is brought to your courtesy of The Silver Bug.Four teenagers were shot after “some sort of argument” late Saturday night on Detroit’s west side, and one has since died, police said. (Photo: Detroit News)
Four teenagers were shot after “some sort of argument” late Saturday night on Detroit’s west side, and one has since died, police said.
The quadruple shooting took place at 11:30 p.m. on the 8400 block of Grand River, south of Joy Road, near the building that houses well-known restaurant Steve’s Soul Food.
The restaurant had been closed for hours by that point, and police believe all parties involved had been at a club on the upstairs floor of the same building.
The shooting, which happened outside the club, came after an argument between the victims and another group, and left one of the victims dead and three others wounded.
The victims are: a 16-year-old boy, who was initially listed in extreme critical condition and died Sunday morning; an 18-year-old man, who is in temporary serious condition; a 17-year-old girl, who is in temporary serious condition; and an 18-year-old man, who is in stable condition, said Officer Jennifer Moreno, a Detroit Police Department spokeswoman.
Police are looking for two vehicles believed to have pulled up on the group of teens, a red Chrysler 300 and a maroon Dodge Charger. There may have been two shooters, Moreno said.
jdickson@detroitnews.com
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2ojZWeUNearly 60 years after his death, Alan Turing, the British mathematician regarded as one of the central figures in the development of the computer, received a formal pardon from Queen Elizabeth II on Monday for his conviction in 1952 on charges of homosexuality, at the time a criminal offense in Britain.
The pardon was announced by the British justice secretary, Chris Grayling, who had made the request to the queen. Mr. Grayling said in a statement that Mr. Turing, whose most remarkable achievement was helping to develop the machines and algorithms that unscrambled the supposedly impenetrable Enigma code used by the Germans in World War II, “deserves to be remembered and recognized for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science.”
The British prime minister, David Cameron, said in a statement: “His action saved countless lives. He also left a remarkable national legacy through his substantial scientific achievements, often being referred to as the ‘father of modern computing.’ ”In both chimpanzees and humans, portions of the brain that are critical for complex cognitive functions, including decision-making, self-awareness and creativity, are immature at birth. But there are important differences, too. Baby chimpanzees don't show the same dramatic increase in the volume of prefrontal white matter in the brain that human infants do.
Those are the conclusions of a study reported in the August 11th Current Biology that is the first to track the development of the chimpanzee brain over time and to make the comparison to humans.
"One of the most marked evolutionary changes underlying human-specific cognitive traits is a greatly enlarged prefrontal cortex," said Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University in Japan. "It is also one of the latest-developing brain regions of the cerebrum."
That built-in developmental delay, now shown to be shared with chimps, may provide an extended period of plasticity, allowing both humans and our closest evolutionary cousins to develop complex social interactions, knowledge and skills that are shaped by life experiences, the researchers say.
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Georgia’s Kakheti region, from where their ancestors were once exiled. But the transition was not as smooth. The Fereydani women, who had fought hard for keeping the link with Georgia, suddenly found themselves alienated in their supposed homeland, where locals saw them as “Iranian Tatars” who spoke incomprehensible Georgian and followed archaic customs. Soon most of them asked to be returned back to Fereydan.
In today’s Fereydunshahr, the memory of an over 400-year-old exile seems more vivid than that of a 50-year-old failed repatriation. But even as Fereydani women keep longing for a land they have not known, they admit that their identity is nuanced: “We still are Iranians. After all, we have been living here for so long now. We are used to the local lifestyle.”Vintage Synths
By Jem Godfrey
Vintage synthesizers: can you love them too much?
I'm in a prog rock band. And this is never a good thing. You see, being in a prog band means that you're officially allowed to become a vintage analogue bore, and I was one — one of the people that put the 'anal' into analogue. I counted Rock Walkman, Emerson Lakeson and that hairy bloke out of Focus as my mentors. "Oh no”, I would opine at the AA (Analogues Anonymous) meeting, "there is simply nothing like the real thing, it's about physics, it's all about the knobs”. What I didn't realise was that it was all about knobs, but more about the one doing the talking in this case.
Last summer, my studio contained a Jupiter 8 (mint, natch); a Prophet 5 (mint); a TR808 (beyond minty, this was actually knocking on the door of aniseed); two TR909s; a Prophet 600 with new cheeks and a complete set of P5 knobs, all the way from Wine Country Sequential in the USA; and a Roland CR78.
But then the inevitable problem would kick in when it came to actually make some music with all this sonic porno: I'd get gear blindness. Which one of my babies would give me the fattest square-wave bass, or the sharpest sync lead? Which one would provide the ultimate pad capable of warming the coldest analogue heart? In the end, the answer was none of them. I found my modern-day, bog-standard Japanese ROMpler did the job 98 percent of the time because it was quicker, easier, more reliable, in tune, easy to edit and easy to forget about while I moved onto the next bit.
When I'm not hobbit bothering, my main bread and butter is jingles and TV music. As anybody who's tinkered with this line of work will tell you, everybody's pitching for the same jobs, everybody's doing the pitch for free and everybody submitted their pitch yesterday. There simply isn't time to get out your patch cords and rustle up an oboe sound for the new series of When Biscuits Attack! This is real life. Indeed, the few times I actually got around to using one of the old girls' warbly offerings, I'd be so excited that I'd put it way too high in the mix, resulting in an inevitable request from the client to 'lose the Bontempi'. Nobody's noticed that the sounds they get from me are now largely software generated, and that the 909 kick is a sample once again.
The ghastly truth is this: in the real world where people are real people, clients are real clients, and real money pays for one's real mortgage, nobody actually cares about your vintage synths! Real people have about as much interest in your minty Moog as a bee does in the atomic weight of Cadmium, but you should probably keep this to yourself lest you get roughed up by a bloke with an oscilloscope and a copy of What Beard? magazine.
Sure, if you're planning on bringing the world Hooked On Electro Paganini On Ice On Fire Volume 1, and you've grown your beard, and you've got your fortune to blow on it, I shall give you a manly hug, step aside, and look forward to hearing it in 2024. The world does need a person like you, and maybe another one as a backup in case your Moog modular falls on you.
However, if you're like me and counting yourself extremely lucky to be making a living through music at all in these troubled times, what really matters is speed and consistency. It doesn't matter if your pads are coming from a Memorymoog or an iPhone, as long as the job gets done. But if you choose to stay old‑school, be sure you're prepared to lose a few weekends a year while you drive all your beloved old kit to and from the menders.
As for me, I've got my weekends back, flogged the lot and jumped headlong once more into the world of the soft synth. I cured my gear blindness and I'm back to churning things out in no time at all, for clients who couldn't care less about how my virtual Jupiter 8's VCOs bear no resemblance to the actual thing. Allegedly.
The down side is that I now have to actively heat my studio in the winter, but on the up side, my blood pressure is back to normal and I've got lots of lovely free surfaces upon which to put my tea.Matt Martin can’t help but think of a certain ex-teammate when he considers the manner in which Auston Matthews goes about his business on a daily basis.
“A lot of similarities to J.T.,” Martin said, referring to New York Islanders captain John Tavares.
“They have the same effort and work ethic. With the success Auston is having, he still comes to the rink and wants to get better every day. At 19 years old, that is a pretty impressive trait to have.
“You can already see those leadership qualities coming out of him. He’s not going to be the most vocal guy in the room, but he will walk around and give you a pat on the back when you make a good play. In my case, if I get into a fight, he will give me a little whack.”
Despite the oddity that is the Islanders organization as a whole, Tavares has become a respected player across the league, one who sets an example on every shift.
Matthews is a mere 44 games into a career with the Leafs that is expected to be long and prosperous, yet already has demonstrated he has the proper constitution to be named the next captain of the Leafs.
Martin, whose stall is beside Matthews in the Leafs dressing room at the Air Canada Centre, agreed.
“I would think so,” said Martin, who departed the Islanders to sign with the Leafs last summer. “I’m not going to make those decisions, but he has at his age maybe the best leadership qualities I have seen … not that J.T. was not an unbelievable leader. John had some bumps in the road early and I’m not saying Auston won’t, but the way he has handled it so far, especially in this market with all the attention he gets, is incredible.
“Sitting beside him, I talk to him a lot. He is well on the way to being a big leader on this team for a long time.”
Teammate James van Riemsdyk concurred.
“Your best players have to be the ones pulling the most rope and he is a guy who has those types of qualities in him, where you can tell he wants to get better, do the things he needs to do to be a great player,” van Riemsdyk said. “We’re really lucky to have him. Those are good things to see out of a guy in his first year.”
POINT SHOTS
The Leafs lost 3-2 in a shootout to the Ottawa Senators on Saturday at the ACC despite a highlight-reel goal in the skills competition by Mitch Marner, one that counted after a review. Count van Riemsdyk among those who don’t like the NHL’s points system, as the Leafs fell to 1-6 in shootouts. “I think they need to skew the points a little more,” van Riemsdyk said. “I don’t know. It seems interesting you can win a shootout and get as many points for beating a team in 60 minutes. I don’t think I like that aspect of it. It makes it exciting for the fans, so that part of it is good, it has that entertainment value to it, but you should be rewarded more for winning games in regulation.” … Before a crowd of 19,544 at the ACC — one that took the time to boo Senators defenceman Dion Phaneuf every so often or cheer his name derisively — Matthews missed a tap-in with an open net in the first period, a miscue that does not happen often … Also in the opening 20 minutes, Marner passed up a great chance to make a pass that went awry and William Nylander missed on a backhand after deking past Ottawa goalkeeper Mike Condon … When the Leafs took a 2-1 lead in the third period, it appeared Nazem Kadri had scored his 100th NHL goal and he reacted as such. His short shot, however, was tipped past Condon by Martin.
FROM THE HASH MARKS
With Morgan Rielly’s streak of 193 consecutive games played ending this week, Jake Gardiner takes over as the Leafs’ present ironman. Gardiner has played in 118 games in a row. Rielly, out with a right leg injury, did not take part in the morning skate … Jose Bautista, at the game in a private box with several of his Blue Jays teammates, was interviewed during a TV timeout. Naturally, there were loud cheers when Bautista said the Jays had unfinished business … Leafs head coach Mike Babcock on assistant coach Jim Hiller, who runs the team’s high-octane power play and originally was hired by Babcock back in 2014 to be an assistant coach with the Detroit Red Wings: “I have always tried to hire different types of people to help you get better and grow. I was impressed by his knowledge and the way he thought offensively. He does not have one thought that would be similar to mine. He likes the offensive side of the puck and that is how he thinks. That is much different than the way I see things in the game and so it has been good for me and it has been good for him too.”Fishing gear is entangling whales at record rates along the West Coast of the United States, and now environmental groups are urging regulators to take action to keep the giant marine mammals safe.
The number of whale entanglements reported for gray and humpback whales nearly doubled—from 16 incidents in 2013 to 31 last year—killing seven of the animals in 2014, according to data obtained from the National Marine Fisheries Service by environmental group the Center for Biological Diversity. Twenty-five entanglements have been reported in just the first four months of 2015.
Fishing gear set near the coastline is catching whales as they migrate between Arctic feeding grounds and tropical breeding grounds, snaring the marine mammals in nets and ropes that wrap around their fins and flukes. The lines, nets, and buoys can make it difficult for whales to swim, and the gear often ends up lodged in the whales’ skin—leading to serious injury and sometimes death.
NMFS researchers have responded by examining specific fisheries to see how best to limit whale interaction with fishing lines. For instance, Dungeness crab gear appears to be disproportionately trapping whales off California’s coast.
“The pot and trap fisheries are the most commonly documented source of serious injury and mortality of humpback whales in U.S. West Coast waters,” said Catherine Kilduff, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Related The Unseen Slaughter Under the Sea
Some 800 commercial fishing vessels drop more than 200,000 crab and lobster traps along the California coast during the annual fishing season—and thousands of recreational anglers drop traps as well.
While trap limits were established by the state two years ago, entanglements continue to increase.
“We are hoping to work with the state and fishermen to come up with measures to reduce entanglement risk in the next few months, before the start of the next fishing season,” Kilduff said.
Some of the changes fisheries on the East Coast have made to avoid entanglements with endangered North Atlantic right whales could possibly be implemented on the West Coast, said Dan Lawson, a NMFS biologist.
Options include installing improved fishing gear attachments designed to break away to avoid snagging whales and limiting the time a trap or net can remain in the water without being retrieved.
The rate of entanglements has steadily increased since NMFS started recording incidents in 2000. Lawson said that could be due to a number of factors: more people on the water, which means more chances of spotting ailing whales; more citizens aware of how to report such incidents; and healthier, larger populations of gray and humpback whales traversing the West Coast.
“This is certainly a priority issue for us, for both gray and humpback whales, in terms of the rising number of reports and the severity of the issue,” Lawson said.You might remember back in 2012 there was a big fight over the SOPA and PIPA bills that would end net neutrality. Sites like Google, Twitter, Reddit and Twitter all joined in by going dark for a day or putting up a message about how important it was to fight. Those bills were defeated at the time but at least two big fights have happened since. Now, the only man at the top of FCC who was in favor of an open internet is leaving and his colleagues have promised lobbyists they will kill net neutrality right away.
If you’re unfamiliar, net neutrality is, basically, the concept of keeping all websites on equal ground. Mass Appeal has the potential to load as fast as Google. There are numerous reasons that it doesn’t but with the right coders and servers it could. Telecommunication companies don’t like that because they’d like to be able to create “fast and slow lanes” of traffic. For example if you’re a Time-Warner customer and Time-Warner has beef with YouTube they might just slow the website down to the point that videos are impossible to watch. Or maybe, they just want to make some extra cash, so they charge you $20 more a month if you want to watch Netflix. Or maybe, Donald Trump doesn’t like what a particular website said about him, so he calls up his friend at Time-Warner and asks him to slow the site down to the point no one read it. Yeah, net neutrality is important.
FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, a Democrat, has announced that he’ll leave office on January 20th, as the Trump regime takes over. That leaves, three people in charge until a replacement for Wheeler is confirmed. Two of those people, Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly, sent a letter this week to the five largest telecom lobbying groups promising end net neutrality with their newfound power. The letter reads in part:
As you know, we dissented from the Commission’s February 2015 Net Neutrality decision, including the Order’s imposition of unnecessary and unjustified burdens on providers … we will seek to revisit those particular requirements, and the Title II Net Neutrality proceeding more broadly, as soon as possible.
Title II is the provision that makes it illegal for a company to charge extra cash for websites of their choosing. Basically, your internet could look a lot more like your cable, with a limited number of sites and premium content costing more. You’d still have to pay HBO Go and the internet company for the same thing you have now.
Until a replacement is found, Pai and O’Reilly have a 2-1 majority vote. It can take months to confirm a new chairman. Congress would have to debate it and Trump is likely to choose someone who is against net neutrality considering his comments about “closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”
Expect to see your favorite websites screaming about this soon. But considering most people only have 1 or 2 internet providers as an option, the effective monopoly makes it incredibly difficult for the public to do anything.READ THE MANUAL OF STYLE AND THE RULES BEFORE EDITING!
Hello, and welcome to the official Apocalypse Rising Wiki! If you're new to editing, make sure to check out the wiki rules and basic contributing guide before editing or creating anything.
About the Game
Apocalypse Rising is a ROBLOX arcade survival shooter. It is currently being developed by Gusmanak and WhoBloxedWho. The goal of the game is to survive and fight in a post-apocalyptic world, populated by flesh eating zombies and other survivors. Your personal choices will alter the game tremendously; you could be a Bandit who hunts down innocent people to murder them and take their loot, a survivor who stays out of fights, or a hero who defends the innocent from bandits.
Apocalypse Rising 2, the sequel, is currently being developed. Early access will be available later down the line.
For more information, visit /r/ApocalypseRisingVancouver, B.C. – Vancouver Canucks General Manager Jim Benning announced today the hiring of Scott Walker as a Player Development Consultant. A Canucks alumnus, Walker played 197 games, collected 44 points (10-34-44) and 466 penalty minutes in a Vancouver uniform over the span of four seasons. In his new role, Walker will work directly with Canucks prospects.
Walker played 829 career games over the span of 15 seasons with the Vancouver Canucks, Nashville Predators, Carolina Hurricanes and Washington Capitals. He amassed 397 points (151-246-397) and 1,162 penalty during the regular season. The Cambridge, Ontario native also added eight points (1-7-8) and 31 penalty minutes in 30 NHL playoff games.
Following his playing career, Walker served as Head Coach of the Guelph Storm of the Ontario Hockey League from 2010-2015. Walker led the Storm to a regular season record of 179-105-22 over the span of five seasons and an OHL championship in 2013-14.
On the international stage, Walker has captured two gold medals in a coaching capacity. He acted as an Assistant Coach for Team Canada at the 2015 World Junior Championships as well as at the 2012 Ivan Hlinka Tournament.DropColour — Our Open-Source Arcade Game for iOS in Swift 2.2
Mateusz Szklarek Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 4, 2016
DropColour is an arcade game in which you simply have to drag and drop one circle onto another of the same color. When you do that both circles will disappear from the screen with nice animation and a sound. The game has no time limit. You lose when the entire board is full and there’s no available space for new circles to appear.
The game is Open Source and you can check its code on GitHub.
Creating the MVP
We came up with the idea for the game in September 2015 during our internal hackathon. Initially, team consisted of one designer and developer. First designs based on mock ups were completed in Sketch. I proceeded to the basic implementation of the game. My aim was to make the main functionality of dragging and dropping circles. I was able to create an MVP in less than 20 hours.
Working on DropColour’s quality
The main aim for next hackathons (November and February) was to release an application to the App Store. Unfortunately code written in less 20 hours was not the best quality and required a lot of refactoring. A new iOS developer, Dariusz Rybicki, has joined the team to help me with the tasks. Together we took the challenges of refactoring the code throughout the app and implementing new functionalities. We’ve also added a new engine to DropColour responsible for the level of difficulty.
Our two most important principles of the project were:
Great playability. Zero bug tolerance.
With that in mind, we have managed to release DropColour to the app store on February 10th.
Few thousand users and counting!
It’s been two months since the release of the game and we have the following data:
Tech info
DropColour was initially written in Swift 2.1 and during development process we migrated it to Swift 2.2.
We used one Apple Framework — GameKit for score synchronization with Game Center.
We used only two external libraries: SnapKit for layout and Spring for animation.
Travis CI + Fastlane are awesome tools for speeding up the deploy process. We used them because we? efficiency. Travis runs tests, archives projects and sends new beta builds to TestFlight. Everything happens automatically when you push new version to github.
Babelish, a Ruby library that allows you to fetch the translations from Google Drive, speeds up the creation of new language versions.
Currently available version of DropColour is 1.0.3, but we’re still working on improving the game.
Thanks for your feedback about the game. We promise that we will continue to work on it and making it even better. We also decided that from now the project will be open source. So if you like it, give us a star on github?
https://ghbtns.com/github-btn.html?user=elpassion&repo=DropColour-iOS&type=star&count=true&size=large
Try to beat the 1780 highscore too! :)The Mini Cooper Coupe was originally unveiled as a concept back in 2009. Now we’re just a few months away from the Frankfurt Motor Show and Mini has given us a preview of the 2012 Mini Cooper Coupe that will be unveiled at the show.
The Mini Cooper Coupe is a new two-seater Mini that will be released early next year. The Mini Cooper Coupe will be the sportiest Cooper in the Mini lineup. The Mini Cooper Coupe will be powered by either a 121-hp 1.6L, a turbocharged 181-hp 1.6L or a 208-hp 1.6L in the Mini John Cooper Works Coupe. A six-speed manual transmission is standard across all versions, but the Cooper Coupe and Cooper S Coupe can be fitted with a six-speed automatic transmission.
For now Mini has only released a bunch of photos of a camouflaged coupe. Stay tuned for all the official photos soon…
PRESS RELEASE:
The MINI Coupé.
A recipe for unbridled driving fun.
The MINI Coupé.
MINI is expanding its product family with the launch of a model geared squarely to maximising driving fun. The MINI Coupé indulges the keen driver with a level of agility unmatched in the small car segment, along with a unique body and interior concept and the brand’s customary commitment to premium levels of quality and equipment. The first two-seater in its line-up sees MINI not only breathe new life into its successful racing history but also provide a shot in the arm for the super-compact sports car class. The selection of engines, chassis set-up, weight distribution and aerodynamic properties of the MINI Coupé are all focused on delivering optimum performance. As a result, the new car radiates the brand’s hallmark go-kart feeling with a whole new depth of intensity and achieves the best performance statistics ever recorded by a volume-produced MINI.
The latest generation of four-cylinder petrol and diesel engines.
The MINI Coupé can be ordered with the most powerful petrol and diesel engines in the brand’s arsenal. Outputs range from the 90 kW/122 hp of the MINI Cooper Coupé, to the MINI Cooper SD Coupé (105 kW/143 hp) and
MINI Cooper S Coupé (135 kW/184 hp), all the way up to the
MINI John Cooper Works Coupé, a thoroughbred athlete producing 155 kW/211 hp.
The ultimate in go-kart feeling.
A level of chassis quality unmatched in the small car segment gives the new MINI model the handling flair you would expect from the brand. The precise Electric Power Steering, the standard-fitted DSC stability control system, powerful brakes and measures designed specifically to optimise torsional rigidity ensure the MINI Coupé driver can enjoy the ultimate in go-kart feeling.
Distinctive roof form, optimised aerodynamics, impressive storage space.
Its flat silhouette and innovative “helmet roof” lend the MINI Coupé a sporty and individual allure. In addition to the integral roof spoiler, an active rear spoiler optimises airflow at higher speeds. Helped by its extremely high-opening tailgate and large luggage area with through-loading facility, the MINI Coupé displays outstanding versatility in day-to-day driving, when transporting leisure items or sports gear, and on trips out with a lucky partner.
At a glance.
-MINI gives the small car segment another fascinating injection of variety with the presentation of the first two-seater in the brand’s current model range. The MINI Coupé represents the faithful transposition of the brand’s sporting DNA into a cutting-edge vehicle concept with a new interpretation of the super-compact sports car class; unrivalled handling agility and the best performance figures of any model in the MINI line-up; innovative design with a distinctive “helmet roof” form and optimised aerodynamic properties; a wide-opening tailgate and large, variable-use luggage area ensuring extensive versatility.
-Latest generation of four-cylinder engines; most powerful petrol and diesel units in the MINI range; engine technology underpinned by the development expertise of the BMW Group / derived directly from
motor sport; MINI John Cooper Works Coupé with 155 kW/211 hp,
MINI Cooper S Coupé with 135 kW/184 hp, MINI Cooper Coupé with 90 kW/122 hp, MINI Cooper SD Coupé with 105 kW/143 hp; exceptional efficiency thanks to wide range of standard MINIMALISM technology;
six-speed manual gearbox fitted as standard, six-speed automatic optional for MINI Cooper S Coupé, MINI Cooper Coupé and
MINI Cooper SD Coupé.
-A chassis set-up, weight balance and body structure geared squarely to providing unbeatable driving fun gives the car’s go-kart feeling unrivalled depth; Electric Power Steering and DSC (Dynamic Stability Control) as standard, DTC (Dynamic Traction Control) with EDLC (Electronic Differential Lock Control) optional (standard on
MINI John Cooper Works Coupé); innovative pedestrian protection systems and measures to enhance body rigidity shift the car’s weight balance slightly further forward, giving the front-wheel-drive MINI Coupé optimised traction; agility and safety boosted by increase in torsional rigidity using carefully targeted, model-specific strengthening elements.
-First “three-box” MINI with strikingly stepped rear end in the classic style of a gran turismo; sporty, flat coupé silhouette; sits 29 millimetres lower than MINI; new, faithful expression of the hallmark MINI design language; distinctive “helmet roof” with integral roof spoiler; first MINI with an active rear spoiler to optimise airflow at higher speeds; rear spoiler extends automatically at 80 km/h (50 mph).
-Strict two-seater concept with extended stowage and loading capacity behind the driver and passenger seats; large, variable-use luggage area; large through-loading facility into the passenger compartment; wide and extremely high-opening tailgate makes loading easier.
-Engine variants:
MINI John Cooper Works Coupé: Four-cylinder petrol engine with
twin-scroll turbocharger and direct injection, plus numerous technological details carried over directly from motor sport.
Displacement: 1,598 cc,
output: 155 kW/211 hp at 6,000 rpm,
max. torque: 260 Nm/192 lb-ft at 1,850 – 5,600 rpm
(280 Nm/207 lb-ft with Overboost at 1,700 – 4,500 rpm).
Acceleration: 0-100 km/h (62 mph): 6.4 seconds,
top speed: 240 km/h (149 mph).
Average fuel consumption according to EU standard:
7.1 litres per 100 kilometres (39.8 mpg imp),
CO2 emissions: 165 g/km.
MINI Cooper S Coupé: Four-cylinder petrol engine with
twin-scroll turbocharger, direct injection and fully variable valve management based on the BMW Group’s VALVETRONIC technology.
Displacement: 1,598 cc,
output: 135 kW/184 hp at 5,500 rpm,
max. torque: 240 Nm/177 lb-ft at 1,600 – 5,000 rpm
(260 Nm/192 lb-ft with Overboost at 1,700 – 4,500 rpm).
Acceleration: 0-100 km/h (62 mph): 6.9 seconds,
top speed: 230 km/h (143 mph).
Average fuel consumption according to EU standard:
5.8 litres per 100 kilometres (48.7 mpg imp),
CO2 emissions: 136 g/km.
MINI Cooper Coupé: Four-cylinder petrol engine with fully variable valve management based on the BMW Group’s VALVETRONIC technology.
Displacement: 1,598 cc,
output: 90 kW/122 hp at 6,000 rpm,
max. torque: 160 Nm/118 lb-ft at 4,250 rpm,
Acceleration: 0-100 km/h (62 mph): 9.0 seconds,
top speed: 204 km/h (127 mph),
Average fuel consumption according to EU standard:
5.4 litres per 100 kilometres (52.3 mpg imp),
CO2 emissions: 127 g/km.
MINI Cooper SD Coupé: Four-cylinder turbodiesel with aluminium crankcase, common-rail injection and variable turbine geometry.
Displacement: 1,995 cc,
output: 105 kW/143 hp at 4,000 rpm,
max. torque: 305 Nm/225 lb-ft at 1,750 – 2,700 rpm.
Acceleration: 0-100 km/h (62 mph): 7.9 seconds,
top speed: 216 km/h (134 mph).
Average fuel consumption according to EU standard:
4.3 litres per 100 kilometres (65.7 mpg imp),
CO2 emissions: 114 g/km.
Exterior dimensions:
Length: 3,728 millimetres (MINI Cooper S Coupé,
MINI John Cooper Works Coupé: 3,734 millimetres)
Width: 1,683 millimetres
Height: 1,378 millimetres (MINI Cooper S Coupé,
MINI John Cooper Works Coupé: 1,384 millimetres)
Wheelbase: 2,467 millimetresSTOURBRIDGE College is planning a merger which would make it one of the biggest of its type Britain.
The Hagley Road-based college has announced plans to join forces with Birmingham Metropolitan College following a process of consultation which will begin in the New Year.
The Birmingham College has eight campuses around the second city and provides a wide range of academic and vocational courses and specialises in high-tech and advanced manufacturing training.
Stourbridge College principal, Lynette Cutting, said: “We have been at the forefront of innovation for a number of years and the merger of our two successful colleges will further enhance our ability to support the local and regional economies and the communities we serve.”
Details of the consultation process will be revealed on Friday January 18 however the boss of the Birmingham college seems to be certain the merger is already done deal.
Christine Braddock CBE, principal of Birmingham Metropolitan College, said: “We are delighted to be merging with Stourbridge College who have a long established reputation for success and innovation. Working together will help both colleges respond to the Government’s priorities, particularly in light of the current economic climate and the need to develop the skills of the current and future workforce.”Howler monkeys are one of the loudest animals on Earth, but new research suggests those with the most impressive are actually overcompensating for something.
A recent study found the male howler monkeys with the loudest calls had smaller testes and produced less sperm than their quieter peers, the University of Cambridge reported. This evolutionary "trade-off" between the size of the male hyoid (the hollow throat bone that allows the guttural call to resonate), and the size of the reproductive organs corresponds with the mating systems of different howler species. The researchers found males with large hyoids and small testes generally lived in small social groups in which one male dominated many females; howlers with small hyoids and large testes lived in groups of five to six males in which the females mated with all of the males in the social circle. Since males in the latter group do not have exclusive access to females, they must rely on "sperm competition," where quality and quantity is key for insemination.
"In evolutionary terms, all males strive to have as many offspring as they can, but when it comes to reproduction you can't have everything," said study leader Jacob Dunn, from the University of Cambridge's Division of Biological Anthropology. "There is evidence in other animals that when males invest in large bodies, bright colours, or weaponry such as horns or long canines, they are unable to also invest in reproductive traits. However, this is the first evidence in any species for a trade-off between vocal investment and sperm production."
To make their findings, the researchers collected data on average testes size among different howler species used 3-D laser scans to analyze the size of over 250 hyoids. They also conducted in-depth acoustic analyses of a number of howler roars.
"The results of our acoustic analyses show that howler monkeys produce roars at a similar frequency as tigers, which is far lower than we would have predicted from their body size, yet exactly what would be predicted from measuring their giant vocal folds," Dunn said.
This means some howlers can roar at volumes equivalent to animals 10 times larger than their body size. Investing energy into these powerful vocal organs could mean there's not enough energy left to also invest in highly productive testes.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Current Biology.
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A lifelong Labour voter has been told a 30ft graffiti mural of David Cameron throttling a nurse on the side of his house will have to go.
Retired Tony Davis, 73, is so passionate about politics he commissioned a local street artist to create the giant work on his end-of-terrace property.
The mural, 30ft long and 10ft high, shows the Prime Minister with his hand around a nurse's throat, with the backdrop of Westminster and Clifton Suspension Bridge.
A caption on the Bristol home reads: "Safe in his hands?" before urging people to vote Labour.
But self-employed builder Tony has received a letter telling him to remove the mural or face legal action for breaching advertising rules.
(Image: SWNS)
If he refuses to remove it, he could eventually be fined up to £20,000 under the Town and Country Planning Act.
Tony said: "I've had a notice of prosecution. If you are a commercial premises you can advertise anything but if you are a private premises you are restricted to a size of 2ft by 3ft.
"But this applies to hoardings - not something that is painted on the wall like mine is.
"Also my question is, what exactly am I meant to be advertising?"
Tony has seven days to reply with the notice but claims his attempts to speak to the council's enforcement department by phone have so far been unsuccessful.
poll loading Should Tony get rid of the mural? 1000+ VOTES SO FAR YES NO
He had intended to keep the mural after the election, even though Labour lost, because he claims it has "brightened up" the area".
He added: "As far as I'm concerned it's not going anywhere soon."
A South Gloucestershire Council spokesperson said: "On April 21 it was brought to our enforcement team's attention that a mural had been displayed on the side of Mr Davis' house.
(Image: SWNS)
"On assessment, the planning enforcement team considered the mural to be an advertisement without the necessary prior advertisement consent and, as such, a standard letter was sent on April 28, requiring the removal of the advertisement in 14 days.
"Whilst the letter does identify that advertisements without the necessary consents are illegal and includes a caution, it is not a formal enforcement notice.
"The letter requests a response from the recipient within seven days to confirm if they believe the advertisement not to be illegal, confirm their intentions to apply for consent, or to confirm removal."Clear, truthful and open communication is a must with partnered sex. It's the best way to assure everyone is fully and freely consenting as well as physically and emotionally safe; to help sex and sexual relationships be as satisfying, positive and awesome as they can be. We can't just know or guess what we or others want or need, like or dislike, are or are not okay with: we need to communicate those things and have them communicated to us.
Starting deep and honest communication about sex can be daunting, especially in areas which can be more loaded, tricky or where we feel vulnerable. Someone might ask what you do or don't like, or what may or may not be okay with you, and you may find you -- or a partner, when they're asked -- have a hard time knowing how to respond. It might be particularly tough to start these conversations if talking about sex openly and out loud is something you've never done. When sex is newer to us, we may not even have a sense of all there is to talk about. It can feel like being asked what you want to eat at a restaurant without having a menu to even know your options. We might also sometimes find ourselves feeling inclined to only say what we think a partner wants to hear, or only responding to what they bring up rather than putting our own stuff on the table and initiating our own questions.
Yes, No and Maybe lists aren't something we invented. They've been used for a long time by sexuality educators, sex therapists, communities, couples and individuals, and they can be seriously useful tools. So, we've made one specifically for Scarleteen readers including all the issues you ask us about and we've talked about together over the years.
¿Prefieres leer en español? Tenemos "Sí, no, quizá" aquí.
How can you use this list?
1) You can either just read through it online, using it as a mental self-evaluation tool or talking with a partner as you both scroll through it. Or, you can print it out using this PDF file, and fill it in by hand. (It makes a fine bedfellow for our Sex Readiness Checklist, too!)
2) First do it alone. Take your time, especially with areas or questions you haven't thought about |
these profoundly disturbing incidents happening seem large, but to have three occurring within a year, and two at the same airline, seems extraordinary.
Risks and realities of flying The tragedy last month has sparked yet another debate about the dangers of flying, and in particular about the risks of entrusting the lives of hundreds to human pilots. One study cited in the UN’s current aviation medicine manual found that roughly 75 per cent of pilots surveyed would hide their depression from their employer if it meant they would not be allowed into the cockpit while on antidepressants. Continue reading
The disasters have cast an unsettling light on Vanhoenacker’s book, Skyfaring, which he wrote to chart his love of flight and the simple wonders he thinks it still offers, even in an age of 100ml liquid limits and mandatory shoe removal.
Could he have a point? Is there something about flying that transcends the tedium, and even the fear, that afflicts the modern traveller? To find out, he suggested we meet in the flight simulator, where he was eager for me to complete a jet “landing”.
Vanhoenacker is a gently spoken New Yorker, who looks much like the Boston business consultant he was before he decided to fulfil a lifelong wish to become a pilot 14 years ago. I had warned him that in a previous life, when I reported on aviation, I had had a few goes in a flight simulator and while take-offs were more or less fine, landing was another thing. “We’re going to do better today,” he said encouragingly, as we continued with what had become a very loud descent. “Fifty!” squawked the plane. And suddenly we were on the ground, roaring down the runway.
“OK, now brake,” said Vanhoenacker. I pushed down on the clunky pedals at my feet and we swerved to the left, then the right, then the left in what felt like a massive fishtail down the runway before finally, thank God, we stopped.
There was muffled laughter from the back seat, where a BA instructor had been monitoring the whole event. “That was great!” said Vanhoenacker. It clearly was not — but when it comes to flying, there appeared to be very little he did not like.
As the simulator’s noisy systems subsided he pointed out a vent in the cockpit roof. “On previous versions of the 747, that was a sextant port, to take star sights,” he said, a note of awe in his voice. “It’s like a legacy of a previous age of navigation.”
Vanhoenacker’s book is full of these details, revealing a world few of us contemplate in our mostly land-bound lives. Like having a job that means you spend the day flying to Africa and back, before going out to dinner with friends in London. Or thinking about countries in terms of the time it takes to fly over them (France is a one-hour country, while Belgium with a healthy tailwind is just 15 minutes and Russia a day-long land).
The Wright brothers created, built and, in 1903, flew the world’s first airplane
Then there is the intriguing way airways are navigated, using radio beacons and “waypoints”, spots defined by geographic co-ordinates or their bearing and distance from a beacon. These waypoints are typically given five-letter capitalised names that are supposed to be simple enough for any controller or pilot to recognise them, regardless of their first language.
Europe’s sky-mappers turn out to have taken a fairly business-like approach to naming their waypoints, though there is a TULIP off the Dutch coast and England has a DRAKE, for Sir Francis. Australians have had a bit more fun, naming points off their west coast WONSA, JOLLY, SWAGY, CAMBS, BUIYA, BYLLA, BONGS, in honour of the opening lines of the country’s unofficial national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda”. The Americans have just gone mad. Detroit has MOTWN and WONDR (Stevie was born in Michigan). Houston has a ROKIT for its Space Center. There is a NIMOY in Boston (where Leonard was born) plus several local culinary references (CHWDH, LBSTA and CLAWW) and SSOXS, STRKK and OUTTT for the Red Sox baseball team.
“Let’s see if there is a Pilita,” says Vanhoenacker, grabbing the iPad BA pilots now use instead of bales of paper charts. It turns out there is a PILTA in my native Australia, as well as a CLARK, a coincidence obviously, but a childishly pleasing one.
The last time I was in Australia, at the start of this year, I was struck by how many people asked for the first time about the safest way to fly to London. One couple told me they were planning to fly to Europe via Canada, in order to avoid war zones. This probably should not have been a surprise. There were 37 people from Australia on board Malaysia Airlines’ flight MH17 when it was downed over Ukraine last July. Another seven were on the same airline’s flight MH370 when it disappeared in March, in what has become the aviation industry’s greatest modern mystery. Australia is still leading a search in the southern Indian Ocean for any sign of the missing aircraft.
Vanhoenacker sees places in terms of the time it takes to fly over them — France is a one-hour country
Being a serving British Airways pilot, Mark Vanhoenacker was reluctant to speculate openly about things like a disappearing aircraft. He said he had never had one close call in more than a decade of flying for BA and, like most pilots, was eager to talk of statistics showing how much safer it is to fly than drive. “To be honest, what startles me when I land and get on [a motorway] is, ‘Why isn’t this better controlled? Why isn’t somebody telling everybody where to go and why are we so close to those other objects?’” he said wryly.
He even managed to sound cheerful about all the security measures that came after hijackers crashed two jets into New York’s World Trade Center on September 11 2001, ending one of the great joys of flying: a visit to the cockpit. People forget it is still possible to ask to visit the cockpit once a plane is on the ground, he said. “We love to have visitors before take-off and after landing.”
And there is still a lot to marvel about in the sheer physics of flying, he added, recommending passengers get a window seat up the back so they can watch how a 747’s great wings bend in flight or how the flaps are deployed as the plane lands. Another tip he offered, for those flying anywhere near the Northern Lights, is that pilots rarely announce such things because they normally occur as passengers are trying to sleep. If you want to be alerted, you need to let the cabin crew know.
Still, I doubt any of this is enough to compensate for all the frustration that accompanies the average flight these days. The tedium of having to remember if toothpaste is banned or struggling to get your shoes off in a security line would not be so annoying if the rules were not so randomly applied.
Even pilots get fed up with such things, I discovered, after talking to Paul Mattson, a Boeing 777 captain on a major US international airline until his retirement last October. He said some pilots from his old airline deliberately avoid going to Heathrow because they find the security checks so irksome. “We have numerous pilots that do not fly to London simply because of the security measures. They go through absolutely everything. They single us out. With glee sometimes!” said Mattson.
Bugbears include the random application of security rules such as the 100ml limit on liquids
Another thing that annoys him is the way the airline industry has changed. “Airlines are more and more run by business people rather than aviation people,” he says, which has led to a surfeit of regulations and procedures.
If there are more business people running airlines that is no doubt because the airline industry is such a difficult business. It is nearly 20 years since the billionaire investor Warren Buffett said capitalism would have been better off if Orville Wright had been shot down in 1903, because the industry has been a death trap for investors ever since. The only time the world’s airlines have made meaningful economic profits since 1947 was a four-year period in the 1960s, according to the sector’s main trade body, the International Air Transport Association (Iata). The recent fall in oil prices has helped drive down jet fuel costs, but profit margins remain woefully thin in an industry beset by a glut in capacity.
This year, Iata expects airlines to make profits of $25bn on revenues of $783bn, meaning they will only retain about $7 for every passenger carried. As a result, airlines subject passengers to an endless round of ruses to flog services once offered free of charge, from a seat reservation to a coffee.
So tight are today’s profit margins that airlines now often charge for services once offered free
Many in the industry counter that flying is cheaper than ever before. “Back in 1975 it would have taken a bit more than one week’s average UK earnings to have bought a typical return air fare. Today, one week’s earnings will buy almost two return air fares,” says Iata’s chief economist, Brian Pearce. It is also true that on the rare recent occasions when flights have suddenly been grounded, such as when millions of people were stranded after the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010, passengers quickly realised how much they depend on flying.
Passenger numbers are only continuing to rise, especially in fast-growing emerging economies, where newly enriched middle classes are scurrying to board planes as eagerly as their predecessors in richer nations. But that points to one of the more contentious aspects of flying today: its environmental impact.
“The aviation sector faces a grave environmental challenge that is yet to be fully acknowledged,” says Bill Hemmings, an aviation policy specialist at the Brussels-based Transport & Environment research organisation, which estimates the industry’s emissions may be growing by as much as 3 to 5 per cent a year.
“Technical innovation can’t keep pace,” he said. “The answer has to be we all stop flying, certainly to the extent that we do today.”
Businesses need to look seriously at alternatives such as videoconferencing, he says. Governments need to start taxing aviation as much as road and rail transport, and stop building more airports to encourage more subsidised low-cost airlines.
Back in the flight simulator, Vanhoenacker was well aware of such criticism and eager to point out how the industry is working to improve its environmental footprint. Airlines are starting to warn pilots about delays at airports, which means they can slow down, burn less fuel and reduce circling time. The latest aircraft are far more fuel-efficient than their predecessors. And big efforts are made to reduce the weight of aircraft by, for example, ditching baby-changing tables that, incredibly, Vanhoenacker says were once widespread in cockpit toilets.
For all this, he knows that his message about the joys of flight is not easily heard in the modern industry. “I know not everybody loves flying as much as I do,” he said. But he insisted there is a fundamental fascination with flight, and I suspect he is probably right. “I don’t think it will ever go away,” he said. “It’s congenital really. We’re an aspiring species that doesn’t have wings. What else would we dream of?”
Pilita Clark is the FT’s environment correspondent and was previously its aerospace correspondent
Slideshow photographs: Greg Funnell
Illustrations by Toby LeighArson attacks and eviction at gunpoint for plantations driving many to despair and take their own lives
The small Apy Ka’y community of around 150 Guarani Indians has lived in squalor by the side of Highway BR 463 in southern Brazil since 2009. Since then, they have been forced out three times by unknown gunmen, had their makeshift camp burned down twice by arsonists and three young people from the group have killed themselves.
Each time they were intimidated they returned and reoccupied their last patch of land but last month a Brazilian judge ordered the Apy Ka’y community to permanently move off the land that was theirs for hundreds of years but was seized without compensation by wealthy plantation owners in the 1970s.
“It will be a death sentence,” says anthropologist and community leader Tonico Benites Guarani who estimates that 1,000, mostly young, Guarani, have killed themselves in the last 10 years throughout Brazil – hundreds of times more than the average Brazilian suicide rate, and unequalled among all other indigenous peoples in Latin America.
But such is depth of despair and hopelessness in the tribe which has lost nearly 95% of its ancestral land to industrial scale biofuels, sugar cane and soya plantations that the true number of suicides could be many more, says Tonico.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We’ve been made beggars on our own land,’ says Tonico Benites, a Guarani in Brazil. Photograph: Survival International
“So many young Guarani people commit suicide. It’s around one a week. The time comes when you have had enough of waiting [for change]. You work yourself up with hope, then the courts dash your hopes. Your family suffers with hunger and malnutrition, the despair increases, there is no security, no hope, you are not sure of life improving. It is very sad,” he says.
As a father and a community leader, Tonico says he understands and worries about his children. “Every day the despair grows. How can you plan your life? How can you be free? The loss of land makes us vulnerable. We become beggars.”
Official figures suggest there are about 47,000 Guarani in Brazil and a few thousand more in Paraguay and Argentina. They have their own language, beliefs and culture but most, says the human rights group Survival International, are now squeezed on to tiny patches of land surrounded by cattle ranches and vast fields of soya and sugar cane.
Many have been herded into small reservations, others like the Apy Ka’y group near the town of Dourados in Mato Grosso do Sul state, have no land at all and live by roadsides.
“A slow genocide is taking place. There is a war being waged against us. We are scared. They kill our leaders, hide their bodies, intimidate and threaten us. Me, too, many times. Last month they telephoned me and warned me there would be consequences if I carried on showing a film about the Guarani to politicians,” said Tonico, who has spent a month in Europe seeking political support
The root of the problem is the loss of the land, he says. “We are fighting always for our land. Our culture does not allow violence but the ranchers will kill us rather than give it back. Most of the land was taken in the 1960s and 70s. The ranchers arrived and pushed us out. The land is good quality, with rivers and forest. Now it is very valuable. The Guarani were living there for hundreds of years and we never suffered. We had 4m hectares then, now we have 200,000.”
Brutal evictions of the Guarani have been continuing for over 20 years with landowners hiring gunmen, the police and army bringing in tanks and helicopters and the courts siding mostly with the rich farmers, according to Survival International.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A lone tree stands on land claimed by Guarani Kaiowa Indians as their ancestral territory called Tekoha Boqueron, now stripped of its original forest to form part of a sugarcane plantation, near Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul state. Photograph: Lunae Parracho / Reuters/Reuters
“Our young people’s only choice is to work for pitiful wages in atrocious conditions in the sugar cane plantations that now occupy our ancestral lands,” says Tonico. “If we cannot plant, what is our future? Begging is no future. If people do leave the communities the only work they can get is on building sites or in sugarcane plantations. Our young people have no choice but to do degrading work.”
“We suffer from racism and discrimination. Until 1988 indigenous peoples in Brazil were not considered human beings in the constitution. This created racism and prejudice. It suggested Indians could be killed, were a free target.”
Despite this history of oppression and killings, the Guarani have kept their pride and culture, and hope that they will regain their land.
“But if nothing changes,” says Tonico, “many more young people will kill themselves, and other will die of malnutrition. The impunity of the ranchers will continue and the Brazilian government will be able to continue killing us. In 10 years time, we will be heading for extermination.”The $6.2 billion pipeline would take gas from Israel and Cyprus's recently discovered offshore gas reserves to Europe and could help reduce the continent's dependence on Russian energy
Italy, Israel, Greece and Cyprus pledged Monday to move ahead with the world's longest undersea gas pipeline from the eastern Mediterranean to southern Europe, with support from the European Union.
If carried out as planned, the long-discussed $6.2 billion (5.8 billion euro) pipeline will take gas from Israel and Cyprus's recently discovered offshore gas reserves to Europe, potentially reducing European dependence on Russian energy at a time of ongoing tensions.
In a joint news conference in Israel's commercial capital Tel Aviv, energy ministers from the four nations and the EU's Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Canete pledged their commitment to the project.
Feasibility studies had been completed, they said, adding that they hope to develop a full plan for development by the end of the year.
They said construction of the pipeline would not begin for several years and it would likely go online in 2025.
"This is going to be the longest and deepest sub-sea gas pipeline in the world," said Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz.
Gas prices have fallen, however, and the pipeline's financial feasibility is based on expectations they will rise again, Elio Ruggeri, head of IGI Poseidon -- one of the companies developing the plan -- told AFP.
Both Israel and Cyprus have started to extract gas from their offshore fields in recent years, with far larger projects expected to come online in the future.
Officials have sought to market that gas to Europe as an alternative to dependence on Russian imports.
Canete admitted it would help limit reliance on the Nord Stream pipeline via Russia, which he said "adds nothing to the security of supply".
- 'A pipe that unites' -
"Cyprus and Israel are very reliable suppliers," he said.
"We highly value gas supply from the region as a vital source of our gas supply that can make a valuable contribution to our strategy to diversify sources, routes and suppliers.
"This is a pipe that unites and will have the full support of all the members of the European Union."
The four ministers agreed to meet every six months over the coming years.
Italy's minister of economic development Carlo Calenda said a reliable and affordable gas supply was a "crucial challenge" for the country, making the pipeline a "top priority".
"We need to foresee the phasing out of coal and carbon in electricity production and therefore gas supply is fundamental for us," Calenda said.
Amit Mor, head of the Israeli consultancy EcoEnergy, said while the ministers' commitment was positive, that did not guarantee the project would go ahead.
"At this stage this is still a pipe dream but it is important to realise that international trade projects sometimes take decades to develop," he told AFP.
"A depth of three kilometres would be unprecedented," he added, saying high infrastructure costs would mean that producing gas at a price to rival that of Russia would be "very challenging".Image copyright Reuters Image caption Shetland prices were said to have risen by 104%
Shetland has topped the UK's house prices rise percentages for the past decade thanks to employment prospects, according to a report.
Top areas Shetland (up 104% to £153,782)
Hackney (up 84% to £412,599)
Southwark (up 78% to £400,832)
Western Isles (up 78% to £104,942)
Lambeth (up 76% to £421,849)
Tower Hamlets (up 72% to £372,604)
Islington (up 62% to £553,972)
Camden (up 61% to £661,720)
Highland (up 53% to £152,606)
Bank of Scotland said the average Shetland house price had more than doubled in the past decade to £153,782, up by 104%.
This was followed by Hackney, Southwark and the Western Isles.
The report said the best performing areas were those with largest falls in unemployment.
At the other end of the scale, the study said Lisburn in Northern Ireland saw prices grow by 5%.
The UK average property price was said to have grown by 22% - £36,482 - to £199,039 over the same period from 2004.
Nitesh Patel, housing economist at Bank of Scotland, said: "In general, house price growth over the past decade has been stronger in the areas that have seen the biggest falls in the unemployment rate as measured by the claimant count.
"Areas in northern Scotland and inner London have generally outperformed other areas on both house price performance and a lower unemployment rate.
"During the recession of 2008-09 property values fell across most areas, even where the unemployment rate rose only marginally.
"This does highlight that while unemployment is important there are also other factors that drive house prices, such as affordability, earnings growth and low housing supply."CHEYENNE, Wyo.—After working out at a gym, Amy Mahaffy dropped off a half-dozen glass jars in a city recycling container before heading home.
The containers however won’t end up being recycled any time soon. Their destination: A mound of glass at the city landfill, an ever-growing monument to the difficulty many communities across the country face in finding a market for a commodity that’s too cheap for its own good.
“We are stockpiling it in a desperate search for a market,” landfill foreman Monty Landers said.
Cheyenne hasn’t recycled the glass it collects—9 tons a week—for years. Instead, the city has been putting it in the landfill, using it to surround the concrete-walled wells that pump toxic fluids out of the dump.
Told where the glass bottles and jars that she diligently rinses out end up, Mahaffy seemed dismayed. “I don’t think that’s what they should be doing with it,” she said. “I think they should be recycling it.”
The economics of glass recycling have been marginal for some time.
Nationwide, only about 25 percent of glass containers are recycled. That’s compared to 31 percent of plastic containers, 45 percent of aluminum cans and 63 percent of steel cans, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In northern Idaho, Kootenai County gave up collecting glass last year. In Oregon, which was the first of 11 states to adopt a bottle deposit law in 1971, Deschutes County stockpiled 1,000 tons of glass at its landfill before finally finding a use for it a couple years ago—as fill beneath an area for collecting compost.
Glass also has piled up at the landfill serving Albuquerque, N.M., where officials this year announced that a manufacturer of water-absorbing horticultural stones would eventually use up their stockpiles. New York City gave up glass recycling from 2002 to 2004 because officials decided it was too costly.
In a sense, glass ought to be the perfect commodity to recycle. It can be recycled an infinite number of times. Melting down one glass bottle and making another isn’t particularly complicated or especially costly.
The challenge is that the main ingredient in glass, sand, is plentiful and cheap—often cheaper than cullet, which is glass that has been prepared for recycling.
Used glass must be sorted by color and cleaned before it can be crushed into cullet that is suitable for recycling into new containers. That contributes to much of the cost of recycling glass, said Joe Cattaneo, president of the Glass Packaging Institute in Alexandria, Va.
“It’s not just a glass company buying it from your municipal waste company, or recycling company,” Cattaneo said. “Some entity has to clean it so it meets the specifications of mixing it with sand, soda ash and limestone.”
Another cost is transportation. The farther away a community is from glass processors and container manufacturers, he said, the more expensive it is to recycle it.
Cheyenne has been in touch with glass recyclers in Colorado but has yet to find a feasible arrangement for glass recycling, said Dennis Pino, director of the city sanitation department. “If we’re going to try and do something that’s going to put us in the hole, it’s not a good idea, especially with the economy,” Pino said.
One of the region’s largest glass recyclers, an O-I Inc. bottling manufacturing plant, is only 50 miles south of Cheyenne in Windsor, Colo. That plant gets the vast majority of its cullet not from Wyoming or even Colorado, but from the 11 states with bottle deposit laws, company spokeswoman Stephanie Johnston said.
Bottles returned for 5-cent or 10-cent deposits are kept sorted by color and usually haven’t been mixed with other recyclable materials or trash. As a result, cullet produced from such glass is more likely to meet the company’s very high standards—completely free of paper, plastic, metal or other contaminants, she said.
“Our interest in recycled content is high. But the way the system is currently set up, it’s hard for us to get quality, clean cullet right now,” Johnston said. “We’re trying to find some ways to increase the amount of quality cullet from the states that don’t have bottle bills.”
Johnson said O-I prefers to use cullet rather than sand because cullet requires less energy to melt down.
O-I has billed the 4-year-old facility as the most modern of its kind in the world. Cheyenne was runner-up in the race to land the plant in 2003.
Within sight of its landfill glass, Cheyenne has begun building a recycling center that will handle a variety of materials including glass. The city still needs to complete two more leachate wells at the landfill, Pino said, and after that the center should be able to process the rest of the stockpiled glass.
Mahaffy said that’s good enough for her to keep recycling her glass.
“If they’re keeping it someplace separate where they could recycle it in the future, that’s one thing,” she said. “But if they’re not ever planning on recycling it, that irritates me.”
The city plans to buy a glass pulverizer and is considering at least two uses for the glass it plans to grind into a fine consistency—in place of sand in road construction and at playgrounds, Pino said.
“It’s not dangerous. It’s been tested—it works great,” he said. “We don’t want to just keep stockpiling it. We want to find another use for it.”It’s faster than a jet, can out handle a roller coaster, and it is environmentally friendly. How, you ask? Starting with only the most exciting super car to drive EVER, the Atom, then adding an electric motor. What you have then is a beautifully designed engineering masterpiece, the Wrightspeed X1. With its minimalist design, consisting of merely a frame to hold everything in place, 3 pedals, a steering wheel and a seat, its more like a stripped down motorcycle with 4 wheels than it is a car. Its basically a street legal go cart. But what does that do for it? It makes it incredibly light! Pair that with an AC Propulsion 3-phase AC induction motor and inverter, and you have rocket-like propulsion from the on-demand torque.
Unfortunately, there are no plans to make this particular design a production vehicle, heck, its hard enough just to get a regular Atom, but they do hint that there will be a production version of the X1. I’m not sure what that means, but i’m still interested.
For those who like specs, check out these numbers:
In recent track testing, on street tires, it achieved the following performance:
0-30 mph: 1.35 sec
0-60 mph: 3.07 sec in 117 ft
0-100 mph: 6.87 sec
0-100-0 mph 11.2 sec
Lateral g: 1.3
Braking g: 1.2
Hopefully high performance automobiles like this will strike a nerve with car enthusiasts, sparking a bigger desire to own a car ‘just like the ones on TV’. In a way, its already working.On the summit of a ragged peak in the Alborz Mountains there lies the ruins of one of history’s most fearsome secrets. Today, it towers above the sleepy village of Moallem Kalayeh in a secluded valley that has been all but forgotten by the outside world. But for centuries, the inhabitants of Alamut shaped the fate of empires and brought terror to the hearts of rulers from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent.
The name Alamut came from an ancient Persian King, who, while on a hunting expedition in a remote valley, followed an enormous eagle and saw it land on a rock at the top of a hard to reach mountain. The King took this as a favorable omen, and, realizing the strategic value of the location, built a castle there, naming it ‘Alamut’, meaning ‘the Eagle’s Nest’.
Around two centuries later, a young man named Hassan Sabah stumbled upon this castle. Hassan was an Ismaeli Shia, an esoteric branch of Islam that was persecuted by the ruling Seljuk Empire, particularly during the time of the vehemently anti-Shia Grand Vizier Nizam al-Mulk. He spent the next two years hiding in the valley from the Vizier’s forces, converting local villagers and instructing the converts to seek employment in the castle. Once he had infiltrated almost the entire castle guard, he declared it his and took it over without spilling a drop of blood (and paid the former landlord as he was kicked out).
The Ismaeili stronghold of Alamut
By conquering the castle, Hassan declared open rebellion against the Seljuks. He then built more defenses for the castle and improved irrigation, so it could be self-sufficient in food production. A giant library and center of learning of mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, and alchemy was built inside. Within a few years, dozens of similar castles had been built in remote regions in Northern Iran, creating an independent state.
In October 1092 a pivotal event happened that brought Alamut into the spotlight of history. Faced with an overwhelming superior Seljuk army, Hassan sent one of his followers, a fidaaei, disguised as a traveling Dervish to the city of Nahavand, where the Grand Vizier Nizam al Mulk’s convey was resting, on its journey from Isfahan to Baghdad. The fidaaei stabbed Nizam while he was on his litter, killing him and driving the Seljuk state into chaos.
The assassination of Nizam al-Mulk
Hassan’s followers, who spread throughout Iran and the Levant became known as the ‘Hashshashin’, or ‘Assassins’ in the West. For centuries, they fought far stronger enemies, assassinating Viziers, Caliphs, Crusaders, and others in far off lands. Sir Conrad of Montferrat, Crusader King of Jerusalem was put to death by an Assassin blade. King Edward I of England and the legendary Sultan Saladin only narrowly escaped Assassin attackers.
The story of the Assassins was brought to prominence in the West by Marco Polo, who told stories of an “Old Man of the Mountain” who promised his drug crazed followers a place in heaven if they died following his orders. He would give warriors a powerful potion and then take them to a secret garden chamber where there were rivers of wine and honey, palm trees, and enchanting Huris, telling them this was the promised paradise and they could attain it forever if they followed his every command. Historians believe this was a gross exaggeration, but the stories have stuck in popular culture, most notably inspiring the Assassins Creed franchise and Prince of Persia movie.An iconic Nova Scotia landmark will set the stage for an epic battle between Autobots and Decepticons next Wednesday — at least, on the cover of a Transfomers comic book.
Issue number 45 of Transformers: More than Meets the Eye will feature battling Transformers at historic Peggys Cove and will be exclusively available Sept. 30 at Giant Robot Comics in Dartmouth.
The store's owner, Darryl Wall, says it's the third year in a row their store has sold an exclusive Transformers comic with a custom Nova Scotia cover.
"The comic itself is the same throughout the world. But our cover is made especially just for our store. Every year, we try to pick a different landmark in Nova Scotia, preferably in Halifax, Dartmouth area," Wall said.
Custom cover art designed for specific stores is part of a program through the comic's publisher, IDW Publishing.
"Sometimes, people just get their favourite characters. Some other stores will do something for a convention or something and ever since we started it three years ago, we wanted to highlight our hometown and show our pride of Nova Scotia."
Comic book artist Casey Coller, who lives in Massachusetts, has drawn each cover for Giant Robot Comics.
Wall said their first custom cover issue was Transformers: Regeneration One, which featured "the evil Decepticons in front of Citadel Hill."
The second was designed for Transformers: Robots in Disguise, issue no. 33, and "it was the heroic Autobots in front of the Macdonald Bridge."
Wall said that Peggys Cove only appears on the cover in this particular issue and isn't featured as a location in the story.
Spreading provincial pride
The special issues are only available for purchase through their store, Wall said. But that doesn't mean locals are the only ones buying them.
"We do sell a lot of these through the internet to people all around the world. We sell them sometimes through eBay or people will contact us just through email and we'll ship them out," said Wall. "We have one guy in Alaska, every time we do a cover, we generally send him out five to 10 copies."
Peggys Cove was chosen, Wall says, because of its international recognizability.
"There's been so many people, especially with the cruise ship industry bringing people there, I think we'll feel a huge surge for this issue."
Wall says he hopes to branch out the Nova Scotia covers to other comics next year, including he says, Jem and the Holograms.
"And I can say that the Misfits are probably going to be visiting some spot in Nova Scotia."If Britain was to leave the European Union and join the US, it would be poorer than all of the other states in America apart from Mississippi, new figures suggest.
The figures, produced by Fraser Nelson, the Editor of The Spectator, also said that without the South-east, Britain could be considered worse off than America's most-deprived state as well.
Nelson said that Britain would rank 50th out of 51 states based on the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita figures and cost of living.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
For his research, Nelson took the US figures for GDP per state in America and divided it by the population to create a GDP per capita figure.
GDP per capita is the total output of a place divided by the number of people who live in it.
To do the same for Britain, he used the most up-to-date Treasury figures. He also compared the wealth of nations and used a measure called Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), to see how far money would go in each place as the price of living often varies.
“PPP adjusts for the domestic purchasing power of each nation’s currency”.
His research also included some other European countries, including Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and Germany.
Nelson found that if Britain, with a GDP per capita of $36, 356 for every person, were to leave the European Union and join the US, it would be poorer than most other states including Kansas, Alabama and Missouri.
He explains: "If Britain were to somehow leave the European Union and become the 51st state of America, we would actually be one of the poor states.
"If you take our economic output, adjust for living costs and slot it into the US league table then the United Kingdom emerges as the second-poorest state in the union.
"We’re poorer than much-maligned Kansas and Alabama and well below Missouri, the scene of all the unrest in recent weeks.
"We certainly have our problems; we’re just better at concealing them.”
Meanwhile, Alaska with a GDP per state of $59 billion dollars and a population of just over 731,000 comes top of the list at $80, 741.
Norway also ranks much higher than Britain, coming in at seventh with a GDP per capita of $65, 515, making it the top European country.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowStory highlights The man was one of six people who were on a ski and snowmobile trip
His companions shot the bear dead
(CNN) A polar bear attacked a man camping in Norway's Arctic Svalbard region Thursday, authorities said, injuring his face and arm.
The man was one of six people who were on a combined ski and snowmobile trip in the Svalbard archipelago, the local governor's office said on its website.
The other people in the group shot the polar bear dead and the injured man was flown by helicopter to Longyearbyen hospital, the governor's office said.
The attack occurred in Fredheim, in Tempelfjorden, it said. An investigation is underway.
It's not the first time tourists and polar bears have come into conflict in Norway's remote Svalbard archipelago.Ok… so I am done with sharing the spring wildflowers from here in Madison Indiana and now it’s on to my all time favorite place to photograph wildflowers and that’s The Great Smoky Mountains National park!!
You would be hard pressed to find a better place anywhere in the United States or world for that matter that has a better bloom than the Great Smoky Mountains. With the incredible varieties |
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